the current establishment WANTS to win
Okay, let's start with this part.
Remember how ridiculous it sounded when islamicists said "America wants a Zionist crusade!" or Russian nationalists said "America wants to conquer Russia!" It sounded ridiculous because you knew that America just doesn't work like that. There is a huge range of views in America and people dont walk in lockstep. If America wanted these things people would be talking about them! Remember how much people talked about the Iraq war? If crazy shit is going down people are going to talk about it and get into details. Details like "those aluminum tubes aren't strong enough to refine uranium" or "Valarie Plame was exposed deliberately after she produced intel that yellow cake purchases weren't going down".
When people say "The government" wants something or "China" wants something or "the Media" wants something or even "Iceland" wants something you need to take a step back and realize that they are talking about between tens of thousands and hundreds of millions of people who aren't a freaking hivemind. "The government" doesn't want something and then magically transmit directives towards millions of people any more then "China" wants an artificial island so every chinese citizen picks up a rock and throws it in the ocean at once.
Yes sometimes certain members of the government want something and we are just using a lazy shorthand. For instance Obama clearly does not want Donald Trump to be president. But House Majority Leader Ryan and Senate Majority Leader McConnell do want Donald Trump to be president, just to name a couple. Keep that in mind. So Obama wants Clinton to be president but that doesn't mean he has a mind control ray to make federal employees start to rig the election. All he can do is things like make speeches endorsing Clinton or call Donald Trump a dangerous man. And meanwhile Ryan and McConnell are giving Trump endorsements and calling Clinton a dangerous woman.
There is a simple mental process to avoid falling into conspiracy theories. Whenever someone talks about an extremely vague definition and attributes motives towards it you need to say "Which specific people do they mean? What specific powers do they exert?" If you cant answer these questions it is at best idle speculation and at worst a conspiracy theory. For example when people said "Russia" wanted to "invade Ukraine" you can make that more specific. Putin wanted Russian troops to occupy parts of Crimea. Putin is capable of giving orders to Russian generals to send troops on covert missions. This would accomplish the goal of occupying Crimea.
Well, there's that, but incentive structures are a very real thing(they are, in fact, how capitalism functions at all), and usually when I hear 'the Media wants X' or 'Wall Street wants X', it's about that. And usually as a rule it's a given that 'organization' or 'party' wants to win or gain more power, because power is generally useful for accomplishing all other goals. Doesn't need to be a hivemind. Just anthropomorphization of a process that does involve humans but isn't actually organized per se. When someone says a country wants something it usually means it's part of their policy agenda, hidden or otherwise.
See, I'll semantics all day. I enjoy semantics. They're an interesting part of language. They're also often not related to the meat of what someone is talking about, although helping people communicate more clearly is almost always a nice thing to do.
@BFEL: Unfortunately, until you can find a source you believe you can actually trust to be factually correct (understandably difficult), it's hard to fact-check anything when everyone's telling you something different. If you can, I'd say do research into specific claims and see what the majority of it says (NOT SINGLE STUDIES). Unfortunately, that takes metric shittons of times. So look for metastudies, or reviews of metastudies by people who know what they're talking about, if you can. As for the debates, though, from the sounds of it, Trump lost not because he lied (probably did but I usually think of him as 'wrong' rather than lying *Shrug*
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1425372 times)