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[wierd]

On the plus side, any REAL conspiracy has hard limits on how large it can become, or how sophisticated it can be, before it becomes logistically impossible to conceal.

This has a kind of perverse corollary though;  Something that is agreed upon by only a very small cadre of political elite in a closed session with little or no commentary is immediately suspect due to this. As stated by Trekkin, it does not do to jump immediately into conspiracy theory, but on the other, demanding transparency and dialog on any decision that would have an impact on application of laws, commerce, treaties, or has financial interests attached is simply good medicine, and when the leadership insists otherwise, it is not normally a good sign.

[MrRoboto75]

I mean

Its only considered paranoia when you are wrong

[SalmonGod]

Or you could just practice self-awareness and moderation, for which unfortunately there are no clear rules you can put forth, and many will fuck it up.  But what can you do?

The thing about having such clear standards on what is considered a reasonable way to judge a situation is that's what abusers take advantage of, and hiding behind plausible deniability is a classic abuse tactic.  An abusive personality wants you to judge every behavior as an individual instance, wherein every normal person loses their temper sometimes or has a bad day or asks for something once in a while or simply doesn't like one of your friends or accidentally says something insensitive and so on.  They bank on you doing exactly that and thinking "Ok, I didn't like this, but I don't want to jump to the conclusion that they're being abusive.  How could I ever have a positive relationship with anyone if I label every human mistake as abuse.  Actual abuse will be more obvious.  When the time comes to treat this stuff seriously, surely it will be more apparent than this and I can act with 100% justification and confidence."  Holding yourself to that standard.  And that is a perfectly reasonable response once in a while -- in moderation.  But if that is always your response to consistently repeated behaviors, you make yourself a victim, terminally passively available to have your being ground slowly to dust for the abuser's gratification.  And if you look back at everything, the behaviors and messaging tactics of power structures are 100% in line with the mechanics of an abusive household.  At some point, you have to be allowed to take a step back and review a situation as a whole, and trust that the patterns you see are meaningful in order to allow yourself to take the steps necessary to defend yourself and secure a better life.

Not saying that your cautions aren't valid.  But they shouldn't be taken as absolute. 

And there are plenty of situations where the time to act in response to something is when you suspect, not when confirmed. 

The time to respond to the establishment of the mass surveillance state in the USA was in the mid-2000's when activists started being questioned at checkpoints about private information that authorities shouldn't have been able to know otherwise, curious things were being done in legal terminology with the word terrorism that could target people based on their language, the first abuses of the Patriot Act were making the news, and the government acted really strangely in response to FOIA requests on the matter.  All in combination with a rich pre-existing history of abuse of surveillance in the USA.  Not after the apparatus had had over 10 years to calcify and seep into the daily functioning of every level of every law enforcement agency in the country, like a cancer that could no longer be removed without dissecting the entire body.

The time to respond with popular pressure when police apparently murder someone is immediately after the event, not after the "internal investigation" concludes a year later only to confirm everything suspicious that was initially reported and leave it at that, meanwhile public awareness has been washed away by hundreds of similarly traumatizing news cycles and the officer's paid leave has long since concluded and turned into a promotion.

[Reelya]

Yeah, seriously, I've been sick for decades of how "conspiracy theorist" gets used as a pejorative to dismiss people who try to raise legitimate alarms about verified or highly likely behaviors of powerful people. 

Haha, this reminds me. A while ago me and co-worker were shooting the breeze and talking about debt (the US federal debt basically), and talking about how "some day it's all going to come crashing down". Our team leader, who was basically a not extremely well educated 20-year old, overheard this and rolled her eyes (basically dismissing it as conspiracy speak). This was in ... late 2006 or early 2007. So, yeah trying to warn people about massive debt problems literally a year before the debt-related global apocalypse got you called a conspiracy nut.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

US federal debt didn't have anything to do with that. It was all the work of various financial institutions, most famously the housing loan repackaging scheme. Sovereign debt is basically meaningless for countries that have large market share, since their "amount of money" is also arbitrary.

[Reelya]

I'm fully aware of that, the point was that no matter what you said the reason, virtually nobody in 2007 would believe anything bad could happen economically.

The girl we were talking too clearly did not interpret the conversation as "federal US government debt" because she wouldn't have even known what the difference was between that and any other debt in general. All we probably actually said that she picked up was that there's too much debt in the USA that it could all come tumbling down. What we were actually talking about was probably the "unfunded liabilities" which currently total $127 trillion dollars (https://www.usdebtclock.org/), and we were saying that eventually that would bring down the economy. So there was no point at which anyone involved linked the federal debt to the GFC (it hadn't happened yet).

It was just ironic that she dismissed that debt-based concern then less than a year later the economy did in fact crash because of debt, even if it was because of a different debt.

And she wasn't quite a complete random on the street, she had a managerial role with a major telecommunication and broadband company. As an aside, I had to tell her the difference between bits and bytes, because she's just trained an entire room full of client-facing staff to say "megabytes per second" when the product was clearly stated megabits per second, and she took it personally and retaliated against me for showing her up.

[Reelya]

I hope your mother was gracious about it and let the realtor friend crash on the couch in 2008

[Lord Shonus]

By 2005, they were discussing the housing bubble in newspaper comic strips. I still can't believe that people were caught off-guard by it.

[wierd]

It's the "That can't happen to ME!" effect.

It appears to affect the affluent much more than others.  That's why the bankers were unwilling to cease their banking schemes, even as all indicators pointed to imminent collapse.  The thought of not getting every possible penny out of the schemes was more terrifying than the reality of imploding the whole economy, (because "that will never happen to ME.")

[sluissa]

"Once is never, twice is always."

[MrRoboto75]

It's the "That can't happen to ME!" effect.

It appears to affect the affluent much more than others.  That's why the bankers were unwilling to cease their banking schemes, even as all indicators pointed to imminent collapse.  The thought of not getting every possible penny out of the schemes was more terrifying than the reality of imploding the whole economy, (because "that will never happen to ME.")

You say that like the rich didn't get screwed the least by 2008.

[Reelya]

That's not necessarily correct. There's been a lot of growth of the share of wealth of the top 1%, but almost none of that growth occurred after the GFC.



Note that during the bubble, the top 1% were rapidly gaining more of a share of the nation's income, but that trend completely collapsed when the bubble burst. It's during the "good years" such as the 1990 Clinton era and the Bush housing bubble when the top 1% made the big gains in their share of income. Note also that the bottom 50% have been losing relative income, but that decline more or less went on pause at the height of the crisis.

[wierd]

We really need capital gains reforms, with floating cutoff values tied to the median income.  The idea being, that the more 1%-ier you get, the more egregious your capital gains restrictions become. This would drive banking behavior to favor small-time lender operations, rather than large hedge-fund operations that are more prone to these kinds of abuses, to grow their capital supplies.

It would also stifle "Money making me even more money for doing nothing but having money" driving the income disparity.  Coupled with repatriation law that actually has some fucking teeth (No, there's a cap on your total wealth that can be in foreign banks and investments, assholes), it would do wonders.

Of course, the GOP twits would rage that the sky would fall under such conditions... but that's really what we need.  With an imminent need to grow the median income to continue market growth, it would cause massive positive changes in the general economy.

[Lord Shonus]

You think pulling massive amounts of currently useless capital out of dead storage and dumping it into the economy will provide a boost?


Sounds like commie talk to me.





/S

[Iduno]

Of course, the GOP twits would rage that the sky would fall under such conditions... but that's really what we need. 

To be fair, so would the established Democrats. Their thing is keeping the (terrible) status quo, because they're also rich and don't want to vote against themselves.