Philosopher Michael Huemer writes Sep. 7:
* While Joe Biden was still running for President, people were saying that he was a puppet, controlled by some other forces. A popular theory on the right is that this was “Obama’s third term”.
The right thinks that illegal immigration is part of the Democrats’ plan to “replace” American voters with more reliable Democratic voters.
All of this is a kind of cognitive disorder, the brain going haywire and losing touch with reality.
* A terrorist group selects the few extremists out of the millions of people in a society. People like that are not all over the place. So it’s highly unlikely that if you elect a leader, that leader will just happen to turn out to have secretly been one of these extremists.
Anyway, extreme ideologies that support this kind of violence typically support violence against the outgroup, not against one’s own group. To have a leader planning a “false flag” terror attack would basically require the leader to be something close to a psychopath. There aren’t that many psychopaths, and it’s highly unlikely that the President would just happen to be one.
* Carrying out a conspiracy like this requires working with many other people. It would be hard to find enough sociopaths to work with you, without accidentally revealing your plan to any non-sociopaths.
* …Joe Biden would disregard all of us and do some crazy thing that none of his advisors wanted, like running for a second term, or agreeing to debate Trump.
I can predict this even though I don’t know Joe Biden, because I have met people. This is what most people are like. They don’t just do what you tell them.
…Being senile doesn’t necessarily mean you’re pliable. You can be senile and just as ornery as ever, or even more so.
* One way we know this is that there are big incentives for people to make accurate predictions of major social events (usually, there is a way to make money off it if you can anticipate a major change before other people do), but no one seems to be able to predict much.
Michael Huemer writes June 15, 2024:
If a group of criminals is holed up in a building with some hostages, the police may not just blow up the building. They have to attempt to secure the safe release of the hostages. But if a group of enemy soldiers is hiding in a building with some civilians, the military may blow up the building. Collateral damage is allowed…
If you view the Israel-Hamas war in the light of other wars, it is not particularly shocking or unusual. (Or rather, Israel’s conduct is not unusual; it is highly unusual, though, that one side should have so little concern for its own civilians as to deliberately put them in harm’s way.) It’s just normal war fighting.
…Perhaps the opponents of Israel’s war are viewing the terrorists (Hamas) like a criminal gang and applying the norms for policing to Israel’s response. Viewed through that lens, Israel’s response looks outrageous–roughly like if the police responded to a robbery in progress by blowing up the building.
…War is usually conducted against another society, whereas criminals are part of one’s own society. (Exception: civil wars.) Perhaps we want to show greater moral consideration to fellow citizens (even evil ones) than to foreign enemies.
…Enemy armies are usually a much greater threat than private criminals, even criminal organizations. This matters because, perhaps, when the threat is greater, you are justified in taking more extreme measures.
* Ordinary criminals usually do not seek out a fight with the government.
…Israel should treat [Hamas] more like a foreign military, since (a) they belong to another society, (b) they are a military threat comparable to a small army (and much greater than any normal criminal group), and (c) they actively seek conflict with Israel.
…the reason that so many civilians are being killed in Gaza is that the government of Gaza (Hamas) does not want to protect its civilians. They probably actually want more of their civilians to be killed, because (a) they think those people are going to heaven, and (b) it makes Israel look bad to the rest of the world. So Hamas deliberately puts military targets in schools, hospitals, etc., so that more Palestinian children will die (which shows that Hamas is more evil than the Nazis; even the Nazis would not have used their own children as shields).
June 1, 2024, Michael Huemer writes:
Polls indicate that 70% of Republicans think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Question for Republicans: Why do you think Trump let that happen?
He didn’t do anything about the election fraud because there wasn’t anything to do, because he had made the whole thing up. He didn’t order any investigations because he didn’t have any information to investigate; he didn’t have anyone arrested because there was no one to arrest, because nothing happened.
Btw, you can equally well wonder why the Republicans in general haven’t tried to have the election fraud that so many of them claim to believe in investigated. Do they not care about it? Are they completely incompetent? Or is no one trying because everyone knows there is nothing to investigate?
It’s also funny how Republicans in general have responded to the alleged problem. Again, 70% of them allegedly believe the election was stolen. This includes many ordinary voters, public officials, and pundits on Fox News and such. Yet no one is trying to find out why Trump didn’t do anything to stop the fraud before it happened. In fact, they have bizarrely little curiosity about the whole thing.
According to Trump, the greatest crime in election history happened on his watch, and he knew about it 6 months in advance. When did he first learn of the conspiracy to steal the election? How did he find out about it? What secret information did he have? Who was involved? And how could he let this happen?
I’d estimate that 0% of Republican elites believe the “stolen election” story. Every one perfectly well knows that it’s just a desperate lie Trump made up to avoid admitting that he lost, something that you tell the gullible masses so they don’t blame you for your failure.
Even Republican voters don’t really believe it—they don’t believe it in the way that, say, they believe their son’s last birthday happened. Their “belief” in the stolen election story consists of their enjoying the way it feels when they say it. This is the “belief” that you present to the world as your position and that you tell yourself you believe, as opposed to the thing that you actually know happened.
That is why they aren’t blaming Trump, wondering why he let it happen, or wondering what the point would be of voting for him again. This also makes sense given that they have no evidential reason for believing the story—as opposed to instrumental reasons for “believing” it—and given the fact that, frankly, it’s just about the most obvious lie, from the most obvious conman we’ve ever seen in public life. It could not be more obvious if he had a big Pinocchio nose growing out of his face every time he talked.
Michael Huemer writes March 2, 2024:
What do far leftists like about Islam? They like that Islamic extremists hate America. That’s what really matters to them. It’s more important to hate America than to recognize democracy, or free speech, or to treat women or gays like human beings.
The far left’s hatred of America is not explained by America’s mistreatment of this or that group, else they would hate the countries that treat those groups far worse. Rather, hatred of America is a fundamental ideological axiom. Their complaints about America’s alleged oppression of minorities are not driven by concern for those minorities; they are just a tool for attacking America. That is why woke activism doesn’t focus on practical steps to improve the lives of minorities (e.g., programs to reduce out-of-wedlock births, increase graduation rates, or reduce gang violence); it focuses almost entirely on convincing everyone that America is evil.
