Musk set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in 19 days - Nvidia says ​it normally takes 4 years

[John Clark]

Musk set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in 19 days - Jensen says it normally takes 4 years

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jws

[John Clark]

Politically Elon Musk is a moron and morally I believe him to be a very unpleasant character, but exactly the same thing could be said about Isaac Newton. As painful as it is for me to admit it, I've got to give the devil his due. 

[Giulio Prisco]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 3:47 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Politically Elon Musk is a moron and morally I believe him to be a very unpleasant character, but exactly the same thing could be said about Isaac Newton. As painful as it is for me to admit it, I've got to give the devil his due.
>

He could well be a very unpleasant character, but perhaps you should
reconsider "moron." Do you ever pause to think that perhaps, just
perhaps, those who don't hate Donald Trump like you might have one
valid point or two?

Now Elon is campaigning for Trump and saying extreme things to win
(like all political operators). But from what he says in calmer
moments I guess his position is similar to mine: Trump can be bad, but
the alternative is worse.

> Musk set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in 19 days - Jensen says it normally takes 4 years
>
> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> jws
>>
>>

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[Lawrence Crowell]

t'Rump may be like the tech-industrialists in the 1930s who thought they could handle Adolf Hitler. I think Harris will win the popular vote, but with how the electoral system has been skewed I think we will get the orange grifter back. Be prepared to live in a totalitarian nation.

LC

[John Clark]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 5:53 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think Harris will win the popular vote, but with how the electoral system has been skewed I think we will get the orange grifter back. Be prepared to live in a totalitarian nation.

I think you're right, but I really really hope both of us turn out to be dead wrong!

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 4:57 AM Giulio Prisco <giu...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>> Politically Elon Musk is a moron and morally I believe him to be a very unpleasant character, but exactly the same thing could be said about Isaac Newton. As painful as it is for me to admit it, I've got to give the devil his due.

> He could well be a very unpleasant character, but perhaps you should reconsider "moron."

Nobody is a genius in every area of human activity, I wouldn't go so far as to call Einstein a political moron but, although his intentions were good, he certainly wasn't very adept at politics. Leonardo de Vinci was a genius at art but an overrated dilettante in science. As for likability, Newton and Gauss were geniuses at physics and mathematics but both were unpleasant characters, especially Newton. But except for antisemites everybody liked Einstein, and even people who hated Darwin's theory like the man when they met him. 

> Do you ever pause to think that perhaps, just perhaps, those who don't hate Donald Trump like you might have one valid point or two?

As for Donald Trump, he has a genius for finding and pushing the buttons needed to get a mob enraged, but he's a moron in all other forms of human activity, and that even includes the ability to make money. If Trump had simply taken the money that his daddy had given him and then invested it in a stock index mutual fund and sat on his hands for the next 35 years he'd be much richer than he is now.

And Giulio, have you ever met or heard of another human being who could spew out lies at a machine gun rate like Donald Trump does at every speech he gives? What I find so bizarre is that even Trump's greatest fans know he is lying but, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, they just don't care. 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jgc

[Will Steinberg]

The Democrats did this to themselves by abandoning the working class in favor of a calcified oligarchy that controls a milquetoast mainstream which pretends to be the underdog while actually being a mundanely authoritarian corporate arbiter of culture.

I take no pleasure in seeing the ‘left’ abandon its post so completely that the country thinks Donald Trump is a good alternative.  As long as people like you two fail to understand why the Democrats have lost so much ground, we will remain screwed.

A way of explaining it is that the Republicans realized that in order to survive they had to sacrifice some of their oligarchy in order to stay relevant to the working class.  They adopted a position that is actually self-critical in a lot of ways.  Trump represents anger at the obstinate two-party oligarchical system.  It’s irrelevant that he is part of it now—it’s about what he represents.  The ONLY reason people really like Trump is that he is a symbol of spite against the oligarchy.  The Republicans hated him for a while but realized they needed to at least pretend to agree in order to survive.

Hopefully the Democrats realize this sooner rather than later.  Their recent intra-party calculus has been to scuttle candidates like Bernie who criticized the oligarchy.  To stay afloat I think a populist D candidate needs to have ranks closed around them.

I would prefer a third party, but just saying this is why people like Trump.  He can say whatever he wants and lie about whatever because the power of his anti-oligarchy symbol is that strong.  Please try to understand this, it is crucial 

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 5:53 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Giulio Prisco]

Most politicians can lie at that rate, it is a necessary skill for the
job. For example, nearly everyone in the other party has repeated and
repeated a huge lie for months (not to mention other lies of course).

> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> jgc
>
>

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[Will Steinberg]

Yeah it’s as you say, lying is part of the job.  Trump may lie in a particularly ridiculous way, but as I mentioned, lying is acceptable people for the singular fact that Trump “calls out” the establishment, and they have made him an enemy.  That kind of mainstream bias is ironically what pushes people towards him, and as that continues to freak out the mainstream more and lead to more desperate attempts to destroy him, the more people resonate with his rhetoric of witch hunts—because it really has been a witch hunt, and the “trumo derangement syndrome” thing is real.  The obvious thing to to would be to ignore and belittle him instead of treating him like the next Hitler, because the clear overreaction drives people to him.

All the Democrats have to do is embrace populism and criticize the oligarchy, and they win.  But it’s anathema to the party.  These are the people who cheated Bernie out of the race because it was Hillary’s turn.  As long as they keep this up, things WILL get worse.  I promise.  I don’t like Trump very much, but I 100% blame the neo/liberal mainstream for creating him.  And if Kamala wins, the 2028 successor to Trump may just be the Hitler candidate you pretend that Trump is.

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[Lawrence Crowell]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 7:10 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 4:57 AM Giulio Prisco <giu...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>> Politically Elon Musk is a moron and morally I believe him to be a very unpleasant character, but exactly the same thing could be said about Isaac Newton. As painful as it is for me to admit it, I've got to give the devil his due.

> He could well be a very unpleasant character, but perhaps you should reconsider "moron."

Nobody is a genius in every area of human activity, I wouldn't go so far as to call Einstein a political moron but, although his intentions were good, he certainly wasn't very adept at politics. Leonardo de Vinci was a genius at art but an overrated dilettante in science. As for likability, Newton and Gauss were geniuses at physics and mathematics but both were unpleasant characters, especially Newton. But except for antisemites everybody liked Einstein, and even people who hated Darwin's theory like the man when they met him. 

Elon Musk is not in the same class as Newton, Einstein or Darwin. He graduated BS in physics from U-Penn with decent grades. Clearly he is intelligent, say in the 130 up IQ class to use that terminology. He never went to graduate school, and he never invented any of the things he is being hailed for. He bought into all the tech industries he is now the leader of, starting with Daddy Erol Musk and his hundreds of millions he gave Elon. He bought into all of these things.

LC

 

> Do you ever pause to think that perhaps, just perhaps, those who don't hate Donald Trump like you might have one valid point or two?

As for Donald Trump, he has a genius for finding and pushing the buttons needed to get a mob enraged, but he's a moron in all other forms of human activity, and that even includes the ability to make money. If Trump had simply taken the money that his daddy had given him and then invested it in a stock index mutual fund and sat on his hands for the next 35 years he'd be much richer than he is now.

And Giulio, have you ever met or heard of another human being who could spew out lies at a machine gun rate like Donald Trump does at every speech he gives? What I find so bizarre is that even Trump's greatest fans know he is lying but, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, they just don't care. 

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jgc

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 10:16 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I would prefer a third party,

I would prefer that too but thanks to the screwy electoral college system it's virtually impossible to have 3 political parties in which any of the 3 has a real chance of winning the presidency, the best you could have is 2 real candidates plus a spoiler candidate who has no chance of winning but can change which of the 2 real candidates wins. The dreadful electoral college system is made even worse because nearly all the states have adopted a winner take all approach, if somebody gets 50.1% of the popular vote in a state then they get 100% of the real votes, the only votes that matter, the electoral votes; even if 49.9% of the people in a state vote for a candidate he gets none of the 270 votes needed to win.    

And Will, I don't know if your reasons for Trump's popularity among white lower middle class men is correct but if it is you certainly don't paint a very flattering portrait of the intelligence of that particular political electorate:

1) Trump is something new: 

Kamala Harris has never been president and like all vice presidents she never had much power, but Donald Trump has been president for four years and he bungled the job to a job dropping degree! 

2) Trump will do better on beating inflation: 

Trump wants to drastically cut the taxes on billionaires and pay for that by imposing huge new tariffs, which is equivalent to a national sales tax, which would affect the lower and middle class much much more than the upper class. The Wall Street Journal, a pro Trump newspaper, conducted the following survey of economists and this is what they found: 

Two-Thirds Of Economists Think Inflation Would Be Worse Under Trump Than Harris

And sixteen Nobel Prize winning economists signed a letter saying Trump's economic ideas were nonsense: 

Sixteen Nobel Economists Sign Letter About Risks to the U.S. Economy of a Second Trump Presidency

3) Trump wants to help the working man: 

Trump has always done his best to keep unions out of any of his companies, and just a few days ago we had Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, was giving a speech while the world's richest man was literally dancing around him while figuratively kissing Trump's ass. And this is the savior of the middle class?!  

Elon Musk captured jumping on stage at Trump rally 

4) Trump will solve the most important problem facing the nation, illegal immigration: 

Ten or fifteen years from now people, or Mr. Jupiter Brain, will look back on the "vitally important" immigration problem and laugh.  

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

First past the post voting and the electoral college are both horrible, yes.

None of your reasons are what I mentioned.  Nobody cares what Trump will do, they care that he’s not the old political elite oligarchy and that he criticizes it.  That’s it.  Without that he would be exactly the same as any other Republican.  I have tried to explain this to you numerous times.  It’s not about policy, so if you want to understand, please listen.  Giulio and Dylan have explained well too.

Intelligence is not the issue.  Some people believe the bog standard Republican promises Trump makes, and some don’t.  That’s not why he is popular, and it’s why people don’t care when he breaks promises.  Because they aren’t voting for his policies.  They are voting as a vote of exasperation and spite against the political establishment that lies in a much more insidious and long-term way.  The fix is simple, just have a Democrat run who criticizes political elites.  But it isn’t happening, because the party won’t allow it, as seen with Bernie.

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[Keith Henson]

I have a different view of why Trump.

Look at where he is supported, it's places that are economically
depressed or where people think they have a bleak future, This is due
to a wired-in psychological trait that in the Stone Age was the first
response to a resource crisis.

Eventually, this leads to war against some outsider group or an attack
on an identifiable subgroup.

The problem is not so much Trump but the evolved psychological traits
humans have.

That humans have any such traits is a very difficult concept for
people to understand

Keith

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[Will Steinberg]

Yes we know, you have said the same thing countless times but it’s still not a complete picture.  And in fact I think it explains almost none of Trump.

Trump ran in the primaries against double digit numbers of Republicans who were all just as xenophobic.  And in fact unlike the rest of them Trump was a NYC Democrat.  So that’s not what his allure is.

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[Will Steinberg]

I gotta stop saying and in fact

[Lawrence Crowell]

Don-the-Con t'Rump is a showman and a malignant narcissist capable of drawing people into his orbit. He has a long career of chewing people up and spitting them out, and he always has a line up of people waiting to be next. He has this charm offensive ability to keep using people, and just as with his show "The Apprentice" they keep coming and are willing to be used up and abused. There is with this myth of him being a successful businessman, when in fact he is a total failure at business that is legal and above ground. He has been quite successful at laundering money for organized crime, and he probably has billions of dollars in secret accounts. Why can't he pay his current judgment? Because all his money is dark money and if he did pay with this dark money he would be presenting to the legal world the extent of his illegality. 

There is also something involving innate human behavior with respect to land and resources. If there is hunger or a drought, the growing desperation causes people to point at those "other people" as the source of trouble. Then if the right "Big Pela Man" steps up people fall behind him. That is where t'Rump comes in; he is a sort of national messiah. He is not the usual political candidate or leader. Historically these sorts of characters are disasters. Hitler was the German messiah, Lenin the Russian messiah and Mussolini the Italian messiah. It is America's turn to be the bad man, and there are more cases of this elsewhere in the world.

LC

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[Will Steinberg]

I’ll eat my words if I’m wrong but I think you people are patently insane.  There is no chance that Trump is able to take over the country.  The military wouldn’t stand for it.  At the very worst it would be a civil war, but I don’t think he will try.  Plus he’s ancient

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[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 4:27 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes we know, you have said the same thing countless times but it’s still not a complete picture. And in fact I think it explains almost none of Trump.

I am not surprised that you think in a way that denies evolved
psychological traits. You miss the point, it's about the response of
stressed people. Focusing on Trump is looking in the wrong direction.

"Traits evolved in the EEA might apply to the current situation in the
US. Consider the correlation between areas with poor economic
prospects such as the Rust Belt and the current prevalence of
xenophobic memes (or just crazy ones such as QAnon).

If the root cause of the symptoms we see is the perception of a bleak
future, is there anything we could do?

The obvious thing is to improve economic conditions or at least the
perception of them. By this model, the IRA went out of business
because of improving income per capita. The major reason for this was
that the Irish women cut the number of children they had from around 4
to replacement. With low or zero population growth, even small
economic growth makes the future look brighter, population support for
fighting diminished, and the IRA slowly went out of business.

The present article might help people understand the evolutionary
origins of certain types of behavior. The people who were caught up in
events such as the Rwanda genocide or, more recently, the Jan. 6
attack on the Capitol appear not to understand their own behavior.

Simple as this model is, humans seem to have a (possibly evolved) bias
against the understanding that they have or are influenced by evolved
internal psychological mechanisms. In other words, too much insight
may not be good for your genes."

Keith

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[Will Steinberg]

But what we are doing is trying to explain why people like Trump, and I am saying that your hypothesis is insufficient to explain his popularity.  It’s certainly part of it, but I don’t think it’s all of it.  

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[ilsa]

No More Trump

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 6:44 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> None of your reasons are what I mentioned. 

Obviously you're right that none of the reasons I mentioned have decreased Trump's popularity with the Nazi-Curious one bit, but that fact is incompatible with something else you said, "Intelligence is not the issue".

> Nobody cares what Trump will do

Nobody? I care, in fact a majority of American voters care, but of course their votes do not elect the president, only the 538 members of the electoral college are allowed to vote for the president. I will however concede the fact that YOU do not care. 

they care that he’s not the old political elite oligarchy

Trump is the oldest man to ever run for president from a major political party in the entire history of the country, Trump is a former president, Trump is a billionaire, Trump has the richest man in the world LITERALLY dancing around him.... and yet he's not a member of the "old political elite oligarchy"?  No Will, intelligence is very much an issue. 

> It’s not about policy,

Obviously true, therefore it must be about intelligence, or rather the lack of it.  

> people don’t care when he breaks promises

It's true that some people don't care that Trump breaks promises, and some people don't care that Trump tells an obvious bold-faced lie about once every 35 seconds in every speech he gives. You care so little you say you're not even going to bother to vote. But I care, and I have already voted.  

 > The fix is simple, just have a Democrat run who criticizes political elites.  But it isn’t happening, because the party won’t allow it, as seen with Bernie.

Will, if you believe that an old man like Bernie Sanders, older than Trump and even older than Biden, could beat Donald Trump in a presidential race then I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. 

John K Clark

 

 

[John Clark]

 Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

  > There is no chance that Trump is able to take over the country.  The military wouldn’t stand for it. 

According to the constitution the President is the Commander In Chief, Trump will be equivalent to a 10 star general who outranks everybody in the military. And the president is head of the Executive branch of government, if Trump wins his zombies will almost certainly control both houses in the legislative branch, and Trump already has the Supreme Court in his pocket, and there is not the slightest doubt the Trump wants to be a dictator,  so who is left, who is going to stop him?

> but I don’t think he will try

Trump already tried to take over the country on January 6, 2021 but fortunately he failed to achieve his goal. What makes you so sure he won't try again? And what makes you think he won't be more successful the next time?  

 

> At the very worst it would be a civil war,

Well it's good that it won't be any worse than the Civil War, the last one only killed 750,000 Americans but the Covid epidemic killed 1.2 million Americans, most of them due to Trump's inept handling of the pandemic. 

> The obvious thing to to would be to ignore and belittle him instead of treating him like the next Hitler, because the clear overreaction drives people to him.

And in 1933 people said it was silly to claim that Hitler would be the next Attila the Hun because this is Germany, it can't happen here! 

 > the “trumo derangement syndrome” thing is real. 

Good Darwin Almighty!  Trump derangement syndrome? Doesn't it embarrass you to mimic the mating call of the generic Trump zombie? 

John K Clark

 

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 10:25 PM Will Steinberg
<steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But what we are doing is trying to explain why people like Trump, and I am saying that your hypothesis is insufficient to explain his popularity. It’s certainly part of it, but I don’t think it’s all of it.

If you have a more accurate way to account for the MAGA/Trump support
being concentrated in the economically depressed areas of the country
I will certainly be interested. Trump is in my opinion just an
example of a class. I am sure you can fill in some of the others.
The interesting question to me is why and when such people get support
from the population.

If evolved psychological traits related to war are too distasteful to
contemplate, perhaps this might work to convince you that we have such
traits. https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding

Not that understanding evolutionary psychology is likely to do you any good.

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[Will Steinberg]

John as usual you have purposefully or ignorantly misread so much of what I said that it is almost impossible to respond.  It is a sisyphean task and I’m not sure why I do it.  

On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 7:47 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 6:44 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> None of your reasons are what I mentioned. 

Obviously you're right that none of the reasons I mentioned have decreased Trump's popularity with the Nazi-Curious one bit, but that fact is incompatible with something else you said, "Intelligence is not the issue".

I’m not sure the point of this part, I’m pointing out that you did your typical thing of completely ignoring the main point and responding with whatever random bullshit is in your head and you want to say.  It is very much like Trump does.  Your brash ignorance and lack of understanding or care about context as well as the way you act like you believing something makes it fact are Trumpian.

> Nobody cares what Trump will do

Nobody? I care, in fact a majority of American voters care, but of course their votes do not elect the president, only the 538 members of the electoral college are allowed to vote for the president. I will however concede the fact that YOU do not care. 

By “nobody” I obviously meant “nobody [who is voting for Trump].”

they care that he’s not the old political elite oligarchy

Trump is the oldest man to ever run for president from a major political party in the entire history of the country, Trump is a former president, Trump is a billionaire, Trump has the richest man in the world LITERALLY dancing around him.... and yet he's not a member of the "old political elite oligarchy"?  No Will, intelligence is very much an issue. 

Yes John, when you explore a concept, you have to look at THE WHOLE FUCKING THING.  Trump hasn’t been part of the old political oligarchy because unlike all the other people who run he wasn’t inside the party machines.  He dealt with them (and was a Democrat forever) but it’s very different from being inside them and being beholden to them.  This is the obliteratively obvious point I am trying to make.  Trump may be a corporate oligarch but he’s not a political one.  And I would argue he wasn’t really a corporate one, he didn’t have his fingers in many serious pies.  More of a socialite and stuck to his real estate stuff and his dumb tv shows and ridiculous products, nothing like the heads of multinational food/chemical/oil/etc. companies who are seriously intermingled with government and routinely pull strings that affect foreign and domestic policies in a massive way.

> It’s not about policy,

Obviously true, therefore it must be about intelligence, or rather the lack of it.  

Or it could be about the other thing that I overtly said.  How does your mind work?  I don’t know how you manage to so perfectly miss every point. 

> people don’t care when he breaks promises

It's true that some people don't care that Trump breaks promises, and some people don't care that Trump tells an obvious bold-faced lie about once every 35 seconds in every speech he gives. You care so little you say you're not even going to bother to vote. But I care, and I have already voted.  

Again, the obvious meaning here is that people who like Trump don’t care if he breaks promises.

 > The fix is simple, just have a Democrat run who criticizes political elites.  But it isn’t happening, because the party won’t allow it, as seen with Bernie.

Will, if you believe that an old man like Bernie Sanders, older than Trump and even older than Biden, could beat Donald Trump in a presidential race then I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. 

Well I see how this one could be misinterpreted but I wasn’t explicitly saying Bernie could beat Trump now, more trying to show that the Democrats scuttle the ascendancy of anyone who criticizes their political system.  But I do think he would have a shot at beating him.

@Keith I feel I have provided an explanation, you’re just choosing to not listen unless I agree that your model explains all of why people like Trump.  I’m not sure why you think the single brain level is the only important factor for what humans do.  We have the entirety of culture and memetics forming emergent mind structures and they have their own set of traits.  Children raised in isolation are like animals, but you seem to think that all people are solely these animals.  I truly don’t get it when everything apparent points to there being so much more than just the evolved physical content of brains.  

[Keith Henson]

@Keith I feel I have provided an explanation,

Sorry, If you did, I missed it.

> you’re just choosing to not listen unless I agree that your model explains all of why people like Trump.

Ignore Trump, do you have an explanation as to why MAGA and QAnon
activity/belief is concentrated in the economically depressed areas of
the country? Or conversely, why do these memes get little traction in
relatively prosperous places?

> I’m not sure why you think the single brain level is the only important factor for what humans do. We have the entirety of culture and memetics forming emergent mind structures and they have their own set of traits.

Are you aware of how much I have written on memes? Richard Dawkins
acknowledged my work in the second edition of The Selfish Gene.

MEMETICS AND THE MODULAR-MIND Analog 1987

http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=29007

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.mindcontrol/c/MebHkQFkUT4/m/rAwQ5rwDPhAJ

> Children raised in isolation are like animals, but you seem to think that all people are solely these animals.

My work is all over the web. I don't think you can support such a
claim. But try it and let me know.

Keith

I truly don’t get it when everything apparent points to there being
so much more than just the evolved physical content of brains.

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[Will Steinberg]

The poorest people in the country are overwhelmingly people of color and they are overwhelmingly democrat.  Though I will give you that they too are starting to go towards Trump.

I do believe there is a tendency towards strongmen in uncertain times.  But my explanation of Trump in particular is that he represents specifically a reaction towards calcified political oligarchy and inefficiency.  Which some strongmen are, and others aren’t.  But I believe the reason he is supported so strongly is because people see this oligarchy as their #1 issue and that it is responsible for all other problems.  And in particular people take issue with the brazen lying that anything about this oligarchy is efficient or positive.  It’s like lying about Biden’s mental decline until the very last possible second.  Lies like that absolutely destroy trust and make people see things as a farce.  So when some guy comes along and is the only one saying “those guys are liars and this is a farce” it resonates so strongly that they don’t even care that he lies about other things.  What they care about is the long con by the 2 party establishment that everything is/was going smoothly when the people see and experience the wheels falling off

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[John Clark]

Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

 > It’s like lying about Biden’s mental decline until the very last possible second. 

I agree that was a grave error but you can't blame that on Kamala Harris, you can't expect her to go on TV and say "you should invoke the 25th amendment and remove Biden and make me President". Yes other people should've said that, but Harris couldn't. For the same reason I think it's unfair to ask Harris while she is still vice president "what mistakes do you think Biden has made and how would you do things differently?" because they know she cannot answer candidly.  Vice Presidents can not and should not criticize their presidents, if they want to do that they should resign first. And if Harris did that I don't see how we would be better off, because then Trump zombie Mike Johnson would be president.

> Lies like that absolutely destroy trust and make people see things as a farce.  So when some guy comes along and is the only one saying “those guys are liars and this is a farce” it resonates so strongly that they don’t even care that he lies about other things. 

I think you're probably right about that, and that's why when you said "it's not about intelligence" you were dead wrong, because having such an attitude is brain dead DUMB.  There is not a human being alive who lies more frequently than Donald Trump, statistically speaking any statement that comes out of that man's mouth is far more likely to be wrong rather than correct, does I must conclude that Trump fans are either so stupid they still believe every word he says, or they know he's lying but they enjoy the lies so much they think he's entitled to have  the nuclear launch codes for another four years. And this is not about intelligence?!   

> The fix is simple, just have a Democrat run who criticizes political elites. 

You keep saying that but I don't know what you mean, every politician who ever lived has given a speech "criticizing political elites", it's on page 1 of "The Politicians Guide To Gaining Power". And it's impossible to be more "politically elite" than a billionaire that is also a former president! Maybe I could figure out what the hell you're talking about if you could give me a name, other than Bernie Sanders of course. Give me the name of a Democrat who is so charismatic he is certain to get elected but is ALSO a genius AND a saint. All I'm asking is for you to name one Democrat who is a political, intellectual and moral paragon of virtue. Just one would be enough, how hard can that be? 

John K Clark  

[Will Steinberg]

I’m not blaming it on Harris, but rather saying it is why people are disillusioned with the Democrats.  I think Harris is just a random person they picked because they think she checks demographic boxes (it is literally why Biden picked her after all, as he stated) and I imagine she is extremely stressed out about being foisted into this role.  It’s why it is difficult for her to talk about her achievements and why mainstream news reported for years on how little she seemed to be doing, or that she was being “hidden”.

Trump’s lies are a different flavor.  Trump doesn’t like about his personality for the most part, or when he does, it is lies he almost certainly actually believes.  I think people see him as some kind of lovable fool.  The lies of the other side are more long-term and all encompassing.  Trump is like a pathological liar, it’s like he can’t help it.  But the lies of the modern Democrat party appear to be designed for specific planned deception.  I’m kind of surprised you don’t understand what I am talking about.

The best way I can describe it is Trump is like some kid who tells you he found a real gold coin digging in his backyard.  But the modern Democrats are like a spouse who is more manipulative, who says “I know I lied last time but it was a mistake, I swear!  I’ll do better this time!” and then continues to lie, and eventually you start to think they’re even lying about their earnestness to stop lying.  

I think the Republican party also engages in this kind of cold, calculated deception, perhaps not as much, as I think they are more likely to tell you straight up that they are assholes.  But Trump is unlike either in the sense that he is clearly just some affable wacko saying stupid shit in a stream of consciousness.  There doesn’t seem to be any calculation, no rhyme or reason, all id.  People feel that with Trump they know what they are getting, and feel more confident that there isn’t some higher-level ruse going on.  Just a dumb dude who makes shit up.

Does that help explain it better?  I think the differences are really obvious to see if you look and think.

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[Will Steinberg]

And just to be clear, I don’t like Trump, I think he is a blowhard.  And I am politically very centrist on all axes.  What I am trying to explain is that Trump is a reaction to a certain kind of cancerous political mendacity, one that disrespects the citizens heavily, and which while always a problem and is part of politics in a system designed around convincing people to vote, has become an all-encompassing media apparatus with a constant—CONSTANT—onslaught from all sides at all times, a unified corporate-government monopoly that seems designed to crush people into little cubes (who vote).  I think Trump’s populism, and populism around the world, is populist exactly because it is a reaction to this homogenizing force, and it puts people back in the spotlight as entities with thoughts and needs, rather than just boxes to check to earn a vote.

For example, the Harris campaign recently made this extremely desperate and tone-deaf appeal to specifically black men:

https://x.com/kamalaharris/status/1845993766441644386?s=46

It’s so off base that I thought it was satire.  It’s just openly saying “we are losing the black male vote more than we thought, so here are some cynical boxes we think we can check to trick black men into liking us for long enough to cast their ballots.”  This post basically says “Hi black guys, you like free money and weed right?  And you are bad at assessing risk in investments?  We got you covered!”.  It’s patronizing and is exactly the kind of barefaced lie about supporting people of color that has pushed said people of color away from the Democrats.  I showed this post to my mother, who is an accomplished journalist who will vote D in this election, and she literally wouldn’t believe it was real.  And yet it is.  

I’m not trying to make you like Trump, John.  I’m trying to help you see why people dislike the Democrats enough to vote for a buffoon like that.  And I keep attacking this unassailable wall of yours because I am fearful too of the direction things are going.  And I believe strongly that a misunderstanding of the problem by people like you is what brings people like Trump to power.  I am desperate for you to understand what I am saying because there will be a point at which it is too late to change.  We might already be there, maybe Trump is the Hitler who will seize power and end the world, but I am not convinced.  And I AM convinced that even if he is not, that said person will come as long as the left doesn’t change its tactics.  I really believe this and I’m trying to show you what’s wrong.

I don’t know who the right Democrat candidate is because it is political suicide to criticize the boss, so these people aren’t speaking up.  If I had to guess I would say a left-wing tycoon or celebrity who like Trump would be able to finance their own campaign.

[Stuart LaForge]

On Thursday, October 17, 2024 at 7:16:05 AM UTC-7 steinbe...@gmail.com wrote:

The Democrats did this to themselves by abandoning the working class in favor of a calcified oligarchy that controls a milquetoast mainstream which pretends to be the underdog while actually being a mundanely authoritarian corporate arbiter of culture.

I take no pleasure in seeing the ‘left’ abandon its post so completely that the country thinks Donald Trump is a good alternative.  As long as people like you two fail to understand why the Democrats have lost so much ground, we will remain screwed.

A way of explaining it is that the Republicans realized that in order to survive they had to sacrifice some of their oligarchy in order to stay relevant to the working class.  They adopted a position that is actually self-critical in a lot of ways.  Trump represents anger at the obstinate two-party oligarchical system.  It’s irrelevant that he is part of it now—it’s about what he represents.  The ONLY reason people really like Trump is that he is a symbol of spite against the oligarchy.  The Republicans hated him for a while but realized they needed to at least pretend to agree in order to survive.

Hopefully the Democrats realize this sooner rather than later.  Their recent intra-party calculus has been to scuttle candidates like Bernie who criticized the oligarchy.  To stay afloat I think a populist D candidate needs to have ranks closed around them.

Yes, the Democratic Party routinely forces out populist candidates. Sometimes they use the media to take a 10 second clip of an impassioned 10 minute speech and play it over and over again to make the candidate look insane, like they did with Howard Dean. Other times they ignore the popular vote during primaries and throw the populist under the bus in order shoehorn hand-picked candidates in with superdelegates like they did Bernie Sanders. Although I have typically voted democrat in the past, I have to admit the party is just stale and corrupt.

I think you have good theory why Trump is so popular amongst Republicans. I think with regards to Elon Musk though, it not so much an antiestablishment bias, as it is direct promises of political favors once in office like the mandate to reach Mars in a decade. I would not discount the possibility that Ivanka Trump might be contributing to Musk supporting her father, since she is his type so to speak.   

 

Stuart LaForge

[John Clark]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 10:58 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

 > Trump doesn’t like about his personality for the most part,

"I am a very stable genius"  "I don't Like to lie, I'm basically a truthful person" 

 

> I think people see him as some kind of lovable fool.  He is clearly just some affable wacko saying stupid shit in a stream of consciousness.  There doesn’t seem to be any calculation, no rhyme or reason, all id. 

Well that's as good a theory as any I suppose, I certainly don't have a better idea to explain why millions of people think that a stupid Id driven lying foolish egomaniac is the perfect person to control the nuclear launch codes. Maybe to be successful the Democrats need to lie more often, and don't just shade the truth but rather tell ridiculous OUTRAGEOUS bold face lies, the BIGGER the better. But I still don't understand why you said being a Trump supporter has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence because your theory seems to contradict that.  

> And just to be clear, I don’t like Trump,

I understand that, but what I don't understand is why you dislike Kamala Harris even more than Trump, or at least you think there's some sort of equivalence in the level of competence and mendacity between the two so it's not worth your time to vote.  There are a thousand reasons why there is no such equivalence but I'll just give one, if Trump wins then Trump's best friend Vladimir Putin wins the Ukraine war and 38 million people will suffer under his totalitarian rule, if Harris wins they don't. Isn't that worth five minutes of your time needed to fill out an absentee ballot? 

Another thing I don't understand is why Trump fans (and maybe you) think the US is a dystopian hell hole when crime is way down, inflation is down, unemployment is the lowest it's been in decades,  the economy has recovered from the pandemic faster than any other large nation, and the per capita income of somebody living in Mississippi, the poorest of the 50 states, is larger than that of somebody living in Britain.       

 > maybe Trump is the Hitler who will seize power and end the world, but I am not convinced

So you think it's possible Trump will not become Big Brother or start World War III therefore Trump is equivalent to Harris. I humbly disagree.  

  > I’m kind of surprised you don’t understand what I am talking about.

Are you really?? 

John K Clark

 

 

  

 

[Will Steinberg]

I think the Democrats’ overarching lie is pretty much the worst thing in politics—it created Trump.  I think you still don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you.  As an example, let’s look at black men, in whom we are seeing a Trumpian shift.  If you haven’t, please look at the twitter post I sent for some supplemental material—I think just that post is enough to explain it, but I will try and be super clear.  This is something that Democrats have built a huge part of their platform, helping people of color.  But all they really have done is put people in token positions and looked the other way for some riots.  It’s not substantial whatsoever.  They have relied essentially on tricking people, infantilizing them, promising free things like the twitter post, while not actually helping the working class people of color they claim to be the party of.  Black guys are used to being patronized and belittled by the mainstream, but this is the party that said it was different.  So when it turns out they’re not only doing the same shit but also running on an implicit program of “black people are stupid so they will fall for our lies”, that really, really drives people away.  The simple solution would be to either actually help, or admit that they are Republicans in blue suits.  But it’s a catch-22.  They can’t actually follow through because it’s against their corporate crony imperative, the same imperative the Rebublicans have.  But if they admit their platform is fake beyond a few bones thrown to culture warriors, their votes dry up.  The Republicans don’t have the same issue because they’re not lying about being a corporate party.

You complain at me and ask ME questions about my own leanings as if it has any bearing on what I am saying.  I’m trying to tell you why D is losing support.  I think a Trump presidency could have some pretty awful effects.  But I am SURE that if Democrats win with this same lying strategy, and thus learn nothing, and fucking Kamala Harris is the incumbent in 28, that the disdain for them will crystallize even more and the next election will be a blowout for someone who makes Trump look tame in comparison.  which is why I think a Trump win would be a useful and probably needed reality check to stop the left from hemorrhaging voters.

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[Keith Henson]

You did not attempt to answer my question.

What is the difference between parts of the country that buy into
MAGA/QAnon and those parts that don't?

Keith


Keith

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[Will Steinberg]

What a reductive question.  I don’t have to have an answer, but it’s certainly not poverty as the most impoverished inner city areas are not MAGA/Qanon, and plenty of rich people are MAGA.  So we have at least failed to reject the null hypothesis there in my opinion.  I don’t have a good suggestion, I reckon it is a confluence of many factors.  An easy guess which I think is better than yours is rural vs urban, which I think tracks far more completely, and is borne out in electoral maps.  

Of course the real answer is surely multifaceted and includes economic, religious, vocational, racial, etc. factors.  

I also think you are happy to reduce people to statistics when they disagree with you, but what about you?  Do you not support Trump because you make a certain amount of money?  If you became destitute would you suddenly believe conspiracy theories?  It’s patronizing.  As if a person’s opinion becomes the “poor person opinion” if they are poor.  Some poor people are communists.  Some are nazis.  Some have the most bog standard opinions you can imagine.   It’s just not a good determinant of political leaning and I think it’s easy to come up with counterexamples.

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[Dylan Distasio]

Will-

There's no hope of getting through here.   Noone is interested in the actual factors that go into why Trump has support across a wide swath of the population, and rest assured it's not just the poors that many on this list seem to have a patronizing disdain for.

The bubble they are in has similar attributes to a black hole.   They've been spaghettified and the best you're going to get out of them is some no-information Hawking radiation...

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 12:47 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> >Keith Henson  wrote:

>>What is the difference between parts of the country that buy into MAGA/QAnon and those parts that don't?

> What a reductive question. 

Yes, but you almost make it sound like being reductive is a bad thing.  

 

> I don’t have to have an answer,

You do if you want anybody to take your incoherent theory seriously, I however do have an answer. If you want to know the degree of support Trump has in a given population there are two key indicators: 

1) The larger the percentage of people that STRONGLY believe there is an invisible man in the sky who created the universe and wrote a sacred book and hears His voice talking to us in their mind the more likely that population is MAGA/QAnon.

2) There is an inverse relationship between the degree of education and the degree of MAGA/QAnon support.

 

> Keith I feel I have provided an explanation, you’re just choosing to not listen

Will, you said the same thing to me, but has it ever occurred to you that we have listened but we just aren't buying the "idea" (I'm being generous by calling it that) that you're trying to sell.  Maybe the particular illogical jumble of emotions and beliefs that are just untrue is the reason for the support that Trump receives, or maybe it's some other illogical jumble of emotions and false beliefs; but the thing that really gets me is that you are also a victim of that very same malignant mind virus, and that's why you don't think it's worth your time to even vote.  

> I also think you are happy to reduce people to statistics 

I don't know about Keith but I certainly have no problem doing that.  

 >  Some poor people are communists.  Some are nazis. 

That is certainly true, and that fact can cause great confusion, so thank Darwin we have the science of statistics to come to our aid in situations like that. 

 John K Clark  

[Keith Henson]

You have missed how the human model works. The condition that turns
on the first step in the process is a *subjective )view" of the
future. It is, in the US case, places where things are worse in
outlook than they were in person's view of the past. This trips our
Stone Age detectors of a coming resource crisis and we become more
likely to spread xenophobic or crazy memes. (In the Stone Age this
led to an attempt to kill the neighbors and take their resources,
i.e., war. While war is rational from the gene's viewpoint it is not
rational from the individual's viewpoint, so genes for seemingly
irrational behavior are favored.)

And it is relative. See the Robert B. Cialdini reference in
https://www.academia.edu/777381/Evolutionary_psychology_memes_and_the_origin_of_war
You don't need to be starving, just feel that the future is not going
to be as good as what you are accustomed to.

I don't expect you to understand or agree with this. Most people have
a strong bias against the idea that they have such evolved internal
psychological traits. Probably too much insight is bad for your genes.

Keith

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 11:15 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> first step in the process is a *subjective view" of the

future. It is, in the US case, places where things are worse in
outlook than they were in person's view of the past.  This trips our
Stone Age detectors of a coming resource crisis

Maybe if you take a very long range outlook that could be true in a general sort of way, but these days I think things are happening far too fast for it to be relevant. Can anybody really say that things today are worse than they were in the recent past say 2020 when, thanks to Trump's bungling of the Covid pandemic, the White House and it's surroundings became the most biologically hazardous 18 acres on the surface of the Earth? 

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 11:15 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't expect you to understand or agree with this.  Most people have
a strong bias against the idea that they have such evolved internal
psychological traits. Probably too much insight is bad for your genes.

 Keith

Yes Keith you are special and smart and everything you think is correct.  If someone doesn’t agree with you it means they are lacking insight.

Understanding why this is insane might be above your emotional pay grade.  I feel like the disdain you have for black-and-white thinkers like the MAGA people could be a reflection of your own obstinate black-and-white thinking.  Where they say “it’s just the deep state!” like a broken record, you chime in on every post about US politics with “it’s just war genes!”.  I’m sure that’s a facet of it, but the desire to see these people as some kind of monolithic other tribe who behaves along rudimentary lines is the same thing you’re accusing them of doing.  

It’s documented that people’s thinking becomes more rigid with age—what is the evolutionary explanation for that?  Maybe a kind of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” imperative because for eons the stuff you learned at birth was just as relevant when you were older?  But now with how quickly information changes, older people end up not being able to adjust their perspectives to new information.  It’s just in your genes :) 

I fail to see how this isn’t as valid of a point as yours.  Or are you special and not bound to genetic determination?  It’s just silly.  If you use these psychological weapons against others they’re bound to get turned against you.  

At least John’s statistics about religion and education are accurate.  Poverty isn’t a determinant of political leaning in nearly as significant way as you propose.  And everyone in the world is unsure about the future.  Except perhaps the rich people who will be better off either way, and they’re split between D and R.  And probably more R, so it doesn’t even make any sense your way.

This isn’t even to mention that perhaps some stone age responses to chaos are actually still useful.  Lower immigration for example?  Maintains the status quo to make planning easier, less mouths to feed, less cultural disruption in general.  If a country is in chaos why would you want more people there?

Your hypothesis is easy to show counterexamples against, and it is also formed by putting the cart before the horse wherein you have personally decided which political opinions are vestigial troglodyte responses, and then you find a way to apply your skewed and oversimplified evopsych model by conjuring up a uniting factor for the group you disagree with.   It’s all backwards.  And like I mentioned, possibly due to your obstinacy genes kicking in, you refuse to even consider other opinions.

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 1:19 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 11:15 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I don't expect you to understand or agree with this. Most people have
>> a strong bias against the idea that they have such evolved internal
>> psychological traits. Probably too much insight is bad for your genes.
>>
>> Keith
>
>
> Yes Keith you are special and smart and everything you think is correct.

I could be dead wrong about humans being subject to evolutionary
psychology, but if I am, many people I respect such as Leda Cosmides,
John Tooby, Michael Gazzaniga, and a long list of people here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology are in the same
boat.

> If someone doesn’t agree with you it means they are lacking insight.

That could be. It bothered me for at least a decade that so few
people were unable to absorb an EP worldview. it seemed obvious to
me. It finally dawned on me that we have probably been selected not
to have a lot of insight.

> Understanding why this is insane might be above your emotional pay grade. I feel like the disdain you have for black-and-white thinkers like the MAGA people

You miss the point. It's not what they think at all, but the whole
class of beliefs (memes) that people who think they have a bleak
future adopt. it is human race-wide. Would you prefer examples like
Germany in the 1920s or Reanda or Cambodia? Under some conditions, it
makes sense for humans to circulate xenophobic memes and even go to
war.

> could be a reflection of your own obstinate black-and-white thinking. Where they say “it’s just the deep state!” like a broken record, you chime in on every post about US politics with “it’s just war genes!”. I’m sure that’s a facet of it, but the desire to see these people as some kind of monolithic other tribe who behaves along rudimentary lines is the same thing you’re accusing them of doing.

You are making it sound like I blame them. I don't. They have no
more control over what they are doing than Patty Hearst or Elizabeth
Smart did in how they responded to being captured.
https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding You might as well
blame someone for pulling their hand back from a hot surface

> It’s documented that people’s thinking becomes more rigid with age—what is the evolutionary explanation for that?

Have not thought about it. EP makes the general statement that all
animal behavior is the result of something that was directly selected
or a side effect of something that was selected. From the Wikipedia
article.

" Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that
examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary
perspective.[1][2] It seeks to identify human psychological
adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to
solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are
either functional products of natural and sexual selection or
non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.[3][4] "
. . .

"The theories and findings of evolutionary psychology have
applications in many fields, including economics, environment, health,
law, management, psychiatry, politics, and literature.[10][11]"

If you are going after me for being an old fart, I got into EP when I
was about 60. My last paper on this topic was 2006. (I have a recent
short paper if you want to read it.)

Abstract: Behavior, including human behavior related to war, is no
less subject to Darwinian selection than physical traits. Behavior
results from physical brain modules constructed by genes and
environmental input. The environmental detection and operation of
behavioral switches leading to wars are also under evolutionary
selection. War behavior in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness
(EEA) was under positive selection when the alternative (starvation)
was worse than war. The model is then applied in an attempt to explain
the behavioral difference between chimpanzees and bonobos with
additional thoughts on the KhoeSan People of Southern Africa.

> Maybe a kind of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” imperative because for eons the stuff you learned at birth was just as relevant when you were older? But now with how quickly information changes, older people end up not being able to adjust their perspectives to new information. It’s just in your genes :)

I commented on this in an interview.

RU SIRIUS: When did you first realize that you were a novelty-seeker?

KEITH HENSON: When I was about 8 years old. My mother read Robert A.
Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky to me. I was enthralled and eventually
read every published Heinlein (and many other SF authors) I could
find. She could not have imagined that 25 years later I would be
giving a paper at Princeton University, "Closed Ecosystems of High
Agricultural Yield," that was partly based on descriptions in Farmer
in the Sky.

RU: What are some of the qualities that people can notice perhaps even
in children that might indicate a progressive, neophiliac potential?

KH: That's a hard one because most kids are interested in new things.
The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are
adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any
case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing
attitudes as you get older.

https://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/02/05/a-reprint-of-an-interview-with-keith-henson-by-ru-sirius-2/

> I fail to see how this isn’t as valid of a point as yours. Or are you special and not bound to genetic determination? It’s just silly.

The last chapter of The Selfish Gene is on memes, and the last
sentence is “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the
selfish replicators.”

> If you use these psychological weapons against others they’re bound to get turned against you.

I doubt you can hold a patch on the clam cult. They spent a few
million going after me.

> At least John’s statistics about religion and education are accurate. Poverty isn’t a determinant of political leaning in nearly as significant way as you propose.

Again, you have completely missed the point. It is not where you are
on the income scale but how you view the future that trips the
behavior on or off. The IRA lost population support because the
future looked brighter with only a small change in actual income.


Keith

> And everyone in the world is unsure about the future. Except perhaps the rich people who will be better off either way, and they’re split between D and R. And probably more R, so it doesn’t even make any sense your way.
>
> This isn’t even to mention that perhaps some stone age responses to chaos are actually still useful. Lower immigration for example? Maintains the status quo to make planning easier, less mouths to feed, less cultural disruption in general. If a country is in chaos why would you want more people there?
>
> Your hypothesis is easy to show counterexamples against, and it is also formed by putting the cart before the horse wherein you have personally decided which political opinions are vestigial troglodyte responses, and then you find a way to apply your skewed and oversimplified evopsych model by conjuring up a uniting factor for the group you disagree with. It’s all backwards. And like I mentioned, possibly due to your obstinacy genes kicking in, you refuse to even consider other opinions.
>
>

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[Will Steinberg]

I just think you are being reductive and elitist.  You should do some LSD or something.

Clam cult?

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[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 7:22 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I just think you are being reductive and elitist. You should do some LSD or something.

I will skip responding to this. I have a nice guy reputation to uphold.

> Clam cult?

For those two words, 4th down in a google search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Clambake


Keith

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAKrqSyHpe2sfesAtZhHjRTav1NnES8idWjnD6ZTG2bT6PMpfBA%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Clark]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 12:49 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 7:22 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just think you are being reductive and elitist.  You should do some LSD or something.

>I will skip responding to this. 

I don't blame you one bit.

> I have a nice guy reputation to uphold.

And as far as I can tell you are indeed a nice guy. However I do think you're overestimating the power of Evolutionary Psychology, it can you give us a few broad trends and drives, such as a drive to reproduce, but it can't possibly give the details about how we should behave in every conceivable circumstance to achieve that goalbecause the entire human genome only contains 750 megs of information (3 billion base pairs, there are 4 bases and there are 8 bits per byte); and that is far FAR FAR too small to write a book of instructions about how to behave in all circumstances. So insteadEvolution invented an information processing device, the brain, to process the data it received from the senses and calculate the details of how to behave. 

But sometimes those details weren't what Evolution had in mind, if Evolution had a mind, which it doesn't. Evolutionary Psychology alone cannot explain the invention of the condom, and I don't think it can explain why Trump and his MAGA/QAnon form of irrationality metastasized in 2016 and not in some other year.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

swo

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 4:49 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 12:49 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> >> On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 7:22 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > I just think you are being reductive and elitist. You should do some LSD or something.
>>
>>
>> >I will skip responding to this.
>
>
> I don't blame you one bit.
>
>> > I have a nice guy reputation to uphold.
>
>

> And as far as I can tell you are indeed a nice guy. However I do think you're overestimating the power of Evolutionary Psychology, it can you give us a few broad trends and drives, such as a drive to reproduce, but it can't possibly give the details about how we should behave in every conceivable circumstance to achieve that goal because the entire human genome only contains 750 megs of information (3 billion base pairs, there are 4 bases and there are 8 bits per byte); and that is far FAR FAR too small to write a book of instructions about how to behave in all circumstances. So instead evolution invented an information processing device, the brain, to process the data it received from the senses and calculate the details of how to behave.

Agree. But there is a lot of bias built into the brain constructed by
genes. All the way from simple reflexes to our unease at walking
along a cliff edge to the capture bonding behavior. It's not hard to
understand how these came about through selection.

> But sometimes those details weren't what Evolution had in mind, if Evolution had a mind, which it doesn't. Evolutionary Psychology alone cannot explain the invention of the condom,

True. If for no other reason, latex was not part of the Stone Age environment.

> and I don't think it can explain why Trump and his MAGA/QAnon form of irrationality metastasized in 2016 and not in some other year.

If you go back much further, there were neo nazi upsurges in the
Midwest that corresponded to economic downturns over decades. I wrote
about these cases in the context of memes long before I ran into EP.
But your point why then is valid. Self-amplifying memes might provide
a random factor. To some extent, we don't know enough. For example,
very few people are aware that there was a food shortage bad enough to
stunt kids prior to the Civil War.

Humans have been facing resource limitations for at least 100,000
years and solving them by going to war. Is this enough generations to
have selected for the response?

I think so, but if humans and war is an uncomfortable topic, we could
switch to capture-bonding.

Keith

> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> swo
>

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 10:22 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I just think you are being reductive 

What on earth is wrong with being reductive?! 

> and elitist.  

And what's wrong with being among the elite?  If a surgeon is going to cut me open I hope it's done by an elite surgeon!  

 

> You should do some LSD or something.

What the hell?!

 John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

Being reductive is bad because you don’t like being reduced.  What if I treated you like the statistical entity of a close-minded old man?  And such a ridiculously simplistic model has barely any explanatory power in a vacuum.  It’s just pointless.  From this kind of thinking to your solipsism, it’s like you don’t see others as people with minds.  I don’t know if it’s autism or sociopathy or what but it’s scary to see people so easily reducing people to objects.  It is what the Trump people do which is why I think it bothers you so much.  You’re on that tribal war level, me good, they bad.  And your facile models and reluctance or inability to see others as complex beings leads to you being confused about why things are happening.  

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 2:24 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Being reductive is bad because you don’t like being reduced. 

I don't mind at all, my behavior can be broken down into many smaller and simpler bits until you get down to chemical reactions, and then you could go down even further to Schrodinger's Wave. Without reductionism there would be no science. 

 John K Clark   

[Will Steinberg]

But this isn’t a scenario for SIMPLE reductionism, these people don’t have behaviors that are predicted by the oversimplified models you give.  You can be reductionist but it requires looking down to lots of lower-order processes, not just one or two like you’re doing.  It is obvious that by saying “reductive” I mean the general term and not the scientific term.  

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 2:58 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

 > these people don’t have behaviors that are predicted by the oversimplified models you give. 

I give? I disagree with Keith, I think his models are oversimplified. I think there must be other reasons, in addition to evolutionary ones, that have turned Trump supporters into such gigantic jackasses, reasons that I do not pretend to understand and reasons that I don't believe you understand either. In fact even Trump supporters don't seem to understand why they are Trump supporters, at least they can't coherently explain it to me and Darwin knows I've asked them, I begged them to do so since 2016 but all I get is random ravings about transsexual bathrooms, women in men's sports, and now Haitians eating cats. Oh and yesterday Trump talked for 13 minutes about Arnold Palmer and the huge size of his penis, I don't know maybe that is somehow related, it's as good a theory as any. 

Or maybe it's just a sign that Trump is developing Alzheimers like his father did when he was about the same age. 

> It is obvious that by saying “reductive” I mean the general term and not the scientific term. 

It's not obvious to me. Maybe by "general term" you just mean reductionism being performed badly, because obviously nobody wants that.  

John K Clark

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 12:34 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:>
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 2:58 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > these people don’t have behaviors that are predicted by the oversimplified models you give.
>
>
> I give? I disagree with Keith, I think his models are oversimplified. I think there must be other reasons, in addition to evolutionary ones, that have turned Trump supporters into such gigantic jackasses, reasons that I do not pretend to understand and reasons that I don't believe you understand either. In fact even Trump supporters don't seem to understand why they are Trump supporters,

That's typical of people under the influence of such evolved
psychological traits. The killers in Rwanda don't understand what
happened when they killed their neighbors. Lots of baffled testimony
before the reconciliation commission. Likewise, Patty Hearst was at a
loss to understand what happened to her. It makes sense in
evolutionary terms because (if you use the Yanomamo. numbers) around
10% of women in prehistory times were captured. Those who were able
to bond with the group that captured them became our ancestors. Those
who did not became breakfast. :-) That's a hell of a genetic
selection filter.

> at least they can't coherently explain it to me and Darwin knows I've asked them, I begged them to do so since 2016 but all I get is random ravings about transsexual bathrooms, women in men's sports, and now Haitians eating cats.

No surprise. You will not get a coherent conversation with a
strung-out doper or a cult member either. I wrote a paper long ago on
the common brain reward pathways of drugs and cults. (Credit to
Kennita Watson who helped.)
https://www.academia.edu/37893481/Sex_Drugs_and_Cults_An_evolutionary_psychology_perspective_on_why_and_how_cult_memes_get_a_drug_like_hold_on_people_and_what
_might_be_done_to_mitigate_the_effects

People in the Trump/MAGA/etc cult are rewarded at the brain reward
circuit level by talking or otherwise interacting with others who
share their meme sets. Attention is highly rewarding. It's why we
post.

I don't want to claim much credit here, I was just in a place where it
was easy to pick the low-hanging fruit.

Keith

> Oh and yesterday Trump talked for 13 minutes about Arnold Palmer and the huge size of his penis, I don't know maybe that is somehow related, it's as good a theory as any.
>
> Or maybe it's just a sign that Trump is developing Alzheimers like his father did when he was about the same age.
>
>> > It is obvious that by saying “reductive” I mean the general term and not the scientific term.
>
>
> It's not obvious to me. Maybe by "general term" you just mean reductionism being performed badly, because obviously nobody wants that.
>
> John K Clark
>

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[Will Steinberg]

A strung-out doper, is that me?  For fuck’s sake.  I pity people like you.  You’re just as much of an NPC as the people you seem to consider mindless animals at the whims of their most base urges.   You just know more trivia.  

People like you guys are a perfect model of where I don’t want to end up intellectually as I age—obstinate, close-minded, just saying the same shit over and over at every opportunity.  Acting like you want discussion but really just wanting someone to listen to you, while imagining you’re above it all. Aren’t you trained in the sciences?  Didn’t you ever learn the Socratic method?  You would stand to learn a lot from some of the people who you are talking about as if they are children who have no control of or consideration over their behavior.  

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[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 10:10 PM Will Steinberg
<steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A strung-out doper, is that me?

Please, don't be so sensitive. I don't know anything about you beyond
your comments here, like the one about LSD. My comments were not
directed to any specific person.

I was talking about the common final brain reward pathway that I
described in an article 20 years ago. But consider, do you think
people are rewarded by what they experience in cults?

Are they rewarded by the chemical effects on their brains of addictive drugs?

Do you think there is anything in common between these rewards?

I don't know if you have ever had experience with cult members. I
have had with the scientology cult. I have also had some experience
with drug addicts. They are remarkably similar. I had no idea of why
for years.

"Typical behavior for both includes draining bank accounts and
education funds, selling or mortgaging property, neglecting children,
destroying relations with family and friends, and losing interest in
anything except the drug or cult. (Not all people become this
irresponsible on either cults or drugs, but many do.) " [from the
article]

> For fuck’s sake. I pity people like you. You’re just as much of an NPC as the people you seem to consider mindless animals at the whims of their most base urges. You just know more trivia.

I didn't know that trivia, had to look it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme) Is that your intended
meaning? Given my well-known history, can you make a case for me
being non-player character? Also seems risky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme)#2023_stabbing

> People like you guys are a perfect model of where I don’t want to end up intellectually as I age—obstinate, close-minded, just saying the same shit over and over at every opportunity. Acting like you want discussion but really just wanting someone to listen to you, while imagining you’re above it all. Aren’t you trained in the sciences?

Since you ask, BSEE, perhaps a dozen papers and articles. Senior life
Member, IEEE. Seven patents. Known for founding the L5 Society.
Refugee in Canada for a few years.

Do you have a web page? I can't figure out which one you might be.

> Didn’t you ever learn the Socratic method? You would stand to learn a lot from some of the people who you are talking about as if they are children who have no control of or consideration over their behavior.

I will refrain from comment

Keith

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 10:10 PM Will Steinberg spewed out this crap: 

> I pity people like you.  For fuck’s sake.  I pity people like you.  You’re just as much of an NPC as the people you seem to consider mindless animals at the whims of their most base urges. [ ...]  People like you guys are a perfect model of where I don’t want to end up intellectually as I age.

By "people like you" and "people like you guys" I assume you're referring to Keith Henson and me, if so then I'm proud to be placed in the same category as Keith.  And if there's one thing in this world you can be absolutely certain of its that if somebody says "I pity you" then you can be 100% certain that person is LYING and that they do NOT pity you because if they actually did pity you then saying it to the person you claim to pity would be the very last thing in the world you would want to say. It is even more obvious that the words spoken are a lie if they are uttered in the middle of a heated argument.

Keith Henson then calmly, intelligently, politely and with more patience than I have responded to Will's blather with this: 

> I don't know if you have ever had experience with cult members. I have had with the scientology cult. 

Yes I agree, you've had some experience with the scientology cult, in fact I'd call that one of the great understatements of all time! And Keith, you're a braver man than I am, braver by far! I think Will Steinberg needs to educate himself, he might start by reading the Wikipedia article about you. By the way, I know it wasn't your fault but I always regretted that they changed the name of the L5 Society to the much more forgettable National Space Society.

Keith Henson

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

epb

 

[Lawrence Crowell]

What you do not see is that the real danger is not with t'Rump, but with the surging cult followers that mindlessly believe everything he says. There are such followers in the military as well, including a growing cult of "warriors for Christ." This is a problem of mass psychosis.

LC

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 7:35 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

I’ll eat my words if I’m wrong but I think you people are patently insane.  There is no chance that Trump is able to take over the country.  The military wouldn’t stand for it.  At the very worst it would be a civil war, but I don’t think he will try.  Plus he’s ancient

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 8:30 PM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

Don-the-Con t'Rump is a showman and a malignant narcissist capable of drawing people into his orbit. He has a long career of chewing people up and spitting them out, and he always has a line up of people waiting to be next. He has this charm offensive ability to keep using people, and just as with his show "The Apprentice" they keep coming and are willing to be used up and abused. There is with this myth of him being a successful businessman, when in fact he is a total failure at business that is legal and above ground. He has been quite successful at laundering money for organized crime, and he probably has billions of dollars in secret accounts. Why can't he pay his current judgment? Because all his money is dark money and if he did pay with this dark money he would be presenting to the legal world the extent of his illegality. 

There is also something involving innate human behavior with respect to land and resources. If there is hunger or a drought, the growing desperation causes people to point at those "other people" as the source of trouble. Then if the right "Big Pela Man" steps up people fall behind him. That is where t'Rump comes in; he is a sort of national messiah. He is not the usual political candidate or leader. Historically these sorts of characters are disasters. Hitler was the German messiah, Lenin the Russian messiah and Mussolini the Italian messiah. It is America's turn to be the bad man, and there are more cases of this elsewhere in the world.

LC

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 6:27 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes we know, you have said the same thing countless times but it’s still not a complete picture.  And in fact I think it explains almost none of Trump.

Trump ran in the primaries against double digit numbers of Republicans who were all just as xenophobic.  And in fact unlike the rest of them Trump was a NYC Democrat.  So that’s not what his allure is.

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 7:06 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a different view of why Trump.

Look at where he is supported, it's places that are economically
depressed or where people think they have a bleak future,  This is due
to a wired-in psychological trait that in the Stone Age was the first
response to a resource crisis.

Eventually, this leads to war against some outsider group or an attack
on an identifiable subgroup.

The problem is not so much Trump but the evolved psychological traits
humans have.

That humans have any such traits is a very difficult concept for
people to understand

Keith

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 3:44 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> First past the post voting and the electoral college are both horrible, yes.
>
> None of your reasons are what I mentioned.  Nobody cares what Trump will do, they care that he’s not the old political elite oligarchy and that he criticizes it.  That’s it.  Without that he would be exactly the same as any other Republican.  I have tried to explain this to you numerous times.  It’s not about policy, so if you want to understand, please listen.  Giulio and Dylan have explained well too.
>
> Intelligence is not the issue.  Some people believe the bog standard Republican promises Trump makes, and some don’t.  That’s not why he is popular, and it’s why people don’t care when he breaks promises.  Because they aren’t voting for his policies.  They are voting as a vote of exasperation and spite against the political establishment that lies in a much more insidious and long-term way.  The fix is simple, just have a Democrat run who criticizes political elites.  But it isn’t happening, because the party won’t allow it, as seen with Bernie.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 6:08 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>
>> On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 10:16 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> > I would prefer a third party,
>>
>>

>> I would prefer that too but thanks to the screwy electoral college system it's virtually impossible to have 3 political parties in which any of the 3 has a real chance of winning the presidency, the best you could have is 2 real candidates plus a spoiler candidate who has no chance of winning but can change which of the 2 real candidates wins. The dreadful electoral college system is made even worse because nearly all the states have adopted a winner take all approach, if somebody gets 50.1% of the popular vote in a state then they get 100% of the real votes, the only votes that matter, the electoral votes; even if 49.9% of the people in a state vote for a candidate he gets none of the 270 votes needed to win.
>>
>> And Will, I don't know if your reasons for Trump's popularity among white lower middle class men is correct but if it is you certainly don't paint a very flattering portrait of the intelligence of that particular political electorate:
>>
>> 1) Trump is something new:
>>
>> Kamala Harris has never been president and like all vice presidents she never had much power, but Donald Trump has been president for four years and he bungled the job to a job dropping degree!
>>
>> 2) Trump will do better on beating inflation:
>>
>> Trump wants to drastically cut the taxes on billionaires and pay for that by imposing huge new tariffs, which is equivalent to a national sales tax, which would affect the lower and middle class much much more than the upper class. The Wall Street Journal, a pro Trump newspaper, conducted the following survey of economists and this is what they found:
>>
>> Two-Thirds Of Economists Think Inflation Would Be Worse Under Trump Than Harris
>>
>> And sixteen Nobel Prize winning economists signed a letter saying Trump's economic ideas were nonsense:
>>
>> Sixteen Nobel Economists Sign Letter About Risks to the U.S. Economy of a Second Trump Presidency
>>
>> 3) Trump wants to help the working man:
>>
>> Trump has always done his best to keep unions out of any of his companies, and just a few days ago we had Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, was giving a speech while the world's richest man was literally dancing around him while figuratively kissing Trump's ass. And this is the savior of the middle class?!
>>
>> Elon Musk captured jumping on stage at Trump rally
>>
>> 4) Trump will solve the most important problem facing the nation, illegal immigration:
>>
>> Ten or fifteen years from now people, or Mr. Jupiter Brain, will look back on the "vitally important" immigration problem and laugh.

>>
>> John K Clark
>>
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[Will Steinberg]

I think the dopamine comparison is a bit of a spook here.  Of course people who find something motivating enough to obsessively pursue it will have overactive pathways which govern motivation and pursuit.  I don't think reductionism really does much in this case--it doesn't have any bearing on why they are motivated.  If you reduce everything down that far then it all just looks the same.  People can be obsessively motivated to do drugs, or exercise, or eat, or be in a cult.  Of course being obsessively motivated means you will see lots of activity in their motivation-pursuit circuits.

If you're asking why certain things and not others seem to have an easier time gripping people like this--bigger rewards, more repetition, etc.  The comparison just doesn't seem useful to me.  Dopamine is pretty much congruent to motivation-action behavior, so to me all you are saying is x = x.  

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[Keith Henson]

Re brave, that was not exactly what happened. I got a couple of
academic publications out of the experience, but duking it out with
the clam cult was not a good idea. I got sucked into the fight
defending free speech. it wasn't a good idea personally. That cult
is smaller now and has less influence, but it still had enough to get
an FBI investigation into their internal prisons and human trafficking
(slavery) shut down.

Someone went after the FBI with FOIA. If you want to read the report,
it is available.

My big disappointment is that (so far) understanding the evolved
psychological traits that make people vulnerable to cults has not
resulted in interventions.

Keith

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[Will Steinberg]

Vulnerability to groupthink is common, it just happens that cults are small, insular groups.

The insanity around covid and how crappy untested vaccines made by giant amoral pharma corporations were pushed on people with the threat of total ostracization and prevention from moving through society was cult-like.  It was just a cult that was so big it became mainstream.  

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 4:05 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The insanity around covid and how crappy untested vaccines made by giant amoral pharma corporations

WHAT THE FUCK?! I begin to understand how a mind that thinks the above sentence makes sense would also believe that Trump and his zombies make sense. Those "crappy untested vaccines" made by "giant amoral pharma corporations" saved MILLIONS of lives and would've saved millions more if so many Republicans weren't persuaded by scientific ignoramuses that vaccines were the work of the devil.  Largely because of Trump's bungling of the pandemic at least 1.2 million Americans died from Covid, more than all of the wars America has fought since the revolutionary war to today COMBINED, but without those satanic horrible vaccines that you hate so much the death toll could easily have reached 20 million or more. And if Trump wins and if we have a new pandemic during the next four years then Darwin help us.

 

> were pushed on people with the threat of total ostracization and prevention from moving through society

Yes and I'm VERY glad the unvaccinated were ostracized! If I'm going to get into a narrow aluminum tube that is flying at 40,000 feet at 600 miles an hour for five hours I don't want the person sitting right next to me to be someone who insists on turning his body into a Covid incubator and virus distribution machine. 

John K Clark 

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 1:05 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Vulnerability to groupthink is common, it just happens that cults are small, insular groups.
>
> The insanity around covid and how crappy untested vaccines made by giant amoral pharma corporations

A corporation that produces a billion or so doses of anything has to
be giant. Amoral is a feature of corporations. "Crappy untested", the
MRNA vaccines were and still are the best vaccines in the world at
generating antibodies to covid. The testing was the best they could
do given the time pressure of both people dying and the economic
damage the pandemic was causing.

A legitimate question is what you would have done differently?

Keith

PS Not everything on the Internet is true.

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[Will Steinberg]

The vaccines were a completely new untested technology that needed trials and then the individual vaccines themselves needed trials.  It would be fine if they gave people informed consent but they didn’t.  I am young and healthy and I practiced safe social distancing and I haven’t gotten a vaccine because I don’t feel like being part of an illegal worldwide clinical trial.  Got covid twice (not for 3 years after the pandemic started btw) and it was easier than the flu.

mRNA vaccines are pushed because they are cheap.  There is no time culturing viruses or researching how to best culture the strains, and the mRNA vaxes can essentially be printed en masse without the need to maintain the complex biological machinery of viruses.  It’s a good idea, but we have no clue if there are long-term effects, and research on side effects was treated like it came from the devil itself.

Pharma companies care about one thing—profit.  They don’t follow the hippocratic oath.  They are like any other corporation.  Vaccines and the covid vax in general are unbelievably profitable.

Here’s a question for John the libertarian: did you know you can’t sue pharma companies for vaccine injuries in general?  You have to apply to a specific government fund with damages capped at $250k even for wrongful death.   And the companies have zero exposure.  How’s that for competition and the free market?

Corporations and the government together run a big fucking racket that drains the citizens through taxes and fees like insurance which go to graft and inflated “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” costs.

I can tell this isn’t a conversation worth having with you.  Keep fellating corporations and corrupt government like a good member of the cattle they see you as

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[Keith Henson]

"reached 20 million or more."

I don't think so for this particular virus. The case fatality rate
was around 1% so no more than ~3.3 million would have died. The
previous outbreak in 2003 had a fatality rate of about ten percent.
Had this turned out as bad, the number would have been around 33
million. But at the start, the people making decisions didn't know
how bad it would be.

Keith

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[Will Steinberg]

What I would have done is be as clear as possible what the vaccine was, what level of testing had been done on it, possible side effects, etc.—informed consent.

Instead people were plied with free stuff and threatened with excommunication.  They weren’t told what the vaccine even was.  They weren’t told that the risks were magnitudes higher for the infirm, obese, and elderly.

Essentially what happened is the government didn’t trust people (and, they are in the pocket of corporations), so they chose to lie and obfuscate in pursuit of public health, thinking “if we are more clear about the risks of the vaccine and the risks of covid, people won’t get the vaccines, and we will have a crisis”.  And I don’t like that kind of thinking.  People should be allowed to see all the information and decide for themselves.  Not to mention plenty of countries with less access to vaccines did just fine during the pandemic.   Perhaps the outcomes in America have to do with the fact that 3/4 of adults are overweight and more than half of that group is obese.  This is a problem in developed countries in general, along with an aging population.  I think low-risk people shouldn’t have been pressured so hard to get the vaccines as long as they were being careful around others.

I have worked in a few virology labs.  I have degrees in biology and economics, so I’m not just talking out my ass, if the pedigree means something to you.  

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 5:01 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The vaccines were a completely new

Yes

> untested technology

No.

> that needed trials and then the individual vaccines themselves needed trials. 

At its peak 4440 Americans were dying from covid IN ONE DAY, and worldwide many times that number, you couldn't just keep doing business as usual. Each and every day you delayed the release of the vaccine you were condemning many THOUSANDS of innocent people to death.  And as it turned out more trials were NOT needed, the vaccine worked wonderfully spectacularly well.  

> mRNA vaccines are pushed because they are cheap.  There is no time culturing viruses or researching how to best culture the strains, and the mRNA vaxes can essentially be printed en masse without the need to maintain the complex biological machinery of viruses.  It’s a good idea,

It certainly is!  

> but we have no clue if there are long-term effects,

I'm sure you have no clue, but scientist certainly do.  

> Here’s a question for John the libertarian: did you know you can’t sue pharma companies for vaccine injuries in general?  You have to apply to a specific government fund with damages capped at $250k even for wrongful death.  

I'm delighted that liability damages were capped because if it was not then the vaccines simply would've never been developed by any pharmaceutical company because they would know it would result in their bankruptcy, and worldwide tens of millions of people would've died. Globally over 13 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered to about  70% of the world's population, if only one in a billion of those doses caused a bad reaction, or even if it hadn't but lawyers could convince a jury that it had, then with today's mega million dollar liability lawsuits even those huge drug companies that you hate so much would be certain to go bankrupt. That protection was needed, without it a pharmaceutical company would be stupid to have anything to do with a Covid vaccine.

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

Oh please.  Plenty of medicine has full exposure to lawsuits and it doesn’t bankrupt the companies.  Why would vaccines be any different?  You’re doing corporate lobbyists work for them, good boy.

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 6:38 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Oh please.  Plenty of medicine has full exposure to lawsuits and it doesn’t bankrupt the companies.  Why would vaccines be any different? 

Because there are NOT plenty of examples of 13 billion vaccinations in about 18 months, and because of Luddites such as yourself plenty of people have an irrational fear and hatred of vaccines, even though vaccines have saved more human lives than any invention in history.

John K Clark

  

 

> The vaccines were a completely new

Yes

> untested technology

No.

> that needed trials and then the individual vaccines themselves needed trials. 

At its peak 4440 Americans were dying from covid IN ONE DAY, and worldwide many times that number, you couldn't just keep doing business as usual. Each and every day you delayed the release of the vaccine you were condemning many THOUSANDS of innocent people to death.  And as it turned out more trials were NOT needed, the vaccine worked wonderfully spectacularly well.  

\

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 2:53 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What I would have done is be as clear as possible what the vaccine was, what level of testing had been done on it, possible side effects, etc.—informed consent.

I followed the vaccine development closely at the time. It was clear
to me, the testing program was well described. There are an infinity
of possible side effects so you are asking the impossible. Informed
consent makes no sense either. In the early days of the vaccine,
there were people trying to get it out of turn who offered $25k.

> Instead people were plied with free stuff

Really? What kind of free stuff? Did I miss out?

> and threatened with excommunication.

That's news to me. How did they get the Pope involved?

> They weren’t told what the vaccine even was.

I knew at the time because I read into the open technical literature.
It is moderately complicated. What would you do? Force a
college-level knowledge on everyone who wanted to be vaccinated?

> They weren’t told that the risks were magnitudes higher for the infirm, obese, and elderly.

The risks of dying from the disease for these people were widely
discussed at the time.

> Essentially what happened is the government didn’t trust people (and, they are in the pocket of corporations), so they chose to lie and obfuscate in pursuit of public health, thinking “if we are more clear about the risks of the vaccine and the risks of covid, people won’t get the vaccines, and we will have a crisis”. And I don’t like that kind of thinking. People should be allowed to see all the information and decide for themselves. Not to mention plenty of countries with less access to vaccines did just fine during the pandemic.

Let's get specific, which countries?

> Perhaps the outcomes in America have to do with the fact that 3/4 of adults are overweight and more than half of that group is obese. This is a problem in developed countries in general, along with an aging population. I think low-risk people shouldn’t have been pressured so hard to get the vaccines as long as they were being careful around others.

And just how do you sort out the careful?

> I have worked in a few virology labs. I have degrees in biology and economics, so I’m not just talking out my ass, if the pedigree means something to you.

In that case, I am even more amazed at what you have said. Any papers
on your work?

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[Will Steinberg]

We’re talking about all vaccines, not covid.  ALL vaccines in America are still not subject to lawsuits, and for the small capped damages, the GOVERNMENT (i.e. the taxed citizenry) foots the bill.

I can understand better forbidding lawsuits for experimental medication.  But in that case we shouldn’t be compelling people to take something that is experimental enough that we need to ban lawsuits for.

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 7:58 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I haven’t gotten a vaccine

I stood in line (wearing a face mask of course) to make sure I got the Covid vaccine on the very first day it was available.

> Got covid twice 

 I never got Covid. 

> and it was easier than the flu. 

I'm glad you didn't die, but I'll bet that neither of those two experiences was much fun, and you may not be entirely out of the woods. Those who got Covid, especially those who got Covid twice, may suffer permanent long-term negative health effects such as: 

1. Fatigue and reduced energy levels
2. Brain fog (difficulty thinking or concentrating)
3. Shortness of breath
4. Persistent cough
5. Joint or muscle pain
6. Loss/change in smell or taste
7. Sleep problems
8. Anxiety and depression
9. Heart palpitations
10. Dizziness
11. Digestive issues

> We’re talking about all vaccines, not covid.  ALL vaccines in America are still not subject to lawsuits,

I don't know what you're talking about but I'm talking about the Covid vaccine, and no other vaccine, in fact no other ANYTHING that humans have manufactured, has ever been issued 13 billion times to 70% of the human population of the planet before.

> we shouldn’t be compelling people to take something that is experimental enough that we need to ban lawsuits for.

The Covid vaccine was "experimental" only in one sense, that particular vaccine had never been used to stop a global pandemic that was killing many millions of people before because nobody had ever seen the Covid virus before.  

>What I would have done is be as clear as possible what the vaccine was,

They were not told everything there was to know about the virus because to this day nobody knows everything there is to know about the virus. What you would've done is generate even more delay, red tape and general farting around while 4440 Americans (about 2.5  911 attacks) were dying EACH DAY!  It is beyond dispute that if we had followed your advice the end result would've been even more death. 

> They weren’t told what the vaccine even was.

Bullshit!  

>They weren’t told that the risks were magnitudes higher for the infirm, obese, and elderly.

Bullshit!  If you are infirm, obese or elderly then your chances of dying from Covid are exponentially larger than for somebody that is not, and compared to that huge danger of dying from Covid the chances of dying from the side effects of the Covid vaccine are virtually nonexistent. 

> Instead people were plied with free stuff and threatened with excommunication.  

People were told that if they were so stupid that they insisted on turning their bodies into Covid virus manufacturing and distribution plants then they could expect to see some pushback if they wanted to live among a dense population of civilized people that were not as stupid as they were.

For example, the Army Navy and Air Force said that if you want to be in the military then you've got to be vaccinated in order to prevent stuff like the following from happening again:  

Covid-19 on an Aircraft Carrier causes its mission to be canceled

> plenty of countries with less access to vaccines did just fine during the pandemic. 

Bullshit!  Russia and China insisted on using their own Covid vaccine that was made with much older non-CRISPR technology, but both had more side effects and was not nearly as effective as the western CRISPR vaccine; so the result was both countries had a very high death toll, although for obvious reasons exact numbers are difficult to come by. Brazil and India had little access to the CRISPR  vaccine and also had a very high death toll. Worldwide between 7 and 20 million people have died from Covid, virtually all of them people who were NOT vaccinated.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 7:58 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> it was easier than the flu. 

I should have added that I too have had the flu, several times in fact, but not in the last 30 years; that was about the time I started getting flu shots on a regular basis. Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.  

John K Clark