I cannot believe the Fed gave Citigroup 2.5 Trillion Dollars!

[cthulu2016]

25. You raise excellent point. We cannot simply defer oversight to elites, however

Last edited Sun Sep 2, 2012, 04:30 PM - Edit history (1)

we can develop a basic sense of critical thinking and a realistic view of the evidentiary value of sides.

In the mega thread encouraging everyone to be outraged over a lie (I would surely call it a lie if Romney said it) the most usual form of argument is, "are you saying Bernie Sanders doesn't understand this issue?"

That is an outsider's reliance on an elite... an anti-authoritarians appeal to authority. And generally I would have thought that Bernie Sanders saying something merited a presumption (a rebut-able presumption, of course) of veracity.

Unfortunately Bernie Sanders is being intentionally deceptive. That is different from being wrong.

So in the future I can never give anything Bernie Sanders says a presumptive color of veracity. That does not mean that I will not continue to generally agree with him about many things, but I will always be aware that he might be lying for political effect.

And the same goes for the global warming delusionalists. Climate change is real and serious but that does not mean it is a religion where virtue is revealed by who can make the most ridiculous claims. There was a thing a few weeks ago about how Greenland had lost it's ice pack in the space of a few days.

That was obviously false. And the diagram used to illustrate the point did not support the bogus interpretation of it.

Like the FED thing, one had only to think, "If this was true what would I have seen in the real world?" If the Greenland ice pack had melted in a few days the worlds oceans would have risen more than twenty feet. And we all would have heard about that!

Similarly, if the Fed had given $16 trillion tax dollars to banks we would have seen the effects of it from every direction.

The most irresponsible thinkers are, ironically, the most reliant on elites. They just have different elites. They have irresponsible elites.

A lot of people surely believed Akin on reproductive science because his view was extreme in seeming support of "life" and thus, to them, he was obviously credible. Same for Ron Paul. And it goes for a few people on the left also.

And it is tragic. The reactive personality-cult anti-critical intellectual style of some folks with whom I would like to agree is a LW echo chamber, and no more worthwhile than the RW echo chamber.

I wish and hope and aspire for our side to be rigorously truthful and reliably correct, and to not spit out dishonest agit-prop.

And sometimes I do not get that wish.