Talk:Socialism/Bipartisan fraud

Guy vandegrift

This comment [First version of this resource -AP295] appeared on the talk page of Socialism/Is it a thing of the left?, and it is already a quality essay of its own. I thank the author for adding a new word to my vocabulary: intradiegetic. It is hard to study or contemplate political science without wanting to be "part of the story" (i.e., hoping to make the world a better place.) In other words, it's hard not to take side in such matters. Whenever possible, one should carefully define labels such as socialism or right-wing, and avoid using them as accusations. The language of mathematics might help clarify what I meant by "left" and "right": A political philosophy or viewpoint can be viewed as a point in a space with almost infinite number of dimensions: Even one's views on abortion are multi-faceted, since differences regarding such issues rape and parental control over pregnant minors all make it impossible to separate people into "pro-choice" and "pro-life" camps. As a mathematician, I want to simplify this complexity with a simple parameter, or a number, like "weight" or "IQ", that allows me to compare individuals. Such parameterization permits me to look for correlations, for example, between church attendance and divorce rates.

All this leaves me with a dilemma: It is not only unfair, but inaccurate and ultimately meaningless to label or parametrize people. On the other hand, if I don't do that, I cannot look for interesting correlations. For that reason, such ponderings are best done from the uninterested extradiegetic point of view.

Lenders don't seem to think it's inaccurate or meaningless. Access to credit (the final word in our debt-based economy) is handily granted or withheld based on one's credit score. People are quite accepting of such reductionism so long as they aren't told to be offended by it.* I avoid using words like "right-wing" or "left-wing" not because I think they're an oversimplification, but because they represent falsehoods and serve no dialectic purpose. They are thoroughly poisoned by the mass media. The essay is not supposed to be a critique of reductionism, but an exposé of our two-faced media. I intend it to arm the reader against the media's lies and hopefully give them a few dialectical tools. Perhaps I could put it in less abstract terms, e.g. by using phrases like "left- and right-wing" instead of a neutral but less specific term like "archetypes", but I must avoid watsonian commentary. Even if one puts down their own pet definition of "left-wing", "right-wing", "socialism", etc. these phrases still evoke a knee-jerk response or induce an amygdala hijack. The subject of this discourse is mass media and propaganda rather than "the left", "the right", or the public. I reference "the left" and "the right" mostly as rhetorical concepts rather than ideologies, and this distinction must be made explicit. AP295 (discuss • contribs)

* But don't ever call a bandersnatch a jubjub. This is a highly pejorative term for a bandersnatch. Inciting hatred is against policy and neo-jabberwocks are not welcome here. Semantically, nothing is lost or gained by swapping in nonsense words.

@Guy vandegrift: I moved the page to give it a proper title, not having put much thought into the original as it was just a talk page comment, but now it appears twice on the list of essays. How do I fix this? AP295 (discuss • contribs)

No problem!--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 02:29, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

@Guy vandegrift: I may move this out of the "directory" on socialism. I know I've been hemming and hawing about this, but it wasn't clear to me exactly how the page worked. I don't mind at all if it's linked on the page of essays on socialism, if it's appropriate to do this without having the essay located in the socialism directory. It seems like that page only includes essays that are in that directory, not just those that include the category tag "socialism". I think it's an appropriate category tag to include, but the word socialism is one of those nominalized political -isms that is excessively burdened by subversive connotations and I think it's essential to the message of the essay itself that it not be presented in a partisan, watsonian context. My question is whether or not it's possible/appropriate to have it appear on that list if I move it out of wiki/Socialism/Bipartisan_fraud to wiki/Bipartisan_fraud. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 19:39, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

My primary responsibility is to subpages of Socialism (e.g. Socialism/Bipartisan fraud). Given the other subpage essays (under Socialism, your essay is 100% welcome, no matter how much you change it. I am not the best expert on what gets the Socialism category tag (i.e [[Category:Socialism]]), but I certainly have no objection to that category tag in your essay. Likewise, removing that tag in your essay is fine with me. If you move the essay into into mainspace (e.g., Bipartisan fraud), you are likely to run amok of editors who feel only major projects deserve mainspace status. My personal inclination is that one essay (on Bipartisan_fraud) does not warrant mainspace status. .... Does that answer your questions? Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 03:01, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

If that's the case I'll have to find a place for my other essays. You've mentioned elsewhere that "landing pages" are not typically named after users. If possible I would like to keep them grouped. I guess it's unclear to me where I ought to put them and more generally how content is supposed to be organized here. I had a quick look at https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Namespaces but it's full of jargon and not easy to understand. I'll read it in more detail later but if you have any recommendation please let me know. Thank you. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 14:50, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

General notes

To do: Explaining away should probably have a greater emphasis. Bogus hypotheses like confirmation bias are far too often used (not necessarily intentionally) to explain away the effects of subversion. The phrase comes up dozens of times on Wikiversity. The terrible Wikipedia article on confirmation bias has FA status. I worry it's becoming a madhouse. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 09:09, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

The above could also be explained in terms of "blame shifting", but explaining away is probably better, though I should mention the former. The essay needs more cited examples of this in general, preferably from e.g. news sites, reddit, and so on, even though the ones I do cite are probably well-understood as being typical examples. It shouldn't be too hard, considering how strongly these ideas are pushed there's hardly any lack. Sometimes media is blamed, but only in a partisan context and usually with a good helping of condescension toward the rank-and-file partisan for good measure. I listened to an NPR broadcast where they were talking about fox news, roughly in this vein. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 03:17, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm less satisfied with the intro each time I read it. I'll have to rewrite it at some point, as it's the most important part. The cartel/price fixing/collusion analogy works well though, so that should probably be kept, but reworded. The whole thing still needs quite a bit of work. I don't want any part of this essay to sound dogmatic, least of all the intro. It should say something about tacit collusion, just to give an example of something that would be difficult to falsify but that must be accounted for anyway. 'Bipartisan collusion' likely isn't tacit collusion in the technical sense i.e. collusion with no information shared, but I need something to refute the vague idea that an unfalsifiable claim is tantamount to crackpottery as otherwise plausible deniability is a blank check, which it obviously isn't in a realistic sense. Hitchens' does attest to this fact: "That's put slightly cheaply: all the same, it makes more sense than the drear convention that two opposing parties contend in the 'marketplace of ideas'.". The general idea here is to convey that there's nothing outlandish about the hypothesis, and that it does in fact satisfy parsimony. Of course this is an honest line argument, but mostly for rhetorical value. I doubt that many people who are wised up would actually try to argue against the hypothesis. Or at least, I've not encountered anyone who will. One who argues in its favor probably wouldn't have to worry about losing a public debate if they're capable of actually making a decent argument. If and when the idea is part of public discourse, observers would recognize that there's something to it. The best an opponent can do in terms of public discourse is simply not to engage and treat the argument as unworthy of discussion in the first place. That isn't necessarily to say people who don't engage are fraudsters, simply that non-engagement rather than debate is probably going to be the typical response. Fraudsters are mostly accustomed to using memorized, subversive quips and one-liners against people who can't "fight back" (partly for not knowing exactly what they should be arguing in the first place) so the fraudsters are not as especially well-conditioned for a debate as one might think. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 03:39, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Hitchens' On the imagination of conspiracy deserves more analysis. Most of the relevant portions are toward the beginning on the first few pages. I should make the most out of the relevant parts, since Hitchens is a credible and somewhat-direct substantiative "source". It would be an enormous help if anyone knows of others that are equally so. The argument doesn't depend on it, but it certainly helps. I can't believe that Hitchens was/is the only 'authority' with enough of a spine to publicly suggest the idea. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 05:19, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

There's the question of scope. For instance, the n-gram statistics I just added. They're certainly interesting and likely one could find any number of such odds and ends that contribute to the argument, yet perhaps such material could be put in a separate addendum. Constructing one's argument with a particular length already in mind is the sort of rhetorical consideration that an advertiser might concern themselves with and I rather dislike it. Nonetheless, I feel it's better to keep the argument compact and not dilute it with minor points. The argument should emphasize the major points. It's interesting to consider how Hitchens' essay "On the Imagination of Conspiracy" might be taken by a reader who didn't already suspect something along the lines of a collusive relationship. It seems like such a person could read it and understand to some extent what he implies, yet fail to register its importance or recognize the extent of collusion. It's likely Hitchens' "radical left" persona prevents this and at any rate his essay is obscure and the partisan farce continues in spite of it. In other words, Hitchens' essay was not impactful because it was designed not to be. Ultimately I intend for my essay to be something that could fit on one or two pages and handed out as a pamphlet. It shall be honest dialectic, yet care must be taken so that it does not make any rhetorical mistakes. While I believe Still's documentary is an honest effort and a commendable one, it too has several flaws. It's long, and information that it should lead with is divided across a few different parts. I've mentioned some of these points before but I feel I had to flesh them out here. Ultimately, any given scholarly contribution seeks to communicate something. This essay must have the potential to do so and so it must be well-constructed. Not to make any aggrandizing statements about my own work, but why do these other works of high value go ignored? Sure, they lack mass media exposure, advertising, and presence in education, yet nothing really stops one person from sharing them with another. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 05:03, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Some of what I've written here might also be relevant: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:propaganda_laundering. There's probably also something to be said for "trusted source" vs "trustworthy source". AP295 (discuss • contribs) 00:45, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Section headings and further reading

I for one would like to see section headings and further reading section. Further reading can contain both off-line resources as well as online links. I like to see an answer to the question: where did the author look apart from their own head, conveniently itemized. I love perusing further reading online. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:14, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I'll include section headings at some point but I've not decided how best to organize it yet. The references are presently informal, in-line reminders, but once I get around to using the proper templates (or whatever they're called) there will of course be a bibliography. I intend for the essay to be as concise as possible. The hypothesis is very well proven by the present content along with some of my other essays that I reference (perhaps most strongly by A Doylist Perspective on National Debt). The presumption of a competitive relationship between the D and R parties is empirically unsustainable. Take for instance the issue of national debt. Intractable without monetary reform, yet such a thing is hardly ever mentioned by either politicians or pundits in the media. Instead the entire discourse is framed as a budgetary problem, implying a collusive relationship at the expense of the public interest. This is only half the problem because this message may, for many readers, contradict very deeply-impressed falsehoods and presumptions. Any given part looks obvious after I've gotten it right but when I first started considering this problem I'd constantly be at a loss for words. Popular culture and public education afford far too few examples of critical discourse, or so it appears from my experience. We are conditioned toward assent. Sure, people write "critical reviews", book reports, etc. in school and college. The subject matter of such exercises is set firmly within the media's diegesis, with plenty of prefabricated examples in the same narrow vein to paraphrase and mimic. It's a facile and risk-free parody of dissent. Anyway, the essay is still quite rough. Perhaps you'll favor me with your impression though. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 14:25, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

I suppose I haven't really answered your question with the above. Hitchens' books The Trial of Henry Kissinger, No One Left to Lie To and For the Sake of Argument (an essay collection) are all good reading. Bill Still's documentary "The Money Masters" is also an excellent work. He also has a book on the subject and I own a copy but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. These all lend strong support to the hypothesis and together I believe they more than suffice. Let me know what you think if you decide to check them out. I think it's perhaps better to look at Hitchens works first. He does us a great service because he was a well-respected and credible journalist and provides a bridge between "credibility" and credibility, so to speak. Nobody can argue that he was a crackpot, least of all the self-styled "left" status quo. I had drawn the conclusion before I had ever even heard of Hitchens, but he gives the nod in "On the Imagination of Conspiracy" and his other work equips the reader with the tools they need to actually make the argument. One couldn't ask for more. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 01:18, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky: That's fine for now, but I reference them in the text itself so they properly belong in a bibliography. Bill Still's work is no less important. It's arguably even more salient and central to the argument than Hitchens' work, though I would tentatively recommend reading Hitchens' first. It's a good aperitif since it exposes just how morally bankrupt Washington is. He has enough authority as a "leftist" to disabuse even the most naive reader, who would then hypothetically be in a better condition to digest Still's work. I did it the other way around, hypothesizing collusion, then watching Still, then finally Hitchens and Orwell, but I'm not particularly trustful to begin with, nor have I ever been affiliated with a political party, being registered as an independent. It's quite hard to admit one's wrong, and I suspect "left-leaning" individuals would benefit from hearing it from one of "their own" first. All of these works exist in something of an interstice between the Watsonian context and Doylist context. They don't actually posit "collusion" (except "On the Imagination of Conspiracy", which strongly implies it) but raise questions which are very hard to answer in Watsonian terms. My intent is to put all this in order and add the missing parts to reach the full logical conclusion, as I don't see that anyone else has done so. Most of the work has been done and so the potential is there. These fraudsters are the people who should be feeling anxious anxious, desperate and uncertain, not the hapless patriots and well-meaning citizens who they've defrauded. Literature and media may be abstract or esoteric but reality is not. DC is full of cheats and frauds. They're no good. They've got to go. I refuse to be subordinate to imposters, charlatans, frauds or hacks and so should anyone with an ounce of self-respect. Or rather I couldn't even if I wanted to, as I'd have no motivation or purpose whatsoever as a subject or subordinate of such unrespectable people. The works I've talked about are rare examples of true journalism and dissent, which is quite a hard thing to do. People in America grow up expecting to be applauded for doing the right thing, but tend to follow the applause rather than dissent, even when dissent is decent, socially responsible, morally responsible, aesthetically preferable, and generally by any reasonable measure the objectively correct course of action. Yet even these rare and commendable works could be considered half measures, or even half-assed. Earlier I said that one couldn't ask for more than what Hitchens' did. I said this out of appreciation for his work but really this isn't true. Hitchens' is probably in the top three of my favorite authors, but he still pisses me off because he knew better. He had the wherewithal and did a lot of the work, but he did not see it through. Like a punch without follow-through, it leaves a shallow wound. The objective of genuine dissent is independence. Can one be a successful dissident without liberty or death as their genuine, immutable objective? This is likely part of what makes the media's left/right archetypes so subversive. They are self-defeating. The "leftist" stock character is averse to conflict. This is not exactly the right frame of mind and more or less requires voluntary concession. They appear to have eglatarian ideals but failing to achieve them, they simply blame their counterpart and vice versa. While I don't share all of Fidel Castro's ideals, the undeniable fact is that he got it done, as did the founding fathers. Of course Hitchens knew this. His memoir was terrible and I don't recommend it, but look at how petulant he is about Castro and Guevara in the part about Cuba. They actually did put their lives on the line to defend their nation and its people from corporate profiteering. Hitchens' intradiegetic character was that of an internationalist and "radical leftist", and I can only assume he resents this debasement/distortion of his own values, which I suspect matched the stock character quite closely. It's fascinating to watch his interviews and I've watched about half a dozen or so which are all interesting. One-on-one interviews that were broadcast on a major network usually contain a segment where he and the host establish this character and he would often disown it later in the interview. At some point he dropped his party affiliation and as far as I know remained an independent, and I recall reading or watching a few times him state he no longer believed international leftism (of the archetypal sort one pictures) had any future. He does seem very much an internationalist and perhaps attracted to the archetypal "radical left" vision. From the memoir, he obviously disliked Castro (for legitimate reasons) but says very little about Guevara. One could say Guevara ultimately died for a number of reasons. The US government strongly supported "counter-revolutionary" efforts, providing training and material support to the government of several nations while simultaneously advocating and supporting shallow reforms to preempt real and consequential reform such as Cuba implemented post-revolution e.g. nationalizing property owned by foreign companies, somewhat placating various and otherwise desperate populations and making them less likely to condone or participate in "revolution". There were improvements in surveillance that made it easier to locate guerillas in the large jungles/forests of south America. All of this said, couldn't one also reasonably say that Guevara died because he was (and particularly vis-a-vis Castro) an internationalist? It occurs to me at this point I've been unconsciously recreating an essay I had already written but discarded earlier this year, (a strong sign that I should give it another look), so I've put it on the bottom of my userpage again and which you can read if you're interested. I'll stop here on the topic of Hitchens and Cuba. Personally I find it difficult to make sense of Hitchens' real character and motivation, but it might be productive to try. It might be necessary to understand this, because from my perspective he clearly resented the status quo, he almost certainly knew all that I know and more about the issue, he had a strong sense of principle, he had the talent and the wherewithal to see it through. Yet he didn't. Why? I'd give a kidney to have a conversation with him. It's bizarre to think of something, put it into words, and then later find Hitchens (and nobody else to the best of my knowledge) made the same point in some or other essay or interview, using the same terms, and sometimes even nearly verbatim. Since we can only speculate, nobody can complain if I do, so here's what I think about him: He seems like a moral and strongly principled person by nature, whose genuine character values and personality traits were quite close to what he, at some point, found to be a subversive archetype. In other words, he was had, and he knew it. Anticipated, sorted, and deposited squarely in the correct container. It would undermine anyone's confidence, and perhaps it took enough out of him that he was no longer capable of free dissent. I suppose this would jibe with everything else I know. I don't know if I'll add all this but it's discouraging that Hitchens did not pursue the point despite by all appearances (at least from the outside) having the tools and being in seemingly in an ideal position to do so. Many hypothetical readers would feel it's a futile pursuit if they see someone like Hitchens as a subject and have no way to understand it, or at least it bothers me. I could wrong about the man altogether, it remains a loose end unless Hitchens' clears it up in one of his other published works I haven't read yet, which he might (though probably not at all explicitly). I haven't read his stuff on religion e.g. "God is not Great" and while I know I should, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to read so many hundreds or thousands of pages about why magical thinking is bad. I know it's bad. Anti-theism is low-hanging intellectual fruit and I don't get much a kick out of it. If the whole book is just Hitchens condescending to the political atheist then I might not be able to stomach it. Actually looking at his bibliography I haven't read most of it, but this is my assessment of him at present. Anyway, that's all for now. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 10:07, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Thinking about it more, what I'm getting at is that Hitchens was perhaps too strongly attached to the idea of "international socialism". That was his natural vision for the world. When one's ideal is crushed they become a cynic. It's interesting that when he disowns it or disclaims that there's any real hope of an international socialist 'movement', there's always the qualifier "international". This ideal was and is empirically unsustainable and he said so himself. Yet, and in strictly literal terms, "national socialism" seems to be the remainder. I suppose Cuba substantiates this. If one takes a very loose view of the word "socialism" then America before the twentieth century might be included as well. Likely the only two things they have in common is that leaders actually somewhat gave a damn about the public they served. America in the 1800s or generally pre-nineteenth-century seems more appealing than Cuba and I feel it's closer to my own ideal, though I respect Castro for kicking the profiteers to the curb so that Cuba should belong to the Cubans. Not terribly different from what the founders did. Self-determination seems to be the common imperative. Hitchens left us a lot of goodies and I personally get a lot of out his work, but if one asks the question why didn't he really fight the good fight?, then in addition to comfort, money, etc. it's probably, because he was a wishy-washy internationalist lefty, as much as I dislike the phrasing of that answer. He did show some interest in early America and wrote a book on Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. I haven't read Rights of Man or Hitchens review but probably should. While I enjoy reading Hitchens and at this point can automatically filter the partisan cues, there's always a faint sense of disappointment that comes with it. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 12:44, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps I'll include what I've written above in an appendix or separate "part two". It seems the more idealistic one is, the more likely they are to partake in the fake left/right dichotomy. If one is then disillusioned, then one may quite easily accept a lower standard of principle should it be necessary to recruit them or ensure their compliance with this status quo. In this manner it seems relevant, but it's largely speculative. I can't be sure I see very clearly specific internal details like these and could very well be off the mark in terms of their significance. I am certain about the hypothesis of the essay though. God knows you'll never hear me talking or writing as though the mass media's bullshit diegesis were a real thing. If you do, then please take me behind the barn and give me an early retirement. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 13:32, 6 December 2023 (UTC)