It is no accident that the current admin is classifying suspected drug runners as ‘terrorists’, for example. Namely, the precedent of the Obama era droning of even US citizens under the same label.

Or, for that matter, that Orwell based 1984 off his experience writing propaganda for the British Ministry of Information during WW2.

or that the CIA literally killed a sitting president

Apparently I forgot to close my sarcasm tag.

You can forget about liberties until you come up with a better acronym

"Acts" as they are passed by Congress are usually a huge collection of additions/deletions/modifications to existing law. And those changes can be unrelated and scattered across hundreds and hundreds of sections of existing statutes, each of which can have their own sunset clauses. So some of the things included in "The Patriot Act" expired, but parts are still active.

> Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win.

I kind of dislike approval voting because it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode where the ballot looks like a first past the post ballot and then some non-trivial percentage of people don't realize they can vote for more than one candidate and you're back to being stuck with a two-party system. Whereas score makes it clear something's different but still only takes ten seconds to explain ("rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10").

> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.

Tribalism. People convince themselves that both options are bad but one is worse and then fight their own brothers who picked the other one.

But the lesser of evils is still evil and the ability to change your vote to the other team is the only leverage you have against either of them, so what happens if you relinquish it?

Given a decision between the devil you know and the devil you don't, choose the one that you have not tried.

> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.

Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways.

On my team it’s rules being bent but not broken, a few bad apples, everyone was doing it, parents wanting to give their children the best start in life, the inevitable results of the need to raise campaign funds to continue their great work, and/or they’ve already rightly been suitably punished.

On the other team it’s a problem that runs through all of them, reflecting their poor character, the lack of basic decency resulting from their hollow look-out-for-number-1 political beliefs, and is undoubtedly representative of a much wider problem that’s being covered up.

> stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along.

You might like this review of the movie Civil War. Very well thought out review.

Alex Garland's CIVIL WAR has a clear and simple meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWBzZJxhQtY

Surely there was a lot of stupidity in Nazi Germany and hence the appalling results, but I think that during the second half of the 20th century most actors in western history were much less stupid than now, although maybe I'm just being naive.

That's a good podcast that gets across that most of the Nazis really were just dense thugs.

One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power. Weimer Germany was run by the social democrats. These people were basically 'center left.' They ended up in control after the 1919 revolution that got rid of the Kaiser, and ruled via coalition government with other centrist and center-right parties as junior members.

In general people's complaints were 1) land reform because especially in Prussia most of the land was still owned by massive landowners (Junkers) and most peasants were tenant farmers and 2) better working conditions in industry for the working poor 3) some way to get out of the economic crisis that was bad even before the depression in Germany.

The social democrats failed to deliver any of this. And mostly they spend their entire time in power battling with the Communists. This included hiring freekorps, which were paramility groups that roamed the German countryside after the war and eventually turned into brownshirts, to work with the police to attack communists. There was already a ton of state sponsored terror in the 1920s directed almost entirely at the left.

Support for the social democrats and other center parties collapsed and in the 1932 election, the nazis and communists were the big winners almost entirely at the expense of the social democrats. The center parties decided that working with the communists was absolutely beyond the pale and thought that the nazis would be more easy to manipulate, so they decided to work with Hitler and made him chancellor. Once the nazis had their foot in the door, as it were, and given that they had contempt for democracy and the rule of law, they used every dirty trick they could after that to consolidate power.

>>You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example

I mean that was just an excuse, in hindsight it's completely obvious that Europe was gearing up for war for years prior to the event. Just like now it seems completely possible that we might end up in a war or even civil war in some countries over a (seemingly) minor event - it's just going to be a spark that sets off the powder keg.

You could also just go with the details of that assassination, which are Baby’s Day Out levels of comic blundering.

Do you have a citation for an actual physicist being beaten to death because of their views on physics or was the book exaggerating for the sake of the plot and promoted widely in the west because it promoted anticommunism?

For what it’s worth I like the show just not that part.

> Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.

I agree, but the other side of this is that we're open to manipulation coming from anyone around the world, and sometimes that game of telephone can act as an effective bullshit filter.

I think the speed at which the impact of stupidity can spread in current times is unrivaled throughout history, though.

I generally agree, but if we assume that the amount of history scales proportional to the number of humans, then it's not so clear cut, as there's never been more humans alive than now. In other words, there's just more history to be dumb in, nowadays, than before.

There's a lot of stupid people out there waiting for someone who knows how to speak to them. Sounding like a country bumpkin and being unimpressive to the elites is probably good qualities if you want to be that sort of person.

Problem could be economical. The rich want to get richer and more powerful, the poor and rest of the 99% have issues. Solving a lot of these issues would mean less wealth and power for the rich. So they need to create scapegoats. And racist stereotypes are probably the easiest way to do that. Close second are the people who think differently than [your_group].

helps that the same rich people have lots of influence over what the rest sees, hears and thinks.

They say money is the root of all evil, and I think that is the core issue. It's unchecked greed and blind nationalism. Political and racial polarization is profitable. Selling guns and ammo is profitable. Being a corrupt politician who helps their rich friends make more money is profitable.

> there’s no evil army here locking people up.

Not what you meant, but that evil army is called ICE.