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I was strongly considering getting Rauch's book after his interview with Jonah Goldberg, but after this one I think I'll pass. I would have given him a fair hearing had he tried to explain how the Wuhan-lab story wasn't a damning failure of the mainstream media, but he didn't. In the same vein he lists journalism as one of several mechanisms that society has developed to discover and vet knowledge, without mentioning the many indications that today's journalists at elite publications have explicitly repudiated those functions in favor of advocacy (while continuing to claim the mantle of Knowledge).

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Making sure that no one ever feels safe. That's a description of abuse.

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I would not trust Jonathan Rauch -- let alone people commissioned by Facebook or Twitter of whom I know nothing -- to identify and censor disinformation. The problem with that is exemplified, for me, by Rauch's mention of "the campaign against mail-in voting" as a prime example of disinformation, without acknowledging that there could be any legitimate reason for restricting distribution of mail-in ballots, although good reason for doing so can readily be discovered through reflection and bringing common sense to bear.

Widespread distribution of mail ballots to any registered voter requesting one (or, a fortiori, to all registered voters) largely nullifies the advantages of in-person secret-ballot voting, a crucial reform adopted by democracies both here and abroad in the 19th century to thwart vote-buying and voter coercion. (I trust that it is not necessary to explain how but will do so if the assertion is challenged.) Widespread distribution of mail ballots also invites another type of abuse that in-person secret-ballot voting also thwarts: vote tampering by intermediaries.

I will concede that the likelihood of a Presidential election being flipped by such illicit manipulations is small, but Congressional elections are easier targets.

One paramount lesson that should be drawn from the events of January 6, though it doesn’t seem to have developed much traction, is that widespread public confidence in election integrity is crucially important. Without that, popular elections will not confer legitimacy on government by the putative winners — and absence of legitimacy is an essential condition that banana republics and despotic regimes have in common. Hence, election rules or arrangements that facilitate such illicit practices as vote tampering, vote buying, and voter coercion should not be tolerated, even in the absence of slam-dunk proof (which would not be easy to come by) that outcomes were changed by such means.

Here is a link to a confession from an informant who requested that his name be withheld. Some skepticism may be in order because of the source’s anonymity, but the confession has the ring of truth to it; if it is a mere fiction contrived by someone with no such illicit experience his inventive facility is remarkable. https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-voter-fraud-with-mail-in-ballots/

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Wonderful, really just wonderful. A true objective statement is one that reflects objective reality: the reality that is open to public scrutiny. The reality science works to discover and understand. The trick of course is objective reality is at best a falsifiable best guess, and it does at times change when the consensus of reasonable minds change based on further objective statements. Subjective statements on the other hand are so much easier to use since they need no proof at all to be true, and reasonable consensus is irrelevant. In fact, all subjective statements are true since they are neither falsifiable nor open to public scrutiny. If you feel it to be so, well then truly it is so. If I feel pain then truly it is pain, whether there is an objective organic cause or not. All pain hurts; even purely psycho-somatic pain. So, now we get to the crux of it: Woke world is based on subjective statements and felt truths that need no falsifiable objective statements. The same is so of Big Steal and Q Anon land. if it feels so then it is so. The fire hose of falsehood works so well to squelch objective reality because it eliminates our ability to distinguish an objective statement from a subjective statement. This is also a definition of psychosis. The psychotic cannot distinguish the subject truths of an inner voice --perhaps a dog named Sam-- and the objective truth, dogs cannot speak and people really die and suffer when you shoot them.

I contend we live in pervasively psychotic world at the moment. Subjective pathological paranoia has replaced objective reasonable suspicion. Yes, it is nihilism, since we can no longer easily distinguish between psychotic subjective statements based on inner pathological language and reasonable objective statements based on communally shared language. What are your axioms? Crazy or Sane? We can hardly tell these days. Nietzsche predicted, just before the World War I, when nihilism marches through the world, horror will follow. So yeh, it is kind of important to reclaim liberalism based on objective statements that can be true, or more important, demonstrated false. I dare you, try and falsify CRT or The Big Steal. Good luck, wear your bullet proof vest too.

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