One of the biggest signals of someone's epistemic trustworthiness is their willingness to concede truths that are inconvenient to their beliefs. The more you learn about the world, the more you realize that most things are really uncertain and have evidence pointing in several directions. The more someone has to say about inconvenient evidence, the more confident you can be that they're correct.
Very much agree. Sounding like a partisan hack does not help your case.
Also, people who look at the statement "Trump did 1 good thing and 100 bad things" and say "Ha! So Trump is good after all!" probably were not very open to persuasion in the first place.
What this reminds me of most of all is the War on Terror, when Bush defenders would criticize liberals for talking about Abu Ghraib or extraordinary rendition, noting that these talking points were being used by terrorists for recruitment purposes.
One reason I was so bothered by left-wing attacks on open dialogue is that I remembered those years, and how those tactics were once used against us.
Also, it’s kind of funny to imagine what the world would be like if the Bush defenders’ argument here actually made sense. Imagine an Al-Qaeda recruiter thinking “I was really looking forward to making a recruitment video focused on Abu Ghraib, but Nancy Pelosi didn’t say anything about Abu Ghraib so now I can’t make a video about it”.
What Lance appears to be denying is the utility of reason, and that's something I feel like writers are constantly butting heads against when they encounter activist spaces. Liz Bruenig used to talk about it sometimes I think--she lamented that the left didn't seem to feel "argument" was necessary or useful, which just leaves you with propaganda and force, I guess. It's sort of surprising to me that this issue persists--I feel like, 3 or 4 years ago, it was mostly in response to "cancel culture" and TERFs getting banned from Twitter. I guess I just assumed people stopped having these discussions since Elon took over, and I haven't been on X in years, so it's weird that Jesse and the Serfs guy are still at it over the same bloody issues. But I guess it's a pretty critical part of what he, and most(?) writers, are trying to do--either make a reasoned argument, or at least provide some objective information for people to make up their minds, and operate in spaces where there are some writers who are proudly diametrically opposed to that.
> Because they thought they knew better than the voters, they covered-up Biden’s mental decline.
The strongest reason anyone would have to coverup Biden's mental decline would be prohibiting him from having a 3 hour long unscripted, public debate with Trump. The people covering it up would have to be retardedly irrational to allow sleepy Joe to attend the evening debate, especially since they knew he was sundowning and trying to hide it from us. Of course, they didn't do this because none of the preceding is true.
They weren't covering up his mind melting because if they were they wouldn't have let him challenge Trump to a debate earlier than usual, attend the debate, stream it live, not get the questions in advance, etc.
"As a pro-gender-affirming care, pro-immigration, anti-Trump, vegan, capitalist, "
i disagree strongly with three elements of that (i'm also anti trump and neutral on gender affirming care), but i appreciate that you can admit truths inconvenient to your side!
One thing about Fauci: he wasn't lying when he said that masks didn't work, because he bought the western consensus on masks. He was lying when he said he was lying! In other words, he thought it would be worse to appear wrong than dishonest, so he dishonestly tried to appear dishonest.
(I don't know any of this to be true; I think Scott Alexander said as much somewhere else, or maybe I just came up with this theory on my own by reading a lot of Alexander and Greg Cochran during the pandemic.)
But then in the Business Insider article you linked to just now (which I can only read the title of) he appears to say that he was asserting that the public shouldn't buy masks only to make sure there were enough masks for medical personnel.
I think it's conceivable that he thought masks would help in a health care setting (where people really would follow protocols about switching masks often, not touching their face, etc) but would be much less effective at the community level. Certainly not super confident, and definitely agree he was willing to tell "noble" lies (eg, about herd immunity) in ways that were ultimately harmful to the credibility of public health.
Incidentally, this gets to one other thing I thought when I read your stack just now; the reasoning, "the Dems covered up Biden's cognitive decline is a hideous attempt at gaslighting us, so I'm going to vote for a worse liar, to punish them!" is a bit weird. But I think the difference is that the *way* Trump usually lies is different from the way that the Biden administration or Fauci lied. Trump just says the first thing that comes to his head; he's an emotional reasoner. If it "feels" false then he just says it's false. This gives people the impression that, if anything, he's *too* honest--he can't be controlled! He just says what he thinks!
By contrast, the lies of Fauci and the Biden administration were far more deliberate than Trump's typical lies (don't get me wrong, I think he has a lot of deliberate lies too; it's just that he so often appears to be un-deliberate that it's hard to think of him as being deliberate about anything). So, if I'm right about what Fauci did, then I think maybe he was thinking, "hey, Trump lies and no one blinks; but if I appear stupid, people will really hate that. So I'll lie about being wrong, and just say that I was lying. People seem to prefer that."
But because Fauci appeared more deliberate in his lying than Trump, some of the people got really mad at him didn't get mad about Trump.
At the time of the COVID outbreak the received wisdom was "masks only work in a clinical setting". This seems to have been largely influenced by the view that diseases were transmitted through fomites or actual pressurized discharge of liquids in medical settings. Part of the concern was that in this sort of setting the mask itself because highly contagious and if you touch it inadvertently during the day, or mishandle it when you take it off, that can be just as bad as not wearing it at all. This was very likely influenced by the Ebola experience- Ebola is, I understand, not airborne at all and you have to really spend a lot of time getting super close to someone (or the body of someone), get all up in their bodily liquids, for transmission to occur.
I can't quite track exactly what was going on, but it seemed to me that even though people took a long time to for them to come round to the fact that COVID is airborne, they realized fairly soon that at the least transmission was taking place over longer distances. They assumed it was fomites being expelled through the respiratory system, and so they concluded that masks would probably have some benefit.
> But because of this, they were willing to lie, to distort, to mislead, all in order to prevent the voters from having an accurate picture of what Biden was like
Biden has given public speeches and been interviewed by the media since losing the election. Also since revealing his cancer diagnosis. There was and still remains no coverup of anything.
Well it was an invitation for talking points to debunk. The reasoning about his mental health is very bad and there is no widespread agreement on what the coverup was or who was doing it, and the loudest voices are the ones saying Biden was wheeled around in a wheelchair and was senile, which you can just look at his media appearances post election and post cancer diagnosis to see that clearly wasn't (and still isn't) the case.
There is now a wide body of publicly available evidence that the extent of Biden's cognitive decline was intentionally hidden from public view. And that good faith accounts of it were attacked. Notably, the prosecutor who declined to prosecute Biden in light of his clear memory failures.
It is also the case that some exaggerated said decline. It's obvious now that Democrats would have been better off having listened to the exaggerators and not let Biden run for a 2nd term.
But there very much was a "coverup"; that's why the debate performance was so shocking--the discrepancy between expectations and undeniable reality. The Elderly Emperor had been naked for quite some time, but many didn't know or could reasonably deny it until then.
Biden was medically unfit to be president at some point in his first term and should have stepped aside for Kamala. Failing that, the 25th Amendment should have forced the issue.
Biden and Co's failure to adhere to expectations of presidential fitness for duty further degrade our political norms and give room to excuse the other side violating such norms.
"We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness."
The point of the special prosecution was to determine whether or not he willfully withheld classified documents. As explained in the previous paragraphs of the executive summary:
"Mr. Biden's memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully-that is, with intent to break the law-as the statute requires."
"Another viable defense is that Mr. Biden might not have retained the classified Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home at all."
"Given Mr. Biden's limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence."
Hurr declined to recommend charges because none of the evidence supported Biden willfully retaining classified documents, of which his poor memory was only a part of reaching that determination. He also obviously didn't write the whole report to just off-handedly suggest in a single sentence that Biden is secretly senile. He was also again, special prosecutor, so if he wanted to focus on Biden's mental fitness, he could have, but didn't, because even after the hours of interviews he did with Biden, he did not believe Biden was senile or whatever else. See also the entire recorded interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNjkE_tDZts and the transcript released a year before https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116942/documents/HHRG-118-JU00-20240312-SD011.pdf
>But there very much was a "coverup"; that's why the debate performance was so shocking
Biden had 1 recoverable gaffe in the debate where he spoke nonsense saying we finally beat Medicare. Throughout the entire rest of the debate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqG96G8YdcE he is lucid, citing statistics, naming legislation he passed, and not lying. Trump doesn't even attempt to do those things. He crushed Trump in this debate like he did in the 2020 debates, but he had a lower low than Trump did.
Also, it seems like whatever the coverup was (you still haven't told me), avoiding the Presidential debates would be priority #1. Why would the coveruppers let the President debate for hours in front of the nation? Why would they let the media broadcast it to tens of millions of people instead of insisting on a private debate? Or asking for the questions before the debate? Or saying it wouldn't be live?
>Biden was medically unfit to be president at some point in his first term and should have stepped aside for Kamala
He still isn't unfit to be President now. He was only unfit when he lost his train of thought and said we finally beat Medicare in a high stakes Presidential debate with the nation watching. Unless he is constantly in that state, he is mentally fit to be President. In the future, those gaffes where he completely loses his mind for a few seconds might become more frequent, or last longer, or become worse in some other way, but you have not provided any evidence that he was in fact senile before the date, during it, or after. Neither has anybody else who is convinced Biden was or is senile or unfit for office.
> "We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Am I the only one that reads this as Hurr saying that Biden was putting on a show for him? Playing up his frailty and memory problem as a tactic? I don't know how else you can understand the "would likely" part if not that. I don't really see people saying that though.
Hurr details throughout the report the good faith efforts Biden made to be available for the interviews and answer the questions. The interviews took place on Oct 8th and 9th, after the Oct 7th attack on Israel. He set aside hours of time to answer the questions, didn't fillibuster, never attacked him, and complied with the investigation fully. This is supposed to be the final, most incriminating product, and what Hurr doesn't say (the juicy "Biden is senile and corrupt and using the autopen to answer a multiple choice prompt because he's in too much cognitive decline to handle interrogation" parts) are not included because there was no evidence for them. You can listen to the entire interview if you want (I have) and at no point does Hurr express frustration that Biden isn't answering his questions or playing a character or whatever else.
He is making that comment because as part of the report he has to determine whether there would be mens rea to convict Biden in court - there isn't because Biden's testimony exonerates himself, as well as the fact patterns uncovered by the investigation. For example, one of the recovered classified documents was a letter Biden wrote about Afghanistan, a subject he had personal interest in and was entrusted with some degree of policy making in that area. While there is the appearance of mens rea there, the documents were actually transmitted by his aides to Obama via fax I believe and they were in charge of destroying the original copy. The locations in which that document and the other ones were found also lended heavy credence that they weren't being kept as mementos. And Biden handled 10,000s of classified documents throughout his 8 years of Vice Presidency, so he couldn't remember what every document was about or when and where he received it and who was in charge of disposing of it. So Biden would come across to a jury as a "a sympathetic, well meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" in light of the preceding.
You are trying very, very, very hard to deny the obvious here. Biden was effectively deemed mentally incapable of being tried due to a failing memory. Everyone recognized this, except you, apparently.
Hur was attacked for this! Here you are denying he even pointed out Biden had a problem!
>Unless he is constantly in that state, he is mentally fit to be President.
>He still isn't unfit to be President now. He was only unfit when he lost his train of thought and said we finally beat Medicare in a high stakes Presidential debate with the nation watching.
Wow, you sure that backwards. Can't just have a president on shift for 8 good hours.
>Neither has anybody else who is convinced Biden was or is senile or unfit for office.
Then why did Biden step aside for Kamala? Why didn't he just prove the haters and the doubters wrong?
>Aides have increasingly shielded Biden from unscripted encounters — shortening his interactions with the news media and installing teleprompters at virtually all of his appearances where he would give remarks, even small private events — sparking suspicion among those who interact with him less often that his aging and decline may be worse than aides have acknowledged.
>“I definitely brought it up with people like, is anyone else concerned here? There were very quiet conversations in the building,” one former White House official recalled. “It’s almost like a no-go zone. You’d be worried to bring it up in a conversation with people you can’t trust.”
>“Joe Biden’s age is his superpower, and as I’ve seen firsthand, his fastball is as good as ever,” Katzenberg told NBC a year ago.
>Hur was attacked for this! Here you are denying he even pointed out Biden had a problem!
He was attacked because what he wrote in the Hurr report was bait for Republicans who were looking to quote mine it, not because Hurr explicitly said in the report or elsewhere that Biden is senile or too old to be President or whatever.
>Wow, you sure that backwards. Can't just have a president on shift for 8 good hours.
The President is likely on shift for only 16 hours a day and is sleeping the other 8 hours. Are Presidents who need 9 hours of sleep rather than 8 unfit for the Presidency?
>Then why did Biden step aside for Kamala? Why didn't he just prove the haters and the doubters wrong?
Why didn't they remove him from office if he was senile?
>>Aides have increasingly shielded Biden from unscripted encounters — shortening his interactions with the news media and installing teleprompters at virtually all of his appearances where he would give remarks, even small private events — sparking suspicion among those who interact with him less often that his aging and decline may be worse than aides have acknowledged.
In 2020, Biden was campaigning full time, so he was more available to staffers and whatnot. In 2021-2023, Biden was President full time, so he was more available to his Cabinet. In 2024, he was splitting his time between being President and campaigning, so of course people around him would think he was being "shielded." In reality he was just less available because he had to take care of meeting with e.g. Netanyahu or Zelensky and then rapidly go to a campaign rally, bleeding time in both areas of concern.
Biden was also subject to misleading video editing that made it look like he was trying to shake hands with people off camera, forgetting where he was in the room, talking to people on stage that didn't exist, and there were videos made where the audio was enhanced to make it look like he shit himself when he was with the Pope and whatnot. There were monthly compilations of "Biden is senile" supercuts on right wing channels that were just tarnishing his image, plus his supporters didn't really care whether he addressed the nation or talked to crowds, unlike Trump's supporters, so the incentives were never to do more media appearances. Rather, he was constantly working with Democrats and House Republicans behind the scenes to pass legislation, and juggling discussions between Zelensky and Netanyahu and various other world leaders.
Teleprompters are normal and only Trump is an aberration in not using them.
>“I definitely brought it up with people like, is anyone else concerned here? There were very quiet conversations in the building,” one former White House official recalled. “It’s almost like a no-go zone. You’d be worried to bring it up in a conversation with people you can’t trust.”
If there was a coverup wouldn't that person be being directed to not say anything about it and just focus on hiding Biden?
>“Joe Biden’s age is his superpower, and as I’ve seen firsthand, his fastball is as good as ever,” Katzenberg told NBC a year ago.
This is a lie but not because he walked in and saw Biden was drooling and reciting nursery rhymes. Every Republican lies and says Trump is a high iq genius, but this is because they have no shame and want to support their candidate. Katzenberg is also "an American media proprietor and film producer" so yeah maybe don't trust those people for political advice.
Here is the mistake you are making: You are concluding that because Trump/Biden have slipped and fallen down stairs, that they are physically disabled and cannot discharge the duties of the President's office. But this is wrong. They are old. They will keep becoming less physically fit for the office as time goes on. They already can't sprint now or do cardio as well as they could when they were 70/60/50. But they are not wheelchair-bound. They don't need a caretaker to walk. Eventually they will slip down more stairs and have more falls and worse physical injuries from engaging in physical activity they could do when they were younger. They will eventually become unable to move. That time is not now, it wasn't before the election, and probably won't be in the next 4 years. They're not physically disabled, but they are of course in declining health in general because they're old, and their conditions won't improve over the next few years, only getting worse. But this does not mean they are physically disabled or are unfit for office.
It was an analogy. The same way you wouldn't say that Biden/Trump are physically disabled because there is circumstantial evidence of their age making them more physically frail, you shouldn't say that they're senile because of circumstantial cases of their mental incompetence.
Sigh. You've been fooled by a right-wing lie about Fauci and masks. Just step back, do you really, really, think it's plausible that Fauci was going to do like Trump, and outright lie to people, against the entire professional consensus? That he wouldn't then be flayed by fact-checkers and fellow-scientists, because They're Part Of The Conspiracy? It's just such utter nonsense, and shows the power of the right-wing lying machine, to take little snippets out of context and scream at people. And it works!
What happened is knowledge of Covid transmission changed rapidly. Nobody cares about this, because it's better clickbait to smear Fauci.
It's this sort of stuff which makes me really sympathetic to the point of view that people should be very circumspect about doing anything which could even give the appearance of feeding the right-wing lying machine. I won't go that far myself, but I understand it, and it's not irrational give the constant success of those liars.
Yes. Read that last one with great care, note particularly this grudging portion (which is a strong indication of the perspective):
"Fauci acknowledged the appearance of a contradiction in the government's public-health advice but denied this was the case. "Actually the circumstances have changed," he said. "That's the reason why.""
Ask yourself - does this make sense? Can one apply a little bit of charity - just a small amount - to what he said in total, and would it be reasonable? Was this a complex situation with a lot of uncertainty, and is it plausible he was sincerely trying to express what the current consensus thinking was at the time?"
Compare the "LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!" right-wing media campaign.
Which one seems a more accurate fit to the facts?
Look, I'm sorry for being exasperated, but given the way the punditry has run with the right-wing media campaign, and how impossible it seems to refute it, it's got some severe implications.
I'd contend that sincerely trying to do one's best in a bad situation, even though the result may not be perfect, is a reasonable course of action.
Remember, this was a once-in-a-century pandemic. I am willing to cut good-faith people involved a lot of slack for getting things wrong along the way, rather than denounce them with the benefit of hindsight.
Yeah, using ChatGPT to find links is fine as long as the user then manually verifies the links (that they are to actual credible sources, and that they actually say what ChatGPT claims they say). I wouldn't even expect somebody to point out they'd found a link with ChatGPT, since that's no different from finding a link with any other kind of search (or just having randomly found it before and remembering it)--after all, they need to check their sources regardless of how they found them.
Does go to show that the author needs to work on sanitizing his links, though--no need to make his readers manually shorten every link to avoid providing tracking data. Everybody should be in the habit of deleting the ends of their links until they don't work, to include only the minimum required to get to the desired page.
I don't think Hanania "belongs to a side" at all but is a grifter who just tries to suck up to whatever side seems more convenient in the moment to get money.
So you're saying Mr. Lance ought not indulge in utilitarian calculations on whether speaking certain truths (or falsehoods) nets out for the greater good.
You are a deontologist after all, the disguise is wearing thin ;)
Or to properly account for the negative utility brought on by the backlash once the lie is inevitably revealed. It's still utilitarian, just not as myopic.
… and history shows that censorship didn’t make people do the French and Russian Revolution. It was poverty (misery and deaths). It always is about wellbeing (safety or security, shelter, food, etc.). Trump was elected because, while economists kept saying how economy is doing great, many people didn’t feel it and then they voted for a fascist because they don’t seem to be getting how economy is so great!
Some liberals and libertarians have this stupid idea of “if you suppress an idea or free speech, then it will grow underground and then spread and it will ultimately become bigger [or some shit]” and now I am like - “have you guys read some history?” because… nah, if you actually suppress hard enough, the stuff dies for long (maybe even forever if you aggressively destroy the all the evidence too). Communism is dead in Indonesia because USA murdered large amounts of communists. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vincent-bevins/the-jakarta-method/9781541724013/?lens=publicaffairs
As I said, Saudi Arabia is fine, China is fine, and plenty of countries with censorship and sometimes pretty brutal censorship are all fine.
Is there any topic where you think telling the truth about it in the public sphere (so like academics, politicians, journalists lying about or avoiding the truth in their professional capacity) causes more harm than good (from a utilitarian POV)? Seems to me that you and Bentham, like most intellectually curious ppl, value telling the truth as a good onto itself (not an absolute good of course, one that has to be balanced against other values, but one that has some independent value) but because you guys are so committed to utilitarianism you are motivated reasoning yourself into greatly exaggerating the utilitarian benefits of truth telling.
One of the biggest signals of someone's epistemic trustworthiness is their willingness to concede truths that are inconvenient to their beliefs. The more you learn about the world, the more you realize that most things are really uncertain and have evidence pointing in several directions. The more someone has to say about inconvenient evidence, the more confident you can be that they're correct.
Lance wield’s Occam’s broom
“anti-Trump, vegan, capitalist” is literally so based truth acorn coded
Very much agree. Sounding like a partisan hack does not help your case.
Also, people who look at the statement "Trump did 1 good thing and 100 bad things" and say "Ha! So Trump is good after all!" probably were not very open to persuasion in the first place.
What this reminds me of most of all is the War on Terror, when Bush defenders would criticize liberals for talking about Abu Ghraib or extraordinary rendition, noting that these talking points were being used by terrorists for recruitment purposes.
One reason I was so bothered by left-wing attacks on open dialogue is that I remembered those years, and how those tactics were once used against us.
Good point.
Also, it’s kind of funny to imagine what the world would be like if the Bush defenders’ argument here actually made sense. Imagine an Al-Qaeda recruiter thinking “I was really looking forward to making a recruitment video focused on Abu Ghraib, but Nancy Pelosi didn’t say anything about Abu Ghraib so now I can’t make a video about it”.
What Lance appears to be denying is the utility of reason, and that's something I feel like writers are constantly butting heads against when they encounter activist spaces. Liz Bruenig used to talk about it sometimes I think--she lamented that the left didn't seem to feel "argument" was necessary or useful, which just leaves you with propaganda and force, I guess. It's sort of surprising to me that this issue persists--I feel like, 3 or 4 years ago, it was mostly in response to "cancel culture" and TERFs getting banned from Twitter. I guess I just assumed people stopped having these discussions since Elon took over, and I haven't been on X in years, so it's weird that Jesse and the Serfs guy are still at it over the same bloody issues. But I guess it's a pretty critical part of what he, and most(?) writers, are trying to do--either make a reasoned argument, or at least provide some objective information for people to make up their minds, and operate in spaces where there are some writers who are proudly diametrically opposed to that.
It isn't all that strange when you're talking with people who think there is no truth, only power, and power decides what is "true" to these people.
"necessary or useful" covers a lot of ground: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/386:_Duty_Calls
> Because they thought they knew better than the voters, they covered-up Biden’s mental decline.
The strongest reason anyone would have to coverup Biden's mental decline would be prohibiting him from having a 3 hour long unscripted, public debate with Trump. The people covering it up would have to be retardedly irrational to allow sleepy Joe to attend the evening debate, especially since they knew he was sundowning and trying to hide it from us. Of course, they didn't do this because none of the preceding is true.
So they're just insanely incompetent and partly delusional?
They weren't covering up his mind melting because if they were they wouldn't have let him challenge Trump to a debate earlier than usual, attend the debate, stream it live, not get the questions in advance, etc.
"As a pro-gender-affirming care, pro-immigration, anti-Trump, vegan, capitalist, "
i disagree strongly with three elements of that (i'm also anti trump and neutral on gender affirming care), but i appreciate that you can admit truths inconvenient to your side!
One thing about Fauci: he wasn't lying when he said that masks didn't work, because he bought the western consensus on masks. He was lying when he said he was lying! In other words, he thought it would be worse to appear wrong than dishonest, so he dishonestly tried to appear dishonest.
(I don't know any of this to be true; I think Scott Alexander said as much somewhere else, or maybe I just came up with this theory on my own by reading a lot of Alexander and Greg Cochran during the pandemic.)
Hmm, I guess it strikes me as more plausible that he lied the first time, but the second is possible too.
It seems, from this article, that he really believed that masks didn't work early on: https://www.newsweek.com/fauci-said-masks-not-really-effective-keeping-out-virus-email-reveals-1596703.
But then in the Business Insider article you linked to just now (which I can only read the title of) he appears to say that he was asserting that the public shouldn't buy masks only to make sure there were enough masks for medical personnel.
I think it's conceivable that he thought masks would help in a health care setting (where people really would follow protocols about switching masks often, not touching their face, etc) but would be much less effective at the community level. Certainly not super confident, and definitely agree he was willing to tell "noble" lies (eg, about herd immunity) in ways that were ultimately harmful to the credibility of public health.
He was initially following consensus from the gathered evidence until political pressure became too large.
The Business Insider article uses selective quoting. Don't use it as evidence. That's the answer.
Incidentally, this gets to one other thing I thought when I read your stack just now; the reasoning, "the Dems covered up Biden's cognitive decline is a hideous attempt at gaslighting us, so I'm going to vote for a worse liar, to punish them!" is a bit weird. But I think the difference is that the *way* Trump usually lies is different from the way that the Biden administration or Fauci lied. Trump just says the first thing that comes to his head; he's an emotional reasoner. If it "feels" false then he just says it's false. This gives people the impression that, if anything, he's *too* honest--he can't be controlled! He just says what he thinks!
By contrast, the lies of Fauci and the Biden administration were far more deliberate than Trump's typical lies (don't get me wrong, I think he has a lot of deliberate lies too; it's just that he so often appears to be un-deliberate that it's hard to think of him as being deliberate about anything). So, if I'm right about what Fauci did, then I think maybe he was thinking, "hey, Trump lies and no one blinks; but if I appear stupid, people will really hate that. So I'll lie about being wrong, and just say that I was lying. People seem to prefer that."
But because Fauci appeared more deliberate in his lying than Trump, some of the people got really mad at him didn't get mad about Trump.
Yes, this is almost certainly true.
At the time of the COVID outbreak the received wisdom was "masks only work in a clinical setting". This seems to have been largely influenced by the view that diseases were transmitted through fomites or actual pressurized discharge of liquids in medical settings. Part of the concern was that in this sort of setting the mask itself because highly contagious and if you touch it inadvertently during the day, or mishandle it when you take it off, that can be just as bad as not wearing it at all. This was very likely influenced by the Ebola experience- Ebola is, I understand, not airborne at all and you have to really spend a lot of time getting super close to someone (or the body of someone), get all up in their bodily liquids, for transmission to occur.
I can't quite track exactly what was going on, but it seemed to me that even though people took a long time to for them to come round to the fact that COVID is airborne, they realized fairly soon that at the least transmission was taking place over longer distances. They assumed it was fomites being expelled through the respiratory system, and so they concluded that masks would probably have some benefit.
> But because of this, they were willing to lie, to distort, to mislead, all in order to prevent the voters from having an accurate picture of what Biden was like
Biden has given public speeches and been interviewed by the media since losing the election. Also since revealing his cancer diagnosis. There was and still remains no coverup of anything.
>The Democratic cover-up of Biden’s cognitive impairment is one of the big reasons Trump is the president.
There was no coverup, and I'm happy to explain why any putative coverup is ridiculous.
Do it.
Well it was an invitation for talking points to debunk. The reasoning about his mental health is very bad and there is no widespread agreement on what the coverup was or who was doing it, and the loudest voices are the ones saying Biden was wheeled around in a wheelchair and was senile, which you can just look at his media appearances post election and post cancer diagnosis to see that clearly wasn't (and still isn't) the case.
There is now a wide body of publicly available evidence that the extent of Biden's cognitive decline was intentionally hidden from public view. And that good faith accounts of it were attacked. Notably, the prosecutor who declined to prosecute Biden in light of his clear memory failures.
It is also the case that some exaggerated said decline. It's obvious now that Democrats would have been better off having listened to the exaggerators and not let Biden run for a 2nd term.
But there very much was a "coverup"; that's why the debate performance was so shocking--the discrepancy between expectations and undeniable reality. The Elderly Emperor had been naked for quite some time, but many didn't know or could reasonably deny it until then.
Biden was medically unfit to be president at some point in his first term and should have stepped aside for Kamala. Failing that, the 25th Amendment should have forced the issue.
Biden and Co's failure to adhere to expectations of presidential fitness for duty further degrade our political norms and give room to excuse the other side violating such norms.
>Notably, the prosecutor who declined to prosecute Biden in light of his clear memory failures.
That's not what the Hurr report said.
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report-from-special-counsel-robert-k-hur-february-2024.pdf
"We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness."
The point of the special prosecution was to determine whether or not he willfully withheld classified documents. As explained in the previous paragraphs of the executive summary:
"Mr. Biden's memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully-that is, with intent to break the law-as the statute requires."
"Another viable defense is that Mr. Biden might not have retained the classified Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home at all."
"Given Mr. Biden's limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence."
Hurr declined to recommend charges because none of the evidence supported Biden willfully retaining classified documents, of which his poor memory was only a part of reaching that determination. He also obviously didn't write the whole report to just off-handedly suggest in a single sentence that Biden is secretly senile. He was also again, special prosecutor, so if he wanted to focus on Biden's mental fitness, he could have, but didn't, because even after the hours of interviews he did with Biden, he did not believe Biden was senile or whatever else. See also the entire recorded interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNjkE_tDZts and the transcript released a year before https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116942/documents/HHRG-118-JU00-20240312-SD011.pdf
>But there very much was a "coverup"; that's why the debate performance was so shocking
Biden had 1 recoverable gaffe in the debate where he spoke nonsense saying we finally beat Medicare. Throughout the entire rest of the debate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqG96G8YdcE he is lucid, citing statistics, naming legislation he passed, and not lying. Trump doesn't even attempt to do those things. He crushed Trump in this debate like he did in the 2020 debates, but he had a lower low than Trump did.
Also, it seems like whatever the coverup was (you still haven't told me), avoiding the Presidential debates would be priority #1. Why would the coveruppers let the President debate for hours in front of the nation? Why would they let the media broadcast it to tens of millions of people instead of insisting on a private debate? Or asking for the questions before the debate? Or saying it wouldn't be live?
>Biden was medically unfit to be president at some point in his first term and should have stepped aside for Kamala
He still isn't unfit to be President now. He was only unfit when he lost his train of thought and said we finally beat Medicare in a high stakes Presidential debate with the nation watching. Unless he is constantly in that state, he is mentally fit to be President. In the future, those gaffes where he completely loses his mind for a few seconds might become more frequent, or last longer, or become worse in some other way, but you have not provided any evidence that he was in fact senile before the date, during it, or after. Neither has anybody else who is convinced Biden was or is senile or unfit for office.
> "We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Am I the only one that reads this as Hurr saying that Biden was putting on a show for him? Playing up his frailty and memory problem as a tactic? I don't know how else you can understand the "would likely" part if not that. I don't really see people saying that though.
Hurr details throughout the report the good faith efforts Biden made to be available for the interviews and answer the questions. The interviews took place on Oct 8th and 9th, after the Oct 7th attack on Israel. He set aside hours of time to answer the questions, didn't fillibuster, never attacked him, and complied with the investigation fully. This is supposed to be the final, most incriminating product, and what Hurr doesn't say (the juicy "Biden is senile and corrupt and using the autopen to answer a multiple choice prompt because he's in too much cognitive decline to handle interrogation" parts) are not included because there was no evidence for them. You can listen to the entire interview if you want (I have) and at no point does Hurr express frustration that Biden isn't answering his questions or playing a character or whatever else.
He is making that comment because as part of the report he has to determine whether there would be mens rea to convict Biden in court - there isn't because Biden's testimony exonerates himself, as well as the fact patterns uncovered by the investigation. For example, one of the recovered classified documents was a letter Biden wrote about Afghanistan, a subject he had personal interest in and was entrusted with some degree of policy making in that area. While there is the appearance of mens rea there, the documents were actually transmitted by his aides to Obama via fax I believe and they were in charge of destroying the original copy. The locations in which that document and the other ones were found also lended heavy credence that they weren't being kept as mementos. And Biden handled 10,000s of classified documents throughout his 8 years of Vice Presidency, so he couldn't remember what every document was about or when and where he received it and who was in charge of disposing of it. So Biden would come across to a jury as a "a sympathetic, well meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" in light of the preceding.
You are trying very, very, very hard to deny the obvious here. Biden was effectively deemed mentally incapable of being tried due to a failing memory. Everyone recognized this, except you, apparently.
Hur was attacked for this! Here you are denying he even pointed out Biden had a problem!
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/democrats-blast-special-counsel-robert-hurs-report-smear-cheap-shots-rcna138117
>Unless he is constantly in that state, he is mentally fit to be President.
>He still isn't unfit to be President now. He was only unfit when he lost his train of thought and said we finally beat Medicare in a high stakes Presidential debate with the nation watching.
Wow, you sure that backwards. Can't just have a president on shift for 8 good hours.
>Neither has anybody else who is convinced Biden was or is senile or unfit for office.
Then why did Biden step aside for Kamala? Why didn't he just prove the haters and the doubters wrong?
>Aides have increasingly shielded Biden from unscripted encounters — shortening his interactions with the news media and installing teleprompters at virtually all of his appearances where he would give remarks, even small private events — sparking suspicion among those who interact with him less often that his aging and decline may be worse than aides have acknowledged.
>“I definitely brought it up with people like, is anyone else concerned here? There were very quiet conversations in the building,” one former White House official recalled. “It’s almost like a no-go zone. You’d be worried to bring it up in a conversation with people you can’t trust.”
>“Joe Biden’s age is his superpower, and as I’ve seen firsthand, his fastball is as good as ever,” Katzenberg told NBC a year ago.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/07/white-house-aides-biden-age/
>Hur was attacked for this! Here you are denying he even pointed out Biden had a problem!
He was attacked because what he wrote in the Hurr report was bait for Republicans who were looking to quote mine it, not because Hurr explicitly said in the report or elsewhere that Biden is senile or too old to be President or whatever.
>Wow, you sure that backwards. Can't just have a president on shift for 8 good hours.
The President is likely on shift for only 16 hours a day and is sleeping the other 8 hours. Are Presidents who need 9 hours of sleep rather than 8 unfit for the Presidency?
>Then why did Biden step aside for Kamala? Why didn't he just prove the haters and the doubters wrong?
Why didn't they remove him from office if he was senile?
>>Aides have increasingly shielded Biden from unscripted encounters — shortening his interactions with the news media and installing teleprompters at virtually all of his appearances where he would give remarks, even small private events — sparking suspicion among those who interact with him less often that his aging and decline may be worse than aides have acknowledged.
In 2020, Biden was campaigning full time, so he was more available to staffers and whatnot. In 2021-2023, Biden was President full time, so he was more available to his Cabinet. In 2024, he was splitting his time between being President and campaigning, so of course people around him would think he was being "shielded." In reality he was just less available because he had to take care of meeting with e.g. Netanyahu or Zelensky and then rapidly go to a campaign rally, bleeding time in both areas of concern.
Biden was also subject to misleading video editing that made it look like he was trying to shake hands with people off camera, forgetting where he was in the room, talking to people on stage that didn't exist, and there were videos made where the audio was enhanced to make it look like he shit himself when he was with the Pope and whatnot. There were monthly compilations of "Biden is senile" supercuts on right wing channels that were just tarnishing his image, plus his supporters didn't really care whether he addressed the nation or talked to crowds, unlike Trump's supporters, so the incentives were never to do more media appearances. Rather, he was constantly working with Democrats and House Republicans behind the scenes to pass legislation, and juggling discussions between Zelensky and Netanyahu and various other world leaders.
Teleprompters are normal and only Trump is an aberration in not using them.
>“I definitely brought it up with people like, is anyone else concerned here? There were very quiet conversations in the building,” one former White House official recalled. “It’s almost like a no-go zone. You’d be worried to bring it up in a conversation with people you can’t trust.”
If there was a coverup wouldn't that person be being directed to not say anything about it and just focus on hiding Biden?
>“Joe Biden’s age is his superpower, and as I’ve seen firsthand, his fastball is as good as ever,” Katzenberg told NBC a year ago.
This is a lie but not because he walked in and saw Biden was drooling and reciting nursery rhymes. Every Republican lies and says Trump is a high iq genius, but this is because they have no shame and want to support their candidate. Katzenberg is also "an American media proprietor and film producer" so yeah maybe don't trust those people for political advice.
Here is the mistake you are making: You are concluding that because Trump/Biden have slipped and fallen down stairs, that they are physically disabled and cannot discharge the duties of the President's office. But this is wrong. They are old. They will keep becoming less physically fit for the office as time goes on. They already can't sprint now or do cardio as well as they could when they were 70/60/50. But they are not wheelchair-bound. They don't need a caretaker to walk. Eventually they will slip down more stairs and have more falls and worse physical injuries from engaging in physical activity they could do when they were younger. They will eventually become unable to move. That time is not now, it wasn't before the election, and probably won't be in the next 4 years. They're not physically disabled, but they are of course in declining health in general because they're old, and their conditions won't improve over the next few years, only getting worse. But this does not mean they are physically disabled or are unfit for office.
Boy am I not talking about physical disability.
Famously, FDR was wheelchair-bound.
That's the mistake your making; well, one of many really.
It was an analogy. The same way you wouldn't say that Biden/Trump are physically disabled because there is circumstantial evidence of their age making them more physically frail, you shouldn't say that they're senile because of circumstantial cases of their mental incompetence.
Sigh. You've been fooled by a right-wing lie about Fauci and masks. Just step back, do you really, really, think it's plausible that Fauci was going to do like Trump, and outright lie to people, against the entire professional consensus? That he wouldn't then be flayed by fact-checkers and fellow-scientists, because They're Part Of The Conspiracy? It's just such utter nonsense, and shows the power of the right-wing lying machine, to take little snippets out of context and scream at people. And it works!
What happened is knowledge of Covid transmission changed rapidly. Nobody cares about this, because it's better clickbait to smear Fauci.
It's this sort of stuff which makes me really sympathetic to the point of view that people should be very circumspect about doing anything which could even give the appearance of feeding the right-wing lying machine. I won't go that far myself, but I understand it, and it's not irrational give the constant success of those liars.
But this is Fauci's own words. Here's what he said early in the pandemic https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/dec/28/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-anthony-fauci-lied-about-masks-fa/?utm_source
And here's what he said later.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-because-doctors-shortages-from-the-start-2020-6?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Yes. Read that last one with great care, note particularly this grudging portion (which is a strong indication of the perspective):
"Fauci acknowledged the appearance of a contradiction in the government's public-health advice but denied this was the case. "Actually the circumstances have changed," he said. "That's the reason why.""
Ask yourself - does this make sense? Can one apply a little bit of charity - just a small amount - to what he said in total, and would it be reasonable? Was this a complex situation with a lot of uncertainty, and is it plausible he was sincerely trying to express what the current consensus thinking was at the time?"
Compare the "LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!" right-wing media campaign.
Which one seems a more accurate fit to the facts?
Look, I'm sorry for being exasperated, but given the way the punditry has run with the right-wing media campaign, and how impossible it seems to refute it, it's got some severe implications.
If the consensus was that fragile, perhaps he shouldn't have said anything at all.
I'd contend that sincerely trying to do one's best in a bad situation, even though the result may not be perfect, is a reasonable course of action.
Remember, this was a once-in-a-century pandemic. I am willing to cut good-faith people involved a lot of slack for getting things wrong along the way, rather than denounce them with the benefit of hindsight.
The circumstances "changed" because political pressure changed. The evidence-base didn't change at all.
source=chatgpt.com
I am outside your window
It's a good way to quickly find links!
Yeah, using ChatGPT to find links is fine as long as the user then manually verifies the links (that they are to actual credible sources, and that they actually say what ChatGPT claims they say). I wouldn't even expect somebody to point out they'd found a link with ChatGPT, since that's no different from finding a link with any other kind of search (or just having randomly found it before and remembering it)--after all, they need to check their sources regardless of how they found them.
Does go to show that the author needs to work on sanitizing his links, though--no need to make his readers manually shorten every link to avoid providing tracking data. Everybody should be in the habit of deleting the ends of their links until they don't work, to include only the minimum required to get to the desired page.
> One of the reasons so many people respect Richard Hanania is that he’s willing to attack his own side.
By this point, many would say he’s changed sides
I don't think Hanania "belongs to a side" at all but is a grifter who just tries to suck up to whatever side seems more convenient in the moment to get money.
So you're saying Mr. Lance ought not indulge in utilitarian calculations on whether speaking certain truths (or falsehoods) nets out for the greater good.
You are a deontologist after all, the disguise is wearing thin ;)
Or to properly account for the negative utility brought on by the backlash once the lie is inevitably revealed. It's still utilitarian, just not as myopic.
… and history shows that censorship didn’t make people do the French and Russian Revolution. It was poverty (misery and deaths). It always is about wellbeing (safety or security, shelter, food, etc.). Trump was elected because, while economists kept saying how economy is doing great, many people didn’t feel it and then they voted for a fascist because they don’t seem to be getting how economy is so great!
Some liberals and libertarians have this stupid idea of “if you suppress an idea or free speech, then it will grow underground and then spread and it will ultimately become bigger [or some shit]” and now I am like - “have you guys read some history?” because… nah, if you actually suppress hard enough, the stuff dies for long (maybe even forever if you aggressively destroy the all the evidence too). Communism is dead in Indonesia because USA murdered large amounts of communists. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vincent-bevins/the-jakarta-method/9781541724013/?lens=publicaffairs
As I said, Saudi Arabia is fine, China is fine, and plenty of countries with censorship and sometimes pretty brutal censorship are all fine.
Is there any topic where you think telling the truth about it in the public sphere (so like academics, politicians, journalists lying about or avoiding the truth in their professional capacity) causes more harm than good (from a utilitarian POV)? Seems to me that you and Bentham, like most intellectually curious ppl, value telling the truth as a good onto itself (not an absolute good of course, one that has to be balanced against other values, but one that has some independent value) but because you guys are so committed to utilitarianism you are motivated reasoning yourself into greatly exaggerating the utilitarian benefits of truth telling.
That debate at 20 min is hilarious