symple · HackerTrans

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

You agree with the point I made but don’t like the statement, “We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades.” I’m perplexed by this. Don’t see how it can be a fruitful experience to nitpick that statement of mine when you agree with the point I was making. The examples I gave weren’t close enough to the 9/11 in details for you so you nitpicked that and ignored my point. Which you have now stated you agree with. This is why I periodically delete my account on this site. Yes, I know, delete isn’t the technically correct term but it is close enough. I change usernames and reset my previous password to a random string so that I can’t use it anymore. It is a deletion of sorts.

symple

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Our reaction to 9/11 was an overreaction. Lots of places have been devastated by U.S. actions and those people haven’t had similar overreactions.

symple

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

War is the ultimate act of overt violence. Discounting examples from war is strange. What does it matter to the victims if a piece of paper somewhere declares it a war?

I can’t point to a single act that satisfies your criteria. The U.S. does not wage peacetime violence in the same way that terrorist groups do. We prefer to do the damage over time. We prefer to avoid headline capturing violence. But the victims don’t care and the point I made is not diminished by this. Our reaction to 9/11 was an overreaction. Lots of places have been devastated by U.S. actions and those people haven’t had similar overreactions.

2000 people weren’t killed in a single day in Nicaragua in the 80s. We did it over time and in a sustained way. The Nicaraguans don’t obsess about how this changed the whole world or desire to go on a 20 year killing spree in reaction to what we did.

symple

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

It’s an easy way to absolve a nation of guilt if you negate any examples done during war. Our bombings in North Vietnam were entirely immoral and are not less so because we were at war. Though no actual declaration of war was made. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was made up to justify enlarging the war. Does McNamara’s Morons count in your mind as an example? Maybe not since that was done to our own people.

Nevertheless, you should read up on the history of our shenanigans in Latin America. One example: while Americans didn’t do the actual killing and torture of Catholic priests and nuns our proxies did. You should also read up on things we funded the Iraqis to do in their war against Iran. Paying someone to do your dirty deeds is just as bad as doing them yourself. We did shoot down an Iranian airliner and later promoted the captain of the ship. We weren’t at war with Cambodia but did terrible things to that country during the Vietnam war. Bay of Pigs.

Look at who we funded and ended up enabling to gain control of Afghanistan during Soviet Union’s involvement there.

symple

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

My memory of the events is that pretty much everyone supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Manufactured support was needed for Iraq. Invasion of Iraq was 1.5 years after 9/11 and Iraq wasn’t tied to 9/11.

I think our overreaction to 9/11 is itself an example of manipulation by media. We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades and those nations didn’t get PTSD from our actions. This leads me to think that our over the top outrage was partially fueled by media narratives.

symple

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Iraqi WMD was believed enough by the public to make it politically infeasible for most Congressmen to vote against authorizing war against Iraq. That the NYT later issued an apology is irrelevant. Iraqi WMD is a great example of manufacturing consent long enough to push through a major policy blunder.

In retrospect the effort was comical enough, in light of the fact that none were found, that the one responsible for it (President Bush) famously joked about looking for WMD under a desk. He received no real political backlash for his joke or for being vile enough to start an unnecessary war that killed hundreds of thousands.

The propaganda surrounding the global war on terror was effective enough that when the U.S. performed terrorist acts on weddings that killed innocents it was labeled “drone strikes” and when the enemy performed acts that killed innocents they were labeled “terrorist attacks”.

People initially believed the b.s. the Pentagon said about Tillman’s death. People largely believed that Chalabi would be the political savior of a new Iraq until our government no longer liked him. There are people who still think we shouldn’t trade with Cuba because they are communist but see no problem trading with China. Criticism of Israel is often times labeled anti-semitism. Do more than a small minority of people understand that Jews aren’t the only semites in the world?

I can’t point to too many specific instances of U.S. media engaged in outright propaganda but there are some clear trends where the collective attitudes on certain topics/beliefs are engineered to be a certain way. The fact that people even ever seriously uttered the phrase “war on christmas” is enough know that opinions are deliberately being manipulated by media.

symple

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

It’s the Completeness Theorem.

symple

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

The provability of a statement depends upon which system you are in. For instance, within PA one can’t prove that PA is consistent but within ZFC one can prove that PA is consistent. We can say of a statement: Statement A can’t be proven in a given axiomatic system but it can be proven in a different system.

Let’s assume the Natural Numbers are consistent system. Let’s collect all true statements in this system and use that collection as our axioms. It is now the case that every true statement about the Natural Numbers can be proven in this system. The problem with this system of axioms is that there is no effective procedure for determining if a statement is an axiom or not. It is not a useful system.

Every true statement can be proven in some system. The incompleteness theorems show that we can’t have a relatively simple set of axioms that are powerful enough to prove all true statements about the Natural Numbers. Every simple enough set of axioms for the Natural Numbers will have nonstandard implementations (models) in which some statements are false in these nonstandard models but true in the Natural Numbers.

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