This has been very useful to me since I encountered it on the old sub. Within the last years, war has broken out. War seeds the clouds of formerly clear skies. The droplets of propaganda are now a torrent.
As such, I don't think it completely wise to follow this rule unaltered when states clash. The power, organization, and incentives come together to cloudy any former clarity. Lies, with a multitude of motivations, float freely.
What addendums would you add to this adage in an age of active conflict?
It means that if someone says "Hey, I'm an evil bad bad bad guy and I want to kill and injure people you love" you should treat that as a statement of intent and not brush it off as hyperbole or something they just "said to get votes".
If someone says "I'm going to kill you and shit on everything you hold dear" you should still believe them.
Not wrong, but I think I phrase the question poorly.
If I were to rephrase: Ignoring extreme statements that demand seriousness due to their gravity, what rules can a person follow to discern the truth without being cynical and treating statements about the self with seriousness.
In the Analects, Confucius said to listen to one's words and observe one's actions. Or in more contemporary language, talk is cheap. You discern someone is truthful through the consistencies between their words and their actions. If their words and actions repeatedly do not match, then they are untrustworthy. This holds true ranging from an individual's personal life to complex geopolitics. You shouldn't feel bad for trusting someone who didn't deserve your trust. You only have to simply label them untrustworthy and move on with your life.
When Tara Reade accuses Joe Biden of SA, we don't need to hear a goddamn word out of his mouth because we have already seen through his actions that he at the very least shelters sex pests. By his actions, I mean his full-throated defense of Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill's allegations of SA despite being a member of the so-called progressive party. There's absolutely no reason why Biden had to go to bat for some reactionary judge accused of SA unless he himself had some skeletons in his closet as well. Tara Reade is that skeleton.
Tara Reade is that skeleton.
Reade's allegation happened, per Reade herself, in 1993, two years after Thomas' confirmation. Which tends to suggest she isn't the only one.
Liberals used it for Trump to the point it was a cliché. Trump is their bogeyman. So they don't seem to use the phrase for other republicans even for truly awful people like DeSantis. I think that's pretty funny.
A series of true statements. However, I must admit to not intuiting the underlying bond tying them together as an answer.
You are right, but I guess the point of my post was that I am having trouble with amount of propaganda out there. I am gullible and aware of it. I liked the idea of simply believing people who admit to being terrible because doubt can be disquieting for a person who struggles to discern social truths. The realities of war in the modern era make the mind itself a battlefield between people propagating programming.
I am aware that the notion of popular discontent being able to bring about peace being libshit, but I still want to modify my heuristics to avoid being a sponge for narratives. My acceptance of any narrative means nothing, ultimately. My unease is with war being able to discredit a good rule of thumb. I want to refine the rule in order to make it able to withstand the realities of a world conflict and the resulting changes to the media-sphere. You have to cultivate cynicism as a consumer of news content during conflict.
A good rule of thumb ought not be discarded completely when it could be modified with addendums.
They can only have 1 at a time. If Trump wins in '24, they'll be rehabilitating him in mid '29 and urging whoever Hillary loses to to pardon him.
What do you mean by this.
I assume you don't mean believe
"Hi I'm Cleopatra I have been imprisoned by the Romans but if you send me $10,000 by western union I will wire you $10 million once I can access my accounts"
Nobody lies in order to make themselves look bad, but people lie all the time to make themselves look good. So we believe the CIA when they say "we do MKULTRA shit" but not when they say "we spread democracy around the world".
We also believe them about soviet nutrition and Stalin not actually being a dictator
Internal documents will always be true (or at the very least, not propaganda). It's what they tell the external public that you'll have to figure out
Nobody lies in order to make themselves look bad
They do if they're antisocial, tho.
If someone tells you who they are and it's a bad thing it's probably still worth believing them
I think the better version of this phrase is "when someone *shows * you who they are, believe them."
We're all the hero of our own story and someone can tell you all day long that they're a nice person and that they're always being taken advantage of...but if you see them being an inconsiderate prick and watch them engineer a situation that leads to their own immiseration you might pause and consider what the other perspective of all their stories actually looks like.
