Jack Poulson has an insider's background, an outsider's perspective, and unique technical expertise, making him an invaluable resource for monitoring the world of national security contracting
Your source used CIA edited Wikipedia or Atlantic Council TNI jokers to vet Greyzone and swallowed the deepest bullsh*t propaganda swill on the web. Teach them critical thinking.
Really? I've not heard that. How'd you find this out? You should write up a big killer expose on these guys if you have the goods on'em. I imagine it would make a big splash as I've not seen this reported in the dreaded mainstream media nor in its many tributaries and feeder ponds and lakes. Probably The NY Times knows all this and is sitting on it, if I know the Sulzberger's.
The exposes you've requested, for what they're worth- they're fresh news to me, and therefore too early for me to evaluate the allegations. Which is one reason I'm posting these article: to get some parallel processing, if I can find some.
(Reasoned analysis is not to be confused with ad hominem cheap shots or glib sarcasm. Just some advance notice on that.)
Mint Press News Dot Com Dot Com Dot Com... The all-purpose go-to rag for all the top-shelf substack conspiracy theorists and assorted dyspeptic and disgruntled right-wing (masquerading as "far-left" hotshots), retrograde poltroons?
Now, there's a reliable source I always turn to when the newsstand is out of, say, Grit---or a personal favorite of mine, OK! Magazine. Outstanding archival work!
(As always, reasoned, fact-based, verifiable, reliable sources is not to be confused with clumsy propaganda, conspiracies, pseudoscience, poor sources, failed fact checks...just some advanced notice on that...)
"Mint Press News Dot Com Dot Com Dot Com... The all-purpose go-to rag for all the top-shelf substack conspiracy theorists and assorted dyspeptic and disgruntled right-wing (masquerading as "far-left" hotshots), retrograde poltroons?"
I said, no ad hominems. You didn't address a single fact claim in the articles. (And "dot com" is not an especially effective insult in an era when every news media outlet has one, and the historic "newspapers of record" of the US hide behind paywalls.)
Sadly, I've read enough of your output to know that content-based argument isn't your thing. So I can't say that I didn't anticipate your non-responsive reply.
It's easy to access your Notes and read enough to know that it's all you've got: worthless, valueless snark and the sort of jejune sarcasm that has a way of confusing casual readers about your sincerity. After a while, regular readers simply assume your insincerity- your cowardice and inability to even state a position, much less defend one. A level of ineptitude that's an embarrassment to everyone else on your side. Whatever that is.
If you're going to refute claims, you need to do a lot better than that. It's so...8th grade (i.e., a 4th grade level of perspicacity, with more vocabulary.)
It's so entrenched through cut-outs that I can almost guarantee nobody in Congress has any real idea of the breadth of this issue. They have decentralized it so that dismantling it will take many years if even a decent attempt is made.
Keep in mind that Congress (the branch of government that ostensibly legislates federal law) is not even permitted to know the alphabet agencies actual budgets.
Short answer Yes. Question: Do You Really want (say) Rashida Tlaib to have Full access to what the Government is doing? There is a Reason Why there are differing levels of classification. What if (A Very Progressive) Congressman Jared Huffman or Judy Chu spilled the beans about the raid on OBL's compound?
You may not like it, I may not like it, BUT Its necessary.
I had a Secret (downgraded to Classified. I got out is 71. There's stuff I won't talk about. Now Most of it is someone doing CYA, and its probably been declassified, but no one has told Me.
This country is not a democratic republic but an oligarchy. That said, in your other comment you argue for the intelligence agencies to select their own supervisors and do decide what those supervisors are allowed to know. Aka "government by unelected and unaccountable spooks".
Giving the keys to the security state to a dingbat who was able to get 100,000 votes in a nation of 330,000,000 is not the definition of a democratic republic...and you know it. The only question is why you think it necessary to lie about it here and in a few other comments in this thread.
So Gibson was right, we're living in Spook Country.
Yay!!!
“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun’s inner workings was ritual, conducted every few nights, though as far as Milgrim knew, Brown hadn’t fired the gun since they’d been together. “What did you say?” “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable. “The fuck—” “If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.” Brown opened his mouth. Closed it. “It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”
― William Gibson
“Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia.”
Then the professors teamed up with the literal Nazis “who had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II” and, as the pair paid the bills with overt and covert war related business, they realized they had found their calling and lived happily ever after.
This is fascinating and important work that I would have never heard of, had Matt not written this. I'm amazed that Jack is able to find people willing to financially support it. There are so few people interested in the public interest these days...
No oversight, no accountability and meanwhile trog's like (pick a politician) lap it all up as gravy on an exquisite pile of mashed potatatoes. You think the moronic Biden family is the issue, think again.
As noted elsewhere, Congress is not even permitted to know the intelligence agencies true budgets.
This should tell you who is really in charge in Washington.
Or, to put it another way, suppose the 1/6 protesters were to attempt to have sought to enter NSA headquarters. They would have been shot on sight, and nobody would have dithered around waiting for orders.
It is ironic that by subscribing to his (or Matt's) substack I am traced by the same mechanisms he writes about. One can not rule out that is a honeypot for cynics and skeptics. Sites like these should offer a cash and print version option delivered to an undisclosed neutral location. ;-)
You're fine. Matt is either super paranoid, or fishing for a pretense... first he was being censored by Facebook (except not really), then he was being investigated by the IRS (except not really). Now there's a network of censorship monitoring the whole internet to punish people who read wrongthink. Obvious punchline: not really.
idk if he's trying to milk dumb-as-dirt right-wingers out of their money, or if he actually believes this shit, but either way you'd be wise to think skeptically.
just to be clear, you're saying there has not been significant cooperation between tech companies, ngo/thinktanks and government agencies to censor and suppress dissenting views?
just to be clear, you're not going to answer my question, are you?
in actual answer to your question, though, I really don't know. I don't trust anything Matt writes because of the flagrant falsehoods and assumptions littered throughout his reporting... he certainly does present a narrative of government intrustion into tech, but then he also claimed Facebook was censoring him and that the IRS was targeting him, both of which (thus far) are completely unsupported and seem mostly like bullshit.
I'm sure you believe that, but the fact that you don't even feel the need to point to a *single* piece of evidence for this extraordinary claim is, well, telling.
I don't feel the need because anyone who reads Racket News is familiar with the evidence. Twitter Files being a case in point. I'm sure you'll find a way of dismissing that as evidence. Or perhaps all the discovery in Missouri v Biden.
I read Racket News (too much, honestly), and I didn't find any of that "evidence" convincing in the least.
If you think I missed something, then I'm asking you now, please enlighten me: what's the most bulletproof, reliable evidence of wrongdoing you've come across in the Twitter Files?
WHY do the really intelligent people wind up doing Anti social stuff for money? The Best Brain's go to Wall Street, social media Teck and the MIC. HELLO, even Russia with less than half the US population is graduating more engineers... not financial engineering. Even the Germans go to Frankfurt. The free lunch is coming to an end in the US and Europe. The others are tired of being exploited and the western compradors and Quisling courtiers will be turfed. We used to be productive and now just exploitive and living off BS and hucksterism. I just read that Russia produces a 155mm shell for ~$600 and the US ~$6000, no doubt that China even cheaper. This cannot stand.
It's only a subset of the really intelligent people who behave anti-socially, but of course they're more noticeable than the really intelligent people who become conscientious but anonymous doctors, physicists, cosmologists, etc. Remember that intelligence and ethics aren't related: they exist on different continua, and the criteria for ascertaining whether someone is intelligent, or ethical, are different too. I've often wondered: if humankind suddenly gained a species-wide 500 cc. increase in cranial capacity, would we then become kinder and more ethical, because this seems the rational, beneficial, farsighted thing to do? Or would we simply come up with more ingenious ways of exploiting each other? I think the jury is very much out on that question, though my guess is that we'd take both roads at once, just as we do now.
I think a lot of it has to do with the proportion of sociopaths/psychopaths in the population. It seems to be endemic in Homo sapiens and screws up everything we try to do.
Thank you, Marilyn. The conceit that intelligence and ethics form sets with coincident extensions is, of course, very attractive to the intelligent. Bertrand Russell was persuaded of it, and there's John Erskine's famous essay, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent. A good antidote to this seductive fallacy is Eric Rohmer's wonderful movie, Claire's Knee, which I highly recommend if you've never seen it.
The truth is we can't infer anything about somebody's ethics, one way or the other, from his/her intelligence alone. As in Rohmer's movie we have to wait and see whether in the end the unfriendly, unlettered boor or the pleasant, refined intellectual proves more ethically reliable (the relevant test, as you will have surmised, isn't their respective intelligence). What we can perhaps infer is that ethical scruple and enough intellectual capacity to understand the extent to which one's actions benefit or harm others are likely to make a good blend.
If we are thinking of those that are intelligent but not conscientious, as you say, I doubt much consideration is given to ethics at all. I suspect that it is accepted as a given. As in, “I am intelligent, as are my peers. Our actions are based on correct thinking, and therefore the only ethical option”.
It is this type of thinking that makes these people dangerous. They misunderstand what it means to be ethical. In my mind at least, acting from compassion is much more intuitive than based on reasoned/calculated decision making. In addition, ethical thought honors others as the primary objective, and only considers actions that do so.
On the other hand, selfish actions that happen to have a beneficial byproduct for others, are not ethical. As we know, the worst behavior is often defended this way. Like when the powerful politician, whose pockets are lined by defense contractors, asks us to "defend Ukraine", the intelligent can distort the meaning of ethics to clear their conscience and manipulate the gullible.
Interesting, Pam. My father, who was a very ethical man with a wide range of competencies, once told me a person's first responsibility had to be to him/herself and his/her family, on the ground that the essential prerequisite for helping others was, inevitably, not being a burden on them. Only when you've mastered looking after yourself are you in a position to meaningfully help someone else. So I think we have to be wary of thinking self interest is somehow automatically antithetical to ethics, and of committing the logical equivocation of substituting 'selfishness' for self interest as if these were identical concepts (they aren't, so we can't oscillate between them as if the differences between them just don't matter). You're the final authority on what qualifies as being in your own interest, and you're the only person on the planet who can deliver this verdict. It certainly doesn't follow that acting on this privileged insight (one which every individual is uniquely privileged to have) commits you to behaving selfishly.
You might be right that the intelligent, through the construction of ingenious narratives, are better able to masquerade selfishness as ethical behaviour--though in my experience plenty of people we wouldn't normally consider particularly intelligent are fairly adept at this kind of deception (often first and foremost a self-deception) too. I tend to think of this more in terms of motivation and will than of intelligence. Schopenhauer warned that we have to be alert to when we're no longer dealing with somebody's reason but his/her will--he/she simply WILL not understand us--and I'm sure you can think of all too many occasions on which you've encountered this phenomenon in the intelligent and unintelligent alike.
As to the question of who's 'intelligent,' and where on the continuum (and according to what criteria) people should be situated, these things remain matters of judgment and debate, as does the question of whether intelligence can be quantified at all. Those who qualify 'objectively' for the designation tend to be the ones who ace I.Q. tests, which reward reading comprehension and the ability to solve simple puzzles. This is child's play for certain kinds of minds, though of course it tells us nothing about their ability to, say, navigate social groups successfully, much less anything about their compassion or empathy. If we think of intelligence as a capacity for certain kinds of mastery, then a child figuring out how to do a somersault or ride a bicycle is as much of a neurological triumph as learning how to read or count.
When you speak of 'peers,' it's worth remembering that we tend to choose as friends those we think of as more or less equal to us in intelligence; and whether this is more or less ethically defensible than using, say, race or ethnicity as a criterion, it results in a society that's just as stratified. To the extent we can construe the intelligent as comprising a group, then like all groups it figures to have the defects of its virtues. So we have the presumably super-intelligent Sam Harris, for example, dismissing 'stone age' religion on epistemological grounds likely quite unfamiliar to, say, a cashier at Whalemart, while failing to understand just why religion remains so appealing to this same cashier (who, of course, will never be friends with Sam despite, for all we know, being an infinitely more ethical and complete person).
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Your father sounds very wise! (A trait he seems to have passed on to his son :)
I agree that taking care of yourself and your family so as not to be a burden on others is an important responsibility. I never would have considered this selfish though, because the purpose was to protect others from hardship. I agree self interest is a different concept all together. (Maybe related to having goals and rewards that one works toward, being responsible with the gifts this life has given you, commitment to your family and community to be the best version of yourself, etc. All honorable concepts, and probably developing that balance and understanding is the real work of a lifetime.
My last thought is that Intention always struck me as the essential element that could separate right from wrong. Which leads me back to the question; Whose interests are being considered and why?
Bellingcat is not intended and does not provide "intelligence", watchdog services or anything of the sort.
Bellingcat is a cutout that is intended to serve as sockpuppet for the spooks while pretending to be independent.
Abso-frigging-lutely Bellingcat is a disinfo-smear op exposed in many Grayzone pieces.
https://thegrayzone.com/tag/bellingcat/
Somebody told me the Grayzone is straight-up Kremlin propaganda, broadcast straight from old Soviet teletype machines.
Your source used CIA edited Wikipedia or Atlantic Council TNI jokers to vet Greyzone and swallowed the deepest bullsh*t propaganda swill on the web. Teach them critical thinking.
I don’t talk to them anymore.
💯
Really? I've not heard that. How'd you find this out? You should write up a big killer expose on these guys if you have the goods on'em. I imagine it would make a big splash as I've not seen this reported in the dreaded mainstream media nor in its many tributaries and feeder ponds and lakes. Probably The NY Times knows all this and is sitting on it, if I know the Sulzberger's.
The exposes you've requested, for what they're worth- they're fresh news to me, and therefore too early for me to evaluate the allegations. Which is one reason I'm posting these article: to get some parallel processing, if I can find some.
(Reasoned analysis is not to be confused with ad hominem cheap shots or glib sarcasm. Just some advance notice on that.)
https://www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence-agencies-launders-talking-points-media/276603/
https://www.mintpressnews.com/school-for-spooks-kings-college-war-studies-churning-out-nato-spies/276736/
Mint Press News Dot Com Dot Com Dot Com... The all-purpose go-to rag for all the top-shelf substack conspiracy theorists and assorted dyspeptic and disgruntled right-wing (masquerading as "far-left" hotshots), retrograde poltroons?
Now, there's a reliable source I always turn to when the newsstand is out of, say, Grit---or a personal favorite of mine, OK! Magazine. Outstanding archival work!
(As always, reasoned, fact-based, verifiable, reliable sources is not to be confused with clumsy propaganda, conspiracies, pseudoscience, poor sources, failed fact checks...just some advanced notice on that...)
"Mint Press News Dot Com Dot Com Dot Com... The all-purpose go-to rag for all the top-shelf substack conspiracy theorists and assorted dyspeptic and disgruntled right-wing (masquerading as "far-left" hotshots), retrograde poltroons?"
I said, no ad hominems. You didn't address a single fact claim in the articles. (And "dot com" is not an especially effective insult in an era when every news media outlet has one, and the historic "newspapers of record" of the US hide behind paywalls.)
Sadly, I've read enough of your output to know that content-based argument isn't your thing. So I can't say that I didn't anticipate your non-responsive reply.
It's easy to access your Notes and read enough to know that it's all you've got: worthless, valueless snark and the sort of jejune sarcasm that has a way of confusing casual readers about your sincerity. After a while, regular readers simply assume your insincerity- your cowardice and inability to even state a position, much less defend one. A level of ineptitude that's an embarrassment to everyone else on your side. Whatever that is.
If you're going to refute claims, you need to do a lot better than that. It's so...8th grade (i.e., a 4th grade level of perspicacity, with more vocabulary.)
It's so entrenched through cut-outs that I can almost guarantee nobody in Congress has any real idea of the breadth of this issue. They have decentralized it so that dismantling it will take many years if even a decent attempt is made.
Keep in mind that Congress (the branch of government that ostensibly legislates federal law) is not even permitted to know the alphabet agencies actual budgets.
Is this true?
Short answer Yes. Question: Do You Really want (say) Rashida Tlaib to have Full access to what the Government is doing? There is a Reason Why there are differing levels of classification. What if (A Very Progressive) Congressman Jared Huffman or Judy Chu spilled the beans about the raid on OBL's compound?
You may not like it, I may not like it, BUT Its necessary.
I had a Secret (downgraded to Classified. I got out is 71. There's stuff I won't talk about. Now Most of it is someone doing CYA, and its probably been declassified, but no one has told Me.
So you're basically against the idea of a democratic republic.
1. I live in The Real World not some Libertarian Fantasy World, where there are no Government Secrets.
a. BTW there is waaaay to much classification going on.
2. Here in The Real World, nations have to keep secrets or Bad Things Happen.
3. I LOVE democratic republic's. And Want this one to Survive.
This country is not a democratic republic but an oligarchy. That said, in your other comment you argue for the intelligence agencies to select their own supervisors and do decide what those supervisors are allowed to know. Aka "government by unelected and unaccountable spooks".
Giving the keys to the security state to a dingbat who was able to get 100,000 votes in a nation of 330,000,000 is not the definition of a democratic republic...and you know it. The only question is why you think it necessary to lie about it here and in a few other comments in this thread.
Dishonest abuse of statistics, there.
Both U-2 andSR-71 were Black projects.
So Gibson was right, we're living in Spook Country.
Yay!!!
“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun’s inner workings was ritual, conducted every few nights, though as far as Milgrim knew, Brown hadn’t fired the gun since they’d been together. “What did you say?” “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable. “The fuck—” “If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.” Brown opened his mouth. Closed it. “It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”
― William Gibson
“Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia.”
― William Gibson
Then the professors teamed up with the literal Nazis “who had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II” and, as the pair paid the bills with overt and covert war related business, they realized they had found their calling and lived happily ever after.
Everyone loves a happy ending.
Even a Nazi.
Excellent
This is fascinating and important work that I would have never heard of, had Matt not written this. I'm amazed that Jack is able to find people willing to financially support it. There are so few people interested in the public interest these days...
Amen. God bless Matt and Racket News.
I was about to write a comment expressing similar thoughts but you've done better than I would have.
Thanks!
With our society's focus on grabbing money, one can get discouraged that so few care about the public interest. It's delightful to find those few.
Can I get a "Make Orwell Fiction Again" ?
I propose a slight change to the acronym.
Make
Orwell
Fiction
Only
No oversight, no accountability and meanwhile trog's like (pick a politician) lap it all up as gravy on an exquisite pile of mashed potatatoes. You think the moronic Biden family is the issue, think again.
As noted elsewhere, Congress is not even permitted to know the intelligence agencies true budgets.
This should tell you who is really in charge in Washington.
Or, to put it another way, suppose the 1/6 protesters were to attempt to have sought to enter NSA headquarters. They would have been shot on sight, and nobody would have dithered around waiting for orders.
And no one can track the money this costs the taxpayers. Sweet gig, if you can get it.
Our legislative and executive branches have enabled this all along the way. Biden was there of course.
"One of the company’s employees blew the whistle to one of Premise’s major aid clients, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,"
I think I understand 'intersectionality' finally. And I am not amused.
Because war is just another marketing opportunity! Cha ching!
This “Acquisition Kill Chain” brought to you by Trident Spectre!
( Pay no attention to all those corpses )
it's turtles all the way down with this spook system.
Truly terrifying insights hiding in plain sight. Thank you Matt. Thank you Jack. I just gotta ask: Are we cooked yet?
We are definitely frogs in hot water
Boiled dry, and no one seems to be able to turn off the stove.
It is ironic that by subscribing to his (or Matt's) substack I am traced by the same mechanisms he writes about. One can not rule out that is a honeypot for cynics and skeptics. Sites like these should offer a cash and print version option delivered to an undisclosed neutral location. ;-)
You're fine. Matt is either super paranoid, or fishing for a pretense... first he was being censored by Facebook (except not really), then he was being investigated by the IRS (except not really). Now there's a network of censorship monitoring the whole internet to punish people who read wrongthink. Obvious punchline: not really.
idk if he's trying to milk dumb-as-dirt right-wingers out of their money, or if he actually believes this shit, but either way you'd be wise to think skeptically.
Matt had a an elected rep call to jail him, is that real enough for you?
Enough for what? To justify the ridiculous idea that you're being watched by the government because you subscribe to Racket News? Not really.
just to be clear, you're saying there has not been significant cooperation between tech companies, ngo/thinktanks and government agencies to censor and suppress dissenting views?
just to be clear, you're not going to answer my question, are you?
in actual answer to your question, though, I really don't know. I don't trust anything Matt writes because of the flagrant falsehoods and assumptions littered throughout his reporting... he certainly does present a narrative of government intrustion into tech, but then he also claimed Facebook was censoring him and that the IRS was targeting him, both of which (thus far) are completely unsupported and seem mostly like bullshit.
when did I say I was being watched by the government? Not that getting data and financials information is above the us government.
Geez! What is up with you? Just unsubscribe & take Eric with you.
Don't be such a snowflake, sweetie.
He's already succeeded with the former and it's not too farfetched to believe he's getting a bit more than his feet wet with the latter.
'Now there's a network of censorship monitoring the whole internet to punish people who read wrongthink. Obvious punchline: not really.'
Anyone who was awake during the whole Covid debacle knows that you are wrong.
I'm sure you believe that, but the fact that you don't even feel the need to point to a *single* piece of evidence for this extraordinary claim is, well, telling.
I don't feel the need because anyone who reads Racket News is familiar with the evidence. Twitter Files being a case in point. I'm sure you'll find a way of dismissing that as evidence. Or perhaps all the discovery in Missouri v Biden.
I read Racket News (too much, honestly), and I didn't find any of that "evidence" convincing in the least.
If you think I missed something, then I'm asking you now, please enlighten me: what's the most bulletproof, reliable evidence of wrongdoing you've come across in the Twitter Files?
SPECTRE? Seriously?? Just sayin yo…Is Blofeld and his cat involved? I think I saw a monocle in there….Asking for a friend 😃🤦♂️
Hail Hydra!
I just sneaked this video out of SPECTRE's secret underground lair...This is what the other video doesnt show you!
https://youtu.be/NY3DrA7tJFk?si=DqwgOKgyP7UqRncL
Haha!!!
🤣
Watch this video at your own risk.
no
Auspicious that Trident Spectre held their shindig on 9/11
A very interesting article, but I am skeptical of anyone who actually believes that Osama was killed by US forces at Abbottabad
Yea, that whole " We dumped the body into the ocean" story never sounded logical to me.
sock puppet sock puppet
WHY do the really intelligent people wind up doing Anti social stuff for money? The Best Brain's go to Wall Street, social media Teck and the MIC. HELLO, even Russia with less than half the US population is graduating more engineers... not financial engineering. Even the Germans go to Frankfurt. The free lunch is coming to an end in the US and Europe. The others are tired of being exploited and the western compradors and Quisling courtiers will be turfed. We used to be productive and now just exploitive and living off BS and hucksterism. I just read that Russia produces a 155mm shell for ~$600 and the US ~$6000, no doubt that China even cheaper. This cannot stand.
It's only a subset of the really intelligent people who behave anti-socially, but of course they're more noticeable than the really intelligent people who become conscientious but anonymous doctors, physicists, cosmologists, etc. Remember that intelligence and ethics aren't related: they exist on different continua, and the criteria for ascertaining whether someone is intelligent, or ethical, are different too. I've often wondered: if humankind suddenly gained a species-wide 500 cc. increase in cranial capacity, would we then become kinder and more ethical, because this seems the rational, beneficial, farsighted thing to do? Or would we simply come up with more ingenious ways of exploiting each other? I think the jury is very much out on that question, though my guess is that we'd take both roads at once, just as we do now.
I think a lot of it has to do with the proportion of sociopaths/psychopaths in the population. It seems to be endemic in Homo sapiens and screws up everything we try to do.
Wonderfully stated
Thank you, Marilyn. The conceit that intelligence and ethics form sets with coincident extensions is, of course, very attractive to the intelligent. Bertrand Russell was persuaded of it, and there's John Erskine's famous essay, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent. A good antidote to this seductive fallacy is Eric Rohmer's wonderful movie, Claire's Knee, which I highly recommend if you've never seen it.
The truth is we can't infer anything about somebody's ethics, one way or the other, from his/her intelligence alone. As in Rohmer's movie we have to wait and see whether in the end the unfriendly, unlettered boor or the pleasant, refined intellectual proves more ethically reliable (the relevant test, as you will have surmised, isn't their respective intelligence). What we can perhaps infer is that ethical scruple and enough intellectual capacity to understand the extent to which one's actions benefit or harm others are likely to make a good blend.
If we are thinking of those that are intelligent but not conscientious, as you say, I doubt much consideration is given to ethics at all. I suspect that it is accepted as a given. As in, “I am intelligent, as are my peers. Our actions are based on correct thinking, and therefore the only ethical option”.
It is this type of thinking that makes these people dangerous. They misunderstand what it means to be ethical. In my mind at least, acting from compassion is much more intuitive than based on reasoned/calculated decision making. In addition, ethical thought honors others as the primary objective, and only considers actions that do so.
On the other hand, selfish actions that happen to have a beneficial byproduct for others, are not ethical. As we know, the worst behavior is often defended this way. Like when the powerful politician, whose pockets are lined by defense contractors, asks us to "defend Ukraine", the intelligent can distort the meaning of ethics to clear their conscience and manipulate the gullible.
Interesting, Pam. My father, who was a very ethical man with a wide range of competencies, once told me a person's first responsibility had to be to him/herself and his/her family, on the ground that the essential prerequisite for helping others was, inevitably, not being a burden on them. Only when you've mastered looking after yourself are you in a position to meaningfully help someone else. So I think we have to be wary of thinking self interest is somehow automatically antithetical to ethics, and of committing the logical equivocation of substituting 'selfishness' for self interest as if these were identical concepts (they aren't, so we can't oscillate between them as if the differences between them just don't matter). You're the final authority on what qualifies as being in your own interest, and you're the only person on the planet who can deliver this verdict. It certainly doesn't follow that acting on this privileged insight (one which every individual is uniquely privileged to have) commits you to behaving selfishly.
You might be right that the intelligent, through the construction of ingenious narratives, are better able to masquerade selfishness as ethical behaviour--though in my experience plenty of people we wouldn't normally consider particularly intelligent are fairly adept at this kind of deception (often first and foremost a self-deception) too. I tend to think of this more in terms of motivation and will than of intelligence. Schopenhauer warned that we have to be alert to when we're no longer dealing with somebody's reason but his/her will--he/she simply WILL not understand us--and I'm sure you can think of all too many occasions on which you've encountered this phenomenon in the intelligent and unintelligent alike.
As to the question of who's 'intelligent,' and where on the continuum (and according to what criteria) people should be situated, these things remain matters of judgment and debate, as does the question of whether intelligence can be quantified at all. Those who qualify 'objectively' for the designation tend to be the ones who ace I.Q. tests, which reward reading comprehension and the ability to solve simple puzzles. This is child's play for certain kinds of minds, though of course it tells us nothing about their ability to, say, navigate social groups successfully, much less anything about their compassion or empathy. If we think of intelligence as a capacity for certain kinds of mastery, then a child figuring out how to do a somersault or ride a bicycle is as much of a neurological triumph as learning how to read or count.
When you speak of 'peers,' it's worth remembering that we tend to choose as friends those we think of as more or less equal to us in intelligence; and whether this is more or less ethically defensible than using, say, race or ethnicity as a criterion, it results in a society that's just as stratified. To the extent we can construe the intelligent as comprising a group, then like all groups it figures to have the defects of its virtues. So we have the presumably super-intelligent Sam Harris, for example, dismissing 'stone age' religion on epistemological grounds likely quite unfamiliar to, say, a cashier at Whalemart, while failing to understand just why religion remains so appealing to this same cashier (who, of course, will never be friends with Sam despite, for all we know, being an infinitely more ethical and complete person).
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Your father sounds very wise! (A trait he seems to have passed on to his son :)
I agree that taking care of yourself and your family so as not to be a burden on others is an important responsibility. I never would have considered this selfish though, because the purpose was to protect others from hardship. I agree self interest is a different concept all together. (Maybe related to having goals and rewards that one works toward, being responsible with the gifts this life has given you, commitment to your family and community to be the best version of yourself, etc. All honorable concepts, and probably developing that balance and understanding is the real work of a lifetime.
My last thought is that Intention always struck me as the essential element that could separate right from wrong. Which leads me back to the question; Whose interests are being considered and why?
Thank you for the fascinating conversation!
Thank you.
‘Go to Hell’: Brave EU Politician Delivers Damning Message to the Global Tyrants -- Sep 21
https://rumble.com/v3jg3k7-go-to-hell-brave-eu-politician-delivers-damning-message-to-the-global-tyran.html