Given how quickly things change, 4 years is more than enough for something random to become labelled "far-right"... (even Friends is offending Gen Z now)
No it isn’t… Gen Z has only ever heard of Friends from a bunch of Boomers complaining about Millenials whining at Gen Xrs complaining about Boomers.
Now, that said, having just rewatched the whole series, there’s a lot in early Friends that really hasn’t aged all that well.
Gen AA or AB might eventually get offended by it, once Trump’s launched the Strategic Electrolyte Reserve, but that’s assuming this species runs that long.
Instagram's influence on people is of a different kind (which doesn't mean it is not a concern...). TikTok directly fuels violence and low IQ, especially amongst teenagers.
Don't forget it was also the chosen Livestream platform for the CHCH shooter and was where the "J6 Insurrection" was planned (hence the frantic redirection and sacrifice of the scapegoat known as Parler)
Before the JFK assassination, 'conspiracy theory' literally meant a theory about a criminal conspiracy. In the case of the JFK assassination, all theories that were counter to the official lone-wolf theory were conspiracy theories, theories about multiple people being involved in the assassination are categorically conspiracy theories while a lone-wolf theory involves no conspiring. Due to this, the term 'conspiracy theory' shifted to mean any theory that was counter to the official narrative.
For instance, all theories about 9/11 are conspiracy theories in the literal sense. Even in the official 9/11 Commission Report theory, a bunch of men conspired to hijack airplanes on the same day and crash them into buildings. That's literally a theory about a conspiracy. But in the new meaning, this is not a conspiracy theory because it's the government's officially endorsed theory.
Whether the CIA induced this verbal judo deliberately is another question. I'm inclined to think they didn't. I think it was a natural language shift, albeit one that has been harmful to society.
I have now. This document shows that the CIA was trying to counter conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination (of course they were), but it doesn't seem to provide evidence for the CIA deliberately shifting the meaning of 'conspiracy theory'.
This part got an audible "Heh" out of me though: "Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy." Robert Kennedy was murdered one year after this document was written, while running for president. Suppose he secretly doubted the Warren Commission's report (as has been claimed by some of the people close to him, but disputed by others), becoming president would have given him a uniquely privileged position from which to assail it.
"It doesn't seem to provide evidence for the CIA deliberately shifting the meaning of 'conspiracy theory'."
No one (the public) had heard that term before the CIA got US media writing propaganda pieces to disparage inquiry into the assassination. It wasn't about the theories. It was about defining a group of theorists and creating ways to dismiss them. That continues to this day in yearly exercises of establishing mainstream credibility where young "journalists" help us all understand the broken psychology of people who want the world to be scary.
Honestly, if you have ever tried hard to advance a line of thought that's dangerious to the establishment you'd maybe be personally familiar, as I am, with the smell of counter-intelligence. But I can't cite a web link that would make that credible. And you've already learned to discredit anyone calling themselve a truther.
It worked. I'm saying it worked because it works on me. No amount of facts or scope or wisdom makes mainstream friends of mine more open to reality. Reality is scary. Disagreeing with the 'news' is scary. But US industry gatekeeps history and I refuse to be naive.
I know what it means better than most. I also know that it's application as a means of establishing liberal identity as opposed to basic historical facts is a long time feature of our empire. Liberals punch down at leftists. Someone questions the motives of our empire and invariably some liberal eager to establish their mainstream credibility shows up to argue with skeptics and side with industry.
> The term 'conspiracy theory' was itself a product on CIA influence operations in this country, specifically intended to squash interest in the assassination of JFK.
that's such a silly conclusion though, and really a perfect AP piece. It discredits people while saying nothing.
It doesn't matter if the phrase existed before hand, it very obviously blew-up during the JFK event.[0]
It could entirely well be that the DoD didn't invent the phrase, but it's pretty obvious that it very quickly became a part of the public verbage during heavy interest in the JFK event -- that trend could have easily been the indicator of work towards the discrediting of both the term and those that had too much curiosity towards things they shouldn't question.
Thanks for the correction. I think it would have been better for me to say that counter-intelligence operations in the country have long intentionally colored inconvenient facts as wild conjecture, regardless of their historical foundation.
I realized I asked a similar question but then let's put it another way: would it be problematic if in reverse, some quantic phenomenons were found to be described well by Newtonian equations ?
This wouldn't be "problematic", it's just extremely unlikely to happen. The math of QM is fully understood. No experiment in over 50 years has produced results incompatible with QM. (This has produced a major crisis in physics.) Some aspects of the math of QM -- the ones that produce the "quantum weirdness" that gets everyone's attention -- are fundamentally incompatible with the math of classical mechanics. CM is local, QM is non-local. Locality is intuitive, non-locality is not. So the odds of discovering something fundamentally new in QM at all, let alone something that can be described by the math of CM, are indistinguishable from zero.
There are some aspects of our day-to-day lives that are governed by QM, like rainbows and transistors. But not weather or climate. Those are purely classical phenomena.
Would a knowledgeable person be able to explain the following to a rookie: if the quantum physics equation describe a reality (or "phenomenons") which cannot be comprehended in the non-quantic reality (ie. classical physics), how can there be common patterns in both realities where equations from one realm would somehow still match patterns in the other realm ?
Some problems need all que quirks of quantum mechanics, but other can be simplified and you get a simplified equation.
For example the electrons moving inside a very pure and very cold conductor are weird but if you have a normal conductor at room temperature, you can use the usual equation V=I*R to calculate the current. The simplified equation V=I*R is not 100% exact, probably only 99.99999999999% so everyone use it.
The same equation can be used to calculate flux of water inside tubes, when the speed of the water is low. You must replace the voltage V with the pressure P, and other similar replacements. When the speed is high, you get more complicated equations, but in some cases the simplified equation is good enough.
The idea is that in some conditions, both system can be approximated with a simplified equation, in spite under the hood they are very different.
No, their bias is grotesque. They make it sound like the DGSI bothered monitoring some dudes because they are using uBlock origins, lmfao.
For the US guys here, the equivalent would be the FBI tracking down a few guys back from Afghanistan, monitoring who they talk to, see that they are curious about how to make bombs, how to encrypt your communications, etc, and write an article saying "oh look, the FBI thinkgs that buying sugar at the supermarket is suspicious", because among 1000 other evidence, the FBI at some point noted that "individual bought ingredients to a make a bomb and bought 25kg of sugar".
Why would the "normal" way of thinking/saying things, involve putting the verb, then the object, and not the other way around ? Pretty much like arguing that the normal way of writing is from left to right. Good demonstration of how brains are wired differently.
These studies seem to confirm intuitions that many people have expressed in many ways, especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language.
As someone who speaks several languages it is also very apparent that somehow the infrastructure in the brain must be slightly different for different languages. For instance, to pick German again, when "caching" certain parts of sentences for later processing, which does not exist in other languages.
The brain being a muscle, it is only natural that this would translate in more developed cognitive abilities for those language speakers.
I've heard several takes on Asian students being better than others in maths: one of those argued that both the languages themselves, plus the way they are taught to young kids, could, on the long term, make brains better suited to maths. Would be curious to see such studies on that.
asian students who matriculate into western unis or all asian students? significant filter skew happening in the former case.
Perhaps related observation, though npt directly addressing the OP topic: STEM programs, as well as medicine - and from personal experience I would argue especially medicine (vs. STEM proper) - rely on curricula that tend to favor humans who are better than most at mimicking computers. Rote memorization (relatively necessary for ideogram-centric writing systems) is rewarded, excursive analysis is not.
This need for "caching", because of verbs being often very far in the sentence structure, is also very common in Latin. That is supposedly why in Italy for a very long time Latin was the main subject in scientific high school (things seem to have changed starting around the mid 2010s, with the introduction of a latin-less scientific school).
Interestingely there is this split of the action again so you need to stash away the "let's" in your brain until you know what to "let's" which comes only at the end of the sentence.
In the english version the verb "think through" comes directly after the "let's", so there's no need to cache anything; it seems that is clearer and more direct.
As a French living in Germany, the German sentence structure has the interesting side effect that it is way harder to start answering before the speaker finishes his sentence.
In French, you basically listen to 3/4 of the sentence, can guess the end, not wait for it and answer. This makes very "compact" discussing from the "sound" point of view. In German, you mostly need to wait before you answer. So, you have maybe more pauses in between, but then the sentences can have these "composed" words which pack at the word level a lot of meaning in little "sound".
This is the joy of speaking different languages, like the different computer languages, each one brings us diversity. For that, I am happy we do not have a single language on Earth.
Yeah, this feature of German is annoying. A very similar one is "splittable [trennbare] verbs" where one verb is split into its root and a prefix where in some sentence types, the root goes in front and the prefix goes to the absolute end of the sentence. But you need both to understand the meaning (there are often many variants of the prefixes for one verb root).
Mach das Fenster *auf*. vs. Mach das Fenster *zu*. (Open/close the window). The verbs here are "aufmachen" and "zumachen".
You will need to wait for the (sometimes long) sentence to finish to understand what is being asked for.
There is some comedy in speeches of the head of state of the GDR - former East Germany - who often read his speeches from paper, and used some veeeery long sentences, spoken slowly and with many pauses. I remember listening and breathlessly waiting for the verb, to finally find out what he actually wanted to say :) Not that it was interesting, it was boring propaganda, I just found this effect so interesting. He used a "sentence melody where every single section ended high, and only at the very end, after a looong sentence, he finally lowered his voice.
Even without understanding the language, you can recognize the structure. Every sentence is split into short sections, and the end of the sentence is clearly recognizable by the voice finally lowering. You do need some knowledge of German to see that the very important verb is only revealed in this very last part, only then do you know what that entire looong sentence was actually about.
