The Monkey Governments and the problem with "Us vs. Them"

So, when I argue with a conspiracy theorist that is telling me that there's a massive government conspiracy, one of their fallback positions tends to be, "Well, are you telling me that you trust the government?"  The answer isn't going to be, "Of course I trust the government!  The government knows what's best for me at all times!"  I don't think many people really believe that.  But that doesn't mean that I support their conspiracy ideas, too, nor their ideas as to how the government really works.  The most basic reason for this is, essentially, that I'm not trusting a Monkey Government, while they're not trusting  a (rather Machiavellian) Shakespeare Government.

What do I mean by that?  Well, basically, I'm going with the analogy of the government being like a story, or more specifically a play.  The conspiracy theorist sees a Shakespeare at work, some malevolent hidden figure that's writing the script, and everything that happens within the narrative is thanks to this hidden power.  Meanwhile, continuing with that analogy, I more see it as a bunch of monkeys hammering away at keyboards to try to make their own narrative.  Eventually we may get something systematic, comprehensive, and with little conflict; but it'll take a very long amount of hammering away with a great many monkeys to get to that point.  And just because you have it, doesn't mean another power might not come in and take it away from you.

See, the larger a conspiracy is, the more fallible it is.  The more people you have involved in something, the more likely something is going to slip.  You can't keep people from blabbing forever.  Instead, what you more of get is the monkeys; but I'm not saying that everyone involved is stupid, but I will say that they are ignorant.  Yes, I am saying everyone is ignorant, even me.  No one knows everything, no one can see or foresee everything, and some people are naturally more ignorant than others; but when you compare what someone knows to what they DON'T know, what they don't know will always be a greater amount.  Nor am I necessarily saying that it's just a bunch of individual monkeys; no, we can get monkey coalitions, corporate monkeys, monkey special interest groups.  But ultimately, every group has limited knowledge and limited interests.  We even elect a presidential monkey, but with the balance of powers for monkeys, that monkey is still just part of the machine.  Even dictator monkeys are generally kept in check with having to reinforce their power to keep internal revolt from occuring, and have to worry about foreign monkey powers trying to dethrone them.

That's the point here.  The reason politics can be tragic, seemingly arbitrary, seemingly random, and downright contentious at times, is because politics isn't under control by a Machiavellian Shakespeare.  Countries and factions don't go to war or revolt because it was written into the play.  It's more a bunch of monkeys all trying to hammer out something that sounds good, get upset with each other, and then start to fling feces at each other.

Okay, perhaps I'm starting to stretch the analogy.  You have to admit, though, imagining WWII as monkeys flinging feces at each other is probably more amusing than it should be.

But here's the tricky thing.   For the most part, these monkeys are trying to do good.  Who they're trying to do good for is an issue in and of itself, but it's going to be for someone (in the case of a truly sociopathic dictator, generally themselves and their immediate family).  Communists want to do good for the working man (communist dictators are a different story).  Socialists have a similar goal, but aren't as extreme as communists.  Even Nazi Germany was trying to do good in eradicating the Jews.  Jews were seen as a major problem to having a happy civilization, they were seen as traitors that hurt the Axis war effort in WWI, and propaganda films had to show them as base, inhuman creatures that did more harm than good in their existence.

In fact, I'll go a step further here:  Nazi Germany wasn't unique.  They were under a spell of Nationalism; where Communism makes demons of the Bourgeois, Nationalism makes demons of those that don't fit within the nation.  For the Nazis (and, in fact, many people throughout history, not just the Nazis), that was the Jews; Jews didn't conform to the national idea, the national language, the national customs, the national religion; for the same reason is why gypsies were also targeted.  There was also the Armenian Genocide, which is an even better example of monkey politics.  See, Turkey was also setting itself up under Nationalism, and their ideas of national heritage, language, and religion did not incorporate the Armenians.  The Armenians were killed off as much as possible, one million of them being slaughtered.  But the US government today won't admit that it's a genocide, purely because of political concerns with Turkey; the US wants Turkey as an ally, and to question Turkey's policies is to question their nationalism, which is still strong.

Now, I don't know if I have a good segue into this, but I'll go ahead and try:  "Us vs. Them" is a really problematic way of thinking.

Who's us?  Who's them?  Why is the them so much worse than the us?  If you're a police officer, you tend to think in "us vs. them"; there's you, and then there's the public, there's the criminal, etc.  If you're in the armed forces, there's the "us" of the soldier, and the "them" of the civilians, the "them" of the enemy.  If you work at McDonald's, there's the "us" of your fellow employees, there's the "them" of your customers and management (if you take by my examples that management is your enemy then... well, I'll let you be the judge).  Now, to take the example of someone that works with customers, how you view the "them" will largely depend on your mindset and experiences, but possibly not in the way you think.

You see, I can almost guarantee you that if you work with customers, you'll get just as many, if not more, cases of "good" customers than you will "bad" -- "bad" being defined as a customer that will yell your head off for something unjustified, or otherwise is a source of stress for no just cause.  If you get many good customers, you enjoy your job, and you've made good friends with some customers, you probably won't think too poorly of your experiences, even with a few bad customers that made you roll your eyes.  If you didn't like your job, and you think back to it, your thoughts will generally be on how you didn't like the job, and your first thoughts will be justify your dislike; you'll remember the bad examples of customers.  Of course, many people avoid that altogether, can mock the bad customers while also remembering the good ones.  But the point is, three people can have the same experiences, but for subjective reasons, have totally different views to those experiences; one has bad experiences with bad customers, one has good experiences with good customers, and one has a mixture of both and can recognize that.

In the same way, two people can have the exact same viewpoints and yet identify themselves with seemingly diametrically opposed sides.  For example:  Abortion.

In the case of Abortion, there are considered to be two major "sides": pro-life, and pro-choice.  Pro-life is so-called because they support life, and presumably they define life as starting at the embryo -- but I'm not sure if all pro-life "advocates" actually do define life as starting then.  Pro-choice is so-called because they support the choice of the mother; they aren't going to say "pro-death", and it would be inaccurate to say that, because they're not centered on the killing of the fetus, but on the mother's decision whether to keep it or not.

Now, we have two people that define themselves.  They aren't on the extremes of either group.  Observe:

Person A says:  "I'm pro-life.  I do make an exception for cases where the woman is raped, is too young to bear a child, or in cases where the birth of the child would kill the mother."  If you press him further:  "Well, I can see an abortion before the egg is fertilized, or even shortly after."

Person B says:  "I'm pro-choice.  I do make an exception for the third trimester, though."  You might even convince them down to the second trimester.

Where is the huge divide between these two?  Both are willing to ban abortion for a certain period of the baby's development, both have cases where they think the woman has a choice.  Neither is truly "pro-life" or "pro-choice" in the extreme definitions of the term, because neither has fully adopted the viewpoints of the extreme examples of their respective sides.  But both define themselves as one side or the other.

Now let's say I want to make a blog post about abortions.

I open with "I'm pro-life" or "I'm pro-choice", and you, the reader, see this.  Now, if you're my diametric "opposite", your brain is probably already starting to shut down, or it's going into "opposing argument mode", where you look at my post trying to find things to nitpick or argue against.

I can avoid this by not coming out and saying which I am, but generally you're going to connect which side I might fall on; even if you're not out to do so, it's a subconscious thing we do when reading people's arguments, since we innately do want to know where people are coming from, and we have an innate ability to fill gaps.  The problem is, often times we fill gaps with what we THINK the person thinks, and not what they SAY the think; and the less they say, the more we can fill that gap with the stereotype.  In this case, if I'm pro-life, and I mention only a few things about being pro-life, you might think that the ideas I haven't stated would fall under the extreme end of being pro-life; what the extremist advocates tend to state.

Often, when I argue with someone, I'm told that I'm the "1%" of my side that "seems rational", while the "other 99%" have crazy ideas.  Well, take the above examples; if you saw many people from a specific side and assumed that they all were in that 99% without asking them what they really felt or thought, then what you say would be technically true, but based on an assumption that probably isn't true.  It could just as easily be true that 1% of that group makes extremist arguments, and 98% are assumed to share it (the other 1%, of course, being those few "rational" ones that actually come out and say what they think in a less divisive fashion).

Okay, I'm going to end this long post with one last example:

I once had a conversation with someone about their experiences with people from a small country (I think an African country, but I forget which one, unfortunately).  He basically said they're all assholes, and he knew that because he personally met people from that country, and they were all assholes.  "That's the problem with using personal experience to generalize..." I started.  He seemed taken aback and said, "Then what else should I use?", as if I was being crazy.

Well, here's the problem with that:  let's just say he did meet many people from that country, let's just say most of them men, if not all.  Let's say he met 20 men from that country, and they were all assholes.  Wow, 20 people all assholes from one country?  Maybe there's something to that!

But 20 people out of how many?  Let's just assume that this is a small country.  Even small, that could give it a population as "high" as, say, 200,000 people.  20 men out of 200,000 people?  That doesn't seem so representative, now.  In fact, it falls well below the scientific standards for a blind sample size.

Now, a big example of this kind of generalization, are the many US citizens who think that we're at war with "Islam", and not islamic countries; or the many people who think that people that are Muslim are intrinsically like the terrorists, are all massively violent, etc. etc.

Well, how many Muslims do you think are in the world?  200,000, like above?  2 million?  200 million?

Try between 1.3 billion to 1.65 billion.  Carl Sagan's billion with a b.

Now, take every bit of footage ever used to depict violent muslims; people cheering for bombings, Muslim riots over the Danish cartoons, etc. etc.  One argument is that these massive crowds show what Muslims worldwide must think.  But it really doesn't, does it?  If 1.3 billion people rioted, attacked, and were violent, then there would be a massive force to deal with well beyond what our military is currently tackling.  In fact -- and I haven't actually crunched the numbers to do this, so I'm more speculating -- I think that if you took all the Muslims that appeared violent in media reports, and put them all on a field, including with suspected terrorists, they would fill a space that could be measured in football fields in the double digits.  Put 1.65 billion Muslims on a field, and I think you'd need one hell of a huge field!

That's the problem.  Our "personal experiences" don't match the reality, because we have such a small sample size.  But we think of a negative event like 9/11, we think of negative events like wars against Muslim believers, and we see the riots against the Danish cartoons, and a picture forms.  That picture is necessarily limited.

But that's the problem with monkey governments.  It's always going to be limited.  You aren't Shakespeare.  To deal with large groups, you have to generalize sometimes.

And this is probably why politics will always be the mess it is.

Rather strange wolf hunting logic

So, browsing the youtubes recently, I came across a rather stirring argument in the comments involving the subject of wolf hunting in Idaho.  This led me to some "interesting" arguments given from quite an avid fun of wolfhunting,  ruj1970 .   Now, I'm not going to go ahead and claim that all people that want to kill wolves are like these people, but they certainly do seem to have some support from a handful of other hunters that share his mindset.

Now, here's a glimpse into his mindset and justifications for wolf killing:

"Your claim that wolves only kill the old sick or weak animals is a blatant lie. It's pathetic that you little lemmings believe such propaganda. The wolves favorite meal is an elk calf Very often they will rip it from the mother elk as it is being born then leave the mother to die a slow death. Elk herds need a survival rate of calves 25-30 per 100 cows to sustain their numbers. Thanks to the wolves in most areas of Idaho that number is in the single didgets. All you are doing is repeating...."

"I'm making rugs out of the wolves that I killed. I will proudly hang them on my wall so all can see that I saved hundreds of elk from a meaningless slaughter."

"The USFWS has done nothing but lie from the beginning of the wolf recovery project. You think they are going to tell the truth now? LOL, you are a lemming."

In response to a video showing the shooting of a wolf, the description for the video made by  Rockholm66:

"Our Game agencies have been working to destroy the North American Model of Hunting. They infested us with wolves, and we will never hunt our way out of this massive problem. We need to fire the vast majority of these welfare biologists who have conducted fraudulent science. Idaho Fish and Game commissioner, Tony McDermott is the only reason Idaho has more than the 10 breeding pair, and now we have thousands."

says user wildcountry270 :

"Wolves have never been endangered> The illegal wolf introduction is all about agendas, killing off the wildlife to end hunting, killing off livestock to end ranching, ruining country life and heritages in order to condem land for the WIldlands project. Environmental groups lie about the real wolves and appose films such as this that tell the real story. Go visit the land of bones, once known as the Yellowstone. Good Job Scott!!!"

From AntiHuntersLoveMe :

"The wolf disaster will come to be known as how not to manage wildlife and how dispicable the intentions are of the pro wolf cult. It warms my heart to see all those dead wolves and true sports men and woman fighting for our wildlife....our future...our country!"

From furtaker101 :

"shoot those mother fuckers then pull that electric collar off and throw that shit in the water!"

This idea of a massive conspiracy by the US government to get rid of hunting baffles me.  So is the idea that all biologists are in on it.  But really, that's just the thing; this is really what demonization is all about, and once you go full-scale, it's really hard to go back.  For instance, take all those arguments above and assume that you believe in them fully.  What are the results?

Well, basically, there is literally nothing that can possibly dissuade you from your mindset.  The wolves are monstrous animals; every snarl, every gesture, every movement is going to denote that to you.  The government is against you; every law that they pass that promotes wolf conservation is naturally spawned by an innate desire to work against you, and any defense or argument they make is obviously a sign of that.  Biologists that study wolves are "bought" by the government, meaning that anything and everything they say is in support of The Lie.

Now, I've seen this logic before, and I think we all have at one point or another.  It's conspiracy theory logic, but you could also say it's witchhunting or devil-fighting logic.  As Aldous Huxley wrote in The Devils of Loudun (which I am paraphrasing, not quoting), an introspective morality based around desiring to do good leads to virtue, but an external morality centered around defeating evil leads to doing bad things.  Doing good for your own sake is not going to lead to harm as much as intending to fight those that you view as evil, to whom you can justify doing anything and everything, since they're pure evil and anything you do will simply be a "necessary evil" done for good reasons, and we see this in witch hunts; anything the accused says is, naturally, a lie, and anyone that supports the accused are either heretical, sorcerors, or possessed and influenced by demons.  The more "power" you give evil, the more you can justify against that evil, and the more you can close your ears off to it.

Witch hunters employed such tactics when hunting witches; if you're accused, you better hope you have the right connections, or you might as well be guilty.   Conspiracy theorists employ such tactics to support their theory.  Conspiracy theorists start off small enough, really; they see a video or hear an idea and think, "That can't be right", then they look for data that specifically supports that initial presumption.  The thing is, when you start cherry picking data, that can accumulate, and spurious claims can be build on spurious "evidence" that neglects everything that contradicts it, building a house of cards.  Anyone that seeks to topple that house of cards can succeed to the eyes of a layman, but it won't to the conspiracy theorist, because any "debunkers" are with the government or they're "sheeple" just repeating what the government tells them.

That is exactly what is being done here.  Biologists are being paid by the government, so any evidence they give is going to be seen as false.  The US government is after the wolf hunters, so any law it passes must be unjust (unless, of course, it supports the hunter, and then it was passed by a lone hero in the corrupt system).  The wolves themselves will be cherry picked as well; every snarl, every gesture of dominance in the pack, every kill, will have all the bad taken out and none of the good added in.  The wolves kill for sport and target children, they're evil, they're vicious, and they'll kill humans (as many anecdotal cases with little support will be shown).

Now, I am not saying that the wolf is a docile creature that would never ever hurt a human.  Of course that's not true; a starving wolf will do anything it can to survive, as will a human being.  As far as large predators go, wolves are one of the less dangerous predators, but they're still predators that are large enough to do damage to a human being.

However, wolves have a very large part to play in ecology.  For instance, one of the reasons for the ballooning populations of foxes and coyotes was primarily thanks to the eradication of wolf populations thanks to human settlement -- and ask any rancher how big a pest coyotes can be.  Wolves also keep populations strong.  While it IS true that they would kill a young animal if they had the chance, it's also true they kill the sick and wounded.  It isn't a willful choice on their part, but simple hunting logistics; you go for the animals you can catch, and you prefer the animals that fight back the least.  This strengthens herds while human hunting weakens them; with the firearm making killing healthy game easy, and the hunting score system, the killing of large healthy animals is prized, leading to further harm to prey populations.

But still, all of this is based on observations, some logic, and simply put, how ecologies actually tend to work.  It's easy to remove these observations once you discredit those that make them.  Already, biologists that study wolves are discredited; government programs are discredited; what's left?  Well, the wolf hunters. Everyone else are sheeple or in on the conspiracy.  It's as simple as that.

That's what's wrong with this mindset.  But as difficult as it is to argue with it, most conspiracy theorists are pretty harmless.  In this case, wolves are being killed in large quantities because of that very mindset. It can't be shuffled under the carpet and ignored, I think, but at the same time you can't argue and convince these people over the internet, or even face to face.  But this mindset has to be understood, and maybe someone will find a solution for it.  Ultimately, I don't know; I can only watch the images of killed and skinned wolves, I can only see tips made openly on how to poach wolves, and shake my head and wonder... what can be done?