What Happened to the USA

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Yes, arguments are not valid or invalid based on authority. In a perfect world, authority would be completely irrelevant.

In the real world, time is an issue, however. You only have so much time to look at an issue, so you must from the beginning sort the wheat from the chaff. You will not be able to read every source, you must prioritize.

For example, what if the Time Cube guy says he has the answer to the problem and has a whole argument on his page, and I post it here? Fancying yourself open-minded and determined to fully evaluate the problem, you might give it a go. But what if I gave you 10 links to arguments, each of which is different, made by people like the Time Cube all of whom use his style of writing? 100? 1000? "Don't waste my time," you'd say. And I wouldn't judge you any less.

Now, this is an extreme example to demonstrate my point--and I'm not saying you're anything like the Time Cube guy--but it underscores my point: Namely, authority (or in the above case, lucidity) is one way to make such a distinction, which is commonly used.

If you find a perfect world, pm me immediately!



You would be surprised at how willing I am to sift through data on discussions or subjects that I take an interest in (though you'd presumably be less surprised than someone who isn't also autistic). I'm not a casual sceptic, it's my default response to new, non-trivial information.



Authority is simply a measure of respect. In the case of Gene Ray, you could make the point that he's disrespecting whatever audience he hopes to convince by failing to relate to it in plain text - though that would describe the outcome rather than the process - hence he undermines his own authority by failing to earn respect.

What you seem to be advocating is taking shortcuts - correct me if I'm wrong - which is what the majority of people do when it comes to what they think of as 'science'. That may be sufficient to sate most people, but I'm not satisfied unless I can look at the raw numbers. There are numerous degrees of separation from hypothesis to presentation, all of which serve to obfuscate the data. This includes peer review, which is held in near reverence by a great many people, but which is not without some serious flaws; flaws which are especially prominent in the 'soft sciences'.

We've gone seriously off-topic here though, except perhaps as an object lesson on how to communicate with people whose opinions differ from yours on a wide range of topics. So, regarding the original question, what happened to the USA is that certain people with specific political agendas have subverted the justifiable pride Americans have in their great nation and used it to drive multiple wedges between them, dividing the people in order to control and exploit them. The end result is that large parts of the population aren't able to have reasonable discourse with each other any more, and that's reaching a critical mass.

The solution is abandonment of the charade of a two-party system upon which the whole house of cards is built, but that would require either bipartisan action on the part of a majority of the electorate or a third-party populist movement that operates outside the establishment. Trump isn't the answer, but he might be the catalyst that leads to one.

That's my take on it.