HN user
Just another wanderer on the path towards enlightenment.
If I cannot respond to false statements without fear of punishment, this clearly isn't the place for me; and isn't a place of discussion in any sense of the definition.
Thank you for making that clear. Those comments were also was not ideological. In any case I wish you the best, I will not be around further.
Sure, I can do that.
Edit: Looks like the posts are 36377821, as well as 36378754. Those were the two posts I flagged and responded to address the false statements or false context being put forth after no action appeared to be forthcoming.
The responses were civil, and high quality as I did not attack, I easily could have as I am quite knowledge in the subject area but nothing changes when people get defensive so I generally choose to err on the side of not being antagonistic; and just correcting the lies. Although it can be hard to do that when the outcome being promoted inevitably (over time) ends in slavery, and some would argue extinction.
I even included recommendations for books that credibly address history and the subjects involved for historic support. I did this despite these people dissembling as I previously mentioned.
While, I briefly mention beliefs that are false and limiting, and that being a great evil. The statement itself is strictly constructive and indicates this specific statement as normative. Beliefs have to be taken on faith, and we were talking about systems and statements of fact and history, as I tried to make clear so any readers would not be confused. Instead you ended up warning a number of others with possible bans for breaking the rules, for what seemed to me to be sybil attack type behavior, and I also received a warning for doing the right thing. Which is why I requested clarification, I also took a 5 point drop for doing the right thing in protecting myself and others. The same structural issues as I previously mentioned in that email several months ago.
You flagged my response here, please review the person I responded to (one level up, and one level down).
Anyone making false statements like that is going to be corrected. To do nothing is to accept it by consent and all that entails (Sapir-Whorf). I flagged it, no action was taken. Falsehoods were found in both.
As I said, its intolerable being forced to accept falseness and be punished or prevented from being able to do anything about it.
I'll leave if it becomes clear that's what this is and be glad to do so as I'm sure any reasonable and intelligent person would.
Ideology is normative, I kept strictly to addressing deceptions, and falseness which were not normative. You clearly read it as ideological. Many people confound and conflate the two because people who use deception and deceit often intentionally corrupt language for the purpose of dual meanings. This dissembling is pernicious, even when talking about systems clearly, communication can become impossible because many deceitful people try to make it about ideology which this is not that.
Psychopolitics first addressed this form of dissembling in the literature early 50s iirc. Also, this duality of tokens makes it impossible to filter effectively because it breaks determinism, a required property for computation. So this is strictly up to the mods to police at scale.
If there is to be none of one, there should be none of either. I'm fine with that as long as you moderate and censor people like the person I responded to equally.
Though that would be in opposition of what you have previously said about who moderates what and how the site is run (hence the request for clarification). It would be better to have clear rules than addressing conflicts like this adhoc and after the fact (in terms of your time, and my time).
TL:DR I would not have said anything, if they had not made a false statement, the same goes for the follow-on response. There is no criteria by which you can determine the post meets the referenced rule before a response is made, and its normative based on the mods. A poster will always have violated the rule before they knew they violated it simply by responding as one must do.
You do not let false statements stand unless you agree with the statement. This is core to any communication as any number of professionals who have degrees in legal, communications, or philosophy will confirm.
Someone claims its ideology, and me communicating that's not what this is about doesn't make what I'm communicating about ideology, or more accurately normative or value-based.
I get it, if the rules need to be revised appropriately, that's fine. It just needs to be clear so we can follow them, and as a reader, hopefully not have to deal with coercive or subversive narratives or communications always blasting in my face when I just want to read the news, reporting it, and then being told the mods allow it and then holding me to a different double standard when I follow the advice given. That's how it looks.
Incidentally, anyone reporting this to you should also be equally censured for wasting your time and more importantly not reporting the other person. To me this seriously is starting to look more and more now that I think about it; like a malicious compliance effort to get you to jump in and by extension threaten your credibility and HN news credibility, while promoting a false narrative by extension of outcome.
If I was in your position, I'd be upset because your rules say nothing about how you deal with intentionally false reports either, and its hard to say this isn't that considering I was reported, but the others involved conveniently were not and I'm not the instigator I was simply responding so it looks targeted.
To me it looks like someone wound you up taking advantage of inconsistencies in your rules and set you loose on me to promote a false narrative and silence a critic.
Since we've previously spoken and you seemed fair and honest in our previous communications, I have to wonder if that's what's actually going on here now that I've had some time to think, its far more likely someone is manipulating you than you'd try to burn your credibility and service down for no perceived benefit (Occam's Razer).
Dang, is your response directed at me or the original poster, because it looks like you are singling just me out and not the poster about this selectively;
If that is the case, you need to take a hard look and rewrite your guidelines so they don't conflict and are consistent, as well as stop providing the advice you yourself have personally given as that too conflicts, and rules must be consistent for them to be fair and followed.
These are excerpts directly from an email you sent me many months ago when I had seen enough of false propaganda just oozing onto your platform that I finally complained about those propaganda statements being made and other issues to you directly. Here is your response.
"We don't moderate accounts for being wrong. The community has to sort this out, for a bunch of reasons."
...
"We've always operated HN on the assumption that readers are smart enough to make up their own minds; "
...
end excerpt>
So, if you are warning me for this, and only allow one side as it seems you are doing now, what you told me previously in writing, is just flat out false, and most importantly here we aren't talking about ideology or even politics in a normative fashion, we are talking about economics and systems of government that have real impact on survival over longer periods of time and the elements of such. Its definite, not opinion, and most importantly I'm addressing false statements made, and resources where one could learn more of the truth to critically think about these problems.
To me, it looks like you are doing the exact opposite of what you said you would do and how you said the site is run. I'd appreciate further clarification.
In either case, if your platform is going to be a one-way propaganda platform where you and other moderators do actually moderate arbitrarily for only one side of a conversation despite saying the opposite.
I'd want no part in it, that's not why I came here, and I certainly don't need to stay. I don't visit for the purpose of being bombarded by false statements and being prevented from setting those false statements straight while at the same time have systems that have actually worked be disparaged without any ability to combat falseness. This is intolerable to any rational thinking person as intelligent thought is the main difference between us and animals.
Credibility is important to me, and if you are applying rules to me arbitrarily for this, you have inconsistent rules, and no one can follow inconsistent rules because its arbitrary, it changes at every conflict.
Technically, they aren't even rules at that point they are heuristics matched to the people who moderate and based on their hidden state of natural biases and however they feel that day. Any person would need to be a mindreader with future sight to have any action not be non-sequitur. This obviously isn't possible, and the outcome of any action becomes indeterminate with regards to the compliance of said 'rules'.
If you need further time to respond, please feel free to instead send the response by email. I'll be looking for a platform that values free and open discussion and allows people the ability to fairly combat falseness.
I have no intention of being a victim of the principle outlined by Sapir-Whorf with regards to thought reform, and the appearance or outcome of ignoring false statements is universally recognized as consent that you agree with them (John Locke and beyond).
I read the article, and while it touches on a common issue, I don't think it goes far enough. When looking at these problematic incentives that are mentioned, notably the author doesn't really address the incentives like for example where does the money come from.
When you talk about venture capitalists, you often are referring to a bank associated with a venture capitalist. Everything in business after all, incentive wise, trickles down from the banking system.
We can't change the way we do business when the incentives are fixed, and banking in general is only marginally overseen by government; most of the regulation and praxis is done by the Fed which is not government; but a private institution.
I think you missed the point.
Community makes reddit work. Many communities while still open are moving off the platform. Some have just said they are doing post freeze such as AskHistorians.
This is digg all over again. It didn't happen overnight. Worse, reddit is now undeleting deleted posts, if you didn't overwrite each individual post despite your wish that what you said be taken down they are keeping it up.
Some mods did have a tantrum, other mods are being smart and implementing contingency, they just don't feel the need to broadcast because that would undercut what they are doing and cause an alerting response.
GDP was never really an accurate calculation and interest rates greatly affect whatever the natural baseline is at any time. Calling productivity down with greater Remote Work is a red herring because there's less overall economic output because the cost of money has risen so steeply and will continue to do so at least two more times. Unfortunately, they've printed about as much as they've offset in interest rates so it looks more like its engineered to kill off any normal to mid-size business. The only people getting the easy money are the people on the gravy train.
Why does this remind me so much of:
They are likely planning on eliminating external apps from using their API. Upon doing that, it no longer becomes feasible to delete your content. They get to keep it forever since they make it so hard to go post by post and delete it.
You also won't have any new features that you actually want, because they haven't listened from the get go and have never been responsive because you are the product not the client.
These things are fairly simple to game out, I've got some money on reddit surviving but not without taking damage. That being said, I don't agree with it, but as people are well aware there is no good alternative.
The game-plan as I've found, (dons being Reddit mask, and I'm not associated with them in any way).
Was always, we own this data (not the community) we bought this when we bought out the founders in 2015/2016, we need to monetize it before interest rates cause an IPO to evaporate, we're going to do this no matter what. We don't want people being able to delete their content (Shredder App), and we can charge for access to this valuable corpus data, and we have all the control because we control the infrastructure. That's where they are coming from.
Now, If you look at which protests were successful in history, and which protests were not, you see that it really comes down to whether at the end of the day the authority making the decisions is responsive to the people demanding change.
Reddit has never been responsive in any of their actions towards external non-employees requesting changes. They've only ever provided illusory promises, or things they were already going to do (but didn't announce), and they had to fake the first communities until they could get enough people interested.
So, they'll let the protest occur for two days because it was planned, and if you crush it you look bad, and you can just ignore it because it doesn't affect the bottom line, people will grow tired and if it lasts longer they would have an automated way to replace the mods.
People will whine in their corners when that happens, and the people that didn't see what was happening, or didn't have an easy alternative will go back to their habits using reddit and supporting their overall decisions mindlessly because its habit. Click-whirr, fixed action pattern, no change happens. Its repeated over and over and over.
From what I've seen, None of the mods actually gamed out how this would go down and took pre-emptive measures to have a fallback and move their communities off the hostile platform. Some are scrambling to get Lemmy to do that, but Lemmy has been tested by who? I hadn't even heard of it until earlier this week so I doubt its a big project, let alone one that can scale to tens of thousands or above.
As for the rest of your arguments, I believe you are simply wrong.
Just coming across this comment, I would disagree with your assessment.
Most distros use systemd, systemd has a dependency on d-bus and to do many of the features their userbase expects, it relies on d-bus activation which reparent's processes under the systemd user in most cases via the dbus-helper which suid's. This process also breaks common admin utilities like tops and ps (they don't show up except under very specific views, like tree view). Importantly, these distros often do not have MAC configured with a safe baseline if at all.
To put it mildly auditing d-bus and activations of this sort is ridiculously obtuse from an administrative perspective. Then there's all the dated software which no one touches or views such as gsd-* that cause a fail-whale when disabled.
The way exploits work most times is by using a chain of exploits. You chain 1 piece to the next, to the next, until you get to a bug that gets you what you want and the attacker then hits paydirt. This is basic cyber-sec 101, I don't see why you would discount exploits just because you don't know how they can get to that point to use it. We work with a porous attack surface everyday.
Most distro's have system defaults which don't even include a basic endpoint stateful firewall. I would hardly call these distros secure (which is most of them). End users are not expected to have specialties in Cybersec, Information Technology or System's Engineering just to set up a out of box system that's secure by default, this is the responsibility of the distro publisher.
That kind of over-generalization is flat out false, biased, and shows a lack of understanding about these things.
He's probably looking for a CPA who has knowledge of the various locales tax loopholes who can also provide advice on how to best conform business decisions to optimize (minimize) taxes for future business decisions.
Regardless, they have an interesting but relatively sordid history.
Its probably just to drive interest for recruitment since tensions are escalating geopolitically and they are probably finding their projections show they are understaffed. Skilled labor isn't as easy to come by as corporations make it out to be (with everything being replaceable).
Anything published like this would be considered a poison the well attack by any ne'er do wells.
That's flawed in a few ways.
With regard to #1
The vast majority of the population are seeking to fill some need when they get online. Its not about popularity, popularity only provides exposure.
Its whether that need is being satisfied, both at the time they choose to jump ship, and continuing on into the future. Also, almost everyone born after the 90s has been indoctrinated prior to the age of reason that they can go online and find anything they might need, addiction triggers and other psychological traps await. There is also, as always, the ever present coercion through concentration of business sectors into a few entities who play shell games and limit your agency and choice. In some places you can't apply for college anymore using paper, its all digital and digital systems break when they aren't properly designed for resilience; these result in less opportunities acting as a filter and coercively limiting those who fall into the implementation cracks with no other choice.
#2 is purely normative, and neglects abuse which may include jamming communications or something more subtle but still malign. This view is filled with supposition, and makes broad over-generalizations, its non-sequitur.
I'd like to add that looking at sybil attacks as just a network attack would be a mistake.
These type of attacks apply broadly at many different levels, for example the minimum thresholds for amplification/de-amplification can be significantly lower than the 51% that's normally attributed by definition to these type of attacks.
Any decentralized moderation system would run into issues with a sybil attack distorting reflected appraisal within a community. Some benefits of such an attack might be dropping the post out of view/delisting it, using generative ai to create harassing/malign responses attacking volunteer psychology (where they stop contributing/volunteering when it costs them).
Useless/mindless generative chatter that is akin to jamming a communications channel, but indistinguishable by most people which in the absence of a clear signal causes isolation (thanks AI).
Some of these challenges also don't have a good answer because they are fundamental problems where a solution would break automata theory/determinism. So you are left with only a bad, potential liability from an approximate solution.
Most propaganda and political warfare focuses on attacking various parts of communications with the intent to either isolate, or destroy/debase personal identity, which is largely determined by reflected appraisal.
Once isolated, with their belief system destabilized it makes people vulnerable and does dangerous/weird things to people's psychology. This has been known for quite some time though hasn't gotten much attention outside certain academic circles, and by quite some time I mean roughly generally known between the 1920s-50s.
The main driving component was formalized under the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (1929), though it was in common use by governments prior to that.
Since most social media already has these issues (but they don't communicate about them in public regularly if at all), internally they do recognize these issues and take a Signals and Systems approach, but the result is as you've seen.
If you cant exceed parity vs. competitive solutions you wont be able to increase marketshare/market penetration.
If this was real, I wonder how much of the respondents had an IQ less than average.
Neurotoxic and other long-lasting chemical effects degrade intelligence. Hardly worth considering this if the only people to vote on it lacked the intelligence to critically evaluate it in the first place.
Heck even ingesting above 0.5 of flouride causes degradation and potentially brain damage in babies, cumulatively you might get 6 or above in a day as its put in everything. Science pretty clearly shows it doesn't impact tooth decay when ingested, its purely topical.
If you're being drugged knowingly or not, in a way that would impact your ability to evaluate that's a pretty big red flag for any study.
Interesting that flouridation is required in any city center above 200k people, with the primary reason being tooth decay. Side effects include lethargy and liver damage. I wonder what factor, if any, this might play in general obesity since liver damage can impact fat metabolism, normal carbon filters such as Brita don't filter this out, only bone filters do.
Property values are still at an all time high.
In a national demographic sure, in the areas where these things were being tested locally, look at Oakland or Richmond and compare those property gains over the last housing cycle. They are at an all time high, but what was the percentage of gain compared to other areas that didn't suffer from those rental boards where if you do a remodel you have to first offer it back to the previous tenant at the same rent (with no allowance for CPI increases or improvements)?
Tax Caps guarantee the collector must charge the maximum increase allowed every year regardless.
People are being priced out of their homes because they are being taxed on the property value, not their equity.
Your math is way off. I know people who live there who pay almost 20,000 in property taxes on their properties, and these certainly are not million dollar homes.
Corporations are people, they wait for either the leading or trailing edge and then pivot. Before we had demand-pull inflation due to constrained supply chains, we are now seeing cost-push inflation, and its not about the pandemic spending as much as the Fed left the money printer on for the past 10 years under QE.
Chicken's come home to roost, and the pandemic happened after the Velocity of Money for the M2 had already dropped to nothing. Giving money to people and paying for their education was a last ditch effort after bank lending stopped in Oct/Nov 2019. The charts are all there for those that watch them.
The plan being the beautiful de-leveraging Ray Dalio talks about in his books "Big Debt Crises".
Some of us actually do read and educate ourselves despite increasingly hostile literature that strays from facts into non-credible opinion.
Credibility has never been more important, and books that have stood the test of time are often more credible than 90% of the garbage out there.
You clearly don't understand the impact of your proposed change.
The laws for building new homes haven't changed much in a few decades. The houses being built are a result of equilibrium with profit and secured funding. Every single action you have proposed creates no new homes.
Your proposed change is to devalue all existing homes further, incentivizing people to not own and leave the state, while allowing the state to price people out of their existing assets by forcing an increase in higher property taxes every single year that is based upon the entire amount of the loan, rather than any equity they might have.
This is no less than state mandated stealing from who you perceive to be rich (homeowners), while creating no new homes; because homeowners aside from developers do not build homes.
Do you know what happened in San Fran areas where they created and enforced the rental boards? Property values dropped, rentals dropped, everyone with options didn't invest in the area, business left, no jobs available, police couldn't be funded, and people regularly get killed as crime increases.
Do you even know how much the price of real estate fluctuates over longer periods of time? Some years it increases, other years it stays the same or decreases. That additional property tax is based upon appraisals that don't happen regularly, and the percentage increases every single year.
For a regular home, it already increases each year by at least 7,000 dollars in property taxes. If you have a well paying job of say 50,0000, roughly 32,000 goes to food right now, more if you are not single; and if they got the funding for a house they wouldn't be able to pay property taxes in less than 3 years at existing rates, regardless of the equity they had since its about appraised asset value. Increasing that further and the economics say the asset class is no longer an investment but a negative cash-flow cost.
Honestly I don't get where you people seem to come up with these things being a good idea. Did you do any research before you actually proposed something to see if it was viable?
Or is this just mindless indoctrination speaking?
Its because politician's have allowed the methods for receiving signals from the people they're supposed to be representating to be jammed.
Look at social media, if there's a narrative that's unflattering someone will create a large number of bots and shout it down in a way that distorts reflected appraisal signals. You see the same on here with anything that mentions certain keywords like China, central planning, socialism, etc.
Representatives already spend most of their time beholden to their donors after passing through the money filter, they may have sworn an oath but the most common form of incompetency is doing nothing, and worse if they're hopelessly corrupt.
No it doesn't, every single study recently done which I have seen has been cherry picking its data with an intention to make it look like its not inflation doing this but corporate greed. This unfortunately is par for the course with any economics; its a how can we both be right, while me being right in a way that I can justify what I want to do if I'm the economist without actually being right and damn the world. Its not inflation its greedy corporations, nevermind that they've printed significantly more money than we have and buying their own bonds control yield.
Here's a shocker, this happens every single time in history where the government doesn't want people to know its inflation or where it allowed debasing the currency. By how much, you obviously don't know.
Additionally, and I'm going to say this slowly. Inflation is a lagging indicator, and the metrics you are using were changed to make it look like it was better than it actually is and the Fed didn't hike rates as high as they should have when they could; also Basel III makes banks less responsive to changes in interest rates so you get a magnificent perfect storm, you've already seen some bank failures. Next will effectively be nationalization but under another name because all the other banks went out of business that could absorb the losses.
You say look at corporate profits, in inflation of course profits are going to go up, just like taxes will go up, initially. Inflation doesn't hit the entire economy all at once. It starts at the first level producers, and then makes its way up in cascading price changes. Companies who's impacts aren't as reliant on physical goods are the last to increase and those who want to stay in business must raise the prices accordingly its simple mechanics, and companies who offer products with narrow proft margins must do this pre-emptively. Initially it shows profits, and then it levels out as inflation slows, or increases as inflation increases. Its out of your hands because the fed has the money printer and has been printing ever increasing amounts of money since 2010 to give the illusion our economy was doing well (under the name Quantitative Easing).
This is all very very basic. Ray Dalio wrote a series called Big Debt Crises, I suggest you look at the case studies for hyper-inflation events. We are on-track except the Fed made a monetary policy f'up and didn't pull a Volcker while also creating new problems with Basel.
Initially after the pandemic we had demand pull because our supply chains broke down, and now we are starting to see cost-push inflation, and the bubble on the ledger waiting to unwind is several trillion. We haven't seen nothing yet, and you are supporting actions that will lead to shortages, which leads to food insecurity which leads to unrest and death from starvation.
Absolutely amazing, and that' not even touching on the problems with central planning of which there are many.
These kind of OP pieces really jeopardize any credibility she may have had as an authority on the subject (as an economist) because they show a profound misunderstanding about how the economy actually works.
Price controls are inflexible, they inevitably lead to shortages, and shortages have a short leap to causing death when its strategic goods like food. There is no way around this, its as fundamental as rational pricing is to the economic calculation problem.
Worse, its top down thinking which focuses on central planning, without even touching on all the failures that occur in such systems and ignores who actually sets prices in a distributed economy, ignoring how the more accurate calculation for inflation says its much worse than 10%, and tries to sprinkle faerie dust to make it seem like you've had it all wrong and these aren't the droids your looking for. Magical thinking at its best, and completely lacks basis because it rests on flawed assumptions.
Producers set the prices they sell their physical goods for, if they cannot do that they stop producing. It is that simple.
The first level of producers pays attention to the balance sheets between the fed and the large banks that are and have been being ballooned for the past few years now because that inflation that accumulates eventually is dropped on the economy without warning and they cannot take a loss and continue to produce. As those goes up so to does the prices to accommodate the difference in value of the underlying currency.
These are simple simple things, it amazes me how so uneducated the so called experts who have degrees in that field actually are.
You seem under the mistaken impression that if I can't cite it, its not happening. This is why cascade failures cause so much mayhem and death. Because so many people subscribe to show me proof, and if there is no tangible proof because proof is a lagging indicator its not happening. This is a complete failure in any professional risk management.
This is like a dam collapsing, I'm pointing at a crack, and you are saying show me proof this crack will cause everyone in the valley below to die. Its a flawed way of thinking in many ways especially with fundamental things that we base our lives and welfare on (as a society). In engineering there is different criteria for evaluating risk with items that are safety-critical. This is safety critical.
Here is an example of a copyrighter losing her job. There are many other examples if you bother to go looking.
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/tech-copywri...
You can dispute it all you want, it won't make you any less wrong when it happens, and many experts are deeply concerned because the rate of change has been exponential even if you refuse to believe it. There's a video that covers the important parts if you want to educate yourself, its on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ&t=5s&ab_channel=...
Its already happening in a broad number of fields.
Bioinformaticians, copyrighting, research studies, law (though we've already seen the downsides). All the companies want to automate everything they can because of the cost savings even if there is a reduction in quality. Cents versus tens of dollars per hour is a no brainer in terms of cost so replacement it is.
Importantly, this is also just the start, and it gets better exponentially, currently the rate of change exceeds the rate at which we can evaluate the changes and thus take action.
Most manual labor jobs account for the lowest rung on the payscale outside of trades which have limited supportability due to limited market size.
1 company per 12-50,000 people for it to be economically viable depending on the trade. Those simply can't absorb the hundreds of thousands of jobs and now deprecated business sectors where those degrees that people are still paying off on their college loans have no benefit.
More recently:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/dangerously-hungry-link-betwee...
https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2022/07/12/food-insec...
Less recently: https://law.uoregon.edu/sites/law2.uoregon.edu/files/fakhri_...
Boyd Orr also wrote on the subject and won the Nobel peace price in 1949 for his work.
Well it most definitely will cause unrest/revolution if it stalls the economic cycle where people can't get food.
That's happened enough times in recorded history to have a solid causal link. Which is already possible with current LLM capabilities; but since its decentralized won't be noticeable until its too late (like a dam breaking).
I believe the large number of people using LLMs are capable of noticing when there is a hole in the market that is actively being used to steal people's retirement money.
This announcement smacks of a fear trade to dissuade a lot of people from looking closer at things they shouldn't be looking closely at.
Backtest Gamestop and FRC. You'll notice two different inconsistencies with the options, and market makers actions/reactions even before the first breaking news that FRC was in trouble, or the fake news where people posted edited video claiming a bank run was in progress (on a Sunday, where the FRC sign was reversed in the wrong direction for a glass reflection relative to the position the shot was being taken from). Lets definitely get real here.
What happens when you create a lot of additional counterfeit shares in a market where the number of buyers or sellers on the ticker decides price action (up or down)... It goes down.
Ask yourself how holding/writing options works when a company goes into receivership, and how it differs when you are a market maker instead of a individual. Do you really believe there is no preferential treatment where the entity deciding has a conflict of interest (because its on the hook if the market maker is on the hook). How is that not jumping on the bandwagon of potential price manipulation to bankrupt a company (any company)?
Obviously do your own due dilligence. When they say its done on a case-by-case basis, and they have a vested interest in the outcome; shady stuff rarely ever gets punished; its how corruption and fraud work.
No, fortunately you can't justify any evil. You simply stop being good. Justification lets you off the hook. There is no justification, and more importantly this isn't consequentialism, though it seems you think it is (and that can justify any evil).
Falseness, and the teaching of false and limiting beliefs is one of the greater evils, and unlike many things its not just normative and thus can't be discounted as such because it results in actual loss at some point.
But somehow, human's still live and coexist together.
That's purely survivor bias and our limited power to destroy each other. Organized warfare was not present until population centers outgrew their resources.
Sophie's choice is a framework, and its not made up, people have used it.
If you don't believe in humans free will
I never said that, I said choices are very few. That's putting words in my mouth, and we're done.