Does the government believe everything people say?

The government is made of people, so it depends on who is in office. Also, don’t believe everything you see in the movies. I pretty certain there’s more than one scientist who makes those types of claims; NOAA in the US has a lot people working there for example.

I think it depends on who the experts talk to. I’ve written to my US Senator and gotten immediate results. I’ve written to my state rep and gotten squat. The disasters you describe are hard to predict so I don’t know how officials would receive those experts. Most of our government is made up of lawyers, and they aren’t scientifically knowledgeable for the most part. Plus you’re also talking movies, which are based on little factual information.

If it is going to smack Washington and they are in it with no escape, then maybe, if it will affect their constituents maybe, if it will affect the economy they will be in a panic if it more far-fetched then true.

No, they believe whoever pays them the most.

One of the consistent problems of a State is that the primary purpose of a State is to maintain its own existence. Everything else is secondary to that. Any State which did not have such priorities would be overthrown and replaced by one that does. Therefore anyone in any position of authority or privilege in a State will have a primary function of supporting the State and any other function will be secondary. We saw this in the Soviet Union, for example, where scientists who supported the Lamarckian model of evolution were promoted to positions of importance ahead of those who did not.

The net effect of all of this is that the top of the pyramid in any State becomes an echo chamber in which those who support the status quo which maintains the State’s power feed back the State’s pre-existing biases. In other words, the State tends to hear only that which it already supports, while actively suppressing new information which may threaten its power base.

@ragingloli Exactly.

your first point of fail is ‘in movies’...... In movies, they do shit to make the story happen. It has absolutely NO basis in reality. Please grow up and study history. History sucks so bad and shows the worst in human kind and then shows again how well people can spend money to kill people. So… no.. Movies are shit when it comes to real life. And torture doesn’t work like it does in movies because movies use it to progress plot points and that isn’t how real life works. Torture doesn’t work.

@cazzie Movies are an excellent way to gauge human nature and the way human beings think. Or at least, they used to be*. This is because movies are narratives, stories we make up with a logical progression of ideas involving conflict and leading to a resolution. Meanwhile, our own brains work exactly the same way: we understand ourselves and the world by constructing narratives, telling ourselves stories. There are only a handful of symbols and basic narratives which comprise the collective unconscious, combined and recombined over and over again in both our lebenswelt and the stories we tell to explain it.

* There is a theory that politics has become strange because it no longer comprises a narrative. There’s a popular and thought-provoking article you may have read about George W. Bush being the first post-modern president. Post-modernism is premised on the absence of traditional narrative. Dubya was a cipher, a non-entity with no identity beyond whatever words were put into his mouth. Essentially an empty shell playing the role of president: qlippoth.

@SmashTheState I think you are confusing movies with books.