We as a nation are supremely naive about education, participation in policy-making as well as politics, and unbelievably naive about how we handle crackpot messaging (which is to say, if it's interesting, we love it, and embrace it rather than fear it). I'm becoming convinced that this kind of reshuffling of social and political believes through propaganda is the biggest threat we face today and in the near future. Everyone forgets that one of the big elements of modern dystopias is thought control, and one of the effects of that can be chaos and disorganization to the benefit of others outside the society. That's what we are facing, and we are as children in our deliberately neglected ability to distinguish fake from real. This is where the Right's careful crafting of anti-science and anti-logic and "fact-neutral" education and news and opinion channels will come back to thrash us all. They have encouraged fully half our population to destroy their filters and rely solely on party affiliation and it's associated tags (religious belief, particular economic policies, etc.) to validate information. Since those have nothing to do with whether the information is *true* - based in the real world and accurate and contextually meaningful - they provide absolutely nothing to stop manipulative memes and messages from wreaking havoc.
If you've lost politics you attack thru culture and hope that shifts the politics.
oh my god boooooog
*Legion* wrote:boogle was raised in one, he knows a barn when he sees one.
Or, if you are a different country, you just stir up confusion and disrupt things.
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
A few ideas I have floating in my head about this:
Words... are a big deal.
Jill Lapore wrote:Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization.
I suspect the proliferation of Twitter/Facebook, the ability to instantly share/spread that propaganda, and never have a need to double check sources before the Next Big Thing pops is a pretty big cause of that. We may have always been wired for it, but the chance for Random Person #56796 to pop out an blog/tweet that goes viral across the globe has been small.
One thing that's really worrisome here becomes the 'team' mentality. The link I posted is actually true, and it points out the extreme injustice and racism in the War on Drugs. It's built right in, and has been from the very beginning.
My fear, here, is that people will start backing the government reflexively, even when it's wrong, because they know that the Russians are trying to damage us. The other team is pointing out the War on Drugs is bad, so that means the War on Drugs must be good.
I think that kind of damage would be much worse; we become incapable of change if the other team points out that we're screwing things up.
Isolation, distance and the homogenous nature of pre-internet (or mass media if you want to apply a deeper RCA) community.
There are so many axes along which to choose a side now and so little guidance or critical thought applied to the process of doing so that I think we retreat to the lowest comfortable state of decision-making. What this means is people who have not been exposed to higher processes and methodologies are completely open to the strongest strain of manipulation and subversion they encounter.
The way to fix it? Education, which is why the apparatus is so keen on dismantling the institution.
"Structured processes and methodologies" might be a better term, DC. People get riled when you tell them their thinking process is "lower"...
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
Interesting article on some of the super misleading ways various partisan media groups have covered the DC baseball shootings. What Alex Jones did is particularly heinous.
My backloggery
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Fair call Ro
This is my number one concern in the realm of our current politics and I am at a loss as to how I can personally combat it. This may sound cheesy but I really worry about my family members who have fully invested themselves into what I see as misinformation and a complete culture of hating the Other. My failing is that I don't have the time (and if I am being honest, the patience) to chase every single erroneous claim they make down to show them they are being misled. I always try to put myself in the shoes of others so I can try to make my position seem as if I came around to a way of thinking based on the facts in the hopes they may see the path also. It kind of works but only one little bit at a time and then they revert back to the Buttery Males. Whoever coined Buttery Males has my thanks ... it's the simple things that make me happy.
"I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's." Twain
What I find most frustrating is that for every one of the 10 lies proven wrong they still believe the source about the other 9! It is like they don't learn that breitbart, inforwars, fox, etc are propaganda and are lying.
"Shampoo in the morning. Coffin in the afternoon."
Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Swtich Friend code
SW-6859-7825-4962
Information Wars: A Window into the Alternative Media Ecosystem
Conspiracy Theories, Muddled Thinking, and Political Disinformation
(Kate Starbird, Medium, 2017-03-14)
slender Aphrodite has overcome me
with longing for a girl.
It's just like looking into cybersecurity. Once you start to learn what is actually happening out there right now, it's hard to sleep well again.
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
Yup. I don't think it'd be at all hard to find a significant number of people who believe that the killer in Charlottesville (if not, the entirety of the Far-Right groups) were actually Soros-funded leftists, or that BLM blocked authorities from helping victims during Hurricane Harvey.
I've seen both stories being bandied about right-wing social media with abandon, and it really underlines the "living in different realities" feeling, and whether or not a society can function that way.
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
Watch me learn to draw.
It can't function that way, once the confusion starts to affect policy-making. Or even just convinces enough people that the government is "the enemy".
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)