If you wonder why we’ve known about climate change since the early 80s, (at least) and yet have done nothing about it, this report is worth watching.
Tobacco Denial, and Climate denial set the standard and the template for what is now standard practice for political “conservatives”, what strategist Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone.”
While watching the news coverage of Steve Bannon’s initial appearance in federal court on Monday, I kept thinking about his 2018 confession to the acclaimed writer Michael Lewis. His quote is like a compass that orients this crazy era of American politics. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
That’s the Bannon business model: Flood the zone. Stink up the joint. As Jonathan Rauch once said, citing Bannon’s infamous quote, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
Below, additional 60 Minutes reporting on “Prebunking” disinformation.
Can people be “inoculated” against lies? (and is that inoculation safe, or a plot by the Lizard people?)
‘Can people be “inoculated” against lies?’
It helps, certainly, but only on the margins, because of motivated reasoning. Humans believe what they want to believe, almost nothing will sway them from their beliefs – and even if a subject is totally new to them, and they haven’t formed an opinion yet, other pre-existing beliefs will heavily sway which ‘side’ they choose to believe. A hardcore libertarian, hearing about some new environmental hazard, will almost certainly dismiss it offhand as a liberal power grab.
Intelligent people are just as susceptible to motivated reasoning, perhaps even more so, because they are capable of finding the evidence they want to support their chosen preference. RFK Jr. is not an idiot, but no amount of reasoning will convince him that vaccines aren’t causing autism.
The internet both helps anyone easily find what they want to find and allows them to spread their own beliefs in a powerful way to others, and those unwilling, unable, or unthinking enough to do that much are swayed by their community’s beliefs and have their own motivated reasoning to agree with their friends and neighbors.
On the margins, to people where no prior conflict in thought exists, inoculating against misinformation can have an effect, and the effort should be attempted. But unfortunately this is effective in the minority of cases, especially with a heavily politicized issue like climate change.
The First Amendment was written to protect speakers, identified speakers, from retribution from the opinions they were vocalizing. It’s obvious intent was to get identified speakers to say what they really think: otherwise what you get is a lot of ‘Yeah, the guy holding the gun is Right! Hooray for That Guy!’
On Ex-Twitter, who is identified? Do you even know if that speech was communicated to you by an actual human being? Maybe it’s just Vladimir Putin, speaking through his disinformation network, amplified a thousand-fold. Maybe its A.I.: nobody who actually needs the protection of the First Amendment. I read that the Putin trolls posted on both sides of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ controversy: because why would they take a side, as long as it keeps the argument going in America? And if you had a magical probe that could identify the true source of a social-media post regurgitating a climate denial meme you’d been fighting for 40 years, you would find nobody is actually behind it, just shadowy ‘Think Tanks’ perhaps acting for shadowy ‘Corporations’. No identifiable speaker, speaking a brave truth against possible retribution and requiring a First Amendment to offer some kind of protection: just a river of speech with nobody behind it except, perhaps, a corporation, and sometimes literally no body at all, just A.I.
My name is not ubrew, btw. If that helps. It helps me, but I don’t think it helps anyone else but me. And we’re all paying for it. The Internet is a ‘public space’ filled with very loud cowards. Nobody with an ounce of the kind of heroism for which the First Amendment was actually written.