The years of brain washing by the right paid off

Politics & Elections
61

I love the way that you set up the fallacy of the excluded middle, pretending like there are only 2 extreme solutions, and then argue against the one that you hate.

It also points more accurately to the problem - none of the above is about the quality of information available. A lot of it is about quantity and targeting – propagandists now understand how to better direct appealing misinformation to soft targets – but the bigger problems are:

  1. Our education system has never done a great job of preparing people to process information and have good media literacy
  2. It’s being further undermined by people who want to diminish this capacity
  3. There’s a snowball effect of people wanting to believe convenient lies over inconvenient truths, which gets more intense as they build out their distorted version of reality.

This was a complex problem that didn’t appear overnight, so there’s no silver bullet solution. But I’m pretty sure that allowing unaccountable oligarch interests from gaining control over huge parts of the media ecosystem was a huge part of the nail in this coffin.

As one example, Musk should’ve been allowed to weasel out of the Twitter deal. It was a mistake to force him to perform on his half-baked joke deal. And it would be a mistake to allow him to buy MSNBC as he’s proposing. Both of these deals resulted in firehosing of hate misinformation through easily consumed channels, which makes it incredibly hard for people to separate truth from lies from noise.

62

Missed this one :wink:

I’d like to point out what is perhaps the right-wing’s starkest example of projection (ie, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty”).

It really isn’t their friends, their neighbors, their colleagues, or the Democrats who are looking down on Trump supporters, laughing at them behind their backs, and calling them stupid.

It’s the places where they get their news and the people to whom they keep writing checks.

ETA: something I offered up elsewhere:

Dear Trump Supporters,

Due respect: like millions of others, you’re being manipulated. The GOP, Trump, RW media, and the Trump acolytes just keep lying to people over and over and over and over.

They assume you don’t know enough to recognize their misdirection, and that you either don’t have the skills or simply won’t bother to fact check that misdirection when it’s fed to you.

And it comes at you like a fire hose (see: Gish Gallop, Brandolini’s Law). There is just an insane amount of misdirection – too much TO fact check if you don’t have the education, training, experience, and knowledge to know fertilizer when you see it.

IOW, I truly have no idea where you’re getting your news, but I’d find another source – one that won’t treat you with such profound disdain, contempt, and cynicism – if I were you.

You should resent being used … by whatever sources you’re choosing. You should resent it deeply. I sure would.

63

This isn’t a bad idea, but the big question about with “critical thinking” is, “what are people supposed to be thinking critically about?” If it doesn’t include critical examinations of capitalism and the state and other forms of hierarchy and authoritarianism, it won’t take us very far. And good luck teaching outside the orthodoxies of capitalism, “private property,” and the nation-state: most schools exist to reinforce those forms of organizing the economy and social life.

64

I don’t think we should teach students what to think critically about. We need to teach the skills to recognize an opportunity for critical thinking and the tools to do it.

I don’t think I had that properly until graduate school, though.

65

A primer on “critical thinking:”

What is critical thinking?

Think about how different things might have been if – after the election of 2020 (let’s just say, in mid-November of 2020), every American suddenly and spontaneously had a basic grasp of ‘only’ the bullet points in this article.

How successful would “The Big Lie” (that the Democrats had stolen the election from Trump) have been? What would happen to the influence of organized religion in American life? What would happen to the efficacy of advertising?

66

The mistake on the Left’s part is thinking that they are the ones who are 100% based on neutral objective reality, and that therefore as a corollary everyone would agree with them if only truth were to prevail. It’s reminiscent of 19th century atheist rationalists who were certain that religion was mere primitive superstition that would wither away in the march of Science. But their confident predictions were belied by developments such as fundamentalism, new age spiritualism, cults and even outright frauds like Scientology, and religions in disguise such as fanatical political totalitarianism.

67

No; the Democrats mistake is believing that the voting public cared about the facts or their own self interest over Republican lies. The Left doesn’t really matter, politically; they are powerless and marginalized.

And while the Democrats aren’t right about everything, they are vastly closely to it than the Republicans who are pretty much 100% wrong. Morally and factually. There is no equivalency between the two.

68

Can you use an example to explain this post?

Like, on the topic of climate change, for all faults of the do-nothings on the left, they are indeed the ones living in objective reality. The do-nothings on the right have to deny reality in order to adopt their “climate change is a hoax” position. So why or how is this a mistake for “The Left”?

69

Or, tariffs aren’t taxes, or legal Haitian immigrants are eating pets, or lowering taxes raises federal funds, or ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for COVID, or COVID vaccines are ineffective, etc., etc.

70

Lumpy’s point is a good one, though: facts alone, ignoring the sociocultural context, aren’t enough. Especially ignoring new developments in that social landscape.

71

Which was my point about asking “ what shoubd we be thinking critically about?” Surely that should include the logic and reality of the social systems we are in and that shape our thinking without us reflecting on the process.

72

For any who weren’t sure exactly how it looks when conservative media outlets abjectly fabricate the position of the Democrats … it looks exactly like this.

Once again, then …

If you find it easier to argue against what you wish others had said than to argue against what they actually do say, then … I guess I can’t stop you.

But the straw man stuff reflects pretty poorly on you.

73

Oh yeah. When I hear the rallying cry “FACTS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS”, that’s definitely coming from the left, certainly not from Ben Shapiro. That definitely wasn’t Rush Limbaugh’s schtick for years, that liberals are just too touchy-feely and emotional. Sure buddy.

The truth is that this was the right wing’s rhetoric of choice for years. The Right is the party of morals and facts. Then that became inconvenient when actual reality got in the way, and now their rallying cry is “who knows what a fact really is”? They complain about “woke moralism”.

The problem isn’t that the right can’t process facts or doesn’t have access to facts, it’s that they no longer care about the difference between fact and argumentive rhetoric. They don’t want me to go to Fox to hear facts I can’t hear otherwise, they want me to go listen to the same reheated emotional rhetoric over and over until it drowns out every other competing thought. “Flood the zone with shit”, as Steve Bannon said.

74

Do I recall correctly? The story – that GWB was a shirker, going AWOL more than once while serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War – was TRUE. But in a twist worthy of Karl Rove, FAKE evidence was created by Bush’s supporters to substantiate the TRUE story. Hats off to Rove (or whichever one of his disciples) – the story switched from Bush’s shirking to Rather’s apparent gullibility.

So, many years ago the GOP specialized in clever lies, carefully concocted ploys to deflect from the truth. Nowadays they realize that’s unnecessary. Many millions of Americans are eager to fall for very crude and obvious lies.

75

Anybody notice just how rarely Conservatives credibly fact check Liberals [1]? It’s almost as if the right lies infinitely more frequently than the left. Also – screaming “FAKE NEWS” at the top of your lungs isn’t fact checking. It’s actually meaningless.

You don’t think the RW media has, or could have, fact-checkers? Really?

[1] Actually, it’s worse than that. Tucker Carlson tried to get a Fox News reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fired simply for fact-checking Donald Trump.

76

Yeah it’s a depressingly familiar pattern.

Liberals: “Here’s all the scientific evidence about global warming. Additionally here’s some more evidence proving that Exxon is fabricating and distorting most of the counterevidence against it.”

Conservatives: “You guys and your facts. Who are you to say what the facts are. Who even knows what a fact is. I don’t need facts to tell me what my gut knows is true.”

77

If the need is to educate people and change their minds, simply presenting them with facts is unlikely to do the trick. We need to talk with people to find out why they hold the views they do: what need it fills, how they got there, what might be obscuring their vision, what fears and hopes their views play to and enable. We start from their experience and build on that.

We need to approach them with what is sometimes called an organizer’s outlook: you walk into a situation, take people as they are, understand where they are, and draw in their own experience to help them see why they can’t get what they want with the views and ideas they hold. Extremely oversimplified example: “So you say you want a raise, Bob. Why aren’t you making enough money?” “Those damn “fill in the blank” are taking our good jobs by working for less money! We should stop immigration!” “What about working together to get higher wages for all of us? Would that help? How could we do that? A few of us are meeting after work to talk about it. I think you should come.”

78

Balderdash. Someone who wants to build a wall and deport all the job stealing immigrants holds that position because 1) they think it’s possible, 2) they think it’s effective, and 3) they think it’s easy.

Your solution already sounds hard. I don’t want to meet after work and think about things. Who has time for that?

The guy telling me he can solve my problem without having to make any effort myself is going to win every time. And all he has to do is convince me that #1 and #2 are true, which is easy because I want them to be true. Because I also want #3 to be true.

79

I’ve posted this before…

Everything really did get dramatically worse when Newt Gingrich brazenly announced that the other side wasn’t a group of colleagues to be negotiated with and have dinner and drinks with; they were enemies to be treated as enemies, stopped at every opportunity, and crushed whenever possible. They were to be painted as evil and an existential threat to all that we hold sacred and the lives of ourselves and our children.

They do that through horrid straw man arguments and dramatic, hyperbolic exaggerations of the other side’s positions. Because their audience lives in a nearly perfect information silo, they are vulnerable to this kind of misinformation and unabashed demagoguery. They literally don’t know any better.

They take fearful people, make them ever more afraid, and then give them a laundry list of Bad Things That Democrats Do, and make them thoroughly terrified. And they’re totally made up.

Then, they send their candidate out to say, “I, alone, can fix it.”

It was a very long run of political Mutually Assured Destruction before that, but Newt … went nuclear when nobody else really had.

He’s still doing it today, and his followers have taken pages straight out of his playbook.

80

My point was about how people change their minds and how we might facilitate that. The methods are well-known and do not include belittling and name-calling. They are not easy and do not change everyone’s mind. They do, however, sway and move people and help build movements. No movement ever gets or needs everyone on its side, and at some point, it does become us against them. Making “us” as many as possible and “them” as few as possible is a good idea.