Meteorologists get death threats as hurricane conspiracy theories thrive
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
I benefit when others around me get better education, that's why I'm happy when my taxes are used to fund schools and universities and other ways of educating people. And it also benefits the economy, so every tax dollar/euro spend on education has a huge ROI.
This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.
Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.
> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
That's what your gut reaction may tell you; but I don't believe this is reality. The refusal to accept widely-accepted science is often rooted in distrust of the official narrative.
It's like saying people commit violence, just because they like violence, or must be stupid. Most of the time there's an underlying cause.
Another is....a systemic lack of education in critical thinking and how to tell mis- and disinformation from truth.
There is a decrease in people's trust in institutions, but my read on it is that it is an effect of these other phenomena, rather than a cause.
I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.
I remember a president whose error on "weapons of mass destruction" left my uncle nearly suicidal and killed countless Americans for nothing.
I remember a president whose DOJ wiretapped the Associated Press in 2012.
I remember a president who allowed his own Director of National Intelligence to lie to Congress about the NSA's activities before Snowden.
I can go on.
But Donald Trump's lies are orders of magnitude more frequent and worse than any previous president, and frankly anyone trying to dispute that at this point is clearly using motivated reasoning.
I don't know how to quantify the extent to which I despise Donald Trump. Suffice it to say that it's "off the scale". And yet, while I agree with you in general, to some extent I think Trumpism is the symptom and not the disease itself. I think there's something deeper and older at play, something that enables Trump and his brand of bullshit to prosper. I don't pretend to understand exactly what it is.. maybe it's as simple as saying "education". Maybe not.
What I have been saying, which is admittedly a bit hand-wavy at the moment, is that "our culture is sick". We don't cherish, promote, and prioritize the right things IMO. We reward the wrong behaviors and - I believe - are somehow incentivizing the whole "rejection of science/math/logic/reason and embrace of ignorance" thing.
Yes, Trump brought out something that was already there, lying dormant. But without Trump, it would mostly have stayed dormant.
Trump's primary victory in 2016 was a massive fluke, primarily (from what I saw) enabled by a combination of the horribly fractured GOP field, with the party establishment unable to rally behind a single candidate until it was already too late, a bunch of people who thought it was funny and voted for Trump for the lulz, and a large number of people who were frustrated by the past few years. That latter group I think came in two basic flavors: the ones who were frustrated because we had a black president, and the ones who were frustrated because the GOP Congress was stopping everything he tried to do (but who didn't fully grasp that this was entirely the GOP's fault). I genuinely believe that had the circumstances been just a little bit different in any number of ways, Trump would never even have made it past the first primary.
Once he was in the position of being a major party presidential candidate, it amplified his voice and that voice gave permission for all the bigots and fascists in America and abroad to show themselves and join their power together.
That said, I think there is a sickness in our culture, and I think its current prominence can largely be traced to Reagan, through several other intermediaries.
What we don't cherish, promote, and prioritize is kindness and compassion for our fellow human beings—all of them.
On the bright side, this also means that improvement in any of them also helps, even if only a little bit, to pull the whole tangle further up.
Quite frankly, the most common reason people believe in a flat earth is because of biblical literalism. There are a few passages in the bible (which, if you ever watch a flat earth video, those almost always come out) which mention things like the earth having corners or god rolling it up like a scroll. Those verses are used as the grounding point for why the earth must be flat and all other evidence to the contrary is a lie.
This is also, consequentially, the origin of moon landing denialism. Mormons used to believe that the moon was literally a part of heaven. As a result, it'd be impossible for god to let someone fly a spaceship there. Pretty much exactly the same process happened "It couldn't have happened because our holy texts say the moon is the terrestrial kingdom... therefor it must be a hoax".
I disagree from what I've seen.
I hear a lot of crazy conspiracies from Trump followers where I live. Including from my family.
On one hand they, they have a distrust for the establishment. But on the other they're dangerously close to fascists. I mean, Trump is a monarch to them. They don't trust the DOJ. Or the house. Or the senate. Or any of the agencies. But they trust Trump. If he says they're eating cats and dogs, then that's what they're doing.
It's very odd to be both in this "anti-establishment" headspace but also basically endorse and ask for a fascist government where one King makes all the rules. And you just trust him and have absolute loyalty.
That is to say, I don't think "distrust the gov" is the end of the discussion. There's more to it.
Even the "rural vs urban divide" people talk about is really a divide between Christianity, as expressed in "traditional values" and secularism. "Left" and "right" is "atheism" versus "faith," respectively. Communism and socialism are hated primarily because they're seen as anti-religion, and this extends to a hatred of leftism, liberalism, progressivism, etc as all similarly demonic in nature.
Aspects of this fundamental struggle between theology and secularism go all the way back to Reagan, at least, and I even believe back to the founding fathers. If you look deep enough into any of the systemic issues in American culture, you'll probably find religion somewhere at the heart of them.
The apparent contradiction between being anti-establishment but pro Trump (to the point of neo-fascism) makes sense in this context. Trumpists consider the establishment to be Satanic, and they believe Trump will replace it with a Christian theocratic order. And even a cursory glance at the Bible will tell you that the Kingdom of God is not even remotely a democracy.
That we should mistrust scientists because they are biased and instead trust think tanks financed by tabacco and oil corporations as well as billionaires...
That government agencies like the EPA are to be mistrusted because everything government is bad, but that the military and police should be supported unconditionally even if they execute innocents in the streets.
- first-hand reports from other people
- private news networks
- the governments of other countries
The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.
Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that.
> private news networks
You mean rebranded affiliates? https://youtu.be/rknON89H35o?t=35
> the governments of other countries
Are governments inherently trustworthy?
I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
News networks, twitter and podcasts got 100x better at making mountains out of mole-hills because they had continuous access to an audience to fine-tune their reaction engines. That's it.
Not when it's thousands of people showing us photos and videos.
It's not that it's impossible that [insert major event here] is a conspiracy, but you always have to ask:
- is it possible for even a highly competent government to orchestrate this conspiracy with no whistleblowers?
- what is the benefit of the conspiracy to the conspirators?
- is the benefit of the conspiracy worth the effort?
In the case of "faking a hurricane," there is no incentive (and in fact there are disincentives to being wrong about it for the meteorologists) and there is no possibly way to orchestrate that large of a conspiracy.
If the CCP is unable to successfully disappear people or put Uyghurs in camps without people finding out about it, nothing this large could be pulled off in the US.
> You mean rebranded affiliates?
No, I mean the Weather Channel and others.
> I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
I don't think you're doing what you think you're doing.
And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.
It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.
It’s likely both are causes, and some other things too.
This is such a weird way of looking at it.
Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect.
What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit."
And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse.
This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
I think it's the other way around: If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.
I'm sorry, but it starts to sound like you have a poor understanding of how science works.
> This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
So what exactly would an educated person do if they were led to believe something based on false premises which affected their life?
Are they not supposed to question the authority who makes decision based on such information? Or question the source that provides such information consistently? Or just ignore it because it doesn't aligns with their political view?
Or are they supposed to just shut up and accept it because... SCIENCE(holy text)?
I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.
I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted.
When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system.
Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
On the other hand, this sounds like something you just made up and decided to connect to the current topic. Is this fact or fiction?
But obviously just blindly throwing money won't help.
I despise school sports.
If $12.5k is spent per child per year, and there are 20 children per classroom, that's $250k.
Combining random sources (which use widely different divisions), I see numbers like:
60-90% instruction salary/benefit and related (higher numbers likely include non-teacher staff)
55-60% salaries
20-25% employee benefits (probably health insurance, which is really expensive in America no matter who pays for it)
5-20% capital/operations/contractors
10% administration
8% supplies
5-35% support (likely varies depending on what counts as "support")
0-5% debt
4% otherAlternate Theory:
This is purely the result of "too much news". Breathless coverage of every little detail means every little mis-step blows up to infinity, quickly eroding trust.
The 24hr + internet news cycle is basically a reaction maximization optimization machine with a dt ~ 0. Fox News walked so Facebook could run and now Twitter is sprinting. Insert long form podcasts in the mix for a constant hum of algorithmic misinformation and this result is inevitable.
tl;dr: more people need to go out and touch some grass.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7505057/#:~:tex....
Thinking the issue is a lack of education is a kind of procrastination, as if we can just fix this over a 20 year span. Ignorance is not the problem here, malice is. There are plenty of ignorant people who are uninformed or believe silly things without being assholes about it.
There's an unwillingness on HN to engage with the fact that the amplification effect of the broadcast/internet/social media selects for liars and propagandists and fraudsters absent countering mechanisms. That's why spamming and scamming are ubiquitous in our super high tech civilization.
Critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, as taught in your average language arts and social studies courses, specifically calls out bias and teaches kids how to be skeptical. When I was in school, we read passages and books and got to make whatever conclusion we wanted. But the essay we wrote had to be evidence-based. The teacher didn't care so much what we said, but rather that we could form a logical string to say it.
All this is to say, I think yes - if public education is further destroyed this will only get worse.
Same for antivax movement, it was present across all education levels.
But I am not 100% on this.
I think this is an uncontroversial statement. I also think virtually everyone who thinks this is probably certain ~they~ wouldn't be dumb enough to be taken in.
Realistically, if information is coming at you for free (like pretty much all of it is), it's purpose is to get someone a return. We are swimming in a sea of marketing and propaganda. No class is going to save you from that.
It's just political polarization. Conservatives (of a certain variety) in the US are polarized against the establishment (the media, science, colleges, etc), and this is the result. Better education might save some of them, but not many. The smarter ones retain the same core beliefs without the abject silliness.
These people are likely predominantly over 50 and were in high school in the 60s/70s/80s.
They've just been deliberately choosing to stew themselves for the past decade or three in right wing and fringe media.
People don't want to believe they are stupid, and they especially don't want to believe the people (or institutions) who call them stupid are superior to them. So they find a way out, by believing something that not only makes them feel important (they know but other people don't), but also superior to those who ostracised them in the first place.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but somehow never came across any similar ideas anywhere, anybody got references (or comments) ?
I've hired students who graduated with a low "C" average in their area of study, who were D- at the parts of their job that required that study, and had no personal interest or accurate knowledge to share about their study.
Readers only have superficial means to reward or punish journalism, which is much more focused on getting attention and clicks these days. Advertising always has been their main income, but the economy thoroughly changed in recent years.
All these issues undermine trust and in the end more arcane conspiracy theories serve as an explanation, why we read so much shit left and right.
> “I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann.
I grew up in Alabama, and I am positive James Spann has saved my life more than once with his tornado outbreak coverage. I can still hear him saying, "get to shelter now". He was a comforting voice at 2am when you and your family are huddled in the most central room of your house because mother nature is actively trying to kill you.
Also, appreciate the username - great game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Spann#Global_warming
So a bit of a "first they came for the climate scientists and I did nothing" vibe.
"He asserts that climate change is naturally caused, as part of the climate's cyclical nature."
So you are, like many people, misunderstand him, and many other people like him, that they don't deny climate change, but just aren't convinced that it is primarily caused by humans.
There is actually no scientific data that proofs the idea that humans are the primary cause of climate change, so it is still an open question, and therefore different beliefs about it should be respected.
But it's such a controversial and sensitive topic, that many people don't even want to be open to another perspective, which is sad.
“there are five clear stages of climate denial: arguing that climate change is not real, that humans are not to blame, that climate change will be a positive force, that it will be too expensive to fix, arguing it will be too late to tackle it. ”
https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/five-stages-climate-den...
I would rather say these people are science deniers.
* Records of fossil fuel extraction volumes and knowledge of by products.
* Atmospheric "libraries" that have documented the increase in greenhouse gases, coupled with proxy trapped atmospheric samples.
* Records of global mean temp. increases.
Couple that with a good understanding of thermodynamics and material properties and we're good to go.
You'll find references for all that along with milestone papers on the science in the IPCC report(s) that are regularly updated. Happy reading.
* Atmospheric "libraries" that have documented the increase in greenhouse gases, coupled with proxy trapped atmospheric samples.
These are evidence of human activity .. you understand isotopes 'n stuff, right?
They fingerprint sources.
I suggest you read the IPCC reports and some of the primary works - you'll have a better understanding and maybe refrain from saying silly things like your comment above.
Even Spann has changed tone:
in more recent years Spann has taken a more publicly neutral stance on the topic, refraining from going in-depth when pressed about climate change in more recent interviews.[citation needed] In a VICE news interview in 2018, Spann told the host that "I do weather, not climate" and that they should "ask a climatologist" for more information.
Spann's original viewpoints have been criticized by many in the meteorology community. In a blog post for Inside Climate News, Katherine Bagley explained that the short-term models used by many TV weather forecasters are too short-term to demonstrate long-term climate patterns, and that most meteorology degrees do not include any education on climate or climate change.* Records of fossil fuel extraction volumes and knowledge of by products.
Yes, ok, humans have been extracting resources, but how are we sure this is driving climate change?
* Atmospheric "libraries" that have documented the increase in greenhouse gases, coupled with proxy trapped atmospheric samples.
Yeah, the climate is changing, but how are we sure this is driven by humans?
I guess you think that if they happen at the same time, one must be the cause for the other, which is a logical way of thinking, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. Just like there are many variables that drive the weather, there are many variables that drive climate change. And we just don't really have good data to know if the human variable is significantly high that we can easily influence it.
Because we have released enough to substantially alter an approx 200K year gas balance.
Our current yearly release of of carbon dioxide is ~35 billion tonnes. The mean annual release from (say) volcanos is 180 - 440 million tonnes per year.
The human release is additional over and above the standard land|air carbon cycle that's been globally stable for millenia.
This is substantial additional insulation which traps more heat energy.
We have released as much GHG in a century as was released in the Siberian Traps.
* https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-m...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps
* https://eos.org/articles/how-modern-emissions-compare-to-anc...
* https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2016/november/cape...
> Yeah, the climate is changing, but are we sure this is driven by humans?
Yes. Absolutely.
> I guess you think that if they happen at the same time, one must be the cause for the other
You guess wrong. I look for a mechanism that connects events, a lever if you will. In this case the laws of thermodynamics, heat equations, and the balance between incoming solar energy and radiated outwards heat energy.
This has been covered extensively in geophysical literature.
> And we just don't really have good data to know ..
We have excellent data. More than sufficient.
Seriously, exert some effort, learn something of the sunject domain before spouting all this unfounded nonsense.
Maybe read the IPCC report in full or even just start with something basic like Syukuro Manabe's 1967 Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...
It's a good paper, I read it back in 1980 when I was first interested in geophysical exploration and modelling, which I did for two decades for oil, gas, and mineral exploration.
I do think a lot of measurements (as in "actions") being taken are very positive, I just think it's for the wrong reasons. The thing about CO2 is that you can easily measure it and tax it. But I think the real issue is our use of exhaustible and polluting resources. We should move to renewable and inexhaustible resources for the reason that we don't pollute our environment any further so we can keep living. If taxing CO2 does the trick that's fine with me, but to be honest I think there's a lot of weird political games going on. I also think there have been many scientific discoveries that have been held back by the ones who are profiting from the current setup, and don't want new innovations to revolutionize our industry. But I also believe that with the global interconnected world it won't be possible to hold these things back and we will soon get new revelations about energy solutions.
Let's say we'll see what happens. Thanks for willing to discuss these issues with me :)
It absolutely is.
There are also a number of denialist blogs funded by Heritage Foundation et al that spend a great deal of effort confusing people and putting out the false message that the science isn't set.
I spent two decades in exploration geophysics mapping global mineral and energy resources for major resource companies. I also spent some time on a global scale volumetric "spreadsheet" application (ERMapper) for stitching raw data, mosaicing sat imagery, performing earth scale magnetic, gravitational, radiometric, et al computations.
What is your background in earth sciences?
> to be honest I think there's a lot of weird political games going on.
More driven by corporate lobbyists than political positions.
Those onside with large corporate entities want to either ignore climate action or to support ineffective policy (of which there are many shades) - CO2 credits are ripe for abuse, companies can continue emmitting in exchange for kicking small sums towards ineffective programs (planting trees cut down last year, sequesting a tiny amount of carbon down boreholes that are extracting vast amounts, etc).
There are also many people that feel overwhelmed and will back bad policy because they want to do something, anything, and either don't recognise bad policy for what it is or feel that any action is better than no action.
> “What do all these stages have in common?” Prof Hayhoe asked. “They all accomplish the same goal. The goal is the important thing – it doesn’t matter what you say, it is the goal that matters. And what is the goal? No climate action.”
Which doesn't make sense. The climate could be changing due to natural causes, but we could still want to have influence on it. One doesn't exclude the other. But this woman wants to make everyone that doesn't think the same way as them to be viewed as "deniers" or something else like "conspiracy theorist" or whatever. It's a campaign, it's not science.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-iq-brain-age-cognitive...
Then there's long COVID. A detailed overview of that.[1] As of late 2023, about 5% of US adults report having long COVID. It appears that, if it lasts a year, there's usually no further recovery.
Some new results indicate that at least some long COVID sufferers still have a reservoir of the active virus.[2] That's encouraging, because antivirals may help them. It indicates where to look.
This is very real. Most people are tired of hearing about COVID, but the virus isn't tired.
[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27756/chapter/8
[2] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/10/getting-to-th...
Think farther back to conspiracy theories that gained wide acceptance in earlier administrations - FEMA concentration camps, Obama isn't a US citizen, 9-11 was an inside job etc. The same patterns of ideation were laid out in Richard Hofstatder's famous essay 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' which was written in 1964: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
...and of course you could trace them farther back through the red scare, the interwar period, the gilded age, post Civil War reconstruction, and the ideas that drove the outbreak of the civil war in the first place.
So while I agree COVID is an exacerbating factor, it's a quantitative rather than a qualitative change.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and
there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism
has been a constant thread winding its way through our
political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion
that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as
your knowledge.'”
That's when I realized that Facebook was a platform for spreading digital viruses that use human minds as their host. I deleted my account shortly after and never returned.
- People have been dumb for decades, the modern internet + social media has just weaponized it.
- It didn't remotely start in 2020 unless COVID caused a time loop that caused Trump to get elected in 2016.
And the vaccine increases your IQ?
It's just depressing.
Is the US the only country suffering from this lunacy, or is this a more global phenomenon?
how is this a surprise?
But this is different: it's just a plain ordinary self-serving lie. Completely invented by a sad narcissistic liar and his merry band of sycophantic enablers to win ("win") an election.
There's also a type of maliciousness to it that's lacking in more traditional conspiracy theories.
We probably shouldn't even call it "conspiracy theory".
what's worse, it became an authoritative tool of (often foreign) powers; at least in most of America (as science came from Europe, ...they brought us "culture" when they colonized us in the south; the north did not get colonized but replaced)
but of course science lied, but it's not that it lied, it is that it changes. newer truth comes along and fights the old truth until it dies ("the pace of scientific funerals")
turns out, breaking people's trust is much easier than gaining it.
but my hill to die on, is the old truth of material scarcity and media (or licensing) content versus the new truth of digital abundance and freely sharing things without the license to do so. why do I need permission from some faceless corporate owner to copy cultural assets that I love and wish to share?
But this is different, this is not science but simply BS that is spread.
those people get no voice around these parts.
also, nevermind the existence of higher order constructs like manifolds. that cannot be what "earth is flat" idiots could be referring to.
send me down another negative four, the invisibility threshold.
In street drug circles today there are widespread complaints about the quality of fentanyl, withdrawal effects and treatment. OD's are apparently dropping. For those that live in some semblance of reality, I think many there's withdrawal going on. For those that don't get out and call in threats like this, they don't really believe anything persistently, they just believe whatever is the rage of the day. They'll OD someday, you just won't see it in the obits.
Can you explain the chain of logic here? During the pandemic I "did my own research" which amounted to basically masking when other people did and getting the vaccines as they came out. At the time my SO was a nurse working on a hospital covid floor, so it seemed prudent. So, I'm not really sure how you see Democrats as being less science based? No snark intended, I'm truly curious.
I'd much rather politicians use science to justify political decisions instead of just doing whatever is popular, or would make them and their friends the most money.
What people should be asking is, why does science have a supposedly left-leaning bias? Why does education have a left-leaning bias? It feels like there's some obvious conclusions the republican can draw there, but they see those conclusions and draw something else instead.
We can also talk about misinformation about covid vaccines. I mean, it's really kind of depressing that one of the best decisions of the Trump administration (IMO) was project warp speed which got mRNA vaccines approved and on the shelves in record time. But now, he can't really talk about that as a positive thing because the entire republican party is against those very vaccines.
For example, there were covid lockdowns because "science" but then if anyone wanted to participate in the George Floyd protests and join a huge crowd of people that was A-OK, no pushback on that, no "scientific" worries about virus transmittal applied.
In that case "science" just becomes another tool to suppress the other side.
I guess I see your perspective, but I kinda just saw that sorta thing as like... fighting for civil rights has always been a dangerous activity?
And that specific talking point to me always read like:
"Oh I have to wear a mask in a grocery store and can't go to movies, but they're allowed to protest for their civil rights??"
The upside to a tightly-controlled “infosphere” is that people who are at the controls and have rational thought can jump right in and quench the idiocy fires right away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracy_theories_i...
(From Category:Conspiracy theories by country)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracy_theories_b...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracy_theories_i...
You can blame this on Russian and/or Chinese disinformation ops and tik-tok, etc, but the problem is more general than that. One of the assumptions around free speech ideals is that the people who are speaking or publishing are citizens of the community in which they are speaking or publishing, and now a large part of the content on the internet is produced by people who are crossing national boundaries, or not even produced by people at all.
You used to be able to assume that the vast majority of the content you're exposed to is produced by people who live in your community or country and would not like to see it destroyed, and now, in fact, you should probably assume the opposite. You should assume that most content on the internet is produced by bad actors trying to rip the fabric of your society apart, particularly if you're reading something that enrages you.
The especially insidious part of this is that most of the rage bait stuff plays on widespread personal biases so it's self sustaining after a while. People start to hate each other, so then they do stuff to each other to make each other hate each other more and so on and so on until you've got Rwanda.
Strongly recommend reading about Wayne Wheeler -- the guy who made Prohibition happen.
Prohibition was not especially popular in the US, even before it passed. But Wheeler was able to make a small minority sound very, very loud, and lever politicians accordingly
The Muller report described Russian interference in the 2016 election as “sweeping and systemic.” The report spent a bunch of pages saying that there were “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.”
If you look through your last few messages you'll see that your argument is constantly changing. First that they investigated and found nothing, but then presented with evidence you try to discredit that source of evidence, first by saying they didn't find anything, and changing tactics to accuse Muller of senility. It as if the truth doesn't so much matter as maintaining your worldview does.
The muller interview doesnt disprove/get Trump off the hook at all. It was for me, just a shocking display of realizing that what was shown in the public eye about the invesitgation had nothing to do with the reality.
Much like everyone realizing biden isnt running the country, and probably has alzheimers.
They didn't prosecute Trump because the report was presented to Barr. He had no interest in prosecuting, and there was a ton of constitutional questions regarding charging a sitting president.
Do you believe that all people charged and found guilty as an outcome of the investigation were innocent and it was all political theatre? There were a lot of people who weren't Trump, where there were no constitutional problems, who were found guilty.
That's an interesting relabeling of what would normally be regarded as simply the gathering, vetting, and reporting of evidence — some reliable, some not — in accordance with established statutory- and constitutional processes and norms.
If it'd really been a coup, Trump would either have been imprisoned without trial or he'd have fled the country to Russia or someplace else without an extradition treaty.
(it also doesn't necessarily need to spread false information, either. The general strategy is just 'find divisive statements and/or figures and amplify them'. Making up their own isn't usually necessary)
On the other hand maybe I'm quite wrong about all this. Someone has estimated (an open calculation) the payback time for the US debt burden at 90,000 years if it was paid back at the rate of $1,000,000 per day. Some might argue there's lunacy at work over many decades to achieve this result.
(from a comment on this blog) - -https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/10/08/the-smartest-pe...
2. The national debt is probably a result of long-term lack of wisdom, yes. But with an economy the size of the US, there is absolutely no reason to pay it back at only $1,000,000/day. A serious attempt would be more like $1,000,000,000/day.
Not everyone obviously, but I was visiting smaller cities where I grew up. I always thought I could go back one day but I don't think I would be able to deal with people there. The customer service is non existent and when you are shopping/getting services you are an inconvenience. Crazy.
See this article about Emmanuel Todd forecasting the collapse of the West using the same methodology he used to successfully predict the collapse of the Soviet Union: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-dec...
I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.
I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.
Are all the people parroting this stuff actually believers? My instinct is that the majority tried to grab the bull by the horns by jumping on the Trump schtick when he took power and are now left riding this increasingly deranged and unpredictable animal. At this point they can do nothing but try to keep holding on lest they be trampled by the beast they created.
But there's also gotta be true believers in there, and yeah, I don't know what those people actually want, and it's pretty scary.
What kind of society produces kids like that? Our values have changed focus from effort, hard work and self improvement to ease, comfort and a one-dimensional notion of happiness. It's a downward spiral.
...like how all of the GOP voted against federal aid for the hurricane victims, esp. several in southern states that got hit.
Since admitting you know nothing takes humility, most (ignorant) people opt to cobble together bullshit. Or accept plausible-sounding cobbled-up bullshit as true.
Things like this are foundational for learning. If you can't do them, you can't learn very well. Even if you do learn to do these things in college, you're literally learning as an adult what previous generations learned in elementary-, middle- and highschool. This is delayed development. People like that will never be able to achieve at the same level.
Here's the article if you're interested:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
I have a friend who teaches journalism at a small, private liberal arts school in the midwest. He's been teaching for over 40 years. He says that, beggining in the late 2010s he noticed incoming students began to really struggle. Then, pre-pandemic he would recommend that they use the on-campus reading and writing labs to get help, lean on TAs, use office hours, etc. Post-pandemic, he says he now recommends that they drop his course because they aren't prepared at all, even with all of the help the campus provides. He says that this went from a small % of his course enrollment to being > 50% in the span of a decade.
Small N but I've gone into overdrive to teach my own (very young) children how to read and interpret literature.
I agree that at times it does seem like a very bad premonition.
My take is that this is a symptom of something else. Populism has existed for a long time, but it feels to me that the environment we created also created the perfect target audience for it on a scale that never existed before. Observing the alt-right and conspiracy bubbles collapse into one over the last five years, it feels like it's the result of a sort of mental defense mechanism for a group of people that is growing every day. As I see it, we have built a world around us that is very complex and abstract, and hostile to the mind in a way that enables this sort of ideology immensely.
In it, it is very hard to feel a sort of purpose, and it is very easy to be overwhelmed. On average, the work people do has little to no effect on themselves or their direct peers. All day, every day is spent shuffling around numbers on a spreadsheet, or doing work to aid someone who shuffles around numbers on a spreadsheet. Then you clock out having a net zero benefit on your life, or that of people that matter. Other than, of course, a number that goes up in a different spreadsheet. And while you do your shuffling about to scrape by another month, you get bombarded with a flood of information about this war or that catastrophe or those disasters.
It leaves people numb, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, helpless, purposeless, etc.
Keep that up long enough, and what happens is something like a narcissistic collapse, except that it's not narcissists it happens to, but normal, healthy but vulnerable minds whose mental health can no longer be reconciled with a toxic reality.
In comes an ideology that does three things: It simplifies. It gives purpose. It provides an outlet.
Once you subscribe to it, everything returns from countless shades of gray to black and white. If you're not one of the good guys, you're one of the bad guys. If a bad guy says a thing, it's a bad thing. If you say a bad thing, you're a bad guy. The simple prescriptive labels of what counts as good and bad are delivered to you, on the house. Takes away all the nuance, all the complexity and all the mental burden that came with it.
Then, it gives purpose. If you fall into this hole, you end up seeing yourself as two things: A victim, and a savior. You see what others don't, and you suffer for it. "They" - the bad guys - are out to get you, to destroy everything. Every confrontation is thus someone attacking you, the victim, or defying you, the savior. It provides a narrative in a chaotic world where bad things happen for no reason and without explanation.
Last, it creates a target for all your bottled up frustration and anger. The bad guys are responsible for all the bad things, and it is made clear how very okay it is to channel all your negative emotions into hate towards some group. Be it Jewish people, immigrants, scientists, democrats or some imaginary lizard people. Hate is fine.
The end result is a full abdication of responsibility, and a return of control at the low, low price of a divorce from reality. To the mind that slips into this rabbit hole it is not so much a choice as it is a lifeline. That is why it is so incredibly hard to get people out of it, as well.
With that in mind, how serious are you? This is fascinating stuff and sounds like you've been thinking about it for a while. Is this your attempt to make sense of it all or is this reflective of something you've observed and studied?
As for my own situation, I have been watching for a while. I didn't know I was, until the pandemic hit and all the alt-right and conspiracy talking points all of a sudden got brought up by my peers in real life. I had seen the same troll posts on 4chan and propaganda Telegram channels months prior. They don't know what these things are, and they were repeating the same things, convinced they came to their own conclusions.
I watched Occupy rise and fall on 4chan over a decade ago, then in the run up to the 2016 elections I saw the whole Trump thing unfold in real time, not thinking any of it. I'm not from the US so the connection to my personal life was never there. In 2019, during the height of the climate protests, a Telegram group I was in got raided by right wing trolls posting nazi imagery, antisemitic memes and then some. The obvious response was to try and get to the bottom of that and join as many right wing channels as I could, which I did, to the point that I joined their social media platforms for the sake of interacting with people who had fallen into the hole. To push and prop, and to see what falls when I shake the tree a little. Nothing about it is scientific, of course. I was just sating my own curiosity.
What I ended up seeing was a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering, a lot of projection, hate, and non-solutions. As well as a lot of people that are more emotionally than rationally inclined in their decision making, their judgement of what they see, and their response. This also seems to be something studies are showing. [1][2]
What I describe in the GP is my attempt to come to a conclusion in my endeavors. Why people end up in the hole. What I had hoped to find an answer for is how to get them out, but I came up empty-handed. I have since lost multiple peers to this behavior and ideology, and alt-right populists have gained a lot of ground politically, here and everywhere else. What I had also hoped to learn is who is helping dig the hole, and why. The answer to that seems to be that there is simply an alignment of interest among many parties, that all benefit from some aspect of it. To what degree they may or may not collude, I don't know. Those are the things where someone smarter and/or more dedicated would have to take over to find good answers.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3867439/
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12706
this implies that its just a few folks talking shit on a lark, when it is actually a concerted, aggressive, multi-billion dollar effort across all-channels, with the goal of degrading civil institutions and hopefully causing a civil war.
that the average American rube can't figure that out is also part of the problem
If someone standing outside the grocery store hands you a flyer that claims the government can control the weather and they're sending you hurricanes on purpose, you'd dismiss them as insane and continue on your way. When your high school buddy Denise posts it on Facebook, though, you're more likely to believe it. Even if you'd think Denise would be crazy if she went out and handed out flyers at the grocery store.
It's like most of us have a built-in crazy filter that works fine for in-person interactions, but it breaks down when that exact same interactions happens online.
The whole "they're abusing our children" is also a trope that goes back a long time, most recently during the 80s with the whole "Satanic Ritual Abuse" stuff. That was much worse, because innocent people's lives were complete wrecked over what was complete bollocks. Pizzagate is near-identical, with s/daycare/pizzahut/.
More examples can be found throughout history – they're typically not called "conspiracy theories", but often they're not that different at its core.
I think what social media has done is allowing people to reach a wider audience. That person outside the grocery store reaches what, maybe a few hundred people with several hours of work? On the internet you can reach about 1.5 billion English speaking people with a minute of work. And that person outside the grocery store has no real way to organise a meaningful community, even if they do manage to gain 2 or 3 acolytes. On the internet you just create a Facebook group, or reddit sub, or whatever.
And all of that is including only the "crazy people". Add bad faith actors to the mix spreading misinformation simply to cause chaos and things quickly become well fucked.
But even before the Speed: Horseback tech upgrade was discovered, "kill the messenger" was an all-too-common human reaction.
She said "ask your government if the weather is being manipulated or controlled. Did you give them permission to do this? Are you paying for it? Of course you are paying for it."
She said the same thing about Helene. She is feeding the mental illness that grips MAGA. This is a sitting Representative and has the full support and admiration of the Republican Candidate for President.
Even Republicans are now coming out to try to explain that humans can't create or control Hurricanes all while their own and their Candidate for President is suggesting otherwise.
Not that it makes her insanity any less insane…
He is truly insane. It is unbelievable to me that the mainstream GOP - who I have always perceived as reasonable people - would back him with such loyalty. But, then again, due to his previous presidency he probably has the best odds.
You can call her weird, I agree she is, but she's clearly representing a significant portion of republican voter sentiment.
What are the unique demographics of her district? I know it is heavily gerrymandered to make it almost impossible for anyone other than a Republican to win the general election, but to get to be the Republican candidate in the general election they have to win the Republican primary.
In every Republican primary she has won there were several other conservative Republicans who were not batshit insane and were actually well qualified to be a Representative in Congress. So why is she winning?
This is all second hand info so take it with a grain of salt.
Back then you had to seek this stuff out though. It was on obscure internet forums, fringe websites, and late night talk radio.
I am not sure what to make of the current situation. Its concerning. I think there are a lot of factors at play though with a big one being we gave everyone a megaphone and then monetized the result regardless of any negative consequences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_Active_Auroral_...
Why bother sending a military against the United States when we can be divided defeated by some guy "just asking questions" after "doing his own research" and sharing to his millions of followers.
It's an interesting theory, at best this is virtue signalling taken as GOSPEL by the other side.. so BAU.
Anybody can use Khan Academy to get a reasonably decent education on critical aspects of math and science. Sites like Stack Exchange, (some) sub-reddits, physicsforums.com, etc. make it possible for anybody to solicit feedback and corrections on almost any technical topic.
In short, it's possible to be as educated as you want to be, and it's mostly free except for the time and effort involved. And instead a large portion of the population seem to be not only not pursuing real knowledge, but actively rejecting it and embracing obvious bullshit.
WTH people?
OK yes.. I know. Somebody is going to say it. The critical phrase above is time and effort involved. And maybe that's right. Maybe it's just laziness. But somehow that doesn't feel right. And I understand the notion that the widespread interconnectedness of the Internet allows small numbers of people with fringe beliefs to "find each other" and reinforce each other's nuttery, and that has some amplification effect on the prevalence of flat-earth thinking, etc.
And yet, I still don't think that explains what's going on with people. And the frank truth is, I don't have an explanation. Or a solution. And I wish I did. I hope sombody does. Because as @taylodl says in another thread:
These kinds of articles reinforce my idea that we're witnessing our society collapse before our very eyes.
I concur, and this troubles me deeply.
And maybe the answer really is as simple as "social media". Which I find to be a sad idea, as the potential of social media act as a force for good still exists and is something I've always been particularly appreciative of.
Humans are social creatures and feel the need to align with those around them. Combine this natural inclination with social media algorithms that show you more and more of whatever they have determined to be "engaging content", and you get a feedback loop that spreads viral content and drives people insane.
Are they referring to the Mayor of Tampa warning "you will die"?
If you put a Trump sign in your yard, will you get death threats? Nope. Laughed at? Maybe, but not to your face. People are afraid of Trump supporters. Now try putting a Harris sign in your yard. Your local sheriff will tell the world to make sure they keep track of you for future recriminations. You'll get anonymous death threats in your mailbox.
There is sickness in politics today, but the solution is not "fix both sides."
There is certainly a risk that people will take the next warnings less seriously. And then an unexpectedly large number of people will die, and we will cycle again.
Would you cite some of them, then? Especially ones that are not just "weather technologies" but are capable of creating, amplifying, and/or steering hurricanes?