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".
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.
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
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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??"
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.