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@nick_anderson_ sums up the political environment succinctly!
(while this cartoon is focussed on the LA fires, it's relevance is much, much wider!)
@ChrisMayLA6 I dunno, this kind of claim rings hollow for me.
We've been subject to orchestrated misinformation for decades. Those who used to be in charge of that are just upset that people are listening to the *wrong* misinformation.
(And that contains within it, for me, the idea that they kind of invited this situation)
Sure, I don't think the problem is new, but it is being amplified & extended by social media.... and certainly, I'd concur with the notion that our political elites are complicit.
@ChrisMayLA6 I think it cuts both ways in that regard. The internet and social media have amplified the good and the bad.
As a barely educated layperson, I have access to more high quality, thoughtful, unbiased (or clear about their biases) analysis and information than I could've dreamed of pre-internet.
The mainstream has lost control of that, and they're panicked. But it's *entirely* their own fault.
Yes, that's a fair comment; although sometimes it seems the bad is engulfing the good....
@ChrisMayLA6 @uoou it absolutely is.
The good people are trying to earn money to live from it, the bad people are running it as a loss leader PR campaign to destroy their enemies, which includes those good people. There's not really any way for the good guys to win that.
An example in the news from yesterday:
He increased the fire budget by over $1.6 Billion last year. $1,600,000,000, and decreased it by $100,000 this year.
The same people covertly and overtly denying vaccines are using the same trick here: ignore the good, and focus only on the "bad".
@Dss @ChrisMayLA6 Again, I think you're having a moral objection to what's being lied about and an aesthetic objection to who's doing the lying.
Are the "good people" the ones who've been normalising US foreign policy for the last 70 years?
@ChrisMayLA6 I think the left & liberals can get a bit sententious about that.
We assume that these sources are digested by their audience primarily as information rather than entertainment, and I think that's largely mistaken.
I think there's also a retreat to comforting fictions in the face of *no offer whatsoever* from the left.
But I think people are, for the most part, smart enough to recognise that they're just being entertained or comforted.
And that's borne out in polls on issues.
@ChrisMayLA6 And, again, I'd lay the blame *firmly* on the mainstream for the conflation of news with entertainment which allowed that...
Hmm.... I'd like to believe you, but hearing disinformation & falsehoods repeated in my local community, I'm not quite so sure.
@ChrisMayLA6 @uoou
Disinformation (and to some extent a lack of accurate information) definitely swung the Brexit vote.
@KimSJ @ChrisMayLA6 (I'll say upfront I don't think we're going to see eye-to-eye on this)
Both sides lied. Leave's lies were more explicit and egregious, for sure. But Remain spent *way* more money.
I think this is more a bourgeois aesthetic distaste for those telling the lies and their presentation and a frustration that they're not in control of the lies than anything else.
(The fundamental lie underpinning the majority of Remain's campaign being what's good for GDP is good for the people)
@uoou @KimSJ @ChrisMayLA6 Remain spent more money? No. Leave used a simple system of "lying a lot" to double their spending allowance, by rubbing two campaigns under different names, controlled by the same few people at the top, and that's without the dark targeted (mostly Facebook) ad spend from outside the UK over the last few days, or all the "donations" of man-hours by Captain Insurance Fraud through work by his call centre staff! All those tens of thousands of "Leave" posters and garden signs? Where did that money even come from? No-one really knows.
@Dss @KimSJ @ChrisMayLA6 Remain still spent more even when you take Leave's fraudulent spending into account. This is broadly accepted. It was a minor point though.
@uoou @ChrisMayLA6 there's a step change between the newspaper leaning a bit too heavily on press releases, and a couple of nation states and billionaires actively feeding disinformation - lies - to billions of people though.
@Dss @ChrisMayLA6 Sure. But if *don't* ignore the other forms of mass communication then there's not.
@ChrisMayLA6 brings to mind the old quote “a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
(Attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and others, but that version is from Terry Pratchett.)