Why does it feel that the evil sides globally are winning. Even evil people are winning. Why?
the hard answer: the voting populace is the single stupidest form of combined intelligence to ever exist, im pretty sure 3 children under the age of 7 in a room would have a higher average IQ than any state in america when measuring the voting populace.
Voting is a joke. People don’t take it seriously, it’s all vibes based, and those vibes are horrendously unreliable and meaningless.
the soft answer: it is, for now. It will change, just give it time. It’s inevitable.
The perspective I subscribe to is that access and abundance has outpaced the average persons ability to choose. By which I mean, their talent at choosing. An overall inability to make quality decisions. I would say the issue really grew some teeth in maybe the 50’s and has been accelerating more or less exponentially. The art of exploiting this inability to choose first starts getting real traction in the evolution advertising. Getting people to buy cans of beans and cigarettes was the larval form of a much more sinister science of mass manipulation. The internet definitely threw gasoline on the fire. And now no one knows what is quality, or true, or nutritious, or sustainable, or important. The average person is completely overwhelmed and operating on a low-level fight-or-flight type reasoning. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a short term solution. People need to start learning at a very young age explicitly how to not be a mark. Which is antithetical to the wealthy and politically connected people whose bread and butter is hoards of unscrupulous consumers of products and rhetoric.
this is definitely an interesting explanation, although i don’t know how much difference there is between this and my theory of “people are just less involved in politics, and as a result, engage less critically with it, as they do with everything else in their lives these days”
The average person is completely overwhelmed and operating on a low-level fight-or-flight type reasoning.
i think this is sort of accurate? I think the difference is that people are choosing not to invest their time and energy into these things, before engaging with them, leading to a very low quality of work. I.E. bad elections. Just looking at social media seems to confirm this outright.
The only short term solution is immense pain and suffering, any sufficient amount of distress will motivate something to engage in more aggressive and risky behaviors, which is the only way out of this mess in any short order, though it may not be desirable.
The long term answer is solving the media issue, because that’s a huge problem, solving the social media issue, which is 70% of the issue at this point, and forcing people to engage critically with this kind of stuff.
The hard part is finding out how to do this effectively without negating the very benefits derived from engaging in this kind of social restructuring. It may very well be too late for us to do anything to combat it, we might be at the crab bucket point in mr bones wild ride.
People are willing to do anything except for engaging in thought provoking/critical levels of social engagement, even if makes a fool of themselves. Just look at any social media, any hot button political issue. It’s all just fish in a barrel.
The candidates are the joke. The system generates trash “representatives”. That’s a feature, not a bug. Nothing worth voting for.
yeah, and you wonder why they’re so bad? It’s because of the type of people we vote for lmao.
Maybe voting is all vibes because First Past The Post voting doesn’t accurately represent the nation.
and yet, in most cases, it pretty roughly aligns with popular vote sentiment. The only difference is that the congress would have a significantly different makeup, whether or not that changes much is a different question.
It really doesn’t
it really does. It may be off by a few percent, but it’s almost always fairly close in line with what the outcome is, like i said, if we ignore the congress, because that would be directly influenced by FPTP in a measurable way.
The world has been in a gigantic psychological experiment.
In some ways, evil is getting the upper hand at the moment, mostly brought on by moderates failing to address basic and fundamental problems forming in society due to being corporate captured.
However, we have a few options at our disposal to fight back:
- Joining and organizing within your local community to create connections with others is incredibly powerful, will make the coming months much more bearable, and lay the ground work for effective resistance.
- We can still effect things drastically with a general strike. This massively impacts their income streams, and can bring the country to its knees if done on a large enough scale.
- Join the IWW and attempt to unionize your workplace, so that the general strike is even more effective.
If we put in the work, we can resist this and we can win. Don’t become paralyzed with doubt and fear, march on and push as much you can. Together we’re strong, separated we are weak. So join up with allies while we still can easily!
Join a union. Most places won’t have IWW.
They’re active branches in most cities, but they can be formed anywhere, even rural areas. If there’s a local union that’ll take you in and isn’t corporate captured (teamsters being an example of corporate captured, IMO), then sure, that can work.
But the IWW is the only union that can unionize any industry, is global in scope, and is grassroots with a revolutionary spirit.
No shit. The IWW is here.
I’m going to take a different tack on this than other responses: evil is winning because good is dumb.
A lot of progressive groups within the past few decades, whether it be Occupy, Black Lives Matter, or others, can’t seem to actually get their policies enacted on a mass scale. In cases where politicians actually go through with their policies, those progressive groups won’t support those politicians from getting voted out and having the reforms reversed.
Trump got elected, in part, because progressives didn’t want to vote for Genocide Joe and Copmala. Yet, you don’t see progressives building the kinds of political groups needed to wil elections like the right has.
As a progressive, I can tell you that the idea of Genocide Joe and Copmala compared to the antiChrist who wants to eradicate entire peoples…
Yeah, you would have to be an incredibly naive and stupid person to vote for Trump and company.
There were tons of discussions about how a lot of progressives couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Democrats, so they didn’t vote.
I wouldn’t expect them to vote for Trump.
“Those stupid progressives! Why do they not simply have hyperwealthy oligarchs back their movements!”
Why does money beat a progressive message?
Because money can buy newspapers, tv stations, social networks, think tanks, marketing companies, and legislation.
So money can hire people who know how to argue and advertise better? That sounds like a skill issue.
And money only “buys” legislation because it is used for advertising. During its height, the NRA didn’t have to contribute the kind of money that other lobbying organizations did. Why? The NRA had a large membership of people that voted.
So money can hire people who know how to argue and advertise better?
Literally yes. As well as buying airtime and mass publication, politicians, legislation, and policy
That sounds like a skill issue.
Oh never mind, you’re a child. Well could luck winning at your video game. 👍
I have a vested interest in progressives succeeding, but they keep making major missteps them cry and say the other side has more money.
The current strategy isn’t working and there needs to be a deep look as to why it isn’t working.
All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Evil is willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to win. As long as good keeps fighting with one hand tied behind its back, evil will keep gaining ground.
It’s less that good has one hand tied behind its back, and more that good is fighting with a sword while evil brought an attack helicopter
Well, I think it’s more that we’ve spent decades building up cultural narratives of good that emphasize heroes who win through proselytizing, converting, and redeeming villains rather than just fucking stomping them. “If I do a bad thing for the right reason, I’m just as bad”, etc. In media, it works out because cosmic justice steps up to do what the hero won’t if the villain refuses to relent. In reality, it means that you get tut-tutted and told that the most you can do to stop ecocide and mass murder is peacefully protesting in such a way as not to even upset or inconvenience anyone, and it’ll all come right if you’re in the right. You might as well just go yell into a closet for all the good it’ll do, ofc.
I guarantee you that a jury of good people would throw a good person in prison if they tried to do the good things that need to be done.
Because capitalism. Capitalism is basically a philosophy that postulates that people are greedy and selfish, so it makes a society based on greediness and selfishness. It’s a self-realizing prophecy if you ask me.
Another word is needed, this one has become so baggy as to be meaningless. Capitalism has been the predominant economic system across the world for centuries now. It just means the accumulation of surpluses, creating economic growth. It has no a-priori about what’s done with the surpluses.
Just as the Gilded Age and today’s broligarchy were underpinned by capitalism, so were New Deal liberalism and 1980s Swedish social democracy. That last model in particular created a society that was freer and fairer (so: less evil) than any ostensibly “non-capitalist” one has ever been.
I think the term fits fine. The surpluses go to the owners of the means of production (barring “state capitalism” I suppose). These surpluses are actually the true value of the workers’ labor that the owners take, which is why I think capitalism is immoral, but that’s not really related to my point. The system incentivizes the owners to maximize these surpluses, which means paying the workers as little as possible, and charging customers as much as possible. I.e. the system incentivizes greed.
Social democracies are absolutely better than unchecked capitalism, but it’s my opinion that they’ll never be able to stop from regressing (they have been, as I understand it). Because of the owners’ place in the hierarchy and outsized wealth and influence, they will always be able to push governments to their benefit, and then it just keeps snowballing as they gain more wealth and influence. Admittedly, very strong unions can counteract this, and were responsible for them becoming social democracies in the first place.
Yes, your theory about inevitable concentration sounds like the one of Thomas Piketty (where war functions to keep a lid on the concentration). Depressingly persuasive.
Personally, I find it hard to deny that capitalism has been incredibly successful at creating abundance seemingly out of nothing. I see it as a kind of ingenious roaring engine, the whole question is how to somehow harness it to good purposes.
And also how to turn it off. Because I think that the abundance does not come magically out of nowhere, as orthodox economics seem to believe. It comes from plundering the natural world, which the human economy sits on top of.
Capitalism did nothing. Scientific discoveries and the philosophy that extracted themselves from stagnating religions allowed for unparalleled progresses.
Another word is needed
The target is well regulated free trade.
It’s good to be angry at capitalism, because capitalism holds unchecked capital acquisition as a foundational right. We know that doesn’t work in a globally connected world, if it ever worked.
Notice that there’s no right to accommodate infinite capital in the phrase I used. And there’s also no complete ban on private property.
The things that work are usually not any of the crap spouted by vocal greedy world leaders.
We need to clip the right that capitalism gives to become billionaire, and then see where we stand on the rest of the rules, and decide together what we want to change.
We’re likely to find a lot more confortable compromises, after the billionaires thumbs are off the scales.
Capitalism is a doctrine that’s been created in the 19th century and is basically based on private property and accumulation of wealth. It does mean something very simple in fact. And it has nothing to do with democracy or oligarchy.
In French we call the precious system the old regime. It was based on privileges and heredity, not wealth and private property.
That’s the fundamentals of the organisation of the society. In Europe capitalism after ww2 was made less damaging to the society because communism was a threat and capitalism had to be seen as a good alternative.
But ultimately capitalism is a sickness that leads to the exact same kind of feudalism that the old regime did. Musk and Trump are merely using the system as intended: they leverage their wealth to get power.
Scary book written in 1970 has proved to be incredibly prescient.
“Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler predicted that as the Digital Age moved forward, a lot of people would begin to lose their minds because they couldn’t/wouldn’t keep up with all the changes.
It’s easy for bad people to offer an easy solution to people who have no idea how to handle it.
Aldus Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932) is another one that predicted the state we find ourselves in.
It’s with noting that Future Shock wasn’t about the digital age; there was no digital age in 1970. Toffler was concerned about the rate of change and information overload, and he talks about the “information era.” But it’s useful to note that computers weren’t on his radar - the technologies he was concerned about were things like Cable TV.
But it was less about the medium - the internet, still mostly only used by businesses and universities until almost 20 years later, when the WWW appeared - fits in perfectly. Toffler’s theory is that - information age or not - as a species - our society and technology had started changing faster than our brains had evolved to handle. That we could just barely handle the introduction of the cotton mill - a device that had a huge impact on society; we could just about handle that much change in a generation, but now things were changing so rapidly that society couldn’t keep up.
A really great modern simile is how people talk about computer technology and legislation. That Congress simply can’t keep up with the rate of change in the world of software; that the people writing laws don’t even understand the topics they’re legislating. How well does the average person understand how blockchains work - even abstractly? How well does Nancy Pelosi? It’s a microcosm of what Toffler was talking about, that afflicts the entire species.
The information age was just another stage; the point he was trying to get across is that, as a society, we can only handle so much change. He argued that we’d been struggling with this since the industrial age started. The information age - in Toffler’s opinion - would be the last straw. Things would change so rapidly that we’d (individually) be in a constant state of shock.
I don’t know that Toffler’s Future Shock explains how we got here, though. It might be a factor, but is this the inevitable outcome?
Huxley, I think, provided a better (if less academic) theory. We are hedonists, and those in power realize that if they play to this, they can control society.
Both, I think, ignored the fact that economic libertarianism leads to oligarchies. And rather than “too big to fail” being an example against laissez-faire economics, it’s a perfect example of the exercise of it. When you have enough power to influence legislature, you do, to your own benefit.
I do think they’re all factors - streams that feed into the vast river in which current we’re all caught, and which seems to be leading to a waterfall of global collapse. But I do blame capitalism as the must significant source. I don’t think we have any better option (not communism, for sure), but I think the capitalism we have is broken and enables abuse, and contributed the must to all of the worst things that are happening: fast fashion, cheap disposable goods, concentration of wealth, income disparity, Elon Fucking Musk with his hand puppet controlling the country. And it’s only Elon because Bezos didn’t think of it first.
Because history is cyclical, and at all times some forces are on the losing side of it. Back in the days when the left was more powerful, the right complained about winning evil. Now it’s the other way around.
Note: this is not a “both sides” argument, I am left.
Note: this is not a “both sides” argument, I am left.
I really wish people had the critical thinking on the internet to understand this point. The other side does see themselves how we see ourselves and acknowledging that doesn’t mean you support their views.
Make America Great Again is just “Change” in the other direction.
It’s very simple: human emotion. When something upsets the status quo, people get scared, angry and desperate. They turn to whatever solution they think will fix things.
In the case of nations, that becomes right-wing politics. Many factors in the recent past have caused distress and fear. People are afraid of losing what they have, they don’t like the uncertainty. They lack the education and critical-thinking skills to choose the best course of action, instead they choose the most reassuring course of action.
In 1930s Germany, support for extremist political parties (not just the NSDAP) surged due to the desperate times they were experiencing. Germany underwent a period of hyperinflation, which was followed shortly after by the stock market crash of 1929. They were already in poor shape, both economically and emotionally, due to the punishments meted out by the Versailles treaty.
Things became very bad for the Germans, and they turned to the looneys who offered a solution. A similar scenario is playing out in several countries around the world, especially the US. COVID really upset a lot of people, none more so than the overly emotional and uneducated. They felt attacked and vulnerable, and they were already deluded by years of misinformation. They turn to politicians like Trump, because he appeals directly to their emotions. He makes them feel safe, largely by scapegoating groups who aren’t actually a threat (sound familiar?).
People don’t check if what they’re hearing is true, they care most about having their fears assuaged. This is why we’ve seen a resurgence of right-wing extremism globally.
Why does it feel like evil is winning globally?
Propaganda works.
We are now innundated with it. And the answer is not “anti-propaganda” although sometimes that helps a little.
The answer is everyone needs to learn how media works; How words and images and sounds form the world.
And to do that requires the help of media corporations.
The answer is everyone needs to learn
Uhoh
Perhaps, because by now enough people feel a real impact on their life and fear for the ruling classes is not there anymore?
Just a few examples from direct, personal experience (I am German, so what I enumerate has a German/Euro perspective):
- Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
- Easy way to figure out who is favored by one law, is to check who has to prove something and how hard it is to prove
- Best part about this is, people in power can always point out to the law and that ‘we’ agreed upon that law
- Systematic discrimination against the worker class/people not owning things: Thing about laws, taxes, …
- Every media has an agenda and is propaganda (In the west, propaganda means mostly being selective about the information presented and how to build the narrative. Only idiots in the west will outright lie about things. It also means, who gets to talk in the media, where to position news (headlines ore somewhere else) etc. Media are owned by rich people or the state owned media are controlled by people with strong affinity to political parties
- Corruption on all but the lowest levels, especially in the government (In Germany corruption on the lowest level is uncommon und has a high penalty, but go up the level a little bit and ‘you scratch my back and I scratch yours’)
- Nepotism on all but the lowest levels (Worked in many different companies and the bigger the company the worse it gets. Working class kid does not get an intern position although it would technically be the best choice? No worries, some kid with the right parents and no clue will have that opportunity.
- No feedback loops: In Germany, we have professional politics which have extremely good conditions for their pension, whose children do not visit public schools and who have private health care decide, what in their opinion is appropriate for most of the people in the country concerning this things…
- No real political influence: We just had the clown-show of voting. Guess what, I can only vote between Nazis and non-Nazis. Can I vote for more taxes for the rich, a sane economic agenda which not benefits the rich, and full military support for the Ukraine? Sorry, I am out of luck. Of course I am free to build my own party. Let’s see how successful that is without massive investment of money and good connections to the ruling classes to get positive media coverage.
Before the eastern block fell apart, at least in Europe/Germany, there was always the fear of the ruling class to experience another (French)revolution. Since this fear is gone, they literally have nothing to fear…
Is it possible to change anything about the situation? I am more than cynical by now:
- Most everyone is struggling to keep their level of wealth/position in society, so the middle class fights hard to be a little bit better of then the lower class, don’t even mention the upper middle class, which fights with nails and teeth for every little advantage and privilege they have
- The higher you go in hierarchies, the more sycophants you’ll discover, which don’t mind selling out other humans for status/privileges, and there are even true believers, so brainwashed by neoliberal agenda, that they will fight for the privileges of rich folk they will never belong to
- There is no way to organize enough people in real life to force any political change (especially not with an aging population)
- The ruling class figured out for a long time in western world, that instead of fighting facts/the truth, they just have to generate more bullshit, discussions, alternative narratives and lean back, because people will discuss and not agree
- Nearly all change to the status quo is opposed and fought by some group, which benefits from the status quo
- Neoliberal propaganda and views are so ubiquitous and pervasive in our media, stories, etc., that a lot of people cannot even think about alternatives any more.
That’s just for the western world, let’s not start about the dictatorships/regimes supported by western governments with money, weapons and knowledge, where things are even more shitty.
Of the views expressed here, yours is the one I believe is most accurate and insightful.
I disagree, however, that it’s hopeless. I think the pivot is this claim:
“There is no way to organize enough people in real life to force any political change (especially not with an aging population)”
There is a way. We just need an honest signal that can coordinate the behavior of the genuinely good people, who currently are fighting each other in opposing political parties (etc), rather than uniting to fight their oppressors. Public key cryptography will let us trust that the signal hasn’t been tampered with, despite the oligarchs owning the communication channels. We just need to find a way to make the signal loud enough, trustworthy enough and able to break through the current haze of disinformation that’s making us fight eachother.
Though this sounds hard, but it will get easier with time. As the system collapses, dissatisfaction with current ideologies will increase and motivate the collective search for a new, honest signal to unite around.
Perhaps the most valuable thing we can do now is research alternative, less corruptible, more egalitarian, more sustainable systems. We need to have an ideal to replace the current mess with when it crumbles. Otherwise the current power holders will simply ride out the anarchy, put on a different hat and continue to exploit.
Thanks a lot!
Accuracy for the western world and for an academic who comes from the working class. Most people I work with are academics and see things different, because they could always afford a lawyer and/or had and have connections themselves. Their whole life and lived experience tells them another truth.
I feel sad, that I have to disagree with you on the honest signal, I see several problems here:
- Define ‘disinformation’: There are obvious black-is-white lies, but most propaganda in the west is not ‘disinformation’, it is simply emphasizing the facts that favor your point of view. If you add another signal, you are just one more signal producing propaganda (although most probably I would be very happy with your propaganda)
- Cryptography … even IT people have trouble understanding this, and even worse: You cannot solve a social problem with technology
- ‘good people’ - a handful philosophers in the west alone had a very thorough discourse about ‘good’ over the last centuries. The discussion is still going on. ;-)
- One of the most important insights is, that it is harder for a group of people to agree than for a few to take power and enforce it. If this wouldn’t be a human/social truth, our western societies wouldn’t be such a shit show by now.
IMHO one of the roots of the problem is how humans are wired and how bigger societies develop in a sociological way. The best way we have found (so far) is democracy, and AFAIK especially democracy with a mostly even wealth distribution (see the northern countries of Europe). AFAIK it is a social rule, that as soon as a group gets bigger, subgroups will be built. It is a human rule that attractive people will be treated better than non attractive one, you will want to help your friends even when it comes at a cost for someone you don’t even know or dislike.
My recipe would be a more even wealth distribution and a way to stop the wealthy force others to do labor for them. Thanks to police and military, I have the strong feeling, the ones with the guns and military will win.
p.s.: I recommend the following books if the topic interests you:
- The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
- The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems
This post is the most accurate representation of modern world society I have ever encountered posted on social media, full stop. Please, everyone, take the time to read it and understand it.
Thanks a lot for your kind words! :-)
I think it is pretty accurate of the system we have in Germany and perhaps in other western countries.
The problem is, one has to experience for oneself a lot of this things, to really understand them. By the time most people understand enough of the system, they probably have children/other liabilities which force them to play along. (Sadly I am not the exception.)
Life is short and ignorance is bliss.
- Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
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Great. Now we have barred-out LLMs.
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Nothing has changed. The world is the same as its ever been. Maybe you have discovered a new definition of what you consider evil. What do you mean by evil? I doubt the ones you consider evil would consider themselves as such. There exists no good and no evil. There are only events that transpire and actions that take place. The world has no preference for such human concepts.
Who upvoted this edgy highschool crap?
It’s a global far right power grab fueled by money from Russia using weaponized disinformation. It’s been going on for decades at a smaller scale before Facebook, etc, even existed. It’s also fueled by conservative dark money groups funded by conservative billionaires. You should read the book Dark Money, I highly recommend it.
Even the antivax stuff is from Russia and it way predates the big platforms. It was started in the crunchy mom communities on Livejournal, where they first experimented with seeing if westerners would glom on to weird mommy trends like not using shampoo, nursing your kids to ridiculous ages, “unassisted birth”, which is where people deliver babies without any medical care at all, “unschooling”, etc. That took off in a big way and then they began with the antivax stuff, and used Livejournal as a tool of Russian government propaganda.
Then they started funding white supremacist groups, and the groups like the yellow vests, Moms for Liberty, etc. Really recommend learning about dark money and Russian weaponized disinformation.
It’s pretty convienient how all bad things stem from a single, external source, preventing the need for any sort of internal societal reckoning. How fortunate that we were born on the good guys’ side and all we need to do is focus on our states’ geopolitical enemies, and if they can be kept in check, it’ll solve every one of our domestic issues, upto and including old wives tales.
I don’t think I’m saying that at all, just that this is where it stems from and that Republicans and their supporters have glommed onto it. Obviously I’m saying it’s multifaceted.
Do you have any sort of evidence that connects the Russian government to things like not using shampoo?
The best place to learn more about the early days of Russian weaponized disinformation on Livejournal is this podcast: https://soundcloud.com/replyall/100-friends-and-blasphemers
Re the shampoo and other crunchy shit, this is stuff my weaponized disinformation expert friend Brooke Binkowski and I have talked about extensively because we both used the site. Her professional opinion is that this was the early thought experiment stuff the Russians did to see what westerners would buy into, they dipped their toes into it with the crunchy mom stuff, and it really took off. This was later well documented. So some of this is just a professional’s opinion, but if you were there and saw it, you’d know is all I can say. I realize this isn’t the most satisfying answer, but see this article because Russian weaponized disinformation for vaccines is well documented.
This was later well documented.
OK, so if it’s well documented, then where is the documentation?
I don’t really want to listen to a 25 minute podcast and I read your BBC source and it only talked about vaccines, there wasn’t a single word about things like shampoo.
I’d be curious to know exactly how deep this goes, since science skepticism and anti-intellectualism goes way back. Was Russia behind the controversy over evolution, going back to the Scopes trial? Were they behind the Satanic Panic? Maybe Russia funded Jack Chick to talk about how Dungeons and Dragons is teaching children to practice real magic. I know, let’s go even further back, the Catholic Church only took issue with Galileo because Russia paid them to.
Or maybe, there’s a long history of anti-science sentiment, particularly in the US, and Americans have autonomy and can use to believe stupid things and do so all the time and have always done so.
I stg, it’s bad enough blaming Trump on Russia but this is seriously taking it to the next level. How did Russia even manage to acquire the power to influence American culture to such a degree? And if they can do that while having significantly less money and being significantly more distant, then surely our own intelligence agencies can do the same, right? Please help me make sense of this.
Ok, I don’t want to argue, and I’m sorry I don’t have more links. I really do recommend the podcast as it’s excellent in general. I trust Brooke with my life and everything disinformation related and I believe her. I was on Livejournal in those days and I can say that scary things happened because of the crunchy mom shit that seemed to originate from there. I don’t want to fight with you, and if you think differently that’s fine, I’m not against changing my mind or anything. This is a pretty good study though on the phenomenon of Russian trolls as well on vaccine disinformation that does prove the point that they do this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6137759/?ref=quillette.com
Regarding Russian funding these things, dark money is a powerful thing. Honestly it’s so crazy to read about. The country being poor doesn’t mean that Russian wealthy people don’t fund disinformation. This is an article on Russian oligarchs and their dark money, about 1 trillion, hidden abroad.
But we also have oligarchs and dark money, yeah? Even if they are bots, how could someone possibly know that they’re specifically Russian bots? Have you considered the possibility that these bots could be funded by American billionaires, either true believers (because, again, there is a very old and deeply rooted mistrust of science especially in rural conservative areas) or for some ulterior motive, same as the Russians would be?
This is where, to me, to be frank, it makes more sense to treat the claim as more of a psychological coping mechanism. It has to be specifically Russian bots because the point is to externalize the problem as far as possible. American billionaires funding health misinfo would create the same psychological discomfort as if it didn’t come from bots at all.
To be clear, I don’t dispute that bots exist, or that bots have spread health misinfo. But I think the extent is exaggerrated, and I think it serves as an all too easy excuse to dismiss stuff that’s incongruent with one’s worldview. And I’m not inclined to think that people need some sort of external force to believe and spread health misinfo or distrust of science. Like, there’s a full-on creationist museum in Kentucky, this isn’t just some new online thing.
I hope you understand that you are off the deep end into conspiracy land to the same degree as Qanon types.
False equivalence is part of the disinformation. The enemy of the perfect should not be the simply good
What?
I think they butchered the “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” quote (or maybe I am butchering it here lol)
I fucking hate that phrase. Those who say it have incredibly low standards and should be ignored.
I saw that was what they were going for but I have absolutely no idea how it relates to my comment lol.
Western shitlibs try not to blame all their problems on foreigners challenge (impossible)
My opinion on this generally boils down to that the system has been set up to reward evil/antisocial behavior, and this part of the system is so entrenched and well established and organized that it has not been effectively and completely toppled or eradicated in so long, it has been able to consolidate power and resources to a point where very few extremely evil people are personally in charge of so much of what happens that it seeps into everything. Actually “seeps” is the wrong word, it’s injected into everything. It’s like has been said many times in recent memory, the cruelty is the point.
For a simplified example, evil executives reward evil behavior by their managers, who in turn punish their employees, who lose control of so much of their lives to these companies and managers that they end up hurting their families and friends out of confusion and anger and other complex emotional reactions, and harm is perpetuated in every area of life.
It’s self sustaining, and even worse it replicates itself. In some ways I think of these systems as viruses. Also as cults. We all buy in to some degree.
There is no ethical consumption while living a capitalist way of life.
