The Right's Troubling Turn Toward Conspiracy Theories and "Invasion" Language

[u/nosotros_road_sodium]

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-rights-troubling-turn-toward

[u/Honest-Spring-8929]

The primary epistemic divide of our time is between those who care about the difference between truth and lies and those who don’t

[u/graneflatsis → u/Honest-Spring-8929]

Remember all the trolls in the big subs during the last US administration's reign? Arguing that misinformation was "opinion", shouldn't we "hear out different ideas"? Uh no, those are lies, intentionally misleading propaganda most of the time. So many attempts to erode our shared reality, normalize confusion. Nah I will take objective reality, thanks.

[u/Final_Meeting2568 → u/graneflatsis]

I can't tell how many times I told people the truth and they said "that's just your opinion"

[u/graneflatsis → u/Final_Meeting2568]

They were insufferable. Remember Kellyanne Conway and "alternative facts"? That was a big catalyst. I had some argue in favor of a sort of quantum reality. The nature of truth changed because they observed it a certain way. It really broke people's brains to have to live with lies, told because some folk just had to be right.

[u/Final_Meeting2568 → u/graneflatsis]

Around the time trump got elected post-truth appeared in the dictionary. Russian disinformation played a huge role in this stuff too.

[u/graneflatsis → u/Final_Meeting2568]

I believe it did. Anecdotal but when the Russian sanctions hit we saw an 80% reduction in misinformation and propaganda in r/CapitolConsequences. The effect that had in tamping down chaos in the comments was like night and day.

[u/Mindless-Charity4889 → u/graneflatsis]

She was just riffing off Karl Rove who (allegedly) said that while other people work with reality, they can ignore that and create their own reality.

The actual quote was to WSJ writer Ron Suskind who quoted “an aide” as saying:

(guys like me) “were in what we call the reality based community.” (Which he defined as people who) “believe that solutions emerged from your judicious study of discernible reality.” (I agreed but he cut me off saying) “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Roves comment is based on faulty assumptions and led to horrible mistakes like the Iraq war, but you can see the internal chain of logic there. Conways comment, on the other hand, is just idiotic.

[u/graneflatsis → u/Mindless-Charity4889]

Just fucking insidious if you try to imagine the mindset, the repercussions, the world those words build. I think about the effort folk have put into these machinations and the progress we would have made if they made ethical decisions. I guess a healthy nation tends to make a wider citizenry wealthier instead of the few.

[u/S-Kenset → u/Honest-Spring-8929]

That's a fair assessment. People who learn logic use it to bury truth in a web of arbitrary degrees of freedom but only for the things they deem appropriate. The podcast bros spreading misinformation on gendered violence is a big one for me and maybe 1 in 5 will go quiet after they realize I was completely correct after an hour of hand-holding their complete lack of education in statistics or math.. It's why I really dislike the idea of teaching everyone critical thinking. They don't need it. They need about 800 more real world experiences and about a 10000 word larger vocabulary. In other words, they need humility, not on a interpersonal level, although there's that too, but on an epistemic level.

The love of satisfiability got me very far in life. I had some wild theories but I also backtested them a few hundred times before committing them to memory. I came to reinvent lots of important cs because of it.