Vect
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2020
Yes, but this, again is ignoring what's real. I guess this is how I see the distribution of information working. Misinformation has only so much pull in a world with a single, observable reality: in this case that Trump objectively did not do the fundamental job of commander-in-chief - to be able to understand or display common humanity to attempt to calm tensions and address unrest, which, yes, with a snowballing media narrative came across to many people as at best callous, at worst, racist. What I saw from overseas was the white law-and-order president siding with white law enforcement that had, one too many times, committed absurd crimes against black people, and I could understand why people just felt angry and helpless, and I did see some Trump people acknowledging there had been an injustice. What the left was upset about was their leaders' profound inability to care about the people he was supposed to be governing. Yes, looting is never good, but these protests were a reactive demonstration of anger and bitterness over a deep wound that looked like it was getting worse. So in this case, misinformation can only do so much damage - it's not creating the narrative, but it takes the narrative to logically specific extremes, which is manifesting now as white people are bad, thus; 'white people are born oppressors' and 'defund the police'., but still staying on the recognition of racial discrimination and problem policing.
But Trump and Co. claiming the election was rigged has absolutely no evidence and a lot of dodgy explanations, bercause it was bullshit. Nobody could come up with any concrete reason, and that's where the spread of disinformation is much more destructive, because people will want to latch on to anything to avoid the painful reality, and in so doing it'll bleed down the echochamber until they start believing in the most extreme nonsense to support the denial of their defeat - and because they've been trained to not trust institutional information (which now includes Fox News and their own party), that makes the legitimacy of every establishment in America seem more disposable - more like an enemy, because you've been given encouragement to believe in your own narrative that they've conspired against you to steal the election. Like, nobody actually believed the Capitol rioters were Antifa in disguise, but for a while it helped them feel better so they went with that - literally anything that confirms the narrative and now I'm sure there are Trump people out there who are sincerely convinced that the Capitol riot was a false-flag operation.
Sorry for spurging, but this is why I see it this way - in a classic example, for years in Germany, there was what was known as the stab-in-the-back myth, that the German people had fought valiantly during World War I and could have won the war, had they not been made to surrender by royalists, politicians and influential Jews - the privileged people that it would be easy to hate after the war. It was bullshit, Germany was on the verge of being invaded, High Command knew it, but decided to tell them that "no enemy has defeated you." Because it was bullshit, this myth took on many forms and was kept alive by the chaos that followed the war as the unofficial reason that Germany had been so humiliated, since nobody had a more satisfactory explanation, and was so memetic that other nations started to believe it. The most famous version of these would become part of Mein Kampf. As a political manifesto, it had to grab attention, so it had to be extreme. This is not a social media thing, but social media amplifies the most incendiary or radical version of disinformation because that's what gets eyes, so the degree of radical misinformation is so much higher than if it were mellowed out through conversation, discourse and gossip or through a generally accepted explanation.
This works with trans snuff as well. I had no reference or framework for gender dysphoria so I bought the tranny stuff that they spouted on Twitter hook, line and sinker, which then evolved into the most radical versions of this (gender is a construct, a trans-woman is a woman, you're a bigot if you don't chow down girlcock, yada yada). I just wanted to avoid conflict and be a good 'affirming' person. Then I had a reason to think about it critically, and realised it was wanting. I had no motivation to keep believing what I had before, so I changed my mind. Had I been trans myself, or thought of myself as one, I would have had a heavy investment in believing in information that I wanted to be true, because I won't have any other narrative to justify my choices.
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