Donald Trump takes Gaslighting to a whole new level.

In a word: "Gasphxiation."

   

“How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”

People who feel more and more powerless have asked me a version of this question: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”

I’ve struggled to offer an answer; so have those I’ve reached out to for counsel. I have yet to receive a menu of compelling options. But I am certain that what needs to inform the answers to these questions, and what needs to precede a comprehensive plan of action, is knowledge.

That means turning to experts on the history of disinformation, such as Thomas Rid, who can talk about how societies have addressed these questions in the past; political psychologists, such as Australia’s Karen Stenner, who can help develop the language for how to reach people awash in distortions and deceptions; and experts in psychology and neuroscience, such as Jay Van Bavel, whose work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, cooperation, intergroup bias, and social media. It includes turning to cognitive scientists such as Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, who study how people reason, make decisions, and form attitudes and beliefs; philosophers of science such as Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, who argue that social forces explain the persistence of false beliefs; Peter Pomerantsev, who specializes in overcoming the challenges of digital-era disinformation and polarization; and political scientists such as Brendan Nyhan, who works on subjects including misperception and conspiracy theories...

Click for the full article

 

THIS WEEK'S CULMINATION OF TRUMP'S "LIBERATION DAY"

 

TIMELY NEW READ

 

 

Read a review in the new issue of my Science Magazine. Yeah, of course I bought it.

For my PhD, I researched human and social engineering in the mid-twentieth century, spending years peering into leather-bound journals at articles that described rats running through mazes millions of times. These seemed like the least-sought-after things in the library. Making my way along the shelves, I looked into radical behaviorist experiments that were first dreamed up in laboratories before World War II and then streamed into the world (as I argued) after World War II. I titled the resulting dissertation “The Laboratory Imagination.”

When I graduated in the spring of 2000, just as a new millennium began, I looked around myself. The dot-com bubble had just burst in the California Bay Area where I lived. The bubble’s “irrational exuberance,” as then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put it around this time, had meant huge tips for my waiter boyfriend who worked at a celebrated place with end-grain wood tables where they made upscale corndogs for the employees in the afterhours. Suddenly, when the exuberance drained away, so did the outsized gratuities (not to mention the corndogs, which slipped in quality). I had no permanent job and was considering an academic post—my doctoral supervisor had arranged a one-year stint at a private college a few states away—but I felt unequipped for the job, which scared me. I decided instead to dedicate myself to a year of yoga by enrolling in a teacher training program. Studying esoteric practices and working as a (very) part-time legal secretary to support myself felt like a way to address the sterility of a world where social control procedures were proliferating—the way everything was so managed, from your Starbucks order to your health insurance (had I been lucky enough to have any).

All around me, I was seeing the experiments I had studied come to life. Some of the most sophisticated of my scientist subjects, the ones whose previously neglected work I had exhumed, called their goal “canalizing.” The point of canalizing was to channel people’s impulses into desired responses by crafting their outer surroundings and even their inner psychology. (The “transformation of duty into desire,” as one put it.) People must be taught to want what was best for them. This was human engineering through behavior modification, and it was the opposite of neglected.

Canalizing appeared to be everywhere in the 1990s. Uniqueness was just starting to be mass produced. The slogan for a cell phone company around that time captured the nascent vibe: “You’re a unique individual. This phone is just for you . . . and everyone like you.” Even the Army was recruiting based on scripted individualism rather than social duty in those days, debuting a new slogan, “An Army of One,” in 2001. “I am an Army of one,” declared a corporal running across the Mojave at dawn while carrying a thirty-five-pound pack in a widely run TV advertisement: “Even though there are 1,045,690 soldiers just like me, I am my own force.” As in the military, so in the academic world: Aspiring to be a bold free thinker around that time in Berkeley, California, led to quandaries. Aiming to be a “thinker of one” was full of pitfalls. You were unique but simultaneously part of 1,045,690 others who were “just like me.” There was an acceptable way to be “different.” Norms expanded to incorporate this quirkiness. And so was born, or reborn, the hipster.

I had spent almost half of my twenties studying the long-forgotten records of a huge experiment in inculcating unfreedom. At Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, a well-funded program of running rats through mazes, with the objective of establishing a universal science of behavior control, flourished during the 1930s. It featured many scientists announcing breakthroughs in what they described as “the maze that a human must learn” in order to live decently and capably in society. But not every experiment was a success. In a 1934 study by psychologist Neal Miller, one particular small Norwegian rat—an animal that had been “variable throughout,” according to its handlers—suddenly refused to run at all after facing myriad electric shocks in an alleyway. The animal’s recalcitrance sabotaged the data for the whole experiment, and the umbrage-filled note in the scientific publication—“Unfortunately . . . [t]his [refusal] spoiled the statistical reliability of the outcome”—piqued my interest. Even in a huge program like Yale’s, one that sought to apply its animal discoveries to humans, a lone two-ounce creature could derail an experiment. I wondered: How did the past, with its seemingly unrealized stakes, contend with the bigger stakes of the present?

To bridge the gap between past and present, I started to think about brainwashing, a topic I had not covered directly in my dissertation but was implied. Brainwashing was a well-worn term, and certainly everyone could recognize it—yet I found I didn’t really know what it meant. It was over-the-top, scandalous, frightening, possibly silly. But it also struck me as possibly the most successful method in history to mold a human being into some new form. It was not just a matter of compelling someone to do something they didn’t want to do or breaking a person down. After all, brute force had a long history, a lot longer than brainwashing. Brute force did not really change people’s minds and sometimes it actually inspired resistance. Sheer physical punishment (“getting medieval on your ass” was the way the character Marsellus Wallace put it in Pulp Fiction) was not reliably successful. The Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-ULTRA program would prove this. Even an average man of the late seventeenth century, the priest Urbain Grandier of Loudun, France, managed to resist making a forced confession at the hands of his tormentors as he was burned alive.*

What concerned me were modern methods, in which physical force was involved but was not the primary driver of change. As Czesław Miłosz observed in his 1953 classic, The Captive Mind, “We are concerned here with questions more significant than mere force.” The scarier thing was people gladly volunteering for terrible outcomes—begging for the gallows or sacrificing their previous beliefs and blindly embracing new ones. Observers from Aldous Huxley to a notorious Communist interrogator agreed that whereas it was possible to resist torture, new methods of the mid-twentieth century were close to 100 percent effective in attaining compliance. Just about no one could withstand them. “If God Himself was sitting in that chair we would make him say what we wanted him to say,” claimed the interrogator. No one was exempt anymore. Said Huxley in Brave New World Revisited: “Government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children.” Breaking the will, Brave New World style, was possible using behavioral technologies of modern mind control. Not only pain but a targeted mix of pleasure and pain would ensure adherence. Brainwashing is neither pure persuasion nor sheer coercion but both: coercive persuasion.

What was this method? Was it possible that, to have a rate of compliance nearing total, the subject must—on some level, in some way, even subtly, even unwittingly—agree? And what did this all have to do with me and my concerns with being a unique and free individual—like everyone else—at the dawn of the internet age? This was not just a random cell phone campaign or a bohemian style of conformity but hard evidence of an extreme process.

The natural place to begin was during the early Cold War. Any proper discussion of brainwashing, I thought, must commence with its entrance into the English language. And even this was hazy…

Lemov, Rebecca. The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion (pp. 11-15). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Stay tuned. Lotta book here...

 

Random web definition

 

 UPDATE:  A BIT OF ONLINE CROSS-REFERENCING CURIOSITY

 

PREFACE

I WAS WORKING IN the library when I bumped into one of my former patients. I hadn’t seen her for maybe five years. We sized each other up. I was a retired professor of psychiatry lugging a pile of books. She was a bright young scholar carrying lots of baggage from her past. We chatted for a bit, surrounded by shelves of books in the stacks, and she asked what I was working on. I told her I had gotten interested in brainwashing.

“Umm,” she said. “Isn’t that kind of a stale, musty topic—Communists, bad science, and all that stuff?” As I said, she was bright and inclined to come right to the point—tact had never been her strong suit. Why was I spending so much time on this arcane topic? Granted, I am eccentric; but what made me think anybody else would be interested in this subject?

Then I came home to watch the evening news, which featured its usual dose of suicide bombers and mass shootings, followed by political leaders making preposterous statements (“Vaccination causes autism,” “Global warming is a myth,” “The COVID-19 virus is not a problem”). It is bad enough that leaders can propound such nonsense; the bigger problem is that they persuade so many other people to endorse their misunderstandings of the world. I thought about my patient again. How did she make sense of a world where people could be persuaded to believe rubbish and follow it up with self-destructive violence?

As a psychiatrist, I should be one of the last people to believe the world operates rationally. I know better. Leaders have all too often been pied pipers, but something new emerged in the twentieth century. I still don’t know what to call this phenomenon. Brainwashing, coercive persuasion, thought control, dark persuasion—all these terms refer to the fact that certain techniques render individuals shockingly vulnerable to indoctrination…

Dimsdale, Joel  (2021). Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media (Function). Kindle Edition.

Hmmm... From a prior post; #OnDisinformation.

Dr. Matthew Motta on anti-science, anti-intellectual trends in the U.S.

 

Ran across this article in my Scientific American app today. I looked up the author, and bought his book.

Looks very interesting. We shall see. Goes to some prior posts (to cite just a few for now).

• The science policy implications of the looming 2024 Presidential election
• Truth and democracy in an era of misinformation
• Why trust science? Here's why.
• Is there a "science" of science communication?

Of course, the "anti-science" stuff (a continuing burr under my saddle) invariably maps to other topics. Another new read in that area.

 

Yeah. See

A "White Christian Nationalist" theocracy drawing nigh, commencing Nov 5th?

And, we mustn't forget the swell Project 2025, etc.

A breadth of sneering anti-"Woke Cultural Elites" vitriol.

"God SAID it; I BELIEVE it; that SETTLES it."

Trust the Plan

Threat from Within? 

Lots more to come. Just getting underway with this stuff.

A BRIEF MOMENT OF LEVITY

Worried about science policy? Don't fret, Trump may prevail soon.

Sorry. The Power of Photoshop Compels Me...

 

ANTI-SCIENTIFIC AMERICANS UPDATE

 

The further I read into Matthew Motta's book, the more I am impressed. A central citation / launch riff of his is Richard Hofstadter's 1964 Pulitzer-prize awarded Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. 

 

I was born in Feb 1946. The U.S. 1950's speak directly to me (I recall the GOP "I Like Ike" campaign stuff and Red Scare McCarthyism). I was graduated from high school in Somerville NJ in 1964, the year of this Hofstadter book publication. At the time, my mind was way elsewhere—uh, girls (quixotically) and guitars. Belatedly pissed that I'm only now reading it.

Nonetheless, thank you effusively, Matthew, for the cite. This stuff could scarcely be more timely, in light of our current, vexing MAGApocene.

UPDATE

"Mental Immunity," anyone?

Additional topical stuff from a prior post.

 

ERRATUM: KINDLE HIGHLIGHTING

NOTE: I really like the Kindle app "highlighting" functionality. I find it helpful in reading more carefully. I'd like to see them add two more highlight colors—light grey and pale green.

UPDATE

“Is science the Enemy?”

More to come...

_________

  

Science Magazine: Timely new AAAS Editorial

Truth and democracy in an era of misinformation

   

Concern about misinformation and its toxic effects on democracy is widespread. A survey of nearly 1500 experts by the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation (the latter being intentionally spread, whereas the former may arise accidentally) as the top global risk during the next 2 years. Examples of misinformation-fueled events abound. In the United States, baseless claims about election fraud in 2020 by the losing presidential candidate, Donald Trump, culminated in a violent insurrection against the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. At the time of this writing, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are fearful of the future after Trump baselessly alleged on national TV that immigrants there were eating their white neighbors’ pets—a racist trope dating back centuries...

 

Although specific instances of disinformation-fueled tragedies can be readily identified, the scientific landscape surrounding misinformation is sufficiently nuanced to require careful unpacking. Two intertwined issues are particularly challenging: the adjudication of what exactly constitutes misinformation and the identification of the intentions of the communicator, the latter of which is crucial to differentiating misinformation from disinformation.

We know that NASA landed astronauts on the Moon. We know that the COVID-19 pandemic was not caused by 5G telecommunications equipment. We know that Trump did not fake having COVID-19. We know that there was no widespread irregularity or fraud during the 2020 US presidential election. Those are facts, established with sufficient certainty that, in the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould, “it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” Any attempt to refute them can be unambiguously labeled as misinformation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that independent professional fact-checks of false claims have been found to not only correlate highly with one another but also with the ratings of bipartisan samples of the public.

 

But just because truth can often be readily ascertained, it does not follow that facts can always be unambiguously identified ... The existence of such ambiguity and contestation should provide the impetus for us to hone our evidentiary skills in adjudicating competing claims, in the same way that, throughout the history of science, uncertainty has stimulated development of better theories and methodologies to resolve challenging issues.

 

The existence of ambiguity does not license the claim that researchers should stop studying misinformation altogether, as some have suggested by appealing to the difficulty of adjudicating competing claims ... [R]esearch on misinformation identified the decades-long disinformation campaign by the tobacco industry that has contributed to the deaths of millions of people, despite the fact that the truth value of some specific assertions is difficult to adjudicate.

 

The existence of ambiguity also does not license the willful dissemination of falsehoods ... But even accepting that ethical imperative, how can we identify when a communicator is intentionally spreading disinformation rather than inadvertently misinforming others? How do we know that Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election is really a lie?

 

By definition, lies are intentional, and it is therefore unsurprising that they can leave fingerprints that differentiate them from truthful information.

At the level of individuals’ speech, many machine learning models exist that can identify willful deception from text, often with accuracies exceeding 90% ... 

 

At an institutional level, the legal system is no stranger to ascertaining intentionality on a daily basis. Inferring intentionality is the difference between manslaughter and murder, and the concept of perjury rests precisely on the identification of willful lies ...

The fact that the legal system is anchored in the notions of truth, honesty, and evidence entails two additional ways in which willful dishonesty can be identified. First, there are instances in which even literal truths can be found to be deceptive and hence subject to legal sanctions, for example, when sellers fail to disclose all relevant information about a product even though they truthfully report some of the information. Identifying truthful but misleading or deceptive information is particularly crucial in light of research that has found the impact of misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines to be greater overall than that of clearly false information. Second, because the penalties of lying to the court are severe, lawyers tend to be painstakingly honest in court. Hence, when they or their clients make statements in public that differ from those made in court, willful dishonesty in public can be inferred.

We know that Trump’s “big lie” about the election was a lie because his public accusations of fraud were made at the same time that his lawyers, who filed more than 60 (unsuccessful) lawsuits to overturn the election results, admitted in court that there was no evidence of fraud. Two lawyers who did claim fraud were sanctioned and fined by a federal judge ...

Although politics differs from jurisprudence, democracy similarly requires some degree of epistemic integrity. For example, citizens must know that elections are fair and that an incumbent will transfer power peacefully when voted out of office. Democracy also requires reliable shared knowledge for meaningful debate and to ensure normatively good policy outcomes ...

In summary, identifying the truth value of some assertions can be difficult, but that does not make clear falsehoods any less false. Similarly, it can be difficult to infer the intentions of a communicator, but that does not mean lies are suddenly truths, and it does not mean we cannot (or should not attempt to) identify lies. On the contrary, the distinction between truth and falsehood and the ability to infer intention has been at the heart of jurisprudence for centuries if not millennia, and the impetus and frameworks for making these distinctions are similarly critical to ensuring the integrity of democratic societies. Relinquishing these principles is unthinkable.

Read all of it. And, join AAAS. 

Goes to my prior post on Artificial Arguments.

See also #OnDisinformation. Mental Immunity, anyone?

32 days to election day. Ahhhh... The Daze of Our Lives.

__________

SATURDAY OCT 5TH UPDATE

Exactly one month to election day. I Finished Matthew Taylor's bracing book The Violent Take It By Force.

Couple of Money Quotes.

So, any and all manner of human logical & evidentiary "reason-based" arguments are irrelevant in the face of Biblical citations and summary "prophetic apostolic" assertions?

Silly me. A Science of Deliberation? Why bother?

 

Below: These are the lind of dopes we face.

 

_____

I minimally commend to you these two books for close study ASAP, one month out from Election Day.

 

Cited Ari's book here.

 

SUNDAY UPDATE

   

"On Sept. 28, JD Vance spoke at a Christian political event hosted by the most influential religious leader you’ve probably never heard of.

His name is Lance Wallnau, and he is one of the chief proponents of a radical religious doctrine called the Seven Mountain Mandate. He’s an election denier. He’s said Kamala Harris engaged in “witchcraft” in her debate with Donald Trump and that an “occult spirit” is working “on her and through her.” And he’s a leader of one of the most dangerous political factions in America: the religious movement that helped fuel the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In fact, as Matthew Taylor wrote in his important new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy,” Wallnau himself was instrumental to the insurrection. “I sorted through hundreds of social media profiles of Christians who were present for the riots and the protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,” Taylor said, “Strikingly, a common denominator you can find across many of those accounts are clips of Wallnau’s Facebook Live rants and links to episodes of ‘Flashpoint’” — a program on a Christian television network called the Victory Channel."... [NY TIMES]

 Read all of it.

 

Tangenitially apropos:
 

 

My TwitterX observation:

Uhhh… “RELIGION,” anyone? Jumps right off the pages, for me. “King,“ “Lord,“ “worship,” “God said,”… etc. anthropomorphism.

Justin Gregg.

 

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

 

Facebook friend posted about this.

On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism...

The Case For Christian Nationalism?

 

 

Not buyin' this one.You can read the Amazon preview if you've time to waste.

A lengthy review here: "The Rise of Right Wing Wokeism" (pdf).

I first encountered Stephen Wolfe, through his writing, when I was doing my doctoral work. We were both working on similar intellectual themes and looking at similar sources. I quoted Wolfe—who has a PhD from Louisiana State University and is now a “country scholar at Wolfeshire”—once or twice in my dissertation. Since then, I’ve read an article here or there from Wolfe and have tracked with some of his comments on Twitter. When I saw that he had a massive book coming out making The Case for Christian Nationalism, I was eager to read a serious exploration of such a timely and controversial topic.

This is a long review, so let me state my conclusion up front: I understand and sympathize with the desire for something like Christian Nationalism, but if this book represents the best of that ism, then Christian Nationalism isn’t the answer the church or our nation needs. For all the fine retrieval work Wolfe does in parts of the book, the overall project must be rejected...

And, we have @TheTheoBros on TwitterX.

I've started following them. LOL. Have to wonder whether it's a spoof site.

BTW: Learned a new word today: gynocracy.

 

More to come...

_________

  

As we turn toward the U.S. Nov 5th elections final approach,

we would do well to get all up in our Brill.

  

This book just came to my attention yesterday, while reading a review of another title. It jumped my queue, and, I'm now a good way through it. It is so timely.

 

 

I've cited the work of the astute Steven Brill multiple times across multiple posts previously.

 

 

Relatedly, how about some Tom Nichols, "The Death of Expertise?"

 

 

See also my prior riffs on disinformation.

UPDATE: MORE FROM UP IN OUR BRILL

Here is a selection of the completely false stories that appeared online and gained traction on social media platforms around the world over just a four-week period beginning in mid-June 2023. These and many more added to the debris that was already online in a vaster, much worse, wasteland:

Deaths blamed on bird flu were actually caused by cell phone radiation; U.K. government report shows COVID-19 vaccines caused five hundred excess heart disease deaths weekly; the World Economic Forum called for a new Bible written by artificial intelligence; elderberries are more effective protection against flu than a vaccine; Disney-Pixar animation movies contain hidden references to adrenochrome, a chemical product from adrenaline that QAnon conspiracy theorists say is harvested from blood trafficked for its anti-aging chemicals; the Iwo Jima memorial will be updated to feature the Pride flag; a photo has surfaced of Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding over the Trump national security documents case who is thought to favor Trump, at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania; Brendan Whitworth, the chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch, is a CIA operative; the actor Jamie Foxx was left blind and paralyzed by a COVID vaccine; no Amish children have been diagnosed with chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, or autism because Amish children do not get vaccinated; NATO was behind the Wagner Group rebellion in Russia; electric cars have been spontaneously combusting throughout Europe; Target is selling satanic clothing; the 2023 Canadian wildfires were caused by arsonists wanting to promote fear of climate change; a whistleblower with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was found dead; Michelle Obama is transgender; Vladimir Putin ordered the destruction of COVID-19 vaccine stockpiles in Russia; John Kerry said U.S. farms could be confiscated by the government to fight global warming; photos from the humiliating invasion of Beijing in 1900 by eight countries, including the United States, are displayed in a U.S. military classroom; a video shows a U.S. soldier opening a gate and allowing immigrants to illegally cross the border; the World Health Organization confirmed that COVID-19 vaccines can induce multiple sclerosis; the Italian food company Barilla withdrew its pasta due to insect contamination; California law allows kids to receive gender-affirming procedures without parental consent; the Presidential Records Act allows outgoing presidents to retain classified documents; a video shows Maricopa County election officials breaking into voting machines; U.S. missiles in Ukraine are trafficked to Mexican cartels; Europe and the U.K. are offering citizenship to mercenaries who fight in Ukraine; Ontario doctors suggested the unvaccinated should be given psychiatric medication; Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are not melting; a Washington state law allows the government to take children from the custody of parents who do not let their children get gender-affirming surgery; the Ukrainian intelligence chief is in a coma in Germany; Bill Gates is funding a new Chinese pathogen that will sicken Americans.

Again, this is new material that got traction on the internet over just a four-week period in 2023. — Whether it is a matter of be: by the legitimate businesses that are the essence of a free market economy, people around the world are contending with a sea of misinformation and disinformation aimed at triggering their insecurities, exploiting their grievances, and drowning out the trustworthy sources that they once relied on. This modern information environment has shattered trust, laying the groundwork for those hoping to thrive when enough people believe nothing or are willing to believe anything. [The Death of Truth, pp 98-100]

"Flood the zone with shit"—Steve Bannon

 

MONDAY PM UPDATE

 

I finished The Death of Truth. A riveting read. It could not be more timely. 

Over the last two decades we have seen the center eroded. The truths and trust shared by those in the center eroded, too. When government stopped working for people in that center, they drifted off to the fringes, lured by the fringe information they were barraged with online. Like so many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol or people who refused a safe vaccine, they became vulnerable to the false promises promoted by the demagogues, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists that the algorithms were steering them to. 

[In  chapter 15] we have listed the practical ways that governments can step in to make the internet a calmer, safer place. If that happens and if, at the same time, those who have been lured to the fringes begin to see their elected officials—given attention by calmer, more trust-building online content—working together and actually getting things done, the disaffected and the alienated will be less cynical and less likely to sign on to the demagogues’ alternatives. If some of what these center-oriented officials get done is in areas where there is dire need and broad consensus—such as initiatives aimed at fixing immigration or public education, creating a fairer tax system, or addressing elder-care and health-care costs—public cynicism and vulnerability to those bad actors and their toxic misinformation barrages will likely recede further. This could create a virtuous cycle in place of a downward spiral. Those who have been lured to the fringes will start to believe again in democracy, in government, and in other institutions and experts. They will be less likely to believe that the world is full of conspiracies that threaten them. 

They will start to believe in truth again. [The Death of Truth, pg. 236]

The final chapter (15) discusses Steve's broad range of promising tech and political reforms. The latter include  things such as "top two," "ranked choice" elections voting mechanisms, and direct plebiscite ballot referendum initiatives to counter and/or mitigate the pernicious effects of gerrymandering and deep-pockets dark money PACs. While I find that all intriguing, I cannot shake my abiding concerns going to interference by courts stuffed with reactionary FedSoc judges.

In any event, Steven Brill rocks. And, this book harks to a number of prior post relevant topics:

Might U.S. military veterans take up arms against us?

The Age of Grievance
Define "Civility"
The AI Mirror
The new Apple of my AI
Project 2025 posts

Just to cite a few (click any headline). Below, a conversation with the author.

 

 

 

TUESDAY UPDATE

 

Generally apropos of this overall riff? My daily stop at The Atlantic turned this up.

When the coronavirus pandemic started, the media scholar Lilie Chouliaraki, who teaches at the London School of Economics, knew she’d have to be more careful than many of her neighbors. A transplant recipient and lymphoma patient, she was at very high risk of serious illness. In her new book, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, she writes that rather than feeling victimized by this situation, she was grateful to have the option of sheltering in place. Still, as the pandemic wore on and opponents of masking and social distancing in Britain—as well as in the United States and many other nations—began to claim that they were victims of government overreach and oppression, Chouliaraki grew both confused and compelled by the role that victimhood language was playing in real decisions about the degree to which society should reopen.

 

COVID isn’t the only recent context in which victimhood has gotten rhetorically vexing. At the height of #MeToo, in 2017 and 2018, the U.S. seemed to engage in a linguistic battle over who got to call themselves victims: those who said they had suffered assault or harassment, or those who stood accused of committing those offenses. In Wronged, Chouliaraki links this debate to pandemic-era arguments about public health versus personal freedom in order to make the case that victimhood has transformed into a cultural trophy of sorts, a way for a person not just to gain sympathy but also to accumulate power against those who have wronged them. Of course, people call themselves victims for all sorts of very personal reasons—for example, to start coming to grips with a traumatic experience. But Chouliaraki is more interested in the ways victimhood can play out publicly—in particular, when powerful actors co-opt its rhetoric for their own aims.

Central to Chouliaraki’s exploration is the distinction she draws between victimhood and vulnerability. She argues that victimhood is not a condition but a claim—that you’re a victim not when something bad happens to you, but when you say, “I am wronged!” Anyone, of course, can make this declaration, no matter the scale (or even reality) of the wrong they’ve suffered. For this reason, per Chouliaraki, victimhood should be a less important barometer for public decision making than vulnerability, which is a condition. Some forms of it are physical or natural, and cannot be changed through human intervention. As a transplant patient, Chouliaraki is forever more vulnerable to illness than she used to be. Other sorts of vulnerability are more mutable. A borrower with poor credit is vulnerable to payday lenders, but regulatory change could make that untrue (or could make payday loans affordable). Such an intervention, crucially, would protect not just present borrowers but future ones. Focusing on vulnerability rather than victimhood, she suggests, is a better way to prevent harm…

Just what I need—another book dropped into the endlessly accruing pile.

We'll see how this coheres with Frank Bruni's The Age of Grievance. Ahhh... "victimhood."

Ever heard of the "Rescuer-Victim-Persecutor Triangle?" The "scripts people live?"

Steiner's book was the first one Cheryl and I read together in 1974 at our outset. It has aged rather well, IMO (It's been updated / re-issued w/ a new Forward, BTW).

Short take: To the extent you live a "scripted" life (your socially shaped "persona"), you are not "free" (in the moral agency sense). Don't know about you, but I've spent most of my 78+ years laboring to unlearn that shit.

Of late I can think of no more poignant "Victims" than those of our Poor Oppressed Majority of the Heritage Christian Nationalist Project 2025 drama.

 

LILIE CHOULIARAKI UPDATE

This woman personifies the word "scholar" at its best.

THE PLATFORMIZATION OF PAIN

Although our languages of pain are deeply grounded in the past, there is nonetheless something irreducibly new about the uses of victimhood today. The platformization of pain—that is, the performance of vulnerability on and through the commercial logic of social media platforms—has transformed the premises upon which victimhood is now claimed. It has done so in two ways: by reorganizing the communicative politics of pain and by expanding the realms of suffering in which victimhood can be claimed.

To begin with, platformization has enabled everyone with a mobile phone and a social media account to broadcast their pain to the 4.48 billion users across social media platforms. Such openness on internet platforms had earlier been greeted as a democratizing move, where marginalized groups found a way to voice their suffering and mobilize social forces for political change. Merlyna Lim, for example, had early on argued that to understand the massive Arab Spring protests of 2011 against the Hosni Mubarak regime, we need to explore the online habits of Egypt’s oppositional youth. Their engagement with Facebook and Twitter, she said, gave them “the means to shape repertoires of contention, frame the issues, propagate unifying symbols, and transform online activism into offline protests.”

In the course of the past decade, however, most scholars became ambivalent about this potential. Rather than a matter of benign technological connectivity, they contend, such expansion of voice has been driven by digital platforms’ corporate interests, which capitalize on user attention and engagement for profit. This means that even though social media platforms continue to make a difference, for instance in the case of the hashtag #MeToo, where they amplified women’s voices about their experiences of violence and abuse, they often do more harm than good. A sinister counterexample that makes the point is the emergence of misogynistic activisms that claim victimhood in order to legitimize violence against women. In this context, Alice Marwick and Robyn Caplan discuss the “manosphere,” a male-only community in websites such as incels.com that spreads its “misogynistic ontology by portraying feminism as a man-hating movement which victimizes men and boys” and that uses this portrayal as an excuse for attacking women. Such groups instrumentalize the communication of pain to turn women into wrong-doers who sexually manipulate their “vulnerable and innocent victims.” This online amplification of misogyny, critics argue, should be seen not only as a matter of patriarchal ideology but also as a matter of the algorithmic logic of platforms that in the pursuit of profit maximize the visibility of any claim to pain so as to monetize user attention: “The misogynist manosphere,” as Molly Dragiewicz and her colleagues’ research shows, “is significantly empowered by the ability to exploit the affordances and algorithmic characteristics of the contemporary digital media environment.”

The platformization of pain, to summarize, does not simply disseminate content but further reorganizes the communicative politics of pain in terms of how and by whom claims to pain are made, who gets the most visibility, and which online communities get legitimized and empowered or not. At the heart of this process lie the platforms’ technosocial architectures, specifically their capacity for anonymous and automated connectivity, which enables competing claims to pain to proliferate online, disconnected from their conditions of emergence—that is, both from the identity of the claimant (through anonymity) and from the context of the claim (through automation)—and so further dismantles the distinction between sufferer and perpetrator. At the same time, the platforms’ orientation toward virality—quantifying user engagement by response counts (retweets, likes) and size of communities (followers)—amplifies already popular claims to suffering without asking questions about who makes them or in which contexts of violence those claims are made. As José van Dijck puts it, “There is no quality assessment built into these [app] buttons[, so that] online quantification indiscriminately accumulates acclamation and applause and, by implication, depreciation and disapproval.”

Beyond restructuring the communication of victimhood, platformization has also expanded the realms of vulnerability within which claims to pain can be made. Digital violence, particularly in the form of online hate speech, has today extended these realms of suffering in that as hate speech goes online, it transfers already existing claims to trauma or injury onto social media platforms… [Chouliaraki, Wronged, pp. 30-33]

Jus' sayin'. Read her Sheet.

 

Scholar. Eminently so. LSE is lucky to have her.

 

More to come..

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