Disinformation Darwinism - Survival of the Falsest

[Foggy]

So it has been very disconcerting for me to see a large portion of this great land of ours going insane and spreading hatred and lies.

As y'all know, I run a website with a motto: Falsehoods unchallenged only fester and grow. I have lived my life according to that motto for a dozen years, more than a sixth of my time on this planet.

But here's an interesting article about what is happening. Not why, unfortunately. That's probably better left to the mass psychologists, if that's even a profession.

I think this is important - so here is the link (gift article from Washington Post) with a few quotes:

Here’s why the Trump GOP’s crazy quotient is expanding

Donald Trump and his post-truth pioneers have expanded the frontiers of fakery this week.

The way to get ahead in Trump’s GOP — the way to win an open-seat primary or to oust a Republican incumbent — is to push the boundaries of flimflam ever further. Republicans are caught in a vicious cycle: By discrediting the truth, they’ve created an incentive for each iteration of Republican challengers in each election cycle to distinguish themselves by embracing an even more sensational blend of falsehoods and conspiracy beliefs. It’s disinformation Darwinism: Falsify more, or fade away; become more outrageous, or perish. The ceiling of crazy in one cycle becomes the floor in the next.

[Tuesday], Trump reposted QAnon slogans “Where we go one we go all” and “I am the storm”; a message from reputed QAnon founder “Q”; allegations that Democrats, not Russia, are the “enemy”; false claims about law enforcement and a voting-machine maker; altered photos of President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland (with hammer-and-sickle lapel pin) and others; and various versions of the 2020 election lie.

There were five dozen such posts and reposts in Trump’s QAnon spree — a whole lot of fakery for one morning. But — who knows? — maybe tomorrow the Office of Donald J. Trump will issue a sworn certification attesting that, after a “diligent search,” it could not find a single QAnon post Trump had shared, ever.

Once you’ve disqualified the truth, your only means of advancement is an ever bolder lie.

There's a lot more in the article, of course, so go ahead and read it.

I think the idea of Disinformation Darwinism is a good structure for thinking about what is happening in this great nation. Yanno, when I worked for the big law firm, my managing partner in our SoCal satellite outpost told me, the top three guys were "excitement junkies" and that was the reason we were involved in a few cases that I won't describe but were wild.

But a third of the electorate in the United States of America seems to be disinformation junkies now. Disinformation Darwinism works because of that - - Earthlings want to be lied to, when they don't have any other solutions to their problems.

And that's why Disinformation Darwinism is working (temporarily) on the right.

[RTH10260]

I am slowly getting convinced that "Q" is a Russian PsyOps, as it was a Russian setup of a laptop attributed to H.B.

While there have been speculations about the mastermind representing Q it has in all these months it has never been tracked down and exposed.

[Foggy]

Did you read about the lady Sugar M told us she knows, who has been scammed out of $600,000?

I've been thinking and talking to ol' Wifehorn about that. That really bothered me. I think it's the same phenomenon that is driving the MAGAts. After you believe the first few lies ... after you buy in fully ... then it's really, really difficult, psychologically speaking, to admit you've been hoodwinked.

I bet there are a LOT of Earthlings out there who have spent more than $600,000 on the Great Orange Pretender.

[Foggy]

'Course, IMHO the current leader in the Disinformation Darwinism Sweepstakes is Ms. Kari Lake in Arizona. That lady is giving crazy a bad name. She is completely bananas psycho-twistoid coo-coo-for-cocoa-puffs rubber-room insane, and she very well might become the governor of the great state of Arizona.

But there are many competitors ...

[Kriselda Gray]

I think it would also be hard to go from living in a world of stolen elections, secret pedophile gangs, un-dead Kennedys, storms brewing and all the other malarkey back to living in a world where none of that ever happened and for the most part, everything is pretty mundane. I mean, Q followers see themselves as warriors engaged in a massive battle to defeat Evil, putting their friends, families, jobs and maybe even lives at stake to help the crusade succeed. What fun is there in going back to being an average, normal person with little at risk, living a normal life where the greatest battle you have to fight is paying your mortgage on time? The kind of "excitement" Q provides can be very addictive...

[Foggy]

I like fighting evil.

Birthers are evil. Sovereign citizens are evil. Maybe not evil, but they believe things that are evil. Right-wing pieholes who lie to us every goddamned day of the week and twice on the Sunday shows are fucking evil. Fox News and its elk are evil.

Fighting evil is a good thing, and yes, highly addictive.

But if everyone is lying about what's evil and what's not, then ... well then, falsehoods go unchallenged. And that's a bad thing.

[Slim Cognito]

It's as if they were a bunch of cosplay nerds, only they aren't as smart as nerds nor as creative.

And they think it's all real.

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[keith]

'Course, IMHO the current leader in the Disinformation Darwinism Sweepstakes is Ms. Kari Lake in Arizona. That lady is giving crazy a bad name. She is completely bananas psycho-twistoid coo-coo-for-cocoa-puffs rubber-room insane, and she very well might become the governor of the great state of Arizona.

But there are many competitors ...

Hey, look. I'm really struggling to decide on who to vote for in that Arizona Governor's race.

Do you really think she is that good? 'Cause I'm hearing good things about her opponent and I can't even remember her name. Hobbs is it? Far out. She just isn't doing enough to keep her name in front of the batshit crazy mob.

[bill_g]

I always vote for the candidate that wins vowel poker. The vowels in their name much match at least one vowel in the state or city name. A pair or three of a kind beats a single letter match. Occasionally a Polish candidate gets a straight (all five vowels plus Y) in their name. They tend to be a shoe in. Then there's the poor guy named Skryzpk. Never wins nothin.

[Foggy]

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

If'n Skryzpk lied about his name ...

[Foggy]

I shortened the title by removing a space and a hyphen.

My new theory is that we are, as I wrote elsewhere, morphing from the Information Age to the Disinformation Age.

The Intartoobz are facilitating this, but it's not new. The saying "A lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots" is actually much older than Faceplant or the bird site. But the Intarwebz allow liars of every stripe to form a community of liars.






Oh yeah, and a community that is against falsehoods.

[RTH10260]

Also too the search engines pick up stuff that nobody would know about in the old age of printed matter.

[Ben-Prime]

Also too the search engines pick up stuff that nobody would know about in the old age of printed matter.

And allows the rankings to be manipulated on how quickly those searches would come up.

[Foggy]

Yeah, and every social media platform has been abused for the purpose of spreading misinformation and disinformation. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram ... and then right-wing social media sites popped up if the mainstream sites did anything to fight disinformation. Gab and GETTR and now PravdaSocial were created because there wasn't enough disinformation on Twitter and Faceplant.

Same with OANN, except that wasn't successful. NewsMax. And the CEO of CNN said he's going to move it to the right.

When there were only 3 networks that gave you the news, they were responsible, for the most part. They didn't tell us about the lynchings. They didn't explain the consequences of bigotry and hatred and poverty. But they didn't lie to us, the way Fox News lies to its viewers every minute of every day.

I don't have a solution. I'm just documenting current events.

[p0rtia]

Yeah, and every social media platform has been abused for the purpose of spreading misinformation and disinformation. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram ... and then right-wing social media sites popped up if the mainstream sites did anything to fight disinformation. Gab and GETTR and now PravdaSocial were created because there wasn't enough disinformation on Twitter and Faceplant.

Same with OANN, except that wasn't successful. NewsMax. And the CEO of CNN said he's going to move it to the right.

When there were only 3 networks that gave you the news, they were responsible, for the most part. They didn't tell us about the lynchings. They didn't explain the consequences of bigotry and hatred and poverty. But they didn't lie to us, the way Fox News lies to its viewers every minute of every day.

I don't have a solution. I'm just documenting current events.

You do your bit, Foggy. And then some.

[bob]

The social media, like the bird site, are full of people who are very confident while being very wrong.

I don't expect them to ever admit they are wrong. Because they don't: they walk away, or use the block/mute tools the hide the jerks that showed they were wrong. As oft expressed here, "No one says 'Thanks for debunking me.'"

But sometimes I think about what they think about when they are alone with their thoughts. Do they doubt their abilities to acquire and process information? Do they stick to their beliefs, with the additional belief that unrevealed information will eventually prove them correct? Do they not care because the righteousness of their cause justifies some lies?

No answer provides me with hope.

[Foggy]

True dat.

And now think about this - how would you like to be the Republican who beats Trump in the Iowa caucuses in January 2024? (Yeah, they might not be first this time, but you can see the problem.) Do you think you can afford enough armed security forces to get you to the New Hampshire (next) primary alive and in one piece? 'Cuz that might be a tough sled.

What kind of campaign do you run, when you're a Republican and hundreds of Republicans nationwide are threatening to murder you everywhere you go? Does that sound like fun?

So what I'm saying is, I think it's going to be exceedingly dangerous to be a sane Republican candy date for political office. Unless you are MAGAts - unless you are willing to tell stupid lies all throughout your campaign, in which case you might be safe but the other Earthlings point and laugh behind your back.


If you run against Trump directly and win a few primaries/caucuses, chances are you will be murdered before the convention.

It's going to get worse before it gets better. And I'm an optimist.

[Slarti the White]

Danraft and I have been talking about information as a virus a lot of late, which I see as a very strong analogy. It's not survival of the "falsest", it's just the information that is "best" at infecting new hosts and getting them to spread it to others is going to dominate and, unfortunately, challenging falsehoods does stop them -- or even slow them down really. In this view, what we are facing is a pandemic of misinformation and disinformation memes and we're not really doing any better fighting that than we did with the COVID... but there are some lessons we can learn. First off, vaccines work: if we can inoculate people against misinformation memes then we can greatly slow their spread. While this has been shown to be at least somewhat effective, it doesn't help someone who has already succumbed to the virus. Another thing that can slow misinformation propagation is the equivalent of non-pharmaceutical interventions -- good information hygiene. If we mask up -- learn to look at the provenance of the information we come across, recognize tainted information (logical fallacies), and determine the merits of arguments and their evidentiary basis we can evaluate how strongly they support or refute the propositions that are going around.

But, in my mind, the real goal has to be "curing" those who have already succumbed to the virus. Over the last few years, I have done a lot of thinking about what this has to look like, and have come to some conclusions about what this can't be: it can't be fighting "evil" or debunking or shaming or ridiculing those who have fallen to this dread disease. Just like someone who got COVID (and is spreading it) isn't necessarily to blame, neither are those who have been the target of the greatest propaganda machine that the world has ever seen. I think that most everyone (save people like sociopaths and psychopaths) believes that what they consider true knowledge is rational according to their assumptions and the information they trust and that they only way you can ever reach them and gain their trust is by showing that you respect their beliefs (even though you don't share them) and that your beliefs, event though they are different, are the rational product of your information and assumptions as well.

The goal cannot be to get inside their circle of trust and deploy some clever argument to change their minds, but simply to show them that there is more that unites us than divides us. An authoritarian cult of personality relies on demonizing anyone not in the in-group (i.e. the Russians are not your enemy, the Democrats are). If the people you trust tell you that the Democrats are pedophiles that are trying to destroy your way of life, it doesn't matter what Trump or any other Republican has done, you're not going to vote for those ebil commie groomers, are you? Throw in some "whataboutism" and it seems like -- to those under the influence of viral propaganda -- that the "good guys" are being unfairly persecuted (WITCH HUNT!) by those who have done much, much worse. Trying to attack that head-on is a recipe for failure that completely ignores how we have all been shaped by evolution.

We have not evolved to make rational and dispassionate evaluations of propositions based on formal logic and evidence. We have evolved to make quick fight or flight decisions so we can act in a timely fashion. After the fact, we use our intellect to rationalize why the decision we made (and have become emotionally attached to) is correct. When our arguments are shown to be flawed, we don't give up those positions, we simply abandon the old arguments and find new ones. On the other hand, any source that supports what we already believe becomes more trustworthy in our eyes, reinforcing the cycle. The cycle cannot be broken from inside anyone's information "bubble", no matter how rational they perceive it to be -- it can only be broken by (in my opinion) showing that we are willing to constantly look for the errors in what we ourselves believe and demonstrating that such an error-correcting mechanism (which is really all the scientific method is, after all) yields better results.

Anyway, just my $0.02.

[Flatpoint High]

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

If'n Skryzpk lied about his name ...

What about Mister Mxyzptlk?

Mr-Mxyzptlk-Superman-50.jpg (118.77 KiB) Viewed 485 times

[Foggy]

Oh I like the virus analogy. Gonna have to do some pondering on that one.

One thing I've seen that might fit in with that - Earthlings who really burrow into the details of their conspiracy theory of choice, and then they do feel like they know more than other people, and they decide they're more logical than others, and it really does give them a sense of superiority over those of us who are just too dumb to see the truth.

But I look at the evidence and decide they're partly insane for believing a lot of nonsense.

So yes, it's difficult to communicate when you think someone else's ideas are just dumb.

And I spent the past few years definitely blaming those who deliberately spread the virus, because they did it for political reasons. The sane Earthlings were screaming that we had to contain this deadly virus, but the President of the United States of America thought it might interfere with his re-election, so he said it wasn't real, and his supporters have been deliberately spreading death and disease ever since, so a part of me has no sympathy or empathy for that group.

But I'll think about this virus analogy. With a real virus, of course, you either die or get better. Or maybe these silly Earthlings are suffering from Long Term Disinformation?

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Meet Dr. Steve Hassan from RVInit's post. The answer to your questions.

[Danraft]

I’d love to comment fully on the small aspect that I’ve been considering (the symbiotic and viral nature of man’s relationship with knowledge), but I’m frankly zip for energy… (health issues). I fear it may take a prolonged period before I feel the full life force moving me.

The general area is so very critical to what the future of humans could look like and the challenge is realize that there isn’t a comprehensive single answer.

It will take thousands (if not tens of thousands) of small interventions in many virtual and geographical spaces. Do what one can. Carry it across the finish line. And, begin again. As an individual, in small collaborative projects, or large corporate style endeavors— just keep at it.

[RVInit]

I’d love to comment fully on the small aspect that I’ve been considering (the symbiotic and viral nature of man’s relationship with knowledge), but I’m frankly zip for energy… (health issues). I fear it may take a prolonged period before I feel the full life force moving me.

The general area is so very critical to what the future of humans could look like and the challenge is realize that there isn’t a comprehensive single answer.

It will take thousands (if not tens of thousands) of small interventions in many virtual and geographical spaces. Do what one can. Carry it across the finish line. And, begin again. As an individual, in small collaborative projects, or large corporate style endeavors— just keep at it.

True that. It will be a long hard road. And require all of us to do our best to help our brainwashed brethren to come out into the light.

The importance of Hassan's message about disconnecting from all the noise shouldn't be underestimated. I think that is a necessary part of it. It's amazing how the brain will rewire itself when it's not constantly fully immersed in the constant buzz of conspiracy, othering, and other tactics the TFG is using to keep his flock steeped in the sewage of MAGAt. We should be inviting these people on weeklong camping trips, no social media allowed.

I see my younger sister every Saturday. It's amazing how in the space of a couple of hours of us just talking she's actually saying things like "Biden is not personally responsible for inflation" and indicating an understanding about how supply and demand affects prices. We haven't discussed the classified documents yet, that will be a hard one.

She fully believes that Hillary's email contained "classified DOCUMENTS". And I blame the media and Jim Comey for that. There were no instances of classified documents being sent to her home email, because that is not possible to do, as was fully explained by the FBI themselves in their 300 page final report on the Clinton email investigation. There was an instance of a person employed in a small government agency typing a confidential paragraph into an email that was composed in her non-classified email account. And eventually someone copied Clinton on that email chain. The woman who typed that paragraph was fully investigated, the FBI determined it was a completely honest mistake as her copy of the document that it came from was not marked in any way except for a "copyright" symbol, which she did not suspect that was actually supposed to be a symbol that indicated this was confidential matter and not to be included in any email. It was for department eyes only, but did not get properly marked, as the FBI explained that it was in process of being declassified at the time and in her department was no longer classified, but still supposed to be kept confidential until fully declassified among all agencies that had that information. That is WAAAAAAAY different than what the TFG did. Way different. But we have so few actual journalists, and fewer still that work for cable news, here we are with the belief even among Clinton supporters that her emails contained some "classified documents".

[Foggy]

But we have so few actual journalists ...

That's because the real and important news is boring.

And you get more viewers if you have a pretty lady reading the news instead of Edward Murrow.

Pretty women are a vector for the Disinformation virus.

I'ma go stand in the corner now whilst y'all have a serious discussion.

[Danraft]

“Real and important news is boring…”
As I said, it is a broad network of topics, some neurological, some technological, societal, etc…
This short video recently came across my mental fovea..
[media] [/media]