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Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

marginalrevolution.com

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Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#71

Post by paradite »

mturmon wrote: post #68
lacampbell wrote: post #62

This makes me wonder more at the pro-Chinese position of a lot of western media, particularly the New York Times. Its fairly telling that Taiwan is most often described as a "renegade province" as opposed to a "peaceful high-income democracy", for example. Having talked to a lot of English speaking, wealthy, educated, overseas Chinese people I am always disturbed at how many of them take communist party positions, de…

Googling: [site:nytimes.com] [renegade] [province] turns up only things like: "Beijing has maintained that Taiwan is a renegade province..." which is perfectly factual. I do agree with your larger point that a lot of stories in Western media are uncritical of the shortcomings and risks of the Chinese political system.

That's interesting. Can you recommend me some pro-China Western media? I am having trouble finding one.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#72

Post by clairity »

i'd say our political machine in the US has done a great job for the last 35 years at distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance.

if recent political movements (tea party, the 99%) and national elections have taught us anything, it's that this is increasingly on the minds of americans (and seemingly others, but i won't speak for them), yet politicians seem to want to talk about anything but that, lest they lose the financial backing of the economic elite.

at its core, this is about fairness, which is one of those fundamental psychological forces we can't and shouldn't ignore. game theory studies show time and again that we are willing to play into lose-lose situations if it means maintaining a semblance of fairness among participants. the trump election seems to be an example of that. the arab spring uprisings seem to be larger, more international examples.

we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity every single time they try to distract us with something else (particularly terrorism, which has killed far fewer people in the last 15 years than a single year of car accidents has, yet we have sacrificed so much monetarily and psychologically trying to battle that phantom).

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#73

Post by eli_gottlieb »

metaphorm wrote: post #52
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's still the distraction. The question isn't, "How paranoid should I be?" or "Whose agenda is served?". The question is, what is the truth?

>The question is, what is the truth? you won't learn this reading news articles online, and especially not from comment sections. the irony of the term "fake news" is that it creates the false notion that there was once such a thing as "real news". information channel manipulation is a very very very old tradition.

>the irony of the term "fake news" is that it creates the false notion that there was once such a thing as "real news".

I'm friends with a journalist. He has opinions, slants, lenses, and even biases. However, he lives around here, and the stuff he publishes is based on events he has actually witnessed, live, in real-time. There is no equivalence between my friend the journalist (real news), and some teenager in Macedonia getting paid to make up sensational bullshit (fake news).

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#75

Post by krapp »

allemagne wrote: post #65
aaron-lebo wrote: post #3

Pretty fascinating stuff. I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is, but Correct the Record was a very real thing, despite the bogeyman descriptions of it in some online communities. https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record Interestingly, the original website is now gone, but it used to say essentially that it advocated for Clinton…

A New York billionaire with decades of supporting liberal policies and democratic politicians was elected as a champion of the conservative working middle class. That's a propaganda victory. If the goal of Correct The Record was to brainwash the public then it failed spectacularly. If the puppetmasters of the world are behind it, they don't seem very effective at all.

>If the goal of Correct The Record was to brainwash the public then it failed spectacularly. If the puppetmasters of the world are behind it, they don't seem very effective at all.

They did brainwash the public, and would have succeeded, if not for the sheer determination and force of will behind the campaign of Donald Trump, whose steadfast commitment to truth and purity of character achieved the impossible and overturned the corrupt established order like Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders... is how you're supposed to resolve that paradox.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#76

Post by ZeroGravitas »

jobu wrote: post #64
monocle wrote: post #10

In China the government hires people to sway public opinion. In the US, special interests and those with money do it. Is it worse that the Chinese government does it to "keep the peace", while those in the US do it to get your money? Super PACs, political activists, pharmaceutical companies, Reddit power users, brigades and pay-for-votes services... not sure if there's any real difference.

In the US it seems like the stuff that really goes viral is just bullshit schemed up by people trying to make a few bucks: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503... And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Here's a great…

As much as that author may wish to take all the credit, "Poor/Black people using food stamps to buy things that anger conservatives" is a long established genre in certain media circles, and it's clear he just put a small twist on it.

The most recent one I saw was people using food stamps to buy food from Amazon. I don't even understand why that's a bad thing, but someone wrote a story trying to gin up some outrage over it.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/16/amazon-be...

http://www.infowars.com/amazon-to-accept-food-stamps-under-n...

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#77

Post by ConfuciusSay02 »

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #58
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed it, too. It looks like the public has gone mad. (Or perhaps like they're trying to gaslight us.) But if the Chinese are doing this, and the Russians, and maybe the DNC and the RNC... that would explain why the public conversation has become so weird.

They are trying to gaslight us. Foreign powers want to misinform and distract the public in democracies; a misinformed populace puts pressure on elected governments to govern poorly. If democratic governments flounder because of this, that gives authoritarians an opportunity to get more power and influence over world politics. Not to say that western nations aren't engaged in their own information operations. Just th…

Authoritarian regimes usually rest on more fragile underpinnings. If anything it's the inverse, authoritarian regimes have a lot MORE to fear from a "misinformed" public.

This is borne out by the fact that we see authoritarian regimes crack down much harder on social media and other forms of free communication.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#78

Post by dv_dt »

lightbyte wrote: post #70
dv_dt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't feel so safe from US Gov't backed propaganda either. The US recently enacted the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act," which, in following recent bill naming history in the US, seems to be more about the opposite of its title: setting up the gov't infrastructure to push it's own propoganda and controlling speech it deems as sourced from "enemies".

That all sounds like fear mongering hyperbole. I just read over the text of the bill here ( https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5181... ) and nothing in it suggests that would happen. Most of it is purely about identifying foreign propaganda.

I see the directive "to develop, plan, and synchronize, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and other relevant departments and agencies, to ... proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests"

I see no reporting requirements for public oversight of exactly what narratives are advanced, nor does the cast of officers listed particularly hint that such information would be forthcoming, nor are there requirements to identify that its the government doing the pushing when a particular narrative is being advanced to the American public.

While there is value in countering foreign propaganda, I feel that to do it in secret is US propaganda and of less lasting value than doing it in the open.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#79

Post by ZeroGravitas »

battlebot wrote: post #22
JulianMorrison wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my opinion that attempts to sway public opinion are spitting in the wind, but normally in the same direction as the wind, resulting in an illusion of efficacy. You can see their lack of real impact when they desperately try (and fail) to turn the public. Cf Trump. Control of ideas is massively oversold by both proponents and opponents, who both have a vested interest in believing it works. The reality is that th…

No, they're not, it is highly effective--I saw it firsthand during the run up to the Gulf War in 2003. I was on a message board and suddenly there would be all these "pro war" type members showing up posting basically propaganda and giving people a hard time and mostly creating chaos. The latest time I saw this behavior was on Reddit during the just completed 2016 elections. And then my suspicions were validated when…

I remember the gulf war, I remember long established members of the boards I inhabited at the time, usually but not always with a right-wing lean, going absolutely bananas at the time. And even the more reasonable ones basically lost the plot. If you really want a conspiracy theory, I'd point to the government and Fox news being desperate to pivot from 9/11 to one of the wars they'd been planning.

I also remember Reddit during the last election. Political sub-reddits that only had Bernie fans and internet libertarians during non-election years suddenly got swamped by "normal" people, and the regulars started conspiracy theories about who all these people were with their "weird" opinions.

The fact is, reddit's demographics skew young & educated, any outside observer would expect them to be more liberal than the average American, and they mostly are, even accounting for the male skew and the pockets of reactionaries that make their home there.

The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate. I'm always saddened that I can't tell the difference between those who've been naively sucked in and those who repeat these things out of a political motive. I used to assume they were mostly in-the-know, but my faith in humanity has ebbed and I can no longer attribute to malice what is adequately explained by them mostly being brainwashed by the most feeble of conspiracy theories.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#80

Post by notahacker »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #54
gnaritas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is off the mark, propaganda works, it cost Hillary the election; that last minute FBI story swayed people and secured Trump as the winner despite the story being false.

It made the numbers move, but those are the same numbers that predicted a Hillary win. Clearly those numbers reflected more factors than absolute voting intention. For example: how acceptable it was to oppose Hillary in public. Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.

Whether Comey influenced it or not is also a moot point, since Comey was a high-profile public servant making an official statement to the mainstream media, not a bunch of anyonymous forumites and Tweeters arguing with other anonymous forumites and tweeters across random internet backwaters.
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