Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. The big change is bad faith argument developing into unapologetic bad faith developing into weaponised bad faith. It accelerated rapidly with some trends like the Tea Party, Gamergate, Brexit, Andrew Wakefield, covid antivax, and the Ukraine situation, and is in evidence on both sides of the trans rights debate, in doxxing, in almost every single argument on X that goes past ten tweets, etc. It's something man…
> It's something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right. It depends a bit by what you mean by left and right, but if you take something like Marxism that was always 100% a propaganda effort created by people who owned newspapers and the pervasiveness of propaganda has been a through line e.g. in the Soviet Union, agitprop etc. A big part of the Marxist theory is that ther…
I think perhaps I didn't really make it totally clear that what I'm mostly talking about is a bit closer to the personal level -- the way people fight their corners, the way twitter level debate works, the way local politicians behave. The individual, ghastly shamelessness of it, more than the organised wall of lies.
Everyone getting to play Roger Stone.
Not so much broadcast bad faith as narrowcast.
I get the impression Stalinism was more like this -- you know, you have your petty level of power and you _lie_ to your superiors to maintain it, but you use weaponised bad faith to those you have power over.
It's a kind of emotional cruelty, to lie to people in ways they know are lies, that make them do things they know are wrong, and to make it obvious you don't care. And we see this everywhere now.