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[Guardian] Liberals want to blame rightwing 'misinformation' for our problems. Get real

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Os Trigonum, Mar 21, 2021.

  1. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    "Liberals want to blame rightwing 'misinformation' for our problems. Get real":

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/19/rightwing-misinformation-liberals

    excerpt:

    . . . In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.

    What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullsh*t since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.

    Debunking” was how the literary left used to respond to America’s Niagara of nonsense. Criticism, analysis, mockery and protest: these were our weapons. We were rational-minded skeptics, and we had a grand old time deflating creationists, faith healers, puffed-up militarists and corporate liars of every description.

    Censorship and blacklisting were, with important exceptions, the weapons of the puritanical right: those were their means of lashing out against rap music or suggestive plays or leftwingers who were gainfully employed.

    What explains the clampdown mania among liberals? The most obvious answer is because they need an excuse. Consider the history: the right has enjoyed tremendous success over the last few decades, and it is true that conservatives’ capacity for hallucinatory fake-populist appeals has helped them to succeed. But that success has also happened because the Democrats, determined to make themselves the party of the affluent and the highly educated, have allowed the right to get away with it.

    There have been countless times over the years where Democrats might have reappraised this dumb strategy and changed course. But again and again they chose not to, blaming their failure on everything but their glorious postindustrial vision. In 2016, for example, liberals chose to blame Russia for their loss rather than look in the mirror. On other occasions they assured one another that they had no problems with white blue-collar workers – until it became undeniable that they did, whereupon liberals chose to blame such people for rejecting them.

    And now we cluck over a lamentable “information disorder”. The Republicans didn’t suffer the landslide defeat they deserved last November; the right is still as potent as ever; therefore Trumpist untruth is responsible for the malfunctioning public mind. Under no circumstances was it the result of the Democrats’ own lackluster performance, their refusal to reach out to the alienated millions with some kind of FDR-style vision of social solidarity.

    Or perhaps this new taste for censorship is an indication of Democratic healthiness. This is a party that has courted professional-managerial elites for decades, and now they have succeeded in winning them over, along with most of the wealthy areas where such people live. Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent that’s who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it.

    What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat – defeat before the Biden administration has really begun. To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself. (Misinformation, we read in the New York Times, is impervious to critical thinking.) The people simply cannot be persuaded; something more forceful is in order; they must be guided by we, the enlightened; and the first step in such a program is to shut off America’s many burbling fountains of bad takes.

    Let me confess: every time I read one of these stories calling on us to get over free speech or calling on Mark Zuckerberg to press that big red “mute” button on our political opponents, I feel a wave of incredulity sweep over me. Liberals believe in liberty, I tell myself. This can’t really be happening here in the USA.

    But, folks, it is happening. And the folly of it all is beyond belief. To say that this will give the right an issue to campaign on is almost too obvious. To point out that it will play straight into the right’s class-based grievance-fantasies requires only a little more sophistication. To say that it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for – a betrayal that we will spend years living down – may be too complex a thought for our punditburo to consider, but it is nevertheless true.

    Thomas Frank is the author of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. He is also a Guardian US columnist
    more at the link




     
  2. CCorn

    CCorn Member

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    The increase in the wealth gap is a byproduct of misinformation about trickle down economics.
     
  3. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Member

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    People who are victims to online right wing misinformation hate speech that is shared incessantly on facebook might disagree with your premise.

    Also, try debating someone who has succumbed to right wing facebook meme culture. It's like debating a person who doesn't know how to play chess and tossed the board in frustration and comes back with a deeper conviction and hatred.

    Also what's most ironic is that the facebook groups that spread this misinformation will often immediately block you the moment you comment correcting some misinformation they are spreading. So they are limiting speech.

    I don't want the government to tell facebook who to ban and who not to ban. I'd rather the free market decide which is what facebook has been doing. They ban people based on wanting to protect their brand image's profitablity.
     
    #3 fchowd0311, Mar 21, 2021
    Last edited: Mar 22, 2021
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  4. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Member

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  5. CCorn

    CCorn Member

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    The free market doesn’t apply to social media. That should obviously be monitored by the government, but only by republicans.

    The invisible hand only applies to bakeries when they don’t want to make cakes for gay weddings.

    Go read Adam West’s wealth of the nations you Moran!
     
  6. Ottomaton

    Ottomaton Member
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    One word rebuttal to the idea that this is all as its always been:

    QAnon.
     
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  7. adoo

    adoo Member

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    Adam Smith wrote “Wealth of Nations”,

    Adam West was an actor​
     
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  8. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Member

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    I'm pretty sure he was joking.
     
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  9. CCorn

    CCorn Member

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    Thanks
     
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  10. dobro1229

    dobro1229 Member

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    The fact that nearly half of our country does rejects facts and truth and rejects topical debate... yeah is a major problem.

    Why do you think that enemies of the United States who benefit from our Demise as a world power are not nuking us or poisoning our water or raiding Fort Knox etc but instead their number one tool is disinformation dissemination???

    If the premise of the OP’s argument that disinformation of the right actual is A Okay and not a problem at all, why do America’s adversaries do it instead of the alternatives??

    Seems to me that the OP and many on the right are posting crap like this as basically an admission of guilt that yes they love disinformation that allows them to live in an alternate reality and them telling us they are going to fight to keep their alternate realities because they are addicted to how lies make them feel.
     
  11. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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  12. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    Thomas Frank
     
  13. dobro1229

    dobro1229 Member

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    I see someone is hitting the all you can drink mimosa bar this Sunday morning.
     
  14. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    good comment. solid contribution
     
  15. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Member

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    I will old chum...;)
     
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  16. dobro1229

    dobro1229 Member

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    I did comment... instead you responded with Adam West Batman clips. The lack of self awareness is pretty amazing.
     
  17. Amiga

    Amiga Member

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    Did 3/4 or whatever huge % of a party believe in the Big Lie, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen when it was not? And did that not lead to the Jan 6th insurrection? And is that not an “our problem”, whatever side you are on?

    I thought so.
     
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  18. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    the best part of D&D is the psychoanalysis. I pick up so many helpful tips.
     
  19. LosPollosHermanos

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    The snowflake / victim complex of searching the internet for self affirming articles to prevent you from questioning reality is getting tiresome

    Stop being a little b**** and grow up. There is always truth to Occam’s razor and the truth being somewhere in the middle. If it really is so painful for you to allow something outside of your schema to enter your cyberspace it really says something
     
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  20. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    you make me want to be a better man.gif
     

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