It’s election season, and the poorly-fabricated false memes are spreading. Be on the lookout, because they are definitely planning to lie to you.
This one’s almost believable unless you think it through: It’s a fake version of the Republican “Commitment To America” that has absolutely nothing in common with their actual platform, or for that matter their policies.
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The battle for tomorrow is here, and it’s nothing like the wars of the past. They had clear-cut lines of good and evil, us and them. All we have is a chaos of competing ideas and a populace that, by and large, made up their minds long before any thought got involved. In a sense, this fight is more hopeless than any beach; in another sense, there’s nobody shooting at me, so I can stand up and shout myself hoarse and nothing bad will happen. It’s just that my solutions fix no problems and my words reach no hearts, because even on the off chance someone reads this, nobody’s listening.
But I’ll try anyway.
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Surrounding every conflict are rumors, innuendo, and error — and that’s not even considering deliberate disinformation along the lines of what we’re now seeing in the Ukraine conflict. Putin is a past master at this; leading up to the war were so many denials that it was going to happen, announcements of withdrawal, and so on that, for many of us, the waters were effectively muddied. And Zelensky himself is a consummate performer, a trained and experienced actor playing the greatest role of all time.
So what’s real, and what’s not? What’s worth worrying about and what’s worth forgetting? Above all: What’s about to happen?
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Lead image taken from the CNN website, 17 September 2020.
Opinion (No shit, Sherlock. -Editor)
The suggestion that CNN might possibly show some slight bias against President Donald Trump is hardly outré. After all, Mr. Trump did effectively declare war on the press as a whole early in his first year in office, calling it the “enemy of the people” fairly frequently. He also singles out reporters from CNN, the Washington Post, and sometimes even the New York Times as “fake news”. It’s not unreasonable that they might feel justified in striking back, and a detached observer examining the front page of their website might well conclude that this is precisely what they do.
So I’m not going to statistically analyze their coverage; if you’re reasonable, you’ll stipulate that I’m right and move on. And, if you’re not, you’ll never believe anything I say after “Opinion” anyway. So let’s skip all that and get right down to it, shall we?
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We’ve been neck-deep in propaganda season most of the year. Not only is it getting harder to tell fact from fiction from spin from nuanced interpretation — and it was never easy — it’s actually becoming a topic people no longer care about. Fake news is the new normal; as a nation, we’re growing accustomed to believing what we choose to and disregarding anything that doesn’t fit our preconceptions. The alternative would be to do our own fact-checking — and who has time for that?
(Present company excluded, of course.)
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Recently, the CDC began releasing comorbidity data for use in hospital tracking and differential diagnosis. Social media seized on this as yet another excuse to declare COVID-19 a hoax. It’s not a hoax, people; COVID-19 can kill you.
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Politicians, the news, and social media are all full of stories about the Post Office: According to most, the present administration is attempting to gut it for nefarious purposes. To this end, they’ve hired a major party donor and Wall Street crony to run it into the ground. This person’s payment will obviously be through his massive investment in competing companies.
One of the first rules of detecting Fake News is the following question:
Is this too good to be true? (more…)
(CONTINUED from Parts 1 to 3)
“Okay, fine. But why is that my fault?” I can hear you thinking this, perhaps a bit angrily, suspecting some sort of bait-and-switch. Don’t worry, it’s still your fault.
Oh, not the virus. That’s nature; that’s what nature does. There’s a reason we invented doors and windows and walls and things; it’s because otherwise nature will kill us. Plagues are just one of the more colorful weapons in its arsenal.
No, what’s your fault is that society has been continuing blithely along (more…)
(CONTINUED from Part 1 and Part 2)
The natural next step to this reasoning has dawned on some of you — the ones who are still reading, who haven’t moved on in horror and self-loathing, or alternately who aren’t so pissed off at me they’ve dropped their subscription (or would have done if only they’d not been too cheap to pay for one in the first place).
What I’m talking about isn’t a matter of fighting COVID-19 so much as it is sweeping cultural change of a sort that’s not merely necessary but long overdue. The fact that we’re in a crisis right now only makes it more obvious that our society is seriously broken; it’s not like it wasn’t broken before the virus came along.
People in the United States need to (more…)
The Not Fake News 
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