Nate Wilcox recently wrote about the signal to noise ratio in the information we receive:
Coming in a context of other tweets about Germany’s up is down policies declaring Jews who oppose genocide in Palestine to be anti-semites, a nominally left wing publication disinforming their readers about Brazil’s Lula, relentless economic gaslighting, a seemingly cooked-up online conflict between Black Americans and Palestinians, and the MI6 blaming Russia for the UK’s recent racist pogroms…
Just before the Iraq war, 72% of Americans believed Iraq was behind 9/11. Official inflation numbers, as I’ve written often, complete fiction at this point. The propaganda around mass rape and beheading on Oct 7th has proven to have no physical evidence. Olds will remember the stories, in the original Gulf War, of how Iraq soldiers were bayoneting babies in hospitals. The NYTimes, also a prime purveyor of October 7 atrocity propaganda, systematically lied about Iraq WMD to justify the Iraq war. An academic study found that the British media lied about Corbyn around 80% of the time, and they managed to convince many Brits that the long time anti-racism protestor was anti-semitic. The WHO and the CDC denied that Covid was airborne for ages and pretended children weren’t particularly at risk.
And these are just highlights. One could make a list of thousands.
We are swimming in an ocean of shit.
No one can make good decisions: who to vote for, who to support, what to believe, or what to do, if they believe large numbers of lies.
And it truly is an Ocean of Shit: there’s so much that no one can keep up, certainly no one who doesn’t make it one of the main things they do.
Further, the lies send many people spiraling off into the worst kinds of conspiracy theories. “Conspiracy theory” isn’t a synonym for “wrong” there are plenty of real conspiracies (lately lots of them to raise prices, to pick a perfectly mundane one), but when you know you’re being lied to, and when it’s systematic, it’s hard to find a foundation point to build from, and from that to construct a relatively accurate model of reality.
If Corbyn’s an anti-semite, Putin loving, lying commie, perhaps you shouldn’t vote for him.
If Iraq was behind 9/11 then invading them makes sense.
And so on.
And this disease infects the professional and managerial classes the worst. Economists believe the figures coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics then propose or implement policies based on fictional numbers, for example.
Reality isn’t allowed to intrude until it’s beyond undeniable, at which point the major mistakes have already been made and the situation is often un-recoverable.
There’s more to it that this, of course. Almost everyone in our societies has been trained to be an order-taker, with lives that involve first doing what teacher says then doing what the boss says. Our ancestors called such people wage slaves and they were right. We’re also a consumer society: we pick from choices offered to us by others, we don’t produce our politics or our homes or our food or almost anything else: we don’t create and thus our choices are just from a menu offered by others.
People conditioned all their lives to do what they’re told, pick from a menu and swimming in an ocean of lies can’t make good decisions. It’s that simple.
The first step in fixing any problem is always facing and acknowledging the truth. If you can’t do that, all you can do is make another bad decision.
Mark Level
“And this disease infects the professional and managerial classes the worst. ” Of course. This speaks directly to the old Sinclair Lewis quote, “You can’t get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not believing it.”
Since the PMC make their living by doing predatory actions against working class people & subordinates, they all embrace (& not just accept) the utter brainwashing. And they demand that you also accept it (no many how MANY times it has proved to be lies in the past) and they demand the truth be censored by the Tech Bro overlords.
The craziest take on this was some years’ back, when the scuzzy Cass Sunstein (who Harper’s called “Obama’s Obama”, in otherwise a gaslighter who talks in highfalutin “moral” arcs completely divorced from actual reality), advocated a government panel to determine what is Reality (e.g., “Ukraine is the strongest army in Ukraine, Russia is the 2nd Storngest”) & then officially fine people money for telling (what will later be definitively proven to be) the truth. And of course those people will never be refunded the stolen money even years later, when 90% of the public (but not TPTB) accepts the correct take.
I forget who the ShitLib troll was, some Dem politician woman or a Never-Trump Republican, who actually stated that it is “a bipartisan consensus” that Russia is evil and must be punished, QED that those who disagree with that consensus must be shunned, censored, fined and possibly (? this was perhaps only strongly implied & not explicitly stated) jailed. Actually, I think it may have been a media shill like Dana Bash, they’re all in on the same program.
People who follow this practice are literally doomed, which I am fine with, but they doom the rest of us as well, which is reprehensible. Again, to quote from centuries old basic wisdom, Voltaire’s “People who believe absurdities will commit atrocities” applies.
I cannot say as a matter of measurement whether these wackos are worse than people who believe 100% insane things, like Heaven’s Gate cultists, Flat Earthers (when I lived in Norcal I saw someone with a Flat Earth bumper sticker more than once, also a “Young Earth” believer, per Genesis). Qualitatively they may be. But quantitatively the ShitLibs & suckups are worse, because they support insane policies that will at a minimum impoverish them, if not literally destroy the United States, their Golden Calf.
They get Darwin awards just as much as the MAGA Cultists who refused to wear masks in public (please note I do not address the jab here, as the case for that is much more dubious & worth actual argument, imho).
This Cargo Cult is doomed; when nobody can tell the truth without being attacked or arrested, what’s the point of continuing a failed society anyway?
Curt Kastens
But are most people in a position that they can make a decision of any importance anyways?
I asked myself recuctenly why the elites bother to tell us anything at all. The answer I gave myself was so that money can be made selling advertisements in between the official lies and propoganda because it is pretty obvious that what we (those not in the elite club) think does not really matter at all.
bruce wilder
People lose the ability to reason reasonably altogether.
If your only anchors for the story you are forced to consume are emotional and dramatic cues embedded in the narrative structure itself (its “plot” if you will), and you adopt that story (you take it in and on as a consumer good), you are not only cut off from any possibility of critical thinking, but you are also cut off from any group of people adopting a different story.
A lot of propaganda is sold like tasty treats from a local street vendor or bakery, laced with elements that make them addictive. But without any of the moral ambiguity, let alone objective factual foundation, of real events.
Nate Wilcox
It’s enough to make a person despair.
It’s very difficult to even attempt to persuade friends and family of anything if they’ve been inoculated against reality .
mago
But but but Rachel Maddow told me so.
Bukko Boomeranger
I’m an old, and I remember it was not Iraqi soldiers bayoneting babies — they were dumping them out of incubators in Kuwait City and thieving the equipment off to Iraq. As attested to, in front of the U.S. Congrifts, by the young woman who nobody (except the conspirators who organised that charade) knew was a relative of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.
Oakchair
Part of the problem is emotional and egotistical attachment to a position. It is much harder to critically think and reconsider an issue when you’ve been conditioned into believing your position makes you morally or intellectually superior to those heathens.
Anytime you see an attempt to get people to consider the issue as a referendum on how smart or moral they are it’s a red flag for a brainwashing operation.
As someone else said we are in a cargo cult era. People have been conditioned to view their opinions as their religion, opposing their religion is a route to Hell.
The dystopia has been growing for a long time, at some point we’ll be stuck with it until it either collapses in on itself or destroys civilization.
GlassHammer
Well you can’t avoid developing a strong belief in a lie (or set of lies) if your brain is hooked up 24/7 to a pipeline that has a mix of lies and truth. Everyone has a weak spot when it comes to lies and given enough exposure something will stick.
So unplug more, if nothing else the delayed engagement puts your focus back into your control.
Jan Wiklund
Most Swedes believed in 1965 that the US fought for freedom in Vietnam, because the media told them so. But in that year a small group began to put together a magazine, “The Vietnam Bulletin”, that was sold outside liquor shops in saturdays, eventually – about 1970 – in thousands of places.
The result was a. that the mainstream media had to correct its views not to seem stupid, b. that the general public recognaized what really happened, and finally c. the whole Swedish establishment sided with the Vietnamese, diplomatically and even somewhat economically.
So rather than whining about lying media one should create an alternative that fights for hegemony.
Willy
Part of the problem is emotional and egotistical attachment to a position.
That’s not a problem but a feature of the human condition. For most, that position will only change after a personal trauma causes them to hit bottom, and even then, they’ll have to decide to commit to doing the hard work of reconfiguring the structure of their world view.
I’m old enough to remember when many would feel shame when their logic behind some belief was proven questionable. That feeling is there to help them want to improve. Not so much anymore.
The problem is the amount of power average people feel they have over their world.
To paraphrase a past commenter: ‘Everybody knows something’s wrong with the world but most don’t know what it is.’ I think he meant that power is being increasingly concentrated away from us, we unconsciously know this, and so we act out in some way which makes us feel better.
Few want to be a voice of reason crying out in some wilderness because there’s no power in that. So many resort to reflexively repeating their chosen tribe’s mantra of the day so they can feel the power of safety in numbers.
A recent Vaush video about the current futility of debate demonstrates this (not a regular but the algorithm seems to know the truth of my leanings). Charlie Kirk is seen responding to a debate challenge with an out of the blue “So define a woman!” That demand had nothing to do with anything even remotely involved with that debate.
In the old days, everybody watching would’ve branded that pathetic pivot as capitulation, surrender. He’d lost because he had no logical counter to the actual topic at hand. But today, Charlie knows his followers will see that as a win. That’s why today you now not only must win logistically, but you also might have to replace your interlocutors entire tribal structure (a core principle behind deprogramming). Because nobody wants to look into the abyss of powerlessness over their own lives.
Adam Eran
First: “You can’t get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not believing it.” – that’s Upton Sinclair, not Sinclair Lewis. Sinclair won the Democratic primary for governor with his “EPIC” (“End Poverty In California”) campaign at the time of the Great Depression. Hollywood responded with biased “newsreels” — Thanks Irving Thalberg — that are just now being exposed as fabrications. (See PBS for “The First Attack Ads” preview here: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-first-attack-ads-hollywood-vs-upton-sinclair-preview/ Naturally PBS has taken the full video down. )
A few things of note about the war on Saddam. First, when he was in exile, Saddam was a CIA asset. Before the first Gulf War, the Kuwaitis were slant drilling to rob Iraq’s oil reservoirs across their borders. Saddam asked the US ambassador whether they would object to him punishing the Kuwaitis. Her response: “We have no opinion about that.” Saddam invaded and lit up the Kuwaiti oilfields, and then got punished by G.H.W. Bush. This was likely at the bidding of big oil, too, since it raised their prices enormously. Greg Palast says the point of the Gulf War(s) was to keep relatively cheap Iraqi oil in the ground. … More proof of Henry Kissinger’s maxim that while it’s dangerous to be an enemy to the US, it’s fatal to be a friend.
Nate Wilcox
This Substack piece by “Motorhead” goes into Elon Musk’s elaborate fakery about Tesla inventory numbers:
“Tesla’s Inventory Numbers Are Fake
This report is about Tesla’s misleading (fraudulent?) inventory numbers that they’ve published each quarter since Q3 2019. And the Tesla Cult takes them to heart, as likely most ignorant investors do ”
https://bradmunchen.substack.com/p/scoop-teslas-inventory-data-is-bunk
Moral: trust no one. Esp Elon
Carborundum
It’s not so much that managers can’t make good decisions because of bad or inaccurate data. There always have been and always will be issues with the data, frequently very significant ones. The difference now is that there are more managers with vastly more data at their fingertips who all think they are experts about the processes they are managing and that more data produces better decisions. In the main, these managers either seem to grab isolated datapoints that support pre-determined conclusions or ask for enough data such that the decision is obvious and risk-free (the fact that this takes huge resource investments and makes timely decision-making impossible seems to viewed as an empire-building feature and not a bug). Because there are many more managers, they form these wonderfully stupid group-think cabals and devote huge effort to intra-group politics under the guise of alignment and co-ordination.
In my experience (significant), most of the measures coming out of national statistical agencies do actually measure what they purport to measure. The measures certainly aren’t perfect, they frequently over-focus on specific dimensions deemed arbitrarily important and they not infrequently have bias (usually under-stated). The key difficulty isn’t that these measures are “wrong”, the difficulty is with how policymakers and others use them. They think they measure more or different things than they actually do and they under-appreciate the level of uncertainty around the estimates produced.