Posts Tagged ‘Disinformation’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Pelosi and the PM

September 26, 2021

Australian Reporting

The Australian media has almost been falling over itself to note that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has praised Scott Morrison on Australia’s climate action. The Sydney Morning Herald which is usually denounced by the Murdoch Empire as far left, had the following headlines.

Nancy Pelosi says Australia is ‘leading the way’ on climate

saying she “hailed Australia as a global leader on climate change” and “singled out Australia for praise”

and

Nancy Pelosi’s praise for Scott Morrison should terrify Labor

This article actually points out the government is not doing much, but often the headline is the take-away.

Skynews had:

Scott Morrison wraps up ‘successful’ US trip

Saying, “Absolutely no one expected Nancy Pelosi to stand there and say Scott Morrison has been a leader on climate change” predicting “some kind of deal made while he was here”

The Daily Telegraph:

Australia praised for climate change stance by Nancy Pelosi [Paywall]

This is a little bit of a beat up, It was not quite fulsome praise but hopefully it will help Morrison to move a little away from promoting gas and coal.

The PM in New York

This is what PM Morrison said in NY. This provides the context:

“our achievements in reducing emissions is an important story for Australia to continue to tell, because it’s our record of achievement that actually establishes the integrity of the commitments that we make. That we will meet and beat our 2030 targets, I was able to inform the President today. And that we will continue to work on our plan as to how we can continue to reduce emissions to zero well into the future.

As I indicated at the start of this year, it was our intention to do. Because in Australia it’s not enough to have a commitment to something. You’ve got to have a plan to achieve it. And this is an important part of the way we approach this task. You have a plan to meet your commitment. If you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a commitment.

And so we will continue to work through those issues. It was a good opportunity to discuss the important elements of that plan today, in particular technology, the hydrogen projects that we’re engaged in, which were announced particularly early this week, and the important role that hydrogen technology as well as CCUS battery technology and others are going to play, not just in advanced economies, but in developing economies as well.

We share a passion that developing economies, particularly in our region, in Indo-Pacific, will be able to develop their economies with a clean energy future, that they will be able to realise the jobs that advanced economies have, to develop their industrial base on the new energy technologies. And Australia wants to play a critical role in that. And we want to partner with countries to achieve it. This will be an important topic of discussion on Friday, particularly to the point that you’ve raised [which was, “was critical minerals and hydrogen discussed during the meeting?”]”

Press Conference Prime Minister – New York, USA 22 Sep 2021 Transcript

The fact that the Government has avoided having a plan since they came to power over 9 years ago is not entirely irrelevant to the context, but let us assume they have suddenly discovered that planning can be useful and are now engaging in it.

He is still brandishing CCS or CCUS, which is about as failed a tech as its possible to get, but helps keep us burning coal and gas….

Pelosi Comments

In my opinion, Pelosi had a choice. She could accuse him of lying and incompetence which is really bad diplomacy and likely to lock him into his current denial of a problem, or she can selectively choose his words to try and hold him too those words. This is what she said (Italics for emphasis):

Yesterday, I had the privilege of welcoming two heads of state, Boris Johnson – maybe some of you were at that presentation with Boris Johnson, Prime Minister Johnson – and then later in the day, in the morning, same morning, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia. Why I bring it up in association with climate is that they were so exuberant about the urgency of addressing the climate issues.

Of course, we thanked the Prime Minister of U.K. for hosting COP26.  I just had the privilege of doing that at 10 Downing over the weekend when I was at the G7 Heads of Parliament and to see what was happening there in preparation for COP26.  But then he made a presentation to our bipartisan leadership of his priorities and strongly, strongly, strongly talking about what the U.K. was doing in terms of climate. 

And the Prime Minister of Australia, Morrison, he was saying we’re not only addressing the Paris Accords, we are – our slogan is ‘We Meet It and We Beat It.’

So, they’re [Boris and Scott] leading the way, and that’s what we all have to do, is meet our emissions responsibility and our financial responsibility to other countries so that when we leave COP26, having fulfilled our obligations to the Paris Accords, and then to go further.

It’s a health issue for our children: clean air, clean water. It’s a jobs issue for our country: green technologies, being preeminent in the world on those. It’s a security issue [important in terms of the newly signed sub agreement], because security experts tell us that migrations and the rest, rising sea levels, thermal management of the planet, drying up of rivers, encroachment of deserts [All Australian concerns], the list goes on, you know what they are, I think that is cause for competition and conflict over habitat and resources.

So it’s a security issue – health, jobs, security – and, of course, a moral issue, if you believe, as I do, that this is God’s creation, and we have a moral obligation to be good stewards [appeal to Religion]. But, even if you don’t share that view, we all agree that we have a responsibility to our children, grandchildren, future generations, to hand off the planet in a very responsible way.

Transcript of Pelosi Weekly Press Conference in the Capitol Visitor Center 23 September 2021

So while Pelosi avoids criticism of the PM, and her statement does involve some praise, it seems to be more, “that’s what you have claimed to be doing, so please do it.” She also seems to praise Johnson more than Morrison.

Her approach may produce a better result than an attack, but we will have to see….

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Decline of the West 06: Rise of Authoritarianism

August 15, 2021

The trend towards authoritarianism, or increasing authoritarianism throughout the world, seems to be noticed by quite a lot of people. Of course it may be exaggerated, but nevertheless marked countries include:

Hungary, Brazil, Russia, China (especially Hong Kong), Venezuela, Cambodia, The Philippines, Myanmar, Turkey, Syria, India etc. I’m sure any reader can find more.

Democracy under Siege

What’s Driving the Rise of Authoritarianism and Populism in Europe and Beyond?

Authoritarian Regimes Seek To Take Advantage of the Coronavirus Pandemic – Center for American Progress

The real reason authoritarian populism is on the rise: it’s simple

The rise and rise of Australian authoritarianism

Whether we think the US is headed that way, or not, is obviously a matter for dispute. I hope I am wrong but many features of authoritarian, neo-fascist rhetoric seem to be becoming more popular in the US, including undermining electoral processes and complete contempt for disagreement.

This is a list of why people might think the Right in the US has fascistic tendencies:

  • Denial of reality in favor of ideology. Climate change, Covid, economics, history…. The hallmark of authoritarian parties is to attack knowledge, and enthusiastically accept the party’s declarations of what is true. Nothing is to get in the way of the party and its power.
  • Destruction of polite discourse
  • Attack and slur those who disagree with Republican Machine. This is joined with continuously shouting, rude, name calling media, which attempts to work up anger and contempt to get people unable to think rationally, and which attempts to scare people off other people, so they don’t get other perspectives and they keep the shouty media prosperous.
  • Support for Moral dogmatism – unless the party breaks the morals, in which case it is ok (massive double standards). The party is always morally correct, and those opposed to the party are evil.
  • Insist that religion is part of the State, and largely support autocratic and dogmatic religion that essentially worships neoliberalism or submission to Mammon, if you are more biblically oriented. In return, this religion gives Republicans the claim they are always doing God’s work and that opponents are devils, and thus treatable with contempt and hostility.
  • People are to be taught that not having the official sexual orientation approved by Republicans will not only lead to social disapproval but hellfire. The Republicans are watching to make sure you meet their conditions of sex virtue.
  • The Republican machines’ idea seems to be not to have discussion, or investigate truth but to manufacture enemies and obliterate them. This has been their policy for years. This is now unnoticeable by most Republicans; its become normal Sadly after years of being abused, the mainstream left has now joined in, although they still appear to largely try and present evidence rather than commonsense slurs.
  • Manufacture of immoral enemies.
  • Republican cultivation of largely powerless enemies, who they can damn. Black people, feminists, professors etc… They ignore the largely powerful social groups such as the wealth elites, which they support. If Republicans attack wealth elites then they attack those who are outsiders, self-made, and who might indicate capitalism needs some fixing up (like Soros).
  • Pretend that any opposition to them is ungodly, communist, socialist whatever, something that is widely disliked even though people are not familiar with it. When it should be clear all opposition is not like this; it can be pro-liberty, pro-responsibility, pro-capitalist, Christian and so on – like mainstream Democrats.
  • Attempt to cancel any known person who protests against their ideology, like trying to drive people who ‘take the knee’ out of a job. Threaten scientists and academics when they don’t praise Republican ideology.
  • Purge the party of those who oppose the leader. Threaten people in the party who claim the elections where not fraudulent.
  • The Republican ideal seems to be to generate irreconcilable polarity, with them on top as the good. There are no shades of grey, and nothing to be learnt from the others.
  • Find minority scapegoats
  • No matter what happens the Republican Machine is never wrong and failure always comes about because of others. Preferably relatively powerless others. Republicans rarely take responsibility for mistakes.
  • Deny that racism, or sexism, is a problem at all, unless it is black racism towards whites, or women being hostile to men. Those positions are apparently common, terrible and unfair. In other words blame the relatively powerless for their problems or for drawing attention to their problems, and proclaim the dominant are superior.
  • Appear to approve of minorities getting shot. Cheer police who murder people. Show no sympathy towards the manufactured enemies, because obliterating enemies is the way to go.
  • Support police violence against peaceful demonstrators and violent demonstrators unless the demonstrators are pro-Reublican in which case… the police become left-wing activists or something, who need to be tossed aside and abused. Something similar happens to James Comey.
  • Argue that if you purge the country of ‘illegals’ then everything will be ok.
  • Support for real and dominant elites
  • Support the wealth elites through regulation, through tax cuts, through making sure tax payer’s wealth gets transferred upwards. Make life precarious for people in general, and use the anger at that precarity to impose more neoliberal reforms that shaft people even more.
  • Sacrifice people to the economy and the prosperity of the wealth elites.
  • Regulate the economy so it is easier for the wealth elites to harm and hurt ordinary people, and make even more money to protect themselves from ordinary people. For example, free up pollution.
  • Support profit seeking as a primary virtue, so the wealth elites appear to become elites through wonderful virtues and abilities (unless of course they publicly wonder about neoliberalism, in which case they can be denounced until they learn to shut up).
  • Pretend vastly unequal shares of wealth do not produce vast inequalities of power or worth, or shape policies.
  • Support any Authority with the right ideology (Orban, Bolsonaro, Putin).
  • Support for a fraudulent and lying leader and suppression of democratic process.
  • Support a leader who has a long record of lying and convictable fraud. And insist that he is well intentioned and telling the truth, and that people who don’t agree are mentally sick enemies.
  • Refuse to allow evidence to be presented for impeachment cases and refuse calls for the Leader to testify – twice.
  • Label any attempt to investigate the Leader’s behavior a witch hunt, despite having carried out far more strenuous investigations against supposed Republican enemies over years and years.
  • Ignore evidence of the leader’s repeated attempts to obstruct justice, as the leader can do no wrong.
  • Try and steal elections, largely by lying and threat. The main evidence apparently being what the leader with a history of lying and fraud tells you, even after he has failed in 60+ lawsuits to demonstrate a sliver of relevant evidence.
  • Support the leader even when, in private, he has tried to persuade governors to find votes for him, and has requested the DOJ to proclaim the election a fraud and leave the rest to him – again with no evidence.
  • Support a leader who appears to use a 4th July speech to denounce his perceived internal enemies.
  • Support a leader when you know he has tried to use Russian forces to discredit his opposition – the Trump tower meeting should be enough, and would be enough if it involved the other side – but again the Republican leader can do no wrong.
  • Support rioters who try to overturn and election result.
  • Try and pretend Capitol Hill rioters were opposition figures under a false flag, or that the riot was completely peaceful and friendly. Yes both can apparently be true.
  • Refuse to support an impartial multi-party inquiry into the riots, who organised the riots, who helped the rioters from the inside, why there was not an adequate police or National Guard presence given plenty of warning, or try and make the Capitol safer.
  • Support the curtailment of the right to vote in ways that look like it primarily affects the other party.
  • Support Texas Republicans who ask other states to ignore the vote and return pro-great leader people to the Electoral College, to vote for him.
  • Support a leader who has encouraged violence in his speeches’, beating up the opposition at his rallies and so on.
  • Support armed militias occupying public political spaces. t
  • Openly support groups who claim to be neo-nazi and bask in the support of those groups.

If the USA goes fascist then many others will follow.

The problem here is that authoritarian regimes, tend to suppress evidence of problems and failure rather than publicly admit to it, or publicly deal with the problems. People under the Regime soon learn that problems are to be ignored, or blamed on the Regime’s enemies. As a result leaders of the Regime may have little idea what is going on. This may be fine under stable conditions, but the problem is that current authoritarian regimes will not face stable conditions.

Authoritarian regimes also tend to be corrupt in that they tend to take money for approvals of actions or interest in problems. It becomes expected that any business requires finance. However they may also have the second order of corruption in that they do not stay bought. This makes any business, or policy, precarious. This is not restrained to authoritarian regimes as plutocratic regimes may behave similarly, but plutocrats may react to second orders of corruption quite punitively.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Decline of the West 04: Normalising anger and abuse

August 15, 2021

Important people in the media both encourage and normalise abuse by repeatedly engaging in it and demonstrating that is how argument should work. ‘Owning people’, trying to gain ‘tears’ seems to be what it is about. This is again much more common than it used to be 60 or so years ago. While I have no evidence, I would date the surge of abuse from the success of Rush Limbaugh, and the attempt to build a support base that did not realise what neoliberal policies meant for ordinary people.

Normalised abuse, attempts to dehumanise others, making it possible to ignore them, or treat them badly, helps build an “information group” or in-group, which is impervious to the other side.

While this is an entirely subjective argument., when I watch, or read transcripts from Fox, it appears that most of their time is spent in abuse, and this behaviour normalises abuse and probably provokes abuse, promoting further lack of discussion. The main aim of rightwing news seems to be to make people angry. This is useful because

  • People are angry. They have been left behind. They do have problems dumped on them. The world feels like it is declining. It feels better to be angry than to be despairing, depressed or apathetic. It is energising.
  • A manipulator wants people not to be angry with them, or angry with the real cause of problems (especially if the dominant elites are the cause of their problems), so needs to deflect anger elsewhere and get people angry with the manipulator’s enemies.
  • Being angry means a person is easier to manipulate.
  • Angry people are not thinking calmly or in complex ways.
  • Angry people connect things which are largely unconnected because of the similar anger feeling tone between topics
  • Angry people are less likely to wonder whether articles actually do make the connections the articles are claiming. Or they may misread articles so that they appear to say the opposite of what they are really saying
  • It is easier to cultivate anger against an outgroup than it is to come up with solutions. For example it is easier to say people are stupid or biased, than it is to listen to them describe their problems.
  • Angry people will generally not listen to people who are identified as enemies, hence they will not pick up different ideas, and they will try to intimidate those identified as enemies, which is more likely to create enemies. Anger tends to mean people interpret others in ways that make them more angry. Anger is a self- reinforcing loop.
  • Anger can be addictive, so people become more likely to listen to those who manipulate them into being angry.

One recent example of this, apart from encouraging the idea that Republicans could not have lost the election, is that after the BLM protests, we can see an apparently coordinated attempt by Republican media to make it impossible to discuss race relations in the USA in a way which might offend anyone who thinks the real problem is black racism. The discussion also completely dismisses anyone who might think there is a problem as a supporter of terrorism, violence and crime.

Racial problems in the US and elsewhere in the English speaking world, will not be solved, because it is more convenient, for some, to have Republicans suspicious of, or hostile towards, black people who protest, than it is to admit there are problems. Likewise it is easier to accuse disgruntled workers of being rednecks, than it is to listen to them and help solve their problems.

The aim and effect of normalised abuse is simple: Divide and conquer.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Decline of the West 03: Falsehood and fantasy

August 14, 2021

I have written many blog posts on how the structure of the ‘information society’ leads to massive distribution of disinformation and misinformation.

While I agree that falsehood and fantasy have always been rampant, see Charles MacKay Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds for example, some of the things discussed in Mackay’s book are perfectly normal and understandable.

Tulip Mania and the South Sea bubble, are standard financial bubbles. The prices of goods and stock did rise, and with skill and luck a person could have made a fortune if they got out at the right time. That people appeared to be becoming rich, was not a fantasy. That the economic fundamentals were bad is not an obvious reason for not participating. When Amazon launched onto the stockmarket, its economic fundamentals were terrible, but anyone who bought shares then might be worth a fortune now. It seems odd to blame people for normal market behaviour.

Likewise, if you have ever fiddled with chemistry you will know that chemical combinations can have surprising and transformative results even when the textbooks can tell you what to expect because of 100s of years of experience. Weird things happen quite naturally. If you have impure substances then weird things will happen even more, or nothing might happen. Alchemy had a coherent and logical set of theories. For the alchemist there was no necessary boundary, or distinction, between psycho-spiritual experience and action in matter. Spirit was as much part of the world as matter. That some people believed in it is not surprising. That some people lost their health and livelihood is also not surprising. How many crowds were obsessed with it is debatable – probably few.

Magnetisers were possibly demonstrating hypnosis or the placebo effect, in an era without even vacuous words like ‘placebo’ to explain mysterious healing away. Again not a big deal, I’m doubtful it affected political rule that much.

Fantasies have always had the potential to seize politics, that is true. But in my long years of watching politics, I have never seen a situation in which a US party is pretending it had an election stolen from it, without any reasonable evidence. I take the lack of reasonable evidence to be demonstrated by the recounts, and by the courts refusing the evidence and legal arguments over 60 times, and the apparent refusal of many of Trump’s lawyers to even allege fraud.

Sadly this denial of loss has not been just a momentary aberration, it appears to be one that is strengthening, despite the growing lack of evidence. And it has consequences: if a side keeps telling people the election was stolen, then it jacks up hostility towards those who accept the election and justifies desperate, and possibly illegal, measures to combat the ‘fraud’ – nothing is out of play. Purging the party of dissent is not a good sign for liberty

We should also note that Republicans did not, as far as I know, allow the presentation of evidence at either of Trump’s impeachments. This could indicate they have little intention of being evidence based.

For instance can see an apparently coordinated attempt by Republican media to make it impossible to discuss race relations in the USA in a way which might offend anyone who thinks the real problem is black racism. Again they demonstrate that Black lives do not matter, and that real problems can be avoided rather than faced.

And big tech/media censorship used to be approved and even gloated over by the Right when it did not affect them, but now it affects them they are trying to make it a left wing thing, even if facebook and twitter helped Trump to win the 2016 election by delivering continual streams of positive misinformation to people interested in Trump.

This is by no means an attempt to defend the Left. The mainstream left is almost as frightened of and addicted to plutocracy and problem avoidance as the mainstream right.

The great thing about fantasy is that fantasy avoids problems. It allows us to think that by not discussing problems they go away. We can feel we have solved the climate crisis by proposing fantasy technology, and doing nothing to bring that technology about, as the fantasy serves its purpose by providing an imaginary solution.

And we can just abuse anyone who disagrees because they are contemptable, and not one of us.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Thoughts on change in the workplace

August 3, 2021

1) Workplaces like any social systems are ‘complex systems’ , this means that complete prediction of the results of any ‘reforms’ is impossible, and that unexpected consequences are normal. Being wrong is normal.

2) This means that any change in work environment should be provisional. You can plan all you like, but you must be prepared to keep observing, and modify the plan as it goes along. Management must be capable of admitting mistakes and correcting them, without appearing confused and indecisive.

3) Information about almost anything in the workplace will probably be disrupted and inaccurate. Hierarchies distort information flow. The more punishing the hierarchy, the less accurate the flow.

4) Information disruption gives rise to destructive fantasies, especially if people feel ignored or pushed to one side. This can obstruct any attempts at improvement, meeting psychological needs, or finding the best work environment for workers. People’s perceptions of how they fit in, will be distorted.

5) While many organisational structures demand that managers appear to know the work better than workers, this is normally not the case. Managers may not understand how people have to do their jobs, or even what those jobs require. However, maintaining the appearance of superior knowledge can be vital to maintaining status in the company. This again leads to disruption.

6) Good communication generally becomes possible with equality, which can disrupt chains of command. So it can be unnerving. This is the role middle managers should have been serving, with feet in both camps, acting as a bridge.

7) In software programming, the lack of knowledge of managers can cripple the software and its capacity. This is overcome by actually listening to the workers and what they do. You may also want to ask ‘What do workers think their role in the organisation is, what would they like it to be?’ And that may include, “hey your management, you make decisions” it may not.

8) Trust building is fundamental but difficult, and it is probable managers are not perceiving the causes of distrust, because of the information distortion. Fixing this primarily means listening to and acting on suggestions from people below.

9) You cannot switch trust on, it takes time to lower levels of distrust. That means you need time before reform, time during reform and time for follow up. This time should be leisurely if at all possible. The less pushed people feel, and the more they feel participatory, then the more involved they will feel. However, even with care change can be messed up.

10) Do NOT do consultations in which you already know the answers and are going to do what you want to do anyway. While it is obvious that this sets up resentment, obstruction and delay, and breaks trust and information flow, it seems normal for managers and authorities to behave like this. The real point of a series of consultations should be to be open to improving the plan, and let people see you are open to their input.

11) Change consultants will often not help here, as they can see their job to implement the managerial plans, rather than to build trust or communication. That is much safer for them, and pleasing management leads to more job recommendations for them.

12) Repetition 1: Without attention to information flow, the building of trust and the recognition of unintended consequences, the workplace will be a mess, and people will not be satisfied.

13) Repetition 2: Workspaces are complex. Different people have different requirements of their work satisfaction. This is why ‘caring’ but unobtrusive managerial attention is important. In general people want to feel they have done something, that they have control over work, that they can make mistakes and not be crucified, that they have a chance of getting better and getting rewards.

14) If changes appear random, too frequent, or appear to over ride what workers know works, or is needed to do their job, then they will never understand their role in the organisation, other than as people who suffer arbitrary change and the whims of management.

15) I you want your organisation to be resilient, it needs redundancy. It needs more workers than strictly necessary, those workers need more time than strictly necessary. Not only does this often produce better thinking, but if everything is stretched to begin with, then in a time of crisis, there is no slack helping to hold everything together, and the crisis is likely to have worse effects.

16) Please note that if your organisation is thoroughly neoliberal, and regards workers as inconvenient but necessary costs, who must operate with machine like precision, and who are completely expendable in the name of profit, then you will never succeed in producing a ‘happy’ reform of the workplace. Any such reform would be destroyed as it appears slack, and the managers are not getting every drop of blood from the workers.

17) Final reiteration. As a manager, you may have an idea of what is best in advance, and that is probably good, but it needs constant testing and consultation, and awareness of information problems.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Information disorder

June 19, 2021

Complexity is one driver for information disorder and confusion. Complex systems, such as social systems (politics, economics, information) or ecological systems, or weather systems, are so complex they are impossible to describe with complete accuracy, so it is hard to test theories about them. They are often impossible to observe in total, and it is hard to interact with them, or the interactions are so continuous that it is hard to tell what actions have what effects. This is pretty standard for human life – we develop unconsciousness along with consciousness – the theories that allow us to understand the world, may also hide it from us. Humans attempt to establish continuity and order, but sometimes change is happening anyway, and the order they try to establish no longer works and the world bights back, in the same kind of way that personal unconsciousness may produce symptoms that demand attention, and may distract us from our real problems.

It is normal to be confused, but still retain some kind of insight. However, in the modern world there is so much information, that it is even harder to navigate towards information that is correct, and the prime driver for the spread of information is rarely accuracy. It is whether:

  • It appeals to people’s emotional bias – it gets you angry with the right people. Confirms how you feel etc.
  • It confirms your identity as ‘whatever’ (White male Christian; Left activist; Australia etc), and confirms that whoever you define as the “other people” are lesser beings in some way. Empirically, it seems that political identity is the number one factor here in the contemporary world.
  • It reinforces your existing world view, or stretches it in an acceptable direction.


On top of that we have the following problems.

  • Information stays around without much in the way of ties to its refutation, so its easy to find discredited information without any awareness of it being discredited.
  • Information can be appealing because it is partially true [For example: Right voters often seem to think they have been abandoned by the elites which is possibly true. Left voters think corporations have too much power and are trying to crush them or kill them, which is also possibly true.]
  • Status tends to be tied up with ‘knowledge’ so higher status people tend not to admit when they are wrong, and they fight to hide their wrongness or attack those who insist they are wrong. Other people try to gain status by not being wrong. [Quick experiment: how often do you like the idea of being wrong in public…. add to that the idea that others who have proved you wrong are dancing in triumph. If that causes you any discomfort, then you have demonstrated the point….]
  • Whole organisations can go down the path of delusion, because of peoples’ fear of what will happen should they deny the organisation’s ‘truth’ – they can be expelled, loose their power, loose their income loose their friends etc. as well as feel the discomfort of being ‘wrong’ in public. They will eventually agree with the falsity, or behave as if they do, and persecute others who do not agree with that falsity.
  • The people at the top of an organisation can be fed whatever it is those beneath them think they want to hear, irrespective of reality, and this then lurches the organisation in a particular direction.
  • People can be instructed to seek for information that does not exist, and punished if they don’t find it, so they do find something…. or they make stuff up to satisfy those higher up. They may come to a point where their whole status and being is tied up in defending this nothing, against challenge, and punishing those who think it is nothing.
  • Much media exists for the simple purpose of maintaining power by spreading interpretations and propaganda that benefit “their side”.
  • This propaganda media is usually marked by opinion masquerading as news, shouting, name-calling, rousing of passions to help guide people’s thinking (generating emotional bias), confirming your virtue for siding with them, convincing you that their elite have the same interests as you, branding the other side as evil, and telling you that the identity you have is under challenge.
  • This set-up stops people from wondering what the “other side” thinks, because the other side is evil, inferior and dangerous to self-image etc.
  • This has the advantage of keeping people’s eyes on this propaganda media, which allows more advertising profit, which also may destroy less biased media which does not raise passions to persuade people of things.
  • The disbelievers are held to believe what they believe because they are biased and evil (and even conspiring against you), and you believe what you believe because you are smart, virtuous, practical etc….
  • Often those who follow propaganda media, officially do not believe it, so if it is shown to be false, they can declare “all media lies” so they can go back to following the lies they believe, and fake their status – they were not taken in, even though nothing shifts.
  • Anyone can be fooled, especially those who think they cannot be fooled. This is the basis of the best cons. People think they are smart enough not to trust a particular politician, but they accept that his policies are what they think he says they are, and that he has implemented them, and has not deceived them.
  • Everyone sees patterns in random events, faces in the sky, landscapes in ink splashes etc. Indeed it is hard not to. These patterns may prove nothing. Q followers have great pattern detection and are encouraged to detect particular patterns and ignore others which might be more relevant, such as the failure of Q predictions. Encouragement of pattern detection is rarely connected with pattern evaluation, and testing. The issue is whether the patterns noted are real or useful, or lead them to fantasy and delusion, and isolation from anyone who doubts the patterns.
  • Because destructive power often tends to depend on false information, there are campaigns to discredit those people who actually have studied particular subjects for a long time to reinforce the idea that disbelievers in the others are virtuous. Even agreement between people who have studied the subject for a long time becomes evidence of conspiracy, not of the likelihood of what they are arguing.
  • Anyone with a youtube channel can claim to have as much of the truth as those who study the subject, provided they say what you want to hear.
  • With conflicting information and too much information, people tend to judge information by the information given by those they trust, who will share political, identity and other propaganda biases. This trust, and identification, forms an information group, that filters out information which does not express group biases. In other words what you accept (or even hear of) tends to become more limited, and that restricts information even more intensely.
  • Because the social dynamics of information encourages to think/feel that information is a matter of status and identity, they tend to think that because they are competent in some fields they are competent in all fields, but they are actually depending on their information group for competence, not their own abilities
  • Eventually everything collapses, because hardly anyone has any relationship to reality, just to their information hallucinations…


Fact checking and education may not help, because these actions are already framed politically and in terms of identity. If you don’t hear the results you want to hear, then it is easy to conclude the fact checkers and educators are biased, evil and part of the conspiracy against you.

Social information processing can be seen as a form of ‘defense mechanism’. Rather than admitting the world is complex and hard to understand, and that it is difficult to find adequate information to allow the definitive solving of complex problems, people defend the hard limits of their egos, by defending against (or denying) these difficulties. We pretend information and understanding is simple, that problems are simple (we only need more of what we have defined as good), and that confusion is generated by evil others (perhaps in a conspiracy), and by stupidity of others. If we shout at the others we are doing something useful. If we suppress something, we are doing so for general benefit. We are good sensible people. We understand everything important. Life is not the meaningless chaos, despair and threat, which it would be if we were wrong. We have found solid ground rather than shifting uncertainty.

This is unreal. Understanding is frequently provisional and difficult, and we are inevitably often wrong. We often look stupid because we believed something which turned out to be false. It is only an ongoing problem if we persist with that falsity. That is reality, and that is what we have to admit and deal with, and its hard.

However, the tendency to see information conspiracies to protect and make sense of what you believe, does not mean there are no information conspiracies at all… 🙂

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The idea the Right is logical, and the Left emotional?

June 6, 2021

Do many people primarily think logically, rather than emotionally?

Readers may remember David Hume’s comment to the effect that reason is the slave of the passions. I suspect he may be right. In other words, we think to justify our feelings, or express our feelings, and that intensifies those feelings and makes the ideas and thinking seem even more real and confirmed.

Furthermore, logic is not a guarantor of truth. If the axioms your logic is based upon are incorrect, then no amount of logic will give you a correct answer or working political policy. Garbage in, Garbage out is a common computer programmer saying, and it seems true.

People probably accept the axioms they make deductions from, because those axioms are emotionally appealing, or help make the world make sense in a way that does not challenge them too much. If so, there is no real distinction between logic and emotion; the logic is being directed by the emotions.

How often do people seriously check whether their axioms are in fact true? Not often as far as I can tell.

As a general principle, I suspect humans cannot often deduce reality logically from axioms; not just because our axioms are probably wrong, but because reality is too complex. You have to discover reality, and that requires more than just logical deduction, it requires exploration, encounter with the world, and testing.

So my guess is that few people are rational and non-emotionally biased. On top of all this, I have not noticed that people of a right wing persuasion are particularly logical and not swayed by their emotions in general.

For example, most rightwing media I have seen or read, involves a lot of shouting, abuse, heavy sarcasm, put-downs, incoherence, contradiction and a dedicated cultivation of anger and hostility towards the opposition. There is much assertion of what appears incorrect common sense or, in other words, what is taken as obviously true often seems improbable to me, and rarely has it been tested adequately to say it is true. There is, more or less, no play to real reason, or exploration. It seems to be primarily about asserting that “We” are good, and that “The Enemy” (those who disagree with us) is evil. The same is true of many rightwing politicians and intellectuals.

I’ve also noticed, that people on the right tend to be very sensitive to left wing abuse of them, and don’t even notice the perennial haze of hostility in their own media. I presume something similar happens on the left, although its not as obvious to me.

As a result I would tend to hypothesize that people notice the emotional bias of those *not* on their side with greater ease than they notice the emotions of those on their own side, perhaps because they share those emotions, and emotional biases.

Another thing that suggests it is hard to think unemotionally or unbiasedly, is the difficulty of doing science.

While science is based on common thinking and exploratory methods, it seems uncommon as a practice. It does not flourish in many cultures for long, away from day to say survival issues.

Science is about checking up your ideas to see if they are correct. Pretty basic, you might think, but this habit appears unusual. Most people seem to search for confirmation of their ideas, not to explore where their ideas do not work.

Science also regularly involves other people checking your ideas to see if they are false, without that much hostility. It involves making predictions and changing ideas if those predictions do not come true. This seems very unusual. Outside of science we seek ways of explaining why our predictions do not work, and why we are still right despite those failures, and more to the point, we then do not test those explanations. If we have a persuasive idea outside of science, it often appears that we keep running with it, even as disasters seem to pile up, rather than exploring if it is correct….

While the ideas that Einstein deduced which led to Relativity theory where logical, it was the fact that they worked in the world, and passed tests, that made them significant, not the fact they were logical.

Nowadays, in politics, if scientists generally agree on something we don’t like, we just assume we know better than they do. Sometimes we might be right, but it is not an assumption that we should have much faith in because it probably comes from emotions, such as fear of “what if the science is right?”

My bet is that if anyone thinks they are arguing entirely from reason on a social issue (in particular), they are probably being swayed by propaganda, emotion and bad thinking.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Covid Conspiracies??????

April 29, 2021

To assume that Covid was fakery produced by government conspiracy, or that scientists were paid to fake data, you might have to make a lot of assumptions.

You would have to assume: a) that Donald Trump had approved the payments to scientists in the USA and b) that his government was exaggerating the dangers of Covid, rather than playing them down and telling people it would pass. This seems somewhat contradictory.

You would have to assume that Russia, the UK, France, Australia, Iran, Brazil, China and India (amongst others) also conspired together to lie about Covid, even when their governments were pretending there was not much of a problem. This also seems improbable, especially given they rarely can agree to do anything together.

That does not mean there could have been no conspiracies.

It seems more likely that some governments conspired to pretend that covid was not a big deal to keep the economy going, and keep the people docile at work, and were annoyed when scientists would not all go along with this.

It may also be the case that some governments, through intermediaries, publicised fake information about covid in the hope that people in other countries would take their advice and do nothing, or people would refuse to accept the quarantines, and those other countries would be ravaged by the disease and destroyed.

Did some governments try to shut down dissent? Well they certainly used the virus to shut down climate protests, school strikes, and some BLM events… So possibly they did. But I don’t see any really huge differences in the US, UK etc…. produced by Covid. Of course I could be wrong.

The virus appears to be unlike the flu or the common cold, although it is often alleged by politicians that it is similar. It has different effects on the body, can affect livers, hearts, brains etc…. For some people it continues for months. It seems to have killed as many people in the US in a year, than about 10 years worth of flu.

Of course the death figures could be all faked, but again it seems improbable, especially given that many governments wanted everyone to get back to work and suppressed figures, and its easy to under-find deaths from Covid, because Covid can have consequences for a business (such as a retirement home), or the Covid death looks like stroke, or heart attack or lung embolism etc….

If the Vaccine is a mind control device, as some people allege, then we have heaps of secret tech knocking around that most scientists seem unable to understand, or explain. If the tech was that advanced you probably would not need to pretend there was a deadly virus to spread it. You could just put it in people’s food, or in normal vaccines or normal medicines – that way it would be much easier to hide.

One thing you might notice, if “you did the research”, was the amount of taxpayers’ money going to help the wealthy, in terms of subsidies and tax breaks, or used to shore up companies dying from other causes, but that is pretty normal nowadays, and is rarely commented upon.

I’d suggest that there may already be a conspiracy to turn the US into a dictatorship, or a form of corporate plutocracy. Republicans seem to have been running this conspiracy since the 1980s, and have won over much of the supposed opposition. This conspiracy is generally known as ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘free market economics,’ and seems designed to benefit established corporations and wealth, at the expense of everyone else.

I’d be much more concerned about that conspiracy than about a Covid conspiracy, but somehow that idea gets far less publicity than the fake news around Covid.

Oh and those neoliberal free market supporters, just seem to be the ones promoting the idea that covid is fake and being used to increase government tyranny. Wonder if that is a distraction, from what they are doing?

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Biofuels

April 19, 2021

Biofuels have been a major part of the supposed energy transition. They have been the subject of much investment, governmental legislation and subsidy, to make them attractive and sometimes to force consumption.

The fundamental problem is that as biofuels work through burning, they produce greenhouse gas emissions now, and do not lower greenhouse gas emissions (even in theory) until the emissions released in their production are recovered through regrowth, and it is generally much quicker to burn material than to grow it back again. They may never reduce emissions if they do not replace other worse sources of emissions and pollution, rather than being used in addition to fossil fuels, or producing no incentive to lower fossil fuel consumption.

That biofuels fulfil either of these conditions is dubious, but they can also produce systemic problems:

  • Biofuels may take a lot of energy and land to produce and transport repeatedly to places of consumption, so their EREI could be extremely low while pollution could be high.
  • Farming, or extracting, these fuels, can: require fertile land and dispossess small holders, forest dwellers, and dependent labour from land (increasing food problems); bring about destruction of old growth forests (increasing CO2 emissions); decrease biodiversity; increase systemic vulnerability to plant disease; and increase price of food by taking land away from food production.
  • Using genetically modified algae for biofuels could risk ecological damage, if the algae escape.
  • Using organic waste, usually for the production of biogas, may remove natural fertilisers from the soil, and increase the energy consumed in making replacement chemical fertilisers. It may also lead to the deliberate production of ‘waste’ to fuel the biofuel plant – as with wood chipping.
  • Using plastics as sources of biofuels, is simply using fossil fuels in a rather complex way.
  • Harmful, or dubious biofuels may be used to boost the illusion of a progressing renewable energy transition, and take attention away from more beneficial technology.

All of these factors make the ecological and social situation worse.

To solve the ‘burning problem’ people and organisations have proposed using biofuels with Carbon Capture (BECCS), but this assumes carbon capture is feasible and works, and that we can store or use the extracted gas without risk of releasing it. This seems to be largely an argument from fantasy.

This does not mean that all biofuels are useless in all circumstances. There are small scale exceptions when locally made biofuels can be used locally to add power to villages which are not connected to reliable electricity, or who suffer from a lack of traditional fuels, but even then replanting trees, and regenerative agriculture may be necessary as well.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

A note on neoliberalism and ignorance

April 18, 2021

Neoliberals put faith in the virtues of the market they structure to favour established corporations. They call this “THE market,” or “THE free market” so people may not wonder if markets can be structured in any other way or any significantly different way. The “THE” implies this market is the only type of market there is, the only type possible. So this is one form of ignorance that neoliberals create – there are, and have been, many types of markets and societies in human history. There is no reason we could not have a more egalitarian, less destructive, more sustainable, or effective, market – or even all of these at once…

This particular form of ignorance is fundamental to neoliberal power, and could be said to be cultivated. However, there are other indirect types of ignorance or misinformation that circulate because of neoliberalism.

For example. Let us assume we accept the idea that THE market is the perfect information processor as Hayek and others have argued. Then:

Putting faith in this market as the arbiter of truth means that it is impossible to distinguish hype from reality, other than by success. Truth is what works in the market so, if hype works and produces profit or defers the business collapse of the hypers, then the hype is effectively or ‘pragmatically ‘true’, no matter how much destruction is caused, or how false the statements.

Attempts by humans to gain knowledge are useless, or pointless, as human knowledge cannot contain (or process) the information of THE market, so ignorance is to be valued, other than when it is used to constrain the market. As all knowledge is ignorance, other than knowledge that THE market is the best we can do, then all other knowledge is to be disallowed, especially if it contradicts the perfections of THE market.

If knowledge is pointless. then it is not worth having. Neoliberals truly did not need to know about coronavirus. Neoliberals did not need to know how we have slowed pandemics in the past. Neoliberals did not need to know about the consequences of ecological destruction. Neoliberals do not need to know about Climate Change. Neoliberals do not need to know about poverty, or the condition of the working poor. Indeed Neoliberals need everyone to be as ignorant, or misinformed, on these topics as possible

All neoliberals need to know is that THE market will solve the problem (if it is a problem), if THE market is left alone to do its work, because THE market is the perfect information processor, and human knowledge is beside the point.

That is; if climate change, or the energy system, or the pandemic, is a problem then THE market will fix it, as best it is possible to hope for. If people die, that is not a problem as long as its not the hyper-wealthy.

The idea that THE market always produces the best possible, result is both Neoliberal positive thinking and positive ignorance. You can only think THE market always produces the best possible result, by cultivating ignorance of history.

For example if THE market always delivers, then the answer to any problem with government service is to privatise it. You don’t have to do any research to find out if privatisation has worked well in the past, solved the problems which were alleged, or generated efficiencies; you just know that it must have worked well. In particular you don’t have to do research in to which forms of government provided service have been replaced adequately and which have not.

The ‘perfection of THE market’ is an article of faith, which cannot be contradicted by reality. We have a true ‘Vision of the anointed,’ full of self-congratulation to use Thomas Sowell’s terms. If there was such a contradiction between reality and THE market, then THE market could not be the ultimate decider of human virtue and fate, and powerful people might be disturbed by the actions of less powerful people.

Lack of knowledge amongst ordinary people is truly a good thing, as it stops them interfering with THE market – hence Murdoch and others.

Neoliberal ignorance also depends on cultivating people’s ignorance of the idea that markets are contained within planetary ecosystems.

If anything at all is the ‘perfect information processor,’ then it is the global ecology. Anything which disrupts that ecology is likely to be eventually wiped out as the ecology moves into its new form of chaotic equilibrium – and the wipe out is likely to include THE market.

Ecologies take no notice of human requirements, or human politics, or human power. Especially if the human systems not only cultivate ignorance of the ecologies they depend upon, but attempt to destroy them or subjugate them.

Neoliberalism heads towards the destruction of everything, and celebrates the process, by blocking its ears, eyes, mouth, touch and brains.

***************

Comment

A friend writes:

How do the neoliberals square this idea of the market as always being the best approach given its failure in the dotcom bubble, and the GFC? They seem like clear counterexamples, and one only needs a single counterexample to disprove a theory.

I think that, in general, people always try and get around counter-examples rather than give up their theory, especially when its tied to their status, money, and ways of making sense of the world. However, I would agree that there seem to be a large number of counter examples as to the efficacy of THE market.

However, neoliberals always say that the crashes were caused by the government interfering with the market.

Given that the market has to have some regulation and that capitalists always seek to regulate for their own sectional benefit, they can always point to the existence of some regulation. A market which gives massively unequal wealth gives massively unequal power, and hence THE market is always structured by politics. Consequently, given the ease of blaming the government, rather than the corporately controlled market and government, they are never at a loss for a way out of the problem.

As well, the corporately owned and sponsored media tends not to blame the neoliberal, pro-corporate market for the problems of that market, and the counter examples can get hidden.

Australia made two big experiments in turning over government to private enterprise and they nearly resulted in the collapse of Victoria and West Australia.

With google I could only find one paywalled reference to Western Australia Inc. https://search.informit.org/…/INFORMIT.098371697477048

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »