Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave
The Case For Gimlet Eyes
I have a friend who sends me reels from Facebook, despite that I consider any link from Facebook an act of hostility.
The most recent reel portended to show the supremacy of the MAGA way of thinking over the liberal.
It showed a man dressed in Arabian garb including turban, explaining to an interviewer how he always aimed his influence at lefties rather than conservatives, because lefties were more open-minded, and thus more willing to embrace his destructive ideas.
On the surface it looked like a radical Islamic operative making a clean breast of his misinformation strategy to a journalist.
But a closer look at his immaculate costume and perfect grooming, his grossly imperfect accent, and his interviewer made up to look like George Will, gave a pretty strong impression of falseness to the scene. Enough to move the arrow to the Better Doubt It portion of my skeptic meter.
My friend caught none of that. He believed he was seeing a radical Islamist calling America’s left wing soft in the head. I have no doubt he giggled in delight as he sent it out.
The reason this is so troubling is that we have all long believed—long hoped—that most matters of judgment concerning truth or falsehood would be within the power of ordinary human subjects to decide correctly.
That is to say, we have always believed that human beings, with perhaps the exception of a very few, could exhibit the perception necessary to tell the difference between true information and horse hockey.
Apparently this is not the case. We have had to adjust our belief that the people’s judgment forms the great repository of wisdom. What are we supposed to think when that penetration is so easily warped by false information in the stream?
Witness the election of our current commander in chief, a triumph of appearance over substance.
Where are we supposed to put the line between being legitimately snookered and being louts who don’t know hokum from hard fact? Perhaps a distinction is to be made between shaky information found lying around, as it were, and a fire hose of deliberate and sustained falsehood that is designed to propagate false understanding.
Perhaps we can be forgiven for occasionally falling for deliberate lies when we have no other means of verifying the truth behind them. From what I can see, though, there are ample means of verifying or debunking just about everything on social media or the TV news.
Nevertheless, this is the hard fact we need to face. Human beings are not the stand-alone arbiters of truth and the denouncers of fraud that we had hoped they were. They are malleable. It’s clear by now that money spent changing public opinion is money well spent.
That’s the other hard fact to face. Propaganda has gotten so sophisticated, the tactics of counterintelligence so practiced, that even the shrewdest skeptics out there can be taken in sometime. Misinformation has evolved to work at exactly those points where we are weakest.
Which makes it all the more important to be vigilant in this process, and know your biases, and view the whole unfolding drama through a gimlet eye. It would seem important to educate everyone in personal biases so we don’t keep electing con men.
Maybe this fake Arab pointed to a truth. We are all in wartime now, dealing with a sustained blanket of counterintelligence, trying to untangle the facts from widespread deliberate misrepresentation and lies.
Concerning the Facebook reel, I haven’t gotten many of these from my friend, but he’s not vowed to stop sending them.
He’s not an idiot, either, as my other friend said. (I have only two friends.) I would only call him unobservant. And he will continue to be a friend if we can just agree to not talk about politics.
I spent thirty years collecting evidence for courts. I thought I'd seen it all, but I was wrong. Much of what is currently presented online, for instance, seems altered. I'm constantly comparing what I'm seeing with what I know to be true. During my 77 years I've seen a lot. But the young have seen little, and what they are shown now constitutes an often unchallenged truth. They have no bank of comparison. The ultra-processed lie fills the void behind the eye.
We are phuked. Between TPTB that have zero allegiance to anything even resembling a truth, and the sophistication of their understanding of human thought modalities, we are toast. This all started with Bernays and his work over a hundred years ago. The spooks took his research and combined it with Skinner's work....and they have been sharpening that knife ever since. They know more about us and how we think than we know about ourselves. So now....you cannot believe ANYTHING. Not even your own eyes. We don't know whether to shit or go blind, or close one eye and fart. They have us right where they want us. We cannot even trust ourselves. This of course leaves us isolated, distrustful, confused, demoralized. That's what the whole trans movement is about. Telling us we can turn a rooster into a hen. Man.....they have you right where they want you when you can believe that. When you can deny biology and think the impossible not only possible but certainly possible. Politics is just the beginning. Politicians have always lied like hell. We are used to that. When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done. I think that was H. L. Menckin. Anyway...our brains are just computers. GIGO. And when they then fuck with language, they fuck with words, they fuck with meaning, and ultimately the ABILITY to think, When you destroy words...you commit mentacide. You reduce a man or woman to beast. I have turned to GOD. I go to morning prayer on a daily basis. It's now how I start my day. I pray for discernment. I read my bible. Without that anchor....I am lost in a sea of perfidy at the mercy of an unmerciful Lucifer....the Father of Lies. GOD help us all.