Just finished reading
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
(gift link) and realize now that there is a brain eating fungus out there that has manifested itself in key spore producers like MTG and Loomer et al. At lunch, I read another article about San Jose State’s women’s volleyball team getting the finger from Utah, Whyoming and somewhere else about a “purported transgender player” and the completely fabricated stink going on there. Combine that with Warzel’s summary of the enormous tracts of bullshit being pumped out now that the southeast coast has been hammered twice, it HAS to be a fungus – nothing else explains how these loonies can, wait, did I say fungus? Sorry, I flipped out there for a second.
Warzel writes:
But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.
Warzel concludes:
In one sense, these attacks—and their increased desperation—make sense. The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly. But in turning away, they exacerbate a crisis that has characterized the Trump era, one that will reverberate to Election Day and beyond. Americans are divided not just by political beliefs but by whether they believe in a shared reality—or desire one at all.