One of the things that make the hullabaloo over "disinformation" hard to take is the cloying irony of it. To take this constant drumbeat seriously you have to believe that the government and media want us to be well-informed. Well, if they do, they have a funny way of showing it.
The alleged Citibike Karen incident should have been a small example, but it turned into a big one because that's the way these things go. Bad enough that anytime someone in New York farts the rest of us have to smell it but do the talking heads (lowercase) have to get it wrong every time? In any case there was never any evidence for the wild accusations that she was the villain of the story, yet that's how she was depicted right away. Days after her lawyer produced the receipt some were still at it.
Media sources that Reilly notes here like The Grio and The Root are, uh, what they are. But there are others at play here too. If you pay attention to leftward media you may have noticed that *sigh* cishet white men and women in these spaces are always competing for who will get the most Uplift the Marginalized points, like some woke version of The Lockhorns. So something like this will bring all the good white men out, and they might not be very concerned if what they're saying is, to use a quaint word, true.
2 comments:
We'd been spared hearing about this one but it's obviously another example of an interesting, albeit depressing, bit of newsfluff. Oh sure, half a dozen young black men being harrassed and threatened by a pregnant white woman. It's hard to believe it was taken seriously for two minutes but that's not what our culture of outrage is about these days.
It certainly looks as though keyboards and smartphones have fully replaced the pitchforks and torches of the 19th century. We get bombarded by outrage porn whenever we turn on the news. I wonder why that is? Okay kids, nothing to do? Let's all make a lynch mob. Yay!
I found an interesting short essay on Big Think that describes the problem very well. I liked his story about Cephu.
btw: Thanks for the good white men article. Sheesh... wotta bunch.
Obviously there was never a time when everything aired on radio or TV or printed in a newspaper was God's honest truth, but it's gotten to the point where the narratives hatched don't stand up to twenty seconds of scrutiny. The erstwhile Archdruid would probably say that our ruling classes have foolishly used up their magic and are now stuck with cheap trickery.
There are dark aspects to human nature. Unprovoked brute physical violence is mostly part of the male profile, but other evils are distributed differently. Anyway, technology doesn't counteract this. It anesthetizes so that people can indulge without really facing what they're doing.
"Just yelling into the void" is an apt phrase. Fake activity.
I know. These are supposed to be the sages of our time?
Post a Comment