Ministry of Truth?

[hollodero]

(05-10-2022, 10:55 PM)StrictlyBiz Wrote: No, I am not suggesting "Fake" anything or denying what our intelligence agencies have claimed. What I am suggesting is that you have been influenced to believe that this is something new or worse than it has been in the past. Foreign actors have been trying to influence our elections for decades and we (the US) have been doing the same to other countries too. I am suggesting that the only thing that has changed is that you are being reminded of it daily and as a result are over focused on it. I do think that we should do everything in our power to eliminate it and trust that our intelligence agencies are working hard on it, around the clock. 

I have to somewhat disagree with this.
Russian influence campaigns reached 126 million people on facebook alone. This, imho, is an unprecedented scale. Everything Russia does to influence other countries is. I'm from Europe, and Russian influence is or at least was everywhere. They give tons of money to right-wing parties like Le Pen or our own Freedom parety and plenty others all over the continent, they at times flood our message boards, and nope it never was like that in the past, not even close.

Aside from that, apparently around 60-70% (more or less, depending on the survey) of republican voters believe that the election was stolen. A majority, that much seems to be quite certain. That also is an unprecedented scale for an apparent lie, meaning an assertion with zero evidence to back it up. I can't remember a conspiracy theory being so engrained into the mainstream.

And I have to agree with Dill that this is turning into a severe problem. If a majority of a party is willing to believe everything over truth and facts, the outlook is grim. Who knows what Trump or anyone like him will come up with next, maybe it's even less harmless than election fraud (not that it was harmless), and at some point it will be. If people are willing to believe everything, then there are no boundaries in villifying the other side, up to the point where they are all perceived as evil, mentally ill and subhuman. And this is actually happening already, on a scale I never witnessed before, not in my own dumb country nor anywhere else. Misinformation turns into a weapon in an ideological warfare, and the real weapons might very well follow. And the fringe of the past steps into the spotlight, and it's not just MTG or the Breitbart mob. The whole GOP goes with their voter's guts (or the planted lies) over facts. This, imho, is a very dangerous development.

Not that I predict anything, I do hope things turn back to more normalcy and these things are not the stepping stone to authoritarianism; and I can understand that you see it differently. But the things Dill are mentioning are imho not that overblown as you make them out to be, in the same sense as I believe the things I said are not phantasies.