05-12-2022, 11:04 PM
(05-11-2022, 10:57 AM)hollodero Wrote: 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.
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.
(05-11-2022, 01:27 PM)Dill Wrote: Darn it. Hollo beat me to the punch on that one.
Sorry guys, couldn't find the time to reply quickly. Life happens.
Thanks for the outside perspective. I appreciate it. It's always good to get another opinion
I've been sold the 'this is the worst thing, the world is going to end' propaganda for decades now. I used to buy into it. And believe it of not, from both sides of the political aisle as my 'political pendulum' as I call it, swung in my youth before finally settling in the center.
Im a child of the 80s, so I grew up fearing the Russians and being petrified that they would nuke us at a moments notice. It was irrational. So I tend to not overreact to Russian fear mongering. That's not to say that they aren't political adversaries and that they aren't actively engaged in trying to influence our politics. But if you think we aren't reciprocating just as strongly, you're naive. In the end it's political gamesmanship and it's always been there.
Im not discounting the power of the internet and it's ability to amplify these efforts, but I still don't see it as a grave threat. I've been down this road before, and it sucked.
Quote: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.Maybe you've forgotten about the 2000 election and the controversy surrounding it. There were quite a lot of Democrats who thought that Bush stole the election. This article from July 2001 states that in a poll, 33% of Democrats believed that Bush stole the election and 52% of African Americans believed so. Just imagine those numbers if social media existed. They probably would be damn near the 60-70 percent you cited.
Yet, the Republic survived.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4687/seven-americans-accept-bush-legitimate-president.aspx
Want another?
This poll in 2007, six years after 9/11, found that only 39% of Democrats said that Bush didn't know of the terror attacks ahead of time. 35% of Dems said that he absolutely knew about it.
https://www.latimes.com/la-oe-goldberg15may15-column.html
Looney crack-pot people who peddle in conspiracies have always been there. Social media and the internet just put them in your face making you believe that it's worse than it is.
Overreacting and curtailing speech to try to stop it is a huge mistake. A slippery slope that we may never recover from.
Quote: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.
Again, if you don't think that this cuts both ways, you're naive. If you think the left has boundaries, or worse, just doesn't engage in vilifying the right, you're living in an echo chamber and need to diversify where you get your information.
As such, I have zero desire to rehash and debate the numerous examples of the lefts vilification of the right, which I am sure will be the response to this post (not from Hollo), so I am about done here.
