THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE - EVERYBODY'S SOMEBODY'S FOOL

My wife and I are heading to Montana for a family wedding and a bit of sightseeing afterwards.  Posting may be intermittent, although lately, how could you tell? 

In the meantime, I’ll point you to an article by science fiction writer Corey Doctorow (link below), in which he compares Fox News to a Ouija Board (or something like that).  My personal takeaways include this sentence:  “The truth is that none of us are qualified to understand the evidentiary basis for almost everything we believe, so we evaluate the process by which the evidence is weighed by people who are qualified.”  I think that’s true, and that it’s kind of important.

Doctorow went on to write:  “I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exer­cises can’t be trusted. That’s a genuinely scary idea, because if the truth is open to the highest bidder, then we are facing a future of chaos and terror, where you can’t trust the food on your plate, the roof over your head, or the school your child attends.”

“Fake news is an instrument for measuring trauma, and the epistemological incoherence that trauma creates – the justifiable mistrust of the establishment that has nearly murdered our planet and that insists that making the richest among us much, much richer will benefit everyone, eventually.

The contagion model for fighting fake news – replacing untrue statements with true ones – is like firefighting. It’s necessary, but it is responsive, even reactionary.  The trauma model of fake news says that the fires will continue until we clear away the brush that makes them so easy to spark: until we address the underlying corruption that is rotting our society, fires will continue to rage.”

“Simply put: if you want to make conspiracy theo­ries less plausible, you should start by stamping out conspiracies.”

Read the whole thing at https://locusmag.com/2019/07/cory-doctorow-fake-news-is-an-oracle/