Complex Numbers

Untruth and Consequences

Today, we veer dangerously close to some of the Forbidden Subjects. Fortunately, the responsibility for them is on this Cracked article, not on me.

5 Social Side-Effects Of Disinformation  

It is not a well-kept secret that we're in an era ripe with the trappings of digital-isolation.

We all make errors. Yes, even me. I'm sure you've seen some and have been too polite to mention them. In my defense, I write these things in an hour or less, and I don't have an editor. Moreover, I'm not getting paid. And sometimes I've been drinking (not tonight, though).

But if you're going to write (or edit or publish) a piece on the dangers of disinformation, it behooves you to get certain things right. To wit:

ripe: adj. having reached a state of readiness or maturity

rife: adj. full of

These words are spelled similarly and their definitions aren't that dissimilar (there are more definitions of both), but they are different enough that I catch it when someone misuses "ripe" when what they really mean is "rife." This is not as blatant as when someone says they weren't "phased" by something (it should be "fazed"), but again - it's an article about being misinformed about things.

But really, that's minor compared to the bullshit illuminated in the article.

While some argue that we're actually closer than ever -- being able to keep in contact with folks scattered across the globe -- the quality of these interactions is less than those of the in-person kind. There's something magical about that face-to-face interaction with our fellow human beings.

I have not found this to be the case, but then, I'm an introvert with misanthropic leanings.

People are now desperately seeking out that feeling of closeness and those feelings have left space for something dangerous to sneak: misinformation and conspiracies ...

To be fair, though, people have been believing bullshit for far longer than there's been pandemic-inspired social distancing. It may not feel that way, but the pandemic is only technically a year old, and bullshit is at least as old as civilization.

5 Online Groups Are Getting Really Weird

When missing that sense of community, online groups have become a quick fix for the isolated.

I've been part of one online group or another for years. I don't see the difference, except that I can't pour the other people a drink online.

There's a player in this game that, while a lot less prominent than the social media giant, has a lot more danger tied into it: Nextdoor. If you aren't familiar, Nextdoor is a social media app with about 10 million users that focuses on hyper-locality rather than the large scale of Facebook. It's more like a hot garbage fire engulfing your neighbor's trash can rather than your city's dump. You have to give your address to make an account, and your "group" are your literal neighbors. Apps like these are particularly infamous, from everything to exaggerating fear in local crime and to helping enable racial profiling.

Okay, confession time: I follow my neighborhood in Nextdoor. I have never participated in a discussion there, but I lurk. And while I've seen more bullshit than I usually like, I've also seen it get piled on and corrected. Nor have I personally witnessed some of the darker side described here. But I live in a progressive, diverse neighborhood in a college town, so I accept that my experience may not be the norm.

Rather than bringing communities together, and helping raise that social capital, they just tear people apart and devolve into massive unmoderated fights over everything from vaccines containing microchips and that tea tree oil is a suitable replacement to washing your hands, to Trump being God's gift to America fighting against cannibals and pedophiles. Seeing your neighbors spout such insanity creates a McCarthy-level paranoia, leaving people wondering if that kind person from down the street, who always drops a pie around the holidays, is really a card-carrying Antifa assassin or QAnon quack.

As Nextdoor is the polar opposite of anonymous internet shitposting, this should be easy enough to figure out.

4 Yoga And New Agey Types Are Getting Into It

Surprise: wellness communities are falling into QAnon conspiracies. Who could have expected that the people who believe crystals have magic healing powers have some hot takes on Covid?

But if you just align your chakras with the proper crystals, you'll be immune to Covid. And it just so happens that I have a perfectly tuned set, which can be yours for the low, low price of $179.99...

What may have started off as a holistic medicine post like, "Here's a turmeric-infused green juice immunity shot that will help give you a boost," can turn into a complete rejection of modern medicine and common-sense recommendations of doctors and researchers. It seems that the acceptance of alternative belief systems made it rather easy to accept alternative facts.

I don't want to rag on peoples' beliefs, but if those beliefs contradict science, we have a problem.

While I appreciate the core tenants of spiritualism, as well as keeping an open mind to the truths around you, it seems counter-intuitive to accept a "truth" that rejects all other truths. If you're able to derive meaning from an Insta or TikTok tarot reading, then here's hoping you can learn to derive reading from actual medical research and preachings from true field experts.

I've generally seen what's called "alternative medicine" as an adjunct to, you know, actual medicine. Not as a replacement for it. I get that people have spiritual needs, and if they want to do yoga or meditate or consult Tarot or pray or whatever, I'm not going to gainsay them. But when they say shit like "an angel told me that Covid is a punishment from God for our evil ways," again, we have a problem.

3 Teachers Are At Risk

We've all had that one out-there teacher who was the champion of the insane. My personal favorite was my high school physics teacher, who had the genius idea of building a hot air balloon that could lift himself off the ground as a class project. Unfortunately, the administration caught on to his idea and made him scale it down to a bowling ball.

This is funny, but it's not a great example. Sure, things could easily go wrong, perhaps even spectacularly, but the science behind hot-air ballooning is well-known and settled, and has been since the time of Aristotle (at least in theory; it took a couple millennia to put it into practice). On the other hand, there is no science behind a lot of the bullshit that's out there.

A video of an English professor at Mesa Community College in Arizona was leaked online by a student, where he went on a 14-minute rant touting QAnon to his class. He was thankfully subsequently fired, as baseless and dangerous conspiracy theories are rightfully considered more dangerous than a hot air balloon made by a bunch of teenagers.

The danger of ideas is far more pernicious than the danger of falling out of a balloon. And while, throughout history, many ideas have been labeled "dangerous," history forgives the dangerous ideas that are based in fact. Not so much the fictional ones.

There's implicit trust in teachers and a given assumption for children (and a lot of adults) that things you are taught in the classroom are facts.

I lost my naïveté in that area in eighth grade. I've told the story here before. In that case, the teacher was misinformed, but not deliberately so. She didn't have an agenda for spreading nonsense; she simply misunderstood physics. That would be bad enough in a generic teacher, but she was a science teacher.

It really doesn't help that a third of all Americans believe that the election was fraudulent or that 86% of teachers haven't even addressed Trump and his claims about voter fraud with students. It's hard to know what you're supposed to believe when the adults in your life don't even seem to know what the truth is, and no one will even talk to you about it.

Okay, but I can kind of understand the 86% thing. Stating your beliefs on the subject of the last Presidential election, whichever side you come down on (truth or fiction), is going to be seen as a political statement -- and political statements don't belong in primary schools. Hell, once I say "Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential election," half the country would dismiss everything I had to say. Or, you know... vice versa.

This is why I try to stay away from politics, one of the Forbidden Subjects.

By the way, Biden was the legitimate winner.

This is the one in-person outlet that these incredibly impressionable youths are getting during the pandemic to even interact with other people. The level of influence that this one and only exposure will have on them can't be understated, and it's best if it isn't flooded with falsity soapboxing.

Or, really, any kind of soapboxing, at least insofar as it's unsupportable by facts.

I remember that the worst thing I had to deal with in high school was trying to create funny content for my Snap story. What a time to be a school kid, with the looming decline of democracy hovering over you like an unsafe hot-air balloon.

Oh, boo hoo. We expected the Bomb to drop at any moment.

2 Given The Coup, We Clearly Need To Address This With The Military

One in five of the participants who stormed the capital had a military history, which when you consider that veterans only make up 7% of the population, not 20%, it's clear how extreme the skew is.

No argument here, but one must be very careful playing with statistics. To hear some people talk, the military is rife (see, that's how you use the word) with right-wing Nazis. I do not believe that this is the case. Are they in there? Sure. There are also a bunch of liberals in there, and a whole lot of centrists. So while the Koup Klux Klan there in Washington in January had a disproportionate number of ex-military folks, let's not go condemning the military itself. Correlation isn't causation.

The literal last thing we want is the military involved in a coup against the American government. They're literally supposed to be protecting us from insurrectionists, not being the actual goddamn invaders. Hopefully, this really underlines the threat of misinformation campaigns with a bright yellow wide-tipped highlighter.

Can we literally stop using "literally" as an intensifier? No? Oh well, I guess that ship has sailed. Point is, though, that as far as I know, they were all acting as private citizens. While I have respect for the military in general, it's made up of people, and people can be subject to believing bullshit.

What all this really shows is that we need to create a strategy for defending against misinformation. At the very least, we could provide some basic media literacy training for our armed forces.

I have no idea if this is a thing or not, but basic media literacy training sounds like a good idea for everyone in general. It doesn't have to be politically biased.

I should also point out that neither I, nor the author of this article, is singling out the conservative side of things. Point 4 above was about new-age stuff, which is almost exclusively the province of the left. You won't hear me say "both sides are bad," but what I am saying is that bullshit doesn't take political sides; it's an equal-opportunity brain rotter.

But now we get to the other Forbidden Subject.

1 Churches Are A Fertile Ground For Misinformation

This is, quite honestly, a weird one. I mean, is it really shocking that churches house conservative messaging? But while there are definitely some churches out there that are openly advocating QAnon gospel, it's weirdly the nature of how the conspiracy is told that appeals to Christian sensibilities.

Far be it from me, an atheist, to defend churches, but I'm certain that, as with the military, they're not all conservative in the political sense. People tend to go among like-minded people, though, and if a homophobe, for example, finds himself in a church led by a gay minister, he's going to find another church, one that reinforces his beliefs. And the other way around, of course. So, no, it's not shocking that some churches house conservative messaging, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that all churches are alike. If they were, there wouldn't be hundreds of different sects.

Once you think about it, it actually makes some sense that QAnon is filling this void of religion. Dark and terrible forces influencing the earth? A lone savior here to bring justice, who works in secret and mysterious ways? The storyline is surprisingly ... Christian. (You could have gone with Blade instead of Q, but nooo.)

Oh, come on now, Superman is the obvious choice.

So even if you wanted to do the right thing as a religious leader -- preach tolerance, forgiveness, to look out for deceivers and misleaders -- you don't really have space, time, and community to foster these connections with people and guide them away from dangerous rhetoric.

Again, I'm in the awkward position of having to defend religion here, but I'm absolutely sure that there are many religious leaders (Christian and otherwise) who are positive and inclusive in their messaging. The ones with the "dangerous rhetoric" tend to have a bigger megaphone, it's true, and they're the ones you hear about (usually right before getting caught banging a prostitute, but that's another issue). But as with the military, we can't just lump them all together in the "believes whacko conspiracy theories" pile.

Fertile ground, though? Sure. Once you start believing one unsupportable thing, you can be open to believing more. That's one reason I hammer on about science.

And while we definitely do live in the darkest timeline, don't give in to fear.

During the nadir of our current situation, I texted a friend of mine like: "What if, in the future, we invent time travel? And there are time cops who go back and fix the timeline to produce the most optimal outcome? ... And what if we're living in the result?"

"You shut your whore mouth right now," was the response.

Point is, maybe we are living in the darkest timeline. Maybe we're not. I like to make jokes about that, myself. I can't count the number of times I've said, "This timeline sucks." But for me it's more an expression of frustration than anything else; fiction aside, I don't think there's any way to change the past.

Nor can we change the future. But we create the future all the time. And I'd rather live in a future where we can still have different opinions about politics, religion, etc., and even argue about such things -- but those opinions are all based on facts.

And to those out there facilitating the spread of misinformation, here's a little biblical quote courtesy of Rob Buckingham, a pastor of Bayside Church in Melbourne: "Ephesians 4:25: So, stop telling lies. Let us tell our neighbours the truth."

And there it is, folks: probably the one and only time I'll quote the Bible in here, and it's buried three layers deep in someone else's quote.