Google Study Finds Psychological 'Inoculation' Can Improve Resistance to Misinformation (seattletimes.com) 173
Are there better ways to fight misinformation? "Researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)
Instead of using the term "debunking," they're calling it "pre-bunking...." The researchers found that psychologically "inoculating" internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.... The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques.
One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, "What happens next will make you tear up." Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media. The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a "horrific" accident instead of a "serious" one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, "someone may be pulling your strings."
Beth Goldberg, one of the paper's authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people's innate desire to not be duped. "This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I've seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum," Ms. Goldberg said.
Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts. The researchers don't have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation....
The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.... The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: "Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate 'mental antibodies' against fake news."
Instead of using the term "debunking," they're calling it "pre-bunking...." The researchers found that psychologically "inoculating" internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.... The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques.
One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, "What happens next will make you tear up." Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media. The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a "horrific" accident instead of a "serious" one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, "someone may be pulling your strings."
Beth Goldberg, one of the paper's authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people's innate desire to not be duped. "This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I've seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum," Ms. Goldberg said.
Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts. The researchers don't have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation....
The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.... The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: "Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate 'mental antibodies' against fake news."
Misinformation (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Sensationalized headlines that are stating simple facts devoid of context that are ultimately meaningless
2. Relying on anonymous, uncorroborated sources
3. Reporting on someone else's reporting without any additional fact-checking
4. Reporting on videos posted to the internet without any additional fact-checking
5. Reporting on anything with barely any fact-checking at all
Unfortunately, nearly all major news outlets are guilty of doing all of the above fairly consistently. The Washington Post ran an article a few months ago that required multiple retractions and clarifications in a single day because, apparently, the reporter, fact-checkers and editor couldn't be bothered to do even basic checking.
The news is broken. The thing is, I think it's always been broken, it's just easier to check on reporting these days, and it's easier for people to counter what reporters have to say if they get things wrong, or flat-out lie.
Re: (Score:2)
The news is broken.
How about the news is imperfect like most things where humans are invovled. I follow a number of international and local main stream news outlets and as long as I use my critical thinking muscles, I feel like I get an acceptable version of what is happening in the world. In regard to your WaPo example, yes people reporting breaking news sometimes get it wrong (and sometimes very wrong) in the rush to get out the news. However, the errors are typically corrected promptly and the people who made the mistak
The news hasn't always been broken (Score:2)
There's also the entire story of the birth of Fox News as a wholly owned subs
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> The news is broken.
Not for the people funding it. That will remain invariant.
Re: Misinformation (Score:2, Troll)
Re: Misinformation (Score:2)
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I'm familiar with just about all of the right-wing fever dreams around all of those things except this one. That Kashoggi was murdered, on the orders of Salman, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul is a simple fact that I didn't think was in dispute in any way. What's the big secret that you "think" is being covered up?
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There's a problem for 3, 4, and 5 in that "fact checking" these days often refers to the process of sitting on the shitter trawling Facebook for affirmative posts on the topic.
People genuinely believe they are fact checking when they look up one piece of misinformation that agrees with another. You could see that quite clearly during COVID-19 and the fact that people *still to this day* point to all manner of questionable sources showing ivermectin is an effective treatment, and that despite an overwhelmin
Re: Misinformation (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the idea is to keep people who can't remember what they did a minute ago from posting the same drivel twice.
It's not foolproof, of course.
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Actually, Slashdot's "you must wait" response was to my first post. I guess they are queuing up submissions to see who should be cancelled due to political incorrectness.
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Removing paywalls != getting studies out before peer review.
Maybe if you spend that 1-minute pre-bunking your bullshit you'd see your post makes no sense.
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Before anyone can peer review (debunk) it.
Peer review has a huge number of issues on its own. Science should not be an old boys club.
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Peer review is not perfect but it is a pretty damn good moderator on the truly stupid. There were all sorts of studies during the past 2 years on COVID that failed peer review and were withdrawn. E.g. the New England Journal of Medicine which withdrew a flawed study showing ivermectin prevents COVID hospitalisation.
The biggest problem with peer review is that it closes the barn door after the horse has bolted, and while the study was in pre-print it was already been cited by other studies to say nothing of
Trolling is a art (Score:5, Insightful)
A tactic like they're describing may work, or not. Some 'influencers' are very skilled. Some play the 'long game', vis-a-vis 'QAnon'. Some of them just substitute increased volume (I literally mean 'sound intensity', being louder) because as we've seen there are quite a few dumb people who respond to someone being louder.
Also, if you've indoctrinated someone from an early age (Catholocism, and religion in general, really, I'm looking at you; also 'we've always been at war with Eastasia') it's nigh-unto impossible with some people to get around the neural hardwiring that seems to create.
I don't think it's an art it's a skill (Score:2)
The key to trolling is to know how to walk right up to the line and get away with it. There's a rather famous story of a journalist who goes into a bar gets a drink and sits down and then two more guys come in and the bartender screams of those two guys for them to get out now.
The journalist is understandably confused
You mean (Score:2)
education?
Obviously. (Score:4, Interesting)
* The media is for-profit, and therefore fundamentally reliant on minimizing the competence of its audience. The sharper you are, the more work they would have to put into maintaining you as a viewer, so they avoid the problem by cultivating ignorance.
* Religion is strenuously opposed to any kind of education that teaches critical thinking, and acts in parallel with business interests to cultivate ignorance.
* Most political ideologies with access to power and influence are authoritarian, and find common cause with business and religion to suppress critical thinking education.
I highly doubt a corporation so corrupt they couldn't stand to keep using "Don't Be Evil" even as rhetoric is going to implement this kind of education.
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Thank you. Lots of good discussion here, but many are somewhat mired in the details.
When I was a kid we had an older relative who was a "magician". I was totally fascinated by his tricks, and still enjoy "magic" / illusionists.
The point is, at a very young age I learned that not everything is as it appears. "Don't always believe what you hear" used to be solid foundation for living. I'm not sure how it changed so much. I guess the digital communication bypasses skepticism?
For me it's the opposite- it's
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It's a fortunate thing for decent people that liars are so lazy and entitled, because even a slightly disciplined mind is practically a supe
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* The media is for-profit, and therefore fundamentally reliant on minimizing the competence of its audience. The sharper you are, the more work they would have to put into maintaining you as a viewer, so they avoid the problem by cultivating ignorance.
I don't think that's how that works. The profit issue for media comes from not from deliberately fomenting ignorance but from chasing viewership. Clarity is easier to explain than nuance. And people will tune in to be outraged. There's still an audience for a good in-depth balanced explanation, but that takes a lot of time and research to do properly and only a few players like the NY Times can afford to do that.
* Most political ideologies with access to power and influence are authoritarian, and find common cause with business and religion to suppress critical thinking education.
One trouble with a political ideology is messaging. Internally you want some debate so your idea
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This is essentially in agreement with my position.
A shallow, unaccountable, gratification-seeking audience is easy to predict and program, while people with long memories and a habit of thinking for themselves are usually too high-maintenance to be worth satisfying. This is especially true with ad-supported media,
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I think what I've found in the last 15 years or so, since I started observing a bunch of scientists, researchers, doctors, all of them speaking on the importance of critical thinking, is that the profit and power people have a lot more influence over our instit
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The key insight to understand these phenomena is that they're nothing special or uniquely human: It's just predator camouflage. Every ad slogan, every propaganda image or corrupt symbol, every clickbait headline...all just degrees of tiger stripes and leopard spots. Someone wants what you have, and has chosen to pursue it by misanthropic means.
You're definitely not exaggerating to call it evil.
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I highly doubt a corporation so corrupt they couldn't stand to keep using "Don't Be Evil" even as rhetoric is going to implement this kind of education.
People elevated that motto to some kind of core organisational goal. It never was. It was a comment made to investors, nothing more. And yet precisely the spread of misinformation elevated that to a position where people are now crying about it.
Google was always in some ways corrupt. People's definition of "evil" varies greatly. People don't agree on what phrases mean. News at 11.
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The guilty flee when none pursue.
who would have thought ... (Score:2)
... that proper education actually works!
careful what you wish for, though. current elite's comfortable empires aren't precisely the result of populace being proficient in critical thinking. for a reason. can't have it both ways!
Also how 4chan works (Score:5, Interesting)
It always surprises journalists how /pol/ is supposedly about "conspiracy theories only", yet frequently able to get the scoop. Guys on there are exposed to bs on near constant basis from each other, meaning everyone and everything is mistrusted as a troll or astroturfing, while legible and hard evidence are rapidly followed upon.
Sure there's a large population of terminally idiotic qanon worshippers, but that just comes with the territory - not everyone makes it through the thick skin training.
Re: (Score:2)
What scoop? That Bill Gates is somehow tracking them with microchips in vaccines?
The other day I heard one of your guys claim that Bill Gates was trying to make baby formula as close as possible to breast milk so that everyone would be forced to buy it from him and then he would control what babies eat! I still don't know why they thought this was bad. I'm not sure they had a very clear idea either.
Speaking of Bill Gates, wasn't he supposed to have been executed at Gitmo by TFG (who is secretly still pres
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Seething journo case in point lol. The most recent one would be SD weight leaks from closed beta. If you need more examples of insider leaks history, just look it up.
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SD weight leaks from closed beta
I don't even know what that means. Is this one of your crazy conspiracy things?
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Definitely one way to look at [reddit.com] those darn computer things (get off my lawn, toasters!111) that do stuff.
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For anyone who wants to know, apparently SD stands for "stable diffusion" which is an "AI" image generator.
Yeah, I don't get it either.
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yet frequently able to get the scoop
When 10000 monkeys throw their poop at a typewriter, you'll find one of them actually produces something that resembles reality. That doesn't mean that you aren't still looking at what can only really be described as a pile of shit. Even peddlers of conspiracy theories are occasionally right. Quite often though it is a pure fluke.
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I'm not talking about qanon here, but the ability to differentiate from trivial bullshit like qanon. Think about it: You're an insider, and have something you absolutely want to leak. Big new conglomerates are not interested, or would delay it for months. Where else can you go?
In other words... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Get your disinformation in first".
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Well, considering this is just about explaining how propaganda works so that people are better able to identify it, I'm going to say that your "summery" doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Makes sense, here's the book: Trust Me, I'm Lying (Score:2)
Great book.
This explains and provides examples of media manipulation (small and large scale). I pay less attention to some of things after reading that (and I fear the effect the things I'm ignoring have on other people...).
That and a couple of influence/sales and social engineering books wraps up my theme for 2022 reading.
I don't want to apply these books to my daily life, just be aware of them and able to identify them going on around me.
Interesting (at first) and scary (for the remainder of time).
Ooohh, Psychological 'Inoculation' (Score:2)
Google Study Finds Psychological 'Inoculation' Can Improve Resistance to Misinformation ...
Psychological 'Inoculation' uh huh. Fucking ingenious. There were times when this was taken for granted, and covered by a broad basic education and by teaching common sense, critical thinking and intellectual honesty before branching off into to a narrow specialization.
We need better thinking (Score:2)
I find it a little depressing that the study focused on "inoculation" and not critical thinking skills. Yes of course you can stupefy anyone -- even smart liberal people -- with saturation. That's how TV, radio, and internet advertising works. Looking at them you wouldn't expect a moron to be influenced by most of those messages but the constant repetition and reinforcement adds up and takes effect when the target's guard is down.
What you should be looking for is how people can recover from being dupe
Amazing (Score:3)
> meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The media or NGOs will always refer to "right-wing" misinformation or "right-wing" protestors. But you'll never hear about left-wing rioters or misinformation referred to as such. Hence rioters in the summer of 2020 were merely legitimate protestors despite the violence and destruction of property.
Hence these academics/researchers are so far to the left they don't even see how their worldview is anything but the norm. And in fact people that deviate from their beliefs are the ones with the problem, or somehow "victims" of misinformation.
Here is an example where somehow only someone with the "wrong" ideas would have a problem with a large influx of destitute refugees coming into their country. Because as these NGOs see it open borders are a human right, and the nation-state is just a fiction of patriarchy or something like that. Hence any criticism of these policies must be "misinformation"
I got this in jr. high (Score:2)
Most of my education was pretty limp, but I had a teacher in jr. high named Ms. Calvert who clearly actually gave a shit, and one of the things she put into her curriculum was techniques of propaganda. I've forgotten the names for even most of the basic ones, though I can still remember a few off the top (like bandwagon, just plain folks, and glittering generalities) but what's really important is the idea of just being skeptical of how something is being sold, and recognizing that there are established tec
Mind control (Score:2)
Google works to perfect the art of mind control. Yay!
Who would have guessed... (Score:2)
that education is the cure for stupidity
There's an older term for this sort of thing (Score:2)
We used to call this "poisoning the well". I wonder if maybe someone could make a video about the tactic of claiming that anyone taking a particular position is a no-goodnik, to try to inoculate them against that?
Captain Disillusion (Score:2)
One form of misinformation is plain old fake videos and optical illusions. Captain Disillusion has been doing educational videos about how those are made for years. Here is one example of his videos about a ghost car:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I think this is one of those things we should be teaching to kids at school. You know, try to figure out scientific explanation before suspecting ghosts.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not 2006. That barely registers as a problem, given what we're facing these days.
The top 10 debunking techniques (Score:3)
One turn behind (Score:2)
The fox is teaching the chickens... (Score:2)
BTW, "pre-bunking" is a made-up term for the same kinds of education programmes that the big tech ad agencies have been trying to sell us all along instead of actually regulating them & prosecuting them for false advertising.
The "good" brainwashing... (Score:2)
Can cancel out the "bad" brainwashing.
Still doesn't help the victims of brainwashing figure out which as which.
And, can you trust ANYONE who claims ANY brainwashing is "good"?
Fox News for pre-bunking (Score:4, Insightful)
But, I'd regularly skim Fox, and after a while I started to really understand the bubble, and how if that's all you watched, and everyone around did the same, then you'd probably think Trump was great. Fox regularly sang his praises, hardly criticized his BS, and ran stories about illegal immigrants committing violent crimes, etc..
As I continued to watch Fox, the techniques [wikipedia.org] employed to manipulate their viewers became very obvious to me. What I hadn't expected, was that I also started to notice those same techniques employed by media I had previously considered neutral (NYT, Reuters, etc..).
So, I'd highly recommend spending some quality time with garbage news you disagree with. E.g. if you lean liberal watch Fox, if you lean conservative read the Huff Post, etc... When it's not your biases being targeted, the fallacies are easier to catch, and its good training for scrutinizing media that does target you.
They're not wrong (Score:3)
pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation
Re:Yes, this explains... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes, this explains... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Most Russians just want to have a decent life. They are annoyed that Putin spent big money on war monuments, without improving their pensions. If Putin wants to fight against the west, he should have gotten some benefit for it.
Some people are enticed by the large payments for soldiers in Ukraine. Then they come home and they face this [youtube.com].
Re:Yes, this explains... (Score:5, Insightful)
The all so common conflation between Stalinism and what a lot of western nations (especially the US political parties) label as Communism, thinks like forgiving some student loan dept, is quite baffling to people like myself.
Among people who consider themselves Communists there's a special label for those that do approve of Stalinism. They call them "tankies" and are usually at odds with them.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How many Communist countries didn't experience Stalinism? Cuba? China? North Korea? Vietnam? Laos? Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge?
The list of such countries seems like it must be pretty short. If it's empty, then is the distinction you make actually useful or only academic (or even apologia)?
Re:Yes, this explains... (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of the self labelled "Communist" regimes that adopted (neo-)Stalinist practices of Red Fascism for example also labelled (still do today) themselves "Republican", so by that logic they're Republican?
If we're going by the usual imprecise definitions around here, I'd say almost the entire EU would qualify for that.
And that's the crux there, no accurate definitions are used. No accurate communication protocols that make sure everyone's talking about the same thing is established, because everyone likes their vague terms that can then be used for equivocation when its convenient.
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That's a really terrible dodge. Your earlier comment implies not only a useful definition of Communism, but that you can distinguish it from Stalinism. The fact that other people use sloppy definitions is not an excuse to avoid the question.
Re:Yes, this explains... (Score:4, Insightful)
Stalinism is a subset of the umbrella term Communism. And the examples mentioned would be better summarized using that Stalinism label instead of resorting to the imprecise Communism. Which of course carries a bit of irony with it, because the "wokes" would likely have been put into some labour camp until they died there in such countries. After all the actual will of the people didn't mean very much under those regimes. You should look up what happened to worker unions when they dared to actually express the needs of their workers and not only danced to the tune of the government.
Thus to me it's like if you called what Mussolini and Hitler did *"Western Capitalism", because you know, they were quite corporate friendly (as long as the corporations agreed with them) and would even go to war for those corporations, all while there's the much more concise label of "Fascism".
And yes, likewise I roll my eyes at what's labelled Fascism these days as well, because the Fascists did a lot of things. So just because Hitler ate sugar, you eating sugar doesn't make you Hitler (faulty generalization / association fallacy).
*That more or less was equivocated where I come from. No greater distinctions were drawn to narrow it down even though the examples given only fit a particular subset really well.
So what I'm saying is that having experienced both worlds somewhat, I'm aware that inaccuracies and outright lies do exist everywhere. And I find it weird that after all this time, learning about critical thinking in school, the possibilities of the internet to research pretty much whatever you want yourself and dissecting it with your critical thinking, there's still some staunch beliefs that only one "side" is the brainwashed one while the other "side" is truth and is allowed to be as vague as they want to be.
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Where you come from, is it normal to respond to criticism by insulting the critic? Where I come from, that is bad form both formally (as a fallacy) and socially (as a tactic).
You have at least clarified that you view Stalinism as a subset of Communism, although that is only a minor clarification of your earlier claim. But is Stalinism a proper (strict) subset of Communism in practice, or only in theory? Or are you intentionally being too vague and evasive to answer?
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Eutopian phase communists and academics try to make this distinction claiming 'real' communism hasn't been tried, etc. That the condition it collapses into is the inevitable outcome rather than merely what happened in 'those' places is something they will never accept.
Most people just buy into the sales pitch of helping the hungry, healthcare and education, level playing field, etc. The problem is the only technology socialists have managed to develop has been war technology such as that developed by the Na
Re:Yes, this explains... (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like capitalism?
Speaking of things that have never actually been tried...
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You mean like capitalism?
Speaking of things that have never actually been tried...
Capitalism means that capital controls the means of production, and that's it, that's literally the entire story. The idea that what we have now is not capitalism is absurdist nonsense promoted by capitalists to fleece rubes, apparently including yourself. The idea that "free markets" or anything else are a necessary component for calling it capitalism is wholly unsupported. What we've managed to prove is that pure capitalism is unsustainable, yet it still dominates, and is still destroying the biosphere. C
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Even the Soviets didn't claim to have achieved communism. It was the goal, but they didn't get there.
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They certainly tried, it just fell apart pretty quick, so they went back to the plan B of sticking to socialism first with the idea that eventually they'll establish communism.
Re:Yes, this explains... (Score:5, Informative)
It has been tried and it failed. "real" communism requires more or less equal consumption/contribution from individuals to be sustainable. That means either unlimited supply so unequal consumption is not a problem or limits on consumption which requires people with guns to enforce it which creates power classes and ultimately leads to corruption and inequality. It may work in the religious enclaves or cults with single-minded individuals. It is guaranteed to fail in any more or less diverse society.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That's because it hasn't been. Nobody has ever tried to implement the stated ideas on a large scale.
Yeah, they have, and it just doesn't work.
- Mao's Great Leap Forward was that. How did that turn out?
- Russia tried it in the very early days prior to the soviets (yes, plural) being united. That too didn't work. It turns out that you actually need laws in order for justice to actually be just, otherwise the unwritten rules get selectively enforced, and the penalties for breaking unwritten rules when they're enforced are never consistent, and an egalitarian system it is not.
I went to a communist subreddit o
Re: Yes, this explains... (Score:2)
Yeah, communists are utopians, lacking understanding of both human nature and economics. It's like promising to one day build a stunning penthouse suite, but halfway up there must be a floor built from prawn crackers. Of course it'll collapse the moment you try to build the floor above. At that point the standard game plan is to stop building, then begin executing workers.
You're right, it's a secular religion. Each generation provides fresh naÃfs who think they'll be the ones to finally do it right. Th
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Russia tried it in the very early days prior to the soviets (yes, plural) being united. That too didn't work. It turns out that you actually need laws in order for justice to actually be just
Uh, what? Communism doesn't mean you don't have laws.
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"thinks like forgiving some student loan dept, is quite baffling to people like myself"
Because one is a slope to the other and what you call communism or something similarly authoritarian is the inevitable outcome. There is really one country that has been free in an American sense, which is say free from an authoritarian state (though we've lost much of that freedom in my lifetime). Other countries have permissive policies but you could have permissive policies under a dictator or king.
The difference is wh
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So you hate poor people, you think the US is free (when jaywalking, drinking in the street and Camembert are illegal) and you're pretending the Republicans didn't attempt a coup d'etat.
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Let's take something stupid, for example. Bathrooms.
I'm told there's a big fucking deal over gender and bathrooms. One one side, you have people trying to mandate that bathrooms conform to the requirements of some subset of people, on the other side, you have people trying to mandate that they do not.
Neither one of them are concerned with what you call freedom
Re: Yes, this explains... (Score:2)
Oh, so after Stalin died suddenly the workers paradise materialised?
CeauÈ(TM)escu abd his whore were not a mad dogs, that made you the poorest and most oppresed Marxist state so that you were pitied by the rest of us?
Forgive me if I call giant BS on your "not true communism" falacy.
Signed: your friends from the South. Who's channel 2 you were all watching, if you could recieve the signal for the French and Italian movies. Remember Studio X comrade?
Comrade, in the 80-ies we were selling you socks and c
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Stalinist governments are trainwrecks. Communist governments are different flavors of trainwrecks.
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Did a lot of people die? You bet ya. Stalin considered that a win.
Was a largely peasant society mobilized to the point where it could fucking steamroll the most dangerous military on the planet with an endless fucking supply of materiel? Yup. They did that too.
The decline of the Soviet Union didn't happen on Stalin's watch.
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Outlasting the Germans, in a Russian winter, is impressive, but not completely shocking. Napoleon experienced a similar loss with his era's greatest army. Germany's regime also _never_ had an endless supply of material, it was one of the key factors in losing a 2-front war.
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Whereas the "Communist" or "Socialist" labels are often used in quite vague and generic fashion, to the point of being synonymous to "something that I do not like".
The way I see it, a lot of p
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Regardless like I said initially, I lived in Romania.
At least from there I can testify first hand that the supposed "anti-racism" in Stalinism couldn't be felt very well in reality.
All ethnic minorities were repressed.
Most of all the Romani people, who still today have a hard time to get equal rights in Romania. Having some German ancestry my family got to experience the unequal treatment as well. While officially we were to be
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Woke marxism? Can you explain what that even is?
Re:Yes, this explains... (Score:4, Informative)
It generally refers to schools of thought that are derived from Marxism and Marxian conflict theory, but instead of focusing on the conflict between the working class and bourgeois, they emphasize the conflicts between identities, i.e. whitenenss/non-whiteness, straight vs queer, etc. The modern versions of wokeness are espoused by intellectuals such as Kimberle Crenshaw (Intersectionality), Angela Davis & Derrick Bell (Critical Race Theory), Gayle Rubin (Queer Theory), can trace their influence back to Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt school of critical theory.
Although these philosophers don't generally refer to themselves as "Woke Marxists", as they prefer to distance themselves from the failures of Marxist governments in the 20th century. But the term is accurate.
The reason Established Marxist regimes oppose the woke versions is that these variants is that they already have the power. These movements are destabilizing forces. Since they've already seized the power, then there's no need for them.
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I'd trace more of "wokr Marxism" to Michel Foucault and the Foucault School of Philosophy, which I do believe is more cited by gender activists. I do wish they'd read more of the actual history of Marxism, to understand its flaws and dangers better. Some of them are indeed happy to identif as Marxists, even at public protests.
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As all of us expected, you can't explain what you think that means. That's because the reality is that it's just two "scary" words that Tucker Carlson stuck together to get stupid people to vote against their own best interests. It's not any more complicated than that.
The problem is that you've been told that anything that benefits the individual is "socialsim" (which, to you, is no different from any other "scary" words that you don't understand). You don't really know what the word means, you just kno
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Ah, yes, and you can't fight racism when you're not woke or anti-communist, right?
Nobody said any such thing.
As they say, the Iron law of woke projection never fails.
Nobody says this.
I'm perfectly aware that not everyone on the left is woke or is marxist.
Nobody said you claimed this.
If anything, wokeism may be falling out of fashion seeing how many liberals and progressives are giving pushback against it.
Indeed. That has nothing to do with your misinformation, which is the real topic here.
They're getting sick of the left's insistence on ideological purity.
Your continued use of the "the left" is so fucking ignorant, I'm honestly questioning how I should respond to you. I'm a little worried that you're not well-connected to reality.
Just because you tweak a couple of variables in the program and rename it doesn't mean you've written a new program. The prevalence of narcissism and psychopathy in the human species pretty much guarantees that there will always be a vanguard party waiting in the shadows, so it's not an ideological distinction that is likely to prevent another holocaust.
Socialists didn't cause the holocaust, you dipshit.
Though certainly, they're equally as capable.
As you point out- everyone is capable.
For every Hitler, the next of which yo
Re: Yes, this explains... (Score:2)
Respecting what makes people unique by categorising people into groups that then determine how they will be viewed by society? Interesting approach to celebrating uniqueness.
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Oh, please. The fact that you're using the term "Woke Marxism" tells us that you've already bought into most of the more obvious right-wing lies and propaganda and that you're happy to spread it around!
Re:Hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Hilarious (Score:2)
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Really? The Ukr/Rus war is the most astroturfed event in internet history, and NATO/intelligence connected NGOs are behind most of that astroturfing. Big tech is part of it, with companies allowing the wishing of death of Russian people
I wish the Russian people could experience what the Ukrainian people are, yes. That would be much more fair.
refusing to label news outlets like the BBC and Kiev Independant as gov't/intelligence connected media, while doing that for Russian sources - double standards.
BBC is historically a highly regarded news organization. We have a free press here in the West, Russia not so much. You would have to be clueless to make such a comparison.
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Re: Hilarious (Score:2)
The BBC was once highly regarded (Score:2)
As has been obvious to the majority of the country, one of its own has said the BBC has been hijacked by the Tories.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/art... [thetimes.co.uk]
Re: Hilarious (Score:2)
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This story appearing four above the story claiming Russia is shelling themselves as some kind of PR stunt
If that's what you got out of that story it's clear evidence that information doesn't matter as people will make up what they think stories mean based on their own internal biases.
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> Mandatory viewings! Regularly!
Google Jigsaw https://jigsaw.google.com/ [google.com]
Games https://inoculation.science/ [inoculation.science]
The games are like very tedious trolling tutorials.
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Inoculation, "6 short videos for education" https://www.youtube.com/channe... [youtube.com]
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Great post. I especially like the "antibodies against". LOLed a bit.
As I posted above, I think I've had said antibodies most of my life. Maybe some of us are innately more immune? I've always been very curious, and that involves actively gathering information. Once you think you have all information, you cease your search. The more curious you are, the more you want information, and maybe like me will be more skeptical that you've found everything there is to find. So if you're a bit of a skeptic, you
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Apparently, they do. There are a lot of people who so deeply believe things that are obviously false that they're willing to risk their lives and reputations on it.
We have people drinking industrial bleach to combat a disease that they don't believe even exists. We have badly failed these people. We have a responsibility to do something to prevent absurdities like this in the future.