Friday, June 30, 2017

The Firehose of Fake News


Alex Jones, with the presidential stamp of approval, peddles fake news of the most uproarious kind:

He’s at it again. Conspiracy theorist and human gopher Alex Jones announced his latest revelation and it’s out of this world. On Infowars, his radio talk show, which is beamed across 118 stations in the US, his guest on Thursday was Robert David Steele, who, according to the latter’s Wikipedia page and website, is a former clandestine services case officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (you know how much spies love publicity) and author of several books. He was also, briefly, the Reform Party candidate for the US Presidential Elections in 2012. Which is a shame when you imagine the missed TV gold opportunity of him in debate with Donald Trump in this last election cycle.

But never mind all that. While on Jones’ show, Steele mentioned how NASA established a colony on Mars to which they shipped kidnapped children over a 20-year space ride.
The fact that, in that case, they wouldn’t be kids anymore wasn’t touched upon. Once there, the “kids” have no alternative but to become slaves at the colony, because that’s just how NASA rolls apparently.

The current mainstreaming of that crap looks a lot like the firehosing mechanism a Rand Corporation study attributes to Russian propaganda:  Just keep on spewing enormous amounts of stuff, never mind if any of it's true, never mind if the stories contradict each other, because at least the critics must address every one of them, and the audience becomes so fatigued by that firehose of fakeness that it simply stops believing anything.  And that's what the powers that be want:  A world where all evidence is a matter of opinion.

I was musing on the above when I laboriously put the finishing touches on my previous dry post about the Blair study on modern sexism.

And then I asked myself why I bother.  It would be much better for me had I invented a story about incredibly gorgeous space aliens kidnapping strapping young Democrats for fertility-related investigations, having to do with silk whips, whipped cream and fishnet stockings.