Some More News: Moral Panics And How To Spot Them

I feel like this video is a good follow-up to Renegade Cut’s Halloween video that I posted earlier this month. Moral panics seem to be both a persistent phenomenon in human societies, and a valuable tool for unscrupulous, usually powerful, people. They’re used to distract from real problems, often at the cost of destroyed lives and livelihoods, and often to protect those aforementioned powerful people from accountability for their misdeeds. I also think it’s telling that, in the Tucker Carlson clip right near the beginning (you knew that fascist shit factory had to be involved here, right?), he equates losing your sex drive with losing your soul. That kind of breathless, hyperbolic ranting isn’t new, but it’s a big part of what’s driving the current moral panic(s), with white supremacist fascism as the goal.

Moral panics convince people of absurd stories that make little to no sense if you dig into them – absurdities, if you will – to hide something that’s ongoing by burying it in noise (say, throwing around the accusation of “grooming” so much that people tune it out when evidence of your own sketchy views or behavior arises). If it’s not that, then it’s to build support for new atrocities.

Absurdities, atrocities, and the murder-clowns of fascism

The fact that I’m writing this is, in itself, evidence that things are not going well in the United States. Nick Fuentes is a despicable fascist weirdo who, ideally, none of you would ever have heard about. He’s a holocaust denier, a white supremacist, calls openly for dictatorship, all that jazz. I’ve been aware of him for a while because a few youtubers I follow have talked about him on occasion, but he never seemed worth my writing about. In most ways, he’s still not worth writing about, except for the fact that he’s managed to attach himself to someone far more famous.

I think one thing I never realized about fascist leaders, growing up, was how deeply strange they all are. I suppose that’s partly my fault, given that they’re famous for murdering people over absurd lies, but I think some of it also has to do with the mythologizing of Nazis in U.S. media. They’re portrayed as relentlessly competent, caring only about efficiency and results, capable of great feats of engineering and blah blah blah. The reality is that many of their so-called accomplishments were little more than propaganda. The Autobahn, for example, existed before Hitler rose to power, and he just claimed credit for it.

If I had to guess why this propaganda persists in our society, I’d say it’s probably because of how close fascism is to capitalism in general, and neoliberalism in particular. I might have felt a need to explain that statement a decade ago, but now I feel I can just point to the GOP. They’re not much different from how they’ve been for my whole life, which is why they’ve been able to go so far, with so much support. Likewise, the Democrats aren’t much different from the Republicans, with their efforts to create the mass incarceration crisis, their opposition to universal healthcare, and their habit of going far harder against the left than the right. And that’s ignoring the decades of U.S. support for fascism abroad.

There’s just a little too much coziness there for anyone in power to want the public to have a clear idea who and what fascists are.

For those who are somehow unaware, Kanye West has started openly peddling anti-Semitic and other right-wing propaganda, and in turn has been warmly embraced by a succession of odious people. The two most recent are Milo Yiannopolis (also a fascist – has been filmed singing with saluting neo-Nazis, had a password referring to The Night of the Long Knives, and the list goes on), and Nick Fuentes.

The three of them just had dinner with Donald Trump, and while it apparently didn’t go well, Trump was supposedly very impressed with Fuentes. To me, that means that we’re likely to see more of that piece of shit, so it’s worth knowing who he is. I’m sharing two videos today, because I don’t particularly want to write about him, specifically, again. I feel that these do a good job of covering who he is, who he appeals to, and why it’s not good to have him closer to the halls of power.

I have a bit of a confession to make. During my time as a lurker around the periphery of the New Atheist movement, I frequently heard a Voltaire quote – perhaps you’re familiar:

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

Until the last few years, I didn’t really get that. I knew that a great many horrible acts had been committed in the name of beliefs I considered absurd, but the same is true of good acts. I still think society would be better if religion was entirely removed from governance, but I think I now have a more complete idea of what that quote’s about. Fascism arose from liberal democracy, and both systems came centuries after Voltaire, but looking at what they believe right at this moment, I’ve gotten a bit more perspective on the scale of absurdity that’s available. These are deeply silly people, who will happily justify torture, murder, terrorism, and genocide.

Fascists are the killer clowns that keep showing up in pop culture. I don’t like the trope, because I’ve known a number of professional clowns in my life, and they’ve all been wonderful people, but I think it’s the best illustration of the problem. Trump, Fuentes, Yiannapolis, Kanye – fascists, including their leaders, tend to be deeply ridiculous people. In some ways, that’s their superpower, not just because it means they’re not taken seriously at first, but also because they seem to be fueled by humiliation. They attract ridicule to themselves like flies to a pile of shit, and they can’t handle even the smallest amount of it. They cannot function in a world where people make fun of them, so they want to murder everyone who does, rather than considering why they might come across that way.

They believe absurdities – more and more of them every year, it seems – and based on those absurdities, they want to murder or enslave most of humanity. As with everything else they do, it might be funny, if our political and economic system didn’t keep giving these people the power to ruin lives.

I don’t think Kanye will ever be president, but this does seem like a way into more “mainstream” politics for those who’ve attached themselves to him, as someone who will reliably get press attention. The GOP’s big divide isn’t between fascism and fash-adjacent neoliberalism, but between which brand of fascism they think will get them into power. By all accounts, Trump loves sycophants, and that seems to be consistent among authoritarians. For those of you who knew nothing about this douchebag when you started reading this post, I’m sorry to have inflicted him upon you. Unfortunately, it’s likely that he and other bozos like him will remain a mutual affliction for as long as fascism is viable in the United States.

 

“When a movement is selling an image of exceptionalism and strength, their design is to attract patrons who are unexceptional and weak.”

A video and some thoughts on propaganda

Whenever anyone starts discussing the accomplishments of communist governments, someone is likely to pop up to point out that those governments are authoritarian. The example I see most often is that someone on the left will point to Cuba’s high literacy rate, and the rebuttal is to say that that was just part of their efforts to propagandize the population. Now, I’m far from an expert on Cuba, but this is one of those subjects where I actually have at least a little relevant experience.

In 2001, I was invited to be a travelling companion for a friend who felt called to visit the Cuban Quaker community. New England Yearly Meeting, to which we belonged, has a sister relationship with Cuba Yearly Meeting, and exchanging visitors is fairly common, though the ability to do it has varied depending on the whims of politicians. At that time, I spoke effectively no Spanish, and didn’t really have the time or inclination to learn. That was, in hindsight, rather bad manners, but I was going there to keep my friend company, and she had actually been studying the language.

It was an interesting trip, but the thing I want to focus on here is Cuban propaganda. There absolutely was a lot of it. Some took the form of murals and slogans, but the primary medium was the Cubavision channel. It had content 24/7 (as did the other channel, which carried pirated movies and soap operas), including speeches by Fidel, cartoons about Cuba being a thorn in the foot of the U.S. (The U.N. were portrayed as cowardly worms, subservient worms, if memory serves), and other patriotic events. At that point in time, I saw Cuba as pretty unambiguously Authoritarian™, with little clear idea of the island’s history. I did want the embargo to end, and saw it as a big problem for the Cuban people, but I think considered Castro to be as much of a problem. I’m still a bit uncertain on the subject, but it’s less clear-cut to me these days.

I also noticed, as I paid more attention to U.S. affairs, how much our own political pageantry paralleled that which was condemned as authoritarian when communists did it. That could be the patriotic displays at sporting events, the ubiquity of heroizing military recruitment ads, the requirement that all politicians always remember to say that “America is the greatest country in the world”, or political rallies with jingoistic rhetoric and political songs and musical numbers. Fidel had six-year-olds singing about The Revolution, and Bush had six-year-olds singing about him and American greatness. Ditto Obama and Trump, and it was gross in both of those cases too. The enraging reality is that to live in the United States is to move through a miasma of propaganda.

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.

Again, this is not unique to the United States, but it’s necessary to point this out and discuss it because USians, as a rule, tend not to believe they’re subject to propaganda, or when they do believe it, they tend to see it as “that which supports the opposing side” more than anything. I think part of the problem there is the way the development of capitalism has worked to hide who holds power, by separating economic and political power (at least in terms of rhetoric), and reshaping the law so that the greatest power tends to be held outside the government. That power is wielded through campaign donations, direct advocacy and messaging, lobbying, and the other forms of corruption with which we’ve become so familiar.

It is also wielded through the media – not just the more obvious news and political commentary, but also through entertainment media. I’ve shared some material on “Copaganda” here, but while this is part of Skip Intro‘s Copaganda series, this video is about the Top Gun movies, and the Pentagon’s involvement in Hollywood. This isn’t a comprehensive dive into that subject, but it’s a dive worth taking regardless.

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Video: Didn’t like the “Just Stop Oil” Soup Protest? Doesn’t Matter.

A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about what I called “Liberal Protest Activism”, in response to both the infamous souping of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and to the general response to said souping. What I didn’t mention was that that post was, in part, inspired by a Twitter disagreement with Michael Mann. Basically, someone had called the protest inappropriate, and I responded by pointing out that more conventional protest had not resulted in adequate action. Mann quote-tweeted me, and basically said I was lying, and that saying “nothing has been done” is being used to justify extremism. I pointed out that I hadn’t said “nothing”, and he blocked me.

Honestly, it hurt a little. I’ve looked up to Mann for a long time, and I still do. The work he’s done on climate science and advocacy is valuable, and he gets entirely too much hate. On the other hand, as I’ve said in the past, being an expert in climate science does not make you an expert in sociology, politics, or policy. Having him not only disagree with me, but point to me as someone being extremist and wrong was a shock, so I spent time thinking about it, which generated the blog post mentioned above. I also deleted that tweet, because I didn’t want to keep getting notifications from people responding to Mann calling me a liar. As far as I can tell, trying to “defend my honor” would end up benefiting no one worth considering. I wrote that blog post partly as a way to deal with my bad mood. I ended up writing this post, because Rebecca Watson has a new video out about the same subject, so now I feel a little braver in talking about it.

There’s a lot there that I agree with (as always, the transcript is at the link above), but I wanted to pause on one point that Watson made:

They were angry simply because young people were doing something for a cause they cared about, and the angry people know deep in their hearts that they do not have even a fraction of that courage and that conviction, and they know that the cause is a good one that SHOULD inspire us all to that kind of courage and conviction. But instead we’re at home eating Cheez-its and doom scrolling Twitter, and channeling our guilt by getting angry at someone who is actually out there doing something. My hypothesis is that NO protest these people could have done would ever have been widely considered to be “meaningful,” and “good” and “effective,” and despite that, there’s a good chance that this protest will historically be seen to be all of those things.

Oof. That hits a little close to home. Regardless of how you feel about their tactics, there’s no question that what they are doing takes courage, especially given the consistently hostile response they have gotten. They’ve put far more on the line for this cause than I have, and they’ve generated a great deal of conversation with the art protests – more conversation than came from their more direct act of spraying paint on the Bank of England to protest its investment in fossil fuels. I think I should have given them a bit more credit. I also very much agree with the guess that no protest the did would have gotten wide support

The reality is that protests generally aren’t popular, and the people who make headlines for protests share that unpopularity. From Watson’s video:

And that hypothesis is based on decades of research: as I said two years ago during the Black Lives Matter protests, “in 1961, 57% of Americans said that sit-ins hurt the cause of those fighting against segregation. By 1963 that number had risen to 60%. By 1964, after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it was 74%. Three quarters of Americans thought Martin Luther King’s “extreme” tactics were hurting the Civil Rights fight. He was one of the most hated men in America. And yet, the Civil Rights movement succeeded.” And even though “79% of people said the (LA) riots were not justified…nearly 30 years later, scientists can see that those riots helped “build support for policy by mobilizing supporters.” They found that both white and African American voters “were mobilized to register (to vote), that new registrants tended to affiliate as Democrats, and that voters shifted their policy support toward public schools, net of a general shift in support for education spending. This mobilization appears to have persisted: those mobilized by the riot remained regular participators over a decade later and remained more Democratic than the general population, even after accounting for demographics.””

She then goes on to talk about Mann’s response to the protest, and the result of his decision not to avoid getting embroiled in pointless internet arguments over tone. I knew he had an article tut-tutting about it, but I didn’t know he made himself a dishonest push poll to “back up” his opinion, and continued arguing about it. I expected better from him, but it’s a good reminder that people are just people are just people. What matters is that we keep working as best we can.

As of this recording, Mann is kind of losing it on Twitter and really insisting that this survey proves something about the relative effectiveness of the soup protest. It’s understandable, because I think he does good work in his own field (which is climatology, not public relations or sociology) and so he’s probably not accustomed to being corrected by people who actually know what they’re talking about. I hope he is able to take a step back and realize that this is just bad science with a dash of “bad understanding of history” thrown in. A well-designed survey could certainly find that people largely were turned off by this protest, but the people who study movements and social change understand that protests – nonviolent, disruptive, or outright violent – might work or not work, regardless of whether or not you like it.

Video: No, Ebola is NOT Airborne

Ebola is sort of the ultimate Scary Disease. It can spread ridiculously easily through bodily fluids, including sweat, it has a mortality rate of 50% and above, and it is famous for being a “hemorrhagic fever”, in that it can cause internal and external bleeding. In reality, the bleeding isn’t that common, and it’s the other symptoms – vomiting, diarrhea, and sweating – that actually kill due to extreme dehydration. So, it’s not generally the bloody horror show in the imaginations of those of us who’re far away from it, but that makes it no less deadly, and it has a devastating impact on the communities it touches. If you want to learn more about it, you might want to check out this interview with a doctor who was involved in fighting the 2014 outbreak.

Ebola is scary at the best of times, and right now, we’re all dealing with a bit of trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic that’s still ongoing, though the numbers have improved. Everyone’s a bit worried that the next pandemic will come soon (monkeypox had a lot of people nervous), and the thought of it being something like Ebola has some people on edge. It’s also understandable that people wouldn’t trust official sources telling them not to worry, because they said similar things about COVID in the early days. Thankfully, Rebecca Watson is here to break down the situation, and explain why you shouldn’t be worrying about airborne Ebola (transcript linked, as usual):

Video: Münecat DISMEMBERS body language experts!

Body language analysis is one of those fields that makes me worry for the future of humanity. I don’t have a problem with some level of “seems like that person’s acting oddly” when we’re comparing someone’s behavior to their own personal baseline, but at best that should be a starting point for investigation, not evidence from which to draw a conclusion. Unfortunately, there seems to be a whole industry of self-described Body Language Experts who make a living opining on the inner thoughts and feelings of people they’ve never met, and also helping the police prosecute people based on their bullshit pseudoscience. As always, Münecat gives us an entertaining and blunt (adult language) dissection of the issue, coupled with her unique musical stylings.

No, parents, nobody is going to give your kids free drugs on Halloween.

Well, COVID seems reluctant to just… go. Today has been much like yesterday – eyes feel puffy, some congestion, and a need to sleep more than usual. My default seems to be staring vacantly into space without any real ability to focus, which makes the ability to touch-type very useful, as long as I don’t get my hands out of alignment and start yoprgm tsmfpo9y, mpmdrmdr.

That means that today’s a video. I’d thought about Shaun’s latest, but PZ beat me to that. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. It’s pretty simple – a breakdown of who J.K. Rowling’s transphobic allies are. As with other analysis of that bigot’s behavior, beliefs, and buddies, this really makes one feel that she enjoys making other people suffer, so long as she’s still still rolling in dough.

So, for today I’ll direct your attention to a different bullshit moral panic – the traditional Halloween-time activity of convincing frightened parents that people want to give free drugs to their children. The TL:DW is this: whether it’s cannabis, meth, or fentanyl, nobody is going to give your children free drugs. That’s not a thing that happens. The people who make drugs want to sell them, because that’s how they make money.

I think what’s really depressing about this is how well it demonstrates that for a certain section of the population, they will believe anything if they’re told that that thing is a threat to them from “bad people”.

To those who need to hear it I will say this: Enjoy Halloween. Let your kids go trick-or-treating. Start trying to think of your fellow humans as being, well, your fellow humans. The ones you need to be afraid of are the ones constantly telling you to be afraid of the people around you.

 

Video: What the new “Climate Declaration” doesn’t tell us

Well, I’m still sick. It feels different from yesterday – my sinuses feel too hot and dry rather than full of gunk – but I’m still out of it enough to want another day “off”.

Thankfully, a blast from the past is here to save me!

Longtime skeptic/atheist types are probably familiar with Peter Hadfield, known on Youtube as Potholer54 for his work debunking creationists, and overseeing the Golden Crocoduck award, for lying in defense of creationism. He’s also done some good work debunking climate deniers, and exposing their bullshit. I hadn’t thought of him in a little while, but recently I saw a new letter/petition “signed by hundreds of scientists” saying that there’s no climate emergency, and it made me think of him.

Sure enough, he was good enough to pop up and demonstrate how this letter is as much empty propaganda as its predecessors. This is an old tactic, and as you’ll see if you watch, a predictable one.

It’s not warming, but if it is, it’s not humans doing it, but if it is, there’s nothing to worry about, and – get ready for this one – there might be something to worry about, but there’s nothing we can do, so we shouldn’t try.

I also like the fact that we can see that our climate action – woefully inadequate as it has been – has had some effect.

Video: How Corruption Leads to Conspiracy Theories

Well, today may have been better than yesterday, but if so it was not by much. I’m glad it wasn’t worse, and I have my fingers crossed for tomorrow. It’s still basically just congestion, and just a hint of an impending sore throat that has yet to arrive. Oh, and some difficulty with temperature regulation. I think my head feels a little clearer today, but the fact that I’m so uncertain seems to imply otherwise.

Anyway, here’s a video that I think is useful. The ruling class of the US has spent the last century or so making corruption so much a part of daily operations that a lot of people can’t even tell it’s there. Growing up, I remember hearing about corruption in other countries – through media of various sorts – and it was always presented as a pyramid of officials shaking people down, and shaking each other down, all the way to the top, all outside the actual laws. I’ve grown up a bit since then, but even so it’s hard to really pick apart just how much the United States has been designed over the years to have a scared and obedient workforce that willingly gives almost all of everything they create or earn to corporations.

In that setting, is it any wonder that people believe in conspiracies? Add in the various conspiracies that we know have happened, and I think it would be more surprising if people didn’t start seeing patterns where none actually exist. This video is an interesting dig into some research into why people believe conspiracy theories, and how government corruption can lead to them. As always with Rebecca Watson’s videos, you can find a full transcript on Skepchick.org.