As Debord put it, “We can truly understand this society only by negating it.” If the “experts” lose influence, it will be because the public has rejected them outright, articulates that their role is to deceive on behalf of the powerful.
1. Everything you will read in this commentary is disinformation.
2. To say that this commentary contains disinformation is disinformation.
3. To say statements calling this commentary disinformation are disinformation is disinformation.
This is what our public discourse has come to. This is what we have done to it. We Americans have made a nonsense of ourselves. You want to talk about America’s late-imperial decline? This is the warp and weft of it as we shred our social fabric. This is what our troubled republic sounds like, an indecipherable cacophony amid which anything we say can be turned to mean other than what we mean.
King Charles’s history of support for environmental projects and sustainable development has drawn the many conspiracies about his family into the Great Reset horror. The very people most keen to display their respect for the crown are torn by their climate denial loathing of anyone promoting policy to address the crisis. It will be interesting to see how they reconcile their ambivalence.
Clearer is that the Murdoch’s were always front and center of this globally. They fled to America where the laws and market were much more lax after Rupert’s almost jailing in the UK.
It’s clear the misinformation tactics so readily employed by conservatives for the last decade or so are found to be wanting when held up to scrutiny. Over the years, numerous trends in the USA make their way over to this side of the Pacific relatively quickly – let’s hope holding peddlers of misinformation to account ‘flies across the Pacific’ quickly.
All elections are filled with the half-truths, mistruths and full-fledged lies. Victory is rarely bought on a platform of complete honesty. But the road to the current Australian federal election has been potholed by more deception than most. This is bound to happen when policy platforms are weak and rickety, leaving the opponents large scope…
China isn’t gods gift to gas which isn’t as clean as the LNP make out.
“They have one view for investors, and then another view when they want to ask the government for money. They talk completely different messages out of both sides of their mouths, constantly. It’s incredible. And somehow still seem to convince everyone of the narrative for how useful gas is.”
The Morrison Government has become so entangled in scandals and misinformation that it’s difficult to determine what’s real anymore, writes Dr Jennifer Wilson. STEVE BANNON, sometime White House Chief Strategist in the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump, coined the term “flood the zone with shit”. This strategy, succinctly identified by Bannon though not created by him, involves disseminating masses of disinformation intended to seed public mistrust and erode the public’s ability to determine what is true. Overwhelmed by disinformation, it becomes impossible to identify one coherent narrative and the search for truth becomes too exhausting to pursue. When the public is exhausted, the zone has been flooded with shit. There is confusion, anger, insecurity and fear, and having concluded that there is no knowable truth in politics, people instead yearn for an authoritative leader, someone who appears to cut through the shit for them, as the only feasible alternative.
Victoria’s anti-lockdown campaigners are spreading misinformation that people, including children, in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory are being forcibly detained by the defence force and coerced into receiving the COVID-19 vaccines.
Far-right intellectuals like Steve Bannon claim to speak for a working class put upon by out-of-touch liberal elites. But their anti-modernist, hierarchical vision of the world doesn’t offer workers what they really need: more money in their pockets, and more power at the workplace.
Unfortunately, the memo also fits a pattern. Before the US election, Donald Trump welcomed the use of data hacked by Russia and released by WikiLeaks to undercut his opponent in the campaign. Afterwards, Trump continued to dismiss the intelligence community’s finding that Russia had sought to influence the election. So the attacks that started before Trump was president continue today. They come even as sanctions against Russia, passed by Congress, haven’t been put into place. And there is no White House-directed effort to counter aggressive Russian influence in the US or West.
This contributes to the momentum of information (much of it incorrect or invented or wilfully conflating facts) flowing online. Like-minded supporters build community and through them maintain channels to push out the Trump campaign’s “firehose of falsehoods”.
At the same time, fact-checking organisations, which have grown as a popular corrective to the spin of the political world online, struggle to keep up with the onslaught surrounding the Trump campaign.
If voters in the US, the public and the mainstream media in Western democracies today find themselves speechless in sizing up Trump’s statements and behaviour, there may be a scientific reason why this is so.
The strategy of his campaign and the people who back him isn’t simply to spin facts to make the candidate look good, as much as to create a blizzard of information that blinds the public.
olddogthoughts 
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