7 ms·

We really live in the age of head-in-sand. How do you do anything about that? Somehow reality has become not just optional and uncertain in our policies, perce

• wwdhx 7y ago
  Dismissing facts as lies is just... something to say. Bolsonaro and his followers know this is true but they simply don't care. Which is a reasonable political stance I reckon.
  • hobs 7y ago
    Dismissing facts as lies is just lying. It should not be brushed off as an acceptable position.
    • thefounder 7y ago
      Lately it seems to be very rewarding in politics. This will only get worse
      • grenoire 7y ago
        Lying being rewarding is definitely not a recent phenomenon.
        • thefounder 7y ago
          Well the difference is that people used to condemn the author when it got caught lying which doesn't seem to be the case anymore. People no longer pay politically when they lie. It all transformed into a world-wide propaganda machine where people think in war/dictatorship terms(we against them).
          • davesmith1983 7y ago
            Most people accept that politicians lie. Saying that a politician lies is like saying "The Pope is Catholic" or "Water is wet". What people care about is whether the politicians will instigate policies that are beneficial to them. Bolsonaro ran with one of his main issues being law and order. In Brazil the crime rates are quite shocking (IIRC the murder rate is huge like 100s a day). It doesn't matter if he lies about the Rainforest if people see if cleaning up the streets.
            • thefounder 7y ago
              Lying is now blatant, endemic and unapologetic. It's really more propaganda than just lying. Let's hope the sane people will tax these politicians otherwise we risk new Nazi systems.
    • mda 7y ago
      Yeah, this is the norm now, scientific truths are lies and conspiracy theories are the ultimate truth. All populist politicians are doing this and their followers love it.
      • davesmith1983 7y ago
        Well a lot of this is due to how this has been presented to by the media beforehand. e.g. There is a scare story at least once a week that is plastered over newspapers/news sites such as "Having a bacon sandwich could lead to bum cancer!!!!", when the headline is clearly salacious. The actual research probably had a sensible conclusion of "Those who have had consistently more red meat, have an increased chance of cancer". If you hear see the same story hundreds of times, you are likely to ignore it or even despise it. The same happens with the populist politicians. Take someone that isn't as controversial as Bolsonaro such as Nigel Farage in my home country. A fair description of his political stance is a Patriotic Thatcherite that is anti-mass-immigration. When he was first becoming well known (back in the mid-2000s) he was constantly branded a racist and a fascist (there was no evidence of this) in an attempt to conflate his position with the likes of actual fascists of old like Oswald Mosley. Now Whether or not you agree with his politics isn't important. In these attempts to constantly smear him he has become one of the most effective UK politicians in recent memory. To many he can simply do no wrong because they will dismiss any criticism of immediately, disregarding its validity.
        • sorokod 7y ago
          There is a sizable intersection between the set of populists and the set of racists. Often the naming of people close or in this intersection is a judgment call.
        • toyg 7y ago
          This would be the same Farage that made sure his anti-immigration message in the 2016 Brexit campaign had "the only prominent white person in the photograph obscured by a box of text": https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag... Also, how can you brand somebody as "patriotic" when his party is a US-based corporation with links to the Russian government and tax havens? Sad to see this rubbish on HN. Farage plays to the same racist tendencies as Trump and Bolsonaro do, with constant dog-whistling. He's absolutely controversial and hardly effective: he still has no MP in the UK Parliament after 15 years of trying, and has accomplished absolutely nothing over two mandates in the EU Parliament beyond annoying even his own allies. It's not the "smearing" that build his success, but a situation of sustained economic weakness of the white working classes that fosters a climate of anger against migrants (who are seen as cheaper competition). That BNP fella was similarly successful for a while. Also, Farage's support is built on social networks, where his messages are spread without a debate, let alone "smears".
    • hanniabu 7y ago
      I mean can you blame them when all you need to do to make a problem go away is say FAKE NEWS and people eat it up? It's much easier then presenting evidence yourself, especially when your motives go against facts, because then you need to find a way to create fake facts like the oil companies do with denying global warming.
      • benj111 7y ago
        "I mean can you blame them" Yes. I know that everyone's jaded by various neo-fascist leaders, but this stuff does need to be called out, else it gets normalised.
        • hanniabu 7y ago
          It no doubt needs to be called out, but whatI'm saying is that it's already become normalized and works so they will continue to keep doing it.
      • dvtrn 7y ago
        I once watched, jaw somewhat agape as an attorney on twitter (or someone whose bio said she was an attorney) sparred with other netizens over a claim she had made about an event someone (a third-party) said was taking place in her community relating to a local business. Respondents began to reply asking for additional information, how the claim could be verified, many simply asked for a source-others expressed concern for accuracy of information because they were potentially affected. Maybe one out of every few were “trollish” by popular definition. I read many of them. Very few seemed to be politically charged or even aggressive towards this attorney, they simply asked for more information. Her responses were aggressive and antagonistic, calling respondents “trolls” and “enablers”. Even people asking in a considerate and mild mannered way because they were trying to inform themselves on the affair. No facts ever came out. From the attorney or the local entity she claimed to have information on. She encouraged others to take the lack of information as proof that her friend’s claims were truth. Many did. It was something to behold. An attorney was sharing what was effectively hearsay on twitter about a local business and actively combatting people asking for more information. Strange times indeed.
  • onion2k 7y ago
    It's much more likely that rather than it being a political stance he profits from deforestation directly through investments in logging companies or indirectly through being paid off, or both. Saying its reasonable means you would have to think a politician using their position for personal gain is reasonable. That would be quite an extreme opinion to hold.
  • benj111 7y ago
    "Which is a reasonable political stance I reckon" Run that by me again. How is denying something you know to be true a reasonable stance. How is taking (or actively not taking) a course of action you know will harm the people you've been elected to serve, a reasonable stance. This is pretty basic stuff for a democratically elected official.
    • pas 7y ago
      Because it works. :(
• deleted 7y ago
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• walrus01 7y ago
  I think they are relying upon the concept that only a tiny fraction of the people who read Bolsonaro's claim will bother to seek out the websites of the organizations monitoring deforestation via satellite imagery, and bother to check for themselves. For most, it'll be brushed off and then moved on to the next new shiny thing in the news/outrage/propaganda cycle.
  • LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    Yes, but even if a couple thousand people (among millions) find incontrovertible evidence that it was a blatant and willful lie, that's not surprising and won't spread. The lie will have no consequences. That is the new norm, and it is weird.
• avip 7y ago
  The general lack of ability to engage in logical facts-based discussion is an existential threat to humanity. Even in this civilized forum reasoning not always wins. Things are definitely dire.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    The problem with facts, though, is that your opponent would nonetheless disagree on what set of facts is actually a good outcome.
    • ChrisSD 7y ago
      And that's fine. A productive discussion can be had along those lines. However if someone refuses to even acknowledge that there are facts then there's no discussion to be had. It almost feels like we're in an age with a kind of new post-modernism. Everyone can have their own reality and make up their own "facts" to fit. This makes science and philosophy irrelevant because there is no shared reality that can be investigated and no "fact" that can be disproven.
      • ethbro 7y ago
        IMHO, it stems from never updating our basic education from an information-scarce world to an information-flooded one. I'm firmly in favor of making a media consumption class mandatory for primary education. Essentially a mix of logic & fallacies, evaluating sources, and meta scientific news literacy.
        • eropple 7y ago
          This would be actively fought against, at least in the United States, as an attempt to indoctrinate kids with "liberal biases". Which is, if one thinks about it, the real problem at hand: when the political ideology of half a country requires complete and uncritical rejection of...yanno... the things happening in front of one's face, you can't actually fix the thing. People have to agree that it's broken first.
• Waterluvian 7y ago
  I think this is one of the costs of democracy. We could always just take power away from all the uneducated who rely on emotion-based decision making. And then somehow punish the educated who do the same despite being equipped with the tools to parse the facts. I'm sure this would work out horribly.
  • new2628 7y ago
    Making an educated/uneducated dichotomy is part of the problem, the educated have also made plenty of horrible decisions, not paying any price for it, and lecturing the rest all the same. Nassim Taleb's framework seems to be more interesting here: there are those with and those without skin in the game.
    • emn13 7y ago
      So what you're saying is general enough not to be disprovable. But there are two conclusions you might draw from that: (A) that intelligence and education aren't helpful, or (B) that those making horrible decisions were being selfish. Given the trumpian sentiment of "not paying my taxes makes me smart", and perhaps the fact that other people were even smart enough not to say something like that (but still to act on the idea), I'm thinking you need to consider (B) as a serious component here. That would suggest that intelligence and education might still be useful - but only when dishonesty and selfishness is not a dominating risk. I suppose there are measures one might take to at least reduce those risks, since obviously completely eradicating those is unrealistic. For instance, if the educated are good at serving themselves but pullign the wool over the electorate's eyes, then perhaps more audits would help. A culture of much harsher penalties for selfish leaders, even where the selfishness isn't illegal, might help. But perhaps also the electorate itself should be smarter too - and that's not entirely impossible in principle too; e.g. you could imagine a pyramid scheme of elections, not too different from the electoral college today - just with more levels (not just two), and with explicit decoupling of the elector from their vote (so no more "republican" electors or "democrat" electors - they too are free agents), and with the explicit aim of voting for people who you think you can most trust - intellectually, morally, and as a planner - instead of those you most agree with (since with multiple levels, that's kind of hopeless anyhow). ...So I'm not really serious with that last suggestion, but I do think we need to be exploring options. A disillusioned electorate mixed with manipulative, egotistical, untrustworthy politicians, spiced with lavish lobbying, no funding transparency, and media so full of noise the signal is hard to find - that's a recipe for serious food poisoning. It may seriously simply help to switch electoral systems every once and a while, even if there's no single best system - simply to shake loose the manipulative habits that settle in after a while.
• Dumblydorr 7y ago
  Take power from propaganda and give it to factitious media, somehow someway...
• agumonkey 7y ago
  > head-in-sand. I think this was the case before. Nowadays it's a different, worse situation. We have more means of knowing but people a proactively smearing information. It's a super impressive neurotic trend of "modern" societies. Now what to do ? I don't know, but I wish. It's kind of a quest, find knowledgeable and courageous people to gather, find ideas and enact them.
• pvaldes 7y ago
  head-in-snow would be a beter description IMHO, probably.
  • defterGoose 7y ago
    Or maybe sand-in-head.
• devxvda 7y ago
  Well, last time the world chosen leaders like this, it led to a world war, so World War III, honestly. Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I don’t see things getting better until they get a whole lot worse.
• rlander 7y ago
  In one episode of Parks and Rec, the lead character, councilwoman Leslie Knope, is trying to pass a bill that adds fluoride to the town’s water source, while being opposed by a councilman/dentist who wants to continue making money off of the many cavities that occur in the town. As she discusses the debate, she realizes, “On my side, I have facts, science, and reason. All he has is fear-mongering. Oh my god, he’s gonna win.” Best series ever.
  • hutzlibu 7y ago
    Only that fluoride in the water were in fact a really bad idea .. Not healthy for your organs and also not really helping with teeth.