Blog of the American Philosophical Association (APA) Tone-Policing and the Assertion of Authority At its core, tone-policing is first an argumentative move sideways and then a stall. It first shifts the focus from the content of the conversation to the tone, language, or manner of discussion (as the quote above says) and then – unlike other interventions about tone – policing announces that the shift cannot be reversed until tone is addressed. The tone-policer doesn’t just declare that their interlocutor’s tone is inappropriate and heightened (usually because it is too hostile, adversarial, or aggressive, upset, or irrational). They insist that the conversation cannot continue until the speaker adjusts it. It often involves a further demand – implicit or explicit – that the interlocutor address their infraction with some apology or other gesture of accountability before things can proceed.
National Institute for Public Policy - Information Series - Issue No. 556 June 12, 2023 - Information Operations against the United States: Defensive Actions are Needed by John A. Gentry Former Soviet intelligence agent and CPUSA member Louis Budenz, who renounced communism in 1945, said the Soviets and the CPUSA long had two race-based goals: 1) exacerbating racial tensions to the point of generating race-based civil war; and/or (2) creation of a geographically large black separatist state in what is now the American south as a way to literally fragment the United States. The modern “diversity, equity, and inclusion” agenda, which is indisputably divisive in the United States, appears to serve past Soviet (and now Russian) interests, but is not remotely consistent with past Soviet or current Russian domestic policies.
MEDPageToday: Who's Really the Victim Here? — It's time to end DARVO behavior in the healthcare workplace by Resa E. Lewiss, MD, David G. Smith, PhD, Shikha Jain, MD, W. Brad Johnson, PhD, and Jennifer Freyd, PhD Perpetrators use DARVO because it works. In one study researchers found that targets of DARVO were more likely to blame themselves. Self-blame is associated with self-silencing. In another study, researchers found that observers of DARVO tended to doubt the credibility of the true victim, believing the perpetrator instead. There is not yet systematic data on what makes certain institutions and certain people more likely to DARVO. Yet, there appear to be relevant characteristics associated with other types of harassment, and the field of medicine checks all the boxes: high prestige, male-dominated institutions and industries, hierarchical leadership structures, inadequate safeguards for employees and trainees, and a climate which tolerates harassment.
Insider - If you've ever lashed out against your abuser, it doesn't make you abusive — here's why. Written by Ashley Laderer; edited by Samantha Crozier - Sep 30, 2022Why the term 'reactive abuse' is dangerous. Abuse experts argue that the term "reactive abuse," while widely used, is harmful and dangerous for the victim because it labels both parties as mutual abusers. Therefore, it suggests that the victim is suddenly part of the problem as opposed to someone who is sticking up for themselves, Wingfield says. "There is nothing mutual about power and control. We call these responses 'self-defending' when a victim stands up to their abuser and says 'no more,'" says Debra Wingfield, a retired licensed professional counselor, and coercive control and domestic abuse expert, and founder of House of Peace. Wingfield, who has 50 years of experience, says that another problem is how the abuser can use this term to their benefit. "Anytime you use the word 'abuse' with them, you're actually giving the abuser leverage to work against [the victim]," says Wingfield.
Williamson, P. Take the time and effort to correct misinformation. Nature 540, 171 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/540171aMost researchers who have tried to engage online with ill-informed journalists or pseudoscientists will be familiar with Brandolini’s law (also known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Is it really worth taking the time and effort to challenge, correct and clarify articles that claim to be about science but in most cases seem to represent a political ideology? I think it is. Challenging falsehoods and misrepresentation may not seem to have any immediate effect, but someone, somewhere, will hear or read our response. The target is not the peddler of nonsense, but those readers who have an open mind on scientific problems. A lie may be able to travel around the world before the truth has its shoes on, but an unchallenged untruth will never stop.
DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27 (Vol 2) Climate Action Against Disinformation, January 2023 Shellenberger was active in so-called ‘woke-washing’ discourse that attacked Western Elites for withholding fossil fuels from the Global South and/ or framed Net Zero targets as a form of colonialism that contravene the global human rights agenda. Shellenberger is symbolic of the growing overlap between climate scepticism and wider culture wars, ‘anti-woke’ or so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ content. In previous years, his public persona and outputs were primarily associated with the environment, but he now posts just as regularly on issues such as migration, homelessness, gender identity or Democratic policy agendas. During COP, this included the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the collapse of crypto-currency platform FTX
Episode 188: How Capital Repackages Substandard Products for the Poor as “Increasing Access” - Citations Needed | September 13, 2023 | Transcript Nima: Yeah, his general argument, obviously, is not that sweatshops are the best things in the world but depending on what you’re comparing them to, they’re pretty damn great, and we should understand their utility. In his article “Two Cheers for Sweatshops,” which he wrote in the year 2000. This is how he summed up his argument: “Of course, it may sound silly to say that sweatshops offer a route to prosperity, when wages in the poorest countries are sometimes less than $1 a day. Still, for an impoverished Indonesian or Bangladeshi woman with a handful of kids who would otherwise drop out of school and risk dying of mundane diseases like diarrhea, $1 or $2 a day can be a life-transforming wage. This was made abundantly clear in Cambodia, when we met a 40-year-old woman named Nhem Yen, who told us why she moved to an area with particularly lethal malaria. ‘’We needed to eat,’’ she said. ‘’And here there is wood, so we thought we could cut it and sell it.’ But then Nhem Yen’s daughter and son-in-law both died of malaria, leaving her with two grandchildren and five children of her own. With just one mosquito net, she had to choose which children would sleep protected and which would sleep exposed. In Cambodia, a large mosquito net costs $5. If there had been a sweatshop in the area, however harsh or dangerous, Nhem Yen would have leapt at the chance to work in it, to earn enough to buy a net big enough to cover all her children.” Adam: Yeah, this was a common argument in all pro-sweatshop discourse, pro-globalization in the ‘90s, 2000s.
Tech Won’t Save Us - 23 04 13 [#163] - ChatGPT Is Not Intelligent - Emily M. Bender I do think that it’s insidious, when this becomes product names because the news reporting can’t not name the products they’re talking about, so they’re stuck with that. But then it’s hard to take the space and say: Okay, so they call this AI-powered whatever, or smart home, but in fact, we just want to flag that that is being repeated here just as the name of the product and we’re not endorsing or whatever. Like that doesn’t happen, so problematic. PM: I think that’s very rare. Like one of the few examples I can think about where a term actually changes is in the early 2010s, when everyone’s talking about the sharing economy and the sharing economy and how wonderful it is. Then after a few years were like: Yeah, people aren’t really sharing here, so this is the gig economy or the on-demand economy or something like that. It’s a bit more accurate for what’s going on. But I feel like you rarely see that when we actually talk about specific products and things like that. EB: Yeah, but we can try! I go for so-called “AI,” I put AI in quotes all the time. We can just keep saying SALAMI or as we say in Mystery AI Hype Theatre, ‘mathy-math.’
Dave Troy Presents - Understanding TESCREAL with Dr. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres - S2E3 - June 14th 2023 Everyone's talking about AI, how it will change the world, and even suggesting it might end humanity as we know it. Dave is joined by Dr. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, two prominent critics of AI doomerism, to cut through the noise, and look at where these ideas really came from, and offer suggestions on how we might look at these problems differently. And they also offer a picture of the darker side of these ideas and how they connect to Eugenics and other ideologies historically. Together Émile and Timnit coined an acronym called TESCREAL, which stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism — and yeah, that's a lot of -isms.
Longtermism and Eugenics: A Primer. The intellectual lineage of Nick Bostrom’s retrograde futurism. Feb 4, 2023 by Émile P. Torres / Truthdig Contributor Although the modern eugenics movement was born in the late 19th century, its influence peaked in the 1920s. During the 1930s, it was taken up by the Nazis, who actually studied California’s eugenics program in hopes of replicating it back in Germany. Despite the appalling crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II, eugenics still had plenty of advocates in the decades that followed. Julian Huxley, for example, presided over the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, while also promoting the transhumanist idea that by controlling “the mechanisms of heredity” and using “a method of genetic change” (i.e., eugenics), “the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.” Today, a number of philosophers have defended what’s called “liberal eugenics” — transhumanism being an example — which many contrast with the “old” or “authoritarian” eugenics of the past century, although we will see in my second article for The Dig that the “old” and “new” eugenics are really not so different in practice.
Disconnect - Don't look into the Orb - Worldcoin is an exploitative crypto project with a new coat of AI paint. PARIS MARX AUG 9, 2023 Reporting from MIT Technology Review and Buzzfeed News last year examined the company’s operations in countries throughout Africa, Asia, and South America where it recruited locals to be Orb operators and set up a system where they’d convince people to have their eyes scanned in exchange for Worldcoin tokens, free t-shirts, local currency, and even the chance to win a pair of Apple AirPods — whatever would get users to part with the biometric data.
Tech Won’t Save Us - 23 08 17 [#181] Pondering the Orb Molly White Paris Marx: “This project kind of further puts into perspective something that we've been talking about for a long time when it comes to crypto projects in particular. People like Pete Howson, I believe his name is, you know has talked about kinda crypto colonialism. I’ve talked to Olivier Jutel about that on the show before. But you know how these companies, you know crypto companies in particular but tech companies more broadly do go into these markets and just seek to exploit people for profit while talking about how they're going to massively empower them. And you know Worldcoin is kind of coming in and saying you know we're going to do all these wonderful things for empowerment and we're going to create this identity service and you know we're going to take all your data to train our systems. And it's like you know we're just going to use you as inputs for that process. There's no kind of real empowerment that is coming out of that and it's just yet another example of how this works.” Molly White: “Yeah and i think that it's also used to silence a lot of the criticism against the projects here where you will speak out against something like Worldcoin or even crypto more broadly and people will say that’s just your white American privilege. You have financial privilege to dismiss these technologies. Can’t you see how these projects are helping people in developing countries? But what we've seen actually play out is broadly that they are NOT helping people. You know that the people who are engaging with these projects in those locations are suffering for it and often being exploited you know in the way that Worldcoin has been exploiting people as you know as effectively test subjects without the proper disclosures or the proper consent. And so i think it really is sort of lays bare some of the disingenuous arguments that we've been seeing you know broadly around crypto and you know how dare you criticize crypto because it's going to help all of these people you know and you can just sort of look at this and say - look, it's not helping people the people who are receiving these tokens you know or not necessarily coming out better for it.”
The Pandata File. Detailed report on the international hub established April 2020 - COUNTER DISINFORMATION PROJECT, JUL 22, 2022 I discovered Fagan was advising the group on messaging and communication strategy from a psychological approach I wondered if and how data could have been collected and used. (HART leaks messages) Tanya Klymenko 2021-02-02 T 13:08:48 "@ pf thank you for sharing, very interesting! So, if the "pro-mask" are particularly concerned about equality then they might in theory be susceptible to a message on raising inequality as a direct result of NPI (lockdown). Is that a reasonable assumption?" Patrick Fagan 2021-02-02 T 14:44:02 "Yes exactly... They are wearing the face mask to be fair to others and to reduce harm... If messaging shows that face masks are unfair and harmful, that would be very powerful"
Outrage factor From Wikipedia "Outrage factors" are the emotional factors that influence perception of risk. The risks that are considered involuntary, industrial and unfair are often given more weight than factors that are thought of as voluntary, natural and fair. Sandman gives the formula: Risk = Hazard + Outrage
Is this a pigeon meme. The guy is captioned covid is over people. Question Is this lockdown? the butterfly is labeled a guy in a mask at the grocery store.
COVID-19 lockdown revisionism Blake Murdoch, Timothy Caulfield CMAJ Apr 2023, 195 (15) E552-E554; DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.221543 The term “lockdown” has become a powerful and perverted word in the infodemic about democracies’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown, as used in public discourse, has expanded to include any public health measure, even if it places little to no restriction on social mobility or interaction. For example, a working literature review and meta-analysis on the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality misleadingly defined lockdowns as “the imposition of at least 1 compulsory non-pharmaceutical intervention.”1 This working paper therefore conflated mandatory isolation for people with confirmed infections and masking policies with heavy-handed limitations on freedom of movement, and since it gained viral fame, it has helped fuel calls for “no more lockdowns.” This working paper has been highly critiqued and is less convincing than comparative assessments of health measures, like the Oxford Stringency Index.2,3 Here, we discuss the spread of misinformation on lockdowns and other public health measures, which we refer to as “lock-down revisionism,” and how this phenomenon has damaged trust in public health initiatives designed to keep people safer.
Kenneth L. Marcus, Accusation in a Mirror, 43 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 357 (2012). Loyola University Chicago Law Journal Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter 2012 Article 5 The basic idea of AiM is deceptively simple: propagandists must "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do." 9 In other words, AiM is a rhetorical practice in which one falsely accuses one's enemies of conducting, plotting, or desiring to commit precisely the same transgressions that one plans to commit against them. For example, if one plans to kill one's adversaries by drowning them in a particular river, then one should accuse one's adversaries of plotting precisely the same crime. As a result, one will accuse one's enemies of doing the same thing despite their plans.,, It is similar to a false anticipatory tu quoque: before one's enemies accuse one truthfully, one accuses them falsely of the same misdeed." This may seem an unlikely means of inciting mass-murder, since it would intuitively seem likely not only to fail but also to backfire by publicly telegraphing its speakers' malicious intentions at times when the speakers may lack the wherewithal to carry out their schemes.12 The counter-intuitiveness of this method is best appreciated when one grasps that its injunctions are to be taken literally. There is no hyperbole in the Note's directive that the propagandist should "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do."I 3 The point is not merely to impute iniquities that are as bad as the misdeeds that the propagandist's own party intends. Instead, AiM is the more audacious idea of charging one's adversary with "exactly" the misdeeds that the propagandist's party intends to commit. But why, out of all of the serious allegations that one might level at one's enemy, should one accuse the adversary of precisely the wrongs that one's own party intends to commit? After all, the risks are apparent. By revealing the propagandist's own intentions, AiM deprives the propagandist's party of the advantages of speed and surprise and gives the adversary an opportunity to anticipate and prepare. At the same time, this method provides independent observers and subsequent judicial tribunals with evidence of intent. Moreover, AiM is not based on any evaluation of what misdeeds are most plausibly ascribed to the enemy, such as those that are based on traditional stereotypes, defamations, or actual culpability, since it relies instead on the plans of the propagandist's party. Despite its counter-intuitive nature, AiM has proven to be one of the central mechanisms by which genocidaires publicly and directly incite genocide, in part because it turns out to be quite effective. Once AiM's structure and functions are understood, its pervasive and efficacious presence can be discerned not only in mass-murder but also in a host of lesser persecutions. These qualities can make AiM an indispensable tool for identifying and prosecuting incitement. The Genocide Convention criminalizes "direct and public incitement to commit genocide,"l 4 regardless of whether actual genocide occurs.15
PBS Hacking Your Mind - Living on Autopilot - Episode 101 Aired: 09/09/20According to Kahneman, when our slow-thinking system doesn't have enough information to answer a question involving numbers, we simply stay on autopilot. And our autopilot system takes what might be called a shortcut and anchors its answer to the last number that crossed its radar, even when that number is completely irrelevant to the question at hand. -And that leads us to reach an absurd conclusion. I know it seems bizarre that anyone would do that, and surely you and I, reasonable people, would never do that in our real lives. Well, you do it all the time.
National Security Challenges: Insights from Social, Neurobiological, and Complexity Sciences. Author | Editor: Astorino-Courtois, A. (NSI, Inc), Cabayan, H. (Joint Staff), Casebeer, W. (DARPA), Desjardins, A. (NSI, Inc), DiEuliis, D. (HHS), Ehlschlaeger, C. (ERDC), Lyle, D. (USAF) & Rice, C. (USA/TRADOC). According to Bandura (1996) moral disengagement is an internal thought process by which an individual is able to disengage their own inner moral control to justify inhumane conduct. For the most part, an individual’s moral standards, which are a product of their social and cultural learning, serve to regulate human behavior. This occurs by the self-sanctions that people apply to themselves when they violate their own internal standards. Self condemnation is a highly uncomfortable psychological state leading to devaluation of self worth and considerable anxiety (Bandura 1990). Consequently, most people seek to avoid a state in which their own actions are not in line with their internal moral standards. One such process, moral disengagement, involves the use of a variety of psycho-social mechanisms that allow an individual or group to disengage from their self regulatory standards and exonerate their violent behavior. The definitions of the eight mechanisms are included in Table 3 below.
I'm Chloe Humbert and I'm not waiting for everybody. And you don't have to either.
Accusation in a Mirror.
This is a disinformation tactic that is related to tone policing and woke washing. Also related to the concept of DARVO and all of these things seem to be deployed against public health and Well, really the reasonable workings of a civilization. These tactics get used to muddy the understanding of what's going on and cause confusion. Tone policing is described on the Blog of the American Philosophical Organization as shifting the focus from the content of the conversation to the tone or manner. They say, quote, "policing announces that the shift cannot be reversed until tone is addressed. They insist that the conversation cannot continue until the speaker adjusts it. It often involves a further demand, implicit or explicit, that the interlocutor address their infraction with some apology or other gesture of accountability before things can proceed", unquote. How this sometimes plays out is that someone in a position of leadership or importance specifically calls for everyone in a particular group or milieu to be accepting and non-judgmental toward offenders of some type within the group in order to quell criticism, basically, and those with serious concerns are dismissed because they didn't express their pain politely enough. which means not only are the offenders not required to make any changes, the aggrieved are actually expected to be the ones to fall in line and go along to get along. This is a form of groupthink, and usually people say straight up they're trying to stop division, but unless you're some ex-CIA agent from the 1980s, you know that diversity isn't the cause of victimization. Not the cause. Most reasonable people recognize the need to hold people accountable, for example. Tone policing is a version of the disinformation tactic known as DARVO, and it stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim Offender. The end result of this tactic is to silence the victim and delegitimize them in the eyes of allies or onlookers. In a MedPage Today op-ed titled "Who's Really the Victim Here?" from 2022, they report, quote, "In one study, researchers found that targets of DARVO were more likely to blame themselves. Self-blame is associated with self-silencing. In another study, researchers found that observers of Darvo tended to doubt the credibility of the true victim, believing the perpetrator instead." unquote. This confusion is brought on by characterizing protest by a victim as being the problem, as if objecting to an attack is also supposedly an attack. And one metaphor I think of is that it winds up being like as if somebody gets slapped and the slapped person yells out, ouch. The slapped person who yells ouch is then accused of raising their voice and yelling. And then that person gets scolded for being bullying or aggressive. When obviously they were the person who was slapped. It doesn't help that actual psychologists have termed traumatic reactions to abuse as, quote, "reactive abuse", even while according to abuse experts, this label is harmful and dangerous because it ignores the power imbalance. In an article from September 2022, in Insider, a retired licensed professional counselor with 50 years of experience says, quote, "there is nothing mutual about power and control. We call these responses self-defending, when a victim stands up to their abuser and says no more. Anytime you use the word abuse with them, you're actually giving the abuser leverage to work against the victim." unquote None of these bad faith, twisted rationalizations make any sense if you think things through. But clever people prey upon the fact that most people don't want to think things through. Nobody has time for that, and we all can be distracted with any number of diversions. Once the confusion is inserted, then you're subject to what's called the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle or Brandolini's Law, which asserts, quote, "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it", unquote. Then we come to woke washing. There are many forms of washing. I even found a new one last week on the Fire These Times podcast called Sumoud-Washing. There's pink washing, green washing, but all of these fall under the umbrella of what's called woke washing, basically, which is promoting something harmful as doing something pro-social. It might be also cloaking the harm behind a patina of do-gooding, but there's often more to it than just deceptive advertising or signaling. Woke-washing is a divisive tactic to target the victim or make their claims seem unimportant or out of line. And this is using the reverse victim offender. An example is someone claiming that net zero targets for climate change are a human rights attack on the Global South by withholding their chance to use more fossil fuels and contribute more to the global pollution, I guess? which is completely ignoring the fact that the Global South is already suffering under actual climate change that's already happening. So it just doesn't make sense. The Citations Needed podcast had a recent episode titled How Capital Repackages Substandard Products for the Poor. On this podcast episode, they never mention the terms woke-washing or DARVO, but that's the underlying thing that the topic hinges upon. They're exposing the horrendous justifications and false choices pushed to make it expensive to be poor. The podcast quotes from a Nicholas Kristof article from September of 2000 called "Two Cheers for Sweatshops". And in this article, there's a story of a Cambodian woman who loses both her daughter and son-in-law to malaria because the family couldn't afford more than one mosquito net. And the author argues that sweatshops are good because if there was a sweatshop in this woman's village, maybe she could have afforded more than one mosquito net. Pretty amazing, since even the richy-rich mathy-math Silicon Valley tech set of the TESCREAL AI-fixated longtermists and all of their eugenics ideas and their Effective Altruism, even that lot, even that crowd, backs charity to provide people in the Global South with mosquito nets to prevent malaria. That said, tech hypers reportedly used woke-washing arguments to defend tech products such as WorldCoin, which Paris Marx reports has been deployed in the Global South luring people to orbs with tokens and free t-shirts in order to collect biometric data from people and train the company's computer systems with it. Molly White describes on the Tech Won't Save Us podcast, describing how it's used to silence people who speak out against WorldCoin, accusing critics of, quote, "white American privilege" and claiming that tech is helping people in developing countries. But White says, quote, "But what we've actually seen play out is broadly that they are not helping people. You know, that people who are engaging with these projects in those locations are suffering for it and often being exploited", unquote. And we just can't dismiss all of this as coincidence, that people are just confused and they come up with these bad faith arguments because of weird worldviews, even though that's clearly the case in some cases. They do have weird worldviews sometimes. But it's been documented that it's often deliberate. There has been documented evidence of people hatching plans to deploy the woke-washing tactic on purpose in order to get caring community-minded people to unmask and spread COVID. Patrick Fagan is a psychologist who once worked for Cambridge Analytica and was later linked to anti-vax groups in the UK. We found out this via messages revealed in the HART-leaks. In a chat exchange in 2021 between Tanya Klymenko and Patric Fagan reported by Counter Disinformation Project in 2022. Tanya Klymenko asked, quote, "So, if the pro-mask are particularly concerned about equality, then they might in theory be susceptible to a message on raising inequality as a direct result of NPI lockdown. Is that a reasonable assumption?" And Patrick Fagan replied, quote, "Yes, exactly. They are wearing the face mask to be fair to others and to reduce harm. If messaging shows that face masks are unfair and harmful, that would be very powerful", unquote. Fairness plays heavily in risk management and PR spin, according to Peter Sandman. In Peter Sandman's 1993 book Responding to Community Outrage, Strategies for Effective Risk Communication, he describes what he calls The Outrage Factor. That outrage is key in people's perceptions of risk. We give more weight to risks that seem unfair, whereas if they seem like voluntary risks, we consider them more fair, natural, or acceptable. And so disinformation purveyors can manipulate people into feeling greater risks are okay because they are chosen while lesser risks or things with no risk are perceived as unfair. It's clear Patrick Fagan is aware of some psychology here and was willing to use it to get people to go counter to public health and altruism. Patrick Fagan also had some weird ideas and wrong ideas but There was no question that he was engaged in planning deliberate manipulation using woke-washing DARVO. And Tanya Klymenko was already equating NPIs, which stands for non-pharmaceutical interventions, as the same as lockdown, which has expanded to include just wearing a mask. This is known as lockdown revisionism and is described in a paper from 2023 by Blake Murdoch and Timothy Caulfield as quote, "lockdown as used in public discourse has expanded to include any public health measure, even if it places little to no restriction on social mobility or interaction. For example, a working literature review and meta-analysis on the effects of lockdown on COVID-19 mortality misleadingly defines lockdowns as, quote, "the imposition of at least one compulsory non-pharmaceutical intervention", unquote. Yes, they consider one simple public health measure as lockdown. This is what leads people to think we're under lockdown because they're asked to wear a mask at the doctor's office. This kind of disinformation leads nowhere good. Though most people who repeat misinformation may be doing so unwittingly, the sources of the disinformation are often doing it as a deliberate maneuver, and the motives can range from mere profiteering to state actors trying to disrupt on a geopolitical scale. And we all know who benefits from not stopping climate change. There's a 2012 paper I found on Accusation in a Mirror by Kenneth L. Marcus published in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal. And the paper is about the tactic of Accusation in a Mirror being used for the incitement of genocides. And I'm going to read from that because it's important. In the paper, it says, quote, "The basic idea of accusation in a mirror is deceptively simple. Propagandists must impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do. In other words, accusation in a mirror is a rhetorical practice in which one falsely accuses one's enemies of conducting, plotting, or desiring to commit precisely the same transgressions that one plans to commit against them. For example, if one plans to kill one's adversaries by drowning them in a particular river, then one should accuse one's adversaries of plotting precisely the same crime. As a result, one will accuse one's enemies of doing the same thing despite their plans. It is similar to false anticipatory tu quoque. Before one's enemies accuse one truthfully, one accuses them falsely of the same misdeed. This may seem an unlikely means of inciting mass murder, since it would intuitively seem like not only to fail, but also backfire by publicly telegraphing its speaker's malicious intentions at times when the speakers may lack the wherewithal to carry out those schemes. The counter-intuitiveness of this method is best appreciated when one grasps that its injunctions are to be taken literally. There is no hyperbole in the note's directive that the propagandists should impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do. The point is not merely to impute inequities that are as bad as the misdeeds that propagandists own party intends. Instead, Accusation in a Mirror is the more audacious idea of charging one's adversary with exactly the misdeeds that the propagandists party intends to commit. But why, out of all of the serious allegations that one might level at one's enemy, should one accuse the adversary of precisely the wrongs that one's own party intends to commit? After all, the risks are apparent. By revealing the propagandists' own intentions, Accusation in a Mirror deprives the propagandists' party of the advantages of speed and surprise and gives the adversary an opportunity to anticipate and prepare. At the same time, this method provides independent observers and subsequent judicial tribunals with evidence of intent. Moreover, Accusation in a Mirror is not based on any evaluation of what misdeeds are most plausibly ascribed to the enemy, such as those that are based on traditional stereotypes, defamations, or actual culpability, since it relies instead on the plans of the propagandist's party. Despite its counterintuitive nature, Accusation in a Mirror has proven to be one of the central mechanisms by which the genocidaires publicly and directly incite genocide, in part because it turns out to be quite effective. Once Accusation in a Mirror's structure and functions are understood, its pervasive and efficacious presence can be discerned not only in mass murder, but also in a host of lesser persecutions. These qualities can make Accusation in a Mirror an indispensable tool for identifying and prosecuting incitement. The Genocide Convention criminalizes direct and public incitement to commit genocide regardless of whether actual genocide occurs." Unquote. Clearly, one of the main things to consider about disinformation is that it just doesn't have to make sense to work. Because it all relies on people being on autopilot and not thinking things through and not paying attention. We're all so busy. It was described in PBS series Hacking Your Mind. Most of our lives are spent on autopilot and not engaging in critical thinking. And all this seems to be connected to Bandura's theory of the mechanisms of moral disengagement. And those mechanisms include portraying wrongdoing as serving a higher social cause, exonerative comparison where wrongs are compared to even more heinous acts to minimize the harms, displacement of responsibility by blaming other groups, and actually blaming the victim of one's action for causing the harm inflicted upon them. In 2022, I did a crowdsourcing of how these methods of moral disengagement have played out in the pandemic, and I posted it on my substack with the title Moral Sabotage and Community Care Disengaged. I'd like it if we could re-engage morality. That would be nice, wouldn't it? We need to crowdsource ideas for that. I do recommend perusing the paper where I found that moral disengagement table. It's in the white volume, July 2012, National Security Challenges, Insights from Social, Neurobiological and Complexity Sciences. I think a review of the authors and the people whose work is cited in that piece might prove very interesting to some people listening right now.
Accusation in a Mirror