Showing posts with label Reason magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reason magazine. Show all posts

Thursday, February 4, 2021

There is a reality crisis…and this is NOT the way to fight it.


So it seems that every moment you turn on the news you run across stories of conspiratorial beliefs and behaviors so shockingly deranged that you might think you ran across a parody of our conspiracy culture rather than an account of an actual event. At first you might get the urge to laugh at it all, but then the laughter feels a bit uncomfortable.

Take for example the case of Steven Brandenburg. He was the pharmacist who destroyed hundreds of vials of the coronavirus vaccine…and now we know why. As detailed by this recent story in the NY Post, Brandenburg is a hard-core conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is flat and the sky does not exist. What you think is the sky is actually a dome erected by the—wait for it—the government!!! The dome is supposed to shield humanity from the eye of God. But Brandenburg ultimately destroyed those vaccines because, as the article points out, he thought they might be a part of Bill Gates’ microchip plot, they might kill people or either make them infertile or make birth control useless. So apparently Gates’ evil vaccines either cause births…or they don’t. I guess you can take your pick of what you want to believe.


And no, it’s not worth wasting time trying to logically deconstruct Brandeburg’s apparently feverish imaginings. This man clearly appears to be mentally ill.


But then you see the story of last weekend’s incident at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles where anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists attempted to block people from getting their COVID vaccines. Where some 40,000 or so Californians have already died from the virus, behavior like this is absolutely maddening. So, if you want to be irresponsible, self-deluded, and self-destructive, you can go ahead and put your life at risk. Just say no to Bill Gates’ microchips that will turn you into an alien clone. But you don’t have the right the put the lives of others at risk with an outrageous stunt like that protest. Behavior like that, as far as I’m concerned, is tantamount to attempted murder.


But the madness of the current conspiracy culture, unfortunately, begets madness of epic proportions of those who think we can use the power of government to solve any social ill.


In Tuesday’s New York Times, this op-ed attempted to offer a solution to QAnon and its own conspiracy mythology in what appears to be a parody of big-government, liberal overreach. The author, Kevin Roose, is endorsing calls from various academics and law makers for Joe Biden to create a “reality czar” and a “truth commission” where the government will now go into to business of even more electronic surveillance to route out conspiracy theorists who might be potentially violent, like the ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Sure, Roose, does allow that reality czars and truth commissions might sound somewhat “dystopian.” Oh, you think? It sounds maybe like “ministry of information” or “ministry of propaganda” in any standard authoritarian regime. Kim Jung Un in North Korea, Manuel Marrero Cruz in Cuba, and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela all have forms of their propaganda ministries that act as the final arbiter of what is allowed to be the spoken truth in their countries. North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela are also dictatorial hellholes people risk like and limb to escape every day. 


As Matt Welch in this Reason article points out, not only does the Roose article sound like a parody of the meddling, over-regulating left, but it is bound to have very severe unintended consequences. Do you really want whichever party is in power to have the authority to interfere with online speech in order to define the truth? Would the liberals endorsing this idea, the same liberals who had just spent four years raging against Donald Trump and his hostility to the news media want to keep a “truth commission” if Biden gets replaced by a Republican in four years. I suspect not.

 

Moreover, the foolishness of these endorsements of the government getting into the anti-conspiracy business is the fact that the fearful, unsophisticated, and disenfranchised who get lured into conspiracy world are people who are constantly looking for any miniscule, subtle sign of more government surveillance, more regulation, more clandestine control. Governmental anti-conspiracy commissions and regulations will boost the paranoia, will merely confirm what conspiracists already want to believe. It might be something similar to the FBI’s and the ATF’s reactions to David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult in 1993. Koresh, a con artist with a messianic streak, was preaching an imminent apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario to his followers. The sign, he said, would be when the armies of an evil government came and attacked their movement. So the ATF and the FBI saw it wise to surround Koresh’s compound with tanks and helicopters. Quite predictably, death and destruction ensued.


So these Orwellian “reality czars” and “truth commissions” are the worst possible things that could be done to counter the conspiracy movement. The only thing, and the most poten strategy for stopping these movements of epic paranoia is also the most challenging thing. It does not involve deplatforming anyone by social media companies or intrusive government investigation. It involves education. It involves teachers from grade school through high school and college stressing the importance of logic, reason, and critical thinking as the guiding principles of any sane, stable and civilized society.

 

As I outline in this white paper for the graduate program in Communication and Public Relations at Saint Peter’s University, the antidote to dangerous conspiracism is especially media education, media literacy, and the fields of public relations where we teach young people to always be advocates for reason and truth. 

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Beware the pink boards!! They steal souls!!!

This piece on the Reason magazine blog is just too priceless!

Ouija boards are made in pink to be marketed just to girls and, of course, some concerned parents are, well...concerned. And worried, and angry, and feelig all apocalyptic.

I would bet a whole lotta money right now that some of these people are Parents Television Council members. He, he, he...

Friday, February 27, 2009

Gotta read this article...



I included the links to some outstanding blogs on the right so an astute and active reader exploring every inch of DonovanMedia could check them out and read some really good stuff.

This piece on the Reason magazine Hit & Run blog, though, is so well done I had to take the time to point it out. It's a thoroughly outstanding dismantling and destruction of a particularly noxious piece of bull*%# about the grace and spiritual rewards of suffering through a financial catastrophe.

And yes, I proudly admit that I regularly play the lottery because I want to win a @%*#load of money I can use to buy frivolous, extravagant, expensive stuff and live a life of materialistic bliss.