So, a quick follow up to yesterday's post in defense of government, Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election. Now really only the most willfully ignorant didn't know this already, but it's still significant that the details of the investigation are now public and have led to indictments. Guess what America? All of you second amendment champions that claim no one would ever invade America thanks to you and your willingness to fight were wrong. Russia launched the first strike in an information war and we lost, badly. And frankly we have no one to blame but ourselves. Propaganda against enemy combatants has been a part of war since ancient Greece. Hell look at the sort of shit we used to put out:
It's still used to great effect today by regimes like Iran, North Korea, and of course Russia against their own citizens to maintain power for the current regimes. I'm not even sure hurting America was Russia's true end game here, they just wanted us to look like shit so Putin had a foil to play off of to maintain his own power base at home. This is also what makes the increase to the defense budget so ridiculous. Conventional warfare between superpowers is a lose-lose for all sides. It's expensive, destructive, and catastrophic to other countries. Why do that when you can launch an information war way cheaper and let your enemy tear itself apart?
This is actually the social downside to decentralization and no censorship. Hell all of it is visible right here on Steemit! It used to be that we got our news mainly from the evening newsdesk with people like Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings. These guys had organizations behind them with journalistic integrity, rigor, and a passion for informing the facts to the general population. Now-a-days screeching gorilla man Alex Jones has millions of followers even though all he peddles are conspiracy theories and supplements as fake as his news. Platforms like this are supposed to give everyone a voice. Unfortunately a lot of people are out there using their voice irresponsibly. Traditional news organizations used to be the gatekeepers for what we knew about the world. While that did give them immense power and meant that sometimes the truth was suppressed, it also meant we had professionals evaluating and comparing sources and stories for credibility. I'm sorry to tell you, but people that do this for a living are better at it then you or I am. I have a longer piece I'm working on for why fake news and conspiracies are so appealing and why we're so prone to echo chambers, but for now I'll say that it's very unlikely that crazy Ted posting on some corner of the internet has the actual real scoop that the mainstream media just won't report on.
How can we work to prevent this in the future?
Well the first is to always be open-minded to new fact and evaluate all information critically. Think real hard if someone is giving you facts and figures and all you're spouting off is anecdotes. Be mindful not to fall into the trap of quickly accepting things that validate your previously held beliefs. Accept that you don't actually know everything and it's ok that you didn't know something or were wrong. Don't have an ego about the truth. The last thing is something we can actually learn from crypto. Steem works by having one witness produce a block and 20 witnesses evaluate that block. So think of this as one new fact happening and 20 organizations evaluating that fact. If most of them are in agreement, great, that fact is accepted. If not then it's rejected. In other words, DO NOT GET ALL OF YOUR NEWS FROM ONE SOURCE!!!!! I found a site that I like to use for controversial issues AllSides.com. It's a site that aggregates news from all over the internet and you can see how different organizations report the same story. If a fact is supported in most write-ups, great! It's probably accurate. However claims or opinions that only appear in one of two places should be considered highly suspect. There is almost too much information out there for us to independently filter the useful and the junk. Learn to lean on a consortium of opinion to from your own. To paraphrase one of my favorite aphorisms, there's my view, your view, and somewhere in the middle the truth.