Saturday, November 19, 2022

Watched A Cat Video Lately? Take 50cc of Populism Vaccine and You'll Feel Better In the Morning.


Those populism-fighting injections of fake news vaccine are packaged as cat videos. Yeah, cat videos, and you taxpayers made it possible. 
 
This strange belief in the persuasive power of cat videos seems to go back a ways, specifically, to one year ago when the New York Times warned all right-thinking Americans that online cat videos might harbor misinformation (i.e., unacceptable opinion, or at most, quibbling over definitions). 

Here's that story from December 2021. And, since that story was behind a paywall, here's the WaPo's article about that NYT article.

There was once a time when you needed a shortwave radio to hear good propaganda, which I used to do over Radio Moscow. When the propagandists of the old USSR wanted to stretch a point or zoom past some questionable logic, they would simply preface a statement with the phrase "as is well known." A good forthright lie, and nothing that would trouble an audience that was already listening to Radio Moscow.  

I like that approach much better than the complicated rationalization schemes that lie behind our global engagement center's ridiculous cartoons.

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