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Some thoughts on propaganda

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We are living through historic times right now, and I mean that in the worst possible way. We’re witnessing, in real time, a slow-motion coup against the United States government, one that may already have reached a point of no return.

We’re also seeing unparalleled propaganda, Soviet-state-level propaganda, become woven into the social discourse, which is terrifying but also fascinating to watch.

Some of the propaganda has historical parallels. Ssome of it does not. Unfortunately, those of us who care about the preservation of the Union tend to play into the propaganda. We reinforce it without intending to, without even knowing that’s what we’re doing.

O Canada

Image: edb3_16

The current Administration makes no secret of the fact it wants to annex Canada. The idea seems laughable on its face, but nearly every war, every act of atrocity in human history, starts with an idea that’s laughable on its face.

This is what propaganda is for: making the absurd seem inevitable.

It starts, of course, with demonizing the Other. That’s how atrocity works. You never go from zero to this:

Image: mikdam

without first passing through this:

Right here, right now, we get to see the start of the process.

Of course, I’m not comparing Trump’s rhetoric about Canada to anti-Jewish agitprop in WWII, but I am saying that the ideas, the fundamental process of propagandizing a society, are the same.

In both cases, the target is made out to be an enemy, inflicting ruin on the peaceful citizens of this great nation, without cause or pity—ruin that demands retaliatory action (in the name of self-defense, of course), ruin that constitutes a national emergency…and with it, emergency power.

The current Administration is in the process of declaring a national emergency against Canada on multiple fronts: there’s an emergency because Canada didn’t like Trump’s tariffs, there’s an emergency because fentanyl something something, there’s an emergency because Canada isn’t keen on selling electricity to the US after the Administration talked about conquering Canada to make it a state. I wish I could say this was all a South Park parody, but it’s not.

It’s fascinating, in a morbid kind of way, to watch this unfolding before our eyes, rather than reading about it in a history class.

Let’s talk about just one part of it: “We need to protect ourselves against Canada because they’re sending fentanyl into the US.”

This ticks all the ticky-boxes for effective propaganda:

✅ We have to protect our children from the evil scourge!

✅ They’re poisoning our people!

✅ The enemy is at the gates! They’re right at our border!

✅ We need to secure our border from the invasion!

The problem, of course, is the fact that less than 1% of the fentanyl coming into the US flows across the Canadian border; we send far more fentanyl to Canada than they send to us (though of course that doesn’t make us the bad guys; we’re the USA, everyone knows the USA is never the bad guys).

Liberals play into this propaganda

I’ve seen a lot of liberals try to push back against this narrative with information about fentanyl smuggling into the US, like the fact that almost all of the fentanyl coming into the US originates in China, or that the fentanyl that doesn’t originate from China tends to come in from Mexico and Central and South America. “Only 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the US crosses the border from Canada!” they say. “Canada is barely a rounding error on DEA statistics!”

Please stop doing that. It doesn’t work. It only reinforces the propaganda.

How?

When you say “Only 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the US crosses the border from Canada,” what you think you’re saying is “stop demonizing Canada. They aren’t the problem.”

That isn’t what die-hard MAGA hears.

What die-hard MAGA hears is something more like this:

See? Trump is right! Canada is the problem! Even the liberals agree! Oh, sure, the liberals want to argue about this percentage or that percentage or blah blah blah percentage, but they don’t deny Canada is sending us fentanyl that’s killing American children. They quibble over numbers, but they still admit he’s right. Fentanyl is coming from Canada. We have to defend ourselves from the Canadians poisoning our children.

And boom! By pointing out facts that you think prove Trump wrong, you have reinforced the propaganda.

This is about feelings, not fact. Feelings don’t care about your facts.

In fact, countering false narratives with facts is likely to make the false belief stronger, thanks to a psychological phenomenon called “entrenchment” or “the backfire effect.”

Put simply: When a person encounters a fact that contradicts a belief, that person is likely to rehearse—that is, to replay in his mind, over and over, all the reasons he believed that thing in the first place. Reinforcement strengthens the synaptic connections in the brain that correspond to that belief; it literally, not figuratively, reinforces the false belief.

The stronger the contradictory evidence, the more the person rehearses, and the stronger the false belief becomes.

What’s the answer, then?

Stop quibbling over facts and statistics. Facts and statistics don’t matter. Too many people don’t make decisions based on empirical reality.

The University of Pennsylvania has an excellent article on countering propaganda and entrenched narratives: bypass, don’t refute.

Instead of contradicting the false narrative with statistics that directly refute the false belief, find other avenues, other paths to the truth.

If people hold the false belief that GM food causes allergies—a common bit of misinformation among anti-GM circles—don’t talk about allergies. Find other ways to highlight the advantages of GM food.

If people hold the false belief that we need to retaliate against Canada for poisoning our children with fentanyl, don’t attack the idea that fentanyl is coming from Canada. Talk about the other sources of the drug problem. Talk about the reasons Canada, our largest trade partner, is vital to the US economy. Talk about the people who will suffer if Canadian trade breaks down.

Bypass the issue of “Canadian fentanyl.” The people who believe the narrative about “Canadian fentanyl” will only entrench in their false belief if you try to approach it head-on.

Don’t reinforce the propaganda you’re fighting against.

Today in American Anti-Intellectualism

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Almost exactly two years ago, when I was in Florida helping care for my mom who had terminal cancer, I tweeted a photo of myself wearing a Stand Up for Science T-shirt. Cape Coral, Florida is antivax central, ground zero of the know-nothing Ron Desantist anti-intellectual craze, so I made a point of wearing that shirt around town.

Three days ago, that two-year-old tweet went viral, which was weird. Retweeted and commented on all over the place. So, curious, I took a look, and apparently it got picked up by the antivax/moon landing deniar/flat earth crowd. Here’s but one of the threads of retweets and comments, posted by a person who’s a moon landing denier, antivaxxer, and Reptilian conspiracy nutter:

The US has a long history of weird anti-intellectualism, going all the way back to the vicious streak of religious Puritanism that runs through American society. We’re so used to it we don’t even see it, but my European friends who visit are always a little shocked by how deep know-nothing, Fundamentalist Protestantism runs in US culture.

Evangelical religion is inherently incompatible with science. A lot, a lot of Americans truly, sincerely believe that the world is 6,000 years old, all the animals were made exactly as they are now, and people and dinosaurs once lived side by side. This is not in the least bit unusual in US society.

This has led to an ongoing, generations-long war against science education in the United States. The Scopes monkey trials are just the tip of the iceberg.

In the last 40 years, that war on education has been joined by American populist political conservatives, who see value in an uneducated population. It used to be that American conservatives, all the way up through Ronald Reagan, were 100% behind cold-eyed, factual science education; this fit with their idea that the US should lead the world in science and technology, because you can’t do that without an educated population.

It took a liberal in the form of JFK to promise to get us to the moon, but the engineers and rocket scientists who made it happen were overwhelmingly conservatives. Not in the current “populist know-nothing party” sense of conservatives, but old-school, pre-Reagan conservatives.

Nowadays, what passes for a “conservative party” in the US is isolationist populists. They want to withdraw from the world stage, so American technical and scientific leadership doesn’t matter to them. They openly embrace the most extreme Evangelical Christians, the Prosperity Gospel, Christian Dominionist movement that seeks to create a theocracy to replace the US government. Their goals are aligned: Education has got to go.

That’s created a huge backlash against science education. Educated people are “elitist.” Universities are “liberal indoctrination centers.”

This isn’t new, of course. What’s new is the alliance between political conservatives and the Evangelical right on opposition to science and knowledge, an unholy union where each of the two sides sincerely believes it is using the other for opportunistic gain.

It exists at least in part because we live in a time of prosperity and unprecedented safety. Very few people alive today remember a time when children weren’t expected to live to be adults, even though that was a frighteningly short time ago.

One of the people in my polycule, who wishes to remain nameless, rather brilliantly calls conspiracy thinking “idiot mantras for dopamine mining” and puts it like this:

It’s literally: Step 1: Confusion about actual science Step 2: read/hear confident idiot talk about how everyone is wrong except you, because you are listening to him so you must be smart Step 3: think “I don’t want to believe I’m stupid so I’ll believe stupid things to feel smart” Step 4: I are smart! I’ll just repeat the same things over and over like some sort of argument cheat code, and anyone who disagrees must be stupid, so I will ignore them”

This enshrinement of the idiocracy, this reflexive anti-intellectualism that has its roots deep in the fertile soil of the American ideals of exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism™, is fundamentally at odds with a post-industrial society in an interconnected economy.

As we turn away from learning and knowledge, craving the certainty of the Age of Superstition, we cede our role in the world. But not to worry, someone else will take over. I’m guessing China.

Some thoughts on Dolly Parton and kindness

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A new billboard appeared recently next to the grocery store where I do most of my shopping.

Image by author

I don’t mean the “now leasing” sign, but the one next to it. The one with the country singer on it.

Back when I was in middle school in Venango, Nebraska, I didn’t know a thing about Dolly Parton except that she apparently had large breasts. I might have vaguely known that she was in a band or something, maybe, but I couldn’t put a face to the name. I knew she had big boobs because all the other kids told me she had big boobs, and if all the other kids are saying something, like they put spider eggs in bubble gum or whatever, you know it’s probably true.

We would get together at recess and tell Dolly Parton jokes, all of them dirty (at least by the standards of a fifth-grader; ah, how little I knew!) and all of them about her breasts.

As I moved into adulthood, I learned that yes, she was a singer, she sung country and western songs, and she had that one hit because of that one movie everyone liked but I didn’t see. I don’t listen to country and western music, so that was about the sum total of my knowledge of all things Dolly Parton.

Nowadays, as I learn more about her, she strikes me as a genuinely marvelous person: kind, generous, giving, and genuinely invested in leaving the world a better place than she found it.

I still don’t listen to country music, but by all accounts she seems quite extraordinary. She is that rarest of things in creation: a genuinely compassionate person.

That’s something the world needs in greater quantities.

As I get older, I become more and more aware of the value of kindness. The truth is, callousness is easy. Indifference is easy. Cruelty is easy. The world is filled with people who see kindness as weakness, but in truth, kindness costs more than insensitivity. To be kind is to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and the ego rebels against that. It reminds us we are not the sun-center of all creation.

Empathy: Humanity’s Secret Weapon

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Pop quiz time. How did human beings—soft, weak, squishy bipeds with no claws, no massive canines, and thin skin—become the dominant mammals on the planet? Survival of the fittest says we should’ve been wiped out by fiercer, stronger, creatures, right?

No.

Our special sauce, beyond our big brains and abstract reasoning, is our cooperation. We work together. We help each other. We tend to our sick and injured. Where one of us goes, the rest follow.

We have each other’s backs.

That makes us unstoppable. There are many creatures larger, stronger, faster, and fiercer than we are, creatures that can take us one on one in a fight, but the thing about humans is it’s never one on one.

You kill one of us, the rest of us will come for you. We are an unstoppable force of nature.

Losers and idiots think that kindness is a weakness because they see the world in terms of the Rugged Individual™, the lone warrior standing strong against a world red in tooth and claw. They don’t see the army that stands behind that Rugged Individual, making his tools and his clothing and his weapons, nor the entire history behind him that brought him to this place. The Rugged Individual stands on the shoulders of others and says “look how I rose to this lofty height all by myself!”

Today, we live in a world increasingly dominated by loudmouth bullies, people for whom the world is always zero sum, people who believe that every interaction has a winner and a loser.

Image: Felix Mittermeier

This attitude appeals to the sort of person who thinks of himself as an Alpha Male™, taking charge through force and strength to leave his mark upon the world, but it’s comedically inept.

And the math is behind it. Entire branches of game theory show that cooperation always wins out in the long run, always…not that the sort of person who sees the world as force against force in a battle royale to the death actually understands the math.

In the end, it comes down to a simple but surprisingly subtle idea: Other people are real. In a world where we act with reciprocal kindness, everyone benefits. We are a social species; we do more acting together than acting alone.

I will admit this has not always been obvious even to me. The Internet makes it easy to forget that other people are real—that the letters we see on the screen come from a real person. I had an experience about ten or so years ago when I met in realspace some people I’d been needlessly abrasive to online, and it occurred to me, holy shit, these folks are actual human beings! Since then, I’ve tried—not always with perfect success—to be more mindful in my online communication.

Bullying is easy. Especially when it’s anonymous, and most especially when it curries favor in our social in-groups. We live in a world where kindness and compassion are increasingly seen as weakness. Let us not forget that it is cooperation that carried us here.

Be kind.

Today in “Horrifying Cyberpunk Dystopia”

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I sleep in a loft bed, to make more room for my computers and one of my 3D printers, which I keep under the bed.

I needed a new floor lamp, and because I’m lazy, I wanted something I could turn on and off remotely without climbing out of bed. So I found a floor lamp on Amazon that advertised remote control capability.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the box and found no remote, just a QR code to download a smartphone app.

Buckle up, because this story is about to take a turn that would make William Gibson cringe.

My first hint something was wrong came when the app forced me to create an account on the manufacturer’s server before I could pair pair with the lamp.

But hey, I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went, so I made an account. The answer is “pretty deep.”

Once you pair over Bluetooth, the next thing you do is download your WiFi password to the lamp. You also must enable location services, so the lamp knows your location. (The software won’t work if you don’t.)

Once the lamp knows your location, you have a choice to make. It asks if you’d rather use the microphone in your phone, or the one built into the lamp.

Yes, you read that right. The lamp connects to your WiFi and your phone, knows where you are, and has a built in microphone.

Once you’ve made that particular Hobson’s choice, the app asks you to upload a selfie, so it can—get this—run facial recognition and AI expression analysis.

Why? So it can suggest a lighting scheme based on your mood.

The Terms of Service allow the manufacturer to store your face and do both facial recognition and AI analysis.

I uploaded a photo of a cat rather than my selfie.

You’re then connected to a community of other lamp users, so you can exchange lighting patterns and such…because, of course, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a floor lamp must be in want of a way to exchange lighting suggestions with complete strangers.

Here’s the light it suggested based on AI analysis of a cat.

The lamp was originally slated to arrive from Amazon on Monday, but when Monday came I got an email telling me that delivery was delayed and it would arrive on Tuesday.

Were I of a paranoid bent, I might believe that the delay allowed a government three-letter agency to intercept the shipment so they could do a supply chain attack, rerouting the lamp’s connection to the host servers (which is a really weird thing to say, if you think about it) through them as well.

George Orwell believed in a future where the government constantly watched the citizens, recording every detail of their lives. George Orwell didn’t know about outsourcing.

Adventures in Drug Addiction…and not even the fun kind.

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Ever since I was in high school, I’ve suffered severe allergies, a trait I inherited from my dad. Pollen, ragweed, animals, dust mites, you name it, I’m addicted to it. For most of my life, I’ve had a persistent low-grade cough from about April to about October.

And nothing I’ve ever tried has worked, except Benadryl, which knocks me out for 14 hours. Not Allegra, not Claritin, not fexofenadine, nothing.

In 2018, I discovered Xyzal (levocetirizine), a once a day antihistamine that, by some miracle, actually worked. For seven glorious years, I’ve been mostly allergy-free, mostly.

Fast forward to last month, when out of the blue I started getting hives on my arms and sides out of nowhere. Careful, systematic experimentation revealed the culprit to be levocetirizine, which still works but makes me break out.

So I quit taking it.

Big, big mistake.

It turns out levocetirizine is physically addictive. And I’ve taken it every single day for seven years.

It also turns out that you’re not supposed to discontinue long-term use abruptly. Apparently once daily for seven years qualifies as “long-term use.”

The withdrawal from levocetirizine is absolutely brutal—anxiety, insomnia, headaches, difficulty breathing, nausea, fatigue, irritability, shortness of breath…I got the whole package, including some of the withdrawal effects WebMD calls “uncommon.”

I’ve been off it for a month now. According to WebMD, I have about 2-4 weeks of withdrawal left.

But hey, at least I’m also having allergy attacks again.

Shoot me now.

New sticker available

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Price: free (donations accepted but not required). I only have a few, but there are more on the way.

The Resist stickers are also back in stock, though I expect to run out of them quickly again.

Get them here!

Update on the Resist stickers

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I had no idea, when I designed the Resist sticker, that it’d touch such a nerve. My first shipment disappeared in less than two hours. I’m getting messages and emails every day asking when there will be more, so here’s an update:

The first batch have now all been shipped out.

If you ordered five or fewer, you’ll get them soon. You should’ve received a confirmation email in the past few days that your stickers shipped, but unfortunately some of the confirmation emails bounced as spam, so they may not have gone through.

If you ordered ten or fewer before the shopping cart showed zero left, then you’ll also have them soon.

If you ordered more than 10, you will only get ten in the first mailing. If you ordered more than ten after the shopping cart showed zero left, I’ll send some out when the new ones arrive.

Yes, there are more on the way.

The second design will be here next week. Alas, I had no idea what to expect, so I didn’t order very many, only 175. I expect it to be gone the same day it’s available. I’ve ordered more of that design as well.

I’ve made changes to the shopping cart.

My shopping cart fell over under the load. People were seeing weird error messages, or couldn’t check out, or the cart wouldn’t load at all. I’ve completely rebuilt it from the ground up; it still looks the same but it’s running new software underneath that should be a lot more reliable.

Dozens of people asked if there’s a way to tip me.

I’ve added the ability to include a tip in the new shopping cart. For free stickers this is 100% optional, but it’s there if you want it.

I’ve also received a number of donations on PayPal and Venmo. Thank you all so much, it’s been incredible to learn how many people want to support this idea. All of the donations I’ve received, every penny, have gone into ordering more stickers. I have about 1200 stickers on the way that should be here by the end of the month.

Many of you, like over a dozen of you, have messaged to ask if there’s a way to get the stickers in quantities of 100 or 200 or more.

I didn’t make any provision for that because I honestly had no clue so many of you would get behind this project. So, I’ll be making changes to the shopping cart to add a provision to order in bulk. I plan to charge my own cost for this and ship the stickers to you directly from the company that makes them. The price will likely be around $35 for 100 or $45 for 150.

I will need to limit quantities for free stickers.

I’m really sorry. I had no idea this was going to blow up. The Resist stickers will be limited to 10 at a time for free orders or 3 at a time for the first batch of the new design, which I’ll post here and on social media when it arrives.

A bunch of people have asked me if I can make the design available in pins or clothing or other formats.

I’m looking into doing this. I won’t be able to offer free pins and such, so what I’ll likely do if I can find a good vendor is make things like pins, clothing, and holographic stickers a nominal charge (I’m not looking to make a profit from this project), but continue to keep the vinyl stickers free.

Thank you all so much for the incredible support. I can’t tell you how deeply gratifying it is to know I’m not the only one who feels the way I feel about what’s happening to our country right now.

Resist

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I’ve been having trouble sleeping.

It’s heartbreaking to see the country gutted and its values torn apart by a fat psychopath in bad makeup, and even more heartbreaking to know that a third of the country voted in favor of hatred. There was a time when we could believe that people on both sodes of the political aisle wanted what was best for the nation. Now we cannot.

So I’ve been having trouble sleeping. And when I wake at four AM with that despair in the pit of my stomach, I sit down and design stickers. In the past few weeks, I’ve ordered hundreds and hundreds of them.

The first design just arrived today. I have more designs arriving in the next few weeks. I am giving them away to anyone who wants them for free, and when I say for free I mean I will even cover postage in the US (international is $2).

Here’s the first design:

These are four inches by two and a half inches. To give you a sense of how big they are, here’s one on a 15″ laptop:

Want one? Order them for free on my site here. Want a bunch? Let me know and I’ll have 100 of them shipped to you at my cost. Got an idea for a design? I’d love to hear from you.

New designs will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

[Edit] Wow. Um, I didn’t expect that to happen. It took two hours for my entire first production run of Resist stickers to disappear.

To anyone else trying to get one, I’m really, really sorry. I’ve ordered more. It usually takes about two weeks for them to be produced.

If you ordered multiple stickers, I may send you less than you wanted, to make sure there’s enough for everyone else. I’ll let you all know when I have more. In the meantime, I’ll have some new designs soon as well, they’re already in production.

Pop Science Bingo!

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I’ve long had a list in my phone I call the “Dunning-Kruger List.” It’s a list of pop-sci arguments I see over and over and over and over again from people with poor science education: Creationists, homeopaths, and so on, all of which are based on a deep misunderstanding of science.

I’m not sure where these pop-sci ideas come from, but they’re all totally, completely 100% wrong, as in the opposite of true. Generally, hearing any of these in a conversation, especially in the Internet, instantly activates my “you’ve never seen the inside of a university science classroom, so you’re so far up Mount Dunning-Kruger it’s not worth the effort it would take to talk you down from its icy slopes.” So that that point my eyes glaze and I route everything further they say directly into my intellectual /dev/null.

This morning, I saw this on Quora:

Since this is officially the 17,000th time I’ve seen a Creationist make this argument, I decided it was time to Do Something.

So I made a thing.

Lessons from my Mom: Malicious Compliance

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I grew up in a tiny town called Venango, Nebraska, a rural farming village of 242 people. A lot of my formative memories took hold there, even though we only lived there for my middle-school years.

I went to school in this building right here, Venango Elementary, which housed the entire kindergarten through twelfth-grade population of Venango.

One of my teachers, a guy named Mr. Shepherd (I don’t think I ever knew his first name—in fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to me he had a first name) had a reputation in my class for assigning “punishment writing” to any kid who acted out in class, by which I mean committed some transgression like speaking out of turn. He’d demand that the offender would write the same sentence 250 times or 500 times or whatever, as befitted the severity of the transgression, then took malicious glee in throwing the pages away right in front of the student who’d transgressed.

Because there’s nothing like making young children associate learning with mind-crushing tedium and then watching their work destroyed in front of them to instill a deep, lifelong passion for learning and a keen intellectual curiosity, amirite?

One day, a day I still remember quite clearly, Mr. Shepherd accused me of talking in class. The actual transgressor was the kid behind me, a kid named Mike, the school bully who loved seeing other people get in trouble.

I have never, ever liked being accused of something I didn’t do. I did something wrong? Cool, man, lemme know and I’ll cop to it. Accuse me of something I didn’t do? Fuck you, I’ll burn my own life down before I take responsibility that isn’t mine to take.

So it was that Mr. Shepherd, with the absolute conviction available only to autocrats, abusers, and teachers of middle school, decided I was the one responsible for the voices he heard, and demanded that I write “I will never talk in class” 250 times that night, to be handed in the next day.

I was livid when I got home. The wrath in Heaven at the rebellion of the angels was but a candle beside my incandescent rage at the injustice of a teacher believing I’d done something I hadn’t done.

Enter my mom, who taught me a valuable lesson.

My mom in 2016, wearing the same expression she did on that day in 1980.

We didn’t have that lovely, evocative expression “malicious compliance” back then, but that’s exactly what my mom suggested I do.

She explained that yes, teachers could be wrong and no, not all injustices could be rectified, but as long as I was going to be writing something 250 times, why not use it as a covert opportunity to express how I felt?

So I sat down and started writing.

I will never talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will always talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will celery stalk in class.
I will beaver balk in class.

She encouraged me to adjust my letter and word spacing so that, on casual glance, the lines of text would all look about the same.

The next day, when Mr. Shepherd took my neat stack of handwritten papers and dropped it in the trash in front of me, I couldn’t help grinning. I’d stuck my thumb in his eye, my small act of defiance against injustice, and he never even knew.

My mom died in December 2023. I still haven’t adjusted to the reality of living in a world where she no longer exists.

There has never been a moment in my life I did not have the absolute, rock-solid certainty that she would always, always be there for me. My mom always had my back. She taught me, not just facts and skills and things about the world, but how to think. She encouraged the boundless, limitless curiosity I still have today.

She taught me how to think. How to ask questions and find answers. How to see the world, not as I want it to be, but as it is.

I still keep in my phone a list of the things she would say, the things I heard again and again growing up, that I continued to hear even as an adult:

  • Education is not the solution if ignorance is not the problem.
  • Information by itself almost never changes attitudes.
  • The curse of being middle class is you can afford anything you want but not everything you want.
  • People vote their identity and their feelings, not their interests.
  • People in groups will agree to something that each one individually knows is stupid.
  • We are predisposed to believe what we wish were true or what we’re afraid is true. Understanding what is true is hard work.
  • You can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
  • Never ask a question whose answer you don’t want to know.

I still miss her, every single day.