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Just over a decade ago, the late novelist Hilary Mantel (6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) delivered a lecture to an event at the London Review of Books and triggered national outrage.
In the course of a talk on “Royal Bodies,” which ranged widely across royal women from Anne Boleyn to Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana, she had made what many perceived as disparaging remarks about Kate Middleton, then the Duchess of Cambridge.
The Duchess, she said, appeared to have been “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished."
Indeed, Mantel said, Kate “seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”
At this, the newspapers were soon in uproar.
The prime minister David Cameron called the comments “completely misguided and completely wrong” and the Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed they were “pretty offensive.”
Mantel doggedly refused to back down, saying that her remarks had been twisted out of context, and that she was in fact writing with sympathy about the perceptions that are forcefully projected on to royal women, the cage in which they are held to be goggled at.
That was true but also perhaps not the entire truth, for there was still a perceptible trace of authorial vinegar in the portrait:
Which of us would be happy to learn, even in sympathy, that we were held at low risk for “the emergence of character”?
Royals are public as well as private figures, of course, and authors are free to hang intellectual ideas on them to try out, as designers do with clothes.
Yet while much of the lecture was sharply perceptive, I didn’t agree with the portrait of Kate.
That word “selected” had rendered her passive, when in fact her behaviour thus far had suggested both an active intelligence and an unusual degree of self-discipline.
The context of her entry into “The Firm” was different from that of other royal brides.
Unlike Diana, who had barely emerged from the fractured chrysalis of her troubled aristocratic family when she first met the much older, more worldly Prince Charles, Kate was a contemporary of Prince William’s at the University of St Andrews.
Her family background, which appeared warm and supportive, was comfortably middle-class.
She seemed generally cheerful and unruffled, even when the press was at the barbed peak of its “Waity Katie” hysteria, trying to goad Prince William into a proposal or abandonment.
After the wedding, in her approach to royal duties, she clearly took the role she had inherited with marriage seriously.
The royal whose attitude her own most resembled was the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had long understood the essential nature of the job:
To turn up to public events looking the part, intuit precisely what was needed — gravitas, fun, consolation or reassurance — and deliver it while keeping one’s personal emotions on the back burner.
This is what a monarchy demands, and the ability to act as an impeccable interpreter of the public mood, year after year, is a particular and testing art.
A few have a natural aptitude for it, but most of us do not, and would quickly find its scrutiny and restrictions intolerable.
Grace under consistent pressure is an admirable quality.
Were a ballet dancer to execute a string of flawless performances, or a pilot to conduct numerous flights without incident, it would not be deemed evidence of an absence of character: quite the opposite.
Yet in Kate — especially for those who increasingly conduct their lives online — serene self-possession seems to drive a proportion of onlookers insane: what lurks behind it, what dark secret is waiting to destroy it, how best might it be disrupted?
The uncomfortable truth is that what many people deeply crave in a young and beautiful royal wife and mother is not competence, but crack-up.
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The increasingly bizarre treatment of Kate, or the idea of Kate, is connected to the most dominant phenomenon of our age: a cultural prioritising of drama over duty.
The supply of drama has spilled beyond the confines of the novel, theatre, cinema, or television to become a commodity on which our public figures are judged.
When Mantel spoke of Kate’s apparent absence of emerging “character,” she was assessing her primarily through the hungry eyes of a novelist.
In books, central female characters often generate dramatic tension by chafing against their circumstances, by the intensifying dazzle of their discontents, something that Kate refused to transmit.
In contrast, Mantel described Diana as a “carrier of myth”: Diana, publicly trapped in the disappointments of her marriage, certainly carried more plot twists than any author had a right to expect.
Unfortunately for her, the final one was her shockingly premature death.
Set against this artistic conception of “character” — distinctive qualities or flaws that, one way or another, deliver drama — is the societal judgement “of good character,” meaning someone who is broadly reliable and respected in relation to their behaviour to others.
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In recent years, the electorate, in line with Neil Postman’s warning in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, has proved increasingly ready to select the former over the latter, even to the marked detriment of our civic health.
The former prime minister Boris Johnson instinctively understood it as his job not to deliver the detail of workable policy but to satisfy the public’s appetite for story:
“People live by narrative,” he once told UnHerd’s Tom McTague.
In the US, Donald Trump — that relentless generator of low mockery and high fury — is now running for a second term as president, after his first one ended in his supporters storming the Capitol building.
Men are often permitted to survive the frantic generation of drama: it is everyone around them who suffers.
Yet women — in art and life — have a greater tendency to be destroyed by it.
There is no strutting female equivalent of the male “hellraiser,” but rather a woman who, soaked in the crocodile tears of the tabloids, is tragically “causing concern” among friends.
Art and its audiences have always relished the restless struggle and disintegration of female characters who are, or become, unmoored from the harbour of marriage and children.
Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — her imagination inflamed by reading novels — is bored with her marriage and disenchanted with motherhood.
She seeks solace in affairs and excessive spending, the consequences of which hasten her suicide.
Zola’s Nana, a courtesan who ruthlessly captivates Parisian society, has her beguiling face eaten away by smallpox.
Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, immolated on their blazing talent, are hung posthumously high in the musical hall of fame, next to Sylvia Plath in the poetry section and Marilyn Monroe in cinema.
In Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, a middle-aged English woman called Sasha Jansen, mourning an unhappy marriage and a dead child, finds herself in Paris, a vulnerable drifter seeking solace from stray men.
Rhys herself, who died at 88 after a precarious but surprisingly long life, had much in common with her literary creations.
As the writer and editor Diana Athill crisply put it:
“Jean was absolutely incapable of living, life was just hopelessly beyond her.
When she was young, she floated from man to man in a hopeless way… by the time she was old, she floated from kind woman to kind woman.”
In Rhys’s latter years — hard-drinking, irascible and impoverished — Athill and a small group of female friends formed what they called “The Jean Rhys Committee,” which met regularly to ask “what should we do next?”
Rhys’s claim to such loyalty, I suppose, was the weight of her literary talent, her ability to exert an odd kind of fascination, and the fortunate soft-heartedness of her friends.
The dramatic collided with the dutiful and was kept alive by it.
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From what I can see, the Princess of Wales exists at the opposite end of the feminine spectrum from Jean Rhys.
Pinned firmly in place by her royal obligations, her wealth, her marriage, and three children, she belongs to the realm of the respectable and dutiful rather than the erratic and dramatic.
She is not a “character” in the artistic sense, nor does she desire to be, but both a survivor and upholder of an institution:
Hers is the territory of the prompt thank-you note, the kept promise, the commitment to public service, the uncomplicated pleasure in children, the stoic endurance of difficult times in the hope that better ones will come along soon.
The public senses an emotional solidity in her, and it is partly why she is held in broad esteem.
In this age of insistent self-definition, duty to others might be an unfashionable concept, but it is nonetheless one that keeps families and institutions from chaos and collapse.
With the advent of the internet, however, anyone with a keyboard can become a form of author, with the freedom to insert a toxic form of drama into real-life situations.
What was extraordinary, during the Princess of Wales’s recent health problems, is how speedily and carelessly such speculations overrode the bounds of decency.
It was already known that she had undergone major abdominal surgery and was taking time to recover.
And yet — egged on by the participation of silly celebrities and malicious US comedians — conspiracy theories about cosmetic surgery and affairs and nervous breakdowns spread like knotweed.
According to social-media researchers, these were also vigorously introduced and amplified by fake accounts set up on Twitter and TikTok, some associated with Russia-linked disinformation eager to spread the termites of mistrust and doubt in Western institutions.
Only the Princess of Wales’s revelation of cancer, which carries a testing drama all its own, served to shut up the majority of them.
Unlike these callous gossips, Mantel recognised her own complicity in dehumanising royalty.
Upon encountering the late Queen, the novelist said: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.”
The Queen looked back at her, she said, briefly hurt. Mantel warned of the way in which “cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty” precisely as it has done in recent weeks.
Her talk concluded with a prescient instruction for those who comprehend monarchy mainly as a source of entertainment: “I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”
In the midst of treatment and recovery, the most hitherto stable of royal women could be forgiven a keen sense of injustice:
Her job description, it seems, must now include the ability to weather the online public’s fits of brutish mania for drama.
With its contempt for duty, and its savage appetite for story, it is hungry to chew up far more than just the Princess of Wales.
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NOTE: Additional photos have been included in this article.
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odinsblog · 2 days
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You. have. been. warned. (source)
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hussyknee · 1 year
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Hey, just in case people who already have been having a bad time with this meme are retriggered by Francesca Scorcese's TikTok – Goncharov is fake. It doesn't exist. [Edited for further clarity] That is really Martin Scorsese's daughter, that's her real TikTok account, and presumably that is really her father in the chat screenshot she posted. Francesca saw the piece in the NY Times talking about how Tumblr made up a fake movie, sent her Dad the link and asked "Did you see this?" Martin joked back "yes I made that movie years ago." That's all it was, Martin Scorsese himself playing along with our silliness.
PLEASE reblog this and DO NOT TAG IT UNREALITY. "Unreality" is for posts that are keeping up the bit, but info posts, reality-affirming posts and ones talking about the meme as a meme are solidly real. We really haven't been doing a good enough job tagging this properly and protecting neurodivergent people from being gaslit and traumatized. I've seen way too many people saying they nearly had a breakdown because of being lied to. We never meant to hurt you, and I'm so sorry people were jackasses when you wanted to know the truth.
Edit: I love everybody reblogging this, but a handful of idiots have been clowning on this post so here's an explainer about how site-wide disinformation can trigger psychosis. Please go in the replies and notes, they have a lot of interesting insights, by everyone from non-psychotic autistic people with gaslighting trauma to DID systems. You can go through the notes on this post as well.
There's absolutely no reason to be ashamed of loving and enjoying this meme, or to feel bad about not tagging things properly when you didn't know how. And PLEASE don't harass, dogpile or shame people for failing to tag properly or choosing not to. You're just giving people anxiety and policing them. Do what you can how you can, be kind, and don't tell other people their business. That is more than enough.❤️
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charliejaneanders · 8 months
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Just did a google news search on KOSA, and found a ton of identical "pink slime" articles being posted on local TV station sites.
Just to be clear... this is disinformation.
The bill does not explicitly call for uploading your driver's license, that's just the likely outcome.
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hadeantaiga · 12 days
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More tips for avoiding misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda:
Does the post have a source? If not, is it discussing a first-hand experience? Is the person an authority on the subject? Experts and first-hand experiences can be wrong and/or intentionally spread lies too, so don’t just blindly trust them. If you have no way to verify if it’s correct, do NOT reblog it.
Read the fucking source. I know this seems like an obvious one but it’s one I’m guilty of not doing from time to time. If you haven’t read the article, do NOT reblog the post.
Do you have enough background knowledge to actually determine if the source is telling the truth, if it is a reliable source, if it was AI generated, etc? Sometimes you just don’t know enough to make these judgements. This is where you either start educating yourself on a topic, or you reach out to someone you trust and ask them. You can’t possibly know everything by yourself, that’s ok.
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A media literacy handbook for Israel-Gaza
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Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
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Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media
The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:
https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf
I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"
Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.
II. Know red flags for bullshit
The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:
High-frequency posting
Emotionally charged framing
Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original
The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)
III. Don't trust screenshots
Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.
IV. "Know your platform"
It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.
V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing
People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.
VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy
TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.
VII. Think before you post
Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.
There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-gaza-edition
The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:
https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2018/03/09/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you.html
Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.
It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford
There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/are-we-having-a-moral-panic-over-misinformation.html
It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news
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awesomecooperlove · 5 months
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🔥🔥🔥
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the-catboy-minyan · 2 months
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I'm scheduling this for after Tu Bishvat is over cuz fuck @bringmemyrocks you for ruining my tree day fun
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so, things to say about this:
1) good job turning Tree Day into a political discourse, taking our culture and making it about Palestinians. definitely not cultural appropriation at all.
2) Olives have been a major significance in Jewish culture. the story of Noah's arc with the dove carrying an olive branch, the Miracle of Hanukkah with the jug of olive oil that lasted for 8 days, and the countless references to them in the Torah. they're a symbol of peace, prosperity and life in Judaism.
3) there's an ongoing debate on wether the Jerusalem Pine is an invasive species or not, it is spreading over some areas of Israel and is an ongoing concern, but there's no practice of planting them deliberately. I have no idea where you got this from.
4) it's not "Jewish Arbor day", it's much more than that. it's a day of ecological awareness, agricultural celebration, and appreciation of local harvest. it's THE BIRTHDAY OF THE TREES. we celebrate the 7 species, listed in the Torah as the special products of Israel (as in, our local specialties).
אֶ֤רֶץ חִטָּה֙ וּשְׂעֹרָ֔ה וְגֶ֥פֶן וּתְאֵנָ֖ה וְרִמּ֑וֹן אֶרֶץ־זֵ֥ית שֶׁ֖מֶן וּדְבָֽשׁ
aka: land of are wheat and barley, and grape and fig, and pomegranates, olive oil, and [date] honey.
we're celebrating our local produce. We've had a local holiday for environmental awareness for thousands of years.
you could have talked about that charity without spreading disinformation, and without bringing up our fucking holiday. good day to you.
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rejectingrepublicans · 2 months
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F—king Republican lies! From the South African draft dodger who fled to Canada and then to the US.
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saywhat-politics · 6 months
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The most powerful moment of the coronation of King Charles III was not the gold glittering off carriages or epaulettes — not the pomp and show and signifiers of power.
It was precisely their opposite: when Charles shed his gold robes and stood in a thin white shirt, his frail humanity implied.
Then a screen was erected around him and, shielded, he had a private consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who dabbed anointing oil with his hands on Charles’s bare breast.
"This was the most solemn and personal of moments,” Buckingham Palace said.
Charles was bare before God, in privacy, God being one of the last beings with no need to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
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The Princess of Wales looked on as the screen shielded her father-in-law.
By contrast, she was at that point the most magnificent she had ever been, swathed in layer upon layer of regality, the dress, the robes, the hanging chains, headpiece and ribbons all serving to move the viewing gaze — subjects in every sense — from our awareness of Catherine Middleton with her everyday human DNA and towards the shared fiction of her transcendent queenliness.
Less than a year later, this moment is remembered with new and terrible power.
It is spring again, but it’s a time of hard Lenten moral reflection for us as a nation, in relationship to our royals, as well as an ever more voraciously unprivate modern celebrity culture.
Both the King and the princess have cancer, the latter’s disclosed by Catherine in an unprecedented video address on Friday, March 22.
Catherine’s speech was something of a plea bargain in which she traded not only her customary silence but her most personal of health ordeals in order to put an end to toxic rumours swirling online that had become in tone like an unruly mob rattling at the palace gates.
Or rattling at the figurative locks on her medical notes, with three workers at the London Clinic, where she and the King were treated, suspended and under investigation for allegedly trying to access her records (hers, it is important to note, the King’s were unmolested).
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📷: Getty Images
What was so powerful about the anointing of the King was the sacredness of that space in which he could be fully human away from observation and judgment.
There should be another one-on-one consultation that is sacred, where anyone, from King to princess to pauper, can expect to be shriven in total privacy, and that is the sanctity of the medical room.
It used to be that priests were our only bound confidants, we could trust them to be privy to all our spiritual ills.
Now doctors are our secular priests: bound by law and ethics to enshrine confidentiality at the heart of the patient relationship.
As a result, our medical privacy in an age of oversharing and online surveillance feels both stranger and more necessary.
If we knew our every GP-inspected rash was to be posted on TikTok for the nation, many of us would quite literally die of embarrassment.
The King’s appointment behind the three-sided screen can now be viewed through the lens of royal illness.
The lavishly embroidered panels and expensive white shirt now replaced by the flimsy three-sided ward screen on wheels and thin hospital gown that can humble us all.
But it also enacts a principle at the very heart of becoming the monarch.
The medical-like screen is erected in the coronation to tell us there are some places the public cannot go; to tell us that there are sacredly personal moments in which a person, any person, however swathed in our projections of power, needs to be nakedly human.
Otherwise, they will go mad. We need to make sure the screens are erected around Catherine now.
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Much is said, quite a lot of it by Prince Harry himself, of the dangers of the wives of the princes repeating the tragic history of their mother, Princess Diana, hunted by photographers.
He remains phobic to any hint of tabloid persecution or paparazzi chase. But this is a sideshow, even an anachronism in 2024.
He and others have not recognised how the “chase” has changed. Who needs paparazzi when there are a billion citizen hacks ready to take pictures with their phones, in case a convalescing woman nips to a Windsor farm shop with her husband?
Instead, the appetite now is not to see but to know.
The royals used to have a contract with the public: we pay for them, and in return, they give us their presence.
Nearly all of their official job is to do with surface: to show up, to put in appearances at a set number of functions, whether at the opening of parliament or the opening of a leisure centre.
But now parts of the online mob seem to be staging a coup. We want more than the surface, we want to puncture the skin barrier of the royal family and occupy from the inside.
The “fans” have become an invasive virus. The royal analogy is often that they are trapped in a gilded zoo. This new model, instead, casts the royals more as lab rats.
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When Catherine disappeared from view in January after announcing a “planned abdominal operation,” the response from internet truthers was one of irate entitlement.
They are now the 1980s tabloids: ravening for intimacies and making stuff up when thwarted.
This wasn’t the boomer generation, who are both more respectful of the royals and more private about their own health.
It was the fortysomething mothers frustrated when they can’t track the phone location of everyone in their life; or the twentysomethings on Snap Map.
Both desperate for their personalised new Netflix season of “The Royals” to drop.
Catherine presents with such stoicism and dignity, it is easy to forget where this new invasiveness started: when she was pregnant with Prince George in December 2012 and hospitalised for extreme morning sickness.
While she was sleeping on the ward, a radio station in Australia rang the hospital switchboard pretending to be the Queen.
They broadcast the nurse’s comments about Catherine’s “retching.”
One could only find this prank funny if Catherine had already — a young, wretchedly ill, pregnant woman — been dehumanised.
George is now ten and his mother hospitalised again, and in that decade, the physical security of ill royals may have tightened but their claim to bodily autonomy seems to have weakened.
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Some say Kensington Palace “brought it on themselves” by their wish for discretion; this claim is duplicitous.
The late Queen Elizabeth II became increasingly debilitated in her final years with not much detail ever given; just as her father, King George VI, died without disclosing his lung cancer.
I’m glad that the British do not subject their heads of state to the same publicised medical reports as the president of the United States; one shouldn’t have to present a stool swab to sit on the throne.
No, instead the apparent justification of all those clicking and posting conspiracy theories “worried for Catherine’s welfare” was this sinful truth.
As a beautiful, 42-year-old mother of three, her drama was more box office than the ailments of those older, a pound of her flesh was worth more.
Pity, Susan Sontag said in her 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, is close to contempt.
Back then cancer was still taboo. Those around the patient, Sontag says, “express pity but also convey contempt.”
Ask any cancer patient and they will say they don’t want pity: it is too isolating, it sets them apart, an unwanted privilege.
This is why the video plea of Catherine was one of affinity, rather than pity or privilege.
Last year, she sat in robes in Westminster Abbey at the coronation of her father-in-law, next to her future king son and future king husband.
In her video address last week, she sat on a classically English garden bench, pale, alone and in jeans, as bare of pomp as any royal can be.
No mention of kings or titles, just Diana’s ring on her hand.
Rather she gave an appeal, parent to parent, human to human, about her “huge shock” and her care for her “young family.”
And, finally, her kinship with anyone who lives in a vulnerable human body susceptible to a democratic illness like cancer, “you are not alone.”
Or, to paraphrase Richard Curtis:
“I’m just a girl, standing in front of a public, asking for some time to endure gruelling chemotherapy."
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NOTE: Additional photos have been included in this article.
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odinsblog · 6 months
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This is what misinformation + selective outrage + indifference looks like
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Me: Gotdammit
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shitbrainratface · 4 months
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*the logic behind this is that "people with BPD lie for attention"
^^ I hope I don't have to explain that if you don't believe in self diagnosis bc you think only a doctor can tell for sure, then that also means you yourself don't have the ability to tell whether someone else does or doesn't have a condition because you yourself are not a doctor
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i-merani · 2 months
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This is a WIRED article from 2018 about Russia's propaganda/disinformation campaign on Tumblr.
The thing is, while Tumblr has addressed it in the past, it is very clear that Russia still uses trolls on this site. The list that they've provided of Russia-linked blogs back then isn't available anymore (I can't access it). The reason I'm posting this now is because I see a lot of people posting screenshots of pro-russian users and I want you to know that there's high chance that these users you are interacting with might be a troll spreading Russian propaganda. With the invasion of Ukraine these blogs must have intensified their activities so you can imagine the state of disinformation on this site.
Here's a useful article on how to spot russian bots/shills
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the-final-sif · 4 months
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You are Vulnerable to Conspiracy Theories
Right now, with tensions high over the situation in Gaza, there is a prime environment for conspiracy theories to take hold. Conspiracy theories are particularly dangerous in places where there is low trust in media, a rapidly changing situation, and high emotional tensions. When humans are stressed and scared we look for answers, and most often the easiest and most comforting answer is to make a big bad guy that's at fault for everything. Already, I've seen a number of false conspiracy theories that have alleged things like this. The most recent example was someone claiming spotify wrapped was released to drown out a pro-Palestine movement. This post ignored that Spotify wrapped is always released on Wednesday the week after thanksgiving. It's the same time it always releases. I've seen half a dozen other ones about McDonald's french fries or any other mundane corporate nonsense. I understand this is a very scary time, but this sort of thing isn't helpful.
You are vulnerable to conspiracy theories. All human beings are vulnerable to them. They are actively dangerous and they harm actual efforts to confront the actual problems of the world, and a lot of them tie back to antisemitic ideas, blaming a jewish cabal that controls all the strings of the media/world. Spreading these conspiracy theories is not helpful to Palestine, and it actively endangers Jewish people. It means people's efforts and anger is misdirected and makes the movement to help Palestine less effective. Every person has a responsibility to help prevent the spread of misinformation, and that includes you.
IF IN DOUBT, STOP, DON'T SHARE. DO NOT SHARE INFORMATION YOU CANNOT VERIFY.
This is a guide put together by the European Commission for COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but the same basic principles hold true. I've added the two most relevant infographics below. Plain text versions of these can be found at the link above.
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allthecanadianpolitics · 11 months
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The CRTC has launched a public consultation on whether to ban Fox News from Canadian airwaves after a complaint over incendiary comments made about LGBTQ2 people on the right-wing American network.
The broadcast regulator posted the notice on its website Wednesday, saying it is accepting comments from interested parties and the public until June 2.
Egale Canada, a Toronto-based LGBTQ2 advocacy group, urged the CRTC to hold the consultation in an April 4 open letter that cited “false and horrifying claims” about transgender people made by then-host Tucker Carlson during a March 28 broadcast.
“This programming is in clear violation of Canadian broadcasting standards and has no place on Canadian broadcasting networks,” Egale’s executive director Helen Kennedy wrote.
Carlson was fired from Fox News last week, but a spokesperson for Egale told Global News it remains “committed to the call” to remove the channel from Canadian airwaves, citing anti-LGBTQ2 rhetoric made by other hosts at the network. [...]
Note from the poster @el-shab-hussein: This post presents the reason Tucker Carlson was fired, for reader context.
Continue Reading.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
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