Sarcastic bitch with a wine problem

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2024

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  • Well, no. The originally German / Nazi tactic called Lügenpresse aka. “Lying Press” is more about just claiming that the press is lying – like how conservatives latched onto calling everything “fake news” after US Republicans and Trump started doing it after their bullshit was called out with that term.

    The idea with the “firehose of falsehood”, like the page I linked to explains, is to saturate media with so much high volume and continuous bullshit that people start to doubt whether it’s even possible to know anything about objective reality in the first place. The point isn’t to proclaim that the media is lying, but to simply lie so much that people start to think that all media is just lies. The tactic originated in Russia and has been in use since Soviet times and the internet has allowed them to take it to a completely new level.

    And yes, Nazi-controlled media was obviously also full of total fabrications, but that doesn’t mean that these two tactics are the same thing.











  • I think it’s interesting is that so many autocracies keep up the pretense of democratic and rules-based governance; even North Korea has elections. Same with political trials like you see in so many authoritarian regimes, from modern Russia or China to Nazi Germany – it’s like autocrats need to be able to pretend to themselves that the system they run is fair and just, and that they’re not just tyrants who govern with impunity and enforce rules arbitrarily.

    What I don’t get is why? Why bother when it’s immediately obvious to everyone that it’s all a sham? Why not drop the pretense, which everybody knows is just a pretense?