The Sudden Crusade Against Disinformation; Drought; and the Inner Totalitarian

Lake Mead near the Hoover dam, seen from the Arizona side of the dam near Boulder City, Nev., July 19, 2022. (photo: David Becker/Reuters)

David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018) — David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma, Wa. (photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Why the sudden crusade against “disinformation”? Is our time plagued by a singular onrush of lying and deceit? Really? According to today’s referees of language – who themselves could be mired in modern cultural/political manias – disinformation is “false information that is spread deliberately and often covertly to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (Merriam-Webster). Slanting the truth or even outright falsehoods has been the stuff of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a little Dale Carnegie lingo) since people discovered other people. Moses’s biblical admonition against “bearing false witness” covers the topic quite nicely.

For years, some people insisted that taxing the rich at towering rates leads to more revenue, as if people blindly and willingly, like lemmings, lay themselves prostrate before the IRS. Does the British “brain drain” from high-tax Britain to elsewhere in the Anglosphere of the 1950’s to 1970’s remind you of anything? Tax havens in the Bahamas? For years, even today, some continue to persist in the belief that socialism leads to prosperity despite its long record of failure. Eugenics, at one time, was all the craze even as it treated people as if they were draft animals. I could go on. So, where’s the sudden crisis in bad information? Dis- and its cousin misinformation have been around as long as humans had the capacity for speech. Now the Southwest is in the midst of a harrowing drought. Watch the “disinformation” smears muddy the waters in how to deal with it.

Honestly, cut to the chase, this jihad against “disinformation” is actually a massive censorship campaign. By what standard are the Cassandras of disinformation labeling some opinions or factual claims fraudulent? As it turns out, these arbiters of truth are partisans who rely on partisans. It’s mental gunk relying on mental gunk to produce more mental gunk in order to control what people say. GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

GIGO case in point: Valerie Wirtschafter of Brookings and her piece, “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims” (see below), where she proclaims that the podcast world is too free, with much too much “disinformation”. Where’s she been? The advertising industry would never have been around to launch so many successful Madison Avenue careers without exaggerations and falsehoods. Coke and Pepsi lambasted each other for years with disinformation. Watch any Superbowl’s commercial breaks for your daily diet of disinformation. Joe McCarthy (Sen, Wisc., 1950’s) and the Socialist International would be minor footnotes in history without mis- and disinformation. It’s been the motivation for wars and invasions and the rhetorical bedrock for politicians in their climb up the greasy pole . . . forever. And, all of a sudden, “Dr.” Wirtschafter discovered it’s a problem.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science — Valerie Wirtschafter

Come on, these are biased people who don’t like what other people have to say. People like Wirtschafter hide behind the aura of other people’s credentials, their government positions, or undeserved media respectability to engineer a “study” to silence still others. To her, the government is always right, and so are the scribblers and mouths that populate the Big Media newsrooms, anyone mentally messaged in endless lecture halls like hers all the way to her “PhD”, and the millennials and Gen-Z’ers filling the cubicles of Snopes and PolitiFact.

Snopes and PolitiFact have been scandalous in their interventions in our political brawls. If it was up to them, we’d never know that there is a strong possibility that COVID-19 came out of a Communist Chinese lab. We’d continue to shutter the schools not knowing that children face a near non-existent threat while ignoring the long-term damage to their emotional and mental development. We’d still be suffocating behind masks, not knowing that masking has little effect in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus. We’d never know that the vaccines don’t stop the spread of the bug or that natural immunity is just as good (see below). Much that we now know to be true about the pandemic would have been strangled in the crib.

Thanks to the people whom Wirtschafter trusts, businesses would still be closed and a couple of adult generations would continue to be nurtured on the idea that they shouldn’t have to go to work. Snopes and PolitiFact would paste as “true” any mention of the low unemployment rate, leaving a below-average labor participation rate lying on the cutting room floor. The low unemployment rate talk is empty absent any discussion of the emaciated labor pool from which the number is calculated. The high portion of employed (and conversely the low number unemployed, hence the low unemployment rate) is drawn from a worker pool that shrunk after the federal government started bribing a good portion of current and potential worker force out of the labor pool with extended pandemic benefits. The money spigot wasn’t shut off till the damage was done. Often referred to as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and I Quit Movement, Gen-Z’ers and others have discovered that living in Dad’s basement and receiving a government check (er, debit card) ain’t so bad (see below). Bringing it up might incur the wrath of the self-deputized disinformation bounty hunters.

Should we pay for pajama boy’s college?

Partisan-laced industries abound in this age of institutionalized political correctness. Stifling voices is the name of the game in the anti-disinformation industry. Though, how can we see our way clearly on existential threats such as the drought in the Southwest when discussion is monitored by the disinformation police? Having long experience with the lefty tendencies of the classroom and faculty lounge, the kinds of people admired by Wirtschafter, there exists among this group a psychomotor tick for totalitarian lifestyle control. That’s the reason for the affection for the buzzword “conservation” and the knee-jerk suspicion about individual freedom. Any talk of increasing the general water supply so people can be free in their daily lives will be met with a smirk.

Let me send Wirtschafter, Snopes and PolitiFact into a tizzy by mentioning a piece by Ed Ring of the California Policy Center, “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit” (see below). He lays out the practical possibility that more than conservation is necessary to stave off disaster for states like California: the supply of water has to be increased. But don’t bring that up at the next Sierra Club confab or among the chattering classes attending a Wirtschafter soiree.

Ring points out a number of options to increase supply, even while taking into account the climate-change bugaboo. Climate change doesn’t mean that California will be the newest Sahara Desert in a century. Precipitation will still fluctuate in a wet season and over time and present opportunities to expand supply. One is the installation of French drains underneath the subsurface gravel beds of the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta’s natural channels. It would capture a portion of the excess flows (flood waters) that flush into SF Bay. The water could then be stored in off-stream reservoirs and delivered to users and/or utilized to recharge the depleted aquifers of California’s Great Central Valley. French drains, think about it.

Expanding and upgrading wastewater reclamation could be an additional route to take. Even if only for non-potable uses such as landscaping or ag irrigation, it would free large quantities of potable sources for human consumption. Of course, that would require budgetary restraint in not wasting money on zany efforts to kill off the next generation in unbridled and subsidized abortions, or turn the state into a parent-free sanctuary for teen sexual mutilation (transgenderism), or find new ways to ladle cash to new and old “oppressed” classes, or drive businesses out of the state in hyper-regulation and -taxation, or sink more public and private money into the thankless task of making unsustainable “sustainable” energy “sustainable”. Keep it simple: just try to maintain water pressure at the faucet.

Desalination is another option if the state can keep its militant eco-utopians and NIMBY’s at bay. It’s expensive, like any of the other options, but, honestly, can you think of a wiser use of taxpayer moneys than the provision of something so important that three days without it brings death? However, I suspect that the inner totalitarian of the conservation-only legion has too great a grip on the minds in Sacramento. These busybodies are just too obsessed with telling other people how to live, and conservation fits the bill. Yep, the inner totalitarian has a grip on power in the state.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate Photos dated 9/-/1981 — 1981 Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests in California organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate. (Photo: Steve Ringman/The Chronicle)

California has an aged 20-million-person water delivery system in a 39-million-person state. Granted, people are leaving so, who knows, maybe its population will eventually come to match its outdated supply. Still, if opportunities aren’t grasped, it’ll be a bumpy ride of brown lawns, metered restrictions and fines, and more of the Great Central Valley resembling the Sudan. Droughts should be anticipated in dry-summer climates but California would rather play the role of woke crusader. With the disinformation inquisition in full swing, you’ll never know that the anguish could have been avoided.

RogerG

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