Science communications is performed precisely as a propaganda function: “The first is what science communicators call “the deficit model,” which assumes the public is deficient in their understanding of science and need scientists as the learned elites to help the benighted masses.” and “The second limitation is that the goal of health communication is not to inform others, but to change their behavior.”
Reporters are idiots. They fall for this story every year, year after year. And not one bothers to question the advocacy group’s press release. Not one.
Link to an essay on the role that “technical authority”, media propaganda, and how “consensus of experts” are used to influence the public and to exert control over us. This essay is an eye opener.
The controversy over hostile social media content advocating violence, hate, and lies on social media – and the deplatforming of individuals and entire services (e.g. Parler).
Was Parler deplatformed for “conservative” ideas or for users advocating violence?
Every time someone not following the face mask meme contracts Covid-19, the media makes the lack of face masks the story. Yet when a large group of health care workers, with 100% face mask compliance is diagnosed with Covid-19, mention of face masks vanishes. According to the CDC, 90% of those diagnosed with Covid-19 were face mask wearers – suggesting the media’s focus on face masks or lack of one as the cause of contracting Covid-19 is propaganda messaging.
Social media post tries to say something about vehicle fatalities going up. Not sure what the author was trying to say but the reality is vehicle fatalities have gone down by a lot, which is good news.
Blast from the past: the social media propaganda poster that led to the birth of this blog and web site.
Western state Governors are increasingly blaming climate change for western wild fires, as if the wild fires are a single variable. If only we could control the climate, we would no longer have wild land fires. Realistically, there is no magic control knob on climate that we can control and which will reduce fire danger for decades to come.
There are concrete steps that can be taken immediately to reduce the threats of future wild fires – but politicians would rather blame climate change – which they do not control – because to acknowledge there are factors which they can control is to acknowledge that their leadership has failed.
A common mistake people make is to focus on a single variable in a multiple variable problem. In this case, the focus is on one variable that cannot be controlled in the near term, while ignoring other variables that can be controlled.
Oregon’s Office of Emergency Management has a reputation for making things up. Yesterday, they claimed that 500,000 or 10% of Oregon’s population had evacuated due to wildfires. This claim received national and international media coverage. The Oregonian noted no where near that many people live in the evacuation zones. This afternoon, they have acknowledged its closer to 40,000, not 500,000. See how Internet memes get generated by fake data from official government sources?
Stories about people attending Covid parties and then getting sick are poorly sourced and in general, probably never happened.