12-09-2016, 07:21 PM
(12-09-2016, 03:45 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It's an excellent point, and I agree that the diagnosis is easier than the cure. In an allegedly "free" society like ours, it's hard to legislate against fake news, which rumor has it is being considered.
I am used to have some "answers" for things, as I see them, and in this case I am at a loss. One thing we can say, is that policies are created based on what people choose to believe, and policies have consequences. Whether the people understand, accept and face up to the consequences of such things as climate science denial, or gun policy, or trickle-down, borrow-and-spend economics, remains to be seen. But we cannot escape the consequences of our decisions.
It can be as horrid as Holocaust denial (the ultimate Big Lie unless someone tries to deny the Atlantic slave trade) to potentially harmful (like anti-vaxxer stuff) and simply cranky (claiming that the Moon landings were faked in a Hollywood soundstage). Then of course is the ultimate conspiracy story of 9/11 as an inside plot or the canard that Barack Obama was not born in the USA. Even with a little more than one month left in the term of Barack Obama as President, some people proclaim the canard as hard as ever.
Some people hold ideological doctrine as the ultimate truth... thus the fraudulent contention that guns make people safer, the denial of climate change, and the endorsement of trickle-down and borrow-and-spend economics. When such people have total power, consequences can be horrible... and people must find the truth the hard way.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.