Geoff > Status Update

Geoff wrote: "Okay, then fantasy needs to be anti-Totalitarian."

That sounds just about like the cue for Nathan to chime in here

Jonathan wrote: "Critical thinking skills need to be a core part of the education policy from day 1"

Amen.

Ted wrote: "This seems curiously pertinent - except maybe the first line:

Fragment

...................
O God, for myself I could forgive everything,
But I would rather be a hawk clawing a lamb,
Or a serpent ..."

Lovely

howl of minerva wrote: "We're deep in Yeats territory. The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity."

Yeah, I think the left needs to regain some of that passionate intensity. I think the Democrats ended up trying to sell themselves as the party of reasonable, competent technocrats. It's happening to center-left parties more generally, and it may be spelling doom.

Yeah. The Left became the elite, leaving the poor only one place to go. Marx thought as things got worse for the poor, the conditions for class-consciousness would be created. What if in fact, we just get deeper and deeper into false-consciousness?

howl of minerva wrote: " What if in fact, we just get deeper and deeper into false-consciousness? "

Then, I think, we would all be doomed.

Watching a recent BBC interview with Marine le Pen, I hate to say it but I think she's right about NATO (a 'defensive treaty' that quite plainly serves no purpose other than US domination in the region). Just as Trump was right about NAFTA. And people throughout Europe are right to be pissed off at the bureaucrats of Brussels.

I think there needs to be a more cogent and widespread left-wing critique of these institutions

At the same time the left needs to maintain a position of zero compromise with the rising tides of fascism and xenophobia. This is a difficult balance, but not impossible, I don't think.

I would recommend watching Adam Curtis' new documentary Hypernormalisation which deals in detail with the emergence of "truth management" and the fact/fiction problem. It is on BBC iPlayer at the moment and well worth watching

NATO perhaps looks less and less useful the further you are from the Russian border. Americans seem not to see the point of it; I'm quite glad of it; Latvians are scared shit of not having it.

I'm also not sure I buy "the left becoming the elite". If you mean they've been winning elections, and hence having power and persuading people to their cause - well yes, but the alternative is not have power and not persuading people to their cause, and I don't see that as better. I'd rather the reformists live in the palace, than have the reformists make a bold stand of living on the streets with the people and handing the palace keys to the conservatives in the process.

There also continues to remain a considerable rift between "the left" and "the liberal elite" - it's just not always obvious, due to prevailing local conditions (like the Republican party being so obnoxiously anti-left and anti-liberal at the same time). If you look at Brexit, though, you can see that the dividing lines were very different from a normal election: left-wing urban poor in London were allied not only with left-wing intellectuals but also with right-wing businessmen and housewives. There were areas in the south that have voted staunchly conservative for 150 years that votes Remain. While, on the other side, isolated rural folk and postindustrial former union members voted Leave, including some very left-wing, even outright socialist people. The vote showed the faultlines between the liberal, cosmopolitan "elite" and the reactionnary masses; and it's not the same as the left/right divide. Similarly with Trump, a lot of those Democrats that Trump captured in the Rust Belt haven't suddenly been converted to small government types - on the contrary, they liked his promises of massive infrastructure spending, safeguarding social security and so on. They're voting as conservatives, not as right-wingers.


If the left has failed (which it has - or at least, to be fair about it, it has underperformed), it's not on the abstract grounds of "becoming the elite". It's because it has a) failed to halt the decline of low-skill high-wage jobs in the primary and secondary sectors, and b) failed to halt the growing income disparity and fairly distribute the gains of growth throughout society.

a), unfortunately, was pretty much inevitable. It's nothing to do with NAFTA and the like, which have boosted American jobs, and at most resulted in a very small number of job losses for the very least skilled. It's ultimately the problem of technological progress - there are rust belt factories making as much today as they ever have, but employing one tenth the workforce. The left has hoped to ameliorate this by promising new job growth in new sectors, but everyone knows, if they're honest, that very few of those web design jobs are going to 55-year-old former coal miners in West Virginia. Ultimately, it's hard to see anything that can be done other than weather the storm - and invest in improving geographical and educational mobility for the children of those workers.

b), however, is something the left can and should do something about. Almost all economic growth is now being captured by an increasingly small fraction of the new aristocracy, and social mobility is declining (in the US and in most other western countries). That, I think, is the underlying problem that fuels anger and resentment.

I agree with Geoff, by the way, that the inability to tell fact from fiction is worrying, and has been for a long time now - although paradoxically I think people are better at it than ever! (and I believe studies have confirmed this)

Ultimately there are two problems. One is about human capital - people not having the experience or philosophical training to be able to evaluate information appropriately. This, as Jonathan has said, is difficult to deliver in the modern educational system, in which the only priority (other than a vague sense of 'discipline' and perhaps reading some Shakespeare) is "developing skills for the workplace". But we should bear in mind: it was never anyone outside the elite who was taught that stuff in the past anyway. The past looks smarter because back then only smart people wrote or got on TV or in the papers.

The bigger problem, I think, is structural. Our problem is... well, freedom. Liberalism. Lack of dictatorship. Don't get me wrong - those are good things. But they have their price.

Looking at it philosophically: almost everything we 'know', we ultimately take on trust. We may try to appy a little rational thinking now and then, but most of the time trust wins out (how much quantum physics, or advanced statistics, or medicine, or even just motor vehicle engineering, do we regularly accept authoritative guidance on despite not everything really making perfect sense to us?) - and we try to compare sources to weed out unreliable ones, but we can only compare to sources we already accept as authorities. Experimental observation and reasoned deduction are both extremely small and rare parts of our construction of our knowledge of anything beyond our small fields of expertise and our immediate lived experiences. And frankly, the more you look even at those sources of knowledge, the more they seem to be based on convention and authority, albeit at a more general level.

So our knowledge depends on authorities, as it always has, even if for a few hundred years it was fashionable for everyone to pretend they'd developed all their own thoughts from first principles. The question arises, then: which authorities? Traditionally it was the Church, or the Bible and the preacher, depending on your denomination (or it was the official canon of Classics, if you were Chinese...). Those are no longer so persuasive. So alternative institutions of authority were developed. In the UK, those were things like Oxbridge, the BBC, the Broadsheets (but not the Tabloids), the Conservative Party, the respectable parts of the Labour Party (up until Thatcher), and in matters of last resort, the Queen. These together formed a reliable, coherent shared mythology, as it were, from which everyone in the country could draw - and even if individuals disagreed with an issue here or there in which they had a particular interest, they did so against a shared background of consensus. The same was much the case elsewhere, though the precise hierarchies may have differed. And, of course, the authorities were able to maintain their aura of authority thanks to being... well, an elite.

But increasingly, those epistemic authorities have been and are being lost. Deference has gone, and huge parts of the knowledge-establishment have been opened up to the bracing winds of the free market. Broadsheets and network news have been assaulted by a wave of blogs, civilian journalists, forums, and social media. The old boy networks and smoky rooms of politics have been opened up to radical challenge from within the parties and outsider coups from without. Universities have proliferated to the extent that out of the top few nobody can keep track of which are great, which are good (with some great faculty), which are bad (but so-and-so is OK, clearly she really needs the cash) and which are just degree mills.

It used to be that if A and B disagreed whether X was true, they would go and ask C. The Guiness Book of Records, for instance! But that relies on there being someone, C, who can be accepted by everybody as authoritative, and since it's generaly hard to find any objective proofs of their authority, that gets harder and harder. [Even when authorities remain, it's often for the wrong reasons. People like Sir David Attenborough, for instance, have been hugely important in persuading people of the need to preserve species from extinction, and awakening people to the threats of deforestation and climate change. But ultimately there's no particular reason why this one enthusiastic TV executive should be any more persuasive than the legions of far more qualified scientists who are routinely ignored and denied. It's just that we all remember him from our childhoods and he's got an awesome voice...]. So instead, A goes to check the info with D, and B goes to check the info with E...

Unfortunately, this is basically an insoluble problem. Unless we can make everyone the same, or impose a dominating elite upon them who have the power to control all media and education, then we're going to continue to have this proble of fundamental epistemic incommensurability, and it's only going to get worth. [and if there's any unclarity there, i think that both those cures are a) impossible, and b) probably worse than the disease]

Yes, you're right, there is a difference; that's why I'm not a liberal. I'm a leftist.

So in that sense to speak of 'the left becoming the elite' is a bit of a misnomer; it's more a question of formerly leftist parties becoming fully complicit in the neoliberal consensus, the redistribution of wealth upwards. In the US Bernie Sanders looked like a radical socialist because he believed in defending the legacy of the New Deal.


Clinton sort of conceded the rust belt; she didn't even visit Wisconsin, for instance. Most people who voted for Trump certainly are not free market fundamentalists, or even virulent ideological racists.

As for NATO, possibly I shouldn't have opened that controversy again. I think an examination of the historical record indisputably bears out that the US has been the more aggressive power since the end of the cold war. Bush senior promised that NATO would not expand, but future administrations simply ignored this. Putin may be a thug, but that's not why he has been demonized. Yeltsin was worse, yet he was allowed to invade Chechnya and launch a coup against his own government.

I would recommend reading Noam Chomsky and Perry Anderson on this subject. I will take book recommendations if you have any.

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/07/putin...

re Hypernormalisation - this piece in the New Yorker may help explain why I think it very relevant to this conversation http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cult...

Wastrel wrote: "I agree with Geoff, by the way, that the inability to tell fact from fiction is worrying, and has been for a long time now - although paradoxically I think people are better at it than ever! (and I..."

Yeah, the crisis of epistemology is a real thing, and Richard Rorty be damned, I'm no longer amused by it.

He Jonathan. Thanks for the link. We wanted to live in historical times but we were distracted by bling as time went by...

Jonathan wrote: "re Hypernormalisation - this piece in the New Yorker may help explain why I think it very relevant to this conversation http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cult......"

Thanks, Jonathon. Just read that. It sounds very interesting.

This past week I've used the catastrophe as an opportunity to reconnect with an old comrade of mine who's extremely well-read in philosophy and Marxism; he had, I thought, some very interesting things to say about fact-vs-fantasy in the the campaign (possibly he's too harsh on Clinton, and no, he definitely didn't vote for Trump); I hope you don't mind if I quote from one of his emails here

Indeed, the paradox(?) of Hillary's campaign is that she ran as a meticulous, genius policy wonk who - simultaneously - could claim to have no basic understanding of whether or not her private e-mail server violated national security protocol. Who could "accidentally" delete thousands of e-mails. A policy oriented candidate whose primary talking point was the lack of civility of her opponent (yeah, I remember James Carville calling Monica Lewinsky trailer trash, not sure if anyone else does).

Now, look at Trump - he brought up NAFTA in all three debates without prompting. The idiot savant of American politics became president by mentioning an actual policy in a debate with someone marketed as the wonkiest of DC wonks. He swept the Rust Belt, and he will win it all over again if he actually enacts his stated plan for job creation: namely, reduce labor and environmental regulations and run a colossal budget deficit to stimulate growth. Hillary had no policy to offer, she had discourse and cultural objects.

Sigh. "Gallup recently reported that in the week before the election, just 16 percent of Republicans said the economy was improving; in the week after, that number shot up by 33 percentage points." from WaPo

Geoff wrote: "Sigh. "Gallup recently reported that in the week before the election, just 16 percent of Republicans said the economy was improving; in the week after, that number shot up by 33 percentage points."..."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/...

David wrote: "https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/..."

There's probably three reasons for that:
- people feel more positive when they think about things they like
- people are more reluctant to express negative views when they may be seen as criticism of someone they like
- people may label time-periods wrongly, or just counterintuitively. In this case, I think that for many people "2008" isn't a year, it's a label for "before the crash", and people may be thinking 2006, 2007, early 2008. Meanwhile, many people will think of "when Obama took over" as 2009, and in practice probably middle or late 2009.

I suspect the first of these reasons is the more powerful in this case, but we shouldn't discount either of the others.

Likewise, the Trump voters geoff mentions may be following either of the first reasons: they feel happier now so they are more optimistic; or they are more reluctant to criticise the president now that they like him. But they may also have a more rational excuse: they see appointing the 'right' president as a step in the right direction, and view "the economy improving" as being about more than just the latest numbers, but being more generally whether the economy is on the right track or the wrong track. And if you've just changed the points you can go from the wrong track to the right track (or vice versa) instantly, even if you're still in basically the same place right now.


In any case, we shouldn't get carried away by this. That optimism is affected by mood, that survey responses are moderated by conversational rules (like not criticising your friend behind their back, or not insulting the person asking the question), and that the precise terms in survey questions are often treated more impressionistically and symbolically than a computer might like, are all long-established universals of human conduct...

Yeah, people think weird stuff about stuff they like and don't like, etc. Sure wish reality was different sometimes.

Remember earlier I was talking about a pizza/beer place, Comet Ping-Pong, I frequent where I sometimes see David Frum, etc.? Well, the alt-right started a Reddit conspiracy that Hilary Clinton and the owner of that pizza spot are running a child trafficking/abuse ring out of it - the conspiracy got some national attention because the owner and staff started receiving thousands of death threats, and it is, of course, preposterous in uncountable ways to think a child abuse ring is run out of a place I've seen punk and experimental bands play, and that during lunch and dinner hours is just a very family friendly place to go and eat good food and have good beer. (It's also just feet from DC's best independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, where I can often be found...) Anyway, guess what? Tonight a man walked in with an assault rifle and a handgun, walked into the back of the restaurant, and fired rounds into floor. People panicked and ran and police eventually apprehended him. I could easily have been there. The alt-right, those who fueled these lies, and this person's violence, are now in the White House. This is a vision of things to come. My haunts are not safe in Trump's America.

God, that is fucking awful.

Brian wrote: "God, that is fucking awful."

Horrifying. I'm so worried for the next four years. What the fuck is going on in this fucking country?

Fuck.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Fuck."

Indeed.

Michael Flynn, Trump's pick for national security adviser, retweeted and shared the conspiracy stories about Comet Ping-Pong. Terrifying.

There was a death threat made against a Muslim woman in the town where I live. He said he wanted her to take off her hijab or he'd burn it off. This was not a block away from where I had lunch that day.

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local...

What the administration does or does not do is one matter; what certain elements of American society feel empowered to do now is a serious problem on its own.

Hadrian wrote: "There was a death threat made against a Muslim woman in the town where I live. He said he wanted her to take off her hijab or he'd burn it off. This was not a block away from where I had lunch that..."

Yes. The empowerment of these things. The legitimization and institutionalization of them. I do not think we can exaggerate the need for vigilance and bravery in these next four years. The insane and delusional have become the ruling class. This is how capitalism dies, not with a whimper but a bang.

The suspect was from North Carolina - said he came to "self investigate PizzaGate" - again, a total fiction invented by the alt-right

Fuck the alt-right. I alt-delete everything they stand for. And ditto these alt-rights all over Europe. Pleased to see Austria refusing to elect a weapons-grade buffoon last night.

You should look at Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism." The right wing in Weimar Germany developed its own fact free bubble that eventually devoured real journalism and attempts at objectivity and fact, once the Nazis gained political power. Maybe I have been focusing too much on Weimar (Godwin's law and all that) but I am worried about the place we are at with the alt-rights alternate reality.

Peter wrote: "You should look at Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism." The right wing in Weimar Germany developed its own fact free bubble that eventually devoured real journalism and attempts at objectivit..."

Same is happening in India. Any news media criticising the Modi government is called "paid media" or "presstitutes". The Hindu Right Wing has its own "journalists" - people who peddle outright lies as honest reportage.

This wave of authoritarianism seems to have the upper hand worldwide right now. I hope it is a transient phenomenon but I have no idea if this is going to be a long-term trend. Frankly, I am worried that we are in a dark political time like the 1930s and I don't know how long it will stay like this.

Geoff wrote: "Remember earlier I was talking about a pizza/beer place, Comet Ping-Pong, I frequent where I sometimes see David Frum, etc.? Well, the alt-right started a Reddit conspiracy that Hilary Clinton and ..."

Now might be a good time to get the phrase "hunt down all nazis" into the Overton window

What makes it a bit different from the 1930's is the amount of decentralisation that has crept into democratic governments across the world. With multitude elements pulling different ways, it has become very difficult for governments to implement any centralised agenda.

The Right is vociferous, but I hardly think they are in the majority - yet. Remember that Trump lost the popular vote by a sizeable margin and even all those who voted for him are not authoritarians. Similarly, Modi came to power in India on an economic platform, getting just 31% of the votes polled: that was enough to give his party a huge majority in the parliamentary system. But so far his performance on the economic front has been less than satisfactory. His minions are trying to cover that up with war-calls against Pakistan and supposed terrorists threats within India: linking nationalism to blind support of the government.

Will they win? We have to wait until 2019 to see. But given the diverse nature of India, I am doubtful.

Just to make sure that the facts expressed are indeed true here is the report about the pizzeria Geof was referring to is indeed in the news. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/l...

I think we should be heartened that in most places these 'authoritarians' may be nationalists, but aren't really authoritarians in the conventional sense: there isn't the sort of ideology of unity and hierarchy and obediance that was floating around before the war. Indeed, many of the most nationalistic, popularist voters are also the most instinctively anti-authority. It will be hard for leaders like Trump to organise those chaotic forces into a coherent movement of control. Witness, for instance, even Sarah Palin calling Trump out for "crony capitalism", and the guy's not even in charge yet. If Trump doesn't do exactly what his supporters want - and he can't, because they don't have a coherent plan - they're likely to turn on him too. In the short term, that's bad, because it means more chaos and anger. In the medium term, however, it's probably good, because it wil likely prevnt the rise of seriously authoritarian, centralising regimes.

I hate to resort to the D&D cliché, but Hitler was Lawful Evil (albeit less Lawful than his popular image); Breitbart is Chaotic Evil. Different flavour of awful.

Wastrel, Modi is finding it very difficult to get his act together in India - but the Hindu Right is running amok. People are being lynched for eating beef, for God's sake.

The anti-authority forces are also on the rise, but in the short term, it means chaos for the nation, I'm afraid.

I didn't know Politics and Prose is also getting death threats. The conspiracy believers now think all the businesses on that block are part of an underground child sex slave ring run by Hillary Clinton. I'm going to have to have a police escort while browsing the newest Dalkey titles? Or is the alt-right just going to send another murderer and make sure no one gets to be a book seller or book reader in DC during the reign of Trump, lest they be shot? This is out of control. The Right threatening businesses, booksellers especially, should horrify this nation if it has any historical memory left in its YouTube and Reddit-addled microbrains. This is horrifying.

And again, top members of Trump's administration have publically legitimized this insanity.

Trump was outraged enough by Saturday Night Live to send out tweets condemning it - think he'll be outraged enough at the Comet Ping-Ping incident to condemn it?

Here. This article says a lot about what Comet Ping-Pong actually is to this community. "Comet has built a reputation as one of the safest, most welcoming arts spaces in the city. The club’s booker, Sasha Lord, is known for cooking up diverse, inspired bills that frequently showcase little known acts (Downtown Boys, Tunde Olaniran) who’ll hit it big a year or two later. In keeping with the D.C. punk ethos, Comet has opened its doors to a slew of benefit concerts and community events, like a showcase for all-women bands who’d come together, learned their instruments, and written a song in a single weekend. Showgoers are as likely to find themselves nodding their heads next to NPR’s Bob Boilen as they are a high-school outcast from a Maryland suburb who’s convinced her parents to drop her off at her first garage rock show. Comet is a platform for art from the margins." Thank you Slate.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/20...

Wastrel wrote: "I agree with Geoff, by the way, that the inability to tell fact from fiction is worrying, and has been for a long time now - although paradoxically I think people are better at it than ever! (and I..."

Just saw message #521. I have also wondered about this: to what extent are my beliefs simply the result of deferring to an accepted authority, and to what extent are they the result of evidence-based reasoning? I think it's too pessimistic to say that everything is authority-based. Authorities conflict, and then they have to appeal to the facts to support their positions. Not everything is relative.

If I could make two changes to the normal school curriculum, I'd strengthen history of science and significance testing. I think those are both subjects where you get some insight into what evidence-based reasoning is.

Geoff wrote: "Here. This article says a lot about what Comet Ping-Pong actually is to this community. "Comet has built a reputation as one of the safest, most welcoming arts spaces in the city. The club’s booker..."

Thanks for sharing that. Jesus fucking Christ.

"Authorities conflict, and then they have to appeal to the facts to support their positions."

Well fine, but what are the facts? One authority says the facts are one thing, and another authority says the facts are another thing. So what, really, are the facts? You could go and look at the state of things yourself, but that has two problems:

a) this assumes that you are able to look at the state of things and determine from them 'the facts' in an objective, and replicable way - a way that is not dependent upon your existing beliefs, your emotions, and your intuitions about what other people think the facts are. Philosophically it's questionable whether this is ever possible, and even on a practical level it appears that it is demonstrably difficult to do this about anything other than the simples possible facts about concrete and undeniable things. Beyond that, it is commonplace for two seemingly reasonable people to observe the same state of affairs and come to significantly different conclusions about the facts.

b) even if we somehow CAN reliably see and grab facts that are in front of us, most of the important facts are out of arm's reach, quite literally. It's all very well touting our evidence-based reasoning, but the ambit of our direct, first-hand experience of evidence is pathetically tiny. We personally have the opportunity to interrogate only a tiny part of the world - for most of us not a particularly vital part - and that interrogation is itself typically extremely restricted in terms of the range and repetition of experiments that it is possible for us to perform upon it given our limited time and resources. Most of our knowledge comes from authorities - trust sources of one kind of another, whether that's the President or our peers. Even our investigations of the world around us must in turn rely upon the groundwork established through the testimony of other - we cannot in practice begin from the ground up.

How do we know that Pizzagate is an absurd delusion? Well, I've heard that a lot of respected journalists think it's nonsense. I've been told that the alleged owner has claimed that they don't even have a basement - and I've been told that Pizzagaters say that there is a basement, although I've never actually met a pizzagater so I don't know if they really do. I don't even know for certain, on my own evidences, that there are pizzagaters at all! [maybe they're like flat earthers or rosicrucians, not actually existing until they were denounced]. Maybe pizzagate is real and alleged pizzagaters are a trick to discredit any real pizzagate-truthers who stumble upon the truth in the future? ["oh, that old story, that was discredited back in the Trump Administration!"]
It seems unlikely to me that Hilary Clinton would run a child sex ring, but then I've never met the woman, assuming she exists. It seems unlikely that anyone with that much press attention could succesfully run any major criminal enterprise for any period of time without people finding out about it. But maybe people have found out about it - how would I know if they had? Maybe running international child sex rings of celebrities is something that's really easy to do, that everybody does, but the media executives go to the parties so they don't tell any of us. It seems unlikely to me that media executives would be willing to co-operate on anything that could make them money, or that there are really that many paedophiles to begin with, but maybe the execs are just faking their greed and animosity, and maybe paedophiles are everywhere - how would I know? It seems unlikely to me that more people who aren't nutjobs wouldn't have found out about pizzagate if it were true. But are they nutjobs? As I say, I've never met them. They look like nutjobs - but I've never met them, only heard reports. And what is said about them sounds like what is said about nutjobs - but maybe these things are really signs of sanity? The media tell me that this is what nutjobs look like. And hasn't pizzagate just been proven? A guy went to the pizza shop and discovered a basement full of child sex slaves. Sure, the media tells me that he admits he didn't find anything, but that's the media. People on the internet tell me that he's been forced to keep silent for fear of his life, but that he managed to slip a secret message to his closest friends that confirms that everything he thought was true. In fact, I hear that the guy was shot on site - nobody's seen him since. That guy in the police reports is clearly a different person. I mean, I don't know that, because I've never met him, if he exists. But some people tell me that's true. Or they probably would if I listened to them. [Or maybe there is no conspiracy theory and it's just a creation of the lamestream media to discredit citizen journalists and maintain their control of what we think.]

The truth is, you and I know nothing about this case, in terms of information we have obtained ourselves without relying on epistemic authorities. I'm guessing neither of us have ever been to the pizza shop in question - and if you have, maybe you just didn't have the secret handshake that would get them to show you the basement. [I've been to a lot of shops in my life; I don't know any of them well enough to be certain that there wasn't an illegal business operating in a hidden basement]. So we have to rely on various media. Now, if a part of that media becomes aberrant, it's very easy to tell, because we can cross-check it with the rest of our media - we can, as it were, hold it up to the standards imposed by the authorities it itself acknowledges. But if a part breaks off entirely and creates its own self-sustaining ecosystem of media, a bubble in which each news source is congruent with all the others, we have no way of breaking out of that bubble unless and until it begins to promote 'facts' that actually disagree with our basic, first-hand observations about the worlds, and that's difficult because a) you can say a hell of a lot of things before you say something that actually disagrees with first-hand experience*, and b) going back to the first problem, it's surprising how mutable and debatable our firsthand experiences are in the first place.

*a good trick here is to avoid the quotidian level of specificity. No amount of evidence about one or two particular instances can disprove claims about generalities. As the Nazi's observed, everybody thinks they know the one good Jew personally - it doesn't mean they doubt for a moment that all the others are devils...

Ultimately, conspiracy theories, famously, cannot be disproven through evidence or reasoning. All evidence of their falsehood is also equally good evidence of a sufficiently cunning coverup. Any apparent flaws in the story are just planted there by Hillary Clinton and her pet Cartesian Devil... ultimately, what divides conspiracy theorists from sane people is not evidence or reason, but a certain state of mind.

And let's not forget, many conspiracy theorists are hardworking, and deeply committed to evidence and observation! They strive to collect information first-hand and to discuss that information constructively with other observers to arrive at an intersubjective consensus. The only problem is, they're all a bunch of nutters. The guy who stormed comet pingpong with a gun was a nutter. But he was not deficient in his desire to obtain objective observations to fuel his evidence-based reasoning! He heard a rumour, he went to investigate it himself - it's insane, but it's perfectly scientific! [and the gun? Well, when you're investigating a possible child sex ring in which the FBI protects major national political figures, it only makes sense to bring some protection...]

The difficulty, of course, is heightened by the fact that there HAVE been conspiracies throughout history, and "oh that's ridiculous! there's no evidence at all!" has been the common refrain of people who didn't know about the conspiracy.

And the other awkward fact is that throughout history intelligent, sensible, literate, scientific, evidence-based reasoners careful to avoid conspiracy theories, moral panics, mass delusions and superstitions, have managed to believe all manor of manifestly, ridiculously stupid things. Sensible people have lurched from each speculative bubble to the next conspiracy theory, throughout history. Which I think goes to show that it is much easier than we think to get caught up within closed bubbles of mutually reinforcing epistemic authorities...

These are all good points. And, from the point of view of a philosopher, there may be something interesting and exciting about the fact that fake news has become a big problem. Epistemology is suddenly a subject of important practical importance!

So, why aren't we trying to apply that huge body of epistemological knowledge? Pizzagate is an excellent test case. I would love to see some people with expertise in the area address the question of what evidence one can bring to bear to show that it is just a lie, given that there are many agents spreading disinformation. The challenge is to find criteria which don't just reduce to appeal to authority. It's tricky, but I feel sure that they can produce something convincing.

Come on, epistemologists! This is the moment you've been waiting for!

Isn't this what all the hipster foucaltians and derrideans wanted? Everything's a text and a discourse, everything's interpretation. All that is solid melts into hey check out my new iphone.

Well, call me old-fashioned, but I think there's a lot to be said for the naive realist position that there actually is an objective world out there.

I don't know. Just make a habit of checking footnotes. That solves a lot right there.

I stand with Geoff, Truth, and Comet Pizza.

Yeah. I read a quote somewhere recently- it might have been Hannah Arendt- about one of the traits of fascism being the denial of objective reality. Orwell made that explicit in 1984 also. But I have to admit that I don't think I ever knew what that meant, until this past year. I think that bending over backwards to try to be judicious and fair to every claim, no matter how absurd- and Clinton's heading a child-sex ring falls into that category- is exactly what propagandists and the alt-right want us to do. I expect a lot more of it, unfortunately, in the coming years, with Steve Bannon running things.