I had a couple of discussions on Facebook over the last month or so, and was debating writing out some of my reasons for handling it the way I have.
It's too long to do in Facebook itself, mostly drawing on various experiences over the years, so... I dunno. I think I'll just start typing and see what comes out. I'll probably cover things I've talked about in other posts again, but it's sort of necessary to bring it all together.
Let's see...
Recent articles made me think I ought to go back farther on this one, to something I did as an undergraduate. This was back before 9/11, back when we were doing 'Military Operations Other Than War'. When we'd had the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia, and were sending troops to Bosnia, and had some stuff going on with Haiti.
I wanted to write a paper, I forget what the thesis was... I don't think I actually got a good grade on it, tbh... but reading about Bosnia really shaped some of my thinking.
At the time, everyone seemed to think it was "ancient hatreds flaring up", but that didn't really make sense. They'd been living peaceably together for a while. Intermarried. Hosted the Olympics.
People don't just wake up one day and decide to start killing their neighbors over something that happened 500 years ago. One of my references gave a rather disturbing timeline. Iirc, it talked about how certain radio stations started it. Spread messages arguing that their particular ethnic group (or religious group, I could go look it up but I don't think the details actually matter. It's like my earlier post with the allegory of the long spoons. It's easy to destroy trust, doesn't matter which group identity you're talking about) was being discriminated against. Targeted.
The author said it was as though every radio station and TV station had been taken over by the KKK. And then there was an uptick in people arming themselves... and when the government got nervous and tried to crack down on it, it was easy for those stirring up trouble to say "See! See! They're coming for you!"
Four or five years (and 100,000 deaths) later, and what had been a rather mixed region was now divided.
I brought it up because apparently, in some quarters, arrogant fools seem to think the Bosnian genocide is a 'success'. They got their 'pure' state....
A weak one. But I guess they think it's better to be the big fish in a small pond, then a small fish in the ocean? (Seriously... Every. Single. Powerful. State. has had to deal with multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity. Romans. Habsburgs. Romanovs. Han. If you're going to be a large and powerful nation/state, you're going to have a diverse group of citizens. So if you prefer being small and weak, go ahead and try making your ethnically - or religious, or political, or whatever identity you want to use - pure enclaves. Preferably without murdering a bunch of people in the process. That's not what they really want though, is it?)
So anyways. As we've grown more polarized, we've also sort of been self-segregating. I've seen it... when you start to someone, only to discover that their views are so wildly different from yours that you don't even know where to begin. And we don't want to get into a 'flamewar', or quarrel, so we generally roll our eyes and walk away.
Maybe even vent to our friends about how stupid the other side is. Like 'how can they possibly think X? And we build our own little echo chambers, where we only hang out and hear from people we agree with, and only read news articles from the sources we trust.
And, for the most part, I understood all that. I don't really want to ruin Thanksgiving, or stop talking to my various aunts and uncles, or get into a verbal fight with someone I don't even know because they've got a bumper sticker or t-shirt or hat I don't agree with.
Which is where the next part comes in...
I deployed to Iraq.
Actually, it's about more than that. 9/11 happened, I deployed to Iraq, and I wanted to understand.
I mean, I'm naturally curious and a voracious reader, so I prob would have done that anyway. But I also kind of agree with Sun-Tzu -
I will never agree with terrorism, or terrorist tactics. But in order to defeat them, I wanted to understand them. Why did they think this was a good strategy? What were they trying to do?
Some of it puzzled me initially. Our frames of reference were too different, I think. Like - did they really think 9/11 would start a race war in the US? (Damn, it's hard to find the references from something so long ago. Iirc, they thought their victory in Afghanistan led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and thought it'd be even easier to defeat the 'weaker' US, and somewhere in there was the idea of provoking a race war.)
I also recall that bin Laden grew mad at Saudi Arabia for not using oil as a weapon against the West, which I later learned was a concept that had been around for a while.
There were other things, not directly related to terrorism. There are some things you can only really learn about your country by leaving it. Like the overwhelming number of conspiracy theories that credible people seemed to believe (like that the CIA actually wanted the Sunni, or ISIS, or whoever to win. Things I knew weren't true, but that people who otherwise seemed rational believed.)
I probably ought to emphasize this more - when official news sources aren't considered reliable, people start looking elsewhere, and it's far too easy for rumors and outright fabrications to spread. I try to keep an open mind, and I don't necessarily trust official news sources, but I use a few rules of thumb when considering a conspiracy theory. One is that if it requires too large of a group to keep their mouths shut, it's probably not true... Another is Hanlon's razor - "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." A third is this - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you want to claim that 9/11 was an inside job, or that FDR knew about and allowed the Japanese to strike at Pearl Harbor, you need a bit more than just 'it sounds plausible.'
I know I grew disillusioned with our own media - the reporting on Iraq was awful, no matter if it was a 'liberal' or 'conservative' source. Fox News, CNN, most of them seemed to be trying to fight the domestic political battles of Vietnam all over again, and didn't really look at Iraq as it's own thing.
But I did think, for the most part, that journalistic obligations to get multiple sources and corroborating information meant you could sift through the opinions and spin and still get something worthwhile.
I remember reading about an incident in a neighborhood, I think in Baghdad? This was around 2006, I think, when extra-judicial killing (aka Sunni and Shia murdering each other and bodies turning up overnight) were a thing. Anyways, the article was talking about a neighborhood where one witness claimed a number of people were killed and their bodies hung from the streetlights. Another witness claimed nothing at all had happened.
And I found myself thinking - there's no way of reconciling these two. You can't say this was the type of distortion you can expect from the different perspectives people can have on the same incident. It either happened, or it didn't, and one of these sources was lying. (By way of contrast - all of our various media sources reported that the police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson. The spin came in the different perspectives on why he was shot, and who you found most credible when the stories differed, but everyone knew that Michael Brown had been shot, and that he had been shot by the police.)
I found myself thinking that letting conspiracy theories spread unchecked was a problem...
And to bring this back to personal policies... it was no longer enough to just roll my eyes and walk away. The people who believe this sort of stuff will spread it to others, and the more biased or credulous will believe it....
And I don't want to live in a world where 'the truth' seems to be whatever the majority seems to think happened. I don't want us to start arguing about whether Michael Brown had really been shot in the first place, or have some fool start claiming it wasn't really the police that shot him. We've got more than enough to argue about even when you accept the basic facts, let's not go spreading outright lies in the process.
(And, seriously, while some conspiracies seem to spread because of human nature, some of them are definitely tied to politics. Like Holocaust deniers... I don't know if they think they need to believe lies in order to undermine Israel, or they just don't want to believe people can be that awful, or what... but it's wrong, and I can't believe anything good will come of people spreading those sorts of lies.)
So anyways. Here I am, in 2020, and suddenly everyone is talking about 'fake news' and 'information operations', and I've got someone spreading crap on Facebook who doesn't seem to do any sort of fact-checking or bias checking. It's kind of scary.
I'm not judging others for cutting out people they don't agree with. I, personally, have deliberately chosen not to block or cut off anyone. Part of that is about preventing me from creating my own personal echo chamber, but part of it is also because rolling your eyes and walking away isn't enough.
I'm not saying get into fights over every little thing, though. That's generally counterproductive, especially if it gets heated and you start calling people stupid. (Even though I'm sometimes sorely tempted to. I have to remind myself that the stereotypes of the other side are generally not accurate. Really.)
I've come up with my own personal rules about it, though, and I accept that sometimes I just don't have the energy to get into it...
But even though I don't expect to ever change anyone's mind, I think its important to engage. For a couple of reasons:
First, as more and more people isolate themselves... so that they only hear from people who already agree with them... it's important to show that 'real' people do have different takes on things. I don't mean the stereotype we each create of the 'other', politically speaking. The 'snowflake liberal' or 'racist and uneducated conservative'.
It's also extremely important to speak out about things that can and should be fact checked. The big one I've gotten into has been about Islamophobia. Terrorists are awful, but most Muslims are NOT terrorists... and trying to lump them all together makes it harder to fight the bad guys.
I know things have gotten so bad that there's almost no news sources we can all agree on (conservatives claim fact checkers like Snopes are 'liberal', and won't believe them... there's now entire information eco-systems to support whatever you want to believe. Which makes it even more essential to keep some sort of grounding in fact, imho.)
There's more to it than that, but I've typed long enough for now. I'm sort of feeling my way into it, really. I try to ask for sources, but stay away from being insulting or sounding judgmental, and I'm most definitely open to giving sources if/when I'm asked for them.
Some days I really do wonder why I bother, though. And while I get why people are drawn to the articles that support their own biases, I have some serious questions for the ones knowingly and deliberately spreading lies.
It's too long to do in Facebook itself, mostly drawing on various experiences over the years, so... I dunno. I think I'll just start typing and see what comes out. I'll probably cover things I've talked about in other posts again, but it's sort of necessary to bring it all together.
Let's see...
Recent articles made me think I ought to go back farther on this one, to something I did as an undergraduate. This was back before 9/11, back when we were doing 'Military Operations Other Than War'. When we'd had the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia, and were sending troops to Bosnia, and had some stuff going on with Haiti.
I wanted to write a paper, I forget what the thesis was... I don't think I actually got a good grade on it, tbh... but reading about Bosnia really shaped some of my thinking.
At the time, everyone seemed to think it was "ancient hatreds flaring up", but that didn't really make sense. They'd been living peaceably together for a while. Intermarried. Hosted the Olympics.
People don't just wake up one day and decide to start killing their neighbors over something that happened 500 years ago. One of my references gave a rather disturbing timeline. Iirc, it talked about how certain radio stations started it. Spread messages arguing that their particular ethnic group (or religious group, I could go look it up but I don't think the details actually matter. It's like my earlier post with the allegory of the long spoons. It's easy to destroy trust, doesn't matter which group identity you're talking about) was being discriminated against. Targeted.
The author said it was as though every radio station and TV station had been taken over by the KKK. And then there was an uptick in people arming themselves... and when the government got nervous and tried to crack down on it, it was easy for those stirring up trouble to say "See! See! They're coming for you!"
Four or five years (and 100,000 deaths) later, and what had been a rather mixed region was now divided.
I brought it up because apparently, in some quarters, arrogant fools seem to think the Bosnian genocide is a 'success'. They got their 'pure' state....
A weak one. But I guess they think it's better to be the big fish in a small pond, then a small fish in the ocean? (Seriously... Every. Single. Powerful. State. has had to deal with multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity. Romans. Habsburgs. Romanovs. Han. If you're going to be a large and powerful nation/state, you're going to have a diverse group of citizens. So if you prefer being small and weak, go ahead and try making your ethnically - or religious, or political, or whatever identity you want to use - pure enclaves. Preferably without murdering a bunch of people in the process. That's not what they really want though, is it?)
So anyways. As we've grown more polarized, we've also sort of been self-segregating. I've seen it... when you start to someone, only to discover that their views are so wildly different from yours that you don't even know where to begin. And we don't want to get into a 'flamewar', or quarrel, so we generally roll our eyes and walk away.
Maybe even vent to our friends about how stupid the other side is. Like 'how can they possibly think X? And we build our own little echo chambers, where we only hang out and hear from people we agree with, and only read news articles from the sources we trust.
And, for the most part, I understood all that. I don't really want to ruin Thanksgiving, or stop talking to my various aunts and uncles, or get into a verbal fight with someone I don't even know because they've got a bumper sticker or t-shirt or hat I don't agree with.
Which is where the next part comes in...
I deployed to Iraq.
Actually, it's about more than that. 9/11 happened, I deployed to Iraq, and I wanted to understand.
I mean, I'm naturally curious and a voracious reader, so I prob would have done that anyway. But I also kind of agree with Sun-Tzu -
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I will never agree with terrorism, or terrorist tactics. But in order to defeat them, I wanted to understand them. Why did they think this was a good strategy? What were they trying to do?
Some of it puzzled me initially. Our frames of reference were too different, I think. Like - did they really think 9/11 would start a race war in the US? (Damn, it's hard to find the references from something so long ago. Iirc, they thought their victory in Afghanistan led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and thought it'd be even easier to defeat the 'weaker' US, and somewhere in there was the idea of provoking a race war.)
I also recall that bin Laden grew mad at Saudi Arabia for not using oil as a weapon against the West, which I later learned was a concept that had been around for a while.
There were other things, not directly related to terrorism. There are some things you can only really learn about your country by leaving it. Like the overwhelming number of conspiracy theories that credible people seemed to believe (like that the CIA actually wanted the Sunni, or ISIS, or whoever to win. Things I knew weren't true, but that people who otherwise seemed rational believed.)
I probably ought to emphasize this more - when official news sources aren't considered reliable, people start looking elsewhere, and it's far too easy for rumors and outright fabrications to spread. I try to keep an open mind, and I don't necessarily trust official news sources, but I use a few rules of thumb when considering a conspiracy theory. One is that if it requires too large of a group to keep their mouths shut, it's probably not true... Another is Hanlon's razor - "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." A third is this - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you want to claim that 9/11 was an inside job, or that FDR knew about and allowed the Japanese to strike at Pearl Harbor, you need a bit more than just 'it sounds plausible.'
I know I grew disillusioned with our own media - the reporting on Iraq was awful, no matter if it was a 'liberal' or 'conservative' source. Fox News, CNN, most of them seemed to be trying to fight the domestic political battles of Vietnam all over again, and didn't really look at Iraq as it's own thing.
But I did think, for the most part, that journalistic obligations to get multiple sources and corroborating information meant you could sift through the opinions and spin and still get something worthwhile.
I remember reading about an incident in a neighborhood, I think in Baghdad? This was around 2006, I think, when extra-judicial killing (aka Sunni and Shia murdering each other and bodies turning up overnight) were a thing. Anyways, the article was talking about a neighborhood where one witness claimed a number of people were killed and their bodies hung from the streetlights. Another witness claimed nothing at all had happened.
And I found myself thinking - there's no way of reconciling these two. You can't say this was the type of distortion you can expect from the different perspectives people can have on the same incident. It either happened, or it didn't, and one of these sources was lying. (By way of contrast - all of our various media sources reported that the police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson. The spin came in the different perspectives on why he was shot, and who you found most credible when the stories differed, but everyone knew that Michael Brown had been shot, and that he had been shot by the police.)
I found myself thinking that letting conspiracy theories spread unchecked was a problem...
And to bring this back to personal policies... it was no longer enough to just roll my eyes and walk away. The people who believe this sort of stuff will spread it to others, and the more biased or credulous will believe it....
And I don't want to live in a world where 'the truth' seems to be whatever the majority seems to think happened. I don't want us to start arguing about whether Michael Brown had really been shot in the first place, or have some fool start claiming it wasn't really the police that shot him. We've got more than enough to argue about even when you accept the basic facts, let's not go spreading outright lies in the process.
(And, seriously, while some conspiracies seem to spread because of human nature, some of them are definitely tied to politics. Like Holocaust deniers... I don't know if they think they need to believe lies in order to undermine Israel, or they just don't want to believe people can be that awful, or what... but it's wrong, and I can't believe anything good will come of people spreading those sorts of lies.)
So anyways. Here I am, in 2020, and suddenly everyone is talking about 'fake news' and 'information operations', and I've got someone spreading crap on Facebook who doesn't seem to do any sort of fact-checking or bias checking. It's kind of scary.
I'm not judging others for cutting out people they don't agree with. I, personally, have deliberately chosen not to block or cut off anyone. Part of that is about preventing me from creating my own personal echo chamber, but part of it is also because rolling your eyes and walking away isn't enough.
I'm not saying get into fights over every little thing, though. That's generally counterproductive, especially if it gets heated and you start calling people stupid. (Even though I'm sometimes sorely tempted to. I have to remind myself that the stereotypes of the other side are generally not accurate. Really.)
I've come up with my own personal rules about it, though, and I accept that sometimes I just don't have the energy to get into it...
But even though I don't expect to ever change anyone's mind, I think its important to engage. For a couple of reasons:
First, as more and more people isolate themselves... so that they only hear from people who already agree with them... it's important to show that 'real' people do have different takes on things. I don't mean the stereotype we each create of the 'other', politically speaking. The 'snowflake liberal' or 'racist and uneducated conservative'.
It's also extremely important to speak out about things that can and should be fact checked. The big one I've gotten into has been about Islamophobia. Terrorists are awful, but most Muslims are NOT terrorists... and trying to lump them all together makes it harder to fight the bad guys.
I know things have gotten so bad that there's almost no news sources we can all agree on (conservatives claim fact checkers like Snopes are 'liberal', and won't believe them... there's now entire information eco-systems to support whatever you want to believe. Which makes it even more essential to keep some sort of grounding in fact, imho.)
There's more to it than that, but I've typed long enough for now. I'm sort of feeling my way into it, really. I try to ask for sources, but stay away from being insulting or sounding judgmental, and I'm most definitely open to giving sources if/when I'm asked for them.
Some days I really do wonder why I bother, though. And while I get why people are drawn to the articles that support their own biases, I have some serious questions for the ones knowingly and deliberately spreading lies.
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