Weapons of mass destruction!!! Weapons of mass destruction!!!
"We're winning the war in Iraq/Afghanistan, just give us another few hundred billion and thousands more troops!"
Trillions squandered, thousands of our people dead, hundreds of thousands of their people dead, Middle East wrecked/hates us, oil prices up, liberties weakened, ISIS.
Why did the North Koreans decide to go nuclear, damn the consequences? Who created the precedent that you can invade a country via some ad hoc principle you just invented like 'weapons of mass destruction' and 'pre-emptive war', a concept that looks like it's bouncing back on us in the form of the 'special military operation' and maybe a 'rebellious province reunification campaign' coming up?
If we were going to burn the 'international law' card we spent such a long time building up, let's attack potential threats while they're still weak, not bayonet-charge a pinata full of hand grenades.
Maybe it wasn't Scott's definition of lying in that the media knew it to be false. The problem was that they didn't know anything, that they were uncritically repeating US govt talking points as though they were true. But the lie is so massive in scale, so massive in consequences! What is the point of having a democracy if the government just tells the media what to say to the people, so the people re-elect the government who continue on with their pre-chosen policies? Of if we the people really put our foot down we install another party who continue with the pre-designated policies anyway (until there's an elite consensus to move on)! It's a completely dysfunctional system, a dictatorship without the dynamism.
Technically the Iraq government did have weapons of mass destruction, in that they had old chemical weapons. And that's exactly Scott's point- the media can imply something totally different than what they're technically saying with certain wording, or do a motte and bailey where they say "We know this 1 fact for sure" and it's something moderate but then also say "Here's our opinion on what may also be happening" and it's something crazy. And the crazy part is what's in the headline.
So if you're strategy to prevent another "Weapons of mass destruction" disinfo being disseminated is just to shut down anyone who's caught in a hard lie, you'll fail. You need a more nuanced strategy of catching people who spread disinfo, and a better strategy of making sure accurate info spreads.
The media might not know whether something is true or not but they certainly transmitted the lies of others to great effect:
There's a whole list of Bush-era flat-out lies here. Bush said Iraq had biological weapons, that there was uncertainty as to whether they had nuclear weapons (when intelligence concluded that they couldn't have a bomb before 2007-8), they lied that the infamous aluminium tubes were only suitable for nuclear weapons, the ridiculous Hussein/Al-Qaeda connection.
It'd also help if we shut down the liars who pretended Afghanistan was a successful operation, or on the verge of success. By 2010 it was pretty clear to those in the know that things were going badly, there were internal reports where they said it was a complete mess. Yet we stuck around for another 12 years because they lied about it. The trouble is that those verity-dodgers were and still are leading our militaries.
Even though punishing the liars isn't a complete solution, it is at least a good start. We don't need to wait for a perfect level of rationalism and idealized truth-telling, we can start by punishing people who blatantly lie and cause vast destruction. We could also punish the credulous media that transmits these lies uncritically. The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
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Notes -
Weapons of mass destruction!!! Weapons of mass destruction!!!
"We're winning the war in Iraq/Afghanistan, just give us another few hundred billion and thousands more troops!"
Trillions squandered, thousands of our people dead, hundreds of thousands of their people dead, Middle East wrecked/hates us, oil prices up, liberties weakened, ISIS.
Why did the North Koreans decide to go nuclear, damn the consequences? Who created the precedent that you can invade a country via some ad hoc principle you just invented like 'weapons of mass destruction' and 'pre-emptive war', a concept that looks like it's bouncing back on us in the form of the 'special military operation' and maybe a 'rebellious province reunification campaign' coming up?
If we were going to burn the 'international law' card we spent such a long time building up, let's attack potential threats while they're still weak, not bayonet-charge a pinata full of hand grenades.
Maybe it wasn't Scott's definition of lying in that the media knew it to be false. The problem was that they didn't know anything, that they were uncritically repeating US govt talking points as though they were true. But the lie is so massive in scale, so massive in consequences! What is the point of having a democracy if the government just tells the media what to say to the people, so the people re-elect the government who continue on with their pre-chosen policies? Of if we the people really put our foot down we install another party who continue with the pre-designated policies anyway (until there's an elite consensus to move on)! It's a completely dysfunctional system, a dictatorship without the dynamism.
Technically the Iraq government did have weapons of mass destruction, in that they had old chemical weapons. And that's exactly Scott's point- the media can imply something totally different than what they're technically saying with certain wording, or do a motte and bailey where they say "We know this 1 fact for sure" and it's something moderate but then also say "Here's our opinion on what may also be happening" and it's something crazy. And the crazy part is what's in the headline.
So if you're strategy to prevent another "Weapons of mass destruction" disinfo being disseminated is just to shut down anyone who's caught in a hard lie, you'll fail. You need a more nuanced strategy of catching people who spread disinfo, and a better strategy of making sure accurate info spreads.
The media might not know whether something is true or not but they certainly transmitted the lies of others to great effect:
There's a whole list of Bush-era flat-out lies here. Bush said Iraq had biological weapons, that there was uncertainty as to whether they had nuclear weapons (when intelligence concluded that they couldn't have a bomb before 2007-8), they lied that the infamous aluminium tubes were only suitable for nuclear weapons, the ridiculous Hussein/Al-Qaeda connection.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/20/18274228/ari-fleischer-iraq-lies-george-w-bush-wmds
It'd also help if we shut down the liars who pretended Afghanistan was a successful operation, or on the verge of success. By 2010 it was pretty clear to those in the know that things were going badly, there were internal reports where they said it was a complete mess. Yet we stuck around for another 12 years because they lied about it. The trouble is that those verity-dodgers were and still are leading our militaries.
Even though punishing the liars isn't a complete solution, it is at least a good start. We don't need to wait for a perfect level of rationalism and idealized truth-telling, we can start by punishing people who blatantly lie and cause vast destruction. We could also punish the credulous media that transmits these lies uncritically. The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
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