Disinformation - Babes in the Woods ...

[PsychoBabble]

I was just reading a really interesting article talking about the connections between Manafort, Ukrainian and Russian actors, and the US. Fascinating stuff, an excerpt below.

But the key META thought that jumped out at me is that we in the US are like babes in the woods in dealing with this disinformation onslaught on a daily basis. Countries like Ukraine and Russia seem to just take it for granted. They've lived with this for decades.

In the USA we have been living in our "Exceptionalism + Rule of Law" bubble for a long time -- and it is no wonder that the new and continual public mixture of lies and truth feels destabilizing, both emotionally and rationally. (Cognitive Psych tells us this is true, anyway.)

Being constantly, publically told that lies are truth, by Trump and others -- and then finding little bits of both entertwined -- does that. The effort required to begin to sort wheat from chaff likely feels like a heavier lift than most are willing to engage in -- and so more and more people simply either tune-out, or find ONE trusted source that they decide to use as a proxy for their own thinking (Fox News, anyone?).

Anyway, we've got some cultural toughening-up to do, since it is unlikely that this disinformation tsunami is likely to disappear, even if it dissipates. I read somewhere yesterday that the Internet is almost perfectly designed as a tool to make (DIS)information easy. Powerful tools in the hands of weak people is a pretty ugly recipe.

Buckle up, fellow Babes ....

Perhaps what is most shocking in these stories is Manafort’s lack of political self-awareness in accepting the position of Trump’s campaign chairman after decades of taking cash payouts from some of the world’s most unsavory characters. Did Manafort think that his decades of political work on behalf of African and Asian dictators, Russian oligarchs, and Moscow’s Ukrainian political proxies would be overlooked when he took over a presidential campaign? Perhaps he took the candidate himself as his model: Trump had likewise spent those same decades leading a dissolute life, having done hundreds of unseemly, semi-legal, and utterly vulgar things, any of which would have disqualified him from the presidency under normative circumstances. Indeed, Trump had also done business with shady Russians and Ukrainian oligarchs and Kazakh billionaires, who all lived together in perfect post-Soviet harmony with Manafort in Trump’s gilded gold tower in the middle of Manhattan.

In the Atlantic, Julia Ioffe’s interpretation of the Manafort story is that nothing he did was particularly special within the context of the outrageous behavior typical in Russia in that time and place. Having spent years living in Moscow, she is underwhelmed. It also seems likely that most of his lobbying activities were borderline legal because he was and remains a very savvy operator who was careful to not leave tracks. If Manafort ever broke the law, he certainly never would have expected any of this to come out into the public sphere.

An American journalist in Kiev told me that “among political consultants in the former Soviet Union there exists a persistent attitude of ‘what happens in Vegas, or Ukraine, or Kazakhstan stays in Kazakhstan.’ Even if Manafort was the most corrupt bastard who had ever come through Kiev and broke a lot of rules, which is not to say that I am saying that he was, he is up against some very stiff competition in that department.”

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/228242/manafort-scandals-trump-russia

(emphases mine)