#strawmanning

[micromontage]

"listening to this album feels like leisurely drifting through the clouds and everything's okay!"

don't tell me what to do.

[wat3rm370n]

Strawman tactic campaign ads.

404 Media podcast - An Elon Musk-Funded PAC Is Running a Democrat Impersonation Campaign - Oct 30, 2024

404 Media is reporting that the Elon Musk super pac has set up more strawman ads pretending to be Democrats or Harris, targeting Republicans saying mandatory gun buyback, giving medicare to undocumented immigrants, and banning cigarettes. The telecoms are not required to have a database of election ads, so when it comes to text ads, it’s all found out by people sending in examples to reporters. So it’s difficult to know for sure what people are seeing in texts, and what kind of misinformation they’re getting.

I've seen this strawmanning tactic used on social media for years. People set up a social media account, make it like a caricature of a person who supports a particular issue or political stance, and they may promote genuine ideas, but then they start slipping in really outlandish things. An example I've seen on the pandemic issue is sock puppet troll accounts that promote masks, and then also post about locking people in their homes, preventing people from working in essential jobs, shutting down businesses, or forcing people to wear masks in the shower. Things that are obviously just things right-wingers claim are wanted, as a strawman to discredit any public health measures as supposedly "extreme".

Sadly this is a disinformation operation that fools some people.

[catgirl-catboy]

The more I run this blog, the less I believe in Straw Men. To be clear, I still believe in StrawMANNING, but there is almost definitely some village idiot out there that sniffs paint in their free time that believes the exact shit that nobody would be dumb enough to believe.

[lj-writes]

How the fuck did @thesovereignempress get unblocked by me and why is she interacting with me after she's blocked me? If you want to find a group of harassers who are also strawmanning cowards look no further than reylows.

[fatphobiabusters]

Wow, it's almost as if a lot of fatphobia is people judging fat people by their covers! And mod egg doesn't think this is problematic? Honestly, what is mod egg getting at? Either it's a bad thing that we shouldn't do, or it's a ok, and totally destroys fat activists arguments. Saying that it's fine to judge a book by its cover because we're human is a really vile statement, how can you not see that?

You are reeeeeally clutching at straws here anon. And more putting words in my mouth. Nice Holier-Than-Thou attitude too. As if you’ve never judged someone instinctively.

I never said any of that. I literally said we don’t exist in a vacuum. Do you not understand human behavior?

Sounds like you just hate autistic people but okay. I have never seen another mod get jumped on as quickly as it happens to me. I didn’t even say anything wrong this time? Leave me alone, I’m going to sleep now.

-Mod Egg

[lj-writes]

Anti: Using the term "enemy combatant" to justify war crimes against prisoners is like seriously wrong and terrifying, that's what Bush did ffs

Reylows: What do you mean "enemy combatant" means whatever Bush said it means?? Hunny stop lying about being an international law scholar lmaoooo

Reylows: We have great reading comprehension we're English majors :)

[wat3rm370n]

The Jeffrey Epstein case is not a "conspiracy theory", stop conflating it with Pizzagate.

Sure Trump is chucking his Qanon base into the Deep State Dumpster over the Jeffrey Epstein case, but real crimes actually happened, it was proven in court.

The story I heard constantly back in 2020 from Qanon MAGA was the idea was that they needed a second Trump term in order to get to "the truth" (whatever that meant to them); and Donald Trump was cast in this drama as the ultimate whistleblower who would finally, eventually, blow "The Deep State" secrets wide open. The Trump administration made a show of intending to do so a couple of months ago but now Republicans are voting against releasing Jeffrey Epstein case files. The new conspiracy theory Donald Trump is peddling seems to be to just claim that Democrats are the ones who made up the whole story about Democrats being involved with the Jeffrey Epstein case. Trump has even blamed Obama for supposedly cooking up files on Jeffrey Epstein. Is everyone really going to go along with this?

I went to a post office demonstration in the rural northeastern Pennsylvania town of Honesdale in August 2020. There were Qanon counter demonstrators that showed up across the street marching and chanting "Save Our Children", and it was clear that the Pizzagate conspiracy fiction had not been discredited with thorough debunking but it had metastasized.

I was hesitant to post any of the Qanon video online at the time because people kept saying "don't give it air" - which is unfortunately one of the reasons many people don't hear about things, and why many people felt blindsided about Qanon being such a pervasive political force behind the J6 insurrection riot.

It's a hotbed of right-wing conspiracy fictions where I live, it's true. I blame the fact that there has been a lot of very publicly prosecuted political corruption in Northeastern Pennsylvania. And Scranton and Honesdale are within easy driving distance of a lot of the die-hard actual cults that are aligned with MAGA. Bizarre iterations of rumours propagate even among liberals, who just don’t know the origins. That’s what prompted me to start following conspiracy theory news many years ago, to in\oculate myself, so I would recognize it. It is a problem. But whenever I tried to contact some of these Qanon researchers and people covering Qanon specifically back in 2018-2020, privately with local information; I found them to be not interested, or more interested in making people in my region seem like we're all backward dumbasses and that's why these conspiracy theories circulate here. As if this Qanon and MAGA stuff isn't everywhere really. And up until this last election, I had almost all Democrats as representatives in government from Mayor up to President. I live in a city that's so Democrat skewed that often conservatives run for office as Democrats, and everyone knows it. I have seen Trump signs in Scranton and in towns around here, but even in the countryside these days I see almost as many "Medicaid Saves Lives" signs on the rural roads as I do Trump signs. So it's frustrating to be patronized. Though I'm used to it I guess, because people from this area often move away for various legitimate reasons, and I don't begrudge them for it, but then treat those of us who live here like we're stupid for staying here, just because they associate the area with their past, or conflate their specific experiences. When of course many of us who live here have also moved with the times. Things aren’t necessarily like they remember just because they haven’t been here; time didn’t stop 30 years ago for all of us here. And shitty things happen all over the place, and I wish people would realize that if you're new to an area, chances are you just aren't privy to the gossip and the local insider information the way you were in the place you had a network of long-term connections. So you may have no idea if your new location is any better or worse with any of it. That's probably the case anywhere.

At any rate, I became very disillusioned in 2020 with the only people covering Qanon up to that point; the Qanon focused content creators who seemed like they weren't interested in real people believing really dangerous things or warning people. They were interested in the intrigue, connections and celebrity characters, and lambasting people for comedic effect. Sick burns and the rest of it. Of course we all know by now that the influencers are subject to attention incentives that are problematic.

The problem is that the real corruption is seemingly getting lumped in with the weird and ridiculous, even if dangerous, conspiracy fictions. And that's a problem. And it does seem like a convenient situation for corrupt people who have maybe committed actual crimes, doesn't it?

So many people in the media seem to trip right into this. Brian Beutler was on The Bulwark talking to Tim Miller, and this outlet hasn't been overall bad with their coverage of the issue generally, but Brian Beutler specifically referred to the "Epstein scandal" calling it a "gripping conspiracy theory".

This dangerously conflates 2 things.

Indeed, the widely pushed MAGA conspiracy fiction about blood libel related tall tales that smear all Democratic politicians as evil child abusers or their accomplices, that’s a lot of garbage, yes. Even though in some cases these narratives are demonizing regular registered Democrat voters as sinister people, which is very socially dangerous. The Pizzagate story was totally made up. There was no basement in the pizza parlor, and there was no secret code. And a lot of the people pushing it sure seemed like they were in on the joke and maybe didn't believe it themselves anyway. Although a lot of people were drawn in by having a very real sympathy for abused children.

But when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, this isn't just a scandal, it's a proven criminal case. It’s normal for people in a society to care about justice for victims. There have been actual crimes that are real and have been adjudicated in court. Jeffrey Epstein was convicted and served a sentence, however mild, and was being held in jail again when he died. Jeffrey Epstein's close associate Ghislaine Maxwell, British-French-American socialite, is currently in prison, a convicted sex offender for trafficking children. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's in the public record, it's been adjudicated. And Ghislaine Maxwell's father was up to his eyeballs in sketch, known as someone litigious and alleged to have worked for Mossod because he had a lot of high level connections, he died presumed to have fallen overboard on a yacht with the same name as his daughter. All this stuff happened. Obviously people speculate about the circumstances of Jeffrey Epstein's death, and they've speculated about Robert Maxwell's death too. And you can call that "conspiracy theory" because it's not proven, it’s speculation, and often involves conspiracy theorizing. But Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison because she was convicted of crimes. Jeffrey Epstein was in jail when he died because law enforcement had charges against him, and he'd already had an adjudicated criminal history. These things are not "conspiracy theories" - they happened.

And wondering if Donald Trump is implicated somehow is not something way out there. He’s seen in photographs and admits he was friendly with them.

So why would anyone go along with some assertion that the whole thing isn't real at all? That doesn't make sense. And this seems an awful lot like strawmanning to me. Just like equating climate activists with believers in chemtrails and “weather engineering” conspiracy theories, or equating people being concerned and avoiding getting sick with covid with pandemic deniers and anti-vaxxers. These false equivalence strawman assertions seem to work to deactivate and neutralize critical thinking and action.

[howstrangethemusicsoundstome]

Remember that time a user got mad at me for calling her a fangirl and insinuating that she was attracted to fictional characters, when such was not too ridiculous of a conclusion to jump to looking at her blog, after she had spent several back and forths arguing with me about a bunch of things she thought that I thought based on nothing? I feel like that really encapsulates the Tumblr experience.