Truthiness must not prevail
Adam Serwer considers the implications of Fox fending off the Dominion voting machine defamation lawsuit (The Atlantic):
Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it.
Isn’t that an authoritarian’s wet dream? SLAPP suits would proliferate. Investigative journalism would dry up. The Biggest Brother could shape what the public knows.
The network may ultimately prevail; that’s what all those fancy lawyers get paid for. But if consciously lying to your audience about election fraud in order to keep them watching your network doesn’t meet the standard for actual malice, it’s difficult to imagine what a powerful media company could do that would. And even if Fox News ultimately loses the Dominion lawsuit, I would not expect its audience to abandon it. After all, the network remains willing to tell them what they know to be true—even if it isn’t.
Hard and brittle
People pay good money for the fun of being deceived. Fox, Newsmax and One America viewers want their conspiracy theories and prejudices validated, not challenged, much less threatened. People watch to be sheletered from things not dreamt of in their philosophy.
On that, this morning, NPR ran a story about transgender kids in Florida. The state’s new rules ban gender-affirming care:
Sandi’s son River (we’re using his middle name, as he’s not out yet to all of their extended family) started saying he was a boy, and presenting as a boy, when he was about 3 years old.
“It was like a light switch went off,” Sandi recalls.
River is now 12, a 7th-grader who loves rock-climbing, math and fishing, and is a whiz with a Rubik’s puzzle.
Sandi says she’s seen her son flourish in the past year since he started on puberty blockers. “I have this glorious picture right after he got his first puberty blocker shot where he is literally, like, ear to ear smiling,” she says. “He’s glowing. I felt like he could finally put his shoulders down, like, relax.”
In the current climate, she worries about what she calls “the constant invalidation” of who River is. “Constantly seeing that who you are is a political debate, [or] an agenda item on anyone’s list,” she says, “makes you feel less than human.”
People dislike having their neat categories jostled. They are hostile to it, even. Rigid minds are both hard and brittle. In fundamentalist communities that cast of mind is taught as a defense against dark spiritual forces and as a way of enforcing in-group conformance. The concept of transgender persons is unsettling.
So God created man in his own image … male and female created he them
I’m reminded of a discussion from 2012 on Scrutiny Hooligans (my old site, now offline). It involves one of the most useful reads from my teen years from Ursula Le Guin. I commented:
Marriage is a rather foundational concept, and those don’t bend easily. It’s like demanding that “up” (which also has a positive connotation) be expanded to also include “sideways” and “down” so as not to be discriminatory. Husband and wife are like that too.
I still recall the first time (20 yrs ago) a woman at a club kept talking to me (and a woman friend) about her “partner.” It made our eyes roll into the backs of our heads. Is this a business partner? A life partner? What?
When we found out the partner was a boyfriend, gravity was restored and we were back on solid ground. We had a familiar point of reference. There are all kinds of terms for opposite-sex human pairing. There’s monogamy, polyandry, polygyny, polygamy, and good-old, garden-variety marriage. I argued for years that accepting same-sex bondings would be easier for the public if there were unique names (for man-man and woman-woman) that weren’t as confusing to people as trying to make marriage fit, but people told me that nothing less than marriage would keep them from being second-class citizens.
Le Guin addressed that feeling of unease. “What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby?” asked Ursula Le Guin in “The Left Hand of Darkness”:
The Gethenians do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imaginations to accept. After all, what is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? ….there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/protective. One is respected and judged only as a human being. You cannot cast a Gethnian in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards ‘him’ a corresponding role dependant on your expetations of the interactions between persons of the same or oppositve sex. It is an appalling experience for a Terran.
Some are having that experience now trying to wrap their brains around “transgender.” It makes them angry. They’d rather have their accepted categories reinforced, their preferred reality validated. Through lies, if necessary.
Commercial interests willingly oblige.