Everyone Believes X
except the geeks and the losers, freak
The line-length experiment. It’s that.
Elon Musk has gone from letting us in on some very interesting things to holy shit somebody just dropped a bomb, with a little help from Matt Taibbi:
Especially:
Notes from the administration of a private social media company: “Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI.” Re: election security, they say, in a discussion about killing a story that harmed one political party and helped the other political party.
This isn’t left and right, anymore — if you regard yourself as a liberal, a progressive, a Democrat, or any other related identity, surely you agree that the national security state shouldn’t be intervening in our political discourse, even though in this instance the person who was harmed was Donald Trump. Surely this is something we can all agree on, across lines of identity and party politics. Right?
“We blocked the NYP story,” of course, means that they blocked the story from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop, wide public awareness of which could have changed the outcome of the election. So the alphabet-soup agencies were shaping the public discourse around partisan politics during the run-up to an election, at least sometimes telling private social media companies what posts and accounts they wanted limited, silenced, and removed. And Twitter was glad to comply. (See Taibbi’s complete thread for more.) Federal agencies intervened in our politics, for what the available evidence strongly suggests to have been partisan ends. And by the way:
They’re just getting warmed up, and a whole lot more is coming.
Now: At this moment, to see at least part of the point of what’s happening, read this book.
Stella Morabito describes the many realities of shared beliefs and discussion that we’ve learned from research in social psychology. She discusses, for example, the Asch Line Study, conducted by the social psychologist Solomon Asch. Research subjects thought they were sitting in a group of research subjects, but they weren’t — everybody else at the table was part of the project. Groups looked at vertical lines on a page, and then went around the table and said which one was the longest. The research subjects were placed at the end, after everyone else had already pointed at which line they said was longest.
They chose a line that very obviously wasn’t the longest.
And then the research subjects, seeing that everyone else had chosen a short line as the longest line, most frequently chose the same short line as the longest line. They saw that their own perception told them one thing, but the group told them another thing — so they chose the reality expressed by the group, discarding the evidence from their own perception.
That’s why social media has worked so hard to prevent full and entirely open discussion of themes like “a woman is an adult who is biologically female,” or, “I support President Trump.” They want the people who think those things to think they’re marginal — to think that they’ve chosen the wrong line length, and to fall in with the group. They want to prevent people with widely shared views from perceiving that their views are widely shared.
You can’t think this stuff, you freak — look around you at how few people see the world the way you see it. You’re isolated. Your beliefs are marginal. People are going to dislike you, given how much of an outlier you are.
Removing content that says X; promoting content that says Not X.
Politicized content moderation is the Asch Line Study. That’s what they were doing.
There has been so much clown-world nonsense these past few years, but what has been particularly jarring and disorienting, at least to me, has been seeing formerly countercultural artists and activists on the Left go all-in with their support for war profiteers, big pharma, the FBI, the CIA, etc. And then comedians and entertainers crying out for more censorship. Writers and musicians and ex-hippies demanding more authoritarianism from federal governments. All the people whom you would have expected to be up in arms about the FBI and CIA controlling the public discourse on social media are instead cheering it on and attacking dissenters and skeptics. What the hell happened?
The amazing part about this whole situation is the prior perpetrators of this sort of thing were the likes of stalin and hitler. They were masters of minimizing those who spoke out against the narrative to the point that people would deny what they could see happening right in front of them for fear that if they admitted the saw what was going on the would be disappeared as well.
And when you have an entire group of people pointing at those who didn't get the jab and saying they should be denied medical care for anything because they wouldn't jeopardize themselves to "save others" you get a pretty good idea of who the guards and executioners of the new left will be.
Keep your guns folks, you will need to use them shortly to save your own lives from the left because that is what always happens.