re: #455 Expand Your Ground

The thing is, there is no way to become immune to advertising and propaganda. You can do your best to innoculate yourself against it, but when its pervasive, it’ll still have an effect on you. It may not be able to get you to do something, but it can still make you feel a certain way. We are not perfectly rational creatures able to dismiss stimuli as irrelevant; it all gets in.

So if you see, for example, drudge link after drudge link about black people committing crimes, it really is going to affect the way you feel towards black people unless you have something to counter it with, or are already ‘partisan’ in the other direction (in which case the weird phenomena occurs where exposure to the counter-belief bypasses any processing and just gives you an emotional charge.)

Which leads to another problem with the ‘education is the solution’ part. If someone is already firmly entrenched, they don’t even really listen to counter-arguments, they simply reject them, and they get emotional pleasure from doing so. If someone is already completely convinced that Obama is a socialist usurper, calm educational proof that he’s not will not make a dent. The only thing that’s been shown to work is long-term exposure to the ‘good’ information, without any re-exposure to the bad. This is pretty much impossible to achieve.

This has obvious evolutionary advantages; once we’ve ‘learned’ something, constantly re-examining it is kind of a waste of time, most of the time. The problem is when we’re taught things that are explicitly wrong.

This is why propaganda is so dangerous, and why people dismissing its powers are such gibbering idiots.