Hosed Down

I'm having a bit of a moment, right now, due a video on a propaganda technique here dubbed "Firehosing".

[Vox: Why obvious lies make great propaganda]

Vox's video refers to a Rand Corporation Report by Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, its point is about firing off such a powerful and constant stream of obvious lies-like a firehose-is a distinct technique. As opposed to the usual lying that tries to sound like the truth. Firehosers almost make a point of stream of conscious-lying.

The authors named for major characteristics of "Firehosing",

1. High Volume

2. Rapid, Continuous, and repetitive

3. No commitment to objective reality

4. No commitment to consistency

Highlighting the last two as the most definitive. 

They don't care that much about the truth, much of their propaganda is either completely false or has a kernel of truth.

Paul says he comes from a background where "...credibility is king and the truth will always win". I know that one. What is happening is not belief in the way we understand it. It's more, the people peddling this have credibility invested in them plus influence and power, everyone else is going along with it, so its okay. 

People know all this doesn't make any real sense. 

This doesn't mean though that continuing to go along with this day by day, year after year, decade after decade has not warped minds. We can see this with the current idea that mutilating millions of people-largely women so far- is perfectly reasonable alternative to changing what passes for your opinion. 

Imagine that instead of dealing with letting go of an assumption, you instead wished to remove the part of the brain that lets a person know you are lying and push for mass removal, to reduce the chances you'll meet anyone who'll give you the dissonance of truth. 

Not because that will work you understand, it'll buy you more time to continue lying for as long as possible. The brain comes to accommodate and adapt to this lying so it becomes increasingly numb to how stupid it sounds and how dishonest it is.

There's a bit where the presenter is illustrating this, using a-who ate my sandwich scenario. He says instead of lying and saying no, the sandwich stealer responds; "You didn't have a sandwich". Reminiscent of "You've never tried to lose weight/diet/get healthy", when it is actually quite easy to tell people have, not least by the change in attitudes people have developed towards eating and weight. 

Still, we're told, we haven't tried. Causing a split to occur between knowing what you've done, and having the feeling that you have done it. Something I didn't know could be separated. It is the norm for the latter to be absent. People feel they haven't done what they can tell you they've done. Taken seriously what they'll tell you they've taken seriously and tried, when they can tell you they've tried way too hard for way too long. 

Being willing to not be seen as credible is okay, how many times have you thought that about 'obesity' promoters? "Food addiction", "with obesity", and recently, the food industry employs scientists to enslave you with sugar...The latest is being a disease where you are both the disease and the "host" of the disease, which is you..... 

You don't have to be credible, when you have power.

What really got me about the video is not the main players under examination-Trump and Putin, or even the technique in and of  itself, weird though that may appear. What shook me is hearing the way it feels to be on the receiving end and what that does to you.

The person who really hit the nail on the head for me was Masha Gessen. 

They just create sort of this unmanageable volume of falsehood.  

She says telling and re-telling obvious lies isn't about persuasion-yes!!-it's about power. For real. The presenter explains the power play is,

.....asserting that they are not constrained by reality. That everything, even things that are totally obvious to us can be challenged.

Gessen goes on to say;

The way they lie makes the obviousness of the lie part of the power play. "Yes I know that you know that what I'm saying is absurd. And I assert my right to say whatever I want to whenever I want to"

This to me is what fat shaming really refers to. You are not really being shamed because you are being called fatty boom boom or even "unhealthy", but really, because you are outside the loop that can lie in this way.

That is your shame. You are powerless, you are weak, you are a victim. All you have is facts and truth. Really, your position is flipped, fat people telling the truth are branded lying, even though reality backs up what we're saying. There should be no argument against the failure of calorie restriction induced weight loss, or that the body regulates its own weight or that hunger is not emotion, but it makes little difference.

You are a "liar" because you are not telling the lies that have the power.

The usual response, to fact-check, or try to, when the people who produce the 'facts' are the ones lying, things get even trickier. At least people know Trump lies and others back up that observation, but what if virtually no-one ever backed that up most of the time and on the rare occasions they did, conditionally, sometimes overridingly so? Gessen again;

There's nothing so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth.

The presenter says; "It's kind of like a schoolyard bully, degrading you by forcing you to argue the obvious."

Exactly. Gessen;

And I think that's kind of how it feels like when we fact-check trump, it's sullying. 

Exactly. Exactly.  It is degrading to keep pointing out that people cannot be disease, and for that to be treated as an argument rather than an obvious fact.

You feel like you've engaged with something that actually shouldn't be a part of the public sphere.

Treemenduhs.

This is precisely how I feel about 'obesity' and its crusade. It shouldn't be part of anything to do with science, medicine, health or anything. The body should be studied as it is, not an idea projected onto it that's obviously wrong. No one should have any time for this sort of regression into obsolete notions.

So this very simple human assumption that you can know what's true, that assumption is taken away from you, you have to work for the truth. The hope is that you'll give up and get exhausted.

 In the case of health, that is the modus operandi. People laughed at the lie that alcoholism was a disease, but that didn't stop those peddling it. Now if you say anything else, people feel that's wrong somehow.

As it is with 'obesity', no matter what you or the public say, 'obesity' promoters will keep going, they'll keep promoting.

The ultimate purpose of firehosing is to rob concepts like facts and reality of their power. 

In the end Gessen says,

There is no truth and no lie. There is only positional warfare. Whoever has a better position. Whoever objectively has more power owns reality.

Absolutely.

The American Medical Association, The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Surgeons, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the American Urological Association, the Endocrine Society, the Obesity Society, the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions and by World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Finally, in 2015, the Nagoya Declaration identified ‘obesity disease’ as a pathological state caused by obesity and requiring clinical intervention 

This is the sort of thing you are dealing with. And they expect to prevail.