Don’t Wait For Everybody – Episode 025
Notes, references (including the video referenced), & transcript: https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/strawmanning
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/yes-paxlovid-is-recommended-for-covid#footnote-32-140722972
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-noem-didnt-tell-181000502.html
https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/the-internet-of-fakes
https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/information-zombies-of-pandemic-misinfo
https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/childhood-milestone-misinfo
https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/climate-engineering-part-of-climate-denial
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/990274685/how-extremists-weaponize-irony-to-spread-hate
https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/anti-mask-woke-washing
https://teamshuman.substack.com/i/136579613/deliberate-disinformation
https://counterdisinformationproject.substack.com/p/the-pandata-file
https://www.cmaj.ca/content/195/15/E552
https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/jessica-overdose-ebc5aee50543
https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/dont-wait-for-the-influencers
https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/maha-is-eugenics
https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/health-disinformation-and-pseudoscience
https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/many-will-follow-the-politics
https://medium.com/@wat3rm370n/a-long-hauler-redditor-8769ee9c6d5b
https://medium.com/@wat3rm370n/vaughn-what-team-is-he-actually-on-c4df1a3a8ae8
https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/public-health-or-not
https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/people-are-not-even-talking-about
https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/behind-the-scenes-hopium-peddling
https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/dont-fail-to-communicate
Transcript:
People need to stop promoting strawmanning. I know it happens usually by mistake. People are not doing it on purpose. They’re unwittingly helping the strawman argument. And for anybody who doesn’t know what a strawman argument or what strawmanning tactic would entail, I’ll read from the Wikipedia page on strawman. Quote,
0:21
The typical strawman argument creates the illusion of having refuted or defeated an opponent’s proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition, i.e., stand up a strawman, and the subsequent refutation of that false argument, knock down a strawman, instead of the opponent’s proposition. Strawman arguments have been used throughout history in polemical debate,
0:48
particularly regarding highly charged emotional subjects, unquote. And of course, this tactic lends itself very well to system one errors, which are made when people don’t stop to think things through, which is unfortunately most of the time. And that is actually natural. It’s not something you have to beat yourself up about. But in order to
1:13
not be taken in by strawman arguments, we really have to make an effort to slow down and consider things with critical thinking and think things through. Because otherwise, this strawmanning stuff gets past us and we can unwittingly be a party to spreading it too. So I have a few examples of the strawmanning tactic.
1:37
There’s been recently a rumor, and that’s all it is. It is unsubstantiated. It’s refuted. It’s been debunked about Kristi Noem having said something and something happening. So, Kristi Noem says a lot of… unconstitutional things, wrong things, incorrect things, outrageous things, unforgivable things, terrible things. So,
2:04
it’s easy to make up something terrible that she could have or might have said that she did, because she’s done terrible things. And people will believe it. And of course, outrage gets clicks. And so here’s the problem with this is that it’s not true. The one thing, and you have to stop to think,
2:29
with all that is laid before you about what Kristi Noem has really done and said, Why did somebody make something up? And, of course, what they said, she may have easily have said. There’s just no evidence of it. It may easily be the truth, but there’s no evidence of it.
2:49
And the problem is, is that some people, at least… I do, and other people have learned to do this. So, when we see something, Kristi Noem says this, what do we do? We go look for the video, because almost always, there’s video. There’s a video from a major news organization and a reporter, and there’s reporting on it.
3:14
If she said something outrageous, there’s evidence of it. And… When you go out and look for the evidence, well, where did she say this and how did she say it? Can we see it in context? Whatever. We go and look, and instead we find a fact check and a debunking where it’s like, no, she never said that.
3:34
So then, how this works as a straw man is that the more this false story gets repeated, the more people are going to realize it’s false, and then… dismiss other things that are being said about what she said. So, instead of the next time somebody going looking it up, they’re just going to see, oh,
3:58
Kristi Noem said this, it’s probably not real, and just move on, and maybe it was real. So, there’s a real danger in this, and I’m surprised that, like, you know, even sometimes well-meaning people don’t realize this. Of course, I saw this being promoted by online influencers on social media, who then admitted that they knew it wasn’t true.
4:21
And they’d reply their own post. And people would ask them, well, why don’t you delete the original post? Well, because it’s viral. People are always, and I’ve seen this for years, is that if somebody posts misinformation and it goes viral, they are so taken with, they just love the attention. So it’s really,
4:40
really hard to get somebody to delete something, even after they know it’s not real. They just don’t want to give up that attention. It is so heady and so powerful for a lot of people to have that emotional, charged. attachment to their viral posts on social media.
5:01
And a lot of people farm attention this way to get followers by, you know, having viral content, and it’s not always true. And sometimes the not true stuff gets more traction than the true stuff. And this is not a mistake, because there are people out there
5:19
There is money out there to go and promote straw man arguments to disrupt and to confuse people or just straight up, you know, cause like a flood of confusion so that there’s informational learned helplessness and people just give up trying to figure out what’s real. And that is a real tactic. That is a real strategy.
5:40
It’s not a maybe. That’s a known documented strategy. So then also you have, you know, the misinformation zombie effect is that these stories just keep going. So even long after they’re debunked, there are people who are still repeating them because they never got the memo. They just never got the debunk. And it’s a problem. And of course,
6:03
the opposition loves this because they love it when the wrong information gets said, if they’re against you getting the right information. So another example of this strawmanning is the chemtrails topic. So chemtrails is widely understood to be a conspiracy theory that involves thinking that airplanes, when you see condensation clouds,
6:29
like the trail after the airplane sometimes because of, you know, normal atmospheric setting of the airplane. Uh People have come up with the idea that this is somehow weather modification, and it’s some kind of conspiracy theory, and it’s something sinister. I don’t know. Most people understand that this is silly. It’s foolish.
6:53
Why would commercial airplanes be doing this in the first place? It’s easily explained by… Okay, so most people understand that this is foolishness, but the right wing has run with it. Now, why is that? I could think of a few. It helps. There are some industries that it helps, of course, and industries with very deep pockets.
7:19
And the way this strawmanning works is, for example, about a year ago, I saw a headline in Penn Capital-Star, which is a Pennsylvania news outlet. The headline read, quote, Mastriano proposes bill to combat chemtrails rooted in conspiracy theory and climate science, unquote. What? What? Climate science has nothing to do with chemtrails.
7:47
Not only that, but the article went on to talk about climate engineering. Okay, so we’re talking about geoengineering, these ideas that you don’t have to do anything about, you don’t have to worry about climate change because you know, there’s going to be a tech solution for it. And of course, we know that this is promoted.
8:05
There’s plenty has been written on this subject is that geoengineering is a diversion. It’s a diversion tactic is to say, no, don’t worry, calm down. Somebody behind the scenes will take care of this all for you. The scientists will figure it out. And it’s not true. A lot of it like is just not
8:27
up to the job at all, if you start looking into it. But the main issue here is that when you go into the article, there’s nothing about climate science. It’s all about geoengineering, which is separate from climate science. But let’s just set that aside.
8:45
None of that climate science or anything about that is at all related to conspiracy theory and theories about chemtrails. It’s just not. This reporter thought he had… He must have been just like… He must have just been luxuriating in the idea that he found the most fantastic way to both sides this absolutely bonkers right-wing bullshit.
9:11
He was probably just… ecstatic about the fact that he could both sides this because you know that that’s what these reporters are just beside themselves, like just ready to grovel. They just want to grovel and get that both sides in so that they could seem balanced and serious people. And I could just tell that that was it,
9:32
because I tried to approach him about the problem with that, you know, framing, and he wanted nothing to do with it. He acted like I was the enemy. And he’s written other articles, too, that, you know, unfortunately, don’t Provide substance. But here we are, because unfortunately, there’s not a lot of money put into this, you know,
9:54
local reporting and state reporting. And this is what we’re left with. And he’s probably on deadlines and who knows. So this both sidesing of journalism, though, is really doing a disservice to a The truth? Because it’s just nothing to do with climate science.
10:14
And I could see right away that this article was just doing PR for the fossil fuel companies. It’s doing PR in the sense of that it’s setting up a straw man. It’s setting up… You’re going to attack climate science, but instead of actually attacking climate science or climate activists,
10:33
you’re instead saying they’re like the chemtrails kooks and that these kooky conspiracy theories are the same thing as climate science. So then once you… blow that out of the water and say, well, those people are just crazy, then you could just say, climate science is crazy. And it’s the same thing. It’s a straw man.
10:55
But even though it’s not. And, you know, of course, a few months later, huh, A few months later, of course, an article came out with Ron DeSantis doing that just very explicitly. So in the Tampa Bay Times, there was a headline, quote, DeSantis compares weather control theory to climate change affecting hurricanes. DeSantis dismissed both theories. unquote.
11:20
So the article, and this is from October 2024, quote, Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday wrote off suggestions that the government could control the weather and likened it to theories that global warming can increase the intensity of hurricanes. This is on both sides, DeSantis said. You kind of have some people think government can do this,
11:41
and others think it’s all because of fossil fuels, unquote. So there you have it. Hyping chemtrail conspiracy theories, it’s a backhanded way to attack climate activism. And it’s just not real, but it’s a tactic that works. They successfully shifted it to being all part, oh, they’re just all crazy. Oh, it’s just the extreme left. And
12:09
The extreme right actually started, like, with actually strawmanning in a way, because I would say that, of course, we all know with Poe’s Law, and I’ll read the Wikipedia definition, Or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views, unquote. And boy, that happens quite a bit.
12:40
And of course, back in the days of the alt-right forming, more than a decade ago… When the alt-right was just hitting the scenes and getting their stride, one of the things that they would do is they would be ironic and they would say, it’s just a joke.
12:58
And then they’d say something like a Nazi would say or something blatantly racist or fascist or just really misogynistic or whatever. And then they would say, oh, I’m just joking. It’s just a big joke. It’s just for the lulz. And of course, we know where that led.
13:18
There’s also something that I had seen on social media where there’s this the far left. People have this the far left in their minds because they do see occasionally people who say bonkers things online. Now, of course, some people, you know, there’s always like a couple people in some fan group forum that are bitter and
13:44
they say things out of emotional distress and And, you know, they’re extreme and they don’t really seem rational. Maybe they’re young, whatever. So there’s those people. But then I would find social media accounts that were quite clearly straw men. So they were straw man accounts because let’s just say in 2020,
14:06
people were doing this like hysteria over the Lockdowns! The lockdowns! And there’s been a lot of lockdown revisionism because we know that they kind of made it out to be that lockdown is just, you know, somebody wearing a mask at a grocery store. And that was a real thing that Patrick Fagan had started on purpose.
14:33
This is documented in the Hart leaks. So… Patrick Fagan is the psychologist who once worked for Cambridge Analytica, and he was later linked to anti-vax groups in the UK. And the Hart leaks, it was an exchange in 2021 between Tanya Kamenko and Patrick Fagan. And there were messages in these heart leaks where they actually were already
14:58
equating all non-pharmaceutical interventions as, quote, unquote, lockdown. I mean, it was just expanded to include, like, just wearing a mask or anything. And that became like a lockdown revisionism. And there was actually a publication that described this by Blake Murdoch and Timothy Caulfield in Canada. And their paper actually explicitly said that the term lockdown was, quote,
15:30
expanded to include any public health measure, even if it places little to no restriction on social mobility or interaction, unquote. And this is just how it got. So they kind of blew it out of proportion. So like just being asked to put on a mask at the doctor’s office was somehow
15:50
equated with being locked inside your house or something for years, which happened nowhere. So there was an active campaign to basically get people to react to. So a person would be asked to mask at the doctor’s office and they would react as if they were asking to be locked up. you know, are under lockdown, quote, unquote.
16:16
So, there’s that. So, that was a straw man, and I saw accounts on social media that promoted that. There were accounts that, like, you know, they would say, I’m a communist, and I think that people should be locked in their houses.
16:30
And it was so obvious, but some people, like, took that and ran with it, and were like… That’s the far left. That’s what they want to do. And that was never a thing. It was just never. And I would see well-meaning people following these accounts. And I would point it out.
16:45
It’s like, do you see what they’re saying? Well, but most of the things that they say are good. That’s what they always say. They say, oh, well, this account usually posts good things. And it’s like, but they’re posting this bonkers stuff. Like, you don’t want to be associated with that. And I have…
17:03
noticed all over the people do not want to give up their faves you know their following even if they know it’s like oh they’re posting nazi stuff now well most of their stuff is true about the pandemic and it’s like no they’re terrible like
17:20
they’re you can’t trust anything it’s it’s uh sort of like how when people say well rfk jr has some good ideas but all of his ideas are about food that’s linked to eugenics thinking and eugenics plans. Like, no. listen, I want food safety, but they cut the people who were inspecting the food.
17:44
And what are you going to do? It doesn’t make any sense. What are you supporting? Are you just grasping at straws to both sides of this and find some common ground? And the same thing has been happening, too, with long COVID and a lot of things. People, they say that they’re
18:03
They’re using the same stuff that the COVID contrarians and the COVID deniers and the pandemic deniers and the anti-vaxxers use. So, you know, of course, it’s a way to strawman long COVID. So you see all these long COVID activists out there pushing bogus quack cures, and then people just associate it must, oh, it’s just a, you know,
18:23
obviously these people are just crazy. And that is what happens when you strawman. And… Unfortunately, there’s a lot of money to be made because they’re pushing, honestly, a lot of these so-called long COVID treatments that people push are long time known. They are stuff that’s been pushed for everything under the sun for years.
18:44
These supplements or these treatments, they’ve been pushed to cure everything under the sun and they’ve been pushed by right-wingers and anti-vaxxers and pandemic deniers. And now people with long COVID are… you know, supporting this. And we’re talking about sometimes the exact same stuff. So once you look at that, and it’s like, well, this person,
19:08
this long COVID doctor is prescribing colloidal silver, and that is just not safe at all. Not safe at all. And most people know that. And they’re like, well, wait a minute. All of those people must be wrong. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of money in being wrong. There’s a lot of money and there’s a lot.
19:28
And if you don’t think that there’s paid, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s plenty of proof. People hire botnets. They hire troll farms. They hire consultants and operations to go online and make fake accounts and boost up the bad stuff, you know, whatever is the narrative they want to boost, or just any crazy narrative, really.
19:52
And they want you to believe, they want to divide, they want to confuse, they want you afraid of people who want public health, they want you… Thinking that everybody on the left wants something that’s really out there when really that’s not even a thing. And they want you to confuse even the terminology, what people are talking about.
20:14
They want people to not know. And this is a known tactic of… in authoritarian regimes, too, is that there could be several news outlets with different things saying the same story, but different details, so that when you go and talk to your neighbor about it, except your neighbor has 10 different details that you don’t have,
20:37
and you have 10 different details and spin on it that they don’t have, And you think you’re talking about the same thing, and you’re not even talking about the same thing. And that’s really scary, but that is something that is documented to happen. Don’t talk in shorthand. That’s all I could say is that, like, to avoid this,
20:55
is that you have to be on your guard, and you have to be wondering, does this help? When you talk to people, you need to say straight out what you’re talking about. If you mean… You know, far left. Like, what do you mean by that? Do you mean people who want universal health care?
21:14
What do you mean by far left? Or do you mean tankies? You have to be specific. What exactly when you’re talking about, and I hear this all the time, like people like, but the far left. And it’s like, well, what do you mean? What do you mean by the far left? Be explicit.
21:29
And then usually if you ask them, they’ll come off with something that’s like, well, I never even heard of anybody who wanted that. And, you know, it’s something that’s really arcane and completely not even on the table and not even something that’s seriously discussed and not anything that somebody wants. And that’s where that fear gets leveraged.
21:51
And that’s why it’s important to be like very specific, because otherwise… you know, you’re superimposing. And I’ve had this happen where people superimpose what they believe about something onto people who they think fit that description. So they think that you’re a lefty, or you’re a progressive, so then they decide that you believe X, Y, and Z.
22:17
And people are far more complicated than that. I can tell you that even Trumpers, Even Trumpers are more complicated than that. Like, you cannot assume that they are going to be on board with everything. You just can’t. I’m not saying hold out hope that they’re going to be on your side on anything.
22:40
I’m not saying go out and find common ground with them. I’m just saying that I do know of Trumpers who get vaccinated. I know lots of Republicans who get vaccinated and don’t want vaccines to be outlawed. They want vaccines. I know Republicans who wear masks. And people are usually more complicated than the stereotypes of the classification.
23:03
So that’s why I think… It would be very good and that would avoid the strawmanning tactic would be very much thwarted if people were very much more specific when communicating. Communicate directly and communicate specifically. I don’t see any other way out of this.