cognitive dissonance – Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0

sugaronastick:

Yes, these monuments were put up to honor Confederate leaders. But the timing of the monument building makes it pretty clear what the real motivation was: to physically symbolize white terror against blacks. They were mostly built during times when Southern whites were engaged in vicious campaigns of subjugation against blacks, and during those campaigns the message sent by a statue of Robert E. Lee in front of a courthouse was loud and clear.

No one should think that these statues were meant to be somber postbellum reminders of a brutal war. They were built much later, and most of them were explicitly created to accompany organized and violent efforts to subdue blacks and maintain white supremacy in the South. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a lot of Southerners don’t really understand this, but they should learn. There’s a reason blacks consider these statues to be symbols of bigotry and terror. It’s because they are.

I think a lot of people in the US at large don’t understand this. But, then an unfortunate number will also get defensive and double down whenever this is brought up–and they start having to realize just how much bad information they’ve been fed all this time.

(A pretty good summary, from Barbara Mann.)

Not just in this specific context, of course. But some of the reactions are too good an example.

The real story behind all those Confederate statues

withasmoothroundstone:

robstmartin:

titleknown:

Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…

This….

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.

This explains a lot. And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce. Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.

And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that. Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid. Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given. It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.

I tried twice to write a longer response, including one example of a particularly weird set of misconceptions I encountered about how single payer even works, which makes a lot more sense in a twisted way if you do factor in the idea that current healthcare costs in the US are inevitable. But, I lost both attempts, so I’ll spare everyone the details. *wry smile*

Part of the intended point there, though, was that the discussion also went the way of too many politicized ones. With the person who was operating under some serious (and no doubt carefully pushed) misconceptions doubling down, and getting insulting when other people pointed out how that wasn’t right.

As you say, absolutely nobody is immune to falling for bad information. Especially if it fits with some of their other ideas about how things are supposed to work. And there are too many people and institutions pushing misinformation to manipulate.

That brings us to Jackie at the crossroads.

As Fred put it in another post referring back:

In this parable of Jackie at the Crossroads, the difference between a Good Jackie and a Bad Jackie is partly that Good Jackie is willing to admit that she’d been misinformed and to learn better, while Bad Jackie doubles-down, angrily defending her misconception. That’s a crossroads because it changes the nature of the thing. Up until that moment, both versions of Jackie can be said to be mostly innocent. They have been deceived, led astray. If we’re feeling ungenerous, we might say they’ve been gullible or naive or not as vigilantly skeptical as we might think everyone ought to be at all times, but mainly they’re guilty of nothing more than the human condition. At this point, their fault is that they’ve trusted some source that was not trustworthy, and when that happens — as it does and will for all of us at some point — the guilt ought to lie primarily with the untrustworthy source, not with those who have been tricked by it.

The choice to double-down on that untrustworthy untruth, though, changes one’s relationship to that falsehood. It changes you from being its victim to being its champion. It means that you are no longer merely deceived, but that you are choosing to deceive others — that you have decided that leading others astray would be, for whatever reason, preferable to admitting that you’d ever been led astray yourself.

The difference between acting in good faith and not once you find out you were working off bad information, in other words. And Bad Jackie pops up too often around certain politicized subjects. Especially where people do have a lot of investment in believing the world should work in some particular way.

So yeah, best avoided. Both turning into Bad Jackie, and engaging more with people who are responding that way. I really don’t know what else to do there.

Source: titleknown