Shifting politics, intensive lobbying and surging disinformation online have undermined international efforts to respond to the threat.
As the old saying goes “a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed”
They have an uphill battle on their hands.
The truth has been out of bed since the 80’s, the billionaires have just bought the governments of the world.
You basically see two pro-fossil fuel campaigns on social media:
- In right-leaning spaces, they say “climate change is a hoax, wind turbines kill birds”
- In left-leaning spaces, they say “we’re all doomed, it’s already over, just give up”
It’s an extremely dangerous two-pronged assault, because any information at all can be catalyzed into inaction:
- “Things are getting worse” can be treated as confirmation of propaganda efforts or confirmation that we’re screwed
- ”Things are getting better” can be treated as admission of overreacting or dismissed as “too little, too late”
That’s pretty much what I came to say. The NYT just serves their propaganda in a sophisticated way.
Yup. NYT is a disgrace, it used to be the gray lady, now it’s trump’s removed.
Yeap.
Until very recently I was prone to the “better is better, and at least we’re not open fascists” argument. But I’ve come to understand that incremental fascism is just the mechanism used on so-called “liberals”.
Dont give up. Kill your masters.
If you’re not willing to do that, you have already given up, please stop panicking over your choice to back our collective suicide and die with dignity.
You’re right
I’m very much in the left camp and I do fear its too late. I fear that in the next 5 decades, millions if not billions will die and that we might actually face a societal collapse
Governments don’t give a shit about climate, they’re too dumb
Companies don’t give a shit about climate because their owners direct the actions and they only care about money
So how exactly should I be positive and have a “let’s go fix this!” attitude?
I’m tired, really really tired
Don’t give up…that’s the point of the NYT article. It’s manipulation.
Every step each of us in the “west” takes to help has an outsized positive effect.
we’re all losing the information war. the world hates truth and loves lies. we’re fucked. it’s all over but the shouting.
and the shouting means so little when your voice never hits the speakers. Black-box algorithms and big-tech social media platforms really snuck up on progressive politics.
I was going to say. Cimate, vaccines, thinking obvious assholes are in peoples best interest. Yeah I agree with yas.
yeah, i truly wish it weren’t so, and i hate being doomy negative. but i don’t see a way out of this. it’s not even like they will Darwin themselves out of the genepool, since their choices effect others, and they raise their kids with the same madness.
They be correct. More than half the population are illiterate. You can’t inform those that can’t read, and worse, can’t retrospect.
Those weirdly compressed titles don’t help either!
Titles are a problem; they’re all that almost everybody sees — click-through rates to articles are around 2.5% of the headline view rates. I try to increase that by using gift links and archived copies of articles; but that has a fairly limited impact on peoples’ willingness to click in the first place.
Actually understanding means doing more than reading the headline, and that makes it very hard to get information across.
