(This article is broken up into several pages. Use the dropdown menu below or the navigation menu at the bottom of each page to be sure you read the whole article, it all ties together!)
How do I know this image is disinformation? How can I determine the intent of the poster, the writer, the man in the photo, in a brief interaction?
Obviously to fully answer this question you have to read the entire article; that’s why I wrote it, but in a nutshell, given all the factors at hand, there are only two conclusions to be drawn about this information as it is:
- The person who posted it genuinely believes what they’re saying. Somewhere, they’ve managed to convinced themselves that what’s written in the text is true. If that is the case and their genuine goal is to work against capitalism, they are simply incompetent to do so. I don’t mean I disagree, I mean they are blatantly and directly working to propagate information that works directly against their publicly identified and self-stated intentions and interests.
They do this in the very act of attempting to advocate for those intentions. There simply can be no other word: they are not competent to do what they are doing, and if they genuinely want to advance their cause they would best do so by sitting down, shutting up, and letting someone competent do the talking. Have all the opinions you want, but don’t present yourself as some kind of expert when you clearly aren’t. It causes great harm – millions of deaths just in the last few years. When someone points it out to you, makes their case clearly, and you want to argue? That leads us to… - The other possibility, which is that the person is fully aware of what they’re doing, and they’re doing it intentionally. That makes them a deliberate and willful disinformation agent. In the case of this image, it makes them a deliberate and willful neo-fascists advancing a obviously constructed pro-Putin narrative with eyes wide open.
I repeat: there are no other reasonable explanations. It may very well be that the person really believes what they’re doing, but in refusing to stop doing it when they’re told what they’re doing they are actively advancing the agenda of autocracy and totalitarianism. In immediately jumping to a fevered and meaningless rationalizations of their behavior and attacking the messenger, they reveal their priorities to be other than truth, no matter what those priorities may be.
Exactly who is this person? Exactly what are their priorities? Exactly why did they choose to share this story and then stand by it? It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. What matters is regardless of the answers to those questions, you know with a very high degree of certainty that whatever you’re dealing with isn’t worth dealing with and should be ignored. Why? Because as we’ve already outlined, either they’re incompetent or deliberately lying. We’ll discuss this more in a later section of this article.
But what makes the story nonsense? That’s important because if the story has reasonable merit then my response to it did not, so let’s talk about that next.
