Yeah I follow politics very closely and I had never heard of RRN until I read this article lol. I really doubt this is something the GOP base is devouring.
Also, is thinking Russia hacked voting machines in 2016 and had control over Donald Trump via a pee-pee tape a high IQ belief in your opinion? What about gifting tens of millions of dollars over to the Lincoln Project for dumb online ads so a bunch of ex-GOP operatives can buy yachts and mansions? Pretty skeptical!
Amusingly, this comment expressing skepticism of that the false narratives Democrats believe in are high-IQ is itself the perfect example of what Richard is talking about.
Yes, these beliefs are varying degrees of stupid. But they are stupid because they are ideologically driven, not because they are obviously false.
Your comment is similarly stupid, and similarly ideologically driven. Given that this is the moderate to high IQ type of false belief, it’s a good sign that Hanania’s readers at least aren’t morons, but still, the lack of self-awareness required to read this article and make this comment is just as complete as that of the liberals you’re mocking.
“Of course my ideological opponents are [stupid/liars/Russian spies/traitors], otherwise they would agree with me!”
That's about as meaningful as Trump pulling massive crowds compared to Biden. You can have a sizeable group of motivated followers or commenters, who still only make up a (tiny) minority of society. Just like Democrat party is (on specific issues) controlled by radical woke activists who are also just a tiny minority, but a vocal and organised one.
Don't you have to subscribe to comment on NYT articles? Plus, those are probably moderated to an extent that it filters out a lot of garbage. 1,000 comments sounds crazy until you realize that there's probably zero filters/restrictions/moderation at RRN.
But the ease of making deepfakes will basically annihilate the ability of the establishment itself to distinguish real from fake sources. How will they know an incriminating audio tape of a politician is real? Because the guy who sent it is a former staffer? But disgruntled employees will be able to obtain deepfakes as easily as anyone else, and eventually some will. A MSM-released video or audio will be no more credible than an MSM reporter reporting that so-and-so has accused Bret Kavanagh of sexual assault. I'm not sure if intelligent people were more likely to believe the Ford allegation against him, but there's no reason why one should believe it simply because credible sources report on it, since they themselves have no real way of knowing if it's true; they have no special insight into the integrity of the accuser.
So I'd predict that everyone's credibility will decline, since it will be nearly impossible to verify if a story based on audio or video evidence is true unless it's basically from the state of the union address. Almost every bit of compromising audio or video, regardless of who reports it, will be like a what a sexual miscondict allegation with no witnesses or evidence other than the accusation is today. Only it'll be 'worse' because at least in that case, mainstream sources were able to marshal feminism to magically confer credibility on accusers becase #believeallwomen, but I doubt there's an ideological framework that can broadly confer credibility on people who happen to be sending compromising tapes of politicians to newspapers; mainstream sources will have to acknowledge this and treat even wrongdoings with seemingly irrefutable video evidence as 'alleged.' So all of it will have a broad pall of uncertainty around it. Every politician will be on tape talking about 'grabbing them by the pussy,' no one will really know if they actually said it, everyone will be able to credibly deny everything, and your opinion on whether any particular politician did say it will mostly depend on whether you think he's 'the kind of guy who would say that,' which mostly means whether he's on your team or not.
One obvious effect is that famous people who have some kind of deviant fetish will have a lot less of an incentive to control themselves. Say rent boys are your thing (probably at least 1/100 of famous people) the only really pressing reason for not going cruising for one is someone might catch you on camera. Now you can just say it's a deepfake, problem solved.
This scenario is so depressingly believable it makes me wonder if liberals are yapping about Deep Fakes HOPING conservative grifters pick up that ball and run with it.
Imho you overestimate the perceived trustworthiness of NYT & similar regime media.
Due to their complicity in the Covid Atrocities, regime media have strongly negative credibility. I.e. if NYT sez X, I'm inclined automatically to assume not-X is the reality
This theory of the GOP seems to overrate the media and underrate the party convention. There have always been GOP voters who believe crazy things. What matters is picking Dwight Eisenhower instead of Joseph McCarthy to be presidential nominee, not worrying that some voters read pamphlets informing them that Eisenhower is going to turn us over to a new world order in the UN because he's against the Bricker Amendment. If you can't do the former, it won't matter that much how much you try to reign in the latter. Focus on the most obvious problem; who the leader is and what they can or can't deliver to the voters.
In theory you’re right, if the establishment could act in concert against the will of the voters then crazy voters don’t matter, but that doesn’t seem like how it works anymore? When’s the last time a Republican convention mattered?
An interesting case came up this year in Tennessee, a Republican state with two large Democratic cities -- Memphis and Nashville. The national Repubs wanted Nashville to bid for the 2024 GOP convention because ... well, why, I don't know. This caused Nashville's Dems to push back in punishment, and the two parties have been in almost hand-to-hand combat ever since. I vote in Nashville, and, not surprisingly perhaps, don't like either party.
Since when is establishment media interested in real reportage on any critical issue? Since when has it helpfully reported any genuine, politically divisive issue? I date the beginning of its privileging of The Narrative over facts (the literate form of deep fakes) from the attempt to frame Zimmermann, no hero, but not a criminal either.
Edgitarian Richard Hananiah's very intelligent view is that the media is reliable except on race, gender, and all the issues that are important. This is in line with his other very clever edgitarian views, such as it being beneficial for 15 year olds to knock up their teacher, and that immigration from third world dumps makes countries more prosperous and pleasant.
Yes, exactly. I particularly like the media's reliability on the proxy war in Ukraine, Israel and the Middle East, the US in Syria, the Floyd insurrection, the Jan 6 riot, parents interested in their children's education, and so many other red button issues. Thankfully, the really smart people go to them--not the Deep Fakes, but the Deeper Fakes.
You're IQ must be so high, which is why you are mindlessly copying the phrase "low IQ low trust" Richard came up with and use it to attack people online.
My first thought after reading this article is: At this point, if the "RRN crowd" are essentially subhuman, which is how your characterization reads to me, shouldn't we like, implement IQ minimums to qualify for voting or something? Instead of letting these barely-human degenerates run amok with our precious Democracy capital D. Maybe that can be your next post, why universal voting rights are bad for democracy (or why democracy is a bad idea because it allows Trump supporters to vote, however you want to frame it). I expect that wouldn't be any more controversial than the one about euthanasia.
That aside and moving on to the actual topic of deepfakes, as you correctly point out, we are already there with text, so I don't see why images and video will be any different. Prominent figures on both sides regularly say things that are utterly appalling to people on the other side with no need to cook them up in deepfakes. We don't need this technology to create a split reality, we are already there, and it's not limited to "the RRN crowd," although I suppose you could say that is the most extreme manifestation of it. But two very intelligent people can obviously see the same exact same statement, event or incident and come to opposite conclusions about it purely due to ideological priors and/or political tribalism.
>What if you’re an independent journalist who happens to get exclusive audio of a world leader plotting a coup? Without a way to verify that the audio is legitimate, your work will be ignored.<
I don't think we need deepfake technology to protect prominent figures from this sort of scenario, either. When was the last time something like this ever played out in the real world? Watergate, maybe? Media/government and their buddies have already got this covered without any need to use the possibility of deepfakes as a shield. Remember Hunter's laptop? That wasn't a deepfake, it was real, yet it didn't seem to matter. Left-wing media never reported any of the Bidens' questionable financial dealings, so to the left, the issue effectively doesn't exist and is simply a fabricated conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, those on the right already hated Joe Biden anyway, and did not really need to see any of the receipts in order to feel that way.
It's interesting that you think deepfakes would come more from small outlets than corporate ones. I think distrust is growing with MSM due to them being wrong all the time.
The lack of course correction in my opinion derives at least in part from arguments not making any difference to the other side anymore. So the optimal strategy is to wind up with leaders who just rile up your own people and wring more turnout out of them.
Also I still think that left-wing-inventrd "stochastic terrorism" concept is far more dangerous as a censorship rationale than it is useful as a description of dumb ideas pushing people over the edge...
The brain drain is indeed a massive problem for Republicans. I already see many smart people who may have been Romney-Ryan voters identifying themselves as classical liberals instead, likely to not be associated with the Ultra MAGA populists. There's only so much magazines like American Affairs can do to provide intellectual weight to right-populism.
As for how the Republican turn toward populism would affect elections, I think educational level will become the main divider in politics. The gender gap will widen because women are getting degrees at much higher rates than men now. Race will matter a lot less as college-educated whites flee the party and working-class minorities (who already tend to be socially conservative and economically populist) start flowing in. The next few years will be interesting to see play out, as AI becomes better and companies will develop competing chatbots that tell users what they want to hear. TruthSocialGPT soon.
It's happening across the political spectrum. A smart, well-educated, fun friend who for years described herself as far left politically changed her mind early this year.
At the behest of the Clinton campaign, the Steele Dossier was made up out of thin air and sold to the FBI, which probably knew it was a fraud from the get-go. Then it was leaked to and recirculated by most of the MSM for years as solid evidence of collusion.
Many such invented stories have been piling up for the last decade, or maybe since the Sadam-Bin Laden collusion and Iraqi WMD.
Wonder what you would say about the European elite in the Middle ages
definitely high IQ to believe literally in the Bible and whatever Aristotle wrote 1500 years before
"Electorally, this will benefit the left, since most people don’t share the low IQ-low trust combination"
no, the left is simply low IQ, and delusional ( what is a woman?), buuut, just like those medieval high IQ guys who believed blindly in the Bible..... they HOLD REAL POWER, so they can get away with their own stupidity.
This great article describes a far more dangerous source of deep fakery than RRN--our unelected govt (and large parts of the elected too) controlling MSM and Social Media to shape and control opinion.
I wonder if political beliefs have become like religious beliefs in that they aren't "like" other empirical beliefs in that the propositional content, if there is any, isn't the point. I know tons of people who think Noah had an ark with two of each kind of animal on it and probably 75% of Republicans wouldn't that consider something to be mocked and would instead call you the elitist if you mocked it. I am thinking that fake news are like religious beliefs about resurrections being required to save humanity or that Jesus ascended into heaven after his resurrection (where was he going? The moon?). I am thinking people who believe that stuff don't really believe it the way they believe water is H2O, but they believe the values etc. believed to be reliant on it. If someone had to bet every dime they owned (and there were no countervailing social benefits) on the fake news of Real Raw News, or on the pee tape or whatever, I bet most people would bet in accord with a reasonal propositional belief about the world. People get real smart once their self-interest matters (if we correctly weigh what their self interest actually is). My guess is it doesn't much matter in most people's lives if they are wrong about things like dying/rising gods, Democrats molesting children, IQ being a matter of social construction or whatever empirical belief they have that is clearly a stand-in for values, but they do get social benefits from those beliefs. Watch how people act when there are costs without benefits, not what dumb things come out of their mouths in earshot of others. It seems to me the world is mostly a matter of people compartmentalizing beliefs and believing contradictory things at once without much worry about it.
Maybe there is a physics of politics about action and reaction. As you say, AI could enhance the dominance of the Left establishment. Sooner or later though, as always happens, the dominant party will overreach and engender opposition without assistance from the RRN crowd. Recently we have seen this with Netanyahu on judicial "reform" in Israel and DeSantis on Ukraine. DeSantis was the establishment Right's hope against Trump, but, right or wrong, his opposition to the Ukraine project went too far for them. On the Left genuine fear of COVID strengthened the public health establishment which then overreached with draconian lockdowns of entire societies As someone said, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Yeah I follow politics very closely and I had never heard of RRN until I read this article lol. I really doubt this is something the GOP base is devouring.
Also, is thinking Russia hacked voting machines in 2016 and had control over Donald Trump via a pee-pee tape a high IQ belief in your opinion? What about gifting tens of millions of dollars over to the Lincoln Project for dumb online ads so a bunch of ex-GOP operatives can buy yachts and mansions? Pretty skeptical!
Amusingly, this comment expressing skepticism of that the false narratives Democrats believe in are high-IQ is itself the perfect example of what Richard is talking about.
Yes, these beliefs are varying degrees of stupid. But they are stupid because they are ideologically driven, not because they are obviously false.
Your comment is similarly stupid, and similarly ideologically driven. Given that this is the moderate to high IQ type of false belief, it’s a good sign that Hanania’s readers at least aren’t morons, but still, the lack of self-awareness required to read this article and make this comment is just as complete as that of the liberals you’re mocking.
“Of course my ideological opponents are [stupid/liars/Russian spies/traitors], otherwise they would agree with me!”
There 1000 comments on the Lori Lightfoot article. As Richard says that rivals NYT!
That's about as meaningful as Trump pulling massive crowds compared to Biden. You can have a sizeable group of motivated followers or commenters, who still only make up a (tiny) minority of society. Just like Democrat party is (on specific issues) controlled by radical woke activists who are also just a tiny minority, but a vocal and organised one.
Don't you have to subscribe to comment on NYT articles? Plus, those are probably moderated to an extent that it filters out a lot of garbage. 1,000 comments sounds crazy until you realize that there's probably zero filters/restrictions/moderation at RRN.
But the ease of making deepfakes will basically annihilate the ability of the establishment itself to distinguish real from fake sources. How will they know an incriminating audio tape of a politician is real? Because the guy who sent it is a former staffer? But disgruntled employees will be able to obtain deepfakes as easily as anyone else, and eventually some will. A MSM-released video or audio will be no more credible than an MSM reporter reporting that so-and-so has accused Bret Kavanagh of sexual assault. I'm not sure if intelligent people were more likely to believe the Ford allegation against him, but there's no reason why one should believe it simply because credible sources report on it, since they themselves have no real way of knowing if it's true; they have no special insight into the integrity of the accuser.
So I'd predict that everyone's credibility will decline, since it will be nearly impossible to verify if a story based on audio or video evidence is true unless it's basically from the state of the union address. Almost every bit of compromising audio or video, regardless of who reports it, will be like a what a sexual miscondict allegation with no witnesses or evidence other than the accusation is today. Only it'll be 'worse' because at least in that case, mainstream sources were able to marshal feminism to magically confer credibility on accusers becase #believeallwomen, but I doubt there's an ideological framework that can broadly confer credibility on people who happen to be sending compromising tapes of politicians to newspapers; mainstream sources will have to acknowledge this and treat even wrongdoings with seemingly irrefutable video evidence as 'alleged.' So all of it will have a broad pall of uncertainty around it. Every politician will be on tape talking about 'grabbing them by the pussy,' no one will really know if they actually said it, everyone will be able to credibly deny everything, and your opinion on whether any particular politician did say it will mostly depend on whether you think he's 'the kind of guy who would say that,' which mostly means whether he's on your team or not.
One obvious effect is that famous people who have some kind of deviant fetish will have a lot less of an incentive to control themselves. Say rent boys are your thing (probably at least 1/100 of famous people) the only really pressing reason for not going cruising for one is someone might catch you on camera. Now you can just say it's a deepfake, problem solved.
This scenario is so depressingly believable it makes me wonder if liberals are yapping about Deep Fakes HOPING conservative grifters pick up that ball and run with it.
Imho you overestimate the perceived trustworthiness of NYT & similar regime media.
Due to their complicity in the Covid Atrocities, regime media have strongly negative credibility. I.e. if NYT sez X, I'm inclined automatically to assume not-X is the reality
You sound like you believe everything you see on TV. Also it sounds like you condone the Atrocities?
This theory of the GOP seems to overrate the media and underrate the party convention. There have always been GOP voters who believe crazy things. What matters is picking Dwight Eisenhower instead of Joseph McCarthy to be presidential nominee, not worrying that some voters read pamphlets informing them that Eisenhower is going to turn us over to a new world order in the UN because he's against the Bricker Amendment. If you can't do the former, it won't matter that much how much you try to reign in the latter. Focus on the most obvious problem; who the leader is and what they can or can't deliver to the voters.
In theory you’re right, if the establishment could act in concert against the will of the voters then crazy voters don’t matter, but that doesn’t seem like how it works anymore? When’s the last time a Republican convention mattered?
An interesting case came up this year in Tennessee, a Republican state with two large Democratic cities -- Memphis and Nashville. The national Repubs wanted Nashville to bid for the 2024 GOP convention because ... well, why, I don't know. This caused Nashville's Dems to push back in punishment, and the two parties have been in almost hand-to-hand combat ever since. I vote in Nashville, and, not surprisingly perhaps, don't like either party.
The John Birch society much more accurately predicted what would happen to America in the next 70 years than Dopey Dwight.
Since when is establishment media interested in real reportage on any critical issue? Since when has it helpfully reported any genuine, politically divisive issue? I date the beginning of its privileging of The Narrative over facts (the literate form of deep fakes) from the attempt to frame Zimmermann, no hero, but not a criminal either.
Edgitarian Richard Hananiah's very intelligent view is that the media is reliable except on race, gender, and all the issues that are important. This is in line with his other very clever edgitarian views, such as it being beneficial for 15 year olds to knock up their teacher, and that immigration from third world dumps makes countries more prosperous and pleasant.
Yes, exactly. I particularly like the media's reliability on the proxy war in Ukraine, Israel and the Middle East, the US in Syria, the Floyd insurrection, the Jan 6 riot, parents interested in their children's education, and so many other red button issues. Thankfully, the really smart people go to them--not the Deep Fakes, but the Deeper Fakes.
Your narrative on Ukraine is as dumb as believing in pedophile rings.
You're IQ must be so high, which is why you are mindlessly copying the phrase "low IQ low trust" Richard came up with and use it to attack people online.
Pretty stupid comment
"You’re probably thinking this must be parody, but I promise you it’s real. "
The RRN website says in bold "This website contains humor, parody, and satire."
Technical disclaimer, probably to try and prevent lawsuits. Look at the comments, the people are arguing in earnest.
It may also be worth checking in at https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/real-raw-news/
I understood that technical disclaimer as (pretty obvious) satire in its own right.
A heuristic I use is that if the source has the words “real” or “truth” in it, it’s probably fake news.
A heuristic I use is that if a source labels itself as satire it is satire.
My first thought after reading this article is: At this point, if the "RRN crowd" are essentially subhuman, which is how your characterization reads to me, shouldn't we like, implement IQ minimums to qualify for voting or something? Instead of letting these barely-human degenerates run amok with our precious Democracy capital D. Maybe that can be your next post, why universal voting rights are bad for democracy (or why democracy is a bad idea because it allows Trump supporters to vote, however you want to frame it). I expect that wouldn't be any more controversial than the one about euthanasia.
That aside and moving on to the actual topic of deepfakes, as you correctly point out, we are already there with text, so I don't see why images and video will be any different. Prominent figures on both sides regularly say things that are utterly appalling to people on the other side with no need to cook them up in deepfakes. We don't need this technology to create a split reality, we are already there, and it's not limited to "the RRN crowd," although I suppose you could say that is the most extreme manifestation of it. But two very intelligent people can obviously see the same exact same statement, event or incident and come to opposite conclusions about it purely due to ideological priors and/or political tribalism.
>What if you’re an independent journalist who happens to get exclusive audio of a world leader plotting a coup? Without a way to verify that the audio is legitimate, your work will be ignored.<
I don't think we need deepfake technology to protect prominent figures from this sort of scenario, either. When was the last time something like this ever played out in the real world? Watergate, maybe? Media/government and their buddies have already got this covered without any need to use the possibility of deepfakes as a shield. Remember Hunter's laptop? That wasn't a deepfake, it was real, yet it didn't seem to matter. Left-wing media never reported any of the Bidens' questionable financial dealings, so to the left, the issue effectively doesn't exist and is simply a fabricated conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, those on the right already hated Joe Biden anyway, and did not really need to see any of the receipts in order to feel that way.
It's interesting that you think deepfakes would come more from small outlets than corporate ones. I think distrust is growing with MSM due to them being wrong all the time.
The lack of course correction in my opinion derives at least in part from arguments not making any difference to the other side anymore. So the optimal strategy is to wind up with leaders who just rile up your own people and wring more turnout out of them.
Also I still think that left-wing-inventrd "stochastic terrorism" concept is far more dangerous as a censorship rationale than it is useful as a description of dumb ideas pushing people over the edge...
The brain drain is indeed a massive problem for Republicans. I already see many smart people who may have been Romney-Ryan voters identifying themselves as classical liberals instead, likely to not be associated with the Ultra MAGA populists. There's only so much magazines like American Affairs can do to provide intellectual weight to right-populism.
As for how the Republican turn toward populism would affect elections, I think educational level will become the main divider in politics. The gender gap will widen because women are getting degrees at much higher rates than men now. Race will matter a lot less as college-educated whites flee the party and working-class minorities (who already tend to be socially conservative and economically populist) start flowing in. The next few years will be interesting to see play out, as AI becomes better and companies will develop competing chatbots that tell users what they want to hear. TruthSocialGPT soon.
ChatGPT will replace most of white-collar jobs, so I think the greater divide will be between actually working people and jobless college educated.
It's happening across the political spectrum. A smart, well-educated, fun friend who for years described herself as far left politically changed her mind early this year.
"Now I call myself a centrist," she told me.
At the behest of the Clinton campaign, the Steele Dossier was made up out of thin air and sold to the FBI, which probably knew it was a fraud from the get-go. Then it was leaked to and recirculated by most of the MSM for years as solid evidence of collusion.
Many such invented stories have been piling up for the last decade, or maybe since the Sadam-Bin Laden collusion and Iraqi WMD.
LOL again the IQ trope?
Wonder what you would say about the European elite in the Middle ages
definitely high IQ to believe literally in the Bible and whatever Aristotle wrote 1500 years before
"Electorally, this will benefit the left, since most people don’t share the low IQ-low trust combination"
no, the left is simply low IQ, and delusional ( what is a woman?), buuut, just like those medieval high IQ guys who believed blindly in the Bible..... they HOLD REAL POWER, so they can get away with their own stupidity.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
This great article describes a far more dangerous source of deep fakery than RRN--our unelected govt (and large parts of the elected too) controlling MSM and Social Media to shape and control opinion.
I wonder if political beliefs have become like religious beliefs in that they aren't "like" other empirical beliefs in that the propositional content, if there is any, isn't the point. I know tons of people who think Noah had an ark with two of each kind of animal on it and probably 75% of Republicans wouldn't that consider something to be mocked and would instead call you the elitist if you mocked it. I am thinking that fake news are like religious beliefs about resurrections being required to save humanity or that Jesus ascended into heaven after his resurrection (where was he going? The moon?). I am thinking people who believe that stuff don't really believe it the way they believe water is H2O, but they believe the values etc. believed to be reliant on it. If someone had to bet every dime they owned (and there were no countervailing social benefits) on the fake news of Real Raw News, or on the pee tape or whatever, I bet most people would bet in accord with a reasonal propositional belief about the world. People get real smart once their self-interest matters (if we correctly weigh what their self interest actually is). My guess is it doesn't much matter in most people's lives if they are wrong about things like dying/rising gods, Democrats molesting children, IQ being a matter of social construction or whatever empirical belief they have that is clearly a stand-in for values, but they do get social benefits from those beliefs. Watch how people act when there are costs without benefits, not what dumb things come out of their mouths in earshot of others. It seems to me the world is mostly a matter of people compartmentalizing beliefs and believing contradictory things at once without much worry about it.
Maybe there is a physics of politics about action and reaction. As you say, AI could enhance the dominance of the Left establishment. Sooner or later though, as always happens, the dominant party will overreach and engender opposition without assistance from the RRN crowd. Recently we have seen this with Netanyahu on judicial "reform" in Israel and DeSantis on Ukraine. DeSantis was the establishment Right's hope against Trump, but, right or wrong, his opposition to the Ukraine project went too far for them. On the Left genuine fear of COVID strengthened the public health establishment which then overreached with draconian lockdowns of entire societies As someone said, absolute power corrupts absolutely.