Some of that coalition is looser and more tactical than others. But take the other thread. The same handful of people were the driving force behind DemocracyNZ (antivax), the NZ First cooption (antiglobalist, antivax), Inflection Point (antitrans), and Better Wellington (anti...rates?).
They're different ideas, but it's the same people, maybe four in particular. They share administrative infrastructure (addresses, webservers, designers) and probably the same source of funding. It's not an accident that these different groups are run by the same people, right?
There's a common thread in these ideas that make them appealing (or cynically useful) to these people. The thing that stands out - the thing that makes these people sound like cookers - are their beliefs in grand deceptions. Is it really that unreasonable to try to find and umbrella term for that?
The supposed common thread is so vague and amorphous (in my educated opinion) to be useless as a descriptor. Plus, the thing is, most of these people in the political arena don’t actually believe in a great or grand deception; it’s just the language they use to sell their politics
As a great many political scientists have pointed out, a great many conspiracy theories about vaccination efforts, migration, etc. actually just reflect political views, and the conspiracy theories come after as a kind of post facto justification. 1/2
So, trying to find a common cause or thread in the post facto justifications leads to bad labels and bad theories about those labels, as you are “diagnosing” the epiphenomena rather than the actual cause (political polarisation) 2/2
Yeah, I take your point. I don't think we're trying to "solve" them, just to alert people that this is a coordinated political project and that what they see are actually parts of a bigger whole, but I see how the labels we put on them can lead to bad theory about what they are.
Especially since “cooked” and “cooker” as descriptors often also takes away the agency of the people behind these groups. The people behind “Better Wellington” know what they are doing, and VFF is getting cleverer. Their brains are “cooked”
“Aren’t cooked.” Stupid early morning (in China) texting thumbs…
Oh boy do I have thoughts about how we've been buying into narratives about "the media cooking [brainwashing] people" that got debunked in, like, the 80s
One of the horrible things about the talk and study of disinformation is that we seem to have to have the same conversations about how people are doing it wrong every generation
Anyway, thanks!