Saturday, January 4, 2014

Misinformation Bubbles Are Bad for Your Health, Obamacare Edition

This post from Josh Marshall tells it all. The punch line is spot on:
Creating your own reality is reassuring and fun. But making first contact with actual reality is jarring if you've been living in a delusion bubble. And in this case I fear the collision with policy reality may lead to a level of cognitive dissonance that will spawn new conspiracy theories of a scale we've perhaps never seen.
I remember the days, oh, twenty or thirty years ago, when it seemed like half of America was in some cult or another, and "deprogrammers" made a decent living kidnapping victims, imprisoning them -- illegally, I presumed - and sitting on them for days or weeks in lakeside cabins until the victims were successfully deprogrammed.

Maybe we need to do that now with people who live and breathe the words of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News. These new victims could be safely released back into society after they sign this pledge:
I realize now, after seeing the facts versus the patently false views of Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News and the rest of the conservative misinformation machine, that I have been lied to repeatedly. I believe now that I'm equipped to fend off this misinformation and that step one on my path to recovery is to stop listening to conservative talk radio or watching Fox News. I agree to continue my road to recovery when I'm safely back home by reading only websites recommended by Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Eschaton, and I accept without reservation that Politico is a participant in the misinformation machine while masquerading as a non-partisan news outlet.
Good luck, and let's be careful out there.

A dittohead just before entering rehab...

...and now after successfully completing the deprogramming process.

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