When events in the real world challenge our preconceived beliefs, most of us experience a sense of cognitive dissonance; the intellectually honest amongst us ultimately adjust our beliefs to account for these inconvenient truths. Others respond by inventing their own realities in which these truths are deemed falsehoods.
Adjusting your beliefs to fit reality can be a challenging task. But those who reinvent reality to fit their preconceptions face their own set of cognitive challenges — particularly when the inconvenient truths keep coming.
Even if you’re a world-class fabulist like Mike Cernovich, who has built his own personal fake news empire pandering, first to Gamergaters and then to Trump fans, by feeding them elaborate falsehoods that reinforced their beliefs. Remember the “Sick Hillary” myth that helped to contribute to her defeat? Cernovich was the primary promoter of that bit of nonsense, and has stuck with it even as an obviously not-on-the-verge-of-death Hillary has reappeared on the political scene.
But pimping fake reality ain’t always easy. Consider the mental gymnastics Cernovich has gone through this week in attempting to explain away events in Syria.
He began his mental gymnastics routine after news broke that Syrian dictator Assad had launched a gas attack on his own people. Cerno started by retweeting several “skeptics” who insinuated that the attacks were “fishy” if not an outright “hoax.”
He then picked up the “hoax” charge himself, blaming the attack on “deep state agents” possibly in league with ISIS, and energetically promoting the #SyriaHoax hashtage that had originated in Russia.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/849840640816893952
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850079263956938752
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850100719482949632
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850106538274332672
One of the sources of Cerno’s new belief? Noted geopolitical analyst Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.
Cerno faced his next instance of cognitive dissonance when his beloved Donald Trump launched a real airstrike in response to the allegedly fake attack. Cerno could only conclude that the otherwise darn near perfect president has a “soft spot” for children — ignoring Trump’s unwillingness to allow Syrian refugees, including children, to enter the US.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850244948528054272
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850414783878774784
How exactly anyone other than Assad could have used an airfield controlled by Assad’s forces to launch this “fake” attack is not exactly clear.
When people began raising questions about possible Russian involvement in the gas attacks — hardly an outrageous line of inquiry given that Russia is allied with Assad — Cerno cried “false flag.”
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850406688339316736
While many on the Alt-Right have abandoned Trump in the wake of the Syria attack, Cerno remains a supporter, apparently convinced that Trump is a well-meaning dupe of ISIS and the “deep space” whose only crime is his excessive love of children, even Syrian ones.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850423864911740928
Or maybe it’s all the fault of United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and her, ahem, “globalist” pals?
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850419840560930816
Damn those “globalists” forcing him to appoint Haley!
Cerno somehow managed to also blame “babies and betas” for, well, I’m not exactly sure what.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850430889028755456
Meanwhile he continued to absolve Assad for his crimes.
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850423213880352768
He demanded answers from his critics:
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850431690094690304
But when his critics tried to challenge his bizarre assertions with facts, he simply refused to listen. (Cerno is in blue in the exchange below.)
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850431310434783232
Meanwhile, he continued to hope that Trump had some incredibly complicated secret plan that would make the Syria strike a brilliant strategic move rather than a “mistake.”
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/850437067578277888
In a post on Medium, Cerno laid out the most persuasive defense he could come up with for his “hoax” claim — and it turned out to be a formally recognized logical fallacy, the “argument from incredulity.”
In what world does Assad, who is 51, make the most catastrophic mistake of his life by bombing children with poison gas? Even in prison, those who murder children are killed. Harming children isn’t merely the act of a maniac. It’s a level of deprativity even violent criminals will not countenance.
Consider the following meeting occurs. Assad is at his table, surrounded by his generals and most trusted advisers. He has finally defeated ISIS. Syria is stable. The U.S. is considering a major aid package. As he smiles with pride, a general speaks up… “Imma let you finish, but first I have to say that we need to gas children with poison gas.”
If you’re laughing, good. You should. It’s absurd to believe Assad would gas children.
Never mind that Assad is fighting a civil war (or rather a number of civil wars) against an assortment of enemies on Syrian soil, so that any civilian killed in attacks by his troops will by definition be “his own people.” Never mind that Assad has been using chemical weapons and committing other atrocities for years.
And never mind that there does indeed seem to be a “grim logic” to his seemingly inexplicable targeting of civilians, as the New York Times has explained:
For years, at least since it began shelling neighborhoods with artillery in 2012, then bombing them from helicopters and later from jets, the Syrian government has adopted a policy of seeking total victory by making life as miserable as possible for anyone living in areas outside its control.
Government forces have been herding defeated opponents from across the country into Idlib Province, where the chemical attack occurred. Starved and bombed out of their enclaves, they are bused under lopsided surrender deals to the province, where Qaeda-linked groups maintain a presence the Syrian military uses as an excuse to bomb without regard for the safety of civilians. …
Dr. Monzer Khalil, Idlib Province’s health director, said such extreme tactics aimed to demonstrate the government’s impunity and to demoralize its foes.
“It makes us feel that we are defeated,” said Dr. Khalil, whose gums bled after he was exposed to scores of chemical victims on Tuesday.
Cernovich wonders what kind of depraved monster would do this to his own people? The answer is simple: A depraved monster like Assad, who has been doing just this for years.
Cernovich, of course, refuses to even consider such inconvenient truths, which he could have discovered with a single Google search for “assad bomb civilians.” But why would he? His fame and influence is built on his ability to deny reality, selling convenient falsehoods to those who care more about pushing a compelling narrative than they do about telling the truth.
Is #StyriaGasAttack a comment on Austrian or Slovenian cuisine?
@ sinkable john
This was a bit of a thing when I was in London (part of that white collar MMA scene).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oDq3_1SkQ8
Not really for me as I can’t play chess* and I’m a pretty rubbish boxer.
(*I would be willing to have a go if you played it on a snakes and ladders board; jazz things up a bit)
@Alan
That’s the most London thing I’ve seen all day, and I’ve been playing a crappy vidya game set in late-19th century London.
Chess on a snakes & ladders board sounds like a Samuel L. Jackson thing though.
@Chimeric: I don’t know; I only know basic chess, but I imagine there’s a rule in the three-hand game (or, for that matter, two-hand games on circle boards) to prevent it.
Cernovich is a clown, but there is something “Gulf of Tonkin” about the chemical attack. There are too many inconsistencies regarding the attack that are not being reported, and combine this with the “Red scare” level panic about Russia going on in the west, its hard not to see a longer game going on. Syria seems more like a proxy war where the west (US, UK, etc.) is confronting Iran and Russia indirectly. The attack happened for sure, but I don’t think the west is being honest about who did what, and how it occurred.
Ooh, that sounds fun. Chess isn’t my game (I’m not much of a strategic thinker) but I could go for a game of 4D Oh Hell.
@Chimeric: I see a thick line between the rooks, presumably those squares are considered non-adjacent.
I can’t chess, but I have been known to triumph at something a bit more my speed – 3D noughts and crosses played on a 2D surface (you draw four 4×4 boards on paper, in a row or however you like – doesn’t matter as long as it’s clearly agreed between the players what order they are in. The thing is to look out for the backwards diagona- ah, damn, now you know my secret).
ETA; (this is to Cerno and his ilk, not to JS from whom I appropriated the quote)
Hey, broflake, if the “deep state” really has the resources to do all that you think they’re doing, what the fuck are you planning on doing about it?? In the Alternate Reality these people live in, the “deep state” is so powerful, they can, immediately after the election, surround the god-king trump with loyalist joo-loving deep state plants… they can fake the moon landings, destroy the WTC and blame it on the muslims, set up a “made-for-tv-movie” of a bunch of children being murdered in Connecticut, etc, ad nauseum…. Did you know, the sun did not come up today??? The deep state jooz are using NASA to explode an endless number of nukes in orbit, one after another, to make it LOOK like the sun actually came up… bet ya didn’t know THAT!!!
I’m sorry if I can’t tell you WHYYYYYYYYY?!?!?!?!? they’re doing it, that’s always missing from the alt-reality analysis… the end game is always “to take our freedom”… or “our guns”… or “our sacred dicks and balls… oops, I mean…our entitlement to women’s bodies… OOPS, I MEAN OUR WESTERN CULTURE!!!”…. Or some other intellectual-sounding reason that really has no concrete meaning.
Don’t bother messing with “proof”, or “evidence” or, really even “reasons”, they don’t need those leftist propaganda elements to prove their claims. The religious fundamentalists hold that because the “holy book(s)” is true”, everything that supports the holy book must also be true, and everything that undermines the holy book must be false. The argument is inviolate because the truth of the holy book cannot be questioned. Similarly, the truth of the existence of globalist jooz conspiracy cannot be questioned, so everything that supports it is true.
Ten thousand scientists measuring ten thousand global temperatures ten thousand times is not conclusive evidence that it’s getting warmer, but a Craigslist ad asking for people to protest trump IS evidence of a global conspiracy to undermine his agenda. Video evidence of aircraft flying into buildings is not conclusive evidence of a terrorist attack, but “how else do you explain the shadow in this picture” IS conclusive evidence of a Sandy Hook shooting hoax.
The alt-realists need to just wake the fuck up and smell the coffee… the coffee…. THE FUCKING COFFEE… IT’S BREWING!!! … oh, that’s not coffee, it’s a joo conspiracy to replace our coffee with mind-control drugs….
*sigh*
To people not afflicted by various conspiracy theories, the ‘Deep State’ is an amorphous grouping of powerful government-associated organisations, institutions, and individuals who have an enormous influence on government policy even tho they are not part of the government.
In the US, this would basically be the Military Industrial Complex, various foreign policy think tanks, and selected influential media (think ‘Foreign Policy’ and ‘Foreign Affairs’ magazines, not the O’Reilly Factor) as well as retired but still influential officials like Henry Kissinger.
To me it’s all a little to amorphous and unconnected to put them all into one label – Deep State. It’s just a bunch of greedy old farts trying to get their way without being elected, but YMMV.
But for people like Mikey, it’s like the Illuminati but without alien reptiloid controllers.
re: gas attack – I’m going to agree with Rick that the whole thing seems a little weird. We don’t need to go full-Cerno to question some of the things our government and the media tells us. Remember Iraqi WMD’s or soldiers dumping babies out of incubators in Kuwait? All BS, but we went to war anyway.
We don’t really know exactly what happened or who did it. The only thing we do know for sure is that the whole area is full of dangerous assholes. All of whom are trying to knife the other dangerous assholes in the back whilst trying to scramble to the top of the pile.
And now there’s a new batch of dead folks.
sillybill: what about barrel bomb attacks? Do you think they sound weird? How about chlorine gas attacks? How about sarin gas attacks? How about targeting hospitals and aid convoys? How about mass torture of dissidents including pre-teen boys? Or how about besieging towns, blocking all food and medicine and blocking water and electricity — for months?
Those are all things that Assad is well documented to have done.
Why is another sarin gas attack so hard to believe?
The only thing I find strange is that the US decided *this* attack was worth launching an air strike — not others. But that has more to do with the leadership of the US, which recently changed.
Who has chemical weapons and the means to deploy them over the kind of area that was affected, and additionally the means to frame up Assad for it? If you don’t want to think that Assad did it, you need to explain who did do it, and how, and why that actor wants us to think that Assad did it and the means by which that actor framed Assad.
The most parsimonious explanation is that Assad did it. He has the means, and the motive, and the history of doing stuff exactly like this. If you want to claim that he didn’t, you need to ascribe a means, motive, and method of framing Assad to another actor. Just leaving stuff hanging out there as A VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION is the mark of a conspiracy-theory-adjacent.
Cernovich’s claim that Assad wouldn’t use chemical weapons because he’s winning is, by the way, the line used by Sergey Lavrov regarding the 2013 sarin gas attacks.
http://www.dw.com/en/russia-expresses-doubts-on-syrias-chemical-weapons-use/a-16885053
@Rick (and sillybill)
You do realize that the Gulf of Tonkin attack was made up, right? It didn’t actually happen?
What inconsistencies? Not reported by whom? Be specific.
” and combine this with the “Red scare” level panic about Russia going on in the west, its hard not to see a longer game going on.”
Thundering Thor on a Tricycle, your historical ignorance is literally painful. Your homework is to watch Good Night and Good Luck, in hopes that perhaps you’ll learn something. Or, yanno, read a history book. There’s a ton of good ones on both the Red Scares; your local library will have some, and the reference librarian will help you find them.
“The attack happened for sure, but I don’t think the west is being honest about who did what, and how it occurred.”
So how about you listen to the victims. (CN: Graphic descriptions of the gas attack, photos of victims. )
re:Chess
I once played Global Chess:
Hey…Guys? I’m trying to post a song of mine, but when I hit post, it doesn’t even display my post. If I try again, it says it’s there.
Is there something I don’t know about?
Weird Eddie – That was a righteous rant.
@Troubelle
That’s happened to me before, and I suspect we’re not alone. Try again but with the text blockquoted, and write something else below the quote. That should bypass the spam filter that prevents you from posting it again.
numerobis,
Oh sure, he’s a dangerous asshole and the world would be a better place if he croaked. Unless the takfiri terrorists like al Nusra and ISIS took over after he died.
The part that is weird is that asshole Assad finally got the Nato powers off his ass and a few days before a peace conference he goes and blows the whole thing.
The part that is weird is videos of rescue personnel not being affected by sarin even tho they have no chem warfare gear on.
The part that’s weird is accounts of visible gas and a distinctive smell – sarin is colorless and odorless if it’s made in a government weapons lab, but the bathtub version?
I would certainly join the crowd accusing Assad of atrocities and warcrimes, I just don’t think he’s the only one. The takfiri head-choppers are worse, the only thing limiting them is access to resources.
POM, I guess my first thoughts that it could be other than Assad came from the Seymour Hersh article in the London Review and the crowd source investigation at Who Attacked Ghouta.
Dalillama, none of those comments were mine so I’ll just say that your excellent suggestion of reading history books is where I learned to mistrust all governments everywhere.
Just to be clear – Assad and the upper levels of his government must go. But – they should not be replaced by people who would make things worse. All of the rebels, with the exception of the Rojavan Kurds (who don’t want to take charge of all Syria) and a couple hundred moderates in the FSA wish to replace the present government (which allows other religions to practice freely and allows women to work and doesn’t force them into burkas) with strict sharia law. Only a salafist version of Sunni Islam will be allowed.
Okay, let’s make up a conspiracy theory.
Putin’s realizing that nope, Americans as a whole aren’t actually stupid enough to believe that Trump’s doing fine. He gets Assad in on it, and they manipulate ISIS (look, I gotta cram that casual racism somewhere, so I’m going the 9/11 truther route that says them browns can’t pull it off by themselves) to commit the gas bombing. And then they manipulate the media into saying Assad did it, and invite Trump to play hero and gain ratings*.
So I guess I gotta make a prediction too, based on my inside knowledge. So then plot twist, they all pretend to find evidence that it was actually ISIS (who for some reason hasn’t claimed it in the first place, ha ha those dumb non-Westerners) so Assad looks good by forgiving Trump, who then declares war to someone in a heroic revenge quest to destroy whoever he pretends (conspiraception yo) has been taking great pains to make him look bad in the eyes of everyone.
Voilà !
*Incidentally, in the real world, this was also his motivation.
@sillybill
I just wanna remind you that civilians also pick sides.
The Gulf of Tonkin is a disputed event where the US navy claimed two seperate torpedo attacks against US vessels. These events, whether real or not, were used to justify the extension of the US role in Vietnam. Prior to the recent attack, two seperate chemical attacks killed dozens of Syrian civilians in 2013, with both sides blaming the other, but no significant military response from the US occured. What makes the recent attack any different? Russia has been directly involved in Syria since 2015. Russia, like China and Iran, are non-aligned states, meaning they don’t play by the rules of a US dominated global hegemony, and because of this, they are broadly represented as a “threat” to national security. I referred to this as a “Red scare” because the hysteria regarding Russia, especially since the election of Trump, has reached a paranoia level that is comparable to that historical period. The involvement of Russia, and to a lesser degree, Iran, changes the game in Syria. Let’s face it, if the West really cared about that region, it wouldn’t have completely destabilized the area after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with various military campaigns framed as “liberations”.
The role of the west, and its allies in Syria is not a story of “good vs evil”. Many of the groups we are funding and supporting have direct links to ISIS and other far-right wing groups operating in the region. The “white helmets” are a perfect example of this; many of their members have been connected to some of the ugliest elements of the conflict, but confoundingly, they are lionized by western mainstream media as a humanitarian group.
At best, I believe the Russian/Syrian claim that a bombing campaign against a rebel ammo dump detonated a cache of chemical weapons that lead to the disaster. Keep in mind, this is war, not a chess game. There are no rules, and no good guys and bad guys. Assad has had the upper hand, with Russia as a significant ally, but this is probably going to be used to justify a more direct Western intervention, with the Western anti-Russia, anti-Assad reading of the chemical attack working as “Gulf of Tonkin” style justification. Assad’s days are numbered, but this is dangerous territory as Russia is the second largest nuclear power in the world, and there is a significant risk of this escalating into something much more catastrophic.
And? How does that address anything that I said? I’m not reading your link – if you make assertions you need to support them yourself, not throw out a link and call it done.
What’s not weird is that he got a clear signal from the US that Shinra wasn’t interested in deposing him just days earlier. That signal seems to have been unintentional, the result of bumbling incompetence rather than a purposeful message, but what the US administration says means stuff whether the message is intentional or not. When the US says, “You do you, Assad, live and let live,” Assad is going to do his thing.
FYI: something similar happened when Iraq decided to invade Kuwait in 1990. Bush Sr. signaled that he didn’t care what Saddam Hussein did, so Saddam Hussein did something he’d wanted to do for a while, and then Bush Sr. was all OMG I TAKE IT BACK but you can’t take that back. Other countries act on what the US administration says.
Because that shit is like casting an AOE spell, and it sticks in one location until enough turns pass, I guess, and it doesn’t act like normal chemicals in dispersing over time? And the doctors who reported symptoms after treating the victims and touching their contaminated skin and clothing are just part of the conspiracy or something?
I have yet to see proof that it was sarin, rather than some other nerve gas – you know there’s more than one, right? – but you keep on seeing that conspiracy if it makes you happy.
Really, dude?
Yep, we’re all just hysterical wimmenz here!
Never mind that there’s actual evidence from multiple reputable sources that Russia involved itself in the election and that Trump by his own words seems to have encouraged it.
Never mind that nobody who opposes Trump is calling for loyalty oaths and a return of HUAC or anything like that.
It’s exactly like the McCarthy era in the United States right now. Sure.
“Fake news”
It’s fascinating. They notice what’s in the media and they fear it enough to make it a meme. A little cross they use to make the scary thing go away. It’s a scapegoat which they use to feel better about the way they fell prey to fake news. If their news was fake then it’s all fake.
Bias is important in destroying this. They don’t know how to use the idea of bias, it’s a general feature of how our psychology works in positive and negative ways. The named logical fallacies for example are specific patterns in how we often irrationally think, the other end of that axis are the rationally made arguments. We are positively and negatively biased towards rational and irrational things as a species. The rest is the way bias is misused among “fair and balanced” people and other specific social examples.
Re: red scare
Why? What’s the end goal of this ‘mass hysteria’? That’s the part I don’t get from the brocialists pushing this narrative. Russia has been the bad guy since at least the Georgia invasion in 08. 2 administrations ago. Both previous red scares were over by this point. Why the long game now? Who’s our McCarthy? Both previous scares used foreigners (generally in the 1st, a specific nation block in the 2nd) as proxy for that eeevil ideology. What are we using the Federation as proxy for? Theocracy? Despotism? I just don’t get it…
No, upscaling his war crimes after being given a green light by Trump and NATO is not weird. It’s completely logical. He thought he could get away with it, so he did it.
Assad makes the “bathtub” (binary) version, because it’s significantly cheaper and much harder for inspectors to prevent as you stockpile the chemical precursors rather than the weapon.
This is nearly impossible, due to the nature of chemical weapon production in Syria. Even if you want to deny that any of the attacks were done by Assad, the only type of Sarin that has seen use in Syria is binary, which has a short shelf life due to impurities causing a high acid content. Bombing Sarin precursors would not create a chemical weapons attack.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/04/05/chemical-realities-russias-khan-sheikhoun-chemical-warehouse-attack-claims