I like to remember Mark Twain's famous pithy remark regarding news. 'If you don't read the papers you're uninformed. If you do read the papers, you're misinformed.' We observe that official propaganda - the papers in Mark Twain's day - is composed by expert professionals to subtly mislead people. In the actual social context in which we live, including during the 19th Century, we are in contact with folks that have read 'the papers', and even if we do not read them those that do inevitably relate what they have learned from reading them.

Those people are not expert professional propagandists. They tell us what the results of the exposure to misleading information has led them to believe, and do not subtly mislead us with precision language warfare. This provides rational folks with copious evidence that the papers are full of crap, because the folks that regurgitate their takeaways from the papers have swallowed a load of crap and vomit it all over us.

I don't read the papers. I let true believers that have been twisted into irrational devotees tell me what the papers say. Things like 'we need to eat babies to reduce our carbon footprint', or 'facts are racist' coming out of their mouths reveal well the lies that are hypnotically embedded in people unfortunate enough to have been afflicted by propaganda, and even if the proselytes are too deeply programmed to be disabused of the false narrative, I am not susceptible to it even if I later am exposed to professional propaganda efforts.

Occasionally, folks like you read the papers, and do so knowing they're being subjected to something full of crap, so report the propaganda accurately as attempts to misinform. Your work makes it very easy to learn about the attempts to mislead us without being subjected to attempted proselytization by entranced zealots. Your work is comparable to vaccination against a mind virus.

Thanks!