Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Today's News: Rage-farming

The term "rage farming" was a new term to me when I started to see people talking about it on twitter - here is the Slang Dictionary definition: 
Rage-farming is a slang term for the political tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents in order to create or increase exposure for one’s group or cause. The tactic is especially associated with conservative and far-right political groups. 
The term rage farming is always used in a critical way. It is typically applied to the act of posting intentionally inflammatory content or otherwise trolling political opponents online with the goal of eliciting a large number of angry responses, thus leading to widespread exposure for the original poster. However, the term may be applied to practices other than online posts, such as making inflammatory comments in interviews or speeches that will be widely covered by the media. 
Similar, I guess, to the practice of sending a bunch of flying monkeys after a blogger or twitter-poster. Except in this case creating more rage itself is the point. 
A recent Tyee article by Edmonton reporter Charles Russnell discusses the Freeland attack as part of the larger rage-farming phenomenon by conservative politicians: 
A political scientist told The Tyee he expects aggressive attacks on politicians to increase in Canada as right-wing politicians continue to engage in “rage farming” by advancing false and misleading conspiracy narratives. 
“They know how to feed those narratives,” said University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley. 
“It is little half-truths, sometimes more blatant lies, that kind of plant the seeds for this rage farming,” he said. 
...[Wesley said] politicians in Canada were stoking resentment of so-called elites. 
“This time around, it’s not just anti-elitism, it’s what we call anti-pluralism,” Wesley said, explaining that United Conservative Party politicians in Alberta in particular advance the narrative that there are “pure people out there, pure Albertans.” 
And so when people like Freeland come to their town, they are targets for abuse because they are not viewed as real Albertans or real Canadians, he said. Freeland is from Peace River, Alberta, north of Grande Prairie. 
All three politicians [Kenney, Poilievre, Smith] have, for example, been pushing the narrative that Trudeau is somehow attempting to punish farmers by searching for ways to lower emissions from fertilizer. 
Smith in particular, has made numerous statements about how vaccine mandates were an unnecessary intrusion on people’s freedoms and she has threatened to fire the board of Alberta Health Services and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta. 
She has advanced the idea of an Alberta Sovereignty Act that she says would allow Alberta to opt out of federal laws, including those governing guns. 
“What these narratives do for conspiracy theorists, is that it helps them make sense of, first of all, complex things that don’t otherwise make sense; it’s boiled down into something really simple,” Wesley said. “And secondly, it gives [conspiracy theorists] an out of sorts, where it allows them to see other people as being either the source of their problems or as being less moral or less worthy.” 
Ironically, he said, this extreme behaviour by people like McDavid will make it less likely that politicians will come to hear them out in their communities because they don’t wish to be abused and they legitimately fear for their safety. 
When an incident like the attack on Freeland happens, it takes a politician away from the message they were there to deliver. 
“So this creates a spiral; a populist spiral where people say they are not listening to us.” Wesley said.
“Well, of course, they are not listening to you. Look at what is happening when they try to listen. It is just a self-perpetuating cycle.”...
There appear to be three sections on the Canadian rage-farm right now: 
1. World Economic Forum
2. Covid vaccines (plus related mandate-hate, mask-hate etc)
3. Climate change (plus related fertilizer panic, insect panic etc.)
Here's some stuff on all of these, with a certain amount of cross-over raging, too

This explains the "eating insects" hysteria. It is stunning how anyone would believe something this stupid: Moving on, apparently Trump went absolutely bonkers today -- maybe he has realized that even if a "special master" is delegated to look through the documents taken by the FBI, he still isn't going to be able to see the affidavit and find out who on his staff tipped off the FBI. And also, of course, jail: UPDATE: Just before finished this, the DOJ dropped its new court brief in the case where Trump is trying to delay things by asking for a Special Master to review everything. The DOJ brief is giving everyone an eyeful: first, this photo: Next, the story being told by this filing: This was beautiful today -- thousands of "I am antifa" replies to this tweet, including mine: And here's a funny one - there are, like, 5K responses to this tweet, all with their own stories: Things that make you say hmmmmm...... If you ever need to keep yourself awake all night, just scroll through Wikipedia articles on nuclear close calls, military nuclear accidents, and military incidents over the last 70 years. An anniversary of a 2007 incident in Minot ND was just this week -- Minot is just 650 km away from my home in Saskatoon: And from World Kitchen chef Jose Andres, a call to action:
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