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Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills. But interestingly people seem to really despise it if you call a bot a bot, or a shill a shill. They might defend some obvious AI slop by saying "it's not a crime to write well" or "many people use em-dashes legitimately" or even just call you an idiot with no further explanation. All humanly written posts, all defending an obvious bot with vigor. I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT, yet everybody just ate it up. It seems like when you bring up concerns, you end up as the bad guy for disturbing the peace, while the bot is the good guy because it's following the right conventions.
I remember a previous discussion about non-autistic vs autistic communication, where autistic communication is centered around an exchange of facts, while the core of non-autistic communication is emotional signalling. It seems that that this phenomenon extends to bad actors insofar as they can provide the right emotional cues to be accepted. Or at least people feel that it's not a disqualifying factor from engaging at face value. Meanwhile I know a shill is paid to say anything necessary in order to spread his message, and a bot is just a program with no emotions or sense of true or false.
But I think this touches on the idea of arguments as soldiers. To many people, it likely doesn't matter what the facts are, just the emotional message that they encode. And while debunkings exist, the practice they just act as another soldier from the other side knocking on the door.
Looping back into current events, it seems like there's little incentive for the administration not to bend the truth. The enemy was already deploying their rapid response arguments with zero regard for the truth, saying that a boneheaded ice agent just executed an innocent bystander on the street in cold blood. What good does it do to say "The agent made a split second judgement thinking he was grabbing a gun, which turned out to be the wrong call" (the truth) versus "an armed and violent individual resisted arrest and was shot while police were trying to disarm him" (not technically a lie). Twitter autists might try to go over the frame by frame, but for everyone else they're gonna live the lie.
This is one of those "anti-memes" that pops up every so often. I have written about it and so have several others. The majority of normies almost never actually engage in thinking, they're are just running on vibes and feels 24/7 and reacting to stimuli. The normie's desire for truth is a weak and pathetic thing compared to his powerful overriding need to feel validated, righteous, and safe. It's Haidt's lawyer and elephant, except apparently many people have a lawyer so small and frail he can barely make himself heard.
I call it an anti-meme because it's the sort of insight people (including myself) seem to instantly forget. Because it's just too blackpilling. What do we do with that information? It means that dialogue is mostly futile and that the cynical demagogues and manipulators were right all along. It means that our democracy with its universal franchise is a sham and a joke. It means that people who are capable of actual thought must choose between postmodern linguistic cynicism and principled irrelevancy. I suppose the silver lining of AI slop is that should you be comfortable with former, the barrier to entry has never been lower.
I think the NPC criticism, while correct, is deployed overly aggressively. These people understand their place in the system and their relative irrelevancy. Making banal statements to signal loyalty to the group most loyal to you is rational. Hyper-analysing things for truth is costly. Knowing that you are a peasant and that what matters most to you are your material concerns and competitions with those around you is wise, even if mostly unconsious. Democracy requires three things: intelligence, engagement and character. Of course you should be blackpilled.
This is especially true of the intellectual class who actually do something more sophisticated. They understand truth on an unconscious level (they have to) and then warp their whole being to succeed in society. This is more sophisticated than our autistic analyses. Anti-social? Yes. But people level critiques of idiocy when they should be levelling critiques of character.
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