Welcome to Reality Radar

I have been calling the information environment “broken” for the last couple years but it just occurred to me that is not the ideal word to use because it sort of implies that it got the way it is accidentally. It’s actually hostile to the truth and intended to confuse and exhaust you.

The Right Wing media and social media ecosystem is completely filled with lies, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and so on. Much of it is contradictory. That’s intentional.

Some of the disinformation is locally-sourced, organic bullshit. These are the lies that Right Wing political operatives and influencers think up themselves. If they gain any traction at all, they get amplified by huge disinformation networks on social media (Twitter/X and Facebook, especially) run from adversary nations.

Sometimes the bullshit river flows in the opposite direction: lies created and launched by foreign disinformation networks are adopted by the America Right and spread virally through their own channels of influence. Witnessing some nasty piece of propaganda work its way from a Russian bot farm into GOP talking points (or Trump’s Truth Social posts) is quite instructive.

Both processes are always operating simultaneously. I call this dynamic the Flywheel of Bullshit.

This is obviously a problem. An even bigger problem is that the manufactured un-reality of that ecosystem works its way into mainstream media and infects the way people who would never identify as Right Wing, Conservative, or Republican understand the issues and the world. This is also by design, of course.

I am mainly writing this to preserve my own sanity. But if something I write helps one person see the world more clearly or helps somebody to change a mind, that would be amazing.

Approaching issues with an honest intellectual curiosity and applying a variety of forms of reasoning alongside interpretation of objective data in context can often be quite clarifying. That is what I hope to do here.

My posts in that vein on social media have received enough positive feedback from a small group of readers that I decided to launch Reality Radar. But again, it is mostly to give me an outlet for the thoughts that are rattling around in my brain constantly these days.

I must caution you, however, that my actual expertise is quite narrow. I know a couple of esoteric topics quite deeply and I know a little about a lot. I believe the tools I mentioned above are very useful and can help regular people better understand even complex issues, but these tools are also available to experts and those experts are often more adept at using them. Plus they know a bunch of things non-experts aren’t even aware that they don’t know.

So I am going to be careful about contradicting experts on these topics (economics is one exception, but since economics is no more a science than Christian Science is, I feel fine about this).

These are simply my opinions, given in good faith. My opinions are subject to change as I learn more. Yours should be too.

I will write when: (1) something grabs my attention, (2) I have a perspective worth sharing, and (3) I have the time. Therefore things will be posted here irregularly. Sometimes they will be lengthy and well-thought out. Other times they will be short reactions to some news item or piece of data.

There is no intent to make money here. I can’t imagine ever charging for this. In fact, I promise I will never try.

I am going to continue to write under the pseudonym “Airwolf” (with or without an !). Telling the truth about these things has always had a downside, but those risks are increasing and so, for now at least, I am going to remain anonymous.