I found this while trawling for the weekly Plagues & Pandemics post. Matt Morgan, at the British Medical Journal:
… Wandering through the Enlightenment gallery, I came across something unexpected. Behind glass lay a small, shrivelled figure, the upper half of something vaguely simian stitched to a fishtail: a Japanese “mermaid.” She was assembled nearly two centuries ago from monkey, fish, wood, and papier-mâché and was shipped to Europe to delight, deceive, or both. She looks like the outcome of a drunken bet with a taxidermist.
She is, however, not a creature of the sea but one of belief. Early collectors cared less about authenticity than spectacle. If a mermaid brought visitors through the door, who cared what was under the stitches? Mermaids were debunked long ago, but this revelation didn’t kill them—it created an industry. “Feejee mermaids,” as they were sometimes known, toured fairs for decades. Being fake was simply another marketing hook.
As I stood there, my phone buzzed with updates from the UK’s covid inquiry: muddled messaging, communication failures, public trust quietly combusting. It felt appropriate—we’re still surrounded by mermaids. They now arrive by WhatsApp rather than sailing ship, sometimes with official logos attached.
Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect. Repeated statements feel more believable, regardless of accuracy. Familiarity does the work. The effect is stubborn and democratic, fooling experts and amateurs alike. Evolutionarily, repetition once served us well. Reliable information rarely echoed endlessly unless it mattered. Then we built the internet, a machine that can repeat anything forever. We weaponised a useful shortcut.
During the pandemic I spent what little time I had outside intensive care trying to debunk misinformation. Vaccines don’t alter DNA. The 5G network doesn’t cause covid. Masks are irritating but are not a rehearsal of government tyranny. In each interview I had to use phrases I’d rather not have mentioned: when I said that “vaccines don’t cause infertility,” some listeners simply stored “vaccines plus infertility” in their memory again. The illusory truth effect doesn’t care which side you’re on—it just counts repetitions. “This is not a mermaid” posters are, to the mermaid, still free advertising…
The writer Naomi Alderman has argued that we’re living through a third great information crisis, after the invention of writing and printing. Her advice includes finding fact checkers you trust and not wading into hopeless online arguments—a form of social distancing for the frontal lobes. For doctors this avoidance feels like heresy, but replying to every mermaid only serves as unpaid public relations…
Back in the museum, the mermaid has been defanged. She’s no longer a fraud but a teaching aid. We see the stitching. We understand the history. We can enjoy the story without believing the biology.
The lies we now face are harder to keep behind glass. They arrive from people we love, wrapped in friendly fonts and “just asking questions.” Perhaps our task is the same as the museum’s: illuminate the construction, explain the motives, and make sure that a better story is already in place. Because the more we parade the myth, the more real it can seem.
War for Ukraine Day 1,449: They Went to Jared’s
Baud
I’ll miss you guys.
SpaceUnit
So are birds real or not?
Chetan R Murthy
@SpaceUnit: Tengrain over at Mock Paper Scissors says no, and I believe him!
Chetan R Murthy
Newspaper and magazine editors once served this function. Today, each of us has to curate the blogs we follow, to get the same effect. Though there is Propublica, TPM, and maybe a few foreign news media.
SpaceUnit
@Chetan R Murthy:
Well then that’s definitive!
Gretchen
People want simple. That’s why covid “vaccines and masks don’t work” was more effective than “covid vaccines decrease serious illness by 75% even though people still get it, and surgical masks decrease infection by 80% but not all”. People don’t want 80% effective. Am I going to get sick or not? Even if that’s the more true analysis, that’s not the simple answer they want.
Kamala had an 57-point plan to make all aspects of American life better. Trump and Vance said you’re struggling because immigrants and DEI hires are stealing all the stuff that should be yours. Not true, but much more effective. It felt true to people even thought it wasn’t.
My town spent 4 years evaluating 18 different plans for renovating city hall and the police station, finally decided on the best plan and bonded it out. Folks swooped in and said, 20 million dollars is a lot of money. We should be able to vote on it. Sounds simple and reasonable, and completely ignores the complexities of the worn plumbing and electric and inadequate space of the current plant. But that’s not simple, and people want simple. Should we spend 20 million or not? Should we do it or not was as deep as a lot of people wanted to go. Let us vote! What happens when city hall disintegrates and the police don’t have anywhere to store evidence? La la la I can’t hear you!
NotMax
The truth is out there.
Further and further out there.
//
MattF
Still, I do wonder— did anyone actually believe that Haitians were eating their pets? Maybe a few, but for most it was entertainment, watching serious people deny it.
Gretchen
@MattF: I think it was simpler – they’re making life worse by being here. Get rid of them and life will be better like it was back when I was a kid. Ignoring that life was better when I was a kid because mom and dad were taking care of me and paying for everything and I didn’t have to do anything but play. Why can’t life be like when I was a child? Because you were a child then, dummy!
Chetan R Murthy
@Gretchen: A commenter over at LG&M described the next step in that process: naysayers say that we have to raise taxes to pay off those bonds, and we don’t want our taxes raised! So it turns into a debate over taxes, and not over whether we need to renovate the city hall, and the no-taxes camp wins. So nothing gets done, the can gets kicked down the road.
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all!
Yeah, I’ve really “fell off the wagon”, so to speak, with respect to doing my morning walk. Monday, I start anew.
Anyways, this:
I have to say I’m conflicted by this (and the overall message here) … but I’m loathe to disagree.
I believe with all my being that lies, ignorance, mistruths should be confronted forcefully and repeatedly with publicly-verifiable facts and evidence lest they fester and metastasize. Having said that, however, casting pearls and horses that won’t drink the water often make it a time-wasting exercise, draining energy.
So where to draw the line?
Rusty
@Chetan R Murthy: This is exactly the story with our local schools. Buildings are old and leaking, falling apart, kids have been in “temporary” classrooms for 20+ years. The state of NH provides zero dollars for new schools, so all of it falls on the local property tax. Add that school bonds require a super majority of 60% to pass. We endlessly vote every two years on building bonds, the last was 58% for the plans that take two years to get community input and put together, and the schools continue deteriorating because a week before the vote there is a campaign that boils down to “I don’t want to pay for a school when I have no kids in it”.
Nukular Biskits
@MattF:
Supposedly Lyndon B. Johnson said that, but I think that motivates a lot of the ridiculous claims coming from (primarily) the political/ideological right.
satby
All part of living in an infantile nation that votes for its own slow disintegration and thinks playing the lottery is a serious financial plan for retirement. I agree people prefer simple clear statements and the simplest statement is IGMFU. From the moment that the right wing became ascendant with Reagan’s election they finally could successfully attack the notion of a common good we all contribute to and take part in.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
I agree it requires some judgment and a hard and fast rule about always engaging or never engaging is not going to work.
Part of the difficulty is accepting that the fact that we’ll lose some battles and sometimes it’s better to take the loss and move on to the next fight rather than trying to find a new “message” that will salvage the situation.
Geminid
There’s plenty of news about the IL-09 Democratic primary. From Inside Elections deputy editor Jacob Rubashkin:
The Illinois 9th CD is a safe Democratic seat, so whoever wins the March 17 primary will almost certainly succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky.
Evanston Daniel Biss appears to be the frontrunner, and his campaign just released a poll it commissioned showing that. Impact Research found Biss leading with 31%, state Senator Laura with 18% and former journalist Kat Abughazaleh with18%; state Senator Mike Simmons and former FBI agent both had 7%; Skokie school board member Bushra Amiwala had 4% and state Rep. Hoan Huynh had 2%; 12% of respondents were undecided.
As it did in last week’s NJ-11 special election primary, the pro-Israel AIPAC is operating through a PAC it stood up for the purpose; in this case “Elect Chicago Women.” According to Evanston Now reporter Matthew Eadie (MatthewEadiebsky.social), the new PAC is putting $1.17 million into ads supporting Fine and attacking Biss. Elect Chigago Women is also backing former Rep. Melissa Bean, who is running to succeed Rep. Raj Krishnamoorthi in the neighboring 8th(?) CD, with another million+ dollars.
Rep. Schakowski endorseded Biss some days ago, but Senator Tammy Duckworth’s endorsement is new. Biss also just received the Sierra Club’s endorsement.
The Justice Democrats’ endorsement is also new. They may have been inspired by last week’s NJ-11 result, where frontrunner Tom Malinowski was hammered late in the contest by a PAC sponsored by AIPAC, and former Sanders organizer Analilia Mejia squeaked by him for the win. Apparently, the Justice Dems hope Biss will be the next Malinowski, and Abughazaleh the next Mejia.
Baud
@Geminid:
I’ll again state my plea for run offs or rank choice voting so we don’t have primary winners in the low 30%, or worse.
That said, the system is what it is for now, and I’ll respect all primary outcomes.
Geminid
@Baud: I’m a runoff guy myself. But we live in the Age of Impatience, so my guess is that Ranked-choice voting is the future. So are crowded fields for open house seats.
satby
@Baud: @Geminid: and Justice Dems running as spoilers.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Wisdom indeed there.
I think I’m going to compose a compendium of all your posts here and publish them under the title, “Rules of the Baud”.
Baud
@satby:
I’m not a fan of them, but they have the same rights as anyone else. Especially in a primary. I usually reserve spoilers for people who break off from Dems in the general election.
VFX Lurker
At my workplace in October 2024, three male co-workers (one white, two not white) discussed this lie at lunch where everyone could hear them.
I stupidly confronted their beliefs with facts, but they clung harder to the lie.
For the record, all three men listened to Joe Rogan.
Baud
@MattF:
@VFX Lurker:
My sense is a lot of bigots self-brainwash by trolling the libs for so long that the trolling becomes dogma.
Community and media reinforcement helps in that metamorphosis.
Geminid
Reuters and others report that the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford is being sent the Middle East. It’s been in the Carribean area since November. This move is unusual in that the Ford deployed from Norfolk to European waters last June, and the Navy tries to limit deployments to six months. But instead of heading home the Ford is crossing the Atlantic again.
This is part of a major build-up to pressure Iran and/or attack it. The carrier Abraham Lincoln is already in the Arabian Sea, and the Ford is headed there. Now the question is, will the George H.W. Bush follow? That Norfolk-based aircraft carrier and its escorts will complete pre-deployment training exercises in about two weeks.
sab
@MattF: We had a repair guy tell us that and he really seemed to believe it. So now I worry about our local immigrant community here on the other side of Ohio (mostly Nepalis not Haitians.)
Bupalos
This is the model for how to deal with post-truth manipulations like Trump’s big lie about the election. It’s actively harmful to reply that “there’s no evidence of widespread fraud.” It’s still harmful on balance to refer to “Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.” It’s probably neutral to say “Trumps’s lie about the election.” The only really helpful thing, and it takes much longer to do, is to include explanations for how the lie is designed and meant to function: “Trump’s attempt to manipulate elections by repeating an utterly debunked lie, to intensify people’s fears and loss of faith in Democracy.”
That has to be the model. You have to take the lie and not just gainsay it but explain why it exists, who is seeking to profit, why it works in people’s minds, etc.
satby
@Baud: of course anyone can run in a primary; and a time honored ( but not good) tradition in IL politics is to run the spoilers in the primaries because the general election is a postscript.
Gvg
@Bupalos: you could also say Trump is just a sore loser. Republicans lie to excuse losing elections. Sometimes people just don’t agree with them and don’t vote the way republicans think they should and instead of thinking about why, they lie and throw a childish tantrum.
They could moderate.
They could try to explain better next election.
We still don’t have to vote the way other people think we should. It’s always up to the voters.
Then point out the official investigations don’t find but a few cases usually involving Republican votes who think they are justified because of the lies they were told about fraud.
Geminid
@Geminid: One difference between the IL-09 and NJ-11 primary contests: while prominent liberals Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal endorsed Analilia Meija in NJ-11, they’ve endorsed Daniel Biss in IL-09. Biss has also racked up endorsements from a number of Illinois labor unions.
Another difference: Analia Mejia is a long-time resident of New Jersey, while Justice Dems pick Kat Abughazaleh moved to Chicago from Washington, D.C. just 14 months ago. She accompanied partner Ben Collins, who had taken a job as editor of The Onion satirical site.
zhena gogolia
@MattF: Biden stuttered for a few minutes in a debate. Trump babbled on and on about Black jobs (first debate) and they’re eating your dogs (second debate). They elected Trump.
Bupalos
@satby: what exactly are you accusing the Justice Dems of spoiling with their endorsement of Kat Abu here? The party comity you’re working so hard to maintain?
Bupalos
@MattF: Post-truth manipulations aren’t actually intended to be believed exactly. They’re designed to kind of sink in as confusion and controversy, undermine the idea of shared truth, and move people a couple clicks back into their lizard brain.
And we do an absolutely terrible job confronting post-truth manipulations. Trump runs circles around us here.
satby
@Geminid: the last high profile carpetbagger who ran in IL gave us the crazification factor from John Rogers.
Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride
@Geminid: I always enjoy watching you geek out about my old district. For what it’s worth, I hope Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss pulls it out, since he would have been my mayor if I’d stayed there.
It’s been mentioned before that his brother is a world-class concert pianist. A couple of years ago I saw him at Wigmore Hall playing Schubert four-hands music with Mitsuko Uchida. Unfortunately, instead of the F minor Fantasy (Schubert’s greatest work in that medium), they dug up an obscure piece that looked promising because it had a late catalogue number, but having sat through it I could understand why it was obscure. Schubert’s “heavenly lengths” aren’t so heavenly when his basic material is mundane.
Baud
@Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:
Biss is a mathematician. That’s all I need to know to root for him.
Baud
Tony Jay will be happy.
Bupalos
@Gvg: I actually think alternate narratives like they say this “because they’re so stupid” or “because they act like toddlers” or anything else that fundamentally removes agency and let’s focus drift from the most serious purpose of the lie and the socially complicated way it functions is detrimental.
People howled about the cats and dogs and “black jobs” as if they were the honest product of stupidity or racism. Things unworthy of addressing in terms other than ridicule.
That only helped Trump. Both of those post-truth manipulations worked by posing as clownishness and moral failure. So no one spent any time doing the work explaining the manipulation, or how black workers or regions like Springfield, or American citizens on a whole financially benefit from immigration. We don’t seem to understand that these are actually modern, sophisticated, media savvy ways to win a debate by making subliminal propositions that won’t be meaningfully opposed.
Geminid
The post’s mermaid theme reminded me a business venture by Elaine Luria and her husband. Luria was an active duty Navy officer at the time, and her husband had retired from the Navy. When his daughter came to visit Norfolk, she was impressed by the city’s many mermaid statues. But when she tried to buy a mermaid souvenir to take back to Nashville, she could not find any.
So they bought some modeling clay and sculpted a mermaid figurine; a literal kitchen table issue. Then Luria’s husband made more mermaids and decorated them.
They thought they could make a business out of mermaid souvenirs, and they took their idea and a couple samples to a consultation with a professor of marketing at Old Dominion University. The professor expressed scepticism as to whether there would be a big enough mermaid market. But then she said she wanted seven!
So was born the Mermaid Factory, a shop in Norfolk’s artsy Ghent neighborhood where patrons buy bisque mermaids and are provided a work table and paint, sequins, shells etc. with which to decorate them. It was a success, and a second shop was opened in Virginia Beach.
But Elaine Luria and her husband were a busy couple. She was elected to Congress in 2018, and they had school age children to raise. So they sold the business, for good money I expect.
People may know Elaine Luria from her service on the January 6 Committee headed by Rep. Benny Thompson. She lost her 2022 reelection to Republican Jen Kiggans, who’s also retired Navy officer. Luria sat out the last cycle, but now she’s running against Kiggans in a rematch.
Timill
@Geminid: Would it help you to call RCV Instant Runoff Voting?
Geminid
@Timill: No. I’m not a fan of Ranked-choice voting no matter what you call it. I’d rather have runoffs. But I accept the fact that Ranked-choice be the coming thing.
I am intrigued though, by Alaska’s new system. They will have an all-comer, “jungle” primary in August. Then the top four finishers will advance to a Ranked-choice runoff in November.
Miss Bianca
@VFX Lurker: the same Joe Rogan that’s just shown up in the Epstein files? Oh, you don’t say!
The Pale Scot
Mermaids are real people, I’ve seen them
Mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs
Another Scott
This problem – repeated lies being taken as fact/truth – will only get worse (at least in the near term). “Deep Fakes” were a growing problem under Obama’s term, and are getting “better”. Now, they don’t even have to work from an existing video or audio source – they just have the generative “AI” tools make stuff up.
Maybe the fact that people eventually get tired of stuff that is the latest thing will save us.
LED watches. Mood Rings. Pet Rocks. Cabbage Patch Kids. Nintendo Wii. “Fresh pepper” on salads. Giant pickup trucks. And on and on.
“Oh, 47 says that everyone who votes for him will get a $10,000 check and a TmurpCoin? Heh. Cletus, you’re so gullible. Did you get your septic system fixed yet?…”
I think this is one of those situations where the only way to win is to not play the game.
Reporter: World famous expert – RFK jr says that mRNA vaccines are unproven and dangerous. How do you respond?
WFE: He’s lying.
R: But he’s head of HHS. Doesn’t that mean we should give weight to his claims about the dangers?
WFE: No.
…
Don’t play their games. Don’t repeat their claims to debunk them. Just don’t. PZ Myers debated a few people over the years but eventually quit because it was a waste of his time and only made the monsters more visible. Just don’t.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
dnfree
@zhena gogolia: I’m tired of hearing “Biden stuttered for a few minutes” as a minimization of what I saw with my own eyes.
Paul in KY
@Gretchen: The good Lord only had 10…
Paul in KY
@Geminid: She’s so winsome!
Paul in KY
@zhena gogolia: It was a bit more than ‘a few minutes’, but carry on with your hobby horse…