Two Skills: Mindfulness and Introspection

Normally we have what’s colloquially known as a bullshit detector. For reasons I will explain shortly, in Counter Disinfolklore we talk about developing your “Incoming Troll Radar.” This requires of us two skills we can sharpen, if we pay enough attention to gatekeeping what we allow into our mind: mindfulness (paying attention and monitoring the state of our bodies and mind), and introspection (scrutiny, alertness). Yet, when anyone — whether an advertiser, our child, our mother or our pet cat — wants us to do something for them, intuitively, they do precisely the same things as that house insurer’s advertisement in a previous example or as Russia promoting the idea that Bucha was a “provocation” by Ukraine: They purposefully use memes to induce in us an experience that is, given what they know about our particular personality or the knowledge of our cultural embeddings, or of the archetypes / deep structure of our minds, highly likely to provoke in us an experience of feeling a specific emotion.

Source: Incoming Troll Radar!

The radar is not a mystical gift. It rests on two trainable skills: mindfulness (monitoring the state of our body and mind) and introspection (scrutiny, alertness). Everyone already has some version of it — a “bullshit detector.” Counter Disinfolklore sharpens that detector into a precision instrument.

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