Historically speaking, in most cases where the state has had loose control the “justice” enforced by populations hasn’t been pretty. The idea of decentralized community enforcement is only able to be romanticized because it is distant, and it’s distant because it fucking sucks. Lynchings, witch burnings, and especially feuds and unending cycles of retributive violence - although the places they have happened in were not stateless, they primarily happened in areas where state control was loose.

Feuds are the natural consequence of a lack of centralized authority. If a Hatfield goes out and kills someone, then the McCoy’s deliver “decentralized community justice” by killing the murderer. Except the Hatfield’s say their guy was innocent and the accusation was a pretext, the McCoy’s are the real killers, so they go out and deliver “decentralized community justice” by killing a McCoy. And so on and so on for generations until everybody’s forgotten what even started it.

The only thing that actually puts a stop to that is the big bad state coming in and saying, “Anytime anyone murders anyone, it is an offense against me. No more “settling the score,” the score is settled now because I say it is, and if either of you keep this up you will be charged.”

But it’s not just the historical examples, which I’m sure “won’t count” for whatever reason - the effect is also observable in game theory.

In the case of the “Iterated Prisoner’s Delimma,” the most effective strategy is “tit for tat,” where defection is punished with defection and cooperation is rewarded with cooperation, which tends to result in cooperation with others following the same strategy. But what happens when we expand beyond two players?

For example, a game with a hundred players where everyone can put money in a pot, and the pot is doubled and then redistributed equally to everyone. In this case, it’s impossible to do “tit for tat” because punishing defection with defection means defecting against everyone else, who would them try to punish you for defecting, and so on. In this case, the most effective strategy is to contribute nothing, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone stops contributing.

This is a basic collective action problem, applicable to many irl situations, and the way to solve it is, again, to have a big bad centralized authority come in and tell everyone they have to contribute to the pot whether they like it or not. “The pot” could mean social services, infrastructure, common defense, etc.

But we also have oligarchs and dark money, yeah? Even if they are bots, how could someone possibly know that they’re specifically Russian bots? Have you considered the possibility that these bots could be funded by American billionaires, either true believers (because, again, there is a very old and deeply rooted mistrust of science especially in rural conservative areas) or for some ulterior motive, same as the Russians would be?

This is where, to me, to be frank, it makes more sense to treat the claim as more of a psychological coping mechanism. It has to be specifically Russian bots because the point is to externalize the problem as far as possible. American billionaires funding health misinfo would create the same psychological discomfort as if it didn’t come from bots at all.

To be clear, I don’t dispute that bots exist, or that bots have spread health misinfo. But I think the extent is exaggerrated, and I think it serves as an all too easy excuse to dismiss stuff that’s incongruent with one’s worldview. And I’m not inclined to think that people need some sort of external force to believe and spread health misinfo or distrust of science. Like, there’s a full-on creationist museum in Kentucky, this isn’t just some new online thing.

I saw that was what they were going for but I have absolutely no idea how it relates to my comment lol.

This was later well documented.

OK, so if it’s well documented, then where is the documentation?

I don’t really want to listen to a 25 minute podcast and I read your BBC source and it only talked about vaccines, there wasn’t a single word about things like shampoo.

I’d be curious to know exactly how deep this goes, since science skepticism and anti-intellectualism goes way back. Was Russia behind the controversy over evolution, going back to the Scopes trial? Were they behind the Satanic Panic? Maybe Russia funded Jack Chick to talk about how Dungeons and Dragons is teaching children to practice real magic. I know, let’s go even further back, the Catholic Church only took issue with Galileo because Russia paid them to.

Or maybe, there’s a long history of anti-science sentiment, particularly in the US, and Americans have autonomy and can use to believe stupid things and do so all the time and have always done so.

I stg, it’s bad enough blaming Trump on Russia but this is seriously taking it to the next level. How did Russia even manage to acquire the power to influence American culture to such a degree? And if they can do that while having significantly less money and being significantly more distant, then surely our own intelligence agencies can do the same, right? Please help me make sense of this.

Do you have any sort of evidence that connects the Russian government to things like not using shampoo?

What?

It’s pretty convienient how all bad things stem from a single, external source, preventing the need for any sort of internal societal reckoning. How fortunate that we were born on the good guys’ side and all we need to do is focus on our states’ geopolitical enemies, and if they can be kept in check, it’ll solve every one of our domestic issues, upto and including old wives tales.