Results confirm that conservatives have lower sensitivity than liberals, performing worse at distinguishing truths and falsehoods. This is partially explained by the fact that the most widely shared falsehoods tend to promote conservative positions, while corresponding truths typically favor liberals.
Way back in 2008 I wrote here about this exact problem, perhaps as a kind of foreshadowing?
The people calling themselves conservatives seem to have an amazing “hubris”. They not only stick to their guns in the face of science or even just details (like Lehman’s CEO who refused to believe his company was in trouble) but they actually become more convinced they are in the right when evidence starts to challenge them.
Prove to them the world is round and they might just try to burn you at the stake for discrediting their flatland leader.
For trans and Black social media users, content removals limit their ability to post content related to their marginalized identities, and thus to participate in the public sphere. For conservative participants, on the other hand, content removals often demonstrate enforcement of site policies intended to remove harmful and inaccurate content.
Virginia Hall in 1944 on this day set up a safe house in Le Chambon sur Lignon, south central France on the farm of Maurice and Léa Lebrat. In her own words:
My life in Haute-Loire was different and difficult. I spent my time looking for fields for receptions, bicycling up and down mountains, checking drop zones, visiting various contacts, doing my wireless transmissions and then spending the nights out waiting, for the most part in vain, for the deliveries.
Hall’s heroic and successful field work to defeat Nazism is captured by a famous painting donated to the CIA in a 2006 memorial.
Source: OSS Society
The painting is named for one of her air drop code phrases “Les marguerites fleuriront ce soir” (The daisies bloom tonight). Depicted with Hall is Léa Lebrat’s cousin Edmund, credited with building and operating a easily-disguised hand-crank generator to power wireless signals to London.
March 1944 she sneaked into France by boat (Brittany coast) and began exfiltrating streams of intelligence as well as training three battalions with a Jedburgh Team to fight the Germans until Allied forces (following D-Day 6th of June 1944) were able to join her in August and take over in September. Again, in her own words (allegedly):
In 1943 I joined General Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services for more adventures with the French Resistance. I became proficient in Morse code and radio operation, which made me invaluable. During the day, I appeared to be a milkmaid. However, at night I directed the Resistance Forces under me in many acts of sabotage and guerilla warfare. I relayed important information from haylofts via my radio to London. I was always keeping ahead of the Gestapo, whose leaders knew of me and wanted me captured. I never gave them the opportunity, my spirit and devotion to the cause carried me on.
I said allegedly for the above quote as “made me invaluable” and “always keeping ahead” do not sound at all like Virginia’s voice, and I’ve been unable to source it as authentic.
She passed away in 1982, doing the hard work more than trying to gain recognition, and remained mostly unknown.
Senator Bob Dole in 2016 called out Hall specifically (“only civilian woman to receive the Distinguished Service Cross in World War II”) when he pushed the US Government to give a Congressional Gold Medal to OSS (awarded March 21, 2018).
Or as President Harry Truman put it, when General Donovan in September 1945 awarded her the Cross:
Miss Hall displayed rare courage, perseverance and ingenuity; her efforts contributed materially to the successful operations of the Resistance Forces in support of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in the liberation of France.
The National Archives have a copy of the “Memorandum for the President from William J. Donovan Regarding Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) Award to Virginia Hall, 05/12/1945″
Charles I, King of England 1600-1649 on his way to execution. (Image by Ernest Crofts). Charles is said to have believed his luck ran out because his beloved black cat died, and Cromwell’s troops arrested him the next day. England still has a superstition that black cats bring good luck.
A new leak from the Kremlin alleges that America’s “bad luck” in the 2016 election was due to a Russian unconventional warfare plot.
…help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position [by occupying the White House with] an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.
This topic shows up for further research as a sixth example under section “E1” (Unconventional Warfare) of Special Operations Research Topics 2022, a publication of the Joint Special Operations University:
Examples of methods might include:
• geocaching covert radar beacons to use in a global positioning system-denied environment,
• substitution of contaminated oil or hydraulic fluids into aircraft logistic chains,
• incorrect calibration of aerospace ground equipment and precision measurement equipment laboratory tools for aircraft maintenance,
• “accidental” cutting of fiber optic lines by digging in the wrong location,
• aircraft damaged in training areas unable to be used on front lines,
• creating chain of command “trust” issues via social media or other online activities.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
