Now That Trump's President... (not any more!)

  On 8/31/2020 at 6:16 PM, very honest said:

i see how maybe it's difficult to know where to draw the line between brainwashing and non-brainwashing, but if you go hang out in north korea, you'll not miss the distinct quality.

Hey, I've been to North Korea (twice!) I speak Korean, and I have to say that the comparison between North Korea and what's currently going on in the US is not really a great one to make. North Koreans literally have no choice. They have one source of media/information, as such, brainwashing is not necessary because there is no other source to counter the information. Many North Koreans obviously do not believe this information, but they have no way of verifying or countering information (or very limited sources smuggled in at high risk).

In America, you have a glut of media sources, so in order to propagate ideas on one side, countering the other sources becomes necessary. You also have a diversity in sources in terms of entertainment as a source of propaganda, and so the need to counter that is also a consideration. An interesting aside on that, I just read this article on Reagan and the movies while in office - really interesting (and somewhat terrifying). https://getpocket.com/explore/item/ronald-reagan-s-reel-life?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I'm not quite sure if I'm making my point clear, but I'd say the efforts of the right to conduct brainwashing operations in the US are actually much more strenuous than those undertaken in North Korea, and the socio-cultural context is very important.

  On 8/31/2020 at 6:16 PM, very honest said:

 

 

that's a good question. i could talk about the recent history of propaganda, and how the internet turned the information landscape upside down, and mutated it. for example, the 90s were more quaint, and the arrival of the internet meant that "mainstream media" became just one player, forced to compete with blogs and click-bait. any sense of responsibility that news executives may have felt for shepharding public opinion was removed, because people became able to browse information themselves, rather than just tuning in at 7pm to channel 7. the "mainstream media" transformed from more-or-less the only game in town into just another competitor. the forces that worked to corrupt the mainstream media now had a broader ecosystem to corrupt. the mainstream media became biased toward click-bait, because they were struggling to survive. people were disenfranchised by mainstream media and migrated toward internet information, and, in many cases, individuals ended up with much more deceptive information, depending on what they ended up looking at. so, it is different now, and more chaotic, and more complex. there was always some corruption and some deception, but mainstream media was also an old institution handed down from antiquity, which did include a certain conscience for wanting to guide the public to the extent it was able, and it had evolved and refined some good practices. now i encounter people who don't know the blogs they think superior to "MSM" are feeding them russian military intelligence disinformation designed to destabilize american society.

but the part of your question i think is actually more interesting is the word brainwashing. it seems like a cartoonish idea, but it's actually something that comes to us from history. the 3rd reich has examples. the ww2 japanese army was pretty fanatical and kind of believed the emperor was a god. the north koreans are forced to believe a very sad and false set of information. i think the term "brainwashing" serves a purpose, as distinct from more regular mis-and-disinformation. there is a qualitative difference, when enough of a population believes fervently enough a set of information that is divorced enough from reality, and an environment is cultivated to maintain it. you enter a red state and it's very surreal and unsettling and everyone seems like a zombie. 

wikipedia is an interesting case, when it comes to epistemology. the most-used resource is the open-source one, where anyone can write to it (kind of). the wikipedia people designed some systems to enforce accuracy, and have been largely successful. one of their guiding principles is to gravitate toward information that is verifiable. they do not think in terms of truth. to the designers of wikipedia, there is no truth, there is only verifiability. they seek to favor the information that is the most verifiable. 

what's my point? you can hack verification. you put the same narratives in the facebook ads that are the narratives coming out of the mouths of the GOP politicians, which are the same narratives coming out of fox news, which are the same narratives coming from the president, which are the same narratives coming from rightist media, which are the same narratives being posted by inauthentic twitter accounts en masse.

fox news, which showed up on the scene in 1996, strategized to be the PR arm of the republican party. by succeeding in this, they made themselves indispensable to the party, and now they actually are the spearhead. the other entities have learned that fox knows how to nose out the narratives that will fly with their audience, and those other entities have learned to pile onto those narratives. because these different actors in the ecosystem (congresspeople, fox, online content) parrot the party line, the consumer thinks they are verifying their info. this is brainwashing.

it's spooky. it's hard to shake them out of it. they are pre-conditioned with defenses against the truth, like is done in cults! they're told not to trust the nyt, cnn, wapo, etc. they're told the democrats are lying about all their stuff, even when they're not. and these people in that bubble believe it, even though the sources they are told to distrust are more accurate, and the information they believe is false.

i've been arguing about politics for a long time and i never had a sense of brainwashing like i do, these days, and i don't think it's me. i see how maybe it's difficult to know where to draw the line between brainwashing and non-brainwashing, but if you go hang out in north korea, you'll not miss the distinct quality.

i've noticed waves of the effects of disinfo campaigns. all of a sudden, a lot of online posters are pushing a certain narrative or set of narratives that you know to be spin. to those who follow fact reporting, a big influx of spin narrative posting stands out. afterward, i learn about the disinfo campaigns that drove (or constituted) the posters. this is a new ingredient in society. twitter has reported that very significant portions of twitter content they believe to be inauthentic. there's no historical analogue to being inundated with impostors, pretending artificial identities, and calculatedly endeavoring to impart manipulative beliefs. i think that's another significant factor in the current state of information.

we must evolve a social norm to value the skillset of being able to check information. that is the necessary adaptation to the change in the environment.

Expand  

are you familiar at all with wilhelm reich's 'mass psychology of fascism'? he sketches out how what he calls 'mystical' beliefs, such like drumpf is sent by god, are anchored emotionally in a mass of emotionally disturbed individuals. he wrote of the rise of nazism in 30s germany. its fascinating if disturbing reading.

Turn off all social media, ban btl comments, get rid of share buttons etc.

It's all been spoiled by shithead grifters gaming the system and weird botnet psy ops. It was fun for a bit but we've fucked it. Turn it all off.

Tbh now we've seen how something as simple and harmless as twitter can be weaponised we should immediately call off all r&d in AI. The benefits won't be worth it, we'll fuck that too.

In fact get rid of all websites except watmm dot cum IMO

And now combine that with text generating AIs like GPT-3

  On 8/31/2020 at 9:42 PM, dingformung said:

And now combine that with text generating AIs like GPT-3

I just looked that up. This is exactly what I mean. It's obviously a completely shit pointless exercise and the people making it just need to fucking go outside, or stick to the autechre subforum

  On 8/31/2020 at 8:02 PM, zero said:

the most ridiculous (but it did make me laugh) one is the "Trump 2020: no more bullshit" flag. I mean c'mon...

late stage cognitive dissonance 

shit's wild

  On 8/31/2020 at 9:31 PM, Amen Warrior said:

In fact get rid of all websites except watmm dot cum IMO

Dunno, man. Delet still visits this place from time to time which kinda puts the site in a bad spot...

  On 8/31/2020 at 8:22 PM, chenGOD said:

Hey, I've been to North Korea (twice!) I speak Korean, and I have to say that the comparison between North Korea and what's currently going on in the US is not really a great one to make. North Koreans literally have no choice. They have one source of media/information, as such, brainwashing is not necessary because there is no other source to counter the information. Many North Koreans obviously do not believe this information, but they have no way of verifying or countering information (or very limited sources smuggled in at high risk).

In America, you have a glut of media sources, so in order to propagate ideas on one side, countering the other sources becomes necessary. You also have a diversity in sources in terms of entertainment as a source of propaganda, and so the need to counter that is also a consideration. An interesting aside on that, I just read this article on Reagan and the movies while in office - really interesting (and somewhat terrifying). https://getpocket.com/explore/item/ronald-reagan-s-reel-life?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I'm not quite sure if I'm making my point clear, but I'd say the efforts of the right to conduct brainwashing operations in the US are actually much more strenuous than those undertaken in North Korea, and the socio-cultural context is very important.

Expand  

wow, are you shane smith or dennis rodman? that's really interesting. i wonder if more americans are brainwashed than north koreans.

  On 8/31/2020 at 8:45 PM, mycospherologyst said:

are you familiar at all with wilhelm reich's 'mass psychology of fascism'? he sketches out how what he calls 'mystical' beliefs, such like drumpf is sent by god, are anchored emotionally in a mass of emotionally disturbed individuals. he wrote of the rise of nazism in 30s germany. its fascinating if disturbing reading.

i didn't read it. interesting. cambridge analytica targetted emotionally disturbed individuals, using facebook data and facebook ad targetting. 

  On 9/1/2020 at 12:13 AM, very honest said:

wow, are you shane smith or dennis rodman?

Lol no but my friend (who is now in jail in China for retaliatory purposes) helped arrange the Rodman visit. 

  On 9/1/2020 at 2:36 AM, chenGOD said:

Lol no but my friend (who is now in jail in China for retaliatory purposes) helped arrange the Rodman visit. 

retaliation for that??

  On 9/1/2020 at 2:48 AM, very honest said:

retaliation for that??

No retaliation for us (Canada) arresting the CFO of Huawei. 

You can't even make jokes about this shit anymore, he's beyond a parody

it's a 4 year stand up routine by an accomplished performance artist. at the end of this he's going to break character and let us all know that this was a massive social experiment being documented by extraterrestrial forces.

There's people voting for this guy. And there's a lot of them.

Good way to lose faith in humanity very fast.

our "favorite president" has never had a stroke. the fake news continues to smear big T

I didn't laugh due to the fact that this guy actually became a president.

I can only hope that it won't be for much longer. Not just hope, but vote too of course.

Sorry, damage is done. The way is paved for more insanity. Brace yourselves.

They've got bags of soup! This is just soup for my family from the food bank. 

  On 9/2/2020 at 5:44 AM, apriorion said:

Sorry, damage is done. The way is paved for more insanity. Brace yourselves.

No. I'm tired and dejected enough as is.

The ae album announcement has made me feel positive all of a sudden. Let's have their album in October, Trump ousted in November, Coronavirus being cured and eradicated in December. We deserve it after this shit show of a year.

where was the announcement?

Blinding Lights (with their token minority friend)