Aug 24, 2021
After 18 months of bare-faced manipulation, we should have a thicker shell.
Concern is choreographed. Fears are fanned. Sirens are blared. They're creating a crisis. Police, politicians and officials are acting. They mime in unison, their bodies arched in the pose of Monsters University scarers.
Unless they have discovered the secret to globally #coordinated TikTok, someone is calling the steps. Giving them the words, the actions, the totally unconvincing yet disquieting bug-eyed leer.
Good acting and stagecraft requires skill. Why are politicians so angry? They're poor players who strut and fret, hamming it, aggressive and obnoxious.
Why do the people accept it, much less fall for it? We are attuned to role playing. Some people spend half their free time inhabiting video games.
We let technology homogenize us, making the truly worthwhile harder to access. Technology does not provide its own logic and we forgot to manage it.
Facebook killed face-to-face recognition. You could not have conned my grandmother. She'd have seen right through it but she's been dead for decades.
Where's the flu?
Seen any drop-dead gory Wuhan video shockers lately — nope?
Know lots of Covid victims — nope?
All-cause mortality was pretty steady in the year from Feb 2020, except at home, where more people died from the lockdown and reduced hospital services than from flu.
Now the FDA has mocked its own process to grant full approval to the Cominarty Pfizer-BioNTech shot.
While the pandemic was orchestrated and the flu rebranded as Covid-19, we are now witnessing the climb of vaccine deaths that are real and accelerating.
First rule of creating a pandemic: fake it till you make it.
Media people
I'm leery of anyone who calls themselves a skeptic. If you are not a doubter by now you are a fool and you need not advertise the fact. I pass by trolls and the "adults in the room."
The average U.S. citizen spent 3 1/2 hours watching television each day in 2020 and at least the same again on the Internet, some people racking up more than 7 hours. [1]
That leaves them wide open to propaganda.
We are surrounded by bots and shills trying to tug our attention. Full-time troll factories won attention from the Russiagate allegations but many countries have them, primarily the Anglophone countries for the obvious reason of the dominant language of the Internet.
The objectives are far more sophisticated than seeding Facebook or attacking people on Twitter.
Resist, resist
A lot of what is printed in the state-corporatist media as opinion is little better than anecdote — second or third-hand information embellished with gossip.
Information begins with what you observe.
Observed information includes what happens to people about you, shared experience and what you talk about at first hand. If people whom you know are sick or die from a cause which symptoms you identify: this would also be first hand.
Secondhand information includes that which you hear in media. But newspapers and television increasingly deal in...
… third hand information such as editorializing and repackaging as opinion information that is secondary and has already been published. Often they comment about what they’ve read on Twitter — it's less valid than anecdote.
The state-corporatist media sides with the military, buttressed by corporate-financed fact checkers. Together these three forces try to silence any interpretation or analysis they cannot control.
Military?, you ask. Why would military care what I think?
We are at war. Any military strategy requires deception. It it essential to any successful strategy of deception to create a whirlwind of information, much of it conflicting. That is how modern mind wars work, not with logic but by disrupting emotions and causing them to collide with perceptions. [2]
The new media, sometimes sole-run news sites of professional journalists exiled from the corporate media, is attacked using the Stalinist term disinformation.
That requires force and deception which the military and police provide.
Proper anger
Learn to recognize manipulation techniques. Often they are borrowed from social media, including Instagram and TikTok. Influencers are well known for using archetypes. [3]
They have moved on from clickbait. Thirst traps are photos or short videos with sex appeal, thirst being a colloquialism for desire. It's not hard to imagine the same technique being used to grab attention in other ways.
Other techniques include:
Dismiss – attack post or poster, through ad hominem.
Emote – when they like the narrative, they’ll cheer, saying: “nailed it,” “spot on,” “couldn’t have said it better.”
Overload – bombard with facts or technicals. Most readers will give up.
Self-confuse – drive people to dig endlessly in the same area.
Fact Cheka – pick on a single fact, and forever.
Make me smile [4]
Cultivate – tend your garden of friends and ideas. Feed knowledge and stay current.
Look up to the sky – see the whole forest not just the trees.
Listen – for breaking twigs, for a change in the breeze.
Aristotle said good intent precedes action; Dante, that hell is frozen and nothing can change. Real humanists measure themselves against the limitless dome above them; stretching the extent of their human frame against the immeasurable depths of the forests, their mind expanding into hidden burrows and sun-dappled glades, populated by the occasional deer or owl that we see — but aware, too, of the millions of fellow living creatures that we don't.
[1] Statista: Average daily time spent watching TV
[2] U.S. Army: Mind Wars by Col Michael Aquino