may be rude

why would you inherently trust anyone? you should read his book. it's an amazing and important book.

@chenGOD you can point to research that says they couldn't measure the overall impact of combined modern deception but why would they? it's not like entities that decide to run info ops log into a guest book and report what they're doing. there are a lot of reasons to think that deceptive practices unique to the modern info channels are a major factor in the narratives that decide elections. polling in 2016 was historically off. trump got 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. you're kind of trying to convince me that i don't live under the sky and you're not moving me. i know people who are taken by this stuff. i see the victims. it's weird. it didn't used to be this way. i see the narratives pushed and i see the narratives believed. i see the narratives designed, and i see them work. i see them spreading through lineages of people like tv and radio never did. i see a consistent methodology applied to a vast scope of people because it's working. we're dealing with fascism down here and it's pushed through the internet. again as i've SAID TO YOU HERE, i know it's hard to measure and prove the overall problem. that doesn't mean it's not there. it would be good to develop better proofs but you're not going to troll me into forming a historic meta study for you on watmm. please leave me alone.

you seem to be arguing based on an assumption that there is only one architect? wylie was one of the architects. kogan knew some parts better. ca was a relatively small program. my original point was about the information situation, using ca to illustrate modern manipulation dynamics, which i think is important. you saying economic inequality means i shouldn't suggest this is important frankly lands as ridiculous. not sure if non-sequitor or red herring are more apt fallacies. i'm talking about information warfare in the information warfare thread

Seems like we're differing in our definition. I'm talking about creating actual disinformation, while the analyst from CA talks about how they would link facebook profiles to blog sites or "news" sites that created the disinfo. I suppose I would say that CA would be a spreader, rather than a creator. i think you're wrong. CA created content, including false information and designed narratives. wylie wasn't really an analyst, he was the architect of the system. you incorrectly assumed implicit information. my explicit statement did not make that claim. seems a lot like a whataboutism fallacy, and i think it's strange that you're missing the point. i'm trying to remember, are you canadian? in the US, shared facts are gone. there's an information situation. please stop working to LOWER awareness of this real and incredibly threatening issue. i have to worry about the fall of democracy, nuclear war, and runaway climate change. help me out over here. this is interesting yeah man. 2022 will be similarly dire to 2020, as will 2024, if things don't improve. i need to plan my life alongside a distressingly unstable political situation.

CA had a remarkably good marketing campaign. what they are alleged to have done is quite different from seeding social media with disinformation and propaganda. This is not in dispute. Manufacturing Consent remains as relevant as ever. CA did not engage in “engineered narrative seeding” (just say propaganda) though. wylie describes the CA service as payload, targetting and delivery. a complete weapons system. they constructed rabbit holes, designed them to be as spready and motivating as possible, and delivered them to the people who would be the most susceptible to them, and who would share them the most. seems like you're factually off on what CA did. seeding narratives in an engineered way, call it propaganda, is something they did. 'Cambridge Analytica planted fake news' A former employee of London-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica has said the company "absolutely" planted fake news. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-43472347

I think you're wildly overstating the "power" that cambridge analytica had. i didn't state that CA decided who got power, and that was not an accident. i was not making that claim. i came close to that, because i was being evocative, so i don't blame you for interpretting it that way. I was suggesting it's possible that the kind of methodology demonstrated may have that power. i'm aware that people debate how effective internet manipulation is. it's a complex topic and there are fundamental challenges when it comes to how to measure impact. if it didn't work then why would people spend money on it? the saudis moderate public sentiment with paid trolls. kashoggi was working on it when he was killed. china, known for censoring the internet, also engages in significant amounts of putting out fake content. engineered narrative seeding is done because it produces results.

correct. in the early days of the internet, we didn't yet realize that the internet is poison. now we are aware of a new environmental hazard, and we are evolving norms for helping each-other to not wander into the toxic waste. or, if they have, to shout "you're in toxic waste." this modern state will force us to refine our collective intellectual acuity. but this will happen through trial and error. we're in a significant sociological adaptation, dealing with truth and deception. there were always tabloids. but we knew they were tabloids. the internet just flipped everything upside down, so people didn't know what anything was. is this real? is that real? now we are getting adjusted to it. we have to tell people: that is tabloid. this is how you recognize tabloid. the tabloids are berserk. fox has decided to be a grotesquely oversized tabloid that's desperate not to lose power. i wish a couple more good lawsuits would knock them down a couple pegs. fox is one of the larger forces contributing to alignments of narratives. that's an important aspect to the modern environment. fox can amplify a narrative for their own motivations, and the russians can amplify that same narrative for their own motivations, and alex jones and whatever dogshit internet blogs can amplify those narratives for their own motivations, and elected officials can pile onto whatever narratives for their own motivations. they all understand the strength of piling on and reinforcing each-other, thereby spoofing consensus. consensus spoofing has nullified consensus in america. we live in a heightened state of divergent realities. it's powered by this de-centralized incentive to cooperatively troll the truth. anyone who tells you "don't listen to the msm" is someone who is not trying to help you, or doesn't know how to help you. the fundamental thing is to seek information from differing sources, and compare and focus on the discrepancies. you don't have to believe everything from the "msm," but to barricade yourself from reporting from establishment journalism is to make yourself vulnerable to being infected by information contagion. you need differing info, and if you really want the truth then you need to spend the time identifying and resolving discrepancies between different sources. how do they arrive at different messages? how did that happen? that's sometimes called media literacy, and it's something that should maybe be taught in school more, these days.

won't be surprised if bannon is more of a player than people realize. i don't think enough people appreciate what cambridge analytica demonstrated. imagine being able to decide who gets power. this was a new force unleashed on earth: systemized psychological manipulation through the internet, at industrial scale, and able to deliver measurable results. imagine being a political operator and seeing what happened. the world changed. the other thing to understand about this is that the tech is not proprietary. it's a methodology that can be mimicked and evolved. the russians were immediately fascinated by cambridge analytica. who else? we don't get to know who is behind influence operations all the time. but we get some info and we can deduce a lot. american political action committees now do this kind of online manipulation. dump money in, narratives come out. let me tell you one thing: oil power is greater than most people can fathom. and that industry faces a massive crash. in fact, it would have happened already, if not for the state of politics. i have my limitted american perspective. but usa is the global superpower. i see the republicans shielding oil from urgently needed renewable energy policies. i see them propped up by info rushes. i see info rushes looking financed. any q-holers out there may like to climb out that way. i am telling you the actual hand in the glove.

i agree, and i am not guessing. there are now multiple indicators that make it look as though trump did it deliberately. I guess I should have asked for this first to avoid any confusion on my part. Can you link to some? tuesday there's a debate, thursday he says he has covid, and friday he is hospitalized. we later learn he was very sick at the time when he was hospitalized, having difficulty breathing, and asking if he was going to die. covid has an incubation period of 2-14 days, and breathing problems don't usually develop until days 5 - 10. that alone was suspicious. it looked like he would have had it before the debate. but he should have caught it with his supposedly frequent testing. his doctor while he was at walter reed was overtly restricted from answering certain questions such as whether trump showed signs of pneumonia. when asked questions about the phase of disease, the doctor made clear that he was prevented from disclosing the timeline of the progression of the disease. seemed like trump told his doctor not to say anything about pneumonia or when he got it. press continually asked when his last negative test was, and they never answered. kaley maceneny, trump himself, when asked, they would act weird and give strange, vague, generalized responses about how trump is tested all the time. they never said when his last negative test was. so, given the original timeline just plainly being strange, and the doctor acting like he's hiding stuff about the timeline, and trump administration being unable to say when his last negative test was, it was looking fishy. the picture of his illness pointed to trump contracting covid at least a few days before the debate. but how would he not know? his own story is ridiculous. he doesn't know when his last negative was? how do you not know when the last negative was? the only reason you wouldn't say is if the answer was bad, and you know that records are kept of those kinds of things and they're hard to tamper with. this is how they would act if they were hiding the fact that he was neglecting to test, or that there was an earlier positive. well, now we learn that there was an earlier positive. mark meadows is now saying that a few days before the debate, trump tested positive. then he says he took another test which was negative. curiously absent is mention of any other subsequent tests between the positive and the debate, only 1. and now trump releases a statement saying "a test" showed he was negative before the debate. interesting, just 1. that doesn't even make sense. 1 subsequent negative wouldn't be enough to demonstrate the positive as false. you would need multiple. but here we have meadows specifically stating one and trump specifically stating one. it's all consistent. just looking at the picture, it looks like he got a positive before the debate, then got a negative real quick (somehow...) and then didn't get tested again until 2 days after the debate, when it was revealed that hope hicks had it and was exposed to trump. and it's not even like you can point to trump's side of the story and say "maybe he's telling the truth." for one thing, his story was effectively "i don't know or won't say when the last negative was." and, from nbc: “The story of me having COVID prior to, or during, the first debate is Fake News," Trump said. "In fact, a test revealed that I did not have COVID prior to the debate.” is he supporting his claim by pointing to the single subsequent negative? that's the plaintext reading. he specifcally does not say multiple subsequent negatives.

i disagree, given the duration and it being a debate. i'm not sure what you mean by this. i can say that biden submitted himself to the debate's mandated testing, while trump coincidentally got himself out of it by being late. but i'm not sure what you're getting at. i agree, and i am not guessing. there are now multiple indicators that make it look as though trump did it deliberately. exposing biden to covid 1 month before the election ranks up there with the worst. it's not ok for a president to knowingly expose an opponent to a potentially lethal contagion. that is fucked up shit. we're not talking about you going to the bar with covid. yeah that would be "douchey" and you would be an "asshole." in pre-vax times, it could cause people to die who wouldn't have, otherwise, but society allows it. but here we are talking about the president knowingly exposing his opponent, who is susceptible to severe symptoms due to his age and lack of vaccines at the time. and in this case the president was in the midst of a months long coup campaign (starting months before the election, with his subversion of confidence in election legitimacy). isolated from context, i guess you could characterize it as just douchey and assholish. but the incident is not isolated from its context, in reality. if he weren't planning to attempt to stay in power regardless of the election results, it would be different. but he was planning to attempt to stay in power regardless of the election results. and that means that his knowingly exposing biden to covid can be viewed as akin to political violence. exposure to a pathogen is not usually viewed this way, but in some contexts, it can be. knowingly exposing someone to a pathogen can be murder. if i videotaped a confession that i planned to deliberately expose an unvaccinated person in their 70s to covid, that would be reckless endangerment. if i did that to win an election, it would be an extremely immoral and criminal way to win an election. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-it-a-crime-to-intentionally-get-someone-sick.html

hard disagree. debate means vocalizing maskless for 90 minutes, sometimes heatedly. biden's lucky he didn't get covid, and it's a testament to the ventilation system. it's a huge deal. like, you're breaking my brain rn. i'm not cool with trump exposing his opponent to covid, deliberately. especially 1 month before the election. and in the context of an overarching coup campaign, there's no making excuses. this is just dark, despotic, heinous stuff. we in the states could have ended up living in a post-democracy america. the guard rails were savaged. nothing was a given. at many points the game could have gone differently.

yeah journos there were fishing for a dramatic response. but it's a big deal that trump seems to have deliberately exposed biden to covid 1 month before the election. getting biden's reaction is fair. i view this as traditional journalism, not clickbait. maybe if we weren't still trying to wake people up from their trump trance, it would be less relevant. dude tried a coup, and i want more coverage of that. that includes this.

saw mask discussion in the thread. i feel exasperated every time i encounter people who apparently were not informed: masks are meant to protect others, not you. they are like 10% effective at protecting you but like 90% effective at protecting others from your vapor. quibble about numbers and mask types if you want, but it remains that this is the principle of masks. they catch your vapor. like a stillsuit.

covid's gonna beat jodey through the alphabet

kind of interesting that the santa mythos amounts to extraterrestrial worship. he is like alf. the friendly neighborhood alien that we are conditioned to love. and the initiation ritual is learning that your family lies to you

just defaults so far

yeah... though you set me up to make the point: raising awareness is possible, and consequential. your posts here are an example. if an individual spends one year making a point to try to reach individuals on a given topic, either going out of their way or just doing so when the opportunity presents itself, the impact is more than just the sum of those direct recipients of that person's messages. it is important to remember the carry-on effect. you may stop someone from going on to be a loud and misleading shithead. you may inspire someone to do more activism. you also contribute to awakening people to their responsibility in the modern world to keep watch on the information sanitation in their various social circles. we are still awakening to a different information regime. we're no longer consumers, we are active (or passive) contributors.

whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. you know we just got burgled with 2 hours of mystical techno right https://rolandosimmons.bandcamp.com/

In dramatic shift, national intelligence director does not rule out 'extraterrestrial' origins for UFOs https://thehill.com/opinion/international/581710-in-dramatic-shift-national-intelligence-director-does-not-rule-out For seven decades, government officials systematically dismissed, ignored and belittled any mention of UFOs. Indeed, despite mind-boggling intelligence assessments, Cold War-era national security fears led the U.S. government to apply scientifically absurd explanations to highly credible UFO encounters. In short, the prospect of a sitting high-level national security official openly discussing otherworldly origins for UFOs was long unthinkable — until last week. Asked about a recent report in which the government admitted that it could not explain 143 out of 144 military encounters with mysterious flying objects – including several which appeared to demonstrate extraordinary technology – director of national intelligence Avril Haines said, “There’s always the question of ‘is there something else that we simply do not understand, that might come extraterrestrially?’” Haines’s comment is the latest sign that a seismic shift in the government’s official stance on UFOs is underway. Just a few weeks before Haines’s groundbreaking statement, NASA administrator Bill Nelson made waves by speculating publicly that UFOs might have otherworldly origins. Indeed, after meeting with the naval aviators who encountered objects that appeared to move in ways that defied physics and aerodynamics, Nelson is convinced that the pilots saw something truly extraordinary. Moreover, after reading a classified government report on the military’s recent UFO encounters, Nelson – an Army veteran, former senator and ex-astronaut – said, “The hair stood up on the back of my neck.” Clearly, something has NASA’s chief spooked. Like Nelson, former Presidents Obama and Clinton both speculated openly about the likelihood of alien life when asked about UFOs in June. Obama went on to state that “There’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.” Obama was likely referring to mysterious flying craft that, according to the government, appear to “remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.” Queried about these seemingly physics-defying movements, former CIA director John Brennan made a jaw-dropping statement, suggesting that “a different form of life” might be behind the phenomena. Similarly, another former CIA director (and long-time UFO skeptic), James Woolsey, signaled a new openness to otherworldly explanations for UFOs. John Ratcliffe, Haines’s predecessor as director of national intelligence, injected eyebrow-raising context to the military’s recent UFO encounters. According to Ratcliffe, U.S. intelligence analysts have “high confidence” that foreign adversaries – such as China or Russia – are not behind the most extraordinary UFO sightings. In a stark summation of the government’s assessment of the phenomenon, Ratcliffe stated that some UFOs exhibit “technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against.” After reading the classified version of the government’s recent UFO report, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) echoed Ratcliffe’s comments, ruling out highly advanced Chinese or Russian aircraft as likely explanations for the mysterious objects. In an interview about the military’s UFO encounters, Romney referred to “technology which is in a whole different sphere than anything we understand.” But sightings of unknown craft exhibiting highly advanced technology are not a recent phenomenon. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA, said that objects “operating under intelligent control” displayed extraordinary technology in the decades after World War II. Mirroring recent government assessments, Hillenkoetter stated that neither the United States nor any other nation could have developed such advanced aircraft. Indeed, declassified documents from the late 1940s and early 1950s show that intelligence analysts systematically ruled out ultra-secret U.S. technology and foreign competitors as plausible explanations for the most compelling UFO encounters. Despite these jaw-dropping assessments, a series of bizarre – and still unexplained – 1952 UFO sightings in the skies above Washington, D.C. alarmed America’s defense planners. As UFO reports and public queries about the incidents overwhelmed the military’s communications channels, national security officials grew concerned that the Soviet Union could exploit public interest in UFOs to cause mass panic and gain an advantage in a surprise attack. As a result, the Air Force’s 20-year project to catalogue UFO sightings quickly devolved into an exercise in “debunking” and discrediting even the most credible encounters. As renowned atmospheric physicist James McDonald made clear, the Air Force began applying “meteorologically, chemically and optically absurd” explanations to UFO sightings. McDonald’s assessment was corroborated by astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who served for two decades as the Air Force UFO project’s civilian scientific consultant. In a stark – and refreshing – break from the government’s record of foisting bizarre, unscientific explanations onto highly credible UFO cases, Haines stated last week that “we don’t understand everything we’re seeing.” Thankfully, the glaring deficiencies in UFO reporting and analysis identified by Haines may soon be addressed. If historic legislation proposed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is adopted by Congress, the government will be forced to conduct the comprehensive, objective and science-based assessment that the UFO phenomenon has long demanded.