Not Funny

Rot in Europe

Keir Starmer Prime Minister United Kingdom outside 10 Downing Street London July 5, 2024

Introduction to story from ZeroHedge:

Clandestine Campaign To Defund ZeroHedge, The Federalist & Breitbart Traced To Kier Starmer Operation by Tyler Durden

Very early into the COVID-19 pandemic, ZeroHedge suggested that a little-known Chinese lab in Wuhan might know something about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe. As a result, and as you know, we were subject to an intense demonetization / deplatforming campaign that included getting kicked off of Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and other platforms, dropped by our advertisers, and targeted by MSM hit pieces which colluded with foreign 'watchdogs' to inflict maximum damage. 

These same groups also targeted outlets including The Federalist and Breitbart over various reporting, which suffered similar fates. 

Now, thanks to a new book by investigative journalist Paul Holden that builds on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, we learn that the origin of these campaigns, launched years before the pandemic, was none other than UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer's political machine, which began targeting left-wing outlets speaking critically of Starmer such as The Canary, and then went after conservative outlets in America - just in time for the 2020 US election.

Follow the link to read the whole thing.

Brave New World

Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment

Excellent story about political propaganda in the USA in the 21st century.

It's a little long. It talks about the collapse of traditional media and the rise of social media.

How Barack Obama Built An Omnipotent Thought-Control Machine... And How It Was Destroyed by David Samuels

Excerpt: 

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves. . . .

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled. . . .

A key technique used in the Obama's 'digital switchboard':

permission structures - is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” provides:

• social proof (most people in your situation are now deciding to) 
• new information
• changed circumstances
• compromise

As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.” 

Later on we get this: 

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia, . . . 

Samual's essay names a bunch of people and books, some of whom I knew and some I didn't. I collected them all in a spreadsheet.

Note: The first time I opened the essay, all I got was a plain orange screen. There is supposed to be a giant image there, but for some reason it didn't load. Anyway, scroll down a bit and you will get to the text.

Disinformation Governance Board

Nina Jankowicz, Executive Director of Disinformation Governance Board

I don't know if this poster is serious or a parody. It's scary either way. There really is a Disinformation Governance Board, it was created last week, and Nina was chosen to head it.

Just what we need, another government bureau spewing more bullshit. That should help clear things up.

Orwell is my Prophet

Big Brother is Watching You

Kafka was my prophet, but it may be time to change my religion to Orwellianism. Jeffery A. Tucker at the Brownstone Institute clues us in:

It’s getting creepy how government policies are increasingly copying each other. It’s not unlike the final global equilibrium in Orwell’s 1984: three large states that are indistinguishable in despotic ambitions, constantly trading places to demonize the other and urge their citizens to do the same. There’s always a scapegoat. 

. . .

As we now look at the large world alliances — dominated by Russia, China, and the US and their respective allies — it is increasingly difficult to distinguish their policies in principle. There is a push in the US/NATO for a China-style social credit system. Russia uses brutal tactics for suppressing dissent that it copied from China. China copies the US system of industrial subsidies and fiscal and monetary stimulus. The US copies China in its lockdown strategy for virus mitigation. 

"Appropriate Audience"

Every wonder just what "Appropriate Audience" is supposed to mean? Quora has an answer. Evidently there are two flavors of trailers: Red and Green. Trailers with Green introductory messages are not going to have anything stronger than PG, while Red trailers can cross the line into PG-13 territory. Note that we are talking about the content of the trailers, not the content of the advertised movie.