Information Warfare Education, Propaganda, and How to Tell the Difference

Town Square
1187

This looks like just another mainstream media outlet’s “pivot” in order to keep from going bankrupt. A disinformation campaign on their disinformation campaign if you will. We saw their UoChicago Disinformation Summit in order to spread Disinformation on their Disinformation with the usual talking heads spreading disinformation.

Whilst the moral outrage of all Hunter’s homemade hooker crack porn was good for a few chuckles, that’s well known fact. What’s of most interest is the timing of the media burying the stories before the election.
The PR schizazzle has no impact on Durham or Biden investigations but does give ideological Leftists something to hang on to, include an opportunity to active those motivational wonder powers of TDS that the Left has been using to self-justify low altitude thinking and actions.

Meanwhile the Right media reports every pivot of the Left, every tactic in great detail.
WSJ on the Disinformation Media Bias

Bloomberg displaying a perfect example of Project and Justify, Distract

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-14/cancel-culture-is-bipartisan-let-s-unite-to-fight-it?srnd=opinion

1188

Nice work. You’re adding much more resolution to the very low resolution Integral levels map.
I like also that you see the dynamic nature, ebb and flow if you will of development.

Perhaps this would be better explored on another site?

It’s at least deserving of a new thread out side of this messy “Disinformation” thread.

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1189

Getting back to the question of:

I think one lesson Teal can learn from the various Green movements as well as the current Amber is how important messaging is, in all it’s forms. Green movements that I know of essentially only “market” to those who “already know”. A lot of “preaching to the choir”, so those in the know … know. Those not in the know are excluded.
This seem to me to be an inheritance from Orange, the academics in their ivory towers who are certain they are correct, build walls to keep out the rabble, and discuss things in published journals. People who do not have credentials are excluded, and people who do not use accepted academic language with supporting documentation are ignored.
In contrast to this, Amber actively drills in messaging over and over and over and over and over. It could be the stupidest idea or thing a person could say, but they repeat it boldly until they themselves believe it. Facts don’t matter.

@corey-devos I think one challenge to the ILC is to recognize when Teal is relying too heavily on this Orange-Green exclusive communication paradigm that goes well over the head of those unfamiliar with 20th century Academic communication norms.
I think we have to distinguish between those who have dug their heels in and are holding onto Amber for dear life, and those who are tired of it and want something different, but find the works of Ken bogglingly over their head because it’s presented exclusively in Academese.
In contrast to this, I see many people who I consider 2nd Tier, and have great messaging to the masses but who probably have never heard of Ken. A few people I’ve been studying the past few years and deconstucting their methods: On the Waking Up side we have Sadhguru, who has absolutely amazing marketing that also expresses 2nd Tier in ways that anyone can understand. I don’t know how many people follow Sadhguru’s messaging, but I believe it’s in the millions. His message of “peace and well being” is easily understood by anyone at any level. On the Growing Up and Showing Up sides we have Tony Robbins, again an absolute master at bringing his message down to a level even those in Survival mode can understand - “better and better in all areas of your life”. WOW. simple. Then when he gets you in the door and in a suggestible state, he slips in 2nd Tier messaging that the way to a great life is contributing to others and constant personal growth. WOW again. Bait and switch. Come for the bait of more money or whatever and switch it up to contributing to the greater good. And he does it with 20,000 people at a time. That’s 20,000 people about 4 times a year. Absolutely amazing.
There are also others, but these two stand out as awesome examples to pick apart and model their methods.
At no time, never ever would either of these “join” unhealthy Amber in order to get the messaging through. That would not work. Nor do they describe things that are so high their audience can’t understand. They adjust their messaging to “funnel” in people with the bait of a healthy version of where they are currently.
I contrast this with Jordan Peterson, who joins in the negative Amber messaging and he and his audience tend to wallow there in anger, fear and dissatisfaction. “Green hurt me, so I’m going to fight Green”. This is not the way to go, IMO. He gains an audience, but both he and his audience are stuck and drawn more and more into a struggle with as @Michelle describes, “woke Amber”, but they are completely stuck because they unable to distinguish between Woke Amber and Woke Green, and are just against “Feminists”, for example, or “Nonbinary” identity in anyone.

There is quite a lot more to this, and dozens of other people to model as good or bad examples.

1190

Seems our “Jan 6th Insurrection and Attempt at Violent Overthrow of our Democracy” had a large percentage of FBI/ATF agents help make it all happen. Modus operandi is seemingly similar to the “White Supremacist Kidnapping Plot of Gov Witmer”.
Or Qanon is everywhere - like Oxygen or perhaps more like CO2.

1191

I think we already talked that topic into the ground months ago.
Why do you just post things we’ve already discussed when you have no intention to engage in genuine discussion of the things you post?

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1192

I actually fully agree with this, Ray. I am very much not an “academic”, although I am deeply fascinated by intellectual products such as Ken’s works, so this lands for me. It’s one of the reasons I’ve tried to focus on more “accessible” introductions to this work — something like “pop integral” maybe — that can use more friendly reference points to bring more people to these ideas. Which is what I was basically going for with my "Learn Integral By Watching Movies (And Playing Video Games) piece here:

The intellectual scaffolding that Integral brings is important, because it allows us to point to the actual data and methodologies that legitimize the ideas in the first place. It’s always good to show your math whenever someone asks to see it. But sitting just behind that math is a set of insights and heuristics that can often be astonishingly simple — a “simplicity on the other side of (a whole lot of) complexity”. I feel like a big part of my job is to take those second-simplicity insights and heuristics, and show how they can be used and applied to our own sense-making in an ongoing moment-to-moment way, in order to better illuminate the territory we are in.

But in order to do that, people need to be able to lean into the material without feeling overwhelmed or totally out of their depth, which is why you see me trying to describe stages using films rather than excerpts from academic journals (though I often do that too), and applying the integral model to things like Nine Inch Nails albums. Which may seem silly or maybe frivolous at first blush, but I can directly see/feel how the integral model enhances my enjoyment and appreciation of everything around me, and my hope is that by applying it to somewhat “ordinary” cultural artifacts such as these — artifacts that have themselves provided a ton of comfort and meaning for me personally — it can help role model how we can apply these ideas to literally any corner of our lives, our interests, our passions, etc., while building more bridges between the “ordinary” world and the integral world.

It’s not nearly enough to accomplish what I think you are asking for, but hopefully it’s a start. It’s what I can do from my own kosmic address, and maybe help invite more folks to do the same from theirs.

1193

Yeah, I think those are good examples of keeping the content but expressing it in a form that is approachable.
Especially the 15 min estimated read time, lol.

Myself personally I often get discouraged listening to something for more than an hour. I like content that is “tight” and doesn’t require a considerable part of my day unless that time is necessary to get the idea through.
But I also understand many people like more chatty audio or video content than I do.

1194

Yes, this is one of our big challenges, to be honest. Particularly with Ken — he doesn’t speak in sentences, he speaks in full chapters, and it can be very hard to pull short excerpts from his work.

I feel like this is a challenge I want to help solve for our members. We are already making excerpts available for all of our material, which are being used as “teasers” so non-members can preview our content. However, it’s possible that these excerpts would be useful for members as well, sort of a “Don’t have time? Watch this short clip” section.

One thing I have gotten better at, though, is breaking these long 2-3 hour discussions into “chapters” that are usually 20-30 minutes or so each, to help make our content feel less overwhelming. I did this for my recent Journalism in the Disinformation Age piece, for example, which hopefully makes our long-form content feel a bit less unwieldy.

Always trying to find ways to do it better, and this feedback helps, so thank you!

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1195

Thanks - I think your website as a whole is pretty tight though.

1196

Appreciated. And yet, it somehow always feels like we should be doing more. I often see messages from people who say they love what we do, but don’t have time to watch it all, and are therefore ending their membership. So I want to try to help minimize this sort of “content indigestion” however I can :slight_smile:

1197

I’m not an expert in marketing nor am I an expert communicator, lol.

But what I see for myself is the content I value and want to purchase or have purchased are offerings that clearly express how they would satisfy a need I had. If I (and I believe most people) feel something satisfies their basic need, then price is really not important. One side issue for me is time zones, lol.

I’m not familiar with the audience who likes the other kind of offerings, so I can’t really say what appeals to them. I suppose you have some market research or data regarding what people’s favorite content is and what their price point is for it. Maybe with that marketing data, organize the content according to audience type and their needs so that it’s easy for a person to connect to their preferred content type?

1198

I don’t want Michelle’s post to get cast adrift, as it’s quite good.

So if we’re talking about a Teal Leadership group, it only stays in power as long as they either have support/buy-in from the populace or they are able to exert tyrannical control. When decision making (power) is concentrated too tightly, eventually the torches and pitchforks come out and we see a French Revolution style change in structure (40,000 nobles, entourage killed). Or it takes the tyrannical path like a Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot to “clamp down” on the masses.

Any ideology that focuses solely on the top elite (cognitive, wealth, birth right, race, whatever) eventually triggers “bloody massacre” or perhaps a series of massacres.

Pull a “revolutions from 1850 to 1950” and you’ll see 100M’s of bloody victims.

In our very recent discussions in this thread, Ray and Corey are both ok with empowering a very small elite and by-passing the commoners, or perhaps even dis-empowering them through revocation of free speech, arms, property or freedom. In this case, it’s the cognitive elite and those that align with their political ideologies. All with the justification that the masses of “those people” are little but an abstract impediment to the progress towards an even more abstract visionary nirvana that’s only been presented in very low resolution - but trust us, we know best. Little high resolution articulation, no operational models, no bringing up (or even neutralizing) the various development stages, nor timelines for implementation of defined phases makes suspect the viability.

Each of these topics I see fitting into your segmentation as specific agendas. With 320M people, there will be a manageable, but likely larger set of sub-segments. And the segmentations will morph and shift over time, just as coalitions are created and dissolved. Your women’s rights vs trans rights is a perfect real time example of what the DEI industry calls the “Allies”. Does a Lesbian Latina have more in common with the straight Latino community or with the Trans whites? So voila the L’s and T’s split after multiple devastating volleyball matches. We also have the split between those that see reconciliation as healthy vs reparations as required, and vice versa.

Your framework is a pretty good start at creating a workable resolution model based on Integral Theory.

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1199

I’m not sure why you seem to prefer taking the least-charitable interpretations possible of what I say in these threads.

Nowhere did I say integral wants to “bypass the commoners” and I certainly never suggested revoking their “free speech, arms, property, or freedom.” It’s like you are constantly in debate mode, trying to point out how very wrong you think we are, as often as you can.

What I said, is that Integral Life is a very small media organization, staffed by three full-time people. And because we are a media-based organization, we create content around integral ideas, perspectives, and practices that will be attractive to others at roughly the same stage of their own development. Like I said, we take an inherently conservative approach here — we begin with the individual, and do our best to help them tune their instrument to the integral scale, so they can enact change locally within their own sphere of influence.

Which doesn’t mean we don’t also do outreach or support integral activities in the “real world”. We are about to launch an “integral initiatives” platform, for example, that tries to generate funding for any number of applications and structure-building. For example, we were recently contacted by a police chief who is trying to restructure his department according to integral principles, and we are going to try to help find the 4Q resources to support that endeavor.

So I really don’t think you need to worry about us seizing your property or freedoms any time soon.

1200

Michelle, I like your heuristic very much, and look forward to seeing you unpack and apply it in these threads as we go!

1201

Thank you for the encouragement. I’m still processing this way of looking at it.

I do think there is something you are pointing to that is significant, I just don’t quite have my finger on it. It’s maybe a question of what happens when developmental leadership ideals and society are too far apart, especially when we always have to start at square one.

I think this is what you are seeing with this comment

Ray and Corey are both ok with empowering a very small elite and by-passing the commoners

It’s like if you build a society that only a small group of 40 years olds may ever understand is that oppressive just in its construction?

Where I get democracy wasn’t developmentally accessible when it started to the masses either, it was at least possible for most people to achieve it. I think it’s a valid question “Is Integral as a stage of development viable as a social system as well, if it is, will it be the last?”. I think this may be why you are responding to my instincts towards refocusing on horizontal development. I think it may be why I’m drawn there too.

1202

@corey-devos , The framing on the Culture War seems fairly straight. Based on our multitude of dialogs, I’m in favor of our Liberal Democratic adaptive system. Meanwhile you’re more in favor of the continued expansion of powers of the Administative State experts to “steer the ship”. Of course we have a hybrid model.
I’m also vehemently adamant that the conveyor belt needs to bring every single person along.

Perhaps slightly overstating your position, but I don’t see nearly as much as you imply. See below.

Key here is you’ve essentially “judged” and “condemned”, in this case the “abosolutists” as you’ve defined them.
We also differ in that it seems you’re quite ok “plowing ahead” past psychoses baked into the various altitudes. “Onward Ho, Damn the Psychoses!” if you will.
Even if you’re using a biological evolution paradigm as basis for humanity turning into a Collective Hive, evolution was hardly a direct linear growth model. Lots of “set backs” and “re-evolutions” to get where we are today.

Maybe I’ve got too much experience in control systems and AI, but we never every get the optimal results along a linear path, and that’s with trivial complexities relative to humanity. The problem set is infinitely complex compared to the extremely low resolution model (4 quadrants, 8 zones). Also I see no comprehension of change-over-time or as Pinker would say “Progressiphobia”.
Religions - they’re tapped out Literal Mythic Ethnocentric = Amber. Always was, is now, and forever shall be static and essentially a block to progress.
Ideologies - “those people haven’t change much in millennia” - still Amber Chimps basing each others skulls in - and of course a block to the “True Path to Enlightment”.

Meanwhile Integralism might look like, sound like, taste like and get implemented just like Marxism directly aligning with Marcuse’s teachings, but oh no it’s “completely different” this time. How different are your views on having the state “explore sexuality and gender identity with young children” that different than the Marxist perv Foucault’s ideas? Oops - they may sound the same, but are completely different this time since I’m wallowing in the Pre/Trans fallacy, right? :slightly_smiling_face:

I do think the disconnect comes down to lack of understanding in our respective (and everyone’s really) frames of thinking. Your ideological frame if you will, just as with mine or Michelle’s or Ray’s personal frames.

1203

Bonus bit for the evening. Musk’s aren’t reported.

image

1204

Interesting inquiry. Perhaps it’s too far out, too great a frame shift, or perhaps someone’s scifi vision for humanity. Or perhaps simply not viable, implementable right now.

Good question. Let me ponder.

1205

Again, this feels like a deliberately uncharitable interpretation of what I say. I think you have placed me into a category you have in your head, and filter my comments for the pieces that you think fit into that category, and ignore the rest. Then you aren’t actually responding to what I say, but instead to whatever you believe that category represents.

It’s odd to me that you accuse me of supporting the “expanded powers of the administrative state” as though I support authoritarianism, while simultaneously defending the state’s restriction of freedom, privacy, and speech in schools and clinics. And even though I’ve laid out perfectly reasonable and integrally-informed compromises for issues like these, you ignore that and continue to throw accusations at me about what you think I believe.

And then again you willfully misinterpret my response to your question, what do I personally plan to do about all those amber wokists in order to “turn them green”. And I said, quite plainly, there is nothing I can do to “transform” them, because that’s not how development works, all I can personally do is filter absolutist takes out of my own sense-making, and push for deeper/wider frames that can prevent the discourse from lapsing back to amber in the first place.

How many times have I had to repeat this? “At any point in history, the political ideal is to let each stage be itself, and govern from the highest reasonably available at any given time.”

But you pretend that i say “I want to take away amber people’s speech, arms, property, and freedoms”. You’re not describing me, you’re describing whatever low-resolution caricature you have of me in your head. I honestly have no reason why you feel the need to be so antagonistic with me, post after post after post.

Such as when you say “How different are your views on having the state ‘explore sexuality and gender identity with young children’ that different than the Marxist perv Foucault’s ideas?”

Hey, you found an overwrought way to call me a “groomer”. Nice work. Of course, what I actually said is that I think it’s okay to tell kids that sometimes men can love other men, and sometimes women can love other women, since one out of 20 of those kids eventually will, and since many kids have two dads or two moms.

I’m not even going to get into your accusations that I have “progressiphobia” or the line of straw-men dominos you set up (none of which actually describe my views) because I think it’s almost a work of art and kind of speaks for itself.

This isn’t just willful misinterpretation, it’s starting to feel downright malicious. Get me out of your shadow.

“compared to the extremely low resolution model (4 quadrants, 8 zones)

If you think Ken’s work is so limited and low-resolution, I ask again, why are you spending so much time here?

1206

@FermentedAgave
You really just ignore what anyone writes, don’t you?

Show me anywhere I posted anything about Teal leading the United States, for example.

I did not.

I’ve said time and again - let America burn of its own Amber Red stupidity. My community doesn’t have any desire to even interact with you much less take responsibility for ruling over you.

Go ahead and chop off the heads of your woke amber enemies as they try to chop off yours. Go on - have at it lol. I’ll be loling from across an ocean.

And also - you completely miss the point about Putin and Ukraine. Putin had a similar mind as you - attack your neighbor who is at a higher stage of development than you. So thats my other point - a well armed Teal willing to kick your ass back to Russia or Arizona or wherever you hope to launch your backwards revolution from

You don’t realize it but the mainland United States is fast becoming a “shithole” country. Year by year More and more of it becomes “flyover country” not worth stopping at. Let me inform you that the “elite” have been buying property well South of Texas for decades, lol.

I myself have residency visa options both in the EU and also South America. And I’m nowhere near elite level. Thats just one of the benefits of not being ethnocentric. Go ahead and burn down your city and start that civil war. If you think you will get any elites at all you are severely delusional. Just woke Red against antiwoke Red. Have at it.