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

Town Square
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Yes definitely possible. This thread is a discussion on Info Warfare/Education/Propaganda but pulling out “positive stuff” likely requires us to be directive. And sadly most people when having their beliefs, positions, or ideologies in open discussion aren’t likely to be particularly “positive” about it :slight_smile:.

I enjoy your fresh perspectives @once3800 and wide open sharing on thoughts, feelings, perceptions, desires.

One thing that I think separates the Left and the Right, at least in the US is what quadrants each thinks needs most focus. Left seems to focus on all problems emanate from Exterior-Collective (social) creating injustices in Interior-Individual and Interior-Collective. Right seems to focus on limiting Exterior-Collective infringement on Interior-Individual, Interior-Collective spaces. Schachtenberg approaches from the Exterior-Collective systems view while Peterson I think definitely approaches from an Interior-Individual (e.g. you clean up your own room before worrying about her room) boundary concerns at Exterior-Individual.
I would speculate that each - Right, Left, Schmactenberg, Peterson, Harris, you, me - would perhaps not us the Integral Quadrants as is, but redraw as nested/overlapping circles of influence or importance.

At least in the US, Newspapers/Media are looking to grab your attention in order to sell advertisting primarily. Secondarily is to “report what is happening”.
I would say that for many - likely Conservatives - practicing virtue enables spirituality, spirituality enables virtue. How spiritual really is a non-virtuous guru, priest or adherent? Again if we look at type of lens, I think Left looks first and foremost for all causes/fixes in the external quadrants while Right looks first for internal causes/fixes.

LOL. Likely a question we are all asking ourselves :slight_smile: For myself Integral is an excellent intellectual mapping - one of many by the way - that fits very well with my thought processes. But I also don’t view Integral as being able to replace any of the other “structures” in my life - family, friends, neighborhood, community, religion, political affiliations, etc…
Maybe we listen to Integral for a new way to assess levels of development and understand how sociology, anthropology, history, politics, nationalism, globalism, collectivism, etc interact through an Integral Theory lens. But I think crucial we consider that IT is just that - 1 lens of many, 1 mapping of many that when viewed in relationship to all of the many other lens and maps is excellent in many domains, wholly insufficient in others, and flat out in error in some domains.

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I think this is, very simply the issue.
Honestly deep down most people want the same things.
Joy, safety, belongingness - things like that.
When these universal desires are corrupted by the people themselves or others to desire cheap substitutes is when things start to diverge and we get unhealthy manifestations and results.

It would be humorous if it wasn’t so sad that most people can’t even recognize their own basic needs anymore. Their need for belongingness corrupts into a need to attack those who are different and we get the reactionary postliberalsim. People’s need for safety gets corrupted into giving up power to tyrants. People’s need for joy gets corrupted into buying 1,000 toys at Christmas that only get a few days of use, and destroy our greater joy of a planet we can enjoy. And so on and so forth.

I actually think Integral Theory is used by some as a distraction. The need for assurance and awareness gets corrupted by a few into over-analyzing and infinitely trying to force a grand Theory to fit into their lives - rather than using the Theories as a tool just changing their outlook to create a life that makes sense.

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The smoking Gun:

Post-neoconservative media for half a decade has mostly been a hoax, and now one of the men in on the gag is coming clean.

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Great post on Hacker X. Good stuff @raybennett

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Great article. And brings us back to some fundamental questions – how do we navigate between the two extremes of total disinformation warfare on the one hand, and totalitarian censorship on the other?

Are both of these legitimate concerns? I think we see clear evidence for the former (dystopian disinformation). But while I think the latter is certainly a danger, I also note that there is more total “speech” today than ever before in history, from all possible political leanings and ideologies, despite our concerns with censorship and cancel culture. (I also know that a central strategy for any disinformation campaign would be to create a public perception that both they and their audience are victims of top-down “deep state” censorship.)

Is it okay to censor blatant disinformation?

If so, is it also okay to censor opinions that are based on and/or repeating this disinformation?

What do we do when our postmodern platforms have successfully deconstructed ALL information – whether factual, false, or manufactured – as “opinion”?

The big questions of our time.

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I think the knee-jerk reaction I was about to type would be “No, of course not.”

But then if I instead use “control the flow of information” instead of “censorship” it’s no longer a yes / no question. It’s inevitable and necessary for there to be some controls on the flow of information we receive. The question is in which quadrants we allow it. When I was a kid, 5 major publishing companies controlled the flow of information. They used specific systems, traditions, regulations and profit models to decide what was published and distributed and what was left on the cutting room floor.

Today it seems we are all individually responsible for controlling and processing a massive flood of information. In the best scenarios this is just too much for people to keep up on or make sense of, so they get overwhelmed. In more nefarious cases we have deliberate misinformation or use of “black hat” technology and psychology to deliberately manipulate masses of people to believe what the content creators know to be false.

I think what we need trusted aggregators who do filter out content according to rules they define. So rather than dictating to facebook that they have to publish everyone’s views equally, we need more variety in social media who can be protected from the predations and takeovers of the big names.

Market forces may be moving in that direction. Most people I know don’t like facebook, but remain essentially because of the lack of alternatives. There was a period of time when there were more community level social media, but they were taken over by behemoths and disappeared. But I wonder if it’s time for their resurgence? Do people have more desire now to congregate around more socially restricted social media?

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Education or Proaganda?

Hemingway has a very good journalistic reputation in conservative sphere, as does The Federalist.

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It is worth noting The Federalist’s ranking on mediabiasfactcheck.com:

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Not much room left for whackos but just enough for your fav to have a spot.

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And would be interested to find a single non-fact in anything PragerU publishes.

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CNN’s Chief Medical Guru Sanjay Gupta on Joe Rogan’s show

Two points to highlight (out of I’m sure are many) before the fundamental “framing” issue. For the “Right” it is about individual rights, hence the Anti Mandate stance. For the Left it’s about “Greater Good” to the point of Authoritarianism.

  • CNN waged a smear campaign on both Ivermectin and Joe Rogan (linked here), as well as Anti Mandaters.
  • In Dr. Gupta’s response (linked here), we only see a single use of the term “mandate” in the entirety of his response completely ignoring the primary concern of those he’s trying to “convince”.
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Which amendment in the constitution gives the right to put public health and safety at risk? Is it in the back somewhere?

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If you see this as a left vs right issue to politicize as a reason to dislike the left, you are 100% part of the problem.

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Actual Republican stance on vaccines:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24474883
“Simple, Easy, and Intelligible”: Republican Political Ideology and the Implementation of Vaccination in the Early Republic

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Once upon a time in Missouri: Republican attorney general backed mandatory vaccination

During a 1921 smallpox outbreak in Kansas City, the state health board required vaccine passports to board trains

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If it were Ebola or Black Death that you were referencing, I’d fully agree. But I assume that you’re context is Covid. Covid has an IFR (infected fatality rate) of less than 1%. It is most lethal to people over 65 years old, who have pre-existing conditions. Maybe we might “more or less” agree up to this point… you know, the anthropocentric, humans-r-speshul obsession with saving human lives, and all that (to hell with the rest of God’s creation) :wink: Yes, the saving of lives has a place, and is justified… however, how much freedom do we want to give up in the pursuit of this honorable objective? And are we causing more harm than good?

The real evil is in requiring children to be immunized, because we are denying them, and our future generations, superior natural immunity, as opposed to the various “gene therapies” that require periodic booster-shots.

I’d rather take my chances with real covid, satisfied in the knowledge that the natural immunity that I acquire will be more robust and more adaptive to mutations than the therapies that rely on specific technologies targeting narrow ranges of genetic/molecular attributes. I’m not a medical expert, but it seems to me that we’ve moved away from Edward Jenner’s robust vaccination methodology towards a tinkering with genetic technologies that I do not find re-assuring. To see what I’m getting at, see link here.

My “constitutional” approach to pandemics is therefore minimalist. Natural immunity is better and more robust. Unless its IFR is significant, just leave it run its natural course, and allow our bodies to do what nature intended.

Yes, the elderly are at risk… but let us put this into perspective… as mostly retirees, they are in the best position to self-isolate if it worries them. Remember the old days, when we used to send off young, productive men, with their whole lives ahead of them, to die in wars, scarcely batting an eyelid? I guess we don’t like it now as our own demographics approach retirement. What’s with that?

My concerns summarized in a tweet a couple of weeks ago:

What bothers me:

  1. Covid is no more lethal to kids than the common flu;
  2. Kids are denied the more effective natural immunity that they can take with them into adulthood;
  3. Kids have their whole lives ahead of them. Those most vulnerable are 65+.

This covid hysteria is wicked.

BTW, I think I’ve caught covid, very early on when they didn’t know much about it. And despite my own pre-existing condition, it was such a nothing-burger that I can’t even be sure that I’ve had it. I took a blood test a year later, but they said that after a year, the antibodies are no longer detectable, hence my negative result. Either way, I’ve continued to “subject myself” to “dangerous” situations with people coughing and sneezing, and still, nothing (except the occasional rhinovirus sneezes and coughs… or maybe covid, who knows, who cares?).

TO SUMMARIZE

Which amendment in the constitution gives the right to put public health and safety at risk? Is it in the back somewhere?

What is the greater threat to public health and safety? Meddling? Or not meddling? While the IFR is so low, I think that the minimalist, not-meddling route is the more appropriate action to take.

Mine is not a politicized view. It is an independent assessment of how I see things.

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No doubt, disinformation on the part of Team Trump exists, and in the absence of further information, we’ll take the Left at their word as to the extent of it.

Of these two poles (disinformation vs censorship), there exists a third wing of dysfunction. Aren’t the do-whatever-it-takes Democrats also immersed in their own massive disinformation campaign? There’s the ridiculous, desperate impeachment circus by Pelosi, Schumer and the rest of the Schiff-show. What about the Hunter Biden laptop scandal that is simply not being talked about? What about the violent riots by BLM, Antifa, etc, that resulted in business bankruptcies and police stand-downs that were sanctioned by political elites, and what about the media portrayal of the riots as “peaceful protest”? Doesn’t refusal to confront the hard truths amount to the exact same thing as lying? Lying by omission is still lying. Doesn’t deliberate refusal to openly address truths, such as the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, also amount to disinformation?

And in having now invited myself into this thread on “Hacker X” and the disinformation-vs-censorship debate, perhaps I am now better able to answer my own question. The Left might not be involved in an openly orchestrated disinformation campaign as they define it, á la Team Trump. But what they, the do-whatever-it-takes party, are involved in, is sending a clear message to their troops on the ground as to what’s expected of them. BLM, Antifa et al are not free agents doing their own thing; they are an expression of the Democrats’ narrative and agenda. They are the Democrats’ brown-shirts. It’s a culture thing. Instead of distancing themselves from the violent riots, the Democrats are, in effect, endorsing them. A toxic culture of corruption, cynicism, loathing and decay. That’s the third wing that seems to be being omitted in this thread.

The way I see it, there’s a bigger problem with the Democrats than simply censorship and lying by omission. They are involved, over this brief moment in history, in the dismantling of a system that took centuries to develop. Taken together, the Democrats’ toxic whatever-it-takes culture and BigTech censorship are by far the greater threat to the future of the US. They control the cultural narrative. It may not be defined as “disinformation”, but the Democrats’ impact on culture is the more destructive. It’s the culture, stoopid. The disinformation campaign of a languishing, incompetent, buffoonish Right pales by comparison… ducking for cover out of fear of being called mean names, their only impact on culture is to inspire cowardice.

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I’ve see little evidence that democrats support the occasions of violence we saw during BLM. I think this perception comes from the frame that the BLM protests were themselves inherently violent across the board, which thankfully they were not (only a single-digit percentage of violence occurred during these protests).

To me, saying “BLM is a violent movement” is like saying “13 percent of the population (black people) are responsible for 50% of the murders.” Well, no, more like .001% are responsible for those murders, and the remaining 12.99% of people should not be expected to carry that blame.

There may, however, be some Democratic leaders who understand what JFK meant by “those who make revolution impossible will make violence inevitable”. Which is not at all condoning violence, but simply understanding that the possibility for violence increases as our system’s ability to change decreases.

That said, I certainly do wish that more leadership was able to emerge from within BLM to better separate themselves from that violence, and to reassert the frame of nonviolent resistance. We’ve never needed a new MLK-style leader more than we do now.

That said, yes, Dems are absolutely engaged in their own disinfo/propaganda campaigns. Politics is itself the art of being (skillfully) partial, and the economic selection pressures in our politics virtually guarantees that this will continue. However, there is clearly a line between commonly duplicitous political triangulation, which is expected, and full-tilt manufacturing of deliberately fake news. It’s the difference between only telling one side of a story, versus making up a completely false story and spreading it as widely as possible. And the problem is, here in social media land, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell one from the other.

As for Hunter Biden’s laptop, I still have not heard anyone tell me why it’s relevant. He doesn’t have a government position, unlike Trump’s purely nepotistic appointments.

I think it’s always a good idea to address the dysfunction that infects all sides in our political systems, but without falling into false-equivalence, both-sidesism, and golden mean fallacies (“the truth must lie exactly 50% between two opposing parties”).

@steljarkos if you could think of one system-tweak that would help reduce this dysfunction, what would it be?

For me it would be overturning Citizen’s United, creating mandatory public election funds, and enforcing radical transparency into the financial dealings of both candidates and elected leaders. The idea that a single billionaire lobbyist can buy off a politician or even an entire party for pennies on the dollar is absolutely ludicrous to me.

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I wouldn’t call what’s required a tweak. I’d call it a complete, sweeping reset. Beginning with getting our life science paradigm right.

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@raybennett

I think the knee-jerk reaction I was about to type would be “No, of course not.”

But then if I instead use “control the flow of information” instead of “censorship” it’s no longer a yes / no question. It’s inevitable and necessary for there to be some controls on the flow of information we receive.

Well said, I largely agree. Funny though, my own knee jerk reaction was “of course it’s okay to censor deliberate misinformation” — but then again, I am wearing a particular hat when I say that. I would happily censor disinformation within this small community, if someone was purposely trying to hijack the space in order to spread propaganda. But I also acknowledge that platforms like Google and Facebook are a completely different scale, and these things don’t always scale so well.

To me, the third way between total disinformation and total censorship looks something like “curation”, which used to be the primary enfoldment mechanism of our media before social media emerged. How do we get back to that, when information has been so decentralized and virtually everyone around us is trapped in their own spinning antmills? I’m not sure we can, at least not until the next informational breakthrough comes along, and I don’t think any of us know what that looks like.

For Google though, the path forward seems pretty clear to me — don’t remove information from places like YouTube, but demonetize them instead. Take away the financial incentives around spreading disinformation, and improve the YouTube algorithms so that instead of the “suggested videos” being a rabbit hole, they become an epistemic ladder to help people climb out of broken and partial views. Folks have the right to exercise their voice, but they don’t have a right to capitalize on their voice using Google’s platform.

At least that looks a bit more like “curation” than “censorship”, from my seat anyway.

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I wonder what sort of calamitous events would have to occur in order to knock us back to the drawing board!

This is when I get hopeful about Ken’s “10% tipping point” idea – that once a more integral “life science paradigm” emerges for a certain threshold of people, that quickly begins to saturate down into our politics, media, culture, etc. I think we are seeing all the right life conditions for this sort of thing to occur — the increasing pathology of power at every stage of the spiral, the total deconstruction of “truth” and shared epistemological reality between us, the increasing violence at the fault lines of the culture wars, etc. But something tells me that, based on how power and information move in the 21st century, it’s going to require a bit more than 10% of us for that to happen.

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I found this form quite a sharp way to cut through the politics of the Covid Vaccines with some sobering considerations for employers.