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

Town Square
924

I think the vast majority of people who participated in the BLM protests were conscientious people with good intent. Just like the civil rights era, most of the protests were in fact peaceful, but the violence that did exist on the margins was hyperbolized by their political opponents (“burning down our cities! etc.) They did the same thing to MLK at the time.

I also think the BLM movement produced some important fruit, however. For the first time in a long time, “bad apple” police officers are being held accountable for recorded abuses, and more attention is being paid to holding these amber-based LEOs accountable to orange standards of justice.

I also think that a lack of real distributed leadership on the left allowed the movement to be gamed by deluded culture warriors with very painfully partial views of reality. Similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement (though they suffered from a total vacuum of leadership) as well as the Tea Party before it (which was largely astroturfed by oligarchs like the Koch brothers). I think that every genuine social movement, on both the right and the left, are vulnerable to this sort of ideological hijacking.

My opinion of wokism continues to be — important mature-green considerations from Zone 7 (which fly over most people’s heads) combined with amber-stage absolutism in Zone 3 (an authoritarian attempt to control how we discuss and interpret reality). I like the high-green zone 7 stuff, and want to integrate that. I don’t like the low-amber zone 3 stuff, and want to negate that.

925

Just to be clear — I do not see you as being “close” to the fringe element, I simply saw you as being in denial that this fringe element exists in the first place. This is largely because, in our discussions about things like Trump’s plot to overthrow election results, it felt to me like you were either making excuses for it (“he’s just exploring his options!”) or were trying to rationalize it (“a lot of people really do feel like the election was stolen” — but not accounting for the fact that one of the main reasons so many believed it was because Trump himself kept repeating the lie.) So I was hoping for a deeper reflection from you, one that could say “I think the left has all sorts of problems, both real and “optical”, but yeah I can admit that January 6 was very bad and made my team look horrible.”

Because here’s the thing — the only reason we would be hesitant to criticize our own preferred parties, is because we are participating with an amber rule set that says “hold the line, never apologize, always double down”. And that is true regardless of whether we are on the left, or the right.

Here in integral land, my hope is that we can better appreciate the fundamental polarities at play here, recognize those aspects of our identity that is overly wrapped up in these social holons, and allow ourselves to criticize those social holons we feel more allegiance to. I think we are now well on our way to having that sort of conversation!

I am grateful that our discussion seems to have taken a turn here :slight_smile:

926

In other news, the latest from the right-leaning Bulwark. I’m hoping that worldcentric individuals can at least partially agree, regardless of political affiliation.

https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/the-west-is-winning-russia-is-losing

927

I see this as where the vast majority is - I don’t think that the vast majority of Americans are White Supremacists or Support Russia defeating the USA, but I do think that the vast majority are in denial about the people in their group trying to drive policy exactly that way. Not just Trump but a whole bunch of radio and TV personalities and gutter press. I’m glad to see someone on FOX news finally drawing a line, btw against a guest vocally supporting Russia.
On the other hand, I feel like the vast majority of the population does not give BLM the same leeway as they do the Jan 6 insurrection, for example - or Kyle Rittenhouse, for example.

And I see the consequences of allowing the far right to pursue it’s agenda as far more terrible than allowing the far left agenda. I see @FermentedAgave 's point about stacking the Supreme Court as a symptom of this problem. With Biden in office I feel secure that the USA will still exist in 2024 and if defeated in an election, he will hand over the office. Al Gore did a similar thing 20 years ago. He gave up the fight for the sake of the country as a whole. But if Republicans and specifically Trump win in 2024, I see a further deterioration of Democracy not just in the USA, but also globally and an emboldening of totalitarian leaders that may just toss out elections when they lose.

928

I will refer to the 4th Turning and my opinion is that we have just this week exited “unravelling” and entered “crisis”. My theory is that increased lifespans have somewhat delayed the 80 year cycle, as older generations hold onto power longer.

929

@raybennett It’s interesting, I’ve often heard it framed in terms of 40-year spans. We had about 40 years of Keynesian economics, and now 42 years of neoliberal economics, and today we’re still paradigm-shopping as we watch neoliberalism crash around us. Problem is, that neoliberal era produced massive unprecedented concentrations of wealth, which is now in turn preventing new forms of social self-organization from emerging. Which is why Robb Smith likes to call it “a time between eras”.

930

That’s great to hear. I do seem to remember little kerfuffles put up by Gore and Hillary. I guess Epstein payed the ultimate price.
But guess with a Geatz or Schiff we will let the courts sort things out.

Ideological hijacking might equate to Radicalized perhaps? Just curious how the technical terms work.
What’s interesting is you don’t state the “even a few is too many” regarding Radicalized Leftists.
But let’s not split hairs - I agree even a few is too many. Gotta fix that.

I might be off here, but aren’t you yourself all in on Zone 3 low-Amber with respect to election integrity and pre-judging the accused such as Gaetz? Cancelling millions’ concerns sounds like a dominance low altitude game to play.
Trump might have been out of line. But since when did we “transcend” basic accountability, basic integrity?The Apparatchik can audit you or me or Conservative PACs without reason or question, yet the voters in Maricopa County don’t deserve an audit with significant irregularities.

You really want everyone to “snap into line” by rationalizing discounting of their opinions, concerns and beliefs. This mentality might work with serfs in Russia or China, but it’s not flying here in the US. But then again accountability is a foundation of the US system that oft is trampled.

Did Trump run scenarios on stopping the Election certification? Yes. Did he not step down and hand over the keys to the kingdom just like every President before him?
President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer are the most powerful humans on the planet right now.

The Leftist fixation on “crushing anyone’s concerns” is highly Regressive, perhaps Zone 3 Amber as Corey might say.
The beauty of our 1st Amendment is that “you cant do that” and the Wisdom is that the voting Citizens will hash out what the deem appropriate in the public commons.
Do you really think you are so special, so much wiser than your 300M fellow citizens to “decide for them” what’s best? Come on. You know you’re 10# of manure in a 5# bag just like the idiot that lives next door.

You’re not alone in this thinking. Corey doesn’t understand the Republican platform nor Trumps either, which is not as you describe.

931

Corey, none of us had all the facts about Putin’s strategy and intentions before the invasion. Tucker Carlson’s original take on Putin, given the information that was available at the time, was perfectly reasonable. And given the more recent information that has become available, Tucker’s revision continues to be perfectly reasonable; though you are certainly entitled to disagree with him. It’s ok to change your mind, in light of new evidence. It’s what mature people do. Disparaging a change of mind as a sign of weakness is not a rational conclusion. Tucker is not secretly harboring any admiration for Putin the totalitarian at all, never did. Lest there remain any doubt:

932

Fitting that Dementia Joe carries the assisted living dementia patients isolated from their families due to government mandated lock downs demographic. Isn’t it awesome that someone took the time and effort to insure that they were able to vote, without their legal care takers involvement.

Dementia Joe won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes. There were 90,000 isolated assisted living residents in Wisconsin during the 2020 election.

Better stop anyone from looking into this. That would be “insurrection” and an assault on our Democracy by White Supremacists, QAnon Conspiracy Theorists, and concerned Wisconsin citizens. :wink:

[Seems the video has been removed. I’ll repost if it shows up on one of the disinformation platforms. :wink:]

Some background information from NPR:

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As @corey-devos would say, “don’t judge the Wisconsin Special Council report by platform publisher”. Google Tube threw a curveball but Rumble has the readout posted.

https://rumble.com/vw66gv-wisconsin-special-counsel-implicates-david-plouffe-and-erics-david-becker-i.html

933

Here is the problem, which I think in this forum is represented by @FermentedAgave - the Right far too often goes off half cocked on insufficient facts.
That’s one thing.
It’s an entirely different level to go off half cocked on insufficient facts and ATTACK the integrity of those who disagree. Yet, we see this time and time again in discussions with @FermentedAgave, who I see as fairly representative of the demographic. Time and time again, @FermentedAgave has been completely wrong, and while he was completely wrong has attacked @corey-devos and myself and accused us of all kinds of things. Also while he is completely wrong, he attacks the entire ILC community as being Marxist communal whatever blah blah blah. And also at the same time, he attacks anyone not following his constantly wrong messaging as … well, look above.

Again, this is representative behavior of a demographic group, not just him. I heard it from a raving homeless man on the bus las night. Same thing - for some reason Biden caused Russia to invade and Trump would have prevented it. It’s kind of eye opening to hear the same messaging of @FermentedAgave come from a delirious drunk homeless man at the back of the bus in Honolulu.

On a national scale I see this goes back to the lie about weapons of mass destruction. That was the first time an entire party’s primary messaging had been to be a complete and utter fabrication. But there was zero accountability for it. Over the years since I have seen the far right be caught in lies time and time again. 90% of the time they deflect, redirect and spin, and occasionally we will get an admission, as you showed with Tucker Carlson. But there is never any real accountability, and their viewers swallow the next deception hook, line and sinker. Again, as we see with @FermentedAgave in the previous post - just move on to the next topic and completely forget that he has been so wrong and the media he tracks has also been wo wrong so many times that it’s not even worth talking to him.

Here are some points:
It’s one thing to be wrong, but a completely different thing to attack those who are right
It’s one thing to be wrong, but another thing to enable the actors acting “wrongly” time and again
It’s one thing to be wrong, but another thing to be constantly wrong because the very foundation is wrong, and everything that comes from that source is tainted with a wrongness.

I can add more, but hopefully that shows my point.

@FermentedAgave Yeah, I see you are a hopeless case. I’m pretty tired of talking to someone who is so completely wrong time and time again and doesn’t even want to look inward to see if there is a trend going on there. I’ll let @corey-devos try to save you or whatever he’s doing. For myself, my practice in these discussions was to track my own internal emotions while engaged in a heated debate, and I’ve done that for several months now and I can now really 100% say that the only emotion I get when discussing with you is sadness that so many people in the country are - yes - morons. I can’t help you - you have to learn how to swim or drown in your own madness. Good luck.

934

Thanks so much @raybennett for taking the time to cover so much ground while tracking your own internal emotions so well.

I had not been diagnosed with dementia, until in your wisdom you detected and diagnosed. Now I see just how misguided and uninformed I am. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Hang in there Ray. Love you brother!!

Now I’ve got to get back to finding my Big Red Button of Mass Destruction…

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935

You’re welcome and good luck.

936

AOC isn’t buying McCarthy’s admonishment. Shocking coincidence @corey-devos with our most recent discussion.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) didn’t buy House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) criticism of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz) for speaking at a white nationalist America First Political Action Conference over the weekend.

McCarthy’s claim there was “no place in our party for any of this” rang hollow for Ocasio-Cortez, who slammed the House GOP leader for “protecting his little KKK Caucus for years” with “toothless” statements.

937

State of the Union

  • viola science dictates it will look better on film with no Mask mandates day before SOTU. Leadership…
  • US today every day is importing 500K barrels of oil at $60M from Russia
  • Democrats have halted all oil leasing in US
  • Justice Barrett punches Sec of State Blink first Blinken
  • Rep Greene, Gaetz, Brobueck, and Cawthorn give each other a Hiel Hilter salute
  • Veep Harris proves her Woketastic grasp of global affairs and foreign diplomacy
  • now for the POTUS…

Great speech! Knocked it out of the park. Very honest and authentic.
He used Project Veritas’ Facebook mole. Wonder if he got her contact info from the Diary raid.
Looking fwd to Dave’s fact checking.

938

Hahahahaha !!!
I’m just laughing today at how stupid Trump’s lawyer is.
I never do or counsel anything illegal, of course - and even gray areas of the law (and there are a lot in my line of work) - I NEVER put in writing. Anything that might possibly be construed as a gray area is only spoken - and then I follow up with an official wording in writing that outlines the exact position that is 100% legal.

So it’s absolutely hilarious to me that Trump’s lawyer wrote to another party’s lawyer requesting him to do something illegal - and put it in writing!
Hahhahahaha!!!
This is even stupider because of the antagonistic relationship between Trump and Pence from day 1 of Trump’s Presidency.

Regardless of political stance on any topic - just the idea that the Republican Party is controlled by people who are so incompetent and stupid makes it impossible for me to support them - even if I agreed with them.
The only thing worse than a criminal is a bungling, incompetent keystone cops criminal who can bring the entire organization down with him.

In one email to Pence’s lawyer, Eastman wrote: “I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act to adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations into non-existent voter fraud.

Oh, wait, wait, wait … let me put the standard response from the Right:

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939

Moving the discussion over from the Ukraine thread to this one.

@FermentedAgave I am deleting your most recent comment in that thread, since you made it after I requested we move the discussion over here. But have it preserved below. Feel free to copy/paste and repost yourself to this thread if you like.

…

FermentedAgave said:

I’m curious how far you’d be willing to take your argument. So you think it is OK for legislators in Missouri to make abortions for ectopic pregnancies illegal — which guarantees that women who suffer ectopic pregnancies (1 in 50 of all pregnancies) will die on the table, because there is no other medical intervention for this — because that is the “will of the people”. You believe that is within the a state’s rights for self-determination.

I didn’t realize this had passed into law. Or did some religious whack job propose a bill that’s set off a flash bomb of OMG outrage in Leftist circles.

I’m a bit surprised the wailing over the Texas 6 week ban has gotten more pitched. Seems that one has made a full tour of court rulings.

corey-devos:

So what if the “will of the people” wants to, say, make it illegal for democratic voters to own property in Alabama? Or for stores to refuse business to any/all gay people, where states can create a vigilante snitch system where neighbors can report each other for being gay? Or for teachers in a school to out gay students to family members? Hey, it’s all “the will of the people”, right?

Are these all hypotheticals, or current real world examples?
Many if not all would likely be deemed unconstitutional, as you well know. You know that we do have our three branches of government at both Federal and State levels by design. Designed specifically to stem tyranny of the majority among several things.

Again, get in there and be the change. The gal from Austin was looking for a community. She might be the difference you are looking for.

On A14. I just read the text and don’t find any mention of abortions. I know the VP “claimed” abortion was a Constitutional Right but most legal scholars disagree with Kamala the esquire.
Given that anyone born of American parents or born in US, would it make sense to extend A14 to any “viable” American, or even as a “human” right?

Perhaps if you dusted off a scathing critique of our current majority leadership, with full Integral bells and whistles it might open something up for all of the Integral community.
You know, get Integral dirty and honestly expose the dark underbelly to light.

I think it’s a tough slog for the IT community. Ken might be the only Trans/Meta/Neo Political guru in the bunch and even he swips up… Everyone else IS extremely political which taints the purity of the Trans/Neo/Meta claims.

940

So far, the ectopic pregnancies piece is a proposed bill. The Idaho bill, however, which allows the family of rapists to sue medical providers for terminating pregnancies that resulted from the rape, is headed to the governor’s desk to sign.

On A14. I just read the text and don’t find any mention of abortions.

You’re being disingenuous here. As you say, we have an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. The 14A was passed by the legislative branch, and enacted by the executive branch. The judicial branch determines how to interpret the amendment. The Roe vs. Wade precedent was grounded in the right to privacy afforded by due process in the 14th amendment, until activist judges were assigned to the SC to undermine that precedent.

I know the VP “claimed” abortion was a Constitutional Right but most legal scholars disagree with Kamala the esquire.

Really? “Most” of them? Have any actual data here, or is that just a hunch? I’ll be happy to look at it if you do.

Notice that the 14th amendment also makes no mention of “interracial marriages” either, and yet the Supreme Court determined that the 14A should be interpreted in such a way that bans on interracial marriages are illegal.

Many if not all would likely be deemed unconstitutional, as you well know.

Maybe? Being a democratic voter is not a “protected class”, so who knows. I would have figured “vigilante justice” would also be unconstitutional, yet for some reason the GOP-rigged SC decided not to take that up at all. And chances are those decisions would also be grounded in the 14th amendment, despite not including words like “homosexual” anywhere in its text. And of course, it took a pretty big push from progressives in order for us to begin considering LGBTQ as a protected class. Hell, even Biden got on that page before Obama did.

Also, here’s one spicy part of the 14A you may have noticed:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

I wonder if trying to illegally force your VP to overthrow a democratic election qualifies! Remember, even Mitch McConnell himself says it was a legitimate attempt at insurrection (his word, not only mine) and that Trump holds the majority of the blame here :wink:

Everyone else IS extremely political which taints the purity of the Trans/Neo/Meta claims.

It’s comments like these that make me feel like you are intentionally trolling us. There is only one single person in this community space who consistently disrupts these conversations in order to twist them into narrow, partisan, anti-left diatribes. Only one person who seems to be 100% committed to their own ideology, and hostile to other points of view. It happens to be the same person who has made significantly more comments in this community than any other. As far as I can tell, everyone else is trying to have a genuine post-ideological conversation, but somehow we keep ending up right here again. I wonder why that is?

941

Ok. So some moral outrage regarding Idaho is relevant but ignoring the sanctity of life will some day be viewed with same horror as slavery. Let’s see if the wheels of Missouri s legislative process work before freaking out. Fwiw it’s batshit cra-cra to ban fallopian tube pregnancies, at least in my opinion.
So this proves what? There’s a State Legislature Rep that’s cra-cra?
I’d focus more on all legal recourse seemingly exhausted on Texas 6 week limitation. That’s pretty draconian.

So is the Constitution and our laws living and breathing, adaptable to changing morals, beliefs, altitudes or not? I would think Realtivists to demand changability.
Claiming I am dienginious is simply a win lose tactic and hardly fair play debate.

Well guess that’s for our “activist” SCOTUS to decide.

Guess that’s the rub when the “facts” look like a mostly peaceful gathering followed by a political assasination attempt to one man and a “violent insurrection and rebellion” to another. Legislative branch and courts will sort that one out for us. It’s looking like a well balanced mono-party affair so far. Sounds like wheels of justice turning right?

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I am one of what 6 or so posters total on IL. During my siesta if not mistaken there were several “questionings of the orthodoxy”. Your lens has it the anything questioning of this orthodoxy is narrow. I don’t post in the vast majority of threads hoping that someone might help weave a discussion with you.

We are back in the well contained and longest in IL history Propaganda thread so no worries on twisting the Ukraine discussion into the 2nd tier nature of abortions any longer.

942

https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-myth-of-online-misinformation/

943

From the Conservative Echo Chamber - A Pulitzer Prize winning NYT reporter on Jan 6th lays out what it was like to be there and how NYT architected their Jan 6th Misinformation Campaign.