Anybody else feel like Lemmy is like 60% Russian trolls lately?

China and Russia both

It isn’t funny. It’s exactly how Trump got into so much society power in the first place! “Mock mock mockery” behavior!

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/12/31/bbcs_adam_curtis_on_the_contradictory_vaudeville_of_post-modern_politics.html
On The “Contradictory Vaudeville” Of Post-Modern Politics
What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia…

NOTHING stops this, because people keep mocking back. And it isn’t just one single individual, Donald Trump, but multiple families (Rupert Murdoch, etc) and millions of people who believe QAnon / “Q” without there being any person, just a constant barrage of leadership icons mocking truth, mocking sincerity, mocking the Constitution, it is a media cult of ignorance! NOTHING STOPS IT! 10 years and 10 months of this!

Have you see examples of what memes were run by the IRA and CA?

You obviously are so well versed on /c/Politics that you don’t even know what Cambridge Analytica did to the population? Steve Bannon?

When presented with a citations, mocking is a typical symptom of the problem. Low-effort one-line junk responses to a total article.

It’s odd how many people think Fox News language behavior isn’t a concern.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/fox-news-trump-language-stelter-hoax/616309/

People so strung out on memes they chase any free sample feed, inclusive of Lemmy.

I don’t agree, other than the dogwhstle use of the phrase problem that is ongoing. But back to my point: there are reasons Cambridge Analytica and Surkov style meme warfare from the IRA go for this topic, because there WAS a transcendence in The Bible, there factually was The Enlightenment

People think we are living in Holocaust Denial… no, what Fox News, Alex Jones, and Trump present is described by Neil Postman… Enlightenment Denial is what killed good in the USA. www.Romans1132.com -James Joyce unraveled all these media mind games back when Edward Bernays was doing his thing!

Rudy Giuliani ‘may have been compromised’ by the Kremlin, and FBI leaders didn’t care

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.” - Carl Sagan, 1995

Problem is, I don’t think they have the desperation needed to convert that energy into action.

Once people start falling in love with fiction media, you get what humans have demonstrated in the Middle East. Constant chaos and nonsense arguing over anti-science story books and any leader can wave around the established symbols people were raised on in their childhood and garner a following - no matter how terrible the ideas are. Media itself is the cult of their chaos and they are conditioned to obey and flock when certain tone and style of media is presented to them (Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh - no matter how many times they are proven wrong, the tone itself is the signal).

It could be another outside media signal from anywhere, China or Russia, they still flock when it’s in a nonsensical style with aggression overtones. It is incredibly dangerous that they have fallen into this thinking.

I think it’s worse than that. I think they want to destroy democracy by constantly praising nonsense and chaos. They keep practicing chaos techniques and they have cultivated an extremely loyal audience who will willingly die spreading diseases, cheering on climate change, etc.

“Chaos and disruption, I later learned, are central tenets of Bannon’s animating ideology. Before catalyzing America’s dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instill chaos through society so that a new order could emerge. He was an avid reader of a computer scientist and armchair philosopher who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug, a hero of the alt-right who writes long-winded essays attacking democracy and virtually everything about how modern societies are ordered. Moldbug’s views on truth influenced Bannon, and what Cambridge Analytica would become. Moldbug has written that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth,” and Bannon embraced this. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” Moldbug writes, “to believe in nonsense is an unforgettable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.” ― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

I’d say the debate about using a strongly typed relational database and ORM is probably more of an impact on end-user turn around than typed language.

In the world of post-truth drama, it makes sense. Nothing turns around the loyalty he builds when he captures the hearts and minds of his voters. Even if he dies of a heart attack, people will still seek out the kind of attitude he has been iconic for. Eton Musk is 25 years younger, but seems to be following Trump as a behavior model of successful businessman icon.

Based on how they treated the top of medical science during the pandemic, I don’t think they want educated workers. They can travel to smarter places. They want trade skills, technology skills, not people educated in humanities. They believe in 25% business growth every year and it’s a unsustainable fantasy that was largely build off over-exploiting the earth and creating population booms.

What’s the endgame, here? We all know there isn’t one.

They’ve been telegraphing the end game since 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/vladimir-putin-conservative-icon/282572/

Trump is an icon of "You’re Fired!’ angry businessmen. They want a state where business is entirely unregulated and controls all aspects of life, company towns and states, no environmental protection rules, dog eat dog education system and weapons everywhere. Public execution or brazen lynching of non-conforming sexual identity / racial out-groups to cheer on. Freedom to discriminate and threaten people they don’t like.

DO YOU SPEAK FOX? How Donald Trump’s favorite news source became a language By Megan Garber

https://web.archive.org/web/20230322173652/https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/fox-news-trump-language-stelter-hoax/616309/

I suggest… translate to Fox News… and why the Fox News audience is reacting the way they are in an incredibly short period of time.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/fox-news-trump-language-stelter-hoax/616309/

DO YOU SPEAK FOX?
How Donald Trump’s favorite news source became a language
By Megan Garber

Rod Stewart wouldn’t translate into that meme mindset.

Yha, i take it that way, but invoking god still triggers a context, and flipping the meaning is often the outcome.

Anthony’s song is a variant of Springstein’s which criticizes the current festering plight of white rural and lower class American, yet again, as it highlights the wealth inequality which leaves many families struggling to survive.

I’n not sure Anthony’s new song holds up to Springsteen’s or even Billy Joel’s Allentown. Lyrics like: “Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds… taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”. Yha, and about that “god” they invoke, almost always that means Jesus - and Bible verse “1 John 3:17” says exactly the opposite of what Anthony is saying rich men’s taxes should go for.

“I mean, we are the melting pot of the world,” Mr Anthony told the interviewer in the video, “and that’s what makes us strong, is our diversity, and we need to learn to harness that and appreciate it, and not use it as a political tool to keep everyone separate from each other you know?” - except if you are a certain height or weight… he doesn’t offer help to a food-addicted person or all the marketing and advertising jingles and images that sell junk-food other than to say taxes should not serve you.

Don’t get caught up in echo chambers. Echo chambers are a really sneaky trap, since it’s very easy to feel like you’ve found ‘your people’. They are essentially online tribalism, and do not offer any insights outside of the main group’s paradigm.

Another approach is not to worry so much about the quantity of people, even an alone-echo chamber might be described as a public blog. Instead of focus on quantity, focus on quality. Hate, dehumanization, violence, evil, apathy towards suffering - all things to avoid. Mob Mentality is a real problem, the psychology of large crowds can be an even more dangerous thing.

When conformity enforcers overwhelm diversity generators, all of us are in trouble. Spartans–fundamentalists, militia groups, fascists, and ultra-nationalists–can freeze the machinery of collective mind. A shutdown of urban diversity devastates that exercise of collective acumen we call an economy. Christian Fundamentalism has been shown by the research of sociologists Alfred Darnell and Darren E. Sherkat to retard the learning of children raised within its grasp. Darnell and Sherkat sum up a common Fundamentalist attitude in the following words: “No schooling is better than secular schooling.” Then there’s the paralysis of thought which outright battle brings. When World War I erupted, Sigmund Freud was horrified by the sudden “narrow-mindedness shown by [even] the best intellects, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments.” Such closings of the mind may explain why authoritarians are prone to ignore it when their approaches flop. They often goose-step from one year to another rigidly glued to backfiring ways. - Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Chapter: The Kidnap of Mass Mind, Page 203-204, Howard Bloom

It’s interesting to investigate… but also more interesting to me are the scale of the numbers. “It was first uploaded on YouTube by RadioWV on August 9 and earned over 10 million views in less than a week and currently has over 1.2 million likes.”

YouTube: radiowv 355K subscribers 94 videos, that’s right now. It’s got 41 million views today… and most of the stuff on their channel seems a couple uploads a month going back years, many getting only 5000 views, some getting 1.1 million. To me, it would be pretty earth-shattering if Google’s view/like farming logic wasn’t top notch and they could let 41 million views happen in just a couple weeks… without detecting it / flagging it.

I think there is a rabid audience and they are casting out media content from all kinds of directions and feeding the flames of whatever takes off. It’s getting people into a frenzy that’s the goal. And we are 10 years since the tools of Cambridge Analytica were brought into their scope… Chasing trending and riding the coat-tails of media I think is a core strategy of their attempts to wrap themselves in voting success. Specacle.

Do you think that those technological tactics like we saw with Cambridge Analytica will reach a point of diminishing returns though?

No, not at all. This February 2017 story spells out the significance of what I think Cambridge Analytica was doing to people since 2013/14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/23/harvard-scientist-worries-were-reverting-to-a-pre-enlightenment-form-of-thinking/

Carl Sagan’s 1995 book, Demon Haunted World, spells out the fears he had about a future possibility of people favoring mocking and not taking science seriously. I think the pandemic was a demonstration of that, people didn’t even care that their friends and family would die, they would argue against basic facts.

I guess I’m wondering if there is a hard limit to how many hateful people you can realistically scrape together with lies

I’ve lived in the Middle East, and been through a Internet revolution back in late 2010 in Africa. The Taliban won recently, once people get favoring lies and mocking each other, it almost never comes back. What Cambridge Analytica unleashed wasn’t containable - it goes way beyond the individuals they target, it was incredibly powerful, it’s a kind of technique that wins debate with appeal to the worst parts of the human brain.

“And our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. There is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion.” - this was professionally trained psychologists/psychiatrists, this is weaponized against the flaws of the human brain after all human history learning. We may never recover and it be technique that just keeps getting applied until higher thinking is openly mocked. Like what you see in Cambodia during the Killing Fields years, but on a global scale. The Middle East has been in this cycle of fiction based hate over media content for well over a thousand years.