If there's one thing I've learned from technology, it's that people put way too much faith in technology
People want to believe that the tech is good enough to build this advertising simulacrum the guy in the video refers to. It's all a fantasy
People want to believe that govt and big tech are this omniscient, monolithic entity. If that was actually the case then how do they not catch whistleblowers who leave trails of evidence months before leaking?
Anyone who talks about tech like it's some kind of deity clearly shouldn't be talking about it, or at least only for the sake of marketing
> People want to believe that govt and big tech are this omniscient, monolithic entity. If that was actually the case then how do they not catch whistleblowers who leave trails of evidence months before leaking?
Power. Cowardice. People saying "it's all fine" because they don't want to live in a world where the only reason they're not in fear or pain is because they kissed the ring. It would not reflect well on them, so they choose to view it differently.
If the above is possible, why wouldn't it be possible where the stakes and capabilities are orders of magnitude higher?
Plus, the problem isn't to so much to keep anything "secret". Usually it's enough to offer another view point aligned with power, that people can flock to out of cowardice and/or as a token of allegiance.
We all know who Assange is, we know that he was hounded and tortured for calling attention to war crimes. So? Nothing happened to anyone responsible, and at best Assange might be free, one day. Similar for Snowden. So yeah, why wouldn't people just blow whistles all the time, right?
And come to think of it nobody -- that is, none of the power centers, all sorts of "sides" in all sorts of conflicts -- can stand honesty. They may disagree on the lies they want to push instead, but they all agree that the truth is not an option, knowingly or not. No need to plan anything, they can just go by smell and instinct and they'll work together to persecute people with integrity without even realizing they're doing it. "Omniscience" in this context certainly doesn't include being aware of oneself, it's more like a stalker who knows every little detail about the life of their victim, but has no clue that they themselves have a massive problem.
"It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us."
The problem with Curtis' "weirdos" theory is that it discounts the existence of the weirdos themselves. The weirdos exist and other weirdos know (better than anyone) that other weirdos exist. So they have to deal with a world of weirdos. They need to enter that reality. Which in doing they also do perpetuate. But it's nonsense to imply that it is just imposed on us and could somehow be dispensed with. It has to exist and in existing it has to be dealt with.
The "Team America" theory of dicks, pussies and assholes? I flat out don't buy it. It's not like Assange and Snowden are just such mean fuckers out to harm the poor American public that you have to fight dirty to combat them -- even though you really don't want to. That's laughable. Or that COINTELPRO was just the only way to handle MLK. No, you fight corruption and criminality with integrity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, the only way to justice and peace, on small and large scales. But everybody just wants to shine light on the their opponents, while believing the stuff they made up about themselves, and made others believe. So there's a lot of half-measures, if even, a lot of lip-service. We want to catch the terrorists who aren't on our payroll, the unpredictable factors, and want to make sure the ones that are don't get caught, the valuable assets. (and it doesn't even matter who says that to whom, this "we" applies to everyone with the means to read this, all nations are equally fucked up in that regard, certainly all the powerful ones). So nothing really gets cleaned up.
Integrity is good, but there's no universal law dictating that it will always prevail no matter what.
That said - I guess - it's not surprising that most of HN (and hope that most non-ignorant people) would agree that a lot of states are way over the optimum non-integrity point.
(For example intelligence and counter-intelligence toward geopolitically important adversarial targets is probably something that makes sense, drone-bombing random groups of people because war-on-something hysteria probably doesn't.)
Integrity reflects cosmos, thus order. The lack, reflects chaos. Congruent to universal patterns and thus laws one could argue that indeed, acting with integrity is a universal law of good.
I’d argue however that better than integrity is what we try to ascribe and describe with the word love. To me it seems when one acts with love then every action is properly constrained, and most importantly acts of discipline; for acts of discipline without love inevitably become acts of abuse. Love is the constraint that trends towards cosmos, integrity, and that which is good.
Technology gives people more plausible excuses to believe what they want to believe. It only has to stand up to the barest scrutiny. "Everything my tribe does is great; everything yours does is horrible. Therefore any evidence against my tribe is fabricated, any evidence against yours is accurate." And so on. This is already happening at scale.
Surely one need no technology to believe in any thing they wish. The only constraint on any mind is the language with which one is constrained by. In that sense the only technological limit would be language itself, which is an interesting place of contemplation in its own right.
I think you think you’re being a realist. But if you have worked at the top end of any big tech company you can see they are both incompetent idiots but also wielders of incredible power… hand in hand with government.
I used to think like you, it was all a conspiracy. But it’s not.
> People want to believe that govt and big tech are this omniscient, monolithic entity.
The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that
conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more
comforting.
The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the
grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension
that are in control.
The truth is far more frightening; no-one is in control.
The world is rudderless.
-- Alan Moore
I think it's both true that the world is rudderless (or maybe there are million different rudders all turning in different directions) and there are also powerful technologies that motivated people can use to do awful things. A real winning combination.
Yes, it would more correct to state that there are various competing albeit unequal centers of power at the top (made of smaller centers of power themselves) and that not even the biggest is absolute.
That makes for an interesting (if you are observer/participant) or frightening (if you are a victim) life.
No "one" (individual) is in control, because the human mind is limited. But constellations of individuals with common interests are absolutely in control.
The unilateral dictator is largely a mythical creature. Cabals of powerful individuals with shared ideas are not.
The contents of the link are so far from what you describe them as it's hard to believe that you're arguing in good faith.
Put another way, what is the government even bringing to the table? Clearly Twitter had the tools to attempt to sway the election on their own, so why do they need to meet with <insert 3 letter agency>?
Why would a three letter agency need to meet with a head of safety at twitter? If they need an IP address from someone illegal, I'm sure there's someone down the chain answering to law enforcment.
You’re speculating based on nothing concrete, don’t be surprised if people label you as a propagandist. Taibbi isn't really a bastion of truth and credibility, he analyze almost everything through a conspiracy lens without providing good justifications other than “look at the map of disconnected dots I drew, it’s all clear now!”.
I attended 30C3 and was fascinated by his talk "Seeing The Secret State: Six Landscapes"..
Although there is some interesting thoughts on psychological warfare in this latest presentation, I wish it was longer and a bit more in depth. If anyone has recommendations for further viewing/reading, please share.
> If anyone has recommendations for further viewing/reading, please share.
For further _reading_ would be especially appreciated. I don't have the patience to watch bunch of ~hour long videos for something that could likely be better described in an article that I could read in 5-15 minutes.
Whisper models can do flawless transcripts in real time. They can run locally on a laptop without proprietary software. Not having them in a tech talk is inexcusable today.
I guess in that they don't offer a reproducible toolchain they are proprietary blobs, but it is functional software with an open license (Apache)
I do think its noteworthy that the time between something becoming available as a python import and the time it takes to integrate into production tools is apparently > 1 year.
The license is kind of irrelevant because its ML stuff that is impossible to retrain from the source data, because what that source data is, is a trade secret and even if it were publicly known, probably not under a FOSS license. The Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy calls this sort of thing a "Toxic Candy" project.
Of course people rarely need to retrain from scratch, but with some of the attacks on ML systems out there, that is an essential thing to be able to do if you can afford or crowdfund it.
Saying that ml models aren't open source because you don't have the data is like saying doom isn't open source because you didn't provide a proof the fast inverse square root works: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
LLMs are just very large magic numbers. That's all there is to them.
Download the audio and upload it to any transcription service. OpenAI has a whisper API but there are a lot of alternatives, including running insanely-fast-whisper by yourself or using one of the lots of transcription APIs out there.
Mindwar by Michael Aquino goes pretty deep, but this entire topic is a bottomless pit and once you start researching him and his associates, there's no going back. This is your chance to still enjoy the steak.
What isn't a bottomless pit? haha, anyway, thanks for the recommendation, grabbing a copy. I totally get that feeling but fortunately I seem to be able to enjoy my steak nonetheless.
I have been dipping into this ever since I got my first fast internet connection back at uni in the 90s and came across Operation Gladio. Back then there wasn't too much drivel and interesting investigative journalism was quite readily available, if you knew where to look.
I think the trick in enjoying your steak is mostly in enjoying it regardless of how fucked some things are. Also, not overcooking it, and invite people over to share ;)
I’m in the same ship. I’m a serious conspiracy researcher (self titled) who only looks at verified sources.
A decade ago I read about Propaganda Due and Operation Gladio and got fascinated. I did read a couple of books about the topic but I suspect the depth lays in some document cache somewhere in a national archive. I do believe EU countries hold some material.
I was also interested in the Bloomfield archive but didn’t get the chance to dip further. These topics are also semi sensitive, I’m afraid, and might expose people like us to unnecessary dangers.
Interesting. Didn’t know about Gladio, really cool read on Wiki. Bloomfield comes up with nothing, but I imagine I’m not looking for the right thing. :)
But the weird thing to me is that conspiracy theorists never seem to be interested in actual conspiracies.
Conspiracies are real and it is easy to learn about them, they are generally well researched by journalists and are not really contested after what was at stake isn't anymore. It's just that we just call them "scandals" and forget about them.
Also they make a lot of sense.
For Gladio for example, why wouldn't the CIA use former fascists as a way to fend off what they saw as the biggest threat, the USSR ? Who else was violent ready and hated communists so willing to do dirty work ? Who else you got ? What other potential allies do we have ? Well the mafia and the Vatican, that should do it for Italy.
Else you have people talking about the gov putting hormones in your water to make your children gay or trans. Facepalm.
What about that QAnon pedophile ring in the basement of a pizzeria...
when you have the Jeffrey Epstein scandal ?!
As if people heard of those stories, forgot about them, then swallowed watered down simplified versions that suit the moral panic of the day.
I have no idea. Maybe they were just targeted to specific type of people. Maybe they were just fed to these people to cover up the real scandals. Some modern scandals, like the J.E. one, are indeed difficult or even dangerous to research. I haven't looked into them yet but I guess there are still a lot of public records some where.
That one was of his best videos, but while it made me a lot more optimistic about human affairs, I wouldn't translate that to the world at large. Large groups of people and organisation do not function like humans.
While this shows it is scientifically proven that being nice and forgiving works with fellow humans, governments and corporations do not operate like that. They have no feelings, they have no physical presence, they do not care about hurting or helping you. They only care about preserving and justify their existence.
I think there are a few societies that are as you described heartless, mainly former Russian empire and the Chinese empire (which hint hint still has the same heartless society today).
The reason why I say so is that if it truly was the case that governments or even corporations were entirely heartless, then we should be living like China and Russia, seen as expendable cannon fodder or serfs.
A civilized government or corporation needs in some way cooperative with the people, that how you can attain taxes, profit , stability and trust.
And as you know we used to, what changed is the prisoners dilemma, most monarchies that decided to cooperate are the ones still Live today while those that sought to suppress started a zero sum game of whoever would win.
The exception there is China where it was the 2nd round (warlords fighting themselves) that decided to not cooperate.
> A civilized government or corporation needs in some way cooperative with the people, that how you can attain taxes, profit , stability and trust.
In theory, sure, in practice, strongly disagree, but this would be too long a philosophical and political discussion to be had as a forum comment.
A civilized government doesn't need to be cooperative and nice with people, with their monopoly on force, overwhelming power over the individual, not to say it doesn't really care about you, in a country of tens or hundreds of millions of other people. You literally are just a statistic. Its only problem is if a huge majority of people rebel against it, but there is a very efficient way to avoid that: control of mass media and... psyops. Why would you rebel against the system when you're brainwashed it is efficient, friendly, and you have the power to change it? How would you organise against it, when all our lives are based on the Internet and technology that is easy to monitor?
Okay so if that is the case then why aren't states in the west doing this overwhelmingly like how we used to/how authoritarian governments do?
Again psyops can only go so far and media is not inherently "owned" or anything of the sort, most of what you're saying you have to buy into a paranoid world view to rationalize instead of just looking at the truth of what civilized vs uncivilized governments do and don't do.
Since it's highly unproductive to assume government in the west is incapable of cooperating, as if this was the case we would literally not have ideals in society followed and protected by a fundamental agreement we fall the constitution, since again why should we in the west follow rules when China/Russia is far worse than us.
> A teaser: evil corporations will make your AI girlfriends suggest that you buy Monster energy drinks.
Like the other commenters, I'm surprised you think this is far-fetched. Just skim through the list of actual advertising campaigns mastermined by the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, to see how deep this field goes [0]. This guy intended (and succeeded) in changing American women's perception of the color green in order to sell more Lucky Strike cigarettes that came in green packaging. An entire government was overthrown in order to sell more bananas. Targeted advertising is small potatoes.
Why wouldn't our AI girlfriends suggest that we avoid sugary drinks, to keep the American workforce healthy, a la CCP public efforts?
Or why wouldn't our AI girlfriends tell us exactly what they deem each of us want to hear? It seems like the AI girlfriend LLM that mirrors our preferences best would be the most appealing to the average Joe.
One can think up a zillion scenarios, some of them terrifying, some of them prosaic, some of them positive.
To assert that a scary scenario is the most probable, without strong evidence, is fearmongering.
> Why wouldn't our AI girlfriends suggest that we avoid sugary drinks, to keep the American workforce healthy, a la CCP public efforts?
Because most products you use come from people trying to make money.
> Or why wouldn't our AI girlfriends tell us exactly what they deem each of us want to hear? It seems like the AI girlfriend LLM that mirrors our preferences best would be the most appealing to the average Joe.
I'm sure they will... until it's more profitable to show a Monster ad. See the VC product cycle a la Netflix, Facebook, Google search, etc.
> To assert that a scary scenario is the most probable, without strong evidence, is fearmongering.
It's not the scary scenario. It's the status quo and it's the standard curriculum in bussiness schools all over the country.
Instead of saying "wild speculation" and using a lot of charged words, it would be more helpful if you explained why you think it is wrong. This just comes across as you trying to denounce the other side as low status and looks bad--though you're probably right.
Yesterday I looked up 'deep tissue massage' on Google Maps and the "most relevant" review on the top result seemed legit, if a bit general (I had no reason to suspect anything). That was until the last paragraph!
If google struggles to detect and filter out obviously fake reviews, it doesn't bode well for broader society.
> Remember to stay respectful in your review while expressing your dissatisfaction with the service you received. Constructive feedback can help the business improve, even if your experience was negative
The "review" is copy/pasted straight from an LLM! Only on closer inspection, I realised the previous 3 paragraphs were between " characters!
Note that it can also be due to translation. I switch between 3 languages in my day to day life, I sometime ask ChatGPT to help me formulate something or review something I wrote. And it often adds such a note at the end if I mentioned it was for an online comment or something like that.
Oh I see. I thought they were giving general advice but that makes sense. The person could have used ChatGPT to write it for them, if language was an issue or they were in a really bad mood after the experience. I do that sometimes.
I haven't had the time to set-up whisper - but I don't even have a gpu. By the way Deepgram hosts Whisper too, but according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367655 their models are much better. Transcribing the video was almost instant.
Man am I glad I don't go to this conference anymore.
There is something in psychology called the blue dot effect where people primed to find blue dots will start identifying purple and green as blue as well.
I attended because of the edgy non-corporate but otherwise technically interesting stuff. But over time I just couldn't stand how everything that is coated in the cheap veneer of the anarcho cypher punk rebellion is accepted without any critical thought.
People don't like hearing what I am saying because the same crowd frequents this site, but I find your delusional paranoid ideation a bigger attack on my sanity then whatever big tech is putting in my social media feed.
You like pointing your fingers at everyone else and accuse them of a big psyops, but guess what, this is what you are doing. Now go and do your worst.
I agree with you mostly, not a big fan of this talk, there are large leaps of inference, I failed to see actual data or concrete logic linking the few disjoint things he talked about back to the 2016 statement he started with.
OTOH at least it does remind people to be skeptical, and the risk
* There is motive. State actors historically had the motivation to do these kind of things and acted on it.
* It is achievable. Behavioral psychology works. I'd believe its use in at least commercial space is common knowledge nowadays. (Humans are very predictable at large scale.. I've seen the data personally)
* Generative AI makes it a lot easier, opens up new possibility of depth and scope
There's a will, there's a mean, it's very profitable.
Maybe DEFCON is better for you? They stick more with the hacking and less with the higher level culture or maybe consider HOPE for that old school phreaker vibe. (Assuming you can easily\cheaply make it to the US)
>There is something in psychology called the blue dot effect where people primed to find blue dots will start identifying purple and green as blue as well.
I am sure this is well-researched and reproducible, and generalizes to other concepts, like all the other biases "discovered" by academic researchers.
Glad you had the balls to say it, because just a few minutes in I was worried this kind of thinking was acceptable (at least here). What a load of deluded bollocks.
I see little difference between the conspiracy thinking coming out of the hacker community and that coming out of MAGA and QAnon communities. Vague sinister claims that those in power are pulling all the strings and executing some master plan to deceive everybody. Reality is a lot more boring, mundane, and complicated than that.
I don't follow the hacker scene much anymore, but when I did, I was a fan of talks by people like Moxie Marlinspike. Entertaining, technical, and just edgy enough without falling into cringe LARP/cosplay pretending to be Neo in the Matrix.
"There is a part of the talk where I am trying to perform a little bit.. the thing that I'm also talking about. My background is in art .. and we always try to think about form and content being kind of the same thing.."
Almost no substance in the talk. Just showing scary looking videos and pictures and making a lot of extreme claims which should reasonable if you don't think about it. For example, he says that "Google is basically useless since the generation of AI content". I can agree to saying that it has gotten less useful in the last 10 years, but "basically useless" is a stretch.
Google is an example of psyops. It is useful for finding uncontested information such as the address of a shop, but to find the truth about events in the world, you are better served elsewhere such as Yandex.
I wish he would have mentioned that NATO has six arenas of operation: air, land, sea, space, cyber, and cognitive.
What an interesting example you picked considering its tight affiliation with Russian Gov and the well known record of censoring news and search results
To clarify, I do not recommend relying on any single source. Multiple sources will broaden your perspective. You can look at Google and other NATO based search engines to see the results they want or don't want you to see, and then you can look at non-NATO aligned sources to see other results.
You can't trust any search engine to tell you the truth about a country in which it operates extensively; in most cases it will have been subverted by that government. Yandex is not a good source about matters in or closely concerning Russia, but it's very useful to those of us outside Russia for finding truths that are suppressed where we are.
Simply enter the exact same search terms for any controversial issue into both Google and Yandex.com to compare the results. It could be about Ukraine war, covid died suddenly, or Gaza. Try 'Google CIA'.
So you’re telling me that two different search engines from two different companies using two different algorithms return two different sets of results.
One of them returns articles primarily from CNN, AP, Fox News, etc. All of the MSM organizations that 70% of Americans do not trust. Even for things that have nothing to do with $politics, I’m always getting these trash results from Google.
Yandex at least returns results from some of the above but at least has a mix of third party websites, indie news sites, forums, etc.
> Is George Soros' involvement funding the "migrant caravan" long enough ago that it's not a hot-button issue?
So this is the ”truth” that is hidden from you? I don’t subscribe to this nonsense but still I seen this even on my facebook feed.
It is not hidden, it is simply a psyops you fell for.
You might be interested in how Russia launched the syrian migrant wave into Europe in 2015, because that actually happened.
(FWIW It's documented fact, if you read carefully even the respectable media will never actually deny it, they just downplay and dismiss it (e.g. I remember the Economist mentioning it parenthetically as "a far-right talking point" or some such - making it sound like they were calling it false, but without actually doing so))
Google is still the primary method I use to find things, and I'm someone who has also thoroughly integrated ChatGPT into my workflow for answers.
I use Google when searching for current news or local restaurants or businesses. I use it as a sort of bookmark manager when I can't remember a domain or specific webpage I'm looking for. I use it when I really need to trust the source of information and know it isn't a hallucination. I even still use it sometimes for coding questions when I just need to remember a function name or something very short and I can get it with a simple Google search of 2 or 3 words. ChatGPT would give me the answer, but it would require a longer prompt or give me a wordier answer.
I had to move over to Kagi as I found it hopeless, so you're individual datapoint isn't enough to disprove anything. Neither is mine, so we need better data to make this call.
I personally use Google but I was using it to mean search engines in general, because I took the top comment to mean search engines compared to generative AI.
> do you really feel that google is the place to go to find things these days?
Uhh yeah? Search isn't a trivial thing to implement and they still have the best product
Maybe the results are less relevant now because of AI spam, but they'll figure this out eventually. I'd say a good compromise is just using ublock origin to filter AI spam sites out of results
Why are they a monopoly in this sector? What's stopping people from just switching to Bing if their product goes to shit? Doing that literally takes like two seconds
I love your enthusiasm for how easy it is to change human behavior.
The cost of starting a competitive search engine is incredibly high, and unlikely to get real funding as a) the business model would likely have to be subscription based to align users interests long term with the companies interests, this alone is probably enough to make it a pass for most VCs, b) the incumbents in this space have an immoral amount of cash to spend on either acquiring, bankrupting or destroying any meaningful competition.
Joining the nuance parade - Google expanded their entry points to Search years ago via Maps and the URL bar.
Do I use Google traditional Google Search (google.com) to find things? Rarely. Do I use Google Maps to find bars / restaurants / order food? All the time.
I guess the nuance is what we're trying to find. LLM's swallowed the listicle - I don't need google.com to find an autogenerated list of "best restaurants in London". But if I'm in London at at lunch, and I need a coffee nearby, it's still useful.
Have you tried alternatives like duck duck go? I feel like several times a week I have to go back to google because DDG is too dense to understand context, and will suggest things that just make no sense. Don’t even get me started on trying to search for NSFW content on it either.
Yeah, the whole presentation feels like an Adam Curtis documentary where random bits of information and imagery are thrown together to create the impression of a common thread.
The author of this one is an artist. Whoever consumes this work without considering this is also demonstrating how often the information is processed under already fixed expectations, also affecting the results.
Adam Curtis also stated that his own work is intentionally "different", so I believe the similarities aren't accidental.
The funny thing to me about conspiracy theorists is that they read theories in an overly credulous manner if it confirms a bias and then they take their own theories as fact. People like me, like most of us I imagine, think "this is a fun story that could have been made up by a talented artist/author. I'm going to save it in my fun stories folder."
Adam Curtis once called himself an "emotional journalist", which to me sounded like an information artist who communicates to us through our feelings
Strangely, it's Adam Curtis who put together the pieces for me on the usefulness of chaos politics to Putin and Russia.
I think some of these things can be viewed in two lights, however they're framed. On the one hand it can be framed as 'OMG drama you must know about this terrible thing that will destroy you personally!', and on the other hand it can be 'this is clearly part of how humans work, take that into account'.
Curtis works is pretty good when seen as an abstract artistic patchwork of archive footage. One can enjoy it the same way you would enjoy an artsy novel or a song based on real life events. Unfortunately that’s also exactly the style used (minus the artistic aspect) by conspiracy propagandists, and it seems pretty clear in 2023 that a large amount of the population consume that type of content as “here is the map of the hidden truth THEY try to hide!” and completely disconnect from reality.
I love his work, the mix of music and imagery is stimulating my brain in a way that makes me feel creative and as if I went through a whole journey. But I hate the fact it gives some form of legitimacy to conspiracy bullshit…
I honestly stopped watching at the mention of MKULTRA. Too many of these talks resort to the tired tedtalk techniques of building credibility with some shoddy journalism linking something common today (facial recognition) to some past horror (mkultra+experiments on dogs) just obscure enough that people recognize it as evil but dont know any details, making them open and eager to absorb whatever bunk you shovel at them. Such links are normally made through references to obscure historical figures, conveniently dead enough that they cannot refute any allegations. Want to have a serious talk about psyops? Start by not employing such childish techniques in your own videos.
Here is a real psyops story. Not ancient history. Something recent involving alive people subject to modern scrutiny.
I watched the whole thing, and i think you made the right decision. There aren't any facts or solid connections here you couldn't learn from browsing wikipedia for twenty minutes.
I particularly enjoyed the bit with the leaked GCHQ slide deck where he points out that there are a lot of pictures of UFOs in it, and says he doesn't know why, but perhaps it's because GCHQ are using them for disinformation. Rather than as, you know metaphors. Or maybe metaphors are considered advanced British BRAIN SCIENCE?
Now i wish i stuck with it. Ridiculous flying saucer speculation is a guilty pleasure for me. But here is a better story of reverse-psyops, of when the public created fake flying saucers to trick the UK military.
thank you, this honestly sums it up. The talk started out with a nice hook but I pretty much lost it when he started extrapolating things to that level.
I really like the talk content-wise, but don't find it very coherent. The speaker opens a few threads left and right, but just jumps between them and doesn't really weave them together.
Is this video just a convoluted way to say that UFOs are a psyop to cover experiment on stealth aircrafts by the military ?
Or is there more to it ?
I watched the whole of it but it seemed... superficial ? What did I miss ?
You missed most of the talk. The term Psyop-capitalism seems to be a pretty prominent part of the message. As in transitioning from Surveillance Capitalism to Psyops-Capitalism. Which you might interpret as a hype machine or... fraud. Fraud it till you make it?
True but it's only an hypothesis at the beginning of the talk and then he doesn't actually talks about it instead he goes into a (too?) quick history of psyops in the US and... end of the talk. The psyop capitalism idea ends up not being discussed.
The data point I can offer is this: from my experience, psychopaths are real, and the governments of the world don't have a leash on them, regardless of their democracy status [1]. In my mind, those of you who built the tools to send data to the govt, you fueled some demons, regardless of how good of an action you think you were doing was. I find it tricky tho, because I do have this belief in arms races, so exploit or be exploited. In economics, they call it a race to the bottom. I also think AI is going to be to most abused persuasion weapon ever.
May I just put something out there, make of it what you will.
There is such a thing as good influence and useful psyops. Maybe,
given multiple narratives of the world, there are some that are
objectively better than others, not for special interests but for
everyone - though who is to be the judge of that?
At the foundation level we do this every day in schools and
universities around the world. We call it "education". Indeed it is a
very strong form of psyops because it is often compulsory.
Many of us here are, or have been, involved in a dark and seedy side,
namely "advertising", to sell products that nobody needs or can
afford, putting ever more burden on the planet to make wealth for the
few. Much as I'd like to see the destruction of the advertising
industry, it's quite woven into human affairs.
Indeed, right here on HN, I repeatedly hear the sentiment that "people
are too stupid to make up their own minds" - that we as technologists
must guide them, make UX decisions, be caretakers of their data,
privacy and security, because... well because we are the "elite who
know better". That's not entirely untrue however arrogant its kernel.
Though I personally, firmly believe the contrary, as an ideology.
Making technology is a powerful form of influence because it shapes
how people see the world.
At the end of the day the important questions is of intent and
methods. Do you make influence in the world with integrity and good
faith? Or are you a selfish, greedy, Machiavellian manipulator out to
further your own ends? Or a tool for others to? I hope that in the
work I have done for BBC and British Govt, it's the former, and that
I've exercised good judgement.
However, trying to influence people to be sceptical and have critical
thinking has paradoxical sides that Monty Python and George Carlin put
best.
So I'll share that I am inspired by Darth Vader.... :)
I's no secret that David Prowse (body actor) was interviewed toward the
end of his life and poured scorn on the Vader role, and on George
Lucas. He said, on it was not something he was particularly proud of.
The thing he saw as his life achievement was as "The Green Cross Man"
a cheesy 1970's road safety influence campaign conservatively
estimated to have saved the lives of half a million children.
Sure, influence based on fear and deception is the worst, and weakest
kind. But not all messages "with an agenda" are to be mistrusted with
respect to their intent, even if one sceptically, rightly, rejects
people who think they "know what s good for you".
Thinkers from Aristotle to Quine, Shannon, Ayer and Wittgenstein have
pointed out that there are no such things as "bare messages",
containing neutral, objective truths. Every byte of information, if it
actually "informs", contains with it an implicit agenda and context.
Every poem or song has a feeling to convey. Even my thermometer is
concerned with whether the room is too hot or too cold (who said that
i forget?).
So maybe the quest for something that isn't "influence" is
misguided? Perhaps the problem is that we focus on and allow a
minority of toxic influencers to prevail, for psychological reasons
we've not yet wised up to. Selectivity is the key.
Though that could be a bit like saying "What about letters? Do they
have an agenda?", because the word "math" isn't particularly precise.
Do you mean the practice? The realm of mathematics? The notation?
Let's not confuse a representational form with a communicative act.
While concepts and symbols might be assumed free of human values,
the moment one human communicates them to another, there's an
agenda.
Interesting that Richard Doty, the man being quoted in the video, doesn't have his own Wikipedia page. Is this part of perception management? He is only alluded to in this documentary film's page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men
Not only the governements. Some kid in Belgium with a horrible rare disease was cut off from the healthcare system because the medication was insanely expensive and the system just could not bear it. A grassroots protest formed to pressure the relevant politicians.
Then it leaked how the big farma corp selling the medication had ordered a marketing company to create more demand. The kid was deemed a cute enough case to sway public opinion, and tailor made news was generated to cause the formation of the grassroots cause.
The kid, the parents, the supporting grassroots protesters were all unknowing pawns, misused as succers in an extremely cynical marketing ploy.
I've since heard about companies existing just to create databases of cute poor victims for just about anything, to support creating grassroots movements for big corporations on demand.
At the risk of oversharing too much personal information, similar stuff happens in the UK. I have a hereditary condition that can be treated with a specific drug (quality of life changing impact). My sister shares the same condition. She has access to the drug because she lives in Wales, UK which has degree of autonomy from England, UK's health service. I don't have access to the same drug, with the same condition because I live in England. The drug concerned is also incredibly cheap to manufacture, and is widely available elsewhere, but big pharma has chosen to place a ridiculous premium on it despite the fact it's long paid back the R&D costs. It is scandalous, and it needs government policy-level intervention. There are MANY similar examples of this kind of market abuse.
PS. I'm not looking for suggestions to resolve this issue - I'm confident every avenue has been exhausted and am resigned to the situation. I make this post this to explain how abusive some market operators are, and how arbitrary access to medication can be even in fully developed nations.
I'm not making any suggestions about your case. I'm just curious based on your experience, would it be plausible for someone in England to just sign up with a GP in Wales if they wanted to if the treatment offered was different than England (or the reverse)?
I'm not suggesting that anyone commits fraud or suggesting that this was a practical solution in your case. I'm just curious if that is illegal or how that is enforced.
Theoretically it could work for someone living on the border I think, but the funding process is discretionary and I guess that might increase the likelihood of NHS Wales refusing the application.
I wonder about this. You see I'm trying to think this through. This was a (very) "long-tail" medicine. There aren't many people who have this disease. So it's kind of tough, splitting this up, seeing who is at fault here ...
1) it's great that this medicine was made. Without that, the kid would have died, slowly, through suffocation
2) the company does need to recoup costs + profit (and it's not making excessive profits). The margin on the medicine is something like 10% to 15%. This is not price gouging. Curing this kid really is that expensive (AND, one might add, a very significant part of the cost is government mandated safety checking, which effectively gets paid to higher ups in hospitals and government)
3) the government is in fact the party that has (through the use of force, ie. legislation) taken responsibility for the health of children in Belgium. So you can't blame the parents for not taking extra insurance for this case.
4) Given that they have responsibility for the health of the child, and that it's a solvable problem, obviously it's a good thing their hand gets forced. That they're forced to cure this child.
5) Obviously the parents did the right thing (plus the only alternative is limiting which parents get to have natural kids, which is definitely a step too far)
6) Spreading the use of this medicine, ie. the marketing ... saves the lives of children. Tough to say that's a bad thing.
I mean ... where is the bad? Where does this go "evil" exactly?
Not OP but I will give it my take, the evil comes in the sowing of doubt which on a widespread scale leads to a loss of agency for everyone because no one can be sure what is real and what is manufactured. “When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth”.
This all makes sense piecewise, but it doesn't make sense on the whole
I won't blame the company for trying to recoup the costs of developing the drug. At the same time, their profit on this medicine shouldn't make the treatment prohibitive
At the same time part of these costs no doubt come from the rarity of the disease. It's "easy" to run a study for something that a lot of people has, but at the point you have trouble even finding people for a double-blind study this gets tricky (it might be that a control group makes no sense here)
Something like a tax advantage for working on such drugs (and more streamlined testing) might be a better solution than the current situations
It’s not about recouping the costs unfortunately. That’s an industry talking point.
For a brief overview of just how messed up the system has become in the US (where quite a few of the drugs come from) check out this Rogan clip. You don’t have to like Rogan; his guest is amazing.
This guy is hawking supplements, IV hydration, and "stem cell therapy for general health and longevity," among other things, on his personal website. A website that has an entire section dedicated to JRE links. Getting some strong 'Dr Oz but for JoeBros' vibes.
Can't wait to see what other fun new things creep into my youtube suggestions after watching this...
> 4) Given that they have responsibility for the health of the child, and that it's a solvable problem, obviously it's a good thing their hand gets forced. That they're forced to cure this child.
Health budgets are finite, whether you fund them privately or publicly, and for the marginal long-tail cases those hard decisions need to be made. Personally a cutoff at some democratically determined level of long tail expense feels fairer to me than the US system where you get better treatment if your capitalism credit score is high enough and none at all if it's too low, but I appreciate that there are differing views here.
But in any case, if we accept that whether this medicine should be paid for out of public funds is a political decision that the public should be making democratically, then obviously a company with a financial stake in that decision organising a campaign to secretly manipulate the decision-making process is evil. Advertising honestly that your company can save x lives at y cost is one thing, posing as a concerned citizen is another.
So many fake telegram channels under the "Anonymous brand". And in the end it's either Russian or Irani intelligence when you start to observe their operators, attacks, used IPs, ASNs etc.
Journalism got so bad, they are way too trigger happy on that next clickbait story. They went from keeping legislation in check to being the useful fools on the internet. I haven't seen a news story without the detail word "allegedly" in years.
Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative. And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence.
For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked.
Divide and conquer. Not a new strategy to be honest, but it works like a charm.
> For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked.
One thing that has bugged me for so long, and no one seems to be talking about, is, for example, how many state actors are lurking on Reddit news, specifically /r/worldnews, to control the narrative.
There are some topics where a great number of comments are from, let's say, "interested parties". That is, people whose comment history is strictly about that particular topic. They might have 5+ year old accounts, and have only commented about that topic. They don't even need to hide it, as both them and the vast majority of well-meaning ignorant passerby can shut you down with either being a conspiracy theorist or pushing an agenda for the opposite side.
This is the first time I mention this anywhere on the Internet, and I know how well it's gonna go down. Everybody is aware of state-sponsored troll farms, but any mention of it is drowned down by people that still believe either this is fiction, or "does not happen in my corner of the internet." To avoid making myself a blatant target of such responses, I will not mention which state or group is most active on that subreddit, go see for yourself.
What I can openly say, is that USA psyops is not really a thing because most of the Western Internet is US-based, and US-centered. The US government doesn't really need massive troll farms because their own citizens and companies indirectly and involuntarily do their work for them. When one's own propaganda has become part of popular culture, is it propaganda anymore?
By this point places like /worldnews have become ineffective when it comes to propaganda purposes, especially because they're so obviously controlled by bots. They're so good they're bad, that's one of the paradoxes of open confrontation/(information) war.
It needs to be read by people at least a step or two above those bots, people that actually effect political change when push come to shove. That type of people has long left /worldnews and related propaganda platforms.
Of course, the same applies to most of the Western media, i.e. it has pushed the propaganda angle way, way too much hence nobody that counts takes it seriously anymore.
The personal issue I have with all those countries involved in psyops is that the try to force their own opinion upon others, and by definition of how we structured our planet that should have been the work of diplomats.
Nations are not willing to find common ground anymore because of this, because their own people "forgot" their own values and are radicalized into useful fools for the leaders that are usually just unsatisfiably power hungry.
I fear that the high level of education of those nations (including Russia's which had many great authors and philosophers, for example) are lost in these cultural purges. And that's what I cannot understand and won't tolerate. We need to keep history alive and the knowledge that was created out of it, because we won't be able to learn from our mistakes otherwise.
But educated people are not easy to control, that's why right-wing populism only works on the uneducated which are slowly assimilating the neighboring population on the psychogram.
All the countries "in the middle" which didn't want to be involved in the West vs East debate have turned much more to communism; but not out of cultural values but more because of opportunism. And that likely will result in them being responsible for killing their own people soon enough, and that's what I would define as collateral damage that could have been prevented. Communism, by definition, has to eliminate rogue elements because it's not designed for compromise. All direct-elected parties in history at one point or the other used their power to eliminate other parties to guarantee their rule for generations to come.
In an ideal world, something like territorial disputes would be a tournament on an isolated island in the middle of the ocean; where the civilian population isn't affected, infrastructure isn't damaged, and the ground isn't poisoned with chemicals, gunpowder, metals, and plagues. The German state is still busy clearing more than 20 unexploded bombs per day, every day, more than 80 years after WW2.
The most damage wars cause is not for the current generation, but for the generations to come that have to clean up the mess of their old, idiotic grandpas that were too stubborn and too blinded to find a compromise with their neighbors. I hope at some point we (as the human species) realize that the male gender is a little too unreflected, too proud, and too stubborn in social contexts, and that's what's bad for politics.
(This comment is likely being downvoted to hell, because I'm not patriotic enough. But honestly at this point I don't care anymore about the opinion of radicalized idiots online anymore. Idiots by definition are the radicals, and the smart ones act with kindness and understanding.)
In the Western world it's mostly Americans that care about patriotism, thanks to your propaganda and flag-waving nonsense now part of your culture. Nobody else really cares if you are or not. Thanks for the comment.
The empire is the empire and the empire controls the narrative, and as a europeean seeing the US - the worlds largest military by far - cry about various tiny media operations coming from the wastelands they and the rest of the west has created by pillaging foreign resources is a bit laughable.
Much of the south americas has been pillaged by the empire, the middle east to, the rest of the world not much less. Deaths squads, millions dead, forever wars and economic plunder but no it's some tiny russian or iranian operation we should worry about, so vote democrat, vote republican, just vote for more war!
This is what many europeans thinks, though we aren't much better with our operations in say northern africa.
America changed the narrative to be the good guys. Wars are no longer result of need for exploration, previous land claims, manifest destiny or anything else. In fact wars are no longer wars, but merely establishing freedoms to the oppressed populations. Military isn't willingfully enlisting to go kill foreigners in foreign lands, they are protecting the freedom at home. Countries that are subjugated and forced to keep military bases in their borders aren't vassal states, but partners. Yet the song changes very quickly when any other country does a tiny bit of the same. I don't dislike these rulers of our times, but one should not be naive to think that it doesn't even matter what you vote for, as you say, you're just gonna be part of the same imperialist State Department roadmap.
Exactly! You are describing classical academic gepolitics as explained by the most standard US military beureucrat before rampant ideological psyops took over.
John Mearsheimer is a good example of this line of thought but he's somehow a radical these days.
The US is fighting bloody wars for resources and control like a big game of RISK, that's how historical empire has always worked and most knew this decades ago, but now theres layers and layers of bullshit on top.
Just admit it, we live a very wealthy life partly because we've plundered the world, not because we've protected ourselves from the bad guys and became uniquely enlightened in a world of savages, that's the winners writing the history, another historical trope that has been memoryholed.
Wars are terrible! But as soon as you have some preference for the society you want to live in (or consider better), you might need to confront issues of violence in defense. I did not find the USSR model preferable, for example.
I get what you mean and me neither but the relatively modern ideological lens, that most wars are fought for democracy, or to protect liberalism is just not true from a historical or economical standpoint.
Most US wars are fought because of realpolitics, resources, opening markets, company contracts, like a game of Civilization, empires battling empires, or plutocrats taking over markets in poorer parts of the world through brute force foreign policy, just like in the rest of history.
There is no US exceptionalism even though i love many things uniquely about your country as a whole and wouldn't live in neo USSR ( unless part of the intelligentsia, which in some parts look like parts of the american plutocracy ).
Would the world be a better place if North Korea had won? Saying it is all/mostly realpolitics etc., does not mean that the outcome was always worse than not fighting or at the very least it isn't easy to make that determination across the board (doesn't excuse bad military action, either).
That is not the point. Just saying the US is a hyperaggressive war machine isn't leading anywhere. Wars have consequences and if they hadn't happened we'd have had the counterfactual, which might not always be great, either.
> Just admit it, we live a very wealthy life partly because we've plundered the world
I dont like this take. It suggest that the sole source of US wealth is natural resource theft. It is not (sole source).
The US fucks/fucked with many countries for many reasons. Ideological - fight vs spread of communism, figting 'terror' in afganistan. Those can be also tied to interest of Military–industrial complex - war is private profit.
Other reasons is to secure the flow of resources, all coups and dictators in middle east were an attempt to stabilise oil flow. State doesnt care much how it will be done. All they care is that oil will arrive cheaply at steady rate. Private companies will help for some cut.
Saudis did what us told them, they are now building indoors ski slopes on their deserts, US doesnt care - even though wahhabism is in practice an ideological opposite of US. They hardly sound like poor oppressed people who's oil being stolen.
The purported reason for invading Iraq wasn't to steal the oil, but to maintain the petrodollar (it's claimed that Saddam was preparing to begin trading oil in Euros).
The actual reason was that Dick Cheney felt like it. There really isn't any kind of actual reason beyond that, and we didn't gain a single thing from the invasion.
Petrodollars (the foreign US dollar oil trade) are a leftover 1970s concept; they simply aren't important or a large part of support for the dollar's value. OPEC oil exports are about $300 billion a year, which isn't a lot.
The purported conspiracy theory reason. The official reasoning of WMDs were generally believed to be a nonsense casus belli presented as legal justification. More people thought it had something to do with 9/11 than WMDs.
In this case, much of the real purpose was laid out in articles and papers written just a few years earlier by a bunch of the same people crafting and implementing the policy. There may have been more reasons than that, but some were frankly stated in public documents.
Their publications (including an open letter addressed to Clinton) lay out a case for preventative (as distinct from preemptive—what we in fact did was preventative, with some bullshit to sell it as preemptive) war over concern that Saddam might do some of the stuff we lied about to claim he was already doing it.
Pure realpolitik damn-the-legality chess-playing stuff. He seems risky (to our interests in the region—who cares about his own people?) so we better depose him, that kind of thing.
This is the explanation that checks out with me. Add some impulse for Bush Jr to finish what Bush Sr started and you have yourself a ridiculous waste of resources.
Invading Iraq was very bad but it's not rubble. It's, like, still there.
Deaths in the war were less than you'd think. GWB actually comes out net positive in his presidency because he started PEPFAR (AIDS prevention in Africa) which was really, really good and saved millions of lives.
The randomness is exactly why it's so good. You'd get bad wars from other presidents, but you wouldn't have gotten PEPFAR. Gives him a good value over replacement president.
The US is still extracting and controlling oil resources in a foreign country via its military, just look at their current presence in North-Eastern Syria.
One would think so, and yet, the US does exactly that in North-Eastern Syria.
Also, see the US President asking the Saudis for some extra pumping of oil last summer (summer of 2022, that is), supposedly that was meant to help with the gasoline prices in the US and hence with said President’s greater chances of electoral success.
I'm pretty sure one of those tiny media operations managed to cut one of the EU's countries out of the herd, so they're a problem I'd like to solve, if possible. Or at least inoculate against, before it happens again.
Russia is a mafia like state, no doubt but i just mentioned hundreds of coups, deaths squads, forever wars and millions dead from western powers, eternal war machines that we are supporting.
And still you'd like to focus on what Russia maybe did in some EU elections, and while i totally agree with you, the fact that it's the part you focus on just like the US media is the psyop in itself. Look over there while multiple wars are ongoing.
That the endgame for that discourse is more war in itself is brilliant, all allowed public discourse should lead to more war from the west towards a myriad of evil people all around, and no one should look into the classes that benefit from those wars.
I see what you're saying. My point (which definitely wasn't clear) is that "small" doesn't mean "ineffective". Equivalent Western operations are hampered because they have goals. Russia is just a chaos monkey - for example I'm sure they'd bung money to XR if they could, despite being a petrostate.
Yes, it's true, I care more about Russia because they've already kicked me where it hurts once. Anyway, if there was a way to inoculate against Russian psyops, wouldn't that also solve the problems you're more concerned about?
Some people just hate to hate. A lot of the world does like the US, some even go as far to exclaim love, and rightfully so.
I've had former close friends attempt to sabotage me in my early career as well, for a multitude of reasons, but the most apparent to me was jealousy. How much of the world do you think operates in a similar way? I would bet a very significant portion does, maybe even a majority if I were at my most cynical years.
Oh those annoying endless rants, not the millions dead in wars, those who ended their lives by death squads because they wanted their own resources, they aren't that important, but those pesky rants!
There's been no stop to the US war machine, they're 100% succesfull.
Nor do I. China is heavily invested in doing business, as is the West, and this can be a limiting factor to how crazy the countries act. China wants functioning markets. It's Russia, on a massive scale, who's gone for the 'make everyone else disintegrate in civil war, what could possibly go wrong with amplifying this perennial human failing' strategy.
Not a fan. We cannot ever eliminate the sparks of these fires without abandoning nations (and then getting flattened by rival nations) so I don't like chaos strategies. Chaos doesn't need help.
> Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative.
These operations were happening way before 2011[1]. The internet and social media were simply the most effective ways of executing them.
> And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence.
Debunking disinformation is not the antidote, and the legal system wouldn't have anything to do about that. The problem is that the West built the perfect tools for psyops, opened them up to the entire world, and are now wondering why their democracies are crumbling. This is either an act of self-sabotage or the enemy is a much stronger adversary than they anticipated.
To be fair, a democracy with open media and protections of free speech will always be harder to defend against foreign psyops attacks. Instead of having to influence enough people to revolt, you only have to influence enough to change the election outcome, which typically is close to parity anyway. And with non-state-run media and free speech protections, you have many pathways.
So democracies have to harden themselves. And I think the only way to harden the populace is education. General education. Education in the scientific method. And also education about psyops.
I agree. But it is not the only requirement. Restoring control of
technologies to the people is vital too. Intellectual self-defence
requires a sceptical stance, but it also requires capability (other
than simply switching off and opting out)
Five giant websites plus endpoint computing that is neither owned nor
controlled by passive "consumers" is a grave step in the wrong
direction.
In the "West" we've allowed this for reasons of private profit and
government control, and I think in doing so we've created the very
conditions for malign influence.
"Education about psyops" is impossible. Until recently this amounted to "don't trust the media, and verify everything the government says [using media sources]."
Reddit is currently being used to poison future training data for LLMs while laundering the source of the beliefs, to make it look like "everyone" believes a single narrative. Whoever "controls" the content on Reddit (and the media, while it lasts) controls what will be the Truth in the future as it's all absorbed into a attributionless knowledge pool.
So Joe Sixpack thinks he's smart, puts on his anti-media tinfoil hat and just asks WhateverGPT his question, which has been tainted by...poisoned Reddit data and media sources that draw from it. Fuck pipe bombs and meth-- this is the real danger of local LLMs. They challenge the monopoly on knowledge itself. There is no dissent.
It's currently impossible for outsiders to launch a psyops campaign on Reddit. VPNs are blocked. Those that took control of the treehouse quickly moved to pull the ladder up. The party line and public perception of it is now meticulously groomed (pun intended).
I am sorry, but what?
"Education about psyops" is not "don't trust the media". Education about psyops is "These are the methods that people use. These are examples where we know it was used. These are techniques to detect it." and much more.
If your psyops game plan is foiled by "vpn detection" of reddit, I don't think you should be playing.
If you really think the fake narratives originate only from the countries which aren't "behaving" as the politicians of your preferred countries would like, I have a huge stock of bridges to sell to you.
Edit: If you'd like a very recent example, research who's telling he saw the "pictures of beheaded babies", and why.
The real problem is that a lot of this “fake information” is a fact.
For example, the USA foreign policy always leads to wars and war crimes and handful of corporations are the beneficiary on a global scale.
Maybe if you as Americans realize that your Constitutional rights are under attack, and there is no right or left in the political spectrum (just crooks and lobbyists), the world will have a chance to follow your example. Who knows?
The bigger issue is that "commie under your bed" techniques never died.
Americans are the victim of mind control more than Russians. Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda. Even Ukrainians kicked their but in information warfare.
And please, don't put me on some "Russian propaganda" troll theory.
Go listen to Judge Napolitano podcast, with real American patriots like Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Ray McGovern, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson, Tony Shafer, Prof. John J. Mearsheimer, Max Blumenthal.
> Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda.
The interesting thing about information warfare is that it doesn't require sophistication and much resources at all. Set up a bunch of troll farms, pay tech-savvy teenagers to do your dirty work, give them some vague talking points, and let them loose on social media.
If you really want to scale this cheaply, deploy AI instead. Russia might not have those capabilities yet, but China certainly does.
BTW, I'm not picking sides here. Just pointing out that it would be absurd to think Russia or China aren't engaging in this type of warfare. They would actually prefer it, given that they can't compete with traditional physical might.
I have a side. The truth. The most links in this rabbit hole point to the operations of the USA agencies as a whole.
Russia has crumbled in the 90s and now is just starting to wake up.
If I have to measure threat and I am an American, I would ask: How on earth China has developed this enormous economical advantage over all of the world?
Who financed this growth? Who benefited the most? And why, after living through the Cold War, we are heading in a similar direction?
These are your sources? And please, the leader in information technology and psychology warfare is known to the whole world.
Practically all the listed sources are part of the complex of disinformation.
On the grand scale of things, the troll farms of Russians are a joke.
USA has more than 900 official military bases outside the territory of the country.
Can you imagine the logistics? The agents? The infrastructure supporting this global operation? The budgets?
Is it surprising that someone interested enough to post in this thread would have had a past interest in the subject as well? It's hard for me to understand how this is a good-faith, thoughtful response. There have been many other takedowns and a lot of other reporting as well, but the link provides some decent insight with a level of detail that an HN reader would appreciate. The tl;dr: most of the "Russian bots" research was, as I summarized, bunk, and pushed by people such as Bill Kristol and other establishment people behind prior false propaganda. I am not sure what "look, you posted this before" is supposed to mean.
> Source: you
Here is an article published in Nature.
Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian [specifically the IRA] foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.
Sure, but you can find op-eds and comments everywhere opining that the "new" nature of disinformation and misinformation on the Internet requires corporate-state collusion to censor and repress, lest those people who are susceptible to these campaigns (never, of course, the experts or the people in government) vote the wrong way.
Although I am reluctant to even mention it due to its politicization, the Hunter laptop story is a fine example; claiming the story was Russian disinformation with a total lack of evidence (a claim that persists in some quarters to this day!) damaged the credibility of news institutions and intelligence agencies more than any actual Russian disinformation. The fact the actual story was largely a nothingburger makes it even worse. It gives the appearance that people in positions of influence and power attempted to repress a story that did nothing more than paint someone related to the President in a bad light. Indeed, it's incredible and shameful that the NYT took years to print stories like this [1] which could have been used to refute people quoting the "don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary" text because they preferred to leave responsible people with the impression that it was all total fiction and Russian disinformation. Rather than trusting the electorate, the NYT, Twitter, and government intelligence agencies believed it was better to mislead them rather than risk them voting incorrectly. In other words, people are not capable of self-government.
That link is merely disputing the argument that bots were involved in disinformation campaigns. This is irrelevant in the discussion that such campaigns were conducted, which you agree with yourself, and the fact that they're wildly successful.
We know this because of their use in influencing elections in dozens of countries by companies like Cambridge Analytica. They certainly weren't the first nor will be the last, just the ones that got the most exposure.
We also know that social media is filled with bot accounts that spread disinformation. This also isn't new, and you don't need to be a researcher to verify it.
We also know that Russia and China don't have the military capability to fight the US, but they certainly have a technological one to conduct these operations. This war is not new, as you say, but with the advent of the internet it has become the most efficient and effective way to destabilize a nation.
So, by the powers of deduction, and without using any biased sources, we can conclude that a) information warfare exists and the US and its enemies are taking part in it, b) a US election would be a major event prime for attack, and c) it would be trivial to deploy bots to run these operations.
Reaching any alternative conclusion would be delusional, and evidence that counter propaganda does indeed also work.
> This is irrelevant in the discussion that such campaigns were conducted, which you agree with yourself, and the fact that they're wildly successful.
I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent. One might argue that nothing is more "destabilizing" than the polarizing idea your domestic opposition is brainwashed by foreign enemies.
>? We also know that social media is filled with bot accounts that spread disinformation. This also isn't new, and you don't need to be a researcher to verify it.
Except we keep finding the alleged bots aren't bots at all. My own Twitter account was, according to these groups, a bot. Perhaps we don't really "know" that at all. Perhaps most actual bot accounts have close to zero engagement.
> This war is not new, as you say, but with the advent of the internet it has become the most efficient and effective way to destabilize a nation.
No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns, although no doubt as t -> infinity, we'll see something.
> I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent.
You're disputing this based on... what exactly?
The effectiveness of propaganda is widely studied and known, so it's unsurpising that an industry that applies it using modern tools would be very profitable. Companies like Cambridge Analytica have been successful all around the world for decades now. See https://www.propagandamachine.tech/ca-map
How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition. But it's ignorant to claim that this impact is negligible, or that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
> No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns
How do you reach this conclusion? The internet is the greatest propaganda delivery method the world has ever seen, and we've known the effects of propaganda for a long time. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
> How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition.
> Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior
> It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
The burden of proof is on people claiming that foreign countries doing the same thing they've always done with a new delivery mechanism has changed anything. And given the amount of bad faith disinformation already put out by the primary actors insisting this is the case - not people in comment threads, I mean organizations like New Knowledge and other sources used by NYT and USGov - the burden of proof is pretty high. If you have to blatantly make stuff up, your credibility goes down.
> that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
Why?
This seems like a very puzzling statement when considering the past century. Aside from the impacts of increasing atomization and social disintegration related to population churn and mass media (not news, but movies, TV, Instagram, etc.), the only really unusual thing about today's socio-political environment is the degree to which dissent is not tolerated and treated as fundamentally subversive. And even that's not too unusual; for example, the pacifists and isolationists today are Russian bots, the pacifists and isolationists of yesteryear were Nazi apologists, secret communists, etc.
Macgregor and Mearsheimer are bullshitters, and Russia absolutely doesn't lack the sophistication to be effective at propaganda. Unfortunately their top leaders (and China's to a lesser extent) are also the victims of some of our own propaganda, and some fringe LaRouche propaganda too.
Sarcasmitron has a great video series on YouTube about it:
Trying to list Mearsheimer in a list of smart people is going to fail you since people can just look him up and see him being wrong about everything he's ever said.
(He's a "realist", which is an international theory that treats countries as being rational with no domestic divisions, except for the US which is irrational because of liberalism. Also, he doesn't speak Russian, which doesn't stop him claiming to know what they think.)
Max Blumenthal is literally a Russian agent and professional genocide denier.
"John Mearsheimer is one who foresaw the very real possibility of a war against Ukraine. I think he is quite wrong about NATO as the provocation, but if you are grading him on predictions alone obviously he wins some serious kudos."
Mearsheimer is my go to expert for international relations. He is a scientist where many people are pundits and propagandists.
I hesitate to accept Tyler Cowen as a source for anything. He's similarly a type of public intellectual where everyone else goes "well he's wrong about this but he's very smart" and then you count that up and realize he's never actually right about anything.
(And he runs an economics blog where all the commenters are anti-immigration racists, about the most economically senseless thing you can be.)
An example of other people right there would be a war on Ukraine was US intelligence, which is why we started that deterrence strategy where Biden gave speeches saying what Russia was about to do the week before they did it.
It does not include Mearsheimer getting all the details wrong, making up an excuse about NATO even Putin doesn't believe, and predicting Russia would instantly win or else that resisting would lead to nuclear war.
For other highlights, Mearsheimer thinks Japan didn't want to invade China in 1937 and Chiang Kai-Shek provoked them! Realism is just victim blaming.
Tyler Cowen writes and says all sorts of things, sometimes even sheer nonsense. But the post about the IR community asks good questions.
In view of the current catastrophe, one can ask oneself whether mistakes were made, whether full speed ahead was the right strategy for NATO and Ukraine.
NATO doesn't have anything to do with Ukraine. Ukraine was never going to be allowed into NATO before this.
Putin and Russians don't actually care about this - they want Ukraine's farmland back and hate their people for being ungrateful and pretending not to be Russian.
(If Russia really cared about NATO on their border they wouldn't have started a war that caused Finland to join it.)
> The campaigns exploit existing political fault lines like race and regionalism to increase polarization and disaffection with the political system. The complete lack of a coherent message across these campaigns is jarring until one realizes that the goal of the campaigns is not necessarily to convince anyone of anything, but rather to generate noise.
In other words, they simply don't care about the message as long as it's divisive. They will loudly support BLM or alt right or whoever as long as it sparks negative emotions and increases conflicts between Americans. And this strategy works incredibly well just because instead of inventing non-existent conflicts it rekindles the existing ones.
My litmus test for this is always whether the person loudly and persistently propagandizing for stuff, leads back to an insistence that the country they're working is going to collapse in race and/or civil war.
It can be framed as 'yes let's go fight this!' or it can be framed as a dismaying, looming threat rumbling ever closer. Doesn't matter. I identify that behavior as an attempt to produce race and/or civil war, even from nothing. And the more persistent the calls, the more well-funded but ill-sourced the outlet (ask yourself how the person's getting paid to do that full-time with such a busy workday), the more likely I'm going to think they are part of what I've come to think of as WWIII: the attempt to destroy rival nation-states purely with the old CIA techniques, which themselves probably date from the middle ages or Machiavelli or something.
Nothing is new. It's all humans continuing to bumble along as a cooperative but rabidly competitive species. These dichotomies produce this behavior and it's about whether stuff's got out of balance. I think Russia waging WWIII predominantly informationally, is out of balance and having some serious negative externalities beyond their wish for power.
I find it rather ironic that a lot of people, probably quite a vast majority, see themselves immune to propaganda (be it state or commercial).
I often play with the tought that I may well be just as brainwashed as e.g. Russians or Chinese are portrayed to be. I don't think there's really a way of knowing for certain. For most this is probably unthinkable. Or maybe I've been brainwashed by constructivist cultural marxism or whathaveyou?
For me it's very easy to tell because I've been living under a Communist regime and now in a "capitalist" (or "democratic" to use a more PC term) system so I know the difference extremely well. Many books have been written about this but essentially it boils down to the freedom of speech and the amount of punishment you can receive for criticism or being disobedient to those in power. People in the West have no idea what it means to be constantly afraid for oneself and one's family, to be totally at the mercy of a soulless system with no justice at all and no recourse, to learn not to trust anyone, even one's neighbors and family members and so on.
Getting back to your question: of course we are all brainwashed (or "culturally conditioned"), this way or another. But there is an abyss of difference between living in one of these regimes that criminalize everything that is not official vs living in a Western country with all its particularities and inconveniences.
Of course there's a cost to this. Liberal democracy is intensely annoying and always expands to embrace whatever kind of diversity is too much diversity.
That's how it can be a target for fascist uprisings: people want to pretend they're open to all things and have all freedoms as long as there are no consequences. In reality, there's one cost to restriction and another cost to multiculturalism and diversity.
If you look at it in a-life terms you see the autocracies as plateaus. Stuff gets locked down, and there's no progress. But progress hurts. Liberal democracies and their tolerance of diversity are about coping with all the unaligned interests of starkly different people, knowing that combining those people is what gets you startling progress. It can almost be reduced to simple mechanical terms, like recombination in a genetic soup.
It's always possible to crush inconvenient genes and have everyone the same (to a point, and if you're determined enough). And then, you don't have those genes anymore, and your future's narrowed.
Freedom of thought, freedom to travel not only for some vacation, even just a neighboring state firmly within your bloc. Not being executed on the border. Watching what you say, constantly.
You have no idea how much that means to you until you properly lose it. Then suddenly there are very few things in life worth more.
Everyone is engaged in propaganda. I called this guy out because he only named the usual "bad guys". You don't have to talk to me like I am 12 but since you insist, i am going to repeat it: everyone is doing it.
That said, the ones doing it the most are those with most resources. So, the US and us vassals working for our "partners" across the Atlantic.
I didn’t intend to be demeaning so apologies if you felt that way.
The thing is that your comment felt to me a bit like a somewhat common dismissal of real and corrosive problems facing democracy these days.
Like for instance now you say that “everyone is doing it” but what is “it” there? Because not everyone is actually spreading disinformation about everything. People, corporations and governments have agendas of course but how they go about things really matters.
There is a clear difference between the ways and behaviour of western democracies on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand.
I know in which places I do and don’t want to live for instance.
Oh, I do agree there are significant differences between the ways countries conduct themselves. It's just that i do hold the EU and the US to higher standards because that's what they have been promoting.
False advertising is a very serious offence in my book. Wouldn't move to Russia unless they change course.
I’m sure there is yet it’s not NATO troops trying to occupy land in Eastern Europe. When one party openly behaves like a villain then they most likely are one. You can blab about the US invasion of Afghanistan but the US didn’t go in to setup a totalitarian kleptocracy that replaces their culture with another.
Afghanistan opium cultivation in 2023 declined to one in 20 compared to earlier (95% less), following drug ban by those who are now in power (official United Nations statistics):
Noy sure if you are joking or not, but US definitely installed cleptocrats, if you ever actually cared about say afghan local news. Generals switching sides for money, while investing in massive real estate projects around big cities.
They may be local but in society like afghan one that can have various meaning too since there are many distinct clans who often openly fight each other. Ie British previously loved in their colonies to give power to some minority to focus hatred within locals and keep eyes from their exploitation business. Quite a few of that caused some recent conflicts in Africa.
Well, it certainly isn’t “equivalent” given that the Russian version of the story/belief isn’t created and maintained in the open air of a free information environment. In the US, you’re welcome to (and people actually do) contradict “official narratives” whenever you want.
I read Russian forums and these people are more sober than you may think. They are fed up with Putin and with what is happening to Russia now. It's not so much that they care about Ukrainians but more about the terrible direction the country is heading. For many, it's the return of the dark era of the collapse of the USSR, they don't see any bright light on the horizon.
This is because chaos warfare and the attempts to just straight up reestablish an old school empire, are bad in the context of modern global commerce. I think it might have worked better for them had Putin run his country along more communist lines, but instead he held power in his government with the same chaos warfare tools he used overseas, and the cost of that is that he's clung to power unto death, but all the systems that are supposed to make Russia work, disintegrated.
Agreed. Most are very open and public about their activities and purpose. It seems like most conspiracy theories are just honeypots for institutions like the studiously benign "Behavioural Insights Team". The BBC (and other public broadcasters) are complicit in "manufacturing consent" for public policy, or other social goals. It's quite obvious to me that the average person has been woven a deliberate and simple (but critically wrong) model for reality, which complies with government goals.
There is a perfect level of cynicism here. The people want a simple model of reality. It shows up immediately at all levels of society. Simple messages work in the family, win elections, and persist for centuries whether they work or not when implemented. The tech industry is interesting as an example closer to HN for how management regularly assumes situations are simple despite endless counterexamples.
There are threads in the media that are probably government sponsored (topically, John Brennan going CIA->MSNBC or the Twitter files). The oversimplification is likely because people don't engage with complexity without shutting down. The refusal of the corporate media to learn that War is Bad is probably government sponsored. Even then, the military industrial complex and regulatory capture muddies the water somewhat about who is motivating the madness.
Multiple actors likely co-operate and help each other without explicit communication. (Is that still conspiracy?)
The corporations wouldn’t want a government created issue, like war, go to waste, and will play along to make some profit. The media will self-censor to avoid losing advertising customers.
As far as they are concerned war is bad sometimes, depending if doesn’t or does further their interests. I remember people watching the US invasion of Iraq invasion on CNN. CNN didn’t start it but it a great boost of views from it.
I dunno. I'm arguing that the media is only going to settle on a simple model of reality and I'm proposing the closest-to-reality model as the one that they'd settle on if not for financially/politically motivated reasoning.
The US has pretty much bankrupted itself and achieved not much useful for themselves with their global military expeditions. I think almost everything they've done in the last 50 years has been an embarrassment for them. I dunno, any successes? The worm is even starting to turn on Ukraine as people note the consequence, expense and general lack of good outcomes as the China-Russia-Iran axis gets welded together. They could have shortened the leash of the coup-organisers back in the early 2010s, left Ukraine as a buffer state and avoided the whole situation with better results for ... maybe literally everyone. I mean, it is starting to look like the 2024 Russia-Ukraine border will be the one that could have been settled on pretty early in the conflict with a bit of diplomacy; then everyone digs in and settles for the long stalemate.
It beggars belief that a neutrally motivated reporter would still be gung-ho about sending in the troops before thinking. I suppose reporters are a bit slow, but the track record is appalling and the alternatives - some more cooperative diplomacy - so obvious even Trump was talking about it. It was a mistake to demonise that part of his platform.
Unless the goal was more war, in which case well done another mission accomplished.
Everything aside (i mostly agree), your take on Ukraine is rather naive.
It is clear that Putin wanted to occupy Ukraine - the whole lot of it - in some way and anex parts of it. Destroyed convoys with riot gear were biggest tell. The anexation was done according to plan even on lands not controled by ru.
There was no room for negotiations there. There is not much room in negotiations with russian anyway. They will take your wallet and then negotiate how much they should give back if you apologize for calling them thieves.
Nobody who was serious about geopolitics entertained idea of Ukraine joining nato or eu. Finland didn't join nato as to not provoke russian (but russian had forced their hand and they joined now for obvious reasons).
> It beggars belief that a neutrally motivated reporter would still be gung-ho about sending in the troops before thinking.
The media is to be used as source of facts, their opinions are not source of anything good. For most parts its either simplistic take or outright propaganda.
I think everyone agrees that once the Russian army started moving it was to late to stop them invading Ukraine. The issue I have is that "Putin wanted to occupy Ukraine" is too simplistic. We should be asking why he felt forced to occupy Ukraine. Russia can't realistically afford to do what they're doing, it is ruinous for them too and they all know it. The US strategy is to bleed them white while expending Slavic blood on both sides. Which to be honest is a pretty good and cost-effective strategy locally speaking, I'd actually say it was a good idea except Russia has nukes, oil and strategically the US really need to be working on isolating China which this failed spectacularly at.
Russia underestimated how active the US was in Ukraine. They weren't expecting the level of resistance they encountered and it is pretty obvious that Ukraine would have folded immediately if the US wasn't backing them. Given that the Russians are probably moving from fear of NATO and it turns out NATO was conspiring against them in Ukraine, I have difficulty accepting that "Putin wanted this". It looks a lot more like "Putin thought he could find a diplomatic solution and realised the only option left was to invade, but it was too late and didn't send enough forces". If their rationale was the obvious one (fear of NATO moving in Ukraine) then the invasion revealed that not only are those fears justified, but they were in fact underestimating the threat.
> We should be asking why he felt forced to occupy Ukraine
That's a hell of a take, I will give you that. I am not even sure where to start off with it. Looking back to europe's past. Poor hitler was forced to attack poland and rest of europe due to Treaty of Versailles. Helpless uncle stalin did same as his oppressed people buckled to outside influences.
Your statement is hair away if not already trying to justify the invasion.
> The issue I have is that "Putin wanted to occupy Ukraine" is too simplistic
Its simplistic but the reasons that caused it are more complicated. For one putin is dreaming of recreating ussr. He made many statements about it, he wrote an academic paper about it too.
His power is slipping, he needed a distraction, a win. Dictators need to perpetuate image of being strong and successful - putin riding a bear with AK waving russian flag. That image was degrading as putin's popularity was waining.
Natural resource grab. The anexed republic are rich in new oil and other heavy industry. New source of money for putin and his mafia to loot.
Growing internal opposition, Navalny while not such saint himself exposed and fought image of putin as beloved ruler
1) The Treaty of Versailles led directly into to WWII. At the time, I would have been strongly with Keynes - it was a stupid treaty, it caused massive amounts of damage, the victors should have negotiated a fair peace and the allied powers may as well have started re-arming immediately on the assumption that war was coming.
If you assumed German policy was motivated by some level of cause-and-effect it is hard to avoid that treaty being an expensive mistake. And in the aftermath of WWII, note that the policies were occupation and rebuilding. Indeed, the US's learning "don't do another Versailles" lead to the peaceful reconstruction of Japan and Germany in a way that should be the gold standard for every post-war strategy.
2) Your statement is hair away if not already trying to justify the invasion.
If you take a holistic view, you'd probably guess (correctly) that I think this invasion is unjustified, but is in the same class of unjustified invasions as Iraq or Afghanistan - unjustified, they happen from time to time and the best that can be done is just calm the situation down ASAP. It was always a better option to go with more diplomacy and the US should be assisting in that.
But the Ukraine invasion wasn't a flight of fancy, everyone who has looked at the topic seriously agrees there is a long backstory of build ups. The only real debate point is which ones are more significant. I think US pressure, since the US is the most powerful entity involved in the war there and it is unlikely that started with Russia crossing the border.
Generally speaking, the most agency goes to the most powerful entity. So in this case, the most agency is held roughly by the US, then the EU, then Russia, then Ukraine in that order.
> We should be asking why he felt forced to occupy Ukraine.
We can certainly think about that academically, but it matters about as much as why Hitler invaded Poland. The reason matters far less than the fact that sovereign nations have no valid reason to attack another sovereign nation without being attacked first or defending an ally who has been attacked.
If you are not Russian then I am so sorry for you falling for their conspiracies, Russia is not the victim here, they always think of themselvees as a super power that God himself given them the right to screw smaller countries over.
I do not think diplomacy could have solved this, only way this could have been prevented if is Kremlin would not have been so corrupt and incompetent, if Putin would have known that the 3 day operation would be at least a 3 year one he would not have started this war. (or special operation if you live in that democratic country where you are not allowed to name a war a way ).
> It looks a lot more like "Putin thought he could find a diplomatic solution and realised the only option left was to invade, but it was too late and didn't send enough forces".
Ironically, this is the simplification that you speak of. It is an extremely simple narrative that people are trying to sell as a sophisticated analysis. It completely ignores the immediate 70 years of history still in living memory, and the preceding five centuries. No "scholar" and "expert" pushing this narrative ever speaks about Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and others, about the secret protocol between the USSR and Germany that divided Europe for half a century; about occupied countries and genocide committed by Russians, and the legacy of all that and its influence on the present day. Completely missing.
For example, explain within your framework why in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sweden abandoned neutrality that they had maintained since the Napoleonic era.
> For example, explain within your framework why in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sweden abandoned neutrality that they had maintained since the Napoleonic era.
Because they're worried about being invaded by Russia, think NATO is substantially more powerful and likely to aid them? That seems like a pretty obvious one to me.
> Ironically, this is the simplification that you speak of...
Yeah. My argument is that only simple messages propagate. I don't know why people feel compelled to point out I'm pushing a simple message. Complex messages don't work.
The issue I'm pointing out is that the current in-vogue simple message is catastrophic in consequence. US foreign policy has managed to go from unassailable global hegemon to conceivably taken out in a 3 front war + debt crisis by 2035. Not likely, but uncomfortably possible and there was no need to be staring at a debt crisis or to provoke a 3-front war - in 2016 it looked like the US and Russia could even have become friends aligned lightly against the threat of the Chinese military going rogue. There are 350 million people in the US, surely they can find another Bismarck instead of the clowns that were responsible for the clown show that was 2000-2020.
> Because they're worried about being invaded by Russia, think NATO is substantially more powerful and likely to aid them? That seems like a pretty obvious one to me.
Why should they be worried about being invaded by Russia, if their policy was to stay neutral and accommodate Russia as much as they could, like Putin's apologist recommend?
I think you're reading something I didn't write; it is pretty obvious why they should be worried about Russia and why they'd want to join NATO. Everyone wants to join NATO. Even Russia has tried to join NATO [0].
But the issue here is that Russia's actions if Ukraine joins NATO were very easy to predict. And we've discovered through the Ukraine war that Ukraine is already partially under the NATO defence umbrella. So Russia actions here are not random imperialism but actually fairly predictable from their long-standing defence interests. If the US (and maybe the EU, I dunno much about German/French politics) hadn't been flirting with coup support and closer military ties in the 2010s then war could probably have been avoided; especially if the diplomatic efforts of the Trump administration had been encouraged.
As it stands, the US has managed to piss off the people who control the world's largest nuclear arsenal and top-10 oil reserves, done who-knows-what long term to their relationship with Germany through the Nordstream sabotage, run Russia's military through a whetstone so they'll be a lot more battle-ready and is encouraging that package to form a China/Iran/whoever alliance because they have no other choice. And re-militarise Europe after 70 years of relative peace. It is obvious that the US doesn't see diplomacy as an option and will not negotiate in good faith. This outcome is so bad that it would be more sensible not to have been provoking a fight in Ukraine. We can only hope that the CCP doesn't know how to take advantage of the gift that the US State Department is handing them.
[0] Would probably have been a good idea to figure out a way to bring them in back when that was something they were trying to do.
> But the issue here is that Russia's actions if Ukraine joins NATO were very easy to predict.
Ukraine has not joined NATO, and is not going to in any foreseeable future. At Russia's request, Ukraine and Georgia were denied entry into NATO already in 2008. The topic was completely off the table. And yet Russia invaded both of them. Leaving Georgia and Ukraine out in the cold decreased the risk for Russia and increased the likelihood of aggression against them.
> I think you're reading something I didn't write; it is pretty obvious why they should be worried about Russia and why they'd want to join NATO.
It's not obvious to me, if I accept the notion that Russia merely reacts to NATO. Sweden was not in NATO and accommodated Russia every way they could. Why did they abandon this policy? Why did Finland do the same?
Finland is particularly notable, because its foreign policy gave birth to the term findlandization: "The term is often considered pejorative. It originated in the West German political debate of the late 1960s and 1970s. As the term was used in West Germany and other NATO countries, it referred to the decision of a country not to challenge a more powerful neighbour in foreign politics, while maintaining national sovereignty. It is commonly used in reference to Finland's policies in relation to the Soviet Union during the Cold War."
If we accept the idea pushed by Putin's apologists that countries in Eastern Europe should stay away from alliances, remain neutral, sit silent and hold their breath to avoid angering Russia, then Sweden and Finland were doing exactly that.
Why did this approach become utterly discredited in early 2022? What changed for Sweden and Finland?
Unfortunately "has not joined NATO" has strong overtones of a bully's "stop hitting yourself!" routine. Russia has invaded Ukraine and encountered NATO materiel paid for by NATO money and NATO trained soldiers using NATO intelligence to kill Russian troops and generals. This is all happening according to achieve strategic objectives held by NATO. I'm just speculating from the sidelines here, but I suspect they see NATO aligning itself with Ukraine and I doubt the Russian leadership agrees with you. And they've probably pegged the Euromaidan as being organised by the US. They may have come to the mistaken conclusion that NATO is active in Ukraine.
This compares to the US invading Iraq where there was a sound like a rodent becoming flat. I mean, maybe there was a huge amount of Russian support during the war and NATO just flattened it, but as far as I recall Iraq stood very alone.
> It's not obvious to me, if I accept the notion that Russia merely reacts to NATO.
Aha, we have found the point of difference. You are incorrect in thinking that Russia only reacts to NATO. I think in the Ukraine war Russia is reacting to NATO. Although there is probably a roenxi-equivalent in Russia who is thinking "this invasion is damn stupid and dooms us all, we should have kept trying diplomacy", but in Cyrillic.
> Why did this approach become utterly discredited in early 2022? What changed for Sweden and Finland?
Well, I'm not sure what their strategists are thinking but my take is the US demonstrated that peace was not an option and they are going to keep increasing the temperature until Russia's red lines get crossed. With that context, it makes sense to be on the side that will win the upcoming conflict(s). It is better than risking a US-backed coup, although I doubt that would be necessary in the nordic countries.
> Russia has invaded Ukraine and encountered NATO materiel paid for by NATO money and NATO trained soldiers using NATO intelligence to kill Russian troops and generals.
They did not. It took 8 years, until the renewed invasion, before any meaningful supplies began arriving in Ukraine. Western leaders had to be shown mass graves before they were willing to provide heavy equipment.
> Well, I'm not sure what their strategists are thinking but my take is the US demonstrated that peace was not an option and they are going to keep increasing the temperature until Russia's red lines get crossed. With that context, it makes sense to be on the side that will win the upcoming conflict(s).
Sweden had been neutral since 1814: it went through both world wars and the Cold War without choosing sides. If we accept the premise that Russia is reacting to NATO and that the Americans are responsible for everything, then why would the events in Ukraine drastically change the outlook for Sweden?
You can't give a plausible explanation, because there is none, because the situation has nothing to do with NATO or the Americans.
Russia has begun violating agreements that even the USSR adhered to, such as the 1975 Helsinki Accords (in short: no violent territorial changes in Europe)[1]. For a long time, Sweden and Finland believed that they could avoid Russian aggression through careful diplomacy, and stand against Russia independently when required, but the war against Ukraine was unprovoked and far beyond Nordic military capabilities, dashing both hopes.
So now you have two key factors:
1. Increasingly hostile neighbour.
2. Insufficient military strength.
How do you respond?
Nordic military and political leaders concluded that tighter international cooperation is the only way to survive this situation. For example, a country with 5 or 10 million people can't afford air defense network that could protect their people from such drone and cruise missile attacks like Ukraine is experiencing; they need external help.
Nordic countries have a fair bit of history with Russia too and can see through the bullshit that many westerners don't immediately recognize. You know where "Molotov cocktail" came from? In 1939, Russians staged the shelling of Mainila[2], claiming that Finns were responsible. Four days later, Russians launched unprovoked war against Finland. As Russian planes were bombing Helsinki, Russian propaganda kept blasting that the planes were delivering food to starving Finns. Molotov cocktail was the hot drink Finns devised to go with the "bread baskets" that bombers were dropping.
And like the fake republics of Luhansk and Donetsk that Russians set up in Ukraine, Russians had established the Finnish Democratic Republic[3], ready to take over the entire Finland as soon as Russian tanks rolled over it. But Finns put up a stiff resistance and kept their independence.
All that is still in living memory, people still have grandparents alive to tell how it was back then. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, using the same methods, leaves no room for doubt for what's really going on and who's responsible.
Sweden has been close to NATO for decades. There is not much to explain. It just does not matter very much, Russia would not have invaded Sweden anyway.
It's different for the baltic states. They were lucky to be able to join NATO without any major trouble from Russia. Russia was still weak in 2004.
I think it was in 2007 that Putin felt strong enough to oppose NATO enlargements in eastern Europe (his speech at Munich security conference).
Georgia caved in in 2008, they don't like dying for Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The nationalists in Ukraine are less pragmatic, even Minsk 2 was too much for them.
As a person born in one of the ex soviet countries, i hate the narrative of 'nato expansion'.
NONE of those countries were acquired,forced, or coersed by Nato, they all 'beg, borrowed and stole' in order to get into the Nato.
Because all of them knew acactly what will happen otherwise. Precisely to avoid what was happening to Ukraine (russia defacto controlling it via puppet politicians) and now being actively invaded by russia.
Russia complaining about 'nato expansion', is akin to wife-beater complaining his wife run away and got a restraining order.
> It just does not matter very much, Russia would not have invaded Sweden anyway.
Swedish military experts think otherwise. If Russia were to invade Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, then one could reasonably expect that they would close the Suwalki gap that connects Lithuania and Poland, to cut the land route between them end rest of Europe, and invade the Swedish island of Gotland, to prevent any supply over sea or air routes. It would require an effort comparable to Normandy landings to liberate the invaded countries; unlikely to happen.
Hence the Swedish reaction, to prevent that chain of events from starting in the first place:
> During the 20th century, infantry, artillery, air force and naval elements were stationed on Gotland as part of Sweden's defense system, until all permanent military units were stood down in 2005. With tensions in Northeastern Europe and Russia escalating in 2014–2015, the Swedish government has taken a new interest in remilitarizing the island. And in September 2016 regular troops were once again stationed on the island, albeit as an interim measure until a permanent garrison could be reestablished. As of 1 January 2018 Gotland has re-established the Gotland Regiment.
And even larger policy shift followed the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, from entry into NATO to establishment of joint air force command for Norway, Sweden and Finland - because the scale of Russian aggression against Ukraine made abundantly clear that none of them would be equipped to fight something like that off alone, and that Putin was willing to unleash it without provocation.
The typical "america bad" narrative pushed by useful idiots completely fails to explain these developments.
Every conflict that lasts for decades tends to generate its own structures and strategies. And the conflict between Russia and the West has been going on for a long, long time.
One strategy of Russia is to say all the things. The West is not a homogenous political entity and in more radicalized nations like the US the opposition will almost always be against the opinion of the governing party. Then there are the isolationists that think sticking your head in the ground will make it all go away. So Russia will always flood the ether with all the things and many western parties will pick those up that fit them and ignore the rest.
But lets take a look at the acts Russia did, not the words.
It never ceased its occupation of part of Moldovia.
It reconquered its Chechen colony.
In 2008 it occupied part of Georgia, now it plans to build a military port and there are talks about a "referendum".
In 2014 it annexed part of Ukraine and started a proxy war in the east.
In 2022 it came back for the rest.
And yes, Putin wont attack NATO members right now. Next stop would most likely be Moldovia. But you can be sure that Putin will use his minions like Orban to break up the EU and NATO and wait for an opportune moment to grab another part of the lost Russian empire.
Russia’s scheme for war occurs in six stages, beginning before the war actually begins. At the low end—in peacetime and under military threat—Russia will conduct nonkinetic warfare (cyber and psychological operations) against enemies while publicly demonstrating new nuclear weapons, raising overall readiness and alert levels, and deploying weapons for potential use. In a “local war,” Russian strategy calls for “grouped use” of precision strike conventional weapons to inflict damage on enemy territory, strikes on conventional military targets, and threatening to use nuclear weapons.
Under “regional war”—war with NATO or China—Russia would employ “massed use” of precision weapons on enemy forces, adding “single or grouped use” of tactical nuclear weapons, possibly to demonstrate that Russia is willing to use them.
In “large-scale war,” Russia would make “large-scale use” of nonstrategic nuclear weapons, and conduct both strategic and nonstrategic nuclear strikes on enemy economic targets. Finally, under “nuclear war,” Russia would unleash “mass use” of its nuclear triad against military and nonmilitary targets.
The precursor stage to war—setting a favorable atmosphere for Russia to prevail—employs “nonmilitary means,” which broadly include “political, information (both psychological and technical), diplomatic, economic, legal, spiritual/moral, and humanitarian measures,” according to a 2011 Russian defense paper. Overt tactics in this stage include “implementing economic sanctions, imposing economic blockades, forming coalitions and unions, breaking off diplomatic relations, and conducting information warfare,” it said. Prevailing political conditions will determine when and to what extent these means are used, and they must be constantly adapted to the fluid situation, the authors note.
Nonmilitary means of war are a “force multiplier,” Russian doctrine holds, which “serve to weaken and reduce an opponent’s forces and capabilities, and even completely eliminating a military threat.” Coordination between military and nonmilitary means are a must. In fact, a 2013 defense article by Russian Army Gen. Valery Gerasimov, head of the military forces, contends that “in a number of cases,” nonmilitary means of coercion “significantly surpassed the power of weapons in their effectiveness.” Gerasimov said the ratio of nonmilitary to military methods of warfare is 4-to-1.
It’s important to separate the way that Russia fights from their strategic objectives, especially in light of maskirovka. With Russia, it’s often many levels of intent with hidden objectives.
I think you are giving Russia too much credit. This is the same doctrine Russia used when invading Ukraine. I am sure all those agents and paid propagandists told their FSB and GRU superiors whatever they wanted to hear while pocketing most money for themself.
Putin is a gambler that has inherited lots of resources and wants to make high probability low risk bets. If he loses a round he goes double or nothing since he can do that a few times. Of course that potentially opens him up to ruinous catastrophic losses if confronted by a competent adversary. Then he will cry: "but my nukes....." and hopes everybody backs off.
As for propaganda I think they just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. All is reactive post hoc information warfare unless there are meaningful consequences.
Btw to think that Russia would have taken any statement regarding NATO expansion seriously without it being written and ratified in a treaty is beyond comical.
They're at debt levels consistent with fighting in WWII [0]. And interest payments on the debt have overtaken military spending. It is going to get paid back banana-republic style. You can quibble the word choice if you like, but the military policy was a big contributing factor to this outcome.
Assuming that the Russia-Ukraine conflict settles down, Iran doesn't act up and the South China Sea stays peaceful. Fingers crossed the US is about to enter a period of peace-by-lacking-affluence rather than something ugly happening.
Bonus graph: You can see China unloading their holdings [1] as fast as a trillion dollars can be moved. It makes entertaining viewing. Good luck to Japan who look to be the bag holders on this one. It'll be intriguing to find out who is on the other side of the tax havens too.
It's funny that in a thread with so many unhinged comments (psyop or psychosis), someone notices that China is the lone country dumping its dollars and comes to the tamest, most naive conclusion, that they employ better economists than the rest of the world.
> Fingers crossed the US is about to enter a period of peace-by-lacking-affluence rather than something ugly happening.
Who's lacking affluence? The 2023 US economy is the best US economy of my or most people's lives.
And since the economy isn't a morality play, good performance doesn't automatically mean it's about to fail.
I would rather use Argentina as an example. They've done as bad a job as you can possibly do managing their economy, defaulted several times, and even that result is not that bad. Everyone still lends to them even. When you're a country, you don't have to be on your best behavior, because there's no other planet for the lenders to move to.
It's perfectly valid to make that statement without a requirement for relativism. War is bad, absolutely. Our enemies may be worse than war, but that doesn't change the fact.
Lol this Warlord trying to impart their Martian philosophy.
Respectfully, you can't "but" a statement as an effective rebuttal when the statement addresses the exact "but" that you claim.
I can make that statement because while all decision making is relative, characteristics of those decisions still have an absolute nature. War (intense pain, psychological destruction, mass violent death, generational effects, the freedom to commit evil acts only for the sake of them) is bad, period. Whether or not the decision to wage it is for a relative good (except when it isn't).
The only escape from this moral reasoning is nihilism. That is, giving up one's human nature.
You can make the case that everything you do in life is bad for something else, the point is that all choices must be ranked so stating that something is BAD is useless because arguably everything is BAD. That is not nihilism and I'm certainly not an advocate for war, I am an advocate for seriously considering choices. I said "compared to what", stating that "war is bad" again does not address the question.
It is nihilism, as explained. I did address the question.
One can't make the case that "everything arguably is bad", unless you are relativistic and reductionist to the point that any "arguable" negative consequence to anything is morally tantamount to the negative consequences of war. This is the type of moral absurdity that nihilists deal in.
Considering choices has nothing to do with the absolute characteristics of those choices.
Only nihilists feel the moral freedom to re-label absolute bad as not, if it is for their relative benefit.
I didn't say that you weren't free to do bad (I'm purposefully not using the word "evil" in order to maintain a tight reign on adjective use) in the service of what you feel is good. That might be an aspect of inescapable human nature (see factory farming).
What I imply is that human action isn't completely morally relativistic. Only nihilists or zealots with occluded moral reasoning think otherwise. No offense.
Maybe taoism is for you. It would allow you to resolve moral absurdity that you are otherwise trying to escape with nihilism. Personally, I'm not as atheistic as that. But at least it would be more consistent.
So you have some absolute line in the sand which exists for you to measure whether something is bad or not. Still it does not help you choose between two bad choices so how useful is that for you?
Traditionally: slaves and loot. Or new land to settle.
Today it is somewhat more complicated, but there are still winners in war. It usually just ain't those, who are fighting in it. And obviously not those, who just get bombed to death.
The matrix is indeed really strong in the West. At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them. And when given information that contradict their beliefs (entirely constructed from hearsay) they become angry and violent. And I'm speaking of supposedly educated people, about information that are available in primary sources.
Ignorance is also carefully cultivated: God forbid to use one's smartphone to check an information publicly and easily available.
I find the claim that people are generally more well informed about the state of the world in countries without a free press and independent institutions quite absurd. The western societies are certainly not perfect, but the messy information landscape in some of them is in my view an indication that different views are able to clash and make their cases with relatively little intervention from the authorities.
That type of information landscape isn't a threat when it is lies to various degrees, in total.
Polls indicate that most Americans don't see the Press as free (trustworthy). They now view it more akin to how people do in authoritarian states. There are reasons for that outside of observer error.
What's more insidious? An openly captured press that is expected to lie or a captured press that claims the banner of freedom?
Last, objective observation of lock-step action of institutions over the past seven years or so, for example, seems to hint at a lack of independence.
As would any indication of a concrete lie that the press seems to be cooperating in hiding.
There is no such thing like a free press. Most media is subject to financial incentives and right and left there are topics that will never be covered even without censorship.
I mean, kinda?
But with this logic it's impossible to ever have a freemedia, or anything really. No human is ever free because there are always some incentives, or even needs (financial, social) one has to adhere to.
> At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them
Pretty much the opposite. In authoritarian states, people grow up under the culture of just accepting things as truth, you don't have the option of not believing. What you are describing is not about believing the press, but polarization / radicalization / isolation - the fact you're even pointing to the 'press/propaganda' is a symptom of it.
Even the author fell into that trap. In his video he claims MKUltra was created to understand the Korean brainwashing of US pilots who turned against the US. In fact they were not brainwashed at all, they were simply furious to be involved into the US warcrimes over Korea and China. So US psyops turned this into a brainwashing incident, and used psychologists to discredit them. And were successful. So here we are are with too many successful lies and discredited sources. Normally historians are used to whitewash criminal regimes, but then it became the press and doctors. And now the internet infiltration, psyops and censorship is enough.
Some obvious false things only need to be true for a limited time : Iraqi forces throwing Kuwaiti babies from their incubators, Iraqi WMDs, the 'missile gap'.
The Iraqi WMDs were never universally believed, neither in the US nor in Europe. There were widespread protests against the Iraq War (before it started!) in the US and the rest of the world. France, Germany, and the Benelux vehemently opposed the war, to such an extent that (some) Americans even renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries"!
I am aware of the opposition at the time : I joined the protest in Amsterdam.
Still it was universal enough to invade a country for no proper reason whatsoever. Hell, much of the non-believers joined the conflict later on ( even the French ).
The fact Earth is a sphere isn't universally believed either.
The Iraq WMD thing is the one everybody has been falling back on whenever they need to prove their claims that "all western media are propaganda" for a decade or more. It's been 20 years, the NYT recognized the lie and apologized, and these guys still haven't found a better example.
Doesn't the lack of newer, more convincing examples tell you a lot about the veracity of the claim?
Edit: didn't see the missile gap thing, did you add it later? AFAIK, that was more of a lie by the US Air Force to increase their funding and actual government officials believed it.
I am not sure how to respond to your comment : one gets the impression it is a criticism, but actually you are only acknowledging my claim 'things only need to be true for a limited time'. Who cares about the NYT?
I did add the missile gap later, I am sorry. What does it matter who's lie it was? Kennedy ran with it.
There's no lack of newer examples. There's only a lack of apology and scale of consequence. That scale being the only reason why the NYT was compelled to apologize.
The WMD lie shouldn't be the "well, it was twenty years ago" example. It should be the "look what they were willing to do, they can never be trusted" example.
Apologizing after the fact of a willful action of that type isn't an apology. It's a vain attempt to reduce consequence for themselves. If only reduced trust, which people like yourself try to still stem citing that lame "apology".
Iraqi WMD was believed enough by the public to make it politically infeasible for most Congressmen to vote against authorizing war against Iraq. That the NYT later issued an apology is irrelevant. Iraqi WMD is a great example of manufacturing consent long enough to push through a major policy blunder.
In retrospect the effort was comical enough, in light of the fact that none were found, that the one responsible for it (President Bush) famously joked about looking for WMD under a desk. He received no real political backlash for his joke or for being vile enough to start an unnecessary war that killed hundreds of thousands.
The propaganda surrounding the global war on terror was effective enough that when the U.S. performed terrorist acts on weddings that killed innocents it was labeled “drone strikes” and when the enemy performed acts that killed innocents they were labeled “terrorist attacks”.
People initially believed the b.s. the Pentagon said about Tillman’s death. People largely believed that Chalabi would be the political savior of a new Iraq until our government no longer liked him. There are people who still think we shouldn’t trade with Cuba because they are communist but see no problem trading with China. Criticism of Israel is often times labeled anti-semitism. Do more than a small minority of people understand that Jews aren’t the only semites in the world?
I can’t point to too many specific instances of U.S. media engaged in outright propaganda but there are some clear trends where the collective attitudes on certain topics/beliefs are engineered to be a certain way. The fact that people even ever seriously uttered the phrase “war on christmas” is enough know that opinions are deliberately being manipulated by media.
Although I agree with your post, the invasion of Iraq can not be seen without taking the US PTSD about 9/11 into account. The WMDs were just a parallel construction.
There wasn't a 9/11 justification to invade Iraq without the WMD excuse. Which is why they used it.
I know why they invaded Iraq. It has nothing to do with 9/11 PTSD nor oil except as a secondary or tertiary benefit.
Whether or not the actual reason is a good one is another debate. But that doesn't change the fact of the WMD lie, but most importantly that of the observation that the Press is an in-total propaganda arm of at least one sect of the government. Which has a lot of downstream implications for the twenty plus years since.
Sheesh, a bit on the nose eh! The memo does seem to still be concerned about WMDs though? Curious if there was an even more ulterior motive under the hood there. The WMD concern, as I mention in other comments, wasn't fully out of left field. But I am curious why it was so top-of-mind for a certain wing of the American political sphere at that time. Presumably not humanitarian concerns?
My memory of the events is that pretty much everyone supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Manufactured support was needed for Iraq. Invasion of Iraq was 1.5 years after 9/11 and Iraq wasn’t tied to 9/11.
I think our overreaction to 9/11 is itself an example of manipulation by media. We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades and those nations didn’t get PTSD from our actions. This leads me to think that our over the top outrage was partially fueled by media narratives.
It’s an easy way to absolve a nation of guilt if you negate any examples done during war. Our bombings in North Vietnam were entirely immoral and are not less so because we were at war. Though no actual declaration of war was made. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was made up to justify enlarging the war. Does McNamara’s Morons count in your mind as an example? Maybe not since that was done to our own people.
Nevertheless, you should read up on the history of our shenanigans in Latin America. One example: while Americans didn’t do the actual killing and torture of Catholic priests and nuns our proxies did. You should also read up on things we funded the Iraqis to do in their war against Iran. Paying someone to do your dirty deeds is just as bad as doing them yourself. We did shoot down an Iranian airliner and later promoted the captain of the ship. We weren’t at war with Cambodia but did terrible things to that country during the Vietnam war. Bay of Pigs.
Look at who we funded and ended up enabling to gain control of Afghanistan during Soviet Union’s involvement there.
Regardless of the ultimate moral judgment, it is obviously not the case that a bunch of civilians dying during warfare is the same as an attack committed solely to target civilian populations during peacetime.
Even granting the premise of “paying is equal to doing,” none of your examples are anything like 9/11. The defining characteristics of 9/11 are obviously these: peacetime, intentionally targeted at civilians, killed a large number of civilians.
The best way to absolve a country of guilt is actually to make divorced-from-reality equivocations so that every less than ideal outcome looks equally evil, equally preventable, etc. The US has done plenty of truly atrocious stuff overseas and at home, silly arguments like “the US committed decades of 9/11-style acts” is counterproductive if your mission is accountability.
War is the ultimate act of overt violence. Discounting examples from war is strange. What does it matter to the victims if a piece of paper somewhere declares it a war?
I can’t point to a single act that satisfies your criteria. The U.S. does not wage peacetime violence in the same way that terrorist groups do. We prefer to do the damage over time. We prefer to avoid headline capturing violence. But the victims don’t care and the point I made is not diminished by this. Our reaction to 9/11 was an overreaction. Lots of places have been devastated by U.S. actions and those people haven’t had similar overreactions.
2000 people weren’t killed in a single day in Nicaragua in the 80s. We did it over time and in a sustained way. The Nicaraguans don’t obsess about how this changed the whole world or desire to go on a 20 year killing spree in reaction to what we did.
It doesn't matter to the victims but it does matter to the frameworks used to make decisions going forward. If your argument here is, "wouldn't it be nice if there were no war?" Sure would!
Different claim than this one: “We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades”
And FWIW other places couldn’t overreact the way the US did even if they wanted to, and I’m sure on more than zero occasions they did. The US is a phenomenally dangerous giant lumbering around. Don’t presume that others would do much better if they were equipped the same way we happen to be.
You agree with the point I made but don’t like the statement, “We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades.” I’m perplexed by this. Don’t see how it can be a fruitful experience to nitpick that statement of mine when you agree with the point I was making. The examples I gave weren’t close enough to the 9/11 in details for you so you nitpicked that and ignored my point. Which you have now stated you agree with. This is why I periodically delete my account on this site. Yes, I know, delete isn’t the technically correct term but it is close enough. I change usernames and reset my previous password to a random string so that I can’t use it anymore. It is a deletion of sorts.
Because it's counterproductive to accuse people of routinely executing massive terrorist attacks against civilian populations when they aren't routinely executing massive terrorist attacks against civilian populations.
How was it “obvious” exactly? Iraq had already used chemical weapons against Kurds and in early/mid-90s the UN found large scale bio weapons programs. It dismantled these programs but then left the country in 1998.
Saddam denied it, Blix and Ritter were sent in and acknowledged there were no traces of any program whatsoever and what had been sealed earlier, was still sealed.
Saddam is a lying autocrat who was making extremely cryptic remarks about WMDs
Ritter was last in Iraq in 1998 when he was denied access to several inspection sites. The question was always what happened between 98 and 03.
Blix gave his report of no WMDs in June 2003… several months after the invasion which he was deployed into to find WMDs. Again, question was what happened between 98 and 03.
So none of this was “obvious” at the time. There were bad decisions, bad information, and straight up liars, but it’s really counterproductive not to assess these decisions honestly in light of the available information of the time.
I had to look up the Blix timeline, and the article I read ( don't have the link on this machine ) says Blix was in months before the invasion and had conclusions about a month before the invasion.
Yep, he was there and issuing statements & reports before the invasion. His team had to leave because we were about to invade and it wasn’t safe to stay.
I truly can’t believe there are still people who buy the lies. They were lying about Afghanistan[1], needlessly because that war had plenty of support, so why would anyone suppose they weren’t lying about Iraq? FFS, half the important people in the admin signed and/or penned published documents advocating that the US look for any excuse to invade Iraq, in the late 90s. It was beyond plain they were bullshitting about the justification.
[1] example: the insane GI Joe playset diagrams of massive, secret, advanced underground bunkers they claimed that Al Qaeda had a bunch of, despite it being impossible to carry out that much earthmoving and concrete pouring (let alone buying all that equipment) without giving away the location to everyone with satellites. Tenfold as true if you tried to do that somewhere not right next to a city (because your supply lines for the huge hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars construction project would be even more plain, and the work itself would stick out like a sore thumb). It was clearly a lie.
No one is claiming that no one lied. I am claiming that the truth was either non-obvious or was controversial. In this case, it was obviously at least controversial. I’m arguing it wasn’t that obvious either. Part of that ambiguity came from lying, part came from Iraq’s track record and secrecy (which of course IMO sovereign nations to some degree have a right to), and part of it came from the usual lack of information that afflicts such adversarial relationships.
Anyway you’re right that Blix was there prior to the invasion even though his report didn’t come until after. The report is not nearly as confident as you’re suggesting though. It wasn’t “no weapons,” it was “no evidence of weapons.” We all know, under circumstances less dire and less confusing than these, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I think it’s important not to write these situations off as “well duh they were lying because they’re Bad Guys and we all knew that” because these types of situations will continue to repeat themselves. We need a deeper understanding of what went wrong and how to do it better than “wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along.” It’s actually quite hard to know things, which is why this stuff happens!
> wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along
I was claiming that before the invasion. Because it was. 100% for certain? Of course not. As knowable as anything like that is? Yeah.
That the guys who said a couple years earlier we should take any excuse to get rid of Saddam, who were already lying about a popular war (which I was also against, incidentally, for the practical reason that it was gonna be incredibly expensive, far outstripping any benefit, and wouldn’t result in a stable democracy in Afghanistan as the admin claimed it would—go figure) and funneling money their own direction all over the place, might be lying to get their excuse, and more opportunities to loot on a grand scale… yeah, far and away the most likely explanation, and their thin evidence was mostly laughable (I think I may literally have laughed at parts of Powell’s presentation, which was the point at which I gave up hope they had any real evidence)
For fuck’s absolute sake, a bunch of these chucklefucks running the show were Iran-Contra alums! Just… wild gestures of exasperation
Yes. IT WAS OBVIOUS.
And yeah, next time the same thing will happen. That’s just how we operate. We go to war on pretty weak lies every so often. All Iraq did (for me) was hammer home that that hadn’t changed (for some reason I supposed it had?) and, so, probably won’t. That anyone’s still treating that situation as oh so muddy and hard to read just confirms that. We’ll do it again.
As mentioned elsewhere: the guys who already wanted to invade Iraq, AFAICT, (e.g. according to the memos) still wanted to do so because of WMDs. So “they already wanted to go” doesn’t really change the substance of the conversation. Curious if you have any read on why Cheney et al were so fixated on WMDs at the time they wrote the memos. Was that all completely a ruse? (I am legitimately curious, idk how to interpret that)
Yeah it’s astounding anyone involved in Iran-Contra was allowed anywhere near a seat of power.
To be clear, I’m obviously not treating it as if it’s muddy now. I am saying that it wasn’t that clear then, for reasons that include people simply lying.
Ok, maybe we’re not as far apart on this as I read it. Sorry.
> Curious if you have any read on why Cheney et al were so fixated on WMDs at the time they wrote the memos. Was that all completely a ruse?
I think they may have worked themselves up a little with their what-if scenarios (their concern was what he might do with a bunch of ifs) and, further, selected that in particular for the infamous open letter to Clinton because most of the rest of what they were selling had no urgency, even by what-if standards.
They had a fundamental problem with that requirement, in fact, that there be exigent need for US intervention before we undertake it. Their whole deal was that we should embrace and proactively enforce hegemony (because the Pax Americana’s just that good for the world—it’d be immoral not to, you see!).
I would guess some mix of genuine ideology and connection to a MIC that wanted those sweet Cold War dollars back and to whom they were receptive (for those ideological reasons), were behind that, but I don’t know and it was enough people that I expect motivations varied.
[edit] I should perhaps add that I’m not categorically opposed to the kind of thing they were getting at. Is the Pax Americana some greater-good thing with breaking a few eggs for? Maybe! It really might be! I’m at least open to the idea. I pull the lever on the trolly problem all day long.
My opposition to their ideas had (has… a lot of these folks are still kickin’ around) less to do with some wholesale disagreement with the very notion of what they were about, and more to do with the specifics of what they wanted to do having a history of costly failure, of that being a risky sort of road to begin with, and of these people in particular having a history of making a huge mess of things while having their hand in the till and technocratically lying to manipulate a democracy into “what’s best for it” (consistent with the means-to-the-end greater-good thing! But far, far too dangerous)
Yes I think we see pretty much eye to eye on this stuff. I am trying to give the benefit of the doubt not because the principals involved deserve it, but because our own thinking for future ambiguity does.
It’s very hard to know things, and it’s easy to forget how hard it is to know things in retrospect.
Just 38 years ago, there were 50 companies in charge of most American media. Now, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom. This means that just 232 media executives are calling the shots for the vast majority of the information we are presented with as a society.
Let that sink in.
And remember media bias and polarization is presented as a broad conflict that can’t be managed and is out of control to the point of causing extremism.
Consolidation of platforms and reach is much greater in the tech side of the arena.
Then there is the consolidation of independent media on tech company platforms like YouTube. If they ban someone, are they really running off to make a living on Rumble? No.
There are only 11 independent investigative journalism groups like ProPublica and The Center For Public Integrity but they are a shadow of their formers selves.
You can check all the information sources you want, but primary source information means very little when the landscape lacks real diversity and the only substantive public oversight is underfunded or politically connected.
And then, there’s the research that shows fact-checker bias:
The key difference is that in autocracy you'd assume that most information on the controlled media is somehow propaganda from your government but in a free media environment you'd assume that you're getting a mix of psyops operations from all the major powers in addition to your own government's propaganda, and also media controlled by specific wealthy private players with a personal political agenda.
I would say that the reality distortion field is way stronger in the east... and if you are in a professional discourse it's fine not to have the Junior Dev go "achtually" all the time because he googles shit he doesn't understand.
Which is a very stupid "strategic" move by the powers that be in the West, because if you control and strongly influence the discourse in the direction that you want that means that you impede the system the opportunity to self-correct. And that opportunity to self-correct in the past was one of the main advantages the West had, an advantage greatly facilitated by a reasonable open and free discourse.
The flip to "Russia == Evil" when they invaded Ukraine (the most recent time) was impressive.
I'm not an apologist, I think Russia is currently [insert long list of bad things here], I'm just impressed at the speed we went from indifference towards Russians, or tacit approval (oligarchs in London), to sanctioned hatred.
You don't care very much for most people by default. Even if you think they're not very good people, because caring takes effort. But once they punch you or a friend in the face? now you have a reason to care.
Everyone just thought that Russia was sabre rattling and that they weren't actually going to do it. Once they did it, that caused a lot of people to re-assess their views.
Then why not 2014? Why don't a dozen other wars around the world get the same reaction? Why not the Uyghur genocide? Why this one?
Yes, it's normal human behaviour, but it's normal human behaviour with a propaganda pump behind it (IMO). Of course, I can't prove this. Maybe it was all just completely organic and I've just watched one too many Adam Curtis documentaries.
Because 2014 was not a blatant full invasion of a country with hundreds of thousands of troops, it was a coup with little green men showing up, carving out a region on the outskirts of Ukraine.
> Why this one?
This one because it was a full blown invasion of the 2nd largest country by landmass in the European continent, it's a huge difference in level and degree... That's the simple why.
Of course the propaganda pump went full on when that happened, it was a major development compared to the annexation of Crimea or helping some militias on breakaway regions, a country tried to take over another country's capital in Europe. It doesn't mean no one would've cared if the propaganda machine didn't start turning but that was just to drum support, not to change completely the public's opinion.
Because Crimea is in a weird political situation where it sorta arguably belonged to Russia before Khruschev did a bizarre stunt with reassigning it to Ukraine, in a time when that didn't matter, which suddenly started to matter post USSR. That plus it having a huge Russian population.
All of that muddled the waters enough to make it very unclear who was in the right there, and that leaves the easy default of not caring.
Meanwhile, the current war was extremely unambiguous.
> Why don't a dozen other wars around the world get the same reaction? Why not the Uyghur genocide? Why this one?
Because it's physically closer, and because Ukraine is a lot more culturally closer to us. Uyghurs are Muslim, while Ukraininans are Christians and generally a decent cultural fit with the west.
And because Ukraine had been moving towards a more democratic government.
And I think Zelensky can take a lot of credit for being a great communicator at exactly the right time.
> And the rest of it sounds reasonable, but how do we prove it's not just a post hoc justification?
I don't think any of it is particularly controversial?
Crimea's situation is well documented, and you can easily search online for posts before the current war. It belonged to Russia since 1783, and Khruschev reassigned it to Ukraine in 1954, which I understand at the time was nigh practically meaningless and a sort of PR stunt more than something that was intended to actually do something.
It's also been a very common vacation spot for Russians, and has a huge Russian population, and it's arguable that if Russia did rig the referendum, they probably didn't need to.
So it's an already messy matter even if you're close to the issue. It's very hard to foreigners to clearly pick a "right side" in this conflict, and it's not hard to argue that Khruschev's action wasn't intended to actually do anything, and therefore should be disregarded.
We must be talking at cross-purposes. All your statements can be true and uncontroversial, and still not be resposible for the groundswell of hatred towards Russians in Western populations. Or, more subtly, would have been ignored without a propaganda pump drawing the public's attention to them.
All I'm saying (and it's not a particularly useful statement tbh) is that it's damn hard to tease out cause and effect here.
The feelings were always there but the cost was too high to do something about it. Now that the cost is already paid, there is no reason to hold them back.
Lets not forget that there is more than enough reason for that hatred. As a European:
Russia regularly kills people on our soil. We do not kill people in Russia.
Russia supports extremist political groups in Europe with the sole aim to do damage.
Russia runs media organizations like RT that also have no ideological orientation but will always report the take that will do the most damage to society.
Russia used gas as a weapon to blackmail Europe. Already in summer 21 Gazprom reduced its supply to the spot market to increase the gas price and keep storage low. Later Gazprom rented storage facilities but kept them empty.....
Russia buys politicians like Orban to weaken and disintegrate EU and NATO.
There are many millions people in the EU who lived under and still remember the repressions of the SU and Warshaw Pact states....
Putins Russia had declared itself as an enemy of the western way of life and political order.
Notably, Crimea belonged to Russia since the defeat of the Crimean Khanate in 1783, when Russians ethnically cleansed half of the native Crimean population, and in 1944 Stalin deported the entire ethnically Crimean population that was left to Uzbekistan. The only reason there are Crimeans in Crimea today is that after the fall of USSR, Ukraine allowed them to return.
Also, Crimea voted 54% to stay with Ukraine in 1991 referendum.
Similar flip with China. I do read user comments on our Dutch news-sites, just to keep an eye on 'average Joe'. I am amazed by the hatred towards China.
Flip? We already knew he was evil. Then the invasion happened and the war crimes came. But yes do go on about how we all got brain washed. Good grief. Stop commenting.
Americans didn’t seem to care when Russia invaded Georgia (or Chechnya).
It’s only when Russia started protecting its GDP by eliminating its only meaningful competition for selling shale gas to the west did it become geopolitically critical to turn public opinion against it.
Russia’s GDP eventually collapses if Ukraine remains intact, as the west will buy gas from them instead. There are no meaningful quantities of petrochemicals in Georgia.
Maybe, but I don't think so. The 2014 invasion was met with a resounding "meh" in the west. So what 20th century factors caused us to go "meh" in 2014 and "orcs! orcs!" in 2022?
The 2014 invasion was just that, but was dressed up as something else and didn't include massive Russian army deployments in the build-up. It also didn't look like something that could happen to Romania, Poland, the Baltics or Finland.
All of which have more in common with Ukraine than they do with say Afghanistan. So 2014 wasn't 'meh' for those that are more politically informed but it wasn't something that registered as a threat to the bulk of the EU and didn't include actual threats not to get involved on punishment of nuclear bombardment by the belligerent.
But even today there are a lot of idiots here who are still in 'meh' mode and who couldn't care less about what happens to Ukraine and who would rather think about this in financial terms than in loss of life or what it means for the future.
Inside that quite rational in a way? When Putin hadn't launched a full-scale invasion of a country, I considered him a bit evil; after he invaded a country, I consider him truly evil. Am I making this decision based on my state's media and propaganda, or on his actions?
Well, have you considered US presidents evil for their invasions, occupations, and wars, or do you consider the people they invaded to be evil? When whole countries are being starved and routinely bombed, is that what they deserve for not being correctly enlightened and choosing the wrong leaders, or is it the fault of bombers and blockaders? Are some brutal dictators not so bad because they're on "your side"? Are accusations of genocide against enemies believed even without solid evidence while accusations against allies are misinformation?
Apples and oranges. The US had done plenty of atrocities since the CIA branched off after WW2, sabotaging foreign governments, temporary invasions, etc. But, if the US was Russia, all the Americas would be Russia by now.
One fundamental fact is that psyops can be benevolent. Psyops are made by elites to affect the masses' beliefs and behavior; they reflect the interests of whichever segment of the elite has manufactured them, but sometimes these interests overlap with our interests.
For example, "the War on Terror is necessary to protect America, democracy, and our freedoms" was a psyop driven by dubious foreign policy interest. "Kindness, dignity, empathy and tolerance are good, racism is bad" was a very benevolent psyop which you can recognize throughout elite cultural products (12 Angry Men, Mr. Rogers are just two examples), where the elite tried to cure the masses of their bigotry through psychological means (identity, social pressure, morality), with relative success. "Russia's invasion is morally wrong and must be defeated" is both aligned with US geopolitical interests, and aligned with defeating international anti-democratic anti-liberal forces, which is in our interest. There are obviously Russian/Chinese/Iranian psyops deployed against us, and some of our elites' psyops are just designed to counteract that.
I doubt the masses will ever have the ability to fight back against psyops, because in a battle between psychology PhDs and confused laymen, the PhDs will always win. We might learn the truth about specific psyops 30 years after the fact if we're lucky, and the well is highly poisoned by paranoid conspiracists. So a more realistic goal is to select trustworthy elites that are more likely to engage in benevolent psyops.
Another key concept is that there's no "elite", there are elites, plural, which may cooperate or engage in intramural conflict. The military-industrial complex, Republican elites, media elites, and to some degree Hollywood elites cooperated to our detriment during the Bush years. But any analysis which sees them as a single blob will miss the conflicts and realities, hence the inane schizoposting ("Soros = CIA = military-industrial complex = mainstream media = Chinese Communist Party" as an all-powerful colluding elite, which prevents any useful analysis).
Yet another problem is that once people realize psyops exist, they tend to go off the deep end (if they already distrust any elite interest group) and reflexively disagree with all goals they attribute to those elites ("they say Russia bad = I'll support Russia"). Essentially the psyops are backfiring and creating a populace so distrustful that some people will reject domestic psyops only to replace them with foreign psyops, because they have a strong need for a narrative, and a great number of narratives are elite-created.
The Behavioral Insights Team was and is a unit established to implement the ideas of (now Nobel-memorial-laureate) Richard Thaler on 'nudging'. The tiny problem with those ideas is that the evidence we have is that they don't work, at least no more than the RCT equivalent of a placebo (ie publication bias) [0]. Mentioning it in the context of psyops seems like a bit of a red herring to me, the biggest conspiracy here might just be the one to create prestigious and lucrative jobs in government for social science graduates.
Regardless of its effectiveness (I largely agree with with your posted study), the negative externalities of attempting to "nudge" and control the narrative are enormous. You now have government departments with an existential motive to subtly alter news stories, guidelines, public messaging - even if the results are dubious, and could have unbounded negative impact on public trust and understanding, etc..
> could have unbounded negative impact on public trust and understanding
Very much this!
And to the parents comment, they are seldom "lucrative" or
"prestigious" gigs afaics.
The bind is that to remain silent, to not engage in counter-influence
in a world where the Internet is "weponised", seems like giving tacit
assent to mischief makers.
The mistake is to think that lies can be countered with more lies.
The best that the "truth" can do, whether as science, education or
accurate news media, is to de-escalate and neutralise information
warfare itself.
But how to prove your particular nudge really worked? I'm reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point - ok, yes, maybe a bunch of kids in New York started a Hush Puppy revival, but a million other fads didn't take off, so if you try to study it you're just studying survivorship bias. Or maybe coincidence.
All models are wrong but some are useful. It's easy to say that someones worldview is incorrect in some respect. Can you be more specific as to what common misconceptions you would like to see corrected?
And yet, statistically speaking, it's a pretty good one.
Like you're walking through a forest, a chaos of various species of tree, shrub, vine and etc, when suddenly you come across a field of corn. That stark monoculture screams intention and an overarching power.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
the world is shaped more by what we dont see than what we do.
It's like a game (video or otherwise). The entire narrative. What's good, bad, desirable, undesirable. The whole drama. Exists within the bounds of the game.
Within that speck is "reality". Outside that speck, that whole thing, is outside consideration and invisible.
So to control people you create a game. A sweet, compelling game. And then everybody enters the game like gnats in a jar. And they will fight to get inside the jar. And fight to stay there.
And all that matters in the game is what. Hitpoints? Epic loot?
Voila, you have enslaved them. Bound them in darkness.
They are more like 50 though? Unless you break them up into groups (political parties oriented around being for/against a topic may be quite well aligned in their views, but it's almost a tautology - you can probably divide people up lots of ways to align groups of views, but it isn't necessarily indicative of psyops).
Now before you howl and point your finger. I still see guys with beards wearing masks religiously. People wearing them under the nose too. These intensely virtuous yet somehow irrational people.
That mask got into their head. And it wasn't via a rational avenue.
OP's use of "99%" makes it very hard. But if you turn it around to mean "99%" of all publicized and acceptable discussion then you could easily include all sorts of stuff.
E.g.: "(Skin Color) Diversity is good" - It feels good to say, and yet doesn't capture anything meaningful. It's just used as a stick to beat people over the head with so they comply.
Odd that you would say that, as it logically subsumes the very meaningful "treating people/sneetches poorly because they have different melanin phenotype/stars on their bellies is bad".
I'm still waiting for the world where skin colour is about as important as hair (yes, this has vastly improved since my youth) or eye colour, eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW68oWV9uE4
"girls are different / brunettes, blondes, redheads..."
(yes, it's heteronormative, but the video, and even some subtones of the text, suggest comfort with more diversity than was either popular at the time, or even, for some people, now)
Currently it means treat people as special because of their skin color and to me is pretty much actual racism. In an ideal world it would mean what you say it does (everyone is valued equally irrespective of melanin or other immutable characteristic), but as someone born with the wrong skin color it pretty much means I'm valued less by polite society. It's horrible and I won't stand for it. History will judge them.
You'd be surprised to find how many people have the same stance as you, it's nowhere near a <1-3% view indicating a psyop has occurred using this heuristic.
Such paranoia and cognitive dissonance. “Why did this soldier lament that he’s a war criminal? Hmm. The Koreans must have figured out mind control techniques and are making him say this stuff. We’d better do it too then.”
A scary frightening conspiracy theory is actually comforting and reassuring. It gives a reason why there is evil and chaos and says that there are people in charge of things.
It's much less reassuring and more terrifying to look at the world and see that no one knows what's going on really, there isn't some brainy think tank with a 1000 year secret plan for the future, that randomness and chaos and brokenness is the default.
Conspiracy at any level tells us that there is a plan and tells us where we are in relation to that plan.
The tone and aesthetics of the video feels like I am watching a "conspiracy theory" video made to elicit all my psychological triggers and biases towards believing in a "grand conspiracy" to control us (paradoxically, the video feels like exactly that: tricks to elicit specific psychological responses). True or not, I stopped watching it.
Military and intelligence agencies conducted extensive research into mind control, brainwashing, hypnosis, drugs, and other means of manipulating human perception during the Cold War era. This was known as "brain warfare."
The CIA investigated claims of psychic abilities and UFOs, seeing them as potential weapons that could influence mass hysteria or disrupt defenses. They sought to debunk UFO beliefs through media campaigns.
Early computer programs like ELIZA showed how simple linguistic tricks could create the illusion of intelligence, influencing how people perceive machines.
New technologies are enabling highly personalized and targeted manipulation of individual perceptions through media and recommendation algorithms.
UFOs became a tool for psychological operations, helping cover advanced military programs and creating plausible deniability for secret aircraft.
Illusionists and magicians taught covert agents how to use deception and surreptitiously deliver drugs or toxins.
The boundaries between human and machine perception are blurring, with AI able to generate personalized hallucinations at scale.
Cognitive warfare aims to exploit vulnerabilities in how we perceive the world through adversarial hallucinations and prompt injections.
Reality itself has become suspect, with everything seen as potential memes or cognitive attacks vying to manipulate us.
Recent U.S. government discussions of UFOs touch on long-running military-intelligence programs while provoking confusion and speculation.
Thought control is far more advanced than any modern layperson can grasp. Our minds are analog quantum tech and can be linked through entanglement.
They’re not just mind fucking you, they are running a secret government of power in parallel to our own.
They screw the government at every opportunity.
The government and big tech aren’t thought control, thought control are the voices in their heads. Thought control are the voices in all of our heads. Their secret state has outgrown a contemporary society that refuses to believe it is even possible, let alone exist.
We are not alone in our own minds, and thought control is running a secret state of extortion against us all.
People want to believe that the tech is good enough to build this advertising simulacrum the guy in the video refers to. It's all a fantasy
People want to believe that govt and big tech are this omniscient, monolithic entity. If that was actually the case then how do they not catch whistleblowers who leave trails of evidence months before leaking?
Anyone who talks about tech like it's some kind of deity clearly shouldn't be talking about it, or at least only for the sake of marketing