Clarke would look more the part: in his little military costume adorned with stolen ballot medals he won at a Chuck-E-Cheese, you almost forget how he occasionally murders inmates (and their babies).
Looks like the Syria pullout was done at the request of Erdogan, and against the overwhelming advice of his cabinet. Horrible look, even by his historically low standards. Gonna be a lot of dead Kurds soon.
Mattis's letter of resignation. Saw a joke on facebook that if he ran for president it would be "Mad Dog 2020." I enjoyed that way too much.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg undergoes lung cancer surgery https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ginsburg-surgery-lung-1.4956147
I fail to see how the reporting of a country that is acting in direct opposition to your country, affecting the elections of your government based on misinformation, is "overblown fear mongering". This is social engineering and propaganda on a global scale. Does it not bother you that democracy can be undermined simply by posting contrary shit to social media?
A large number of people don't fully understand the nature or impact of such propaganda. To them, propaganda is still very much this: And that is blatantly obvious, and so therefore anything else would be that obvious and would not sway them. But modern propaganda is quiet, small, directed, nuanced, and very much the sum of a large number of small parts. The science of persuasion is a scary thing. I was first exposed to it when we hired shrinks in video games to intentionally make them addictive, creating things called "compulsion loops", that would push people to endlessly play games. Look at Candy Crush... it's a prime example. Look at how many people were and are addicted to that game. Why? It's a stupid game... but it pushes the right buttons to build up a desire and dependency for the resulting brain chemistry. Same can be applied to social media messaging, news feeds, etc. To suggest that some foreign country is doing it and is being successful against the good old US of A is just bullshit, I tell you what. NO WAY smart Americans would ever fall prey to something like that.
Let's also not forget that Russia didn't come in with a plan to take a position or worldview currently held by zero Americans and make it the dominant view. They came in, found a pre-existing propaganda apparatus already in place, and realized "holy shit, if we give that thing a little push, the consequences for the United States would be terrible." When the Russians went looking for the most devastating weapon to use against the United States, the weapon they found was right-wing Americans. PatriotEagle.ru only works because Dad has been listening to Rush Limbaugh for twenty years. The best propaganda works with what is already there, and what Russia exposed is that the United States has a significant there there.
It’s nice you worked on video games you cite it every time this comes up. From the shitposting and Facebook trolling examples of the Russian interference I’ve seen it looks like it’s about two steps above chain emails. Nothing super elaborate in execution that it could even be compared to candy crush. Maybe there are complex mechanisms in people that fall for chain email retardedness. I’ll give you there is a not insignificant amount of retartds that fall for chain emails that simple minded tactics would work on. The next logical question is how should it be dealt with by the government or the private sector it was piggybacked on? You run into freedom of speech with government involvement and wildly partisan chicanery like you mentioned in the intellectual dark web thread.
Exactly my point. You're making the hilarious assumption that you know enough to see and interpret what has gone on. The reason I bring up the video game work is that was my first exposure to people who do this kind of manipulation professionally, as a clinical science. It was fucking scary.
Oh, and to be clear, these were low-level hacks that were pimping out their basic shit to game companies... not nation state sponsored programs... and they were still scary.
There's also the separate but parallel problem that social media algorithms are designed to give you more of what you've already got. Unlike any naturally occurring culture or society, which will confront you will its full breadth at every turn, algorithmically derived cultures and societies seek hyper-homogenization, because that's what they assume you want and is therefore most profitable. It's one thing to have YouTube thinking you really enjoy watching restorations of rusty old machines (which to be fair to Google, I really do), but it's a very dangerous thing when you're seeking out political opinions and educational resources. Click on a Jordan Peterson video and Youtube isn't going to recommend a Yo-Yo Ma performance next, it's going to send you straight down a right wing rabbit hole you might not even be aware you need to climb out of.
I’m mean I’ve seen what’s been reported in the MSM. Not sure if they have been missing huge parts of the story.
A thing thing that I learned when reading about how Cambridge Analytica targeted people was that they only aimed at two types of undecided voters. The undecided but "poorly educated/informed" were bombarded with the whole EU costs us XXX billions of pounds lies and the most criminals are from the EU lies and the undecided but "educated/informed" were bombarded with Brexit will never pass and here are all of the things you can do to avoid voting day stress. I put those two terms in quotes because that's how CA grouped people. It was a terrifying read because people who have a strong preference are just bombarded with self confirming information and not the specific adds. So the larger 95% of the voters had no idea what was being done to sway people to their side they were just being told that their side was the right side believed in by a large majority of people.
YouTube reads THIS website. Any website. I typed Seth Rich’s name yesterday on here and today my YouTube home feed is flooded with theories around the guy. I have NEVER typed his name into YouTube. You can’t hide from anything ANYWHERE. It will be fun in twenty years when cameras will be small as a flea, cheaper than a used, decade-old Zune and you’ll be able to scatter them like bird feed everywhere.
Are you sure it was because you typed his name and not because your computer loaded the metadata for the Rogan video about him from YouTube due to it being embedded in the thread?
Dude, I have no fucking clue. Sometimes I think Google reads my brainwaves with how quick it is at listing something VERY specific in only a couple typed letters. SkyNet is everywhere, self-aware.
They can see what you post, what you like, what you write and can tailor your scrolling experience subtly to see what you like and agree with. Then you share it. You think you’re so clever. But you never once think you’re being manipulated because it’s THEM who are wrong. The people most susceptible to this are so far gone that watching and listening to them is like observing a different species of person. And they don’t budge, even in the face of facts. They just exist on a different wavelength and very smart people know exactly how to manipulate them. It’s either boomer-aged facebookers who can’t differentiate between real news sources and fake snapshots of headlines or younger people trolling them with shit they know isn’t real that plays to older peoples’ confirmation bias. I could send my future in-laws some crazy made up shit about Obama or Hillary and they would believe it. If it fit their biases. Same with my own dad.
I know. It just FEELS that way sometimes. It’s creepy how closely monitored I feel sometimes, and I don’t have a big digital footprint compared to most people I know, One of the most clever future predictions in Minority Report was the way advertisements constantly altered to fit the interests/hobbies of the person who was looking at them. I see that happening. It both interests and frightens me how far it will go in my own lifetime.
I have family that are hardcore MAGA Trump supporters, and they get really upset every single time that I remind them that as Canadians who never travel outside of Ontario Trump's policies have made their lives actively worse and that the "booming" stockmarket isn't helping them a single bit because they have nothing invested in stocks. And I think that the part that gets to them is that they have nothing from Fox News to fall back on for their arguments because Tucker Carlson never talks about Canada.