@Bisbonian

is far more about protecting them from embarrassment, and them from us, than it is about their protecting us."

pretty much my guiding principle.

@WIProgressive

Glad the songs inspired you to post.

Off Topic, your screen name brought to mind a true story told me by someone who worked in Manhattan's welfare department which, I think, was officially called Department of Social Services:

Before Clinton "reformed" welfare, someone somewhere thought giving welfare recipients financial incentives to go to work would be a good thing. Otherwise, the minute they got paycheck #1 that exceeded the amount of their welfare check, they'd get cut off from all benefits, which was both harsh and an incentive not to get a job. So they created such a program, naming it the Work Incentive Program, the acronym of which was WIP.

After they printed up who knows what all, trained welfare staff, etc., they realized at some point that naming a program designed for welfare recipients WIP probably was not the best idea. So, they re-named it and replaced all the original materials.

After I heard that story, I never named anything without first considering what the acronym would be.

Queen and Eurythmics songs. Love Annie Lennox, miss Freddie terribly -- so gifted. Such overwhelmingly bad news this past summer I tried to retreat from it all. It's too much and music is the only way (for me anyway) to get through it. I been loading up my Ipod, yes, I still a 2nd generation Ipod, and tuning out! I don't like giving the $$ to Apple but WTF. At work, at the gym, at home I listen to music. Light fires in the firepit in the driveway on weekends, listen to tunes and look at what stars I can see with City light pollution and hope to DOG somehow in my lifetime we pull out of this toilet bowl swirl.

@Cassandrus

refers to Congress and the President claiming Russia "hacked the election" and destroyed the democracy for which our troops gave their lives, etc. This bs was later dialed back to "meddling," then ratcheted back up as far as "interfering," but initial terminology and hyperbole matters, as politicians probably know:

Believing is not a two-stage process involving first understanding then believing. Instead understanding is believing, a fraction of a second after reading it, you believe it until some other critical faculty kicks in to change your mind. We really do want to believe, just like Agent Mulder.

http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/09/why-you-cant-help-believing-everything-...

Isn't it more that they're slipping lies into every side of every discussion so that there can be no truth anymore?

The CNN narrative of Charlottesville is clearly agenda driven bullshit. Something's happening that we're not seeing. But you will never hear a dispassionate discussion of what we know, what we don't, and what just feels off. Someone might wonder, rightly, where all these Nazis suddenly came from, and how antifa got so big, and what the government was trying to do by essentially engineering a riot. But the only people allowed to say those things in public have been preselected for their known tendencies to bring up the Elders of Zion in the next sentence. And that's not an accident either. Because it means you can't trust anyone, so you might as well give up.

Can't wait to see how super awesome the lives of poor people instantly become the day after a Confederate statue comes down. Yeah, these are the real issues.

@Meteor Man

strategy itself. The strategy, tactic or technique is the one described in the quote from Goebbels that is in the essay, which I will paraphrase as follows: Tell a big lie, not a small one, and keep repeating it.

Then there are many, many specific examples of Big Lie, such as "Only white males supported Bernie during the 2015-16 primary season." or "Comey made Hillary lose the election." Or "We have to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was involved with the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers" and has WMD he is likely to use to attack us again."

Sorry if the essay did not make that clear.

The Big Lie is the strategy. It's good to have goals, but they have to be achievable. Strategy requires tactics to achieve the goal.

There are others, but the most notorious "Big Lie" in America may be Liberal Media! The narrative of "the liberal media" has been driven by the tactic of endless repetition by the Right Wing Noise Machine.

A new tactic, which is behind the new big lie of "The Alt Left" is The Rescue Game, which was described at The Archdruid Report (gone now) which I summarized here:

The Recue Game is based on Transactional Analysis, which examines the roles that people play in social situations, rather than focus on the inner conflicts experienced by the patient. The pop psychology classic I'm OK, You're OK was based on transactional analysis.
Here's how we play the game as described by The Archdruid.

This is how The Rescue Game works:

Here’s how it works. Each group of players is assigned one of three roles: Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer. The first two roles are allowed one move each: the Victim’s move is to suffer, and the Persecutor’s move is to make the Victim suffer. The Rescuer is allowed two moves: to sympathize with the Victim and to punish the Persecutor. No other moves are allowed, and no player is allowed to make a move that belongs to a different role.

That may seem unduly limited. It’s not, because when a group of people is assigned a role, all their actions are redefined as the move or moves allotted to that role. In the Rescue Game, in other words, whatever a Victim does must be interpreted as a cry of pain. Whatever a Persecutor does is treated as something that’s intended to cause pain to a Victim, and whatever a Rescuer does, by definition, either expresses sympathy for a Victim or inflicts well-deserved punishment on a Persecutor. This is true even when the actions performed by the three people in question happen to be identical. In a well-played Rescue Game, quite a bit of ingenuity can go into assigning every action its proper meaning as a move.

What’s more, the roles are collective, not individual. Each Victim is equal to every other Victim, and is expected to feel and resent all the suffering ever inflicted on every other Victim in the same game. Each Persecutor is equal to every other Persecutor, and so is personally to blame for every suffering inflicted by every other Persecutor in the same game. Each Rescuer, in turn, is equal to every other Rescuer, and so may take personal credit for the actions of every other Rescuer in the same game. This allows the range of potential moves to expand to infinity without ever leaving the narrow confines of the game.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/rescue-game

"Bernie Bros" are The Persecutors, the New Dems are coming to the rescue, protecting America from The Alt Left with their new and improved Centrism.

@DonMidwest

I was able to access the article in the New Yorker via your link. However, I could not read very much of the article without subscribing.

One of the most important political theorists of the 20 th century

(well, that sure seems like a long time ago that that century passed, or is it me?....)

I vividly recall reading her 1967 article in The New Yorker. Don't recall the exact details, but think about it often and have several of her books but have not read them recently.

In what is possibly the finest parenthetical paragraph ever written, and one of particularly cautionary splendor today, Arendt adds:

(Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers … who “exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined. This, of course, can happen only if the executive branch has cut itself off from contact with the legislative powers of Congress; it is the logical outcome in our system of government when the Senate is being deprived of, or is reluctant to exercise, its powers to participate and advise in the conduct of foreign affairs. One of the Senate’s functions, as we now know, is to shield the decision-making process against the transient moods and trends of society at large — in this case, the antics of our consumer society and the public-relations managers who cater to it.)

This is from an article on Hannah Arendt

Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt on Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization “No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of factuality.”

Here is a link to New Yorker and the 1967 article. Not sure if it works. I subscribe so if I got there, might not mean that you could get there

Truth and Politics

There is a web site with her stuff on it -- somewhere

Doing a search found this article published yesterday

What philosopher Hannah Arendt would say about Donald Trump Donald Trump is not a totalitarian, but his creation of a social movement is very dangerous - and the left is enabling it, explains Roger Berkowitz, a scholar on renowned Jewish-German philosopher Hannah Arendt

She was THE expert on totalitarianism back then.

@Pluto's Republic

I wrote about the DNC and Podesta emails in March, if you are interested. https://caucus99percent.com/content/big-lie-russia-interfered-us-preside...

(I did not check to see if you commented on that thread.) The things you referenced seem interesting. I will look at them after I finish replying to everyone who posted on this thread. Thank you again.

In just the past few days, as the Russia Hack of the DNC has been exposed as the conspiratorial Big Lie that it is — this news is finally filtering through the corporate media in places like WaPo and The Hill.

The pushback, filled with lies and misinformation big and small, are perfect illustrations to the propaganda doctrine in this essay.

For the first time in a long time, truth warriors can relax because those lies are being met and slain personally by Adam Carter, who along with the Forensicator, blew the lid off the Big DNC/Crowdstrike Lie about Russia. (This was the subject of my essay, The Road Stops Here.)

In today's episode, Distortions & Missing The Point, he takes on New York Magazine, Washington Post, and The Hill. You might like it.