@Lookout "ceaseless propaganda, forced them to write long confessions and placed them in groups where they denounced each other. Their techniques [are proving] to be quite successful."

Sounds like a small town that I know very well, and yes, social media is playing a large part in it. The vocal Blue Team denigrates Green Team by calling them members of the Red Team. This has been going on for decades, but is becoming far more vindictive, lately.

Brainwashed indeed. In addition to your excellent examples, I would add that propaganda is reinforced across all the media platforms. Most in the US use MSM TV shows for their news. Their message is the procorporate push to war for example...lately it has been Russian Aggression and China's violation of human rights over and over as the US and its bitches are the aggressors. And here we are with the largest military budget ever stirring up shit around the world with wide spread acceptance among the population.

I mention that because I'm faceless and tweetless yet I constantly hear the propaganda across all the platforms. I think the AI social media programs can target more effectively than say TV.

We seem to have lost our critical thinking ability.

Thanks for the thought provoking OT. We are being brainwashed.

@ggersh
so your picture is almost certainly right

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/12/10/roaming-charges-36/

And now for the Elite Liberal Left side to have it's turn

https://www.today.com/news/politics/hillary-clinton-reads-parts-victory-...

As most everyone her knows, no matter what side of the spectrum we are on the propaganda is effective enough to say yes we americans are brainwashed

@Dawn's Meta

itself has indeed become the message: the Net can no longer be said to be politically neutral, with ISPs showing a stunning willingness to simply silence hosted sites that do not toe whatever editorial line that they have adopted. H/T to Marshall McLuhan for that chestnut, but he probably didn't see this coming.

This site and its management are wonderfully even-handed. and that is the reason I still participate here. However, that'll be cold comfort if whatever corporation hosts the site were to decide to assert themselves in judging its content, perhaps up to the point of pulling the plug on it. Corporate ISPs have certainly done so with other sites in recent memory. Admittedly, those sites were generally pretty extreme in their views- but once one begins pulling plugs, where would one possibly stop? We are well down that greasy slope.

The internet has changed. Truly free-speech resources are becoming more and more marginalized in real time here (to thunderous applause from a large section of the electorate). John Gilmore famously stated that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". Unfortunately, he said that back in the halcyon days of September 1993, and he didn't see this coming either. We now live is a much different time, where the corporate-owned government and government-owned corporations are beginning to flex their muscles in a way that he did not anticipate.

There's a word that very accurately describes that unholy marriage of corporate and government power, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Frisbee? Frypan? Fashion? I'm sure that it'll come to me soon. The interested student might also google "samizdat" for a roadmap to our future: I, for one, am glad that I've always liked the smell of mimeograph fluid.

Meanwhile, let's pause for this commercial message...

independent blogs and boards.

The unfortunate situation is that everyone is siloed to some extent, if not a lot.

This makes having open discussion with other than like-minded people very difficult.

It's been said in times of extremism, the middle ground/moderates are the first to go or to be disappeared. We are effectively there, since the suppression of open discussion let alone alternative views is quite coordinated and wide-spread.

We must keep trying. I like Chris Martenson's mantra: it's all about the data. If we get new or better information we should be able to integrate it and change the direction of our views.

Thank you for the OT.

@CB If ANYTHING could make ME break down and side with Morgoth Itself on something, it would have to be this - only problem being, of course, that just because one goes to war doesn't actually mean one won't happily accept the ideas they're supposed to be opposing.

What do we do? I CANNOT live in a world like this.

The best I can think of is tearing down the Internet itself...or investing everything we've got in literal time-travel (as to the latter, 'Dr. Ronald Mallett' is actually a name worth knowing - and given the recent zeitgeist and the fact that he's Afro-American, it's outstandingly suspicious that hardly anyone talks about him while the worst pseudointellectuals keep getting MacArthur Awards).

much more subtle and effective means of manipulating the 'herd' without using coercive means. Using physical force and constraint to 'brainwash' subjects has been shown to be ineffective for the most part by the western nations starting with WWI.

The techniques described by some of the methods you have highlighted end up producing damaged and dysfunctional psyches in their subjects - some even permanent. The military and police forces have been the last to let these methods go, mainly because these organizations modus operandi, is in fact, the use of force with its corollaries, fear, pain and punishment.

The primary purpose and end game of all these methods of "brainwashing" is CONTROL of physical behaviour which entails mental control if we don't want to slip back into the dark ages. We have since discovered that consensual control can be enabled with the skilled manipulation of the thought process and the key to this manipulation was Edward Bernays, the father of American propaganda.

Edward Bernays, The Father Of American Propaganda
...
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic (AKA “capitalist”) society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” – Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda(1928)
...

The Chinese have become masters at this and they do it out front in the open. The following video WILL be coming to America by using the current plandemic creating fear and division to 'herd' groups of people into the pens for their safety. The only missing piece is biometric identification so that the process can be enacted and controlled by the Masters of Big Data. REAL ID is key to this with FEAR of an out of control 'disease' as incentivizer. We are being firmly herded towards The Great Reset of The New World Order. And just like 90% of the Chinese who support their government, "We will own nothing and be happy."

NOTE: I removed the previous video because the last portion was about the Uygurs which is pure propaganda. I have spent 15 years looking into that problem and have determined it is an operation by the US government just like the situation in Tibet.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkILQ6D2m_I]

@The Liberal Moonbat

It is a bit ironic on some level, but I think a successful solution. Covid discussions don’t dominate all the other essays, and the Dose gives as much space as desired for Covid contributions.

This is an open thread so speak about anything you like. Please direct your covid 19 comments to The Dose. Thank you.

Not that I was planning on saying anything in particular, but the contradiction in this is a bit of an eyesore.

@gjohnsit
is that the greatest threat to the Democrats comes from the religious right.

@on the cusp

I am occasionally susceptible to propaganda.
I avoid tv, NPR, and I am faceless and twitless.
Still, I can build up a lot more faith in politicians that they never deserve.
I have been conditioned to think a person in government office cares about his voters. Well, the proper term is their "constituencies", which is their donors.
It has been very hard to break from that conditioning.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal I generally agree with your points... it is great IF various opinions can be floated civily.

I see the siloing as the Reds that are the silos of Breitbart, Newsmax, OAN, FOX, etc., vs the Blues in silos as DKO, DU, CNN, MSDNC, etc., and other bluenomatterwho, channels. I see neither side changing much, save becoming more tribal. The BNMW's party has become the party of war and wall st. and they are still all in, because blue ties. And seemingly no one can go far right enough, if they have a red hat on. I don't see the twain meeting. Others are going to have to fix this.

thanks for the thoughts

I think a "silo" is what corporate media types call like-minded people getting together outside their zone of control.

The very idea of an "echo chamber" is worth a little analysis. Are echo chambers bad? Yes, I suppose. But the idea that a group of like-minded people coming together constitutes an echo chamber is nothing but an assumption. What it assumes is that those people never come together with anyone else, ever. Or that they walk through life with their hands over their ears shouting "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" every time they're outside their "silo."

Are there people like that? Sure. But you can find them just as surely among cable tv watchers who would never in a million years go to the internet for news or discussion. For some reason, those like-minded people are never considered to be in a "silo" or an "echo chamber."

None of this should be taken to deny that the Internet is clearly a great place to deploy tools of mind control, in some ways even more effective than corporate media (but with a few key drawbacks for propagandists too). Nor does it mean that there aren't some forms of social media using groupthink in noxious ways. Some of them are even filled with people (or bots) whose goal is to convert people to some noxious idea or other.

But the problem is not that people who agree are talking to each other on the internet. After all, if we're talking about the creation of groupthink, the corporate media excel at it, and if they are being outstripped by digital tech in that regard, it's partly simply because they are slower--but mostly because you can have a much more profound effect on a person's mind if you pretend you're having a real conversation with them, rather than just talking at them like television newscasters do. Homo sapiens has, for a long time, lived by its communications (try to hunt that wooly mammoth without being able to communicate with each other.) We are profoundly influenced by what we think other humans think, even if we continue to disagree with them. The Net enables a bunch of shitheads to take the old "infiltrate the movement" tactics, speed them up, and in many cases mechanize them (how often are we actually talking to code when we "converse" online? Probably more often than we think).

But to my mind, the same shitheads doing that on the Internet are also doing that through my television. The problem is authoritarian shitheads being in charge of everything, and using that power to fuck with our minds--not the fact that people who agree like to talk to each other.

Ironically, that was where the name "caucus" came from--I was trying to get Markos to allow us to have specific "caucus" diaries in which people who agreed in principle could debate strategies and tactics. As I pointed out, on Capitol Hill, the Blue Dog caucus gets together and talks about strategies and tactics without being constantly interrupted by me busting into their meeting and doing an interpretive dance that represents the current relationship of GDP to wages.

It's really OK for people who agree to talk with one another. Without such "silos" the Civil Rights movement would never have happened. Nor would any populist movement I can think of. Can it get out of hand and turn into a cult or some other exercise in brainwashing? Yes, of course. Any human activity can go awry, and badly. But it's not the fact of people conversing with others who agree with them on the Internet that makes it go wrong. It's the fact that such conversations are all too often swarmed by pestiferous operatives and bots programmed by their colleagues.