Every year, Merriam-Webster picks a word to capture the culture of a moment in time. The choice is based on the frequency and quantity of searches as well as the departure from the norm. This year, the choice seems perfect: gaslighting. It’s drawn from the 1944 film noir starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.

The term means to be subjected to extended psychological trickery to cause the victim to question his or her own reality. In the film, Boyer plays a handsome stranger who meets the beautiful heiress Bergman on a foreign journey and they fall in love. He convinces her to marry and move back together to London to her family home, whereby he embarks upon a subtle campaign to convince her she is bonkers while he secretly searches the home for legacy jewels he intends to steal.

It’s painful to watch, but the experience connects with our own as we watch mainstream media, see respectable scientists canceled for supposedly spreading disinformation, or when we watch a White House press conference. They try to convince us that they are normal and we are the crazy ones, probably guilty of wrongthink or not aware of the full facts. The more they insist on their version of truth, the more we are invited to see ourselves as nuts for failing to give them all the benefit of our doubts.

The film has this crucial moment when Bergman flips from believing that she is a broken spirit and confused person suddenly to realizing that she is the victim of an elaborate hoax. Once she realizes this, and all the pieces fall into place, she calls him out as a fraud and a thief…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

MSNBC Goes Full Clowntard: Gaslights That Inflation Is A “Good Thing”, Deletes Tweet After Angry Backlash

November 9, 2021

MSNBC Goes Full Clowntard: Gaslights That Inflation Is A “Good Thing”, Deletes Tweet After Angry Backlash

While millions of Americans are suffering from runaway, galloping inflation everywhere (to avoid the dreaded “H” word that made Jack Dorsey every lib’s enemy #1) from the gas pump to the grocery store aisle – which of course affects low-income individuals the most, MSNBC has gone up to bat for the Biden administration, deploying their best pretzel-logician to explain why all this inflation is literally – wait for it – good.

First, the now-deleted tweet…

Nevermind that in September, a Kroger executive warned in that grocery prices were about to get nasty, and the company will be “passing along higher cost to the customer where it makes sense to do so.” Or that Nestle CFO Francois-Xavier Roger said blistering inflation would likely continue into next year – telling the crowd at a Barclays consumer staples conference: “If we talk of 2022, it is likely that input cost inflation will be higher next year than this year.”

Or that Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic admitted last month that inflation is not transitory (and even has a swear jar collecting dollar bills for every time some gaslighter utters the word “transitory”).

Or that agricultural input costs from fertilizer to feed have gone through the roof – thanks to soaring natural gas prices of all things.

Or labor shortages throughout the supply chain – including US ports and the trucking industry – including those who refuse to take the Covid-19 vaccine.

Or just read this from Bank of America:

“Meanwhile on Main Street: cost of living rising…wages rising; food (coffee @ 7-year high, wheat @ 13-year high), energy (BofA forecast $120/bbl Brent next 6 months), shelter (US rents up 9% YoY), wages annualizing 6% past 6 months; US core CPI currently 4.0% YoY, likely to be 5-6% spring’22.”

Nope. You see, the inflation we’re seeing today is a good thing, according to MSNBC’s James Surowiecki, whose financial background is a Ph.D. in American history and being a writer at The Motley Fool and The New Yorker.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Psychoanalysing NATO: Confirmation Bias

November 9, 2018

Psychoanalysing NATO: Confirmation Bias

Earlier parts of this intermittent series discussed NATO’s projection and gaslighting.

Psychology Today defines confirmation bias as:

Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it. Confirmation bias suggests that we don’t perceive circumstances objectively. We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm our prejudices. Thus, we may become prisoners of our assumptions.

Or, closer to the topic of this essay:

Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.

This quotation is from an interview of George Kennan by Thomas Friedman published in the New York Times twenty years ago. He was speaking about what was then called “NATO expansion” (later changed to the more anodyne – and deceptive – phrase “NATO enlargement”. (I as a civil servant in the Canadian Department of National Defence used to amuse myself by seeing if I could sneak the forbidden “expansion” – an altogether more honest word – into briefing notes for the Higher Ups. As I recall, I got away with it about half the time. A trivial pleasure in the evolving disaster.)

But back to Kennan, Mr X, the author of the Long Telegram, the founder of “containment“, the man who actually lived long enough to see his recommendations, not only followed, but successful. He was right: in the long term, the Soviet system was not sustainable; it was, as Russian President Putin said: “a road to a blind alley“.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Psychoanalysing NATO: Gaslighting

July 18, 2018

Psychoanalysing NATO: Gaslighting

NOTE: Because “NATO” these days is little more than a box of spare parts out of which Washington assembles “coalitions of the willing”, it’s easier for me to write “NATO” than “Washington plus/minus these or those minions”.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid has called on Russia to explain “exactly what has gone on” after two people were exposed to the Novichok nerve agent in Wiltshire. (BBC)

The Russian state could put this wrong right. They could tell us what happened. What they did. And fill in some of the significant gaps that we are trying to pursue. We have said they can come and tell us what happened. I’m waiting for the phone call from the Russian state. The offer is there. They are the ones who could fill in all the clues to keep people safe. (UK security minister Ben Wallace)

Leaving aside their egregious flouting of the elemental principle of English justice, note that they’re uttering this logical idiocy: Russia must have done it because it hasn’t proved it didn’t. Note also, in Javid’s speech, the amusing suggestion that Russia keeps changing its story; but to fit into the official British story “novichok” must be an instantly lethal slow acting poison which dissipates quickly but lasts for months.

This is an attempt to manipulate our perception of reality. In a previous essay I discussed NATO’s projection of its own actions onto Russia. In this piece I want to discuss another psychological manipulation – gaslighting.

The expression comes from the movie Gaslight in which the villain manipulates her reality to convince his wife that she is insane. Doubt the official Skripal story and it is you – you “Russian troll” – who is imagining things.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Establishment Propaganda Gaslights Us Into Submission

February 13, 2018

How Establishment Propaganda Gaslights Us Into Submission

“Gaslighting” can be an effective tactic to instill confusion and anxiety in people, causing them to doubt their own logical abilities, but it can be countered by remaining confident in our judgments, argues Caitlin Johnstone.

Poster for the 1944 movie “Gaslight”

The dynamics of the establishment Syria narrative are hilarious if you take a step back and think about them. I mean, the Western empire is now openly admitting to having funded actual, literal terrorist groups in that country, and yet they’re still cranking out propaganda pieces about what is happening there and sincerely expecting us to believe them. It’s adorable, really; like a little kid covered in chocolate telling his mom he doesn’t know what happened to all the cake frosting.

Or least it would be adorable if it weren’t directly facilitating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.

I recently had a pleasant and professional exchange with the Atlantic Council’s neoconservative propagandist Eliot Higgins, in which he referred to independent investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley as “bonkers” and myself as “crazy,” and I called him a despicable bloodsucking ghoul. I am not especially fond of Mr. Higgins.

You see this theme repeated again and again and again in Higgins’ work; the U.S.-centralized power establishment which facilitated terrorist factions in Syria is the infallible heroic Good Guy on the scene, and anyone who doesn’t agree is a mentally deranged lunatic.

This is also the model for the greater imperialist propaganda construct, not just with regard to Syria but with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and any other insolent government which refuses to bow to American supremacist agendas.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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