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AI and the new kind of propagandaSome dystopian nightmare fuel

AI and the new kind of propaganda

Some dystopian nightmare fuel

Do you remember how the unconstitutional, pastel-authoritarian and totally batshit insane “Disinformation Governance Board” – with its Mary Poppins-cosplaying, Monty Python level of unintentional self-satirizing department head – was rolled out two years ago like a half-joke, half-beta-test of a version of the 1984 Ministry of Truth?

Well, kids, I wouldn’t really call this 4D chess or anything, but of course this was just bait. This parody and its rapid withdrawal reassures us that nothing of the sort could conceivably take place, while also seeding a visible, red-herring template for how we should expect heavy-handed, overt propaganda efforts to look in this day and age.

Meanwhile, there are currently massive efforts in the background and below the surface, all across the playing field, towards implementing big data and AI technology for not only the purposes of classical, increasingly obsolete propaganda or simple surveillance. No, this time, we’re exploring entirely novel methods of behavioural modification and narrative control intended to GET OUT AHEAD of the crystallization of discourses and even the formation of identities and worldviews.

They want to control the formation and reproduction of “social imaginaries”.

So the idea is to use massive data collection and AI pattern recognition to preemptively disrupt the formation of behaviourally significant narratives, discourses or patterns of information.

With these tools of “early diagnosis” of information that potentially could disrupt the power structure and its objectives, it then becomes possible to nip it in the bud incredibly early on, way before such information has even coalesced into something like coherent narratives or meaningful models for explanation or further (precarious) conclusions.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.

I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me.

Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.”  It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing.  Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war.  So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality.  This angered me.

The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad.  “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.”  Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Leftists Hate Free Speech Because They Fear Dissent, Not “Disinformation”

Leftists Hate Free Speech Because They Fear Dissent, Not “Disinformation”

I think one of the most bizarre social developments of the past 10 years in the US has been the slow but steady shift of the political left as supposed defenders of free speech to enemies of free speech. The level of mental gymnastics on display by leftists to justify their attacks on freedom and the 1st Amendment is bewildering. So much so that I begin to question if liberals and leftists ever actually had any respect for 1st Amendment rights to begin with? Or, maybe the only freedom they cared about all along was the freedom to watch pornography…

One can see the steady progression of this war on speech and ideas, and the end game is predictable: Is anyone really that surprised that the Biden Administration is implementing a Ministry of Truth in the form of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board? Can we just accept the reality at this point that leftists are evil and their efforts feed into an agenda of authoritarianism? Is there any evidence to the contrary?

Before I get into this issue, I think it’s important to point out that it’s becoming tiresome to hear arguments these days suggesting that meeting leftists “somewhere in the middle” is the best and most desirable option. I see this attitude all over the place and I think it comes from a certain naivety about the situation we are facing as a country. Moderates and “normies” along with people like Bill Maher and Russell Brand are FINALLY starting to realize how bag-lady-crazy leftists are and the pendulum is swinging back slightly. But, it was conservatives that were calling out the social justice cult and their highway to hell for years.

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

NY Times Calls For Biden to Appoint “Reality Czar” to Fight “Misinformation”

NY Times Calls For Biden to Appoint “Reality Czar” to Fight “Misinformation”

Here comes the Ministry of Truth.

Drew Angerer via Getty Images/Composite

The New York Times has amplified claims by “experts” who are calling for Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar,” prompting critics to compare the idea to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984.

In an article entitled ‘How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis’, the NYT’s Kevin Roose cites “experts” who are calling on “the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a “reality czar.”

The job of this “reality czar” would be to head up “a centralized task force could coordinate a single, strategic response” to things like COVID-related and election fraud “conspiracy theories.”

“This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems. (For example, it could formulate “safe harbor” exemptions that would allow platforms to share data about QAnon and other conspiracy theory communities with researchers and government agencies without running afoul of privacy laws.) And it could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis,” states the article.

“Ah, the Ministry of Truth. I’ve been waiting for this one,” responded Raheem Kassam.

While the Orwell comparison has become something of a cliché, in this instance its the best available.

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

Is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth Alive?Why Don’t We Hear Much About Julian Assange?

Is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth Alive?Why Don’t We Hear Much About Julian Assange?

In Orwell’s dystopian fiction 1984, the government’s mission through the Ministry of Truth is to supply its people with news, entertainment, books, films, plays and songs, packed with the information it wants the people to know. It constructs lies to fit the narrative it wishes to establish and sets about rewriting historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line.

Have we slept walked our way into 1984 with the curious witchhunt of Julian Assange?

From the time Wikileaks published Collateral Murder in 2010, exposing the slaying of Iraqi civilians at the hands of merciless US Apache soldiers, in what became the biggest news story of its time, the United States has wanted Julian Assange silenced and forgotten.

He has lived in a state of confinement since May 2010 when he was arrested and jailed in the United Kingdom, lived under house arrest for a further 18 months in England and then sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy from June 2012 .Yet many people think Assange was in a position where he could simply walk free.

Has there been a well crafted smear campaign to dehumanise Assange and coax the public into forgetting him? How else could he have been detained within two tiny rooms devoid of sunlight for more than six years without public commentary and concern? The apparent dismantling of Assange’s character and disinformation has been thorough. Most people do not know the specifics of his case, but “believe” he is an arrogant rapist and an ungrateful, badly behaved houseguest, smearing faeces on the embassy walls and being cruel to his cat. These disputed claims are now so well accepted it’s inconceivable that they could actually be lies.

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

EU is Steadily Moving Towards Creation of 1984-Style Ministry of Truth

EU IS STEADILY MOVING TOWARDS CREATION OF 1984-STYLE MINISTRY OF TRUTH

EU Is Steadily Moving Towards Creation Of 1984-style Ministry Of Truth

The European Parliament passed a recommendation calling  Russia “the main source of disinformation in Europe” and appealing for increased funding for the EU’s East StratCom Task Force, which already got 1.1 million euros in 2018.

HINT: The East StratCom Task Force is a EU body focused on so-called proactive communication of EU policies and activities in the Eastern neighbourhood (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) and beyond (Russia and further).

The passed document says that East StratCom Task Force as well as its two task-force subdivisions dealing with the southern neighborhood and Western Balkans, should get “adequate financial and personnel resources which are still required, aimed at the significant increase of their potential, effectiveness, professionalism, institutional continuity and quality of work, as well as safeguarding them against political meddling by officials and countries that back Russian disinformation.

Furthermore, it called on EU member states “to ensure that electoral laws take into account possible threats stemming from disinformation campaigns” and urged them to “adapt their electoral rules on online campaigning and to monitor and evaluate the transparency features in relation to political advertising introduced by the online platforms.”

The suggestions also include support for “independent and diverse Russian-language media in the countries of the Eastern Partnership and beyond” and “to focus on the EU accession countries and partners in the EU neighborhood by assisting them in their efforts to counteract hostile propaganda and disinformation activities.”

The formal justification of the moves suggested in the document is based on the mainstream media narrative that Russia every day carries out disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks, aimed at increasing tensions within the EU and its member states.

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

Weaponized Consensus by the Collective Establishes Counterfeit Premises to Control Contrived Contingencies

Weaponized Consensus by the Collective Establishes Counterfeit Premises to Control Contrived Contingencies

But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
– 2 Timothy 3:13

They are like chaff that the wind blows away.
– Psalm 1: 4

Many years ago I read a book entitled “People of the Lie”  written by Scott Peck, an American psychiatrist.  It was a fascinating analytic study of malignant narcissism and deceit. I came away from the book with an understanding that a very significant percentage, if not the majority, of people in the world are not decent.

Other conceptualizations presented by Peck in “People of the Lie” included disguise as a main motive of evil, along with descriptions of people assessed as such to being self-deluded, as projecting their own actions onto others, as utilizing the pretense of love to actually hate, and as possessing an inherent intolerance to withstand criticism.  The author further identified evil as the opposition to life; even acknowledging the word “evil” aslive” spelled backwards.  Dr. Peck also claimed evil could be measured by its consistency and conceded that decent individuals have difficulty in cognitively processing the concept:

[Erich] Fromm saw the genesis of human evil as a developmental process; we are not created evil or forced to be evil, but we become evil slowly over time through a long series of choices.

When confronted by evil, the wisest and most secure adult will usually experience confusion.
– Peck, Scott.  (1983, 1988). “People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil”; Century Hutchinson.

Peck also illustrated evil as more than the mere absence of good but, instead, as being overtly hateful and destructive. In other words, evil can manifest either by contingent circumstance or design.  More often than not, however, it is the latter; evil happens on purpose. Furthermore, although the banality of evil is evident throughout history, it often materializes in the cult ofpersonality; or, stated another way, institutionalized by way of The Collective.

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

Google ‘Ministry of Truth’ intensifies suppressing ‘fake news’ (such as this)

Google ‘Ministry of Truth’ intensifies suppressing ‘fake news’ (such as this)

On November 18th, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt spoke about how Google will help to defeat Russia. He said that Google helps in this effort not by “censoring” Russian newsmedia, but by “de-ranking” them in Google web-searches, so that web-pages from these sites, which he calls “propaganda,” will show so far down in the rankings in any Google-search, so that users of Google will not encounter (or will be vastly less likely to encounter) Russian sites — or any other non-mainstream sites (such as this one), which refuse unquestioningly to trumpet government lies.

Schmidt was speaking to the NATO-sponsored Halifax International Security Forum, which is headquartered actually in Washington DC, though “The Forum is best known for its annual security summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia” in order to strengthen Canada’s bond to America’s anti-Russia military alliance, NATO.

Schmidt’s full speech, and the Q-and-A’s after Schmidt’s presentation, are shown complete in the video here:

https://www.facebook.com/Halifaxtheforum/videos/1642381182492613/

Since no transcript was provided, extensive excerpts from the video will be quoted here.

At the video’s start, it’s marked as 1:51:38, and at its end, it is marked as 0:00:00, but only the end-marking shows in the video while it’s running, and that end-marking indicates the number of minutes-till the video’s end. I therefore provide both markings [with the minutes-from-the end being shown in brackets like here], because the video’s producers had made unusually difficult the finding and location of anything that’s said in Schmidt’s war-speech presentation. The presentation wasn’t addressed to the publics of NATO-member countries, but instead to scholarly and financial elites in those countries, people whose own careers are in service to these nations’ aristocracies (people who themselves are highly invested in their nation’s military-industrial complex). It thus reveals some things that Schmidt might prefer that the public not know.

1:08:00-[-43:00]

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

Ministry of Truth Goes After Facebook, Twitter, Google

Facebook, Twitter and Google meet with Congress on Tuesday about Russia’s use of fake accounts and paid advertising to meddle in the 2016 election.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google are under close scrutiny as Congress is set to crack down on alleged election-ad abuses. The three tech giants meet Congress](https://www.bloomberg.com//news/articles/2017-10-31/facebook-twitter-google-to-tell-congress-how-russia-meddled) today.

Senators want to know how the companies failed to keep Russians from exploiting their networks — buying 3,000 Facebook ads mostly with rubles — and using fake accounts to spread chaos and disinformation to millions of Americans. The three companies’ general counsels will appear before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Tuesday and the House and Senate Intelligence panels Wednesday.

“The foreign interference we saw is reprehensible and outrageous and opened a new battleground for our company, our industry and our society,” Colin Stretch, Facebook Inc. general counsel, said in prepared remarks. “We’re determined to prevent it from happening again.”

Facebook plans to tell lawmakers that 80,000 posts by 470 fake Russian accounts reached an estimated 126 million people, and that it closed 5.8 million fake accounts from all sources in October 2016 alone. Fake Russian accounts on Facebook’s Instagram posted another 120,000 pieces of content, the company will tell lawmakers.

At the same hearing, Twitter Inc. will say it has suspended 2,752 Russian-linked accounts, far more than it previously disclosed, according to testimony obtained by Bloomberg. Alphabet Inc.’s Google plans to say the impact on its sites was much smaller, with $4,700 worth of Russian-linked ads, compared to the $100,000 Facebook disclose.

Facebook head of security Alex Stamos has said using algorithms to try to cut fake news or political comments would result in the company acting as the “Ministry of Truth” — something it doesn’t want to be. But its current effort to stop misinformation, by letting neutral third parties fact-check posts flagged by users, is falling short, according to people familiar with the process.

Meanwhile …

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

Facebook Security Chief Lashes Out: “Censorship Is Easy If You Don’t Worry About Becoming The Ministry Of Truth”

Facebook Security Chief Lashes Out: “Censorship Is Easy If You Don’t Worry About Becoming The Ministry Of Truth”

In a furious tweetstorm this weekend, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer warned interfering desperate politicians and triggered letfists that the fake news problem is more complicated and dangerous to solve than the public thinks.

As a reminder, we noted that Alex Stamos was seemingly pressured into ‘finding’ Russian evidence after Senator Mark Warner paid the social media company a visit

A few weeks after the French election, Warner flew out to California to visit Facebook in person. It was an opportunity for the senator to press Stamos directly on whether the Russians had used the company’s tools to disseminate anti-Clinton ads to key districts.

Officials said Stamos underlined to Warner the magnitude of the challenge Facebook faced policing political content that looked legitimate.

Stamos told Warner that Facebook had found no accounts that used advertising but agreed with the senator that some probably existed. The difficulty for Facebook was finding them.

For months, a team of engineers at Facebook had been searching through accounts, looking for signs that they were set up by operatives working on behalf of the Kremlin. The task was immense.

Warner’s visit spurred the company to make some changes in how it conducted its internal investigation. Instead of searching through impossibly large batches of data, Facebook decided to focus on a subset of political ads.

Technicians then searched for “indicators” that would link those ads to Russia. To narrow down the search further, Facebook zeroed in on a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, which had been publicly identified as a troll farm.

“They worked backwards,” a U.S. official said of the process at Facebook.

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

Morning Joe: Ministry of Truth Is Needed To Fight War On Fake News, ‘Russian Operatives’ On Social Media

On Friday’s Morning Joe, Willie Geist hosted a panel to discuss the latest news on the Russian hacking narrative regarding Facebook ads that were purportedly used by Russian intelligence to stoke “racial tensions” during the 2016 presidential election. The panel’s primary reaction, with only one dissenting voice, was to call for increased government “regulation” and financial “penalties in the hundreds of millions” to shut down alleged Russian influencers.

The segment started off with Geist introducing the latest reporting on the topic:

GEIST: Twitter says it has shut down more than two-hundred accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who bought political ads on Facebook. Of the 450 accounts released by Facebook as part of its investigation, Twitter was able to match 22 of them to its own site. The disclosure by Twitter followed a briefing by company officials to staffers of the Senate and House Intel committees yesterday. Following that meeting, the top Democrat on the Senate committee, Mark Warner, slammed Twitter for its presentation.

SEN. MARK WARNER [D-VA]: [playing clip] The presentation that the Twitter team made to the Senate Intel staff today was deeply disappointing. The notion that their work was basically derivative based upon accounts that Facebook had identified showed enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions, and, again, begs many more questions than they offered.

(…)

GEIST: The top Democrat on the House Intel Committee, Adam Schiff, also weighed in on Twitter’s briefing to his committee, releasing a statement that read, in part: “… it is clear that Twitter has significant forensic work to do to understand the depth and breadth of Russian activity during the campaign. This additional analysis will require far more robust investigation into how Russian actors used their platform as a part of their active measures campaign…”

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

Defeat is Victory

Defeat is Victory

John Holcroft

On the wall of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth from his novel 1984 there were three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It occurred to me that these apply just a little bit too well to the way the Washington, DC establishment operates.

War certainly is peace: just look at how peaceful Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine have become thanks to their peacemaking efforts. The only departures from absolute peacefulness which might be taking place there have to do with the fact that there are some people still alive there. This should resolve itself on its own, especially in the Ukraine, where the people now face the prospect of surviving a cold winter without heat or electricity.

Freedom is indeed slavery: to enjoy their “freedom,” Americans spend most of their lives working off debt, be it a mortgage, medical debt incurred due to an illness, or student loans. Alternatively, they can also enjoy it by rotting in jail. They also work longer hours with less time off and worse benefits than in any other developed country, and their wages haven’t increased in two generations.

And what keeps it all happening is the fact that ignorance is indeed strength; if it wasn’t for the Americans’ overwhelming, willful ignorance of both their own affairs and the world at large, they would have rebelled by now, and the whole house of cards would have come tumbling down.

But there is a fourth slogan they need to add to the wall of Washington’s Ministry of Truth. It is this:

DEFEAT IS VICTORY

The preposterous nature of the first three slogans can be finessed away in various ways.

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

Red Swan Descending

Red Swan Descending

The proverbial peddlers of Florida swampland can now move over. They can’t hold a candle to the red suzerains of Beijing.

The latter had drawn a line in the sand at 7.0% GDP growth. Conveniently enough, the “consensus” estimate of so-called street economists was pegged at 6.8% for Q3, thereby giving authorities one thin decimal point through which to thread a “beat” at 6.9%.

By golly they did it!

Even then, China’s Ministry of Truth had to fiddle down the GDP deflator to negative 0.5% (for the second time this year) in order to hit the bulls eye. And that’s exactly the point.

No real world $10 trillion economy plagued with all of the turmoil evident in China’s whipsawing trade data or its volatile real estate development sector or its faltering rust belt and commodity-based industries can possibly deliver absolutely stable GDP numbers to the exact decimal point quarter after quarter.

In fact, the odds that these reports represent anything other than goal-seeked propaganda are so overwhelmingly high that they perforce raise another more important question.  Why does Wall Street and its servile financial press not issue a loud collective guffaw when they are released?

But no, the Wall Street Journal took it all very seriously, noting both the “beat” and China’s claim that the “miss” wasn’t a miss at all:

The better-than-expected result—a Wall Street Journal survey of 13 economists forecast a median 6.8% gain—is likely to renew debate over the accuracy of China’s growth statistics…….Speaking at an event to promote entrepreneurism in Beijing on Monday, Premier Li Keqiang said “even though it was 6.9%, it is still a growth rate of around 7%.”

Right. China’s #2 communist boss is out promoting the “enterprenurial spirit” while emitting central planning propaganda to the decimal point.

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

“Keep Reporting On Bright Economic Future” – China Ministry Of Truth Demands Media “Properly Interpret” Data

“Keep Reporting On Bright Economic Future” – China Ministry Of Truth Demands Media “Properly Interpret” Data

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. As China Digital Times reports, propaganda directives issued by the Xinhua News Agency and the Central Propaganda Department show that Chinese media are being instructed to “properly interpret economic data,” and “promote discourse on China’s bright economic future.”

As China Digital Time reports, two leaked images of propaganda directives issued by the Xinhua News Agency and the Central Propaganda Department show that Chinese media are being instructed to report positively on the economy. CDT has translated both.

The first below is the Xinhua notice, which asks its various departments to draft plans for promoting the discourse on China’s bright economic future.”

screen_shot_2015-09-08_at_1.54.41_pm

Office of the Xinhua News Agency Editor-in-Chief

Notice

To the departments of Domestic News (Central Government Procurement Center), International News, Domestic News for Overseas Service, Photography, Reference News, and Audio-Video; the CNC [China Xinhua News Network Corporation], Xinhua Online, the New Media Center; all media reporting platforms; and the Editorial Department:

In keeping with the spirit of notifications from superior authorities and Agency leadership requirements,the focus for the month of September will be strengthening economic propaganda and guiding public opinion (the related notification is in the attachment that follows). This includes taking the next step in promoting the discourse on China’s bright economic future and the superiority of China’s system, as well as stabilizing expectations and inspiring confidence. We request that your departments take immediate action to plan related reporting; identify individuals to take responsibility; and confirm reporting topics, individuals responsible for those topics, and publication dates.

Please plan related reporting. After the responsible parties within the relevant department have signed off on the plan, send it to the Creative Planning Center at the editor-in-chief’s office through 0A prior to 5 p.m. on September 9, and fax the leadership signature page to 63071200.

 

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

 

“It’s A Tipping Point” Marc Faber Warns “There Are No Safe Assets Anymore”

“It’s A Tipping Point” Marc Faber Warns “There Are No Safe Assets Anymore”

Markets have “reached some kind of a tipping point,” warns Marc Faber in this brief Bloomberg TV interview. Simply put, he explains, “because of modern central banking and repeated interventions with monetary policy, in other words, with QE, all around the world by central banks – there is no safe asset anymore.” The purchasing power of money is going down, and Faber “would rather focus on precious metals because they do not depend on the industrial demand as much as base metals or industrial commodities,” as it’s now “obvious that the Chinese economy is growing at nowhere near what the Ministry of Truth is publishing.”

Faber explains more… “I have to laugh when someone like you tries to lecture me what creates prosperity”

Some key exceprts…

On what central banks hath wrought…

I think that because of modern central banking and repeated interventions with monetary policy, in other words, with QE, all around the world by central banks there is no safe asset anymore. When I grew up in the ’50s it was safe to put your money in the bank on deposit. The yields were low, but it was safe.

But nowadays, you don’t know what will happen next in terms of purchasing power of money. What we know is that it’s going down.

On the idiocy of QE…

In my humble book of economics, wealth is being created through, essentially, a mixture of capital spending, and land and labor. And if these three production factors are used efficiently, it then creates a prosperous society, as America became prosperous from its humble beginnings in 1800, or thereabout, to the 1960s, ’70s. But it’s ludicrous to believe that you will create prosperity in a system by printing money. That is economic sophism at its best.

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

 

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