We need to talk about grooming. Again.

We need to talk about grooming.

Grooming is an active component, a strategic operation that runs though the core of every hierarchy of wealth, distal power and violence that has ever existed. 

Update: 2024 February 24th

Update: Paper on Cognitive Warfare 2023

"This article characterises the nature of cognitive warfare and its use of disinformation and computational propaganda and its political and military purposes in war and in conflict short of war. It discusses both defensive and offensive measures to counter cognitive warfare and, in particular, measures that comply with relevant moral principles."

Cognitive warfare has been defined in various ways.

Here are a couple of influential definitions to give the flavour of what is meant by this term: “Cognitive Warfare is a strategy that focuses on altering how a target population thinks and through that how it acts” (Backes & Swab, 2019)

“the weaponization of public opinion, by an external entity, for the purpose of (1) influencing public and governmental policy and (2) destabilizing public institutions” (Bernal et al., 2020, p. 10)

example : encouraging a cohort of voters to not vote, convincing them not voting is cool, in order to give another group an advantage ; behavioural modification driven by online and real world grooming operations informed by harvested behavioural surplus data.

example : running a decades long mis and dis-information news media campaign slandering the EU

example : encouraging a cohort of voters that their lives are at risk unless the vote for a certain candidate

example : Brexit!

example : Covid masks are Muzzles!

end of update.

I suggest reading that article before continuing.

Let's face it, the structure of the dominant Industrial Militarised Culture is a hierarchy structure of wealth, distal power and of violence, and it is inherently adversarial in that it suppresses the voices of those most harmed by it's operations in order to maintain it's status. This is what is happening all around us, all the time. The oppressed are being silenced, especially when they speak out and organise to confront and end the oppression they face.

To ensure the case for the oppressed is not heard by most ordinary citizens, grooming is deployed to divert the minds of the more comfortable 'well adjusted' citizens, to exploit key vulnerabilities such as insecurities, biases, knowledge gaps and fears in ways that can drive behaviour that the grooming entity can then exploit.

Thus negative stereotypes about Gypsies, for example, published in mainstream News papers, can lead to enough people thinking 'Gypsies are a problem' to enable Governments to seek to pass legislation criminalising the nomadic way of life of the Gypsy culture..
What is grooming?
Grooming is studying a person or a group of people, identifying their fears, biases, insecurities, blind spots, knowledge gaps and other dysfunctional behavioural patterns in order to exacerbate those, and thus drive predictable behavioural change that can be exploited for sexual, economic, religious, ideological or political advantage.
Grooming is fundamentally an act of psychological abuse in that rather than help the target resolve the issue, the issue is exacerbated - offence number one. 
Then the target is manipulated into behavioural changes that can be exploited  - offence number two.
Grooming is a double crime.
We need to be able to define such activity as a criminal offence as part of preventing grooming as an activity.
We also need to be able to define grooming in a way that helps those targeted for grooming to recover from such targeting, and to be able to address their fears, biases, insecurities, blind spots, knowledge gaps and other dysfunctional behavioural patterns with an eye to resolution of those, a healing outcome.

A letter I wrote to UK News Papers, defining grooming as an act of psychological abuse and suggesting it be made a criminal offence,  which was published in Ireland and Scotland. The letter looks at grooming in the context of the revelations of Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen. Ms. Haugen was a senior executive within Facebook, she was a product manager in the Facebook civic integrity department. 

In this video Ms. Haugen presents her evidence concerning Facebooks activities that exacerbated known conditions of users in order to generate traffic, through which they sold advertising, to a British Parliamentary Select Committee on Digital Media.  When challenged on this Facebook doubled down on the practice. This led Ms. Haugen to go public.



It is clear that Facebook/Meta is not taking independent action to confront this kind of abuse, and is continuing to generate vast revenues from such activity, and is lying to the public about it's actions and intent. Here Ms. Haugen explains how and why Facebook is lying to the public.

It gets worse.

Facebook is just one operational platform among many. Political Grooming operates online and in the real world of print and broadcast television, and is infecting legislatures.

We saw operatives from Cambridge Analytica move on to COVID misinformation activities early in 2020.

This is just one of many examples of this activity being very well funded, linked to right wing lobbying groups with access to legislators, and influencing COVID policy away from the Scientific advice and consensus.

https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/02/cambridge-analytica-psychologist-advising-global-covid-19-disinformation-network-linked-to-nigel-farage-and-conservative-party/

The former lead psychologist of Cambridge Analytica – the notorious digital analytics firm which disseminated fake news on behalf of the Brexit and Donald Trump election campaigns – is advising some of the leading pandemic disinformation platforms in Britain and is connected to COVID-19 conspiracy theory groups in the US, South Africa and elsewhere, Byline Times can reveal.
Many of these platforms and groups have direct ties to hard-right politicians in the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Patrick Fagan, a behavioural and consumer psychologist, was head of psychology at Cambridge Analytica from October 2017 to May 2018. He worked on “local and presidential political campaigns in Europe, Africa and North America”, according to his own website. 
He is currently the chief scientific officer for Capuchin Behavioural Science, which claims to “apply a range of scientific behavioural methods including psychometrics, implicit testing, eye-tracking, facial coding, EEG, and more to deliver measurable commercial results”.
Byline Times writer Karam Bales has investigated, researched and written a series of articles exploring this nexus of deliberate Covid disinformation. The evidence is damning. 
A threat to democracy, a threat to healthy Governance.

"https://blog.f-secure.com/the-psychology-of-election-hacking/

An article from Finland on election hacking.

Election hacking is perhaps the most topical example of what the combination of hostile information-technological and information-psychological activities can mean in the modern information environment. It has government officials asking whether malicious information activities targeting elections could be the new normal.

When the news about the French election hacking broke, many recognized the timing was due to French legislation. The leaks happened just moments before the legally enforceable election silence started, making it impossible for the media to report on, and for the campaign staff to correct any falsehoods and disinformation.

But last-minute election hackings and strategically timed document leaks are more than just a media game. In fact, the leaks during the election campaigns both in the U.S and in France are textbook examples of how psychological operations can be applied to serve not only warfare, but whatever we call those illegal, malicious and democracy-threatening information influence activities. 

This includes not just hacking and leaks, but how this information is used in addition to fake news and other forms of illegitimate manipulation."

From an article about election hacking, written by  Saara Jantunen, a researcher at the Finnish research Agency of the Finnish Defence Forces, entitled 'The Psychology of Election Hacking.'
This describes in brief the activities behind the Brexit Campaign, and indeed the grooming activity can be traced back to Boris Johnson's writing career in Brussels, in the mid 1980s, where he was paid £250,000 annually to write lies about the EU for the English Conservative audience.
To the present, then.
NATO, Ukraine and Russia

NATO, topically enough, is up to it's eyeballs in this kind of psychological grooming. 

It issued a report in 2020, entitled Cognitive Warfare. There are more documents available here : NATO's officials are quite brazen about this.

NATO is quite clear, as this text taken from the report, demonstrates.

"While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon".
"The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”

"Cognitive Warfare is therefore the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural and societal fields. "
In other words, none of this is new. What is new is the enhanced capability offered via social media and online microtargeting. The ability to influence individuals in private which enables a layer of ersatz secrecy. A sibling might share a home, but not a content feed. In that context civil war becomes easier to foment in the minds of targets within any given community. An advertising budget is now a utility of the battlefield.
 We can see the real world effects of this on our screens and news papers right now, today, as USUK media ramp up war speech, even as Ukrainians on all sides say nothing much is happening and that they don't want much to happen, either.

Attack people's minds through cognitive biases and ramp it up towards real world violence against political and economic hubs.
Weaponising the minds of any vulnerable part of the population. The NATO report says this:

"As defined by Clint Watts, cognitive Warfare opposes the capacities to know and to produce, it actively thwarts knowledge. 

Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic and more).3 

Cognitive Warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce or thwart knowledge. Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic and more). 

Cognitive Warfare is therefore the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural and societal fields. 

Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital."

Cognitive Warfare - Political Grooming Gangsterism -  targets the whole of a nation’s human capital - Brexit, Trump, anti-masking, anti-lockdown, anti-vax, climate denialism, online and real world misogyny, the denial of Racism as a problem within Britain's institutions - Police, Military, Government, Civil Service and NHS, in spite of ample evidence of racism causing harm in all these institutions.

Corbyn and the Sabotage

Without any shadow of doubt this is intentional psychological abuse, and it has been the a core component method of mind games and sectarian warfare within the Labour Party, waged to sabotage the Socialist membership and ensure that neither Corbyn nor any Socialists would gain high office by Labour winning a majority in Parliament. This amounts to am amoral and disgusting betrayal of the right of the British electorate to fair elections and a healthy governance system.
We really need to get on top of this, rapidly.
Why is this important in terms of democratic deliberation?
Because effective policy must be based on reliable, real world evidence, rather than belief or opinion.
And, with climate change ahead of us, the need for reliable evidence based policy on almost every area of our way of life is essential. Pollution in the air, on land, in all our waterways, environmental destruction, misogyny, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, racism and poverty are all areas that demand an evidence led response to resolve those problems, and the need is urgent.
There can be no room for error driven by belief or opinion - if we are to make errors, let it be based on the best available evidence and aware of the limitations inherent in such a position being that as new information becomes available, changes to policy can be made addressing that new situation.
Grooming as an activity is all about entrenching beliefs that deny evidence, in order to render the target exploitable. It is a direct threat to solving real world problems.
"A problem fully understood is half way towards resolution. A problem incompletely understood is insoluble."

We need to define grooming activity as an intentional act of psychological abuse, and we need to pass legislation that criminalises such behaviour, and the criminal law should impose severe penalties, financial and custodial, for such criminal activity especially so when it is aimed at a population, because it is a fundamental abuse of Human Rights.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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