The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
In 2004, a wide ranging group of people across numerous sectors collated the following insights and suggestions as to how to make British Democracy more fully and functionally democratic.
They looked carefully at peoples lived experiences, gathering and listening to witness testimony, to relevant expertise. They looked at where were people being disempowered.
That led to consultations, assemblies and other fora for discussion of how to end those disempowering dynamics.
They look at what changes could be made to devolve more democratic decision making power and responsibility to the people, placing the people as collective decision makers on policy that impacts their lives and empowering the people to hold government. They also understood the need for structures that enable the people to hold The State to account, if the need arises.
The collective that lives, works and generates wealth and taxes has a natural right to a meaningful role in policy formulation, implementation and oversight. We do not deserve to be Ruled. We do not need to be Ruled.
😊
Solidarity is our super power.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
Robert Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinology researcher and author. He is a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University.
Sapolsky has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience. He was also awarded the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Young Investigator of the Year Awards from the Society for Neuroscience, the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology, and the Biological Psychiatry Society.
In this conversation, he will share scientific research related to the neurobiology of transgender people with the goal protecting the rights of transgender people via the creation of informed policies.
Robert Sapolsky speaks to the neurobiology of sex expression, which he demonstrates presents as a natural and indeed expected wide variation across a spectrum. There is no absolute binary present.
Biology is all about subtle variation, and Sapolsky explains why that matters, in a really engaging manner... it is complex, yet not at all complicated.
Reassuring and enlightening.
Hatred complicates things. Always.
Power struggles in politics complicates things.
Always.
Kindness Prevails.
Remember that.
The more, the merrier.
Solidarity as humane persons.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
This has been a subject of concern for some time. This post is to serve as an alert.
We know that there is very well organised ongoing, in-depth collection of surveillance data about entire populations. Surveillance Capitalism collects data on our psychology and behaviour, every day, all day long, all the time.
The platforms collect data on c.4,000 data points for every active consumer. We know too that this data and the analysis of that data is being deployed by the platforms that collect it.
All Social Media and on-line News Content platforms sell their capability to target consumers. They have millions of users, they know a lot about those users, they have categorised the users in great detail, they sell precision micro-marketing which increase sales to ad revenue spend compared to other platforms for advertising.
They can direct content to stimulate very specific traits including psychological characteristics, locations, income range, age range, hatreds, fears, likes, hobbies, work history and much, much more, to offer enhanced marketing effectiveness to advertisers, increasing sales to advert ratios, offering more precision.
They call it micro-targeting, and it is fed by global data-mining.
Advertisers go to the platforms believing that micro-targeting advertising/influencing will be more effective in generating attention and sales. Influencers.
Ideological Marketing.
In marketing language then the objective of online political grooming is to locate and identify 'vulnerable' people who are then targeted with content that exploits sets of cognitive biases, insecurities, pain, fear, distress and concerns. The objective is to weaponise the targets 'heart and mind' in support of the groomers goals. Here is an example.
The strategy is to weaponise the minds of a violent minority and a larger supportive base of Nationalists to the point where the violent will present rioting, the supporter base will present supporting oppressive legislation aimed at minority groups, marginalised groups, groups of people who are 'othered' - "they are not like us!"
We know now that in 2016 and before, decades before SCL and then Cambridge Analytica and a raft of affiliates, consultant coders, data analysis experts and on the ground staff were carrying out these kinds of campaigns in many, many countries, influencing more than 100 different elections over a few decades, growing as the tech world grew, but growing out of previous propaganda industries.
Adam Curtis BBC Documentary 'The Mayfair Set' speaks to those industries, and their sponsors in the aftermath of WWII and throughout the 20th Century.
Today sending refined content to micro-target individuals, groups, populations is an expensive operation. Data Centres eat electricity. Very expensive to run.
Cognitive Warfare requires high tech savvy, funding to pay for distribution, teams of people to work as content producers, journalists to pick this up, mainstream news media to present this as 'another opinion in the room' and refusing to counter it, head on and demolish it in public in the manner of an honest discussion of the issue.
Instead the false logic, the emotionally immature attachment, the propaganda and the naked hatred remains festering.
Posing as 'valid opinion', vague patriots pretend to represent the whole, they are just like us, workers whose masters Rule us all,
Our Rulers are the ones who who curate those opinions as weapons to seed the minds of a restive population, to prevent solidarity emerging.
So...
Funding febrile fearmongering for far fright street theatre.
When it comes to political funding, from election posters to think tanks, those who fund such an enterprise do so with purpose, to serve their interest. Most often preventing accountability for harm already done, and preventing regulation of harm ongoing, because wealth extraction is the only measure of note to those who Rule.
In 2004, The Power Inquiry looked at this and made this suggestion as to how to resolve the issue.
"Fourth, party funding has to be cleaned up. We suggest limits on individual donations of £10,000 and on group donations of £100 per member. Millionaires could still give large sums to a pressure group of their fancy but the pressure group would need to have any political donations authorised by a vote of its members.
British politics is also generally underfunded by comparison both with its own past and with other social activities today. So we propose an ingenious but modest wheeze for public funding, especially designed to help parties without sugar daddies.
At each election, every voter would be able to nominate a local political party to receive, say, £3. If you do not vote or you do not want the bastards to have an extra penny, then your £3 would stay in the public treasury to be spent on hospitals and tanks."
A neat solution to get the Wealth as Power Lobby out of the election process. The Power Inquiry had 47 recommendations to shift the balance of power to the electorate, to local government, to make Power safe for people. It takes a lot of wealth to operate campaigns that manipulatively influence millions of people for political purposes. Wealth as Power is a political lobby inside and outside of almost every aspect of this culture. And I think that it goes well beyond parties, because it is a cultural lobby. Wealth lobbies for more Wealth. Wealth lobbies to evade accountability for harms caused. Wealth lobbies subvert a peoples electoral democracy. They must be regulated for us to try to build a healthy functioning democratic system.
"This may seem an ambitious programme, spread as it is over three fronts: reviving elections and parties, rebalancing our institutions, and giving voters a direct say in national and local decisions. But we should reflect that over the past twenty-five years we have reformed almost everything in Britain from the trade unions to soccer's offside rule.
The one area that remains more or less just as it was is the political system, which has become shabby, vandalised and unloved like a bus shelter where the buses don't stop any more. Time, I think, to take pity on a set of British institutions which used to be so widely envied and imitated and could be made a source of pride again."
Good governors govern well, Wealth Extraction Rules in its own interest. I think that we, as a population majority, have a choice t make as to which of these we consider a necessity, and which is not.
The funding that incites and organises a wide range of politically bigoted groups can be traced, and it should be.
What do I think of the Southport Riots?
Targeting vulnerable people selected through studying their biases, insecurities, fears - psychological profiling, criminal intent
Disseminating content designed to exacerbate those vulnerabilities - incitement, criminal intent
Tweaking the content, increasing the tension and emotional charge to drive or nudge behaviour in a desired direction - manipulation, criminal intent
Providing mechanisms for multiple small groups to form to take actions designed to inflame public political discourse - undermining healthy democracy, criminal intent
Be ready to mobilise a group action at a few hours notice, maintaining targets in a febrile state. Inciting hatred, fear and vengeance, heightening emotional rhetoric, lying about events to provide 'reason' for the violence. "We are protecting the children".
Vulnerable people are being exploited and their exploitation causes even more
harm.
The people who incite and orchestrate this are the ultimate criminals - the rioters are not the cause, they are the symptom.
They have been groomed. Some quite willingly, admittedly. These are carefully selected unhappy, emotionally immature violence prone people. Their emotional immaturity renders them exploitable. They are vulnerable. They need help, they too are being exploited.
This is not to offer excuses, because there are none when violence and abuse are perpetrated, rather it is to try to understand many dynamics feeding into this deliberately provoked street violence as political theatre.
Surveillance Capitalism - a short talk.
By all means hold those who participate in violence to account.
By all means hold those who are abusive on our streets to account.
And for all our sakes, do not allow the people who cause this, the politically and commercially powerful who fund all of this, across the board, to go unaccountable. They must be held accountable, their behaviour must be described accurately, the harm they cause witnessed, survivors needs met and prevention must therefore be the next stage.
Because it is dishonest, grooming, at any level, in any relationship or setting, is not Free Speech.
Because it is manipulative and causes emotional harm, it is psychological abuse.
Because it incites hatred and fear, aimed at marginalised identified groups, it is bullying.
Because it is designed to undermine healthy public debate on democratic governance it is political.
We need to legislate ideological grooming as the psychological abuse that it is, to recognise it as a criminal activity, to define it as an offence, with a custodial sentence as a rational reasonable preventative measure, more health and safety than punishment.
We already define psychological abuse within Domestic Violence.
The legal precedent of criminalising gaslighting, bullying and other forms of psychological abuse within a relationship, human to human, exists.
The relationship of human to human in this dynamic contains a Power Disparity, the more powerful party being the sponsors of the most public figure, the funders of the ‘research’, content creation, content dissemination compared to any of the vulnerable targets.
Preventative Legislation would mean the platforms would have to shut all that grooming down, which they could do. They have total control of the platforms. They would have to uphold that legislation in order to operate.
Protecting the vulnerable from avoidable harm is a fundamental duty of care.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
