Showing posts with label Pope Francis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pope Francis. Show all posts

Facebook is looking more like The Vatican with every passing day.

Political Grooming Gangs are undermining our democracies, escalating social tensions and disrupting our communities.

Update February 24 2024


"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!

respectfully suggest readers read the paper linked above, and then decide whether or not this piece is worth your time. The paper certainly is.

~ end of update ~

Knowing that abuse is happening, paying lip service to addressing the situation (even as the abuse continues with no meaningful remedial action being taken) in order to preserve public status, image and income is dysfunctional behaviour and it causes more harm.



I don't buy the apology, until I see behaviour that confronts the harms in full, openly and honestly.

Political Grooming Gangs are abusing Facebook and deliberately undermining our democracies, escalating social tensions and disrupting our communities with lies, manipulation, gaslighting, emotional hijacking, neuromarketing false narratives....

Apology is oft taken as meaning remorse, when in fact what we see with powerful institutions that it is a line of defence, a public relations exercise.

The etymology of the word 'apology' is revealing : "defense, justification," from L.L. apologia, from Gk. apologia "a speech in defense," from apologeisthai "to speak in one's defense," from apologos "an account, story," from apo- "from, off" (see apo-) + logos "speech".

The original English sense of "self-justification" yielded a meaning "frank expression of regret for wrong done," first recorded 1590's, but it was not the main sense until the 18th Century. The old sense tends to emerge in Latin form apologia (first attested 1784), especially since J.H. Newman's "Apologia pro Vita Sua" (1864).

Thus when The Church or The State apologises, it is most often adopting a position that defends it's current image, status and power. Truth and Reconciliation processes are likewise marred by competing institutional interests and the wish to avoid the most honest accounting of harms caused, the parties culpable seeking always to mitigate the costs of facing the truth, addressing the harms, accepting the punishment.

Make no mistake about this - powerful Institutions of all kinds understand the intent and the meaning of the words they use, for both State and Church and Corporation are the source of all legal language, and this language and it's use allows these and other institutions to continue to maintain their status and power. Apologies most often avoid the necessary full accounting of the consequences of their actions. Polluters pollute. get caught, are fined and continue business without ever fully confronting the externalised costs dynamics of their industries. The Vatican fights every case, yet withholds information on thousands of untried cases. Facebook was fined, and their stock rose.

Sorry, but not sorry: they paid the fine, it is a business expense.

We see this is so with the way both Church and State in Australia  have responded to the emergence of living witness evidence with regard to Residential School Systems in which poor and Aboriginal children have been incarcerated by force and brutally harmed in systemic fashion, over long periods of time.

We see it in terms of  Institutions defence of themselves against the interests of Survivors  and the genuine demands for Justice within every State on Earth.

It is a pattern of behaviour.

Saying 'I am sorry' or 'We are sorry' has no meaning unless there is material action to back it up, unless there is a clear indication that whatever transgression occurred will not occur again and that any perpetrators will be made to account for the harms they have caused.

And in cases where the harm caused is beyond remediation, then corrective legal punitive measures against Institutions,  and judicial incarceration  of individuals who have caused harm must follow, to protect from any future harm and to provide a meaningful deterrent.


In the case of The Vatican, and Facebook, there has been no internal driven action to correct the situation where known abusers operate within and through their structures. They resist rather than putting their hands up, and admitting responsibility.

To be fair, they are not the only institutions feigning apology for allowing abusers to operate within their systems. It is a standard behavioural pattern within in every powerful institution, every gang,  every dysfunctional family - to protect their status, image and ability to operate, at all costs.

Facebook, Masks, Brexit and Donald Trump

Facebook permits micro-targeting of content that absolutely has caused harm, is causing harm and will continue to cause harm - for example, the current issue of anti-mask wearing freedom conTheory content.  We know that activists are using Facebook and other social media to organise protests and live events.

That content is helping spread the SARSCOV2 virus within the United Kingdom and The United States of America. That is causing harm.

We know that military grade disinformation and disruption campaigns are being waged on Facebook, and that Facebook is earning billions from this activity.

"Emma Briant, a scholar of propaganda at Bard College who has spent years studying SCL, says the company’s mix of work demonstrates how military-funded psychological research can be exploited to wage domestic political warfare, establishing a dangerous template for political campaigning. During elections, tactics intended for battlefields could be used to foment division and extremism or discourage voters."

We know for certain that Brexit was in large part 'won' using these techniques against an unknowing population, a vulnerable population.
"Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings — now a special advisor to the UK prime minister — wrote in 2017 that the winning recipe for the leave campaign was data science. And, more specifically, spending 98% of its marketing budget on “nearly a billion targeted digital adverts”.
Targeted at Facebook users."
We know for certain that Trumps election in 2016 was in large part 'won' using these techniques against an unknowing population, a vulnerable population.

Facebook's position is similar to the Vatican knowing that pedophiles and adults who beat and bullied children were operating within their ranks, and yet it did all it could to preserve it's external image and income revenue stream.

2020 US Presidential Election

Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) was Nixon's baby. I remember reading Hunter S. Thompson's scathing writings on that odious little man and that disgusting campaign.

Nixon, Johnson and Trump are not too far apart in morality.

'Making the economy scream' so it hurts the people.

Now it is online micro-targeting and political grooming gangsterism.  News media are part of the corruption.

Trumps re-election campaign has a $1 billion dollar 'advertising' budget just for Facebook in the coming months.

And it is already well under way.

"Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.


I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.
What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise."

What the writer is describing is grooming


Studying populations to source vulnerable people who are then targeted with content that exploits cognitive biases, insecurities, pain, fear, distress and concerns in order to exploit them at the ballot box, by triggering and re-inforcing those biases. Truly evil behaviour and activity.

Zucked! and MindF*ck.

I have just finished reading two important books - Zucked! about Facebook and MindF*ck about Cambridge Analytica


Here's a few pertinent quotes from Mindf*ck!

“In psychological warfare, the weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them.”


and

“We were spying, pure and simple, with cover from Trinidadian leaders. It felt bizarre—unreal—to be observing what people were watching on a tiny, faraway island, somehow more like we were playing a video game than intruding on the private lives of actual people. Even today, thinking back on it, Trinidad seems more like a dream than something we actually did. But we did do it. The Trinidad project was the first time I got sucked into a situation that was grossly unethical, and, frankly, it triggered in me a state of denial”


and

“perspecticide – the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception – you first have to understand on a deep level what motivates”


So notice the terminology - psychological warfare, notice the anger and abuse that is being 'stimulated', notice the irrationality of the to and fro of online 'debate' - that is warfare!

When we have well funded, well organised entities observing people as they are manipulating content being broadcast to the people they are observing,  and when they are refining the manipulation of that content in real time to better exploit the reactions of the targeted people, all the time actively working to undermine the perceptual dynamic of an entire population, person by person, intimacy at scale, in order to exploit the people for political advantage, we have a huge problem.

Political grooming gangsterism, no less.


I had not read these two books when I wrote my first blog pieces on Political Grooming Gangsters.

Even back then I was exactly on the money in terms of the dynamics, the influence, the covert nature of the manipulation.

Now I know a little bit more, I have some extra detail, I have some witness testimony and all I can say is this - our social systems and our democracies are being undermined and harmed by the most abusive grooming type behaviours imaginable and the grooming is operating at scale. To be fair, it's not like there were not problems before this micro-targeting emerged. The dynamic of propaganda is old. It is the way that the digital online tech has created intimate access to people's psyche at scale that is new, and extra harmful.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg are allowing this to happen on their Facebook platform, and Amazon and Google likewise and others - and I cannot say it is just for the cash, because if any of them took action to prevent this abuse happening (and they could) they would make immeasurable gains in reputation, and that would translate into long term business stability, and therefore I have my questions about why they are allowing this to happen.

I cannot see into their minds nor would I want to.

That they are allowing this to happen is a best feeble, greedy and arrogant and at worst, it is truly evil.


Here's the thing, if you -,the user - know and understand what is being done you can counter it. If you do not know, then you can be influenced by this activity.

At the collective level, across a society there needs to be regulation, and intense, legal or law enforcement level active opposition to political grooming gangster activity. We need both. Now.

Wear a mask when you are out and about and in shared public spaces. Stop the spread, spread the Love.

Wear a mucking fask,
Not so much to ask,
Stop the spread,

Spread the Love,

Because 

when push

comes to shove

It's you I am caring for,

My brother
You I am caring for,
My sister.
Yes! its you
I care for -
care for me too.
Why don't you?
I masking for you
are a friend,
who ever you are..


Wear a mucking fask!


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.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received



The Popes Global PR Tour. Words and action.

Activists for any number of 'causes' are taking comfort in the words of Pope Francis.

Memes are proliferating across the interwebs.

This.



Survivors around the Earth are not taking comfort in Pope Francis's words, nor are they impressed by the actions of The Vatican. The same can be said of survivors advocates, lawers, physicians, psychotherapists and close friends.

Actions speak louder than words.

The action that Survivors, survivors advocates, lawers and transcenders and humane decency require is that the Vatican hands over all it's documentation on clerics who have sexually assaulted, bullied, abused harmed defenceless children: from the initial allegations, through to investigations and the response of the Catholic Hierarchy and it's officials acting under it's umbrella in their dealings withe Survivors.

That, and that alone is the missing element in the world wide process of Survivors seeking justice, resolution and probity with regard to their cases. And those that are taking their cases forward are a minority of the total caseload.

Some say this refusal to open up is partly a matter of the Vatican's finances.

Wealth hoarded, concentrated or sequestered is wealth taken away from the wider community.

All wealth is generated from within the community at large. Including the massive wealth of The Vatican and national church organisations.

It is not generated by individuals who are billionaires etc, no matter how the big the egos of celebrity 'entrepreneurs', politicians and fawning pundits waffle on about their 'wealth generation'.

There are people who capitalise on the cheapened labour and the taxes of the grass roots, and they take a bigger share than they need or deserve, and they do not 'create' it. The workers create it, and the shoppers create it, and that service users create it.

The fact is that great wealth has nothing to do with greed; it's a political utilitarian device that enables Political Power to exercise itself over people, in that so called 'economic decisions made by Governments are political, ideological rather than economics based on evidence, and such decision making exists in order to enhance, protect and project political onto others, the electorate and their children, who are seen as objects rather than human beings, with real feelings and experiences that matter.

Private Military Contractors do not come cheap.

The behaviour of The Vatican and The Irish Government towards both predatory clerics, and survivors, and the ECB in relation to Greece, and the DWP in relation to job seekers, disabled people and other vulnerable groups, amongst many others, makes this abundantly clear.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

George Monbiot, Pope Francis the 'reformer' and Junipero Serra

George Monbiot, in an article in the Guardian, explores the myth of Pope Francis, the Liberal, the Reformer.

I quote from his article. It's worth reading.

For Pope Francis the liberal, this promises to be a very bloody Sunday

Francis is the poster pope for progressives. But the canonisation of Junípero Serra epitomises the Catholic history problem


"Nowhere is the church's denial better exemplified than in its drive to canonise the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, whose 300th anniversary falls on Sunday. Serra's cult epitomises the Catholic problem with history – as well as the lies that underpin the founding myths of the United States.

You can find his statue on Capitol Hill, his face on postage stamps, and his name plastered across schools and streets and trails all over California. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II, after a nun was apparently cured of lupus, and now awaits a second miracle to become a saint. So what's the problem? Oh, just that he founded the system of labour camps that expedited California's cultural genocide.

Serra personified the glitter-eyed fanaticism that blinded Catholic missionaries to the horrors they inflicted on the native peoples of the Americas. Working first in Mexico, then in Baja California (which is now part of Mexico), and then Alta California (now the US state of California), he presided over a system of astonishing brutality. Through various bribes and ruses Native Americans were enticed to join the missions he founded. Once they had joined, they were forbidden to leave. If they tried to escape, they were rounded up by soldiers then whipped by the missionaries. Any disobedience was punished by the stocks or the lash.

They were, according to a written complaint, forced to work in the fields from sunrise until after dark, and fed just a fraction of what was required to sustain them. Weakened by overwork and hunger, packed together with little more space than slave ships provided, they died, mostly of European diseases, in their tens of thousands.

Serra's missions were an essential instrument of Spanish and then American colonisation. This is why so many Californian cities have saints' names: they were founded as missions. But in his treatment of the indigenous people, he went beyond even the grim demands of the crown. Felipe de Neve, a governor of the Californias, expressed his horror at Serra's methods, complaining that the fate of the missionised people was "worse than that of slaves". 

As Steven Hackel documents in his new biography, Serra sabotaged Neve's attempts to permit Native Americans a measure of self-governance, which threatened Serra's dominion over their lives.

The diverse, sophisticated and self-reliant people of California were reduced by the missions to desperate peonage. Between 1769, when Serra arrived in Alta California, and 1821 – when Spanish rule ended – its Native American population fell by one third, to 200,000.

Serra's claim to sainthood can be sustained only by erasing the native peoples of California a second time, and there is a noisy lobby with this purpose. Serra's hagiographies explain how he mortified his own flesh; they tell us nothing about how he mortified the flesh of other people."

How will Pope Francis deal with this matter? The prognosis is not good.

Why? Well here's a little Irish and Australian History and current affairs for my readers and other interested parties.

When the English King Henry II invaded Ireland, in 1169, he did so with the approval and 'Authority' of the then Pope, Pope Adrian IV.

The authorising document, Laudabilter, issued in 1155, by Pope Adrian IV, noted that the Irish Christians were heretical, and that Henry's invasion was being actioned and authorised by the Pope to save their souls.

The unspoken deal worked like this : "you can take the land as long as you promise attempt to convert the heretics, bringing them back into the 'fold' and thus saving their souls; those who refuse are condemned by their refusal, and therefore annihilating them is of no consequence, as their refusal condemns them to hell."

This became a 'standard' by which colonisation and extirpation of Aboriginal 'heathen' Peoples was supported by the Holy Roman Empire for centuries. It was and remains a commercial venture, more than a spiritual one.

The Magdalene Laundries.


The Industrial Schools in Ireland.

The Indian Residential Boarding Schools in Canada and North America.

Institutions that were extant into the 1990s and that were the subject of intense Church and Government activity in terms of 'damage limitation' exercises across the globe. The story of Kevin Annets 'trial' by which he was removed not just from his ministry as a United Church Pastor in Port Alberni, but his entire career destroyed, his family disrupted and his name slandered, over a simple yet illegal land deal that if exposed threatened commercial interests, and their friends in Government as well as the Church.


There are living Survivors of these Institutions, seeking some kind of resolution and justice.


In July this year, the 4 orders of Nuns involved in the Magdalene Laundries refused to hand over ANY compensation to the remaining Survivors of those hellish prisons. The Irish Government is still indemnifying the Vatican with regard to it's liabilities, and it is still falling short in meeting the needs of Survivors in terms of services, transparency and accountability.

The same applies to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada and North America, and the living Survivors of those horrid 'boarding schools'. All the so-called Truth and reconciliation processes have been reduced to management processes, rather than genuine healing processes. Spin more than substance.

And this affects the next generation, the next, in as much as intergenerational trauma is a scientific and experiential reality. What is unresolved gets passed on. Pain is transmitted. Children get hurt.

In all these stories, there were and are commercial interests at stake, as well as a culture's very existence and peoples lives.

What would Jesus have the Vatican and other Churches involved do? What would he have the Governments do?

One can see this in some more detail in the way the Aboriginal People of North Western Australia are being 'served' by the Australian Government today.

Tony Abbot, who replaced Julia Gillard, is a good friend of Archbishop Pell, who has been 'managing' the 'scandal' of Church cover-ups of serial pedophiles who had free rein within Church orphanages and Aboriginal Residential Schools.

Julia Gillard instigated the current Judicial Inquiry underway  in Australia into these matters, her removal has suited the Church more than it has suited the Australian electorate.

 Such is the Power of the Vatican.

The 'intervention' in the North Western Territories was pushed forward after Aboriginal Leaders refused to give over their land rights in exchange for more Government help with their problems. The 'intervention' was mooted on the false charge that there was widespread sexual abuse of children within the Aboriginal Community and the Government had to step in. A cruel irony. such is the Power of the Mining conglomerates.

The reality is that anyone who expects meaningful reform in the Catholic Church does not understand the true character of this Institution. They are naive, which is understandable. Whilst it is true that it's history, and the details are well documented, they are not widely known,much less understood.

The same applies to corporate driven State Governance, wherever it exists....

Furthermore, the only way to counter this is widespread public information campaigns based on confirmed data, documented evidence and crucially, the voices of those who have been oppressed..

For example, I have rarely heard Survivors voices been given a fair hearing in the mainstream media, and this includes the Guardian, who misquoted my own words, my meaning and my intent, which was and remains wholly honourable, in this report in 2010.

My case is the rule, rather than the exception I know there are many, many voices more worthy than mine, many whose needs are far greater. I think I got away lightly compared to the horrors others have survived. Or not. So many did not survive.

I gave a full and detailed account of myself, outside Lambeth Palace, as I was waiting to see the Pope with other protesters, and activists, to Helen Pidd. Her editor 'edited' the piece and reduced my statement to farce. I have been writing on this issue for more than 5 years. I have been living with the realities on my own experience for all of my life.

The BBC gave sycophantic fawning coverage to Pope Benedict's 'tour' of the UK and it's bias did untold damage to Survivors efforts to bring their voices to the public.

It is  the media were made to account for themselves, in as much as their 'reportage' of these matters has exacerbated the problem, rather than helped to resolve it.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe