Showing posts with label grooming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grooming. Show all posts

AI, Fake News, Grooming and Legislation to protect and enhance Free Speech

The AI snaps were made by Luca Allievi using Midjourney. (Luca Allievi/SWNS)
AI generated image of the much loved late Queen Elizabeth II, on the decks, mixing it up. Obviously fake.

To the Editor

This morning, an article in The Guardian newspaper discussed the potential of AI generated content that could pose a risk to political elections.

The solution is quite straightforward.

Yet nobody seems prepared to articulate it.

Targeting people who present with biases, lack of accurate knowledge, fears and worries with content designed to exacerbate the emotional reactions associated with those vulnerabilities, in order to drive behavioural change that can be exploited for political gain, is the problem here.

Many media are utilised to do this. It is not something new.

What is the best term to describe this activity?

It is grooming. It is psychological and emotional abuse.

AI increases the scale and precision of delivery systems of such content. 

We know that the problem is already part of current political activism. Brexit, Trump, anti-LGBTQA+ 'activism', misogyny, anti-abortion have all 'influenced' elections. Cambridge Analytica and SCL are two well known entities proven to have engaged in this kind of content delivery.

The solution is Legislation that defines this activity, and makes it a criminal offence to engage in this activity. Such legislation does not impede or limit Free Speech, it protects Free Speech, in as much as it sets a standard of evidence, honesty and integrity as an essential element of Free Speech. Such legislation is protective, rather than oppressive.
 
It does not impede Freedom of Religion. What it might do is create a firewall between Religious Belief and Secular Governance, which in my view, is an essential step, long overdue.

Human Rights Legislation and evidence is the basis for healthy Governance, and Human Rights Legislation protects the rights of Religious communities and individuals to practice their respective faiths.





Kindest Regards

Corneilius Crowley

London


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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Open Letter on Grooming and the need for legislation to criminalise such manipulative behaviour wherever it emerges.

Schoolgirl who faced terror charges is ‘wake-up call about grooming.

Of course, it is not just on Facebook  etc., where grooming occurs. It is a common problem right across our culture, from Religion to Politics, from Populist Rhetoric to Misogynist and Racist Dog Whistles, from Ponzi Schemes to Phishing Emails.


To the Editor

An article on the Guardian, 7th January, 2023, about a teenage girl, Rhiannon Rudd, who was arrested on terrorism charges, which were dropped when it was shown that she had been groomed, tells a terrible story.

Someone knowingly targeted a vulnerable person, having studied that person's biases, lack of knowledge, fears and hopes, provided content designed to exacerbate the emotional dynamics of those vulnerabilities, in order to drive behavioural change that could then be exploited. 

Tragically, Rhiannon Rudd committed suicide a year after this incident. 

Anyone, at any age, can be subjected to such targeting. We can see the adverse impacts of this activity all around us. It's not simply a problem with social media, it is a problem within our culture. 

This is quite clearly criminal behaviour, given the intent to manipulate others, in order to exploit them, wherever it happens, even if legislation does not exist to impose a criminal penalty.

We need  legislation that clearly identifies this activity, that imposes a robust custodial sentence upon anyone or any entity proven to have  engaged in such activity.

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

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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


"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

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.

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Dunces with Wolves

This article is about the vulnerability a knowledge gap represents, and what can happen when a knowledge gap is not recognised, and what can happen when a knowledge gap is exploited by a malign actor. 

I once thought that I was a Climate Sceptic.

Not because I understood the science - I clearly did not. I was not a climate sceptic.

I was a climate dunce.


I was ‘sceptical’ because I believed the ever present dynamic of war mongering, which is symptomatic of the odious cult of competing industrialised militarised powers  and Externalised Costs (a global institutionalised psychopathy), would make global cooperation on action needed to adapt for oncoming climate change practically impossible.

Honesty

Co-operation and honesty are essential to the efficient regulation of toxic institutional behaviour of any kind, on a global scale.

This cannot be done without legislative processes designed to confront harm causation and to support repair of environmental damage, and to prevent further land, air and water pollution. And nothing useful can be done without funding the social material action and support  needed to protect people from the avoidable harms ahead. 

Poverty must be abolished, to reduce chronic stress and to free up human potential that could be harnessed to the vocational task of repair and recovery, to build a better future for all our children, by taking action, substantive action, in the present.

War as a tool of foreign policy impedes all of that. No question that the adversarial dynamic and the waste of materials, brain power and time of war making impedes healthy action on a range of problems we face, as nations, and as a species.

I was a Climate Change sceptic.

I was a sceptic because I  thought the focus on Climate Change was a deliberate distraction from War Mongering.  It was obvious to me that the shift to  'the war against terror' (TWAT) was pushed out at the same time as American political concern about Climate Concern went 'mainstream'. For that reason I did not look at the Science of Climate Change much. I was obsessed with my anti-war stance. I wilfully maintained a knowledge gap that I ought not to have.

Bush and Gore

Gore gave way to Bush in 2000. Al Gore ceded to George W Bush without a whimper, to a  move by Bush that was clearly illicit. Why did Gore back down, after all the effort? 

Gore literally handed the control and the budget for the US Military Machine to Bush. Bush and his sponsors had 'The New American Century' as their global policy document and it was a war mongers charter using war as a tool of global political hegemony. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

Then Gore went Climate Change. 

He did not mention climate change or pollution during his election campaigning.

I do not recall Gore campaigning in the 2000 presidential election on Climate Change, do you? 

I thought "that’s too convenient."  

I thought the truth about American, British, Russian and Chinese Militarism - and the industrial Wealth Extraction cult that spawned such war mongering - was too inconvenient to be faced up to. That was my 'inconvenient truth' and that enabled me to side line the other 'inconvenient truth'.

Truth is always inconvenient to those whose lies protect their status.

Looking back, I can see the irony in my own position. I thought that there was a stitch up in America to get the war makers into power. I thought then it made perfect sense to orchestrate a clever distraction to take attention away from war makers plans. Hence my ill-informed scepticism. Ill informed because I really did not understand the science that describes Climate Change.

The truth of war is inconvenient.

The wars that were prosecuted after 9/11 were planned long before 9/11. 

The plans for War on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were all on the books already. War planners know that it takes years to prepare for war, and that once The War starts, the plans go out the window, because wars do not go according to plan - they go according to who can take the most pain, absorb the most damage and still stand afterwards. 

Wars are chaotic and tend to go according to unplanned, and those who can take the most punishment tend to be the one's still standing at the end of combat operations. 

Often all sides will claim 'Victory' in spite of the massive trauma innocent civilians are subjected to. 

Assad claims victory in Syria, as does the US and Russia. ISIS is still active. The civilians pay the price.

Nobody really 'wins' a war. People survive a war. Many do not. Furthermore, given the prevailing cult of competing powers, one has to understand that no war is an isolated event, they are all part of a larger cultural behavioural dynamic.

I am not a climate sceptic today.

I understand more of the science. 

Climate Change is a species level problem. As are war, poverty, racism, misogyny and wealth extraction that is based on externalised costs. They are all part of the same problem.

The issue of War remains a major block to global cooperative action on climate, and many other matters, including Covid. 

Remember when the UN called for a cessation of all war activity in early 2020, so that the world could turn together and deal with the pandemic as a collective?  

Who rejected that call? 

Covid is still telling us "work together for mutual aid, or you are lost." 

The Pandemic is not over, in spite of frequent declarations of that fantasy by right wing lunatics in power across USUK and EU.

I was not a climate sceptic: a sceptic understands the science and says 'nope, I see too many holes here so I remain sceptical'. A good sceptic is a well informed sceptic.

I was a Climate Dunce. 

I really did not know enough to be sceptical about the scientific claims of Climate Change, either way.

A dunce is not capable of rational scepticism. 

I have been a dunce on many, many issues. I am a dunce on a whole range of issues. I know nothing about the biology of venomous frogs. 

I knew nothing about SARS, let alone SARSCOV2 back in March 2020, even as I was dealing with a severe infection of SARSCOV2. Ihad not been paying any attention to the news frm China, or Northern Italy, or Spain. I was truly a COVID dunce. Which is why I decided back in March 2020 to look to the experts who know what they are talking about. 

Dunces are easy targets for grooming gangsters. 

Dunces part with their cash readily if carefully groomed. Knowledge gaps produce vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

The problem is that it’s not the dunces fault when the dunce is being exploited via a vulnerability by a dedicated grooming operation. 

Grooming is the activity of targeting a vulnerability and heightening it in order to drive behaviour that can be exploited.   The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie that looks at this behaviour.

Grooming to exploit is a double cruelty - rather than help the target heal the vulnerability, the vulnerability is heightened, and then the target is exploited.

The people who exploit others vulnerabilities are really evil. They are as the archetype of the Human Wolf, who preys on the vulnerable. Real wolves are nothing like this, of course. 

The Political groomers, the Wolves of Wall Street, are a really serious problem

Political Grooming Gangsters

Study the tactics of Cambridge Analytica, and many, many others.

1. Target - seek out and find - angry, ill-informed, passionate and vocal people, through their online activity. Micro-targeting is enabled by on line activity, where what is called 'behavioural surplus data' can be gathered, analysed and then processed to produce detailed psychometric profiles, which allows those who can see that information to target people quite precisely,on an individual basis, and present curated content to trigger biases, insecurities, hatreds and knowledge gaps.

This is gold dust for advertisers. Predictability is a key goal of advertisers. If I spend X can I guarantee a return of Y? 

Predictability is also the currency, the raw material upon which exploitation is built.

2. Heighten and exacerbate the anger or knowledge gaps of those being targeted with content directed to them. Micro targeting allows the grooming operators to measure the targets reactions, fine tune the content, and over  time present content to drive or nudge the targets behaviour in ways which can be predicted and exploited.

3. Set up online groups so they can be angry together, chat online about their anger, and form emotional bonds.Ensure they are exposed to a flow of content designed to heighten their biases and affirm their self righteousness. Online contacts can become friends.

4. Set up small real-world meet ups via focus groups, discussion groups, clubs. Form up groups of around 30 people, which can be easily led and managed. Nurture these gatherings so that to the participants, who rarely gather with that many people of similar outlook, the gathering feels like it’s part of a bigger group, part of a larger network, and then part of a movement. This engenders ‘courage’ to take action.

5. Suggest actions, set up local 'activist' groups to carry out the action, start crowd funding to drive bonding, to fund materials and signage, produce professional content supporting the action, organise transport etc..

6. Start with small local actions. Photo and video the events, and ensure these are well set, photogenic. Make small crowds seem bigger. Promote the material by advertising spend. Get targets to write to local officials, to comment on news threads, to share the content. Tell them they are making real change possible. Make it seem bigger than it is. Push for more crowd funding. When people give money they make a deeper emotional commitment. They feel like they are taking action, doing something.

7. Push out more content to deepen anger and self righteousness, especially if the small events draw criticism. Use the criticism to harden the targets positions, deepen their emotional attachment to the cause, heighten their sense of righteousness.

8. Repeat until targets are febrile.  Fever pitch. The groomers can see the degree to which targets are enervated, how long they stay up at night, how angry their online exchanges get.

9. Then ask them to raid government or media buildings in larger numbers, appoint some organisers, pay them from the crowd funding, that way the money trail does not lead back to the groomers.

10. Keep the crowd funding going. Someone has to pay the organisers, the copy editors, the graphics people, the video makers : might as well be the victims of the scam.

That’s been done in 68 countries during 100 elections between 2008 and 2016. 

By a British firm, Strategic Communications Laboratories, who honed their skills doing ‘Hearts and Minds’ campaigns post 9/11.

Cambridge Analytica was one of their illegitimate children. SCL meets Robert Mercer, and goes to work for various Free Market personality politicians.

Then Trump, Brexit and now Covid misinformation. Many State are engaged in this activity, we are told.  I think the bulk of it is being run by Free Market Fundamentalist Oligarchs and their think tanks and minions and operatives.

So what to do?

Grooming is psychologically abusive in and of itself, and the exploitation of people amounts to a second layer of criminality.

We need legislation defining grooming as a criminal offence, an act of profound psychological abuse. We need to impose a criminal penalty for such behaviour.

We need to make that penalty very serious indeed - because grooming is cruel and exploitative.  Defining grooming as a criminal offence would make it far less likely that social media platforms and News and Press media would carry such materials. Making them liable for any harms caused by such content would be a useful inducement to avoid such activity, without impeding Free Speech.

Grooming should not be protected by claiming it is Free Speech.

We also need to explain what grooming is to our people, starting now online, in news media and in all our schools.

The best way to prevent people from being groomed is to develop our awareness, our critical thinking skills, our understanding the nature of logical fallacy arguments.

This is part of building socially coherent grass roots political solidarity movements based on evidence, seeking to elect legislators who will bring in legislation and over sight mechanisms to regulate Toxic Industrial practices, to repair harms caused, to prevent new harms. and who will remove the excessive and corrupt influence of Wealth Extraction class from our legislatures and other governing bodies, from our schools and universities, from our media.

Let them influence legislation and other areas, if they wish, but on an equal footing to the citizens and scientific community. Levelling up, as they say.

A short article look at how the Swedish and Norwegian working and middle class curtailed the power of the Oligarchy during the 1930.

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-the-power-of-the-1-percent/

A study of one strike action by Swedish workers, demonstrating the difficulties they faced at the time. The work of building coherent grass roots political movements is difficult enough, logistically and made much, much more difficult by the violent repression of Oligarchy dominated Governments. 

https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/swedish-workers-general-strike-economic-justice-power-shift-dalen-1931

Recent moves by the Westminster Government seem to be preparing for such struggles, by making them illegal, by making electoral participation more difficult, by gerrymandering constituency borders and other tactical plays...




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

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Freedom from democratic regulation of externalising costs - the driver of anti-masking ideology.

Observing what has been happening, I have made an assessment that the use of the language of 'restrictions,' if it is deliberate, is most probably designed to trigger the 'my personal freedom from tyranny' emotional hook. Nobody likes to feel restricted. It's a way to nudge an opinion set that dismisses evidence.

In this blog piece I want to explore how that trigger works, why I think it is being exploited for political reasons, what the effects are of such intentional triggering and why I think it is lethal to all our futures. I want to show how it relates to a constellation of problems as a key, as a critically important distraction, deflection, obscurant strategic weapon.

The ability and willingness of certain agencies to exploit this trigger more or less guarantees that this pandemic will run on and on and on causing incrementally more harm, with no end in sight.

I say incrementally causing more harm because the assumptions about the nature of the virus and it's impacts are incorrectly assessed and thus measures to limit those harms - measures to uphold the populations right to health - are conflated with undermining personal liberty, even as this government outlines very real legislation that undermines civil liberties and diminishes Government accountability.

"who will we not save?" as they sought to 'protect the Hoard'..

The effect of saying "We are imposing restrictions" is quite different the effect of "We are implementing preventative public health measures to protect the populations Right to Health."

If the strategy is to allow spread to achieve herd immunity, then it would be useful for the Government to create a scapegoat and exploit that vector to insulate the Government from the costs such a strategy will incur. The Government must not pay the price, and so others will be made to carry the cost. This is an externalised cost exercise.

Non-Essential Travel is Tinder for the Virus.

In the most simplistic terms, if SARSCOV2 cannot meet a new host, it will die out.
Suppression of  transmission of the virus in the community is the most effective strategy in dealing with an epidemic of an infectious pathogen.

Stopping the spread is spreading the love.

However, in global terms this strategy is only as strong as the weakest or least effective implementation of it. Any country that allows spread of the virus will generate variants, and successful variants will select for more efficient replication, transmission. Where we have huge unknowns is the virulence of new variants - we cannot predict future virulence and this means allowing spread is taking a terrible gamble. England has been a significant weak link in terms of global transmission suppression, as has the US and EU.

This takes on another dimension when it is a question of travel between countries or within countries, in the midst of a pandemic of  new highly infectious air borne virus, when we cannot predict long term outcomes, even as we observe short and medium term harms. International Travel, because it always involves enclosed spaces and a mix of people who are exposed to each other for significant periods, operates as a dating app for this virus. This kind of travel is inherently risky for spread of SARSCOV2.

Right to Health.

When powerful lobbies with immense economic interests advocate for their interests at the expense of the whole population, at the expense of the populations Right to Health, we see a conflict of interest, and an externalising of costs occurs. The people pay the price. 

What is one years economic activity in the great scheme of things, compared to many, many years of life lost to death and long term disease?  This kind of question arises in other areas. What is the value of high processed foods industrial economic activity and profit taking that leads directly to dietary disease, compared to the costs of dietary disease?

If we had regulation that limited high processed foods, that removed them from our food shelves, would that be a 'restriction' or a 'public health measure'? New Zealand is going to ban sale of tobacco. 

Is that a restriction? Is it a rational public health measure? Do the 'rights' of Tobacco Company shareholders trump the rights of people vulnerable to addiction who are being exploited?

Here we see the choice of the word 'restrictions' clearly has a political and economic meaning.

Economic liability, externalised costs.

In the case of a loss of business imposed by a Government 'restriction' - an order to cease flights - the Government is liable to some degree for compensation to those adversely affected. 

The affected Business lobby will have a reasonable claim that since the Government is restricting it's ability to function it deserves adequate support for the duration of that limitation.  That was not the case with the travel lobby - they lobbied for continuation of their business, they lobbied for spreading the virus as one outcome of that stance. It was not their intention, yet that is precisely what happened.

I know of someone who flew to Thailand this week, for a holiday. Upon arrival he was tested, and found to be infected, and infectious. It is likely that he picked up the virus just before he flew out, in public transit or at the airport, and was incubating during the flight, totally unaware of his condition.

That person had to quarantine for 12 days and do regular tests. He was without symptoms. He was bored. He tried to bend the rules. He was more concerned with his personal freedom, the irritation he felt because he had to quarantine than he was with protecting the Thai population. His reaction is quite typical among wealthy westerners who think international travel is their right. The sovereign individual. Me, me, me.

It's not his fault, it is the culture that has acculturated him so that he behaves as he did. He could easily have taken a holiday anywhere in the UK. He felt an entitlement to undertake international travel, travel that is spreading the virus, in the middle of a global pandemic. He is one of millions.

Throughout this pandemic there has been no travel lobby seeking to protect the population's Right to Health. The travel lobby is happy to externalise the costs of spreading the virus - the travel lobby was unwilling to share those costs.

Tourist travel spreads the virus

Since February 2020, I have had a sense that something was off about the insistence  upon maintaining tourist and holiday travel - non-essential travel -  because I could not help but notice  how much of a vector of spread of the virus such non-essential travel was, precisely because effective quarantine arrangements were resisted and were not put in place. 

The first two waves of SARSCOV2 spread within the UK are entirely down to the Government's deliberate choice to reject quarantine, to reject precise tracking of where the virus was, to reject mass testing to chase down the virus, to reject support for isolation and to allow open, unchecked borders.

It was that choice more than any other that seeded SARSCOV2 into the UK. The media were full of the narrative 'the China Virus' when by February 2020 it was the Spanish, Italian and Austrian Ski Holiday Virus, even as the East Asian countries were proving that suppression of community transmission is the most effective way to avoid the avoidable harms which the USUK Governments did not avoid - by choice.

Where there were proven suppression of community transmission strategies put in place, community transmission was much more reduced. That's the basic scientific truth here.

Measures designed to reduce harm in an epidemic of infectious disease are more correctly described as preventative public health measures. They are not necessarily restrictions. When viewed in this context they are not sensed as restrictions - even as they do require temporary limitations on behaviour - it is understood that the measures are protective and that they are temporary, and that once the threat has subsided, the measures can be withdrawn, and the limitations thus evaporate as they are no longer necessary.

That protection that could have been organised, and funded if Governments and travel lobbies had put populations right to health at the top of their priorities. The protection evaporated. 

Freedom to trade trumped the Right to Health. 


How selfish, and to be honest, how cruelly reckless.

The Oligarchy are waging a war against democratic legislative regulation of Wealth Extraction grounded in toxic industrial practices which incur costs when they are not cleaned up or prevented. Those costs are kept at a distance. Those costs are externalised from the economic activity of the operations from raw material sourcing through processing, manufacture, distribution, sale, consumption and end of life of product.

The Free Market Fundamentalists and Industry leaders choose to see such regulation as might be required to prevent those costs from being incurred in the first instance, let alone dealt with when they are incurred, as a form of tyranny. "We will not let you restrict our Wealth Extraction by reducing our profitability by demanding we pay all those costs." 

They understand that the demand by a growing and significant cohort of reliable scientists, concerned citizenry, NGOs and some government officials for corrective and adaptive action on climate change, on environmental degradation, pollution of air, land and sea, on species loss and other related matters, including mass poverty, low wages and corrupt influence of legislators represents a threat to their 'liberty' to carry on extracting wealth even as it causes harm and to externalise the costs of that harm. 

Democratic legislative  regulation is deemed to be an enemy of their ability to extract wealth and their capability to and willingness influence legislatures to protect that wealth extraction. Democratic regulation is a threat to their political power, power which stems from their Wealth Extraction.

However they cannot stand in the town hall and make that plain. They must find other ways to protect their interests and this puts them into conflict with our collective interests.

Political Grooming Gangsters.

By deploying emotional hooks that conflate emotive notions of individual freedom within existing democratic systems with a vaguely defined Libertarianism, the Oligarchy have been able to enroll the 'Mask is a Muzzle Freedomeers' in a process that is undermining democratic regulation to protect the populations right to health, and this is inextricably linked to the protection of their Wealth Extraction Systems and their toxic industrial practice of Externalised Costs. 

Trump, Brexit and anti-masking, anti-vax, anti border quarantine, open up the economy, let the vulnerable take it on the chin - these are all views that are underpinned with funding and logistical support from the Oligarchy of the Wealth Extracting Industrial giants. They are not emergent concepts, that have popped up from the grass roots of society, as an organic awareness and movement. These ideas have been developed and promoted by the Oligarchy, and seeded into vulnerable parts of the population through a process of political and ideological grooming.

Percentages or persons?

There is a pattern where people opposed to public health measures cite that only a small percentage of people die from Covid - they ignore the reality that a small percentage of a massive population is a lot of people dying avoidable deaths.  The Covid Freedomeers dismissal of the lives of so many vulnerable people is a good example of externalising costs

The vulnerable must pay the price incurred in the strategy of allowing spread of the virus beyond control in order to keep the economy open. The cost is externalised. 

The people who will gain from keeping the economy open in ways that place the vulnerable at greater risk that they ever needed to be placed at, will not pay the price. 

The vulnerable pay the price.

The Covid Freedomeers do not draw attention to how many of any given population have pre-existing conditions, which elevates their risk of death and disease and harm, exponentially. That is why they cite percentages. To evade the human realities.

The vulnerable will pay the price of the Freedomeers ill-advised reckless endangerment.

Then there's the matter of post infection chronic disease, which is rarely discussed in honest detail - as I write close to 2% of the total population of adults across the UK are suffering with varying degrees of Long Covid. 1.3 million people, who did not have this chronic disease burden prior to January 2020. 1.3 million people whose condition could have been avoided.

Not avoiding avoidable harms - externalising costs.

The Freedomeers claim that protecting the vulnerable undermines their Freedom, even though the evidence is that where States and populations have adopted best practice public health measures, and have pursued strategies to suppress transmission of the virus within the territories of the State whilst protecting borders with effective quarantine and screening, both economy and civil liberties fare much, much better - not to mention the right to health of the population is upheld and preserved.

Here's some of the evidence for my observation.

a) www.99-percent.org/what-is-the-market-fundamentalist-agenda/ - a detailed blog examining the ideological stance of the Free Market Fundamentalists, drawing on their own published writings and legislative action.

b) https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/02/cambridge-analytica-psychologist-advising-global-covid-19-disinformation-network-linked-to-nigel-farage-and-conservative-party/ - the same people who orchestrated the vast manipulative targeting operations that 'won' Brexit and Trump's Election are also heavily involved in COVID misinformation and disinformation, and keep the economy open lobby groups with privileged access to senior ministers in the Government.

c) https://bylinetimes.com/2021/10/01/inside-the-radicalised-anti-vaxxer-network-influencing-government-vaccine-advisory-panel/ an exploration of one of these groups and their direct links to Government, allowing them to influence Government policy without adequate oversight, and with a decidedly malign intent.

d)  https://graphika.com/reports/ants-in-a-web/ - just one example of many, where wealthy billionaires and states operate psychological manipulation campaigns that undermine healthy democracy, and attempt to drive behaviour that can be exploited.

"Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who fled China to evade trial for Corruption, is at the center of a vast network of interrelated media entities which have disseminated online disinformation and promoted real-world harassment campaigns. The network acts as a prolific producer and amplifier of mis- and disinformation, including claims of voter fraud in the U.S., false information about Covid-19, and QAnon narratives."

e) https://blog.f-secure.com/the-psychology-of-election-hacking/ - a concise blog that looks at psychological targeting operations.

"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."

f) https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/15/gb-news-funder-legatum-linked-to-koch-climate-denial-network-us-race-baiting/ - US Free Market Fundamentalists linked to UK News Press Media operations spreading Covid misinfo and climate denialism and other fallacies, designed to divide electorates and thus weaken or impede democratic solidarity to evolve regulation of toxic industries.

g) https://bylinetimes.com/2020/12/02/ministry-of-defence-funds-man-behind-great-barrington-declaration/ - Weaponised mass communications in a Covid setting. Government, Military and extreme right wing free marketeers working together.

h) https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/06/grooming-how-it-operates-why-it-works.html my own blog examining how grooming works, why it works, using Brexut as  a case study (not exhaustive) and suggesting ways to prevent profoundly psychologically abusive such campaigns

Cognitive Disssonance Weaponised.

There are a number of internalised conflicts inherent in the Anti-mask Freedom lobby, not least that they are being exploited by the very people they most often claim are engaged in a conspiracy of tyranny - the Oligarchy.

By triggering emotional hooks related to vague notions of personal freedom, they blind the Covid Freedomeers to the Freedom the Oligarchy desires - freedom from rational democratic regulation of Wealth Extraction and Toxic Industrial practices - and enrol the Covid Freedomeers in demolishing rational democratic governance.

Now, to be honest, as much as I find the position of the Covid Freedomeer an irritant, I was myself fully hooked into Conspiracy Theory, New Age Woo and other belief systems that ignored evidence, and that exploited my vulnerability.

I do have deep reservations about the nature of State power as it operates within the current  historical context, understanding as I do, as many of us do, that the origins of The State System are steeped in blood letting, that the evolution of the Rulers localised institutionalised 'right' to  exercise violence, to 'defend' their realms from external and internal enemies and to engage in war fare runs counter to egalitarian principles and usually causes great harm to workers, and rarely do the Ruling Class bear such harms.

Of course, I and many, many people see the potential for healthy democratic development of a truly equitable social power system as it has played out in the past, and  is playing out in the present. 

We are all aware of the potential trajectories of a more democratic system of Governance focused on Justice, Equity and Humanity,  into the future (Power Inquiry 2006, UBI, Blockchain Policy Fora, People's Assemblies, Egalitarian Democracy).

We live within an historical context that is the struggle to end oppression.

Trade unions were an expression of that struggle, as were The Suffragettes, Martin Luther King, the struggle against Apartheid and the struggle of workers to attain decent working conditions, education for their children, health care systems for their communities and much else besides.

In the 21st Century, the Unions of the grass roots will need to expand well beyond the work place and working conditions...

Schools, Hospitals, Care Homes, even our own homes are the new political battle fields, fora for dissent and laying the ground work for collective change, countering oppressive corruption, building healthier democratic systems that serve all our futures, that nurture our world instead of exploiting and damaging our world.

The Grooming Operations are a very important element of the way oppressor class maintains it's hegemonic stance, a very potent weapon and we must understand why so many are vulnerable to that kind of persuasion, because we need to help them and us to break free of that persuasion, in order to build social grass roots solidarity that we need to confront the problems of Power.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-industrial-system-is-inherently.html

"The Industrial System is inherently adversarial: it treats those who are harmed by the Industrial System, those who bring attention to the harm, in order to stop the harm, as adversaries. 

Insulate Britain

The custodial sentences imposed on Insulate Britain activists for contempt of court are clearly a contempt of our collective welfare. In the same way that Shell's move from Holland to England is. In both cases, those who drew attention to harm and suggested ways to prevent the harm are being treated as adversaries.

Another way to put it is like this: political power struggles undermine healthy governance - adversarial dynamics inhibit co-operative dynamics. Any relationship that has a power struggle within it is likely going to be toxic.

Industrial political Power is inherently adversarial in that it is profitable only because its foundation for wealth extraction is created by externalising costs.

Those who bear the pain of the costs and bring attention to that pain, and those costs, are considered as adversaries.

When those who are harmed find a voice and become advocates to confront the harm causation, with an eye to stopping the harms, the industrial cult treats them as enemies to be crushed. 

This is a reactionary stance - the cult wishes to preserve the extraction of wealth above all else, and will attack anyone who questions the morality or wisdom of extracting wealth at such a cost. 

It will take every measure available co-opt anyone who proposes solutions in order to control any proposed change.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Open Letter on Facebook : Define grooming, criminalise it, impede predatory media content dissemination.

open letter : long version




To the Editor

Frances Haugen's testimony and evidence concerning Facebook and Instagram speaks volumes.

Media communications that target people’s cognitive biases, their insecurities, prejudices and worries, their misunderstandings, cultural conditioning and their fears, studying those conditions, aiming attenuated content that exacerbates those conditions at the targets,

And doing this with intent, in order to drive behavioural change - more on-line time extracted from users,  to encouraging addictive behaviour, whilst allowing malign actors access to vulnerable people, inciting hatred, nudging target groups into voting or not voting based on emotional and irrational drivers, increasing sales: all of this is economically or politically exploitative. 
 
This activity is psychological abuse. This activity is grooming. 

If we had legislation identifying it, defining it and criminalising it, as psychologically abusive intentional action, then the media providers would be unable to allow such behaviour to be disseminated on their platforms as a revenue stream.  Their AI algorithms would have to be written accordingly. 

This would not be an inhibition of free speech. This would be protecting vulnerable people from predatory actors.  

The asymmetry of power  between the State, the Corporation and the individual human being is immense. Legislation is required to prevent bad actors exploiting that power disparity. This is a question of Health and Safety.

Free Speech is, on the citizens side, the responsibility to speak truthfully, publicly and it is also an admonishment to State and other institutional actors to never use their power to harass honest critics, witnesses, whistle-blowers and truth tellers - the State and other powerful institutions must listen to the honest citizen and hear the honest truth.

Frances Haugen is demonstrating the best practice of Free Speech. The Bi-Partisan response is demonstrating the best practice of the State as an ear for the truth. 

Make grooming a criminal offence.

Yours Sincerely

Corneilius Crowley,
London



open letter short version
To the Editor

Frances Haugen's testimony and evidence concerning Facebook and Instagram speaks volumes.
Media content that targets people’s cognitive biases, in order to drive behavioural change such as encouraging addictive behaviour, inciting hatred, nudging target groups into voting or not voting based on emotional or irrational drivers, increasing sales: all of this is economically or politically exploitative.
 
This activity is psychological abuse. This activity is grooming. 

We need legislation that makes grooming a criminal offence.

This would not be an inhibition of free speech. This would be protecting vulnerable people from predatory actors.

Frances Haugen is demonstrating the best practice of Free Speech. The Bi-Partisan response of Congress is demonstrating the best practice of the State as an ear for the truth. 

Make grooming a criminal offence.

Yours sincerely,

Corneilius Crowley
London

To be fair and honest, Grooming was already a standard behavioural characteristic of our current system. Grooming is a core element in every hierarchy of wealth, power and violence culture. The online media environment has made it possible to direct grooming content to individuals on their own, exploiting their vulnerabilities, exacerbating fears to drive behavioural modification, which can be exploited politically or economically, whereas prior to the online media environment, propaganda was aimed at larger aggregate groups, and was to some degree more obvious and more cautious.


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.

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Oligarchy anti-democratic Grooming Memes - an example, debunked. A dynamic explored.

Right Wing oligarch friendly meme take down analysis.

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.” Aneurin Bevan

There's a meme circulating suggesting removing or reducing politician's salaries, because the politicians are enriching themselves using our taxes. It is blatantly incorrect and it is a grooming device. Obviously people who are elected to represent the people in our legislatures are engaged in full time work, and so they need to be paid a decent salary. And they are engaged in a lot of work that cannot be done by a lone individual, and therefore they need to run an office, with researchers, advisors and other staff to assist them in their work. They also have the Civil Service to support them. All of these are necessities.

The meme is targeting genuine concern that a significant cohort of leading politicians are corrupt, but it switches the bait to a different hook in order to avoid the actual problem - the corruption is the influence of Wealth as a political hegemon that buys some politicians it is not the wage and expense system which supports their role.
The meme was advertised, sponsored, promoted and targeted at 'progressives' and others who claim to be politically anti-establishment. The targets are reposting it without subjecting it to a critical analysis, without understanding the meme is designed to help the oligarchy achieve their political goal of destabilising democratic regulation of their extractive industrial model..

So I am going to give it a go.

1. The issue is not the politicians wages, the issue is the influence of  Wealth (Wealth with a capital 'W' indicates Wealth as a political movement, a political organisation) on politicians and media, and the revolving door between Wealth, their media and think tanks and Government Office. 

For example in England right now we have a hedge fund banker who rose through the ranks of investment banking designing and then selling dodgy CDOs that caused the '08 crash in charge of the NHS! He was doing part-time work for JP Morgan all year, while being paid as an MP, rumoured to be earning more than 1K sterling per hour until the moment he accepted the role as Health Secretary! His salary is small change. His situation is not uncommon. He who pays the piper calls the tune, as the saying goes.

2. The  Oligarchy want you and I, and anyone who is concerned with political corruption to undermine democratic regulation so that they don't pay fair share taxes. The  Oligarchy want you and I to undermine the possibility of democratic regulation so that we don't fund NHS properly, so that it starts to crumble under the pressure and they will privatise it to save it, and then you and I must rely on privatised insurance to pay for our healthcare costs, generating a cash revenue stream for their coffers. 

The  Oligarchy want you and I to undermine democratic regulation so that the poor remain poor - in order that the oligarchy can make more profit from maintaining low wage workers (which is where they make most profit...) and more importantly The  Oligarchy want you to undermine democratic regulation so that they they don't have to help pay for climate and environmental damages or re-rig their industries to prevent harms, to pay their 'externalised costs'.

3.  To that end they carefully conflate our sense of distrust  of obviously corrupt governments which they influence, ironically enough, with their desire to dismantle democratic legal regulation, co-opting you to their agenda:  they do all of this rather than encourage you to occupy the legislature and exercise your democratic power as a shared responsibility to curtail the abuse of power by oligarchs, which is what you really ought to be doing, for your own and your children's sakes.

4. So to get the oligarch money out of politics, we must do that by electing decent men and women, honest people who are also experienced in the areas we need proficiency and who reject influence and money from lobbyist, into our legislatures and resource them so they can carry out their roles. 

5. We must also learn to spot grooming tactics in News Media and online, to make elections more honest, and we must become involved in understanding the problems and designing solutions. 

The Power Inquiry of 2006 looked at the matter of honesty in elections and direct involvement of citizens in designing policy, in some detail. This short article is a good brief introduction to the work of the Power Inquiry.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/power_inquiry_3310jsp/

The activity of Political Grooming is a serious problem

Many people are being groomed by well organised, well funded grooming operations.

Grooming operates by studying the persons vulnerabilities and then targeting those with emotive concern in order to exacerbate them, which triggers an emotive amygdala reaction, which is often beyond conscious intellectual control and then by associating those heightened concerns with the concerns of the groomer the groomer can direct the behaviour of the target to meet the needs or exploitation target of the groomer. 

It is a very dirty, nasty process.

Utterly abusive.

And they get away with it because very, very few people understand these tactics, and rather than seek to protect the groomed we get irritated with them, and the groomers exploit our irritation to drive even deeper wedge between us all.

Two ways to counter this:

1. Better understanding across the progressive alliances of how grooming operates and functions. Awareness is the best defence, being able to see it happening as it happens...


2. Legislation that identifies grooming as a behaviour set, that names it as psychological abuse and then criminalises it by making it a criminal offence.

https://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/right-to-free-speech-also-comes-with-responsibility-40020617.html

Gaslighting and Grooming, Blaming the Victim, Bullying

#Gaslighting is essential to the bully culture  because the bullies have to convince the majority of the population being bullied that they are not being bullied. That is because the bullies are usually a minority who would be unable to face down the majority if the majority united in resistance.

#GaslightingGrooming operates by studying the person's vulnerabilities, targeting those with emotive concern in order to exacerbate them, triggering emotive amygdala reaction, associating targets concerns with the concerns of the groomer by which means the groomer can direct the behaviour of the target to meet the needs or exploitation intention of the groomer. 

Target concerned about lack of housing, because it impacts her or his living situation.

Groomer links lack of housing to immigration - knowing full well the situation has nothing to do with immigration, it has to do with the economic set-up and legislation that reduces access to affordable housing.

Target becomes concerned about immigration. More stories are presented that dehumanise immigrants.

Groomer raises rent, lowers wages and this increases the pressure the target feels.

Groomer shares content blaming immigrants for higher rent, lower wages.

Target angry at immigration more than high rent, lower wages.

In time target hates immigrants. willing to cause harm to immigrants.

Multiply this 10 million times, significant numbers will be more easily manipulated to alter their voting behaviour, and some will be more susceptible to behaviour mod than others and go further.

Pick any concern, study enough people, locate the vulnerable, slowly work on them - ensure funding flows and think tanks and others maintain the 'work flow' of grooming content. Push until significant numbers of people change their behaviour in ways that can be exploited.

This activity is psychological  abuse.

It is locating biases and vulnerabilities, the rather than helping to resolve them, it exacerbates them, it exploits them in order to generate behaviour that is harmful.

Grooming is abuse. It is not a fair game. The groomer knows what he or she or they are doing. The groomed, always unaware of what is being done, is vulnerable.

For one person to to this to another is already quite grim.

For any organisation to do this to an entire population is a crime against humanity.

To do this as a profession, as a career is profoundly amoral and anti-social. To pay people to do this is an intentional action and it is a crime against humanity.

Does this apply to every Hierarchy?

Every Hierarchy of Power, Resources (Wealth) and Violence, yes.

There are examples of non-power hierarchies that are based on skill, age, experience, wisdom and they tend to be within egalitarian cultures.

Grooming is unknown in egalitarian cultures.

The Neoliberal Free Market Fundamentalists are waging a long war. 

In the same way as the endless war against terror, their war is open ended, with only a vague and misleading indicator in public as to the final goal. The Neoliberal Free Market Fundamentalists  will not cease in their efforts to undermine the very concept of a social contract because that is their enemy.

 They see the social contract as binding the democratic state to protecting the population from the worst ravages of the Oligarchy that is built on externalised costs - no one must be allowed to impose any democratic regulation that mandates that those costs be paid by the extractors of wealth.

Think of concentrated Wealth as a political party, a political hegemon with a budget to corrupt every level of democracy.

Their war is against the very idea that governments ought to exercise power to nurture social care on behalf of ordinary people who, having no real social material power, are individually, and as individualised, atomised citizens, weak and vulnerable and for that reason they need that help and protection, which is in part their right because they pay taxation to Government.

For more detail, read this interesting blog on the agenda,  the ideology and the reasons why cruelty is core to the activities of the Neoliberal Free Market Fundamentalists - the adverse effects are 'externalised costs'.


"In Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windemere’s Fan, when Lord Darlington defined a cynic as ‘a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing,’ Cecil Graham replied, ‘And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.’

Graham is not alone in thinking that any value other than the market price is absurd. Many proponents of free markets think this way. 

This line of thought has an engaging clarity and simplicity: if a willing buyer and a willing seller agree on a price, what right has anyone else to say that this is not the fair value? 

(of course, in the real world many transactions are not between willing buyers and sellers freely assessing the value of the transaction.  Most smokers buy cigarettes, not because they have assessed the value and found it worth the price, but because they are addicted. Workers being paid below the living wage accept it, not because they agree it is fair, but because they have no other choice)."

--- worth a read, I think.

Because they are ideologues, the Free Market Fundamentalists are content to use psychologically abusive tactics most decent people would shrink back in horror from.  Grooming to influence, induct, enrol or hook people into a change in behaviour that can be exploited.

The ends justifies the means for ideologues. 

Their idea, their projection, their version of 'reality' is supreme. In their minds the Free Market is so good that it shoves aside evidence of harm and externalised costs, it rolls over adverse outcomes for people , it ignores collateral damage, it sees avoiding avoidable harms as a hassle or a restriction, a form of tyranny and their attitude clearly lacks empathic concern for people - people are economic units to be deployed that feed the machine that amasses wealth in order to form and maintain their political hegemonic structure.   

The Free Market Ruling Class considers themselves to be 'The Beautiful People'. They truly believe this - the culture of people whose wealth and status encourages them to assume that they are superior to all ordinary folk, they are taught to feel they are better qualified to rule and govern, they think they are wealthy because they are superior rather than lucky. Even those who merely inherit vast wealth think this.

It goes that those who are think themselves superior do not mind so much the wounds inflicted upon the inferior.

Notice how the Telegraph, the newspaper of the Free Marketeers, is waxing lyrical over a teenage woman, Emma Raducanu, who recently won a major tennis tournament, salivating over her 'vast' economic potential - she is a candidate for entry into the pantheon of beautiful people, a clothes horse for the neoliberal free market wealth accumulating mindset hiding behind Nationalism.

They wish to acclaim her as a role model, and will seek to co-opt her for the aggrandisement of their ideology. Her current sporting success is the result of her efforts, her parents support and her luck and is not a marker of Britishness, or of the virtue of vast wealth. They will seek to make of her a marker of both.  Even as they publish articles denigrating desperate people in leaky boats cross the English channel. Even as Priti Pat-Hell, another multicultural icon, seeks to find ways and means to push those vulnerable boat people back out to sea, as a public relations distraction from the many harms of Brexit.

Because these tactics are in essence psychological warfare tools, most of us decent people lack any understandings of how they work, and we are therefore largely vulnerable to that form of predation. 

That is why Murdoch can choose who Rules.

The Labour party elders are completely unable to counter these weapons not least because they are unable to identify them in real time, name them and then counter them in public discourse as a praxis of exposure, a way to educate the electorate on the nature of these tactics. See, show, tell - this they cannot do.

Public awareness of these tactics is the best defence in the first instance.

As things stand the Labour party elders and their membership appear to be unable to take the fight to the political grooming gangsters. They MUST change this, and rapidly. They have the public platform to do this, they need to name the tactical plays, every time they are given ANY platform, and they need to move away from the Press as a means to reach the public - they cannot speak clearly through that Press Mechanism at all. It will always seek to thwart them, twist their content.

Conflation

Conflation is the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, opinions, etc., into one, often in error, and when done intentionally it becomes a weapon, a psychological tactical weapon.

The Free Market Oligarchy carefully conflates elements of people's concern in order to gaslight and groom those who are vulnerable within electorate. They know they cannot fool all the people, all of the time, so they target those who they identify as vulnerable by studying biases within demographics. 

Here are some examples.

Authority/Authoritarianism - Authority is the respect afforded to experience and skill in any given field. Authoritarianism is the brute force of Sajid Javid removing mask mandates, with the anti-mask Freedom lobby baying in the background, with impunity,  in order to provoke more spread of the virus to reach mythic herd immunity, aka 'living with the virus' as a means to stabilising 'the economy'.

Freedom/License - Freedom is not license to do as one pleases - Alisteir Crowley's admonition 'do what thou wilt is the Law' is not Freedom at all. Freedom comes with a responsibility to cause no harm. Causing pollution is a breach of Freedom of those who need to live without pollution.

Concern/Fear - Genuine concern is not the same as fear, and to denigrate genuine concern by lampooning it as fear is tactical gaslighting.

Evidence/Opinion - In matters of the shared commons, evidence is critical to developing healthy policy, and because opinion can often be in conflict with evidence, opinion or belief in the design of policy can undermine the health of the commons, precisely because it often ignores or denies the evidence.

Commons/Property - The deliberate occupation of the commons,  only for it to be privatised

Regulation/Limitations imposed - Oligarchs tend to see regulation of their industries as onerous, in particular regulation that limits toxic practices or harm causation. They conflate that regulation with tyranny or unjustly imposed limitations.

Duty of Care/Restrictions - Everyone has a duty of care, as participants in the community, to everyone else in the community. To cast those duties as restrictions is a deliberate conflation.

Autonomy/Sovereignty - Autonomy is about being equal and responsive within a community, with equal rights and responsibilities - Sovereignty means being above others, a law onto oneself. They are not the same thing.

Because they - the Free Market Fundamentalists - are ideologues, for them the end justifies the means, and this means all forms of psychologically abusive manipulation and grooming tactics are being used, without remorse.

Labour elders are unable to identify this, which is why the Blairites were able to sabotage Corbyn.

In order to resolve the problems we face, we MUST address this vulnerability.

We must thwart the political grooming machine before we can make any real progress on Climate, Pollution, Environment, Poverty, Racism, Misogyny or Warfare.

Awareness across the grass roots is key

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Kindest regards

Corneilius

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