Right Wing oligarch friendly meme take down analysis.
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.
“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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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
---
Corneilius
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