A Discourse on Why We Need Legislation to Criminalise Ideological Grooming. Common Sense approach.

This has been a subject of concern for some time. This post is to serve as an alert.

We know that there is very well organised ongoing, in-depth collection of surveillance data about entire populations. Surveillance Capitalism collects data on our psychology and behaviour, every day, all day long, all the time. 

The platforms collect data on c.4,000 data points for every active consumer. We know too that this data and the analysis of that data is being deployed by the platforms that collect it.

All Social Media and on-line News Content platforms sell their capability to target consumers. They have millions of users, they know a lot about those users, they have categorised the users in great detail, they sell precision micro-marketing which increase sales to ad revenue spend compared to other platforms for advertising.

They can direct content to stimulate very specific traits including psychological characteristics, locations, income range, age range, hatreds, fears, likes, hobbies, work history and much, much more, to offer enhanced marketing effectiveness to advertisers, increasing sales to advert ratios, offering more precision. 

They call it micro-targeting, and it is fed by global data-mining.

Advertisers go to the platforms believing that micro-targeting advertising/influencing will be more effective in generating attention and sales. Influencers.

Ideological Marketing.

In marketing language then the objective of online political grooming is to locate and identify 'vulnerable' people who are then targeted with content that exploits sets of cognitive biases, insecurities, pain, fear, distress and concerns. The objective is to weaponise the targets 'heart and mind' in support of the groomers goals. Here is an example.

Just asking questions?

Bylinetimes published this article looking at the paper and money trails of various 'journalists' who have been inciting bigotry in the 'culture wars' a form of cognitive warfare.

The strategy is to weaponise the minds of a violent minority and a larger supportive base of Nationalists to the point where the violent will present rioting, the supporter base will present supporting oppressive legislation aimed at minority groups, marginalised groups, groups of people who are 'othered' - "they are not like us!"

We know now that in 2016 and before, decades before SCL and then Cambridge Analytica and a raft of affiliates, consultant coders, data analysis experts and on the ground staff were carrying out these kinds of campaigns in many, many countries, influencing more than 100 different elections over a few decades, growing as the tech world grew, but growing out of previous propaganda industries.

Adam Curtis BBC Documentary 'The Mayfair Set' speaks to those industries, and their sponsors in the aftermath of WWII and throughout the 20th Century.

Today sending refined content to micro-target individuals, groups, populations is an expensive operation.  Data Centres eat electricity. Very expensive to run.

Cognitive Warfare requires high tech savvy, funding to pay for distribution, teams of people to work as content producers, journalists to pick this up, mainstream news media to present this as 'another opinion in the room' and refusing to counter it, head on and demolish it in public in the manner of an honest discussion of the issue.

Instead the false logic, the emotionally immature attachment, the propaganda and the naked hatred remains festering.

Posing as 'valid opinion', vague patriots pretend to represent the whole, they are just like us, workers whose masters Rule us all,

Our Rulers are the ones who who curate those opinions as weapons to seed the minds of a restive population, to prevent solidarity emerging.

So...

Funding febrile fearmongering for far fright street theatre.

When it comes to political funding, from election posters to think tanks, those who fund such an enterprise do so with purpose, to serve their interest. Most often preventing accountability for harm already done, and preventing regulation of harm ongoing, because wealth extraction is the only measure of note to those who Rule.

In 2004, The Power Inquiry looked at this and made this suggestion as to how to resolve the issue.

"Fourth, party funding has to be cleaned up. We suggest limits on individual donations of £10,000 and on group donations of £100 per member. Millionaires could still give large sums to a pressure group of their fancy but the pressure group would need to have any political donations authorised by a vote of its members. 

British politics is also generally underfunded by comparison both with its own past and with other social activities today. So we propose an ingenious but modest wheeze for public funding, especially designed to help parties without sugar daddies. 

At each election, every voter would be able to nominate a local political party to receive, say, £3. If you do not vote or you do not want the bastards to have an extra penny, then your £3 would stay in the public treasury to be spent on hospitals and tanks."

A neat solution to get the Wealth as Power Lobby out of the election process. The Power Inquiry had 47 recommendations to shift the balance of power to the electorate, to local government, to make Power safe for people. It takes a lot of wealth to operate campaigns that manipulatively influence millions of people for political purposes. Wealth as Power is a political lobby inside and outside of almost every aspect of this culture. And I think that it goes well beyond parties, because it is a cultural lobby. Wealth lobbies for more Wealth. Wealth lobbies to evade accountability for harms caused. Wealth lobbies subvert a peoples electoral democracy. They must be regulated for us to try to build a healthy functioning democratic system.

"This may seem an ambitious programme, spread as it is over three fronts: reviving elections and parties, rebalancing our institutions, and giving voters a direct say in national and local decisions. But we should reflect that over the past twenty-five years we have reformed almost everything in Britain from the trade unions to soccer's offside rule. 

The one area that remains more or less just as it was is the political system, which has become shabby, vandalised and unloved like a bus shelter where the buses don't stop any more. Time, I think, to take pity on a set of British institutions which used to be so widely envied and imitated and could be made a source of pride again."

Good governors govern well, Wealth Extraction Rules in its own interest. I think that we, as a population majority, have a choice t make as to which of these we consider a necessity, and which is not.

The funding that incites and organises a wide range of politically bigoted groups can be traced, and it should be.

What do I think of the Southport Riots?

1. Targeting vulnerable people selected through studying their biases, insecurities, fears - psychological profiling, criminal intent 
2. Disseminating content designed to exacerbate those vulnerabilities - incitement, criminal intent 
3. Tweaking the content, increasing the tension and emotional charge to drive or nudge behaviour in a desired direction - manipulation, criminal intent 
4. Providing mechanisms for multiple small groups to form to take actions designed to inflame public political discourse - undermining healthy democracy, criminal intent 
5. Be ready to mobilise a group action at a few hours notice, maintaining targets in a febrile state. Inciting hatred, fear and vengeance, heightening emotional rhetoric, lying about events to provide 'reason' for the violence. "We are protecting the children".

Vulnerable people are being exploited and their exploitation causes even more 

harm. 

The people who incite and orchestrate this are the ultimate criminals - the rioters are not the cause, they are the symptom. 

They have been groomed. Some quite willingly, admittedly. These are carefully selected unhappy, emotionally immature violence prone people. Their emotional immaturity renders them exploitable. They are vulnerable. They need help, they too are being exploited.

This is not to offer excuses, because there are none when violence and abuse are perpetrated, rather it is to try to understand many dynamics feeding into this deliberately provoked street violence as political theatre.

Surveillance Capitalism - a short talk.

By all means hold those who participate in violence to account. 

By all means hold those who are abusive on our streets to account. 

And for all our sakes, do not allow the people who cause this, the politically and commercially powerful who fund all of this, across the board, to go unaccountable. They must be held accountable, their behaviour must be described accurately, the harm they cause witnessed, survivors needs met and prevention must therefore be the next stage.

Because it is dishonest, grooming, at any level, in any relationship or setting, is not Free Speech.

Because it is manipulative and causes emotional harm, it is psychological abuse.

Because it incites hatred and fear, aimed at marginalised identified groups, it is bullying.

Because it is designed to undermine healthy public debate on democratic governance it is political.

We need to legislate ideological grooming as the psychological abuse that it is, to recognise it as a criminal activity, to define it as an offence, with a custodial sentence as a rational reasonable preventative measure, more health and safety than punishment.

We already define psychological abuse within Domestic Violence.

The legal precedent of criminalising gaslighting, bullying and other forms of psychological abuse within a relationship, human to human, exists.

The relationship of human to human in this dynamic contains a Power Disparity, the more powerful party being the sponsors of the most public figure, the funders of the ‘research’, content creation, content dissemination compared to any of the vulnerable targets.

Preventative Legislation would mean the platforms would have to shut all that grooming down, which they could do. They have total control of the platforms. They would have to uphold that legislation in order to operate.

Protecting the vulnerable from avoidable harm is a fundamental duty of care.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

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

https://www.reverbnation.com/corneilius - .mp3 songs

https://www.soundcloud.com/coreluminous - .wav Songs

https://www.corneilius.net - Archive

#folkmusic
#singersongwriter
#blogger
#music

David Cameron, the Rioters and the Blame Game : A question of societal dynamics and scapegoating.

If two people with the same fear based hang-up form a relationships that relationship will have that hang-up built into.

If ten people with the same fear based hang-up create a societal structure that societal structure will have that hang-up built into.

If those people have children, then their children will grow up in an environment that writes that psychology into their brains and bodies, through experience.

This dynamic is also linked to traumatic events, be they natural disasters or the effects of war, mass starvation, invasion, colonisation or personal events within an individual life. Furthermore, it is important to understand the long term affects of such traumatic events on communities and whole societies.

"Historical trauma (HT) is cumulative emotional and psychological wounding, over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma experiences. The historical trauma response (HTR) is a constellation of features in reaction to this trauma.

The HTR may include substance abuse as a (normalised) vehicle for attempting to numb the pain associated with trauma. The HTR often includes other types of self-destructive behavior, suicidal thoughts and gestures, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, anger, and difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions. Associated with HTR is historical unresolved grief that accompanies the trauma.^[1]"


Historical trauma is an similar in nature to intergenerational trauma, which is the phenomenon that where a trauma an individual experiences in an earlier generation can have effects that reach into the lives of future generations

Imagine then what happens when it is not ten, but hundred of thousands and millions of people who build or form part of a hang-up based societal structure. Imagine the adverse affects, for example of the Christian Faiths teaching on masturbation, which is a natural and healthy expression of sexuality, which is then turned into something shameful. Imagine the confusion, fear and shame that arises when that many people are taught that their natural bodily functions are something to be ashamed of.

Thus those people will see that hang-up (or any series of hang-ups or fears) as normal, and will codify their compensatory behaviours related to their insecurity as their Laws and Morals.

This is the also the psychological basis of the consumer culture, a secret very carefully screened from the consumer, a secret that was also the foundation of the work of Edward Bernays, the inventor of the 'art' of Public Relations, the science of creating and selling an image.

He knew that many people are insecure, and that they could be manipulated to seek relief from that insecurity through compensatory behaviours, and that as long as the insecurity remained, they would continue to buy what was being marketed - be it a product or an idea. This is the secret of what is called 'aspirational marketing. And of propaganda.

Such people, or groups of people, will also reject and oppress the natural child that says "NO!" and will demonise those adults within their structure who resist or expose the behaviours or psychology that is imposed by such societal structures or who point out the true nature of the fear or the adverse affects and costs of the societal structures that dominate their society.

Understanding how Post Trauma Behaviour evolves, especially when it is not resolved, is essential to de-coding the societal structures we are attempting to change. This also applies to dealing with our own personal stories.

A Trauma event usually causes pain and fear, and the need to get away, to be safe, to cope often over rides the ability to resolve that trauma. This is the fight or flight mode.

” THE ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

         Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

         The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. “

source : Judith Herman “Trauma and Recovery”

If the trauma is not resolved, then the person or community traumatised must cope with the situation and the feelings, and coping entails suppressing the feelings that might overwhelm, which leads to the need to control those people involved so that no-one brings those feelings up, thus maintain the status quo …..

As such people or communities continue to cope, they re-write their own neurology and behaviour to normalise to that coping strategy.

Justification and rationalisation of the need to control then becomes all the more likely, and in times these justifications and rationalisations become structured into how the affect people live their lives, and over time will become codified as the ‘norm’ for that group.

In order to break the cycle, to resolve the trauma, empathy is essential, a large portion of which is self-empathy. Self empathy is the ability to accurately sense one’s feelings and the meaning of one’s experience. This is crucial to developing empathy for others. As I understand myself, so it becomes easier to understand others. And that understanding must come from within, from an honest and clear self reflection – it cannot be imposed, taught, medicated, analysed externally.

It can be facilitated, as Alice Millers describes it, when dealing with the adverse affects of child abuse, by an ‘enlightened witness’. Someone who truly understands because they themselves “know well of the painful stories of their own childhoods and can respectfully and effectively deal with the suffering of their patients. They will not preach them forgetting and forgiveness out of their own fear; they will know that ALL of their patients suffer from the effects of the denial of having been” traumatised.

Thus as David Cameron and other Authorities blame the  rioters for “a complete lack of responsibility, a lack of proper parenting, a lack of proper upbringing, a lack of proper ethics, a lack of proper morals” and wilfully ignores the prevailing conditions that give rise to so  much pain and trauma in our society that are directly linked to the intentional unequal distribution of resources,  to historical intergenerational abuse, he seeks to scapegoat  the weaker section of community,  the poor, the rioters, the parents, and he seeks to demonise them, thus bringing along all those whose hang-ups align neatly  with his and by this he protects the system of inequality which he represents.

He points one finger, with three pointing right back.

“a complete lack of responsibility," - he refuses to take responsibility for his part in a system that creates extreme wealth at one end and extreme poverty at the other.

"a lack of proper parenting" - he refuses to address the intense stress on parenting that arises from a system that REQUIRES both parents to work to serve the economy as consumers.

"a lack of proper upbringing" - same again

"a lack of proper ethics" - his selling weapons to the Egyptian Military during the uprising and afterwards his silence on the Military repression now underway is but one example of his disregard for ethics of any kind.
.
"a lack of proper morals” - the morality of the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Israel, Libya is not in question fro David Cameron, revealing his utter lack of morality.

This is not to say that the rioters behaviour can be justified, rationalised or deemed acceptable – it is to say that to address it requires that it is understood in the context within which it occurred. ALL the elements of this dynamic must be equal before the Law, before the people and that is blatantly not the case. Honesty is the root of all positive change.

As long as leaders and Institutions protect the codified trauma based controls, in effect maintain the denial, the ‘coping strategy’ which is their fear, the conditioning processes that are an articulation of their fear and mistrust of the human being and of life itself, there will be people who accept that control, be it by sublimation of their own autonomy, acquiescence through resignation,  or naked self interest, and there will be people will resist or react in whatever manner they can – and yet the only possibility of liberation for all concerned is honesty. Ruthless self honesty.

To expect such leaders to do otherwise is to misunderstand who they are and what they represent.

Sadly, there are so many examples of this suppressive dynamic operating throughout the Dominant Culture  - Civilisation - that a listing of them would be one of the largest books ever written. These dynamics form the greater part of all Hierarchically Violent Societies.... be they the 'civilised' or the rare 'headhunter' hunter gatherers (who are used to stereotype ALL hunter Gatherers....).

Nonetheless it is vital that this dynamic be understood as a pattern, because then it can be observed and emphatically revealed wherever it occurs, be it on the personal level, within small communities, within Institutions or across entire societies. This means that the utterances of Power, of abusers, can be de-constructed and countered as and when they arise.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Single Issues, Riots, Ideology and the Truth: The Dominant Culture is Toxic.

If there is an ONE single root to the riots, it lies deeper than any of the current public media analyses, most of which are geared to an ideological stance, the basis of which is that the psychology of the current dominant culture is more or less OK, and that these riots are evidence of a malaise with Society, a disenfranchised minority behaving badly. With the emphasis on 'minority' and 'behaving badly'.

It's clear that each person who engaged in the rioting and looting had their own reasons for so doing.

It's clear that each of those individual decisions emerges out of a larger context: poverty, police immunity in death in custody cases, consumerism driving the desire to HAVE, economic policy that coerces people into work through the stick of poverty.

Economic policy that rewards the rich, undermines the poor, traps the middle class and loots 'resources' from distant lands, bloodily; a 'lack of respect for authority' amongst children and the youth, obvious corruption in Governance, in Commerce, in Justice, in Institutional Power of every kind. A lack of respect amongst Authoritarians for children which more than mirrors that lack of respect amongst children, whose sense of injustice is ever keen.

Add to that the black markets, the black economy, the war on drugs which criminalises self-medication (addiction is 80% the result/symptom of Adverse Childhood Experiences), the wars being prosecuted, and profited from, and these are  realities that are being masked, spun, obscured, lied about by Politicians and other Institutional Power actors EVERY DAY, such that they reveal a willing denial of the reality of our Dominant Society.

Add to all that that SOME people within all that were merely opportunists, who went along for a laugh, a buzz. And add to that some people who are really, really angry, enraged and almost out of control - both as rioters and as police men.

Quite a mix. Lots to look at. And there's more of course .... the list is endless..

Under Common Law, or Common Sense Law, there are two primary instructions : Cause no Harm, Cause no Loss and Address all Harm, Address all Loss - address means in this context deal with the situation such that the loss or harm is resolved. Common Law seeks resolution and restorative justice, rather than punishment ...... though to some minds it might feel as though resolution IS punishment.... because they perceive that they lose whatever they gained by their adverse actions in the resolution of the case.

What few appear to be willing to admit is that the fundamental basis of this Society is sick, that the sickness is not something attacking the culture, but is in fact fundamental to the culture. The Dominant Culture, Industrialised Society, is founded upon coercion, might, power and the immunity of those who 'rule' from accountability for their actions, especially when those actions cause harm or loss to others.

And that means that the 'sickness' cannot be healed without profound changes to the culture, changes which would move us towards a more empathic, nurturant society based on meeting our natural needs, and the needs of the environment that supports us.

This is what the Natural Child expects. This is what the Natural Child is biologically geared to grow into, or emerge from within.

Natural Child, Natural Society. People meeting people's natural, genuine needs.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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