Political Grooming Gangs and Racism - Taboo must be broken.

Why do some news media twist stories of violence to reframe them as stories of cultural or racial difference, in an attempt to imply inferiority or superiority? 

The issue with grooming gangs that target vulnerable children and then exploit them is not a racial issue. 

It is clearly a behavioural and cultural issue, in the sense that this behaviour occurs in every hierarchically violent culture, irrespective of race, religion, skin tone, language group or gender. 

The only place you will not find this behaviour is in egalitarian cultures.

Two mass murderers, two human beings, two skin tones, two cultures and two utterly different approaches towards how they are placed. Similar events that happen within the same culture are treated differently.

This is just one example of the way the issue of race and perceived difference is handled by some news media and by some politicians -  it sets people within the different communities against each other., rather than opposed to the violence itself. The violence becomes a secondary issue. 


Racists and Xenophobes delight in this kind of caricature. Those who would prefer that different communities do not find solidarity with one another appreciate the advantage such a twisted and slanted caricature provides.

The issue here is clearly not skin tone, culture or demographic - the issue is the violence -  and yet there are those will who co-opt the narratives of the violence to make indirect claims about race and culture that are aimed at audiences who will be influenced to internalise those claims, and that will feed the expression of petty hatreds, which in turn fuels more dismal street level abuse adding to the existing sense of oppression and all of this perpetuates social division, it breaks down bridges of solidarity between ordinary folk, and it is being used as political distraction in the public domain.

Why is this form of Racism so common?

Where did this come from?

Who benefits from this skewed portrayal?

Political Grooming: inventing Race as a social weapon. 

Racist ideology was invented in the Americas, while they were still British Colonies, under British Rule, paying taxes to the British State. Race was defined by Christians, using the Bible as the source of their reasoning, and instituted into Laws defining the White Race.





Race was invented as a carefully crafted novel social phenomenon, and rather than emerging as some natural outpouring, it was enabled via pulpit, pamphlet and deliberate legislative action that favoured different low class labouring groups, one over the other -  white free workers above white indentured workers, who stood over black indentured workers, all of whom were favoured over slaves who had been freed, with slaves and Native peoples placed at the bottom of the new hierarchy, and this was carried out during the 1640's - 1690's,  a four decade program.

Slavery was already a substantial dynamic across the Spanish Empire colonies in South America.

Yet in early Colonial years it was rare, as the indentured worker was the dominant mode of labour.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p262.html

There were some Africans who were brought to the 'New World' who ended up as indentured labour.

In most cases they were people who had been taken as slaves from Africa by the Spanish or by the Portuguese, and who were then captured as booty by English pirates, who were at war with the Catholic Spaniards and their allies.

The pirates, seeking to monetise their booty then brought them to the 'New World' where they were sold into indentured work - they would work a number of years to pay for their purchase costs, and on completion, would be granted status as a free person, and could work, save money, buy land, farm it, build businesses, marry and contribute to the social development of the colonies and so forth.  There were slaves as well, and in the early years a fair number were freed by their owners or were able to buy their freedom. The bulk of the labour force was European, largely British and Irish.

As the colonies expanded, the need for labour grew too.  Indentured labour was harsh, and had a high attrition rate. Many who started died while they were still indentured. With expansion, there was a need for more labourers.




In time slavery was introduced, then institutionalised and industrialised: turned into a fully fledged commercial operation, and industry, supplying slave labour to the colonies, to meet that need.

This led to a situation where in terms of numbers, the population of workers, indentured, freed and enslaved ran to many times that of the wealthy, the troops that defended the colonies, the urban middle class and their loyal workers. The work was hard, the lifestyle harsh, the social environment oppressive.. There was a huge disparity between the power of the wealthy and the power of the working poor. The labour force lived lives that were pretty much a state of punitive oppression.

The owners started to make laws to control this larger population, bit by bit.

"The shift from indentured servitude to racial slavery in the British colonies is evident in the development of the colonies' laws.

• Virginia, 1639: The first law to exclude "Negroes" from normal protections by the government was enacted.

Virginia, 1639 Act X. All persons except Negroes are to be provided with arms and ammunition or be fined at the pleasure of the governor and council.

• Maryland, 1664: The first colonial "anti-amalgamation" law is enacted (amalgamation referred to "race-mixing"). Other colonies soon followed Maryland's example. A 1691 Virginia law declared that any white man or woman who married a "Negro, mulatto, or Indian" would be banished from the colony forever.
Maryland, 1664 :That whatsoever free-born [English] woman shall intermarry with any slave. . . shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issue of such free-born women, so married shall be slaves as their fathers were.

• Virginia, 1667: Christian baptisms would no longer affect the bondage of blacks or Indians, preventing enslaved workers from improving their legal status by changing their religion.
Virginia, 1667 Act III. Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children that are slaves by birth. . . should by virtue of their baptism be made free, it is enacted that baptism does not alter the condition to the person as to his bondage or freedom; masters freed from this doubt may more carefully propagate Christianity by permitting slaves to be admitted to that sacrament.

• Virginia, 1682: A law establishing the racial distinction between servants and slaves was enacted."Virginia, 1682 : Act I. It is enacted that all servants. . . which [sic] shall be imported into this country either by sea or by land, whether Negroes, Moors [Muslim North Africans], mulattoes or Indians who and whose parentage and native countries are not Christian at the time of their first purchase by some Christian. . . and all Indians, which shall be sold by our neighboring Indians, or any other trafficking with us for slaves, are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.

source : 
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1h315.html

The rulers/owners turned to the Churches they sponsored to use the Biblical story of The Tribe of Ham to suggest Africans were descendent from Ham, a son of Noah.  The Africans were cast as a lessor race of people in this biblical hierarchy. And so the concept of racial hierarchy was initiated. Prior to that people thought of difference as just that, difference. The concept of  innate biological or racial superiority was unknown.  It was most often religious or political difference that mattered - Christianity vs Islam and Christianity vs Judaism for example, and class.

https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(son_of_Noah)

The land owners of the colonies used the Bible and it's Protestant  Puritan Work Ethic interpretations to suggest that Africans could be therefore converted to Christianity, as they were part of the Judeo-Christian narrative, and in that way they could be 'saved',  even within Slavery. Slavery was thus considered more akin to 'work' than imprisonment or punishment, and the idea of working diligently aligned with the Protestant work ethic which was central to the ideology of the colonial Europeans, and that made it easier to pretend that conversion to Christianity and diligence in the work they did could function as a way of saving the Africans from the eternal damnation of Hell, offered as a way to improve their lives and condition.

Native peoples, who were more often than not seen as robust, intelligent and in general honest peoples, in the early years, albeit different in nature and culture, were re-cast as Wild Savage Heathens, and thus they were already damned to Hell and being so savage and wild, they would not be easily converted to Puritan Christianity, and being indolent - they could not be easily enslaved, or put to work.  They could be killed and their lands taken and turned to Christian expansion. That was the point - for the owners saw a potential Empire stretching out to the West.

In this way the Puritan Economy was laid out - Wealth reveals Gods favour, poverty was God's disfavour and thus poverty was seen as the fault of the poor, who could, if they but tried hard enough, win God's favour by working hard for the wealthy. If they did well, it was God's will.

The American Dream, work hard and God will reward you.


Thus a Christian  Puritan Work Ethic Meritocracy social hierarchy was institutionalised, that ran from the owners who were Rich White Protestants, to Middle class white, artisan class white, menial labour white, white indentured workers,white  criminals, black folk. native peoples.

A Hierarchy ordained by God.

The plantation owners established this in order to ensure that none of the oppressed would seek solidarity with each other and resist or rebel against the elite ruling class.

The invention of Race was a Political, Economic and Religious protocol for oppression and social division.

It was in effect the operation of a Political Grooming Gang.

Exploiting studied vulnerabilities within different segments of an oppressed population, triggering the emotion with suitably crafted content, exploiting the reactions,  creating legalised favouritism that deliberately set one group against another.

Political grooming gangs still operate across almost all power systems. Education that does not teach an honest history is in effect a political grooming operation, if only by omission, in some cases..

Such omissions are essential component of manufacturing consent, within Hierarchies of Violence, Power and Wealth.

Education is absolutely key to eradicating Racism across the grass roots.


So that's a little bit of the history on the origins of Racism,. 


What about the realities of what is happening in the year 2020?

We need to understand how situations come to be, in order to confront what is not working, what is dysfunctional.


The Industrial Revolution could not have taken place in England as it did, without the wealth of the colonies, for which the slave trade was absolutely central. That is something we all need to understand. It might have happened in much smaller scale were it not for the vast wealth imported on the broken backs of slave and indentured labour - cheap labour generates profits. Same old, same old.

When slavery was abolished, the American south ensured that the 13th amendment contained a loop hole. Slavery was permitted within the prison system, for convicts.

American Police Brutality.

American policing has a world wide reputation for political corruption and racial violence as well as being portrayed as 'America's Finest' and held up as pillars of the community.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, in Ireland, images of American police with billy clubs assaulting black civil rights marchers were known, we venerated Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movements.

And yet movies and TV series portrayed the police as decent warriors fighting crime in a hyper violent culture. Good guys, for the most part. A few bad apples.

The 80s saw the War Against Drugs unleash new levels of organised criminal violence, and new levels of police violence in response, even as the drugs industry expanded.

Policing took a different turn after 9/11 and became much more militarised as a result of The War Against Terror.

But there's a history to all of this we in Ireland and elsewhere knew little of.

George Floyd

As I edit this, on June 6th,  there are protests across the Earth, large public events in many countries, in the midst of a global pandemic, in response to the awful murder of a black man, George Floyd, by 5 Minneapolis Police Officers. The grisly murder scene was recorded on various mobile phones, and the murder ran for just under 9 minutes. 

The murder was recorded on smart phones and then broadcast on-line, which drew out much shock, anger and direct criticism. Well of course it did.

There were protests that day, protests which were largely peaceful, focused, and multi-racial.  Local community was outraged and actively seeking immediate action.

The video footage was unequivocal - the police officers had total control of the arrested man, and they killed him, even as witnesses pleaded with the lead officer to take his knee off the mans neck..

People wanted justice, and the exercised their rights, and the people protested.

Justice was not forthcoming. Tensions flared.

In some places the protests erupted into riots, over a matter of days, in part because the murderers were not arrested and charged - they were fired, and that was obviously not just, and that inspired anger and outrage and in part because some people - not Black Lives Matter activists, others - wanted to escalate the situation. 

Just as the media images at the top of this article, there are those who seek to co-opt intense situations for perceived political 'gain'. Agent provocateurs doing their bit. Once that flame is lit, it takes action to quench it.

After a week of night time riots in some cities, and many more peaceful, large scale daytime multi racial protests in others, the lead police officer was arrested,detained and charged with 3rd degree murder. Around the USA young people were talking to their elders about this situation, and many, many white people were being educated on the realities of racist police brutality. The protests continued. Trump made matters worse, by being divisive as ever, braying to his supporting base about being the President of Law and Order, and threatening Militarised Violent against rioters.

Videos of police brutality were flooding social media in ways people have not seen before. There was lots of police brutality before, for example looking back to the Occupy movement, that was not so well recorded and placed online.  This time, the videos were reaching a much wider audience.

The charges were upgraded. And they were extended. The lead officer is now being charged with 2nd degree murder, and the other officers with 2nd degree murder.

Has something shifted? Too early to say. The learning is on going.

I would imagine the youth are not going to let this go.

Race, Policing and history.

Here's an interesting historical insight - the institutional set up of policing with regards to black communities in the North is rooted in assumptions made during the mass migration of black people from the South up into the North during the early years of the 1900s.

The 13th Amendment contained a slavery loophole, exploited across the Southern States.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation

Policy towards the incoming and expanding black community and how they were to be policed by largely white administrations flowed from assumptions based on data from the South, statistics taken at face value, without digging into the context and background of those statistics. Statistics can be lethal if taken without the correct context.

Khalil Muhammad  is an American historian:

"..Muhammad’s work focuses on systemic racism and criminal justice; The Condemnation of Blackness deals with the idea of black criminality, which he defines as the process by which “people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not.” 


That process has been a vicious cycle in American history, Muhammad explains, wherein black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, then deemed dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further."

It's from a Vox article, by Anna North, speaking with Khalil Muhammad, an American Historian.


How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian

“The problem is the way policing was built,” historian Khalil Muhammad says.

"The deliberate choice to abolish slavery, [except as] punishment for crime, leaves a gigantic loophole that the South attempts to leverage in the earliest days of freedom. What that amounts to is that all expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights, and social rights were then subject to criminal sanction. Whites could accuse black people who wanted to vote of being criminals. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminals. And the only thing that wasn’t criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land.

Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South builds up a pretty robust carceral machinery and begins to sell black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this. And for the next 70 years, the system is pretty much a criminal justice system that runs alongside a political economy that is thoroughly racist and white supremacist. And so we don’t get the era of mass incarceration in the South, what we get is the era of mass criminalization. Because the point is not to put people in prison, the point is to keep them working in a subordinate way, so that they can be exploited."

In the early years after 1900, a migration of black people from the rural South to the urban North started, and this accelerated during WWI and WWII, and afterwards, due to the war economy.

Historians differentiate between a first Great Migration (1916–40), which saw about 1.6 million people move from mostly rural areas in the South to northern industrial cities, and a Second Great Migration (1940–70), which began after the Great Depression and brought at least 5 million black people including many townspeople with urban skills to the North and West.

So there's this influx of people, and an enlargement of the population, and an administration unfamiliar with the new comers. North and South really were two quite different cultures.

The South had exploited the loophole in the 13th Amendment, which permitted Slavery within prisons, to maintain control of the black population as a work force subservient to the white bosses, by using the threat of imprisonment as a whip, by criminalising a range of behaviours common to the black population. In effect they criminalised all sorts of normal behaviour of black people, and so their criminal records taken at face value portrayed the black community as more criminal than they were. And you can understand why so many decided to leave that toxic situation and move northwards.

The basics of this story is that the Northerner Police forces looked around for information, for any data, and the fell upon statistics from official records in the South, to try to plan for this new population dynamic, and in picking up raw data from the South without understanding it's context, the historical threads, they misread it and absorbed a series of incorrect assumptions that led to an institutionalised negative view of black communities from a policing perspective. This led to suspicion, it led to a prejudiced view of black communities, it repeated without analysis the bias of the South, it fostered racist attitudes and it led to much harsher policing tactics applied to the new black communities as a new standard.

And that standard persists to this day, in large part because it has, over time and through not being addressed, become institutionalised, embedded, part of the policing culture.

American Police forces have a profound problem and it is to do with their sense of entitlement to apply lethal violence, and their corrupt politicisation, which is mixed-up with racist perceptions, elitist political and economic policies, and both strands of this fabric of American life must be addressed, not least by the white majority working and middle class communities who elect politicians, sheriffs and district attorneys, and who fund the policing that continues in such fashion.

It is well worth reading the whole article, and looking further at Khalil Muhammad's book on this.

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

The present is always a thread of the past, and if we do not know how that weave was woven, we can be lost for words when we are trying to understand what we are seeing, and we can be conned or misguided into accepting easy assumptions that knowingly gloss over our lack of knowledge, if we are not careful.

The 13th Amendment 

The 13th Amendment contained a loophole that allowed slavery to continue. The Southern States exploited that loophole to maintain control over the black work force. In order to do so, they maintained the lies of innate superiority of white people, and innate criminality of black people. This documentary digs into that historical dynamic and it's impacts today.









Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Letter to Editors - Political Grooming Gangs

update - this letter was not published.

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

But this article in the Guardian is edging closer to the issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/06/government-universal-credit-deception-asa-taxpayer-funded-features

"What the government has effectively done is use public money to gaslight poor people, denying the reality of what has been done to them. 

In its eagerness to push its gargantuan failure of a welfare policy, it has swept aside the truth and peddled lies. 

Politicians, campaigners and journalists have all pointed out how Rudd and her DWP predecessor Iain Duncan Smith have done so – and each time we have faced breathtaking defensiveness from a Whitehall department that is meant to be working on our behalf, rather than for the Tories."

===


To the Editor

Sir/Madam
.
Organised, well funded media communications operations that  target and manipulate peoples social woundednesses, their insecurities, prejudices and fears through public, social and private media, through marketing, and propaganda, and through lobby campaigns operating on an industrial scale:  in essence manipulating vulnerable people for ideological, religious, political or economic exploitation.

It is appalling behaviour.

It is abuse.

If one were to behave that way within a relationship, it would be considered utterly abusive.

It is not new. Edward Bernays has a lot to answer for.

What is new is that we have a much more detailed knowledge of how this works, a detailed personal, paper and money trail.

Let's be real here - let us be calling out the behaviour of these political grooming gangsters.

And let us not take the easy route of blaming social media - seek out the people and companies who design these targeted campaigns, and demand they account for their abusive behaviour.

The media can do without their business.

The people can do without being triggered and manipulated.

Our politics can be cleaner, honest and worthy.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog.

All we need to do is be honest, responsive to the evidence we find, and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges.

The rest is made easier as a result.

Trauma, Trump, Brexit, Iraq and Recovery



 It's not a matter of Left vs Right, it is a question of  from Institutionalised to Humanised.
- it is not an adversarial process!

"The study of psychological trauma has a curious history - one of episodic amnesia. Periods of active investigation have alternated with periods of oblivion. Repeatedly in the last century, similar lines of inquiry have been taken up and abruptly abandoned, only to be rediscovered much later. Classic documents of 50 or 100 years ago often read like contemporary works. Though the field has in fact an abundant and rich tradition, it has been periodically forgotten and must be periodically reclaimed.

This intermittent amnesia is not the result of ordinary changes in fashion that affect any intellectual pursuit. The study of psychological trauma does not languish for lack of interest. Rather, the subject provokes such intense controversy that it periodically becomes anathema. The study of trauma has repeatedly led into the realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.

To study psychological trauma is to come face to face with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature (behaviour). To study psychological trauma is to bearing witness to horrible events.

When events are natural disasters or 'acts of God' those who bear witness sympathise readily with the victim. But when traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim(ised) and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides.

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. The perpetrator appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victimised, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim(ised) demands action, engagement, remembering.

Leo Eitinger, a psychiatrist who has studied survivors of Nazi concentration camps, describes the cruel conflict of interest between victim(ised) and bystander: "War and victims are something the community wants to forget; a veil of oblivion is drawn of everything painful and unpleasant."

 In order to escape accountability for crimes,the perpetrators do everything in their power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrators first line of defence. If secrecy fails the perpetrator attacks the credibility of the victimised who speak out. If that fails, the perpetrator tries to make sure no one listens.

After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies; it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon themselves; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on."

------

These are the opening pages of Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

-----

In the UK, with regards to the Invasion of Iraq these words ring out as a clarion call above and beyond the petty concerns of Brexit; they also ring out to remind us all that Austerity kills vulnerable people and that we bystanders, all of us taxpayers, each and everyone of us, without exception, have a role to play in confronting both of these atrocities - the murder of a nation, and the murder of a nations most vulnerable citizens, and many more and we have a role in preventing future atrocities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_Act_2001

We cannot compare the deaths of tens of thousands of vulnerable people induced by deliberate chronic economic distress with the destruction of an entire countries civil infrastructure and a war that killed a million people, maimed many more and orphaned 4 million children.

We can draw parallels, because the atrocious behaviour of powerful interests is in direct conflict with the needs of ordinary people and at the same time ordinary people, as bystanders are dis-empowered and urged to do nothing to undermine those powerful interests.

The British public are permitted and encouraged to to protest fracking, CO2 in the atmosphere yet totally inhibited when it comes to prosecutions of War Crimes (Iraq) and Crimes against Humanity (UN report on the rights of disabled people in the UK).

Racism, human progress vs evolution and adaptation.

Racism is always top down...

The origins of Cultural, Scientific Racism and Legal Racism are with the elites, the intellectual classes, the ruling oligarchy, who taught, promoted and legislated (legalised) racism reinforcing it through applied trauma and reward, thus normalising and institutionalising the practices of Racism.

Racism has never emerged from the grass roots.

Trump, and others like him who represent Power (and who is himself a traumatised child-adult) say things in public that encourages ordinary folk who are racists by social conditioning and learning (and who are powerless by comparison, and who feel that dis-empowerment and are frustrated by it) to 'come out', and they do, so that they too can feel powerful, superior... and can assuage the pain of their own powerlessness.

The majority of grass roots 'racists' are groomed into that way of thinking and feeling, precisely because they can be triggered to assault other grass roots people.

50 years ago, this week the US Government passed laws banning segregation.


However, they did not teach honest histories in school to show the people how the colonial British invented Race, using the Bible, the pulpit, pamphlets, broadsheets and then Institutionalised Racism as a means to ensure the working poor, the slaves and the native peoples would not rise to defeat their oppressors but would fight with each other for their place in the hierarchy...

Laws are never enough, they can easily be broken, therefore honesty in education is critical for prevention.

Hence, until parents demand honesty in education, Racist views will perpetuate to be used by power to divide the people

Australian Aboriginals legally described as Fauna until 1967 - do you understand what that actually means?

The Ruling class defining for everyone the status of the people who are the ancient inhabitants of Australia....

"Animals!"

"Cave Men", "Ug Ug".

These are terms I hear from 'well educated' people all the time....

They have been educated to describe ancient egalitarian peoples in that way as part of a trajectory of progress and evolution that leads to the current dominant culture of industrialised militarised power and technology as being the apex of evolutionary progress. with a bright future in the stars....

No. That is a lie.

I am a biological organism, and I am ancient design: to be co-operative, happy, loving, empathetic, robustly healthy as part of a social community that is fully part of the habitat..

There is no need for further 'evolution' or progress in this regard..

Does an Elephant herd need to 'evolve' further, to progress to become better Elephants?

Do Trees and Fungi need to 'improve' themselves?

No.

Evolution has nothing to do with 'progress' - evolution is about responding to a dynamic environment....

Industrial Culture is a disease state, a rape of life itself.

Which is why fighting for survival does not work, even though resistance is a natural response, it cannot win. The struggle for survival is not a biological reality, it is a social construct of all hierarchically violent cultures.

The Industrial Rapist will not stop, and it is only the Citizens of the Industrial Culture who could stop that culture from the act of raping the Earth's habitats - if we understood, if we have the courage, solidarity and empathy to live that understanding.

This is why I write.

Who will stop Bolsanaro and the Evangelical Movement tied into the Oligarchy?

Who will stop British Weapons makers from supplying Saudi War planes so that they can continue to bomb Yemeni civilians?

Who will stop the British and American States from funding violent militia?

Who will stop Boris Johnson spending £100 million of Tax payers funds on a marketing campaign - grooming that part of the electorate that are susceptible to being groomed via their vulnerabilities, triggering that part that can be enraged, just to divide and conquer?

Who?

The Healers.

Courage rather than fear.

Knowledge rather than belief.

Recovery rather than progress.

This is hard work, it is terrifying work, and yet what alternative is there?

For me, none.

For many others a whole host of reasons determine whether we act or not.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

The Great Hack - a review.

The Great Hack.

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


I just watched 'The Great Hack' on Netflix.

I watched it twice, just to make sure I was clear on what I thought it was, and editing this months later, I have to adjust my position, I have more information.

Now on 24th June 2020, having read 'Zucked',  I am about to start on Christopher Wylie's 'Mindf*ck'.

I will be reappraising my stance as a result and will edit this piece, or write a part two, as a follow up, to show what I am learning as I travel.

The online user-content-creator social media in general is an advertisers landscape : We create content on our timelines, that content tells facebook a lot about our psychologies.

Google+, Youtube, Amazon and Facebook's management and business model, the techniques they use to expand their business, and their willingness to make advertising revenue by selling access to their users psychologies, with intimate specificity through micro-targeting.

The lure to advertisers is founded on intimate psychological data gathering of the users likes, dislikes, key strokes, reactions, engagements, fears, rages etc, which users agree to, even if we do not fully understand what that means.  As Bill Hick put it  they are working ' the outrage dollar' or the 'fear dollar' ...

It is true Facebook does not sell your data - it is too valuable a resource for them. They hold that data and it is their feedstock for advertisers seeking to reach precise target groups. Facebook also allows the advertisers to work on any targeted group, to observe how effective their adverts are, what ways targets are responding to various versions of the content, and it enables them to use that information in real time to refine the content and enhance the effectiveness of the advertisments. 

This is relatively innocent, until a bad actor pays to target deliberately manipulative content at specific groups of vulnerable people, and enhance that for political, ideological or economic gain. And when the bad actor is spending millions of dollars a week, or billions in an election, all classed as 'advertising' then the platform becomes a vector of abuse. The platform does not create the abuse, it allows the abuse to occur.

These Companies have no functional ethical or moral code. They permit all the tactics of narcissistic bullying across their platforms, knowing it causes real harm, under the fig leaf of 'freedom of speech'. That is the problem. A bit like The Vatican.

Bill Hicks was on point in this beautiful routine.



They - the social media giants - are not the origin of such behaviours.

Most official News and Press media and all entertainment and all marketing revel in such tactics to increase sales and profitability. The Bible is as fine an example of this as any document I know of. 

Telling people what to think.

I have written much about that subject on this blog over the past decade. What they appear to be doing is knowingly, if not intentionally, enabling and profiteering from these behaviours across their services because a lot of people are vulnerable to manipulation, and there is a dysfuctional vulnerablity dollar out there, for marketers to exploit.

My apologies to Carol Cadwalladr for misunderstanding her perspective. Her work and that of other journalists and, importantly, the whistle blowers like Mr. Wylie and Ms. Kaiser is really critically important work.


-----.What follows is the original piece.

It was not about a hack at all.

Hacking is gaining unauthorised access to a prohibited computer system and injecting novel code into it to play with it, extract information, undermine it etc...

Cambridge Analytica is not a hacking operation.

Though it has been associated with hacking in the Nigerian Elections in 2015, with Cambridge analytica staff organising the hacking the emails of the Nigerian President to bring him down during an election Not that that was mentioned in this 'documentary'.

Not enough time, really. There is a lot in this documentary.

The narrative presented in 'The Great Hack' was carefully designed to avoid the simple truth that all mainstream news that carries advertising, are also being utilised as political grooming devices and that many are actively aware of that and unwilling to do anything reasonable about it.

The Sun, Telegraph and the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror, they all carry propaganda posing as news.

The narrative in The Hack was also to seek to blame Facebook, and the Tech companies, rather than talk about political grooming, seriously.

In essence a deflection
 

Another way to say it this : no one talked intelligently about political grooming.
 

As a cultural and politically institutionalised dynamic of abuse carried out in the public domain, a form of bullying, that is the mainstay of advertising, marketing, religious indoctrination and propaganda.

Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-semite, racist, terrorist supporting politician; he is exactly the opposite.
 

The press bullying of him, and his strength of character, are an object lesson in how to deal with public bullies.

Here's my take on the 'documentary'...

 
Ms. Kaiser is no ordinary whistle blower...

 
Ms Kaiser worked for the Obama Election campaign, a proven grooming operation - I said so at the time, even without understanding the way online micro targeting was being weaponised by groups such as Cambridge Analytica, because I was paying attention to the funding drives on facebook, and to the mainstream print and broadcast campaigns. And because it's been the basic dynamic of neoliberal 'democracy' for a long time and I understood that no rational citizen would ever vote for policies that cause harm to his or her own community, voters are not that irrational.


Ms. Kaiser was involved in  the 2015 Nigerian Election campaign, where she introduced a team of Israeli specialists to the Cambridge Analytica team,  who had hacked the incumbent Nigerian President's emails...

Cambridge Analytica ran campaigns for right wing candidates in a number of third world countries, to earn a few bob and to prove the efficacy of the model, before going on to the really big bucks. 68 countiries, and probably more. Hundreds of elections.

Trumps Election 2016 campaign spent just under one hundred million US dollars on their facebook messaging.

 

Ms. Kaiser worked on Trump's campaign at the very core of it's Facebook operations, fully aware of what she was doing. She was at the very center of this. She knew they were targeting peoples biases, fears, insecurities and prejudice in order to exploit those for political gain.

The term for this activity is grooming.

It is taboo to say this out loud. "shhhhhhhshshs!"

Ms. Kaiser mentioned the use of weaponised communications tactics, which are apparently 'restricted' by the Department of Defence. I would say that  every Instiotutional Religion deploys the exact same behaviour. Indoctrination of the faithful. Such practice is normative in violent hierarchies. Spreading stories, maintaining a narrative, optics, favours and punishment.
 
I would take issue with Carole Cadwalladr's effort to load all the blame to Facebook and the Tech companies. They are liable and culpable, I agree, yet not singularly so. That has to be called out - the general practice of targeting known cognitive biases (vulnerability) ought itself be declared a criminal offence, as it is an abusive thing to do to another person.

Alexander Nix 

Included in the 'documentary' was two brief sections covering Alexander Nix, the CEO of CA.

His boasting at a dinner meeting about CA's abilities, and his recalcitrant appearance before the House of Commons Committee Hearings on Fake News, where he got off very lightly.

Cambridge Analytica was shut down due to bankruptcy, - such a difficult decision to make (not), and so much money already banked, lives ruined and it is likely that the bulk of their files are now missing, destroyed or lost, etc  -  there's a hole in the evidence set.

Well, well, well.

If you wish to check the nature of the Observer and The Guardian take a peek at Medialens a UK based news media analysis website which has, since 2001, confronted the propaganda that gets passed off as 'news reporting' - in effect misleading readerships in line with existing established political hegemony via the readerships triggering their cognitive biases, or as I would call it, the grooming of ordinary folk via opinion posing as evidence (WMD) in the UK media.

Chomksy called that process of propaganda the manufacturing of consent.

www.medialens.org is well worth a look.

The Great Hack

I found The Great Hack riveting - and yet I felt it was somehow dishonest. That said, everyone might want to to watch it, and note how we, in our own unique case, are being mislead - turn the exercise into a learning by experience.

It also tried to pass off Russian influence on UK voting as a major influential factor, which is inaccurate -  all competing powers brief against their perceived opponents, through various media outlets. That is standard practice, and no great secret or conspiracy. It rarely has any meaningful effect upon the target populations elections.

The major effective malign influences are always homegrown. The home government has more to fear from a people who realise they are being bullied than any other external state or agency.

In this previous posting, I outlined in the most precise and concise terms, the true nature of political grooming gangs.

Let's have a laugh!

Boris Johnson's £10 million grooming operation will go nowhere near his hair or his crumpled suits...

and


"You've been Groomed!"

New Reality Show Pitch.

'Enjoy the thrills and spills of indoctrinators, indoctrination and the indoctrinated as our intrepid reporter takes you on a journey of discovery, breakdown and release."

pitched to ITV, BBC, CNN etc...

all rejected it as 'improbable'.

subtext - are you trying to kill us off.

( yes, of course, you are grooming gangsters!)

No, i did not pitch this, this is all make believe fake news...

--
Here's a track I created to articulate the realities of political and ideological grooming.

https://soundcloud.com/coreluminous/we-know-how-to-groom-you



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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News Media, Our Billions, Their Billions, Blair indicted? who is in charge here?

This life is a jam, not a rehearsal.

We are sensitive, because that is how biology grows... through sensitivity.

Being bullied undermines sensitivity, always.

I understand that live in a Violent Hierarchy, where large powerful groups of people and institutions wage war, often through proxies, militarily, economically, culturally and ideologically seeking degrees of 'full spectrum dominance.'

That is not Healthy.

At all.

On any level.





It's bio-illogical.

Nature or Living systems are not competitive fora,  they are all fully fledged mutli layered co-operating diversities.

--


The historical situation of emerging from within oppression, to resist and recover full health.

That is 'where' we are.... the 'when' is always now.

So here's a behavioural over-view, a massive generalisation, yet I think one that is helpful as a focussing tool

It is understood, that in some cases, some traumatised or brutalised or neglected children or individuals can learn dysfunctional behaviours, thought sets; and in turn they craft controlling mechanisms to manage a chaotic life, which are internalised and later on expressed in the will to control others to meet perceived needs of the controlling, wounded party.

This will influence the children born to such a parent, so as to habituate the next generation to hierarchy, power, violence as normal...unconsciously... behaviourally.

So too with communities.   Suspend all judgement, just for the next few paragraphs amd walk with me a little, as I explain.l

What can happen to a family to turn it into a dysfunctional unsafe place is scaled up at the State level.. the same dynamics, different expressions due to size, complexity etc... both bad situations..

Europe is littered, as is every other continent, littered with traumatmised and marginalised communities, oppressed by more powerful communities..We call the States and 'demographics' - everything is expressed as socio-economic status...

The existing system is rooted in bullying, in hierarchies of power.

It has everywhere attack the egalitarian pre-conquest cultures. None have been spared. Contact with industrialised peoples leads to extinction...

It is to be expected that leaders and ruling groups within this Competing Powers set-up are violent operators.

Concentrated private Wealth has always been the primary political party, (we call them the Oligarchy) and it was they who first replaced the Kings, and it was they who opened and maintained Parliaments of Owners,  and who pursued general Education by the State, and the financing of wars via Taxation and borrowings, and later on, after WWI and II, they ceded limited powers to Democratic assemblies, begrudgingly..

Now, they - the owning class, the Oligarchy - are clawing back more of that power, and wealth which the believe is theirs by right, and by the might of their billions, and so it goes.

Until someone decides the break the cycle in his or her life...

Until many choose that, quietly, robustly and then choose solidarity...

The Billionaires have their billions - we tax payers have ours, and we need to not be fighting each other, divided to vote for which bully we choose to be ruled by.... really...

We need to be using our Billions to regulate the Oligarchy, because their businesses all operate within the commons, and must be forced to be honest, transparent and safe for the commons. It really is that simple.

That's how we can frame the next step in Democracy...

---
Some days I think that the news media's role is to deliver stress to our brains.

And distraction, entertainment, fine.

Honesty about power, the kind that makes a robust man laugh - not a chance!

Then I remember the Worshipful Company of Stationers (and Newspaper Makers), the Star Chamber and censorship of printed materials in 14th Century England.

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

--- War and News Makers...

Nuremberg.

the ultimate legal, criminal responsibilities lie with those who ordered the war.

Given that to marshall the logistics for war is a deliberate and complex operation, why did the citizens not act to prevent the politicians from committing War Crimes, at that stage?

The preparation of an illegal war is as much a war crime as the rest ....once combat commences, there is no way to undo...

it is not logic, nor is it advisable though it is common to undict a trooper and not have the troopers entire command chain in the dock with him.

If a War Crime occurred, then the FULL picture of command liability is essential in confronting what took place, and how...the context must be understood, not to mitigate, nor to deflect, but to focus liability where it is...

We NEED this information in the public domain, in order to be able to prevent it from happening

It has to be that future military commanders whould understand that any time a politician issues an illegal order, they have the duty reject the order, then to arrest that politician, and hand him or her to the custody of the Civil State.

It has to be that following illegal orders breaks the millitary code, and the order issuer can be arrested by the subordinate.

Illegal military orders ought be seen as treason against both the home people and the target peoples...

If we truly want peace, we must be robust about it.

Arrest Blair, Cameron, May - see who wants to go to war after that.





Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Intergenerational Trauma, exported to Australia, expanded to cover entire land mass.

So there's the ecology of the human psyche, it's fragile, we are naturally sensitive.

 





The evironmentalism of living as the habitat, as part of ancient living patterns...

The ecology of diversity - 250 language groups, no warfare.

they had a justice system, like for like.. people get angry, make errors, do silly shit...they learn.

It was all about working together, different personalities and different skills developed meant the group as a whole was really fully well equipped.. all the time...

Then the Europeans arrived...

The Europeans were all traumatised from their culture of god given hiearchy of violence,  already some 1000 years old, and arrogant with it, and they brought the trauma cult to Australia...

eventually...this has to happen.

This is a superb, clear and grounded explanation of the basic thread of living with Intergenrational trauma patterns... a apologise, i have not been able to embedd the video, my link is not happy today...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlqx8EYvRbQ - Intergenerational trauma, and recovery.

This animation was launched at The Healing Foundation's #OurFuture Youth Webinar on 24 July 18.

The animation has been created as a new education resource that explains where Intergenerational Trauma comes from and how it impacts young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
Please visit our website for more resources:  

http://healingfoundation.org.au/child... #OurFuture


there are those who bring nurture to the wounded,
those who confront the oppressors insecurity, and help resolve it...... if you let them, they will do so.


yes, here and there, now and then, are many people, many experiences, no two people entirely, or vaguely, the same; alike is something different, a shared space, a commons.

The average does not exist.

The averaging of humanity is a lie.

The healthy have a history, a dated chronology going back, 80,000 years and more.

Pay attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlqx8EYvRbQ




Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Is' Freedom' an illusion born of relative comfort within a violent hierarchical society.

There is no freedom within a Hierarchy of Violence and Power.

Trump is not free, nor are the Iranians.



The Palestinians are not free, and neither are the Israelis..

They may experience relative differences in how they feel they are and conflate those with freedom or a lack of it, yet none in those situations are free.

They are all trapped by the psychology of hierarchy and violent power relationships.

The USA, as self-assigned 'champions of freedom' is not free at all.

It is locked into a global pathology that it is enacting.

Where is your freedom to stop the US wars?

What freedom did the Iraqi or Libyan people have to say

"No! You cannot start wars on our land, our peoples!"

Who spoke for either at the time?

No one did.

Freedom is an illusion, a delusion conflated with relative comfort.

The entire psyche of competing industrialised militarised powers is a global psychopathy. and as long as it persists then freedom remains a delusion of the middle classes.

Egalitarian behaviour is our basic biological setting - co-operation is what biology is all about.

The Hierarchy system projects it's own psyche onto biology, calling it a struggle for survival.

Geuss what - Hierarchies of power are inherently unstable, and are constantly seeking to buttress their structures by competing violently... it's pathological behaviour... and because they are normalised to it then easily project it onto biology.

Patriarchy has nothing to do with being Male, it is to do with behaving as the Hierarch Cultural Archetype approved in such a system, for men.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Battle of the Billions. Whose Billions Rules, whose Governs?

Billionaires, Wealth Funds, Tax Havened Wealth - people and organisations that have amassed vast fortunes, harvested from the general population, via the industrial consumer culture, which involves exploitation of any number of environmental and human vulnerabilities, through predatory economic systems owned by established Oligarchies...

Capitalist Billionaires use their Billions as political tools, to promote their continued status as economic and political hegemons, as rulers...

Churches do the same, of course... both Institutions collect funds from the 'faithful' which are used to enhance the status of the Institution. One pretends social service, the other spiritual service.

Their urge for vast wealth is not some personal flaw, it is not a banal greed for money itself, as much as it is the need for a very large fluid budget ie - the money, to feed and exercise the Power.

Capital is the unspoken Political Party, and we find it's comrades in every party, in every area of concern to Power.

Because some people conflate Capitalism with the Industrial Factory system, with trading, with the day to day business of working, buying and selling they can be frighted by calls to 'End Capitalism!' because it seems to them to mean end of all production, end of all luxuries and modern conveniences plus total social breakdown. It does not.

"End Capitalism!"

Ending Capitalism simply means confronting the Corporate Financial interference into civil and legislative matters of the commons, and it means confronting it in order to disable it, whilst taking up the shared tasks of healthy Governance.

Capitalism, and others, generally funds small actors in all sides of every mainstream discourse or problem and equally often they are silently supporting various extremes, on the sides of the angry, on the violent pushing and shoving of belief, faith and tradition, all  of it competing with evidence - it works,  it fosters division.

  As we see in competing identity politics - Brexit - distracting from the bullying which people who are 'different' are so often subjected to, often with mainstream media approval.

This in an age of better informed citizens where beleif, faith and tradition are exposed to the light of evidence, and are found wanting,.

Evidence matters,.

Power cannot be exercised unless one has an appropriate budget.

Power needs Wealth, Power needs aq constant supply of disposable, renwable income.

Capitalism is the political ideology of Wealth Rules All.

It is not factories and shops, even thouse do occur in Capitalist systems..

Capitalism is political rule by Oligarchs and their private wealth.

Ordinary folk cannot compete with such wealth.

I have £50 to my name...

And yet...

When we realise and understand that all taxation originates with and belongs to the ordinary citizen and is held in trust by Government, we can look again and perhaps see that we do have the economic and legislative tools with which we can regulate the Oligarchs.

All the wealth of Billionaires originated in our shopping, our working.. time to take a stand, a rational, evidence based stand.

Our Taxes, Our Billions, our Legislatures, our Judiciaries, us organised, our Political Power...

Regulate the Oligarchs, expose the press media to critical analysis, and confront liars... re-instate social care, environmental care and community as core operational practical values of Governance and the Civil Service.

We must take up the challenge, and occupy the legislatures, the judiciaries, the civil service, the other services, and do so democratically.

We must organise to fire the Corporate placemen and women.

Do business, we say the CEO, and stay away from Civil Governance.. 

#nowthatiswhaticalltakingbackcontrol

Every business profits from civil infrastructure, education, health systems, reseach so they ought to consider it a privilege to operate in the commons, rather an exploitable opportunity, a predators prey scape.

It's a privilege to be an operator in the commons. And there are responsibilities with that privilege. Do no harm, cause no toxic spill.........etc.,
An important step to confront the Billionaires is to assert control of our taxes as a collective, as 'our billions.'

And the only safe way to do that is to bring politics into the 21st Century of evidence, out of the dark ages of belief and opinion. Penalise lies in  public office severely.

The Commons demands those who avail of it cause no harm, to the commons or to any other. It demands that the use of the Commons is transparent.

As a citizen, I appeal to all other citizens, as a tax payer I call to all taxpayers, to see that the collected taxes are our billions, and we must deploy them well, to nurture society by nurturing all the people and the environment.

The profit of our endeavour is happy communities, of happy people, who are free of chronic stressors induced by politics or economics...


Kindest regards

It's not about what party will do what, it's about who will take up the task, on our call, during our watch, with our budget and our full support, to rebalance our social systems in favour of nurture.


Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog.

All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find, and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easier as a consequence.