OMG! Midterm Voters Don’t Give a Damn About Gun Control! OMG!

Neighbor is on the election committee.
The new method, seems kinda iffy.
However, it also requires an electoral (I know him too) to certify the ballot as legit.
Regardless, there is a paper trail.

No, they love Dominion. You’re thinking of Diebold.

They both suck, but Dominion has a paper trail so when it mysteriously swaps votes you can hand count votes until the bureaucrats tell you otherwise.

It’s a quote, verbatim. Well, at least thought for thought…😉

Rant, “c’mon man” …

Southern, I have you beat at zero.

Well yes I just think a lot of the freakout will be the loss of the echo chamber of “legitimacy” that they were so used to.

dacian just keeps posting

@possum:

Because a certain cohort here can’t stop feeding the trolls.

Which Dacian?

it’s a communications platform, left or right. the left will make sure it’s a communications platform for the left or for no-one.

and that’s how they think about everything in the world. “ours, or it doesn’t exist.”

including you.

My spouse manages roughly 150 remote-working employees. Large companies have had to adapt to the ever-changing post-COVID workplace. When someone is terminated, their access to critical systems is gone before the employee even knows they are terminated to mitigate possible adverse actions by the (former) employee. Fortunately no sensitive data or programs are stored locally on the remote machines. They can still trash the company-owned computer…however, they signed for the property and if it is trashed they face legal action for the damaged property. They receive a FedEx box and return label within two days of termination in which to return company equipment.

It’s a master level troll, really. Multiple levels to it and it’s gone viral too.

Whatever else the guy may be, Elon is clearly fuckin’ hilarious.

Shrewd observation.

Gotta wonder if they found a faster way of doing it in the generation of tictok

[Nerd rant inbound.]

Ooooof. That’s a larger topic than you might realize, like an entire book and not a short one. The ultra short answer is “Yes”. The slightly longer answer is “Yes and no”, which has to do with the fact that much of this isn’t new, it’s been around for a long time but has gone unnoticed by most of the public. The delivery mechanism is new and it’s more effective in certain ways, particularly in the odd ways it is self-reinforcing due to differences in generations of people.

TikTok uses an entirely different mechanism to manipulate people. Social media is similar to slot machines and general casino gaming, it’s a mostly Pavlovian reward system that plays on several neurotransmitter pathways to hijack the brain and it uses Freudian tricks to make this initially appealing so that people come back for more doses. All of these conditioning mechanisms require repetition to program behavior. Social media also uses an interesting mix of positive/negative reinforcement via vote-systems. Wrongthink is immediately and severely punished. It’s like rewarding a dog for good behavior and really beating the shit out of it immediately for bad behavior.

In this regard TikTok’s similar to Twitter and Facebook in that it has the same basic functionality and it’s addictive and fits in your pocket thanks to phones. TikTok takes lessons on how to make aspects of the program more addictive, learned from prior iterations of social media, and puts them on steroids too.

But they all basically train you like a person trains a dog. That’s part of why they’re so much more effective on young people who don’t have the experience/fully formed brain to resist. Schools, these days, function in many of the same ways and use linked-reinforcement from social media to amplify the effects of the school and social media. Interlocking fields of fire, if you want to run with a gun analogy. Either way, they target people who are the “blankest slate” because that means there’s less to attempt to overwrite which the Pavlovians discovered was pretty hard to do.

TV, basically, works by a form of hypnosis and plays heavily on the fact that most people believe hypnosis doesn’t work. That’s a balancing act in some regards. It’s not meant to work too well or it would be obvious how manipulative it is. It’s true strength is also in repetition just like the web, which is based on people repeatedly coming back for another dose because the source of the advertising is addictive but not for the same reason as social media (affirmation).

TV “informs”, which cloaks its addictive nature in a manner which FB, Twitter and TT don’t really have in a lot of cases because they don’t really need it as much. This is why TV is the preferred outlet for propaganda directed at old people. Boomers are the TV generation. They’re also huge as current generations go, like 78 million of them. Most of them believe that they watch TV for information, and that’s the insertion point for both Freudian and Pavlovian manipulation. It’s 1/2 of the source of generational warfare too. Propaganda works on multiple levels and TV news plays heavily on a couple of them, first being “fact based” (this isn’t manipulating you and you’re here because you’re smart and know this!) and secondly, decades of repetition that has built a misplaced trust. Stats on TV vs internet as an information source coupled with a week or so of observation of both from a good vantage point will perfectly explain the “Boomer vs. Millennial” thing for you. Both sides are being heavily manipulated and specifically against the other group by the very thing that’s fucking both of them. This is a two-way (technically four way) emotional manipulation commonly found in cults, btw.

I’ll digress at this point, this could go on for many pages more and barely stratch the surface. Overarching point being: This is complicated and runs on incentives that are short-term based rather than long. This has lead to corruption. This is highly manipulative and the people who are the most far-gone are the ones who vehemently deny that they are susceptible to this. These things operate on deep brain systems. No person born is immune. They work on dogs, cats, lizards and birds. These things play on brain functionality found in most species on this planet. It is only untrainable creatures, like insects, that this doesn’t work on because their neurobiology is fundamentally different.

Well, if you care that much, SAFE, a fairly long comment is in moderation.

Also ignore the keystroke error in the formatting that turned most of it bold. Only the first bold word was meant to be bold.

Will keep an eye out for it also on the oddball stuff that came up in passing, ever heard of a document titled Silent weapons for quiet wars?

strych finally saw your nerd rant post and …………..yeah pretty much what I noticed back when I was in college. Lot of excess admissions and many of the departments were not productive fields of study unless you wanted to be a professor (or politician lately). The cult analogy is perfect as multiple levels (short attention span + long rants + everyone reinforcing the message) were exactly what we found with NXIVM (see Vanguard retreats executive training and others). It would also explain why any counter culture (see independent thinking) is quickly condemned and limited on the platform when possible as it is a quick crack in the narrative that is catchy and while not enough to break the programming is enough to create questions.

IIRC, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars is a treatise on biowarfare?

I know there’s a book on it, I haven’t personally read it so I’ll limit my commentary to basically nothing and go see if there’s a copy available on B&N… (there is, $11.99. Ordered.)

NXIVM is something I never really delved into either. I’d have to go look at it before commenting on it, but a lot of those “personal improvement” systems are borderline cult shit. Every notice how they’re rarely run on long-established systems elucidated by psychologists as a set of suggestions? It’s always some sorta weird fucky person?

…it is a quick crack in the narrative that is catchy and while not enough to break the programming is enough to create questions.

This is the least allowable thing, for the reasons I note. Your brain is searching for patterns and looking for deviation from the expected. When the unexpected is found you have an emotional reaction we usually call “surprise”, a mix of anxiety and curiosity. If sufficiently alarmed you run away, otherwise your curiosity leads you to investigate.

The latter being absolutely unacceptable to the manipulator. Which is why they push “entertainment” of the “right type”. I point this out about the music industry all the time. Rap’s a good example. Big record labels push a specific, and quite narrow, brand of rap that keeps you from asking “What the actual fuck is going on in these neighborhoods?” because the popular, widespread music seems to provide a perfect explanation. They do NOT push the music that doesn’t bolster the preferred narrative, which is actually most rap and hip-hop. Meanwhile, country music is promoted in a similar manner but in another direction by the same labels and industry. Odd, that, huh?

Music is always a tricky one but the independent label sometimes has some fun ones. Tom Macdonald, Topher, Chris Webby, Adam Calhoun, Burden (and a bunch that do collaborations with the previous). May still be (likely is) various levels of programming but a lot more enjoyable than on message music.

Interesting that you bring that up, it’s another level of what I’m talking about.

“Indie labels” mostly owned by the Major labels through a series of shell corporations, this is true at least of all the labels that get their artists on the “Indie” charts.

That’s why people like Tom McDonald don’t have a label at all, they are fully independent. Which is also why they don’t show up on Billboard even when they outsell the #1 group/artist on the chart. Because Billboard is owned by the labels too and exists to promote those artists that are on the label.

The only one that comes to mind as actually semi-independent is Epitaph, which owns Hellcat. There are others in other genres, but not really that many truly Indie as opposed to “Indie”. If you chart through the “Parent Organizations” of the latter you usually end up back at Sony, Viacom or similar.

While that’s not always true but true more often than not. And note how few actual indie artists make any sort of chart worth talking about regardless of sales. I mean, sure, breaking the Billboard Top 200 is cool and all but look at a band like The Interrupters which gets massive radio play all over the country on top of stupid high internet traffic but their top charting song ever was 141/200 and that was back in 2018.

And likely you won’t see them chart higher than that (though they currently have a song at 145/200, their second charting sinlge) because they don’t have the right distribution contract to get everything they do counted. Again, like Tom. He can blow out Apple’s store and YT and a bunch of other services that keep records and still be kept out of the 200 Singles chart because of how things are counted in favor of the Majors.

Big companies, in this regard, are selling a message. One might ask what that message is and why they want to sell it.

Not a hard message to puzzle but sadly one easily followed, be compliant with what we want of you and if not don’t step out of line in ways we don’t like/can’t profit off of. What gets interesting is how much money they are willing to lose to control the platform/message which gets quickly to your point and rapidly connects with old CIA programs.

You’re right about the message to the artists, I was referring to what they’re “selling” to the public.

IMHO, when you go through and look and who owns what it’s fairly clear that they are selling a message that is intentionally divisive. It’s been set up in a way that means that, at a glance, *those* people don’t have a valid story to tell, so why listen to them?

Look at how many older folks hate Hip-hop and say it’s all gangster shit. But IRL most rap isn’t gangster shit, just the stuff that’s being pushed. You can see an opposite message being pushed in Country.

IMHO, the point is to try to set up a situation where it’s hard for people to discuss what might or might not be a reflection of reality in music because the music is being curated in a way that’s designed to make that conversation as hard as possible.

And if you look at how musicians themselves talk about influences and you trace the history of US music you find that both Country and hip-hop flow from R&B, Blues and Jazz. And, in fact, both Hip-hop and country music inform each other in real time. The artists often have very similar takes on things too, which isn’t surprising once you get to the heart of what each type of music is.

But you’d never know that from radio or the charts which push to very divergent viewpoints. It’s been amusing to me for a long time how Hip-hop and Rap going back to the 1980’s are mostly against drugs, gangbanging and, quite frankly, distrustful of government and about self-sufficiency. Again, something you’d never know from listening to most of the pop stuff that’s heavily promoted.