This is a video from 2018, so it’s a post-mortem of Trump’s election, and at the time was very incisive analysis, but retrospect has made it even more interesting to me and I am curious what people’s thoughts are here.
Essentially the death of euphemism should be taken as a warning sign that the far-right feels more confident that they no longer have to hold up a mask and that, rather than having to court moderate republicans by giving them plausible deniability, they are going to get to dictate the terms for the party going forward.
This 2018 video pre-dates what we now know from the October 2019 books about Cambridge Analytica and their endorsement of this kind of aggressive approach. It’s worked, and I see no evidence that people have lost faith in strong hate as a motivation technique - the copycats of what Cambridge Analytica seeded on the Internet and in society-wide culture have grown and it’s become standard technique. It was already in play in 2014 bottom-up on social media and few people noticed, they just started adopting it, and then 2015 Trump started echoing it from top down.
Carl Sagan’s 1995 book, Demon Haunted World, spells out the fears he had about a future possibility of people favoring mocking and not taking science seriously. I think the pandemic was a demonstration of that, people didn’t even care that their friends and family would die, they would argue against basic facts.
I guess I’m wondering if there is a hard limit to how many hateful people you can realistically scrape together with lies
I’ve lived in the Middle East, and been through a Internet revolution back in late 2010 in Africa. The Taliban won recently, once people get favoring lies and mocking each other, it almost never comes back. What Cambridge Analytica unleashed wasn’t containable - it goes way beyond the individuals they target, it was incredibly powerful, it’s a kind of technique that wins debate with appeal to the worst parts of the human brain.
“And our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. There is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion.” - this was professionally trained psychologists/psychiatrists, this is weaponized against the flaws of the human brain after all human history learning. We may never recover and it be technique that just keeps getting applied until higher thinking is openly mocked. Like what you see in Cambodia during the Killing Fields years, but on a global scale. The Middle East has been in this cycle of fiction based hate over media content for well over a thousand years.
This 2018 video pre-dates what we now know from the October 2019 books about Cambridge Analytica and their endorsement of this kind of aggressive approach. It’s worked, and I see no evidence that people have lost faith in strong hate as a motivation technique - the copycats of what Cambridge Analytica seeded on the Internet and in society-wide culture have grown and it’s become standard technique. It was already in play in 2014 bottom-up on social media and few people noticed, they just started adopting it, and then 2015 Trump started echoing it from top down.
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No, not at all. This February 2017 story spells out the significance of what I think Cambridge Analytica was doing to people since 2013/14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/23/harvard-scientist-worries-were-reverting-to-a-pre-enlightenment-form-of-thinking/
Carl Sagan’s 1995 book, Demon Haunted World, spells out the fears he had about a future possibility of people favoring mocking and not taking science seriously. I think the pandemic was a demonstration of that, people didn’t even care that their friends and family would die, they would argue against basic facts.
I’ve lived in the Middle East, and been through a Internet revolution back in late 2010 in Africa. The Taliban won recently, once people get favoring lies and mocking each other, it almost never comes back. What Cambridge Analytica unleashed wasn’t containable - it goes way beyond the individuals they target, it was incredibly powerful, it’s a kind of technique that wins debate with appeal to the worst parts of the human brain.
“And our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. There is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion.” - this was professionally trained psychologists/psychiatrists, this is weaponized against the flaws of the human brain after all human history learning. We may never recover and it be technique that just keeps getting applied until higher thinking is openly mocked. Like what you see in Cambodia during the Killing Fields years, but on a global scale. The Middle East has been in this cycle of fiction based hate over media content for well over a thousand years.