Penguin wrote:Yea, Uncle Scam. Here was some stuff about SCL and Behavioural Dynamics Institute I posted some time back (among other similar firms) -
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... p?p=276636(Wikipedia bullies at it still)
The Behavioural Dynamics Institute is an academic institute that specialises in understanding influence and persuasion in order to change audiences’ attitudes and behaviour. The institute specialises in applying its methodology to military and political campaigns, where the audiences are hostile or friendly, national or international.
The BDi was formed in 1990 and has invested over £19m in developing scientific approaches for ‘influencing a target audience’. The unique methodology draws extensively from group and social psychology and incorporates semiotics, semantics and many elements of cultural anthropology.
The BDi harnesses the leading academics from universities around the world so
that the ‘persuasion and influence’ body of knowledge is constantly at the cutting edge. Using advanced research techniques, the BDi can accurately diagnose an audience from within (in theatre) or remotely, so that a clear understanding of the group dynamics can be ascertained.
The BDi then develops the most powerful psychological approach (using the data) to produce a programme of communication and ‘perceptions,’ which will be the most likely to engineer the desired result from the Target Audience. The attitude and behavioural changes are highly quantifiable and accountable, generating a real MOE (Measure of Effectiveness) report.
The Behavioural Dynamics Institute can tell you how ‘difficult’ an audience is likely to be, how best to influence the audience and then can actually produce the communications or triggers that will change the audience.
That's exactly the state of the art, as it long has been, and as it's long well known to have been. With technological upgrades since the days of Edward Bernays. And it's not just used in obviously political contexts. All major media runs to a greater or lesser degree on the techniques above-described.
In fact, when you remind yourself that the text is, after all, a communication that's using the most powerful psychological approach possible to influence your attitude toward what they're describing in a way that's beneficial to them for long enough to shake off the rhetorical hype, you may recall that it used to be called "focus-grouping." It can definitely be and definitely is used both to create and to reinforce a consensus view of such broadly based "truths" as Who We Are and What We Stand For as (
MEMBERS OF THE TARGET AUDIENCE HERE).
Which in turn provides the foundation on which all propagandists, psi-operators, and politicians (not to mention corporations that sell stuff) build the various mass-culturally communicated narratives that pretty much everybody alive reflexively accepts in whole or in part as the objective "truths" of the world they live in. And that applies pretty much equally to the default narrative "reality" within which whole cultures and nations of people understand and experience the events of their lives and to the default narrative "reality" within which this or that faction of conspiracy theorists understand and experience the very same events.
Sinister forces, including but not limited to the news media, Disney, and the CIA, do definitely not only manipulate people's perceptions but also fabricate major events that are staged solely or partly for that purpose. Which I've never seen anyone on this board dispute, and don't dispute myself. It's sinister and it very effectively prevents the vast majority of the world's population from living meaningfully free or self-determined lives. I object to and oppose it with all the resources I've got.
The timid lurkers should now avert their eyes while I savagely point out that I've very, very rarely personally flamed Hugh or anyone else.*** Nor have I gone around the board electioneering against him among the RI citizenry at large, for example. Nor have I started threads badjacketing his username out of pure angry spite. Nor have I ever denied that either that psi-ops and propaganda are very real and very damaging.
I apologize in advance for being so childish and thin-skinned that I'm even going to go off-consensus-narrative here. But:
There were numerous posters expressing their disagreements with Hugh in the form of unrestrained vicious personal attacks on a regular basis for years before I even started posting here. As there still are, from time to time. Not too long ago, I called someone out for interrupting a thread on which Hugh and I were strongly disagreeing with each other for doing what I understood at the time to be exactly that. And I'm perfectly willing to name names: professor pan.
I'm now going to go laterally off-topic for two paragraphs. So WARNING: Please skip them if you're in any danger of being driven into a lurking state of silence by their dreadful menace.
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Who also has a tendency to conveniently disappear when he'd otherwise have to admit that he'd been wrong, coincidentally. Because you know what? Hugh's not the only poster who does that. As a matter of fact, Hugh and profpan aren't even the only two posters who do that. I'm only mentioning them by name because I'm certain that I've straightforwardly called both of them for that particular debating foul when it was one to their faces and then moved on. As I may have on other occasions with other posters, too, though I don't make a habit out of it.
Most of the time I just chalk it up to a little extra sensitivity. Everybody has their vulnerabilities. Which I'm sure I don't infallibly perceive and honor, since I'm not infallible, being, you know, human and stuff. But nor do I ever feel that honoring them is any kind of imposition on me when I do perceive them. Because being human and stuff, I can identify.
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Anyway. I just wanted to clarify by restating the same basis for my disagreement with Hugh wrt the list of terms in the OP that I've already repeatedly stated very clearly. It is this:
None of those techniques has been clinically or practically established as making anyone even remotely capable of influencing the attitudes and behaviors of other by embedding cues in popular media and its by-products that look or sound like a commonly referenced component of a totally unrelated news event. There's no evidence of that kind at all that supports the claim that they do. Not when they're contemporaneous with those event, and not when they're years in the past or future.
It's therefore not possible for anyone to use a search engine to discover that I'm full of shit for saying Hugh's flatly wrong to claim that there's so much proof just hanging around out there ubiquitously validating him that it's not even necessary for him to point people who ask him where it is in its direction.
Because it's not there. I say so as a matter of conviction. Because I feel strongly that people are disempowered when they're misinformed about how the world and their own cognition and behavior actually operate.
I'm not proud of that, but I really can't help it. That's just my personality. So please be as sensitive to my irrational freak-out as you can.
Thanks.
