Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Apr 03, 2018 6:37 pm

.
DrEvil » Tue Apr 03, 2018 3:10 pm wrote:
Belligerent Savant » Tue Apr 03, 2018 9:02 pm wrote:.

Indeed.

Though I'd imagine we can locate a few tribes that don't suck. Most of the Palestinians don't suck, in my view. Native Americans have a perpetual pass as well...

(the groups found on the bottoms of boots, essentially.)


I'd say that most people don't suck as long as they have a normal, peaceful life. The problem is when life gets shit on by the fuckheads pulling the strings and playing the great "game". That can turn even the most reasonable person into a zealot. Given the situation the Kurds are in I completely understand why they do things that I normally wouldn't agree with. You can only step on people so many times before they start punching back.

Same goes for the Palestinians, although I have very little sympathy for Hamas. I understand why they're pissed and agree with their grievances, but I can't stomach their religious horseshit. They've essentially hijacked a just cause to promote their own warped one.


Wise words -- surprising, coming from a Doctor of Evil... :moresarcasm :wink
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 03, 2018 7:06 pm

SRP-I carried things over to "Rhetoric and the art of Collaborative Discussion" so as to try to maintain the integrity of this thread.
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby American Dream » Mon Apr 16, 2018 10:17 am

Back to topic:


Chapter 5: Undermining the West through Mass Media

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German neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel launching his “Voice of Freedom” programme: “We hope to be politically incorrect, uncorrect. […] We want to bring you the rebels”.




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Margarita Simonyan, Editor-in-Chief of Russia Today (later, RT).




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American far-right activist Lyndon LaRouche, a special guest on Russia Today on the 21st of August 2008.




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American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer as an “expert” on Libya on RT, 9 July 2012.



More at: http://www.tango-noir.com/2017/10/07/ch ... -pictures/
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby Sounder » Wed Apr 18, 2018 4:39 am

Is this propaganda?

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-smoki ... wn/5636570


Today I was going to write about how mainstream media propaganda over the use of chemical weapons in Douma, Syria – had reached hysteria mode two days ago and then suddenly today, stopped. The silence was both abrupt and stunning. The national newspapers went from the outrage of the chemical attack, Russian confrontation and Britain’s saintly ‘humanitarian’ role of bombing another country to, well …. Ant McPartin’s drink-drive episode in The Sun, The Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Telegraph – and the Windrush scandal in The Times, the Independent and Guardian. Nothing about the UK, US and France bringing the world to the centre of a truly global crisis.

There’s a reason.

Mainstream media, the government and the propagandists have just been called out as liars – by one of their own. Irrefutable, hard evidence has just come forward that totally destroys the story of chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government in Douma. Theresa May and her cabinet now stand in the dock.


Twice winner of the British Press Awards‘ Journalist of the Year prize, and seven-time winner of the British Press Awards’ Foreign Correspondent of the Year, Robert Fisk has been Middle East correspondent since 1976 for various media; since 1989 he has been correspondent for The Independent, primarily based in Beirut. Just to be sure of his credentials though, he has lived in the Arab world for more than 40 years, covering Lebanon, five Israeli invasions, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Algerian civil war, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the 2011 Arab revolutions. There’s no doubting this man’s C.V.

He has managed to make his journey unaccompanied by Russian or Syrian officials – to Douma, the site of the so-called attack that three Western governments decided was enough evidence to be the pretext for the bombing a sovereign state that could have escalated into something much worse.

Apart from his own account, he gets the testimony of a senior English-speaking doctor at the clinic that treated victims of what a video purported were chemical weapons used by the Syrian government.

That doctor says the video was real, but did not show the effects of a chemical weapons attack. It showed something completely different. This is what the doctor is reported as saying. Below is Fisk’s own account.


RI or my computer will not let me post whole articles, others seem to have no issues with this.
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby American Dream » Wed Apr 18, 2018 8:24 am

Robert Fisk seems like a sketchy character to me...


Fisking Douma

Image
Robert Fisk


With Syria and Russia claiming that East Ghouta is under “full control”, we can understand why Robert Fisk would saunter in with his sleeves rolled up to do some investigative reporting for the Independent. Meanwhile, Syria says that it is “too dangerous” for OPCW to do their own investigations even if it is safe enough for Fisk or any other malleable journalist. Could Syria be buying time to cover up evidence? Who would suspect them of that unless they were for “regime change” and funded by the Rothschild Bank, I guess.

Fisk’s article is really the sort of thing that could occupy an entire semester in a journalism class as an example of what not to do. Fisk is essentially Judith Miller but in a kind of reverse-kryptonite version. Instead of being embedded with the American invasion like Miller was, Fisk is escorted around by Syrian troops. Instead of functioning as a propagandist for George W. Bush, Fisk serves another master in Damascus. Is there anything that Miller and Fisk share in common? Certainly. It is the Islamophobia that allowed both to justify their support of war crimes in the name of stopping al-Qaeda.

In an article titled “The search for truth in the rubble of Douma – and one doctor’s doubts over the chemical attack”, Fisk relies on the word of a physician named Assim Rahaibani who refers to the rebels in Douma as “terrorists”, Fisk adding that this is “the regime’s word for their enemies.” Would a journalism class question the use of relying solely on someone like this? Even Fisk has to admit, “Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?” This of course is a rhetorical question because he never had any intention of getting any other version except one that would serve Bashar al-Assad. In seven years of reporting on Syria, there has never been an attempt to get outside his pro-regime comfort zone.

Dr. Rahaibani assures Fisk that no chemical attack took place. Instead, because of a conventional bombing attack, “huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived.” (Generally, dust clouds float upwards but let’s not trouble ourselves over this rather minor defect in an article filled with Goebbels-like fabrications.) This led to an onrush of people to his hospital suffering hypoxia or oxygen loss. Then after a White Helmet member on the scene shouted “Gas!”, a panic began and people started throwing water over each other. Nothing more to see here. Move along, folks.

Not every doctor agrees with Rahaibani. In today’s Guardian, Martin Chulov describes what they were up against:

The head of the largest medical relief agency in Syria claims that medics who responded to the suspected gas attack in Douma have been subjected to “extreme intimidation” by Syrian officials who seized biological samples, forced them to abandon patients and demanded their silence.

Dr Ghanem Tayara, the director of the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM) said doctors responsible for treating patients in the hours after the 7 April attack have been told that their families will be at risk if they offer public testimonies about what took place.

A number of doctors who spoke to the Guardian this week say the intimidation from the regime has increased in the past five days, a timeframe that coincides with the arrival in Damascus of a team from the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which aims to determine whether chemical weapons were used. All the medics insisted on anonymity, citing the fear for their lives and those of their families.

“There has been a very heavy security presence on the ground ever since the attack and they have been targeting doctors and medics in a very straightforward way,” said Dr Tayara, a Birmingham-based physician, now in Turkey where he is supervising the departure from Syria of some of the Douma medics. “Any medic who tried to leave Douma was searched so vigorously, especially for samples. At one medical point, seven casualties were taken away. The Russian military police were heavily involved. They were directing things.”


Fisk has the temerity to explain the absence of OPCW investigators as if it were simply a matter of bureaucratic delay, like getting your license renewed at the Motor Vehicles Bureau:

At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they lacked the correct UN permits.


Russia claims that security concerns have led the UN to delay giving permission to the OPCW investigators but if you spend 5 minutes looking into this question, you will discover that this is a lie. Yesterday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said: “The United Nations has provided the necessary clearances for the OPCW team to go about its work in Douma. We have not denied the team any request for it to go to Douma.”

Continuing in Milleresque fashion, Fisk writes:

There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups.


How did he find these “many people”? Strolling down the street or through dating services provided by the Syrian secret police? Fisk is sure to add that he “walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook.” Odd that this being the case, he could not find a soul that opposed Assad. If you had no knowledge of East Ghouta, you would probably take Fisk at his word. But if you understood that the religiously observant and poverty-stricken agricultural belt around Damascus was the first to rise up, you’d have to be skeptical. Fisk says that “a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.” Well, I am surprised that he is surprised since the city’s make-up was well known to genuine reporters like Aron Lund, whose integrity is beyond reproach:

Many inhabitants of the Ghouta and the bulging suburbs of eastern Damascus were new arrivals, escaping from drought-stricken parts of Syria to compete over low-paying, menial jobs. They bristled at the glittering wealth, the class divides and the corruption of the capital. Others were part of the Ghouta’s original population, but among them, too, anti-regime sentiment grew alongside the social crisis of the early 2000s. In conservative Sunni towns like Douma, known for its piety as “the city of minarets,” the Sunni-fundamentalist teachings of Salafism were gaining ground. The Salafists excoriated the secularism of the ruling Baath Party and its rapacious corruption as two sides of the same coin.


Well, those Salafists will no longer trouble East Ghouta. In fact, after Assad is finished with these pockets of discontent, he will be free to reconstruct Syria as a place that has been purged of the Sunni poor with their hijabs and their AK-47s. In an article titled “Creating a New Syria: Property, Dispossession, and Regime Survival” Erwin van Veen describes the coming gentrification that would have made Robert Moses green with envy. Who knows? Maybe Jared Kushner has begun consulting with Syrian investors about mega-projects co-funded by Saudi Arabia:

An additional consequence of Law no. 10 is that it will enable large-scale demographic engineering by reallocating appropriated property to new owners. This will not necessarily be sectarian in nature as the majority of both Syrians and regime-loyalists are Sunni. Rather, it will create large loyalist urban centers to underpin the regime’s power base and limit the return of refugees, who are largely not perceived as supporters of President Assad.

In addition to remaking urban centers as areas of repopulated loyalist concentration, the strategy will probably also involve undoing the existence of impoverished Sunni-belts around Syria’s main cities from which so many rebels were recruited. Insofar as these poorer suburbs are currently depopulated due to rebel recruitment, casualties, and flight, the regime is likely to use Law No. 10 to appropriate the land (in many such areas, property rights were not well established even before the war) and to then prevent their resettlement if and when refugees return. Any Sunni populations that have not fled but are still living in such suburbs at present will also be at risk of forced displacement and dispossession commensurate with the extent of their perceived disloyalty to the regime. It is clear that the regime has no problem initiating displacement on a large scale when it suits regime interests. Dealing with the suburban belts in this fashion will remove a source of resistance against the regime once and for all.


Richard Hall, a former editor at the Independent, took to Twitter to debunk Fisk’s reporting:

Robert Fisk is allowed access to Douma before OCPW inspectors are allowed in. Doesn’t speak to any witnesses of the attack, only a doctor who didn’t see it, but says everyone “knows what happened.”

Fisk seems perplexed why victims of the attack did not hang around in Douma when the government took over the area. And doesn’t seriously deal with the fact that those who stayed behind might not be able to speak freely.

Fisk is among a handful of journalists given regular access by Syrian government. He and others are shepherded in on minded trips when it is useful for the government. Journalists who do make it in and write something that counters the government narrative are not allowed back.

Fisk notes in his piece that he was granted access to the site before chemical weapons inspectors. As were a number of other journalists who — let’s be generous here — toe the government line. That feels like an attempt to muddy the waters ahead of an independent investigation.


In his own critique of Fisk, Scott Lucas of EA Worldview provides a translation of an interview that a Swedish reporter conducted with a Douma resident. Somehow the reporter managed to make it into Douma just like Fisk but without the predisposition to absolve Assad. The Douma resident stated:

We were sitting in the basement when it happened. The [missile] hit the house at 7 pm. We ran out while the women and children ran inside. They didn’t know the house had been struck from above and was totally filled with gas.

Those who ran inside died immediately. I ran out completely dizzy….Everybody died. My wife, my brothers, my mother. Everybody died.

Women and children sat in here, and boys & men sat there. Suddenly there was a sound as if the valve of a gas tube was opened.

It’s very difficult to explain. I can’t explain. I don’t know what I should say. The situation makes me cry. Children & toddlers, around 25 children.


Fisk’s reporting has gained so much notoriety over his service to the Baathist dictatorship that it has helped to coin a term: “fisking”. (I have subsequently learned that it was the rightwing that first used the term but that does not let his reporting since 2011 off the hook.) It is not just his embedded reporting from Syria that has come under scrutiny. Brian Whitaker, a long-time editor and reporter for The Guardian, is something of an expert on Fisk. This article on his personal website Al-Bab should reveal how questionable Fisk is across the board:

Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent, once offered this advice to would-be journalists: “If you want to be a reporter you must establish a relationship with an editor in which he will let you write – he must trust you and you must make sure you make no mistakes.”

It was good advice, though perhaps more a case of “do as I say” than “do as I do”. Even if you disagree with Fisk’s articles or find them turgid, there’s still entertainment to be had from spotting his mistakes.

On Wednesday, for instance, anyone who read beyond the first paragraph of his column in The Independent would have found him asserting that Saudi Arabia had refused to take its place among “non-voting members” of the UN Security Council. He described this as an unprecedented step – which indeed it was, though not quite in the way Fisk imagines: the Security Council doesn’t have “non-voting” members (unless they choose to abstain). Presumably he meant “non-permanent members”.

Perhaps that is excusable, since the UN is not Fisk’s speciality. But he does specialise in reporting about the Middle East, and so we find him in a column last year informing readers that Syria had a stockpile of nuclear weapons – or, to be more precise, quoting President Obama as saying that it had:

“And then Obama told us last week that ‘given the regime’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, we will continue to make it clear to Assad … that the world is watching’.”

Obama’s actual words were: “Given the regime’s stockpile of chemical weapons, we will continue … etc.”

Fisk is at his most comical when he gets on his high horse and immediately falls off. Writing with (justified) indignation about the killings in Baba Amr last year, he began:

“So it’s the ‘cleaning’ of Baba Amr now, is it? ‘Tingheef’ in Arabic. Did that anonymous Syrian government official really use that word to the AP yesterday?”

Well, no. Obviously a Syrian official wouldn’t use the word ‘tingheef’, since it doesn’t exist in Arabic.


Let me conclude with a link to an article written by Idrees Ahmad, the fearless academic who has become the subject of an investigation by the administration at the University of Stirling after Assadist Tim Hayward lodged a complaint for Idrees’s ongoing critique of Assadist propaganda. Like Whitaker, he has been following Fisk for years and has focused on his Judith Miller-style embedded reporting:

In this context when one of Britain’s more celebrated war correspondents—a person known for his acerbic diatribes against docile western journalists—enters Aleppo and sees a destroyed ambulance righteous fury is sure to erupt. And Fisk doesn’t disappoint. There is the familiar bombast of superlatives. Things are “ghostly”, “ghastly”, “frightening”, and “horribly relevant”.

But it is the object of Fisk’s fury that is a surprise. Fisk is not angry at an ambulance being bombed. Indeed, he heavily implies that the bombing was merited. Fisk devotes much of the article to implicating the Scottish charity that donated the ambulance. In his curious legal brief against medical aid, Fisk’s allies are not facts but suggestion, insinuation and innuendo. His method is insidious and part of a pattern. It merits closer scrutiny.

For the past four years Fisk has reported from Syria embedded with the regime. The regime herds him to the places it wants him to see and the people it wants him to interrogate—and Fisk appears to yield to the controlling arms of his handlers with the somnambulant innocence of a debutante. On more than a few occasions he has echoed the regime line without demur.

Take Daraya. After a horrific regime massacre, Fisk arrived at the site “in the company of armed Syrian forces” riding an “armoured vehicle” and after interviewing a few frightened survivors, wrote that contrary to “the popular version that has gone round the world”, the massacre was the outcome of a “failed prisoner swap”; the men who committed the crime “were armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops”.

In Daraya, however, no one was aware of this “prisoner swap”. And even his own interviewees didn’t support his conclusions. Most gave evasive answers. And the only interviewee he cites as supporting his theory casts further doubt on it: “Although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard,” writes Fisk, “he believed that most were related to the government army”.

The record was quickly set straight by the American journalist Janine di Giovanni who sneaked into Daraya disguised as a local and interviewed survivors without the intimidating presence of regime forces. (The Free Syrian Army had left two weeks earlier.) Di Giovanni revealed in precise detail how the offensive began, what weapons were used, and how the slaughter was carried out. Human Rights Watch corroborated her report.


https://louisproyect.org/2018/04/17/fisking-douma/
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Apr 18, 2018 12:49 pm

American Dream » Wed Apr 18, 2018 7:24 am wrote:Robert Fisk seems like a sketchy character to me...


That is because Robert Fisk is a brave, honest and humane reporter who has spent years in warzones throughout the Arab world and who therefore actually has some clue what he is talking about. You hate that kind of thing. So naturally you just have to piss on him in passing, and of course you have to borrow Proyect's piss because you are incapable of pissing unaided. I suppose it makes a change from your other hobby, shitting on women such as Vanessa Beeley.

It's enirely natural that you would prefer hacks like the execrable Proyect and the grotesque Weinberg, two shameless and inveterate pseudleft wamongers, both of them ignorant, both of them sedentary, and both of them comfortably spectating in the imperial Homeland, just like you.
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby Elvis » Wed Apr 18, 2018 1:58 pm

Because the US/UK-funded White Helmets are so much more believable than Robert Fisk.

Louis Proyect flings the facile charge that Fisk holds a "predisposition to absolve Assad," that "he never had any intention of getting any other version except one that would serve Bashar al-Assad" and only works to "toe the [Syrian] government line"—

all this without once acknowledging the White Helmets' $100M funding by US/UK and their predisposition to vilify Assad and draw in more Western intervention.

That's one way these kinds of "sketchy" leftist authors only tell half the story—and much of the half they do tell consists of government PR rehashes and easy cheap shots like Fisk holding a "predisposition to absolve Assad."

It's quite obvious who holds the real predispositions.
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby Sounder » Wed May 02, 2018 10:25 am

Is Bolivian Ambassador Sasha Llorentty Soliz a Russian stooge or a class enemy like you say Putin and Assad are, AD?


https://www.globalresearch.ca/mass-hyst ... is/5638586

.......On April 13, just prior to the US, UK and France’s violation of international law and the UN Charter, in their bombing of Syria, Bolivian Ambassador Sasha Llorentty Soliz (image on the right) delivered one of the most courageous and brilliant speeches in UN history, completely unmasking the criminality, hypocrisy and brazen lies which are now the daily tirade to which the Security Council is subjected.

“For some reason, some members of the Security Council are avoiding addressing the main reason for convening this meeting, which is that one State Member has threatened the unilateral use of force in violation of the Charter of the United Nations…Over the past 72 years humankind has built a framework that is not only physical or institutional, but also juridical. Humankind has setup instruments of international law intended precisely to prevent the most powerful from attacking the weakest with impunity so as to establish a balance in the world and prevent grave violations to international peace and security….The Security Council must not be utilized as a sounding board for war propaganda nor interventionism. It should also not be made into a pawn to be sacrificed on the chessboard of war, geopolitics and petty interests…. We believe that this meeting is very important because we are not only discussing an attack on a Member State, or the threat of a military strike against a Member State of the United Nations, but rather because we are living at a time of constant attacks on multilateralism…Let us recall that there is a clear policy and mindset of multilateralism subversion. What happens is that for some the discourse on human rights is used until it no longer serves their interests, and then they violate those rights. My region is a witness to that. We endured Operation Condor, as it was called, during the 1970s, which was planned by the intelligence services of some Member States. When democracy did not suit them, they financed coups d’etat. When they were unhappy with the discourse on human rights, they infringed human rights. When the discourse of democracy was no longer enough, they were ready to finance coups d’etat. The use of unilateral practices leaves behind unhealed wounds, despite the passage of time.”

“Some of the members of the Council have spoken on the situation in Iraq and Libya, which I believe are some of the worst crimes that have been committed this century. The invasion of Iraq, with its dire consequences, left more than 1 million dead. The effects of the strikes against Libya and the regime-change policies imposed on it, which, as my colleague from Equatorial Guinea aptly said, they still feel, suffer and endure throughout the entire region of the Sahel and Central Africa. But no one wants to talk about the root causes of these conflicts, and no one will talk about the impunity enjoyed for those serious crimes. It warrants repeating. Those are the most serious crimes committed this century.”


Bolivia’s speech unmasked the “interests” underlying the current witch hunt, the subversion of multilateralism, the abdication by the UK, the US and France of their responsibility for many of the horrific human rights abuses occurring today, and the attempt to foist responsibility for their own crimes onto Russia and North Korea, a demonization opportunistically endorsed by most Western mainstream media, and which will be deceitfully used in an attempt to disguise more horrendous crimes in the future.......
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby American Dream » Thu May 03, 2018 10:20 am

Pro-Russia/Right forces have manipulated us again and again. It's time to stop our collaboration with that process.



BOTS AREN’T THE ENEMY IN THE INFORMATION WAR—WE ARE

Image

In rolling revelations all winter, Facebook and other tech companies admitted that potentially hundreds of millions of users had been tricked by data miners and harassed by trolls, including legions at the Internet Research Agency, the Russian outfit indicted by the Justice Department in February. That sounds like a cause for condolences. But trolled people troll people. Many victims turn around and enlist as foot soldiers, passing on their cognitive injuries to others. “Computational propaganda,” as the human-machine hybrid campaigns are known, has been described as a way of “hacking people.”

This damage to our brains is overdetermined. First, the crime is in the software. As WIRED’s own Adam Rogers predicted in 2015, “Google’s search algorithm”—with zero help from bad actors—“could steal the presidency.” But digitization has also simply overwhelmed us. The journalist Craig Silverman put it this way: “Our human faculties for sense-making, and evaluating and validating information, are being challenged and in some ways destroyed.” And the information war includes seasoned generals, including Yev­geny Prigozhin (a restaurateur, b. 1961 in Leningrad) and Mikhail Bystrov (a cop, said to be in his late fifties). These two men ran the IRA and deftly exploited America’s mental vulnerabilities, flammable culture, and opportunistic software.

The weapons are hybrids too. According to reports in March, Cambridge Analytica, the data firm employed by the Trump campaign, launched disinformation scripts and bulk provokatsiya. IRA did the same, but it also conscripted real people. Some of these are partisans, or freestyling trolls. But a smaller group willingly subjugate themselves to specific infowar efforts. In January, a woman in South Carolina—a phytocannabinoid seller in her mid-­sixties—seems to have mobilized her #MAGA-­festooned Twitter account to promote a Nunes-­supporting meme: “Release the memo.” “Make this trend,” she implored. Trend it did.

Computational propaganda, which describes human-machine collaboration in influence ops, was coined at the Oxford Internet Institute at Balliol College, Oxford. (Balliol was founded in 1263, the year King James I of Aragon aimed to sabotage significant information channels by censoring Hebrew writing.) The phrase describes the mixing of algorithms, automation, and human curation to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior.

That human curation is key. People can whitewash buggy botspeak by giving it a human sheen in a retweet. Curators can also identify the cultural flash points—the NFL, Colin Kaepernick, the memo—that fire people up, so botnets can ratchet up the velocity of the most incendiary memes. The writer Jamelle Bouie points out that, in the US, these “flash points” often entail racism. It takes an American idiom and id to properly troll the electorate.

Samantha Bradshaw, at the Oxford Internet Institute, recently documented the ways that 28 nations have used social media to shape opinion. In every case, the campaigns aimed to ape the style and habits of actual activists, and they caught on to the degree that they seemed human. The content didn’t need to be accurate or fair to be effective; it just needed to seem human, and humans with beating hearts are uniquely able to dispel the whiff of the uncanny from an automated script. Humans, of course, are indispensable when bodies are needed to show up in space or for photos.

As Bradshaw told the British parliament in testimony about hybrid information warfare, researchers lack the corporate datasets or government subpoena power to identify the exact humans involved in these campaigns. But the IRA indictments pointed the way to some Americans implicated in the Kremlin-sponsored infowar in 2016. When CNN approached two such people, they had contrasting responses.

“What would you think? A guy calls you and you talk to him and you build up a rapport over a period of time,” said Harry Miller, who was reportedly and unwittingly paid by some of the Russian indictees to cage Hillary Clinton in effigy. “They had that beautiful website.” By contrast, Florine Gruen Goldfarb, who mobilized Trumpites to demonstrate at an IRA-organized event, refused to accept that she’d been manipulated. “I don’t go with the Russians. C’mon, give me a break,” she said.

Bots have equanimity when it comes to contested stories. Humans decisively prefer to spread lies


The fact that the campaigns involve masquerade, deception, and anthropomorphism—the disguising of robots as people—is part of why the IRA is charged with fraud and not acts of war. It’s also why Americans are disinclined to see the internet and the nation as under siege. If we had swollen glands and bloody vomit, we’d accept a diagnosis of anthrax poisoning, but no one likes to see herself as cognitively vulnerable. Once, to my shame, I circulated some bot-­amplified lies about antifa. (The meme was “Antifa is just as bad as neo-Nazism.”) When caught out, I started to justify myself; fortunately, seeing disinfo as aerosolized anthrax—equally hard to detect—helped restore my confidence. I corrected my mistake. My immune system rallied. “No one likes to be told they’ve been duped,” Bradshaw told me by email. But we must be “more aware of the ways in which bad actors try to infiltrate our networks to manipulate our thoughts and actions.”


https://www.wired.com/story/social-medi ... ourselves/
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu May 03, 2018 12:58 pm

[quote="url=http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=656782#p656782]American Dream » Thu May 03, 2018 9:20 am[/url]Pro-Russia/Right forces have manipulated us again and again. It's time to stop our collaboration with that process.[/quote]

Is that the royal We? Or who, exactly, are you accusing, apart from yourself?
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby Elvis » Thu May 03, 2018 3:28 pm

we must be “more aware of the ways in which bad actors try to infiltrate our networks to manipulate our thoughts and actions."


This much goes for everyone, and I frequently see Wired as one of the bad actors.

I'm reminded of hearing an NPR correspondent say, "The question is, how do we prevent people from trying to influence the conversation?" :shock:

When NPR repeats a lie—trying to influence the conversation—and millions of listeners amplify that lie, it's still called "journalism" and I don't really find it any better or less dangerous than FB bots.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby American Dream » Fri Aug 10, 2018 3:37 am

War of Words: Meet the Texan Trolling for Putin

In 2014, Russell Bonner Bentley was a middle-aged arborist living in Austin. Now he’s a local celebrity in a war-torn region of Ukraine—and a foot soldier in Russia’s information war.

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Though Moscow has been transmitting propaganda and dezinformatsiya, or disinformation, since the Soviets came to power in 1922, the propaganda’s tenor and volume have sharpened and increased over the past decade. At a NATO summit in Wales in September 2014, U.S. general Philip Breedlove described Russia’s actions as “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”

The Russian propaganda campaign employs what political scientists from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation have termed the “firehose of falsehood” model: basically, an overwhelming number of half-truths and outright lies are spewed across a dizzying array of media channels. The goal is to sow confusion and exploit existing rifts inside Western democracies. And in 2008, around the time that Russia began refining this new model of disinformation warfare, there was plenty of internal unrest to exploit.

The Great Recession had given rise to political upheaval across the West. In the U.S., demonstrators protested near Wall Street when investment banks were bailed out after causing the economy to tank, and the populist anger spawned movements as varied as Occupy Wall Street and the tea party. In turn, the Russian propaganda machine exploited unsettling questions about economic inequality, globalization, and free trade. RT, the Kremlin’s biggest foreign-facing megaphone (founded in 2005 to, in Putin’s words, “try to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams”), offered wall-to-wall coverage of the Occupy movement. The channel’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, later characterized this coverage as “information warfare” meant to propagate discontent in the U.S.


RT and others seized on the global migrant crisis to cultivate fears about security and identity. The Internet Research Agency, for example, created a Facebook page called “The Heart of Texas” to promote Texas secession, and it accumulated more than 225,000 fans before it was shut down late last summer. In May 2016 the group organized a rally outside a Houston mosque called “Stop Islamization of Texas.” Another troll-operated Facebook page, the “United Muslims of America,” was used to organize a simultaneous counterprotest. “What neither side could have known is that Russian trolls were encouraging both sides to battle in the streets and create division between real Americans,” Senator Richard Burr said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last November. Even now the American public is only beginning to grapple with the scope and effectiveness of the Russian campaign—and the extent to which people like Bentley are unwittingly drawn in.

In the waning days of 2013, Bentley couldn’t shake the feeling that his life was stalling out. Born into a wealthy family, he’d dropped out of high school and worked a factory job before joining the Army. He then bounced around odd jobs and ultimately found his calling as a marijuana activist, although trafficking the drug had eventually turned him into a fugitive. Now he was working as an arborist in Austin, renting a bedroom in a ranch-style house in Round Rock, and searching for a larger purpose. Following the Great Recession, his tree-trimming wages had dropped from $1,000 for five days of work, in 2007, to $700 for six days of work. He watched as his friends struggled as well. “People I know in Texas, Oklahoma, and Washington, they’re all working harder for less money now,” he told me.

He was fast becoming his own worst fear—a middle-aged man with a bloated waistline and no savings. “I have to find something real and meaningful in my life,” he thought, “even if it’s to be like Davy Crockett and end up at the Alamo. I have to express myself by action and not just words.”

For years his media diet had consisted of a vast constellation of Kremlin-friendly fringe websites like Veterans Today and Global Research. (He later became a fan of Southfront, which appears “to be a Russian front that deliberately obscures its origins,” a State Department official told Politico.) The perspectives that he found there, from articles lamenting the shrinking American middle class to posts about the failures of the American justice system, resonated with his own experiences.

One day, alone in his bedroom and searching the internet, he stumbled across a story about the Euromaidan, a wave of public protests in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. For three months, beginning in November 2013, demonstrators had gathered in the city center to revolt against the corruption of President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin. In February 2014, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and less than a week later, Russian soldiers—dubbed “little green men” because they wore unmarked uniforms—popped up in Crimea. The soldiers forcefully annexed the region in March, and that spring the conflict escalated into a full-scale war when pro-Russian separatists stormed government buildings in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Kremlin sent tanks and troops across the border to support the rebels’ fight against the Ukrainian army.

Despite nearly unanimous international condemnation of Russia’s aggression, Bentley was seduced by Putin’s view of the war. Shortly after the occupation of Crimea, Putin denounced Western leaders who’d condemned the takeover, and he claimed that “neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites executed the coup” to overthrow the Ukrainian government. This new regime, Putin said, was persecuting the country’s ethnic Russians, and he was stepping in to save them. Bentley, taking a cue from Russian media sources, also became convinced that the U.S. was behind it all.

Over the next few months, he joined more than a dozen Facebook groups focused on Ukraine and Russia (including one called “President Vladimir Putin Fan Club” and another titled “American Vladimir Putin Fun Club”). He connected with influential internet activists, writers for alternative websites, and talking heads on RT. And then one day in June he came across a photo of a red-haired woman who had been killed in a Ukrainian airstrike in Lugansk. Her legs had been blown off, her face bloodied. In the picture, captured just before her death, she stared directly into the camera lens. “It was like she was looking into my soul,” Bentley said. “It was like she was asking me, ‘What are you? What are you going to do about this?’ ”

He began making preparations to leave his life in the U.S. behind. He broke the news to his family, including his father, sister, and niece, at a French restaurant in Austin; uncomfortable with his politics, they didn’t press him for too many details. He sent off for a Russian tourist visa, and in the fall pared down his possessions, selling his beloved Yamaha motorcycle and gifting a pair of burgundy leather boots to his nephew. What was left fit into two large duffel bags and a camouflage German military backpack. He packed sensibly, including long underwear, Carhartt overalls, a Swiss Army knife, and a flashlight. The only sentimental tokens he allowed himself were a black-and-white passport photo of his late mother, which he tucked into his wallet, and an antique Afghan fighting knife that his globe-trotting grandfather had picked up on a trip in the thirties. He had $3,000 in cash, two thirds of which he’d collected in a GoFundMe campaign for what he billed as his “Fact Finding Mission to Donbass.”

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Bentley with his Sut’ Vremeni combat unit (front left) in April 2015.


Read: https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/s ... a-hacking/
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby dada » Fri Aug 10, 2018 4:38 am

You know what Andy Warhol said about the news. You don't care about whether they're praising you or trashing you, you measure the column in inches.

I'm saying that for every article like this that makes the rounds, the Kremlin wins again. You'd think the genius political scientists at RAND that came up with that incredibly nuanced analysis - the firehose of falsehood - would figure out that there are many layers to the Kremlin strategy. Instead they play right into it.

Then again, the western media is playing it's own attention-grabbing game. Time-sinks on both sides. Who loses?
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby American Dream » Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:15 am

That's why there should be an Illuminati/Elders subcommittee which rules every publication everywhere with an iron hand. But there isn't!

dada » Fri Aug 10, 2018 3:38 am wrote:You know what Andy Warhol said about the news. You don't care about whether they're praising you or trashing you, you measure the column in inches.

I'm saying that for every article like this that makes the rounds, the Kremlin wins again. You'd think the genius political scientists at RAND that came up with that incredibly nuanced analysis - the firehose of falsehood - would figure out that there are many layers to the Kremlin strategy. Instead they play right into it.

Then again, the western media is playing it's own attention-grabbing game. Time-sinks on both sides. Who loses?
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Re: Global Research, Chossudovsky, Russia, Propaganda

Postby dada » Fri Aug 10, 2018 5:53 pm

American Dream » Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:15 am wrote:That's why there should be an Illuminati/Elders subcommittee which rules every publication everywhere with an iron hand. But there isn't!


Pretty much the Western media strategy in a nutshell. Spin the narrative to manufacture consent for soviet-style censorship of news media in the West. Working like a charm, I'd say.

Well, at least they didn't have to resort to strategy of tension tactics to do it this time. That can get expensive. And who pays the bill? The taxpayer. So really we should be thanking the Kremlin.

The question now, I guess, is who will run the American samizdat. Because we can't leave that up to the people. That is not the new way.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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