jducoeur

Thanks to drwex for pointing out this fascinating and remarkably disturbing little article from a couple of months ago, titled Weaponized Narrative is the New Battlespace. It examines the current situation from essentially a military POV, and carries forward the previously-discussed logic: not only are we in a literal propaganda war, but the weapon being used is Narrative itself.

The article isn't very long, and it's a must-read -- it lays out the situation quite bluntly. It is, mind, not optimistic: the contention of the article is that there are assumptions about individual mental capacity built into the ideals of the Enlightenment and the democratic institutions that grew from it, and that Weaponized Narrative is all about overwhelming that capacity.

Note that there are some considerable differences from the traditional fears of propaganda-for-oppression that we're used to from 1984 and its ilk. First of all, in this discussion it's not just being used for internal oppression, it's being applied as a tool of conquest -- propaganda not just in support of a military advance, but as the military advance itself. Second, it's not about restricting the subject's available information to a single approved viewpoint; quite to the contrary, it's about overwhelming the subjects with so much contradictory information that they flee to a created narrative that is simpler and more comfortable than the complex reality. In the modern world, where information overload is a constant problem, that's a damned good tactic.

Seriously, read it. Thoughts welcomed...

If you're not already following Yonaton Zunger, you might want to consider doing so -- his Medium blog has been one of the more consistently interesting ones out there.

Particularly interesting is his post yesterday, From Russia With Oil, which provides a nicely clear summary of what is currently known about the Trump/Russia connection, spelling out explicitly what we have reasonably strong evidence of, and what is merely circumstantial but compelling.

I confess, I especially like the title of the post, which calls out just how much the whole mess feels like a James Bond story -- without Bond around to stop things before Spectre puts its fiendish plan into motion.

Part of me still feels like it's too outlandish to be true, that the Kremlin *literally* bought the US President -- but the story is compelling enough that I'm starting to feel that demanding an independent investigation may be the single highest priority right now. We can't take our eyes off all the other issues that need attending to, but this could yet prove to be the block that takes down the entire Jenga tower of corruption in this Administration...

Laurie Penny is a journalist who has, in recent months, been following the Milo Yiannopoulos National Crassness Tour. It's made for delicious reading: she is utterly unsympathetic to Milo, but as far as I can tell he's enjoyed having her around as a sparring partner, so she's gotten to see what the whole shit-show looks like from the inside.

Her most recent post (which I suspect may be the last in this particular series) is especially fascinating, and well worth a read. It follows the Milo story over the past few weeks -- from the Berkeley riot to Milo suddenly becoming a Conservative un-person due to finally crossing a bridge too far -- and reflects on it.

The bulk of the article is not about Milo, and that's part of what makes it so interesting. Rather, it focuses primarily on the idiot children who have been following him around -- the GamerGate-type alt-right groupies who've been treating him as some sort of prankster-god -- and how completely incapable they are of coping with a world in which their side has, for now, won. She gives a sense of who they are as people, without even slightly forgiving them for what they have done.

Along with that, she makes a point we should be remembering and echoing: that the sudden crushing of Milo lays bare the hypocrisy underneath the right wing's cloak of First Amendment rights.

Not a short article, but highly recommended. She's a fine writer and analyst, and this is a great corrective to our tendency to see the right wing as some monolithic and impregnable fortress of evil -- quite to the contrary, she shows just how fragile some of them are, and in the most terribly practical sense that's worth understanding from a tactical perspective...

Lots of people are terribly worried about "Resistance Fatigue", and there's some basis for that -- spending all day, every day for years worrying about the fight is a good way to mess with your head and just fall into eventual despair.  You have to learn your own capacity, and pace yourself accordingly, because this one's going to be a marathon.

But it occurs to me: we do know one person who famously has no patience and precious little discipline, sitting at the top of his gold-plated tower.

Can we help induce Presidency Fatigue in Trump?

Seriously: it's pretty clear that he didn't really understand what he was getting into, and I suspect it's all more of a pain in the ass than he expected.  He's used to being CEO of a company that he *owns*, not working with other people and making sensible compromises.  As far as I can tell, he's a bit overwhelmed and cranky already.  Tiredness and anger cause people to make stupid mistakes.

I'm being a bit flippant here, but only a bit.  I suspect that he isn't mentally prepared for ongoing resistance to everything he does, every day, for years.

So the details of each individual fight aside, the ongoing *act* of resistance may well be helpful.  We need to keep it non-violent, and not play into their damned "all those protesters are destroying the country" narrative.  But keeping up the pressure may well gradually break a man who is, I suspect, really fairly weak to begin with...

[Slight spoilers for Rogue One]

Kieron Gillen (my current favorite comics writer) has started a rambling blog-like-entity in the form of emails that go out now and then, Kieron Gillen's Word Mail. Today's installment isn't up in the archive yet, and the relevant bit is from the middle anyway, so I'm going to quote from his discussion of Rogue One directly. Hopefully he'll forgive me:

To that end, the ballooning of viewpoint characters becomes the point, those pilots as real as anyone else, the actors commitment to those fragments of time meaningful. And as we pull away from our cast, we come to the final scenes, with those nameless Rebellion troops being cut down by Vader, one by one. Look at the details as Vader looms out the dark. The half-lowering of the gun as each consider just not doing this.. and then raising as they decide they have no choice.

Any of them didn't slow down Vader for a half second, the Death Star survives. Any of them.

Which leaves me aware that's all we can do when facing fascism in the dark. We have no idea if what we do make a difference. But it may. You have to believe it may.

Yes. This.

We live in a society that encourages egotism, wanting to believe that we are going to Matter in some big, important way. That's human nature in general, but modern celebrity culture in particular leads to an internalized belief that everything is either Important in some huge way, or it doesn't matter. I've been seeing this a lot when talking with folks about the rising struggle -- I've hit the comment, "Yeah, but I can't *do* anything" several times, with an implied "I can't do anything Significant".

But I think Gillen is exactly right above. Most of us *aren't* going to be Luke or Leia -- we're not going to be one of the heroes on the marquee. But those heroes only get the critical shot through the help of countless other people, each of them giving that half second of help.

We're facing a rising tide of fascism worldwide, and it's scary as hell. But it is not on any *one* of us to stop that -- it's on all of us, working together, each doing our tiny bit.

Don't worry about hitting the Death Star -- it's not your responsibility. Just look for your own half seconds, and remember that they *do* matter...

[Yes, I'm a bit distracted by politics today.]

Thanks to a comment in siderea's DW, I call your attention to Presterity, which looks likely to be a very important site for managing the current mess.

The site looks to be a really good shot at something I've been thinking we need: a well-curated site that ingests and organizes information about the Trump administration and what's going on.  There is such a torrent of craziness happening that keeping things straight is hard.  So they've set up a system whereby anyone can submit news as it's happening, and this then gets sent to the volunteer curators to analyze and organize it, so that everyone has to-hand a clear account of each topic.

This is an important project -- if they were accepting money, I'd toss them fifty bucks towards expenses in a heartbeat.  I might well volunteer as a curator, but first I'm going to read into it, and get myself set up to be able to submit articles.  We're in the middle of an information war, and this is an important defense shield.

Check it out...

I've been pondering Trump's travel ban on Muslims entering the US.  (Which may or may not be wildly unconstitutional, but is at best screamingly inhumane.)

On the one hand, it's straight out of Dictatorship 101: choose a minority who are already distrusted by some of the populace, and systematically "other" them.  Pick up the pitchforks and start leading the mob against them.  It whips up patriotic fervor, and distracts people from the way that you're stripping them of their freedoms.

That said, this *particular* variation is starting to have a specifically familiar theme.  I've mainly been thinking about how Trump has been taking his style from Putin's Russia (in particular, the high-handed abuse of the press), but this one is reminding me of another successful neo-dictatorship: Turkey.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's dictator (yes, he's elected, but by this point I consider that a detail -- so are many dictators), spent several years building up a gigantic boogeyman in the form of the Gulenists, an Islamist movement founded by Fethullah Gulen, a cleric currently living in the US.  Gulen was originally an ally of Erdogan, but after they parted ways a few years ago, Erdogan began to blame the Gulenists for everything wrong with Turkey, making them out to be a terrifying conspiracy out to destroy the country.

Of course, last year there *was* a coup attempt, and Erdogan wasted no time blaming the Gulenists for the whole thing, possibly far moreso than was warranted.  He has spent the time since then purging all areas of the state of all Gulenists *and* anybody else who disagrees with him, on the grounds that there is a massive conspiracy that he must root out.  And having survived the coup, he's doing this with considerable popular support.  Frankly, it's a masterclass in not wasting a good crisis.

The talking heads today are mostly focused on how idiotic the travel ban is -- that it's just going to convince much of the Muslim world that the US really *is* against them, that we *do* want to go to war on them, and that IS is the only group that is going to defend them.  All of which is true, and the obvious (and possibly correct) response is that Trump is simply a moron.

But consider: what if that's the whole point?  The travel ban is likely to cause more terrorist attacks on the US, with a causation that is obvious if you *think* about it, but indirect enough that Trump can claim it isn't his fault.  And when there *are* attacks, Trump has the excuse he's looking for to clamp down on civil liberties and attack his foes in the public sphere as being "weak on security".

Mind, I don't think Trump is anywhere near Machiavellian enough (or at least, disciplined enough) for a scheme like this.  But as far as I can tell, Bannon totally is -- and Bannon's just been placed on the National Security Council, replacing the Director of National Intelligence and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.  (Yes, really -- this happened yesterday.)  Bannon is, quite literally, calling the shots on national security, and this feels like exactly the sort of thing he'd do to interpret "national security" as being his own personal, lifelong job security.

Many of us spent eight years saying that the *main* problem wasn't George W Bush, it was Dick Cheney.  It's looking to me like that is true in *spades* of Steve Bannon.  I increasingly suspect that Trump is mostly a clumsy and bullying loudmouth on his own, but Bannon is malign and smart enough to be even more dangerous.  I dearly hope folks are digging deep for dirt on him -- he needs to become a major embarrassment to Trump, soon, before he has a chance to entirely unwind the United States...