Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/28/russia-bought-black-lives-matt.html
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It’s useful to post the following Adam Curtis video as a reminder that the primary goal here is undermining confidence in Western liberal-democratic institutions.
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So, our existence in not holographic but one more of conceptual art? At least it’s not performance art!
Thanks for the video.
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Russian kleptocracy is only but one influence. It is also the work of those of striving to de-colonialize the Americas of European, Russian, and other imperialist influences. Often, “Western” is used pretty much like a euphemism for eurocentric values. Of course the pro-active approach is for us to implement other institutions, rather than only reacting to problematic ones.
Oh come on, BLM is a perfectly domestic response to America’s completely domestic structural racism. No Russian meddling is required to sow political chaos when the US has over two centuries of institutionalized white supremacy to create discord. To think the Russians are responsible for Trump is to be utterly blind to the fact he is the culmination of everything wrong with America. No other country could have produced him.
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Yep. I think the Republican’s black lives don’t matter message is far more inflammatory.
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I’m really curious about the actual nature of this ad, because let’s face it CNN has a poor track record of differentiating between Black Lives Matter and other groups.
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Perhaps, but BLM did a godawful job of keeping the nuts, trolls and various toxic beasties from doing stupid stuff in their name.
Remember “White Tears” coffee mugs and shirts and stuff? Yeah. That didn’t poll so well.
It was an organization that did some good and had noble intentions, but it ultimately failed to learn some of the basics from MLK (“purify your movement”, etc.) that you need to keep your name from gaining a negative connotation.
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What does that mean?
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I just started a media diet to get away from the constant shitty news that’s coming out every day. In the meantime, i’m reading Marshall Macluhan’s theory that world war 3 will be fought as a guerilla information war. It seems like we’re right at the beginning of it, with social media manipulation. Next could be taking advantage of our incredibly lax information infrastructure.
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That’s one part of an overall larger way in which future wars will be fought (at least when involving super-/nuclear powers).
The term you’re looking for is “asymmetric warfare”, and has been on the radar of military leadership for decades. Back in yesteryear when I was in the Army, due to having a medical specialty and being stationed in a large specialty hospital, I occasionally had the opportunity to chat with some very high-ranking folks about this stuff while they recovered from procedures for a day or so in a hospital bed.
What I can tell you for sure is that they very much expect any wars to be harder and harder to distinguish as wars in the future, with more and more scrutiny put on seemingly unrelated financial crises, political shifts, sudden infrastructure failures, and things of that nature. Without trying to put too much spin on it, they expect there to be “shadow wars” in the future that will make the intrigue of the Cold War look like high school drama in comparison.
And whaddayaknow, we’re already seeing hints of this possibly having happened with Russia influencing the last election (and some suspecting that it’s had its dirty little claws buried deep into parts of the Republican party for a lot longer, overtly or covertly), and who even knows what else?
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Sure, but I suspect the ads might have been kind of extreme perversions of a BLM message, designed to discredit BLM while also riling up conservatives. Facebook won’t release the ads but I bet someone could sleuth them out on the internet somewhere, saved on a reddit thread or blog.
The Russians would do this kind of thing just because they can do it, it’s easy and cheap too, so why not.
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confidence. Oh dear. That’s rather thin gruel.
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I never heard of this before, but I just came across it on Facebook. Dates to '97
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Looking at the ads that Russian actors produced, I’m impressed. They really have our number for (presumably) not having lived here for a long time.
FTA:
“How did they know how to target [the audience] with such exquisite specificity?” he asked. “Frankly, [the posts appeared] in areas where the Democrats were, perhaps, a little bit asleep at the switch? How did they have that level of specificity? That’s one of the questions we need answered.”
I think we all know how they acquired that level of specificity: they paid for it. It was on offer from Facebook. This might be an interesting shake up.
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Russians didn’t create Trump. But it’s harder and harder to argue that they didn’t influence our election enough to help push him over the edge to victory, or that he wasn’t actively aware of and even seeking out said help.
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Just because we were already “on fire” doesn’t mean that 45 and all his antics didn’t throw a heap of ‘napalm’ on us…
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Is it not more concerning that the populace is so gullible that their ‘democracy’ can be so easily subverted? This whole Russia bought ads on Facebook thing seems silly to me. It’s as if democracy and free will are an illusion, and the outcomes of our elections are actually determined by advertisements, instead of the agency of free thinking voters. Had the Cheeto lost, you wouldn’t be hearing a thing about Russian ads.
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