Conspiracy theories and Conspiracy theorists

[Ellen Stuttle]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Now why would all those people in the media conspire on spreading a falsehood about Steve Bannon and bigotry? There are so many people categorically claiming Bannon is a bigot when he obviously is not, I think that satisfies the criteria for conspiracy. 

It doesn't satisfy my criteria for conspiracy.  See my exchange with William.  Many people touting the same line doesn't demonstrate secret central organizing going on.

Ellen

[BaalChatzaf]

3 hours ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

It doesn't satisfy my criteria for conspiracy.  See my exchange with William.  Many people touting the same line doesn't demonstrate secret central organizing going on.

Ellen

The most you can say of two or more others is that they behave as if they are co-operating.  Only externals   can be observed. 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On 11/17/2016 at 2:35 AM, Ellen Stuttle said:

Many people touting the same line doesn't demonstrate secret central organizing going on.

Ellen,

Not like a central organization. But like a central philosophy. Somewhat like the one world government thing.

In this last case, lots of people think the same thing (they think they are superior ruling class stock and the rest of humanity are inferior stock) and are mightily attracted to the idea of a central world government because of the simplicity where they can exercise their privilege and stay among their kind. They all take similar positions, but there is no one central organization. 

In fact, this is the exact position of Alex Jones--meaning, he says that is the way they are. Yet when people call him a conspiracy theorist (and criticize people who mention him), they never attribute that position to him. They always treat it as if Jones is talking about a James Bond villain cabal or something. 

People tend to do that with the term conspiracy in general. Like you do here, for instance. You are claiming my intended use of the term "conspiracy" means some kind of secret central society or something. For the record, secrecy can be involved, but it doesn't have to be central.

btw - I'm curious (sincerely curious). Would you call the collusion between the Open Society Foundations, the DNC and the press--as exposed by WikiLeaks--a conspiracy?

I would, but I don't think that fits the criteria of many of Alex Jones's critics. Or Steven Bannon's critics, for that matter.

For instance, WikiLeaks showed conclusively that the press runs a network of secret nudges or sometimes outright instructions to each other for what to say in public. That's why they always say the same wording, the same position, and the same tone at the same time, irrespective of the venue. (One of the most comical for me was when everyone used the phrase "power through" to discuss Hillary Clinton's experience with pneumonia--she was "powering through" it. So many people said "power through" that day, I thought they were talking about a new superhero show on HBO. Just joking, but it was comical.  )

The nature and tone of the bigotry accusations in diverse media against Bannon show this similarity to me. Some people, like me, consider that a conspiracy. I base this on seeing what sleazy press people have done and think it is a good probability they are doing it again. Others don't see this as a conspiracy. But the truth is this is not the spontaneous expression of honest journalists.

Incidentally, I do not like being in the position of defending Alex Jones because of the insinuation that I buy into everything he says. I don't and I often say so. But the stereotype that people use of him to turn off their brains when he brings information to light is irritating. For example, the globalism thing. He keeps being proven right over and over, yet the same dismissal is used against this information over and over. This practice of demonizing the man to avoid discussing, with an interested person, the issue he raises is what I argue against. It's a form of intimidation. So the only corrective I find right now is to defend him. 

Michael

[Peter]

Wolf wrote in the Freeman’s Constitution: If suit is brought against a fictional legal person, any and all of its representatives, officers, agents, and fiduciaries may be summoned to appear. end quote

Now here, “summoned” sounds like if the official person does not appear they may be forced to appear. Or at the least they will lose their job if they don’t appear. Refusing to testify, for whatever reason could be viewed as immoral . . . yet as testifying against organized crime or Hannibal Lector shows, it can be dangerous.

Peter

An interesting snippet about *testimony.*

Controversy is a constant for memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, newly installed at UCI By AMY WILSON from The Orange County Register: . . . . She is, and has been for three decades, very much in the debate business. Her belief that memory is highly malleable and susceptible to all kinds of contamination was debated for a while, until she proved in the laboratory in the 1970s and '80s that she was right. Then, just when she was getting bored, came a host of new cases, straight from therapy, that were claiming that memories of traumatic events - horrific and usually sexual - could be deeply submerged in childhood, then, like Jonah spit forth from the whale, plumbed and revived, wholly intact.

Loftus said, "I don't think so."

Thus, the Memory Wars - as they are called by Science News and Psychology Today - began. They pit one set of psychologists against another: one that says "recovered" memories, especially those of sexual abuse, are true and should always be believed, another that says these memories probably are implanted by therapists mucking around with something they don't understand; the result is memories that cannot be believed, or should not be believed without corroboration.

Loftus is the leader and the unapologetic lightning rod for the latter bunch, which lost a lot of the early battles in the 1990s but has lately been winning a lot, especially in the courtroom. It's a war she is happy to fight, professionally and publicly. She has testified for the defense in more than 250 cases, saying that you can't trust memory. But in fall 1999, the war, which was always personal, turned against her, personally. It almost broke her.

Ultimately, it made her leave a house she'd lived in for 28 years and a university that she had given her life to. It made her leave her breakfast club. It made her watch all those wronged- women movies on Lifetime television. It made her come to the University of California, Irvine. Which has made her deliriously happy. And if you think she was determined before to win this war, you should see her now.

This, then, is a story about how the most influential female psychologist of the past century came to Orange County, and all the stuff she brought with her. Less than a month into her new job in Irvine, an "NBC Nightly News" crew is in her office. Down the hall, waiting their turn, are folks from the Discovery Channel. CNN is calling at 2 p.m. She is absolutely at ease, citing her own research, explaining in sound-bite fashion how memory, especially of a crime, gets distorted.

The phone rings.

"Why do people lie in such cases?" she repeats into the receiver. "I could guess, but I'm not an expert on lying. You're going to need to find yourself another psychologist."

The Baltimore Sun reporter rethinks his position and asks another question. She begins to explain what she is an expert in. That would the porousness of memory, how it can adapt itself to new information and make it its own; how it can be fooled; how it can invent; how it can be recounted with confidence, emotion and detail and still be wrong.

She proved in study after study that the mind is not some videotape device that we can count on for accuracy and clarity. She has shown that memory is highly susceptible to seduction by suggestion. That what we remember is colored by what we expect to see, what we're told we've seen, what we want to see, what we are asked to see.

She has, literally, persuaded subjects in a laboratory they have seen barns in barren fields. She has convinced teenagers and older children that they were lost in a mall when they were small. After the convincing, they actually painted remembered details of a day that never happened.

The great thing about Elizabeth Loftus is that she will tell you pretty much anything you ask. A couple of days in, and you know that a guy left her once because she used the wrong ply toilet paper. Or how, after writing a book on repressed memory, she got some death threats and tried to learn to use a gun, but "that it's not how I wanted to live," even though a practice range target in her office says she was handy with a .44. You know that she can't remember much about her mother, though, God, she'd like to. You know, too, that she was fondled once by her baby sitter but it was no big deal, in retrospect, given that her mother drowned when she was 14. You know that she's quite amicably divorced but genuinely proud that she was married for 23 years in the first place. That she doesn't consider herself a feminist, although she got a doctorate from Stanford in 1970, when a lot of feminists were just talking about what they were going to do with their lives.

You find out that she was swatted with a newspaper by a woman who sat down next to her on a plane and that Gloria Steinem took pen to paper once to explain how Loftus was wrong about everything. You find out she once asked a lone man at Los Angeles' Fern Bar to join her large group of friends for dinner. He turned out to be an ex-con who was wearing an ankle cuff monitor. She was disappointed that he wasn't more interesting because of that.

Then she'll explain to you, in real words because you don't have a Ph.D. . . . .  end quote

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This is what taking apart a conspiracy looks like at the start:

Trump Administration to Cancel Billions of Payment to UN's Green Climate Fund

Notice that he's going to spend the money on a Theodore Roosevelt-like conservation program here in the US. Repairing Hoover Dam. Everglades. Etc.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

10 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

below

/quote/ [MSK] "You are claiming my intended use of the term "conspiracy" means some kind of secret central society or something. For the record, secrecy can be involved, but it doesn't have to be central."

No, I wasn't claiming that your "intended use of the term 'conspiracy' means some kind of secret central society or something."

You wrote that you think that all the people calling Bannon a bigot when he isn't (emphasis added) "satisfies the criteria for conspiracy," and I said that it doesn't satisfy my criteria.  In other words, there aren't "the criteria of conspiracy."  The criteria you were using in the statement aren't the ones I use.

(Do see my exchange with William where he took my saying that some statements about activities of "groups of scientists" are true re climate issues as meaning that I was thinking there's an international conspiracy in the sense of a secret organized effort.  I wasn't meaning that.)

Which way of thinking of the term - loosely, referring to like-thinking people doing the same thing, maybe with cue-sharing ranging to outright collusion, or narrowly, referring to an actual cabal of people operating as a secret group with specific plans of achieving some purpose - is more common, I don't know.

/quote/ [MSK] "btw - I'm curious (sincerely curious). Would you call the collusion between the Open Society Foundations, the DNC and the press--as exposed by WikiLeaks--a conspiracy?"

Michael, I scarcely knew what WikiLeaks is until I started reading OL again, after about three months of being so occupied with other things, I rarely looked at proceedings here followed by three months of not reading here at all.  I was aware of collusion such as you describe before, however.  Maybe that collusion is more extensive than I've thought, but judging from my impression of it, I'd just call it collusion (as I would with what goes on in climate issues), not a conspiracy.

Regarding Alex Jones, my pointing out differences in meaning of "conspiracy" wasn't meant as having any reference to him at all.  I've never watched him, probably never will.  I don't have a working TV.  YouTubes are hard on my eye problems and I only watch a YouTube if it's something I think I really should see.  I haven't an opinion of Alex Jones.

Ellen

[KorbenDallas]

11 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

He keeps being proven right over and over, yet the same dismissal is used against this information over and over.

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

You wrote that you think that all the people calling Bannon a bigot when he isn't...

Ellen,

Just so we're talking about the same thing, my phrase was "all those people in the media," not "all the people."

I was talking about the media-engineered conspiracy.

If you don't think the media acts conspiratorially in these matters, I would be surprised given WikiLeaks proof, etc. And I would strongly disagree.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

Maybe that collusion is more extensive than I've thought...

Ellen,

LOL...

You ought to read some of the emails. One of the main editors from Politico, for instance, in writing to John Podesta started his email with, "Now that I've become a hack," and asked him to sign off on a stack of material before it goes to publication. There was a lot of stuff like that, not just isolated incidents. CNN was caught red-handed leaking questions to Clinton before debates and town halls. And so on.

The WikiLeaks dumps during this election totally discredited the media. It's relationships were far deeper than collusion-like shared interests. It was a conspiracy by many to get Hillary Clinton elected at all costs, legal and illegal. They orchestrated Bernie's downfall, step by step, in the primaries. Add that to the Veritas videos showing the DNC funding people to cause violence at Trump rallies and blame it on Bernie supporters and things like that, this went waaaaaaay beyond collusion.

Maybe you have heard of one the guys from Chicago who was caught on video saying how it all worked, Bob Creamer. He is the husband of Representative Jan Schakowsky. 

I expect to see a lot of DOJ activity about these things after Trump takes office with a new Attorney General. 

btw - You should be glad WikiLeaks exists. Do you remember the CRU Climategate scandal a few years back when their emails were leaked to the public admitting they falsified data through selective omissions and that they targeted peers who disagreed with the party line? That was the work of WikiLeaks.

The progressives used to love WikiLeaks when they were leaking stuff about the Bush administration. Then Climategate came along, and Snowden, and the Podesta files and now they think WikiLeaks is a covert CIA operation or right-wing conspiracy or something. (It's actually in the press like that.)  

btw - Just for the record, WikiLeaks does not hack. It publishes. And it is an equal opportunity publisher of government and institution dirt. (Their motto is "We open governments.")

It publishes documents from anonymous whistleblowers after it runs a verification of authenticity process. (They keep the whistleblowers anonymous for their protection.) As they like to say, there have been over 10 million documents leaked in over 10 years from all over the world and not one has been found fraudulent. Sometimes these whistleblowers might be hackers, but in most of the cases, I believe they are people like Snowden, meaning they work in the institutions and can't stomach the corruption they see. So they use the institution's own protocols to get the material. Then they send it to WikiLeaks, who then format it to uniform specifications and work to make sure it is authentic, then publish it on their website.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

As long as we're talking conspiracy theory, this video by Anonymous (or someone claiming to be Anonymous) is spreading quickly. It was posted about 6 hours ago on Facebook and now has over 650,000 views.

Some of the documents of the Open Society Foundations have been leaked online and they show a lot of monkey-business.

I actually bought the inspiration for Soros's foundation, "The Open Society and its Enemies" by Karl Popper (both volumes). I haven't read it yet, though. Looking at Wikipedia (see here), it's pretty easy to see that Soros has perverted Popper's ideas (maybe not the fundaments, though--I need to read it first to say for sure):

Quote

He [Soros] has stated that whereas the greatest threats to the "Open Society" in the past were from Communism and Fascism (as discussed in The Open Society and its Enemies by his mentor Karl Popper), the largest current threat is from market fundamentalism.

"Market fundamentalism" basically means capitalism without Soros in it.

 

I don't know how far this Anonymous project will go. In the recent past, Anonymous has talked big, but done little. For instance, they took down a bunch of ISIS Twitter accounts as the world yawned. However, this could be by design since governments have monster hackers in their cyber-security departments. In other words, Anonymous could be announcing stuff at one end and doing stuff at another and allowing places like WikiLeaks, DCLeaks, etc. to publish their efforts.

The good news is that Soros is on the radar of a lot of talented cyber-people and they are sick of the stench of terrorism that always happens wherever his activities are running. And they are sick of his backstage manipulations of governments to cause chaos.

Many people believe Soros is behind much of the chaos in the Middle East. One of the intents of this chaos is to create an oppressive problem so great, gobs of refugees flood Europe (and the USA and elsewhere) to escape, but simultaneously they break down local governments and institutions, thus paving the way for a one world government (an "open society" without borders).

Or, maybe it's just nothing but a conspiracy theory.

 

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

Trump Meets With Goblins, from the Alex Jones Channel, promoters of truth, reason, rationality, and that which exists:

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I study a lot about covert persuasion, propaganda, etc., and I don't know how I missed this.

Lots of modern-day revolutions are identified by a color.

In the video below, Robert Knight discusses this with Wayne Madsen, but they don't go into the why colors are used. They do give a bunch of examples.

(I wish they would stop with the corny thumbnails, too.  Although, the one below is kinda funny.  )

I'm going to think about this a bit.

Off the top of my head, I think a color in the name of a revolution is used for memory and a frame. If I'm right, the main reason would be that the visual cortex is the largest part of the brain, meaning it's far easier to create relevant neural pathways that are effective mental tent-poles with a color than with, say, an abstract word, since there is physically a far greater number of neurons that process color.

This topic might not be for everyone, but it's interesting to me.

Michael

[william.scherk]

On 11/17/2016 at 10:11 AM, Peter said:

Controversy is a constant for memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, newly installed at UCI By AMY WILSON from The Orange County Register: [...]

Loftus said, "I don't think so."

I have utmost respect for this lady (and she still answers my emails). She was in the battle for reason. Thank goodness and good scientific work that so much of the Memory Wars are behind us.  At its height it was the 20th century epitome of moral panic built on conspiracy theory.  Witchhunt and freakshow of self-delusion. Satan. Mobile crematoria. Them. The international Cult. 

Here is a link to an archived copy of the full text corresponding to the snippet from Peter's vast Gigaplex of copy-pasta. 

Quote

Copy-and-paste citation Amy Wilson, "War & remembrance," Orange County Register  (Sunday, November 3, 2002).

William H.  Calvin UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 98195-1800 USA

Sunday, November 3, 2002 War & remembrance  Controversy is a constant for memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, newly installed at UCI. By AMY WILSON  The Orange County Register For more information on Elizabeth Loftus' life and work: "Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial" by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham (St. Martin's Press, 1991). "The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial" by Paul Eberle and Paul and Shirely Eberle (Prometheus Books, 1993). "The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegation of Sexual Abuse" by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchum (St. Martin's Press, 1994). To find the complete text of articles written by Loftus and to read "Who Abused Jane Doe," her Skeptical Inquirer piece, go here. To learn more about the history of repressed memories: "Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria" by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters (New York: Scribner's, 1994). "Return of the Furies - An Investigation into Recovered Memory Therapy" by Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager. (Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1994). "Therapy's Delusions : The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation of Today's Walking Worried" by Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe (Simon and Schuster, 1999). To read about an alternate view of recovered memories: "Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found" by Lenore Terr, M.D., (Basic Books, 1994). To learn about how memory works: "The Seven Sins of Memory : How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" by Daniel L. Schachter (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001). Find out more about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation here. To find out an alternate view, go here. Academics can debate anything. It's healthy. It's what, among other things, they are paid to do. They can also go to war. Which is something different altogether. [...]

Alternate views? Pah.

Back to the weird hypnotic video that caught Korben and Michael's eye ...

 

 Korben reports that Alex Jones and his cousin Buckley Hamman think 'brainwashing' camps are something something something:

On 11/13/2016 at 9:53 PM, KorbenDallas said:

In the video, Alex says this represents sedition.  He later says, "...if you look at it, every piece of blue in the sea of red is an admitted command base."   He says he had some secret maps that showed triangulation with military precision where They were going to take over the states.  And at the end he says these are brainwashing camps by the NWO:

Exaggeration. Rhetoric. Soros Nazi collaborator. Do I have to explain every little thing?

Anyway, the video.  It features Alex and cousin but does not feature links, notes, references, chyrons or other on-screen information (except during call-ins). This is my bar to giving Infowars a passing mark as credible and reliable -- all too often sources of discrete bits of information are unidentified. If your question is "Where did this (information) come from?" ... you most often can't find out from Infowars itself. 

Open your mind and keep a pen handy to jot down your questions.  There will be a test at the bottom.

Quote

 

Shocking Sanctuary Cities Map Details Takeover Plan
Areas throughout the US where towns and counties are designated as “Sanctuary Cities” appeared to correlate with the Democrat vote in the 2016 presidential election, according to an analysis of election maps.

 

 

 

 

 

Where did the overlay map of  coloured 'pins' come from that Cousin Buckley made hypnotic magic with?

Well, converging evidence says the data for the pins comes from an outfit called the Center for Immigration Studies. The CIS folk provide an interactive Sanctuary Cities (plus states and counties) map that looks like this:

Eyeball that against Buckley's hypnotic throb ...

 

 

So, the hypnotic throb of Sanctuary Cities winking in and out of the Blue Archipelago ... corresponds to data that the CIS (and another outfit**) have collected on formal and informal policies that preclude a certain kind of ICE-locality interaction.  CIS provides the data for their pin-map state-by-state, with details, on a separate page.  

Now zoom in on the CIS map to verify the pattern spied by Buckley and Alex ... here to the blobs of yellow east of Chicago:

This is mostly Iowan sanctuaries, so let's zoom in just a touch closer.

 

All together, there are 23 Iowa counties that CIS says have sanctuary policies or practices. Since the push-pin graphic does not show any boundaries, we can use the PolicyMap controls to devise a map that shows just the counties signified by the yellow pins.  But before I do that, prime your visual cortex with a WSJ snapshot of Iowa voting patterns in the 2016  election ...

Here is a PolicyMap rendering of mine .. with boundaries around all the Sanctuary Counties (you can visit the map here to play with it yourself):

And now, with an image-editing trick, we can colour in the Democratic-voting counties from the 2016 data .. (we can also use PolicyMap to render various datasets on the Sanctuary Counties base map, but more on that later)

So, back to Alex and Buckley.  According to Korben Dallas,

In the video, Alex says this represents sedition.  He later says, "...if you look at it, every piece of blue in the sea of red is an admitted command base."   He says he had some secret maps that showed triangulation with military precision where They were going to take over the states.  And at the end he says these are brainwashing camps by the NWO
 

Iowa, hypnotic induction number two.  Your attention is focussed, tight, clear,  You hear nothing, but you seek patterns.  See the pattern emerge.

 

I heard the word Hispanic a few times in the cousins' video. I heard KKK and Hispanic and so I wondered if the brainwashing was a function of Hispanicity ... or foreign-born intensity, or some measure of Hispanic/Latino in-migration, whether from American citizens of Puerto Rico or just a big change in ethnic composition in counties. 

In this one I look at Murder rate over time, just to see if there was any persisting pattern, and to see if counties with high rates had any hypnotic relation with the counties which have a practice of 'sanctuary':

I want to add to this Gif animation the all-important map Pins.  But first another listen/watch of the cousins finding, er, evidence of the Takeover Plan.  The data don't lie, do they?

While I do that and the discussion marches on through the swamp of shoddy epistemology, here is a palate-cleanser, and a tonic for your free souls ...

 

Anthroplex, for the Woke in you.

___________________

** The other outfit that provides data and analysis and maps and stuff for the Sanctuary Cities/Counties/States issue is OJJPAC -- Ohio Jobs and Justice PAC. They have a list and lots of details and reports, some of which are fun and some of which are dire propaganda.  

 

 

 

Edited November 19, 2016 by william.scherk
OJJPAC info added

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

32 minutes ago, william.scherk said:

Thank goodness and good scientific work that so much of the Memory Wars are behind us.  At its height it was the 20th century epitome of moral panic built on conspiracy theory.

William,

On your suggestion awhile back, I bought a book about this. I missed the whole kerfuffle since I was down in Brazil and it didn't hit the mainstream radar, at least not at the stuff I looked at.

I got Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory by Lawrence Wright. He wrote a book on Scientology I liked a lot and later they made an HBO documentary out of it. I only read half of this book, though. It's extremely well written, but I got weirded out by the cognitive dissonance of witnessing a man doubt his own mind more and more over time. I'll probably finish this book some day. 

I don't have much to say about this whole false memory media thing, though. I wasn't here and didn't witness any of the bickering. There are no heroes or villains for me. At my distance, it seems like a modern episode out of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay--should anyone ever update it. (Believe it or not, I actually read that thing with the help of audio. I highly recommend it for learning about ancient magic, the tulip mania, how they did real estate scams centuries ago, etc.) 

In my day, they had Pet Rocks.  

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, william.scherk said:

So, the hypnotic throb of Sanctuary Cities winking in and out of the Blue Archipelago...

William,

All I see is win-win.

We'll never have to find out if Alex Jones was out to lunch, or if there ever was a real threat (and this was part of it), or any combination of the two because, shortly, sanctuary cities are going to go the way of the dodo bird.

Donald Trump is going to blast them into history under the rubric of "Terrible Boneheaded Social Experiments Grounded in Legal Overreach."

This way I get to feel safe and live in a rational society of rule by law and you get to mock.

We both get something we value.

Win-win.

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

2 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

[To William]

All I see is win-win.

We'll never have to find out if Alex Jones was out to lunch, or if there ever was a real threat (and this was part of it), or any combination of the two because, shortly, sanctuary cities are going to go the way of the dodo bird.

Donald Trump is going to blast them into history under the rubric of "Terrible Boneheaded Social Experiments Grounded in Legal Overreach."

This way I get to feel safe and live in a rational society of rule by law and you get to mock.

We both get something we value.

Win-win.

Michael

Reductio ad Trumpum.

[Brant Gaede]

35 minutes ago, KorbenDallas said:

Reductio ad Trumpum.

Is a fallacy?

--Brant

 

[Brant Gaede]

South Tucson, AZ is not a city. It's an oddball political sliver enveloped by Tucson, which is a city.

--Brant

[KorbenDallas]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

Is a fallacy?

--Brant

 

In the sense like a reductio ad Hitlerum, and Godwin's law

[william.scherk]

4 hours ago, william.scherk said:

Shocking Sanctuary Cities Map Details Takeover Plan
... counties are designated as “Sanctuary Cities” appeared to correlate with the Democrat vote in the 2016 presidential election ...

Nope.  At least not in Iowa.

 

4 hours ago, william.scherk said:

But first another listen/watch of the cousins finding, er, evidence of the Takeover Plan.  The data don't lie, do they?

The Cousins make up a lot of shit.  And they repeat shibboleths embedded in non-stop patter as might a carny barker or Jim Bakker, before cut-aways to Anthroplex or other BS survivalist product.  Them. They. Soros.  They Them.  Them. They. Devuls.  No need to fill in the blanks.  It's all just one vast plot with multiple entailments.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

14 hours ago, william.scherk said:

The Cousins make up a lot of shit.  And they repeat shibboleths embedded in non-stop patter as might a carny barker or Jim Bakker, before cut-aways to Anthroplex or other BS survivalist product.  Them. They. Soros.  They Them.  Them. They. Devuls.  No need to fill in the blanks.  It's all just one vast plot with multiple entailments.

William,

You need to get out more. Demonization is just one covert persuasion technique among many. And it fails when it reaches a tipping point where reality is too far removed from the projected demon. For instance, the progressive side has been demonizing white adult Christian males for a long time and they finally overplayed their hand.

The reality-fantasy gap became too large and ripped the technique in pieces. Now it only works for the deeply indoctrinated. Everyone else is starting to ask questions and, as Rand would say, checking their premises.

Here's a cool article by Chris Martenson posted to ZeroHedge about a few other techniques:

We're Being Played

The gist is that the excessive fear and loathing we see all around us re the presidential campaign is the aftermath of a binge of propaganda and covert persuasion that targets fear and loathing with their core messages.

I agree.

There are a lot of haters hating right now who don't normally hate in the manner they are hating.

btw - Getting back to demonization, I think it's a losing battle to try to combat demonizing George Soros with mockery. That will only play to the choir, and a very small choir at that. Most people on the progressive side who like George Soros will give it a big fat yawn while the Soros haters get excited by the demonization. They don't even see the mockery.

Why?

Because the nature of Soros's very presence perfectly calls demon to mind from many, many angles.

And why that?

Because he is a demon.

   

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

17 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Here's a cool article by Chris Martenson...

The article mentioned the video below and it is even cooler.

Seriously.

This thing rocks.

That's probably why it was uploaded at the end of October and already has over three million views.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

18 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

In the sense like a reductio ad Hitlerum, and Godwin's law

Those aren't fallacies. They imply fallacious reasoning.

--Brant

[KorbenDallas]

23 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

Those aren't fallacies. They imply fallacious reasoning.

--Brant

Red herring, if I had to classify

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

They imply fallacious reasoning.

Brant,

How about lazy imagination for finding comparisons?

Michael