Kony Baloney Invisible Indoctrination 2012

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Kony Baloney Invisible Indoctrination 2012

This film, Kony 2012 by the Invisible Children organization was put up four days ago on YouTube and already has over 50,000,000 views--and the film is about 30 minutes long!

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I want a thread here on this project because I might add to it as I study this thing.

To start, here is an article on The Blaze that questions the innocence of the story.

Is There More to the Invisible Children Story in Uganda Than Meets the Eye?

by Jonathon M. Seidl

March 8, 2012

The Blaze

I sometimes post a comment on a story over there and here is what I did on that one (you can see it on Page 3 of the comments if things stay the same as now, which they should).

On my own, I have been studying persuasion, crowd control, and so on for about 3 years. I just saw this movie and I was bowled over by the sheer number of psychological triggers and manipulation techniques in it.

It’s got Internet memes, framing galore, false scarcity, hero’s journey plot-line, mood sequences leading to commands, subliminal images, interactivity, messages nested in open loops, and God knows what else, all with a big honking detailed (but simple) call to action at the end.

Quite simply, this is the best propaganda film I have seen since I started studying propaganda.

I am going to download this video and study it. There’s a reason it is going through the roof in views and that is not just because Americans are emotional about kids. It is firing manipulation triggers on all cylinders in overdrive.

Even the choice of the enemy scapegoat is brilliant. What Kony does takes child abuse to a whole new level of evil. Who doesn’t want to see this guy wasted?

Since Kony is Mr. Invisible Villain for a few years now, wanna bet that he gets captured within the false scarcity 2012 deadline and we get bombarded with “We did it!” all over the place?

The power of “we.”

Creepy.

Another message is for the USA government to deploy the military not for USA interests or self-defense, but because “it’s the right thing to do.” This sets a precedent that leads to very scary implications. Starting a “right thing to do” war always ends so very wrong in the end.

I shudder…

Please see this film.

My intuition tells me something really bad is going to come from it.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Quick note:

I put this film on this morning just to take a peek. I had no intention whatsoever of watching it to the end.

Thirty minutes? Uganda? Are you kidding me? I've got a ton-load of stuff to do.

But I got roped in after the first minute.

And now I'm writing about it.

This stuff works on everybody, even those who know about it.

Nowadays, when I perceive it might happen to me, I just let it roll. But then I analyze it right after I snap out of the semi-trance.

One thing doesn't work when you know about it: Adopting the message they want you to adopt.

That's one of the main reasons I'm studying this stuff. And I want to help others see it, too.

Michael

[Peter]

It is Progressive propaganda, and it is affective. It was created to kill an objectively defined, murderous bastard which is good in this instance, but the filmmaker, (and the state moderated media) are also promoting Obama, one world government, and liberalism.

Half the commercials you see on TV now feature a Black person in a favorable light though Blacks only comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population. Many sitcoms are promoting the same cause. The primary goal is to sell a product or show but the subsidiary goal is liberal propaganda to promote the Black candidate and liberal causes. If you were a commentator like Rush and stated this thesis you would hear the baboons hooting from all the major, state moderated, media outlets.

I deliberately added a letter or two to another thread just to illuminate Margaret Sanger’s blatant, condescending racism, which has the same fascist backbone, but without the altruistic drivel we hear from today’s liberals. That there is some truth to her thesis is illustrative.

Using the millions of followers of “The Social Media” as tools is ingenious. The tactics reminds me of the movie, “The Pod People” where if any of the “taken” see someone not “taken” they hiss like a cat and point at the still free human to bring the hordes of pod people to kill them. It is using “Mob Tactics” and the theatrical tactics of Nazi propagandists, on a supposedly globally free network representative of all humanity.

On a personal level, I like the idea of one person by his own ingenuity, doing some good in the world. It is an honorable thing to do.

Peter Taylor

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

There's a lot of support for this video and it's growing exponentially, but here are three criticisms on YouTube that are also getting a lot of traction: one is by a girl from Uganda, one by Alex Jones and one by a liberal.

You have to take some of the stuff in these videos with a grain of salt (especially Jones), but they all raise good questions about the intentions and methods of the people behind this thing.

I am studying the film as an exercise in propaganda, but the why is important. With super-effective propaganda like that, we definitely should look at it.

It's funny. I agree with Alex Jones on one thing. This video is getting the left-wing antiwar crowd to beat the drums of war and invasion. The very things they constantly protest against.

And I agree with the the girl and the liberal that the people behind the film are making a crap-load of money that is not going to Uganda--in other words, it is a de facto a for-profit operation.

You gotta' be good to do that.

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Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Sigh...

This popped up on Drudge, so I will go ahead and post it. This is only because I posted a video by Alex Jones on Kony and I don't want anyone to think I'm ignoring his kool-aid stuff.

Now he wants Angelina Jolie arrested for war crimes because she does some of her touchy-feely Hollywood save Africa schtick around Kony. It's good to have this guy Jones doing his angle in the press because he sometimes comes up with the real deal--stuff others in high places want hidden (and I like it that he's a loud voice against crony-capitalistic wars)--but look at the price we have to pay.

Caramba!

Arrest Angelina Jolie For War Crimes: Kony 2012

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Once again...

sigh...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On another note, this popped up in a news feed. It only looks like a blog, though.

The name of the blog is The Life And Times Of A Young Republican and the blogger is a young dude named Steven Krage, I normally wouldn't post a small blog like a news article, but this did pop up on a Google news feed.

I'm still having trouble groking "young Republican" with Objectivist the way this guy is advertising himself. And he doesn't sound all that well-versed in Rand's concepts. Well, there it is... he certainly has a right to do what he's doing...

May he learn and grow.

Anyway, here's the article.

Ayn Rand's Objectivism vs. KONY 2012

March 10, 2012

(No quotes this time.)

Michael

[Selene]

Michael:

This is why I try not to go to his site too often.

I guess you have to accept a few broken windows before he breaks down a door here and there.

Adam

[9thdoctor]

Just trying to get caught up with all this business, and it's time for a letter to the editor, let me tell you, what?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This one is cute. I hate to say it, but Smith's perplexity is almost all about the manipulation techniques. I doubt she would like it or even admit it (after all, people like her can't be manipulated, right?), but this stuff is done on purpose.

Even Smith's response has been calculated into the mix. The category is called "buzz" and the mechanism driving it is called manufactured controversy.

All is vanity – and it's gone viral over warlord Kony

Joan Smith

11 March 2012

The Independent

From the article:

The celebrities squaring up to Kony are responding not to facts but to the film's saccharine tone and its unashamed narcissism. It's all about feeling good in return for not doing very much, and the rest of us can share in the glow by wearing a wristband, buying a campaign kit, and putting up posters.

. . .

The film was made by an American organisation called Invisible Children. Quite why its activists think they're helping kids in Uganda by launching a celebrity wild goose chase is a matter for them.

. . .

But the most astonishing thing about the campaign is its total insensitivity to questions of race, power and representation: the film demands that we look at a nasty black man, Kony, through the eyes of a winsome white child with blond curls who happens to be the film-maker's son.

These are just three of the techniques.

1. When you give people something to do that does not involve too much effort, you get interactivity and your message gets sticky. The Catholic Church has known about this for centuries. When you atone after a confession, they tell you to do things like lighting candles, saying Ave Maria and so forth. Go to any public presentation nowadays and the speaker will ask you to raise your hand if you have done this or that. This is classic crowd control.

2. I think the phrase in the article, "celebrity wild goose chase," says it all. But you actually get two persuasion benefits. The first is celebrity endorsement. And the second is enhancing a secret. We all are attracted to celebrities (even monkeys stare at pictures of celebrity monkeys--seriously) and we cannot resist a secret.

3. This one is ugly. The bad black man seen through the eyes of a blond white kid strikes deep on a cultural stereotype level. And the idiots who wax poetic don't even realize they are responding (right on cue) to a subconscious racist image that has been propagated throughout the culture in images, characters, art, entertainment, news and so on for centuries.

I am working on analyzing this film, but since this article touched on a few points, I thought is was useful to post it here.

Michael

[9thdoctor]

Here's Hitchens piece on Kony from 2006.

http://www.vanityfai.../hitchens200601

[9thdoctor]

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This just doesn't strike me as conspiracy theory stuff. Obviously they want to get the camel's nose into the tent, in the sense of getting US military involvement started in Uganda, but, well, they're being amply up front about it. Oh, and I don't buy the racism angle, they've got good guys and bad guys, and both sides are black (negro, African, I mean whatever's polite nowadays). The scenes with the little white kid were awfully saccharin, but that racism does not make.

[Selene]

both sides are black (negro, African, I mean whatever's polite nowadays).

Starting point guard for the NBA ___________?

The defendant?

[Dglgmut]

Yeah, I got turned off a lot when it started getting action-plany. Very interesting.

I like that post you made about it.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dennis,

If you think that it's easy to get 50 million views for a half-hour film on YouTube about a fringe bloody African strongman within 4 days starting from a virtual nobody account, I say more power to you.

Try it.

Then tell me that it's only some people being "amply up front about it."

Apropos, I just checked and, as of this posting, the count is just shy of 75 million views.

This kind of thing only happens with music videos of famous artists or zany scenes with kids or pets or stuff like that (maybe a sporadic rare exception). And the videos are almost always 5 minutes or less.

So my point is that there is a reason this happened. I don't believe for a minute that the world simply started caring about Kony like an on-off switch. One minute nobody knew who Kony was, then the switch flipped and everybody instantly got lathered up to get him. That just doesn't happen without a cause.

I think you missed the point on the racial stereotype. My focus is its use as a persuasion tool, not as a statement on race or racial hatred. The test at Project Implicit below (from another post I made) is more along the lines of what I am focusing on. There is a subconscious stereotype that comes from our culture and has nothing to do with bigotry per se. I guess we can call it the leftovers from centuries of racism. But it's real, as the test shows.

When some massive influences permeate the culture in all things, not just in words, like blacks are inferior to whites, you end up adopting these attitudes without even realizing it. Malcolm Gladwell, for instance, who is part black, discovered to his dismay that he actually had that bias when he took a Harvard test (he wrote about it in a book called Blink). Here is the test he took: Project Implicit.

Now here is a point I want to stress.

Covert persuasion does not work like a stage hypnotist where you zap a person and he starts clucking like a chicken.

There are basically two criteria (presuming that the different techniques are executed correctly): (1) The person being persuaded must not be aware that it is going on, and (2) The techniques need to be stacked on each other. They work as a set, not as an individual command-and-obey utterance.

I used the image of a seesaw before for a similar topic and it works here too. Imagine a seesaw with a large bucket on one end and viewer compliance on the other. You put one technique in the bucket (say false scarcity). Then another (say sense of community). Then another (say the subconscious image of the Great White Savior - Dr. Livingston I presume? -- told through the eyes of a child at that). Then another (pattern interrupts). Then another (embedded commands in open story loops). And on and on.

I probably will present some of this stuff here with examples as I dissect this video--I already downloaded it, but basically your seesaw will start getting heavier and heavier and heavier and going down as the other end goes up and up and up. Finally it reaches a tipping point where the viewer's compliance slides right on down to you from the sheer weight of gravity.

That's how this works.

And that's the reason for such a massive amount of views in such a short time for a video that is way longer than normal and deals with such an unattractive topic--all from a group that is unknown to the general public about a realtively unknown bad guy in a part of the world that hardly gets mainstream attention.

Anyway, I'm not all that interested in the substance--although I do hope they get Kony, and I also hope this trial balloon doesn't set a precedent and result in major USA military involvement in Africa over the next few years.

I am interested in how these folks pulled this thing off. That is the context for my comments.

As to the video about the Invisible Children guy talking about the group's finances, (yawn)... I don't care one way or another. In fact, I hope he made lots of money.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

Why couldn't they just say, "Listen, we need your money?" Instead of, "This is how we take control of our country!"

The American government should rent out their army to people who can raise enough money for a cause. No discrimination that way.

[BaalChatzaf]

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This just doesn't strike me as conspiracy theory stuff. Obviously they want to get the camel's nose into the tent, in the sense of getting US military involvement started in Uganda, but, well, they're being amply up front about it. Oh, and I don't buy the racism angle, they've got good guys and bad guys, and both sides are black (negro, African, I mean whatever's polite nowadays). The scenes with the little white kid were awfully saccharin, but that racism does not make.

Just what we need. Another theater of battle in the Forever War.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

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This just doesn't strike me as conspiracy theory stuff. Obviously they want to get the camel's nose into the tent, in the sense of getting US military involvement started in Uganda, but, well, they're being amply up front about it. Oh, and I don't buy the racism angle, they've got good guys and bad guys, and both sides are black (negro, African, I mean whatever's polite nowadays). The scenes with the little white kid were awfully saccharin, but that racism does not make.

Just what we need. Another theater of battle in the Forever War.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Bob:

Come on, we have had so many successful military operations in Africa and its environs under Democratic Presidents.

Clinton and Mogadishu ...oops maybe not.

Carter and the Iranian rescue operation ...oops guess not.

Never mind.

Adam

[9thdoctor]

Come on, we have had so many successful military operations in Africa and its environs under Democratic Presidents.

Clinton and Mogadishu ...oops maybe not.

Carter and the Iranian rescue operation ...oops guess not.

Iran's not in Africa! Meanwhile, don't forget the Marines in Tripoli!! Our batting average ain't that bad...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh5OlT-cslQ

[Selene]

Come on, we have had so many successful military operations in Africa and its environs under Democratic Presidents.

Clinton and Mogadishu ...oops maybe not.

Carter and the Iranian rescue operation ...oops guess not.

Iran's not in Africa! Meanwhile, don't forget the Marines in Tripoli!! Our batting average ain't that bad...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh5OlT-cslQ

Possibly why I said "...military operations in Africa and its environs..."

Maybe?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Cool discussion of the Kony video and social media from the News division at The Blaze.

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One guy asked if this was democratization of propaganda and my ears perked up, but they watered it down with generalities and a discussion of how Obama uses video.

Still, this discussion is worth seeing.

Michael

[Revah]

After reading this thread, everything I've been hearing about Kony and this campaign makes so much more sense. I've been hearing about it second-hand, from the younger people that I know, teenagers who are cutting their political activist teeth on this cause.

Teenagers who until a few weeks ago probably had never heard of the LRA. It seems that if you want to motivate the younger generation to careabout anything, YouTube is the way to go about it. The strange (or perhaps the not-so-strange) thing is that nowhere in all their enthusiastic explanations of the campaign was US military involvement mentioned. It was all about 'raising awareness' and sending money to help the children in Uganda.

Rallying the left around military action is certainly a nice propaganda trick.

I almost don't want to disillusion the young people I know who are taking an interest in socio-political issues and the wider world for the first time because of this (and planning direct action! That's one way not to feel utterly hopeless about the world's problems.) Truth's more important, though. I'll be passing on a few of your video links, Michael.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Now here's something nobody expected:

Invisible Children Co-Founder Detained: SDPD

SDPD said he was found masturbating in public, vandalizing cars and possibly under the influence of something Source: Invisible Children Co-Founder Detained: SDPD | NBC San Diego

By Sarah Grieco

Mar 16, 2012

NBC San Diego

From the article:

A co-founder for Invisible Children was detained in Pacific Beach on Thursday for being drunk in public and masturbating, according to San Diego Police Department.

Jason Russell, 33, was allegedly found masturbating in public, vandalizing cars and possibly under the influence of something, according to Lt. Andra Brown. He was detained at the intersection of Ingraham Street and Riviera Road.

Brown said Russell was acting very strange.

I wonder if this news will get to Kony.

Nah... I'm not even going to go there...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here's a video of Russel doing his thing.

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You can read more about it here. His wife says it was stress.

But from the overdose of persuasion techniques, my paranoia is kicking in and I seriously wonder if this is a publicity stunt for more buzz.

Michael

[9thdoctor]

But from the overdose of persuasion techniques, my paranoia is kicking in and I seriously wonder if this is a publicity stunt for more buzz.

I'm going to engage in some rank psychologizing here, by first noting that the article says he's a "devout evangelical Christian", then, well, I'll let the link to this article by Christopher Hitchens say the rest.

http://www.slate.com...ittle_time.html

"Thus, without overthinking it or attempting too much by way of amateur psychiatry, I think it's safe to assume that many tearoom traders have a need, which they only imperfectly understand, to get caught. And this may be truest of all of those who are armored with "the breastplate of righteousness." Next time you hear some particularly moralizing speech, set your watch. You won't have to wait long before the man who made it is found, crouched awkwardly yet ecstatically while the cistern drips and the roar of the flush maddens him like wine."

[J.S. McGowan]

I seem to remember reading in the Virtue of Selfishness that Ayn Rand saw the invasion of countries under a dictatorship by a free countries is morally justifiable. Doesnt this justify America getting involved in the affairs of other countries and hence give some justification to the Kony 2012 movement?

I disagree with the whole thing. It all seems like Hipster Socialist jibber jabber, but under what specific circumstance is american military interference justified?