The Fake Video Of Pelosi Isn't Just About The Morons Who Believed It- But The Media That Covered It

Trump has lied more than any other President in history. Americans need to process that.

Nancy Pelosi's rebuke of Facebook on account of being a willing party to a clearly manipulated video of her was more than justified (WSJ, yesterday, p. A2). Facebook's line at the time was that its members ought to be free to "decide for themselves" the veracity of media content, including an obviously doctored youtube video.  Alas, fifty years ago when the bulk of Americans were well -read and not chained to screens which lowered their IQs that may have been so. But no longer. We now must depend again on responsible media gate keepers to save 'Muricans from their own worst instincts and idiocy.

I first saw the fake Pelosi video on Chris Hayes' 'All In' show last Friday.  Like other mainstream media outlets, it was presented  side-by-side with the un-doctored footage of the House speaker.  This was in an effort to debunk the viral clips which had been created and circulated by Right wing Agitprop specialists to snooker and distract the lower IQ segment of our nation. 

Neither Janice or I would have been fooled even if we'd only been shown the doctored footage, of what has now become known in techie parlance as “deepfake” videos .   In the case of  the one circulated and touted on FAUX News as if real,  Pelosi's speech had been subtly slowed down and then pitch-corrected to make it appear as if the House speaker was drunk or incapacitated .   It was an obvious fake to anyone who's seen Pelosi, thus Janice and I concluded only an imbecile would be fooled by it.

Facebook did not remove the video but eventually added “fact check” links to the clips, which most users likely ignored or didn't see. Journalists and pundits debated the social networks’ decisions to leave the video up, while others lamented the rise of political misinformation, filter bubbles, the future of “deepfake” videos and the internet’s penchant to warp reality.

But what is needed here is a larger context examination of how the corporate media itself is being outplayed by the liars, propagandists and pro-Trump fifth columnists (such as embedded at FOX News) in our midst. It has even gone beyond millions of citizens accepting the fake video at face value, to whether too many in the so-called "serious" media are themselves being played like puppets.

Eric Alterman, writing in a piece ('Lord of the Lies') appearing in a recent issue of The Nation (June 5-10, p. 10) notes, for example:

"Daniel Dale of The Toronto Star, who tracks Trump's deceptions, says that most journalists rarely bother to mention that Trump's statements are filled with falsehoods. 'If you watched a network news segment, read an Associated Press article, or glanced at the front page of the city that hosted him, you'd typically have no idea that he was wholly inaccurate'.  Most coverage, Dale points out, reads something like 'Trump speaks to big, excited crowd, insults X and Y, talks policy Z'"

Which is a sorry, cartoonish template that - if Walter Cronkite were alive today - he'd laugh at. He'd wonder what school of journalism the perpetrators had attended - if they did at all.  Incredibly too, Trump often lies about the lies and the media almost never really hone in on it.  Well a few did when Trump blurted out in a tweet several days ago: "I had nothing to do with Russia helping to get me elected!"  Huh?  The detestable toad then denied it, insisting to the yapping press corps that he never said any such thing. A Freudian slip then?

Another egregious example cited by Alterman occurred when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly in September last year and trotted out of his favorites, i.e. he had "accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country."

Caught out by hundreds with IQs far superior to his - "the assembled audience burst into laughter".  He was "briefly left speechless"  before realizing he needed another lie to cover his humiliation, i.e. "he didn't expect that reaction".  So then  he ad-libbed the lie that "he meant to get some laughs."

But while this one was good for yucks, others have had more real world consequences, such as at a Green Bay rally  on April 27.  There he related this wholesale whopper to a crowd of drooling MAGA goons who accepted it without question (ibid.):

"The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully.  And then the doctor and the mother determine whether to execute the baby."

Did any of the local papers or media expose this claptrap? Nope, not even The Green Bay Press -Gazette, so perhaps it was outside their  reporting wheelhouse. But that lies at the heart of how our nation is getting mind-fucked day in and day out. The press repeatedly being left sucking air and unable to catch up with all the lies, because Trump is treated with excess respect instead of plain contempt - in the futile effort to appear "objective'".  And so, with little or no blowback from the 4th estate (bloggers like me with lesser audiences having to call out the crap)   such atrocious lies continue to make abortion providers targets of domestic terrorists  - even as assorted backward states pass abortion banning laws.

Another example that rivals the preceding in vileness was Trump on Memorial Day, siding with the most bestial, bloodthirsty tyrant on the planet - Kim Jong Un.  Asked a question by the ever somnolent mainstream Washington press corps, Trump responded he had to believe Kim,  who told him "Biden is a low IQ individual".  This degeneracy did get a reply from Biden's campaign manager Kate Bedingfield the day after, i.e. in The Denver Post (May 29, p. 17A):

"For anyone to appear on Memorial Day and to side with a murderous dictator against a fellow American and former vice-president speaks for itself."

Only mentioned near the very end of the piece was that a half imbecile member of the press corps had actually asked Trump about "the North Korean leader's (earlier) description of the Democrat's intelligence level."

WTF?! Why is this even in the question mix?  Only an ignorant buffoon would ask that knowing full well how Dotard would respond given his ongoing bromance with the N. Korean swine.  But it gets to the heart of how much of the media itself is responsible for the mess we're in. I mean if we can't depend on the press to be critical thinkers how can we expect the ordinary citizen to be?

Alterman near the end of his piece writes "thankfully most Americans don't believe Trump" - citing fewer than 3 in 10 according to a WaPO Fact Checker. However he also writes:

"What worries me, however, is that people don't realize how much more dishonest Trump is than any of his predecessors. Only about 50 percent of Americans think he is 'less honest' than any previous president".

Which thereby conflates most presidents as liars in some form and worse, fails to hurl Trump into the depths to which he belongs.  Much of this again, is because of the media and mainstream press which often repeats his idiotic tweets without criticizing them properly - merely assuming (as in the case of the Pelosi fake video) most Americans have the intelligence and sense to separate what's factual from rubbish. Well, they don't!

How to respond?  In particular how should the media treat them: as official communications with all the gravitas of a presidential official statement or announcement - through the orthodox, standard channels? Or as disruptive refuse no better than environmental toxic waste?

Some (e.g. Journalism prof Indira Lakshmanan)  have proposed repeating the tweets, but then doing a fact check. The problem with that is twofold: first, most people will have already seen the tweets say on the morning or evening news. Doing a follow-up fact check will then be too late and of minimal impact. Thus, Trumpers' erroneous beliefs and fables are merely reinforced in a kind of confirmation bias. (As manifested in a recent Justin Amash town hall, with one of  his conservo constituents, see e.g. the lead off link below.)

Second, the very act of repeating the offending tweet has the effect of dignifying it - even if unintentionally.  (The same, obviously, applied to the treatment of the Pelosi fake video).


Back to the fake Pelosi video which the FOX News trolls  (e.g. Laura Ingraham,  Tucker Carlson et al) actually broadcast and integrated into their newscasts as evidence she was unfit to be House Speaker.  That above all revived for me the danger of propaganda and its effects on the brain as shown in the excellent PBS documentary series, ''The Brain'.  The series  featured neuroscientist David Eagleman who explored the role of that organ in social connections, as well as genocide and propaganda.  His key finding? 

"A basic, single word label is enough to change your brain's pre-conscious response to a person in pain, in other words, how much you care about them."   

In this context, the impact on the brains of those who watched the Pelosi video -  and didn't detect the obvious distortions - would have interjected a virulent anti -Pelosi bias.  Even in the more benign media treatments, whether repeating the lie or attempting to knock it down, the predominant political narrative suddenly became squarely on Pelosi’s health, not her competence.

As the video views continued to climb, I had to concur with Charlie Warzel in a recent Times piece that our attention was successfully hijacked by a remedial iMovie trick.  It’s easy to fall back on the notion that the Pelosi viral videos are an example of a broken system. But that’s not exactly true. Many of the forces that led this particular doctored video to become news are part of an efficient machine designed to do exactly this. Our media distribution systems are working just as intended. They just weren’t designed for our current political moment. 

Alterman and other media critics like Robert McChesney and Norman Solomon estimate it may take the U.S. media ecosystem years, decades to adapt. But we don't have that time while a pathological liar and criminal Vulgarian fouls the nation and the presidency every moment he tweets or talks.

As Warzel also notes: Facebook, by virtue of the fact that it made $16.6 billion in advertising revenue last quarter, is a media company. But Facebook wasn’t designed to be a media company, especially not one in the middle of an information war. As a platform, Facebook has no real responsibility for the veracity of its content; as a media company, it most certainly does.

Similarly, the press has few answers for how to cover propaganda in an online environment that is designed to spread hoaxes. The heart of the reporting process breaks down when your adversaries’ only goal is to hijack attention.   (See David Brooks' recent column in the NY Times on how much of the net is ideally adapted to infiltration by pathological, psychopathic trolls. The type who traffic in wacko conspiracy theories  like Pizzagate and the QAnon deep state B.S.)

And then there’s the political reality; the media has even fewer answers for how to deal with a president and his associates who are as prone to trafficking in these wacko conspiracies as they are to breathe. The media  then becomes trapped in a vicious cycle of newsworthiness, diverting attention and outrage to false claims and viral hoaxes. After all, the Pelosi fakes weren’t newsworthy because they were high-tech, but because the lie was so blatant and spread by powerful individuals.

In other words, it’s not only our systems that our broken,  and being degraded by the day, but our whole political landscape. And it’s only going to get worse. We need a new handbook. And quick. We definitely need a more advanced form of journalism that can better adapt to compulsive liar leaders - especially those who cozy up to bloodthirsty tyrants.

See also:

Donald Trump

This Quote from a Trump Voter on the Mueller Report Shows How Deeply Right-wing Media Has Warped Its Viewers’ Reality

by Cody Fenwick | May 31, 2019 - 6:48am | permalink

And:

Media

The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate

by Chris Hedges | May 27, 2019 - 5:27am | permalink

Trump's Tweets Need To Be Treated As Toxic Psychological Waste - And Ignored By The Media

"After my speech on Thursday night there was a big turn for the better. Troy wins a great victory  during a very tough time of the year for voting."
Trump tweet at 9:59  last night, with Ohio House District 12 results still too close to call and now provisional ballots, absentees must be counted.

The deplorable offal above highlights the problem with the chronic liar occupying the White House and the difficulty in transcending his incessant, duplicitous tweets. Even in the act of correcting them, one per force repeats them - else there is no context. In the case of the preceding balderdash Trump (perhaps correctly) assumes his gaggle of gullible Goobers will believe his twaddle. Betting that they are unaware that in fact the Ohio District 12 results ended in a statistical dead heat with Balderson at 50.2 % and  the Dem Danny O'Connor at 49.3 % or a difference of 1,754 votes. A difference that can easily be made up after the provisional and absentee ballots are counted - which will be over the next ten days.  So, in effect, Dotard has blabbed the results prematurely.  (In any case whatever the results they're nothing to get overly exercised about as the two will face off again in November, when it really counts.)

Even if it turns out O'Connor loses, it will be by a minuscule amount - likely less than 1 percent.  That ought to scare the bejeezus out of the Gooprs,   given this occurred in a district Trump took by 11 points in 2016 and which  is highly gerrymandered, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/05/of-course-sanford-wins-in-sc-can-you.html

So in no existing universe could Troy Balderson's tiny margin be considered a "great victory". But this embodies the inherent problems dealing with the illegitimate buffoon based at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Michael Massing's recent Nation article ('Journalism In The Age Of Trump: What's Missing and What Matters') fairly well set out the parameters and dimensions of the problem posed by Trump's barrage of lies - generally dispatched in his hateful tweets.  But even his not so hateful tweets encompass distortions, exaggerations and outright dismantling of the truth.  As Massing puts it:

"Trump’s venomous attacks on the press—as an enemy of the people, purveyors of fake news, a failing institution—have taken their toll. Journalists are denounced at political rallies, trolled on social media, and subjected to racist and misogynistic taunts. Such assaults, together with the unforgiving financial climate in which they operate, have made journalists feel under siege like never before. One result has been the development of a siege mentality."

This should not be news to anyone who's followed Trump's lies and tweets (which generally are synonymous) from even before his illegitimate ascension to the presidency.  Now, however, there is the matter of what to do about them. How to respond?  In particular how should the media treat them: as official communications with all the gravitas of a presidential official statement or announcement - through the orthodox, standard channels? Or as disruptive refuse no better than environmental toxic waste, say in the environment?

One approach is to repeat the odious tweets but to fact check them. For example, Journalism professor Indira Lakshmanan advocates inserting the lying tweets between two doses of fact to diminish their import. So suppose Trump tweets "Mexican rapists are swarming across the border endangering all real Americans."    Lakshmanan would preface that with the fact that illegal entry at the border has actually decreased, then report the tweet, then its falsity.

The problem, as philosopher-economist  George Lakoff has pointed out, is that this method repeats the tweet - so people (mainly vulnerable Trumpers)- remember the tweet but not its correction.  Thus, Trumpers' erroneous beliefs and fables are merely reinforced in a kind of confirmation bias.  Dickinson philosophy teacher Crispin Sartwell doesn't buy this because he claims  'Truth Sandwich'? Baloney! - WSJ    

"Mr. Lakoff's account is as obviously false as it is patronizing"  Noting: "The people watching CNN or reading the Times see and hear Trump's tweets as much as any AMericans and more or less universally oppose him".  

In other words, he argues Lakoff's take can't be correct if so many NY Times' readers and CNN viewers basically ignore Trump's tweets. dismissing them as lies.

But here is where Sartwell falls down-  not appreciating Mr.Lakoff's description of the power of repetition of Trump's tweets mainly applies to Trump's cult members, i.e. his stooges or drooling goobers at his rallies who get wet dreams with his every syllable. It is they for whom each tweet incites "changes in their brain circuitry", in Lakoff's words.

Most germane here is the excellent PBS documentary series, ''The Brain', in which neuroscientist David Eagleman explored the role of that organ in social connections, as well as genocide and propaganda.  His key finding? 

"A basic, single word label is enough to change your brain's pre-conscious response to a person in pain, in other words, how much you care about them."   

And let us note here Trump habitually has used single or double word labels to attack his opponents, e.g. "little Marco", "crooked Hillary",  "Lyin' Ted" etc.  In other words, Trump's goobers' brains are already sensitized to receive his lies and further ignore those to whom Trump has directed his dpersonalized tweet attacks.  There is no "pseudoscience" in this, as Sartwell insists, but more widely known actual neuroscience. 

But I've dealt with Sartwell's nonsense before, e.g. last September when he penned another load of fulsome rot in the WSJ ('Texting and Twitter Make This A Golden Age For the Written Word').Sartwell, clearly under the influence of MJ candies or cookies, scribbled:

"Texting - to say the obvious - is writing. Snapchat conversations are written with thumbs, but they are written. Twitter seems to be getting blamed for many ills, including those of the Trump administration. But whatever else the president does as he tweets, he is definitely writing. Barack Obama composed a couple of decent memoirs, but he is not as prolific an author as Mr. Trump, a master of his chosen genre.It strikes me that Twitter is not only a social media platform, it is a poetic form, like haiku or a sonnet."

This elicited my response:

"I had to wonder what Sartwell was on when he wrote this unmitigated hogswill. I suspect it must have been a combination of MJ edibles and maybe booze. No sane human, certainly not a professor, could compare a bunch of incomprehensible, misspelled,  cartoon tweets to Obama's memoirs - unless he wasn't in his right mind.  And to compare a tweet to a sonnet carries false analogy to the same level as comparing a can of Alpo to a 5-course gourmet meal for a human. It is simply bare bollocks. Utter nonsense."

For those who dispute my take, I defy you to read a sonnet of Shakespeare's or of Robert Browning's and then read one of Trump's tweets. Any one. If you can seriously argue that they are equivalent as "poetic forms" - then I'd say you're more gone than James Eagen Holmes when he adopted the Joker personality.   As for Sartwell, the fact this guy could summon such an absurd "argument" shows he isn't anywhere in the same league as Lakoff.  

The actual cure for Trump and the disease of Trumpism may be staring us in the face, and was offered some weeks ago in a WSJ op -ed ('The Press's Cult of Trump')  by a Swiss editor  Patrik Müller who has compared Trump's rise in the USA - compliments of too much media attention - to that of Christoph Blocher. 

Like Trump, Blocher was a billionaire who took over the Swiss People's Party and transformed it into an anti-immigrant party.  As he put it: "Blocher dominated the headlines for years, much the way Trump does in the U.S. Amid dire warnings by virtually every Swiss news outlet, his party increased its share of the vote constantly.  In retrospect, it's widely accepted that Blocher's exuberant media presence and his demonization, helped him rise. While meaning to do the opposite, the media made him the hero against the 'political class'."

As Massing puts it (ibid.): "With their constant drumbeat of 'Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump' watching these networks (MSNBC, CNN) is a soul sapping and demoralizing experience."

For his part Müller believes that neither our media or Trump will break out of this toxic "symbiotic" relationship.   He concludes it will continue until "the audience gets tired and stops reading articles."  Oh yeah, and Trump's tweets too! 

When I put this challenge to wifey she sneered and replied: "Are you kidding? We have to know what that shithead is tweeting to know how to combat him!"  

Case closed!

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/paul-street/80540/the-american-sea-of-deception

Excerpt:

"We have no historical database of presidential untruth on which to rely to make detailed comparisons, but it is certain that Trump’s rate of falsehood is beyond anything ever seen in the White House. Armed with Twitter and a mad and malignantly narcissistic penchant for twisting facts and truth in accord with his own ever-shifting sense of what serves his interests and hurts his perceived foes, this monstrosity is gaslighting the last flickering embers of civic democracy at a velocity that would make Goebbels green with envy.

Keeping up with Trump’s erroneous and duplicitous statements is exhausting work, hazardous to one’s own sanity. Just as depressing as Trump’s serial fabrication and invention is the apparent willingness of tens of millions of ostensibly decent and honest ordinary Americans to tolerate, dismiss or even believe the endless stream of nonsense and bullshit."

The Role of the Brain in Propaganda and Genocide

In his superb PBS documentary series, ''The Brain', Neuroscientist David Eagleman explores the role of our master organ in social connections, as well as genocide and propaganda. The origins of the latter are actually embodied in our desire to "seek out alliances" with friends, family and hopefully others who share our same interests, convictions and even political leanings. In Eagleman's words:

"It gives comfort to belong to a group"

The problem is that this same positive desire for bonding and alliance can be inverted to attack those with whom we disagree and also who may share none of our own attributes or beliefs. As Eagleman puts it:

"There's a flip side of this drive to come together. Because for every in group there are outsiders. And the consequences of that can be very dark. "

He then goes on to cite examples from history of "one group turning on another", including those who were defenseless and posed no threat. One of the starkest examples was the Jews in Nazi Germany. Defined first as an "out group" and then depicted via propaganda as vermin (rats) their fate was extermination in the 'Final Solution'. The same occurred to the Tutsis living in Rwanda who began to be depicted as 'cockroaches' by the dominant Hutus and ended up with over 800,000 slaughtered as a result.

Eagleman, after observing most of his (Jewish) family lines ended in the 1940s, asks:

"Under normal circumstances you wouldn't find it conscionable to go murder your neighbor. So what is it that provokes thousands of people to do exactly that? What is it about certain situations that short circuits the normal social functioning of the brain?"

He then goes to eastern Europe and picks up on the Bosnian Civil war over 1994-95 over which more than 100,000 Muslims were slaughtered by Serbians in actions known as "ethnic cleansing".  One of the most horrific incidents occurred in  Srebrenica where over 8,000 people were systematically killed.

The immediate cause was the expulsion of thousands of refugees by the UN command, from a safe center, delivering them right into the hands of their enemies waiting outside the gate.  Women were then raped before being killed, men were instantly executed and children butchered on the spot. And this, as Eagleman notes, was "just the beginning of the largest genocide on European soil since the holocaust".

Eagleman interviews one of the Muslim survivors, Hasan Nuhanovic, who lived because he was a UN translator and part of a protected group. But his family (mother, brother, father) was sent out of the compound to meet their deaths.

The most horrific aspect? The mass murderers weren't strangers but neighbors with whom his family had previously shared a great deal: meals, outings family get -togethers.  In Nuhanovic's words: "The mass murders were perpetrated by our neighbors, the very people we'd been living with for decades."

As he put it referring to the sudden switch: "They had been obeying 'don't kill' for many years, then it was suddenly 'Go and kill!'"

Genocides keep happening - Rwanda, Darfur, Nanking, Armenia ...and Eagleman's interest is in 'why?' Traditionally the question is asked through the lens of history or economics or politics but Eagleman is convinced (as I am) that "one more lens is needed": genocide needs to be understood as a neural phenomenon.

His research was predicated on the question; "Does our brain function differ - when we relate to someone - depending on which group they are in?"

After all, for every in group we belong to there's at least one group that we don't. That division can be based on anything: race, gender, wealth or religion.

Eagleman's experiment put 130 participants into a CT scanner and showed them six pictures in which one in particular gets stabbed (in a film) by a syringe needle. Each hand is labeled according to being a member of a putative group, e.g. Jew, atheist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Scientologist  etc.

The stabbing scene activates the pain matrix in the brain- which occurs whenever we see someone else in pain - unless we are psychopaths.

In the experiment the question to be addressed was: Would the scanned subject care as much seeing a member of the outgroup getting stabbed as the in group?

The results? For each subject, on watching a member of his in group getting stabbed, there was a neural activity spike appearing on a graph. When one of his outgroups was stabled (e.g. for a Christian, an atheist) the response was essentially a flat line. No alarm, no connection.

Eagleman's conclusion:

A basic, single word label is enough to change your brain's pre-conscious response to a person in pain, in other words, how much you care about them.

He also adds it's not really about religion, since "even atheists care more about other atheists' hands getting stabbed than any others."  Thus, it's not about religion but "which team you're on".

To understand how whole groups like the Bosnian Serbs can go off the rails and slaughter neighbors, one can study psychopaths - like Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Charles Manson etc. What's with their brains that allows them to act that way?  Well, Eagleman points to networks in the medial pre-frontal cortex that underlie social interactions. When we interact with other people this part of the brain becomes active. But in the brains of people with extreme psychopathy  the area has much less activity.

Because the psychopath doesn't care about you - you're just an object to be manipulated.

So, Eagleman asks: "What accounts for genocide? Can it be due to armies of psychopaths? That can't be true because psychopaths occupy only a small percentage of humans."

But genocide can engage thousands, tens of thousands or millions. So - how does one get ordinary citizens to act as psychopaths?

Eagleman then refers to experiments conducted in the Netherlands involving pictures shown to subjects and their responses via the medial pre-frontal cortex. Subjects are shown stereotypical images of other people from different social groups. In many cases, for example, the medial pre-frontal cortex is almost inactive when the subjects look at homeless people. The researcher notes the pattern observed suggest a type of mental avoidance and not thinking about the imaged person.

Eagleman avers:

"To a brain that responds this way, homeless people are dehumanized, They're viewed more like objects and that can enable us to not care. "

And as the Netherlands brain researcher adds: "If you don't diagnose this person as another human being than the normal moral rules may not apply."

Thus, Eagleman reasons that "under the right circumstances our brain activity can look more like a psychopath's"

But to get to genocide, one must understand one more thing about group behavior. Eagleman again:

"Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale. Not just a few individuals but whole sections of a population. If all members of a perpetrating group are complicit then it's as if they all experienced the same reduction in brain activity.This can be investigated and studied like a disease outbreak - a group contagion. One that's most often spread deliberately."

He goes on:

"The perfect tool for this job is propaganda. It plugs right into neural networks and it dials down the degree to which we care about other people."

Just as in the former Yugoslavia, where Serbians killed their Muslim neighbors, they were bombarded by propaganda. In this case, state-controlled TV stations demonized the Bosnian Muslims. They went so far as to actually claim the Bosnian Muslims were feeding Serbian children to the lions at the zoo. While a brain disposed to critical thinking would instantly recognize this as bull pocky, an already socially degraded brain, e.g. that saw Muslims as inferior, would simply ingest the propaganda. (Very similar to how many are doing right now with Trump's despicable propaganda).

The same thing transpired in Rwanda.What began as "humorous" cartoons depicting Tutsis as the most hated insects on the planet then transmogrified to non stop hateful rants about the "cockroaches" on Kigali RTLM radio, run by the majority Hutus.  While the Tutsis could tune out this hate spiel (as most wise aleck 'free speech' mongers like to recommend for those who dislike bullying verbal taunts), the Hutus didn't - but rather fed their infernal hate on it to the bursting point. Every night more hate was ingested via this "free speech" medium until only a trigger was required to unleash the worst in Rwanda. That transpired when the Rwandan President's plane (he was Hutu) was shot down en route to what was supposed to be a peace conference in Tanzania.

See also:

http://hutututsi.weebly.com/propaganda.html

The good thing as Eagleman observes, is that propaganda is almost always easy to recognize. In the form that leads to hatred and genocide "it always plays the familiar tune of dehumanization. Make your enemy less than human. Make him like an animal."

Propaganda is a weapon but has now become an art and a science. And thus it's becomes ever more dangerous. What's more, the internet now is the most likely medium for dispensing propaganda and to reach the people most likely to act upon them: young men.

The political agendas around us, actually manipulate the brain activity inside us.

How to get around it and stop it? That usually must entail the victimized brain stepping outside its own 'box' to see the propaganda for what it is. The trouble is that most brains are not trained to do that so often need an outside interlocutor who is able to recognize the infection for what it is and 'unpack' it for the affected brain or brains. The goal: enable the person to see through the political agendas of others, especially leaders or would-be leaders.

The problem is this intervention might not be welcome by the propagandized persons especially if they embrace the propagandizer on an emotional or charismatic level (as most of Trump's supporters do). In that case the interlocutor may be treated like Emmanuel Goldstein, the character from '1984': Recall Goldstein was himself demonized as a "traitor" by the rulers and people of Oceania. What was his crime?  He attempted to break through the state's propaganda. That is, that continuous war was used to siphon off the wealth of the society to keep people living at bare subsistence. Goldstein's exact words, for which Oceania's fascists wanted him dead:

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. "

Muslim Focus Groups Speak Out Against Demonization

The recent PBS special 'The Brain', featuring neuroscientist David Eagleman, was excellent because it not only touched on brain dynamics but on how our brains can become debased and their potential thwarted by hate speech and propaganda. Eagleman - showing actual data (e.g. from positive emission tomography) - revealed how genocides through history can be traced to a severe "reduction" in social connections - emerging from how we see others. In the case of genocides the thread that uniformly runs through them is the demonization of an entire human group, whether based on race, religion or some other cultural difference.

It was a sobering look, also, at how propaganda and hate speech can actually deform brains and cause those similarly reduced to aggregate individuals, thereby to persecute the "target group of the moment". This information is especially apropos now as we behold Muslims being singled out for demonization and lumped together despite the fact they come from 77 different countries and speak over 100 different languages.

How is it possible to do such indiscriminate lumping? Well it's possible because our brains, if we don't care for their health and what goes in, are susceptible to "social reduction". They are also subject to having the fear centers based in the amygdala triggered and then ramped up by irresponsible rhetoric.

Hence, it was interesting to hear one Muslim mother advise others in a focus group on CBS (convened by Frank Luntz) that they should not watch the Republican Debate because it would be too full of hate speech. As she put it to Luntz:

"I knew that subjecting our children to the hateful stereotyping and the lumping of Muslims with terrorism is actually something that psychologically impacts them. I do not want my children to be subjected to the vilification of their faith. I will not allow Donald Trump to tell my kids how they should feel about being Muslim".

Another young Muslim woman told Luntz:

"This is my faith and it is part of who I am. And it is painful to see how it has been so demonized."

Another Muslim lawyer observed:

"We can't hide behind the fact that non-Muslim Americans right now do feel afraid. Not because of the fact of safety being a concern but because somebody looks different"

Another pointed out:

""Why are we being picked on? We're not out there chanting 'death to America!'.  We don't have any bombs in our hands! We're just being ourselves and this is a narrative that's missing right now".

Indeed, but the last guy misses the point of the mass commission by fearful Americans of the fallacy of composition.  This is extending attributes to an entire group only actually demonstrated by a subset. Thus, because a small set of twisted radicals acts out then all Muslims are seen as having the same potential. It would be as if we atheists expressed monumental fear of right wing Christians because one of them acted out and shot up a Planned Parenthood Clinic.

Incredibly, some inept thinkers actually believe the resistance to committing the fallacy of composition vis-à-vis Muslims actually represents some kind of "reverse psychology" to try and protect Muslims. It is nothing of the sort, but rather trying to point out a major logical error to avoid trashing reason and critical thinking amidst hysterical yelping.

To make the further point of hysteria, another member of a focus group held by Scott Pelley referred to "idiotic questions" being "manufactured out of thin air" put up on rightist websites which have no basis in fact or reality. Many of the questions, according to the respondent, "were so vicious and absurd they didn't merit being dignified by any kind of answers."

Another college student made a totally apt point to Pelley that:

"The Qu'ran was written in Arabic which is a deeply metaphorical language where one word has hundreds of meanings. So, if you want to define some passage in a violent sense you're going to be able to so define it because of the wide breadth of interpretations. In the same way one can define it in a peaceful sense which over a billion people now do".

Hmmm....sounds remarkably similar to the dangers my old Loyola University Exegesis prof used to belabor as regards biblical passages translated from Greek and Aramaic. There is too vast a disconnection with modern English to be able to take those passages literally.

Another Muslim college student told Pelley:

"I don't understand logically how it makes sense to say that ISIS represents all Muslims when they're killing the very people that they claim they represent."

The point she misses is that when brains are attacked and then colonized by propaganda (the most serious form of consciousness reduction according to David Eagleman) then logic and rational thought go out the widow. All one is left with is emotional hysteria and unreason, as well as hate.

This gets back to the point made by an expert from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London , that most U.S. security specialists and the Pentagon take very seriously:

"ISIS thrives on polarization. They want people to say they hate Muslims. This is the foundation of their success"

This is not coming from any "libo" or "libtard" but from a serious geopolitical organization cited in The Wall Street Journal  ('Islamic State Tries To Forge Divide in the West', Dec. 11, p. A9):

And why it should be so hard to grasp that every bit of political bombast directed at Muslims, or hurling of the epithet "raghead" on a blog or FB post, or  mention of selective screening is another promotion for ISIS' agenda is mystifying. But perhaps explained by the brains of the sources of hostility being taken over by propaganda - as Eagleman noted.

This is why it is extremely dangerous to express vitriol or mass rejection of Muslims here in the U.S. because it plays directly into the ISIS narrative that all Muslims are unwelcome here - so why not join them.

We can't afford this kind of propaganda acceptance which truly undermines our free speech as well as national security as it sows fear.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/65233/the-republican-path-to-the-dark-side

Excerpt:

Whether it's fear of same-sex couples getting married, fear of the government taking away the people's guns or fear of Black men, they've always understood that fear works to motivate their white base.

Fear works because it appeals to our basic animal instinct to stay safe, and it makes the simplest, inane and most downright evil solutions sound smart.....Terrorism is a problem; no one denies that. But Republicans and their enablers in the media are blowing it way out of proportion. There's no reason Americans should be as scared about it as they are

The 'Secret Lives of the Brain'? Been There, Done That - 20 Years Ago!

Some of the press blurbs about David Eagleman's book: 'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' (Pantheon, 2011):

"A fascinating, dynamic look under the hood of the conscious mind".....Brain Pickings.

"A stunning exploration of the 'we' behind the 'I'" - Jonah Lehrer, author of 'How We Decide'

"A thrilling, subsurface exploration of the mind and all its contradictions" - The Courier Journal

"A popularizer of impressive gusto....Eagleman aims grandly to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars." - The New York Observer

And on and on....making one wonder, indeed, if Eagleman has somehow discovered the skeleton key of the brain, and human conscious operation.

Well, what's so terrific about the book? It's basically the proposition that the brain (and by extension our consciousness) manifests no single uniform identity but is instead comprised of a "team of rivals"- each competing for prominence and emergence. In a recent MSNBC 'Morning Joe' appearance, Eagleman actually referred to different neuro-subsystems being akin to differing "political parties" - which got the attention of those present.

The problem is that the concept  of multiple, competing  brain 'selves' isn't new. It's just been decked out in new window dressing by Eagleman. This is difficult for some to appreciate, but perhaps only because they don't read as widely as they think they do.

Twenty-one years ago Neuroscientist Robert Ornstein, in his book The Evolution of Consciousness, Prentice-Hall, 1991, used a more complex model - adapting the fact that human behavior is a confluence of the new brain (neocortex) as well as ape-jackal brain (mesocortex) and reptile brain (paleo cortex).
Ornstein associated specific modes of behavior with particular neuronal sub-assemblies to assign relatively distinct units of dominant behavior. He called these sub-units "simpletons".  The operational functioning of a human brain then was essentially the result of the interaction of these sub-assemblies or simpletons, e.g.

{H} = [A] + [P] + [L] + [R] + ........

where [A] = Altruistic, [P] = Playful ,[L] = lustful, [R] = reflective and so on.

A dozen or more such "simpletons" may "inhabit" each human brain - and come to the fore if the correct stimulus appears. Thus, a "hostile-aggressive" simpleton may appear if one is cut off in a lane of traffic, or is chewed out by one's boss. A "lust" simpleton may appear for any number of stimuli-images which I won't bother to detail, but which anyone can imagine! A "caring-loving" simpleton may appear in response to words of endearment, or an affectionate hug from one's spouse, or child. A "comic" simpleton may appear spontaneously - and proceed to play a practical joke, or take a humorous perspective on everything for the time it is "in control".

Ornstein points out that many humans "require time to get their simpletons in place" for particular situations. A father of two young children may need a half hour or more after he arrives home from work to "chill out" to allow his hostile-aggressive simpleton to depart, to make way for the "loving-caring" simpleton that can address his children's needs without yelling at them, criticizing them or swatting them. Far better, as Ornstein indicates, to allow decompression time for a simpleton change, than to invite disaster. Ornstein argues that if a person makes any kind of effort - he or she can identify most of the simpletons at work in their personality, and learn to recognize them - and bring a desired one on when the situation calls for it. (As in the case of the father above).

What does all this tell us about the human brain? First of all, that it's extremely complex. In fact, the brain is not "one" but three: composed of a neocortex (center of abstract thought), a mesocortex, and a paleocortex (wherein emotions, instincts, lust and territoriality reside). The interplay between one or more of these parts - as well as between what Ornstein calls the "thought circuit" and "emotion circuit" can bring a particular simpleton into play. Often changing simpletons - say from "hostile-aggressive" to "caring"-   is not easy, because the thought and emotion circuits are nearly detached from one another (the former localized in the neocortex, the latter in the limbic system-hypothalamus). This lack of "communication" is the cause of endless problems or misunderstandings in human social interactions.

Before Eagleman arrived on the scene with his take on a novel morality arising from competing "brain rivals" - Ornstein was already there. Morality and justice meted out often runs into complications - Ornstein observes- because:

i) The typical human is not one steady persona (identity) but up to a dozen or more living together, with more or less equal power shared.

ii) For a given misdeed or crime, which simpleton (brain sub-system) do you hold accountable? If you hold the whole person accountable you are perhaps assuming more than is warranted by our current brain architecture and its dynamic interplay. After all, why should one's WHOLE self be held accountable because the Lust simpleton briefly got out of control? Or because one's murderous-rage simpleton did?

The answer is that for society to function, as Ornstein notes, it needs to hold the whole person responsible, even if only one part of his collective simpletons was the perpetrator. Sophisticated brain discriminaton, say to parse the origin of specific immoral actions, is simply not at the level needed to identify "responsible brain simpletons". (Though obviously, say in a case of rape, a lust simpleton can be brought under control by chemical castration).

Other conclusions also arise:

i) Humans possess no constant or persistent self, but a gaggle of competing "selves" (simpletons) any one of which can seize control at any given time. Thus, the concept of a fixed personality is a fiction or artificial construction.

ii) For a truly genuine concept of "free will" one therefore needs to look not just at a person's acts, but the interplay at the time for his different selves. In other words, how does the presence of multiple selves within a person alter the concept of free will at its core?

By all means read Eagleman's book if you're so inclined and want to have a readable insight into brain operation. But for deeper insights, try to get hold of Ornstein's book too. After all, he was there first with the concept.....and some quite coherent explanations.