Eighty years ago the Turkish government forced Hollywood to drop a movie project based on The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, then a best-selling novel on the Armenian Genocide by German-language author, Jew and outspoken Hitler opponent Franz Werfel. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, originally written as a warning against Hitler through the prism of the Armenian Genocide, never saw the silver screen. Such a movie could have also raised awareness of the fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time and later of the ongoing Holocaust. It could have shaped the “narrative” of the struggle against Hitler. Many have since been interested to finally turn the novel into a major production, but Turkish opposition and obstruction seemed insurmountable.
It had taken years — and the passionate support of Armenian activist Kirk Kerkorian, who financed the film’s $100 million budget without expecting to ever make a profit — for The Promise, a historical romance set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide and starring Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, to reach the screen. Producers always knew it would be controversial: Descendants of the 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire shortly after the onset of World War I have long pressed for the episode to be recognized as a genocide despite the Turkish government’s insistence the deaths were not a premeditated extermination.
The Promise, which opens April 21, finally would bring the untold saga to a mass audience. But at the Toronto Film Festival premiere in September, producer Mike Medavoy watched the late billionaire’s carefully laid plans upended by a digital swarm that appeared out of nowhere.
Before the critics in attendance even had the chance to exit Roy Thompson Hall, let alone write their reviews, The Promise’s IMDb page was flooded with tens of thousands of one-star ratings. “All I know is that we were in about a 900-seat house with a real ovation at the end, and then you see almost 100,000 people who claim the movie isn’t any good,” says Medavoy. Panicked calls were placed to IMDb, but there was nothing the site could do. “One thing that they can track is where the votes come from,” says Eric Esrailian, who also produced the film, and “the vast majority of people voting were not from Canada. So I know they weren’t in Toronto.”
The online campaign against The Promise appears to have originated on sites like Incisozluk, a Turkish version of 4chan, where there were calls for users to “downvote” the film’s ratings on IMDb and YouTube. A rough translation of one post: “Guys, Hollywood is filming a big movie about the so-called Armenian genocide and the trailer has already been watched 700k times. We need to do something urgently.” Soon afterward, the user gleefully noted The Promise’s average IMDb rating had reached a dismaying 1.8 stars. “They know that the IMDb rating will stay with the film forever,” says Esrailian. “It’s a kind of censorship, really.”
Federal authorities deported 23-year-old California resident Juan Manuel Montes, who has lived in the U.S. since the age of nine and twice received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protections under Barack Obama’s administration, in what appears to be the first case of a DACA-protected “DREAMer” being deported under President Donald Trump.
According to USA Today, Customs and Borders Protection officers approached Montes in Calexico, California on Feb. 17, after Montes had left his wallet in a friend’s car.
Just three hours later, Montes found himself deported to Mexico.
“Some people told me that they were going to deport me; others said nothing would happen,” Montes told USA Today. “I thought that if I kept my nose clean nothing would happen.” Read more (4/18/17 5:40 PM)
So, Thatcher was the bane of the working classes, and much of what she did still has repercussions to this day. So, in no particular order, just in the order I remember them, here are some things she did that pissed us off –
•
In 1989 she introduced this thing called the “Community Charge” but which everyone calls the “Poll Tax” which replaced an older system in which your tax payment was based on the rental value of your home. This new tax meant that people living in one bedroom flats would pay the same as a billionaire living in a mansion. Obviously, the rich loved it, everyone else… not so much. So there were riots (video of news about the riots) – There were lots of riots in the Thatcher years, and they were all notable for the extreme levels of police brutality.
(photo, poll tax protest in Trafalgar Square, 1990)
•
Then there was her war on industry. There was a lot of inflation when she came to power, so she instituted anti-inflationary measures. All well and good… except not the way she did it. She closed many government controlled industries, most famously steel and coal. The amount spent on public industries dropped by 38% under Thatcher. The coal miners went on strike, for almost a year, but in the end, the pits were still closed, and 64,000 people lost their jobs. Unemployment rates soared in industrial areas, and inequality between these (generally northern or welsh) areas and the rest of the UK is still there. During the strike there were numerous violent clashes with the police at picket lines which were widely televised. As a memoir from one miner attests: “
I saw a police officer with a fire extinguisher in his hand, bashing a lad in the back. I tried to get closer to note down the officer’s number but they were wearing black boilersuits with no numbers. The next thing I knew, a police officer struck me from behind. I was coming in and out of consciousness as I was dragged across the road into an alleyway. They blocked off the alley and beat another lad and me with sticks until I was unconscious.” (I can’t post the whole thing it’s too long, but read it in the Guardian) Images such as this swept the country, turning many people against Thatcher –
And after it was all over people felt Thatcher had lied, saying she wanted to close only 20 pits, when in the end, 75 were closed down.
• Inequality soared whilst she was prime minister. There is a thing called the gini coefficient, it is the most common method of measuring inequality. Under gini, a score of one would be a completely unequal society; zero would be completely equal. Britain’s gini score went up from 0.253 to 0.339 by the time Thatcher resigned.
•
During her time as prime minister the notorious ‘Section 28′ was published. It stated: A local authority shall not (a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. – Section 28 wasn’t repealed until 2003.
• She introduced the Right To Buy scheme, which allowed people to buy their council houses for a very low price, which, at first glance, seems like a great idea, allowing people who normally wouldn’t be able to afford their own home to have one – however, loads of people have entered the scheme and now we have far too little social housing, meaning there has been a sharp rise in homelessness.
• The Battle of the Beanfield was a clash between hippies and police near Stonehenge in 1985. 1300 police officers converged on a convoy of 600 new age travellers who were heading to Stonehenge to set up a free festival in violation of a high court order. Again, there was an insane amount of police brutality, and 16 travellers were hospitalised, 573 people were arrested (one of the biggest mass arrests in UK history) – “Pregnant women were clubbed with truncheons, as were those holding babies. The journalist Nick Davies, then working for The Observer, saw the violence. ‘They were like flies around rotten meat,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no question of trying to make a lawful arrest. They crawled all over, truncheons flailing, hitting anybody they could reach. It was extremely violent and very sickening.’” (source) – Once everyone was arrested, the empty vehicles, which were in many cases the only homes the travellers had “were then systematically smashed to pieces and several were set on fire. Seven healthy dogs belonging to the Travellers were put down by officers from the RSPCA.” (source same as above)
Most of the charges were dismissed in court after Lord Cardigan, who had tagged along with them to see what would happen, testified on behalf of the travellers against the police.
•
Her removal of Irish dissidents right to be placed in a category that essentially made them political prisoners instead of merely criminals led to a hunger strike that ended in 10 deaths, including that of Bobby Sands, who was elected from his prison cell, reflecting the immense national, and international support for Irish nationalists. Thatchers lack of sympathy, or even empathy led to her becoming even more of a hate figure.
• She presided over a rapid deregulation of the banks, which ultimately led to much of the problems during britains 2007-2012 financial crash many years later.
• She took free milk from school children, which, though not as serious as anything else listed here, directly affected every child in the UK and was very unpopular, leading her to get the nickname “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”, which is still used today.
This is nowhere near everything she’s done that pisses people off, but I hope it goes some way to explaining why when she died “ding dong the witch is dead” became number one in the UK charts, people partied in the streets, and people protested her (State funded) funeral. She is a decisive figure, some people in the UK do actually love her. I do not. She decimated the UK’s industrial heartland, she caused mass unemployment and the destruction of much of working class culture, she was cavalier in her financial policies and increased inequality by staggering levels, she approved serious police brutality and attempted to destroy the culture of unions in this country. I fundamentally disagree with all she stood for and it angers me that her mistakes are still affecting this country and the people who live in it. And I am VERY angry that the current government are spending £50 million on a museum about her.
Can I be honest, I think if we went back in time and told that “MYRRH-DER” “*gasp* Judas! No!” joke to a group of medieval peasants they would completely and utterly lose their shit. They would be grabbing each other and crying with laughter. idk I just love the thought of a joke created through a modern, 21st century medium being accessible and enjoyable for devout practising Catholics hundreds of years ago
You’d be burned as a heretic, but sure, imagine they’d laugh.
No, you really wouldn’t.
When I wrote this post I specifically had in mind the liturgical plays enjoyed by medieval folks, especially from the 14th century onwards. These plays were once performed at liturgies, in Latin, under the direction of the priest or bishop, but later became plays that were enjoyed on the village green, recited in English, and performed and produced by players. Gradually, more and more comedic and farcical elements crept into the plays, because that’s what audiences loved and demanded.
They would tell the lives of saints and Bible stories such as the Fall of Man, Noah’s Ark and the Nativity. Because plays were enjoyed at carnivals and because religious spirit and merrymaking aren’t incompatible, certain characters became humorous and stereotyped. For example, Noah’s wife was a shrew who would smack her husband to get him into the ark, Herod was a ludicrous, blustering tyrant and poor old Joseph was particularly derided and used as comic relief, especially in the Nativity plays. Apparently, being cuckolded by God was not the way to appeal to a medieval man, though he would gain respect after the Reformation.
In the context that medieval peasants watched and loved ribald and slightly irreverent liturgical plays, something that would later evolve into the English stage as we know it in Shakespeare, it is entirely accurate and harmless to think that during a Nativity play the last wise man might say “I bring thee myrr…” and after Jospeh has thanked him, he would unmask to reveal his red hair (sorry guys Judas was ginger) and exclaim “MYRR-DRE!” causing Joseph to gasp and cry “JUDAS!! NAY!!” and probably trip over himself falling backwards, to the unparalleled surprise and delight of the devout medieval peasants who, guess what, still have a damn sense of humour.
Part of my problem with it is 1) the implications and 2) ignores the Taoist roots
For 1, the implications of the Dark Side being a side instead of a corruption makes the Star Wars universe… suckier. Because throughout the movies, TV show, and all other stuff, the Dark Side is presented as evil, corrupting, and damaging. Anakin goes off the walls when he falls. Dooku aids in the destruction of the Republic and spread of corruption. Palpatine is manipulative. Say what you want, but all presented Dark Siders are perfectly fine with murder and mass slaughter. Which, as a corruption, makes sense. But as a legitimate, and necessary, side of the Force?
That means that balance in the Force requires a degree of mass slaughter and murder. Which makes balance kind of evil. And this ties into the weird dummying down of Taoism.
(Disclaimer: I am no expert on Taoism and Eastern philosophy, so if someone who is wants to comment I am fine.)
Now, I will not deny that Star Wars has always had Christian themes in it, from the virgin birth to Luke’s redeeming of his father. But those aren’t the only themes. The Jedi have a ton of Eastern influences, from the very name ‘Jedi’. The Force is very Taoist in nature. And in Taoism, it’s not a balance of good and evil. It’s a balance of life and death, chaos and order, with imbalance resulting in evil. You need to accept that death is part of life. You don’t need to accept murder and mass slaughter.
Except… balance is apparently between murder and not murder now.
Having a Light Side, and making the Dark Side equal to it feels like a shitty retcon. And it makes the story worse for it in my opinion. I get graying morality, and letting the Jedi make mistakes and have issues. But turning it from an Order that let politics warp their spiritual beliefs into a group that was clearly wrong about the whole basis of their theology from the beginning where they preached balance by not being balanced feels like it dummies down the story and makes things worse.
(Also, the Light/Dark thing seems to arise out of the need to make flawed good guys become bad guys because… good guys apparently need to be perfect now)
I would also add that it is a deliberate misread of both the OT and the PT in terms of acting. I can get on board with the idea that suppressing one’s feelings is ultimately a terrible thing – I do think that much of Anakin’s arc relates to the idea that he is caught in a cycle of anger and guilt about the very act of feeling. It’s not doctrine, of course, but it is an end result of his interpretation of doctrine and the effects of doctrine on his life, re: attachments. But, nonetheless, Anakin is permitted to feel anger. He is allowed to feel joy. He is allowed to fear a whole spectrum of feelings. He is then supposed to process those feelings and, if they are negative, let them go. The fact that he is incapable of doing that doesn’t in any way prove that such a process is wrongheaded, impossible in general, or contributing to evil in this universe.
Do we see Luke express joy post-training? Yes. Do we see Obi-Wan express joy? I’d argue yes. We see compassion and love from both of them, neither in defiance of doctrine or the apparent balance of the Force. To say they are actively contributing to the imbalance of the Force requires a retrospective misreading of the script and acting in the first six saga movies, to say no, actually, they were emotionless. Or that those moments of emotions were violations, moments in which they were bad Jedi.
So, the Light Side does not forbid emotions. The Jedi encourage healthy processing of emotions. Exactly what is the Dark Side contributing? Oh right. Murder.
I’m trying to get through this but with every paragraph I finish the screaming in my head gets louder.
For everybody who doesn’t want to read the whole thing – do, it’s really eye-opening – here some key paragraphs:
Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so
to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a
series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate
change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute);
and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of
the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve
Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he
gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting
“liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger,
and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at
the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.
It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a
rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a
Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo
Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic
views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands
after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the
29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s
bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than
PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on
Twitter.
…
But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name:
because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics
company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was
spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in
“election management strategies” and “messaging and information
operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and
Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological
operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)
Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign.
…
In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a
database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting
population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post
reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington
office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s
administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in
engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly
if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.
…
One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of
thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have
tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a
trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together
to drown out all other sources of information.
Like zombies?
“Like zombies.”
Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then
exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools
developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy
with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”
The last sentences:
(…) a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the
60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With
no divisions between military and civilian participation.”
By that definition we’re already there.
I’m gonna break it down further because seriously, holy shit.
1. Billionaire white man is spending millions to “disrupt mainstream media.” He’s very conservative and backed Trump with $13.5 million in donations, and has close ties to Steve Bannon.
2. He funded Breitbart.com with $10 million, which is now more popular with U.S. Internet users than HuffPo or PornHub.
3. He also has a large stake in a company that specializes in psyops, also known as propaganda and other forms of psychological warfare, refined in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia.
4. This company lent its software both to the Leave side of Brexit and Trump’s presidential campaign.
5. This company claims to have a database with information on almost every eligible voter in the U.S.
6. This information is then used to target people with ads, websites, and headlines in a way designed to control their thinking and change their minds on political issues.
7. There are thousands, maybe millions of cookie cutter “news” websites and Twitter bots designed to spread a specific message to make it seem legitimate and drown out actually legitimate news.
Other important quotes:
“Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.”
“The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.”
“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”
“It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.”
“There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”
““Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.””
Hydra and Project Insight are real. Terrifying to know.
… so that’s what happened to 4chan. I could tell it was being used as a testing pool for propaganda – free human test subjects! – but I was stuck using forensic linguistics to catalogue “insincere posters” and check for patterns in the things they said. It’s already known that people are paid to post on there, but the overarching motive was unclear.
I have been witnessing this happening on Facebook and Reddit with my own eyes and struggling to describe it in coherent words that don’t sound alarmist, but I’m not sure there are any.
^ This has been happening for a very long time. I would estimate this started around 2006, aka, “the summer that never ended”, but it was absolutely in motion by 2009. I’ve been watching it happen. My friends have been watching it happen. It’s not “oh no, this is happening”.
We finally found the wallet. This has been the proverbial serpent in the frog garden for a decade. It has devoured the internet.
Yeah, 2006 sounds about right. I was talking about this with my partners the other night.
The rise of Facebook is a linchpin because it’s the best implement anyone’s ever had for delivering individually tailored propaganda to a large number of people. (Peter Thiel was its first funder…)
Account signup opened to the public in ‘06 and the userbase started expanding dramatically around 2009-10. This was also when they started turning a profit. I don’t have a timeline for the development of their manipulative algorithms, but it seems a reasonable inference that that’s when they figured out how to get people hooked and also convince them to buy things, so…
since Asch’s work in the 1950s showing manufacturing consensus is not just possible, it’s EASY, this is bar none the oncoming internet identity crisis i’ve been silently freaking out about.
they haven’t just cracked the most effective propaganda nut that’s ever existed, they’ve made it cheap to run.
we need an internet identity-based immune system yesterday and i hate to say it, but Urbit is looking halfway to more viable by the day. barring that, we need to help equip these websites with sockpuppet destroyers
fucking sick how this thread went from restating the entire contents of the article twice to ‘facebook and 4chan is and have been psyops for 11 years’ within like 5 replies
Reposting this, again – mostly for the McLuhan – but this is why Big Data is so scary. It enables what amount to psy-ops (amongst other things) on an unprecedented scale.
And to think, the Romans banished Cicero because he was *too persuasive.*
At one time ascribed to Jacques Louis David, this engaging image has
most recently been identified as the work of Marie Denise Villers.
Although little known today, Villers was a gifted pupil of Anne Louis
Girodet-Trioson (1767–1824) and exhibited in the Salons, where her
portraits attracted attention.
I’ve just checked the official website of Russian LGBT network, and there are news from today:
“We receive alarming reports from Chechnya that unknown people are calling those who are now hiding from persecution and offer help with traveling abroad. These people call themselves the employees of the LGBT organization and invite to come to Krasnodar and discuss the details.
The Russian LGBT network officially states that our representatives in the regions do not communicate and are not authorized to call someone. All communication is conducted ONLY through the Hotline and mail kavkaz@lgbtnet.org. We warn that such proposals for assistance are not related to the work of the Russian LGBT network and may pose a threat to life.”
“Мы получаем тревожные сообщения из Чечни о том, что неизвестные люди звонят на телефоны тех, кто сейчас скрывается от преследований и предлагают помощь с выездом заграницу. Эти люди представляются сотрудниками ЛГБТ-организацией и приглашают приехать в Краснодар и обсудить детали.
Российская ЛГБТ-сеть официально заявляет о том, что наши представители в регионах не ведут связь и не уполномочены кому-либо звонить. Все общение ведется ТОЛЬКО через Горячую линию и почту kavkaz@lgbtnet.org. Мы предупреждаем, что подобные предложения о помощи не связаны с работой Российской ЛГБТ-сети и могут представлять угрозу для жизни.”
You can reblog this as an addition to a bigger post but please spread it somehow
A Middleground 