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Companies learning to flip elections perfected their tactics in smaller or emerging countries, such as Latvia, Trinidad, or Nigeria, before turning to markets involving elections in developed nations. Paul Mason suggests that while at the moment there is a lot of angst from people being reminded of how their harvested data is used, it is really the union of private espionage, cracking, and "black ops" capabilities that should be setting off alarms.
Disturbingly, both CA and SCL have high-level contracts with governments, giving them access to secret intelligence both in the US and the UK. SCL is on List X, which allows it to hold British secret intelligence at its facilities.
It now appears that techniques they used in Ukraine and Eastern Europe to counteract Russian influence, and against Islamist terrorism in the Middle East, were then used to influence elections in the heart of Western democracy itself.
Let's be clear about what we're facing. A mixture of free market dogmatism plus constraints imposed by the rule of law has led, over the past decades, to the creation of an alternative, private, secret state.
When it was only focused on the enemies and rivals of the West, or hapless politicians in the global south, nobody minded. Now it is being used as a weapon to tear apart democracy in Britain and the US we care — and rightly so.
From New Statesman: We need to destroy the election-rigging industry before it destroys us
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:51AM (5 children)
The point you're missing is that it doesn't need to be fake in order to be propaganda. Some of the most effective propaganda comes from just shining a flashlight on things strategically.
Sort of like how American history has largely been purged of all the times that there was significant racism directed at white people. The Irish, Jews and Italians commonly were boxers during the first half of the 20th century for a reason. They were all discriminated against harshly, but you'd think that was never real because people of color are now the ones that are defining racism in ways that are deeply problematic by making so much noise that nobody pays attention to all the other groups that were oppressed but that society no longer considers to be vermin.
Yes, it is true that slavery was a thing for most of the 19th century and pockets existed into the 20th century, but it's misleading to claim that white people were a homogeneous group that tolerated each other when the historical record is pretty clear that the concept of white people as a group wasn't something that was a thing in the US until relatively recently. But it doesn't stop people of color from blaming it all on whitey and refusing to do anything on their end to not reinforce stereotypes that they don't like. Sort of like how the Irish got together and decided that it wasn't good to keep reinforcing stereotypes that they didn't like and by the early 20th century you were as likely to think of them as patriotic police officers rather than white nigger, simians.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:09AM
Interesting that close to that exact phrase was used by one of the greatest masters of propaganda of the 20th century, who commented that "man muss die Dinge so beleuchten" (one must shine a light on things in a specific manner) that the common folk would agree with you. I can't remember the exact quote, but that phrase stuck out.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:59AM (2 children)
Really? Where exactly did you get that idea?
I'm sorry to spoil your little "whites were so good to the poor little black people. They just took them right into their houses and begged them to fuck their daughters!" buillshit narrative.
For pretty much the entire 18th and 19th centuries, the white *abolitionists* overwhelmingly wanted to repatriate all blacks back to Africa. After the civil war, a large majority of white Americans still favored repatriation.
Why do you think Liberia exists? That was in 1820. And additional ventures took free blacks to Haiti and Sierra Leone [kalamu.com].
The overwhelming majority of non-slave owning whites (including most abolitionists) wanted to keep the US free from blacks and other non-protestant, non-europeans. Which is, of course, why the Irish and Italians (catholics), the jews, the Chinese, the Japanese and anyone else who wasn't white, protestant and of European extraction were discriminated against, both informally and legally. And the blacks were beneath all of those groups in the eyes of the white majority, well into the second half of the 20th century.
Abraham Lincoln himself frequently said that while he didn't want slavery, he didn't want to live among blacks either, and favored repatriation/re-colonization.
As well as earlier cases smacking down the blacks, in 1896, SCOTUS in Plessy v. Ferguson [wikipedia.org]Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that:
If you want a more immediate discussion of this, check out CSPAN's recent review [c-span.org] of the case.
In this case, SCOTUS codified the horrendous Jim Crow laws [wikipedia.org] and giving the imprimatur of the federal government to completely segregate blacks and whites. While the most egregious, blatant, government-sponsored forms of segregation were *mostly* stopped no more than 50 years ago.
And you wonder why black people are really touchy about this stuff? Many places are still highly segregated, and blacks are subject to much more police harassment, discrimination in jobs, housing and a raft of other ways.
And some asshole like you comes out and spews a bunch of complete bullshit that doesn't comport *in any way* with reality, then gets modded +5 'insightful'?
You're spouting off with absolutely no facts to back you up. Why don't you study a little history? No wonder blacks are pissed off.
But it's so much easier to get folks to nod sagely and agree with your completely bigoted, and completely false, account of history. Fewer folks would do so if you just wandered around talking about how inferior the niggers are.
Either way, you're woefully misinformed, a bigoted scumbag or both. Probably both.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:23PM
Irrespective of all the woe-is-me bitching that "African" Americans seem to promulgate, I have yet to see any of them to scramble for tickets back to the motherland where they seem to think they had it so well if the white man had not stripped them of their peaceful, Utopian existence. Victimhood seems to be the only industry they excel at. It's time to grow up and stop acting like a petulant child, and maybe things would go better for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @05:01AM
Let's not forget that there is physically difference between Europe and Asia apart from color of people living there. And it is purely an invention of the whites, nobody in rest of the world bothered to create a place for people based on color.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 01 2018, @04:53AM
Italians are about as White as Arabs are Black. White is Germanic, Slavic, and Celtic. Spaniards aren't White either; they're Hispanic.
Not sure what you'd call the Portugese though. The Census Bureau tried to classify them as Hispanic, but the backlash was deafening. Guess they get their own designation (which Brazilian is generally lumped in with).
If all you mean is European, say European.