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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: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:22AM (2 children)
And they should. Let's look at the story in more detail:
In other words, a shitty breakfast.
Bacon and eggs can be cooked in a similar length of time as the grain porridge (Beech-Nut sliced [google.com] its bacon thin (ad is from 1905 no less and they're pushing thin, sliced bacon for breakfast then), making it a quick cooking food). And there's a synergy there. Cook the bacon first and then you can reuse the grease for cooking eggs (need some oil/fat to keep from sticking to the pan). Third, bacon and eggs just taste good for most people. And the aroma fills the house. It's definitely a better experience to wake up to.
Instead of a silly story about Beech-Nut getting propaganda cooties on our sacred bacon, perhaps we should consider what was actually going on. People from the late 19th Century through to the early 1920s were steadily becoming more affluent. And one of the many things affluent people do is eat better tasting and better cooked food. That means more meat, eggs, and milk products among other things. At that point, you run into the gritty realities of making breakfast. You want something that cooks and cleans fast. The wife isn't going to get up two hours early just to make breakfast. Any tricks like the above reuse of bacon fat for cooking eggs is a time-saving synergy that a busy wife would appreciate. So meats that are suitable for breakfast? Ground or thin sliced meat will cook faster. Poultry and fish don't have a good texture for that. You're stuck with stuff like pork, beef, or mutton. Bacon and eggs probably just survived this breakfast evolution process better and Beech-Nut was one of the lucky benefactors of that.
They, of course, advertised. And the dude who specialized in modern advertisement is, of course, going to claim that he was instrumental in selling said bacon and eggs even though Beech-Nut had been pushing bacon for at least two decades before. People weren't going to continue to eat the old crap.
Tl;DR. Cool story bro, but I notice nobody actually looked hard at how successful this advertising campaign was supposed to be.
Drama much? I'm sure there are interesting parallels to the Third French Republic which had a similar nasty struggle between groups with similar ideologies. But that's not particularly sexy since that particular problem shows up again and again over the centuries with no special merit to the 1930s instance.
So you are no doubt considering the Wiemar Republic. But that had the special flaw of being ignominiously imposed by the victors of a brutal war with numerous parties vying hard to be the engineer when the trail finally ran off the rail. This key factor isn't present in the US which has a government that was imposed voluntarily and has stuck around for a couple of centuries.
I doubt that fluff can convince anyone who wasn't already convinced. It's a colossal waste. A key thing to remember about these propaganda people is that the only person that they need to convince is the one writing their checks. Something like Cambridge Analytica seems more like a bunch of grifters shaking down sugar daddies than a credible propaganda threat.
I think of these propaganda games more as voluntary wealth redistribution than something dangerous that we need to ban.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:22PM (1 child)
I have been saying this shit since the election but the left is convinced that we were all brainwashed into voting for Trump because Facebook told us to.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:57PM
The belief is its own reward. (Or is that "The disease is the cure."?) I foresee a lot of such people dumping funds into social media and other money sinks because of their belief in its magic efficacy. That's one thing market economies do well, is transfer money away from clueless people efficiently.