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Current Affairs published an in-depth editorial on recent revelations about a $1 million astroturfng campaign by Correct the Record:
Astroturfing makes me angry. It should make you angry. It should make you fucking well see red. It's marketing evolved into something incredibly scary, sophisticated, and evil. It's essentially thought warfare, or psychological warfare, which takes away much of what was supposed to make the internet a new and beautiful frontier of communication. Worse yet, if you actually identify and approach these operatives, they'll gaslight you and deny that they are such an operative. These are people who are paid to psychologically abuse you. Do you get this? It's an ugly and evil thing, and not only does it take away our ability to take information and fact at face value, but it takes away our ability to take opinions, feelings, and personal stances at face value as sincere and legitimate.
takyon: For some additional context, "Hillary-supporting super PAC invests $1 million to hit back at online Clinton critics":
Correct the Record, a super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton's bid to become US president, has promised to invest more than $1 million to respond to users criticizing its candidate on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and other social media services. The super PAC says its new "Barrier Breakers digital task force" will to respond "quickly and forcefully to negative attacks and false narratives found online," in addition to thanking major supporters and "committed superdelegates" directly.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 26 2016, @09:33AM
Why! Thanks magister... truth be told, I wasn't born into the English language (as such, your words come sweeter to my years, but...)
Because of this, I needn't waste my time with weird spelling, and thus the rote has rotten less my mind.
And therefore I'm able now to ask...
The truth of whom, magister, the truth of whom?
(ok. Fooling around set aside, let me pretend I'm profound now)
---
You can’t educate one who doesn't want to be educated. The first step for one to want this is to admit one has questions; if no other questions can come into one's mind, to doubt one's own truths. A constant act of creative destruction towards their own answers.
Now, I ask you: how many questions do you see coming from us, the SNers?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I mainly see a bunch of guys who have plenty of answers (different answers to the same question, of course).
And the dialogues here resemble a skirmish in which those answers are used like clubs; then everybody is tired and put their hard and unchiped-in-battle answers on their shoulders and go home. Until next time. No questions asked (that's bad), no strings attached either (and this is a good thing™)
(is this S/N specific?) Will this ever change? If not, there's no chance of education...
So, what gives? I don't know, I'm happy from time to time I get to read one of your hermetical rants: (letting aside they sound delicious) their hermetism have the quality of raising questions, even if your sole intention was to encode your answers into them.
What questions? Well, discovering the nuances of your answers in the references, fun, sarcasm, choice of words (and puns, don't forget the puns, especially the gang-chained puns you conjure for your purposes) and everything that you put together and make their form so puzzling delicious.
My opinion? I might be wrong but I think if you become more didacticist than you are now, you'll just become just a guy with yet another set of answers.
(meditation mantra: questions give birth, answers kill)
My apologies for inflicting my answer onto you.
In truth (my truth), the story goes like this: in his childhood, the man's mind is opened to a wide horizon; as he ages, this horizon becomes narrower until, sooner or later, it collapses to a single point. That point is called his point of view.
Well, the above is my point of view (as recursive and metabullshitphysical as it may be).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0