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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 VLM on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:32PM
Everybody should try to at least think about an "unthinkable" idea once a day
An interesting aspect of alt-right political philosophy that is not discussed enough is most of the alt-right people and some of the trad-right people are very comfortable on an intellectual level with physics style thought experiments. Regardless if anyone likes it or not, it observationally leads to lots of alt-right recruitment, lots of personal histories begin with something that summarizes to "as a thought experiment, what would happen if the cathedral narrative about XYZ were untrue?" where XYZ is some topic right wing people care about and the thought experiment matches observed reality better than the authoritarian establishment narrative. Then they start reading red-pill dogma or Moldbug and next thing you know they're fully switched on, for better or worse. I read Moldbug, that red-pill stuff is degenerate, but whatever, everyone's got their own path.
I have noticed that folks not susceptible to alt-right recruitment, in totally different settings, for whatever reason, act like their hamster exploded if you try a non-political thought experiment on them "So imagine you're in an elevator how can you tell the difference between an acceleration from a cable and acceleration from gravity?" "Or imagine for the sake of argument that semiconductors are full of holes where holes are real things just like baseballs, how do they flow and collide?" and they just flip out demanding its not real therefore wrong to think about as a mental model. They flip out in full on rhetoric mode. "you're just making up words it doesn't mean anything unless they're words I like" and so on.
A meme I've been trying to push (mostly unsuccessfully) is if the predominant recruitment style for alt-right today is the physics-style thought experiment, that means they're preferentially going to recruit only the cognitive elite. Bubba ain't gonna read his Misner and Thorne, or whatever the cool kids read today, and think about elevators vs gravitational fields, or the political equivalent. That means there won't be many of them, although that minority (the cognitive elite) is the only people who've ever done anything anyway so maybe its not a big problem. If the only people who think, agree with you, I guess you're golden? So the death of my pet meme is that it doesn't matter.
I don't see proof by induction or thought experiment in left-wing dogma. If its there, at a significant level anyway, I'd like to think about it. The deep mental philosophical model behind left wing thought is much less clear to me than the right wing model, probably because of my own sympathies and biases. (Insert obvious snarky comment about why I can't see the deep mental philosophical model of lefties here, so obvious there's no point even stating it)
Its fun to watch. By watching politics I can almost feel the visceral appeal of sportsball, the gut level prediction, the excitement during the wait, the brutal confirmation or denial by reality, in a tight repetitive cycle. Pass the popcorn...