Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances . .
Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Justice will be done and hopefully democracy will survive one of the most insidious attacks since its founding.
The whole #TrumpRussia story is complex but not complicated in terms of seeking justice. The nation needs a special prosecutor and an independent investigation since US intelligence agencies are constrained by a variety of practices when gathering both domestic and international evidence.
Some people will go to jail, others will leave government, yet we will get to the next election with better defenses and greater wisdom. Worse off will be all those unindicted co-conspirators, because we will definitely know the difference between witting and unwitting.
Perhaps those voters with low-information will have more than alternative facts for 2018 and understand how criminal elements may have nearly achieved the hostile political takeover of the US.
Ultimately it is clear simply from public reporting, that Trump has ties to the Russian mob, and the new/old protocols of domestic and international agencies, brought closer together by 9/11 have made justice more Byzantine. For example the FBI was more invested in the long-run traditional pursuit of the Russian mob than in an orange media clown, who in public statements, revealed he knew about the foreign electronic interventions while campaigning.
Unfortunately, social media and hacking were new, additional variables beyond the usual transfers of money laundering an FBI tended to prioritize, especially in terms of co-mingling electoral politics, money-laundering, and even hacktivism.
Making that investigation more complex and perhaps ultimately more successful are the inter-agency boundaries crossed by trying to track the misuse of an entire US political party’s campaign apparatus by a foreign power accustomed to trolling as well as micro-targeting of propaganda in social media. Much of this is now getting pieced together both officially and not.
It is not an unwitting relationship nor is it a novelty, it is a feature, not a bug(sic) of global crony capitalism and kleptocracy, and the US’s normal climate of disorganized crime became simply more organized specifically because of the Trump campaign. More insane are his claims of not knowing how mobbed-up he may have been.
The most pathetic element of it was the tacit participation of the mass of reactionary fans of a TV celebrity who while a popular vote loser, was the beneficiary of targeted electoral college GOTV efforts and the mistakes of a Democratic party opposition.
2016 has produced a perfect stormfront for an anti-democratic cabal who are now fomenting a budding domestic race war and potential increases in regional military actions. with global implications.
Unfortunately they really didn’t plan on winning the election, rather expecting to consolidate some gains on one side and further control of organized crime on the other. The GOP is apparently still figuring out whether this convergence of international crime and national politics was fortuitous.
Hence the bumbling Congressional actions by the majority party and the immediate attempts to roll back democratic policy, regulations, and laws, compelled by the desperation of Agent Orange as he tries to relive the divisive public rallies of the campaign while maintaining at minimum the integrity of his golf stroke.
What would have been easier to cover up or at least leave a new trail of bodies in Russia, has become a much more public spectacle in the US, and those indicators of the current strategy of tension become described as they have in the first day of Senate Intelligence Committee hearings. The problem will come as more stonewalling and firewalling could come as the Trump administration and its associates seek to evade impeachment and/or prosecution.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot tell us what we need to know about Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia. Why? Because doing so would jeopardize a long-running, ultra-sensitive operation targeting mobsters tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and to Trump.
The FBI apparently knew, directly or indirectly, based upon available facts, that prior to Election Day, Trump and his campaign had personal and business dealings with certain individuals and entities linked to criminal elements — including reputed Russian gangsters — connected to Putin.
The same facts suggest that the FBI knew or should have known enough prior to the election to justify informing the public about its ongoing investigation of potentially compromising relationships between Trump, Putin, and Russian mobsters — even if it meant losing or exposing a valued informant…
In secret court proceedings that were later unsealed, both current and former government attorneys argued for extreme leniency toward the man when he was finally sentenced. An FBI agent who expressed his support for the informant later joined Trump’s private security force…
The resulting picture is not a pretty one for Donald Trump. However, because of its efforts to neutralize the organization of perhaps the world’s most powerful mobster — a man considered a serious national security threat — the Bureau might just have compromised its own ability to provide to Congress or inform the American public about all of the ties that exist between Trump, his presidential campaign and the regime of Vladimir Putin…
The Russian mob should also not be confused with a mere crime syndicate. It is an organization comprised of state actors, oligarchs, and specific groups of individuals working collectively with the authority of the Russian government — a “mafia state.” At times, it is difficult to tell where the mob ends and the government begins…
Donald Trump, Bayrock partner Tevfik Arif, and Felix Sater attend the Trump Soho Launch Party on September 19, 2007 in New York. Photo credit: Mark Von Holden / WireImage
“Darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence.” – Terry Pratchett
As we’ve previously discussed in the Propaganda Series, propaganda is not always language or images. Sometimes it is the lack of words. It is just as important to “listen to what is not said” as it is to “listen to what is said”. Sometimes though, propagandists try to time travel. They employ a tactic in an attempt to change the present by attempting to change the past. I say “attempt” for reasons that will be clear soon enough.
When a propagandist tries to pull off this particular trick, they don’t need a fancy machine or a black hole or a magic potion as is the staple trope of science fiction and fantasy time travel. They need nothing more complicated than a pen or a typewriter. In the present, a word processor and some basic HTML coding skills will serve that purpose. Maybe Photoshop or GIMP. When a propagandist tries to change the present by changing the past, they don’t call it time travel. No. They don’t call it anything, because they really hope you don’t notice what they are doing. Silence will work often, but they are not above a bit of misdirection. Well executed propaganda does, after all, have much in common with stage magic.
When we citizens and media consumers catch their slight of hand, we don’t call it time travel either. We call it historical revisionism. The Obama Administration was caught red-handed doing precisely that in relation to the Edward Snowden case.
“Silence is argument carried out by other means.” – Che Guevara
“Hello darkness, my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.”
– The Sound of Silence, by Simon & Garfunkel, lyrics by Paul Simon
“Darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence.” – Terry Pratchett
“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.” – Henry David Thoreau
Just as darkness is the absence of light, silence is an absence. We’ve considered the word and the image as propaganda up to this point, so let us pause to consider their antithesis as a form of propaganda. The phrase “[t]he only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” is often attributed to 18th Century Irish born English statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, although what he actually wrote in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents was that “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Regardless of the apocryphal attribution, the quote goes right to the heart of the issue of silence being a form of propaganda. Like most tactics of propaganda, silence has multiple forms and uses. Let us examine some of these variations on a theme. Continue reading →
“Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.” – Sigmund Freud
“One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering. ‘Supernatural’ is a null word.” – Robert A. Heinlein
Words are magic . . . or so it seems. Words can make people change their minds. Words can make others take actions even against their own best interests. Words can shape the world, determine the fate of nations and people, create and destroy. However, as Robert Heinlein noted, one man’s magic is another man’s engineering and in the modern world, propaganda is the most engineered form of communication possible.
Magica verba est scientia et ars es.
The magic of words is science and art.
The science is in the methodology and psychology of execution. The art is in making the message appealing. This is the essence of rhetoric. How is this so? Let us first consider the methodologies of propaganda as a form of rhetoric before we look at the psychology behind these tactics. Although the psychology applies to both negative (black), positive (white) and value neutral (grey) uses of propaganda, in the context of this portion of the discussion, the word “propaganda” should be viewed with its maximum possible negative value load, i.e. the kind of bad propaganda designed to get you to act against your best interests or to harm others. Why? Because many of these tactics favored modern political polemicists are rooted in logical fallacies and outright lies. Knowing “snakes” as a category isn’t as useful as knowing “pit vipers” as a sub-category when the survival of the species can be at stake so we’ll consider the dangerous kinds of propaganda first. Why? Because if you treat all snakes like they are dangerous, then you are less likely to get bitten.
My Theatre Arts teacher in high school told me: “You should know the rules before you break them.” It wasn’t an original thought, but most thoughts aren’t – after all, about 108 billion people have been living and thinking on planet Earth for some 200,000 years, so it’s hard to come up with something new. He also told me: “Steal from the best, then make it your own.”
Or as filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard put it: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”
This last day of Women’s History Month 2017, it seems fitting to highlight a respected Classics scholar and translator who is also a rule-breaker in her own work, which both references and defies poetic traditions and themes – a very tricky thing to pull off.
The poetry of Anne Carson (1950 ― ) was described by Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Book Review as “unclassifiable” even though much of it has been inspired by The Classics, the great wellspring of Western Civilization. Merkin also called Carson “one of the great pasticheurs” ―defined as “an artist who creates a pastiche.”
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This is the first Carson poem that caught my eye, because I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and the thunderstorms there are “dry and frightening.” The poem of course has nothing to do with Arizona, yet it is an excellent description of the desert storms from my childhood. Note that the ideas jump from Jezebel of the Old Testament Book of Kings to torqued ellipses, which is covering a lot in just eight lines.
Thunderstorm Stack
A bird flashed by as if mistaken then it starts. We do not think speed of life. We do not think why hate Jezebel? We think who’s that throwing trees against the house? Jezebel was a Phoenician. Phoenician thunderstorms are dry and frightening, they arrive one inside the other as torqued ellipses.
![C8V7udAXsAIZS__[1]](https://flowersforsocrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/c8v7udaxsaizs__1.jpg?w=640)
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