Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts

Thursday, February 6, 2020

2/6/20: The Wokeflake Follies

The Iowa Boner, The Rips Heard 'Round the World, and impeachment fails. All by Wednesday. This is the alternative?



ALSO:
  • Scripture, agitation, and The Herd Mind
  • Democracy implodes without the public's consensual trust
  • The means, ends, and Salem Witches
  • Romney, Amash, Manchin, and the Principled Pit of Hell
  • Howard Dean says Democrats will challenge November's election  
* Subscribe on any podcatcher that doesn't suck.
* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

Saturday, February 1, 2020

2/1/20 - Criminal Conformity & The Beautiful Mutant

"Imitation is suicide." How independent thought gets smothered in infancy, the need to belong: why standing apart from the impaired herd is not only hard, it runs against our social and evolutionary grain. Also, collective and self-delusions protecting us from unpleasant discoveries that might destroy our notions of being special, divine, or even "good."

Listen to "Your Undivided Attention" here: https://humanetech.com/podcast/



ALSO:
  • Tending to personal and commercial attachments
  • How political and marketing swine manipulate attachments via identity
  • Meditation and Buddhist philosophy as tools to disconnect
  • Blank Slatists: Beware
  • Emerson's Self-Reliance: read it. 
* Subscribe on any podcatcher that doesn't suck.
* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

1/28/20 - The Boldness of the Herd, Political Atheism, Our Glowing Christ

The next great war: intellectual autonomy. The bold certainty of the herd, the challenges of independent thought and why seeing someone who is genuinely their own Man is so rare, the media has supplanted the church, disengaging from the ideological Holy War in favor of political atheism, and Toddzilla's Paradox: the conflict between intellectual independence and the desperate human need to belong. Still available for children's parties! Now doing bat mitzvahs!



ALSO:
  • A quick impeachment fart
  • You want an authoritarian
  • Political Vampires
  • Algorithms, Lippmann, Bernays, and You
  • Silver Spoons: A Hate Crime
  • The filthy Centrus Americanus
  • Friendship: Loyalty & Support vs. Honesty
  • Nothing can be done about climate change
  • Data Overload revisited 
* Subscribe on any podcatcher that doesn't suck.
* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

1/15/20 - Snakes, Survival, & Sabotage: The Need to Feel Alive

Todd discusses collective human boredom in relation to the need for a sense of purpose, struggle, and the addictive rush of just feeling alive. How a dormant survival instinct comes alive during a crisis and how, absent that, we'll manufacture one just to have something to endure, battle, and survive. Also, some some predictions for the 20's. Book those children's parties now!


Also:
  • An evening with Pablo Escobar's "chemist"
  • A naked man kills a fer-de-lance
  • Men, middle age, and the power plant
  • Healthy anxiety vs. fear
  • This election won't matter
  • The tyrant is in the eye of the beholder
  • The Titan Tragedy
  • Podcasters: they're spammy and slimy.
  • ^They call that foreshadowing
* Subscribe on any podcatcher that doesn't suck.
* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net
* Fuck Twitter

Sunday, January 12, 2020

1/12/20: The Great Hack & The Great War of The 21st Century


After rotting in my queue for a couple of months, and one too many recommendations, I finally watched The Great Hack on Netflix. This feature-length documentary is worthwhile as a means to understand how our stolen data is not only being sold, but used to exploit the hole in our psychological firewall to manipulate and "trigger" what they call "persuadables" into a desired response or action. Or, non-action. It's essential if you're more than slightly interested in the subject. But...

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

10/30/19: Disinformation '16, Weaponized Truth, Hillary The Halloween Zombie

This episode focusses mostly on disinformation and interference in the 2016 election and includes selected clips from the Your Undivided Attention podcast episode "From Russia With Likes" (#1) featuring disinformation expert RenĂ©e DiResta. Her expertise connects incredibly well to my Propaganda series. Topics include: the seemingly innocent methods used by the Russians exploiting personal identity to create online communities that can be manipulated via agitative identity politics later on, The Call to Action: The Manchurian Propagandist, more on the propaganda dopamine connection: validation, attacking trust in political institutions and the media, anger and apathy, exploiting freedom of speech, and the silliness of the "Global Public Square.

Listen to Your Undivided Attention here: https://humanetech.com/podcast/



ALSO:
  • Hillary: probably right about Tulsi Gabbard
  • Hillary: definitely right about Jill Stein
  • Hillary: absolutely a Trump asset
  • Hillary: continue your role as a public servant. Retire. Quietly. 
  • Americans subsidize European entitlements
  • Trump's "foreign policy" could lead to universal education 
  • Media and Information Education: stat!
  • Be sure you're subscribed to "Escaping The Cave"
*Subscribe on any podcatcher that doesn't suck.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net  www.escapingthecave.com

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

10/01/19: Agitational Dysfunction & Revolutionary Hatred

An introduction to LeBon, his ideas on mobs, and The Psychology of Revolution--specifically hatred. The forthcoming electoral reality show, 2020's prepared script, how the spinoffs will be cast, and what happens when our Matrix Avatar Superheroes stumble into the Desert of the Real.



ALSO:
  • Unrealistic expectations in the steaming pile of Twitter
  • Was it your childhood dream to be Saul Goodman?
  • More on pseudo-environments and internal narratives
  • Fcuk Twitter
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Friday, September 27, 2019

9/27/19: Propaganda Blindspots & The Constituent Mob

Institutions fail and democracy descends into mob rule when representative are paralyzed and terrorized by fear of their voters. Trump, Ukraine, and 2020's year-long electoral reality show disguised as an idealistic impeachment. Informational sectarianism and how it's easy to see "their" propaganda. Yours? Never! Their demagogue is your savior. There may be a way for a detaching informational unicorn treat that. MSNBC, CNN, and FOX are Pepsi, Coke, and Dr. Pepper; when everything is spin and propaganda, who's a political infidel supposed to believe?



Also:
  • Alternate Informational Universes 
  • Half-assed media sophistication: not enough
  • Why can't we watch the opposition's media without going nuts?
  • Our dueling scandals aren't automatically mutually exclusive
  • More on the the Current Events Man 
  • Media isn't free. You are the product being sold. 
 
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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com
 

Thursday, September 26, 2019

9/26/19: The Internal Narrative Trojan Horse

"The fiction is taken as truth because the fiction is badly needed." A quick introduction to Walter Lippmann and the commonality between him, Ellul, Bernays, Haidt, and Harari. People can't personally perceive the world beyond their own sliver of firsthand experience. Therefore, the Current Events Man is beholden, dependent upon, and therefore exploited by the propagandist and his digital distortions. Tech and data overload confusion has made this exponentially worse. If democracy is demands an "enlightened citizenry", it's maybe doomed from the start. Paradoxically, there's a stab at some hope in here too. Weird.



ALSO:
  • Te Nosce, bitches 
  • Competing Scandals; Competing Networks; Competing Narratives 
  • Smoking, Facebook, and associative dopamine addiction.    
  • The Matrix and the Internet
  • The responsibility and danger of exposing "their" delusion
  • All Cats Meow
  • Why we believe the ridiculous
  • Finding hope in human imperfection
  • More on likability and art
  • The Hobgoblin  
  • Where the hell is Jill Stein? #NeverForget

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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and and podcatcher that doesn't suck.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

9/24/19: Wokeflake Comedy: Sociological Propaganda

A rare ETC podcast: one topic. The stage that was once the playground of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, and even Andrew Dice Clay has been stormed by a mob of Social Vengeance Warriors hell bent on using comedy as a delivery mechanism for textbooksociological and agitation propaganda, complete with its own version of the Ten Commandments (now in print!) and a handy scapegoat Satan. When does the "Thank You, Comrade!" showcase start?



ALSO: 
  • Controlling speech is controlling thought; Speechcrime is Thoughtcrime
  • Unless Nickelback is your standard, nothing great has ever come from timid conformity.
  • "Unanimity requires compliance" and defiant creative independence
  • Educating and maintaining The Sufficiently Woke Comic

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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and and podcatcher that doesn't suck.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

9/18/19: Newton's Third Law of Totalitarian Messiahs

Agitation propaganda doing its work, speechcrime taking root in the form of virtual media mobs enforcing cancel culture and point-of-view authoritarianism, the Wokeflake Messiah will arrive soon, Newton's Third Law of Extremism, the slave's spirituals and frightened children scrambling to the ideological church to be soothed by visions of a future Heaven on Earth.



ALSO: 
  • Toxic Compromise
  • The Election Won't Matter
  • At all.
  • Wokeflakes Becoming Trump
  • We The Authoritarian People
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Tuesday, September 10, 2019

9/10/19: Iceberg Ahoy! Validation Junkies & The Chosen Ones

Social validation, dopamine, and social media's Walter White; the predictably ridiculous reaction to Dave Chappelle's latest Netflix special and how comedy has evolved from truth telling to Wokeflake proselytizing; more on how people are more willing and eager than deceived when it comes to swallowing fiction and disinformation; choking on data leading to confused gullibility; honesty in a crisis; Sausage Party Hope: children demanding their happy ending. Where's the spring of genuine hope?



ALSO:  
  • The Battle of the 21st Century
  • The iceberg bobbing off our bow
  • Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube: Walter White cutting his meth supply? 
  • Pinker's Utopian and Tragic Visions
  • Evolution and self-awareness
  • The apocalypse and its "chosen ones"
  • Progress's Myth and becoming organic

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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net

Thursday, August 29, 2019

8/29/19: Propaganda: Agitating The Inner Ape

Agitation and Integration: two often closely related but very different types of propagandas: one used to provoke internal conflict the other to shape members of a population into a mold. Agitation: The propaganda of insurgency and revolution. Includes how internal enemies are used as scapegoats to manufacture then exploit hatreds as means to an insurgent's end, Mao's view on "the enemy residing in every man" and fitting him into the "Socialist Mold", Hitler's internal agitation, spontaneous volunteer propagandists, and how facts and "truth" are irrelevant to the person burning with primal hatred.



ALSO: 
  • Agitation propaganda during the American Revolution 
  • Triggering revolution by provoking hate? It's easy!
  • Exploiting hatred and the path to genocide
  • Hatred: small investment, high return
  • Agitation and Integration can be used simultaneously
  • Utopia is totalitarian
  • Intellectuals: More susceptible to integration propaganda than dolts
  • Intellectuals and self-bigotry
  • "Can I hate you?"
  • Justification, rationalization and stampeding enraged elephants
  • Agitation to Integration: extremely difficult
  • Successful Agitation + Failed Integration = Mob Rule
  • Winter Is Here
  • Yep. It's a doozy. 
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

8/28/19: Monetized Agitation, Unleashing Hatred, Poking The Crackerbear

This quick primer episode is the uncomfortable preface to Jacques Ellul's agitation propaganda. I explore how our Matrix Avatars themselves act as agitation propaganda and the way the informational cyber-swamp has actually managed to monetize it. Also Ellul on the dangerous effects of suppressing innate drives and human nature, the Ideology of Happiness, the universal violent human instinct, the devastating effects of dissolving human domestication to unleash and exploit primal hatred, and the self-defeating ignorance of poking the hibernating Crackerbear.

When it's done, to quote William Munny, "Have a drink, kid."



Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net

Thursday, August 22, 2019

8/22/19: Propaganda: Contradictions, Agitation Media, Typhoid Zuck

Propaganda's ambiguity and contradictions including: creating tensions while relieving others, an introduction to the companion propagandas: agitation and integration and how they overlap; self-justification and imposed guilt; attachment and ostracizing oneself to join the "enemy; politicization and privatization; "Why die for Danzig?' and how political orphans benefit extremists and authoritarians.



ALSO:
  • Andrew Sullivan on the boomerang
  • Post-Truth hatred and division: a bigger threat than climate change
  • Don't blame the bartender for getting you drunk
  • Twitter, Facebook, and Typhoid Mary
  • Atomic Ping Pong
  • Our personal broadcast stations
  • The Russia investigation saved the Democrats
  • Setting up your triage tent
  • Forget the mob; save yourself
  • Information or Propaganda? Can you tell? Does it even matter?
  • The Matrix & Propaganda
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net

Saturday, August 17, 2019

8/17/19: Propaganda: Dependent Drunks In Denial

On Ellul's "The Need For Propaganda." We've both developed a tolerance for and a psychological dependency on propaganda's certainty-stoking, justifying, and and self-worth generating narratives, social media is a propagandist's dream, desensitization and an increasing desire for the excitement felt from being immersed in the constant, and necessary stream of propaganda, how our addiction has allowed both traditional media and social media "influencers" to monetize the Outrage Industrial Complex, our role as retained ideological attorneys, and wishful thinking (and possibly disastrous effects) of suddenly eliminating 320-million people's propaganda narratives. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Grab a sammich for this one. And maybe a stiff drink. Hey! I never said this would be easy!



ALSO: 
  • This is a triage situation; not a search for the "cure"
  • Disinformation bit me again!
  • Why we won't quit the informational drug
  • A possible path to empathy
  • The culture war is a War of National Narratives
  • Chosen perspective becomes "personal truth"
  • Provoking shame as a "debate" tool: a boomerang
  • Social media "influencers": personal brands hocking a product while posing as "journalists"
  • The IDW: agitation propaganda
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

Thursday, August 15, 2019

8/15/19: Propaganda: Righteousness And Simplicity

The Propaganda opus resumes with Ellul's take on psychic "dissociation". Includes more on wordknapping, how righteous and simplistic propaganda narratives silence the self and numb natural cognitive dissonance, replacing reality with the electronic eyes of the "verbal universe", the effects of disconnecting a person's personal opinion in favor of an acceptable "public" opinion, and how opposing propagandas affect the target.



ALSO:
  • Democratic Socialists: as ridiculous during Occupy as at their "convention"
  • Aligned, Premeditated, and Secret Consciences: Individuality and Haidt's Elephant
  • Disconnecting thought & action  
  • Opposing propagandas: political abstention or fanaticism?
  • The IDW: Agitation Propaganda
  • Data Overload and the Defective Human Mind
  • Your congenial host and the Ideological Riptide
  • No one's immune. Not even you.
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net

Thursday, August 8, 2019

8/8/19: The Internet's Ethic: Informational Anarchy & Deadly Insignificance

After more shooting's, Chris & Rich rejoin the show to discuss our "news" (propaganda) consumption, and the predictably tribal response. We're malleable psychological adolescents and clearly unprepared for this informational responsibility. Also, the same recycled arguments with a few new propaganda twists, did you know the Dayton killer was a self-proclaimed Leftist? Is it coincidence that most "news" coverage is in El Paso? Remote rhetorical assaults and the historical usefulness of "physical accountability": smacking bullies in the snout.



ALSO: 
  • "Can I believe this" vs "Must I believe this"
  • Snorting pacifists: lambs to the wolves
  • Arya Stark: she was fiction. 
  • "Educated Intellectuals" aren't immune to propaganda; maybe more vulnerable  
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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

8/6/19: Propaganda: Autonomy Lost, Fake Tensions, Exiling Sectarians

How propaganda acts as an informational virus to destroy critical thought and alienate the person from himself. More on data overload, the uninformed Current Events Man knowing a little about everything and a lot about nothing, mistaking feelings for thought, having to accept or reject an entire doctrine in total, losing intellectual autonomy, and how artificial tensions are often accompanied by dubious solutions.



ALSO:
  • Artificial solutions to real needs
  • Real solutions to artificial needs
  • "Influencers", their product, and their Patreon
  • The Tribal Dance of Rhetorical Fuckery
  • We're a species of sleazy lawyers and pathological liars
  • Self-stereotyping caricatures
  • It's fine to generalize then exile sectarian fabricants
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747


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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

Friday, August 2, 2019

8/2/19: Propaganda: Slogans, Rationalizations, The Religious Mind

The conclusion of Ellul's psychological crystallization segment featuring the makeup of its slogans & how they're used to replace thought, collective belief and obsessions, self-justification/rationalizations and how they spawn the self-righteous Puritan, the closing of the crystallized mind, propaganda's religious personality, and a bizarre 21st century media phenomenon: monetizing mind rape.




ALSO:

- Marianne Williamson: The New Trump?
- Introducing the father of American propaganda: Edward Bernays
- They know you better than you know yourself
- Propaganda's side-effects and how they mirror the '60's definition of "neurosis"

Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747


*Like the pod? SPREAD IT! You are the marketing team.
*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com