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...

Synapse Pruning & The Signal to Noise Ratio

First of all, I know I never finished the hitchhiking updates from November. I made it home safely and felt bad about not finishing until I remembered: no one's reading them anyhow! So...who cares? Literally! If you happen to be an anomaly, I apologize. I'll finish them , eventually. Then you'll be able to hear all about the Russian trucker watching porn as he DROVE, or more accurately swerved, down I-80 in Iowa. True story. Good times. But, not why I'm here this early morning...

This link is about how motherhood changes women's brains.

Interesting read, sure, but pay attention to the part about "synapse pruning". It's the brain's way of, as I like to put it, "getting rid of that which does not fucking matter to make room for that which does." And make whatever remains more efficient.

4/29/20 - Social Media Disease: A Cacophony of Nothing

Todd's merciful Bat Plague boycott continues with more spiritually uplifting content like: "F**k Subaru. I hate them and you should, too." Also, 2020's Jill Stein; Steinbeck, Salinas, and digital detox; social media "should" be regulated like radio; carnival barkers and data overload are killing democracy; the Wisdom of the People™ doesn't exist therefore populism is pandering to a screeching herd; and rejoice! The Devil's all up in ya! Can you feel him? 



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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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7/17/19: Guidance Is Internal

Chris & Rich sit in on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. We discuss the achievement, the courage of those undertaking it, and how subsequent generations were cheated of their signature crowning moment in history.



ALSO: 

-Data overload, informational suffocation, and how the compulsive "current events man" is actually less informed.

-Are we "really" evolving?

-Patriotic appreciation vs. copycat anti-Americanism



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8/9/22 - Tribal By Nature & The Invasive Species

 

The one where Todd finally plants his flag! We're tribal critters who are bound by self-serving fictions; these stories are called cohesive narratives; national myths. And, in this country at least, the collectivist fairy tale of socialism is the antithesis of individualism; the "prepare the road for the child" mentality is mutually exclusive with our established American principle: meritocracy. Collectivist socialism and its "equity" cult is, therefore, an invasive species. Wokeism is an ideological insurgency. But from where?

#111 also features the details of a lengthy and dramatic tribalism re-think, how data overload and its existential chaos push people toward idiocratic political cults, and foreshadowing hints about finding propaganda's Rosetta Stone! Answers are finally coming! But are they the ones you think you want?

 

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10/12/20 - The Whitmer Plot, Michigan's Militias, Socialism's Facade

Brian rejoins Todd just in time to discuss the plot to kidnap our governor, Michigan's militias, the psychology of extremism, and the ongoing destruction of social and governmental norms. What are these groups fighting against and do they have a legitimate point buried beneath their theatrics? Is socialism a cult destined to lead to disillusionment and a totalitarian state whose main purpose is maintaining the utopian illusion? We also discuss data overload, Manchurian Propagandists, as well as free speech and the responsibility that comes with it; when does free speech become destructive? Can we tell the difference between propaganda and information? Has propaganda become so ubiquitous that it's actually replaced objective fact without us realizing it?

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MUSIC: The Limbos & Paul Vernon

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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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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2/11/20 - Unimpressed Sobriety & Sanity's Touchstone

Toddzilla's latest Message of Hope formally introduces the loyal listener to Mr. Lippmann: a Man of the People! Touched on are Lippmann's "The Phantom Public", his iconoclastic thoughts on technologically pre-historic data overload, emotional detachment, objective reality, the presumed wisdom of We the People™, and democracy's fate. Have a drink first. Also, institutions and trust are dead, a defense of the "elites", and generalists vs. specialists.



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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 

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3/28/20 - Detroit, Intellectual Distancing, The Glowing Antichrist

Can Detroit and rural Michigan bear what they say is coming? Social distancing as an apt metaphor and how it can be useful. A crisis instinctively prods a frightened herd into a closed-tribe psychology, which is nationalism. How data overload contributes to it and helps obliterate the utopian Brotherhood of Man mythology. Why many quietly want Trump to fail, whether they admit it or not.



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