It's astonishing, but to be expected. People like this literally live in alternate realities where the _ENTIRE_WORLD_ runs on the Republicans / Dems logic.
Their minds are mush and it takes yearssss to even begin to snap them out of it.
Reassuring that the concerns are consistent with those of decades ago:
- Sealife death (coral indicator)
- Ocean currents disrupt (ice shelves)
- Extreme greenhouse acceleration (permafrost unfreezing)
These points observe how forum members adapt to and manage controversy irrespective of any connection to organized influencing. Basic psychology.
So connecting these observations to "spies" is absurd begging of the question.
Maybe this little catalogue seemed insightful in the 80s era of USENET news, but today it's simplistic and anarchistic.
MSM and FAANG have gone so far beyond these points in strategy and tactical manipulation of opinion that trying to reckon MSM / FAANG concerns and approaches with a litany about interpersonal behaviors of ordinary, singular net users is like confusing an interaction with a next door neighbor is the same contact with aliens in another solar system.
Difference is in scale, not in kind. BBS's, Chan honeypots, chat control, dark network infiltration, MSM/FAANG & governmental manipulation are all just different ways of trying to coerce and orient different maturities and scales of technical networks. The implementation details and scale may differ, but the actors, activities, and mechanics are all the same. Without a single machine or computer in the picture, these same tactics are the fundamentals of manufacturing consent amongst a gaggle of free agents. If you only have a bunch of humans trying to organize themselves in a network, these same forces will emerge. If you can't see that, that's more a failure on your part, but I still beseech you to really bloody pay attention. It's not about tech. It's about guiding attention and shaping narrative. The tech has just made the activity and execution easier to do, more difficult to investigate, faster to get results, and is absolutely something I will until the end of my days, initiate young men and women to.
Even just members of this forum, through my observation of how they operate over the last decade are prone to the same forces. It isn't alien. Quite the contrary. Most bloody human thing on the planet. People organizing against other people. Tale as old as time. We have the manual. It is in use. It isn't perfect. It can be worked around. But you have to know about it to do it. The first step is learning. The second step, is resistance. There cannot be the second without the first.
It is a proudly proclaimed tenet of U.S. conservatism (Republicans) that liberty includes the freedom of bias and to promote bias for personal, business and political ends. This includes freedom of bigoted policy and exclusion of others on racist principle. There's a hyper-Hegelian ideological gesture made by conservatives that intolerance of their bigotry is a form of discrimination against white Christians which endangers their privilege and majority. This gesture generates a surprisingly high degree political resonance in the U.S.
As to the matter of structural bias in the 4th estate relating establishment political objectives and policy, the national press is a complex instrument of great power, so of course it will play bias to the hilt, and occasionally its management will become roiled by "controversy" over the positions of the levers of machinery of opinion.
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