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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 1/28/23

Twitstorm II Taibbi Unearths Twitter McCarthyism

Message Peter Barus
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In "Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud", Matt Taibbi discusses an enormous and pervasive campaign called "Hamilton 68" that permeated, and we have to say, permeates not only the MSM...

Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group's "research." Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as sources.

The mind-boggling aspects of this story...

It doesn't just contravene every tenet of Journalism (if there's any left), it breaks the Fourth Estate (if by that we mean, the battered but Constitutionally cited Freedom of the Press) the way the past few presidents have broken the law: set it on fire, put the ashes through a blender, and fed the pureed slurry to an eager attention-mining infrastructure.

Of particular interest to armchair nerds like me is that it is the logical hell-spawn (or hell's pawn) of Cambridge Analytica, the collapse of which sordid enterprise (as depicted in"The Great Hack" film) revealed the penetration of the new economic logic, "Surveillance Capitalism". Actually only one of said logical demonic offspring, as Cam Anal was almost certainly cloned, and the clones cloned, out to seven generations.

But this was not the cause-of-causes of our fragmented, terrified society. It only made that inevitable. Until then it had been merely likely, while the "social" media platforms displaced the newspaper and TV business, and were trying desperately to live on old fashioned newspaper advertising. "Targeted Marketing" was expected to work by capturing all your online "behavioral surplus" (read Zuboff for this), and tailoring ads just for you. Just when the rapidly-consolidating platforms were staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, Moore's Law brought sufficient capacity to deal with the teraflops of minutiae relentlessly stored by an oblivious public, and "big data" could be mined.

The result of all that was "neuromarketing" algorithms that not only presented precise levels of user-annoyance calculated to sustain a baseline of public anxiety and resentment, but in the background myriad micro-impressions of body-image, social status, self-worth and so on, battered our egos for at least ten years. So that today, the world is your individually-wrapped oyster.

To boil all this down and pound it into the ground and break it off, humanity has not been superseded by "A.I." and relegated to the Singularity slag-heap; there was no need for that, to end our reign at the top of the food-chain. Before we ever came anywhere near that remote possibility, we gave it all over to a machine more like a microwave oven.

No. Nothing that sophisticated. We put our future, as a species, into the digital clutches of an obsolete household appliance. A toaster.

If this were one of my usual rants, the end. But no-o-o-o. Let's just let it all out. Why not?

Back to Matt Taibbi's amazing discovery. The question that springs to mind is, what were they thinking, what's the plan? I mean, a plot to to implicate sort of random but predominantly right-wing "social" media accounts as Russian disinformation bots, and feed this to the MSM as "news"? It wouldn't give advantage to either wing of the Party (R or D). We have to consider that the point of the operation might be to bring about, um, what it brought about: general Russia-phobia. And, neutralizing the one remaining Branch that might conceivably resist this insurrection, Congress.

Stepping back quite a distance, to get a view of a larger context, is a good idea at this point. We have to back off until there are no more orphan puzzle-pieces lying around. And the only context large enough to encompass this now is the context of what (delightfully perspicacious) Caitlin Johnstone might call Washington-centered unipolar global hegemony (WUGH).

A hopeless dream of World Empire, such as brought us the blazing nightmare nineteenth- and twentieth-century holocausts, still entrances the psychopathic pretenders to Ultimate Power. And all this disgusting behavior has been part of the setup. Not just for the Ukraine catastrophe, but at least as far back as the cold war years, and up through Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, leading (in the twisted logic of this demented scheme) to the hoped-for collapse of Russia and China. India (we're talking so-called leadership here remember) would see this coming and hunker down to wait for China to be softened up enough, and for a chance to seize the reins in the chaos. The Global South would not enter into these calculations, being left at a low boil for later resource exploitation.

But don't bother chasing any conspiracy theories, remember that this is all baloney. The big money makes it just one more obvious slate-wiping threat to everything living in the known universe. We must expect failure when humans try to set up such Babel-towers, long before anything resembling heaven's stairway appears. We are not good at scale. We persist in thinking bigger is better. We keep trying to build a canoe the size of an aircraft carrier. This never can work.

Unlike any other naturally-selected life-form, our delusions can kill us off. We can go extinct because of stuff that is not there and never was. The actual plot is very likely even more insane and Bannonesque, such as the one to bring about Armageddon early, and steal the starry crown before the messianic bottom lands on the golden throne. (They always leave that part out, but would they pull this stunt expecting only to get their sin-besmirched asses into heaven? Hell no. They want to run the joint.)

Armageddon, by the way, just to reveal my bias, is not some future Apocalypse. It is, and has been for several thousand years, our rueful metaphor for normal human existence, here and now. It's not the End Times we should worry about, it's Our Time. Heaven and Hell are just aspects of normal existence, here and now. Humans only get to choose where to live. Mostly, until recently, we seem to prefer somewhere in between.

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I'm an old Pogo fan. For some unknown reason I persist in outrage at Feudalism, as if human beings can do much better than this. Our old ways of life are obsolete and are killing us. Will the human race wake up in time? Stay (more...)
 

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