We Don't Get Fooled Again

Everyone is jumping on the Bash SCL/Cambridge Analytica bandwagon, and especially those whose agenda is to paint the conservative/nationalist movement as being somehow evil and nefarious.

The video linked above is slick and subtle. It first casts the process of demographic analysis as a black art, with ominous background music and an astounded tone. It then goes on to talk only about the Trump and Brexit campaigns, as if these were the only organizations that used such tools.

Now, I'm not saying that SCL/CA and the techniques of mass market manipulation (MMM) aren't evil and nefarious, but they are by no means limited to Trump and Brexit. In fact, they are just the latest iteration of the study and science of Marketing/PR pioneered by Edward Bernays at the beginning of the 20th century. In other words, SCL/CA may have invented better tools for MMM, but the basic formulae and tenets they use are a century old, and more if you include Sigmund Freud (Bernay's uncle).

The idea of polling people voluntarily, using seemingly innocuous questions, and then applying matrices to cross-reference the responses to build a psychological profile have been the mainstay of MMM for decades. These types of analyses have shown up in women's magazines and online since at least the 1950s.

People are offered the perceived benefit of getting to know themselves better, and thus freely hand over all kinds of data about themselves to complete strangers, who then plug the answers into mathematical formulae and derive a complex profile of the individual. The film Blade Runner opens with a scene of an interviewer applying a psychological profile to one of the characters, and that film was released in 1982. The infamous LBJ Daisy ad, released in 1964, used the same techniques and led to the candidate being swept into office.

Every single public figure, organization, political party, corporation, and movement has used these exact same techniques to manipulate mass audiences since before anyone reading this was born. In fact, advertising was created to advance future sales into the present by manipulating the viewer by pursuading him/her that a product is vital and/or bestows status on the owner. Listen to Bill Moyers interviewing Edward Bernays several decades ago, and see if you don't hear the exact same thing that the "documentary" at the top of this article says, and from the mouth of the man who invented it.

What is import to keep in mind as we hear SCL/CA lambasted over the next few weeks is that it is an effort to taint Donald Trump. It is a sophisticated attempt to target an issue that crosses party and political divides. This is not to say that Trump or Brexit are good or bad, but they did garner the majority of votes. In other words, Bernays' techniques were used to win those elections, and are now being used to taint them. It is amazing to watch this if you are aware of what is being done to the mass audience.

In other words, digital privacy is an issue that crosses political affiliations. SCL/CA, and by extension Facebook, is a convenient whipping boy around which the political left is building a narrative that appeals to both sides of the spectrum. Once a sufficient mass indignation and panic has been achieved, the political left will offer themselves as the solution to this problem, even though they are as much to blame as anyone else.

The problem here is not SCL/CA, it is the entire MMM industry itself. Consumers are so woefully ignorant of how these things function that they fall prey to them repeatedly and are never even aware of it. This is not a left/right, globalist/nationist, nor racist/diversity issue. It is one that pervades every single aspect of modern life. We are ALL targets from ALL directions using the same time-tested tools and techniques that have worked so well for the past 100 years. Cambridge Analytica is just one single organization in a vast sea of similar companies, all offering the same "benefit" of manipulating mass markets, and each with their signature matrices and algorithms.

If universities stopped devoting so much class time to gender and racial diversity studies, and more time to the PR/MMM industry and its methods, we would all be much better off - at least less likely to fall for these manipulations.

But then, students would suddenly realize how they've been manipulated and the entire advertising and PR industry would collapse and governments would lose the ability to steer entire populations.

Can't have that, can we?

You Ain't Him

Story link: https://www.rt.com/uk/417075-icymi-snowflake-offended-guide/

You know what really pisses me off? Bourgeois #Bumbledicks who spout off their overfed pie-holes about how they hate "white" culture and think "White" culture should be torn down. These puffed-up, sophmoric shit-wits sit in their protective arm chairs in New York or Los Angeles and complain about something they've never experienced. Nor has anyone else, for that matter.

I've been to 59 countries (and counting), many of them in Europe and North America, which are the supposed centers of "white" culture, and I have yet to encounter "white" culture.

I have greatly enjoyed Irish culture, German culture, Italian culture, Spanish culture, Portuguese culture, French culture, Dutch culture, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, even British culture. I have even experienced Swiss culture, which despite being composed of three distinct cultures, is nevertheless distinct in and of itself. And yes, even poor old Canada has a unique culture.

Russia and Greece have wonderfully distinct cultures even though they both use Cyrillic alphabets. I don't think anyone would argue that Israel has its own culture, despite being based on war, death and suffering.

I have been to 48 of the 50 US states, and each one of them has a very distinct culture.

South Africa, Australia and New Zealand have completely unique cultures.

Just where, exactly, is this "white" culture the Bumbledicks keep railing against? Apparently, they don't get out much. This is the problem with lard-butt boneheads who look at a couple of travel sites on the internet and think they've experienced culture. These dim-bulbs have more than likely never been to an art museum, opera or symphony, so they wouldn't know culture if it bit them on their over-protected posteriors.

When you listen to these uneducated blowhards talk, it's always in gross generalizations - black culture, white culture, hispanic culture. Hell, they barely speak English, much less Spanish or Portuguese, and wouldn't know Hispania if it slapped them across the face and rubbed their swollen noses in it.

These Bumbledicks talk about Native Americans with the wave of a hand in the general direction of North America, forgetting that there were/are hundreds of distinct cultures, and forgetting that America also applies to Central and South.

These disgusting, small-minded Bumbledicks want to put the world in tidy little boxes and label them according to which way the wind in blowing that day. They are so terrified of leaving their isolated, echo chamber compounds that they really have no idea what the world is really like. They spend their entire lives watching echo-chamber programming and spouting their slogans on echo-chamber social media that they don't have time to actually go out and subject their senses to real culture.

I get attacked all the time by these effluvium-encrusted snake tits all the time. They say I can't possibly understand the plight of the (insert box du jour), and that I belong to the "privileged white" box and should be punished. They never bother to notice I live in Indonesia, one of five countries I have lived in, speak 17 languages, am an artist, and have been around the world several times the hard way (not flying). In fact, I'm not even "white" - I'm pinkish-red with multi-colored spots. None of that, including my two non-white wives, disqualifies me from "white" privilege boxes or "white" culture boxes. None of that fits their tidy little categories that enable their hate and bile.

Somehow these lunatics earned a weekend furlough from the asylum and never went back. Unfortunately, the guards too overpaid and under-motivated to go find them. They weaselled their way into areas with microphones and started broadcasting their insanity to a nonplussed world. It's a sad but true fact that we must all live with that mistake we sane folk can take the microphones away from them.

The heart of the matter is that us sane folks believe that everyone deserves a chance to express their opinion. It's called free speach, and we consider it a valueable natural right that no one can abridge. However, these stoop-headed boat anchors want to spew their sputum all over us, while denying us the right to shower off afterwards. Don't know about you. but this doesn't fly in my cabin.

Sorry, Bumbledicks, it's time to put you down. You have gotten out of hand and you are now a danger to polite society. Your minions think violence againe person and property is a good idea. Your minions think that gagging reasonable voices is just hunky-dory. Your minions are choking out the good grass with weeds. This cannot be tolerated, even by exceedingly tolerant people. You get to speak, but you aren't allowed to hush. Your right to live is based entirely on your willingness to let live.

Take your hateful, segregationist, privileged rubbish and go crawl back into the cave you slithered out of. The clear thinkers are retaking the asylum and Bumbledicks aren't allowed to roam freely. The way you should have dont it was to express your opinion, let others do the same, and argue based on facts. You blithering fools dove off some deep end the rest of us cannot and will not follow.

Diversity includes everyone or it includes no one. That's how it works.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and you ain't him/her/it/them/xim/xer.

The Hollywood Happy Hi-Howdy

One of the most alarming features of the Bumbledick Left is that it requires absolute conformity, a philosophical analogy to lock-stepping military parades.  Once conformity takes over any group of people, it becomes susceptible to charismatic leaders, who despite any good intentions, always get corrupted by the perception of power.

Individuals gain power over groups by offering something that the group desires more than any other thing.  Wealth, fame, eternal redemption - these are strong motivators for many people.  When a leader promises to fulfill these desires, and is perceived to be successful at doing it, the people invest tremendous amounts of trust and authority in the leader in the hopes of attaining their ultimate dreams.

Once a leader has hundreds, thousands, even millions of people willing to do pretty much anything they are told, the temptation for the leader to fulfill his or her own desires is overwhelming.  When followers literally throw themselves at a leader, willing to do anything to obtain their desires, who among us could resist the temptation?  I aver that exactly none of us could.

Throughout history, people can, will and have surrendered even their most strongly held moral and ethical limits to obtain their deepest desires.  Literature is full of great novels and biographies of just such people.  Great films, like Treasure of the Sierra Madre, dramatize the effects of moral degradation on the souls in the face of wish fulfillment.

And speaking of great films, that brings us to the topic of today's screed.

If you've been keeping up with the tattler sheets (a,k,a. the news) or @RadioFarSide's tweets, then you know that Hollywood's soft underbelly is being exposed at a rather alarming rate, precipitated by accusations against Uber-Producer Harvey Weinstein.

Many don't realize it, but the entertainment industry has been known for its "loose" ways for centuries.  In the ancient Greek and Roman theater, women were not allowed to perform, as it was seen as degrading to the Feminine Ideal.  The European castrati are legendary as replacements for female opera performers.  Victorian England held female performers at a level just slightly above outright harlot.  And none of this is to say that the males were viewed much (if any) better.

Mae West made a name and a fortune playing on the "fallen star" image.  Madeline Khan mocked the image with great hilarity in Blazing Saddles.  Victor/Victoria was a comedic treatment of the lengths to which female performers would go to achieve stardom.  In fact, the entire long tradition of drag queens is an extension of the use of males to perform female parts, since women were castigated for even wishing to enter the second oldest profession.

Grace Kelly's aristocratic family were aghast at her choice to enter the acting profession.  Of course, all was forgiven when Prince Rainier offered to make an "honest" woman of her.

All of this is to say that anyone who is shocked by revelations of Hollywood improprieties is either ignorant of history or very naive.

Hollywood has, for nearly a century, offered the lure of great fame and fortune.  This dangling carrot has lured millions of aspiring performers from around the world to a single city in the Western United States that rather pompously calls itself the Dream Factory.

This powerful siren song of fame makes anyone in a leadership position in Hollywood almost by default a predator.  Not that they have to work very hard, because there are plenty of folks who willingly throw themselves at anyone offering the Golden Carrot of fame.  In fact, as I watch the unfolding mess, my first thought is that Harvey Weinstein did something to unleash the wrath of the Hollywood Inner Sanctum.  None of this would be coming out if it weren't first ordained and sanctioned by the Inner Sanctum.

Ask Randy Quaid.

Are You Ready For Some FU-ball?

NFL players genuflecting in submission; Brad Mills/USA Today
Sports, via Reuters

The idea of compulsory worship of the State and its symbols makes me puke.  I haven't stood for the US national anthem in decades - probably since high school - and especially at sporting events.

Don't get me wrong, I happily stand and salute any time someone waves the Bonnie Burnet Blue and plays Texas Our Texas, but that hasn't happened at any public event I've attended since the early 2000s, and the reason I do so is because my country has been a captive nation of war since 1865.  But that's another story.

What I find particularly amusing about the current debate-du-jour in the good ol' US of A is that the people protesting the national anthem by going down on one knee is such a screwed up situation that I can't help but laugh my fool head off.

Before I get to the real meat of the matter, and being a product of Roman Catholic indoctrination, seeing people go down on one knee is what I call genuflecting, and it is a sign of submission to higher authority.  Thus, these over-stuffed boneheads are, in effect, offering greater submission to the State than simply standing and covering one's heart.

Har-har-har!  What a bunch of buffoons!

What is most amusing, however, is that all these meat-balloons that are submitting to the State in supplicated "protest" are biting their own asses.

They play a game that does not exist anywhere outside the United States.  They work for a monopoly that has special dispensation from that State to be exempt from the laws of that State that prohibit monopolies.  Most of the players would be manual laborers were it not for the incredible luck they had in landing such over-paid jobs that made them millionaires and national "heroes."  Their places of work are stadia that were paid for by municipal bonds and legal tax cheats granted by folks who have been sold a bill of goods in the interest of "tourism" and "public relations."  The owners of these bloated boneheads (yes, it is a kind of slave market) are billionaires who, for the most part, use the teams as tax write-offs against their massive incomes.

Furthermore, these steroid-puffed slabs of beef receive additional income through product endorsements that are marketed to duped citizens of those United States, and incentive payments from networks whose major source of income (given that their other shows are increasingly unwatched) to draw bleary eyeballs to the weekly spectacles that few outside the United States watch (soccer, a.k.a. football, rules the rest of the world).

Frankly, given that these people wouldn't have the ridiculous incomes and unreal jobs if it weren't for the United States, they should be bowing and scraping the turf on their obscenely wasteful stadia in submissive gratitude for what they have.  They certainly know nothing of the trials and tribulations of the inner-city poor folk they claim to be in solidarity with, nor would any of them bother to go into those neighborhoods.  They are upscale now, and have been since high school.

The gentle reader may ask what makes me any kind of expert on American FU-ballers.

Well, back in the day, when I was a fresh graduate from university, which I paid for out of my own pocket with no sports scholarships, I lowered myself to work sports for one of the Big Four affiliates in Houston.  Not only did I spend untold hours toting heavy gear up and down the sidelines of pro-sports events, I spent vastly more hours in the dark editing "news" stories for the local and national sports broadcasts, working for a boos that hated white men (this was the late 80s and early 90s, mind you).

I shot hours of interviews with these mental midgets with a ratio of 100-to-1 of footage recorded to usable sound bits (not even enough for full bites).  I did focus pieces on these meat-lockers in their palatial estates, where they regularly got into trouble beating wives and girlfriends, doing copious drugs, driving intoxicated, and living like Roman gladiators with the blessing of Caesar.  In fact, I can't count how many stories were quietly pushed aside to keep public images polished to a high sheen.

Yes, these over-grown and sickly-coddled children should not only be genuflecting to the flag and anthem that represents the only nation on Earth where they could find meaningful work, they should be lying prostrate in worship.

The owners too.

And where they have all screwed the pooch - though it is hard to sort this one thing out of the incredible list of options - is that they have fed into the one issue that Donald Trump can turn into a fortune.

Trump is a marketing guy - dare I say genius.  That's how he got to where he is now.  He is adept at manipulating symbols to dress up pigs' snouts for the ball and reaping a mighty profit from it.

These Bumbledicks (Marxist-Socialist Progressives) - owners, players and media alike - have just handed Trump one of the meatiest scenarios they possibly could, and we note that Trump has dutifully taken the opportunity and like an NFL quarterback doing the sneak, is running with all his might for the end-zone.

What completes the delicious irony is that no one, and I mean NO ONE (except us Far Siders) will dare to attack Trump's glaring Achilles' Heel on this issue, and that is the sheer number of dual citizens among his appointees, staff and advisers, since those dual citizens are of the nation of Israel.

What an incredible farce!