Comment by CMay
4 hours ago
People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
> It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US
It's the USA eating itself and trying to attack Europe, if anything. It's American fascist billionaires who own, buy, and steer these social networks.
Owning the social networks doesn't mean you control all the information inherently, because it can easily get out of control. It wasn't that long ago that hundreds of thousands of bots had to be removed after running rampant for a long time which were manipulating trends that cause peaks on journalist's social media dashboards that influences what stories they cover.
Yes, social media bots impacting statistical trend services which some news organizations use to decide what stories to cover.
Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim. Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist" and most people don't even know what that really means.
We're not attacking Europe, we're making Europe stronger so it can stand more independently so it doesn't require as much US intervention in the case World War 3 does start and a new front opens there beyond Ukraine. That way the US can invest more of its resources in the pacific. NATO understands this.
The reason we had to do it rudely, is because we've been trying to get Europe to do this for decades nicely and that hasn't work. So you get the rude approach.
> Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist"
The man that bought one of the most important social networks and has substantially changed its algorithm is nearly openly a nazi. It's not just the sieg hail the day of the presidential swear-in, it's everything he does to the world and the USA. And so do all the others.
> So you get the rude approach.
You're digging your own grave. Your president is handing over your empire piecewise to your adversaries for a fistful of gold. You must understand this: the only thing worse than communism, is fascism, because it's just corruption as a form of government.