OF INTERNET SHILLS
Over the past few years, after Mr. Daniel DiGriz and I decided to remake this website and begin a more rigorous round of blogging and to create a members’ interactive area, I began to notice something both on my blogs and even more so on my News and Views from the Nefarium videos. At first, I thought I was just being over-sensitive or perhaps even a bit paranoid. What I began to notice was that while most people maintained a respectful and courteous level of interaction and discourse both with me and other people, there were a few handfuls – fussbudgets and busybodies – who were either (1) discourteous, unpleasant, or downright insulting in the extreme, or(2) who were busily engaged in pushing their political agendas (which usually fell either into some form of bigotry, usually some sick and twisted expression of “white supremacy” or a defense of their messiah figure, the president) in spite of the fact that the subject under discussion wasn’t about either subject, or (3) the group I call “pettifoggers” and “nitpickers,” a group of people ever ready to nitpick over some careless mistake, and to do so frequently and often, without making any other contribution to genuine conceptual discussion. The goal is to make the owner or contributor to the website look ridiculous.I began to suspect that I was somehow a target, but I kept such thoughts largely to myself, though I envisioned banks of people hired by various governments or corporations to do nothing but monitor websites and in general be pains-in-the-you-know-what. Given that I need no help in looking ridiculous, considering all the high octane speculation I indulge in here, I dismissed the idea.
But Mr. S.D. shared two articles these past two weeks that seem to indicate that my initial suspicions were perhaps justified, and reading these articles, especially the first one offered by RT(Russia Today), I am both stunned, and not surprised at all:
Five Eyes online Manipulation
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
I tended to dismiss such ideas until very recently when a well-known individual posted a comment on my website after completely misunderstanding my blog, and accusing me of “falling for” something.
The section of the first article that caught my eye in this respect was the following:
” In addition to the personal attacks on targets, JTRIG also involves the use of psychological and social-science tactics to steer online activism and discourse. The document details GCHQ’s “Human Science Operations Cell,” which focuses on “online human intelligence” and “strategic influence and disruption” that are used to dissect how targets can be manipulated using “leaders,” “trust,” “obedience,” and “compliance.”As far as circulating things via internet or emails to destroy someone, I recently saw this done to someone else, well-known in the alternative field, in the past year. Frankly, while at first what I was reading in my emails seemed genuine, causing me momentarily to wonder just what the heck was going on, there’s another tactic that I think is in play, which I have seem many times on my own and other websites, and that is simply unpleasantness, i.e., a certain individual or set of individuals who repeatedly show up, and make either a pettifogging or nitpicking comment designed to embarrass the blogger, or to attack him/er, or the commenters on the blog, creating such an unpleasant and vitriolic environment that people simply leave, or quit commenting.
“Using tested manipulation tactics, JTRIG attempts to influence discourse and ultimately sow discord through deception.”(Boldface emphasis added)
So what’s my point with all of this?
Simply this: I strongly suspect that these programs were and are evidence of the amount of “concern”, perhaps even “extreme concern” or “panic” that might be taking place in the corridors of power at the top of the pathological plutocracy and technocrats that think they alone should run the world; it’s a measure of their inability to cope with freedom and free speech, and an indicator of how, despite their best efforts to regulate and control and spy on the internet, they have not been ultimately successful(otherwise, the internet would look and sound like the BBC, or Faux News, or CNN, and hence, most of us wouldn’t be on it). It is a kind of psycho-cyber warfare, or perhaps socio-cyber engineering. Whatever it is, I suspect simple discourtesy, pettifogging, nitpicking, and unpleasantness are the first tactics in the playbook.
Unfortunately, it’s also an indicator that the shills will always be there, and they we need to be mindful of that fact.
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