Rising fascism in the US

I live about 46 miles from Stonehenge and the Solstices, and Equinoxes, with all the druids hippies and new agers doing their thing is on the local news every three months.

I wasn't being nasty either, but as you can see the solstices don't exactly pass by unnoticed over here.

Over Anchorage.

On Friday, Mr. Kirby said that Mr. Biden ordered the unidentified object near Alaska downed “out of an abundance of caution.” He said the object was shot down over waters off the coast of Alaska.

It was quite fine Frank. I actually didn't know that we travel an eliptical path around the sun, which when I looked it up, lead to me finding out the Moon's orbit around the Earth is also eliptical. I was just suprised you both knew about the solistices and how they worked - from memory, I heard a single mention of them somewhere between grade 6-8 and that was it. I only remember because interactive cause & effect has interested me from childhood.

Can you spot fake news? Here are the headlines of three recent stories that received wide coverage: “Putin issues international arrest warrant for George Soros”; “A baby born in California was named heart eyes emoji”; “Criminal farts so loudly he gives away his hiding place”. Did you recognise that only one of these stories was true – the third one?

This is the type of test that Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology in society at Cambridge University, likes to use in experiments, as outlined in his fascinating, if slightly terrifying, new book.

Van der Linden has found that only about 4% of participants in these tests can correctly identify all the bogus stories presented to them. You are probably thinking that, as the reader of a serious national newspaper, you would not be fooled so easily, but Van der Linden explains clearly why we are all vulnerable. We all have a tendency to accept information that is consistent with our prior beliefs, and reject that which is not, resulting in confirmation bias.

Some of us are also more likely to believe in wild conspiracy stories – from secret microchips in vaccines to stolen elections – but most of us are unaware of how often we are duped by the things we read and hear. And Van der Linden warns that there is growing evidence that our inability to filter out misinformation is putting many lives at risk and undermining democracy across the world.

[...]

Van der Linden has identified “six degrees of manipulation” – strategies that are used to fool people into believing the unbelievable. These include discrediting factual information using deflection and denial, and making emotional appeals to generate responses based on feelings instead of rational thoughts – for instance by exaggerating the risks of rare side effects from the Covid-19 vaccines.

Polarisation strategies are employed to deepen divisions between groups of people on issues, such as abortion, that strongly align with liberal and conservative viewpoints. Conspiracy theories are seeded to cast doubt on mainstream explanations for events. Trolling seeks to exploit and provoke people about controversial issues, such as baiting high-profile individuals on social media about their views on Brexit.

The sixth strategy is the impersonation of expert individuals and organisations to lend spurious credibility to outright falsehoods. The book highlights the example of the Oregon Petition, which has been circulated periodically over the past 25 years with more than 31,000 signatures of supposed scientists who reject the scientific consensus on climate change.

But Van der Linden found that individuals who deny global warming are more sceptical of the validity of the petition – which includes very few climate scientists – when they are warned in advance that conservative lobby groups are seeking to manipulate views by hiding the extent of consensus among experts in order to create opposition to policies to phase out fossil fuels. This is an example of “prebunking” – making people more alert in advance to specific attempts to deceive them – and often provides a more effective defence than debunking misinformation after it has appeared.

However, Van der Linden and his colleagues have shown that it is even better to inoculate people by warning them of how they might be manipulated, and to give them a chance to explore for themselves how easy it is to create and spread misinformation. They even created an online game, Bad News, through which thousands of people could try their hand at writing deceptive social media posts and headlines. Subsequent testing revealed that participants had, in the process, become more immune to false claims.

Foolproof ends with a chapter offering advice to readers about how they can inoculate friends and family to make them less susceptible to propaganda, by challenging and discussing fake news that is encountered, for instance, on a WhatsApp group. So, even as a reader of a serious national newspaper, this book could help you to play your part in creating “herd immunity” against the growing scourge of fake facts and nonsense narratives.

But belongs here for some reason.

Truly, their propaganda-induced psychosis is like a Jim Jones Kool-Aid drinking party.

However, Van der Linden and his colleagues have shown that it is even better to inoculate people by warning them of how they might be manipulated, and to give them a chance to explore for themselves how easy it is to create and spread misinformation. They even created an online game, Bad News, through which thousands of people could try their hand at writing deceptive social media posts and headlines. Subsequent testing revealed that participants had, in the process, become more immune to false claims.

Feb 14 (Reuters) - Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia's Wagner mercenary group, said on Tuesday that he founded and financed and the Internet Research Agency, a company Washington says is a "troll farm" which meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Prigozhin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, spent years operating on behalf of the Kremlin in the shadows, but has emerged in recent months as one of the most high profile figures connected with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

He has previously admitted interfering in U.S. elections, but his statement on Tuesday appears to go further than before in outlining his specific links to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA).

"I was never just the financier of the Internet Research Agency. I thought it up, I created it, I managed it for a long time," Prigozhin said in a post shared on social media by the press service of his Concord catering group.

"It was created to protect the Russian information space from the West's boorish and aggressive anti-Russian propaganda," Prigozhin said.

Prigozhin was first sanctioned by the United States over his links to the Internet Research Agency in 2018 and charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his inquiry into Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. election said that Internet Research Agency sought to sow discord in the United States through "information warfare."

It sought to sway the 2016 election in favour of Trump, Mueller’s report said.

"The campaign evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015 to undermine the U.S. electoral system, to a

targeted operation that by early 2016 favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate [Hillary] Clinton," the report said.

"IRA employees also traveled to the United States on intelligence-gathering missions."

Prigozhin, who spent the final decade of the Soviet Union in prison for robbery and fraud, was for years an associate of Putin. His catering group swept up government contracts, earning him the nickname of "Putin's Chef", while he deployed Wagner mercenaries to fight alongside Russian servicemen in Syria and to conflicts across Africa to advance Russia's geopolitical interests.

After years of denials, he last year admitted his links to Wagner and said he had interfered in U.S. elections.

Having rapidly built his public profile both in Russia and abroad since Russia invaded Ukraine, analysts say the Kremlin has moved to clip his wings more recently, concerned about the outspoken businessman's growing stature and high-profile criticism of the defence ministry.