[HN Gopher] On subversion and dissolution of opposition movements
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On subversion and dissolution of opposition movements
Author : nikolamilosevic
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-12-24 11:25 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (inspiratron.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (inspiratron.org)
| pagutierrezn wrote:
| Ups! I initially thought it had something to do with svn
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| "The strength of activists, social change, and opposition
| movements seems to be decreasing around the world. The trend is
| reinforced by the seemingly old tactic of discrediting,
| deception, building mistrust among members, and disinformation
| spread by various political and state actors, who over the
| millennia perfected their methods."
|
| Could the decrease in "strength" (i.e. interest and involvement
| by its participants) be possibly due to how unpopular the demands
| of the activists are to the general public? It seems the author
| has a very myopic view of the situation. People are seeing what
| "defund the police" leads to, and what their kids are being
| taught in schools -- they see it, and they're judging it, and
| their response is increasingly "NO". The democrats in the US see
| their polling numbers plummet, and are recognizing that pursuing
| the agenda demanded by the activists will take them out of power
| altogether.
|
| The examples cited are COINTELPRO and the Soviet Stazi? Those
| were quite a long time ago, and not at all part of any
| suppression of today's activists. The article fails to mention
| that for the most part, "big tech" has supported opposition
| movements, and show clear bias against conservatives.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| There is only really one issue, and that's the rapidly
| increasing atmospheric CO2 level and the potential impacts it
| will have on our ability to maintain a functioning society. The
| fact that you're focused on a bunch of telegenic activists and
| police defunding (which appears to not be actually happening,
| anywhere) illustrates how successfully we've been distracted
| from matters that affect our own survival.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| There has indeed been defunding and redirecting funds to
| other purposes...and several cities have recently reversed
| course due to the uptick in crimes:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-
| de...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/08/13/at-
| leas...
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/refund-the-police-
| cities-a...
|
| https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2021/11/15/denver-
| refunds...
|
| ...and others easily searched.
|
| Also, I'm leery of "There is only really one issue". The
| environment and climate are very real concerns, but a
| singular focus leads to zealotry and extremism -- which are
| discredits the cause(s) they're advocating. Anti-abortion
| activists learned that bombing clinics and assassinating
| doctors did not help their cause.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| From what I can tell, studies that have tried to find a
| correlation between police funding (and rare, temporary
| "defunding" efforts) have come up with very little. In some
| cities that reduced police funding, crime rose. But then in
| some other cities that increased police funding, crime
| rose. And vice versa in other cities.
|
| And the overall magnitude of the budget cuts is tiny. Even
| the examples you cherry picked, the budget cuts are
| hilariously small compared to recent increases. For
| example, your last link shows that Denver has been
| increasing its police budget ~5% a year since 2017 (well
| above inflation), and they decreased it by 0.75% for a
| single year during a pandemic. That's a city that's seen a
| 75% overall increase in police funding since 2012 and still
| has a visible upward crime trend that clearly predates the
| "defund" movement (http://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/wp-
| content/uploads/Per-c...)
|
| This is exactly the kind of statistical nothingburger you'd
| expect to see if someone was inventing an issue to try to
| make people emotional and distract them from real problems.
| toyg wrote:
| The author misunderstands Machiavelli. Works like _De
| Principatibus_ are meant to _help_ "subversive" democratic
| efforts to recognize, reveal, and hence _counter_ tyrannical
| strategies. Machiavelli was a supporter of democratic
| governments, which were rare and revolutionary in his times, and
| had been burnt by the success of counter-revolutionary forces; so
| he described what were effectively catalogs of tyrannical
| behaviors, in order to help people avoid their traps. The fact
| that tyrants also ended up reading his works and treating them
| like manuals, was a side-effect.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Machiavelli wrote De Principatibus to get a job with the Medici
| after losing his position when they returned to Florence. There
| are a lot of interpretations of the work but the simplest is
| that it's a manual for an autocrat and that Machiavelli
| believed that the maxims he described were true. The most
| important is that the ends justify the means.
|
| It's quite a different question whether Machiavelli personally
| believed in autocracy. In the Discourses he discussed the
| management of republics. He also worked for the Florentine
| Republic for many years. There's no question he saw the
| strengths of republics, but his views are also conflated with
| admiration for Rome, which was Republican after 510 BC.
|
| I think the simplest answer is that Machiavelli believed in
| Florence, desired the unity of Italy against foreign invaders,
| and wanted to be part of the action. That's just my own
| opinion.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli#The_P...
| anovikov wrote:
| Agree, those wishing to actually understand Machiavelli should
| read "Discourses on Livy", rather than "Prince". He was an avid
| supporter of republicanism (not democracy, those didn't exist
| yet) and proven superiority of republican order vs aristocratic
| on many examples from his era as we as from the long past,
| starting with Roman Kingdom times - described by Livy.
| brnaftr186 wrote:
| Pretty sweeping statement to say democracy hadn't existed
| prior to, unless you've got semantic arguments to press it.
| I'll, of course, grant you that suffrage wasn't prefect. But
| I'd also be willing to further that argument with the idea
| that we've still yet to see a proper democracy in any modern
| era, forwarded by Graeber and Wengrow in "The Dawn of
| Everything". You'll also note that, given these passages are
| true, an elected representative is simply the best aristocrat
| - which is a coin with two sides.
|
| I'd also go so far as to posit that democratic processes are
| an innate form of human organization. Think of every time
| you've been organizing and out with your friends. Even coming
| to an end where you synthesize, it's nonetheless effectively
| informal voting. So, I'd say that indeed there were many
| societies, regardless of whatever precise definition is
| formalized, which predated Machiavelli quite probably on the
| order of tens of thousands of years.
|
| From Dawn of Everything:
|
| "[...] political philosophers of later Greek cities did not
| actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting
| candidates for public office at all. _The democratic method
| was sortition, or lottery,_ much like modern jury duty.
| Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode
| (aristocracy meaning 'rule of the best'), allowing commoners
| - much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic
| aristocracy - to decide who among the well born should be
| considered best of all; and well born, in this context,
| simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of
| their time playing at politics. "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pnyx :
|
| "The Pnyx was the official meeting place of the _Athenian
| democratic assembly_ (Ancient Greek: ekklesia). In the
| earliest days of Athenian democracy (after the reforms of
| Kleisthenes in 508 B.C.), the ekklesia met in the Agora.
| Sometime in the early 5th century, the meeting place was
| moved to a hill south and west of the Acropolis. This new
| meeting place came to be called "Pnyx" (from the Greek word
| meaning 'tightly packed together.'"
| wrnr wrote:
| That is also my reading of it, I've always liked this quote
| by (I think) James Burnham, The one measure the good must
| take form the bad.
| slibhb wrote:
| One interpretation is that it's satire. Another is that it's an
| attempt to trick dictators into planting the seeds of a
| republican revolution.
|
| A third is that, while Machiavelli is a republican, he's also a
| realist. He understands that, sometimes, there will be a
| dictatorship, he accepts this and he's offering genuine advice
| to autocrats. That his advice is cold-blooded is a reflection
| of his concern with concrete reality as opposed to ideals and
| his belief that a dictator trying to be good is worse than a
| dictator who ruthlessly pursues his self-interest.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Here's the no-ads .pdf version (linked at the top of their web
| page) - - https://inspiratron.org/wp-content/uploads/kalins-
| pdf/single... (Note the mangled Stasi logo in the .pdf:)
|
| The 5-page article focuses on state security organization (Stasi,
| FBI) with massive resources and legal powers, going up against
| opposition movements with neither. Younger folks might not know
| that such organizations do such stuff...but to me, the stories
| read like "mighty army manages to track down and kill a 3-legged
| cow". Wow! Really? /s
|
| Like most stuff I've read, the essay makes the Stasi out to
| supreme masters of their craft. Um, _no_. Remember what happened
| to East Germany when the Soviet Empire fell? The whole State
| vanished away like a sand castle in the face of a rising tide.
| The Stasi, like most such organizations, were a bunch of creepy
| machismo control-freak thugs with state backing. Their goals
| were: 1) indulging their own sociopathic inclinations, and 2)
| keep State backing, while said State lasted. Understanding why
| states endure or fade away didn 't seem to be on their radar. Let
| alone _doing_ anything to help East Germany endure.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Yeah, I only read so far into the article before losing
| interest in it. Great title, but it fails to deliver.
|
| You raise an interesting point, about the fall of the Soviet
| Empire. Perhaps an extremely effective tactic, right up until
| the truth catches up and gets it's pants on.
| paganel wrote:
| > The strength of activists, social change, and opposition
| movements seems to be decreasing around the world.
|
| Maybe it's some bias from my part, but (at least in the Western
| world, which I'm following more closely) it looks like the
| establishment is starting to get more and more shaky.
|
| I think the last thing standing on the establishment's side was
| the "mainstream media" (for lack of a better word) but the
| ongoing pandemic plus a recent election or two (mainly Trump +
| Brexit) have shaken its influence to the core. The propaganda
| machine that is Hollywood has also lost most of its influence on
| the general public in the last few years, mostly because its
| movies don't target the general populace anymore.
|
| It feels like if someone would just come in and grab the reins of
| power by force almost no-one will be willing to risk his/her life
| in order to defend today's democracy (or what's left of it).
| nikolamilosevic wrote:
| Point of the article is that establishment is defending whoever
| is on power and itself, and there is no much more democracy,
| especially when opposition is dissolved, leaving people to
| chose between parties that are not fundamentally different.
| Erosion of democracy is the result, especially now all aided
| with technology and biases big tech platforms introduced
| teeray wrote:
| http://archive.today/lDfVU
| logronoide wrote:
| Probably one of the best videos about subversion:
| https://youtu.be/GwDdJsdYM3g
| qntty wrote:
| Is this guy trying to convert me to Christianity? Am I
| misunderstanding his final statement where he seems to say that
| the only solution to subversion is faith in God?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Is this guy trying to convert me to Christianity? Am I
| misunderstanding his final statement where he seems to say
| that the only solution to subversion is faith in God?
|
| Care to link that part?
|
| I'd believe it though. IIRC, disinformation techniques are
| meant to seize up rational judgement processes, and it makes
| sense that one way to defeat that is an extra-rational
| commitment to something.
|
| I recall a scene in the show _The Americans_ , where the
| Russian agent was blackmailing a very religious woman into
| helping him. Going against all rational self-interest and at
| great personal cost, she told her superiors about what was
| going on allowing them to thwart the Russian's plan, because
| she believed that was the right thing to do. The Russian
| agent character grumbled that religious people are the
| hardest to manipulate because they don't act predictably (or
| something like that).
| wussboy wrote:
| I'm always scared to click on political videos in you tube,
| just in case it's Jordan Peterson. Even one accidental click
| will inundate your suggested videos with right wing hatred.
|
| But don't worry. YouTube's algorithms aren't making the world
| worse!
| rubyfan wrote:
| Agree, youtube links should probably only be ever opened in
| private mode behind a vpn.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Even one accidental click will inundate your suggested
| videos with right wing hatred._
|
| Right-click, copy link, open new private window, paste link.
| zionic wrote:
| I'm no fan of his but Peterson is hardly right-wing. If
| anything he's politically centrist with a strong focus on
| individualism.
|
| Both right and left wingers hate him because he undermines
| their collectivist/authoritarian sides
| pstuart wrote:
| > Both right and left wingers hate him because he
| undermines their collectivist/authoritarian sides
|
| Speak for yourself. I don't hate him but I'm not a fan -- I
| think he's a gifted speaker in crafting what people want to
| hear but find his reasoning specious.
| wussboy wrote:
| I did not claim he is right wing. I only claim that if you
| watch one of his videos you will get right wing videos
| pushed to you on YouTube.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| A little web searching turns up a number of people who
| believe otherwise. Here's one I can't easily classify into
| left/right boxes.
|
| https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/09/21/jordan-
| pe...
| throwrqX wrote:
| Is there any evidence this guy was actually a KGB agent? I've
| seen this guy a lot and he talks awfully like someone who is
| saying what a certain group of people wanna hear.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Is there any evidence this guy was actually a KGB agent?
| I've seen this guy a lot and he talks awfully like someone
| who is saying what a certain group of people wanna hear.
|
| He showed up in this NY Times video identified as a former
| KGB agent, so that claim stood up to whatever fact checking
| they did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo&t=180s.
|
| > I've seen this guy a lot and he talks awfully like someone
| who is saying what a certain group of people wanna hear.
|
| That doesn't mean he's wrong.
| lkrubner wrote:
| Regarding the dangers of disinformation, one way to build a
| democracy that is largely immune to disinformation would be to
| build a democracy in which you only vote for people whom you know
| personally. That would mean introducing another layer of
| representation, in-between the public and Congress. The simplest
| and most naive approach would simply establish districts of 860
| people:
|
| 330,000,000 / 860 = 383,720
|
| 383,720 / 860 = 460
|
| In other words, in the USA, where we have 330 million people and
| a House of 430 Representatives, if we wanted to keep the House at
| that size, while only having people vote for people that they
| know, you would divide them up into very small districts of a few
| hundred people, so that people in the districts could get to know
| each other directly, without having to rely on something like
| television.
|
| 860 people would be the population of a neighborhood in the
| suburbs, or 2 large apartment buildings where I live in New York
| City.
|
| Someone will probably respond "Your intermediate district has
| 383,720 people in it." Right, but the 860 elected representatives
| in that district know they only need to get to know each other.
|
| There is a small historical precedent for this, the Polish
| Lithuanian Commonwealth, a democracy that at its peak in the
| 1500s had 10% of the population voting, in a system of small
| Sejms that would then send representatives to the main Sejm in
| the capitol. For many reasons, this is worth more study. The
| Commonwealth was the largest and most successful experiment with
| democracy that existed in the West between the end of ancient
| Athenian democracy and the revolutions of the 1700s.
|
| I will say, based on personal experience, people's behavior is
| non-partisan when they vote for someone who they know personally.
| Indeed, it seems to engage a completely different part of the
| human brain.
|
| To understand this, it is worth studying what happened to my mom.
| She is a left-leaning leader in a strongly Republican town
| (Jackson, New Jersey), yet the Republicans appointed her to the
| Environmental Commission and the Planning Board, because they
| knew her and trusted her. My mom served from 1973 to 2019, 46
| years in total, and was finally given an award from the city
| government that recognized her as the longest serving member of
| the Jackson government, since its founding in 1848. She served
| for 26% of the town's total history.
|
| My mom worked as a teacher in the high school, and even though
| most of her students, and their parents, were Republican, they
| loved her and wanted her to serve in government.
|
| An illustration of this was during the angry years after 2008
| when a new kind of Republican entered town politics, basically
| the Tea Party Republicans. They were very loyal to the real
| estate developers, who hated my mom, and so they conspired to
| oust my mom in 2009. This lead to an outcry, throughout the town,
| and so my mom was reappointed. You can read that story here:
|
| http://www1.gmnews.com/2009/07/30/board-member-offers-to-ste...
|
| The point is, this is an overwhelming Republican town that for 46
| years was willing to appoint a left-leaning activist to several
| government commissions, because when they thought about my mom,
| they did not think about her in partisan terms. Instead, they
| thought of her as the teacher and activist that they loved.
|
| From this I conclude, when people vote for people who they know
| personally, they engage a very different part of their brain,
| relative to the part of the brain they use when engaged in
| partisan politics.
|
| Having said all this, I don't think a simple division of the
| pubic by 860 is ideal. I suggest a somewhat more subtle system
| here:
|
| https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
| robinduckett wrote:
| Instant bounce due to the sheer amount of ads and overlays
| luckylion wrote:
| Honest question: why do you surf the web without an adblocker
| these days? Are there technical constraints that limit your
| browser/plugin choice? Is it a moral stance ("I want ad-funded
| sites to make money if I consume their content")?
| 7fYZ7mJh3RNKNaG wrote:
| In my case, iOS does not allow extensions on Firefox. I
| didn't know this before recently getting and iPhone and was
| pissed, but the side effect is less browsing on my phone
| which is nice.
| ahelwer wrote:
| Same boat. I ended up just paying for adguard and using
| safari. All the browsers on iOS are just wrappers of safari
| anyway, as far as I can tell.
| robinduckett wrote:
| I don't have an adblocker on my phone, although I am
| increasingly tempted.
| [deleted]
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