How does it end?

I was looking over some of the comments out there on various blog sites this morning.  Wow, a whole lot of gibberish going on.  Insults flying, sarcasm unchecked, one-upmanship attempts… it really got me wondering, are we, have we become, a nation of imbecilic bottom-feeders or what?  Is this all/the best we got??  Do we have some psychological childish need to behave this way?  That it gives us some kind of goofy personal satisfaction?

We constantly feed each other this stuff; tit for tat, over and over.  And it’s not just your Everyman who does this kind of thing; it even happens at the so-called “highest levels” of discourse. Take yesterday’s bizarre comments by four U.S. House Republicans (see :20 to 1:02 mark)

Am I guilty of the same thing, fomenting discord, by even bringing this video up?  Does that also make me part of the problem??

Phrases like “normal tourists visit,” “not Trump supporters who were taking the lives of others,” “DOJ harassing peaceful patriots,” “no insurrection but a mob of misfits” really give a distorted picture of what we all actually saw happen.  How can we come up with two completely different analyses of the same witnessed event?  Who’s not seeing what?

Granted, a lot of questions there, and the gods know we’ve discussed this subject ad nauseam. But:

Q1: Where does this all end?  Does one side even dare to stop, which then emboldens the other side?

Q2: How to best handle the problem of childish gibberish, writ large, in the U.S.?  You tell me.

Thank for posting and recommending.

Analysis of the insurrectionists and their motivation

An 18-minute interview with a professor who studies political violence all over the world led him to some interesting findings about the insurrectionists in the 1/6 coup attempt. 

Summary of the interview

Most of the 1/6/ insurrectionists were male (~85%) and White (~94%) and ~34 to 55 years old. About 45% were professionals including CEOs, business owners, doctors, lawyers and managers, but only 7% were unemployed, about the same as the national average. About 90% of the 420 arrested so far are not affiliated with any militia or gang. The apparent main driver was fear of the Great Replacement of rights of Whites by expanding rights for non-White Hispanics and Blacks. About half of the insurrectionists came from counties that voted for Biden, i.e., urban areas. The main risk factor was % decline in non-Hispanic White population -- counties where the White population was declining had the highest likelihood of participating in the violent protest. Fear of the Great Replacement was the main driver of violence.

Commentary

This fear makes no sense to me. Rights for White are not going away or being reduced. Rights and privileges for non-Whites are possibly coming closer to White rights and privileges. Replacement isn't possible. About 4% of adult Americans fit the insurrectionist mindset, but a much greater group are driven by fear of the Great Replacement and they sincerely believe the election was stolen. The larger group claims they are not willing to participate in violence, but include a lot of active and passive supporters of the insurrectionists, i.e., they are willing to overlook or sympathize with the crimes of the insurrectionists because they were fighting in defense of what they see as severely threatened White rights and privileges.

Is this the basis for the Great Replacement fear?

The DarkSide hack on US infrastructure

A soft, cozy place to nap

Last week, Colonial Pipelines was hacked by an organized crime group called DarkSide. The group installed ransomware in CP's computers and the company had to shut down it's entire transmission pipelines from Texas to the East Coast. CP transports 45% of East Coast the oil, diesel and gasoline used in that region of the country, e.g., this hack has a huge impact. The pipelines remain shut down today. The company refuses to say if it paid the ransom or not.

DarkSide is a Russian government-sanctioned criminal organization that can hack and disrupt operations outside of Russia and inside countries Russia deems to be enemies. Quartz writes about the DarkSide crime gang in an article entitled, Hacking collective DarkSide are state-sanctioned pirates:

DarkSide is not a unit of Russia’s intelligence services, and there’s no evidence that it is funded or directed by the Kremlin. Instead, DarkSide is a private, for-profit criminal organization that operates under the benign neglect of Russian authorities. DarkSide reserves its mischief for Russia’s geopolitical rivals—companies based in the US and western Europe—and Russian authorities don’t interfere with its work.

In many ways, DarkSide resembles the privateers that terrorized the seas during the golden age of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In that era, a captain could obtain a letter of marque from a colonial government officially authorizing him to pillage and plunder merchant ships belonging to rival nations—so long as he left his own country’s ships alone. Unlike pirates, who were “enemies of all mankind” and liable to be captured and killed wherever they went, privateers could safely use one of the major powers’ ports as their base of operations.

Hackers get a similar deal. DarkSide is one of the many for-profit ransomware groups that have proliferated and thrived in Russia. These cyber-gangs steal companies’ data and hold it hostage in exchange for ransoms ranging from $200,000 to $20 million. Many of these groups, including DarkSide, slip lines of code into their hacking software that check to see if a victim’s computer uses Russian as its default language; if so, the software automatically stops the attack. Features like this help hackers avoid the ire of their host governments, and ensure that they don’t wear out their welcome in their safe harbor.

“Russian actors tend not to target their own country, mainly because they don’t want law enforcement coming after them,” said Jon Clay, vice president of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Trend Micro. “We see that around the world: Depending on which country an actor group is coming from, they tend to stay away from targeting their own.” 

The attack seems to be a serious miscalculation on the part of the cyber criminals. One explanation for the ill-advised attack is that hacking syndicates—much like the privateers of yore—are loose cannons. DarkSide is particularly hard to control because, in addition to carrying out its own attacks, it sells its hacking software as a service to other criminal groups who want to extort companies.

In a May 10 statement, DarkSide seemed to indicate that the Colonial Pipeline attack was the result of an affiliate gone rogue. “Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society,” the group wrote. “From today we intoduce [sic] moderation and check each company that our partners want to [attack] to avoid social consequences in the future.”

A few points merit mention. First, Russia remains a deadly enemy that is now engaged in a permanent full-blow war against the US. Russian cyberattacks will not stop. Based on the scope of the Solar Winds hack, Russian cyberattacks can cost the US economy trillions. 

Second, it is not close to credible for any Russian-sanctioned cyberwarfare group to claim their goal is merely to make money, not to cause problems for society. The Russian government will not hesitate to order its criminal minions to launch attacks that could cause trillions in damage and millions of American deaths if it believed that the time and circumstances were right. Knocking out power grids in and infrastructure the US for weeks could cause mass deaths, e.g., by crippling water and sewage treatment plants, food transportation, etc.

Third, US companies continue to be sloppy about computer security. Computer security costs money and that cuts into profits. Due to Republican hate of government as tyranny, companies are not forced to take security seriously. They aren't even required to repost hacks to anyone.[1] Due to mostly Republican-broken American government, the US economy and government is a big, fat juicy target just sitting there for criminals and hostile nations to attack and feed on at their convenience. 

Average Americans pay the price for both the mostly Republican-broken government and unregulated markets with their immoral profit above all mentality. As usual, money talks and everything else walks. No one is looking out for taxpayers or the public interest. In its capitalist greed, America is defenseless and there is no place to look for help. 

Questions: Is it unfair or inaccurate to blame Russia for the CP hack? Solar Winds? Is the seriousness of the threat discussed here as serious as described, or is it at least hyperbole or worse, e.g., flat out lies? Is it fair to mostly blame Republicans for an ineffective government presence in this? Is corporate greed part of the problem, or is that assertion too tenuous to be credible or a major factor?

Footnote: 

1. One source commented in 2018:

Just a friendly reminder that the United States does not, at the time of this writing, have any kind of federal data breach notification laws on the books.

Such a law that would provide specific rules about what a company — let’s say, Equifax, Intel, Uber or Yahoo, just as a couple high-profile examples — has to do after a major hack, like how soon it needs to tell customers the hack occurred and how executives should behave when they find out there’s been a breach.

Truth vs. Indoctrination

Granted, there is a bit of an overlap (since both truth and indoctrination involve the imparting of information), but fundamentally, these are really two different concepts.  The way I see it, the goal of truth is to disseminate facts upon another, while indoctrination’s goal is to disseminate opinions upon another.

Societally speaking, disseminating truth takes on a positive connotation, while disseminating indoctrination takes on a negative one.  Truth can categorically prove its wares, whereas indoctrination cannot.  Indoctrination depends more on receptive, often gullible subjects.

Two great examples of this “truth versus indoctrination” slippery slope can be found in the subjects of religion and politics.  Regarding these subjects, at what point does truth slip (bend) into a form of indoctrination and indoctrination get promoted into a form of truth?  Yes, good question.

Let’s start with religion.  What truths can be proven about religion?  Is it not always a touchy-feely, indoctrination kind of thing, totally dependent on “our feelings?”  Logically speaking, there really is not a lot of logic to it... if any. 

For example, let’s take a major focal point of Christianity: Can it ever be proven, be an objective truth, that Jesus lived, died on a cross, then came back to life three days later?  No, it cannot.  Logically speaking, that’s impossible.  Yet, as children, that’s what we are indoctrinated with. For most of western society, that belief grows with us and psychologically within us, as we grow into adults, and pass it along to our own progeny.  Sure, Jesus might have actually lived.  And sure, he might have been crucified.  So far, so good (or good enough).  But then the story takes a strange turn, heads down the slippery slope, and believing his coming back to life after three days slips us into bizarr-o (indoctrination) territory.  A case where possible truth gets turned into indoctrination.  And it’s not just Christianity; I’m sure all the other orthodox religions do the same thing with their children.  Such are the indoctrination stories with no objective truth, passed on from generation to generation to the especially receptive/gullible.

Let’s take on politics now.  What better example can there be than the current-day “big lie” being perpetuated by the majority of republicans; the big lie being that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election?  Votes have been counted and recounted, in some cases even more than twice.  Yet the lie persists, even in the face of contradictory factual evidence.  Like with religions, have Trump’s supporters now slid down that slippery slope, been indoctrinated to believe the big lie?  Personally, I think so.  And it gets worse, more ingrained, the more they hear about it (i.e., the power of suggestion/repetitiveness at work).

___________

Lots of philosophical questions there, along with my “opinions” 😉, and I know things can get really complicated.  Few things are ever cut-and-dried (probably only objective truth ;).  But here are the basic questions I’d like to discuss…

Q1: Whether politics or religion or any other subject matter, is indoctrination just subjective wishful thinking in the face of no facts?  What part of my analysis did I get wrong?

Q2: What do you see as the main difference between truth versus indoctrination?  IOW, at their most fundamental, what are they?  Define them in basic terms.

Q3: Do you think anyone has ever tried to indoctrinate you? If yes, who/when?  Did you ever manage to reject it?  Or do you still embrace it?  Does/Did it give you a sense of identity; like you belonged to a like-thinking collective?  Tell us about any indoctrination experience(s) you’ve had.

Thanks for posting and recommending.