Intimidation vs Persuasion

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Over recent years, I’ve notice that much political communication…ranging from formal statements by politicians down to off-the-cuff social media posts by individuals..has come to consist mostly of  insulting one’s opponents. While there has always been a considerable amount of this, political insult has now become so prevalent as to drive out more rational forms of discourse. And while both/all sides do engage in the kind of behavior I’m discussing, it is much more predominant and extreme on the Left.

From a marketing point of view, this may seem a little odd: why would one want to insult one’s prospective customersthe people one is trying to persuade? I think the answer may be provided by Willi Munzenberg, who was Stalin’s master propagandist. Here’s what Munzenberg told Arthur Koestler, back when Koestler was still a Communist:

Don’t argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them. Make them shudder with horror. That, Arturo, is propaganda!

And that seems to be the objective, recognized or not, of much of today’s ‘progressive’ speech. People are being intimidated from speaking their minds not only out of fear of practical consequences…loss of customers, loss of jobs…but out of fear of being publicly demonized as a Bad Person.

See  Lead and Gold  on  Mediated Democracy and the Temptations of Leninism.

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Ephemeral Amusements

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The Daughter Unit was a little over two years old when we went to live in Greece, and almost kindergarten age when we left, and during that period we lived in a second-floor apartment in suburban Athens and hardly ever watched television. (I had a television set, but it was 110v, and Greece was a 220v country, and anyway, I was almost never at home in the evenings, the exception being when we went to our neighbors to watch Jewel in the Crown when it aired with subtitles on Greek TV.) This was at a time before wide-spread adoption of video players, before cable, way before streaming video. It was, in bald point of fact, rather like the three to five broadcast channels available when I was growing up. So, no, I didn’t miss TV much, and nor did the Daughter Unit, because we had books.

Heaps and heaps of books; my parents took the opportunity of the Daughter Unit being a military dependent and entitled to have her personal items shipped to Greece gratis to include almost all of the kid-lit that Mom had accumulated for my brothers and sister and I. (Mom and Dad were in the process of moving into a travel trailer parked on the building site of their eventual retirement home, and so took every opportunity to down-size what they didn’t need or want. Like … that part of the personal library.) Off that shipment went to Athens, augmented with new books that I bought through an English mail-order service which offered lovely catalogs aimed mostly at expatriates whiling away the decades in locations devoid of English-language bookstores, and a children’s bookstore in what passed for a mall in Voula or Vouliagmeni, which featured Greek, English and I think German and French-language books. It was a small place, barely one twenty-foot square room in size, with each wall dedicated to a language. I am pretty certain that I bought the Daughter Unit’s favorite comic book series there; the Asterix and Obelix books.

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What Future for Grocery Shopping?

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The Covid-19 situation has caused a lot of people to try online shopping for things they had previously bought in physical stores.  Groceries, in particular, were something that most people preferred to buy in person, usually buying online only for specialty products that were hard or inconvenient to find locally.  But with the lockdowns, a lot of people have started using the various online shopping platforms.  These seem to fall into three primary categories:

–Systems such as Giant Peapod (recently rebranded as just Giant Food), which are operated by a grocery chain or an individual store.  Some systems will deliver directly from a warehouse, bypassing their brick-and-mortar store locations.  And sometimes an option is offered to preorder electronically, with in-store or curbside pickup at the store.

–Systems such as Instacart, which are more or less vendor-agnostic: these systems will allow you to place orders for any of several stores in your area, after which one of their shoppers will collect your order from the vendor’s regular store.

–Systems (Boxed is an example) which are have no store presence; they are only for online ordering and home delivery, but do the delivery from their own facilities…many kinds of products, obviously, are susceptible to this model only if shipped express with dry ice or similar packaging (expensive) or if the vendor has local facilities in the same area as the customer.

The relative success of these approaches will have great implications not only for the futures of the various merchants and system providers, but also for the commercial real-estate market.  Systems that use the existing stores for fulfillment, such as Instacart, are beneficial to the survival and thriving of strip malls and other commercial space where grocery stores are typically located; systems focused on warehouse delivery are beneficial to the industrial property market but not so for retail properties.

Your thoughts and experiences?

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Robin DiAngelo

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Dear Robin:

I watched your video. No, not that free one on YouTube, but the one you presented to me and my co-workers and for which you probably charged ten thousand dollars. Nice work if you can get it, as Ira Gershwin once quipped. (Do Jewish folks count as white, too?)

No, I haven’t read your book on white fragility. The video was enough for me, riddled as it was with execrable reasoning directed against ridiculous strawmen such as: individualism is the doctrine that human beings are utterly uninfluenced by the culture in which they live. Also, reading all those little black letters surrounded by an expanse of white paper is kind of a metaphor for structural racism, isn’t it? So reading must be bad.

Although I’m not buying what you’re selling, I’ll grant that you’re full of passionate intensity for your cause. Sadly, this reminds me of that great poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, in which he observed that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” (Do Irish folks count as white, too?)

The exact nature of your cause is somewhat unclear, couched as it is in the fog of critical discourse analysis and other Marxist claptrap; yet apparently it has something to do with establishing the cultural hegemony of your black-and-white ideology in which skin color is the only thing that really matters in life: in other words, a cleverly manipulative repackaging of the ideas of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. (Do Italian folks count as white, too?)

As you no doubt know but wish to suppress, 100 years ago there was no such thing as whiteness. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon majority in America drew cultural, not color, distinctions between themselves and the Irish, Italians, Slavs, and everyone else – at best barely tolerating some of these peoples. Your precious notion of whiteness is a more recent ideological construct, into the origins of which you and your ilk likely don’t want us to inquire.

So Robin, what’s really the point? All I got out of your talk is that anyone who doesn’t have really dark skin (yes, I noticed your jibe about light-skinned blacks and their distasteful “colorism”) should feel endlessly guilty in an original sin kind of way and therefore should endlessly atone for their sins through self-renunciation, confessions of complicity in systemic racism, and preferably re-education at the hands of high-paid diversity consultants like you.

Finally, your talk didn’t mention any actual Black people – like, say, Martin Luther King, Jr. The reason isn’t hard to find: MLK eloquently said that “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Yet to you that is unacceptable, because you believe a money-grubbing, power-hungry, paleface re-education professor has the right to dictate to Black folks what they can think and how they can live (and if they don’t submit to your dictates, I guess they too must count as white, at least on the inside). Last I heard, that kind of dehumanizing condescension was called racism.

Observations on Federal Law Enforcement Actions in Portland

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Federal Lawmen arresting Portland protesters shown in recent social media video had the word “Police” on the uniforms as well as black and green “Homeland Security” shoulder patches. That the Leftist voice over says they were “not identified” is not supported by the visuals under the voice overs.

It is clear these Federal lawmen were looking for someone specific and that they were doing so in an unmarked vehicle.

Federal law men do this regularly. This tactic is seen most in drug cases and when they are hunting cop killers. A later Federal statement about this action after the person being detained was released made clear the Feds were looking for an individual who attacked federal officers at the court house, and the person picked up may have been a “known associate.”

As for the rest of the Leftist voice overs, Federal law men are required to give Miranda rights in an arrest.

They are _not_ required to do so immediately. Removing a detained individual from the scene and reading Miranda rights later has been accepted by the Federal courts for decades.

Given the tendency of Antifa/BLM groups to mob lawmen removing their members. The Feds here were simply applying the least violent tactics.

PERSONAL SPECULATION BASED ON OBSERVATIONS

If the Feds are following their organized crime template. The organizations and the people wiring money to post these individual’s bail money are now under Federal electronic surveillance. This has been how the Feds deal with large organizations of people bailing out the people the Feds arrest since the “Drug King Pin,” “asset forfeiture” and RICO additions to the racketeering laws were passed in the 1980’s.

Given the “Big Data” tools available to the Feds, every Antifa/BLM person detained in Portland is having all relevant bio-metric identification taken from them and the information is being fed into various law enforcement data bases, to include those of the Secret Service. The latter has a higher level of access to the NSA data banks than the FBI to evaluate people as threats to the President or other politicians they protect.

In so many words, if any of the Antifa/BLM people being picked up in Portland were anywhere near a Secret Service presidential detail protected Trump campaign ot Administration event, Trump family event or Presidential /V.P. visit to any city outside Portland since the summer of 2015. Any metadata in cell phones, bank, hotel, credit card, airline, or bus line records somewhere that matches these people has been pulled. If this data compared with those Secret Service “security bubble” hits has a match.   It will cause an automated threat profile to be generated. A threat profile that will show all the electronic records of their travels and electronic money transfers for the period(s) of interest.

The latter — electronic money transfers — will be used to map the money flows at lower levels of Antifa/BLM to reach up to the higher levels of money flowing from the big corporations and Soros backed front groups.

Please note, Federal standard operating procedure with organized crime means some number of those Antifa/BLM being arrested & released in Portland are now Federal informants.

One more thing,   the Feds — and the Secret Service especially — have made very extensive use of both facial recognition and visual pattern recognition technology.  I guarantee that these unmarked Federal law enforcement vans cruising in Portland Oregon have cameras with both technologies.

That Federal law men are getting out and walking a couple of blocks to their target from such vans and slow walking them back is a “poker tell” [AKA   tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP)] of facial recognition technology’s use.   As everyone who turns to see the uniformed law men coming and watching them going with the detainee gives the watching camera’s enough eye-nose area data to match them up with their driver’s licence photos.

Please see:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07…

“A 2016 study by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology found that one in four US state or local police departments had access to facial recognition technology, and that nearly half of all American adults are in a police facial recognition database, in part because of agreements that provide access to repositories of drivers’ license photos.”

One of the many things that came back from Iraq   US Army surplus to American law enforcement was a visual surveillance technology called “Constant Hawk.”   The US Military pioneered artificial intelligence (A.I.) visual pattern recognition technology to beat the Iraqi road side bomb campaign, starting in 2006, with the “Constant Hawk”   camera system in MC-12 twin engine turbo props.   (A MC-12 is the Cessna King Air in olive drab and white paint job).

Strategy page -dot- com reports in 2020 that a “Constant Hawk-lite” technology has been shrunk to the point an 11 kg (22-lb) drone can carry it.   See:

Information Warfare: Son Of Hawk Sees More
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20200707.aspx

“Constant Hawk uses a special video camera system to observe a locality and find useful patterns of behavior. Some of the Constant Hawk systems are mounted on light (MC-12s, mainly) aircraft, others are mounted on ground structures. Special software compares photos from different times. When changes are noted, they are checked more closely, which has resulted in the early detection of thousands of roadside bombs and terrorist ambushes. This largely eliminated roadside bomb attacks on supply convoys in Iraq.”

Short Form:

There are Federal law enforcement light planes and unmarked Federal law enforcement vans cruising above and around Portland “mapping the Antifa  human terrain” the way that Google Earth does for roads and houses in your neighborhood.

My gut says we are going to see rounds of mass arrests based on the data these systems are gathering.

A fact to remember related to this effort is that the criminal conviction rates in Federal courts run to 98%.

-End-