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Whats real? Its getting harder to tell
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of USA Today (Milwaukee, Wisconsin affiliate)
Posted: December 12th, 2016
http://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/crossroads/2016/12/03/...
A web of truthiness, post-truths and half-truths is replacing a once-shared goal of knowing the actual truth. Ever since Eddie Bernays changed his occupation from advertising man to public relations expert a century ago, the distortion and manipulation of the truth through covert campaigns has been a mainstay of public life. We make light of it by calling it spin instead of covert information warfare, but covert warfare it is, and the prize is the capture of friends and enemies alike in webs of disinformation. Words - stories, narratives - have been weaponized and collateral damage is extensive. The Russians excelled in the use of stolen material ... to affect the recent campaign. They have done the same with neighbor countries to undermine clarity about their intentions and actions. There is a NATO group, for example, that does nothing but peruse Russian propaganda to understand it, but it was discovered that ... they unconsciously absorbed false material as if it was true, because thats what the mind does, it treats data as data, even when it knows the data is a fiction. So the NATO group has to be debriefed in order to recalibrate their maps of the real to ... well, to the real. But who debriefs the debriefers? Who debriefs us? The inability to discriminate between plausible and crazy plus the impossibility of knowing whats real in this perpetual fog of information warfare causes anxiety and fear, which people counter with narratives to comfort the afflicted soul. Then its called truth.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the manipulation of public perception.
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