A War of Perceptions
We are at war, but it isn’t a kinetic war where things explode. It’s a perceptual war that uses our advanced social medium platforms and weaponized psycho-social messaging against us.
It is a war that undermines our trust and faith in self-government and our civil institutions. It is a war that divides, polarized, confuses and eventually turns us against our neighbors. It eats away at the values, morals and principles that unit people. It fills us with mistrust, greed, envy and hate.
When we are disunited and weak, when we are unable to govern ourselves and events spiral out of control, we will welcome the social order that the wealthy and powerful tyrants of our day want to impose.
I know this sounds bleak and a little crazy, even to me, but we have entered into an age were the powerful elites who own or control the means of mass communications can modify and manipulate mass perceptions if we let them.
We must love humanity, trust in our shared values, heal our divisions, restore civility, take back control of our public discourse and rebalance public actions to better serve the greater good for all.
Oct. 7, 2016 – The Day We Learned and Forget Russia Was Attacking Us
by Brian T. Lynch, MSW
James Clapper of the CIA and U.S. intelligence agencies announce that Russia is taking active measures to interfere with our Presidential elections.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/64-hours-october-one-weekend-blew-rules-american-politics-2-162827162.html
It was Friday, October 7, 2016. There was a rapid series of news dump that day that changed to course of our Presidential Election and our country.
If corporate (for profit) news outlets based reporting on the gravity of events rather than a stories public appeal, the top news story on this one day during the campaign would have been that US intelligence agencies announced that Russia was actively messing with our election. Media manipulations by powerful people behind the scenes took place in the hours that followed the announcement, burying the biggest news story in a decade. Who was behind the release of that shocking Access Hollywood tape that stole our attention?
The video doesn’t say. It could have been Hillary friendly sources, neutral sources or even Russian cyber-ops. It doesn’t matter. The corporate media released the tapes and then fed the blaze of interest that followed.
Then, an hour later, the first of the Podesta emails were released These emails that had been stolen by Russian based hackers and the content was used to strategically selected emails for release that maximize damage to the Hillary campaign. The Podesta email release blunted the impact of the Access Hollywood tapes. Both stories dominated the news for days. The two stories combined completely eclipsed the Russia story. And so the biggest story in a decade, That our democracy was currently under attack by Russia, got buried and erased from our collective conscious until after the election.
The Hypocrisy Risk for Social Conservatives
by Brian T. Lynch, MSW
Whenever hypocrisy strikes a Republican politician, the immediate argument on the right is that Democratic politicians are not morally superior to Republicans. This is may be true, but it is also misleading. The most recent GOP hypocrisy scandal is an example.
Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania became the latest GOP social conservative to manifest hypocrisy. Murphy is married, has an adult child, is a staunch right-to-life proponent and a member of the Congressional House Pro-Life Caucus. This January he voted for the latest Pro-Life bill that passed in Congress. He proudly highlighted his support for the bill in a press release that reads in part:
“Passage of H.R. 7 in the wake of the President’s executive action yesterday gives me great hope that moving forward, we will once again be a nation committed to honoring life from the moment of conception onward and ensuring American taxpayer dollars are never spent to end a life before it even begins.” [Murphy, January 24, 2017]
The scandal is that he had just suggested to a woman who became pregnant as a result of their extra-marital affair that she should have an abortion. The woman, Shannon Edwards, was offended by the hypocrisy of Murphy’s public and private attitudes on abortion and told him so in a text message:
“And you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options.” [Edwards, January 2017]
Ms. Edward’s texts went public and Tim Murphy has since announced he will not run for re-election next year. The very polarized social media debates are well underway.
From this brief account the hypocrisy is clear and the consequences are sad for those involved, especially his wife and child. Frustration on the right is also understandable as this keeps happening on the GOP side. It may seem like the media are selectively reporting on GOP moral gaffs, hence comes the counter-argument that Democratic politicians are just as likely to engage in immoral behaviors, but circumstances make this misleading.
On the Republican side, family values focuses on moral issues, such as this case in point. On the Democratic side family values focuses more on policy issues, such as universal health care, fair wages, school lunch programs, etc. It is less likely politicians will fall victim to hypocrisy if the family values they promote are policy related rather than morality based.
As long as Republicans exploit social conservative issues and insist on legislating morality, the GOP will continue to provide glaring examples that we all fall short of living perfect lives. Conceding that Democrats are just as likely to engage in immorality may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are still less likely to sound like hypocrites when they do.
Data Driven Viewpoints 