Information War Continued

 This is a direct follow up to my previous post, though it may not seem like it. The year 2020 has been disturbing and shocking on many levels, and like many of my fellow Americans I have so many questions. Like - how did it come to this? What happened? How did we get here?

Some of that debate is just as useless as assigning blame for the Massacre at Nightless City in The Untamed. Still, there is something that does get under my skin... not in the sense that I think it's responsible for everything. It's more, I don't know... the hypocrisy.

I talked before about how there were bad faith actors manipulating the situation, and credible people being manipulated. But the most irritating part was how self-righteous the cultivators became. How absolutely certain they were, that they were standing for all that is good and right. That they were doing some great service by standing up to and denouncing evil. And yet we all know that they basically looked the other way while real harm was being done. That they believed lies and rumors... and that ultimately they weren't standing on the side of truth and justice at all. 

It's the hypocrisy. And more than that. It's that if they really cared about righteousness, if they really cared about standing up for justice... they'd have actually investigated the situation. 

On the one hand, I get it. Nobody has the energy (or resources, or access) to investigate everything. At some point we have to trust other people to tell us the truth. Like cultivators trusting that the Jin guards were telling the truth about how Wen Ning died. 

On the other hand - how can you claim to stand on the side of right, when you are giving your trust to bad faith actors? And in the process allow injustice and wrong to be ignored? 

How can you not be aware of the cognitive dissonance it takes to say "this is wrong and a sign of how horribly evil the enemy is when they do it, but understandable, forgivable, and acceptable when it's us?" 

To be honest, that's what makes me so mad at so-called Christian Conservatives today. It's not so much the bad faith actors, since just about every political interest has those. It's that tendency to wrap themselves up in self-righteousness and claim it's somehow justified or good or acceptable. As if you could possibly do the whole 'build the kingdom of heaven' on such a faulty foundation.

There was a study done once, on cheating, and it talked about how some religious people wound up justifying it. The thought process was generally along the lines of bargaining with God, where they basically said "I'll cheat, so I can get into a position where I'll be able to help others." 

And... it doesn't work like that? That's not how faith and religion and righteousness is supposed to go. It's not somehow okay or acceptable to lie so long as you do good things to make up for it. (Which is not to say you should be burdened with guilt for the rest of your life or anything. There's a whole process for confession and reconciliation. It's just that the ends don't justify the means, and you can't somehow excuse bad behavior with later good behavior. In fact that's almost worse, because what else are you willing to justify doing in the belief that you'll somehow make up for it later?)

I was raised in a very religious environment, so I get the appeal of 'building the kingdom of heaven' and all that. And I'm also absolutely horrified at what some people are doing in the name of such a thing. Because the minute you decide the ends justify the means, the minute you think lying about something is in a good cause... that you'll somehow make up for it when you're in charge and going about your business...

It betrays a complete lack of understanding of just what it takes to build such a thing. It shows that your foundations are faulty, that the kingdom you're building is built on shifting sand. You're not building a kingdom of heaven on earth, you're not doing God's will, and you are not justified in sinning in order to do so.

(I hate that this sounds so morally black and white, I am reaching for the religious language of my roots to help explain how horrifying I find this.)

It really bothers me that they wrap themselves up in self-righteousness, wave the Bible around, and claim they are dong God's will even as they go against everything that the Bible says.

Trump encapsulates the problem, because they are willing to overlook and accept things they know are wrong. And they say it's because 'God works in mysterious ways', or it's some sort of sign about how He works through our fallible and flawed world, or something...

Instead of the very simple explanation that They. Are. Wrong. 

That they are justifying wrongdoing in order to gain power, that they have decided they know what God wants better than He does, and that God wants them to support someone who embodies almost everything a good Christian isn't. Someone who lies on a regular basis, who mocks disabled people, who doesn't care about the sick or the poor...

You can't build a kingdom of heaven on such poor foundations, and any attempt at doing so will fail miserably.

They might, might, end up with a theocracy... and then will probably have the types of problems that come when a theocracy is imposed with such a terrible foundation. That is, the hypocrisy and abuse of power that is practically inevitable when people think the ends justifies the means has a tendency to make people more secular and turn them away from God.

Information Warfare, Blame, and the Netflix show The Untamed

In typical fashion I'm going to talk about an entirely fictional show and then apply the topics of that discussion to the real world. Also with no regard to spoilers for said show.

And yet again I am using The Untamed to kickstart everything.

I mentioned that public perception plays a huge role in the show... and actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. The main character, Wei Wuxian, starts using powers that are disturbing to pretty much everyone else. Corpses, resentful energy, etc. It makes it very easy for people to believe nasty rumors about what he's using those powers for, with little to no relation to reality. His first life cumulates in a tragedy through a combination of rumor-mongering, his own arrogance, bad luck... and yes, some deliberate manipulation by some pretty shady characters. The degree to which each of these elements plays a role is something we could debate for hours, but that's not what this post is about. Or rather, that's only a small part of what this post is about.

See, there's a character (Jin Guangshan, though it's hard to say how much was done by him and how much was done by the bastard son he reluctantly recognized and used to do his dirty work - Jin Guangyao) who saw Wei Wuxian's abilities (able to fight thousands! On his own! And he created a powerful spritual tool - the Stygian Tiger Amulet - that helped him do so) and considered him a threat. This character also coveted the Stygian Tiger Amulet Wei Wuxian created. The story isn't quite clear on just how much he was responsible for it, but there definitely seems to have been a smear campaign in place.

They put everything Wei Wuxian did in the worst light, exaggerated his arrogance, spun outright lies implying that Wei Wuxian didn't respect his adopted brother (and now sect leader), etc. There's a really interesting scene where we see the cultivators discussing what to do about Wei Wuxian, and you see a few people try to stand up for him and defend him - and get shouted down or dismissed. 

When a pompous and arrogant Jin noble got cursed, he assumed Wei Wuxian had done it - with no proof - and gathered a couple hundred cultivators to ambush him. That ambush turned tragic when someone important died during the fight, and Wei Wuxian was blamed. Eventually it led to all the cultivators gathering together and talking about attacking Wei Wuxian, who at that point (grief-ridden, angry, and maybe a bit unhinged) invited himself to the meeting. Wei Wuxian didn't start the fight - the other side shot him first, and then attacked - but he definitely threw down. It's fiction, so it's hard to feel as upset about this as we would for real life characters, but thousands died in that fight. Really, all of our characters survived a rather nasty war... so even though the story doesn't show it they've all got blood on their hands.

Which brings me to the point, I suppose. Thousands die in what some people translate to the 'Massacre at Nightless City'. 

Is Wei Wuxian the one responsible? He was their main opponent. But... he didn't start the fight. Was it the responsibility of Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao, for manipulating events and painting Wei Wuxian a villain? All in their lust for power? Was it the cultivators themselves, who believed the lies and spread the gossip? Who wholeheartedly believed they were right, that they were the ones on the side of justice? 

You could go round and round assigning blame, or trying to divide it up and say that 45% was one and 20% another... but part of the beauty of this story is that it shows how pointless most of that is. There's plenty of blame to go around, and a lot of crappy things happened - now what?

The manipulators did wrong, but can you put all the blame on them? There will always be immoral people willing to justify whatever in the pursuit of power, surely they wouldn't have succeeded if others had asked the right questions, or insisted on proof. (This happened rather consistently ever since the end of the war, but stands out most significantly in the incident that first set Wei Wuxian at odds with the rest of society. They had won the war against the Wen, and the survivors were hunted down and put in work camps. For various reasons had a debt to a couple of Wen, and wound up visiting one of those camps in order to try and pay off that debt. What he found was that his own side was treating the prisoners badly... just as bad as the Wen they'd just fought a bloody war against. So even though he hated the Wen - who had destroyed his home, hurt his brother, thrown him into a rather horrible place to die, etc - he also had this debt to two of them, and could see that they weren't all bad. The people in the camps were NOT a threat. Old, civilians, even a toddler. He ends up killing some of the guards, breaking them free and taking them to live somewhere under his protection. The discussion conference about him shows that the cultivators all believe it was an unprovoked attack, the surviving guards claimed that the death of one detainee in particular was because he fell of a cliff - rather than being murdered as we'd learned earlier - and so of course to them Wei Wuxian seems out of control and a threat to all. We're not even sure whether that's a deliberate lie on Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao's part, or the guards coming up with a lie to protect themselves. Regardless, the Jin family didn't have any interest in finding out the truth and the rest of the cultivation world accepted their story without question.)

Should we be angry, then, at the general public? Is it their fault for believing and spreading gossip? For believing the manipulators when they outright lied? But if they were at fault - wasn't the death of thousands a bit extreme for punishment? 

That brings me to the point of all this - because there are real world parallels here. There are people who deliberately spread lies and try to manipulate the situation to their own favor. And there are people who believe those lies and take action based on those lies. 

The pandemic brings this home rather viscerally, to me at least. I had posted some months back that we could predict and prevent much of the death. We're now almost at 200,000 dead Americans and the vast majority of it did not have to happen.

Hundreds of thousands dead. In the real world, not some fictional fantasy. It's almost too terrible to comprehend. 

There's a definite urge to blame - to blame the people who minimized the threat and did everything they could to prevent people from taking sensible precautions. To blame the ones who turned this political, so that some people proudly act as though refusing to wear a mask is some great show of freedom and patriotism. To wonder how many of them believe their own BS, and are honestly just fools... and how many are knowingly and deliberately saying things they are fully aware are false.

To blame people - for being gullible and credulous and believing the BS.

There's plenty of blame to go around. You can even try tracing things back to earlier stages and blame China, though that's a bit like saying Wei Wuxian was responsible for the death of thousands because he rescued a few civilians from a work camp. (i.e. in the broader sense it can be true, but it misses a lot of the steps along the way where different choices would have effected the outcome.)

I have more to write on this, but it's long enough that I'll probably do a separate post. 

Rasputin - Some Musings

I've been reading a history book on Rasputin, which has been interesting for a variety of reasons.

I'd heard about Rasputin before - who hasn't? - but never really looked into the details. I just knew a story of some dark and sinister figure that was eventually murdered in a rather spectacular way. That is, if I recall correctly, that he was stabbed (and/or shot?) and an attempt was made at drowning him, and he only finally died of hypothermia on his way back from that. Or something like that.

So it's interesting to see what a historian can make of the details, their assessment of what is likely fact or fiction, and what it all means.

It also provides some interesting insights into Russian culture/history, though I have no idea how much of it would still be relevant to today. I vaguely recall learning that Russia's relationship with their eastern edges was a bit like our own relationship with our expansion into the American west, and it was interesting to see that Siberia was more than just some freezing cold place for political exiles.

What's weird, to me at least, is that our Western notions of right and wrong are so at odds with some of the values here. Like, I keep wanting to label someone 'good' or 'bad', even though I know it's not realistic, but it still catches me up in odd ways.

Like some of what Rasputin did for the tsar and tsarista seem - positive. Encouraging a weak ruler, building confidence, etc. But, as an American, we've never been to keen on the authority of the crown or any such nonsense, so Rasputin trying to discourage the tsar from bending on certain issues seems short-sighted and foolish to me. Especially given what I know is coming... better to bend a little, then have the revolution they eventually got, and see the murder of the entire Romanov royal family. Right?

And then there are some of Rasputin's opponents. Like - Rasputin himself seems a complex and mysterious figure, hardly a shining example of holiness. (Some of the historical accounts of his relationship with women are downright disturbing). But the people who opposed him seem hardly any better. Spreading malicious lies, making up facts...

And, well, some of his former-friends-turned-enemies were conspiracy theorists that honestly seemed to believe that Elders of Zion bs. Is conspiracy thinking that engrained? They hardly seem like principled (or holy) opposition to a demonic Rasputin, when they seem about as bad as our own neo-Nazis.

These perceptions of Jewish - and foreign - conspiracies just seemed so... widespread. (That's not even touching on the deep strands of mysticism and whatnot that Rasputin tapped into. Iirc, something similar was going on in the West at the time, with mediums and seances and whatnot being quite popular.) Why did so many people buy into them? They seem so ridiculous to me, on the face of it, but too many of the figures in this account who buy into them seem to have real influence.

And while I find myself sympathizing, a bit, with the royal family's desire for privacy and unwillingness to listen to the wild rumors and whatnot when it came to Rasputin, it also seems somewhat foolish for anyone in a leadership position to fail to address public perceptions, even if they do seem erroneous. How much of the way this plays out is because of poor public relations on their part?

To add another layer of interest - as accusations and rumors fly, I find myself thinking that Russia back then was dealing with what we're dealing with now...

Information warfare, where it's almost impossible to sort fact from fiction, and people spread misinformation for their own personal gain.

Further Musings

I'm veering rather heavily into speculation now.  Based, again, on some personal rules of thumb w/regards to human behavior.  That, and some things I picked up while studying counterinsurgency tactics and whatnot.

We have a tendency to lose sight of our goals and focus too much on the opposition.  Going back to Iraq, for example, there's a world of difference between "kill all the terrorists" and "protect the local population so they can support us in defeating the terrorists".

When you focus on killing the terrorists, you can get the pernicious "whack-a-mole" problem we faced back around 2004/2005.   You can kill them off in one area, only to have them creep back in as soon as you leave.  Or, as the French learned in Algeria, you can create insurgents faster than you defeat/capture/kill them.

With regards to guerrilla warfare, I like to consider what life is like for the average non-political farmer.  They probably don't care too much about who is in charge, as long as they can grow their crops, sell the crops, and feed their family.  Preferably in peace.  Guerrillas and the government want that farmer to take sides.  The guerrilla would love to have food, the ability maneuver through those farm fields, and the surety of safety that comes from knowing the farmer won't give them up.  The government would also like the support of that farmer, since the farmer can report any guerrilla movement they see.

The guerrilla is trying to tap into some sort of grievance against the government.  If that grievance is widespread and shared, they may see significant support from that (not-so-apolitical) farmer.  If not, then the government probably is getting plenty of tips and is right on top of the guerrilla.

If the support for the guerrilla is widespread enough, they can probably grow into a revolutionary movement and overthrow the government.  If the support is not there, the government can keep them in check.

When the non-political population is more divided, things get tricky.  They may despise a corrupt or incompetent government, yet not support the violence and disruption of the guerrillas.  Or there may be some other dynamic.

Anyways, it seems to me that guerillas, at some point, may have to make a choice on how to sustain their support.  In our own revolution (which did use some guerrilla tactics) the revolutionaries risked losing more and more of their voluntary militia-men as support waned.  The Battle of Trenton gave an important morale boost, since that victory helped sustain support.  Anyways, if that victory hadn't occurred, the revolutionaries would have faced a tough choice to let their volunteer militia of mostly farmers to go back home and farm, or to try and keep them there against their will.  I don't think anyone was going to try and keep them, but I bring that up because in a different choice has been made elsewhere.  Child soldiers, for example, are taken against their will and forced to fight for one side or another.

Going back to that apolitical farmer, if the guerrillas don't have enough support to get food and other essentials, they sometimes will harrass the local farmers and take what they need. (Alternatively, they can give up, starve, or find resources somewhere else.  Like through criminal activity or somesuch).  They'll often justify it as saying "we're fighting on your behalf" and "you'll be better off if we win", but that apolitical farmer generally can't trust that, and sees the guerrillas more as violent thieves taking what they want.

That's when counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare starts getting ugly.  The population is beset on both sides, by brutal government loyalists and just-as-brutal guerrillas.

If one side could win hearts and minds, to use what has pretty much become a cliche, it could create a turning point.  Unfortunately, both sides tend to focus more and more on killing each other then on creating the kind of system that would draw support from that apolitical farmer.  To go back to our whack-a-mole example, US troops would come in and kill the insurgents...and move on.  Then the insurgents would come back and kill anyone who cooperated with us, and terrorize the population so much that when US troops returned nobody would support them.  It wasn't that the entire population supported the insurgents - the insurgents killed and terrorized many of their own people - but when we were more focused on killing the insurgents then on protecting the people we were never able to get the kind of intel we needed.

Anyways, same dynamics play out elsewhere.  Albeit less violently.  With regards to information warfare and psychological warfare, I don't want to underestimate such things, but I also don't want to exaggerate them too much.  I think it's a bit like marketing campaigns - I know that not all ads work, and that many of the ads that do work only work because I'm already looking to buy something like it.  Or was unaware that a certain product existed in the first place.  Take Barnes & Noble coupons - they work, partly because I know I will buy books anyway and prefer to buy them when I can get them at the cheapest rate...but I'm probably going to buy books anyway.  The coupons do get me to buy more than I otherwise would have, but it's not really against my will...it just changes my budget calculations on how much I can get.

Hmmm.  Not sure I put that right.  Okay...on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter I generally scroll past any of the in-app ads without wasting my time on them.  Like Tumblr has an add for Wayfair.  Maybe if I was looking to buy furniture I'd click on it, I've used Wayfair before I think, but I'm not looking right now so I don't bother.  And I personally dislike the "episodechooseyourstory" ads...wish I could block them.  Not sure if that's just a bad campaign, or that the data for targeting me is terrible.  Thing is, if the ad isn't something I'm already interested in it's not going to work very well.  If it's a good ad, I might remember that company if/when I am in the market for something.  Car ads, for example...I definitely don't plan on buying a new car any time soon, but maybe next time I do I'll remember a particular brand or model because of a commercial.

If the CIA or Russia have success, I think it's for similar reasons as those ads, and those guerrilla movements - they are tapping into some sort of widespread grievance that already exists.  If it didn't resonate, if average people didn't feel like whatever-it-was matched their experience, it wouldn't get much support.  From that perspective, the Democratic focus on Russian involvement is a bit of a boondoggle.  Yes, it's scary and the implications are concerning, but Russia couldn't have affected the election as much as the Democrats suspect if there weren't other things going on.  I'm not saying to drop the issue entirely, but I am saying that Trump's election highlights a problem that probably had an even greater impact than Russia - namely that neither party seems to represent the average American any more.

Most Americans did not like Trump or Hillary.  But the parties are so focused on fighting each other, especially with the often irrelevant echo chamber of stories in the mainstream media, that there is a massive untapped potential for support.  I don't want to say "in the middle", because it's true that most Americans lean more towards one end of the political spectrum or the other.  It's just that most don't really feel like either party represents them.  That is part of what Trump tapped into, though I'm not too pleased with the results.

So to get back to the article that started all of this - I think there's some truth to it.  I also think the effects of information warfare and psychological warfare are sometimes exaggerated.  I think a lot of influencers don't realize this, so some of the debates over truth, facts, etc. reflect a mistaken idea about what will work...but this is such a new arena that nobody really knows yet what will and won't work.

And even if, in the long run, some of this will backfire...it still is making a mess of things today.  Like my earlier post about cybercrime, and how cybercrime can grow like a cancer if it's not kept in check...the free-for-all in this new arena can have negative effects regardless of whether a specific tactic is successful or not.  That is, some people are saying "if they can just make you distrust your own news sources, and not know what to believe, it's as effective as making you believe something that isn't true."  Even if people eventually sort out the fact from the fiction, if it takes too long to sort out, if the confusion is too widespread, and if success breeds success, things may get out of hand...and the fears of information warfare and psychological operations might not be all that exaggerated.

Continued Musings

I'm not sure how to clarify my thoughts on this one without going into my own personal rules of thumb.

For example - I don't know anyone who wakes up in the morning and says "I'm going to be an evil person today".  Seems sort of self-evident when you put it like that, but the implications are deep.  That means, for example, that climate-change deniers are not saying to themselves "I'm going to pretend that climate change is not an issue so that I can make money, and screw everyone else!"

Any counter-argument that assumes they are greedy and deliberately lying will not be very effective, since it doesn't match their own experience as to why they  believe what they do, and why the people they know came to the same conclusions.  You can call them names all you want, but you're pretty much just preaching to the choir, and maybe even doing some virtue signaling or trying to overwhelm the opposition with a show of strength.  You are not persuading anyone to change sides, and you're not really engaging in debate.

Given my own experiences (with conservative and liberal relatives of various stripes), I would say they are sincere in their beliefs and are not malicious or deliberately hurtful.

If everyone is trying to do the right thing - in their own minds at least - and aren't trying to screw everyone else over, then why do we have such wildly different opinions on things?

That's where it gets complicated, of course.  Some of it has to do with our tendency to confuse what's good for us with what's good for everyone.  Some of it has to do with life experiences, and the lack of familiarity with what life is like for those are different (i.e. living in a bubble.  How can someone who is rich, and surrounded by rich people, understand what life is like for those who are poor?  And vice versa, but we generally aren't as concerned with that.)

And then there are those who, for whatever reason, have learned to justify less than ideal behavior.  There are people who deliberately lie, cheat, and steal.  I doubt they think of it that way themselves, though.  Like the con-artist's code, they find a way of making it seem like everyone else deserves what they get.

Finally, there are those who believe that the ends justify the means.  The ones who don't see themselves winning in an open and honest market of ideas (either because they believe their opponents won't let them, or because they believe people are too dumb to know what's good for them) and basically will justify doing whatever it takes to win in the face of it.  These are, in some ways, the most dangerous ones.  You see it with terrorists, who believe murder and violence is justified if it leads to their honorable goal (anarchy, Catholic rule, Islamic Caliphate, etc.)

Yet that same mentality can be used to justify less violent acts.  Like spreading misleading information.  Conducting a character assassination.  Manipulating public opinion with twitter bots, paid internet trolls, or a well-placed person in the media industry.

I don't know how often political adversaries have convinced themselves of their arguments first (and are simply spreading things they believe in, as well), versus cynically manipulating people with arguments they don't personally believe.  IMHO the former fits in with human biases of one sort or another, whereas the second is more problematic.

Taking An Idea Out to Look At

I start my summer classes tomorrow, and I'm kind of excited about the material.  I'll be taking three classes - the second computer programming class, a class on incident response, and a class on malware.  Should be fun.

That's not why I'm writing today, though.  I came across an article this morning that I really wanted to blog out my thoughts on.  Mostly because, if I don't blog, they seem to jumble together and not really amount to much other than "it's complicated".

The article is discussing the mechanics of what it says is a "full-on psychological war".

I almost shared this to Facebook and Twitter, but a couple of things stopped me.  First, most of the examples in the article were discussing Trump.  That means that anyone who is a Trump supporter will focus more on that, instead of considering the tactics listed and what it means.  (Articles like this all too often seem geared towards the people who already agree with them, unfortunately.  I'd love to see the same article, except with examples related to holocaust denial.  There are still enough Americans who remember grandfathers or fathers from WWII that they know holocaust denial is a bunch of crap.)

The second reason is that I don't think this 'war' is as one-sided as the author makes it sound.  That's mostly from some impressions I picked up during the 2016 election, though.

Despite those issues, I think this touches on a very real problem.  It...feels like a good explanation for what I'm seeing and hearing today.  I remember when I was in Iraq, noting one of the big issues there.  There was an incident (or maybe not), where Sunni insurgents killed some Shi'a and strung their bodies up on a lamppost.  One source said his friends saw it, while many other residents said the claim was nonsense, and aimed at inciting more violence.

So here's the thing.  Our media has it's biases, and if you are careful you can sometimes read past that.  But for the most part if an event happened, both sides reported that it happened...and the bias appears in their interpretations and explanations.  And, in some cases, with disputes over unclear facts.  That's part of why reporting that the police shot a black man is such a difficult topic.  Nobody disputes that the police shot the guy, they dispute whether it was justified or not.  That report from Iraq, however, had a very clear dispute regarding the facts.  Either bodies were hung from lamp posts, or they weren't.  One side is lying.  There is no middle ground, there is no way to reconcile this in order to account for  different perspectives.  Either it happened, and the local Sunni are so supportive of the insurgents that they lied about it, or it didn't happen and the Shi'a in the article was willing to lie instead.  (Or his friends lied to him.)

In some ways, I feel like things have degenerated to a similar state.

That's mostly where I've gotten so far.  I'm going to eat brunch and probably write more afterwards.