The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America(theintercept.com) |
The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America(theintercept.com) |
During the Cold War, the CIA famously funded all sorts of cultural endeavors, but much of the output (if not directly CIA-created, then at least bolstered by the Agency) is still held to have been culturally relevant: abstract expressionism (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...), the Kenyon Review (https://www.thecollegianmagazine.com/the-kenyon-review-and-t...), etc.
Lots to criticize in the Cold War, but I think you can at least make the argument that this was emblematic of an American cultural power that was self-assured of its own value and legitimacy.
In comparison, now we have...LLMs creating personal finance tips?
But I don't know that I find a lot of fault with, like, funding the Kenyon Review. That sort of seems like a fine thing to do. I'm not sure there's a discernible difference between that and just sort of generally funding arts and culture, which a) seems fine, but b) also certainly serves to aggrandize "our" culture and promote the glory of "our" way of life.
1. I think the examples I linked to are real, in the sense that they were both a) CIA funded (or boosted) and b) are broadly credible cultural output.
2. Voice of America was a real media outlet with real cultural impact.
There are also non-American examples. The BBC World Service is (or was) pretty widely listened to, which strikes me as a pretty big soft-power boost for an otherwise waning colonial power.
I do think what separates those from (apparently) this example is that they were all output that had genuine value to the target audience. That's sort of like the discussion around USAID: it was, indeed, also often CIA-adjacent and, during the Cold War, was anything but a purely altruistic endeavor (which is why it's so funny to see reactionaries describing it as some sort of bleeding-heart operation), but it nonetheless provided genuine value to recipients of its relatively meager budget.
What seems to be the dominant philosophy in Washington now is either a) America can get all the same cultural influence for cheap via AI, or b) soft power influence doesn't matter anyway because America has the Tomahawk missiles.
I think both of those views are likely to be incorrect.
Information is not self recommending. There's a lot going on in the world, attention is scarce. Moreso today than ever before, but it's been true for a long time.
It’s incredible. The guy seems to be giving brutally real opinions, the good and the bad, and telling his life’s story. Reddit readers ( admitting they’ve never been to Cuba ) try to shout him down and tell him what he should be thinking.
It’d be nice to hear more first hand stories like that.
This is like sales and marketing, idealists think you can build the perfect product and it will sell itself. It won't. It's an adversarial marketplace and you have to show the world what you did, against people who are trying to tear you down.
Putin doesn't plaster Europe with propaganda because he thinks the Russian system is good. He does it for power. And if your system is that good, propaganda is effective.
> A Soviet visits America and says: "Wow, the propaganda is so good here! Much better than back home", an American replies: "What propaganda!? We don't have propaganda here!", to which the Soviet responds: "Exactly!".
I'm fine with this.
> one for EU, one for Japan, etc?
I'm not okay with this. Wouldn't lump the two together.
It’s so bizarre to me that in the US heartland, Latinos are demonised, yet beyond US borders they care so much about the democratic welfare of their South American amigos.
But the First Amendment is a cultural touchstone for America. Even if everyone else does this nonsense, it's not of demonstrable value and it does hurt us when we get caught like this. Unilateral disarmament isn't usually an option. But it is, I think, when it comes to this.
I think we should pass a law banning undisclosed social media, psyop and other unattributed propaganda campaigns among (a) allies and (b) other democracies (as judged by a neutral source).
Yes it is. I'm supposed to pay with my email and chance to be spammed. No, I won't be doing so.
It would be a surprise, it they weren't using AI to add to the mix.
There's a reason why the public distrusts journalists more and more. Many people still think the problems are limited to domestic journalism, and haven't connected the dots yet w.r.t. that foreign policy journalism is just as bad, if not worse.
I mean there used to be a fair amount of government loyalists remaining, working for outlets like Voice of America who, probably, sincerely thought they were doing a good thing. But they butted head with the Trump administration hard.
For all loyalists there is a grifter to true believer ratio, and for the current admin it's bad. Why pay a hard-to-find true believer to make actually convincing propaganda, when you're a grifter yourself and have the opportunity to take the budget for yourself and let an LLM half-ass it?
The public just distrusts large organizations now because those large organizations haven't been effective with their stated missions.
The real threat has always been corrupt governments and corporations meddling in politics that gave away the birth of guerrillas (and even sponsored them) like here in Colombia.
The "socialism bad" has been in many cases just an excuse for so many here to hold themselves in power and make the lifes of the less fortunate completely miserable.
Power just corrupts, be it from "left" or "right".
European-style socialism would be better. Full 60s socialism would be significantly worse. It's quite likely that people ITT are using "socialism" to refer to either, and we're all talking past each other.
Oh boy, no it does not. Supporting low-intervention markets (i.e. brutal competition among corporations) alongside high taxation of gains (and strong services for individuals) is absolutely coherent and both capitalist and not right wing. (It's a decent description of my politics.)
Pretty much.
> A left wing one?
Wouldn't say that. I like wealth redistribution and taxation as a tool of both economic empowerment and political equalisation.
I do have friends whom I'd consider left wing. I agree with them on many issues, from unionising bars to raising the minimum wage. I disagree with them on others, e.g. regulating everything for the sake of it.
Eh, if you're not hiding behind a LLC I can see regulation not being necessary.
Like you want to build a factory and dump the sewage into the river? Fine, but uh you're personally going to prison forever then.
The weird thing is this crap gets deregulated while hairdressers get fined for not having the right subchapters of licenses.
Or, what system is not responsible for human atrocities?
The atrocities normally attributed to such systems like the Korean war, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Vietnam war, Iraq war, etc actually turns out to not really be atrocities when you look just a little bit closer, or at least are trading a small atrocity for a much larger one.
This basically sums it up:
> According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_social...)
(To make it more fun Marxism is also its own thing)
That we assign to the Bolsheviks the mantle of one or another 19th c epithet is a kind of secret pact between the two sides of the Cold War. It is itself doctrinal Leninism even if the State Department spreads it. Its func
Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.
Meanwhile, in Europe (I don't know Latin America well enough, although I know a few well-known right-wing leaders that didn't have stellar records) socialist governments consistently have a better record on basically everything from press freedom to economy to public health compared to economically liberal ("centrist") governments. But they're socialist so it doesn't count.
Are you complaining about taxation and regulation? Both are cornerstones of every successful state in human history.
communism wasn't behind american slavery or the Belgian occupation of the congo.
Not a fan of communism but I dont' think unfettered capitalism is much better. both systems benefit a minority of people at the expense of the majority largely because they allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
At this point, anyone spouting vitriole about communism and socialism like they are the same thing just come off as lacking basic capacity to understand nuance at best and mentally ill at worst.
Left wing policies actually work pretty well, this is why the US has spent so much resources undermining movements and states trying to implement them, and this is why the Soviet needed nuclear weapons to survive for as long as it did.
Communism has also had famine, famously both the Holodomor in the USSR and the Great Leap Forward in China.
The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
It's kind of weird to attribute those famines, or e.g. the Kazakh famine contemporary with the holodomor which was arguably worse but is less well known, to communism. Quick industrialisation would be a much better, though partial, explanation. If it was a property of communist or socialist projects, why'd you need to reach almost a century back to find examples?
We're massively overproducing food now, and still have famines. Egalitarian distributive policies are key to ending hunger.
The most enormous understatement. They had the biggest famines ever seen.
> The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
That's nonsense. There is no money that can "subsidize" anything if people are already starving because the country screwed up the agricultural system. Starvation is more powerful than monetary systems.
In my childhood there were always children starving everywhere but the causes of this were finally throttled, by and large, in the 90s and 00s, with a bit of regression in the recent past. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
This is one of the most important features of the history of the last half century but goes completely unnoticed.
Deliberate famine and starvation campaigns is still a thing capitalist countries engage in, e.g. in Yemen, Cuba, Haiti and Palestine. Due to international support of RSF the ongoing crisis in Sudan could count as well.
To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it
Today there are examples of socialist but not communist countries in Europe. But if you compare them to Venezuela or Brazil you would be crazy.
Maybe we need better terminology
The US has generous social assistance, just less of it than some European countries. It has unions more powerful than many European countries. Meanwhile the most popular Dem-aligned politician in the US has recently introduced a bill to partly nationalise AI companies.
> You can’t have it both ways
You’re responding to my first comment in this thread