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Guillermou's avatar

“Every nation has the government it deserves,” wrote the philosopher Joseph de Maistre, and some are doing it right and wrong right now. De Maistre's moral interpretation of politics admits of exceptions, but America in 2023 is not one of them. A destructive tide of rudeness and corruption is rotting the cultural and constitutional docks that, since the Civil War, have kept the US above the waters of chaos.

The US regime has become a tasteless theatrics in which political actors, hypokritaien Greek, play common characters in a disgusting farce. The zombification of the Capitol, not to mention the streets of our city, which have become permanent encampments for the dazed and disturbed, is simply a symptom of the underlying disease. Like all institutions, politics falls apart without regular infusions of constructive energy. A modern democracy is healthy only if its major parties grow organically from its voters, representing their interests out of habit and inclination even more than by conscious effort.

https://unherd.com/2023/08/america-is-now-a-zombie-state/ (08(08/2023)

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Guillermou's avatar

The French writer Sylvain Timsit published a decalogue of the strategies that are most frequently used by the media and by political elites to manipulate the masses.

1. Encourage distraction by promoting information overload, or when such information contains a strong emotional charge such as reporting tragic events

2. Create the problems and also the solutions with the intention of causing a specific reaction, so that this public demands measures and decision-making that solve the situation such as the loss of freedoms.

3. Appeal to graduality by applying changes that are important gradually, so that public and political reactions are equally gradual and easier to contain.

4. Infantilize the interlocutor by positioning the public as a group of naive people or incapable of taking responsibility for themselves

5. Make people think that this measure is painful but necessary, and that it is necessary to agree on it in the present, although its effects will be perceived years later.

6. Position the public as a group of naive people or incapable of taking responsibility for themselves, or of making critical and responsible decisions. The public actually identifies with that position and ends up accepting the measures imposed and even supporting them with conviction.

7. Appeal more to emotions than to reflection

8. Promote complacency in mediocrity to reinforce the feeling of success and satisfaction with the situation in which we find ourselves, even if it is a precarious or unfair situation.

9. Reinforce self-blame. It is being used for the unvaccinated.

10. Know people better than they know themselves. It is the basis of artificial and emotional intelligence.

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