penn and telling on themselves

an exploration of cognitive framing

if you pay attention, the projection driven drama donkeys will always tell on themselves. they cannot help but stare right at the floorboards beneath which the body is buried. they do this because they do not really believe in objective reality or objective morality, just subjective image shaping of such things and so their arguments are not about logic or rightness or facts, they are wrestling matches to set the frame in which such things will be interpreted.

the underlying view is that the best way to win an argument is to make sure that one is always the one posing the question.

the problem with this notion is that it works. in fact, it’s incredibly effective to the point where “getting to set the frame” proves cognitively dispositive for people to the point of generating alternate realities.

so how does one combat or escape such a trap?

by telling on the trick.

long time readers know that i love penn and teller and their penchant for playfully dismantling “magic” and revealing illusions. this is something we need FAR more of in politics and history and social sciences because the only real defense against “the trick” is seeing how the trick is done and “pre-bunking” and frame setting are tools shared by psyop teams, nudge units, and behavioral economics teams alike and are now in widespread use all over the internet and all over the world.

this maliciously manipulative magic is all the mode.

but once you see it, you see it.

and it loses its power over you.

so let’s look.

example one:

depending upon one’s priors, one of two things happen when one reads this:

1. aha! look, she’s a bad person! i knew it! 100 “experts” say she’s unfit! they would know, they are the experts. who are you to gainsay them? did you work in intelligence? this is national security and they know best!

2. aha! look, the same people who lied about the hunter laptop are now lying about tulsi. it’s the same trick, the same bad people, and we should support her! their disapproval is proof we’re over the target!

each side is sure that it’s correct.

the problem is that in the way that matters, both are wrong.

this is not even about her confirmation, it’s about something entirely different and once one locks into the “do we trust the experts or not?” frame, this gets lost, hidden and the pre-seeding/prebunking trick starts to work.

this is not what it looks like.

no one expects this to affect her hearings.

it's not intended to head off tulsi.

it's a way for 100 guilty people (and by extension other people like them) who were always likely to be investigated for their possible past misdeeds to try to make a case it's political retaliation when people start asking questions about what they got up to and for whom.

see it now that the cups are clear?

this is going to be the go to playbook for the next 4 years:

any investigation into past actions and activities of the people who weaponized state agencies for political or institutional purposes will be cast as trump "using justice and intelligence to attack his political enemies."

it's just the next round of psyop from the people who do psyops for a living, an attempt to frame holding people accountable for their persecution of political enemies as “persecution of political enemies.”

it's inversion and projection.

miss this frame and voila, those who victimized you are the victims here.

spot it and you gain useful information about what those who would seek to manipulate you fear.

welcome to the game.

spot the cloak, dodge the dagger

it’s going on all around you on many, many fields. this is an area of expertise and praxis common in intelligence agencies, counter intel, behavioral economics, nudges, advertising, marketing, politics, and 100 other places. it has, of late, become one big miasma of manipulation crossing fields and vectors. the guilty are all so busy projecting their own acts onto others that it has grown into a signal, the UV ink that pops under a blacklight. and this is NOT a hotel bedspread you want to look at. but you need to.

here’s another set.

it’s easy to mistake the histrionics about “trump will declare martial law” and “trump plans to set up concentration camps for political enemies” (both claims i’ve heard from people i once thought thinkers but who seem to have lost all calibration and discernment) for “just more TDS driven by mistaking CNN for news” but this is an error.

these lockstep talking points erupted everywhere at once. this is how you know they were seeded. every news station and wild eyed pundit does not suddenly invent the same persecution fantasy and pitch it from the same angle using the same words and analogies on the same day by coincidence. this is a talking point. someone released and seeded it. and they did it for a reason.

the reason is this:

trump wants to deport illegal aliens. this is hardly new news. it’s actually popular policy and the people who tried to claim “this is not happening, this is not a problem, well, akshully, it’s a good thing before finally pivoting to ‘then who will mow my lawn and pick the lettuce’” have lost massive credibility on this issue. they have lied over and over and they lost public trust and public opinion.

trump’s policy has widespread support even among latinos.

so how do you thwart it? by saying trump is a dictator who wants military rule and concentration camps. then, when he starts rounding up illegals to ship home, you scream “see! police state! military use on US soil! concentration camps! gathering those in the country illegally and enforcing its laws is literally genocide. ICE facilities are dachau!” and you frame as fascism and power grab what in reality amounts to an end to lawlessness and actual invasion and a return to basic ideas like “borders” and “citizenship.”

this whole thing is designed to make protecting american citizens and society look like an attempt to conquer it. they are seeding the debate to come and seeking to use a false frame as a way to accumulate credibility. it’s cult leader 101 and a way to frighten hispanics with tales of “people who look like you are being put in boxcars!”

they then extend it to “and they are going to deport naturalized citizens and those with green cards and legal immigration too!” so that when some mistake inevitable happens, then can howl “see! told you they were coming for you!”

this is a campfire story intended to make the cub scouts wet their pants at every rustle in the forest tonight.

it’s going to work on a fair few people. this is why it’s so important for the rest to be aware of the trick.

pssst.

of course, the next evolution of this game of cat and mouse among intel and counter intel is that if i were seeking to lie to you about what i planned to do, then of course the above is exactly what i would tell you.

i’d find a false frame to depict as false flag any opposition to the very oppressions i had in store. this is why this game gets called “the hall of mirrors.” it rapidly devolves into a madness of reflections of reflections of reflections and no one can tell up from down or trust from betrayal amidst the double, triple, and quadruple bluff.

jeez señor cat, that sounds terrible! so what is one supposed to do?

good question, glad you asked.

the answer is not to play. discount all of it. stop trusting politicians, pundits, and polemicists altogether. stop the fast, emotional thinking they push and think slowly. stop and look. stop and develop objective views about objective reality, objective morality.

what is happening here and what should be happening here?

those are the key questions.

why do you want me to be afraid?

those lacking strong personal identity and sense of self and prone to adopting external salients as internal purpose are far more prone to being pulled into and lost within these games. i suspect this is why they seem more prevalent and effective on the left as that is the group that seems to draw those externally validated by political belief.

if you want to not be an NPC, build character.

build systems of trust.

start small, and work bottoms up, never top down.

emergent reputation networks are the way forward.

trust your family. trust your friends. trust the people around you who you know and who exhibit critical faculties and integrity and character. then work up.

if you cannot tell if something is a ploy or prevarication, assume it is and place little faith in it until you have reason to.

these sorts of psyops only work on people who willingly jump into other’s frames.

maintain your own from within, not from without.

and play your own game.

constantly hunting the trick is exhausting.

just stop listening and focus on what matters instead.

where i think we get into such trouble is this “trust placed in things and people far away and the opinions of strangers, in meaning ascribed to that which should have none.”

it turns life into a film noir gumshoe detective story.

those bored and lacking purpose become desperate and line up to be fooled because it’s better than feeling nothing.

this has always been so.

and civilizations die by forgetting the obvious things.

“Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”

—Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)