+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄 @bonifartius@qoto.org

Sir, this is a Fedi's.

This got buried in the hellthread, 72 accounts tagged so probably it didn't get to a lot of servers with HellthreadMRF enabled, but I thought it was a fun idea and I would like to spread mischief on the earth.

The executive summary: for $15 for a domain and a Saturday's worth of producing plausible documentation, then however long it takes you to hit up journos/politicians/Twitter/Reddit, you can wield horrifying perceived political power. A teenager can do this from his mom's basement.

The backstory is that a friend was freakin' out about the sinister plot to destroy all airplanes by 2049 and outlaw beef, because environment. The plan was outlined at ukfires.org, one of those popup think tanks with bland corporate clipart all over it, you know the type of place I'm talking about (and can go see for yourself if you don't). Whatever, the plan isn't the point, the anatomy of the political scam is the important part; that the plan was absurd is part of the scam. So I explained the scam and how little it takes to perpetrate it. You yourself can perpetrate this scam in a matter of hours with no risk to yourself by trying to look important, listing absurd policy proposals and making sure that the right people can see them. Remember: nobody ever checks your math or verifies your credentials or even your citations. You can totally actually pull this off just by looking official enough that a congressional representative or MP would not be reluctant to cite your "work" or that you can get people on Twitter to freak out by believing that you have some sort of policy-making authority. Send it as an anonymous tip to opposing politicians' staffers claiming that it's already endorsed and is driving policy behind the scenes. You've set the agenda!

I'm getting back to work, but if you need an extra person to "join" your "organization" because you need at least two people to say "team" or use the plural form of "researcher", go ahead and ping me, I will join.

-- Post follows, with typos intact, but I removed his name:

Yer playin' into it, man. ukfires.org is some academic think-tank. They can't mandate anything.

So this is the template:

* Think-tank proposes insane shit.
* People freak out. [You are here.]
* INTERLUDE: Agenda-setting effect of media PDF from the 19goddamn70s attached (Congrats, you are talking about what they want to push rather than what you want to achieve.)
* Some politicians make reference to it, more people freak out.
* Those politicians are dismissed by their own party as too radical.
* That sits six months or a year. If people stop freaking out about it, some fringe politicians will start talking about it again.
* Eventually someone proposes some steps towards it.
* Some people oppose those steps but because of the earlier freak-out, the opposition has already been discredited.

This is what happens *every* time, people get played *every* time, people fail to notice even after they were played *every* time. You are doing what is expected.

Anyone—THIS MEANS YOU—can make a web page that looks like that, fluff up their credentials, ask some friends to "join" so you can borrow their credentials, and write "The Whatever Foundation is an independently funded organization of Canadian researchers and engineers from $university and " in grey text near the bottom of the page; try to *look* authoritative without saying you are. Put horrifyingly bland logos on there like a map of the earth with electrons around it. LYING HAS ALWAYS BEEN LEGAL IF YOU DON'T PROFIT so you have no downside to being just slightly misleading about how important you are; after all, that's exactly what they're doing and the best part is that NOBODY WILL CHECK YOUR MATH. Then you put some gussied-up extremely controversial proposals into it like "We gotta go full nuclear by 2035, and in the interim we need to eliminate all emissions requirements to keep fuel cheap" and you draw some diagrams of nuclear-powered telephones and PUT IT IN THE HANDS OF A CHILD, include some graphs, then email that to as many possibly sympathetic politicians as they like...and also send it to some people on Twitter to MAKE *THEM* FREAK OUT ABOUT your insane ideas like BURNING CATS FOR MONEY and MANDATORY NUCLEAR SUPPOSITORIES. If it's crazy enough to make people pay attention but polished enough to look credible, and it gets any traction, CONGRATULATIONS: *you* just set the agenda, *you* are making people freak out, you have learned how to CONTROL THE WORLD BY EXPORTING A WORD DOCUMENT AS A PDF but if you go that route, make sure that you scrub the metadata or, better yet, include metadata that looks like an office computer from your organization. Congratulations, you've gone from intron to exon, you've become the ruling class, the Associated Press will email you. I'm entirely serious: this is exactly what they have done but they had some institutional backing which means, in practical terms, that a school paid for the website and allowed the use of their name.

(But if you don't want to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon writing a poposal and shoving it onto a random website with a .org domain then you could, at the very least, not play into the cycle by being part of the freak-out.)
McCombsShaw1972--agenda_setting.pdf

Damn, no wonder Amazon employees wanna blow their brains out

i find the removal of the “master/slave” thing in computer protocols to be kinkshaming

MOM!
The weak men are making hard times again!

@ChristiJunior @Terry @p @dave @Wyatt The way they make you delete your own tweet when it has been judged to be "hate speech" is especially sick. Like selling your soul to the devil for tiny endorphin hits.

These people don't actually believe that children should be at strip joints and shit. That while detestable would be something I could understand. No, these people are taking their kids dancing with naked hookers SIMPLY BECAUSE THE OTHER TEAM DOESN'T WANT THEM TO

@r000t "Clearing the discourse of abuses and abusers. The more you institutionalize rules of ethical behavior that should be voluntary (say, anti-racism, anti-sexism), the more they will be used as a cover for unethical actions."
https://scribe.rip/incerto/pedophrasty-bigoteering-and-other-modern-scams-c84bd70a29e8

This comes off more as a threat than anything else.

GamePro - June 2001
https://archive.org/details/game-pro-153-151/page/n19/mode/2up

Man can you imagine living in China, where there’s total censorship of major events in other parts of the wor-

@Moon With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride
You're toxic, I'm slippin' under
With a taste of a poison paradise
I'm addicted to you
Don't you know that you're toxic?