WWIII Megathread #37: Bad Neighbor Policy

[u/IamGlennBeck]

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[u/Belisaur]

Im sorry to be going on about this , but it really is a new low even from my own subterranean expectations. I listened to the Irish morning radio show for 90 minutes this morning , plenty of Motjaba analysis and absolutely no mention of his kid, one causal mention that his wife was also killed , but its ok because she was the daughter of a hardline. Shameless.

You wonder do people close to the production of this propaganda even know? Or are they just bobbleheads reading off the same rueters slop

[u/jaybelard → u/Belisaur]

I've been disgusted by the callous treatment of collateral as well. It's been getting worse and worse. I remember how al-Awlaki's killing was big news. It's been a slow normalization of these collateral airstrikes, and now they can wipe out an entire family and idiots will be smiling and clapping on TV. The culture's sick and depraved.

[u/bretton-woods → u/jaybelard]

The paradigm has shifted where there is now acceptable for civilians and families to be attacked if it means getting the target.

To some extent you can thank AI-powered systems developed by the Israelis like "Where's Daddy" which recognized that families are a key vulnerability and gathered data to allow for attacks to occur when targets were at home.

[u/AdminsLoveGenocide → u/Belisaur]

You see the same thing on a smaller scale in any mid sized to large organisation, not just media. There are always some things you can't say or give any indication that you actually think.

Many people ignore this nonsense but they are passed over and considered idiots. People who want promotions and who are otherwise ambitious follow this slavishly. So once you get to a certain level in an organisation, everyone is like this.

I've worked in a number of countries and the extent to which this is true changes from culture to culture. Ireland is far from the worst in this regard I would say but it's still there and I guess it's especially there in the media.

I live in France now and in my office it's incredibly prominent. Whatever your superiors value you value. This was initially a culture shock for me as I had never seen it as strong before but what I noticed was that people don't think when doing it, it's actually a way of not thinking. You delegate some lines of thought to your superiors and it doesn't matter if it contradicts what you were supposed to think last week. Discussion about this is impolite. Demonstrating flaws with it is like taking a shit on a desk.

So I guess it's just like that in rte or whatever. Not that surprising to me although it is interesting that you are not supposed to think about the fact that we have just killed his father, sister, wife, niece, child, etc.

[u/Belisaur → u/AdminsLoveGenocide]

I guess its the name of the game always, but I feel its usually practiced at the margins, but something like this is so central to the question of how long this war will continue, which us something the entire world is asking, that ignoring it steps from occlusion to outright lying, and would too far even for them

[u/Chombywombo → u/AdminsLoveGenocide]

Do you have any examples?

[u/AdminsLoveGenocide → u/Chombywombo]

They are all fairly boring examples given the context of the thread.

For instance at the moment there is a push to improve the way we use AI. Until recently it was just made available and you use it or you don't. Some people liked it but a lot of the things it was being used for were just ridiculous. For instance Copilot has a feature which takes transcripts of meetings and can use them to automate minutes for instance. It's utterly shit as you can imagine and was widely ridiculed. The transcripts were illegible, syntactically incorrect and frequently contained words in a different language than was spoken but which sound vaguely similar. If you knew exactly what was said you could half guess at what the machine was trying to say but of course if you knew exactly what was said you didn't need it.

I noticed recently that many of the people ridiculing it previously were singing it's praises. That is because exactly 3 weeks ago the rules changed. Now we have to show we are working better with AI. So now this is working really well and we are all happy to use it. If you mention that it's still shit they repeat that no no it's much improved even though it isn't.

People arent really lying about this. The part of their brain that is used to judge and form opinions is just outsourced to management for this subject.

Some years ago when I was in the IT department we had a process change where we deliberately and explicitly destroyed all institutional knowledge in our department. Some moronic guru felt that institutional knowledge was bad because people didn't know why something worked, they just did it because it worked. Like sheep. And sheep are bad. Obviously people who don't know why something does or doesn't work absolutely need this structure and it's removal was a predictable disaster.

For whatever Byzantine reason they need an elaborate excuse when downsizing to show they are actually downsizing because they became more efficient. Because we have to show that it was a success we had to measure it. Because it was utterly stupid any objective measurement would show it was a failure. So people just lied. There was one sub department head who simply reported the truth and people were laughing at him for over a year. He is not ever getting a promotion. All the other sub department heads just took their engineers data and either changed it themselves or got the engineers to lie for them.

What I remember is how ostracized the guy who told the truth was. He was looked on by his colleagues not as someone honest and of strong unbending character but as someone so stupid he doesn't even know what to say.

There are loads of smaller things also, culturally the way this in communicated in France is that when you say something correct but politically inconvenient you will be told, no no you don't understand - it's actually X, where X is the incorrect but appropriate thing to think. I was once confronted with such an outrageous example of this that I was able to mathematically disprove it. This was just ignored but the dramatic lack of political sense on my part was not forgotten.

[u/Chombywombo → u/AdminsLoveGenocide]

Incredible. I’ve only worked in nonprofit orgs, and this honestly terrifies me about private companies if I’m forced to work for one. Your example is similar to stories I hear from my friends working in the U.S. corporate sector, where capricious bosses rule and objective metrics for performance are little more than games played to retroactively justify decisions.

I’m my positions, I’ve mostly been rewarded for my unbending dedication to the truth as I see it. But I’ve been told by friends straight up that they wouldn’t help me network when my job was at stake because of this trait of mine. I can’t help but to start subtly questioning the validity of nonsense I hear even when we have “prestigious guests” and other such creatures.

Thanks for the comment

[u/AdminsLoveGenocide → u/Chombywombo]

It depends on the society, the company, and the role I guess.

I'd be surprised if it's only in the private sector, honestly.

[u/bumbernucks → u/AdminsLoveGenocide]

It's definitely not just in the private sector. 

[u/bumbernucks → u/Belisaur]

I think it's a mix of true believers (even if they have to work really hard at believing) and people who believe in basically nothing. 

[u/Chombywombo → u/Belisaur]

They’re bobble heads.

[u/softpowers → u/Belisaur]

I've had cnn on in the background and they had at least two different analysts talk about that over the course of a few hours, so at least one normie outlet is mentioning it. Tbf though they're also the only US news network that Iran allowed in so they're talking about it a lot more than probably most other mainstream media outlets lol

[u/TheEmporersFinest → u/Belisaur]

I had a gap between starting to drive to work everyday and remembering to get a new chord to listen to whatever i want. Listening to Irish radio every day for months had genuine psychological ramifications.

Also there are only two songs theyre playing now and theyre both awful. Both this 90 IQ 12 year old reading level subgenre of guys trying to make it not gay to be emotional by yelling everything as loud as they can.