In response to this – https://www.facebook.com/owenjones84/videos/596744154004309/
Exploitations of national sentiment and exacerbations of xenophobic anxiety, using Margaret Thatcher’s market survey techniques put in the context of real-time algorithmic manipulation, continue to drive the contemporary political scene.
All these fictions of unease are produced by a calculus of crafty coercions, the simplifying mechanics of the mass image. What M John Harrison called “a thousand and one labyrinthine excursions beneath the political crust” (“Settling the World” (1975) M John Harrison), has now turned into hyper-visible spectacles of online confusion. It’s all there, easy to see, but vested interests, stupidity, and bigotry, are the new forms of obscurity, no secret services necessary.
Concerning Jeremy Corbyn’s restraint concerning Russia, the British public have to decide whether they appreciate the simplifying rhetoric of strong and stupid statements, or thoughtful and considerate ones. It’s nice to resolve situations quickly, but correctness is another essential attribute: anyone can do quick stupidity, even Boris Johnson, as has been noted.
Conmen usually use speed in order to facilitate their deceptions, global politics is certainly no different, in this respect.
Steve Bannon, setting up offices in Brussels, in order to influence European elections, is no different, really, to Russian interventions in the USA, through Facebook manipulations. The irony, of course, is the point and proponents of anti-globalist arguments, being undermined by their resorting to various right-wing, international alliances and techniques of manipulation, lol.
In the inordinate concern with frames, these days, it seems that pictures are entirely neglected, simply taken for granted. This is the typical, tunnel vision of instrumentalist thought, that narrative theories were questioning; but the fundamental mediocrity of political intellect never really changes, for its practitioners the framing becomes the positivist picture, and the picture is simply forgotten.