Useful idiots

I certainly don’t mean to discount the very real occurrences of violence against any woman but all this reading of non-proven incidents of rape brings to mind the term “useful idiot.” It’s a term I heard used in a 1984 news program featuring Soviet KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov. In that interview, Mr. Bezmenov described how our country would be demoralised and ripped at the seams by useful idiots who parrot in news articles tripe fomented by those with larger agendas. That idea that some women are raped while attempting to cross the border should never be discounted; I don’t doubt there is rape and other violence in some situations. The idea of panties in trees being proof of widespread rape is what is laughable. The conjectures without victims, witnesses or other proof make a mockery of the very real subject of abuse and the people who copy and paste such nonsense in blog posts are either well meaning idiots or idiots with an agenda, but idiots nonetheless.

Last Free Voice

She has a point. People parrot, don’t analyze, and then other people without the capacity of analysis repeat and cause problems. It’s like shouting fire in a theater.

Imagine I show you a list of 30 words. One of the words is written in green ink. The rest are blue.

Half an hour goes by and I ask you to recall the words on the list. Which word are you most likely to remember?

The one written in green ink, of course. This is the “von Restorff Effect”: Novelty grabs our attention.

It’s basic cognitive hardwiring. Journalists don’t zero in on “man bites dog” stories because they’re perverse. They do it because they’re human.

…

When a story breaks, grabs the media’s attention, and gets people talking, something else happens. The story ceases to be about a single incident. Instead, it creates a narrative.

The absence of a narrative means a story must stand or fall on its own. And when a story runs contrary to a narrative, it is positively resisted.

The Ottawa Citizen

Another word for narrative is “script,” as in, “since we were looking for guys dressed in black carrying bicycles, he fit right into our script.”

The media uses these means to control you: novelty and its stepchild, negativity — since evolution has primed you to first look for threats — and a script into which all news must fit. We could call that script a “justification,” as we do in our manifesto.

When those who have money and power want you to jump, they make a few calls to their friends and business associates. They put out the meme: X is the new threat, or Y is another instance of the current script of threats, whether it be global warming, hackers, racists, Satanists or godless Communism.

That’s how you keep a nation in line when they don’t have much in common as far as ideologies, values, etc. go. You manipulate them with carrot and stick: we free, they bad.

Much as democracy relies on having a horde of people who don’t read or think very deeply about issues, modern society relies on useful idiots to bleat out that the sky is falling any time such a meme comes around.