Why Totalitarians Love Elections

They are easy to manipulate:

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Big Data & Psychographic Profiling

While essentially unknown to the general public, the astounding technologies of the London based firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) are credited by some as having a fundamental role in the 2016 election of US President Donald Trump and the ‘Leave’ campaign that led to the UK Brexit. CA trumpets proudly on its website and in its strategic communications that they “use data modelling and psychographic profiling to grow audiences, identify key influencers, and connect with people in ways that move them to action.”

Birthed at the nexus of leading Cambridge University Psychometric scientists and the SCL Group (self-described as a ‘global election management agency’), Cambridge Analytica works big data to identify and manipulate the intentions of mass voter populations.

According to CA Chief Executive, Alexander Nix, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Harvesting Facebook ‘likes’, smartphone data, purchase histories, subscriptions, church visits, online and other available aggregate information, CA builds profiles of every individual in the target audience (i.e. every potential voter in the US during election season 2016) and generates a ‘psychographic analysis’ in combination with the OCEAN (‘openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism’) personality trait or ‘lexical hypothesis’ model to predict and influence the electoral actions of individuals.

As reported in the Swiss Das Magazin, with just ten Facebook ‘likes’ as input, CA could “appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could ‘know’ a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes… (the) machine could predict a subject’s behaviour better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”

Deployed in a number of developing nations, the SCL Group has worked extensively with military and political contacts in activities that Slate magazine described as akin to a ‘coup’ scenario.

According to their website, “Cambridge Analytica is building a future where every individual can have a truly personal relationship with their favourite brands and causes by showing organisations not just where people are, but what they really care about and what drives their behaviour.”
Professor Jonathan Albright of Elon University describes CA’s algorithms as “a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go.”

CA’s Nix gave an example from their brief tenure on GOP candidate Ted Cruz’s primary campaign. Cambridge Analytica’s big data analysis “identified that there was a small pocket of voters in Iowa who felt strongly that citizens should be required by law to show photo ID at polling stations. Leveraging our other data models, we were able to advise the campaign on how to approach this issue with specific individuals based on their unique profiles in order to use this relatively niche issue as a political pressure point to motivate them to go out and vote for Cruz. For people in the ‘Temperamental’ personality group, who tend to dislike commitment, messaging on the issue should take the line that showing your ID to vote is ‘as easy as buying a case of beer’. Whereas the right message for people in the ‘Stoic Traditionalist’ group, who have strongly held conventional views, is that showing your ID in order to vote is simply part of the privilege of living in a democracy.” According to some sources, CA is able to bombard target individuals with thousands of uniquely tailored and feedback evolving ‘dark ads’ (advertisements that aren’t seen by others).

‘Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine’

In a piece titled ‘The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine’, journalists Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath assert that Cambridge Analytica, “has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion. Many of these technologies have been used individually to some effect before, but together they make up a nearly impenetrable voter manipulation machine that is quickly becoming the new deciding factor in elections around the world.”

It would be easy to argue that primitive versions of these techniques have indeed been used in various ‘coloured revolutions’ and ‘regime change’ operations for decades at least (and more subtly in the general domestic activities of the mainstream media): perhaps the only salient difference being that now the ‘coup’ chickens have extraordinary ‘Artificial Intelligence’ technologies at their disposal which have now clearly come home to roost.

Fraught and fragile as our democracies are, the inevitable march of ‘progress’ means we’re about to lose them permanently to The Machine.

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Source:  David Thrussell, https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/coming-techno-apocalypse, opened 8 Sept. 2017, the birthday of the Mother of God

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While on the subject of elections, we cannot help but take notice of the Alabama [u]. S. Senate race.  We do have an ounce of respect for Roy Moore because he did stand up to the federal judiciary a couple of times, timid as that stand may have been, when he was serving as Chief Justice of the State of Alabama.  But it is very silly of Chief Justice Moore and his supporters to believe that sending him to Washington City will change anything.  He will either fall into line with the corrupt GOP leadership in order to get any of his campaign promises enacted, or he will be banished to the Senate wilderness along with Sens Paul and Lee and flail at the wind until he leaves in frustration. 

If Justice Moore really were interested in helping Alabama and the other States, he would put all his energy into becoming Governor of Alabama, where he could decimate the globalist New World Order agenda with the powers available to him in that office, all the while surrounded and guarded by an overwhelming number of Alabamians kindly disposed toward his goals.  His ensample would encourage like movements in other States.  But as long as Southerners, etc. keep worshiping the false god of the American Empire, this isn’t going to happen.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!