Keyword Hijacking Smackdown! Challenge for HMW (and poll)

[orz]

I can't even figure out any more which "side" of this "debate" that obtuse piece of sarcasm is directed at.

[vigilant]

Fer crissakes, people -- if asking someone to explicate on something they are REGULARLY and VIGOROUSLY claiming is real is too much to ask, I give up.

Smackdown withdrawn due to refusal of challengee to participate. Go about your normal business.

Wouldn't that sort of be... like the rat asking for a "trap reset" after he got smacked down in his own trap?

[ninakat]

Fer crissakes, people -- if asking someone to explicate on something they are REGULARLY and VIGOROUSLY claiming is real is too much to ask, I give up.

Smackdown withdrawn due to refusal of challengee to participate. Go about your normal business.

Maybe HMW just doesn't get into mud wrestling, with liberal amounts of poo-poo thrown in. One thing I do agree on is that we should all go about our normal business and quit this petty crap. Enough already.

I'm with Marmot in encouraging Hugh to continue with his insightful postings. Sometimes I think he's on to something, other times I'm not sure. One thing that IS for sure is that when people roll eyes, it makes THEM look bad, not Hugh. I hestitate posting this, but frankly it disheartens me to see this thread. OK, back to normal business.

[Jeff]

And I'm of the opinion that this is fracturing the board. Which one might say is another hallmark of successful disinformation.

I'm coming around to a "Keyword Hijack" subforum, where Hugh's insightful postings pertaining to Nell and The Incredible Mr Limpet be held without (a) hijacking threads and (b) raising the blood pressure in General Discussion.

[professorpan]

Wouldn't that sort of be... like the rat asking for a "trap reset" after he got smacked down in his own trap?

Uh, no. It's more like me shaking my head in disbelief.

Enjoy having your threads derailed with non-sequiturs and images from Disney DVDs -- really. Enjoy.

[Hilda Martinez]

I'll vote in a second, but here are my two cents.

I read Hugh's posts with awe, horror, fascination and amazement. Where did these ideas come from? From a brilliant mind? From the mind of a madman? Are they valid for us? I thank Hugh for giving us all a new perspective and a springboard for discussion and thought,, and at times I silently curse him for taking my thinking to dark depths. Is he right all of the time? Perhaps not. Does he seem a little off kilter? Perhaps. I think most of us would agree here that our intuition is telling us that Hugh is on to something. Maybe we are being too hard on him because he is not articulating things properly or only presenting part of what should be presented, or maybe he is going overboard in his enthusiasm to share with us what he has discovered and pieced together. CIA/State Department involvement in the media is well documented. That's scary enough to me. But, how scary is the manipulation of children's brains to the extent Hugh is proposing? Or the degree of that manipulation? What if it is true what he is saying about keyword hijacking and the minutae in popular culture being so controlled? This is the most terrifying thing to think about in my opinion.

It all reminds me of a Robert Frost poem:

Design


I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

[brownzeroed]

Pan:

Uh, no. It's more like me shaking my head in disbelief.

Good thing too. I was starting to think your name was Professor-Sisyphus!


Jeff:

I'm coming around to a "Keyword Hijack" subforum, where Hugh's insightful postings pertaining to Nell and The Incredible Mr Limpet be held without (a) hijacking threads and (b) raising the blood pressure in General Discussion.

You get my vote.

[populistindependent]

And I'm of the opinion that this is fracturing the board. Which one might say is another hallmark of successful disinformation.

I'm coming around to a "Keyword Hijack" subforum, where Hugh's insightful postings pertaining to Nell and The Incredible Mr Limpet be held without (a) hijacking threads and (b) raising the blood pressure in General Discussion.

I for one want to pursue this, and have started serious work on it today, but I understand and respect your concerns and I think they are valid. Also, I am relatively new and people are justifiably suspicious when a new member aggressively heads off in a new and odd direction that upsets other members.

Where I am starting the research is in the areas of advertising techniques - already finding some good scholarly papers that form a background for the idea of keyword hijacking at the very least, motivational psychology, and related areas. After that I am going to dig in to the who, when, and where and I have been looking at some documentation connecting various ad firms and corporate heads to defense department and intelligence agency projects.

I think understanding the phenomenon is the first step, and then specific examples need to be documented and then the who, when, where and why can be mapped out and identified.

I don't have to work on it here and I will refrain from posting about it here if that is your wish.

[Trifecta]

Hugh's own forum, can he be a moderator?

Unlike the relegated orgone forum, this one will definitely have legs.

bravo

[Trifecta]

PI, here is a great tool to help you see the connections www.spock.com enter search terms and get a visual representation of the people involved and their bios ... its still in beta, but speeds the process up.

good luck

[brownzeroed]

Here's another idea. It looks like there are at least 35 people interested in what Hugh has to say. If each of those people chipped in a buck/ year, Hugh could have his own board and complete control over its comings and goings.

Completely serious. The above is %100 snark free. In fact, I'd even visit it frequently.

[orz]

I think understanding the phenomenon is the first step, and then specific examples need to be documented and then the who, when, where and why can be mapped out and identified.

And so begins another insular internet fandom... insulated from "mean" sceptics and trolls and logic... sailing off from reality into the groupthink normalisation of absurd ideas... into inpenetrable insider jargon... into fierce flame wars between sub-sub-sub-factions of the original group...

Well maybe not. I'm being devil's advocate, but these are my concerns. Why is it not good enough to simply research propaganda in the media without doing so under a contrived banner of "Keyword Hijacking"? Why start from a flawed premise and work backwards?



I actually think a seperate subforum is a great idea, tho of course some kind of threshold would have to be decided on; it'd be unfair to banish Hugh's every post there. Maybe devise some system of detecting how many paragraphs of copy-paste regurgitation he's used?... or how many bolded words in a quote.

[populistindependent]

And so begins another insular internet fandom... insulated from "mean" sceptics and trolls and logic... sailing off from reality into the groupthink normalisation of absurd ideas... into inpenetrable insider jargon... into fierce flame wars between sub-sub-sub-factions of the original group...

That is the danger. We need to be reminded of that. Thanks.

Why is it not good enough to simply research propaganda in the media without doing so under a contrived banner of "Keyword Hijacking"? Why start from a flawed premise and work backwards?

It is the objective evidence I saw in a controlled and disciplined environment that is the foundation for my interest. So for me, the premise - that there is a specific and discrete technique in operation within the broader subject area of propaganda in the media that is significant and being overlooked - is not flawed.

Certainly we are a long way from fully understanding propaganda in the media, and it is also certain that we have difficulty in seeing the full effects of the propaganda on ourselves and our conversations do tend to run in the same unproductive circles, so for those reasons I am willing to stretch a little and apply some creativity and some new ways of looking at things, even if they are intuitive and improvable at this point.

I am not trying to promote the concept of keyword hijacking, by the way. I want to find out one way or the other what the truth is. In some ways, I hope I am wrong.

By way of establishing some context, I am excerpting a few paragraphs from an essay on the effect of advertising that bears on this discussion. If it is in fact true that those who imagine themselves to be the least effected by advertising, or propaganda, are the most vulnerable to it, it logically follows that people would be emotionally invested in their self-image of being too independent and intelligent to "fall for" any of it. This could well be true to some extent for all of us. If it is true, then we are trying to look into our own blind spots. That justifies creative experimentation and flexibility in our approaches to this subject.

The Language of Advertising Claims
by Jeffrey Schrank

Students, and many teachers, are notorious believers in their immunity to advertising. These naive inhabitants of consumerland believe that advertising is childish, dumb, a bunch of lies, and influences only the vast hordes of the less sophisticated. Their own purchases are made purely on the basis of value and desire, with advertising playing only a minor supporting role. They know about Vance Packard and his "hidden persuaders" and the adwriter's psychosell and bag of persuasive magic. They are not impressed.

Advertisers know better. Although few people admit to being greatly influenced by ads, surveys and sales figures show that a well-designed advertising campaign has dramatic effects. A logical conclusion is that advertising works below the level of conscious awareness and it works even on those who claim immunity to its message. Ads are designed to have an effect while being laughed at, belittled, and all but ignored.

A person unaware of advertising's claim on him or her is precisely the one most defenseless against the adwriter's attack. Advertisers delight in an audience which believes ads to be harmless nonsense, for such an audience is rendered defenseless by its belief that there is no attack taking place. The purpose of a classroom study of advertising is to raise the level of awareness about the persuasive techniques used in ads. One way to do this is to analyze ads in microscopic detail. Ads can be studied to detect their psychological hooks, they can be used to gauge values and hidden desires of the common person, they can be studied for their use of symbols, color, and imagery. But perhaps the simplest and most direct way to study ads is through an analysis of the language of the advertising claim. The "claim" is the verbal or print part of an ad that makes some claim of superiority for the product being advertised. After studying claims, students should be able to recognize those that are misleading and accept as useful information those that are true. A few of these claims are downright lies, some are honest statements about a truly superior product, but most fit into the category of neither bold lies nor helpful consumer information. They balance on the narrow line between truth and falsehood by a careful choice of words.

The Language of Advertising Claims

[Jeff]

Why is it not good enough to simply research propaganda in the media without doing so under a contrived banner of "Keyword Hijacking"? Why start from a flawed premise and work backwards?

Yes. Regardless of what may be motivating Hugh, I don't know why this sounds to some so controversial, fractious and "gate-keeperish."

I actually think a seperate subforum is a great idea, tho of course some kind of threshold would have to be decided on; it'd be unfair to banish Hugh's every post there.

I wouldn't want to do that. In fact, I've encouraged him to start threads on the subject when the fancy strikes. My principal grievance is the perpetual disruption and redirection of other members' threads. And something had better be done about that, soon.

[orz]

Good stuff populistindependent. From what you've said about your background in this I think your ideas are much more valid than Hugh's, and I can also appreciate why based on your experience you'd be more open to not totally dismissing him. I'm just not sure I'd want to have anything to do with the phrase Keyword Hijacking when studying/discussing these issues is all.