
Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica to make Facebook users more favorable to war - cmurf
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/john-bolton-paid-cambridge-analytica-make-facebook-users-less-limp-wristed-war/
======
IAmEveryone
These people really do behave like characters from a third-rate movie script
that gets rejected for being too over-the-top.

At the point where you're actually hiring consultants for a PR campaign to
improve the public image of _war_ , should you not be thinking: _how far have
I strayed from the pack_?

I could totally see a misguided yet defensible attempt to convince the public
of some specific war you really like, such as Iraq. But just any war,
generically?

(That's not to mention that no amount of psychological profiling could ever
make a dent in the public's attitude towards war with the budget John Bolton
could muster. Those facebook ads are, after all, competing with quite a few
high-profile war movies every year, not to mention history books and
grandparent's stories)

~~~
tlb
From the military's point of view, the public's willingness to support a war
is at least as important as better planes and bombs. Every military parade and
Blue Angels flyover are the military spending money to convince the public
that war is glorious.

The shift from promoting a particular war to promoting war generally has to do
with the number and frequency of small wars. In 1940, it was sufficient to get
the public hating Hitler and Hirohito. Now, there are too many enemies for the
average person to keep straight.

~~~
lisper
I think it also has something to do with the fact that every war the U.S. has
fought since WWII has ultimately turned into a disaster.

~~~
khc
depends on what you mean by disaster, I think a lot of South Koreans are
thankful that US participated in the Korea War

~~~
lisper
The Korean war is not over. But OK, fair enough, I'll revise my claim and say
that every war since Korea (i.e. in the last 65 years) has been a disaster.
(And Korea was not exactly considered an unalloyed success even back in the
day.)

~~~
oh_sigh
US invasion of Grenada in 1983?

------
sykh
I hope that at some point American society as a whole will collectively
reflect on the fact that it appears that swaying public opinion is not hard.
What are the implications of this in terms of having a republican form of
government? If collectively we can be swayed, or nudged in such a way that we
will back certain policies then in what way are we free? Each of us tends to
think we have free will and that we make our own decisions but it's clear
that, statistically speaking, this isn't true when speaking about the
population as a whole.

Of course attempts to say public opinion have been going on for thousands of
years but what is new is the scale and ease at which this can be done. It was
much harder back when there were hundreds of independent newspapers and when
information exchange was much more costly both in terms of time and in
expense. Now that vast amounts of information about hundreds of millions of
people have been collected it's much easier to influence opinion.

What implications does this have for free speech? For instance, should
algorithmically generated text garner the same free speech protections as I
do? Should a couple of companies be in charge of the vast amount of data
collected about us?

I'm reminded of an Isaac Asimov story about the future where only one person
votes for President. The person has been chosen by a computer as being
representative of the general population and he/she has the sole vote.

~~~
mnm1
The republican form of government is clearly an unsuccessful form. Where is
evidence that it works at all? Every single country that has it has huge
corruption problems, election problems, or both. Maybe it's time to let go of
this dumb idea that should have been left back in high school: "let the
popular kids in school rule." We have the technology (USPS) and have had it
for well over a hundred years to do direct democracy and have the people
actually rule instead of this metaphorical "rule by the people" that is a
joke. As far as I can tell, other republics are no better. Whether the
corruption is legal (US) or not (most other countries), the outcome is the
same. But perhaps it is not man's nature to desire freedom. I think few people
actually do and too many pretend to.

~~~
mercer
I don't see a need to be partisan about it. The dynamics of power and
corruption are strong enough that whichever 'side' they pick is relatively
irrelevant.

~~~
scrub_tier
Perhaps the poster isn't particularly articulate. There are hawks on both
sides of the isle, but I'm not necessarily convinced that they're comparably
equal. I personally would be interested who's backers benefit most from
policies of force, and perhaps map it to their economic incentives in state
economies and campaigning. I get the impression it's at least publicly
conceived that Republican appeal to a more hardline defensive policies looking
back 4 administrations, at least at a policy level.

~~~
mnm1
No you completely misunderstood the argument like the other comment and
capitalized republican when I clearly had it lowercase and am obviously
talking about republics, not the Republican party.

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dmix
I've always been far more neutral regarding this US Administration than the
most people, but I was happy when John Bolton originally didn't get that
cabinet position back in early 2017.

Mostly after reading his background into "selling" the Iraq war to the public
and his involvement in passing phony documents the CIA discredited as fact to
the Bush administration. He seems like a classic neocon war hawk, which I
hoped we would have left behind in the past era.

There's nothing fiscally conservative or America-first about hawking wars and
world policing.

~~~
rando444
_Seems like a classic neocon warhawk_

That's an understatement. This guy was a core member of the PNAC. (The group
of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, et. al. who openly suggested that the US
needed a new "Pearl Harbor" in order to advance the country's interests)

Again: they put out an open letter stating that America needed to be attacked
in order to achieve its strategic goals.

~~~
enoch_r
I am no fan of Bolton or war, but this is an extraordinarily uncharitable
reading.

The article in question is pushing for a "military transformation" in which
the DoD moves "more aggressively to experiment with new technologies and
operational concepts." It discusses challenges to this process--for example,
the Pentagon has limited funding, and the US can't declare a "strategic pause"
to experiment while our allies and enemies hold still--and notes that:

> the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is
> likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -
> like a new Pearl Harbor.

This seems to me very far from saying that America "needs" to be attacked.
They're just noting that the speed of military innovation tends to increase
very dramatically after an event like Pearl Harbor.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
The need is implied by the conflicts of interest inherent in the investments
portfolios of the founders of the PNAC. They "needed" it as much as a war
profiteer needs war to make profits.

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binarray2000
For anyone wondering, why the US oligarchy is so thirsty for war, I'll quote a
man who knew what he talked about, George F. Kennan:

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the
American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially
unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would
be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."

[https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan](https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan)

Bitter truth, it seems, is that without making military supplies and
equipment, without using them (killing someone), without the military
industrial complex the whole US economy would undergoe "a shock". Therefore a
boogie man (Russia, China, Serbia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea,
Vietnam...) is needed.

Also, before Facebook and along with it, there is a warmongering US media (90%
of which is held by five corporations) to sell a war to US citizens.

~~~
jamestimmins
This is a big part of 1984, if I recall correctly. The various nations fight
each other not because they are really any different, but because war requires
so much production and rebuilding, and that was essential for supporting their
planned economy.

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dopamean
This guy is such bad news. Even though I'm pretty anti-Trump I had thought for
a while that one good thing about him is that he appeared to reject the Bush
era neo con stuff. That even though we wouldn't have a democrat in office we
wouldn't slide backwards toward the Bush nonsense. This is so disappointing.

~~~
Analemma_
It's a peculiar feature of the Trump administration that even the silver
linings I thought were possible have all been squashed. I thought there might
be a chance he was serious about "draining the swamp", and now the CFPB is
gutted, Dodd-Frank is being rolled back, everything about Ajit Pai's FCC, etc.
You think maybe we'd have less neocon-style adventurism, and in comes Bolton.
The list goes in, there really is no good in this regime whatsoever.

------
Zigurd
He's off to a fast start.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-legal-case-for-striking-
nor...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-legal-case-for-striking-north-korea-
first-1519862374)

It pisses me off that we have the optimal mix of stupid and evil running the
country that we could have a nuclear war decades after we thought we had
gotten out from under that shadow.

~~~
matthewmcg
Yikes! It seems obvious that a "preemptive" (i.e. unprovoked and illegal)
attack on North Korean facilities could lead quickly to either immediate
action against South Korea or to the North Koreans launching a missile at the
U.S. or an ally like Japan.

A preemptive strike is supposed to be a risk reduction measure, but it seems
like it only increases the risks to the U.S.!

~~~
jacquesm
And it will cause the rest of the world to turn their collective backs on the
US. The winner of such a scenario would be China.

~~~
mythrwy
Sadly, the world doesn't turn their backs based on abstract principal. The
world turns towards the winner. Thus history shows, and thus it has always
been and thus it always will be. And no one will shed a tear for the NK regime
were it to go away.

Happily none of this is likely to go down because it's all bureaucrats now and
those don't win wars and they know it. But they will bury you in red tape and
process.

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throwaway84742
Unexpectedly good play from Trump IMO. Classic set up: Bolton is a bad cop,
ultra militarist hawk that, given the opportunity, will fuck up North Korea as
badly as possible. Trump gets to use that as a leverage in negotiations. I
don’t think Bolton will be staying very long after that’s done.

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crawfordcomeaux
Cool! Let's channel the energy they were trying to stir up into a conceptual
war where the disagreement at the center is with money and violence.

Let's agree to love each other over choosing strategies involving money and/or
violence. If we're optimally collaborating, we're sharing everything as
needed. This means money can be used as a signal of how effective we're being.
The more money we directly touch/have/use to meet our needs, the less
effective we're being.

If I'm able to ask a global community for everything I need I'm unable to
satisfy on my own, eventually someone will realize we can make this the
default in society if we simply choose to pursue it.

------
wu-ikkyu
Just the other day Reddit and Google/YT rolled out the censors on gun videos.

Today it comes out that Facebook is being used to promote mass murder.

What the hell is going on in SV?

------
oh_sigh
Is this wrong? If you think your fellow citizens don't have the heart for a
necessary war if it is coming, what is wrong with this?

~~~
rainieri
Don't mind the down votes. They don't see the big picture. A big portion of
the population care more about Trump being the bad guy than the threat posed
by some other nation or nations.

What's their opinion when a Democrat is in charge and war is being pushed over
the nation?

~~~
cmurf
-s-Yeah it's everyone else who doesn't see the big picture.-s- What are your credentials demonstrating you know the big picture?

The concern with DJT all along has been he's such a liar and a con man that
when the time comes that we need to trust what he says and does, there will be
none left for him.

[https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/974748724176941056](https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/974748724176941056)

~~~
rainieri
The big picture being that sometimes war is near?

That still doesn't answer why put this guy over someone else. Qualifications?
haven't really read much about him to be honest.

Also why does it matter what that guy has to say about Trump? Is it really
that clear to him that we need to listen closely to what he has to say? What
interests specifically is he talking about? do you know?

~~~
cmurf
It's easy to look up the history of Barry McCaffrey if you don't already know
him. The list of four star generals is small, as there are only 7 active four-
star army generals at one time.

Preemptive wars are defensive, they confront an imminent threat, and as such
are ethical and legal. Preventative war is what Bolton has advocated his
entire career, and are not about confronting imminent threats but
manufacturing a fiction confronted with aggressive illegal and unethical war.
Any country at any time could become a target for any reason, given his
worldview. And it is exactly this that makes him ill suited to head the
National Security Council. That role is meant to be an honest broker in
negotiating and balancing among all the incoming policy, military, and
intelligence positions of the government. If that person is ideological, he
cannot be trusted to be an honest broker. He isn't and he won't be.

It will be interesting to see him butt heads with Mattis. And he will.
Hopefully Mattis wins, and for sure hope he doesn't quit or get canned.

