{"id":992,"date":"2019-01-04T12:33:12","date_gmt":"2019-01-04T12:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=992"},"modified":"2019-01-04T12:33:12","modified_gmt":"2019-01-04T12:33:12","slug":"counteractive-measures-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2019\/01\/04\/counteractive-measures-needed\/","title":{"rendered":"Counteractive Measures Needed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just bought and watched <strong><span style=\"color: #3366ff\"><a href=\"https:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/ca\/movie\/active-measures\/id1419836915\">Active Measures<\/a>.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Quite remarkable to see it all put together like that. Nothing we haven\u2019t seen in the news, but the news has a short attention-span, and this overview shows the pattern \u2014 of Putin trolling the world to divide and conquer, with the brainless buffoon, Trump, as his deeply compromised and indebted strohman \u2014 puts together what has come to light so far, and the story is still shocking. A few years ago I would have sworn that 1\/1000th of this would have been enough to bring Trump down, or, rather, prevent him from ever rising. Putin\u2019s formula is obvious: cyber-troll whatever divides people, and let the global mafia divide the spoils.<\/p>\n<p>I used to think that the online media and computation had found their way to the Achilles heel of democracy, but now I think it is the Achilles heel of language itself, and the human brain\u2019s default option of unreflecting credulity.<\/p>\n<p>(Worth watching the movie, though it would have been much more effective without the edgy TV docu-drama-style background \u201cmusic,\u201d and if the text clippings had run more slowly and not been put in competition with the soundtrack. A bit like an over-busy powerpoint presentation. Yet you can still make out the woods as the trees flick by\u2026 But is it enough to counter rampant rival narratives from conspiracy theorists and con-men? Even when it takes the form of Mueller\u2019s Report? Look at the way EU funds keep flowing to Orban despite what everyone knows\u2026)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just bought and watched Active Measures. Quite remarkable to see it all put together like that. Nothing we haven\u2019t seen in the news, but the news has a short attention-span, and this overview shows the pattern \u2014 of Putin trolling the world to divide and conquer, with the brainless buffoon, Trump, as his deeply compromised &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2019\/01\/04\/counteractive-measures-needed\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Counteractive Measures Needed&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":994,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions\/994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}