Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used to Advance THE NARRATIVE

Facebook's ingenious opinion forming architecture

In my habit of browsing facebook to maintain cognitive parallax sometimes I come across things that are interesting. A friend of mine was commenting on the failure of fact checkers to perform any semblance of the service their namesake purports to provide. These observations were fairly straightforward and indicated fact checkers marked findings from papers on climate change and covid false without any analysis whatsoever. I’ve long understood that the cathedral function of “fact checking” is solely to advance THE NARRATIVE, so this was not surprising. What did surprise me is that the post earned itself an automatically generated link to facebook’s climate page so that I could learn about temperature risk in my area. I clicked, and was rewarded with this graph front and center:

Looks like > 1 degree F warming since 1950!

Now, if you’re new to the game this might just look like straightforward evidence that it is hotter now than it has ever been in Kansas. If I were a dumbass and it was a particularly hot day, this would be very persuasive. Since I’ve become familiar with how this data is massaged by The Powers That Be (TPTB), I immediately recognized that the start of the x-axis at 1950 is somewhat convenient and unlikely to be arbitrary. See, the 1930’s were hot, especially in the midwest. Much hotter than today, in fact, especially in Kansas. So much hotter, that this nice positive correlation/warming trend might just be obliterated should the graph start at 1930, or even 1920 to make it an even 100 years. Or so I thought…

After clicking on the link to go to the NOAA website to try to plot temperature from earlier in the 1900s, I found that the only available datasets were those that had been “enhanced” to better account for why the temperature was hotter in the past/ensure that there is a near perfect correlation between the adjusted temperature data and atmospheric CO2 levels:

Luckily, people like Tony Heller have been diligently cataloging the raw temperature data since noticing that this was becoming a politically charged issue. Unfortunately, I can’t compare a plot of Kansas raw temperature data to the one I encountered on facebook, but I can at least find average temperature from 1895-2019 using the raw data gathered at US Historical Climatology Network Stations (USHCN) that he published on his website:

Looks like < 0.2 degree F warming since 1895

So over a much longer timeframe we get < 20% of the warming indicated on the handy graph from our friends at facebook. Is 0.2 degrees of warming over 120+ years a big deal? Maybe. Are the adjustments that the USG makes to the data appropriate? It seems a little convenient that the adjusted data leads to a near perfect correlation with CO2 emissions. In any case, I think this shows that the Kansas graph facebook provided is misleading. It is meant to leave you with the impression that there is clear and irrefutable data to show that the planet is warming substantially while raw temperature data with a less arbitrary start point is less convincing. At this point, I think you’re supposed to go comment on your friend’s post to tell them what a dumbass they are…

So I know what climate partisans might be thinking, it still shows a warming trend so who cares. Perhaps 0.2 degrees of warming since the dawn of the industrial age shows that planet is about to spontaneously combust/turn into Venus at the worst, and cause mass extinction of the human race at best. But what if it isn’t even warming at all? I’m not so sure the raw data can even be taken at face value. Thanks to boriquagato, I recently learned that the USHCN stations aren’t being monitored to account for factors that might alter the temperature readings. The bad cat compares temperature data at a thermometer that is a part of the network that seems like it probably looks a lot like it looked back in 1895:

To another thermometer in the network that is now surrounded by some things that we might expect to have an effect on the immediate air temperature:

I’m not going to say that this is absolute irrefutable proof that CO2 doesn’t have a meaningful impact on global temperature. I will say that given this context, the plot of Kansas temperature data since 1950 isn’t very persuasive.

On to COVID. When I went to comment on my friend’s post, a little popup appeared over the “attachments icon”. Here is a screenshot:

The icon in the lower right is for “attachments” I clicked it, and I was provided these handy options of things I could attach to show all my dumbass friends how safe and effective C19 vaccines are!

This architecture is nothing short of genius for leveraging the principles of social psychology to form opinion. First of all, descriptive norms are very powerful in controlling behavior. In this case, the behavior that facebook wants to control is people saying anything that is not consistent with THE NARRATIVE. This system weaponizes the dullest, and laziest participants that have access to the feeds of anyone who might be expressing dissident opinions, then provides a minimal effort pathway to contest the dissident opinions that cause you even the mildest cognitive dissonance. It will seem to the OP like one of their friends is engaging in discourse, but really they’re just clicking a single button to forward the propaganda curated by TPTB. Before, just ignoring the post would leave the reader with some annoying cognitive dissonance, while engaging takes time and requires independent thought. They’ve made the path of least resistance for anyone who stumbles across your post to become an agent of the propaganda machine.

There are dozens of links to choose from, several links to cathedral sources might dissuade even the most ardent dissident from continuing to voice their opinions on the platform

If on the off chance any of your friends are open to heterodox views and you post something damaging to the narrative that starts getting too much attention, facebook isn’t concerned at all! They can do everything from ensuring that your posts don’t show up in anyone’s feed all the way to outright banning you off the platform and deleting your post.

Facebook isn’t alone in these efforts to engage in social engineering. Google is also on top of their game, and I won’t even pretend to know the full extent of what they’re up to on this front. I know search engine results are curated, I know that substack links aren’t able to be posted on youtube, that substack emails get placed automatically into the “promotions” folder of gmail accounts, even if you directly subscribe, and I know that “ephemeral experiences” were used to encourage only those with certain online profiles to register to vote and participate in elections. If you have the interest Dr. Robert Epstein initially discovered this with a research study that he discusses in this talk he gave at OSU.

Cops are required to recite Miranda to those being arrested to ensure that they are made aware of their rights. Even still, suspects will talk to the police. Just like it is very wise to take their warning seriously by following the advice in this video, it is probably a good idea to keep in mind that engagement on facebook can only be used against those that wish to defy THE NARRATIVE. So what is the alternative? For social media, I like locals, which to my knowledge doesn’t engage in any of these shenanigans. Rumble is a good alternative to youtube (but notice I still use youtube links, convenience is a bitch). Creating a publication on substack instead of posting on facebook is also an option (I’m subscribed to a neuroscience PhD that writes the publication Data Matters who did this explicitly). The ultimate step would be to avoid all google products and services and “de-googling” your phone. Section 230 reform would provide some relief, but I have a feeling that might not come before the amalgam of meta and alphabet create an inescapable prison for the mind of the blue pilled to ensure that they can never see anything that deviates too far from THE NARRATIVE. Anyone who has any independence of mind left that enjoys posting on facebook might do well to consider that they’re being played. I’m concerned that if these new features are any indication, the situation we all probably understand is bad with tech censorship and manipulation is about to get a whole lot worse…