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In reply to the discussion: What The Holy Hell? [View all]
jfz9580m
(17,262 posts)35. I suspect Russian ransomware is the real issue
I was never very sold on the Russian influence thesis because I am not a believer in influence per se. I know that behaviours that can make one seem like a zombie could just mean one no longer gives a shit. These societies tend to make people give up and resign themselves to being their worst selves.
I used to read a New Yorker piece by Maria Konnikova over and over again at a dark time in my life. I suffered from no illness, but did feel I had no control at all over my life. The piece is on Martin Seligman’s theories on Learned Helplessness. That definitely was (and to some extent residually still is) my state of mind after a particularly shitty job at this spooky hell that seemed to be a fusion of the worst parts of China, Russia, the Middle East, Si Valley, the US and India. Yeah that was awesome:
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/theory-psychology-justified-torture
Trying to Cure Depression, but Inspiring Torture
By Maria Konnikova
January 14, 2015
He is no scholar of interrogation, he says, but as he understands it, “the point of interrogation is to get at the truth and to have the person believe that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” Does learned helplessness actually achieve that end?
Here’s what we know: learned helplessness can indeed be a severe form of torture. The inability to control one’s environment has repeatedly been shown to create not only anger and frustration but, eventually, deep and often insurmountable depression.
In a sense, inducing learned helplessness makes a person give up. We shouldn’t forget the high price at which the learned-helplessness findings came: many of the animals used in the studies died or became severely ill shortly thereafter. So is learned helplessness an effective way of causing incredible pain? No doubt.
But here’s the more relevant question: Does the condition, in turn, make someone more likely to tell the truth and give up important information that had previously remained hidden? Here we have no direct data—after all, there have never been controlled torture trials that we know of—but we do have some theoretical basis in the study of severe depression to suggest that it will do no such thing. People who’ve given up lack all incentive. Once they are in that state of hopelessness, there is no longer a way to motivate them.
Absent any possible inducement or motivation, most people just want to quit. The threat of pain or even death no longer makes much of a difference: Nothing I do or say matters, so why bother? A person in a state of learned helplessness is someone who is passive, someone who has abandoned all active will and desire. He can tell the truth, yes, but why? Lying or saying whatever it is that the torturer wants to hear is just as likely to attain the same result. A person without motivation is not a person who can be induced to tell deep truths: the incentive simply isn’t there.
“I think learned helplessness would make someone less defiant and more likely to compliantly tell the interrogator what he wants to hear,” Seligman said. “It would also likely undermine the belief that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” In other words, it would do the opposite of what its users in this particular context intended.
By Maria Konnikova
January 14, 2015
He is no scholar of interrogation, he says, but as he understands it, “the point of interrogation is to get at the truth and to have the person believe that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” Does learned helplessness actually achieve that end?
Here’s what we know: learned helplessness can indeed be a severe form of torture. The inability to control one’s environment has repeatedly been shown to create not only anger and frustration but, eventually, deep and often insurmountable depression.
In a sense, inducing learned helplessness makes a person give up. We shouldn’t forget the high price at which the learned-helplessness findings came: many of the animals used in the studies died or became severely ill shortly thereafter. So is learned helplessness an effective way of causing incredible pain? No doubt.
But here’s the more relevant question: Does the condition, in turn, make someone more likely to tell the truth and give up important information that had previously remained hidden? Here we have no direct data—after all, there have never been controlled torture trials that we know of—but we do have some theoretical basis in the study of severe depression to suggest that it will do no such thing. People who’ve given up lack all incentive. Once they are in that state of hopelessness, there is no longer a way to motivate them.
Absent any possible inducement or motivation, most people just want to quit. The threat of pain or even death no longer makes much of a difference: Nothing I do or say matters, so why bother? A person in a state of learned helplessness is someone who is passive, someone who has abandoned all active will and desire. He can tell the truth, yes, but why? Lying or saying whatever it is that the torturer wants to hear is just as likely to attain the same result. A person without motivation is not a person who can be induced to tell deep truths: the incentive simply isn’t there.
“I think learned helplessness would make someone less defiant and more likely to compliantly tell the interrogator what he wants to hear,” Seligman said. “It would also likely undermine the belief that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” In other words, it would do the opposite of what its users in this particular context intended.
I was not mentally ill at any point so this piece and these two others were a source of comfort to me in those lonely hell years when I was not even on DU:
https://ia800501.us.archive.org/19/items/joost-meerloo-rape-of-the-mind/%20Joost%20Meerloo_Rape%20of%20the%20mind.pdf
I cannot seem to copy the text, but it is Joost Meerloo’s “Rape of the Mind” and details the effect of interrogation and torture techniques used by both Nazis and Stalinists. It is well worth reading. I would recommend it to all DUers.
Finally, on more ubiquitous terrain away from Russia, China, Nazi Germany etc. are our good ol’ Si Valley etc. creeps. I personally consider this one of the best pieces written on contemporary mental health crises. It is written by an academic called Ruth Cain:
https://theconversation.com/how-neoliberalism-is-damaging-your-mental-health-90565
How neoliberalism is damaging your mental health
Published: January 30, 2018 7:31am EST
Ruth Cain, University of Kent
There is a widespread perception that mental ill health is on the rise in the West, in tandem with a prolonged decline in collective well-being. The idea that there are social and economic causes behind this perceived decline is increasingly convincing, amid what has been termed the zombie economics and grinding austerity, which have followed the global financial crash.
In particular, there is growing concern that the conditions and effects of neoliberalism – the enervating whirl of relentless privatisation, spiralling inequality, withdrawal of basic state support and benefits, ever-increasing and pointless work demands, fake news, unemployment and precarious work – is partly to blame. Perhaps most wearying are the invasive yet distant commands from media, state institutions, advertisements, friends or employers to self-maximise, persevere, grab your slice of the diminishing pie, “because you are worth it” – although you must constantly prove it, every day.
Depression in this context may appear almost self-protective: an opt-out from an unwinnable set of continual competitions. The recent rise in diagnoses of mental illnesses and “developmental disorders” involving states of agitation and hyperstimulation is similarly interesting. In the case of ADHD, for example, a person’s hyperactivity and distractibility render them officially “disordered” or even disabled, to the extent that they are supposedly unable to cope with a hyperstimulating, late-capitalist environment. Yet they are, in another sense, entirely in tune with an economy of non-stop distraction, in which attention is repeatedly grabbed at and financially exploited.
Published: January 30, 2018 7:31am EST
Ruth Cain, University of Kent
There is a widespread perception that mental ill health is on the rise in the West, in tandem with a prolonged decline in collective well-being. The idea that there are social and economic causes behind this perceived decline is increasingly convincing, amid what has been termed the zombie economics and grinding austerity, which have followed the global financial crash.
In particular, there is growing concern that the conditions and effects of neoliberalism – the enervating whirl of relentless privatisation, spiralling inequality, withdrawal of basic state support and benefits, ever-increasing and pointless work demands, fake news, unemployment and precarious work – is partly to blame. Perhaps most wearying are the invasive yet distant commands from media, state institutions, advertisements, friends or employers to self-maximise, persevere, grab your slice of the diminishing pie, “because you are worth it” – although you must constantly prove it, every day.
Depression in this context may appear almost self-protective: an opt-out from an unwinnable set of continual competitions. The recent rise in diagnoses of mental illnesses and “developmental disorders” involving states of agitation and hyperstimulation is similarly interesting. In the case of ADHD, for example, a person’s hyperactivity and distractibility render them officially “disordered” or even disabled, to the extent that they are supposedly unable to cope with a hyperstimulating, late-capitalist environment. Yet they are, in another sense, entirely in tune with an economy of non-stop distraction, in which attention is repeatedly grabbed at and financially exploited.
I did feel like the place I was working at was more like a hostage situation than an honest job offer a few weeks after I got there. There were some pretty decent Russian women there who seemed as miserable as I was and one of them said something about the place being like Kremlin.
I think the average Russian or Chinese person is embattled in a different way from say the average American or Indian. If you are used to something closer to a flawed democracy (and as I am, relatively Westernized/Anglicized), it is a real shock to the system. This was 2011 and this slow descent into a Panopticon was only just becoming more overt. Remember the NSA scandal of the Bush years? So Google etc openly going full police state, was a shock to me as an early, isolated human research subject (there is no other term for it).
It was a spooky hell overall, but over the years I did notice how many Ransomware gangs come out of Russia and I wondered if that was the deal. One of my favorite journalists is Yasha Levine and he has roots in both Ukraine and Russia I think and he was a bit skeptical of Russiagate etc.
Based on my experiences I had a suspicion that Russian ransomware is potentially the real issue rather than influence which is cited more often.
And most of us have such piddly secrets. What embitters me so much is that my only secret was bloody marijuana. FFS at least a third to one half of the Republican frat boys at that shithole are probably high on MJ most of the time. It was such bullshit.
Otoh if you have secrets like these, I can see how Russian (or Chinese) ransomware hackers would have you right where they want you:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/05/donald-trump-epstein-files-allegations-00816123
In the files, dated between August and October 2019, the woman, whose name is redacted, alleges that when she was between 13 and 15 years old, Epstein took her to either New York or New Jersey, where, “in a very tall building with huge rooms,” he introduced her to Trump. Trump, she said, “didn’t like that I was a boy-girl,” which the interview notes interpreted to mean tomboy.
The woman said other people were present, but she couldn’t recall who. Trump asked them to leave the room, then said “something to the effect of, ‘Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be,’” according to the interview notes. Trump then unzipped his pants and put her head “down to his penis,” she recalled in the interview. She said she “bit the shit out of it.” In response, she said he pulled her hair and punched her on the side of her head.
“Get this little bitch the hell out of here,” the woman recalled him saying. At that point, she said, people reentered the room. The FBI interviews don’t contain information about how the incident ended or how the woman exited the encounter.
The woman said other people were present, but she couldn’t recall who. Trump asked them to leave the room, then said “something to the effect of, ‘Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be,’” according to the interview notes. Trump then unzipped his pants and put her head “down to his penis,” she recalled in the interview. She said she “bit the shit out of it.” In response, she said he pulled her hair and punched her on the side of her head.
“Get this little bitch the hell out of here,” the woman recalled him saying. At that point, she said, people reentered the room. The FBI interviews don’t contain information about how the incident ended or how the woman exited the encounter.
That place I worked at was full of gloomy scientists who seemed to be cleaning up for these pseudo elite shitheads.
My boss there was a decent man that way, but kinda annoying ..he was not a bad man, but I am not a self-loathing enough Calvinist to think that some pot is a reason to be an inductee into a bloody police state that Google forces because a bunch of American politicians and people like Marvin Minsky went and hung out with Epstein and then presumably got pwned by Russian hackers.
So I came back to India. This is all kinda what I pieced together over the years after.
The scientists there were pretty respectable. But it seems like the worst use of “having nothing to hide” to go and let Google exploit that. At that point you will have something serious to hide- having helped Google usher in a police state because of all the sexual harassment and underage banging that creeps like Andy Rubin, Amit Singhal, Kanury S Rao, Lawrence Krauss, Walter Lewin, Geoff Marcy, Marvin Minsky etc have engaged in. That is not a metaphorical “vaccine” so much as way to groom people (women especially) to accept a creepy, corrupt and undemocratic police state as normal or worse inevitable.
That place struck me as a fusion of all the worst types of regressive and fascistic cultures and values sending women’s rights especially into the dark ages.
A fourth piece that really helped me at that time in my life (2014-2019) was a piece by Alison Taylor on the cultures of corrupt firms:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=public_integrity
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And I've read visitors are on sanction list, so someone had to sign a waiver
SheltieLover
Saturday
#6
No democrats, no oversight is a possibility. It could be a good thing.
littlemissmartypants
Saturday
#24
No democrats, no oversight is a possibility. It could be a good thing.
littlemissmartypants
Saturday
#25
And be sure to wear white so you stand out against all those dark suits around you.
calimary
Saturday
#38
No democrats, no oversight is a possibility. It could be a good thing.
littlemissmartypants
Saturday
#26