Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Conservative blogs--military intervention needed?





















A big hat-tip to Canadian Cynic for retrieving
this nugget.


From a US military report co-authored by the infamous Dorothy Denning, promoter of the "Clipper chip," comes this proposal to infiltrate the blogosphere:

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.

[Emphasis mine--DD]

A "significant educational burden?" Aw, come on. Lack of education has never stopped conservative blogs from being popular before. Indeed, education can be a serious stumbling-block when the aim is to inflame and mobilize the rubes. Why let analysis and ideas get in the way of a good hateful shriek?

So, bon courage, undercover milbloggers.
Join the fray. No one will notice anything odd or untoward: you'll fit right in. Your challenge, though, is not to shoulder that "educational burden," but to shed it. Don't slow yourselves down. Who knows? Someday you might even win a Weblog Award.

No comments: