Wednesday, November 01, 2017

If I was a young graduate student in political science today,

(and at age 55, I am not) I might not be necessarily pitching my advisor "coercive persuasion" as a thesis topic, but I'd sure as shit being reading up on said subject.  I'd at least want a sense of what it isn't and a path to maybe a definition that'd fit the strictures of poli sci.
Apropos to yesterday's attack in NYC it continually fascinates me that outfits like ISIS have got some kind of profiling model (however crude) that hooks in recruits and allows a terrorist organization to program and train a homicidal asset entirely remotely.  Maybe there is something I'm not getting here, but that seems pretty unprecedented and flies in the face of Jacques Ellul's fairly rigid definitions of propaganda and thought control. Somehow ISIS doesn't need to control the state apparatus or the flow of information to a recruit in order to create a zealous soldier....
What am I not getting here?

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