Notes, references & transcript: https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/stigma
References:
Choice Overload – How Having Too Many Options Can Shut Down Your Brain - InsideBE
Nielsen, S. C. (2007). The Tragedy of War: Clausewitz on Morality and the Use of Force. Defence Studies, 7(2), 208–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702430701338999 Though Clausewitz uses the term ‘aggression’, there is no accompanying discussion which attempts to argue that it is a crime. An example is the following rather ironic passage: ‘It is only aggression that calls forth defense, and war along with it. The aggressor is always peace‐loving (as Bonaparte always claimed to be); he would prefer to take over our country unopposed. To prevent his doing so one must be willing to make war and be prepared for it. In other words it is the weak, those likely to need defense, who should always be armed in order not to be overwhelmed.’ Clausewitz, On War (note 1) p. 370.
Medical News Today: What is gaslighting?
Tatiana Trifan @tatianatrifan.bsky.social 9:15 AM · Dec 11, 2025
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - Wikipedia
PBS – HACKING YOUR MIND – Living on Autopilot – Episode 101 – Aired: 09/09/20 It’s especially hard to overcome our autopilot biases because, much of the time, we’re not even aware we’re experiencing them. For instance, here’s an autopilot bias I can almost guarantee you’re not aware of — being biased in favor of one person over many people. One of Kahneman and Tversky’s closest colleagues studies how that bias distorts the decisions we make.
SciShow - The Return of Thalidomide - Jun 14, 2023 Hank Green on Youtube: As I’m making this video, I’m actually taking chemotherapy right now. And it’s wild. They give you the chemo, but before they do they dress up to make sure none of it gets on their skin because it’s dangerous for people. And then they put it in my veins.
Commentary: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace by James B. Meigs, MAY 2020 For the police, fear of public chaos outweighed, at least temporarily, concern for possible victims. Before dispatching those casually deputized citizens to keep order in the streets, the Anchorage police chief suspended the search for survivors in damaged buildings. “Arguably, the city was protecting its ruins from looters more conscientiously than it was looking for people trapped in them,” Mooallem writes. Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors. As in war, the first casualty in disasters is often the truth. One symptom of elite panic is the belief that too much information, or the wrong kind of information, will send citizens reeling.
The world’s biggest problem? Powerful psychopaths. | Brian Klaas - Big Think Jul 12, 2023
CMD - How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid By Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch | December 22nd, 2021 Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover. One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
And Voila, An Anti-Mask Twitter Rando Chloe Humbert · Apr 7, 2023
Wall Street Journal - Interest-Only Loans Helped Commercial Property Boom. Now They’re Coming Due. Landlords face a $1.5 trillion bill for commercial mortgages over the next three years. By Konrad Putzier, June 6, 2023 Many of the commercial landlords on the hook for the loans are vulnerable to default in part because of the way their loans are structured. Unlike most home loans, which get paid down each year, many commercial mortgages are known as interest-only loans. Borrowers make only interest payments during the life of the loan, with the entire principal due at the end. Interest-only loans as a share of new commercial mortgage-backed securities issuance increased to 88% in 2021, up from 51% in 2013, according to Trepp. Typically, owners pay off this debt by getting a new loan or selling the building. Now, steeper borrowing costs and lenders’ growing reluctance to refinance these loans are raising the likelihood that many of them won’t be paid back. Many banks, fearful of losses and under pressure from regulators and shareholders to shore up their balance sheets, have mostly stopped issuing new loans for office buildings, brokers say. Office and some mall owners are facing falling demand for their buildings because of remote work and e-commerce.
Anti-mask Woke-washing. The moral distortion of social justice. Chloe Humbert Aug 31, 2023
Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far. Revelations that digital consultants to the Trump campaign misused the data of millions of Facebook users set off a furor on both sides of the Atlantic. This is how The Times covered it. By Nicholas Confessore, April 4, 2018 In March, The New York Times, working with The Observer of London and The Guardian, obtained a cache of documents from inside Cambridge Analytica, the data firm principally owned by the right-wing donor Robert Mercer. The documents proved that the firm, where the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon was a board member, used data improperly obtained from Facebook to build voter profiles. The news put Cambridge under investigation and thrust Facebook into its biggest crisis ever. Here’s a guide to our coverage.
Dailydot - Exclusive: Ex-Cambridge Analytica psychologist secretly aided prominent anti-COVID vaccine group. Leaked chat logs detail efforts to influence elected leaders. Mikael Thalen - Posted on Jul 30, 2021 - Updated on Aug 4, 2021, 11:45 am CDT Leaked chat logs reveal how the former lead psychologist for Cambridge Analytica has been working behind the scenes with a notorious anti-vaccine group in the U.K. The chat records, provided to the Daily Dot by the activist collective DDoSecrets, detail efforts by HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team), a self-described “group of highly qualified UK doctors, scientists, economists, psychologists and other academic experts,” to influence politicians on issues related to COVID-19. The leak, as first reported by Logically on Tuesday, involves tens of thousands of chat messages stretching back to January before the group’s official launch.
The Pandata File. Detailed report on the international hub established April 2020 - COUNTER DISINFORMATION PROJECT, JUL 22, 2022 I discovered Fagan was advising the group on messaging and communication strategy from a psychological approach I wondered if and how data could have been collected and used. (HART leaks messages) Tanya Klymenko 2021-02-02 T 13:08:48 “@ pf thank you for sharing, very interesting! So, if the “pro-mask” are particularly concerned about equality then they might in theory be susceptible to a message on raising inequality as a direct result of NPI (lockdown). Is that a reasonable assumption?” Patrick Fagan 2021-02-02 T 14:44:02 “Yes exactly... They are wearing the face mask to be fair to others and to reduce harm... If messaging shows that face masks are unfair and harmful, that would be very powerful”
Twitter from @theSGLF: State Government Leadership Foundation (SGLF) Feb 9, 2022 Our latest ad is making an impact and liberals are now agreeing with what conservatives have been saying all along: mask mandates do more harm than good.
COVID-19 lockdown revisionism Blake Murdoch, Timothy Caulfield CMAJ Apr 2023, 195 (15) E552-E554; DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.221543 The term “lockdown” has become a powerful and perverted word in the infodemic about democracies’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown, as used in public discourse, has expanded to include any public health measure, even if it places little to no restriction on social mobility or interaction. For example, a working literature review and meta-analysis on the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality misleadingly defined lockdowns as “the imposition of at least 1 compulsory non-pharmaceutical intervention.”1 This working paper therefore conflated mandatory isolation for people with confirmed infections and masking policies with heavy-handed limitations on freedom of movement, and since it gained viral fame, it has helped fuel calls for “no more lockdowns.” This working paper has been highly critiqued and is less convincing than comparative assessments of health measures, like the Oxford Stringency Index.2,3 Here, we discuss the spread of misinformation on lockdowns and other public health measures, which we refer to as “lock-down revisionism,” and how this phenomenon has damaged trust in public health initiatives designed to keep people safer.
Toxic Sludge is Good for You 2002 In today’s corporate culture major PR firms promote crisis management as a necessary business expense. Whenever something bad happens to a corporation, often its first move is not to deal with the actual problem, but to manage the negative perception caused by that problem.
The Scarlet Letter - Wikipedia
The Astounding Physics of N95 Masks minutephysics Premiered Jun 18, 2020
Information about our most popular models of 3M N95 Respirators (sometimes referred to as “masks”).
