Battling Archetypes

Decoding Trolls
Decoding Trolls
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Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net

  1. 1h ago

    Exporting Chaos (Turning) in a Conservative (Right) Costume

    Riot, and the surf One more word, then. Riot. The dictionaries send it to the Old French riote, a quarrel, and stop. Read it by its sound, and the straight sound, Rt-, sits on the face of the word for tumult. Keep that in mind too. Continued from here: Now imagine you wanted to hack minds today. Would you invent a sound-meaning bundle like M-N and N-M, or Tr- and Rt-? Would you then try to hardwire it into humanity? You could not. It took six thousand years for this pattern to be embedded, and for someone like me to go hunting for why I keep seeing the same sound-meanings in so many languages across all that time, and why contemporary vocabulary is still full of it. Or would you, having noticed it without really understanding it, riff off it? Would you call your social media network Truth Social? You would be surfing it. And here is the surf. Tr- is turning. Rt- is righting. Create the chaos, which is the turning. Then purport to solve it, which is the righting. The riot is the turning. The strong man who says I will lock every rioter up, the strong woman who says it, is the righting. The weak man who says it suddenly becomes strong in the minds of those who hear him. The chaos is his opportunity to model himself as strength, as power, as energy, as the rightful ruler. I will lock the far left up. That is the righting. They are turning. I am the righting. And because the hand that offers the righting was behind the turning, the righting is his to offer. The oldest shape of the trick, Tr- in trick, from druj, is the damsel in distress. russian Disinfolklorists love the motif. I have written about it very often. The hero needs a damsel. Donald says Ukraine is in distress. You need me to save you. If there is no damsel in distress, you distress one. You withdraw the means of defence, the Patriot missiles, Starshield. You deny it. Then you lie about it. You confuse everyone, because you are trying to make the damsel desire you and need you. Then you ride in to the rescue, and in Ukraine’s case you try to hand the damsel away. The Nazis turned, then righted The Nazis came to power exactly the way MAGA came to power, and exactly the way the National Rally in France, and the AfD, think they are going to come to power. For three years before 1933 the Nazi storm troopers, Tr- in troopers, fought on the streets of German cities. For the same three years the Party, Rt- in Party, campaigned as the one force that could end the fighting in the streets. The violence they created provoked the need for righting. This is the oldest trick in the book. You turn, then you right. Because they were behind the violence, they were the ones who could right it. Within a day of the Reichstag fire, Reich again, on 27 February 1933, the decree suspending civil liberties was signed. We hear the same tune, the same trope, the same troll from the National Rally in France. They will suspend rights because shopkeepers need to be protected. Which is true, of course. But they are itching to suspend the rights. We fell for the troll in Germany in the 1930s. We will not fall for it this time. I will see to that, and all of us listeners, it is our job to see to that, to help people understand it. Turning, righting. See too my Lulaverse and the Principles of Infolklore episode: russia carpet bombed Syria from 2015 to provoke the refugees. Their arrival entrenched Law and Justice in Poland, Brexit in England, Le Pen in France, Orbán in Hungary. Provoke the violence, then pose as the remedy. Provoke the refugees, then exploit their misery for your own political ends. On 6 January 2021 a crowd was turned against the seat of the American legislature. The man who turned it ran four years later on law and order. Turning, righting. MAGA, russia, Rubio, Trump, turning. Ukraine, righting. Hold the two words. What happened in France Here is what happened, as the French press and the interior ministry have reported it so far. The movement began in September. It started with a teachers’ strike in Créteil on 17 September and student marches over the state of the schools. It grew into a movement over the cost of living. On 13 October Jordan Bardella, the president of Le Pen’s party, spoke from Madrid. With these authoritarians it is always a family business, a nephew or a son-in-law, it is full of archetypes, like a mafia family. He called for an immediate end to the protests and for tougher penalties against minors. On Saturday 17 October the marches went nationwide. The interior ministry counted 550,000 people on the streets. The unions said 800,000. By evening the marches had turned, in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Limoges and elsewhere. Masked young men smashed shop windows and looted. Unmasked young men did it too. Town halls and police stations were attacked. The town hall of Limoges was set on fire. The prefecture for Marseille’s department counted more than 30,000 looters in one day. One demonstrator died north of Paris, of a heart attack. RIP. On Sunday 18 October looting resumed around the Place de la République. An undeclared call to assemble there at two in the afternoon had gone round social media, on TikTok, run by China. That evening, two hours before President Macron addressed the nation, Le Pen spoke. She pre-empted him. “A crise de confiance.” “A threat to democracy.” Macron is “without credibility or authority.” Rt- in authority. She blamed the far left, of course she did, and the president. Bardella, after visiting a Paris police station, said, “Order no longer exists in France today,” and that France was humiliated. You provoke the distress. You neg the victim into feeling vulnerable. Then you pose as the saviour. It is the oldest trick in the book, and it is what is happening in our news and in our politics. You do the turning. You say order no longer exists in France, and people think, oh mon Dieu, I need right. Then you pose as the Right. Turning and right. France was humiliated. No, it was not. France has an independent nuclear deterrent, thank God, deliverable on land, sea and air, independent of any other country. It has an amazing car industry. It has the most amazing art and cities and beautiful places and ideas. Yes, it has underfunded its education. Yes, young people there have a genuinely held grievance. But these ghouls, the russian ghouls, the russians funding the National Front and the National Rally, these ghouls talking down one of the greatest national cultures in our human family, are just exploiting the chaos. They are turning the turning into more turning, so that they can purport to right it. And who has confidence they would right anything, when they are so unright as to exploit a moment of national turning for their own political ends? On the night of Monday 19 October curfews came into force in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and Nice. By Tuesday the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, had 2,513 people in custody and 67 in prison. He said this. “You couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye after hundreds of shops have been looted and say we hadn’t lost control.” The government blamed looters and ultra-left militants and named the far-left party, La France Insoumise. Le Pen’s party meets in congress this week, and there she launches her campaign for the presidential election of April 2027. One academic quoted in the press called the weekend a Christmas present for her party. Turning, then righting. The riot on Saturday. The party of order on Sunday. Read that sequence again with the two words in your ear. The russian hand: what is on the record Now the russian hand. Here the Code of Positive Trolls I write under asks for care about what is claimed. Nobody in France has yet shown Moscow’s hand in the organisation of the violence. Viginum, the French state’s watchdog for foreign digital interference, found only minimal foreign influence in the mobilisation before 17 October. What is on the record is this. A French assessment dated 18 October found that the pro-Kremlin network called Matryoshka produced around twenty fabricated news reports in two days, dressed as AFP, Deutsche Welle and Le Monde. One claimed that fifty-four French teachers had been killed. The Kremlin’s Pravda network put out twenty-one items on the Saturday’s disorder across two French-language sites. Iran’s foreign ministry and its embassies posted thirty-four times about the protests, and Paris summoned Iran’s ambassador on 7 October over it. TASS, the Ruschist state agency, called the events pogroms. And the far-right influencers in English, this clown Tommy Robinson among them, had ten times the audience of the state channels. What they amplified was recycled. Burning cars from a Kurdish demonstration in Paris in December 2022, presented as Saturday night, with eight million views. A burning bus from January 2023. Football celebrations from May. Create the spectacle, then amplify the outrage. The two are inextricable. And watch who amplified. The righting side, the self-declared righting side, amplified the turning, ten to one. Create the spectacle The germ in the street So the germ is in the amplification first. I contend the germ of russian interference is in the street too. I say that with some care, because I spent seven years learning how to tell. As a diplomat in eastern Ukraine from 2015 to 2022 my job included going to demonstrations to discern whether they were russia-controlled. Sometimes they were. Usually they were genuine, as the No to Capitulation rallies of autumn 2019 were genuine. going to demonstrations That was the time, you may remember, when Macron and Steinmeier and Merkel and Obama were trying to force Ukraine into capitulation, to surrender to the Ruschists the right to hold elections in russian-occupied Ukraine. President Zelenskyy made fun of Putler at the press conference after the meeting in December 2019. I went to those amazing rallies, where Ukrainians said no, we are not surrendering ou

  2. Oct 23

    Revolutions in Paris, DC, Berlin: Turning, Then Righting

    I’m going to talk about turning, then righting. When I use the word righting I mean R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, not rioting as in France. But I am going to be talking about the rioting in France too. Turning, then righting. This is a fundamental movement in our mental models, in our lives and in our world. Movement is usually the beginning of philosophy and of religions. And there is a very simple dual movement embedded in our languages. Turning, then righting. Would you invent one, or surf one? Imagine you wanted to hack minds today. Would you invent what I call a sound-meaning bundle? Would you then try to hardwire it into humanity? Get an advertising agency, or lots of bots, to communicate it right into the inner minds of everyone? Or would you notice one that already existed? One that had been embedded in our language, in our concepts and in our minds for six thousand years. Even if you did not really understand what it was, you might just riff off it. You might surf on its surface. So what I am talking about today is turning. When you see a revolution on the streets of Paris, whether in 1789 or today, that is turning. And then comes the righting of the turning. Think of a wheel. The wheel is turning, with a Tr- in it, the consonantal pair. When it stops turning, it is righted. You have a wheelwright who fixes it. The wheel was turning, then it was broken. There is a riot, perhaps, or an insurrection. Then someone rights it. The wheelwright rights the wheel. So you create the chaos, which is the turning. Then you purport to save it, to solve it, which is the righting. The riot is the turning. The strong man who says I will lock every rioter up, or indeed the strong woman leader who says it, I will lock the far left up, that is the righting. And because the hand that offers the righting was behind the turning, the righting is his to offer. Think of a wheelwright who plants stones or nails on the road. Think of running a business that fixes tyres. You guarantee yourself plenty of custom by putting nails on the street. The hand that offers the righting was behind the turning, and he is ready for it, because he planned it. The damsel in distress The oldest shape of the trick is the damsel in distress. France is in distress. Europe is in distress. russian Disinfolklorists love the motif, and I have written about it often. The hero needs a damsel. If there is no damsel in distress, well, no bother. You distress one. Then you ride in. America was great. You say it is not great. You convince people it is not great. In fact you make it ungreat. You degrade America. You distress America, and then you say you are going to save it. There is an abhorrent cultural meme I have spoken about before, the men who call themselves pick-up artists. They nag their victims. Your nose is a bit too big. Wow, I am surprised you ever had a girlfriend, because you are pretty ugly. Then they use that vulnerability to hook the person. That is the micro level. On the macro level we are not used to this. We are not used to it in geopolitics. We are not used to it in politics. We are not used to people arranging riots like the January 6th insurrection and then riding in to supposedly fix it. We are not used to countries carpet bombing, let us say, Syria. Imagine a country like russia, which was having problems in Ukraine in the summer of 2015. It decides to carpet bomb Syria, which it starts doing in September 2015. That provokes millions of migrants, because nobody wants to die. The migrants come into Europe. They cause political chaos. And the people who ride to the rescue are PiS in Poland and Orbán in Hungary. Germany had a lot of problems. Merkel invited them in, legalised a million migrants and more or less absorbed them. Now we have the AfD, supported by russia, riding high in the polls. You cause the distress, then you purport to solve it. You cause the distress, then you sponsor political movements like the National Rally, you offer them massive loans, and then you purport to solve it. The same trick in Reform. It is a routine. A mantra for the moment The movement I want to bring into our minds is turning, then the straightening. I am going to keep saying it. Turning, then righting. I want to embed it, so that when our minds are being turned by someone, in real time, we recall this little mantra. Turning, righting. I am also going to show you how, in the letters themselves, there is both a sound and a meaning. That is what I mean by a sound-meaning bundle. It can help us understand precisely what is going on when someone in our private life, on the micro scale, is turning us. Or when a thought inside our own minds is turning us. And then we can carry it all the way from the micro to the macro, to the streets of Paris, to US politics, to what is going on between the United States and Iran and Israel and the world. Everything seems to be turning upside down. So who is going to do the righting? And then you have these political right movements, far right movements, which say, oh, we will lock up all the rioters. We will fix it. Keep this in mind while I talk. Turning, then righting. The wheel is turning. That wheel has been the metaphor of Indo-European cultures for four to six thousand years. Then the righting. This is exactly what we see in our political right. I am not describing this because it is clever to have noticed it. I am describing it because it is a mnemonic. It helps us remember, in the moment when someone is turning us, that we need to be righted. We have to right ourselves. We have to think, how can I right myself in this moment of maybe they are right? Maybe I will just vote for MAGA and it will help. Maybe I will just vote for AfD. They seem to offer a simple solution. They are going to solve the migrant problem. They are negative about the government, and I have plenty to complain about in my own life. So maybe they are just right. Ah sure, I will give them a vote. That is the righting. And then they call themselves the Right. They self-declare. I am right wing. And you think, God, that sounds right. So what is going on with the sounds? In turning there is Tr-, the consonantal skeleton. Its reversal is in righting, right, Rt-. Tr- and then Rt-. Keep those two words in mind. Turning, right. Say them a few times in that order. The wheel turning, and then righted. By the end of this you will not be able to watch a riot on the evening news without hearing them. Think of the conservative voter You think to yourself, I am quite conservative. I am a traditionalist. I do not really like change. I am going to vote for the Right. I feel right wing and I am unashamedly right wing. These people come along and there is tumult. There is a lot of turning, a bit of a revolution, demonstrations. I do not like that. I just want to do my job and go home from work, and I want the righting of this. The MAGA people come along and say they are going to solve migration. I did not think much about migration before, but I read all these memes. Every time I turn on my computer, or turn on Fox News, I read terrible things. People from Haiti eating pets. My cat went missing. I want it to end. I want to be right. And here are people promising to make it right. This guy Trump turns my mind. He is turning around in my mind. But he promises to make it right. So I fall for it. I fall into it. I do not know what to think. My mind is turning. Notice the two sounds. Turning, Tr-. Its reversal, Rt-. Turning, right. What a sound-meaning bundle is The sound is Tr- and Rt-. But a meaning travels with those sounds. Underneath the words you and I speak there are families of sound that carry a meaning with them. Nobody teaches us these families. We never even notice them. They behave lawfully all the same. And they can now be measured. The first one I found is the M-N- sound. It is in Mana, mind, moon, month, man, name, which is the reversal, N-M-, and meaning. The same two consonants, in language after language, from Ireland to India, on the same cluster of ideas. In all of them is the idea of something shining through something else. The meaning of a word shines through the word. In a human there is something that marks it off from a stone. We call it the life force, or Mana, or energy, qi or ki. In the mind, the same idea. In the moon, the light shining through. The dictionaries file those words, mind, moon, month, man, name, under four separate ancestors, and call the shared sound shape of M-N- an accident. I had a hypothesis that maybe they emanate from one root. So I put it to a test. I used the NorthEuraLex database, a public one of 107 languages, organised by meaning and never by sound. That is what I mean by a sound-meaning bundle. On it the M-N- sound keeps company with the field of mind, moon, month, name and meaning at a rate of 20.8 per cent. You look at the 107 languages. You look at all the words for mind, moon, measure, month, man, name and meaning. In the Indo-European subset, 20.8 per cent of them carry the M-N- sound. The rate for the language as a whole is 3.46 per cent. Choose any two consonants and any six fields of meaning, and the average is 3.46 per cent. So a word on the field of mind and measure and moon and meaning is eight times more likely to carry the M-N- sound than a word taken at random. The chance of that being a coincidence is one in a number with sixty-six digits after it. The frame came first of 182 frames tested. That work is the project I call Reversion to the Moon. I use Mana, the idea of energy inside memes, to distinguish positive from negative trolling. So it feeds into this project, and it is where the method was built. The moon, mēnōt, the word the proto-Indo-Europeans used for it, and what I call the moon-based metaphor, light shining through the moon, is my hypothesis about why the first Indo-Europeans embedded the bundle. By chance at first, and thereafter by convention. By sound-meaning bundle, then, I mean not

  3. Oct 15

    Podcast | Real Ukraine, Future russia, and Tools Three and Four

    This week brings a little more of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, and a bit of the principles of Infolklore. It also brings the end of Future russia, Real Ukraine. Or, as I now call it, Real Ukraine, future russia, with a small r. President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder My view is that President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder, as the English would say. He has been dealt quite a bad hand over the last few weeks. We are going through one of those cycles we have all been through many times before. He has flushed out Donald and Putler by offering this ceasefire. He knows, of course, it will never be taken up. So it is a safe offer. He also knows that no action he takes, or Ukraine takes, will help get aid from the United States and from Donald. So he models peacefulness and a wish to make a deal. It will not help with America. But it builds capital for after the midterms, and for the long term. I see him trolling America, Donald and russia along. He knows well what Donald and the people around him do not seem to understand, or do not care to, because of whatever compromise is going on. The more you offer peace to the russians, the more they think you are weak. That goes for Donald too. So they think Ukraine and America are very weak. Constitutionally, peace is almost impossible for them. Remember Lavrov’s and Peskov’s words this week: no, we will not take a break. So it is very easy to troll the russians. Reflexive control works very well on this front. I focus on the front. What may be happening east of the Donets River is a very important milestone in Ukraine’s battlefield success. The mid-range strikes go on. There are these Academy Award-winning strikes on the data centres, and now Sberbank’s, which is a beautiful hit. When I was a diplomat in Dnipro, I went to see the board of PrivatBank when the state took it over. We talked about the vulnerability of data centres. It never crossed my mind, as I sat in that room with the then CEO of PrivatBank, that Ukraine would one day destroy Sberbank’s new data centre. Let’s hope to see more of those. That is what I focus on, rather than all the Starlink noise. Real and future russia Real and future russia is my new analytical lens. I use it to look at any national or nationalist movement. Such a movement may define itself by looking backwards. But it must mainly define itself by looking forwards. In Ukraine’s case that means building a modern European state without corruption, along the lines the European Union models. It means a state brilliant at nurturing its children’s destinies, educating them properly, and turning out critically minded humans. It means looking away from the Soviet legacy. That is a movement all countries must go through, in my humble opinion, in varying degrees and at various times. Future russia, real russia, will be the russia around St Petersburg and Moscow, with a few forests around them and a population of perhaps 20 million. It has a good chance to be a good state. It has good universities, museums and human capital. It will have to pay its debts, as will all the other former Ruschist Federation countries. But whenever we hear any russian, with a small r, speak about the past, mining grievance, Peter the Great, any of that nonsense, past glories in any disguise, we know it is old russia speaking. Historical russia. That person must be given no power and no entitlement to control of the information space or of economic resources. That should be a condition of any economic aid from the European Union, China or any other great power. Talking about history and the past is a luxury. A country and a national culture can afford it when they are not murdering people by the million in pursuit of a historical goal that was untrue and never existed, instead of building a modern nation state. An apparent contradiction This is where I ended a couple of weeks ago. There may seem to be a contradiction here. My main intellectual project, as many of you know, is to re-centre Ukraine in the story of humanity over the past 6,000 years: of Indo-European linguistic, cultural, religious and human development. Yet I also hold an absolute ban on entertaining any historical russia. The Bolshoi, the ballet, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, all of that imperialist nonsense, however wonderful some of the art is, and however derivative of Western European art in many cases. Future russia is asked to leave its history alone and live on the map, within the borders it ends up with after its withdrawal from 100% of Ukraine. So why should Ukraine not do the same? Because re-centring Ukraine is not a claim on anyone’s land. It is a claim on our attention. The difference between the two is the difference between the historical lens and the real lens. Identity is wholly a function of stories The narrow version of the project affords Ukraine what every sovereign culture already has. Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 1 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 2 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 3 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 4 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 5 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 6 In 1777 Johann Gottfried Herder asked where Germany’s Shakespeare was. As I have written, “The modern nation state was created after Herder’s 1777 plea to unite the 10 German tribes behind a set of stories (folklore or more accurately folksongs) typifying Germanness. The Brothers Grimm, Goethe and later Wagner answered that call. And 90 years later the first unified German state was created.” Identity is wholly a function of stories. Some of you will remember that I came to this realisation in eastern Ukraine. russia understands it too. That is why it is so brilliant at Disinfolklore, and why Donald is. Disinfolklore also creates identity, by telling mean stories and injecting meanness into our minds. It creates just as strong a sense of identity as the positive stories do. Think of Greece. We think of Athens and ancient Athens. But the first capital of modern Greece was not Athens. Choosing Athens was a way to attach some of that ancientness to the modern state of Greece, a wholly new, invented country, like Germany, like Switzerland, like Belgium. And this week we saw Rubio, the complete ingénue, in front of the Acropolis, talking about Western civilisation, or values he learned as an undergraduate, probably when Huntington was all the rage. It was such an embarrassment. Huntington took a whole set of Indo-European cultures and chose Islam as his main dividing line. Given what I have looked into of ancient Iran, and since it was ancient Iranian scholars who largely systematised Islam, I see Islam as an Indo-European religion, as I see Christianity. By making their war in Iran, they are doing what Huntington asked of them. But for him to stand before the Acropolis banging on about this is just so embarrassing. If you saw any of his speech, he is probably the worst orator ever. He has absolutely no sense of pace, for such a portentous speech meant to lead into his presidential ambitions. That is, if he is not in The Hague, or in prison, guilty of war crimes. My point is this. We know all about ancient Greek. But the modern Greek state is related to it only through stories, and by having its capital at Athens. It is the same with Germany, and with Italy, also a fairly recent state, from around 1870. The collectors and the states they made The same work made most of the states we now take for granted. “You see most European states alive today are a function of the national consciousness wrought from the folklore collectors’ work, inspired by Ossian, Herder and Brothers Grimm,” I wrote in November 2024. The Ossian tales turned out, in the end, to be faked. “States which had never existed before - Greece, Finland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Belgium,.. were all created out of this work.” All of us who take part in the national cultures of the states we belong to have won the lottery in many ways. Others have not. The Assyrians, the Kurds, the Palestinians. Tens of thousands of amazing cultures and peoples never made it. Then there are the Manchu, who ruled China for centuries. Around 1911 they lost power in a revolution. Today you would be lucky to find more than a handful of people who identify as Manchu. Great cultures disappear all the time. They lose control of the states they ran. I believe this is what will happen to russia. It will be well deserved. They should not regret it or be afraid of it, because it has happened countless times before. It does not involve mass death. It involves new memories. Take Vilnius. Polish schoolchildren still learn Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz’s poem that opens with Lithuania, and Vilnius was long thought of as a Polish city. But Vilnius is in Lithuania. Short of the Law and Justice party going in to take it back, nobody talks of this as a problem. It is a perfectly normal development in human relations. So russians should not be afraid of their country disappearing in that way. Ukraine is one of those states. Its songs and its poets, Taras Shevchenko first among them, made a nation of a people the empire called a province. As Timothy Snyder has written, “The earliest articulation of Ukrainian patriotism by russian subjects came from the left bank, from the new university at Kharkiv, in the 1820s and 1830s.” russia is relentlessly trying to destroy that city today. In August 2022, as russia shelled Kharkiv, I wrote that by destroying the buildings of the university where the idea of modern Ukraine was born, Muscovy could not turn back time. It was too late. From the first days of the full-scale invasion, my mission was, in the words I used later, “to campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly, by fair means or foul.” There are only around 190 of us with a protected nation state. Ukraine was a founding member of the United Nations. It signed the C

  4. Oct 7

    Podcast | Plagued by Information Bombs and Actor Sovereigns’ Costumes

    I thought we’d start off with a bit of plague. That’s a joke. We’re actually going to start with a bit of Disinfolklore about a plague. A non-existent plague, in my humble opinion. We’re going to look at the plague story as a story, as an item of Disinfolklore, which is what all this is about. A story, not a pathogen It’s been a very busy week. In the first week of October a story went around the world. A laboratory in Siberia. A worker taken ill. A test tube, perhaps. Very graphic. All of us can remember test tubes from school. I’d be surprised if they even use test tubes these days. Pneumonia, as someone quipped. Let’s just hope Donald doesn’t work out there’s a P in pneumonia. We’ll never hear the end of it. That’s a play on his Democrats thing, and the B at the end of dumb. If he finds out there’s a P at the beginning of pneumonia, perhaps plague, he will never stop plaguing us with his pneumonic plays on words. Two hundred people under observation. A hospital closed. All units of Disinfolklore. Then a denial, another unit of Disinfolklore. Then a second case, reported. Another unit of Disinfolklore. Then a cover-up, alleged. Another unit of Disinfolklore. Then all the anti-vaxxers, who suddenly seem to care. They didn’t care about Covid. In fact they thought Covid was a conspiracy. Now they are tweeting like crazy about a plague. A non-existent plague, that is. Within three days the President of the United States had offered russia help. I predicted that a couple of days before it happened. Structurally, this struck me as an alibi. russia built it to provoke exactly this kind of reaction from friendly countries. He said he’d call Putler about it. So this episode is not really about bacteria. I don’t do epidemiology here. I don’t do fact-checking. That’s not what Disinfolklore is about. Look at the wording of the people whose job is to be careful. The State Department is “monitoring the situation”. The CDC is monitoring “reports”. The World Health Organisation is following up on “the reported death”, and asking for clarity on “media reports” of a second case. Appeal for volunteers! The main reviewer of a submitted draft journal article I have co-authored requested that I find human coders to see if the findings of archetypes in stories can be replicated. If you’re willing to help on this please send me an email (dutiful-raffles0r@icloud.com), message, dm me on X, or comment here and I’ll send you a link. Above is a screenshot of the web app I’ve created for this purpose. It’s quite a simple task: the App (see screenshot above) shows you items of Disinfolklore from Russia-occupied Ukraine. Then it asks if you see any specific archetypes in the short story extracts. If you don’t see any, you just tick ‘None!” And whichever you see you just tick them. Will take about two hours and then you save it/download it. It would mean a lot to me and my co-author as this is the last remaining issue to address with the paper on Disinfolklore! All anyone outside has is reports. Yet my timeline is full of doctors opining on every dimension of this as if it were real. People are expressing concern for the non-existent dead lab technician. They argue over whether she was eighteen or twenty-three. Pictures are sent around. The people who don’t believe the story do the same thing, sending round pictures of this very russian-looking person in Siberia. But all anyone outside has is reports. Those of us who have spent the last three or four years in the Ukrainian information space have been through cycles like this many times. The scale of this troll is pretty big. So the unit of analysis here is the story. It’s one piece of Disinfolklore, with many dimensions to it. Disinfolklore is folklore’s counterfeit. It takes the storyteller’s tools and uses them to put a meaning in our minds. This episode asks how this one was detonated, what it is for, and why so many clever, educated, well-meaning people carried it for nothing. They’re not even being paid for it. Three readings I posted three readings of this story as it broke. Here they are as I wrote them. The first, on the sixth of October: “Plague: What an information bomb! All those peeps who believe Covid wasn’t real falling for this troll.” The second: “Russian Plague: Why this information warfare bomb now? The plague is not real. This is an example of Combat Propaganda. Russia wants back into the family of civilised nations: its message is: You need Russia. Cooperate. We must be friends. Look: if you’re friends then you can get information on the plague.” And maybe build a golf course and a Trump Tower in Siberia on the side. And it goes on. The second main goal is to associate russia with plague in our minds. For those of us who listen to all the russian Disinfolklore in the Ukraine information space, that association is easy. But the rest of the world needs to be convinced, constantly, that russia is the bear they should not poke. So this is a version of the Nuclear Apocalypse troll, which no longer works. That is according to Gideon Rachman, who wrote in the FT this week. He wrote that russia’s nuclear apocalypse threats don’t seem to work any more. However, this is not a good thing, was perhaps his line. The bottom line is that the Nuclear Apocalypse troll no longer seems to work. A secondary objective is to confirm for the security elite which runs russia how dumb the rest of the world is. “Even governments which know this is a troll must play along with it as it’s too hard/impossible to explain to their citizens that this Disinfolklore Galaxy wrought of the plague troll is NOT real.” These are just my hypotheses about why on Earth russia might do this. I don’t know why. There are probably a hundred different reasons. But they’re certainly going with it. It’s playing out the way these things always play out, only on a global scale. The third piece I wrote: “Plague: Ruschist Biolab troll. Distract from whatever else is going on: Look at us! Feel sorry for us! Help us! … Look away from Ukraine! Neatness of the tale is its tell.” And at its end: “We fall for the troll and perpetuate it. We will believe opposites. … ‘Surrender to us or die’ is Ruschia’s perennial message.” Three readings, one claim. The thing to analyse is the information bomb. It works whatever lies beneath it. That is what the rest of this piece shows. The three laws A hundred and fifty years ago the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James Frazer named the Laws of Sympathetic Magic. I did a five-episode series on the laws of sympathetic magic almost a year ago now. Four decades of laboratory work by the psychologists Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff showed that educated, scientifically literate adults reason by these laws every day. Offer people a sweater and they will wear it. Tell them it once belonged to Hitler, laundered and sterilised, and most refuse. “Once in contact, always in contact.” That’s one of the laws of sympathetic magic, the Law of Contagion. Things once in contact go on affecting each other, at any distance, forever. Think of the great love of your life. Your lost love. Contagion is analogous to my word Mana. Mana is an energy passing between us. It passes in conversation, when we’re with people, and when we read their words on the page. Mana is my word for that energy. The scientists call it the Law of Contagion. Then the Law of Similarity. The image equals the object. Like produces like. A thing that looks like another thing is felt to be it. So people constantly mistake the Photoshopped images for the real thing. Donald. Putler on his horse with his bare chest, rather than a scared old man in the basement. I’m not quite sure how to describe Donald. So this story feels a bit like Covid. My timeline filled with experts asking whether anyone else was reminded of February 2022, or 2020. The third is the Law of Opposites. Reverse a sign and it carries its inverse charge, its Mana, its energy, through the same channel. These laws don’t care whether a story is true. They work on the shape of a story. That is why an information bomb can be built out of reports alone. Plague, the bear and the honey-knower Say the word plague. What comes is not a bacterium. It is the Black Death. The cart, the pit, the end of the world. The word carries the charge of six centuries of European memory. My own Cambridge college, Trinity Hall, was founded in 1350 to train lawyers. Most of the lawyers had died in the Black Death. This is the same operation as “Don’t poke the bear“. The same operation as “We are going to nuke you if you don’t let us have our way”. The old Slavic word for the bear was so feared that speakers stopped saying it. Instead they said medved’, the honey-knower. The real name was lost. The name was in contact with the thing, so the name was dangerous. It’s a huge irony. Or rather it’s not irony, it’s harmony. One of the great war criminals of our age is named Medvedev, and another is Medvedchuk. Honey, both of them. Medvedchuk was the Ukrainian member of parliament who first voiced the Ukraine biolabs troll in the Verkhovna Rada, on behalf of his masters in Moscow. And Medvedev, this week again, was threatening nuclear end days, nuclear holocaust, on everyone. Medved’ means honey lover. So, bear. They are the epitome of “Don’t poke the bear”, and they do what they say they do. The name was in contact with the thing. Medved’, for honey, was in contact with the bear. So the name was dangerous. Now put the word plague beside russia in every headline on Earth for a week. Everyone is going to Google it, and they will see the plague and russia. Those of us fortunate enough to come from normal countries, or at least countries which are normal in our lifetime, will find this very odd. Most people live in the normal world. They aren’t in th

  5. Oct 1

    Podcast | Disinfolklore Detector - Live Demo

    A listener asked: “I’m definitely interested to hear more in detail about how you use AI.” This week’s work was precipitated by a new model, which Anthropic dropped last week. Opus 5.5 has, for reasons that will become clear, become a bit of a revolutionary model. By model I mean a neural network algorithm. I am describing the architecture and the algorithm behind what many of us see as a chatbot. But there is a different way to use the model behind the chatbot. You reach it through a part of the computer that those of us old enough will remember from the 1980s and MS-DOS. It involves all of these little instructions. On a Mac it’s called Terminal. It is a part of our computer which is there, and which most of us never go to. It lets us reach these models in a way you cannot easily reach them through a chatbot. Some of you will also remember that I have been going through the principles of Infolklore. I use many words from the transcripts of Volya, and I am trying to derive the principles of Infolklore from the way many of us present on Volya. Last week’s episode carried the latest of them. The Meta Main Game The aim of all of my work is what I call the Meta Main Game. Within about ten years, the assisted cognition we already experience is likely to be mainstreamed directly inside our minds. We experience it now by interfacing with the internet, through chatbots, through web browsers, through this very app. Whether that is done through connectors implanted in us or through light, I don’t know. Obviously Facebook and Elmo are working on implants. I am agnostic about whatever technology is used. I hope it isn’t done through implants, because I think that’s pretty gross. My goal is to prepare for that moment. I want to prepare a module that an interpreter of sensory data will use, through assisted cognition, to determine quickly whether the data she is encountering is Disinfolklore, Infolklore or Neutral. It should work for humans or for computers. So it is an intermediary through which data streams. It lets us make decisions very quickly in the face of what I expect to be ever-accelerating vectors of information and sensory data. By sensory data I mean not just text, and not just music. I mean everything we encounter in our reality, including conversations, what people are telling us, and what we are feeling. Disinfolklore, as we know, is folklore-like story weaponised to inject lies, exploitative mental models and coercive control into minds. Infolklore is its positive twin. Its divine twin, if you like. The same archetypal forms, used to protect communities and rebuild shared understanding. Neutral is neither. It is a menu. It is an account of something that has no archetypal content. There is nothing good about it and nothing bad about it. It is just sensory data. So the detector I am working towards must be able to tell these three types apart. The Disinfolklore Detector is the Meta Main Game’s first working form, and I am building it now. This case records one week of that building. In this week a cheaper, much more efficient model let me run many different operations at once, as simultaneous conversations with the machine. Each of these operations has its own window on one state-of-the-art Mac. One window, the operator, keeps the others and the long-running jobs in order. Visualise a big screen, or several screens. Each has one of these MS-DOS-like windows open in it. The one in the top left-hand corner is the operator, which helps organise all the others. Two latent dreams Two latent dreams lie behind all of my work, and behind my work this week. One is a question I asked in the London law firms where I worked in the early 2000s. The other is what I conceived at a conference on artificial neural networks in Long Beach, California, in December 2017. That is where the Meta Main Game began. Both needed people and resources, compute and money, ideas and technical capacities which I did not have. The first needed a firm’s worth of them. The second needed someone who could help build and train a neural network. Now the machine I have available to me can be directed in plain spoken and written English. All it takes from me is a clear mind, one that can keep hold of all of these different vectors, all of these different aspects of the project. So this week’s lesson is really about that mind. Multiplying the conversations drew me back into the loop, the place of the person who checks and steers what an automated system does. There the work was plain. I was keeping thirteen windows in step, 24/7. Fifty-eight of my messages to those windows that week were the same instruction: just carry on. The operator window took that work over, a step at a time, as I taught it to report in terms I can see. Window titles, and a list of what to type where. What stayed mine were the rulings on meaning, the permissions and the signatures. The case closes where the Meta Main Game began, in Luhansk and Long Beach in December 2017. It closes on the open question of whether I can, in fact, build this. What I am building The Meta Main Game is a means of assisted cognition. On 14 July I put it like this: “In the vision I have for the Meta Main Game, in, say, ten years, humans will have the capacity to add on cognitive modules, which will immediately enable them to see” in different ways. They will filter data in ways not available to us today. Those ways may not even be necessary for us today, but may well be necessary in ten years’ time. Seeing through these modules is not just about reading. The module is meant to work on all sensory data: what we read, hear and see. At this point it is a hypothesis. It is an idea to work towards. Three kinds of work feed it. The main one is Automating Disinfolklore. The second is what I call Cryptotypic Engineering. The third I deal with mainly in my Power of Mana work, at PowerofMana.net: the Reversion to the M-N- sound. That is the linguistics and the meaning work. I draw on it whenever I talk about Mana. The engine of Automating Disinfolklore is a large language model that runs on a state-of-the-art Mac. The model I am running at the moment is a Meta model, Glimmer, released a few weeks ago. The work I do will be adaptable to whichever locally hosted large language models come along. Glimmer reads a text under one codebook, the written rules for every verdict, and one brief, the instructions it is given for each reading. It judges what it reads with the Code of Positive Trolls: Generosity, Ethical Discipline, Patience, Perseverance, Focus and Insight. Those are the criteria. If a text conforms to those six, it is Infolklore. If it violates any of them, it is Disinfolklore. If it triggers none of them, there is no archetypal content. It is just talking about the weather. Not the weather in a Jane Austen novel. Just the weather. There might be symbolic content there, but generally speaking there isn’t. My rulings on real texts are the standard Glimmer is measured against. So I am teaching it to perceive reality like me. Mine is the only ruling. Two bodies of Infolklore The engine learns first on two bodies of Infolklore, about 47 million words in all. One is a spoken reservoir, which we know about. It is an archive of broadcasts in natural spoken English by native English speakers. This show is among them. The other is an archive of two Ukrainian newsrooms writing in russian, in the form of the structured article. Later it will meet Disinfolklore at scale, in an archive of about 290 million texts from state influence operations around the globe, from war bloggers and from fringe platforms. Dravidian, Hindi, Chinese, russian, MAGA. The engine reaches people first through the Disinfolklore Detector. It is planned in five stages, from a page on my Mac, for me alone, to a tool that other people’s AI agents and AI assistants can consult. The Muse in your postbox Some of you might have seen that Meta made a big play in the last week by releasing Muse. Basically, you allow Muse to run free in your computer. Say you mention to your husband or your daughter, “Oh, it’s Peter’s birthday next week. God, I must order that ice cream cake.” The next morning an ice cream cake arrives through your postbox. Muse has done that, because you gave it the right to all of your credit cards and access to all of your devices. It is making your life less complicated. In return, Meta gets access not just to your posts on Facebook but to every single aspect of your life. That is the reality we are already embroiled in. This case is one week of preparing for the moment when billions of people have these agents running around their lives and their computers, to one degree or another. What was happening that week In this week the engine’s verdict rule was about to be tested against my judgement. The verdict rule is the way it weighs the six elements of the Code into one verdict. A library of very old texts, which the project reads for archetypes, recurring patterns of story and figure, was being read again. The codebook was being revised. So were the principles of Infolklore, which describe how the two bodies honour the Code and which I draw on in my writing. The detector’s first stage was built during the week. Much of it was running at once for the first time. The law firm and Long Beach In the early 2000s I worked in various law firms in central London. I sometimes wondered what would happen if all of these resources were dedicated to pushing the bounds of human knowledge rather than protecting the legal order. Hundreds of lawyers. Over a thousand employees. In December 2017 I travelled to the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, NIPS, in Long Beach, California. I was working then as a diplomat in russia-occupied Luhansk. At the same time I was trying to build an automatic means of interpreting satellite data into actionable intelligence. It was my entrepreneurship pr

  6. Sep 24

    Podcast | Grass Whispering Infolklore

    Principles of Infolklore (Ep 6) Let’s go back to the principles of Infolklore. Some of you will remember how I am deducing The principles of Infolklore. Previous episodes: Ep 1 - Aug 20 Ep 2 - Aug 27 Ep 3 - 3 Sept Ep 4 - 10 Sept Ep 5 - 17 Sept I use a combination of my own written work, what scholars would call a vocabulary. I use that as a lens to look at the transcripts of Volya Radio, of RIA Melitopol and of RIA Pivden. I had noticed that they are particularly interesting artefacts. They appear to practise what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. I have theorised it since February 2020. I am using a neural network algorithm, a frontier model, in a kind of recursive loop, which I think is the technical term. It goes through the archive again and again and again. We start with some principles in mind and look for them in the words spoken on Volya Radio. Then we find out whether they are general principles of Infolklore that turn up elsewhere in the text. Then, with those in mind, we go back through the whole data set again, and again. So every week I speak to you, new and interesting aspects of the data set are emerging. So are new understandings, on my part, of what constitutes Infolklore. Many of you know I have been writing about Disinfolklore for three to four years. I was writing about it without that moniker for almost a decade. That began when I was posted to eastern Ukraine, at the end of January and early February 2015. I spent that time, as I am always banging on about, in russia-occupied Luhansk and on that bridge. What the Law Is For I want to continue where I left off, under the heading of what the law is for. Ukrainian Arts and Culture, the 15th of June 2025. Some of us might remember that show. Two guests, Tatiana and Alexey, and a host asking them about a grandmother’s house. The talk is of rushnyky, the embroidered towels. “Ukrainian embroidered Rusniki” Given at weddings, the guest says. They symbolise prosperity. “And they hang them around the icons.” Then the old house at grandma’s. “and it’s made out of clay, the walls out of clay,” Flowers painted on the walls, as a charm. I remember well visiting Petrykivka, about fifty kilometres from Dnipro. That form of flower painting is protected by UNESCO. Some russian nesting dolls adopt it as if it were russian. In fact it is Ukrainian. Perhaps all of us remember that amazing painted house in Kherson region, flooded and destroyed when the russians blew the dam. So, flowers painted on the walls as a charm. It was never winter there, one of them says. It was always spring. And the wind in the grass. “and the grass, shepochka, whispered.” “how can you not be a poet when you hear the grass whispering?” And then, without any change of tone, the year of the independence vote. Alexey was a student, he remembered, going door to door. “and giving the pamphlets or leaflets” “for like going to vote for independence” He knocked on the door where Tatiana lived, and nobody opened. He went further down the street. Then he came back and knocked again. “I was persistent.” That is what he told Ukrainian Arts and Culture, on Volya, on the 15th of June 2025. They met leafleting for independence. Nothing in that whole hour looks like law, or like Right as the post-World War II legal order defines it. No European human rights convention is named. No crime is charged against the Ruschists. Nothing is argued. It is a lawful hour from end to end. A lawless hour, you might say. And yet it is a morally lawful and pleasant hour, from end to end. The right to take part in the cultural life of your own community is in the Covenant of 1966, in article fifteen. The right of a people to determine its own future is the first article of both Covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its twin. A clay house. Icons under embroidered towels. A boy with leaflets who would not go away. That is not the law being honoured in the way Will or Mockers honour it when they speak about the law of the sea. That is the thing the law exists to protect. Said out loud on a Sunday, with no enemy in the sentence. The swans The war is in the hour all the same. Tatiana’s brother is at the front as they talk. The painted walls took Mockers straight to another house, in Oleshky. The artist Polina Raiko painted her whole house. It was partly destroyed. Near the war, flowers painted on a clay wall take on a beauty that the same flowers far from it do not have to that extent. At the time, I posted pictures of Polina’s house, showing the swans on its walls. I also posted the photos of the swans going by the town hall after the russians blew the dam. The fake governor of the day was speaking to camera, saying everything is fine, as the swans went by. Apollo flew on swans to the Azov Sea in Greek myth. Back, as the Greeks did not know then, to where the Greeks came from. A thousand years before the Greek language was formed, out of a daughter language, from Ukraine. Right, over the longue durée And so, Right. Right is the second of the elements in the Code of Positive Trolls. The Code of Positive Trolls is the mental algorithm I use to help me discern Disinfolklore, Infolklore and neutral Mana, neutral energy, in memes. The second element is Ethical Discipline. Right often means the post-World War II legal order. But Right is not only the honouring or the breach of the law of war. A story that carries the thing the whole order was written to keep safe supports that order. In this hour, that thing is a clay house. The boy with the leaflets was asking a people to choose its own future. A house like that is only safe in a country free to make that choice. Over the longue durée, the vote and the front are one act of independence, decades apart. The story moves the listener towards the law without ever naming it. Where no law is invoked, we judge a story by the whole Code of Positive Trolls. It is a moral judgement. That is the deepest sense the word Right carries. Deeper than the article in the Covenant. Right, in the end, is whether a thing passes the whole Code of Positive Trolls. The Energy in this one moves towards what is Right. Not away from it. Towards it. One book counts. One book remembers. And the book that says why either of them is worth keeping is a grandmother’s house, with flowers painted on the clay. The grass whispered. And he knocked on the door, and he was persistent. I Won’t Say Winning Good Morning Kyiv, the 14th of September 2025, an hour and thirty-five minutes in. A host is running through what the autumn holds for russia, and it is good. Then he reaches for the obvious word and stops. “I won’t say winning.” He says it once more, longer, with the reason and a replacement in the same breath. “I’m not going to say winning until we’re won, until the full territories would be taken back, but on the ascendancy, you’d have to say, wouldn’t you?” That was Good Morning Kyiv, on the 14th of September 2025. And the co-host takes the replacement without a pause. Yeah, absolutely. On the ascendancy. Not winning. That is the whole practice of Infolklore on Volya, in real time, in ten seconds. Here is the claim in one sentence. The discipline we can hear best on this station, on Volya Radio, runs on our own first choice of word, spoken aloud, cancelled, and replaced in the same breath. And it runs one way. The refusal falls on Ukraine’s winning and never on russia’s losing. Two sorts of folk-shaped story travel this war. One is told to work on you, for somebody who will not give his name. The other, the kind I call Infolklore, is told in the open by people who give their own time and energy to defending the law the world wrote down after 1945. What they tell has to pass every practice of the Code of Positive Trolls. This hour is about how they choose their words. The Word Cancelled Nine months after that morning, a different show and a different voice, and the same word goes back in the box. Booms & Woe then Ming and Will, the 8th of June 2026. “I’m not going to say winning. I’m going to say Ukraine is on the ascendancy in a number of areas. Russia is clearly losing.” There it is, both halves in one mouth. Ukraine is not winning. russia is clearly losing. He does not hedge the second. The refusal to say winning turns up six times, on five separate mornings, across fifteen months, in at least three different voices. The refusal to say losing turns up nought times. A rule that only runs one way is not a tic. When a word is taken back, the doubt goes against our own side’s success. Never against the enemy’s collapse. The cancellation is not always about modesty. Often it is about precision. Sometimes the precision runs against russia in a way that costs a good line. Booms & Woe then Will & Ioana, the 6th of April 2026, on the Ruschist economy. “I won’t say small business failings.” “But they’re not failings. Those businesses are just going underground to the black market.” The russian press was saying failings. Failings would have been a lovely word to read out on a show that enjoys russia’s woes. He put it down, because the shops had not failed. They had gone under the counter. That is a smaller and truer thing. Sometimes there is no side to it at all. Good Morning Kyiv, the 21st of March 2026, a host on how Ukraine is using a particular missile. “I won’t call it air defense because they’re essentially using it like you would use close air support.” The first word was wrong for the job the thing was doing. I won’t call it air defence. So it went. That is all. The habit fires on any word. That is what tells me it is a habit. And once, the cancellation ran the other way, upwards, towards the grander word. The person doing it said so. This Week in Absurdistan then Booms & Woe, the 12th of December 2025, a host reading a summary of somebody else’s analysis. “I wou

  7. Sep 19

    Podcast | Demon of the Moon (Ep 2): Over the Longue Durée

    Some of you will remember what I’m doing. I’m deducing, from transcripts, from millions of words of Volya Radio transcripts, what I call the principles of Infolklore. I have re-recorded this podcast, due to audio issues with the original recording of 16 September. I’ve posted it as two parts. This is the second part. The first part is here. Continued from: Infolklore, I remind you, is not just the opposite of Disinfolklore. It’s a positive creative practice. I try to practise it. Most of us probably listen on Volya Radio to Will or Mockers every day. They’re the very epitome of Infolklorists, from my perspective. So the law that we honour on Volya Radio is basically the same since the beginning, since SBU Crime and Punishment. Then it was taken on by other segments on Volya Radio. On the 16th of January 2025, for instance: “In any case, there’s no legitimate target on Russia’s part. Nothing that Russia hits is legitimate because the war itself is a crime. It’s a crime of aggression.” So the war is a crime. This is true. It is the crime the UN Charter was written to forbid. The law of armed conflict binds both sides. The law of armed conflict. The post-World War II legal order. The Geneva Conventions. Regardless of who started the war. This is the whole reason the laws of war exist. A rule that only bound the innocent side would bind nobody. So a russian shell that lands on a Ukrainian artillery position is a lawful act inside an all-unlawful war. But a russian artillery shell that lands on a Ukrainian school is not. It is an unlawful act in an unlawful war. The sentence I read you says it cannot be. Principles of Infolklore - Series so far: Ep 1 - Aug 20 Ep 2 - Aug 27 Ep 3 - 3 Sept Ep 4 - 10 Sept Ep 5 - 17 Sept An error in rightness This is an error in rightness. We all make mistakes. And it was made by a person who, in the same hour, refused to show prisoners of war on air, because the Geneva Conventions forbid this. Same mouth, same morning, keeping one article and arguing away the whole of the other. The argument has a second limb, which is the one that costs. In This Week in Absurdistan, on the 13th of December 2024. In the first winter of Volya Radio on X: “Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukraine has every right to occupy Russian territory, Belarusian territory, North Korean territory and fire any goddamn weapon it wants to [?] any of those territories to end this war of aggression against them. That’s what the rules of armed conflict in Geneva and the Hague Convention say.” Any weapon, anywhere in those territories, and the conventions invoked to bless it. The conventions forbid exactly that, in so many words. They forbid reprisals against civilians and objects in particular. Blackout Sunday, and the hostage dialectic Ten months later, on Booms & Woe, the same idea arrived in a plainer coat. If you hit our electricity and our gas, we do the same to you. The russians understand a knife for a knife. Our word for this on Volya is Blackout Sunday. It was said on the show a hundred times before it came true. Every one of those hundred was a wish for a civilian grid to go dark. Although I note it is usually in the context of the civilian grid, which is helping to feed the russian war machine. If the russian war machine does not separate its electricity substations from those that serve civilians, then Ukraine cannot be expected only to hit electricity substations that only serve the military. Especially if there are none. This is the hostage dialectic, which the russians are so good at. They create of civilians guards. They surround themselves in civilians. Then, after they hit civilians in Ukraine, they cry when Ukraine hits them. That is the russian hostage dialectic. You cannot win a war provided you take proper precautions not to kill any civilians. But civilians are being held hostage, as they are in russia, and indeed in Ukraine and Oleshky. People there are starving to death. There is a famine in russia-occupied Ukraine. That is despite russia’s duty in law, as the occupier, to ensure the conditions of sustainable existence for those people unlucky enough to be under russian occupation. You cannot stand back while that is going on without trying to liberate them. A question for the Code of Positive Trolls So whether the wish was Infolklore is a question for the Code of Positive Trolls. It sits on the record beside these conventions. I make no judgement about this. What I’m looking at is transcripts of thousands of hours of talking. I’m looking at the main immanence in them, not the variations from those immanences. All of us are dealing with this war. We are part of this terrible, terrible data stream of appalling acts that russia is responsible for every day. We all have emotional reactions to them. So I’m not going to sit in judgement on the particulars when the whole itself is determinable as Infolklore, and as conforming to the Code of Positive Trolls. Drone safaris, and the laws of war I posted after one of Zarina Zabrisky’s amazing articles. She is the American journalist who has catalogued russia’s drone safaris. They have killed over 2,000 to 3,000 people in Kherson. There russia uses humans to train its drone pilots, by killing children, babies, buses. This is happening every day, and the world hasn’t taken notice. NATO, if it was a serious organisation, even if it didn’t care about Ukraine, would be trying to find a way of solving this problem. How do you solve the problem when you have these genocidal maniacs using first-person view drones, which cost about 500 euros each, and they are hunting civilians in a city? Zarina Zabrisky did an amazing article on how the russians have mined all the rivers, and the Dnipro, and the riverbeds all around occupied territories. I asked the question carefully, as a lawyer does. It was something along the lines of, well, maybe it’s time to change the Geneva Convention on the laws of war. Laws do change and transform over time. If the ICRC and those signatories of the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the laws of war will not defend them and enforce them, then we may need to change them to laws which they are prepared to enforce. So Ukraine is tied to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the only country actually enforcing them and staying true to them, while their enemy uses them basically as a guide of what to do the opposite of. Then you can’t win a war by doing this. The Geneva Conventions themselves become an instrument for the enemy. So these are questions we must raise and talk about and think about in a free society. If the russians are taking advantage of our adherence, our blanket adherence to them, then a lawful government or a lawful operation may decide to change those laws. Understand this about people like me. russia invaded Ukraine in March 2014 (or, as the European Court of Human Rights now finds, in February 2014). In the first moment, the first milliseconds of hearing about russia’s invasion, I understood that unless international law was defended at that moment, then we would enter a realm in which no laws applied. That was part of russia’s objective. Our countries have a legal duty to enforce international law. Ukraine is actually enforcing international law. So if we are not prepared to enforce these laws, then we cannot cry when Ukraine acts in ways which seem, on the surface, to be a violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Instead, we should be supporting Ukraine properly. We should be enforcing the laws ourselves, or accepting that these laws are constraints and instruments by the enemies of everything we hold dear. So I do not stick religiously to the letter of the law in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. There is this concept in European human rights law called the margin of appreciation. In this case, a state like Ukraine would have to have a very wide margin of appreciation by a court, which the Rashists, as the initiators of this invasion, do not have. Not least because, as I’ve just said, the war itself is unlawful. But activities, any activity within that unlawful war, must be lawful. All of us know practically nothing russia does adheres to the Geneva Conventions, even if you put brackets around the lawfulness of the war itself. Relief, and a wall of dead bodies On Booms & Woe, on the 9th of December 2025: “Anyway, this soldier with his leg torn off is really, really happy that he’s in hospital. Really happy, he says, really finally at hospital. Woohoo!” She gives him relief. She gives him a reason and an inside. Interiority is the posh way of putting it. He was in the trenches and then he got injured, not killed. He got captured by Ukraine, and he’s now in the hospital recovering. So seven months later, on the same show, a different reader on the same men. “And the only thing they’re building is a wall out of their dead bodies.” A wall out of their dead bodies. There’s no inside there, though it is a description of the reality. The aim of the war splits along the same seam. russia has lost 10,000 souls over the past week, as I speak to you. They’re up to around 1,400 a day at the moment, because they’re throwing human beings against a wall of defensive drones, knowingly, every day. They’re losing land. They’re not even taking land. So to blame Ukraine for defending itself is not appropriate. The aim of the war splits along the same seam in Good Morning Kyiv and Booms & Woe, on the 12th of October 2025: “That’s really the only way you can survive is by, interestingly, prosecuting a policy of trying to annihilate them, not just defeat them and get them to run off is actually a defensive strategy.” Annihilate, not just defeat. Beside that, in the same year, on the same show, someone reading the youngest russian dead off a Ukrainian intelligence agency list: “Born in 2006, I’ve got socks older than that. So when they published this information, the main intelligen

  8. Sep 17

    Podcast | The Demon of the Moon (Ep 1)

    So let’s start with the beginning of chapter three of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. This is the sixth part of my show reveal of that monograph. That integrates the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method, applied to the Rashist state apparatus. I have re-recorded this podcast, due to audio issues with the original recording of 16 September. I’ll post it as two parts. This is the first part. The second is here. Continued from: The Disinfolklore analytical method has twelve tools. They’re available on Disinfolklore.eu. They divide into four groups. Tools one through five are detection. Tool six is a metaphorical bridge. And tools six through eleven, taken in series, constitute the Code of Positive Trolls. The Code of Positive Trolls is the ethical instrument that adjudicates what to do once one has detected a potential troll. So, the entire Code of Positive Trolls itself, all six elements in it. Generosity. Ethical discipline, or Right. Patience. Mana, or energy. Focus. And insight. Those are the six elements. They’re collectively also the means we use to determine whether something is Infolklore or Disinfolklore. That is what Mockers and Will do daily on Volya Radio on X. And it is what all of you often do in the discussions there. The twelfth tool, the final one, is what I call, rather grandly, cryptotypic literacy. That’s the deep grammar instrument that reads the substrate. The foundation. The underpinning beneath the surface deployment of a troll. So for instance, we see this whole bevy of movement from the United States administration this week. They are modelling their willingness to go for russia, russia, russia. However, the substrate. I think most of us feel it. And today Mockers, on Volya Radio’s Spaces on X, spoke for us all. She expressed a wee bit of scepticism about all this suddenly happening in the very week we’ve seen Trump Jr. have his wedding paid for by an odious Rashist oligarch. So we can be sceptical about these particular manifestations of willingness to go after russia. That is what I mean by the substrate. There’s something underlying things. It’s a rather grand way of talking. But it’s something that we do all the time, especially when we’re in the realm of Disinfolklore literacy. We’re constantly looking. We’re looking at what’s underneath the particular moves that we see Donald make. There’s always something underneath all of it. So cryptotypic literacy is about the deep underlying layer underneath the surface. Running information through the method I’m going to introduce each of these tools in plain English. I’ll just do a couple tonight, because there’s a few other things I want to get onto as well. Then I’ll apply the full toolkit to the Cheburashka artefact. Cheburashka is the russian Mickey Mouse. Then I’ll apply it more rapidly to the Mausoleum Emperor artefact. I haven’t spoken to you about it, but we’ll get to it in a week or two. And I’ll also apply it to the Europe Projection artefact, and to the Mariupol boat artefact. I’ve talked about that one before. It involves Daria Dugina. She also features as a bit part in my book Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. I am revealing the book to you here gradually, episode by episode. Once you have that twelve-tool Disinfolklore analytical method in your mind, it’ll be in your hand like it is in mine. I’m continually running information through it. And we should be able to apply it ourselves. If not systematically, step by step, then certainly there are little elements in it which will, hopefully, recur and occur to us in important moments. I try my best to apply these things as I go through my day and I’m hit with particular pieces of information. That might be from the Ukraine war discourse. Or in my private life, or in work, or in art, or in any particular situation I’m in. This method should work to help us interpret better the reality in which we are embedded. The six perfections, and focus The previous chapters and the previous episodes of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut introduced the Code of Positive Trolls. It is the six-perfection ethical instrument that sits at the methodological heart of the approach. I derived the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls from the six paramitas of Mahayana Buddhism. Generosity. Ethical discipline, Right. Patience. The third, joyous perseverance, or Mana, energy. The fifth is meditative focus. That’s what it’s known as in Buddhism. And I put it to focus. So we’re focused on Ukraine, as an example of how we can apply the method. But we can use it in other discourses, like MAGA discourse. We’re focused on getting to the truth. We’re focused on rightness. We’re focused on helping Ukraine, in this context. Other people and other sides are focused on the opposite. They’re focused on destroying the post-Second World War legal order. So Donald’s focus is always about passing the buck, passing blame. So that can be quite a good way of looking at data: to be focused, and to understand what you’re focused on. And that way we are not distracted. Where the Code came from I derived the Code of Positive Trolls and its six elements from the six paramitas. I learned them from a particular lama who introduced them to me. And five years after being introduced to them, I was scratching around for an evaluative framework. I wanted to determine the difference between what I call a positive troll, a negative troll, and something which is neutral. Neutral. It doesn’t move us at all. This instrument, I thought, wow, this is amazing. It works. So, for instance, if this particular meme is about deception, then that comes in under Right. I just worked it through my mind over the course of a few months. And these were actually a particularly rich way of checking whether a particular meme was positive. Whether it had positive energy or negative energy. After working on the idea for a long time, I realised that actually here was a perfect means of coming up with a way of distinguishing between positive trolls and negative trolls. A scientific way. One I could teach a computer to learn how to do. So the Code is an instrument. We apply memes to it, and what is going on in reality. The instrument does not require a reader’s prior alignment with any Buddhist philosophy. It’s not about religion. It’s just a tool I happen to find in that discourse. I mentioned that I learned it from a lama just so you understand. I was looking around for a solution, and this is how I came to it. It only requires that the reader is willing to use it. I’ve spoken before about the principles of Infolklore, and I’ll get to them later. I’ve been deriving them from the transcripts that I have been analysing from the Volya shows. So it’s empirically derived. You tell a computer, okay, I want you to parse this data set, and look at it through the prism of the Code of Positive Trolls. Lo and behold, though it does not surprise me in any way, shape or form, it works very well with what all of Volya Radio has been doing. That is, supporting Ukraine, and talking about the daily diet of Disinfolklore emanating from the Rashists on various registers. From Putler down to the lowliest St Petersburg Linguistics Faculty trained milblogger. And with what we’re all trying to do when we’re on Volya Radio. So it’s quite consoling, for all of you and for all of us who are involved in Volya and helping in the ways we do. But it’s also not really surprising that the Code of Positive Trolls works as an instrument to parse that data. That is because one of the reasons I chose to look at the Volya data set was that I reckoned it would be a really good means of parsing the data through the prism of the Code of Positive Trolls. Allocation So every reading in this book, Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, runs in two steps. First, what I call allocation. I name what the artefact does. And by artefact, in this sense, it could be a flick of an eyebrow. It could be a visual meme. It could be a whole story involving days or weeks or months, or a movie. Or it could be press conferences, or an element within a press conference. So the lexical unit itself is undetermined. It can be of any size and have any content. That’s the instrument. That’s the tool I’m trying to build with the Disinfolklore analytical method. It should work on any lexical unit of any size. Anything you can interpret with a mind, in your mind, or in a book, or in a movie. It should work on that. So I’m really flexible on what the unit of analysis is, because I want the whole system I’m building to be useful in many different contexts. I just happen to be building it in the context of the Ukraine-russia war. But it ought to be applicable and useful in every other context we come across in our lives. Whether that’s MAGA, in India and China, wherever. The best way I could get it to do this is to teach the computer lots of different kinds of writing, and kinds of memes. So, first, allocation. Name what the artefact does, in three different ways. It may deploy a named archetype. For instance, the merciful sovereign, or the bridge troll. I’ve spoken before about when Putler is playing the reasonable man. He is trying to model himself as the reasonable man, the merciful sovereign. So that is an archetypal presence. So we can get a grip on that. Some data does not have archetypes in it. It may make a claim. It may make a claim to lawful order. The truthful teller. The strong one. The wronged one. It may be like it often is on Volya Radio, where presenters are actually making a claim about the law. Then the third bit. Maybe it’s naming no character, no archetypal immanence, and making no clear claim. And it may only carry the architectural signature of Disinfolklore itself. So any of the three is a handle, a grip. I talk about gripping. I’m trying to get the computer and the algorithm to grip, a

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Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net

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