The problem is, convincing anybody of anything is very hard.
Using ranged weapons is a tale as old as time, but the invention of the bow and arrow and the invention of the ICBM are still very different. Trying to convince people when you had to talk to them face to face is different than being able to mass print reading materials. Trying to convince people through a limited available bandwidth of a radio station is different than being able to have one of a thousand cable channels. Communicating with a mass audience is different than being able algorithmically modify your communication on a per person basis. It's a mark of the shallowness to dismiss the current information environment and its ability to manipulate mental blind spots as nothing new.
Given the speed of their collapse, I'm willing to bet there were more people in Afghanistan who believe in lizard people than who believed in the state they built. Ditto Iraq.
Convincing specific people of things is hard. Convincing a few of a very large group appears to be easy, if you don’t care which few those are.
If you look at the world, such feeling is not only prevalent, it's actually far more disturbing than you think.
For example, all ads industry is built on manipulating human emotions. And surfing the web, you are forced into so many such abusive staff every single seconds.
Look at the web content as well. When people staring at their phones, they are bring manipulated in the literal sense.
And you'll find every one of these AD's producers have a matter of factly explanation, or even glorified one.
Surprising?
Not at all. Karl Max predicted this inhumane end of the capitalism more than a century ago.
I was talking about the ridiculousness of people taking abuses without much care. To OP's point that someone discussing manipulation matter-of-factly.
Capitalism death? Capitalism is the strongest it ever is.
HN now are a playground of people whose attention span cannot be maintained more than 5 minutes, and jump onto stimulation without a strain of sensibility.
https://www.federalpay.org/military/army/colonel
The real money in the military-industrial complex is made by defense contractors, spefically the executives and shareholders of companies like Raytheon, BAE, and Lockheed Martin. Corruption in the upper echelons of US military itself, while far from unheard of, is vigorously investigated and prosecuted by bodies like NCIS. "Fat Leonard"-scale scandals do happen, but are rare:
It's way more educational to look at countries where it already happened at least once.
Sometimes military removes government, sometimes it sides with government and kills enough people to quench the unrest.
I also admire the overall benefits program. Great health care, pensions and perks such as USAA memberships are really valuable. So it's difficult to put a number on their total compensation. It's much more than it seems and passes down (somewhat) to future generations. For example, my children can be USAA members because my father was in the Army in Vietnam (50 years ago).
E4 enlisted make $27k per year. Crap right? But their housing and food is paid for. That $27k is entirely discretionary.
If you’re serving in Atlanta Georgia, take home is $22k per year. So about $1,900 a month, after housing and food.
That’s why so many enlisted buy motorcycles and new Camerons. It’s a good chunk of money when your 22.
Not to demonize it. It is a fascinating topic, and one of those "genie out of the bottle" type things. The tools exist, someone is going to use them, therefore everyone has to use them.
Human minds are evolved things, we have always been subject to manipulation. But now, our minds are swimming in a dense ocean of information, awash in it, noise and wisdom alike flowing through us unimpeded, and most people don't even realize this because they don't articulate it in this way. There are no borders, there are good actors, bad actors, irresponsible self serving actors, mixes of all types masquerading as each other, and probably more I didn't think of and mixes of all of it.
In the new world, you have to think about your thinking, you have to understand metamemetics, or you're swaying in the wind generated by someone else for their own ends at all times. How many of my deeply held beliefs are there because someone wants them there? How many of my behaviors are the result of someone else's planning? How many of these beliefs and behaviors are bad for me? How might I become an actor in this realm on my own mind and reclaim my agency?