ENTJ, Beads, and yeah a Feather !
Hmmm,
This gets more intriguing with each post :D
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I will admit to being an ENTJ on the MBTI. I also have secret fantasies about launching an all-women counter protest group who march down the street of Baghdad in red white and blue bikinis. This would be great psy-ops for disarming those militias.
Sorry Terri, the "boots" issue came up during a soapbox thread. But, I have to admit, the bikini of Baghdad will indeed shake the psyops world. Hell it might even work. You join a distinct group of ENTJs (that would be a compliment).
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I agree, Stan. Again, all jokes aside, I'm going to see if I can et any support for setting up an administrative shell for a think tank in my department (Interdisciplinary Studies). A friend, colleague and sometimes student of mine who has been lurking here for a while (and when are you going to post Greg?), also think that it would be a good idea, so I'll be chatting with him as well.
Hello Marc !
You're not talking about stuffed animals again, are you ?
Greg ? He would be ? Is this a mystery :confused:
Regards, Stan
Greg is an friend and colleague
Marc,
I now somewhat remember :D
Seriously,
I would be more than happy to assist Greg with his studies. I however would wonder what exactly you expect from all this. Anthro with Stan may not produce the required results (he is afterall only half frozen).
Let the games begin !
Stan
"No Christian should enlist or re-enlist in the Army"
Evening Marc !
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It doesn't appear his suggestion cost the military any Christian enlistees -- which suggests that soldiers and sailors of many faiths can live, work and fight together despite their religious differences. If Wiccans are good enough to die for their country, they're good enough to be treated with respect afterward.
Hmmm, I have a similar experience from the early 70's :eek:
As a Catholic (when they were doing my dog tags), the drill gave me the strangest look (contemptuous pity) and would do the same for the next 12 weeks.
His pathetic ideological views were placed well ahead of our basic principles and laws of a nation, state, or social group. I had no clue, that being Catholic was so bad.
Regards, Stan
Where's Irene the Infidel When Needed Most?
I've been thinking about Tokyo Rose lately and I'm wondering if our side has an Irene the Infidel who with her sultry voice in perfect Arabic has been taunting and ridiculing Johnny Jihadi and his small penis and impotence and inability to father children and scare the Americans? Tokyo Rose didn't exactly turn the tide in Japan's favor but she was a source of irritation on occasion and did sow a tad bit of doubt at times. I'm thinking that given the rigid paternalism and the way many muslim men put women in a second class citizen status if such propoganda couldn't from time to time cause a knee-jerk reaction amongst certain elements in the jihadist camp(s)? We ought to be able to borrow some female Mossad employee to cut some CDs of this nature and do some broadcasting. Ridicule/scorn can be a powerful influence and I would imagine any number of female Iraqis would find it very humorous as well. On the other hand, given the fact that putting women's panties on a detainee's head almost warrants a firing squad in retribution, I can hear the PC adherants crying already and wringing their hands and threateing class action human rights lawsuits. I'd cover an Abrams with loud speakers on full blast playing such a CD and idle it through sadr city and mosul. If you can't kill them at least you can provoke them.
Armchair PSYOPers - Everyone's an expert
I realize that people are kidding around a bit in this thread, but I think this discussion illustrates one of the big problems faced by those who are tasked with doing PSYOP: Everyone out there thinks they are an expert, everyone thinks they have a great idea about what will affect the enemy. The worst thing is that these armchair/amateur PSYOPers sometimes have stars on their collars, and their "brilliant" ideas actually turn into leaflets, radio broadcasts, etc. This is often disastrous and counterproductive.
When we were training the Salvadorans, we taught them a disciplined, calculated, systematic approach to PSYOP. Start out by determining what you want the target to do. We usually wanted him to surrender or at least just go home. (We were not trying to enrage him, we didn't seek to humiliate him. We didn't talk about his momma or his prowess or his manhood. What good would that do?) Then develop themes, campaigns, and finally products that would fit into those campaigns. Ready to go, right?
Wrong. Before you pack your leaflets into the O2-B, you need to test those products on what the pollsters call "focus groups." Even when working in your own culture (as our students were) you'll often find that your beautiful, brilliant leaflet will have the opposite effect from the one you desire. If you are working outside your culture, and if you don't speak the language, you will almost certainly get it wrong.
During WWII some of the PSYOP products we launched at the Japanese were actually used by enemy commanders to motivate their troops. Some of the suggestions thrown around in this thread seem likely to become part of this PSYOP Hall of Shame.
Inserting Carl Rogers In Sadr City
I like that idea of polling to get an idea of what would work in Iraq - it's sort of like the self-actualization therapy modality espoused by Carl Rogers, reflective listening. We would have to dress female pollsters in hijabs to get into the women's quarters in homes and their segregated section in the masjids in order to crunch the numbers. I like the idea of flyers with the message that tells 'em to just say NO to the jihadi that wants to use their home as a safe house and threatens to shoot the kids if they don't comply. I can envision a picture of a woman in a hijab and veil with a pack of kids behind her standing in front of the door of her house with her arm making the classic "STOP" sign with the palm of the hand, confronting a armed, male jihadi. Scene 2 of the flyer shows the jihadi slinking away with his head hanging down, shamed into inaction by a female. Even the Liberals at Berkeley would like that. One good fatwa could end a multi-million dollar flyer campaign, on-the-spot. Jihadis certainly exploit the air waves and print, but they don't control it like in a dictatorship. I would suggest that we don't really have a clue about the dynamics at play with Islamic gender roles, separation and segregation there-in, the mechanisms that define the distinctions and enforce the distinctions. We have even less of a clue as to how they perceive our perceptions of them and thirdly, we have no cultural back-drop of similiarity, no point of equal reference to develop models of exploitation. My theory is that it takes more human energy to sustain distinct and harsh gender separation than it does in cultures with blurred, enmeshed roles, hence anything that requires additional human energy to sustain said distinctions takes that energy away from other enterprises and activities. I doubt this potential has been closely addressed by the psyops community and if anything, the whole 3rd world may well be lumped into one model where-in one approach is expected to work equally well in all cultures simply because they are of the 3rd world. I further suggest that we are dealing with a 4th world, the one of magical realism and our traditional approaches are not working as well as we want them too. The amount of input in this thread bears that out and anything that can alter an enemie's pattern of violent response warrants consideration.