Gaslighting is a colloquialism, loosely defined as making someone question their own reality.
The term may also be used to describe a person (a “gaslighter”) who presents a false narrative to another group or person which leads them to doubt their perceptions and become misled (generally for the gaslighters’ own benefit), disoriented or distressed. Generally, this dynamic is only possible when the audience is vulnerable, such as in unequal power relationships, or when the audience is fearful of the losses associated with challenging the false narrative. Gaslighting is not necessarily malicious or intentional, although in some cases it is.
In politics
Gaslighting is more likely to be effective when the gaslighter has a position of power.
In the 2008 book State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind, the authors contend that the prevalence of Gaslighting in American politics began with the age of modern communications:
To say gaslighting was started by… any extant group is not simply wrong, it also misses an important point. Gaslighting comes directly from blending modern communications, marketing, and advertising techniques with long-standing methods of propaganda. They were simply waiting to be discovered by those with sufficient ambition and psychological makeup to use them.
The term has been used to describe the behavior of politicians and media personalities on both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. Some examples include:
“Gaslighting” has been used to describe Russia’s global relations. While Russian operatives were active in Crimea, Russian officials continually denied their presence and manipulated the distrust of political groups in their favor.
“Gaslighting” has been used to describe how leaders and followers of sectarian groups ensure the conformity of any potentially deviating members.
Columnist Maureen Dowd described the Bill Clinton administration’s use of the technique in subjecting Newt Gingrich to small indignities intended to provoke him to make public complaints that “came across as hysterical”.
“Gaslighting” has been used to describe state implemented psychological harassment techniques used in socialist East Germany during the 1970s and 80s. The techniques were used as part of the Stasi’s (the state security service’s) decomposition methods, which were designed to paralyze the ability of hostile-negative (politically incorrect or rebellious) people to operate without unjustifiably imprisoning them, which would have resulted in international condemnation.
In popular culture
In 2017, Harvey Weinstein orchestrated extraordinary efforts to undermine the perceptions and reality of women he sexually preyed upon, the journalist’s investigating their stories, and the public. He hired Lisa Bloom, the high-profile attorney who represented women sexually abused by Bill Cosby and women who accused Bill O’Reilly, and Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, for her expertise, including intimate knowledge of how to prey on the vulnerabilities of sexual abuse survivors. Journalist Ronan Farrow has alleged that NBC did not air his investigation of Weinstein because Weinstein threatened to disclose the sexual indiscretions of NBC’s The Today Show host Matt Lauer and MSNBC’s president, Phil Griffin. Farrow also alleges that Weinstein retained intelligence/espionage firm, Black Cube, to uncover vulnerabilities to dissuade journalists who were closing in on Weinstein from going public. Weinstein granted interviews to the New York Post to tout his contributions to society including helping women advance in Hollywood and his work on a charity concert that raised $100M for the 9/11 first responders through the Robin Hood Foundation.
Late last week, the US Navy presented its vision and requirements for the next generation Destroyer. One to replace the remaining Ticonderoga cruisers as well as some of the Burke destroyers. Binkov’s analysis goes in depth on the requirement set, its capabilities, the construction timetable and budget.
Machinima has advantages and disadvantages when compared to other styles of filmmaking. Its relative simplicity over traditional frame-based animation limits control and range of expression. Its real-time nature favors speed, cost saving, and flexibility over the higher quality of pre-rendered computer animation. Virtual acting is less expensive, dangerous, and physically restricted than live action. Machinima can be filmed by relying on in-game artificial intelligence (AI) or by controlling characters and cameras through digital puppetry. Scenes can be precisely scripted, and can be manipulated during post-production using video editing techniques. Editing, custom software, and creative cinematography may address technical limitations. Game companies have provided software for and have encouraged machinima, but the widespread use of digital assets from copyrighted games has resulted in complex, unresolved legal issues.
Comparison to film techniques
Machinima can be less expensive than other forms of filmmaking. Strange Company produced its feature-length machinima film BloodSpell for less than £10,000. Before using machinima, Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum of Rooster Teeth Productions spent US$9,000 to produce a live-action independent film. In contrast, the four Xbox game consoles used to make Red vs. Blue in 2005 cost $600. The low cost caused a product manager for Electronic Arts to compare machinima to the low-budget independent filmThe Blair Witch Project, without the need for cameras and actors. Because these are seen as low barriers to entry, machinima has been called a “democratization of filmmaking”. Berkeley weighs increased participation and a blurred line between producer and consumer against concerns that game copyrights limit commercialization and growth of machinima.
Character and camera control
Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd list four main methods of creating machinima. From simple to advanced, these are: relying on the game’s AI to control most actions, digital puppetry, recamming, and precise scripting of actions. Although simple to produce, AI-dependent results are unpredictable, thus complicating the realization of a preconceived film script. For example, when Rooster Teeth produced The Strangerhood using The Sims 2, a game that encourages the use of its AI, the group had to create multiple instances of each character to accommodate different moods. Individual instances were selected at different times to produce appropriate actions.
In digital puppetry, machinima creators become virtual actors. Each crew member controls a character in real-time, as in a multiplayer game. The director can use built-in camera controls, if available. Otherwise, video is captured from the perspectives of one or more puppeteers who serve as camera operators. Puppetry allows for improvisation and offers controls familiar to gamers, but requires more personnel than the other methods and is less precise than scripted recordings. However, some games, such as the Halo series, (except for Halo PC and Custom Edition, which allow AI and custom objects and characters), allow filming only through puppetry. According to Marino, other disadvantages are the possibility of disruption when filming in an open multi-user environment and the temptation for puppeteers to play the game in earnest, littering the set with blood and dead bodies. However, Chris Burke intentionally hosts This Spartan Life in these unpredictable conditions, which are fundamental to the show. Other works filmed using puppetry are the ILL Clan’s improvisational comedy series On the Campaign Trail with Larry & Lenny Lumberjack and Rooster Teeth Productions’ Red vs. Blue. In recamming, which builds on puppetry, actions are first recorded to a game engine’s demo file format, not directly as video frames. Without re-enacting scenes, artists can then manipulate the demo files to add cameras, tweak timing and lighting, and change the surroundings. This technique is limited to the few engines and software tools that support it.
A technique common in cut scenes of video games, scripting consists of giving precise directions to the game engine. A filmmaker can work alone this way, as J. Thaddeus “Mindcrime” Skubis did in creating the nearly four-hour The Seal of Nehahra (2000), the longest work of machinima at the time. However, perfecting scripts can be time-consuming. Unless what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing is available, as in Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption, changes may need to be verified in additional runs, and non-linear editing may be difficult. In this respect, Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd compare scripting to stop-motion animation. Another disadvantage is that, depending on the game, scripting capabilities may be limited or unavailable. Matinee, a machinima software tool included with Unreal Tournament 2004, popularized scripting in machinima.
Limitations and solutions
When Diary of a Camper was created, no software tools existed to edit demo files into films. Rangers clan member Eric “ArchV” Fowler wrote his own programs to reposition the camera and to splice footage from the Quake demo file. Quake movie editing software later appeared, but the use of conventional non-linear video editing software is now common. For example, Phil South inserted single, completely white frames into his work No Licence to enhance the visual impact of explosions. In the post-production of Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, Rooster Teeth Productions added letterboxing with Adobe Premiere Pro to hide the camera player’s head-up display.
Machinima creators have used different methods to handle limited character expression. The most typical ways that amateur-style machinima gets around limitations of expression include taking advantage of speech bubbles seen above players’ heads when speaking, relying on the visual matching between a character’s voice and appearance, and finding methods available within the game itself. Garry’s Mod and Source Filmmaker include the ability to manipulate characters and objects in real-time, though the former relies on community addons to take advantage of certain engine features, and the latter renders scenes using non-real-time effects. In the Halo video game series, helmets completely cover the characters’ faces. To prevent confusion, Rooster Teeth’s characters move slightly when speaking, a convention shared with anime. Some machinima creators use custom software. For example, Strange Company uses Take Over GL Face Skins to add more facial expressions to their characters filmed in BioWare’s 2002 role-playing video gameNeverwinter Nights. Similarly, Atussa Simon used a “library of faces” for characters in The Battle of Xerxes. Some software, such as Epic Games’ Impersonator for Unreal Tournament 2004 and Valve‘s Faceposer for Source games, have been provided by the developer. Another solution is to blend in non-machinima elements, as nGame did by inserting painted characters with more expressive faces into its 1999 film Berlin Assassins. It may be possible to point the camera elsewhere or employ other creative cinematography or acting. For example, Tristan Pope combined creative character and camera positioning with video editing to suggest sexual actions in his controversial film Not Just Another Love Story.
Here is a video showing how a server can be found and used, with Rust:
In today’s video I tried to checkout servers that had 0 players on them in the MODDED tab in Rust… I have done this before with the video I Played on 0 Pop Rust Servers (they are wild)… but this time its MODDED! WOO
Common features of brainwashing include isolation, humiliation, accusation, and unpredictable attacks. The abusive environment produces real and anticipated fear, which contributes to the battered woman’s belief that her situation is hopeless and that she must depend on her abuser.
A group of volunteers cleaning up the shores of the Mississippi River near the biggest city in Tennessee have stumbled upon the remains of an ancient boat encrusted in mud.
A team of archeologists from the University of Memphis that was rapidly called to the site, confirmed that the ship is most certainly a Viking Knarr, suggesting the Norse would have pushed their exploration of America a lot further than historians previously thought.
The heavily damaged ship was found near the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers and lies on a private property.
It has a length of about 16 meters, a beam of 4.5 meters, and a hull that is estimated capable of carrying up to 24 to 28 tons, a typical size for this type of ship.
Knarrs were naval vessels that were built by the Norsemen from Scandinavia and Iceland for Atlantic voyages but also used for trade, commerce, exploration, and warfare during an era known as the Viking Age, that goes approximately from 793 to 1066 AD.
A Washington Atomwaffen Division activist was sentenced to 84 months, or seven years, in prison for “threaten and intimidate journalists and advocates who worked to expose anti-Semitism”.
“Kaleb Cole, 25, a leader of the National Socialist group Atomwaffen Division, was convicted by a federal jury in the Western District of Washington of one count of interfering with a federally protected activity because of religion, three counts of mailing threatening communications, and one count of conspiring with other Atomwaffen members to commit three offenses against the United States – interference with federally-protected activities because of religion, mailing threatening communications, and cyberstalking,” United States Department of Justice reported.
There are few displays of ethnomasochism and xenophilia more perverse than that of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – a day in January when white and black alike are meant to remember this hero of the Civil Rights era and to reflect on how far we have come as a country.
Historically, when despots take control of a free people, they always take guns from everyone and rewrite history. They try to make oppressors into national saviors and turn sincere patriots into thugs. This rewriting of history is happening as I write as leftists distort political and economic reality, destroy true patriots, and deify thugs.
People can manipulate others using hundreds of tactics. Some of the most common include:
Using intense emotional connection to control another person’s behavior. For example, an abusive person may try to manipulate a person by moving very quickly in a romantic relationship. They may overwhelm their victim with loving gestures to lower their guard or make them feel indebted.
Playing on a person’s insecurities. This is a popular tactic among advertisers, such as when a cosmetic company makes a person feel unattractive or “old.” It also works well in interpersonal relationships. For instance, someone may make their romantic partner think no one else could ever possibly love them.
Lying and denial. Manipulators may bombard their victims with lies. When they’re caught, they may deny the lie or cover it up with another falsehood.
Hyperbole and generalization. It’s difficult to respond to an allegation of “never” being loving or “never” working hard. Specific details can be debated, while vague accusations are often harder to dispute.
Changing the subject. In an argument about one person’s behavior, the individual may deflect attention from themselves by attacking their critic. The deflection often takes the form of, “Well what about [X]?” For example, when one spouse expresses concern about their partner’s drug use, the partner may attack their spouse’s parenting skills.
Moving the goalposts. This happens when a manipulative person constantly shifts the criteria one must meet in order to satisfy them. For example, a bully may use their coworker’s clothes as an excuse to harass them. If the individual changes outfits, the bully may claim the person won’t “deserve” professional respect until they change their hairstyle, their accent, or another miscellaneous trait.
Using fear to control another person. For instance, a person may use threats of violence or physically intimidating body language.
Using social inequities to control another person. For example, a neurotypical person might attempt to use a cognitive disability to demean another person or dismiss their experiences.
Passive-aggression. This is a broad category of behavior that includes many strategies such as guilt-tripping, giving backhanded compliments, and more. Passive-aggression is a way of voicing displeasure or anger without directly expressing the emotion.
Giving a person the silent treatment. It’s fine to ask for time to reflect on an argument or to tell someone who deeply hurt you that you no longer wish to speak to them. But ignoring a person to punish them or make them fearful is a manipulative tactic.
Gaslighting.Gaslighting involves causing the manipulation victim to doubt their own understanding of reality. For example, an abusive person might deny that the abuse happened, telling the victim there’s something wrong with their memory.
Recruiting others to help with manipulation. For example, an abusive parent might ask family members to remind a child how much the parent has sacrificed for the child. The social pressure may convince the child to stop complaining about abusive behavior.
A manipulative person may combine these tactics or alternate between them depending on the context.
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