The most insidious metastasizing is located in how sexual violence can be weaponized in war and in domestic terrorism. This is not exclusively Russian but is symptomatic of a pernicious attacks driven by a globalized misogyny. The shooter attacking a DC pizza parlor about a non existent basement that housed a pedophile ring is only a tiny traction of a mass delusion no different than the actions of a genocidal military. What’s worse is trying to make it a rule of engagement and a transferable fetish among even more sociopathic populations like the social media subgroup called incels.
Less than a year before Vladimir Putin unleashed the largest armed conflict on European soil since World War II, the Kremlin quietly expanded the Russian Security Council’s Science Council, an advisory body composed of nearly 150 prominent academics and government figures. Among the new members was a deputy commander of a nondescript military unit: one A.G. Starunskiy. Russian investigative journalists subsequently alleged that this Starunskiy was really Aleksandr Gennadiyevich Starunskiy, a high-ranking officer of the General Staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) who had been intimately involved in that agency’s disinformation and influence campaigns.
The Science Council is apparently engaged on the information warfare front. Last October, it advocated harsher criminal penalties for disseminating “fakes” via social media. Since then, it has met at least twice with Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev to address the West’s purported push for “controlled regime change” in Russia and its blame for the world’s woes — for which the Kremlin has long alleged the West leverages the power of the internet. While little is currently known about the military entity for which Starunskiy later came to be second-in-command (unit 55111, per the Kremlin announcement), some additional context about Starunskiy and his bona fides is available through open sources. Whether or not he remains engaged in waging Moscow’s information war against the West, his expertise poses intriguing questions about how Moscow conceptualizes the craft — particularly as his star continues to rise within the Russian security apparatus.
Over the past two decades, Starunskiy has apparently assessed both the U.S. and Chinese military practice of psychological operations, and he more recently served as a member of the editorial board of the Russian Defense Ministry’s monthly “Foreign Military Review.” However, he is perhaps most notable — and noted, among other Russian academics — as an authority in the obscure field of acmeology, which was the focus of his 1998 dissertation: “The Psychological Effect as an Object of Acmeological Research.” Therein, Starunskiy “consider[s] psychological effects in the context of a specific area of professional activity and the people involved in it,” which in his chosen case study includes Russian military service members and their susceptibility to adversary messaging. Starunskiy concludes that “based on an acmeological study of armed conflicts … the most acute problem of information and psychological security of a person manifests itself in a combat situation, when military personnel, in addition to other psycho-traumatic factors, are targeted by special structures of the armed forces of the warring parties.”
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Particularly since Russia’s initial incursion into Ukraine in 2014 and its election interference in the United States in 2016, Western commentators and academics have intensively studied the “science” behind the Russian information warfare, its historical underpinnings and contemporary tradecraft. Its nexus with Starunskiy’s “acmeology” raises an underexamined angle: the degree to which Moscow relies on such novel theories as an explanatory salve for a world so frequently unfriendly toward Kremlin ambitions — and the degree to which the West should assume there is much “science” to Russian information warfare at all.
newlinesmag.com/…
The most prominent forum for men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate or “incels” has become significantly more radicalized over the past year and a half and is seeking to normalize child rape, a new report says.
The report, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s new Quant Lab, is the culmination of an investigation that analyzed more than 1 million posts on the site. It found a marked spike in conversations about mass murder and growing approval of sexually assaulting prepubescent girls.
The report also says that platforms including YouTube and Google, as well as internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare are facilitating the growth of the forum, which the report said is visited by 2.6 million people every month. “These businesses should make a principled decision to withdraw their services from sites causing such significant harm,” the report says.
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The forum was founded in 2017 by Diego Joaquín Galante, known online as “Sergeant Incel” and Lamarcus Small as a response to Reddit banning the subreddit /r/incels. It offers an invitation-only Discord server for its members who have posted more than 400 times to the site, and an active channel on the chat app Telegram. Moderators of the forum also maintain a Twitter account that promotes incel ideology and attacks perceived critics.
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YouTube isn’t the only inroad, the analysis found. Galante and Small have created a network of seemingly more mainstream websites that funnel people to the incel forum. Google searches for body image or unemployment frequently return links to these “incelosphere” sites, the CCDH found.
Teenage boys are among the forum’s most active and extreme users, according to the CCDH. In one instance, a boy who said he was 17 was recorded as being on the forum for an average of 10 hours per day during the period of the report, posting an average of 40 times per day, the report said. Another, who claimed to be 15, spent an average of five hours per day on the site, posting repeatedly about his desire to commit a mass shooting.
The forum enables their participation, the analysis said, by encouraging users to hide the site from prying parents or teachers by using a feature that disguises it as a banana marketing website.
www.washingtonpost.com/...