THE AMATUS AGENDA by Jason Bond

HOW TO DESTROY THE CANCER THAT IS KILLING SLAP

 

The phone rings. I’m surprised. I didn’t even know I existed, much less that I had a phone. Or that there were people who knew the number.

Being a fictitious portmanteau of characters created by Robert Ludlum and Ian Fleming, you can imagine my surprise when I got a call from the most dangerous blogger in Bouton, Jason Sifflet and assigned to investigate and report on a curious facebook phenomenon that calls itself Amatus Edwards, amongst other things.

If it looks like a Flambeau and talks like a Flambeau and goes to Flambeau Conventions to support Allen Chastanet...
It's probably just Amatus...

 

I have no media experience or training, zero creative writing experience and like most right thinking people, I have no interest whatsoever in who or what an Amatus Edwards is, far less what it claims to be.

I tried to decline, but Sifflet insisted. I tried to interest him in my more conventional skills. Perhaps I could use my martial arts training to give Edwards a taste of his own medicine. Perhaps I could make him my bitch.

But Sifflet would have none of it. Edwards was an expert in self-matyrdom. Sifflet didn’t want him dead or hurt. Sifflet wanted him destroyed.

Upon encountering the creature in its Facebook form, I immediately understood the danger to St Lucian national security.

Most honest political operatives (Jadia Jn,Pierre, Angel Brouet, Melanius Alphonse, Frank Charles, etc) make no bones about who or what they are. They openly practice what we, in the intelligence community, call Active Measures.

Most masked political operatives try to use their fake identities to cover the fact that their nefarious doings are, in fact, Active Measures. Stupid, I know. And yet Paul Ward wants us to believe he's real.

Amatus Edwards is, at first glance (and upon deeper inspection), the most insidious of all political operatives. He uses his real identity as a GENUINELY FAKE PERSON to pass off propaganda, misinformation, real data, plain bullshit, other people’s intelligence and other Active Measures as unbiased, objective academia.

And then, he uses jargon and a retarded version of sarcasm to pass himself off as the smartest person in the dumb-assed argument.

But, it gets darker than that.

NO MORE MAGIC BULLETS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF AGENDA SETTING

In the Kafkaesque, absurdly amoral space where news media meets counter-intelligence there developed in the 1950s and 60s a technique called Agenda Setting.

Amatus Edwards, it seems, has mastered this nefarious form of Mind Fu, without even knowing such a thing exists. Like the kung fu student in the Shaolin movies who learnt the secret kung fu style but didn’t complete the training, he is dangerously well-informed and ill-trained.

Amatus practicing MIND FU on members of SLAP

 

A classic case of ‘a little education….’

The great thing about Agenda setting is that the people who are going to follow you don’t even have to agree with you. All they have to do is engage you. Once they do, you win.

In fact, the more they disagree with you the more certain you can be that you have them in your thrall.

And that is all you need.

You see, attention is a limited resource. It obeys the laws of conservation of matter and energy. You can’t create attention. You have to take it from somewhere and transform it into what you want.

You begin to understand the danger of THE AMATUS AGENDA now.

Before Agenda Setting, the morons who accidentally invented Western Civilization thought that print and broadcast messages worked like magic bullets: You fire your message at the audience and they all swallow it,  unquestioningly. Like Homer Simpson watching ads for beer.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, both first and second world illuminati had accepted that real life was more complicated than that.

Humans, especially the ignorant ones, were unpredictably thoughtful. And history had shown that no matter how you discipline and control the bodies of men, one random free thought from an illiterate slave was all it took to send entire empires into disarray and all its neighbors into intractable chaos.

Both the West and Khrushchev’s USSR veered immediately into the dangerous world of Agenda Setting where instead of telling people what to think, they would control them by telling them what to think ABOUT.

In this way, people got to feel like they were free, agreeing and disagreeing with you on the subjects that you and ONLY YOU can bring to the table.

Everything else? Forget about it. Irrelevant details.

It would have worked too, if not for those pesky Beatniks.

When Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and the rest of the genius-homo-junkies started dropping acid and disassociating words, America and the West experienced some unexpected social turbulence.

It took decades for the master races to master a world in which they kinda controlled the subject matter and had no control over the opinions.

The Soviets sacked Khrushchev and his replacement,  Brezhnev, retired Khrushchev’s  half-free experiments and brought back Stalinism with a fervor that would have made Old Joey proud.

LOOOOOSEEERRRRRSSSSS..........

 

In the long run, however, the West’s chaotic experiments with controlling thought with Agenda Setting in the media, in universities, in finance, business and technology paid off. It finally proved superior to the Soviets’ total lack of freedom even before the internet spilled out of the military into academia, commerce and porn.

The West was able to control and harness people while making them feel free and happy. The communist human resource, meanwhile, became the enemy of the state, cannibalizing the corpse of communism in an orgy of capitalist corruption that continues to this day.

By the time the internet hit the world like irrigation for the desert of the individual human mind, the West was well-schooled in Agenda Setting.

Meanwhile, Russia suffers political shockwaves every time Pussy Riot holds a concert that no one attends. Pathetic.

In short, the West learnt to harness dissent while the Soviets learnt that ‘every day the bucket goes to the well…one day the bottom a go drop out.’ Dissent is like water. Either you use it or you lose. If you try to contain it, it WILL break you.

And your mother. And your fascist friends. And your dog.

Herein lies the retarded genius of Amatus Edwards.

MIND FU: THE ART OF FUCKING WITH PEOPLE’S BRAINS

Allow me to explain. In little St Lucia, Amatus Edwards has used some of the most sinister mind control techniques of the 20^th century to make everyone talk about what he is talking about.

1.  HE HAS MASTERED HIS OWN SELF IDENTITY (AMONGST OTHERS): First he wasn’t a Flambeau, he was unbiased. Then he was outted by a troublesome blogger and now he’s a bloodless partisan ‘schooled in macro-economics.’ Efforts to paint him as a wife-beater succeeded in making him more of a martyr than he already thinks he is. It’s like trying to kill a cockroach in the corner with a very big boot.

What do you get when you cross a scapegoat with a cockroach?

 

2.  HE DOMINATES S.L.A.P.’S AGENDA: St Lucia’s most intelligent facebook group might be Not for Party But Country. The most popular might be Da Majority (so says Nigel Shamori Whatever). But the hottest is S.L.A.P. And almost every day, Amatus Edwards succeeds in producing at least one post that makes people talk about whatever he wants them to take about.

3.  HE HAS MADE HIMSELF UBIQUITOUS:  Amatus Edwards is like a sleepless Maji Noir in a cyber-world where it is always night. (I think everyone can agree that he is a bit of a dick hanging from the ceiling, raping you psychologically in your worst nightmares.)Up at 3am? Amatus is there. Come on for lunch, there he is. Home at six? More Amatus. It’s as though he’s following Stalin’s directive to monitor, if not gather, every single grain of political sand. In the 21^st century, that amounts to being a big MAKO JWA. But he doesn’t care, because that shit works. It really does. Every question you ask is a three pointer before he even answers you. Every follow up comment you make gives him a penalty kick on your brain.

4.  HE DELIBERATELY MAKES HIMSELF A LIGHTNING ROD TO SAVE CHASTANET’S STUPID ASS: Some people thinking that hating on Amatus is a kind of practice for punch lines they’ll use of UWP leader Allen Chastanet. But political punch lines are made of a light form of hate and hate, unlike love doesn’t multiply. It must be manufactured. Hence, every time you waste your hate on Amatus Edwards, you have less of it to spend on his sugar daddy, Allen Chastanet.

5.  SOUNDS, AT FIRST, LIKE SOMEONE TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY: By a combination of spouting jargon, misinterpreting other people’s research and having no shame, Amatus Edwards manages to look, to the newcomer, like an innocent trying to make sense, while partisan berate him. Most people who come to SLAP never comment. They lurk. We will never know how many of these lurkers buy Amatus’ story. To some of them, he might be a voice crying in the wilderness.

6.  CANNOT BE HUMIATED: I know. I said that already. But there’s more. A lot of people thought that Edwards didn’t want to be known as a Flambeau out of shame. But he has no shame. A review of his personal archives has proven that Amatus is shameless and joined Flambeau only because he was exposed and now, he wants some of the $29 million in Taiwanese funds that no one can find.

IN CONCLUSION

The research has shown that once you engage Amatus, you have lost the game.

You are going to think ABOUT what he wants. Talk about what he wants. Write about what he wants. He’s successfully distracting you from more useful enterprises like doing your nails, throwing out the garbage and twiddling your thumbs. He is successfully making you think about an Allen Chastanet government. No matter how much you hate the idea, he’s making you think it. And even though you know it’s ridiculous, you still do what he wants. He’s tenderizing your brain. Seasoning you for the cannibal Flambeau. There is nothing you can do.

Except….

RECOMMENDATIONS: HOW TO DESTROY AMATUS

Remember Rick Wayne? No? He used to be the most important, most powerful journalist in St Lucia. But he went on a trip, vilifying Kenny Anthony in favor of Richard Frederick, Allen Chastanet, Guy Joseph, Rufus Bousquet and rest of Ali Baba’s closest friends.

Labourites hated him for it. Then, they got tired of hating him and started ignoring him. Then, he went away. His talk show disappeared. His newspaper is not sure if it still exists. He’s now Timothy Poleon’s unpaid sidekick on the lunchtime radio talk shows. He pays for his own call to the show and Tim makes tea and surf the net while he talks, hoping secretly that he will go away. Everyone who still speaks with him secretly wishes (in vain) that he would end the conversation. Why? Because Labour ignored him to death.

And so, what shall you do with Amatus?

1.  IGNORE HIM, DUH!: When he comes on, don’t say a word. Some, if not most of his posts will die horrible, ignominious, unreported deaths. When he sees no one responding to him but Paul Ward and Carlton A Smith, his shit will shiver inside him.

2.  POUR COLD WATER: If any of his posts gather steam, pour cold water. Rather than addressing his content, address his hypocrisy.

3.  SHOOT THE DAMNED MESSENGER: This is a last resort and must not be done recklessly. The problem with the last facebook assassination attempt on Amatus Edwards was that it looked like a facebook assassination. You can’t be seen looking like some paid mercenary. When you snipe him from the trees, shoot him in his ass, not the head. Make everyone laughs at him. Be polite, calm and thoughtful as you metaphorically pull his pants down and throw him from the top of a tall building into the cactus of his own prickly reasoning.

4.  If he doesn’t seem to piss himself when you throw him from the metaphorical tall building, fire an FB bomb that says, “He probably pissed himself when I threw him from the top of the building….” It will seem truer than the truth and no matter what he says in reply, it will make more people laugh at him.

5.  RIDICULE HIM RANDOMLY, NOT RELENTLESSLY: Paying no attention to what anyone has said on his post, make a joke at his expense that EVERYONE including his wife, can laugh at. Do this regularly, but not too frequently that people get bored of it. Make it like a special occasion. Dress up. Chill Champagne. Call your friends. Then, FLOGG Amatus.

6.  MOST IMPORTANTLY: If he posts something that actually interests you or that you MUST reply to, take his charts and PDFs, make your own post and bring the discussion to you. When he shows up at your post of his stuff, ignore him so hard that he will think no one can read his posts. Even though you are discussing what he wants you to, you will be doing it on your terms, not his.

7.  Don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house. Amatus is in deep shit because he has secrets that his enemies use again him. Live your own life as though everything was going to be published and broadcast and recorded for all time. Be the same in dark and light, in solace and in company.

FINALLY…

This is not really a recommendation. It’s kinda like a voice from the sky or the grave or something. The voice of Gandhi and MLK and Mandela and them fellas.

It’s saying: “Instead of letting Amatus set the agenda, instead of ignoring him to death and making him get no notifications, likes or comments, how about killing him with love?

How about recognizing that Amatus Edwards is a powerful, if misguided, intelligence. How about instead of answering his stupid posts, we reset the agenda by asking him  honest questions that require honest answers. Catch him off guard and ask him honest questions. Set his agenda. Keep him busy working on what we want.

Perhaps then he might stop being the malevolent little shit that he is and might evolve into the best possible version of Amatus Edwards that this world can sustain.

Let us make our own posts where we seek his wisdom, however much of it he has left.

It will be like the most loving, gentle hijacking in history.

What do you say?  Are you ready to give Amatus Edwards some tough love?

I  am.

Although, frankly speaking, I’m really drunk. I don’t usually drink but I had to. It really stresses me out the things I found out about that guy during this investigation.

“Loving Amatus….”?

I MUST be drunk.

De rum dat do me dat.