[Rancid]

This quote has been brought to you by propaganda.



See, in MSM, there are "buddy films" where the two protagonists, at the beginning of the movie, appear to destest one another. Or, they both seem to be in a permanent bad mood.

This signifies "alienation" to the MSM viewer.

But as the film progresses, our two grumpy and anti-social protagonists gradually learn to like one another by killing a series of black and brown "bad guys," endulging in some highly anti-social "car chases" in urban areas, and finally by retrieving the "nuclear research secrets" or "stolen bankster money."

The message is that your alienation and feelings of malevolence can be cured with huge sums of cash, having thrills in machinery, and proving to rich people that you're a "good dog" for their interests.

That two posters who have nothing in common should "get married," is a result of the fake logic that has been created in Rancid's mind by MSM.

And it's propaganda because 1. It explains away alienation 2. It points towards products and violence against others as a solution

[Rancid]

The nice thing about propaganda is that if you call everything propaganda, then the word loses its meaning, and then propaganda becomes truth...

[Sivad]

Riggs was just bucking for a psycho pension.

[QatzelOk]

The nice thing about propaganda is that if you call everything propaganda, then the word loses its meaning, and then propaganda becomes truth...

If you would like a definition of "propaganda," I again recommend PROPAGANDA by Jacques Ellul.

The main thing about propaganda is that it has a manipulative agenda, and will use any technique (including psychological tricks, deception, and torture-like repitition) to manipulate the viewer into acting a particular way.

Pre-propaganda (like sitcoms, or religious texts, or mass media's daily lies about targetted foreigners) aim to create a gullible media viewer who is "ready to believe" the big lie.

The "big lie" is propaganda, and it may take the form of either a text (book, movie, report) or an act (a bombing, a school shooting, a Facebook smear campaign, etc).

(That's all I am providing free of charge. Please pick up the book I recommend as soon as you can. You might even find a free version online)

[Rancid]

If you would like a definition of "propaganda," I again recommend PROPAGANDA by Jacques Ellul.

The main thing about propaganda is that it has a manipulative agenda, and will use any technique (including psychological tricks, deception, and torture-like repitition) to manipulate the viewer into acting a particular way.

Pre-propaganda (like sitcoms, or religious texts, or mass media's daily lies about targetted foreigners) aim to create a gullible media viewer who is "ready to believe" the big lie.

The "big lie" is propaganda, and it may take the form of either a text (book, movie, report) or an act (a bombing, a school shooting, a Facebook smear campaign, etc).

(That's all I am providing free of charge. Please pick up the book I recommend as soon as you can. You might even find a free version online)

What is the psychological priming is done with a small truth rather than a small lie?

[Wellsy]

You might even find a free version online)

https://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Ellul_Jacques_Propaganda_The_Formation_of_Mens_Attitudes.pdf

Small truths are best for propaganda as they can’t be contested on true or false grounds but require a question of their significance/emphasis, a question of why the focus on this fact? But one is more prone to think in terms of attempting to be objective and truthful.

[Rancid]

https://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Ellul_Jacques_Propaganda_The_Formation_of_Mens_Attitudes.pdf

Small truths are best for propaganda as they can’t be contested on true or false grounds but require a question of their significance/emphasis, a question of why the focus on this fact? But one is more prone to think in terms of attempting to be objective and truthful.

Indeed. I would argue more propaganda is done this way.

It's also a good way to create misinformation. Wrap the lie in a truth.

[skinster]

If you would like a definition of "propaganda," I again recommend PROPAGANDA by Jacques Ellul.

(That's all I am providing free of charge. Please pick up the book I recommend as soon as you can. You might even find a free version online)

I have this book on my reading list but there is about 4 more that'll come before it.

[QatzelOk]

I have this book on my reading list but there is about 4 more that'll come before it.

After the textbook introduction that Propaganda provides, I would recommend reading Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish), Roland Barthes (The Joy of Text), and maybe Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)... in order to explore how propaganda is used to domesticate humans (Foucault), and to create a false "reality" (Barthes, Baudrillard).

If Foucault's texts are too dense for you to read (French sometimes translates into pretentious and unreadable English) then I recommend a Foucault "reader" type of text. Much shorter, and gets to the point.

[skinster]

Stop it, my reading list is endless.

[Wellsy]

There is also the view in which facts are made false by their inadequacy in that they aren’t properly situated in relation to other facts.

If they are not false, what are they? Well, they are inadequate. In the context of Spinoza, this means that you are missing knowledge, and were you to have this knowledge, your idea would not be negated, but would be shown to be only partial.

The classic example would be the sun. The sun looks small and close, yet it's actually large and far away.

The idea that the sun looks small and close is inadequate, yet still true. That is, it does look small and close, and still looks that way after we learn about astronomical laws and measurements.

Our idea was inadequate because we did not realize that the idea of the sun being small and close isn't an idea about the sun, but an idea about our bodies. So we mistook an idea about our body for an idea of something external.

Even the talking head entirely full of shit attempts to base their points pulled out of their ass on some aspect of reality.

Effective critique always come from revealing the limitations of such a interpretation in such a way that it falls over its own assumption and what it entails logically as a necessity from those assumptions. I see how effectively this is deployed with theory and science but less familiar with news stuff and a critique of its social basis.

[QatzelOk]

Effective critique always come from revealing the limitations of such a interpretation in such a way that it falls over its own assumption and what it entails logically as a necessity from those assumptions.
I see how effectively this is deployed with theory and science but less familiar with news stuff and a critique of its social basis.

One uses the same methodology when critiquing new sources, news items, or forms of news delivery (media).

The difference is that mass media is a commonly-shared source of social values. So any criticism of it is usually limited to academia, and then... nothing happens at all. No changes are made. No information is shared with normal media users.

So while the methodology is the same, in the case of mass media, any "results" can be easily ignored by the vast majority of humanity. And media is so close to the human race that it has been able to hijack its attention span to the great loss of popular criticism that leads to actual social improvements.

Imagine if Michel Foucault and Marshal Mcluhan had a debate in a salt mine 5000 meters under the ocean that no one else attended, and they were both had their minds erased right after the debate. Their conclusions may have been brilliant - no one will ever know.

[skinster]

[skinster]

[Rancid]

Big fan of fake news here.

[Sivad]

Establishment news is to journalism what Arby's is to food.

[QatzelOk]

Establishment news is to journalism what Arby's is to food.

No. Chuck E Cheese is more like it.

Unlike Arby's, Chuck E Cheese has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with food.

[skinster]

Big fan of fake news here.

[skinster]

[skinster]

When Corporate Power Is Your Real Government, Corporate Media Is State Media
The New York Times published an astonishingly horrible article the other day titled “Latin America Is Facing a ‘Decline of Democracy’ Under the Pandemic” accusing governments like Venezuela and Nicaragua of exploiting Covid-19 to quash opposition and oppress democracy.

The article sources its jarringly propagandistic claims in multiple US government-funded narrative management operations like the Wilson Center and the National Endowment for Democracy-sponsored Freedom House, the extensively plutocrat-funded Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the United States Naval Academy.

The crown jewel of this piece of State Department stenography reads as follows:

“Adding to these challenges, democracy in Latin America has also lost a champion in the United States, which had played an important role in promoting democracy after the end of the Cold War by financing good governance programs and calling out authoritarian abuses.”

Whoa, nelly.

The fact that America’s most widely regarded newspaper feels perfectly comfortable making such a spectacularly in-your-face lie on behalf of the US government tells you everything you need to know about what the mass media in America really are and what they do.

The United States has never at any time been a champion of democracy in Latin America, before or since the Cold War. It has intervened hundreds of times in the continent’s affairs throughout history with everything from murderous corporate colonialism to deadly CIA regime change operations to overt military invasions. It is currently trying to orchestrate a coup in Venezuela after failing to stage one during the Bush administration, it’s pushing regime change in Nicaragua, and The New York Times itself admitted this year that it was wrong to promote the false US government narrative of electoral shenanigans in Bolivia’s presidential race last year, a narrative which facilitated a bloody fascist coup.

This is propaganda. There is no other word for it. And yet the only time western politicians and news reporters use that word is to talk about nations like Russia and China.

Why is propaganda used in an ostensibly free democracy with an ostensibly free media? Why are its news media outlets so consistently in alignment with every foreign policy objective of US government agencies no matter how destructive and inexcusable? If the media and the government are two separate institutions, why do they so consistently function as though they are not separate?

Well, that’s easy. It’s because they aren’t separate. The only thing keeping this from being seen is the fact that America’s real government isn’t located where people think it is.

In a corporatist system of government, where no hard lines are drawn between corporate/financial power and state power, corporate media is state media. Since bribery is legal in the US political system in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations, America’s elected government is controlled by wealthy elites who have money to burn and who benefit from maintaining a specific status quo arrangement.

The fact that this same plutocratic class also owns America’s media, which is now so consolidated that it’s almost entirely run by just six corporations, means that the people who run the government also run the media. This allows America’s true rulers to set up a system which promotes narratives that are favorable to their desired status quo.

Which means that the US has state propaganda. They just don’t call it that themselves.

Strip away the phony two-handed sock puppet show of US electoral politics and look at how power actually moves in that country, and you just see one more tyrannical regime which propagandizes its citizens, brutally cracks down on protesters, deliberately keeps its populace impoverished so they don’t get powerful enough to change things, and attacks any nation which dares to disobey its dictates.

Beneath the thin layer of narrative overlay about freedom and democracy, the US is just one more despotic, bloodthirsty empire. It’s no better than any of the other despotic, bloodthirsty empires throughout history. It just has good PR.

Plutocrats not only exert control over America’s media and politics, they also form alliances with the secretive government agencies whose operators remain amid the comings and goings of the official elected government. We see examples of this in the way new money tech plutocrats like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have direct relationships with the CIA and its proxies.

We also see it in the sexual blackmail operation which was facilitated by the late Jeffrey Epstein in connection with billionaire Leslie Wexner and Israeli intelligence, along with potentially the FBI and/or other US intelligence agencies. Today the internet is abuzz as newly unsealed court documents relating to Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell reveal witness testimony regarding underage sex trafficking, with such high-profile names appearing in the documents as Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew.

The Overton window of acceptable political discourse has been shrunk into such a narrow spectrum of debate that talking about even well-known and extensively documented facts involving the real nature of America’s government and media will get you laughingly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, which is itself a symptom of tight narrative control by a ruling class which much prefers Americans thinking they live in a free democracy whose government they control with their votes.

In the old days you used to be able to tell who your rulers were because they’d sit on thrones and wear golden crowns and make you bow before them. Human consciousness eventually evolved beyond the acceptability of such brazen indignities, so it became necessary for rulers to take on more of a background role while the citizenry clap and cheer for the illusory puppet show of electoral politics.

But the kings are still among us, just as cruel and tyrannical as ever. They’ve just figured out how to mask their tyranny behind the facade of freedom.

But 2020 has been a year of revelations, a trend which seems likely to continue accelerating. Truth cannot stay hidden forever.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07/31 ... ate-media/