Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Many people turn to conservatism and religion because they perceive — correctly — that mainstream culture is a fraudulent sham bereft of meaning and authentic values. Their solutions are misguided, but their reasons arise from a perception of a very real problem.
"It's incredible how much money the Americans can afford to blow just on exploding stuff overseas. Their healthcare system and infrastructure must be phenomenal."
The US can afford to hand over hundreds of billions of dollars over to Ukraine, but my insurance (Medicaid handled by a private insurer in this state) can't afford to cover a stress test. We must send more tanks and F-16s to a proxy war, but we certainly should never let heart patients have stress tests. It's too dangerous!
Western societies have suffered astounding levels of betrayal and abandonment in recent decades. I am surprised this isn't discussed more than it is. Our political elites have adopted the neoliberal ideology which has fragmented our societies and ruined our democracies.
I wish everybody would read Noam Chomsky's book Profits over People, especially the introduction by Robert W. McChesney where he outlines the effects of neoliberalism on societies.
Liberalism is dead in our societies and been replaced by neoliberalism-- it is the instrument of reckless criminal capitalism which has created so many billionaires and is synonymous with economic fascism-- which is what the Ukraine war is really all about .
I dunno about your take on religion. I suppose the committed non theists here would heartily agree, but i think because religion has always been a mainstay of culture, that it needs an update like economics and sociology and those sorts of things do. And it is of course getting it. You maybe just hear about the most ostentatious versions of fundamentalism, that still is quite popular.
There will be social conservatives. You might as well make common cause with them so they won't attack your coven or whatever and so you can work together in some common causes. Or not. Just do your own thing and ignore those who differ. As you like. But movements are created through a confluence of groups converging for a time. It is happening. The amount of leftists who are sympathetic to Tucker is quite significant. You don't have to agree 100%. I rarely find that kind of agreement with anyone.
In 1978 an American writer named Jerry Mander wrote Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television. It should have been required middle school reading, but that didn’t happen, and America would have no provocative dinnertable discourse reflecting back on its empty consumerist agendas.
Here is the introductory paragraph of Mander’s book:
“If this book has any basis in ‘authority,’ it lies in the fifteen years I worked as a public relations and advertising executive. During that time, I learned that it is possible to speak through media directly into people’s heads and then, like some otherworldly magician, leave images inside that can cause people to do what they might otherwise never have thought to do.”
At the time this book was published, major newspapers ran stories and editorials about the inherent biases of news reportage via the television medium. Public Television was a real alternative to the commercial media run by mind miners.
What Mander did, without dramatically presenting his thesis, was show how propaganda is embedded in the psyches of every American. The tools of advertising are the tools of fomenting coups, are the tools of countering rational thought.
We now have a culture that is rooted in lying, The vendor lies to the buyer, the politicians lie to the voters, the news anchor lies to the camera and the viewers believe the words of the people they know are lying. In this environment, truth telling is a defiant act and is fraught with risks. Lest anyone get the right idea, Julian Assange is there to counsel inaction.
At this time, there is nothing more important, in my opinion, than keeping journalists alive and working.
As a person who got a Master's in New Media and Cultural Studies, I wanted to study this and write a paper on it.
I was quickly informed that my paper would fail if I did. "Just write about something u identify with" was the final word from my dean. Fuck u academia!
Noam Chomsky reported that at MIT his friend Ferguson showed that in the USA campaign contributions by a corporation were correlated with a boost in the stock price of said corporation. MIT told Ferguson to stop it and confine such research to Nazi Germany. Ferg did not get continued employment at MIT.
I live my religion because I believe it is true, not because mainstream culture sucks. It does, but that is independent of my choice to practice my religion, other than that my faith gives me eyes to see.
Just awesome. It had never occurred to me before listening to the last part of this post that there has been no “scientific research” on the effects of domestic propaganda. One could, I suppose, put together multiple volumes of examples of domestic propaganda; study and put together a list of the financiers of specific types of propaganda that has been published at different times; research what the financiers were focused upon via their messages to shareholders, etc., and get some information about what people who were polled thought about the issues or events that were the specific subjects of the propaganda. But, all you would have is a conclusion that the financiers got what they wanted- if they did (they almost always do) - and infer that they would not have spent money on an effort they did not have good reason to believe would be effective. But, there are no studies with control groups etc. You are absolutely correct- you couldn’t do a PhD thesis on it. And then, of course, there is the problem that we are swimming in it. How would you do a double-blind or whatever study of the attitude of fish to water with certain characteristics, if they go home to the river after an hour and experience those characteristics plus a million more? And, having come to the test site after spending their entire lives in the river? This assumes that fish have attitudes they can communicate and that there are any left in the river that aren’t floating, bloated and dead. Starting to fade. A very thought provoking post. Many thanks.
Of course we're being manipulated, they'd have to be stupid not to. TPTB may be mean spirited, violent and greedy, but they employ people who are not stupid.
“So much is lost due to the fact that modern science and academia don't research western domestic propaganda and its effects, because they don't acknowledge the existence of western domestic propaganda. “
Once you understand that we are governed either by sociopaths, or by persons whose behavior is functionally indistinguishable from that sociopaths, everything makes sense.
Escaping The Prison Of Mainstream Culture: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
"It's incredible how much money the Americans can afford to blow just on exploding stuff overseas. Their healthcare system and infrastructure must be phenomenal."
The US can afford to hand over hundreds of billions of dollars over to Ukraine, but my insurance (Medicaid handled by a private insurer in this state) can't afford to cover a stress test. We must send more tanks and F-16s to a proxy war, but we certainly should never let heart patients have stress tests. It's too dangerous!
Western societies have suffered astounding levels of betrayal and abandonment in recent decades. I am surprised this isn't discussed more than it is. Our political elites have adopted the neoliberal ideology which has fragmented our societies and ruined our democracies.
I wish everybody would read Noam Chomsky's book Profits over People, especially the introduction by Robert W. McChesney where he outlines the effects of neoliberalism on societies.
Liberalism is dead in our societies and been replaced by neoliberalism-- it is the instrument of reckless criminal capitalism which has created so many billionaires and is synonymous with economic fascism-- which is what the Ukraine war is really all about .
I dunno about your take on religion. I suppose the committed non theists here would heartily agree, but i think because religion has always been a mainstay of culture, that it needs an update like economics and sociology and those sorts of things do. And it is of course getting it. You maybe just hear about the most ostentatious versions of fundamentalism, that still is quite popular.
There will be social conservatives. You might as well make common cause with them so they won't attack your coven or whatever and so you can work together in some common causes. Or not. Just do your own thing and ignore those who differ. As you like. But movements are created through a confluence of groups converging for a time. It is happening. The amount of leftists who are sympathetic to Tucker is quite significant. You don't have to agree 100%. I rarely find that kind of agreement with anyone.
In 1978 an American writer named Jerry Mander wrote Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television. It should have been required middle school reading, but that didn’t happen, and America would have no provocative dinnertable discourse reflecting back on its empty consumerist agendas.
Here is the introductory paragraph of Mander’s book:
“If this book has any basis in ‘authority,’ it lies in the fifteen years I worked as a public relations and advertising executive. During that time, I learned that it is possible to speak through media directly into people’s heads and then, like some otherworldly magician, leave images inside that can cause people to do what they might otherwise never have thought to do.”
At the time this book was published, major newspapers ran stories and editorials about the inherent biases of news reportage via the television medium. Public Television was a real alternative to the commercial media run by mind miners.
What Mander did, without dramatically presenting his thesis, was show how propaganda is embedded in the psyches of every American. The tools of advertising are the tools of fomenting coups, are the tools of countering rational thought.
We now have a culture that is rooted in lying, The vendor lies to the buyer, the politicians lie to the voters, the news anchor lies to the camera and the viewers believe the words of the people they know are lying. In this environment, truth telling is a defiant act and is fraught with risks. Lest anyone get the right idea, Julian Assange is there to counsel inaction.
At this time, there is nothing more important, in my opinion, than keeping journalists alive and working.
As a person who got a Master's in New Media and Cultural Studies, I wanted to study this and write a paper on it.
I was quickly informed that my paper would fail if I did. "Just write about something u identify with" was the final word from my dean. Fuck u academia!
Noam Chomsky reported that at MIT his friend Ferguson showed that in the USA campaign contributions by a corporation were correlated with a boost in the stock price of said corporation. MIT told Ferguson to stop it and confine such research to Nazi Germany. Ferg did not get continued employment at MIT.
Science is dead. Technology killed it.
I live my religion because I believe it is true, not because mainstream culture sucks. It does, but that is independent of my choice to practice my religion, other than that my faith gives me eyes to see.
I cracked up laughing when I saw the photo of the Israeli women. Caption this photo:
George Wallace Glee Club (Alabama)
WFU (Women for Ukraine)
"We want our alimony and child support payments! And we want them NOW!"
Just awesome. It had never occurred to me before listening to the last part of this post that there has been no “scientific research” on the effects of domestic propaganda. One could, I suppose, put together multiple volumes of examples of domestic propaganda; study and put together a list of the financiers of specific types of propaganda that has been published at different times; research what the financiers were focused upon via their messages to shareholders, etc., and get some information about what people who were polled thought about the issues or events that were the specific subjects of the propaganda. But, all you would have is a conclusion that the financiers got what they wanted- if they did (they almost always do) - and infer that they would not have spent money on an effort they did not have good reason to believe would be effective. But, there are no studies with control groups etc. You are absolutely correct- you couldn’t do a PhD thesis on it. And then, of course, there is the problem that we are swimming in it. How would you do a double-blind or whatever study of the attitude of fish to water with certain characteristics, if they go home to the river after an hour and experience those characteristics plus a million more? And, having come to the test site after spending their entire lives in the river? This assumes that fish have attitudes they can communicate and that there are any left in the river that aren’t floating, bloated and dead. Starting to fade. A very thought provoking post. Many thanks.
Of course we're being manipulated, they'd have to be stupid not to. TPTB may be mean spirited, violent and greedy, but they employ people who are not stupid.
“So much is lost due to the fact that modern science and academia don't research western domestic propaganda and its effects, because they don't acknowledge the existence of western domestic propaganda. “
Once you understand that we are governed either by sociopaths, or by persons whose behavior is functionally indistinguishable from that sociopaths, everything makes sense.
I really enjoy your content. Thank you a heap.
Seek a career in the fast-growing realm of duckspeak.
Women can gain equal rights if they act like dickhead men.
BIPOC people can gain equal rights if they act like dickhead white men.
In case you make a logical fallacy in any replies, this does not mean all white men are dickheads. Some (like me) are arseholes.