Actual people who do the work of social reproduction (parents, extended family, teachers, coaches, and other caregivers) tend to see their opinions as creating the particular specific kinds of people that society, as they envision it, requires. They're right, for their own part; it takes years to get a child to internalize the doctrines of private property and wage labor, for example.
History is always written by the powerful and the winners. Of course history books are more propaganda than reality, this is true throughout almost all of the study of history. Some researchers actually pursue the truth via the facts, they are a blessing.
I reckon it starts even earlier. The [brainwashed] parents attend to the new-born baby. Some parents even allow [ritual] genital mutilation to days old babies with all the attendant Cluster B personality disorders that are dragged along to the party of woes we all endure today.
It starts well before that, through the parents' ingestion and feeding of absurd ideals, misleading narratives, arbitrary rules, insipid sentiments, and other errors that make a good obedient slave.
Some of the ways I deal with the propaganda mill: multi-source news and opinion, cross reference information, ask is the item creditable, establish trusted sources, know some history as it is still the greatest whistleblower. Above all be skeptical.
The little time I spend on the MSM these days is to see what lies they are telling.
One of the most effective forms of linguistic manipulation is called presuppositions. Things that are not stated directly but have to be true in order for you to understand the sentence. A classic, blatantly obvious example is "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Less obvious ones abound, like "The Assad regime has again delivered a chemical attack." (Some of the more juicy presuppositions: 1. The Syrian government is a one-man regime. 2. It has committed previous chemical attacks.) Or even: "The defense industry has started manufacturing blah-blah-blah." There is no such thing as a "defense industry". There are only specific companies making war machines.
It's really eye opening to look for the presuppositions in media and other forms of propaganda. Have fun.
It's also fun to get a counterpart to agree to a common denominator before proceeding with the conversation. That is, to clear any and all presuppositions away. And if those are not recognized and acknowledged first, then there's no point to continue. Otherwise you're implicitly accepting their premise.
Most times the approach stumps people and nothing further happens. They just cannot understand what they might have said that was not "true" already. They also immediately label you difficult.
I think what you're talking about is also called "framing". It's a well-known tool of rhetoric. If you can set the terms of a debate (or, really, any discussion whatever) you can probably "win" it. Socrates (and many others) would seemingly ask a series of disconnected question, while guiding his interlocutor to the conclusion he wished to reach.
People say I'm "cynical" or "skeptical" or acting "judgmental" because I question everything I'm told or read (no matter the source) and test it for the truth. I say I'm being a "realist" when I do this, but maybe it's more likely that I've acquired a very good "bull-shit detector" (propaganda detector). I don't care for people trying to manipulate my feelings either toward or against others. After reading that headline, the first thing that popped into my head was, "How dare they try to make light of what actually happened there and blame the victims!" Reading Caitlin Johnstone may very well be the anti-propaganda medicine we all need.
Propaganda is based in duplicity, and duplicity is the de' facto standard by which most people conduct their lives.
We see it in the Media, in Congress, from all of our elected and appointed officials, in Business, in our Healthcare, in our schools and in our homes. Most of us act in duplicitious ways each and every day.
If we want to stop seeing it, we need to stop being it. Be genuine and integral in our own little corner of the world, and practice it everywhere.
I actually think that is incorrect. The recognized authority in propaganda, Edward Bernays, posited that the content and the implied intent in propaganda is what makes it pernicious or injurious to the consumer.
Television is a technology that here is turned over to advertisers, and the agenda of advertisers is at odds with the needs of the people. This is not only investing in duplicity; it is a mark of contempt for the needs of the people. In most other developed countries, the Television technology is turned over, or a substantial portion of it, to teachers and government service agencies that try to address many of the needs of the viewers. That is still an example of propaganda, but it isn’t rooted in duplicity.
The Cuban people have been taught that they have the Yanqui boot of oppression on their neck, and it is so, but that truth of living in a revolutionary state is also mediated to the society through propaganda.
“I think we are living in a world of lies: lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are the children and grandchildren of lies. One of the hardest things to accept is that the reality of our world is buried under so many layers of official deception and well-cultivated public ignorance about our history and our political system. Even if you break through somehow, momentarily, and hold up a fragment of the truth, most people have no context for dealing with it. It's like a bolt from the blue, they can't process the information. And so the sea of lies closes over us again, and again, and again.
But I don't know what else we can do, except to keep on telling as much of the truth as we can find, to anyone who will listen: reclaiming reality, fragment by fragment, one person at a time. It's an endless task- maybe a hopeless task - but the alternative is a surrender to the worst elements in our society - and in ourselves."
I love Chris Floyd's writing. Is he still writing? Once in a blue moon, I see his stuff published at CounterPunch, but it looks like his website "Empire Burlesque" is taken down, see:
Hollywood has become less subtle lately. The new "Jack Ryan" on Prime is an example. No matter how rogue or vile the CIA may act in any criminal scenario, everyone involved believed they were working for the greater good of America (and the free world) while the leadership of the CIA remains fully committed to rooting out the "one off" bad actors to ultimately save us from the global narco terrorists always waiting to attack an innocent USA. Did I get that right? Bottom line is we can trust our leaders as they always, always do what is best and win the day. Of course it's all Bullshit as the CIA and all other three letter federal agencies are far beyond redemption at this point but they sure have the Hollywood producers fully aligned with the narrative.
And of course, "Our CIA*" must act in secret and subject to no law or oversight. It's for our own good, see.
How much you want to bet that the series was directly or indirectly sponsored by (wait for it!) the CIA?
*"Our CIA" was a favorite phrasing of liberals when the russiagate conspiracy theory was at its height, as if the agency that tortures people was some kind of patriotic national treasure.
Thank you Caitlin🙏Lately I have often wondered if the whole ”success story of modern culture” is not one of those. The story that no matter how bad all seems now, it is still better than when people lived in earlier times. I’m not advocating some rosy image of past that was somehow virginally good either. I’m nowadays much more thinking that there is not any progress but more that each age is in a sense a ”whole” and it is not so much good things and bad things but things that are difficult and take effort and things that are easy and we can enjoy. And with each age we distribute these differently.
"This inquiry began with a deceptively simple question. How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all? The attempt to explain this anomaly – the persistence of a belief in progress in a century full of calamities – led me back to the eighteenth century, where the founders of modern liberalism began to argue that human wants, being insatiable, required an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy them. Insatiable desire, formerly condemned as a source of frustration, unhappiness, and spiritual instability, came to be seen as a powerful stimulus to economic development. Instead of disparaging the tendency to want more than we need, liberals like Adam Smith argued that needs varied from one society to another, that civilized men and women needed more than savages to make them comfortable, and that a continual redefinition of their standards of comfort and convenience led to improvements in production and a general increase in wealth. There was no foreseeable end to the transformation of luxuries into necessities. The more comforts people enjoyed, the more they would expect. The elasticity of demand appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events, not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century. Those wars, indeed, gave added energy to economic development. ~~~ The True and Only Heaven – Progress and its Critics (Christopher Lasch – 1991).
“Achievements of the Megamachine – The first exhibition of the megamachine comes from the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, constructed under the architect, engineer, scientist, and physician, Imhotep, who well earned his later deification. The Pyramid of King Zoser, the dominant feature of a whole city dedicated to the dead, surpassed all contemporary works – Lewis Mumford “The Myth of the Machine – Technics and Human Development (1966)
I think propaganda and its instruments should be taught to 3rd graders across the country. American culture is a propaganda minefield . Only in America is television a totally private enterprise. (For an excellent treatise on the subject by Jerry Mander: Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television).
Then there is the smartphone. This is not strictly American, but, again children should be taught the ramifications of their mobile phone. It is a tracking device that is worth way more to marketers than consumers pay for them. And when the cultural dependency on the smartphone is viewed in the context of the consumer culture, there’s a lot to unpack.
If we want our children to learn to think, we need to impress upon them from an early age that the consumer society is predicated on selling, and selling is often a euphemism for lying.
In 1985, an American academic (Neil Postman) wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death. This and the Mander book are operating instructions for living in the consumer culture.
Social Security is retirement money that workers are required to underwrite, and Medicare is single payer healthcare that workers are required to underwrite. They are retirement programs funded by their recipients, and so could be labeled “retirement programs,” and never be threatened to be cut or terminated, but the status of these programs are never free from politicization. The very label “entitlement” is pejorative and implies that it is subject to be cut for budgetary constraints.
No public service is safe in “the land of the free.”
I don't know about the able-to-read part. I am wondering if people are still getting the basic skills in school. For instance, I was told by a headhunter that a resumé must state its case in the first 25 words or less, because the reader (a person in lower management) won't read further than that. (The old standard was 100 words; but that was a couple of generations ago.) Now, Mr. Trevelyan seems to be a snob who thinks some intellectual authority knows what is worth reading in a universal sense, but most people probably know what is worth reading _to_them_ in the immediate case, like the resumé reader trying to find the best candidate for a particular job. If they find mere reading to be laborious, they are going to have a hard time accomplishing that end. More abstract and theoretical stuff is going to be beyond them. I am not the only one who has noticed this.
Everyone can 3D render and print as many false coins as they like, naturally, and everyone will engage in such moral exhibitionism anyway.
However, the Western cultural matrix and its essential pathologies aren't going away as long as "reformers" keep worshipping the bath water and trying to filter incremental babies out of it. Indeed, without the ability to simply walk out of Mordor, the process of exiting judgment seems to depend on the same sort of duplicity that trapped us in it in the first place. Still working through the consequences of that.
My 6th grade social studies class was called "critical thinking". We deconstructed The NY Times every day. This was during the height of the Vietnam War.
Heroic societies tend to cherish lying and deception. This is why those of us who would rather have none of that have to beat down virtue hoarders and 4chan shitposters alike, *hard*, when they show up on boards like this.
The subtle propaganda works, but so does the blatant, in your face bullshit. That's because people are predisposed to believe the worst about people/countries against whom they are already prejudiced. Right now, Russia is the "evil empire," and any defamatory BS you can think up will be believed by many - no proof or even evidence is required.
Since Caitlin’s post is about the subtlety of propaganda, allow me to push back against your generalization, especially your inclusion of “Jewish racial hatred” in your list, since religious and race propaganda are perhaps the most pernicious and powerful forms of propaganda, and have, by far, resulted in the most human suffering.
But first, just as an aside, while the “Warbucks corporate” profiteers may be part of the “perfect storm” of pro-war forces, that particular comic character is now nearly lost to the mists of time, and I suggest billionaire Iron Man Tony Stark is a more relevant and accurate modern model.
Second, I’ll grant you there may be a case for the “boomer roosky haters”—Joe Biden most prominently. However, that quickly fading demographic alone hardly explains the almost universal western cultural hatred of all things Russian (and, increasingly, Chinese). Biden may be the de facto Emperor/Don of the NATO empire/crime syndicate, but in fact most NATO leaders are of younger generations, not boomers. It turns out that propagandized Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Zers are every bit as good at warmongering, possibly even better than boomers (though, admittedly, the boomers set a high bar).
But the one that just sticks out like a sore thumb is your mention of “Jewish racial hatred.” Is it in your list because you identify Palestinians or Iranians as haters of the Jewish “race”? If so, I suggest that a very useful view of the “Arab-Israeli conflict” has a lot less to do with the Jewish religion(s) of Israelis and a lot more to do with the brazen amoral secular political hegemony and military aggression against (and hatred of) non-Jewish neighbors by the Israeli nation state. I think your list would be much more accurate in light of the last 70 years of history if you had excluded “Jewish racial hatred” and instead included “Arab racial hatred” or even “Persian racial hatred.”
BTW, I am not a fan of the term “race”, because it has been such a destructive idea in human history, but Arabs and Iranians have a far more credible claim to a racial identity than Jews, many of whom have more recent descent from various ethnic backgrounds and not from some ancient Israelite tribal patriarch.
My own take is that Zionists (who are mostly Christian and have a religious obsession with all things Jewish) are far more responsible for modern warmongering than haters of the Jewish “race”.
One of the difficulties in detecting propaganda is that you have to have some idea or knowledge of what the actual underlying facts and truth are. But that real knowledge is hard to come by, because most "issues" have been subject to propaganda, so a person's mind - as Caitlin notes - is full of falsehoods, thus making detection of the propaganda difficult if not impossible.
The best propaganda is selective use of facts, weaved together in support of a rational story that is plausible, with omission of other facts that question or contradict the narrative.
Thus there is no "lie" or "falsehood". That's The NY Times way.
Those "subtleties" ARE the propaganda, and it is more blatant now than ever. I stopped trying to "counter" it because it is a Sisyphean task if there ever was one. For every article you deconstruct there are dozens (if not hundreds) more to drown you out, most likely long before you can even finish writing, much less publishing, your piece. You just learn to see through it, and then stop reading (or listening) to it altogether, unless you for some (masochistic?) reason want to be informed of the CIA take on things -- which these days we are surrounded by 24/7 everywhere and in all media except in certain places (like Caitlin's blog), if you know where to look. Since I am a linguist by training, I found it challenging and even interesting at first (years ago!) to unravel the language that conveys the lies, and it is not always easy and it takes time, so you feel afterwards that you have actually done a good piece of work and that it is helpful -- but as I say you lose the energy and motivation to do it when you realize what you're up against. It would take literally an ARMY of people to deconstruct the propaganda, because that is what they have to use against you (us). Lies Of Our Times was a short-lived mag that tried to do this (Times meaning the NYT), but it was and is a virtually impossible task. You are taking on not only the NYT and the Washington Post but every other "news"paper, not only in the US but in Europe and much of the rest of the world as well. My last -- and totally failed -- effort was two "pages" on Facebook called "Backtalk: the NYT" and "Backtalk: Washington Post," but I wrongly bet on the possibility that people would flock to those pages to collectively deconstruct the lies of at least those two "papers of record." It went nowhere, and I am pretty much resigned to the fact that I am not cut out for any sort of "organizing" work. Whatever I do will have to come from me and me alone. I wonder if Caitlin feels differently, with her thousands of readers. I hope so! Whoever said "the Revolution will not be televised" might have been right, but it looks more and more like it will have to be if it ever happens at all.
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies
Tell me lies
Tell me, tell me lies
Oh, no, no you can't disguise
You can't disguise
No you can't disguise
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
See the light that's right before my eyes
You can't hide your lyin' eyes
And your smile's a thin disguise
I thought by now you'd realize
etc...
How many more out there with lies/disguise/eyes/etc
'I love the way you smack my ass..'
Puddle of Mudd. 'Control'
"... westerners ingest through the news media from day to day." - it's not just media. It starts with kids education in schools.
This. Ever read a textbook? Really read between the lines of a textbook and take notes. It's disgusting how much we manipulate young people.
Actual people who do the work of social reproduction (parents, extended family, teachers, coaches, and other caregivers) tend to see their opinions as creating the particular specific kinds of people that society, as they envision it, requires. They're right, for their own part; it takes years to get a child to internalize the doctrines of private property and wage labor, for example.
History is always written by the powerful and the winners. Of course history books are more propaganda than reality, this is true throughout almost all of the study of history. Some researchers actually pursue the truth via the facts, they are a blessing.
I reckon it starts even earlier. The [brainwashed] parents attend to the new-born baby. Some parents even allow [ritual] genital mutilation to days old babies with all the attendant Cluster B personality disorders that are dragged along to the party of woes we all endure today.
It starts well before that, through the parents' ingestion and feeding of absurd ideals, misleading narratives, arbitrary rules, insipid sentiments, and other errors that make a good obedient slave.
There was another manipulation in the Times missile story, hiding in plain sight: "attacking a bridge to **occupied** Crimea."
Some of the ways I deal with the propaganda mill: multi-source news and opinion, cross reference information, ask is the item creditable, establish trusted sources, know some history as it is still the greatest whistleblower. Above all be skeptical.
The little time I spend on the MSM these days is to see what lies they are telling.
Probably, the simplest lie detector is to remember that truth is hard.
One of the most effective forms of linguistic manipulation is called presuppositions. Things that are not stated directly but have to be true in order for you to understand the sentence. A classic, blatantly obvious example is "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Less obvious ones abound, like "The Assad regime has again delivered a chemical attack." (Some of the more juicy presuppositions: 1. The Syrian government is a one-man regime. 2. It has committed previous chemical attacks.) Or even: "The defense industry has started manufacturing blah-blah-blah." There is no such thing as a "defense industry". There are only specific companies making war machines.
It's really eye opening to look for the presuppositions in media and other forms of propaganda. Have fun.
It's also fun to get a counterpart to agree to a common denominator before proceeding with the conversation. That is, to clear any and all presuppositions away. And if those are not recognized and acknowledged first, then there's no point to continue. Otherwise you're implicitly accepting their premise.
Most times the approach stumps people and nothing further happens. They just cannot understand what they might have said that was not "true" already. They also immediately label you difficult.
I think what you're talking about is also called "framing". It's a well-known tool of rhetoric. If you can set the terms of a debate (or, really, any discussion whatever) you can probably "win" it. Socrates (and many others) would seemingly ask a series of disconnected question, while guiding his interlocutor to the conclusion he wished to reach.
Exactly this. Always go one or two levels upstream of what they need you to believe.
People say I'm "cynical" or "skeptical" or acting "judgmental" because I question everything I'm told or read (no matter the source) and test it for the truth. I say I'm being a "realist" when I do this, but maybe it's more likely that I've acquired a very good "bull-shit detector" (propaganda detector). I don't care for people trying to manipulate my feelings either toward or against others. After reading that headline, the first thing that popped into my head was, "How dare they try to make light of what actually happened there and blame the victims!" Reading Caitlin Johnstone may very well be the anti-propaganda medicine we all need.
Propaganda is based in duplicity, and duplicity is the de' facto standard by which most people conduct their lives.
We see it in the Media, in Congress, from all of our elected and appointed officials, in Business, in our Healthcare, in our schools and in our homes. Most of us act in duplicitious ways each and every day.
If we want to stop seeing it, we need to stop being it. Be genuine and integral in our own little corner of the world, and practice it everywhere.
Then we will begin to see our own reflection.
I actually think that is incorrect. The recognized authority in propaganda, Edward Bernays, posited that the content and the implied intent in propaganda is what makes it pernicious or injurious to the consumer.
Television is a technology that here is turned over to advertisers, and the agenda of advertisers is at odds with the needs of the people. This is not only investing in duplicity; it is a mark of contempt for the needs of the people. In most other developed countries, the Television technology is turned over, or a substantial portion of it, to teachers and government service agencies that try to address many of the needs of the viewers. That is still an example of propaganda, but it isn’t rooted in duplicity.
The Cuban people have been taught that they have the Yanqui boot of oppression on their neck, and it is so, but that truth of living in a revolutionary state is also mediated to the society through propaganda.
https://www.dennislewis.org/articles-other-writings/articles-essays/propaganda-in-a-democracy/
From Chris Floyd, many years ago:
“I think we are living in a world of lies: lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are the children and grandchildren of lies. One of the hardest things to accept is that the reality of our world is buried under so many layers of official deception and well-cultivated public ignorance about our history and our political system. Even if you break through somehow, momentarily, and hold up a fragment of the truth, most people have no context for dealing with it. It's like a bolt from the blue, they can't process the information. And so the sea of lies closes over us again, and again, and again.
But I don't know what else we can do, except to keep on telling as much of the truth as we can find, to anyone who will listen: reclaiming reality, fragment by fragment, one person at a time. It's an endless task- maybe a hopeless task - but the alternative is a surrender to the worst elements in our society - and in ourselves."
I love Chris Floyd's writing. Is he still writing? Once in a blue moon, I see his stuff published at CounterPunch, but it looks like his website "Empire Burlesque" is taken down, see:
https://www.chris-floyd.com/mobile/articles/house-of-death-trump-s-endgame-plan-to-kill-democracy-10112020.html
Do you know what's up with Chris?
Hollywood has become less subtle lately. The new "Jack Ryan" on Prime is an example. No matter how rogue or vile the CIA may act in any criminal scenario, everyone involved believed they were working for the greater good of America (and the free world) while the leadership of the CIA remains fully committed to rooting out the "one off" bad actors to ultimately save us from the global narco terrorists always waiting to attack an innocent USA. Did I get that right? Bottom line is we can trust our leaders as they always, always do what is best and win the day. Of course it's all Bullshit as the CIA and all other three letter federal agencies are far beyond redemption at this point but they sure have the Hollywood producers fully aligned with the narrative.
And of course, "Our CIA*" must act in secret and subject to no law or oversight. It's for our own good, see.
How much you want to bet that the series was directly or indirectly sponsored by (wait for it!) the CIA?
*"Our CIA" was a favorite phrasing of liberals when the russiagate conspiracy theory was at its height, as if the agency that tortures people was some kind of patriotic national treasure.
Thank you Caitlin🙏Lately I have often wondered if the whole ”success story of modern culture” is not one of those. The story that no matter how bad all seems now, it is still better than when people lived in earlier times. I’m not advocating some rosy image of past that was somehow virginally good either. I’m nowadays much more thinking that there is not any progress but more that each age is in a sense a ”whole” and it is not so much good things and bad things but things that are difficult and take effort and things that are easy and we can enjoy. And with each age we distribute these differently.
"This inquiry began with a deceptively simple question. How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all? The attempt to explain this anomaly – the persistence of a belief in progress in a century full of calamities – led me back to the eighteenth century, where the founders of modern liberalism began to argue that human wants, being insatiable, required an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy them. Insatiable desire, formerly condemned as a source of frustration, unhappiness, and spiritual instability, came to be seen as a powerful stimulus to economic development. Instead of disparaging the tendency to want more than we need, liberals like Adam Smith argued that needs varied from one society to another, that civilized men and women needed more than savages to make them comfortable, and that a continual redefinition of their standards of comfort and convenience led to improvements in production and a general increase in wealth. There was no foreseeable end to the transformation of luxuries into necessities. The more comforts people enjoyed, the more they would expect. The elasticity of demand appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events, not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century. Those wars, indeed, gave added energy to economic development. ~~~ The True and Only Heaven – Progress and its Critics (Christopher Lasch – 1991).
“Achievements of the Megamachine – The first exhibition of the megamachine comes from the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, constructed under the architect, engineer, scientist, and physician, Imhotep, who well earned his later deification. The Pyramid of King Zoser, the dominant feature of a whole city dedicated to the dead, surpassed all contemporary works – Lewis Mumford “The Myth of the Machine – Technics and Human Development (1966)
Photos to illustrate these quotes:
http://www.wolfenotes.com/2014/06/progress/
Spot on! Progress is a myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history
I think propaganda and its instruments should be taught to 3rd graders across the country. American culture is a propaganda minefield . Only in America is television a totally private enterprise. (For an excellent treatise on the subject by Jerry Mander: Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television).
Then there is the smartphone. This is not strictly American, but, again children should be taught the ramifications of their mobile phone. It is a tracking device that is worth way more to marketers than consumers pay for them. And when the cultural dependency on the smartphone is viewed in the context of the consumer culture, there’s a lot to unpack.
If we want our children to learn to think, we need to impress upon them from an early age that the consumer society is predicated on selling, and selling is often a euphemism for lying.
In 1985, an American academic (Neil Postman) wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death. This and the Mander book are operating instructions for living in the consumer culture.
Social Security is retirement money that workers are required to underwrite, and Medicare is single payer healthcare that workers are required to underwrite. They are retirement programs funded by their recipients, and so could be labeled “retirement programs,” and never be threatened to be cut or terminated, but the status of these programs are never free from politicization. The very label “entitlement” is pejorative and implies that it is subject to be cut for budgetary constraints.
No public service is safe in “the land of the free.”
"Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." ~George Trevelyan
I don't know about the able-to-read part. I am wondering if people are still getting the basic skills in school. For instance, I was told by a headhunter that a resumé must state its case in the first 25 words or less, because the reader (a person in lower management) won't read further than that. (The old standard was 100 words; but that was a couple of generations ago.) Now, Mr. Trevelyan seems to be a snob who thinks some intellectual authority knows what is worth reading in a universal sense, but most people probably know what is worth reading _to_them_ in the immediate case, like the resumé reader trying to find the best candidate for a particular job. If they find mere reading to be laborious, they are going to have a hard time accomplishing that end. More abstract and theoretical stuff is going to be beyond them. I am not the only one who has noticed this.
jamenta loves the British system of totalitarian slavery, remember.
No, it's just that values and virtues are lies and none of that is worth participating in or upholding.
We can't communicate about our experiences of evaluation?
Everyone can 3D render and print as many false coins as they like, naturally, and everyone will engage in such moral exhibitionism anyway.
However, the Western cultural matrix and its essential pathologies aren't going away as long as "reformers" keep worshipping the bath water and trying to filter incremental babies out of it. Indeed, without the ability to simply walk out of Mordor, the process of exiting judgment seems to depend on the same sort of duplicity that trapped us in it in the first place. Still working through the consequences of that.
My 6th grade social studies class was called "critical thinking". We deconstructed The NY Times every day. This was during the height of the Vietnam War.
That curriculum could never happen today.
Heroic societies tend to cherish lying and deception. This is why those of us who would rather have none of that have to beat down virtue hoarders and 4chan shitposters alike, *hard*, when they show up on boards like this.
The subtle propaganda works, but so does the blatant, in your face bullshit. That's because people are predisposed to believe the worst about people/countries against whom they are already prejudiced. Right now, Russia is the "evil empire," and any defamatory BS you can think up will be believed by many - no proof or even evidence is required.
The blatant stuff softens them up for the subtle stuff.
The pro-war forces comprise a perfect storm of boomer roosky haters, Jewish racial hatred, and Warbucks corporate profiteering.
Since Caitlin’s post is about the subtlety of propaganda, allow me to push back against your generalization, especially your inclusion of “Jewish racial hatred” in your list, since religious and race propaganda are perhaps the most pernicious and powerful forms of propaganda, and have, by far, resulted in the most human suffering.
But first, just as an aside, while the “Warbucks corporate” profiteers may be part of the “perfect storm” of pro-war forces, that particular comic character is now nearly lost to the mists of time, and I suggest billionaire Iron Man Tony Stark is a more relevant and accurate modern model.
Second, I’ll grant you there may be a case for the “boomer roosky haters”—Joe Biden most prominently. However, that quickly fading demographic alone hardly explains the almost universal western cultural hatred of all things Russian (and, increasingly, Chinese). Biden may be the de facto Emperor/Don of the NATO empire/crime syndicate, but in fact most NATO leaders are of younger generations, not boomers. It turns out that propagandized Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Zers are every bit as good at warmongering, possibly even better than boomers (though, admittedly, the boomers set a high bar).
But the one that just sticks out like a sore thumb is your mention of “Jewish racial hatred.” Is it in your list because you identify Palestinians or Iranians as haters of the Jewish “race”? If so, I suggest that a very useful view of the “Arab-Israeli conflict” has a lot less to do with the Jewish religion(s) of Israelis and a lot more to do with the brazen amoral secular political hegemony and military aggression against (and hatred of) non-Jewish neighbors by the Israeli nation state. I think your list would be much more accurate in light of the last 70 years of history if you had excluded “Jewish racial hatred” and instead included “Arab racial hatred” or even “Persian racial hatred.”
BTW, I am not a fan of the term “race”, because it has been such a destructive idea in human history, but Arabs and Iranians have a far more credible claim to a racial identity than Jews, many of whom have more recent descent from various ethnic backgrounds and not from some ancient Israelite tribal patriarch.
My own take is that Zionists (who are mostly Christian and have a religious obsession with all things Jewish) are far more responsible for modern warmongering than haters of the Jewish “race”.
One of the difficulties in detecting propaganda is that you have to have some idea or knowledge of what the actual underlying facts and truth are. But that real knowledge is hard to come by, because most "issues" have been subject to propaganda, so a person's mind - as Caitlin notes - is full of falsehoods, thus making detection of the propaganda difficult if not impossible.
The best propaganda is selective use of facts, weaved together in support of a rational story that is plausible, with omission of other facts that question or contradict the narrative.
Thus there is no "lie" or "falsehood". That's The NY Times way.
just manipulation of the reader and betrayal of the truth.
Those "subtleties" ARE the propaganda, and it is more blatant now than ever. I stopped trying to "counter" it because it is a Sisyphean task if there ever was one. For every article you deconstruct there are dozens (if not hundreds) more to drown you out, most likely long before you can even finish writing, much less publishing, your piece. You just learn to see through it, and then stop reading (or listening) to it altogether, unless you for some (masochistic?) reason want to be informed of the CIA take on things -- which these days we are surrounded by 24/7 everywhere and in all media except in certain places (like Caitlin's blog), if you know where to look. Since I am a linguist by training, I found it challenging and even interesting at first (years ago!) to unravel the language that conveys the lies, and it is not always easy and it takes time, so you feel afterwards that you have actually done a good piece of work and that it is helpful -- but as I say you lose the energy and motivation to do it when you realize what you're up against. It would take literally an ARMY of people to deconstruct the propaganda, because that is what they have to use against you (us). Lies Of Our Times was a short-lived mag that tried to do this (Times meaning the NYT), but it was and is a virtually impossible task. You are taking on not only the NYT and the Washington Post but every other "news"paper, not only in the US but in Europe and much of the rest of the world as well. My last -- and totally failed -- effort was two "pages" on Facebook called "Backtalk: the NYT" and "Backtalk: Washington Post," but I wrongly bet on the possibility that people would flock to those pages to collectively deconstruct the lies of at least those two "papers of record." It went nowhere, and I am pretty much resigned to the fact that I am not cut out for any sort of "organizing" work. Whatever I do will have to come from me and me alone. I wonder if Caitlin feels differently, with her thousands of readers. I hope so! Whoever said "the Revolution will not be televised" might have been right, but it looks more and more like it will have to be if it ever happens at all.
Gil Scot Heron
That's Scott-Heron