191 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. Pressefreiheit ist die Freiheit von zweihundert reichen Leuten, ihre Meinung zu verbreiten.

      Frei ist, wer reich ist.

      Das Verhängnis besteht darin, dass die Besitzer der Zeitungen<br /> den Redakteuren immer weniger Freiheit lassen,<br /> dass sie ihnen immer mehr ihren Willen aufzwingen.

      Da die Herstellung von Zeitungen und Zeitschriften immer größeres Kapital erfordert,<br /> wird der Kreis der Personen, die Presseorgane herausgeben, immer kleiner.<br /> Damit wird unsere Abhängigkeit immer größer und immer gefährlicher.

      -- Paul Sethe, 1965

  2. Feb 2024
    1. Unit commanders subsequentlydistributed instructions on “The Art of Writing a Letter,” urgingsoldiers to write “manly, hard and clear letters.” Many impressionswere “best locked deep in the heart because they concern only sol-diers at the front . . . Anyone who complains and bellyaches is notrue soldier.
    2. From the perspective of the regime, lettersfrom the front served to justify the war and to bind together the na-tion in a common purpose. Military officials underscored the im-portance of writing home; letters from the battle front supplied “akind of spiritual vitamin” for the home front and reinforced its “at-titude and nerves.
    3. recisely becauseGermans had begun to think in terms of Feindbilder, or “visions ofthe enemy,” Goebbels regarded exhibitions such as these a “fantas-tic success.”

      feindbilder - an idea of an enemy, a created image

    4. s aresult, Victor Klemperer could repeatedly “run into” one of Hitler’sReichstag speeches. “I could not get away from it for an hour. Firstfrom an open shop, then in the bank, then from a shop again.”66Radio as well as film turned Nazism into spectacle.
    5. Tacked onto the doorways of apartments, posters, labels, and badgesattested to the fact that nearly all residents belonged to the People’sWelfare or contributed to Winter Relief.

      signaling you belonged, if you didnt participate you were probably suspected of being a subversive

    6. Beginning on 1 May 1936, laws required state registry of-fices to present all newlyweds with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf
    7. The Ministry of Education authorized the National So-cialist Teachers’ League to organize retraining camps in order to“equip,” as Rust put it, teachers with lesson plans in “heredity andrace”; an estimated 215,000 of Germany’s 300,000 teachers at-tended two-week retreats at fifty-six regional sites and two nationalcenters that mixed athletics, military exercises, and instruction.
    8. Nazi pedagogues extolled das Lager, “the camp,”as the privileged place where the “new generation was finding itsform.”

      das lager - the training community camps for german children

    9. Filled with photographs, graphs, and tables, thepropaganda of the Office for Racial Politics made the crucial dis-tinction between quantity and quality—Zahl und Güte—easy tounderstand. Unlike Streicher’s vulgar antisemitic newspaper, DerStürmer, the Neues Volk appeared to be objective, a sobering state-ment of the difficult facts of life

      hiding behind objectivity. ppl saying things and being like well its just fact w/o the ability to double check

    10. By the middle of 1937 the Office of Racial Politics hadtrained over 2,000 “racial educators,” who on the basis of an eight-week course in Berlin received a special speaker’s certificate enti-tling them to address Germans on population and race policy. Certi-fication was part of the effort to make German racism objective
    11. Repeated references to the “false humanity”and “exaggerated pity” of the liberal era indicated exactly whatwas at stake: the need to prepare Germans to endorse what univer-sal or Christian ethics would regard as criminal activity.
    12. What was necessary, he insisted, was to“recognize yourself” (“Erkenne dich selbst”), which meant identi-fying with the idealized portraits of new Germans and following thetenets of hereditary biology to find a suitable partner for marriage,to marry only for love, and to provide the Volk with healthy chil-dren.
    13. new visual regime repeatedly in-troduced the German body, most often in portraits of sunnyathletes, large families, and marching soldiers, and sometimes bycontrast in juxtaposed close-up shots of misshapen, degenerate
    14. vast network of Gemeinschaftslager or com-munity camps was established across Germany; at one point or an-other, most Germans passed through them. Alongside concentra-tion camps and killing camps, the training camps were fundamentalparts of the Nazi racial project.

      gemeinschaftslager - community / training camps to educate germans on racial ideology

    15. cultivate racial solidarity by overcoming social divi-sions, prohibiting racial mixing, and combating degenerative bio-logical trends
    16. until the very end of the Reich in 1945, they handedout hundreds of thousands of copies of the eight-mark “people’sedition” along with pamphlets providing advice on how to main-tain good racial stock and prepare Ahnenpässe, “Germans, HeedYour Health and Your Children’s Health,” “A Handbook for Ger-man Families,” and “Advice for Mothers.”
    17. the sheerforce of the imagery and the busy schedules of national acclamationmade dissent politically risky; but even more: dissent also appearedto be futile.
    18. With the cheerful slices of German life they broadcastand the national audience they pulled together, radio plays recrea-ted the people’s community. It produced the effect of being unteruns, “just us.”

      unter uns - only us, (us referring to ethnic germans, the feeling of inclusion in a special group)

    19. On these occasions, friends and neighbors knew they wouldfind one another in front of the radio and could later share im-pressions—in this sense, Gemeinschaftsempfang, collective recep-tion, had been achieved.

      gemeinschaftsempfang - communal listening, the understanding that everything you hear is what everyone else is also hearing and the sense of solidarity you gain from it

    20. In what it touted as the triumph of “socialism ofthe deed” over “private capitalism” and “economic liberalism,” in1933 the Propaganda Ministry pressed a consortium of radio man-ufacturers to design and produce a Volksempfänger, or “people’sradio,” for the mass market.
    21. The eventfulness of the Day of Potsdam was the reason “all three,father, mother, and Emma” Dürkefälden, had gone to Kaune’s tav-ern, but it was also what they themselves produced by going there

      self perpetuating / self fulfilling cycle-- by drawing in crowds, nazis could pass off the illusion of unanimous support and community among germans, national unity

    22. Nazis wanted the Germanpeople to comprehend events on the order of grand history by hear-ing broadcasts on the radio, seeing the reassembly of marchers onfilm, and taking photographs of their own part in the making of thepeople’s community
    23. With banners, flags, marches, and “Heil Hitler!” the Nazis pro-duced a distinctive public choreography and accompanying soundtrack that seemed to affirm the unanimity of the people’s commu-nity.
    24. Radio helped to create the collective voice of thenation.
    25. “People looked to Nazism as a great and radical sur-gery or cleansing” and therefore saw “the movement as a sourceof rejuvenation” in public life.
    26. hile“Strength through Joy” vacations were budget affairs, third-classrailway journeys to Thüringen rather than Bavaria, and parsimo-nious meals at second-rate hotels, they offered millions of Ger-mans the opportunity to travel, to see the seaside, or visit theReichshauptstadt—Berlin was one of the favorite “Strengththrough Joy” destinations.

      giving people who had never had the opportunity to travel-- of course theyre gonna support your regime if it gives them perks. for all accounts this seems like a great deal for germans if you discount the ethnic cleansing happening in the bg

    27. The dreamof the Volkswagen seemed to promise “a new, happier age” thatwould make “the German people rich and Germany beautiful,” asHitler put it. Indeed, the Volkswagen functioned as a symbol for thenewly won capacity to dream about the future: in this fundamentalsense, the Nazis appeared as “men of the future.”
    28. Propaganda displays of bombs andbombers, and the destruction they could wreak, revealed the ex-posed, trembling body of the nation, which the Nazis claimed toprotect through a nationwide program of air defense.
    29. Ger-mans wore special badges to show they had donated their marks;the badges functioned so as to make citizens accountable to them-selves. “On Sundays,” Hauser remarked, “when collecting for theWinter-Relief Fund is going on in the streets no one would darewalk abroad without a badge pinned conspicuously to his coat.”
    30. Moreover, the impression thatGermans were assembling behind the Nazis reinforced itself. Moreand more people adjusted to the “new direction” when they sawthat others had done so.
    31. The Day of Potsdam and May Day indi-cated that there was considerable desire among Germans to partici-pate in rituals of national renewal
    32. One-potmeals on the first Sunday of every month provided opportunitiesfor party representatives to go from door to door in the evening asthey collected the pfennigs that had been “saved,” and to snoop.

      volunteer activity as a PR cover for nazis, an opportunity to see who might be a subversive, and to create atmosphere of fear among people who didn't contribute to the cause. very red-scare "snitch on your neighbor"-esque

    33. In addition, Goebbels tried towin over proletarian celebrities.
    34. plac-ing leading functionaries of the regime in Germany’s factories.
    35. Hitler registered to vote in the working-class Berlin precinct Siemensstadt, and enjoyed a great propagandabonanza when he spoke from the floor of the Siemens factory in anationally broadcast radio address on 10 November 1933.
    36. Evenbefore Hitler spoke (8:00 p.m.), the choreography of May Day hadfastened the links between workers and the nation, between ma-chinists and machine-age dreams, between technical mastery andnational prowess
    37. This is thesignificance of the Day of Potsdam: the images of unity were madeavailable for national consumption. The growth in radio ownershipespecially in 1933 and 1934 indicates how great the desire was topartake in Nazi spectacle, although the fact that radios remainedmuch less common in rural areas
    38. Socialists around the worldhad celebrated May Day as a festival of labor since the 1880s; butin Germany they had failed to get the official recognition the Nazisnow offered. So strong were the hopes for national unity that theGerman Free Trade Unions welcomed the Nazi gesture and encour-aged members to participate in the celebrations.
    39. the Nazis recognized only Volkskameraden, people’s com-rades, and Volksfeinde, enemies of the people, whom they sub-jected to deliberate and refined cruelties in a “willful transgressionof norms.

      volkskameraden - people's comrades

      volksfeinde - enemies of the people

    40. National Socialism offered acomprehensive vision of renewal, which many Germans found ap-pealing, but they combined it with the alarming specter of nationaldisintegration.
    41. In the national broadcast, selected party members spoke out thescripted reactions of “ordinary citizens,” who, appearing from allwalks of life, expressed support for Hitler.
    42. The strong presence of the police,who tended to sympathize with the National Socialists, restrictedthe mobility of opponents, while Nazi toughs broke into SocialDemocratic or trade union offices and Nazi officials banned so-cialist newspapers.
    43. Held on 21 March 1933 in Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche, whereFrederick the Great lay buried, the Day of Potsdam aligned Hit-ler with revered Prussian traditions, the Hohenzollern dynasty andthe founding of the German Reich some sixty years earlier, andthe heroic sacrifices of the Great War, represented by the “hero ofTannenberg,” President Paul von Hindenburg,
  3. Nov 2023
    1. going back 3,000 years state of Israel was um dominated by a Jewish 00:01:26

      Non-Jewish religions (Kebarans, Natufians, Sumerians & Akkads and later Babylonians originating from Levant, Anatolia & Eurates crescent) and non-Semitic races (the biblical "Philistines") all co-existed for millennia before the Bible was even written, 1200-200 BC. Jews being the dominant population probably applies only after ~600BC, when they started returning from the 80y Babylonian enslavement, and started to gradually re-occupy their fatherlands, a significant event that culminated a sense of identity much stronger than that of the neighboring populations.

  4. Sep 2023
    1. According to YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan, 70 percent of views on YouTube are from recommendations—so the site’s algorithms are largely responsible for amplifying RT’s propaganda hundreds of millions of times.
    1. as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter

      It was not just one journalist that made this claim, nor was a claim of Russian Pravda - it has been noted by many journalist around the world that the, undisputed so far (Sep 2023), claim that it was Boris Johnson who broke the peace negotiations was made by the Ukranian Pravda.

  5. Jul 2023
    1. Der "Demokratische Widerstand" taucht inzwischen auch im Verfassungsschutzbericht auf. Darin steht, dass die dahinterstehende "Kommunikationsstelle Demokratischer Widerstand" (KDW) eine Vielzahl an öffentlichen Veranstaltungen durchführe und im Internet Verschwörungserzählungen und demokratiefeindliche Propaganda verbreite. Sie habe sich zum maßgeblichen Akteur des Spektrums der "verfassungsschutzrelevanten Staatsdelegitimierung" in Berlin entwickelt.

      nein.

      "demokratiefeindlich" ist unsere regierung, die das volk belügt und dem volk wahlfreiheiten wegnimmt. um diese sklaverei als "demokratie" zu bezeichnen, muss man dumm oder böse sein.

      "delegitimierend" ist unsere regierung. wer jeden tag A sagt und B macht, der verdient keine legitimität, und muss sich umso mehr auf eine "legalität" berufen, die er sich selbst ausgestellt hat. fuck the system!

    1. Moscow then illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014

      What Reuters and other mainstream media systematically neglect tot write is that what predated the annexation of Crimea was a 2014 a violent US-backed coup d'etat replaced the russia-friendly elected government with a Western-affiliated one that banned russian language (30%-50% of population) and said political parties, arresting their leaders.

    1. The reiteration of slogans, the distortionof the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats uponthe citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long meaneither that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest andmost persistent propagandists or that the people must savethemselves by strengthening their minds so that they can ap-praise the issues for themselves.

      Things have not improved measurably since the 1950s apparently. The drumbeat has only gotten worse.

    2. We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object ofpropaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangersto democracy.

      How would Robert Hutchins view the new millennium?

  6. Jun 2023
    1. the culture is against you the world is against you right nobody respects you and and people are going to denigrate you and people are going to corrupt your children
      • Evangelical leaders create propaganda
        • deeply embedding messaging in their vast media network
        • of books, internet, radio, tv, church
        • to create fear-based, polarizing social norms that fragment society
        • For example, SBC LifeWay sells tens of millions of copies of Christian books that indoctrinate social norms of fear and division into children
    2. white evangelicals believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims
      • The author describes how
        • the evangelical leaders have manufactured the now widespread mythology
          • that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims
        • in order to weaponize fear to consolidate power
    1. Second, the social life of annotation is of greater importance than individual reader response. Annotation must be studied and promoted as a social endeavor that is co-authored by groups of annotators, with interactive media, spanning on-the-ground and online settings, and in response to shared commitments.

      When will we get the civil disobedience version of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Mark a Book?

  7. Apr 2023
    1. Lying press (German: Lügenpresse, lit. 'press of lies') is a pejorative and disparaging political term used largely for the printed press and the mass media at large. It is used as an essential part of propaganda and is thus usually dishonest or at least not based on careful research.
    1. Now, I've made a number of documentaries about fake news. And what interests me is the first person to use the phrase mainstream media was Joseph Goebbels. And he, in one of his propaganda sheets, said “It's very important that you don't read the mainstream media because they'll tell you lies.” You must read the truth by the ramblings of his boss and his associated work. And you do have to watch this. This is a very, very well-established technique of fascists, is to tell you, don't read this stuff, read our stuff.<br /> —Ian Hislop, Editor, Private Eye Magazine 00:16:00, Satire in the Age of Murdoch and Trump, The Problem with Jon Stewart Podcast

  8. Mar 2023
    1. Rysslands anfallskrig mot Ukraina har splittrat den rasideologiska miljön. De flesta grupper undviker att ta tydlig ställning. Men i ett försök att framstå som en balanserande kraft i det offentliga samtalet sprider de högerextrema medierna ett okritiskt pro-ryskt narrativ om kriget och krigets orsaker. Det gör den rasideologiska miljön till en tummelplats för rysk desinformation och påverkan.
  9. Jan 2023
    1. one reason the Golden Age of Piracy remains the stuff oflegend is that pirates of that age were so skilled at manipulatinglegends; they deployed wonder-stories—whether of terrifyingviolence or inspiring ideals—as something very much like weaponsof war, even if the war in question was the desperate and ultimatelydoomed struggle of a motley band of outlaws against the entireemerging structure of world authority at the time.
    1. News outlets make myriad subjective judgment calls pursuant to processes that are not made public to readers/viewers and that are often not written down or audited after the fact.

      To prevent extreme propaganda, the Mass Media must be forced to publish automatically the inventory of news broadcasted throughout the year, categorized.

    1. Anti-imperialists who repeat Western, mainstream criticism of the West’s official enemies might have noble intentions, but the effect of their actions is to amplify and legitimize fraudulent claims about our leaders’ true foreign policy objectives. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, they are helping to build public support for Western military aggression and economic warfare, all of which causes immense suffering abroad and diverts precious public resources from the domestic needs of Western electorates.

      Western citizens criticizing the West's rival nations contributed to the mainstream narrative of the collective West as a power of good (vs evil).

  10. Dec 2022
    1. On Twitter, the picture is very similar in the case of Russianpropaganda, where all accounts are verified (with a few exceptions)and mostly associated with news outlets, and generate over 68%of all retweets linking to these websites (see panel a of Figure 4).For what concerns low-credibility news, there are both verified (wecan notice the presence of seanhannity) and not verified users,and only a few of them are directly associated with websites (e.g.zerohedge or Breaking911). Here the top 15 accounts generateroughly 30% of all retweets linking to low-credibility websites.
    1. Conspiracy theories that provide names of the beneficiaries of political, social and economic disasters help people to navigate the complexities of the globalized world, and give simple answers as to who is right and who is wrong. If you add to this global communication technologies that help to rapidly develop and spread all sorts of conspiracy theories, these theories turn into a powerful tool to target subnational, national and international communities and to spread chaos and doubt. The smog of subjectivity created by user-generated content and the crisis of expertise have become a true gift to the Kremlin’s propaganda.
    1. Our results show that Fox News is reducing COVID-19 vaccination uptake in the United States, with no evidence of the other major networks having any effect. We first show that there is an association between areas with higher Fox News viewership and lower vaccinations, then provide an instrumental variable analysis to account for endogeneity, and help pin down the magnitude of the local average treatment effect.
  11. Nov 2022
    1. Βρέθηκαν στη γραμμή πυρός από την αρχή, συμπεριλαμβανομένης της αεροπορικής επιδρομής της 9ης Μαρτίου που κατέστρεψε ένα μαιευτήριο στην κατεχόμενη πλέον πόλη-λιμάνι της Μαριούπολης.

      Συμφωνα με τον Johnny Miller, η ίδια η έγγκυος στη συνέντευξη κατηγορούσε τους Ουκρανούς, αλλα το οι NYT & BBC έκοψαν αυτό το κομμάτι από τη συνένμευξή της.

    1. το 1945, σε δημοσκόπηση που πραγματοποιήθηκε στη Γαλλία, το 57% των ερωτηθέντων πίστευε πως η Σοβιετική Ένωση είχε τον πιο καθοριστικό ρόλο στην νίκη του ναζισμού, ποσοστό που μειώθηκε το 1994 στο 25% και στο 23% το 2015, ενώ αντίστοιχα αυξήθηκε σημαντικά το ποσοστό των ΗΠΑ – από 20% το 1945 σε 54% το 2015 (Πηγή: δημοσκοπήσεις IFOP 1945, 1994, 2004, 2015).

      Stillpeople do not know what Putin wrote about WWII.

  12. Aug 2022
  13. Jul 2022
    1. Ginther says the city needs more officers to patrol the areas. “Yes, that’s why we invested in 170 of them this year. We will invest in those types of classes in the next several years. We know we need more officers,” he said.

      Ginther is bad a math if he thinks that retiring over 200 officers and hiring 170 results in "more officers".

      https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/officers-apply-for-retirement-incentive-program/530-1f741623-e0d9-4f01-a951-866de932f1a7

  14. Jun 2022
    1. LIST OF MILITARY RESOURCES REQUESTED TO BE PROVIDED IN SUPPORT OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES PRODUCTION BETWEEN SEPTEMBER 2018 AND JULY 2019. I. Based on the Paramount scripted titled "TOP GUN: MAVERICK", Commander, Naval Air Forces (CNAF), in concurrence with Chief, Navy Office of Information (CHINFO) and approval from Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (ATSD-PA), is prepared to provide the following support: a. (b)(6) Assign a senior staff, post-command Officer to review with public affairs the scri 's thematics and weave in key talking points relevant to the aviation community

      The Pentagon helped to turn the film 'Maverick' into military propaganda.

      McLeod, Alan. 2022. “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Is Military Propaganda. Official Documents Prove It.” MintPress News. June 13, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220617074530/https://www.mintpressnews.com/top-gun-maverick-military-propaganda-official-documents/281077/.

    1. Ohio does not have CAP laws

      Ohio already has scores of other laws that can be applied where warranted. From negligent homicide to child endangering. Application of existing law is up to prosecutors.

      Statists who seek to rule others based on their emotions think "one more law" would ensure that they never have bad feelings ever again - if their opinion is forced upon enough people.

      This ignores the reality that the situations they're fretting about are already covered by existing law. The objective reality that "laws don't actually prevent bad things from happening" is lost on these fools.

    2. CAP laws were passed to protect children without taking away the Second Amendment right

      Requiring firearms to be locked such that they cannot be effectively used in an emergency has been found to violate the Second Amendment, so she's either ignorant or intentionally misleading.

  15. Apr 2022
  16. Mar 2022
    1. Ben Collins. (2022, February 28). Quick thread: I want you all to meet Vladimir Bondarenko. He’s a blogger from Kiev who really hates the Ukrainian government. He also doesn’t exist, according to Facebook. He’s an invention of a Russian troll farm targeting Ukraine. His face was made by AI. https://t.co/uWslj1Xnx3 [Tweet]. @oneunderscore__. https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1498349668522201099

    1. But the Russian despot has told his lie so many times that he apparently believes it himself.

      Does Putin even see the population of Russia as real people? Particularly the activists. Maybe he thinks that most people need to be told what to do ("freed from the empire of lies").

    1. Russia has reportedly been trying for years to “unplug” from the internet so it can completely control communications in the country. Internet providers shouldn’t help the Russian government, or any government, keep people within an information bubble.

      Any good article on this, and on Russia's propaganda machine in general?

      Are they trying to emulate China, or did they arrive on this on their own?

    2. The European Union, in an unprecedented move, has decided to prohibit the broadcasting and distribution of content by these outlets throughout the European Union

      Example of censorship done by our western institutions. The reasoning here is to prevent the spread of one-sided, fact-misrepresenting propaganda -- but it's still censorship.

    1. For centuries, Kyiv was looking westwards and was a part of a union with Lithuania and Poland until it was eventually conquered and absorbed by the Russian Empire, by the czarist empire. But even after that, Ukrainians remained a separate people to a large extent, and it's important to know that because this is really what is at stake in this war.

      Putin's twisted logic rests on the assumption that Russia's conquering of Ukraine by war for a brief part of history justifies his (false) assertion that Ukraine was always a part of Russia.

  17. Feb 2022
  18. Jan 2022
    1. Comments are turned off.

      At 1:41 in the video, almost everyone has masks on.

      By the 2:00 mark in the video, nobody has masks on anymore.

      Apparently "the science" says that you wear your masks for the photo op - but then take them off when you don't think anyone is looking anymore.

      I don't think the Government should be allowed to post propaganda to social media platforms like YouTube with comments disabled.

    1. The safety and security of our employees continues to be our top priority

      If the safety and security of their employees was truly their top priority, then why didn't they have any security present to prevent this?

      This is because they are lying and have higher priorities than the safety and security of their employees.

    2. outside of Columbus

      Columbus is a municipal corporation. This address lies within the boundaries of Columbus.

      Stating that this branch was "outside of Columbus" is false.

  19. Dec 2021
    1. The New York Times continues to cite him as one of its primary sources on the question of COVID's origins.

      Peter Daszak is still cited by respectable media, and that is insulting, given his record on truthiness.

  20. Oct 2021
    1. A retrospective of 50 years as a human being on planet Earth.

      The Art of Noticing

      This is a compilation of articles that I had written as a way to process the changes I was observing in the world and, consequently, in myself as a reaction to the events. I have come to think of this process as the art of noticing. This process is in contrast to the expectation that I should be a productive member of society, a target market, and a passive audience for charismatic leaders: celebrities, billionaires, and politicians.

      • Social: fame
      • Economic: wealth
      • Political: power

      An Agent of Change

      To become an agent of change is to recognize that we are not separate, we are not individuals, we are not cogs in a machine. We are complex and diverse. We are designers. We are a creative, collective, self-organizing, learning community.

      We are in a process of becoming—a being journey:

      • Personal resilience
      • Social influence
      • Economic capacity
      • Political agency
      • Ecological harmony

      This is how we shift from an attention economy to an intention economy. Rather than being oriented toward the failures of the past, the uncertainty of the present, or the worries of the future, in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and fear, we are shifting our consciousness to manifest our intention through perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We are the builders collective.

      We are one.

    2. Neurons, synapses, electrochemical receptors, and a compromised immune system.

      I use the metaphor of a compromised immune system to describe the effects of propaganda, the polluted information ecology in which we are swimming.

      Ultimately, the cognitive distortions are the disease of modern life, where we can no longer understand ourselves or our world, because the disinformation campaigns have impaired our ability to think rationally when we are in a constant state of stress, anxiety, and fear. We become stuck in the lizard brain, the limbic system, where we make emotional decisions and subsequently justify our actions with rationalizations.

    1. The Daily is part of my ritual of learning through long-form journalism in an audio format what is top of mind for many Americans. I was raised on American exceptionalism that was piped into Canada through several media channels: TV, radio, music, books, movies, etc.

      Jacques Ellul called this Propaganda and The Technological Society.

    1. As early as 1928, Edward Bernays recognized propaganda as a modern instrument to produce productive ends and "help bring order out of chaos".

      Amy Westervelt delves into the history of propaganda to uncover the deceit at the heart of public relations, marketing, advertising, and design in an analysis of the business strategies of oil and gas companies in the podcast, Drilled.

      Westervelt pays particular interest to Edward Bernays.

      “Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term ‘public relations’ when propaganda started to become a negative term. His specialty was using psychological know-how to manipulate the masses and orchestrate cultural shifts in his clients’ favor (clients like Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and General Motors).”

    1. Drawing from his own experiences fighting for the French resistance against the Vichy regime, Ellul offers a unique insight into the propaganda machine.

      Why is Jacques Ellul believable when he takes a psychological and sociological approach to understanding propaganda? Because he lived through the Nazi invasion of his own country and became a leader in resistance to the Vichy regime.

      As we live in times when populist movements are outsourcing influence, capacity, and agency to authoritarian leaders who purport to be able to solve our problems, we are horrified to realize that we also have been merely following orders in the work to imagine, design, and build the fascist architecture of modern society.

  21. Sep 2021
  22. Jul 2021
  23. Jun 2021
  24. May 2021
    1. FDR's famous date which will live in infamy speech where she said this was an attack on our citizens in Hawaii in the Philippines and that pairing Philippines in Hawaii

      Pearl harbor only came later, as US soil, it was their colonies that had been primarily attacked and occupied.

  25. Apr 2021
    1. THIS is the type of propaganda that is brainwashing our children to take part in a political agenda, instilling the fear of the Earth cooking us like an oven (their description of Venus) in their lifetime, telling them they must take action now at any cost!
  26. Mar 2021
    1. Shepard said at the time, "They Live was the basis for my use of the word 'obey,' The movie has a very strong message about the power of commercialism and the way that people are manipulated by advertising. [...] One of my main concepts with the Obey campaign as a whole was that obedience is the most valuable currency. People rarely consider how much power they sacrifice by blindly following a self-serving corporation's marketing agenda, and how their spending habits reflect the direction in which they choose to transfer power."

      Shepard Fairey on the link between his Obey campaign and the movie They Live.

    2. To that end, the branding strategy I chose for our project was based on propaganda-themed art in a Constructivist / Futurist style highly reminiscent of Soviet propaganda posters.

      I love this esthetic myself.

  27. Feb 2021
    1. The intellectual cesspool of the inflation truthers

      Powerful Headline (words) from a Washington Post article under Economic Policy. WORDS.....! Words..... When you study Legal Theory you learn that "words" play a significant role in all aspects of social order.

      Controlling the rhetoric with consistent narrative

      This statement simply implies the use of consistent narrative (story) to allow control of the rhetoric. Narrative can be viewed as believable while Rhetoric is a general pejorative. When the rhetoric is mis or dis-information the narrative must be credible.

      Main stream media (MSM) has held a long-term standing across the world as being credible. This standing is eroding. It has eroded considerably over the last 25 years among critical thinkers and the general population has started to take notice.

      I question everything from MSM especially when narrative is duplicated with identical rhetoric across known government media assets. History is a wonderful thing when searching for Truth. Events in historical time periods can be researched, parsed and studied for patterns based on future evidence and outcomes.

      Information "Spin" is real and happens for one purpose, that purpose is to benefit a position, agenda, person, plan, etc., by manipulating (advertising, PR, propaganda) information. Spin is difficult to refute without hard facts. Spin has a short-term shelf life, but that is all it needs to chart a new course, set the "ball" in motion so to say.

      History allows Truth to overcome Spin.

  28. Dec 2020
    1. But something about the comforting rigidity of the process, its seductive notation, but perhaps mostly its connotations of intellectual privilege, has drawn a diverse selection of disciplines to the altar of mathematical reasoning. Indeed, the widespread misappropriation of the language of mathematics in the social and biological sciences has to be one of the great tragedies of our time.

      The deliberate misappropriation of the language of mathematics.

  29. Oct 2020
    1. By 2005 blogs had crashed the cultural gates. China’s editors, station directors, and pub-lishers had always acted as cultural “gatekeepers:” deciding who could and couldn’t becomeknown through publication, TV and film appearances, and musical performances. In a majorcultural power-shift, pop cultural icons could emerge through blogs, forums, chatrooms, andpersonal websites, completely outside of the government approved cultural structures.But while Communist Party propaganda department had lost control over China’s cul-ture, in the realm of politics the gates and walls are constantly being rebuilt, upgraded, andreinforced. It would be impossible for a dissident political leader to rise to popularity in thesame way that Mu Zimei rose to stardom.

      Even though China's publishing class lost control as cultural gatekeepers with the advent of blogs, the Communist Party propaganda department constantly rebuilds, upgrades and reinforces the gates.

    1. It seems like a waste of money to hire an actor to play the “algorithm guy” when there are actual algorithm creators being interviewed in the film.

      It does seem like they're trying to normalize themselves and divert from the facts of what they have personally done. Imagine if Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Göring were able to do the same? And the state of the art of their propaganda was nothing in comparison.

  30. Sep 2020
  31. Jun 2020
    1. Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 by friendly fire

      Even though Fox News repeatedly repeated the Govt's claim that Tillman was killed fighting the Taliban.

      In interviews with The Washington Post, the Army Ranger's mother and father said they believe the military and the government created a heroic tale about how their son died to foster a patriotic response across the country.

      U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Matthew Beevers said Saturday that Tillman was killed Thursday night in a firefight at about 7 p.m. on a road near Sperah, about 25 miles southwest of a U.S. base at Khost.

      After coming under fire, Tillman’s patrol got out of their vehicles and gave chase, moving toward the spot of the ambush. Beevers said the fighting was “sustained” and lasted 15-20 minutes. Pat Tillman turned down a $3.6 million contract in 2002 to join the Army in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Beevers said Tillman was killed by enemy fire, but he had no information about what type of weapons were involved in the assault, or whether he died instantly.

  32. May 2020
  33. Apr 2020
  34. Mar 2020
    1. When the disease emerged, the Chinese government suppressed information and then turned the social media platforms into tools for both reliable information and propaganda.
    1. “Tonight, we are witnessing what will be a massive paradigm shift in the future of disease control and prevention,” he said. “A bold, new precedent is being set, the world will once again benefit greatly from America’s leadership

      This is written like straight up State Propaganda.

  35. Feb 2020
    1. The multinational food industry has a vested interest in rubbishing Monteiro’s ideas about how UPFs are detrimental to our health. And much of the most vociferous criticism of his Nova system has come from sources close to the industry. A 2018 paper co-authored by Melissa Mialon, a French food engineer and public health researcher, identified 32 materials online criticising Nova, most of which were not peer-reviewed. The paper showed that, out of 38 writers critical of Nova, 33 had links to the ultra-processed food industry.

      Big corporations at work!

  36. Oct 2019
    1. In case you wanted to be even more skeptical of Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts, Facebook has now changed its advertising policies to make it easier for politicians to lie in paid ads. Donald Trump is taking full advantage of this policy change, as popular info reports.
    2. The claim in this ad was ruled false by those Facebook-approved third-party fact-checkers, but it is still up and running. Why? Because Facebook changed its policy on what constitutes misinformation in advertising. Prior to last week, Facebook’s rule against “false and misleading content” didn’t leave room for gray areas: “Ads landing pages, and business practices must not contain deceptive, false, or misleading content, including deceptive claims, offers, or methods.”
  37. Aug 2019
    1. "primer for developing and improving technological methods to help promote trust and accuracy, especially on the web and involving news reporting." W3C Credible Web Community Group

  38. May 2019
    1. how big the gap between critical history and the “popular history” that makes it to best-seller lists

      There's a BIG difference between the gap between academic and popular history and this, which seems more in the tradition of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly "history".

  39. Dec 2018
    1. Peter Jukes on problems with BBC news.

      The BBC has a duty to 'inform' but absolutely no obligation to reflect widespread but evidence-free opinions about  MMR vaccines, global warming, fake moon landings, 911 inside jobs, or Obama's birth certificate. The natural and logical corollary to this duty to inform is an obligation to fight misinformation. 

      And what bigger story could there be this year - where is the duty to inform is most pressing - than the subversion of democracy by overspending, illegal coordination and potential foreign funding of the most important constitutional vote in our lifetimes?

      . . .

      This constant political pressure makes the corporation risk-averse, and probably even more so with a subject like Brexit which begs big questions about the future of the country and its national security.  Because of its hierarchical structure and special funding, there is a constant danger that senior BBC execs see their political masters as their most important customers rather than the license-fee paying public. 

    1. A detailed report on Russia's disinformation campaign based on the data released by Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

  40. Oct 2018
    1. Federal prosecutors on Friday alleged that a Russian woman is the chief accountant of Project Lakhta, a sprawling Kremlin campaign to influence politics in the U.S. and European Union. It’s an operation that the FBI, in a criminal complaint, says is ongoing.

      The complaint accuses the woman, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, of keeping detailed records of payouts to a social-media campaign of which the St. Petersberg-based troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, is just one component. Its chief financing, the FBI complaint continues, comes from Concord Management and Consulting, run by the oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, sometimes called “Putin’s Chef.”

  41. Sep 2018
    1. Simply put, the modern economy is evolving beyond the constraints of traditional work models. As a society, we are demanding the freedom of flexible work environments. Collectively, we are breaking barriers and smashing limitations, especially when it comes to making a living. The time is ripe for us to champion our own destiny by harnessing the power of the gig economy to spur lasting social change.

      This is all very "uplifting," but this entire paragraph is devoid of meaning. When is it NOT the time to "champion our own destiny?" What does it even mean to "harness the power of the gig economy to spur lasting social change?" What sort of change? People can't afford to live in Silicon Valley. The ethos of the tech companies show that they don't care about the communities of which they are a part.

  42. Aug 2018
  43. Jul 2018
    1. Gatov, who is the former head of Russia's state newswire's media analytics laboratory, told BuzzFeed the documents were part of long-term Kremlin plans to swamp the internet with comments. "Armies of bots were ready to participate in media wars, and the question was only how to think their work through," he said. "Someone sold the thought that Western media, which specifically have to align their interests with their audience, won't be able to ignore saturated pro-Russian campaigns and will have to change the tone of their Russia coverage to placate their angry readers."
    2. According to the documents, which are attached to several hundred emails sent to the project's leader, Igor Osadchy, the effort was launched in April and is led by a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It's based in a Saint Petersburg suburb, and the documents say it employs hundreds of people across Russia who promote Putin in comments on Russian blogs.
    3. The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.
    1. I saw Eliot Higgins present in Paris in early January, and he listed four ‘Ps’ which helped explain the different motivations. I’ve been thinking about these a great deal and using Eliot’s original list have identified four additional motivations for the creation of this type of content: Poor Journalism, Parody, to Provoke or ‘Punk’, Passion, Partisanship, Profit, Political Influence or Power, and Propaganda.This is a work in progress but once you start breaking these categories down and mapping them against one another you begin to see distinct patterns in terms of the types of content created for specific purposes.
    2. Back in November, I wrote about the different types of problematic information I saw circulate during the US election. Since then, I’ve been trying to refine a typology (and thank you to Global Voices for helping me to develop my definitions even further). I would argue there are seven distinct types of problematic content that sit within our information ecosystem. They sit on a scale, one that loosely measures the intent to deceive.
  44. Jun 2018
    1. Reporting, and therefore repeating, Trump’s tweets just gives him more power. There is an alternative. Report the true frames that he is trying to pre-empt. Report the truth that he is trying to divert attention from. Put the blame where it belongs. Bust the trial balloon. Report what the strategies are trying to hide.

  45. Apr 2018
    1. Louis C.K.’s message is clear — white men have nothing to complain about.

      Not only Renee Graham is factually incorrect, she does not understand comedy. What a sad person.

  46. Mar 2018
    1. Mark Galeotti says he regrets coining the term "Gerasimov Doctrine" for Russia's supposed strategy of hybrid warfare. Gerasimov's speech was actually about how the Kremlin perceives US actions in the Middle East and Europe.

      "There is no denying that the West is facing a multivectored, multi-agency campaign of subversion, division, and covert political 'active measures' by Russia"<br> ...<br> "there is no single Russian 'doctrine'<br> ...<br> "There is a broad political objective -- to distract, divide, and demoralize -- but otherwise it is largely opportunistic, fragmented, even sometimes contradictory. Some major operations are coordinated ... but most are not."<br> ...<br> "more emphasis ought to go on counterintelligence and media literacy, on fighting corruption ... and healing the social divisions the Russians gleefully exploit"

  47. Feb 2018
  48. Dec 2017
    1. I was listening today to hearings on the FBI, where the fact that FBI agents gave to Democratic candidates was cited as prima facie evidence of corruption. We saw this in summer 2016 too, where fact that people in the DNC didn’t like Sanders was presented as a massive conspiracy.

      . . .

      There has been a massive conflation of opinion (personal belief), bias (personal action), and agenda (structurally embedded goals). These things often line up, but strong institutions and processes can help stop opinion from becoming bias and bias from becoming an unintentional agenda. And where institutions don’t mitigate these things in appropriate ways they should be reformed.

      But if we collapse this chain, if opinion = bias = agenda, well, then everything immediately becomes corrupt, because everyone has an opinion.

      In the case of Republican congressmen, this isn't a matter of perception. They're lying to protect Trump.

  49. Nov 2017
    1. Mike Hearn, formerly with Google, calls a recent report on Twitter bots promoting Brexit "deliberate lying, or if you like, fake news."

      Without having looked into it further than reading his response, I'm doubtful about his doubtfulness. I suspect the kind of bots he was trying to identify were a different variety. He says he never saw "cyborg" accounts. He doesn't mention that Russia is known to employ people for social media propaganda.

    1. Jonathan Albright says that Instagram is another major channel of Russian propaganda.

      IRA (Internet Research Agency) - a Russian troll factory.

      David Karpf argues that actual user engagement among US citizens can be hard to estimate, since a lot of apparent activity comes from fake accounts.

    1. Kris Schaffer distinguishes bots, sockpuppets, and trolls, and talks about how to identify botnets. Twitter and other social media sites should be able to eliminate many of the bogus accounts. But they don't.

  50. Oct 2017
    1. Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state's real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.

      The account, @TEN_GOP, was enormously popular, amassing at least 136,000 followers between its creation in November 2015 and when Twitter shut it down in August

  51. Sep 2017
      1. Talking about these lands as depopulated — size comparisons downplay population
      2. Uplifting Disney music. Contrasting the old with the "modern" new 3. Rural natives — "Cling to their primitive ways" within the "confines of their small world"
      3. Audience: Americans, middle-class men 5. Primary consumers of videos like this: middle-class, business-men in the United States. Looking to invest in businesses in Central America. Sex tourism is also huge.
      4. Gender — Showing a lot of women, exotic. Don't see men represented because your audience is male.
  52. Aug 2017
  53. Jul 2017
    1. What’s the Problem with the Tar Sands?

      No information about who is writing these articles. Sadly, the crawl did not capture the "About" page, and this website no longer exists.

    1. OSFC is supported by a broad coalition of organizations and interests. We may represent many interests, but when it comes to getting the facts out about the promise and potential of responsible oil sands development – about the jobs it makes possible, and the footprint that continues to shrink by the day – well, that’s something every one of us can get behind.

      This is clearly a pro-oil development resource, which is rather vague about who is actually providing the information. Not many citations, either.

  54. Jun 2017
    1. we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.

      ...

      What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.

      ...

      The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself.

  55. May 2017
  56. Apr 2017
  57. Mar 2017
    1. Ah, Thema Islam. Merkt man immer gleich, wenn die Kommentare gesperrt sind. Man könnte ja die Autorin darauf hinweisen, dass man Diversivität nicht mit mittelalterlichen Riten verwechseln braucht. Und dass der Staat vielleicht ganz gut daran tut, Säkularität zu fördern, wenn er ein friedliches Miteinander ermöglichen will.

    1. oolf develops a metaphor in which literary art is a horse and "propa-ganda" is a donkey-attempting to mingle the two can produce only sterile off-spring

      Around this time, W.E.B. Du Bois was writing that all art is propaganda and advocated for African American literature that offered favorable depictions of black people. It's interesting that both Du Bois and Woolf were thinking about liberation through writing but had different ideas about the connection between art and propaganda.

  58. Feb 2017
    1. The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

      Very well said.

  59. Dec 2016
    1. Selling user data should be illegal. And the customer data a company is allowed to collect and store should be very limited.

      Under the guidance of Jared Kushner, a senior campaign advisor and son-in-law of President-Elect Trump, Parscale quietly began building his own list of Trump supporters. Trump’s revolutionary database, named Project Alamo, contains the identities of 220 million people in the United States, and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 individual data points about the online and offline life of each person. Funded entirely by the Trump campaign, this database is owned by Trump and continues to exist.

      Trump’s Project Alamo database was also fed vast quantities of external data, including voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, and internet account identities. The Trump campaign purchased this data from certified Facebook marketing partners Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom Corporation. (Read here for instructions on how to remove your information from the databases of these consumer data brokers.)

    2. Trump's campaign used carefully targeted negative ads to suppress voter turnout.

      With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.

      “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official explained to reporters from BusinessWeek. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”

    3. 100,000 personalized collections of lies.

      Parscale also deployed software to optimize the design and messaging of Trump’s Facebook ads. Describing one such test, the Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Mims writes that “one day in August, his campaign sprayed ads at Facebook users that led to 100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters.” In total, Trump’s digital team built or generated more than 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content.

    1. Nine Lessons of Russian Propaganda<br> Roman Skaskiw (an American who moved to Ukraine in 2012)<br> [I liked this article enough to google the author. First, I looked at Twitter -- and thought it was either an imposter, or his account had been hacked. But then I went looking at other sites, which are registered to someone using the same name. They shift between reasonable and crackpot.]

      From 27 March 2016.<br> But gosh... This shit is strangely familiar.

      • Use and abuse all factions.
      • Destroy and ridicule the idea of truth.
      • Headlines are more important than reality. They stick.
      • Demoralize, and terrorize.
      • Distract and misdirect.
      • Pollute the information space.
      • Accuse the enemy of doing what you're doing.
    1. An analysis of links among "fake news" sites and mainstream news sites and social media.

      There’s a vast network of dubious “news” sites. Most are simple in design, and many appear to be made from the same web templates. These sites have created an ecosystem of real-time propaganda: they include viral hoax engines that can instantly shape public opinion through mass “reaction” to serious political topics and news events. This network is triggered on-demand to spread false, hyper-biased, and politically-loaded information.

    1. Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and the newly appointed chief strategist to Trump, is on Cambridge Analytica’s board and it has emerged that the company is in talks to undertake political messaging work for the Trump administration. It claims to have built psychological profiles using 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It knows their quirks and nuances and daily habits and can target them individually.

      Boy, we have problems:

      • Fake news. (Bad, but not as bas as...)
      • Extremist propaganda (increasingly, from government)
      • Disinformation created to cause chaos and distrust.
      • Tracking of individuals to create personalized propaganda.
      • Google, Facebook, etc. merrily amplifying it.
    2. The fact that people are reading about these fake news stories and realising that this could have an effect on politics and elections, it’s like, ‘Which planet have you been living on?’ For Christ’s sake, this is obvious.”

      It's only obvious once you realize how many people are exposed to bullshit daily, and how many people are stupid enough to listen to it.

      If you aren't an idiot, and you don't associate with idiots, you can spend all day on the web every day and rarely see any of this shit.

    1. Leading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova’s trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton’s State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy — perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it. This is what we now call “fake news.”

      Pussy Riot became an international symbol of Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free speech; of how his regime uses falsehood and deflection to sow confusion and undermine critics.

      Now that the political-media environment that we smugly thought to be “over there” seems to be arriving over here, Ms. Tolokonnikova has a message: “It’s important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’” she told me. “It’s important to remember that, for example, in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.”

    1. Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of Web sites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.

      http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy

      Another group, PropOrNot, is supposed to be releasing their study on Russian propaganda tomorrow, 25 November. [Update: PropOrNot apparently labelled so many sites as "Russian propaganda" that it is practically a piece of disinformation all by itself. Maybe they're Russian. :) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-propaganda-about-russian-propaganda

  60. Oct 2016
  61. Jul 2016
    1. Here we have a marvelous illustration of the functioning of propaganda in a democracy. A totalitarian state simply enunciates official doctrine — clearly, explicitly. Internally, one can think what one likes, but one can only express opposition at one’s peril. In a democratic system of propaganda no one is punished (in theory) for objecting to official dogma. In fact, dissidence is encouraged. What this system attempts to do is to fix the limits of possible thought: supporters of official doctrine at one end, and the critics — vigorous, courageous, and much admired for their independence of judgment — at the other. The hawks and the doves. But we discover that all share certain tacit assumptions, and that it is these assumptions that are really crucial. No doubt a propaganda system is more effective when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted, when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot — or suffer the consequences. The more vigorous the debate, the more effectively the basic doctrines of the propaganda system, tacitly assumed on all sides, are instilled. Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force — maybe even too critical for the health of democracy — when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system: in this case, the principle of the right of intervention, the unique right of the United States to serve as global judge and executioner. It is quite a marvelous system of indoctrination.
  62. Jun 2016
    1. agnotology - the study of willful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favor. (Coined by Robert Proctor of Stanford University.)

      • tobacco companies
      • climate-change deniers
      • politicians

      Withholding evidence and outright lying are just the two most obvious tactics. They also take advantage of people's desire to be reasonable, by claiming there are two sides to a topic that doesn't actually have any reasonable opposition -- the "balanced debate" scam. And they influence people by conflating the main issue with others -- personal liberty, religious beliefs, capitalism vs socialism.

  63. Apr 2016
    1. In my fifth-grade language instruction class in 2002, we would read aloud, in unison, phrases such as "Comrade, stone them!"

      Mo discusses this in her spot on This American Life: "The Poetry of Propaganda: Party On!"

  64. Nov 2015
    1. The key lesson of the post-9/11 abuses — from Guantanamo to torture to the invasion of Iraq — is that we must not allow military and intelligence officials to exploit the fear of terrorism to manipulate public opinion. Rather than blindly believe their assertions, we must test those claims for accuracy.
    2. In sum, Snowden did not tell the terrorists anything they did not already know. The terrorists have known for years that the U.S. government is trying to monitor their communications.What the Snowden disclosures actually revealed to the world was that the U.S. government is monitoring the Internet communications and activities of everyone else: hundreds of millions of innocent people under the largest program of suspicionless mass surveillance ever created, a program that multiple federal judges have ruled is illegal and unconstitutional.
    3. Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several preexisting adversaries: Internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden.
  65. Feb 2015
    1. Hvordan er det mulig å skrive så mye tull samtidig som påstår man står for noe som er så uendelig viktig? Vedtatte fakta? Hvem er det som vedtar fakta og hvordan blir fakta som har vært vedtatt plutselig avslørt som løgn om det var vedtatt faktum? Historien er ikke sann fordi stater sier at slik er det bare. Å vedta noe som fakta burde på ingen måte bety at det ikke kan bli vedtatt som den største løgn like etter. Jorda var flat må man huske. Det var vedtatt fakta,var det ikke?

      For noen er religion vedtatt fakta. For andre er vitenskap vedtatt fakta. Religion har en ting vitenskap ofte mangler,den vingler ikke riktig like mye. Om man bare går 50 år tilbake i tid vil man se at kanskje så mye som 50 % av det som var vedtatte vitenskaplige fakta den gangen,er tilbakevist nå.

      Journalisten skriver her som om han ønsker all ytring velkommen,men snakker åpenbart ikke styresmakter og systemer imot.

  66. Jan 2015
    1. After 2004, I believed the story that the protesters in Ukraine and elsewhere were mobilized through text messaging and blogs.

      believes the story ... it's a story he believes.

    2. We were supposed to be saving the world by helping to promote democracy, but it seemed clear to me that many people, even in countries like Belarus or Moldova, or in the Caucasus, who could have been working on interesting projects with new media on their own, would eventually be spoiled by us.

      Applies to these activities wherever undertaken, including any country in the West, he just so happens to be interested in former Soviet Block countries

    3. But a lot was in the open—cyber-attacks by the US government, for example. Already by 2006 or 2007 it was crystal clear that there were dedicated units within the Department of Defense whose job was to take down the websites of jihadists and other foes, even if there was typically tension between the Pentagon and the CIA, which wanted to derive intelligence from them so didn’t want them taken down.

      Which has grown into something quite else, because while it may not be possible to control the Internet by controlling every router, it is possible to effectively control the Internet by control the volume and direction of propaganda and cyber attacks. In other words it is possible to have a pivotal influence.

  67. Jul 2014