#propaganda principles

[trexalicious]

The UnSussexfull's PR has become propaganda...

*credit to @amagi2000 for this. I didn't want to hijack your posting to the BRF fandom

[tangledinink]

kind of an uncanny resemblance, no...? :3c @tblsomedoodles @tmntseparatedaucompetition

[unwelcome-ozian]

[iphnh]

my absolute favorite person in the world right now is a rich white suburban mom who has come to every protest, rally, and vigil for palestine in my city and who brings more and more of her friends and neighbors to each action.

she doesn't know any of the big legal terms, but she knows children are being killed and that's enough to mobilize her. queen.

[katyspersonal]

Tried to play with the concept of 'comphet'... and lost. Not bi erasure justification team anymore </3

[badolmen]

For the longest time I understood shipping from a distance - I’ve never been that invested in couples or pairings, even if I thought they were cute or worked well together. I never understood that ‘omg they give me serotonin’ feeling, just a dull ‘huh guess they’re cute together.’

So tell my why some random ass blorbos from the most random ass game (that I don’t even like the gameplay of) has me scrolling through their ship tag and smiling like an idiot.

[psychosodomy]

i believed the shitty pissy versailles historical myth by choice cause french ppl stay musty dirty nasty disgusting busted

[pebblegalaxy]

Sun Tzu's Principle of Winning a War Without a Battle: Exploring the Strategy, Historical Context, and Practical Applications

Sun Tzu, a Chinese military strategist who lived more than 2,500 years ago, is considered one of the greatest military minds in history. His famous treatise, The Art of War, has been studied and applied by military and business leaders for centuries. One of his most important principles is the idea of winning a war without a battle. In this article, we will explore this principle in detail,…

[enbycrip]

Yup.

Fascist and right-wing propaganda is *expert* at manipulating people to act against their own best interests, and it does that by heading right for emotions. Strong emotions actively stop people thinking critically.

Think a little more and think how much right-wing tactics cluster around provoking strong emotion and actively *preventing* people thinking clearly and critically. How much involves screaming something someone *clearly* didn’t mean at them and demanding they defend themselves from that accusation. How much the anti-abortion stuff means throwing highly emotive images of dead babies at people, because the reality of “the majority of abortions are needed by desperate mothers of young children due to grinding poverty and lack of access to flexible work and free childcare” and “most abortions take place, and the pregnant people *want* them to take place, when the embryo is a clot of cells utterly unrecognisable as a human” point to complex realities that *don’t* fit the narrative they want to push.

This doesn’t mean you need to read Capital. In many ways, I think Marx is much more effective as a historical theorist than a political one these days, and reading him without knowing the context of the time he was writing will give you a clouded picture at best (and a lot of it will simply not make sense).

What it does mean is that holding a set of political *principles* is necessary.

And what I mean by “principles” is “a place that all your political and ethical beliefs *rest* on.” They’re not sacred judgements handed down from On High. They’re *foundations*; a starting place you consider all situations and ideas from and that you can return to when you’re in danger of getting lost in the weeds.

Take “bodily autonomy is necessary”, for example. If you stuck to that religiously rather than as a foundational belief, you could end up believing people shouldn’t help suicidal people who say they want to die, or not perform surgery on someone unconscious and dying because they can’t give consent. Whereas, taken as a foundational principle, it means you *interrogate* those situations. The right to life is incredibly important; when you know most suicidal intention (if not ideation) is fleeting and comes to people fighting major depression, other mental illnesses, or dealing with terrible circumstances, then you realise preventing someone from carrying out a fleeting intention - AND helping them with their circumstances if you possibly can - is giving them a chance to assert their autonomy *when they are capable of doing so*.

you know how there used to be all those posts going around like “I don’t know any political theory, it’s not hard to have good politics, it’s called being a decent person” type stuff, where it’s like okay, well, if it works it works. but this year more than ever has convinced me that actually it’s really important to have political values to fall back on even in cases of high emotion, e.g. anti-imperialism or bodily autonomy. feelings like kindness, empathy, concern, just on their own, are politically neutral and can just as easily motivate conservative or even fascist political positions. you know. like what happens to empathy-based politics when it’s people whose lives are very different from yours, or where there’s a culturally-ingrained bias against seeing them as people, or if they are just interpersonally offputting and unlikeable. like how etiquette is for being polite when you’re not “feeling it”, you need something to fall back on, a metric to evaluate what a “just society” looks like for people you don’t personally know and/or like. am I making sense here

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ten journalists who have covered the war on Gaza for two of the world’s leading news networks, CNN and the BBC, have revealed the inner workings of those outlets’ newsrooms from October 7 onward, alleging pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards and frequent violations of journalistic principles. In several cases, they accused senior newsroom figures of failing to hold Israeli officials to account and of interfering in reporting to downplay Israeli atrocities. In one instance at CNN, false Israeli propaganda was put on air despite advance warnings from staff members.

5 October 2024

[punkitt-is-here]

Man I know I'm bitching about this a lot but I think the complete degradation of the satire and edge of the fallout series over time makes me so mad. The first game literally has an occupying American soldier shooting a Canadian protester dead right there in the opening to let you know the game's stance towards the military and the US as a whole; it's a biting attack on the jingoistic, war-and-profit loving country the US was, rooted in reality. It immediately forces the player to recognize the US (especially in this setting) were not heroic, patriotic do-gooders, but violent, colonizing bastards who blew up the world over chasing a white-picket-fence dream. "War never changes" is about the futile nature of war, the repeating cycles of violence and corruption, the very principles of fighting your fellow man never changing over time. It is always abhorrent, it is always messy, it is always reprehensible, and it is always done for the self interest of the elite in some way. Men do not die for their country, they simply die. Contrasting that with the opening of Fallout 4, which seems to idolize the military and pre-war America, is fucking baffling. You have those white picket fences, those perfect nuclear families, and "war never changes" is stretched like an Animorph cover from a harsh condemnation of the violent cycles the world is put through to a patriotic, watered down idea that war is inevitable and so are heroes. There's no fucking edge to how Fallout 4 remembers the country that ended the world; it gleefully eats up the Americana iconography, sanding down every edge that could make the player even consider that the US in the world of Fallout is meant to be our US taken to a logical extreme, instead revelling in patriotic clothes and ideals and icons while the entire basis of the franchise was built on satirizing and critiquing that exact blind patriotism. It drives me insane that these two completely ideologically different games are under the same roof and that one of them fell for the exact propaganda the first game was satirizing in the first place.

[ineloquent-tumbling]

You can’t reason people out of conclusions they didn’t use reason to come to.

[savanir]

I kind of wonder what the normal civilian outside perspective would be on a situation in which the Infinite Realms go to war against the GIW (and the Justice League) because of crimes (vivisection probably) against their King.

I have read a few fics in which the war happens, and those are always interesting. But imagine just trying to live your life. And either the denizens of the dead suddenly declare war (and it is important that they make clear why they go to war), or the American government makes the first move and it’s just… bad.

Even if alien invasions and apocalyptic events are a thing in the universe I cannot imagine most people being cool with such a development.

Like, why would anyone think it’s a good idea to declare war on beings that are already dead?

so the answer to that would be lengthy propaganda campaigns but that too isn’t going to work on everybody, it would just be absolute chaos.

Then there are the other nations of course, Europe takes ages to make a single decision on anything ever, China will shoot you if you try to go over their wall, Russia doesn’t agree with America on principle.

imagine making a sign and going out to protest against the war on the realms and then coming across an invading ecto entity, and they take one look at your little sign and feel your sincerity and go “oh okay, we shall not harm you” and that alone completely disproves the GIW’s claims that these beings are non sapient and non sentient.

[tanadrin]

The supposed efficiency and effectiveness of fascism was always propaganda: in reality, fascist regimes were deeply inefficient, hobbled by interpersonal rivalry, had institutions weakened or totally subverted by the personalist nature of leadership, and were deeply corrupt and lawless.

So it really, really bugs me how so much speculative fiction and even casual discourse since has taken WW2 era propaganda about fascism at face value, and depicted authoritarianism generally and fascism in particular as an intrinsic tradeoff between the chaos and disorder of liberty and the order of repression. Fascism is not orderly! That was always a lie. There is a reason right-wing authoritarian regimes have mid performance at best and at worst collapse due to infighting and military defeat—they suck at running states!

Democracy is the ideology of order and stability. Democracy provides for stable succession and can sustain rule of law in ways personalist rule cannot. Democracy can create avenues of accountability to reduce corruption that authoritarian (or even one-party rule) could never contemplate. “Democracy is chaos” is a lie invented by fascists to try to discredit liberal principles, and the apparent “chaos” of interwar democracies was often caused by the fascists themselves because they did not believe in liberalism.

I think of this most often in the context of video games about politics where it is assumed that authoritarian governance gives you efficiency bonuses at some cost to happiness or freedom—but I think these mechanics are backward. Fascism and authoritarianism are good for the narrow ruling clique at the top, the people they personally enrich, but they make for brittle and weak states, and they often fuck over even the narrow ethnic group or core citizenry whose will they are supposed to be channeling. Starting World War II was very bad for almost all Germans and Italians!

By contrast political scientists debate if a consolidated liberal democracy has ever deconsolidated, and the biggest challenges to democratic systems of government have tended to come when those systems are illiberal (as before the American Civil War), or being sabotaged by most participants (as Weimar Germany, where neither the left nor the right were really interested in democracy).

[the-library-alcove]

One thing I've been struggling with on a personal ethical level is dealing with the knowledge that the "Antizionist" movement on the Left is not an organic, grassroots ideology. We literally have recordings of the meetings by Hamas members from the 1990s where they laid out this exact setup: They would attempt to propagandize to the American and Western Left their specific narrative that was designed to ensnare Leftists by appealing to their ideologies and shortcircuit critical thinking. And it's not a coincidence that Al Jazeera, the Qatari propaganda outfit, was founded three years after that meeting, as Qatar is deeply involved in helping push this narrative on US universities. Add to the Iranian regime's previous experience at exactly this--using Leftists as useful idiots during the Iranian Revolution--and you can see the state-funded media and educational apparatus designed to achieve this exact result.

So I'm struggling with how much blame, how much personal culpability, there can be for people like, for example, Greta Thunberg, or other Gen-Z "antizionists", who have been deliberately and intentionally mousetrapped into cheering for a literal mass murderer and rapist in Sinwar. Because an enormous amount of money and effort went into trapping them with this belief system.

But on the other hand, they're actively abandoning their previously-claimed principles en masse--as feminists, as minority group supporters, as progressives--in order to embrace the "Antizionist" belief system.

So it's a struggle for me in debating how much blame they deserve individually, when they've been ensnared systematically, but their individual choices are still reprehensible.

[tired-shadow-creature]

yeee

A lot of the plots/general ideas in the discworld novels, the watch series included, are Terry asking questions like "How and under what circumstances would this actually work?" and "What is the logical conclusion of this?" and then answering those questions via the story. This approach is. Not ideal for creating Propaganda, even subconsciously.

Like, a lot of the novels read like Terry asking a question, thinking about it and then giving an answer based on those thoughts. You can agree or disagree with those answers all you like but they are just that. A person's thoughts and conclusions on a subject. Someone presenting their thought process and conclusions is not (inherently) Propaganda.

I do think that without the internal monologues and narration the Watch novels might have ended up fairly propagandistic, actually, since a lot of the back and forth thought processes and considerations would have been lost. But thankfully the narration does exist.

Theoretically even with the help of narration you could still make Propaganda from this. But I don't really think this happened here. And i think the main reason for that is the way that Terry presents the story through characters.

Terry's writing can be almost realist - "here are different peope and their thoughts, as they are, here is a situation, as it is, make up your own mind on how you feel about it." And that is. Not a great basis for Propaganda.

Propaganda requires for there to be either no dissent in opinion or for that dissent to be minimised/disregarded/vilified/etc. There is only one right answer, one right way of thinking, and if a different one happens to come up it is clearly wrong, misrepresented, distorted and/or bad. Realism (when done well) already doesn't really lend itself to this very well and together with the style of narration this makes the discworld novels very poor Propaganda tools.

Like. There is a lot of dissenting opinion in the watch novels. And with very few exceptions (i.e. the guy upset about non-human guards, aristocrats upset they're not above the law) those dissenting opinions are generally treated as neutral/generally valid, reasonable or even outright correct.

It's most obvious in Night Watch I think (people are right to be pissed at the watch, the innocent DO have something to fear, wanting witnesses for the bottle-victim being brought into the watch house isn't unreasonable, etc).

But it's present in all the books. Like, Bashfulson is right to insist on being there for the interrogation in Thud!. Carrot insists on protecting the dragon once arrested even when Vimes seems inclined to disagree. Vimes and Vetinari argue a lot. Carrot and Vimes have very different ideas about criminal justice throughout the series (Carrot being very pro rehabilitation and Vimes tending towards punitive justice). Vimes argues with himself a lot internally (I.e. People shouldn't take the law into their own hands - where else should it be now?, kill them kill them - no arrest them in the light). Detritus (rightfully) berates Vimes for his thoughtlessness/ignorance in Thud!. And so on.

Reading the Watch novels, I never got the feeling that I should believe that Vimes or the Watch are always perfectly good and in the right or even that theirs is necessarily always the ideal way of solving the problem presented. I could think that, but it doesn't really seem to insist I do - here is a situation, make up your own mind about it.

If this is Propaganda, even just subconscious one, it is exceptionally badly done. And tbh considering Terry was a spokesperson and a journalist before becoming a fiction author, I really think even a subconscious Propaganda effort by him would have been more competent than this.

Just saw a post saying the Watch series in Discworld is copaganda. Deep sigh. People really need some extra time in the reading comprehension lessons before coming to Tumblr.