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Post by lieden on Aug 31, 2010 7:07:12 GMT 1
This could be a place where we could share and refer to articles of interest. Starting with this rather thought provoking (considering, for one thing among many, our common liking here for war games and other media in the same vein) piece I came across today: Robert Fisk: Battle Stereotypes that were fed to young minds ~ The Independent, Sat 28 Aug 2010
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Post by Mister Buch on Aug 31, 2010 12:01:05 GMT 1
Wasn't Robert Fisk...... the KINGPIN?! There's a (pretty famous actually) collection of damaging / offensive war comics over at Superdickery: superdickery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=35&Itemid=49I'm honestly not sure why this writer got so riled up about those comics. Surely during the war, everything printed in the UK was bloodthirsty and jingoistic. I do wonder what sort of effect today's kids will grow up with, playing Modern Warfare. When I was a boy, we played Lylat Wars and watched Rambo 2 and Robocop. Mind you, I think maybe those Rambo movies had a bit of an anti-Communist agenda.
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Post by jklinders on Aug 31, 2010 13:51:08 GMT 1
Ah propaganda. They say the first casualty in any war is the truth. For right or wrong there was barely 2 sticks standing on top of one another in Germany after the war was finally over. We can only imagine what those people went through and probably badly at that. There is always a price paid when the diplomats fail and war ensues. But the truth always dies fist and that makes it easier to make up your own lies as they go along.
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Post by Clint Johnston on Sept 3, 2010 3:36:21 GMT 1
Not to me brutal or cold minded, but their own propaganda machines were going full blast as well. It was just a part of war at that time.
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Post by Knightfall on Sept 3, 2010 4:21:52 GMT 1
Propaganda was crazy during World War II, especially in America. If you ever watch the old Looney Tunes cartoons from that era, half of them were to encourage troops and explain to kids what a blackout was. One such cartoon was about Daffy Duck dodging the draft board, and how he was basically the world's biggest asshole for doing so.
Exhibit A:
And as for Germany, yeah, they got wrecked. My friend moved out to Dresden with his wife. You can still find bullet and artillery damage on older buildings, and most parks are all lumpy because they actually laid the soil and grass over the wreckage instead of clearing it out. They wanted there to be a constant reminder of that time.
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Post by lieden on Sept 3, 2010 9:29:31 GMT 1
More on propaganda: John Pilger: Flying the flag, faking the news ~ Znet, Fri 03 September 2010 Highlights: In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country”. Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations”. The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom”. In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation”.
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Post by lieden on Sept 3, 2010 9:31:44 GMT 1
Propaganda was crazy during World War II, especially in America. If you ever watch the old Looney Tunes cartoons from that era... I've watched 1930's-1940's Looney Tunes, and it's pretty inconceivable the messages they were putting across, and how blatant they were about it. Propaganda has grown a LOT subtler since then.
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Post by Clint Johnston on Sept 3, 2010 14:29:47 GMT 1
Well it just seems more blatant now. At the time it was merely echoing what the extremists thought. Racism was a force to be reckoned with in WWI and WWII, and the donald duck cartoons with japanese buck teeth and rolling l's were merely a 2 second gag line that made people laugh as much as him losing his temper. Today it's not as acceptable to make the comments on race, and therefore it seems shocking to us. As to your point on subtlety today, I don't think so. There's no propaganda ministry or anything, but watch CNN for 30 minutes and see if you don't find quite a few examples of not quite influencing language. Fox is more repudiated for it, (which they occasionally deserve) but NPR or CNN or any mainline news channel is just as judgmental. For the record I watch none of these examples regularly, and am firmly on the fence on most political issues. I just resent their trying to tell me one way or the other. Just explain what happened. Not insert a dig at the democrats or Palin.
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Post by jklinders on Sept 3, 2010 15:41:51 GMT 1
Here here!! Way too much bloody opinion in the news. Just report the facts, all of the facts and nothing but the facts. But the whole story is rarely "news" as you can rarely have "news" without controversy. So selective editing of the whole equation is unleashed on the public that supports a particular view and if anyone calls them on it they just shrug and say well we didn't have enough time for that.
Individual news organizations may have a bias one way or the other, but if you work at getting your news from multiple sources you should still be able to get a mostly accurate picture. I for one would like to see the news wire agencies curl up and die so that papers and news channels do their own reporting again. It would work wonders towards a more real picture of facts.
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Post by Battlechantress on Sept 3, 2010 23:13:25 GMT 1
Back when the tsunami wrecked southeast Asia a few years ago, it took *weeks* for people like ABC to even get reporters into those areas, because they stopped having their own press pools in I believe the 1980s. Part of it was due to budget cuts; the rest because American media doesn't generally give a shit about reporting anything beyond our own borders. I guess they thought they'd never have to have actual human beings reporting anywhere outside of the United States again (especially once the Cold War ended). Too bad they still don't seem to have learned their lessons after the tsunami. Of course, I remember reading with sadness about the plight of Chilean miners, and more than one idiot on the news site I was reading actually said, "Who cares about anything going on outside of America?" /facepalm Ah, what ugly Americans we truly are!
I gave up on watching cable news. Shit, I can't even watch ESPN to see who won the latest Red Sox game without getting 30+ minutes of bullshit opinions on what a superstar athlete did wrong this time anymore. I went to check on one patient this morning and realized that the station she had it on (whatever Court TV calls itself now) was debating about whether or not a defendant would get life in prison while they waited for the judge to sentence her. Hey fucktards, that's what our legal system is for (and it's why you were waiting for the judge in the first place)!
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Post by Knightfall on Sept 4, 2010 2:09:44 GMT 1
Personally, I think Fox News is modernized propaganda. They seem to have one goal, and one goal only, and it isn't telling the truth. This whole to-do about building a Muslim community center a few blocks away from Ground Zero is just embarrassing. Their honest concern is that we'll have an Al Qaeda training camp in New York if we don't stop them. I've heard some of their reporters say something like that almost verbatim.
Not to even mention how they thought the symbol of the Nuclear Peace Summit, a hydrogen atom, looked suspiciously like a Muslim flag. -.-
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Post by jklinders on Sept 4, 2010 2:40:34 GMT 1
There will always be a certain amount of wank in the anonymity of the internet 'chantress. We got them up here too.
The need for investigative reporting within a news organization became pretty apparent locally when a local reporter uncovered a couple of small scale scandals in the federal government. Some might call it muckraking, but you don't find this stuff off the wire services. To me the associated press or the Canadian Press are just a modern equivalent of the old town crier reading the sheet handed to him by the King. All the major networks are pulling it off the same feed. Then they put their own spin on it.
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Post by Battlechantress on Sept 4, 2010 2:50:36 GMT 1
There is very little investigative reporting done where I live, and much has been made of that fact. There are quite a few people who would like to see that change, but given how conservative this state is (and most of their respective newspapers make Fox News look like card carrying liberals), I doubt it will.
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Post by lieden on Sept 14, 2010 9:22:21 GMT 1
Roy F. Baumeister: Is there anything good about men?Don't let the title fool you, no man-hating there. Rather an interesting interpretation of why men and women are different, and a plausible explanation as to why women lag behind in high-ranked positions and fields like science. Excerpt (Conclusion): To summarize my main points: A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.
Men go to extremes more than women, and this fits in well with culture using them to try out lots of different things, rewarding the winners and crushing the losers.
Culture is not about men against women. By and large, cultural progress emerged from groups of men working with and against other men. While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks of shallow relationships, less necessary for survival but eventually enabling culture to flourish. The gradual creation of wealth, knowledge, and power in the men’s sphere was the source of gender inequality. Men created the big social structures that comprise society, and men still are mainly responsible for this, even though we now see that women can perform perfectly well in these large systems.
What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally. Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values. They have to prevail over rivals and enemies in cultural competitions, which is probably why they aren’t as lovable as women.
The essence of how culture uses men depends on a basic social insecurity. This insecurity is in fact social, existential, and biological. Built into the male role is the danger of not being good enough to be accepted and respected and even the danger of not being able to do well enough to create offspring.
The basic social insecurity of manhood is stressful for the men, and it is hardly surprising that so many men crack up or do evil or heroic things or die younger than women. But that insecurity is useful and productive for the culture, the system.
Again, I’m not saying it’s right, or fair, or proper. But it has worked. The cultures that have succeeded have used this formula, and that is one reason that they have succeeded instead of their rivals.
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Post by jklinders on Sept 14, 2010 14:58:08 GMT 1
Great article lieden(got your handle right this time yay me). There was actually quite a bit in it I had not considered and I had probably considered more in that article than some would suspect. I do have one quibble with the author though and it is this line. " That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it’s a hard sell." Call me old fashioned but no matter the reason I will not under any circumstance approve of a concept of equal pay for less work. He's right, it's a tough sell and it won't fly. Working overtime sucks when it is not by choice and if I have to do it then I want full credit for work done. Likewise someone else who cannot be bothered to work overtime should not be paid as if they did. I don't care about the reasons behind the idea, it's stupid and promotes laziness which will not benefit the feminist cause at all.
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