Archives for posts with tag: Propaganda

The first reaction, for the ‘average person’, is to ‘love’ this post.

The ‘normal’ reaction, for the ‘fact-checkers’ among us, is to ask ourselves:

Is this actually true?

Heidegger has something really interesting to say about the subject.
I’m gonna put it succinctly and bluntly.

None of us knows everything about anything. Not even about the most trivial thing.
Because the very nature of our knowledge and of our manner of expressing it – language, none of us is able to ‘put together’ even the simplest ‘absolute’ truth.

Hence, according to Heidegger, we have as many truths as there are people interested on the subject.

‘Then the African Proverb is a ‘lie’?’

Nope.

The African Proverb pictured above is a meta-truth.
Heidegger’s truths, as well as those discussed by Popper, all converge towards the ‘absolute’ one.
As each of the ‘people interested on the subject’ dig deeper, each of them gets closer to the kernel. Probably none of them will ever get exactly ‘there’ but their respective positions will become ever closer.

Meanwhile, there’s nothing like a ‘meta-lie’. As we had ‘truth’ and ‘meta-truth’.
A lie, any lie, is also a meta-truth.

We know – we are under the impression, more exactly, that we’ll never reach ‘the absolute truth’. About any subject, let alone the ‘absolute-absolute’ one. But we can conceive that there is one. Somewhere. At least about individual points of interest.

Do we even have the concept of an absolute lie?
What would that be? How could that even be expressed?

This being the reason for some of us being able to come up with so ‘plausible’ lies.
They put so much truth into their words that it becomes harder and harder for us to notice that the ‘proposed conclusion’ is misleading.

That, in fact, they are lying through their teeth.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#ObjeKnowThreWorlOnto

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Colajul de mai sus este cât se poate de ‘adevărat’.

Există, în același timp, două categorii de oameni care au nevoie de ajutor.

‘Nevoiași’ și ‘refugiați’.

Există și alte două categorii de oameni.

Unii care încearcă să ajute și alții care încearcă să încurce.

Ion ăla care nu-i duce lui “mă-sa” o pâine , fiți sigur ca n-ar da nici la refugiați.

Din păcate, mai există încă o categorie.
Oameni de bună credință dar care se lasă purtați de val.
Văd o imagine cu o ‘puternică încărcătură emoțională’, sunt impresionați de ‘adevărul’ conținut în acel mesaj și simt nevoia să împărtășească cu alți oameni trăirea pe care tocmai au experimentat-o.
Fără să …

Pusă în fața primei imagini, o persoană care a încercat deja să-i ajute pe ‘nevoiași’ ar putea fi frustrată de relativul său insucces. Sunt încă foarte mulți ‘nevoiași’ care au nevoie disperată de ajutor și nu țin minte ca vreo campanie de ajutorare a vre-unei categorii de ‘defavorizați’ să fi fost atât de ‘productivă’ pe cât este efortul spontan pentru ajutorarea refugiaților Ucraineni.
Tot în fața acestei imagini, cineva care nu a ajutat încă pe nimeni și care se gândea să înceapă, acum, cu refgiații s-ar putea să se ‘blocheze’. Sau, chiar, să-și piardă încrederea. În ONG-uri, în societatea civilă…

Dacă le vezi în ordinea propusă de mine, a doua imagine nu face decât să întărească impresia produsă de prima.
Iar emoția produsă va încurca ‘subiectul țintă’. Căruia îi va fi dificil să facă observația de bun simț pe care am citat-o mai sus. Și pe care o reiau aici.

Ion ăla care nu-i duce lui “mă-sa” o pâine , fiți sigur ca n-ar da nici la refugiați!”

Din care Românie facem parte?
În care Românie vrem să ne creștem copiii?

Din România care ajută sau din acea Românie care se lasă dusă de nas?

Și nu mă pot abține să mai adaug ceva.
Dacă am fi avut deja grijă de copiii din fața bordeiului ăla, genul asta de propagandă ar fi fost mult mai puțin eficient.
Și nu pentru că propagandiștii ar fi avut mai puține pretexte!

Pur și simplu pentru că noi am fi fost deja alt fel de oameni.
Oamenii care ar trebui să devenim după ce vom fi trecut prin experiența în mijlocul căreia ne aflăm!

Și cât de bun propagandist trebuie să fii pentru a include în colajul ăla și un ‘sens interzis’…
Oare propagandiștii ăștia n-au copii? Nici mamă, nici tată?
În ce fel de lume vor să îmbătrânească?!?

Și de unii singuri…

My late mother used to quote a co-worker:

After you get used to it, being hanged becomes bearable.

Let me give you some context.

I live in Romania. You know, that country which shot its dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, on the Christmas Day 1989.

I was drafted to the army in October 1980. When I left home, you could still find food to buy. Soap, chocolate, washing powder, toilet paper… you name it. Nothing fancy but life was ‘normal’.
Nine months later, in July 1981, food was already scarce.

In 1985, things were already bad. You had to queue up for anything you needed. For all of the above mentioned items.

By 1988, things had become even worse. On top of what I had already mentioned, rolling blackouts were common. Those of us who lived in apartments connected to central heating were ‘enjoying’ running hot water for only a few hours a day/a few days a week. And shivered during the entire winter.

I’m telling you all these because in December 1989 most of us were hugely surprised when communism had fallen. With a bang.

We’d become so accustomed with what was happening to us that we were convinced our lives were ‘normal’.

Compare that to what you see below.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that we had only 1 (one) TV channel. Which was on for 2 hours each working day from Monday to Saturday and 12 hours on Sunday. And 80% of what was churned out was pure propaganda.

Într-un fel sau altul, am reușit să facem saltul de la ‘ridendo castigat mores’ la miștocăreala derizorie.
Uitând că orice spunere vorbește în primul rând despre ‘comunicator’ și abia după aceea despre ‘obiectul comunicării’.

Satisfăcuți că au mai dat o palmă moravurilor învechite, tinerii frumoși și liberi se duc acum în Obor. Să o ardă ecologic. Uitând că fructele și legumele alea ‘verzi’, cele pe care le cumpără ei de la ‘precupeți’, au fost produse tocmai de nea Ion. De bețivul din poza de mai sus… De rudele și de prietenii lui!

Ne mirăm că ‘stânga’ are un ‘electorat captiv’, indiferent de câte ‘prostii’ face.
Ne mirăm de câtă tracțiune are propaganda anti USR. Indiferent de cât de rezonabil sună programul lor. Indiferent de câte lucruri au reușit să facă de când au ‘spart gheața’.
Ne mirăm de cât de multe voturi a obținut celălalt partid ‘anti-sistem’. ‘Cum de poate cineva să voteze cu extremiștii aia’?

Îl mai țineți minte pe Dorel? Pe vestitul Dorel?
Pe amărâtul ăla de care ‘s-a făcut’ atâta mișto pe internet? De care am râs cu toții?

Câte articole/postări/luări de poziție de genul ăsta s-au perindat pe sub ochii noștri?

„Dăi, dăi, dăi, dăi, dăi!” – spunea cârmaciul echipei, după care lua poziţie de repaus sprijinindu-se de un stâlp electric. În acest timp, lopata şi târnăcopul stăteau la o bârfă pe marginea drumului, profitând de faptul că muncitorii erau complet acaparaţi de talentul lui Dorel.
Şoferii au nervi, ba unii sunt chiar exasperaţi de faptul că a trecut mai bine de o săptămână şi treaba nu e gata. Măcar de s-ar lucra la ore când traficul e lejer sau noaptea când nu-i vede nimeni, altminteri puţini sunt aceia care apreciază o asemenea prestaţie.

Și dă-i și combate… că muncitorul român, că statul, că obiceiurile… că săracul privat nu poate să plătească lefuri mai mari că-i ia statul o grămadă de taxe ca să plătească pensii și ajutoare…

Și ce vină are Dorel în toată chestia asta?

Te pomenești că Dorel o fi de vină că s-au terminat lopețile?
Sau că ‘cineva’ a trimis pe un șantier prea mulți oameni și prea puține utilaje, materiale sau mai știu eu ce?
Te pomenești că Dorel, ăla cu târnăcopul, o fi de vină pentru toate chestiile care merg prost?

Și atunci?
Ce-i atât de greu de priceput, pentru marii comunicatori care ies pe bandă rulantă din toate universitățile – de la noi ca de pe tot locul, că ar fi mai bine să ni-l aliem pe Dorel în loc să-l împingem în brațele extremiștilor? De stânga, de dreapta… nu contează!

Cert este că genul ăsta de miștocăreală ieftină e combustibilul campaniilor ‘de comunicare’ abil orchestrate de cei care vor, simultan, să mulgă ‘banii europeni’ și să ne păstreze la ‘periferia Europei’. Într-un fel de limbo… într-un echilibru fragil… tocmai bun ‘pescuitul în ape tulburi’.

Cu cine să se identifice ‘nea Ion’ când vine vorba să voteze cu cineva? Cu aia care îi promit niște pensie/ajutor social și îi dau o găleată colorată sau cu cei care fac mișto de el? Cu ăia care își fac cruci până în pământ sau cu cei care fac bancuri despre ‘creștinii fără ș’?

Și ca să termin într-o notă mai veselă… vă invit să meditați pe marginea termenului ‘self-driven’.

Da, știu, nu toată lumea e familiară cu termenii automobilistici.
A horse driven cart este o caruță trasă de cal/cai.
A self driven car este un ‘automobil’ care se ‘auto-drivuiește’. Care se ‘auto-șoferește’. Car, adică autoMOBIL, este o chestie care se autopropulsează deja!

Ford face mașini care se autopropulsează – adică au motor, de când a făcut prima fabrică.
Cele care mai au de așteptat, dar nu prea mult, sunt mașinile care se conduc singure. Self driven… Care nu mai au nevoie de șofer…

Și nici de bancuri proaste!

Cei care numesc masca, botnita, sunt aceiasi oameni care daca maine s-ar da lege ca este obligatoriu sa circuli incaltat pe strada, ar incepe sa circule desculti ca “labutzele lor trebuie sa respire si nu li se incalca lor drepturile fundamentale”.
Normal ca considerati masca botnita daca sunteti niste javre.

E o problemă imensă cu spunerea asta.
Pe de o parte este extrem de exactă iar pe cealaltă este cât se poate de contraproductivă.

Propaganda anti ‘botniță’ are ca scop divizarea societatii.
Îngreunarea procesului de regrupare a forțelor și de reconectare între diversele segmente sociale. Proces esențial pentru depășirea crizelor. Inclusiv pentru depașirea crizei Covid.

Cei care stau în spatele genului ăsta de propagandă înțeleg Covidul ca pe o oportunitate. Ca pe un prilej pentru a-și pune planurile în aplicare.
În situația asta, orice raspuns în stil ‘pamfletar’ – oricât de haios ar fi el, le cântă-n strună.

Cei care, din diverse motive, au căzut în plasa propagandiștilor se simt jigniți. Devin opaci la orice argumente. Și încep să-i urască pe cei care poartă masca.
‘Mascații’, la rîndul lor, după ce iau contact cu genul asta de mesaje, se simt îndrituiți să le disprețuiască pe ‘javre’.
În loc să-încerce să-i convinga!

Iar propagandiștii se distrează văzând cum dezbinarea se întinde precum pecinginea. Precum un virus.
Precum un virus pandemic….

One of the best examples of professional grade propaganda which had recently crept up on my FB wall

As always, the ‘gaslighters’ use ‘the obvious’ to get inside our heads.
Once there, they actually twist our minds.

In fact, the professional propagandists act like viruses do.
They use the internal mechanisms of the target to alter its ‘software’. To ‘convince’ the target to act in a manner favorable to the ‘virus’ rather than in its own interest.

And the fact that both sides – or trolls embedded there?!?, use the same ‘tools’ only makes it harder for the targets – for us, really, to defend ourselves. To maintain our sanity.

Let’s go back to the example at hand.
Yes, it’s ridiculous to blame this child for Pearl Harbor. This is the evident part of the meme.
Only it’s very legit to blame those who deny that Japan attacking Pearl Harbor was ‘murder’. Legit enough to become a must.
Just like it’s a must to blame those who deny the Holocaust.

Same thing with slavery. And with other crimes of the past.
Blaming people alive today for what their ancestors had done in the past is ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as denying that past crimes had consequences. Some of which continue to pull us down today.

Present day colored people in America – and Roma people in Europe, continue to suffer the consequences of having been enslaved for many generation.
Denying that only burdens entire societies.
It burdens the colored people themselves and, on a way larger scale, it burdens the rest of us. The colored people having less opportunities than the rest of us is a waste for the society at large. The disproportionate number of crimes and felonies perpetrated by the colored people are a cost shouldered by all of us.
Meanwhile, the blame is not entirely ‘theirs’. Had they been ‘defective’ in any way would have prevented any of them from ‘prospering’. Hence we’re dealing with a rather ‘cultural’ thing. Which cultural thing has appeared at the intersection between us and them. We had enslaved them. We had kept them at arm’s length until not so long ago. So many of us continue to look down on them.
We consider it’s their individual responsibility to pull themselves up!
And how are they supposed to do that? Statistically speaking, and in the present conditions, not only the most talented and the very lucky among them….

How are we going to proceed? Continue with the blame game – and play into the hands of those who want us weak, or attempt to do something about it? To find a real solution?

How does it work and what are the consequences.

To cut a long story short, some 25 years ago I started trading on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. The market had been freshly reinstated after the fall of the communist regime and most of us so called investors were quite naive. Due an incredible amount of luck and a small but very useful spark of intelligence I made a fair amount of money. For that time…
In an attempt to maximize my profits, I went back to school.
Where I learned the difference between fundamental and technical analysis.

I’m not going into details. It’s enough for you to know that no matter how different they are, both fulfill the same psychological function.
They ‘clean up’ the slate. They help the decision makers distance themselves from the objects they have to decide upon.

What?!?

A stock – or any other tradable item, is no different from a bicycle.
We, human beings, become attached to things we already have in our possession. We find it harder to divest ourselves from something than to buy into something new. We tend to procrastinate when having to choose between multiple opportunities to buy and to ‘defend’ an already made decision. An already acquired possession.
Fundamental and technical analyses do nothing but bridge these two ‘chasms’. Help us across.

OK. But has any of this to do with propaganda?

Well, market analysis is a tool used by the decision maker himself.
Propaganda is a tool used by somebody who intends to influence the decision maker. Using the same psychological mechanisms.

While market analysis attempts to clear the ‘sentimental fog’ which distorts the factual information available to the decision maker, propaganda works its way in the opposite direction.
Facts are presented in such a way as to ‘smuggle’ them, below the radar, into the minds of the intended targets.
While market analysis is meant to help decision makers overcome their biases, propaganda is meant to fine tune those biases towards ‘encouraging’ the decision makers into adopting the decision coveted by the propagandist.

Somebody sent me this picture.
See how things work?
Most people consider themselves as being free from racism.
Also, most people consider that other people – namely the politicians and the journalists, have ‘vested’ interests. And that these ‘other’ people use ‘divide and conquer’ to maintain their grip on power.

The key word here being ‘other’. It’s the others who engage in such heinous acts. Never ‘our’ people.

But do you know what bothers me most?
I’ve been subjected to communist propaganda for the first 30 years of my life.
I’ve never dreamed it would take me another 30 years – and a stint of daily trading on the Stock Market, to figure out how propaganda works. Only to find it being used by people who declare communism to be the scourge of the Earth.

Well, since communism actually is a scourge, how about we NOT using the same tool as those who try to infect our minds with it?
For no other reason than propaganda yielding communism having been a complete failure….

Well, this is yet another perfect example of a sentence simultaneously true, false and indeterminable …

First of all, it is indeterminable simply because we’ll never know, let alone ‘for sure’, everything ‘under the sun’.
It is obviously false because we continuously discover things previously unknown to us. From another trench on the bottom of the ocean to a new satellite circling around Jupiter. Not to mention the huge number of materials and gadgets which have not ‘seen the light of day’ until the moment they have been invented by us. And they might have been made starting with raw materials which had previously existed… but denying their novelty would be shortsighted… to say the least.
And it is obviously true because no matter how many things we have discovered/invented, we have remained practically the same. We entertain the same passions and fears, we continue to behave in certain ways…

And the worst part is our refusal to learn from past experiences…

We’ve experienced the malignant consequences of the extreme ‘propaganda’ used by the nazis during WWII.
By the communist regimes trying to build ‘the new man’.
And we’re currently ‘repackaging’ the same king of destructive propaganda into ‘fake news‘…

Are we nuts?

Specially that we already know that what we learn actually changes our brain

Bloody Caesar

 

Did you know this maxim was attributed to Philip II of Macedonia and was heavily used by both Caesar and Napoleon?

Also, did you know that it covers a lot more than ‘divide and conquer’?

For instance, a rather successful computer game and a problem solving methodology  that recommends the original problem be divided into smaller, and hence easier to manage, sub-problems.

Going back to the original meaning I must admit that both the ancient Macedonians and the ancient Romans made ‘good’ use of it. Alexandre the Great had conquered everything between Greece and India while the Ancient Rome had been, for a while, the most powerful empire known to man.

In more modern times the same strategy had been used by Germany, among others. Again, with relative success. During WWI the Kaiser had facilitated Lenin’s access to Russia and by doing so he had split the coalition he was trying to defeat – as a result of this manoeuvre Russia had asked for a separate peace treaty, eventually signed at Brest Litovsk. During WWII Hitler took great care to keep Russia at bay while he conquered the Western part of Europe.

Now the same strategy is being used by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the current Czar of Russia.

On Sunday, March 22, 2015, Sankt Petersburg – Putin’s birth place and political trampoline – hosted the Russian Conservative Forum. It was attended by a “a motley crew of representatives of fringe right-wing political organizations in Europe and the United States” which “including Hitler apologists, Holocaust deniers, apartheid fans, and a Russian skinhead who once decapitated a puppy as a publicity stunt, gave it an air of dark surrealism. Speakers condemned the U.S. as the enslaver of Europe and sang the praises of Russian President Vladimir Putin, holding up Russia as the last fortress of Christendom in the war waged on it by liberalism and multiculturalism.
“In the West, we are brainwashed to hate Vladimir Putin,” said British anti-abortion-rights campaigner Jim Dowson. He went on to say that Russia is blessed to be ruled by “a real man” while the U.S. is led by the “feminized” Barack Obama.”

On Tuesday, March 24, “The UN General Assembly’s budget committee … rejected a proposal submitted by Russia that called for withdrawing a July 2014 administrative ruling by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He ordered the world body to recognize same-sex unions of any of its 60,000 global staff who wed in countries that legally recognize such partnerships.
The dispute turned an internal UN personnel policy into a microcosm of the differences that pit the U.S. and EU nations against more socially conservative countries over recognizing rights of those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”

If we put two and two together and then add the result to what has already become evident – that the Russian (more exactly Putin’s) Propaganda machine has been revved up in a massive way for quite a while now – the pattern becomes visible.
Putin is ‘doing his worst’ to convince those uncomfortable with the spread of ‘liberal values’/globalization that if they want to ‘preserve their national traditions’ they have to ‘unite closely around’ the only leader that can save them from being engulfed by the ‘decadence of the West’. Around him, that is.

In fact this is exactly what the ’emperors of old’ I mentioned at the beginning of the post used to recommend. Instil as much fear in your opponents, individually, as you can and try to rekindle the smallest differences that ever existed between them.

There is a small problem though with this line of thinking.
No matter how much we respect/admire some of them or hate/despise the others none of those who had used this strategy ended up in a ‘comfortable’ manner.
And all of them had brought great misery to the people under their rule. Including Caesar. A civil war is no small thing, not now, not then!

While we ponder what to do in order to counter this nefarious propaganda, we need to keep in mind that Russia is not Putin and that the Russian people has never had a taste of what real democracy feels like. Blaming the entire people, wholesale, for what Putin does in their name ‘is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake’.

PS. Same counter-strategy should be applied to all would be ‘dividers’ who try to become ’emperors’.

http://scarlet.unl.edu/scarlet/archive/2008/02/28/story9.html
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royinterface/12/104/20141335.full.pdf
http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/14608/did-the-germans-purposefully-arrange-to-send-lenin-to-russia-to-start-a-revoluti
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/treaty_of_brest-litovsk.htm
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-hateful-sort-of-love
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/world/europe/right-wing-groups-find-a-haven-for-a-day-in-russia.html?ref=europe
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-23/is-russia-against-fascism-or-isn-t-it-
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-24/russian-bid-to-block-same-sex-benefits-for-un-workers-rejected
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/17/crimea-crisis-russia-propaganda-media
http://www.unrv.com/fall-republic/caesars-civil-war.php

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