Watch this…
Radio Free Asia: “did you know in North Korea they eat babies?”
Me: “I don’t believe that.”
Radio Free Asia: “WHAT?!?!? How did you do that???”
See. And I’m just a dumbass who does nothing but smoke weed and watch pirated b-horror movies. Whats everyone else’s fucking excuse?
People fall for this shit because they want to, not because the state department has magical brainwashing powers. Propaganda doesn’t mean people don’t have fucking agency.
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OP believes that they are just smarter and more built differenter than other people because theyre so cool and smart and superior
No I am very stupid. I accidentally peed in my bathroom wastebasket last night.
Wow maybe you should of known better than to do that
Yes but I materially benefit from pissing in my waste basket cuz it means I don’t have to take the time to turn on the bathroom lights, so I’m going to buy into Radio Free Bathroom propaganda about how my toilet is filled with piss eating goblins to justify continuing to piss in my wastebasket.
im sorry ur just built different
I do have a magnum dong
Lmao everyone get a load of this guy he has a dong
Unfortunately…
what b-horror movies though?
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I remember meeting a Cree Mormon on the rez and had the most
reaction in my life.
I would have survived the titan sub, i am simply built different
He has a point. We are most of us here cause we just shrugged off propaganda because we were so poorly socially integrated that indoctrination didn’t take
Structure vs agency debate #183757
The fundamental unit of propaganda is not facts, it’s emphasis.Also this is vulgar idealism.
You have to believe something, and you can’t experience everything first hand. So to some extent we are beholden to media to tell us what’s going on in the world. I’ve never gone to the white house and checked if joe biden is actually the US president, nor has anyone I know, but I see it in the media…
The key is outside of commie circles and some corners of the internet, a lot of the counter narratives are effectively banned, and simply going “nah, don’t believe it” is an instinct that has to be honed with life experience, and one that will eventually get it wrong, so you still need alternative media sources.
But yeah, a lot of stuff is obviously self serving and outlandish if you have any frame of reference besides US liberal mainstream media. or sometimes even if you don’t tbh.
So to some extent we are beholden to media to tell us what’s going on in the world.
I get what your saying, but in the modern digital world you really don’t need to be that online to encounter counter narratives. You see this on
, any time there’s a thread about the DPRK there’s usually several diligent fellow travelers posting about how a lot of the info you hear about North Korea is just blatant propaganda, often with citations. People tell them to fuck off regardless. They 
sub had a post about how the whole “Hamas beheading babies” story is likely Bull and everyone was saying “well I believe it’s probably true anyway”.At this point I think anyone literate with an internet connection and even a mild interest in politics and history doesn’t have much of an excuse for being THIS poorly informed. The ignorance is willful. The reason we haven’t had much luck reaching these people isn’t due to any lack of effort of charisma on our part, there’s plenty of great, entertaining propaganda outlets for us now, it’s cuz the audience is not available to be reached.
A lot of them don’t even have a mild interest in politics. They have an interest in The News and in voteball, but that’s it. So they put in zero effort or critical thought in to whatever The News says or what their voteball team says.
voteball
voteball
that’s brilliant!oh god it is voteball
supreme court justices are just refs
Alright, I’ll bite. What is and isn’t propaganda about the DPRK?
Because, from what I can tell, you can’t both be a backwater and a hellhole while having the capability to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Some of their technology is astonishingly advanced and shouldn’t be possible in a country where millions are starving and everyone is uneducated.
You can’t just pick one guy and have them be a nuclear scientist through sheer willpower and propaganda. You need to have a robust education system that happens to produce those kinds of people.
For what it’s worth, that’s been true for the US, the Soviet Union, China, France, the UK, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, and Iran. They had inequality, sure, but a good chunk of each population was very educated and very advanced.
A better read person on the topic could probably make a better effort post than me, but to give a few bullet points.
There is a bit of a weird cult of personality around the Kim family, but it is grossly exaggerated by the western press.
They do dedicate a lot of their economic capacity to military development, but that’s kinda understandable what with an empire that once bombed them nearly back to the Stone Age having air bases just south of their border.
They do struggle economically, but the idea they’re in a perpetual famine is bullshit and a lot of these struggles are do to US sanctions.
The really crazy stories you hear about people believing in unicorns and Kim personally feeding his concubines to dogs are almost entirely bullshit coming from weird right wing South Korean news papers that almost always get debunked within a week.
simply going “nah, don’t believe it” is an instinct that has to be honed with life experience, and one that will eventually get it wrong, so you still need alternative media sources.
You also need a background understanding of how the world works (ie, theory) to replace the propaganda with anything useful. If you don’t, you might distrust the propaganda on instinct, but get drawn into a completely bogus explanation for whatever the propaganda is trying to cover up. Which is where I think a lit of reactionary conspiracy thinking comes from.
Propaganda doesn’t mean people don’t have fucking agency.
Agency just means that the mechanisms that determine behavior in response to stimulus occurs within us. It doesn’t mean we have control over it. People swimming in propaganda all their lives are going to behave using that propaganda they’ve epxerienced to judge other propaganda. You might as well pick a fish up out of water and say, “just breathe air, bro.”
the horror movies are inoculating you. they’re the glasses from They Live.
I do love John Carpenter
Apparently learning doesn’t exist to hexbear lmao. You can 100% do due diligence, find reliable information, educate yourself, and try to form a principled and informed worldview. You are not ever immune to propaganda but acting like everyone is equally credulous and willing to simply blindly follow reactionary propaganda is silly IMO. This doesn’t have anything to do with inherent differences or vulnerabilities, but material conditions which can allow for this, and there are people who despite upbringings steeped in this propaganda manage to shake it and investigate, be critical.
Maybe I’m off base but I didn’t even jump to the “everyone is dumb but OP and the smarties who are propaganda immune” interpretation of this post at all. I think the best way to look at vulnerability to propaganda is not with a sense of superiority but as an opportunity to educate oneself and others to help recognize the signs of this reactionary propaganda. And no, I don’t think both sidesing this is fair at all - aren’t leftists supposed to have the basis of our political ideology founded in theory and analysis of history? That’s certainly a more rigorous interrogation of preconceived notions than what any lib absorbs to form their worldview.
Exactly Ironically claiming that the propaganda hard too see through is more arrogant
Most people on most issues hold several mutually exclusive beliefs, all weakly held. Both the societal base and superstructure have systems which work to passively affirm certain weakly held beliefs over others. They do this with the intent of allowing weakly held beliefs to influence the formation of more deeply held beliefs. The extent to which people have agency over this varies from person to person and system to system. A child being raised in a cult does not have the same autonomy over their beliefs that an adult oil executive does, for example.
I assume this post is about an argument you had or saw online about some various group in the imperial core not being responsible for their egregious actions because something something propaganda. I understand the frustration. At the same time, I wish that the D I S C O U R S E resulting from these conversations actually involved more discussion about how propaganda works and what the implications of that are. I rarely even see people acknowledge the superstructure exists when it comes to propaganda. Seems important, especially in the US.
If you directly ask if something is propaganda they’re legally required to tell you the truth.
We are at the point they don’t seem to really be hiding it anymore. Libs who know that Radio Free Asia is literally funded by the State Department will go ahead and treat it as reputable anyway. If it came out that Vaush was actually CIA, I doubt he’d lose a single fan. They just shrug it off these days and go on believing what they want to.
v*ush could come out as a self-described fascist and not lose a single fan
I don’t understand how anyone can think that the US education system, media industry, and iron-fisted grip on the press form the most ruthless and effective propaganda apparatus that has ever been seen in history, and then turn around and say “but actually anyone under its influence could just stop being influenced by it if they wanted to”. Only one of those things can be true.
Even if it were true that it’s just some trivial act of will to reject propaganda, clearly lots of people have not done that and just dismissing that fact as “they didn’t do the triumphant act of will, unlike me, the smart person” is counterproductive and even ruinous toward any viable leftist movement.
