Everything may collapse with Putin, and because of him. We’ll see in a few weeks.
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Russia is a huge place. They are perfectly capable of wearing out their aircraft on domestic flights.
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Did you read the story about the Ukrainian crew member on some Russian’s yacht in Barcelona who opened the seacocks and scuttled it?
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I wasn’t sure if Fucker was going to make it here or stay w/ the Putin stans, but ladies, gentlemen and envy’s here he is…
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Being only an “entertainer” instead of a newscaster, I wonder if defenestration is still on the table. /s
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Something about bail money, either for the crew member or the yacht, not sure. /s
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I’d say he was an idiot for thinking his viewers would forget but TBH he’s probably right. It’s like telling a citizen of Oceania that we’ve always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia even as the alliances might shift from one week to the next.
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Yeah, he could probably change his views on a topic nightly without his viewers noticing.
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It’s been too long that I read 1984. wasn’t it that they didn’t really expect the masses to truly believe that stuff, as long as they always behaved as if they did?
Edit: I meant that “too long” not just in terms of my own memory faults. That book gets on the list, like Maus, to expose my son to in the next years in case school doesn’t.
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The Party took a kind of a “fake it till you make it” type of approach. A lifetime of forcing people go through the actions of believing the party line eventually made most of them completely and genuinely internalize it.
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Yep, that’s what i remember as the point of the ending scene’s math equation.
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No, they wanted the person to actually believe it.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
I wish this was just limited to dystopian fiction, but Murdoch and his minions genuinely think they can use 1984 as a guidebook.
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It’s fascinating and frightening how much the modern Republican Party resembles Soviet style authoritarianism.
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That against a member of the outer party. Different rules for the three layers, iirc.
Masses: bread and games.
Outer party: total surveillance
Inner party: total surveillance of which they could opt out for a while.
But yeah, I totally have to reread it myself, as I read it before 1984.
(On my own. I know that we covered it in English during Oberstufe Englisch, but I cruised that segment on my then more recent memory).
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In that quote above Smith is railing to himself against the Party. At the end, though, Orwell makes it grimly clear it is indeed their primary goal.
Smith has been turned back into the true believer they expect all outer Party members to be:
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
And lots of Victory Gin. But Orwell depicts the inner Party as not caring what the Proles believe because they’re more easily kept apathetic and indifferent and apolitical. They don’t read the news and history that Smith is constantly re-writing but rather consume “Prolefeed”: soap operas, sports and porn.
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Blur maybe?
(Otherwise, so much for reading it again.)
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I’ve been working on my 3-stage propaganda model since I came up with it. Well, really 5-stage, but the other two are special cases.
-
It’s not propaganda. It’s just advertising.
You’re not being told anything that is false or misleading. There’s going to be spin, but it’s not actively lying. -
You are meant to believe it.
AKA: It’s plausible.
If it’s dug into, you might see that it is, in fact, wrong, or a flat out lie, but if it’s done properly then there’s always some wriggle room to say that you’ve misinterpreted it, or it’s true according to some set of stupid assumptions or under some abstruse technicalities. But it’s still a bald-faced lie.
eg: Mitch McConnell stating “We are negotiating in good faith”, or “This anti-Abortion bill is about protecting life”. -
You are meant to be confused by it.
AKA: It’s bewildering. AKA: You can’t tell what’s true or not.
It’s not meant to make sense. It’s word salad, intended to make you doubt your own ability to tell what’s true or false, or even what that might mean in the face of statements like “Communist Russia invaded Ukraine because of LGBTQ Woke NATO argle bargle”. You can’t fact check it because it’s like catching smoke with tongs. It consists of dogwhistling and boo-words and gibbering madness.
eg.: Trųmp’s twitter feed. Or Q. Or pretty much the entirety of the GOP at this point. -
You are not meant to believe it.
AKA: It’s a joke, but nobody is laughing. AKA: It doesn’t matter what’s true or not.
It’s clips from a video game in 2011, in a tweet labelled “Our troops’ glorious victory yesterday”. It’s declarations of victory released the day before the battle. It’s statements that “Historically, Marseilles has always been an integral part of Ecuador.”
There are two levels of message: the surface level is so obviously and clearly stupid and wrong that it’s not fooling anyone (well… except see stage 4), but that’s not the Core message. The Core message is in that the surface message is so transparently and ridiculously unconvincing, and the Core message is “you’ll pretend you believe this if you know what’s good for you, because you know we’re watching, and we know where you live.” It’s a loyalty test. If it was convincing, it wouldn’t be much of a test to make people act like they believe it, would it?
eg., Russia. China. -
You are meant to believe it.
AKA: There are five lights.
When people have been soaking in stage 3 propaganda for long enough, it has effects. Like brainwashing in a cult: repeat a lie often enough, and people will believe it, even if only because they haven’t got the resources left to hold on to the hard, lonely truth in the face of the relentless incessant lies. And there are places where it’s not enough to act like you believe the transparent lies. They demand that you actually believe it. And they can make you believe it. They’ve had practice. And they’re motivated.
eg., North Korea.
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For those unfamiliar with the reference.
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