There are good lies and bad lies, apparently. It’s bad propaganda when Russians buy ads on social media, but it’s good propaganda when the CIA does. The Soviet Union emitted a lot of propaganda, and Voice of America didn’t.
Meanwhile, the politically naive complain about “post-modernism” and how everyone acts as though the truth is relative. Well, what else did you expect? [part 1, stderr]
We float in a sea of propaganda and lies; the biggest lie of them all being that we don’t float in a sea of propaganda and lies. There’s a truth out there, and every media figure and politician earnestly tries to claim the high ground by indicating, with ritual dance-steps, that they are conveying the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The “influencers” that are all over Facebook and Instagram and Twitter are pretty much Hollywood special effects. Why not go a step further, and make “influencers” that are totally fake?
The CIA is not supposed to do domestic propaganda, because we’re the good guys. That’s how we can tell ourselves from the Russians: they use propaganda.
“What happened to Abu Zubaydah’s eye?”
A friend of mine retired from an IT executive job and she and her husband decided to become wealthy capitalists in their retirement. Since the evils of capitalism are a frequent topic here on FtB, maybe it’s a good idea to do a quick explainer of how a few of those evils work. These are the simple ones, and I’ll describe them as cleanly as I can so you can understand what’s going on when you hear about it elsewhere.
My family used to sometimes make expeditions to New York; we’d take the train up on a summer morning from Baltimore station, stepping out into the magic wonder-land of the city at 34th Street Station.
A while back, Caine posted some pictures from Vaught’s Practical Character Reader. I did what I usually do when someone posts about an interesting old book – I checked for it on Ebay.
Hallmark denies or downplays whether it had any involvement in the invention of Valentine’s day, though it is often tagged as a “Hallmark Holiday.”
Make the small big and the few many.
Return animosity with virtue.
– Lao Tze