this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Sounds like it's referring to any marketing or public communications from any company government or individual. I'd qualify that as overly broad.
In some languages “advertising” and “propaganda” are the same word, and not for nothing. Bernays worked in both advertising and politics. It’s the same set of tools whether its to sell cigarettes or war.
Would all rhetoric (persuading people) be propaganda? I think that makes the word useless.
it's not useless if it describes something.
It's describing all communication, good and bad. This conversation we're having right now would be propaganda.
You're trying to influence someone's understanding of the term propganda, which makes it propganda.
And you're communicating, which makes your comment propaganda. Or is it only propaganda when it's to political ends?
turns out, everything is political, so, yes, it's all propaganda.
So I think that definition is useless, since there's nothing that isn't propaganda.
have you read Foucault?
You want to summarize?
no.
Than why'd you bring it up?
I wanted to see if it was worth continuing this conversation
You thought I'd have read it?
I thought if you had read it this might be a worthwhile conversation.
And yet you continue
this hasn't been a conversation for hours
Should I set up a bot, we can just trade trivialities back and forth forever?
Rhetorical exchange between two people is one thing, mass persuasion is quite another, though they are not entirely unrelated.
So would any speech to a bunch of people be propaganda? What makes something propaganda?
Hollywood's role is propagate the owner class views upon the wagie population to create obedience with a few exceptions... And they don't make those movies anymore.
Lastime they did it was jocker and elites go to scared that they ensured to ruin the prequel. That vibe changed real quick lol
So no Luigi movie for us is what you’re saying 😞
Hollywood's role is to make money. They do that by making movies that appeal to people so that they'll pay for them, while not alienating their funding. There isn't some top down directive to portray oligarchs well, it's just part of the ballance. Another factor is that directors, at least established ones, tend to be rich, so they have that perspective in their work.
The profit motive certainly is a major aspect, maybe even the largest, but there’s more going on than just that. For instance, the US military-intelligence-industrial complex gets directly & indirectly involved, and this is well documented.
Through money. They don't let people film with their equipment unless they have some say in the outpout. But again, it isn't a conspiracy, it's factors and pressures that sometimes effect the output.
Okay sure, they conspired, but again, it’s not a conspiracy 😂
It seems like you’re jumping through hoops to maintain some kind of Panglossian, high school civics worldview.
Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths:
Conspiracy I take as being secretive. I think this strategy is publicized.
To the extent that it has been exposed, yes, it is now publicly known, and to the extent that it hasn’t been, it’s not.
I pointed you to some of the seminal and most often cited works on the theory and practice and history of propaganda. Instead of telling us that you question the very validity of the term “propaganda” out of ignorance, how about engaging with the literature, or the Wikipedia entries about the literature, or the YouTube explainers about the literature?
I'm trying to nail down what propaganda is so we can talk about it. It's not much use taking about it if we mean different things.
I'd define propaganda as misconstruing the truth towards political ends. If it's commercial ends rather than political, it's false advertising. If it's not misconstruing, then it's advertising or public communications. Just to set a baseline.
I can't find what your sources are defining as propaganda from a brief look, so let's compare to my definition.
You define it wrong. Propaganda is the same thing as public relations. Public relations is literally the American name for it per Bernays who coined both terms. He believed propaganda is a good thing but the term became loaded so he renamed it in a classic public relations style.
Okay cool, so your definition of propaganda is any communication for political ends?
Every public communication is propaganda, politcal content is irelevant. It depends on the goals of said proaganda if it is bad or not.
That's how censorship works in practice... Profit motive and ownership structure is just the American way of doing it.