I'm really getting tired of this...
Jul. 23rd, 2003 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearPublic opinion is being swayed (or at least, more and more organizations and people are trying to sway) by propaganda techniques than I can ever recall, and the one that seems to be used the most often is one I like to call Proof by Repeated Assertion. This is where a statement is made to justify some action, and that statement is only supported by a restatement of itself as a justification for making even wilder claims.
This is happening all over, nowadays, from the White House on Iraq's WMD, to SCO's complaints against IBM and Linux, to the RIAAs claims against mp3 swappers, to the MPAA's claims that region encoding was necessary on DVDs. Quite simply, nobody really wants to go into real, honest analysis and consideration of the facts; they simply want people to believe them, so they say the same things over and over and louder and louder. All the while, they're manipulating the media (which in the cases of the MPAA/RIAA or the Government, they pretty much control) into following them as if the public either really cares (they don't until their own wallet gets involved), or could actually do something about it.
Alternative opinions are silenced and ignored; alternative interpretations of the facts are never given, as if the claimant could do no wrong. A hundred groups could claim their album sales went up as a result of Napster, but Metallica comes along and says that Napster hurt their sales and everybody's in an uproar and "the industry is dying"; this of course conveniently ignored the fact that most Metallica fans considered their more recent works to be garbage and not worth buying. So maybe Napster did hurt Metallica's sales, but not because people were sharing files to keep instead of buying the album; its because they knew the album wasn't worth buying to them.
The latest wave of this kind of crap is coming from SCO, currently headed by a chap named McBride, who is a parasite of industry to a degree I'd never seen before. He gives nothing to the companies he's run (and he's been CEO of 3 in the last 5 years or so, if I recall). He only makes money for his companies by litigation, which is what he's doing for SCO. They claim IBM stole Unix Sys5 code and put it in Linux, and continue to say that louder and louder, increasing in obnoxiousness and scope the effect of this, all the while refusing to actually say what was "stolen". Facts like precedent set in the 1991 BSD legal decision (that the traits of Unix in BSD are negligible, and most similarities exist because the code was simultaneously developed for both or were actually BSD elements put into Unix) are simply never stated by anybody connected with the case.
That the use of this technique goes all the way to the top, to the President and his staff, is the biggest annoyance. It sets really a really poor example to our children that skepticism, logic, reason, proof, analysis, debate, and finally Truth itself, are utterly unnecessary. All that matters is getting things to go your way, simply by stating what you want people to believe repeatedly, silencing the alternative through excessive noise, and the sheep will listen...or simply look the other way and let you do what you want.
The media, the media-suppliers, and the President himself are teaching America's children that the best way to be successful is to be a con artist, and that if you repeat a lie long enough and loud enough, it becomes the truth.
Teaching propaganda in school was supposed to teach children to recognize it and learn how to be skeptical; instead, they remain ignorant of when they're being manipulated, all the while learning propaganda as techniques to manipulate others.
As a society, we need stop accepting that we are being manipulated and that it doesn't really matter, else the true dangers of that (WW2, anybody?) will present themselves to the ruination of all...
The question is, can we do that without further manipulating ourselves?
This is happening all over, nowadays, from the White House on Iraq's WMD, to SCO's complaints against IBM and Linux, to the RIAAs claims against mp3 swappers, to the MPAA's claims that region encoding was necessary on DVDs. Quite simply, nobody really wants to go into real, honest analysis and consideration of the facts; they simply want people to believe them, so they say the same things over and over and louder and louder. All the while, they're manipulating the media (which in the cases of the MPAA/RIAA or the Government, they pretty much control) into following them as if the public either really cares (they don't until their own wallet gets involved), or could actually do something about it.
Alternative opinions are silenced and ignored; alternative interpretations of the facts are never given, as if the claimant could do no wrong. A hundred groups could claim their album sales went up as a result of Napster, but Metallica comes along and says that Napster hurt their sales and everybody's in an uproar and "the industry is dying"; this of course conveniently ignored the fact that most Metallica fans considered their more recent works to be garbage and not worth buying. So maybe Napster did hurt Metallica's sales, but not because people were sharing files to keep instead of buying the album; its because they knew the album wasn't worth buying to them.
The latest wave of this kind of crap is coming from SCO, currently headed by a chap named McBride, who is a parasite of industry to a degree I'd never seen before. He gives nothing to the companies he's run (and he's been CEO of 3 in the last 5 years or so, if I recall). He only makes money for his companies by litigation, which is what he's doing for SCO. They claim IBM stole Unix Sys5 code and put it in Linux, and continue to say that louder and louder, increasing in obnoxiousness and scope the effect of this, all the while refusing to actually say what was "stolen". Facts like precedent set in the 1991 BSD legal decision (that the traits of Unix in BSD are negligible, and most similarities exist because the code was simultaneously developed for both or were actually BSD elements put into Unix) are simply never stated by anybody connected with the case.
That the use of this technique goes all the way to the top, to the President and his staff, is the biggest annoyance. It sets really a really poor example to our children that skepticism, logic, reason, proof, analysis, debate, and finally Truth itself, are utterly unnecessary. All that matters is getting things to go your way, simply by stating what you want people to believe repeatedly, silencing the alternative through excessive noise, and the sheep will listen...or simply look the other way and let you do what you want.
The media, the media-suppliers, and the President himself are teaching America's children that the best way to be successful is to be a con artist, and that if you repeat a lie long enough and loud enough, it becomes the truth.
Teaching propaganda in school was supposed to teach children to recognize it and learn how to be skeptical; instead, they remain ignorant of when they're being manipulated, all the while learning propaganda as techniques to manipulate others.
As a society, we need stop accepting that we are being manipulated and that it doesn't really matter, else the true dangers of that (WW2, anybody?) will present themselves to the ruination of all...
The question is, can we do that without further manipulating ourselves?
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-23 12:11 pm (UTC)So much of 'civilization' is standing on the top of something and proclaiming (loudly) that something is right and every question is answered "because it is so".
Media, gov't, religious organizations, schools. Because I say so is stereotypical for a reason.
How many 'facts' become so just because they are repeated so many times? Just within music, dancing, and history you run into so many of them. Take everything with a grain of salt ... except of course those sources [politicos] that should be taken with a 50lb salt-block.(
no subject
Date: 2003-07-23 12:19 pm (UTC)This technique requires that you never give ANY reason "why?". You dodge the why? question by stating something else using the original assertion as the why? so it *sounds* like an explanation and not a dodge.
I specifically left religion out of it because they haven't really used this particular technique recently; issues of faith and morality are slightly different than issues of fact. The churches have their own ways of keeping sheep.
And "grain of salt" is the very problem. There's so much of this going on now, from the very top of our government to the media sources that "inform" us, that there's simply no salt left. We as a society have gotten too tired and burned out by it all to carry the grain of salt with us.