I do not understand people who think their own government will not propagandize them.
Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
401–410 of 577 posts
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all, I would want to do a bit more research than you appear to have done before calling someone a "cowardly, insincere opportunist". I don't know much about the CEO of Raytheon or his historical record on gay rights. I suspect that you don't either. I do wonder just how early people are required to come to the 'battle' in order to escape your scorn. If someone was an adult in the 80s, are they an insincere o…
I think what is extremely destructive is siding with "legitimate" military grade weapon sales. But it doesn't invalidate your point. As a gay it means something when a CEO speaks up publicly in favor of gay inclusion. If it assures you, it also means something to many people who aren't gay. The issue the parent is pointing out is that these are easy wins used to diverting attention from their huge losses. And, some w…
Weapons sales are besides the point. There are plenty of corporations doing totally non-shady things that make exactly the same kinds of tweet. I don't think it's helpful to drag this thread into a discussion about the ethics of selling weapons. I suspect that we don't even disagree on that point. (Please don't think that I hold any brief for Raytheon.)
I find the rest of your post a little bit confusing. I don't think you are saying that you want Raytheon to stop making tweets in support of LGBTQ rights. But also, you seem to be hinting that there are somehow potentially bad consequences arising from Raytheon, or other corporations, making these sorts of statements. As the bad consequences are only sketched in the vaguest terms, it's difficult to know what to make of the idea. For example, you seem to suggest that people might be more alert to the bad things that Raytheon does if they didn't publicly support their LGBTQ employees. But you don't have to wind back the clock many decades to get to a time when they didn't do this. It doesn't seem that people had much more success in compelling Raytheon to stop making arms sales in the 70s or 80s than they do now.
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#403>The film also notes that the United States has laws against propagandizing the U.S. public, which might make such a disclosure a confession of a crime. I would add that since 1976, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has required that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.” That changed in 2013: >The U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm has begun the "unleashing of thousands o…
Imagine you have a tech industry that merged with madison avenue along with psychological methods learned from Guantanamo and CIA Black Sites, and you wanted to build a societal manipulation machine, otherwise known as propaganda. Makes me wonder if there is any relation between the changes mentioned here and some of what the social media infrastructure has been used to do.
Whoa! Easy with the conspiracy theories! /s
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#404Tom Secker, who's one of the co-producers of Theatres of War, has for many years written and podcasted about the CIA and the DoD's influences on movie and TV series scripts:
https://www.spyculture.com/podcasts/
He's also amassed a huge library of documents via FOIA about this particular topic:
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> USA is an advocate of very specific stability. "Free world" is a hyperbolic but US is still a huge global power. > In cold war it was obvious there were two sides, and the other was obviously more free than the other. Go ask for example Estonians, Lithuanians or Latvians who they enjoyed the yoke of the USSR. You could also ask a Guatemalan how they enjoyed living under the US installed military dictatorships (whic…
Not only Guatemala, but essentially all Latin America. I don't think a country can honestly claim to lead the "free world" while exporting brutal dictatorships to a entire continent.
My country went through this and we've been far more free than Cuba throughout the whole ordeal and thereafter. People love imagining this was never a possibility, but the threat of falling under communist chaos was very real, I simply cannot dislike those who helped preventing it no matter how hip and cool it's become.
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might have been some improvements in this area but I still haven't seen any (male) IT guy in a movie who is not portrayed as some kind of weirdo and relegated to the side. Even female nerds are at the very best assisting the hero. TV lawyers and doctors however get to hold jargon-filled monologues and be in lead roles. /rant
Jack Ryan would be a counterexample.
That must have changed - in the novels he was a former Marine who had made a bit of money in finance and then gone into academia.
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems strange to me, too. Red Pilled is used in contexts where someone starts seeing the hidden truth the elites want to hide from them etc. Woke in my experience is more used to describe progressive people and their opinions, without having anything to do with some hidden secrets or other such things.
The hidden secret is the life - the oppressive discrimination - many minorities, especially black persons, have been experiencing for generations, without most white people being aware of it. When you take that red pill, when you are open to the facts, it is shocking what has been happening right under our noses. You can't unsee it. A simple suggestion: Just talk about it with people who are black; if you don't know…
> I think you are talking about the reactionaries' use of the word
That's a fair point, yeah.
> When you take that red pill, when you are open to the facts, it is shocking what has been happening right under our noses
I think the problem there for me personally is, that "being red-pilled" was kinda adopted by the right wing, so I would never label myself red-pilled when I learn what kinds of things black people experience because of being who they are. But yeah, if we keep current politics out of our context, then I get what is meant with being red-pilled.
So essentially, red-pilled means "I learned(or at least think so) something which the mainstream(god I hate that word in the political context) does not know."
Furthermore, if what you think you've learned is objectively true, then you were red-pilled, if it's objectively wrong you just invented a new conspiracy theory.
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might have been some improvements in this area but I still haven't seen any (male) IT guy in a movie who is not portrayed as some kind of weirdo and relegated to the side. Even female nerds are at the very best assisting the hero. TV lawyers and doctors however get to hold jargon-filled monologues and be in lead roles. /rant
Now imagine House M.D. rehashed to a brilliant but callous software guru trying to diagnose various misbehaviours/misuse of tech all around town. I'm not sure if that's a promising pitch or straight up garbage!
I'm holding out for a Breaking Bad style show about a software consultant who realizes how much money they can make by pivoting to running a malware ransom ring
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In cold war it was obvious there were two sides ... These two sides narration was a very intentional American construct. View from the other side wasn't symmetrical. US as seen from the other side was just seen as a powerful country that likes to mess around with other countries business exploiting them for their own purposes. End of cold war changed nothing. US is still a powerful country that likes to mess around…
I agree until your second to last sentence. I think the hesitation isn’t because of military concerns, I think the USSR posed a serious military threat if the US ever decided to throw down, but rather economic issues. Unlike the USSR, America does a lot of trading with China, which makes framing them as some boogie man both practically and rhetorically tricky. It doesn’t help that business interests (and consumers) i…
Good point. Trade and financial relationships are another obstacle.
Re: Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
#410>The film also notes that the United States has laws against propagandizing the U.S. public, which might make such a disclosure a confession of a crime. I would add that since 1976, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has required that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.” That changed in 2013: >The U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm has begun the "unleashing of thousands o…
However, that act didn't seem to have an effect in publishing media like: Top Gun movies and the America's Army videogame. Not sure how the VoA programming looks like (sounds like I guess) but I don't think outlets for government promotion were lacking even before the act was overturned
> America's Army videogame
That was a great game. High realism, frag grenades with right range, different stance involving accuracy, shooting using iron sights. I played tons of hours on Bridge and Hospital maps.