Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

worldbeyondwar.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 184 posts

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#171

Post by the_optimist »

dragonwriter wrote: post #117
the_optimist wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a difference between propaganda and false information? This is a practical question. If they say “propaganda” but in practice simply plant false information, is that still in scope?

> Is there a difference between propaganda and false information? Yes. Propaganda is information you are told that is crafted to inculcate a particular belief, whether or not the information and/or belief are true. (Derived from the old latin name of the institution in the Vatican bureaucracy responsible for spreading the faith, propaganda fidei .) All advertising and persuasive speech is propaganda. Some of it uses…

Does this supposed distinction matter to the CIA? What are their limits when approaching this potentially black-and-white boundary?

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#172

Post by elteto »

anonym29 wrote: post #145
elteto wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. Although if we do have a pandemic with 20% mortality rates I feel like we would experience societal collapse in a much larger scale than in the movie. Much larger as in: we can’t finish developing a vaccine because world order is severely degraded.

Thank goodness COVID's mortality rates for nonsmokers aged 18-50 without diabetes were 2-3 orders of magnitude lower than that.

And mortality rates in children was even lower. I think that really helped cool things down. And even then, we all know how crazy things got.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#173

Post by wkat4242 »

I always wondered if those countless military/intelligence shows like 24, Jack Ryan etc were sponsored as propaganda.

They always show off the US intelligence services as the good guys, in unrealistically cool nightclub style offices. But the story is always the same 'anything goes to defeat the bad guys'. Which is exactly the attitude of those services as exposed by Snowden.

Sometimes I wonder if they're trying to bend our mindset to make us believe these things are necessary. They make for mildly interesting entertainment but I always wondered if there's more behind it like the article says.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#174

Post by wkat4242 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #63
nsxwolf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inaccurate part of the movie is that all that stuff worked. In real life, what "ended" the pandemic was a combination of mother nature and the human willingness to accept a lost cause and move on.

And an effective vaccine, as far as death and severe illness is concerned. https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/new-study-shows-fewer-p... > The findings, based on data across 2,558 counties in 48 US states, show that counties with high vaccine coverage had a more than 80% reduction in death rates compared with largely unvaccinated counties.

It was at first but we're at the point now where that's been dropped too. Here in Spain I haven't even been able to get it anymore in the last year and a half. I've had COVID twice, one time recently, and it was mild. Same with everyone else. Last week in the Netherlands there was nobody even in the ICU anymore in the whole country with it.

Even without the vaccine we would have got here but it would have taken longer and cost more lives.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#175

Post by wkat4242 »

thesaintlives wrote: post #164
aardshark wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you live in a first world Western country and is your social circle comprised of people who do the same? In my experience when you go outside of that circle you start finding people who have personally experienced loss from COVID very quickly.

I found completely the opposite. I spoke with all my Indian colleagues. Covid? What's that they said. No problem here Sir..

Seriously, the Indian variant (I forget which letter they gave it) was pretty devastating over there. I have many colleagues and they all know people who died, if not in their own family.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#176

Post by pangolinja »

wkat4242 wrote: post #173

I always wondered if those countless military/intelligence shows like 24, Jack Ryan etc were sponsored as propaganda. They always show off the US intelligence services as the good guys, in unrealistically cool nightclub style offices. But the story is always the same 'anything goes to defeat the bad guys'. Which is exactly the attitude of those services as exposed by Snowden. Sometimes I wonder if they're trying to b…

wait till you find out why they were so keen to spread the idea of America fighting against the Nazis in all those movies and shows;

it was so you didn't question who had established the Nazis from the very beginning, who had been funding them all the way to 1942 and beyond, who had secretly supported key Nazi evasion of post war justice, and the covert funding, establishment and maintenance of fascist and neo Nazis paramilitary groups and structures across Europe and the world ever since. the Military propaganda was the cover to keep Dulles and Bush and the rest of the Nazis in good public standing.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#177

Post by free_glamorgan »

wkat4242 wrote: post #175
thesaintlives wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found completely the opposite. I spoke with all my Indian colleagues. Covid? What's that they said. No problem here Sir..

Seriously, the Indian variant (I forget which letter they gave it) was pretty devastating over there. I have many colleagues and they all know people who died, if not in their own family.

The official statistics on Covid deaths in India showed a mortality rate 1/10th that of the US. There would need to be more than an order of magnitude error in reporting for their death rate to exceed that of the US.

FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#178

Post by bakuninsbart »

jibe wrote: post #81
elteto wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contagion also compressed time quite a bit because it’s a movie meant to entertain. It couldn’t show the long months of research, development and testing that actual science requires. Still a great movie.

It wasn’t too bad, the movie spanned 4 months from outbreak to vaccine. Pfizer’s Covid trial started 5 months after outbreak. If Covid was killing 20% like the virus in the movie, we could have matched or beaten the movie timeline.

Right, I think it is fascinating that basically the whole world decided to wait for the trials to finish. If death rate had been higher I'm sure some countries would have just started vaccinating and hoping for the best.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#179

Post by ceejayoz »

free_glamorgan wrote: post #177
wkat4242 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, the Indian variant (I forget which letter they gave it) was pretty devastating over there. I have many colleagues and they all know people who died, if not in their own family.

The official statistics on Covid deaths in India showed a mortality rate 1/10th that of the US. There would need to be more than an order of magnitude error in reporting for their death rate to exceed that of the US. FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?

That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60981318

> More than 4.7 million people in India - nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest - are thought to have died because of Covid-19, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report.

> Three large peer-reviewed studies had found that India's deaths from the pandemic by September 2021 were "six to seven times higher than reported officially". A paper in The Lancet by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research centre, uses subnational all-cause mortality data from 12 Indian states. They come close to the WHO's estimation.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#180

Post by free_glamorgan »

ceejayoz wrote: post #179
free_glamorgan wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official statistics on Covid deaths in India showed a mortality rate 1/10th that of the US. There would need to be more than an order of magnitude error in reporting for their death rate to exceed that of the US. FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?

That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60981318 > More than 4.7 million people in India - nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest - are thought to have died because of Covid-19, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report. > Three large peer-reviewed studies had found that India's deaths from the pandemic by September 2021 were "six to seven t…

I'm aware of that, which is why I made the point that it would only bring India's Covid death rate to around the same as the US and other Western countries. It is also of no help to the discussion around my original point, which is the idea that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who died unexpectedly of Covid.
Post reply on HN