13/12/2021
Question of the day in the life .. your life, my life ...
What are the five most influential (obviously propaganda-nistic) media campaigns that have effected your beliefs and behaviours? The best case scenario for this question is to identify a couple you might not have noticed or acknowledged previously, but just sharing the ones you've already noticed and likely/maybe/hopefully set aside, is a great inquiry to have .. and to please share if you would.
So my five are: 1) OMG Sports. Like I'm middle aged and still, when I watch games of the local teams where I grew up in the DC area, I respond as if my life freaking depended on the outcome .. my heart rate and blood pressure go through the roof when I watch the WFT and/or UofMD sports. That is definitive external conditioning .. no doubt about it .. it's deeply embedded and I haven't had any real success unraveling it. 2) responding to woman's bodies like just the sight of a breast or a va**na should make me wet/hard .. that ain't normal folks .. not like there shouldn't be sexual attraction .. but not in the knee jerk and other jerking manner and degree we experience it in this culture. Our over-primed reactionarianism to sexual images and ideas is used in so many ways, on so many levels (with both men and women) to alter our behaviors .. from everything from relationships to the kind of car we buy, beer we drink and burger we eat. I've got it for sure .. I think most of us do. Seriously though how many hours and days, how much time have you spent of your life with your attention drawn to internalized sexual thinking/fantasy? .. maybe with a computer screen in front of you, maybe not .. my point is .. it's a conditioned, habit-forming, and generally unhealthy set up .. that is used with great frequency and efficacy to distract our attention and/or alter our behaviors. 3) Democrats GOOD. Republicans BAD. You can obviously flip this one and it is equally applicable. As with most of these propagandized memes, you can count on the distinctions between each side and the identification with one side or the other to be pretty close to absolute .. this is part of the mechanism of design of propaganda to be used for societal influence .. create emotionally-based attachments on both sides of an issue .. once the emotional attachment component is in place, identification with and loyalty to that idea or position become very unlikely to be internally questioned or even acknowledged as needing questioning .. think pro-Trump/anti-Trump, pro-abortion/anti-abortion, pro-vax/less-than-fully-pro-vax-all-the-time-no-matter-what. Were you to consider switching sides from whichever side you identify with, re any of these issues, it would almost certainly cause some degree of cognitive dissonance and upset. The degree of antagonistic, dismissal-with-prejudice-type absolutism that imbues much of our political discourse now is something that is profoundly out-of-balance .. and to our point here, something that has been, and is being, created and maintained purposefully to keep us revved up and divided .. about as many things as possible. Bottom line, if you're all excited and certain and upset about something .. there's a really high probability that the intensity and the upset have been stoked through the influence of outside (emotional) leverage .. your experience and reactions to these things are more profound and absolute than they would be otherwise had you never been exposed to these (purposeful, intentional and directed) external forces. Just ask yourself, how likely would you be to hate/dismiss your neighbor for their political identification without the knowledge and clarity you have gained about them based on what you've watched on television and read in the paper? C'mon be honest now .. how much more likely would you to be friendly, or at least friendlier, with your neighbor on the other side of the aisle, if neither of you had never watched television or listened to the radio? It oughtta be a litmus test before opinion comes out of anyone's mouth .. "Is my idea and position about this issue primarily based on what I've watched on TV, heard on the radio or read in the paper?" If the answer to the question is 'yes' .. then you should just, by law, be forced to keep quiet until you develop better habits over how you make decisions and come to beliefs about things .. that or you should be taken to a re-adjustment facility and separated from the rest of us (obviously saner) folks until we decide that you've reformed yourself enough to see your family and interact with society again. (OK .. nobody here goes off on tangential topical topics .. much.) 4) Pot bad/Pot good. Pick your side .. both are fraught with high intensity, fact-challenged, highly emotional beliefs and reaction quotients .. this issue has evolved a lot over the last few decades .. but still .. I remember I had friends, and even my own family, who literally believed the best thing to do if they found their kid using pot was to report them to the police and in some cases have them arrested .. so that they would 'learn their lesson'. Does this sound sane to anyone now? The intensity was/is (primarily) externally manufactured. From the original damning yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst seeking to remove cannabis as a competitor for his paper and pulp businesses to the eventual inclusion of pot as a 'Schedule 1' drug with 'no known medical purposes', all the way to the extreme environmental damage and social violence still surrounding the growth, distribution of, and profit from cannabis. Whichever side .. it's all jacked up. 5) Fluoride in the water .. just do the research .. we were sold a bill of goods re fluoridation in the public water supply because some folks had an awful lot of really dangerous and toxic industrial waste to deal with .. and the brilliant solution to the problem (thank you Edward Bernays) became to convince the American public it was a grand idea to have governments pay these industries for the privilege of dumping hazardous industrial waste into our water supply [this industrial effluent is not only non-pharmaceutical-grade fluoride, it's also over 100 different other waste chemicals that come with the primary fluoride-containing component (hydrofluorosilicic acid, a by-product from the phosphate fertilizer industry, not a medical-grade form of fluoride used at your dentist's office)] Rather than having to pay all those bureaucratic, over-reaching, profit-challenging, and wholly unnecessary hazardous waste fees, these industries actually get paid by the taxpayers to offload their industrial waste into our water. It would be prohibitive to the profitability of their business if they had to dispose of the waste otherwise, ie upfront as a hazardous waste, so, you know, what choice do they have? If you haven't looked into this issue in depth, I promise you will be appalled at what you find when you do. The pro-fluoride propaganda campaign was intentional engineering of society-wide beliefs at it's finest .. from the 'Father of Modern Public Relations' himself, Mr Edward (i've-done-more-harm-to-society-than-any-more-publicly-well-known-bad-guy-in-history) Bernays. Here's a quick article if you're not as familiar as you might have thought with this subject. https://www.chrisbeatcancer.com/fluoride-is-poison/
A good source for info on this issue is the Fluoride Action Network. https://fluoridealert.org/
So, thanks ever so much if you've read this far. And if you've already taken the time to wade through these musings, please take another minute or two and share some examples of propaganda-dependent/originating beliefs that you've identified in your own life.
This topic has real potential as a 12-step program don't ya think?! Propaganda and News Addicts Anonymous. PANA Anonymous or ProANA Anonymous, or PropANA Anonymous. I expect royalties.
Fluoride: How a Toxic Poison Ended up in our Water Supply
