You get the idea. Americans make movies where America good, everyone bad. China is now making movies where China good, everyone bad, specially white Americans.
Anyways, along with the glorification of US might and power by the pentagon, their recruiting tactics have also used video game stylization to attract young people:
Russia has been doing it since the dawn of cinema. e.g. Battleship Potemkin. Mosfilm, soviet propaganda, and amazing advances in movie-making have all marched together from the very start. You'd be surprised at how many of the tropes and techniques that form a part of modern movie language have their origin in soviet propaganda.
The thing is, everybody expects a Mosfilm flick to toe the party line. What the U.S. has done was sneakier.
Another country that comes to mind is India - but I've never been enough of a Bollywood fan to be able to make any assessment on this topic.
But it's a very effective tool to shape public opinion. I'm fairly certain without the overwhelmingly heroic portrait of (members of) the military, the public would be more inclined to question the huge investments that go into warfare. Particularly the display of highly achieved individuals in the military leads to both public respect of military members, and enlistings to service.
We’re all vulnerable to this. Just here in tech we’ve deified the guy in a t-shirt/hoodie (zucks of the world) or mythical 10x programmers, built up and tore down people like Adam Neumann, all caricatures.
Propaganda works sadly.
With respect to war, it takes observing a war play out to realize how stupid it actually is. It took Americans 20 years of just watching Iraq/Afghanistan to conclude all that nationalism stuff is just not worth it at all. I don’t know how it’s all going to play out in the next 50 years, but I’m pretty sure in the aftermath of any American/Chinese conflict the conclusion of america-bad by the Chinese and China-bad by the Americans will just seem quite silly also.
Haider is the only Indian movie that I can think of that doesn't take the establishment position when it comes to the portrayal of the armed forces.
More recently, a certain Canadian national has carved out a niche for himself by staring in ultra patriotic movies that are very popular with the Indian audience.
> FWIW, I hear he’s applying to become an Indian citizen again.
He claimed to have applied for an Indian passport in 2019. But then again he claimed he was an honorary citizen of Canada in the past. He's not exactly a reliable source.
one difference is that authoritarian regimes have been known to infuse everything with state propaganda, whereas almost nobody expects this from western democracies, showing just how much more subtle and even effective the latter can be.
>whereas almost nobody expects this from western democracies
Are you joking? Ever since 9/11 the US has been pumping out propaganda disguised as entertainment like gangbusters! It's really obvious when you go and watch reruns of old copaganda shows from 03 to 06, and then there's "24". Of course there's also blatant ra-ra Military propaganda like J.A.G. and NCIS
It's not surprising to see outright propaganda from the US, it's surprising how many decades it's taken for people to begin to call it what it is. Surprising and depressing.
What you wrote is true, but it's astonishing how people tolerate having an industrial production of propaganda (since WW2) in what should be a democracy.
Democracy and propaganda aren't mutually exclusive. Plus, the US isn't a democracy. In fact, most countries banging the democracy-propaganda-horn aren't actually democracies. Austria, for example, is a Republic. Democracy is just a smokescreen.
And whichever organization selects which films get to be shown in China. Some films do much, much better in China than in the US thanks to this; some examples are the Transformers films, the Warhammer film, and someone else already mentioned Pacific Rim and Iron Man.
Basically, if there's a Chinese secondary actor and / or a Chinese location and they're not the definitive bad guys, it's been tweaked for and co-developed with China.
Now I don't say that's a bad thing per se, I kinda like there being a propaganda force in blockbuster films to compete with that of the US. I would much prefer no propaganda, but at the same time I feel like high budget action blockbusters can't do without.
Also take the word 'propaganda' with a grain of salt, it's usually nothing over the top, or limited to "this country or these people are not put in a bad light"
I for one would love to see more films where the Americans aren't considered the heroes.
To be fair almost every country does this, for obvious reasons;The main aspects to analyze considering that everyone does this are: how big is your industry and how this directly affects the efficacy of your exported pictures: the reach & perceived reality of your presented truth; and secondly: the degree you distort truth to positively assert yourself.
The second aspect is vastly more important, but then again some people believe in the concept of a 'white lie' or lying for the greater good, which is very dangerous, especially in a world where you cannot be certain that you're the only one who knows a piece of information.And on top of that people who seek to hide the truth or lie by omission often do a lot of worse things than merely not presenting the whole facts.
> The other country that is doing this at Hollywood scale is China
The difference being that while state propaganda has infected Hollywood it does not wholly control Hollywood. You’d be hard pressed to find any rough equivalent to Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post etc in China.
> Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post
Those movies are also propaganda, but in a more subtle and effective way; The message of these movies being that while america sometimes makes mistakes, in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven.
You don’t see in these movies american soldiers raping civilans, laughing about it, and suffering no ill consequences
> You don’t see in these movies american soldiers raping civilans, laughing about it, and suffering no ill consequences
Have you watched Apocalypse Now Redux? Because I can remember a scene that is very similar to that description. In this movie, the American military or government has no good heart, no conscience and breeds madness and senseless death.
When I joined the (Canadian) military in the mid 90s, many of the guys there cited anti-war films such as 'Apocalypse Now', 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Platoon' as inspirations for signing up.
This is true, but the way these movies were propaganda is actually a lot more interesting: One big thing they do is cover up the fact that the Vietnam war ended up in basically a huge mutiny in the US forces, and a de facto truce with the Vietnamese.
> in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven.
Nothing about Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket says that at all. Have you even watched them? They’re both about how war and the military machine are devastating and dehumanizing to the soldier, and to the enemy. All words seem like egregious understatements for them so I recommend seeing them (or seeing them again).
To my horror I did find out that the first half of Full Metal Jacket was attractive to enough teenage boys in the late 80s to eventually cause Jarhead to be produced [1]. I guess they stopped watching after the first half, or the idea of murdering teenage girls was attractive to them? Either way it is anything but propaganda.
As for the other movies that do involve righting a wrong or at least exposing them, that’s not state propaganda. Primarily because the state is the villain in them and they encourage suspicion of the state, neither of which promotes state power. A movie which gives the feels about being an American doesn’t make something propaganda it makes it a movie that wants to sell to Americans.
Shit, China influences US film too. Many films avoid showing LGBTQ main characters or China in a bad light so they can sell into the Chinese market. A good example is the recent remake of Red Dawn. It was supposed to have the Chinese as bad guys but instead they used the extremely implausible North Koreans as antagonists.
Regarding China, most Hollywood studios seem to be kowtowing Chinese line these days. I have noticed a clear trend in Hollywood movies where they don't portray anything negative about China, and usually project things in positive light. This same trend can be observed in most mainstream media's projection of China. Worldwide, China is definitely reaching proportions that were only possible for the US earlier in influencing, or arm-twisting influencers like media, and movie makers.
Yeah, I find it ironic that the commenters in the ad whine about the "Netflix Original Trailer" looking "Emma" ad in favor of the "Video Game" ad. "No, give me back the old propaganda for an imperialist death machine that will grind up my life and spit on my retired body if I survive once I'm too old and helpless to do anything about it, this one is going to appeal to my political enemiiiieeeeeees and then they'll get ground up in higher numbers instead of people like meeeeee T_T".
That ad is the equivalent of showing college applicants a glorified video of a Film Studies major buying a ticket straight to Hollywood after graduation and winning an Oscar for best director.
It’s false advertising at best, predatory at worst. Do you know who are selling a bag of dreams to? Do you care? You’ll take their time, money and lives, and it won’t matter to you in the least, will it?
You're right. They need lives and bodies to serve big picture grand strategy agendas, they'll pander to the "excitable gamer" or the "marginalized underdog" alike as soon as they understand which demo to reach out to when, what style to emulate, and what emotional buttons to push.
I mean, if one country does it, everyone else is forced to do it to level the playing field. Hollywood churns out higher quality propaganda because huge budgets and USA global hegemony, but it won't stay like that forever as we move to a multipolar world. The same is happening with online news outlets that churn out cherry-picked propaganda to counter propaganda from another country - information warfare.
The last book I read contained direct quotes from the man himself about the importance of creating new businesses to help the motherland. Nothing major, but when I read that I realised the the entire series was basically promoting some kind of "the Russian dream" as seen by an incel-boomer (can't really put a better word on it)...
And please tell your FSB handlers to stop living in the past ;)
Once this was pointed out, I can't unsee it. It's kind of ruined movies that involves the military or military equipment for me, since it can be really obvious when creators toe the line for the military. When I see military equipment my gut reaction is to anticipate the other shoe dropping, and to look for shoehorned hero worship or some good-versus-evil plot point.
Speaking of good-vs-evil, do you also see WWII veterans and military history in the same light? They got into war that no one asked for. I cannot imagine if US and allies had lost WWII. It is simply unimaginable.
Right, because there is this magical line in history where everything was different.
It's just that the propaganda for that war was so incredibly effective for so long, it is nearly impossible to find people who see it in a realistic light.
Normally the magic line goes the other way -- people think propaganda or such may have existed in the bad old days but in "modern times" of course everything is copacetic.
> In 1939, estimates of the Army's strength range between 174,000 and 200,000 soldiers, smaller than that of Portugal's, which ranked it 17th or 19th in the world in size. [1]
Despite of the abundant resources, it was largely a sleeping nation militarily prior to WWII. Air Force was essentially non-existent. Pearl Harbor was the critical moment that kicked the US Military machine in top gear. It only accelerated in the Cold War where there was serious FUD. It is difficult to put into context without having lived in that era. Propaganda, whatever you think of it, was necessary to convince the tax payer for their own security as well recruit enough people to sustain defense. The allies had seen the eye of evil and walked into its belly so it was straight forward to sell. Today's generation is largely detached from that reality.
Oh my. It’s almost as if the Soviet Union contributed a lot more bodies to the war than the nation that was separated from most of the war by two major bodies of water. But I’m sure happy that the American propaganda worked, or else the War would have surely been lost...
This is hilarious, yet I’m not laughing.
> The allies had seen the eye of evil and walked into its belly so it was straight forward to sell.
That's an example of a well-cemented "good-vs-evil" dichotomy in the sense that the story of good vs evil in WWII has been told and retold so many times, that people can't imagine arguing with it.
The concepts of "good" and "evil" are interesting, for example the discussion of the Banality of Evil (Arendt) etc.
Yes, many philosophers (e.g. Nietsche) wrote of it. It is a pretty well established moral line today, completely undisputed - the holocaust, terrorism, etc. It is beyond political ideology.
I'm not sure how to read this, are you denying that the holocaust happened?
I grew up during a time when quite a few witnesses were still alive and I did talk to some, no need to read a history book (although it definitely helps your overall formation as a reasonable person).
I’m questioning the good vs evil narrative. In my lifetime I’ve seen it used to lay waste to entire countries, and I helped do it.
I’m a little more skeptical now.
WWII being the fight of good versus evil is the foundation myth of post-1945 western civilization. It is the central dogma of the western pseudo-religion, which prevents meaningful discussion of these matters.
Eh, I'd say the Holocaust makes a good argument in favour of it genuinely being a good vs evil thing. I mean, that certainly wasn't the only (or even main) motivation, but come on.
The actual myth is that the West is/was systematically engaged on the good side in good vs evil conflicts, when in reality WWII was more of an exception in that regard.
The "West" was ... not exactly on one side of WWII. It had, after all, factions on all sides of WWII. It is not the "West" as a whole that tells that myth.
Exactly, the biggest “bad guys” nations are now the core west nations: Germany, Japan, Italy. While their victims China, Russia and others are villified.
It’s about manufacturing consent and dehumanizing others so that the moronic public is more in favor of killing innocent civilians.
Russia, it must be said, was no better than the Nazis, and in many ways worse. Its evils were visited mainly on Soviets (not excluding Russians), and were mostly concealed until much later.
The origins of WWII have a lot to do with they way what WWI ended. Germany was blockaded and the german people were starved until they were forced to sign a very one-sided treaty.
The holocaust, which is undeniably evil, is used to to hide all the other evils that lead up to WWII or were committed during it. This capped by the completely unnecessary nuclear bombing of Nagasaki by the US. WWII was not actually an exception, we just pretend it was.
Another example is the systematic starvation of German populace in the post-war years, due to the allord policy of deindustrialization. The average daily food intake was estimated at 1000kcal! And it was not a matter of food scarcity - it was a deliberate allied policy:
>Germany received many offers from Western European nations to trade food for desperately needed coal and steel. Neither the Italians nor the Dutch could sell the vegetables that they had previously sold in Germany, with the consequence that the Dutch had to destroy considerable proportions of their crop. Denmark offered 150 tons of lard a month; Turkey offered hazelnuts; Norway offered fish and fish oil; Sweden offered considerable amounts of fats. However, the Allies disallowed the Germans to trade.
The Nazis were evil, but that doesn’t imply that the allies fought against the Axis powers because they were good. You can do the right thing for the wrong or neutral reasons.
“US and allies”—that the US fought the whole war with the rest of the allies as support is another artifact of Hollywood’s portrayal of WWII. Although it’s understandable that there are less American movies about the Eastern Front, so it’s not like that has to be caused by some propaganda effort.
The western front was more or less a sideshow. All of the big battles were in the East. The Soviets kept bottled up a German force fully half as big as were fielded on the whole western front, in a little peninsula of Latvia ("Courland Pocket"), for almost a year.
But the naval war in the Atlantic mattered. And, US supplies (particularly SPAM, and trucks, tires, and fuel) delivered through Iran were helpful late in the war.
But aside from naval work that denied Germany South American resources, the Soviets could have done the whole job on their own, and would have overrun all of Europe. In particular, there is no evidence that British and US area bombing achieved anything, although point attacks on rail locomotives did.
Fun fact: the "WWII veterans" group includes German veterans. They got into war many of them asked for.
The good side in WWII includes Stalin and his regime. I do think that Hitler was bigger treat to everyone (including Easter Europeans themselves) and the alliance was needed. However, that does not mean Stalin represents "good guy".
The anitisemitism was not limited to Germans. Plenty of non-Germans people cooperated with it for own benefit or out of own anti-semitism. That includes people who were victims themselves - but still disliked Jews.
Also, closer to America, in movies American army simply can not possibly commit blunder, make really bad decisions (whether practically or morally). Real WWII featured a lot of those.
Also, speaking about movies, in American war movies war essentially feel good and heroic. The good and heroes wins. civilians basically dont exist and literally never are a real character with personality, motivations or agency (as limited as it is). The damage dont to them, the moral choices they have to do or their reaction to it dont exist.
I view the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln brigade as having fought and sacrificed on the side of good. When the survivors later tried to join the US Army for the fight against Germans and WWII (which they viewed as a continuation of the same war they had already been fighting) many of the were labelled "premature antifascists" and rejected.
Americans love that stuff though, it’s not necessarily propaganda forced down our throats. We’d still want to see the badass, all American commando on a 100 kill streak.
That’s my understanding. The US military approach is basically “we’ll provide real gear and vehicles as long as your movie doesn’t put us in a negative light”. It’s basically the military getting free advertising in return.
I get the sense most blockbuster Hollywood movies fit that bill quite well with minimal edits. The more niche, gritty movies that talk about the unpleasant/controversial events/aspects probably don’t even ask for help.
Alternatively, it could be taken as a honest question: do they actually want it because of the propaganda, or would they want it regardless of the propaganda?
Long time ago I heard this joke: Ship is sinking, the captain needs to tell everybody 'women and children first' . So to the british: you are gentlemen, aren't you? To japanese passengers: look what everybody else is doing. To US-American: you guys want to be heros?
I wouldn't say "being young" is that relevant after a couple centuries. Nobody in the US today knows someone who witnessed the declaration of independence (unlike, say, in Israel or India).
Probably. But I believe there's still a notion that they're new players who got everything right to the top. While other countries have seen peaks and valleys.
That is also true for the police. Usually the police is incompetent if you want to be funny, or they are suffering humans. The police as a hero is also USA propaganda.
I grew up watching Soviet movies about war, which usually depict very different picture. Sure, there are heroes, but they are not super heroes as in American movies. They get injured, die. Soviet war movies show that wars really suck.
Some UK war movies fall into the "wars really suck" category - an obvious example being The Cruel Sea based on the novel by Nicholas Monsarrat who served in Royal Navy during the Battle of the Atlantic:
"This is a story of the Battle of the Atlantic, the story of the ocean, two ships, and a handful of men. The men are the heroes; the heroines the ships. The only villain is the sea, the cruel sea that man has made more cruel."
"China bad" is one of the primary goals of western propaganda.
Start looking out for any online discussion involving anti-Asian racism / attacks, the housing crisis, etc. and you'll see posts like "but what about the CPP?" and "aren't Asians the most racist against blacks?"
Hwæt?! I think it's more than just modern Americans who love(d) heroic war stories. Look at J. Caesar, look at the knightly romances from the Middle Ages -- the latter are especially sanitized, the former were probably bloodied up a bit. The pursuit of that kill streak has been a genre for a really long time. I thought it was common knowledge that the US Government helped it along here and there and has in one medium or another since the beginning. There is a Maldon for every few Beowulfs though.
I think Hollywood is lot less subtle now at trying to push political propaganda than it was ever then, except that wokeism is the theme of the day. In some instances it has completely taken over the plot, like in the last season of Fargo, to the point of becoming some sort of unwatcheable catechism.
It's not that there's something wrong with gay rights, or any other specific social cause powerful organizations adopt. It's just that it's a very cheap way to win a positive image for things that ... would have trouble getting a positive image if focus was on their core business.
Raytheon lobbies for Mideast arm sales. In the hierarchy of shit they need to be ethical on, LGBTQ rights is not really top of the list. It’s nice though, nonetheless.
No connection to Hollywood of course, Raytheon would love nothing more than war never being mentioned. The more they can sell outside of the US and not have anyone know it’s causing genocide in places like Yemen, the better.
You're going off on a tangent here. By all means criticise Raytheon for the bad things they do. But why criticise their CEO for making a tweet supportive of gay rights? No evidence has been presented that the tweet is not sincere. HN all too often seems prone to spinning complex and sometimes borderline conspiratorial narratives around LGBTQ rights advocacy.
It's arguably not a tangent but simply a more holistic view.
Twitter is a lot of posturing, and the tweet is posturing "look how progressive/ethical/whatever I am". GP is simply pointing out that yes, supporting gay rights is a good thing, but the person overall is still a piece of shit for all the atrocities they implicitly support. The gay rights stance, even if genuine, simply can't balance that out.
Yes, of course it is possible to advocate for gay rights and yet also do bad things. Perhaps that was the OP's point, but it seems too obvious to be worth mentioning.
You may view the tweet as 'posturing', but we have seen no evidence that it is not the expression of a sincerely held belief.
This is the sort of attitude that I was talking about when I said that HN seems to like to spin complex narratives around LGBTQ rights advocacy. Sometimes people speak out for LGBTQ rights because...they support LGBTQ rights. And that's all there is to it.
If you don't like other stuff that Raytheon does, then it makes a lot more sense to criticise them for doing that other stuff than it does to spin speculative narratives around the motivation behind their pro-LGBTQ tweets.
> No evidence has been presented that the tweet is not sincere.
Imagine, in the age of chivalry, a lord who arrives at every battle with his forces - but who delays his arrival until the battle is already won, and always joins the winning side.
You might well say arriving late is better than not arriving at all. Perhaps there are some last pockets of resistance, you wouldn't turn down his help sweeping those up.
Alternately, you might say they are cowardly, insincere opportunists. They ended up on on the right side, but the timing calls their sincerity into doubt.
To some people, all LGBTQ 'activism' by Fortune 500 companies looks like this. Especially if their 'activism' doesn't extend to their middle east or russian divisions.
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 opportunist if they weren't speaking out in favor of gay rights then? What if they were an adult in the 1960s and didn't support the Stonewall riots?
As a gay person, it means something to me that a company is willing to speak out publicly in support of its LGBTQ employees. No-one is perfect and no-one is free from hypocrisy. All of us have probably blown with the wind on certain social issues where we could have spoken up earlier if we'd had more courage and moral clarity.
This holier-than-thou cynicism about corporate LGBTQ activism is extremely destructive, in my opinion. In the final analysis it only gives succour to those who are opposed to LGBTQ rights. For actual gay people, the massive shift in corporate attitudes to LGBTQ employees is a huge deal, and has real practical benefits in our lives.
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 would argue this kind of public stances further divide citizens who may other wise team up to take everything immoral/illegal those companies do one by one and compel them to stop it.
My workplace talks about inclusion all day long, pronouns started to show up left and right, yet LGBT workers are still under represented, and non existent in leadership roles. Tensions haven't gone down, they were inexistent and have been on the rise for years as the word inclusion has started to resonate.
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.
You understood my point, you seem to disagree and that's fine.
I do agree that people back then appear to care less about arm dealings. I beleive they care more today then back then. And that people also care about a lot of other unethical practices certain large corporations get involve with. I think people always cared, but information didn't flow as fast, broadly, and independently as today, and even that is being fought against (again by large corporations).
If you don't think diversion coupled with virtue signaling is a thing and that it is elaborated precisely for their desired effect, fine. I shared my perspective and the one many people beleive is undoubtful at this point.
Weapon dealing / wars are beside the point perhaps but directly relate to the whole thread: Hollywood propaganda.
I think it's kind of an compromise between the artistic community in Hollywood who usually want to be progressive and capital, which dont want to do anything risky or threatening to powerful/rich people/advertisers.
Gay rights and a few other issues satisfy both groups.
Whenever I see someone use “woke” as an insult… it’s been an inconsistent mishmash that matches what was called “political correctness gone mad” when I was a kid — stuff the user doesn’t like but knows better than to say plainly that they don’t like.
Of course, I know plenty of people who have used the word “woke” positively, in the same way I know people who respond to “X is PC gone mad” with “X & PC is just being polite to people”.
Hard to tell what the common current use is though, given the lack of social connection during the pandemic and living in a non-English speaking country. Online polls have a self-selection bias, but I wouldn’t know in which direction that bias alters results.
It's a word whose meaning is gradually being deradicalized by mass media.
Once it stops being about fighting back against the black community being murdered in broad daylight by police or striking for $15/hour and starts being about "unthreatening-to-state-and-capital" topics like pronoun choice and diversity quotas in the C suite it starts to look a bit ridiculous.
And thats the point where a lot people start to hear about it and reject what they see.
For all the feigning of ignorance, 'woke' is well entrenched in in mainstream language now. It would definitely have made it to one of those "word of the year" things within the past few years if it wasn't for wokeism.
Pretending to be bravely battling fascism and tyranny on behalf of the oppressed while censoring for theocratic and communist dictatorships is Hollywood's bread and butter. Not just Hollywood for that matter, a lot of multinational corporations in other industries too.
I asked because whenever I hear about someone complaining of “wokeism” they’re complaining about things that I think are good.
Giving black actors roles in areas normally dominated by white actors? That’s awesome! But whenever this happens loads of people online will claim that is “wokeism”.
Representation for gay, lesbian, queer, and trans people in media? Wow that’s great! Many complain this is “wokeism”.
Recognizing that trans women are women and trans men are men? 100% that’s the bare minimum and I am happy to see it. “Wokeism”
The real reason I asked was to get people on here to reveal what kind of progress they are against.
Of course there is sometimes an element of hypocrisy suggested in the “wokeism” complaint. But there’s always hypocrites. Sometimes accusations of hypocrisy are used as a smoke screen to simply complain about there being gay people on the television.
> I asked because whenever I hear about someone complaining of “wokeism”
Forgive me if you were being genuine, but frequently when I see the word used on the internet, I see replies from people who seem utterly bewildered and claim that they really want to know what the word means. But it's trivial to find out what this or any other word or slang word means with a simple internet search, so it doesn't really seem like they care to learn what it means but rather they are trying to make a statement or trying to use cheap rhetoric to cast aspersion on the post being replied to without actually addressing it in any coherent way. Then when definitions are proffered, they are often not met with gratitude and understanding but with argumentation -- suddenly they do know what it means.
EDIT: Ah I misread your post you indeed were not asking sincerely, you were actually feigning ignorance as I thought. Worse, you're misrepresenting what the word means and baselessly attacking the parent poster as a bigot, and you have refused to walk that back or provide any evidence for these insults. This is a good example of behavior that is described as wokeism.
> they’re complaining about things that I think are good.
That's not what woke means though, it's clearly about hypocrisy and insincerity and performative pointless acts or gestures. Did you not read the definition I gave you, or were you being insincere when you asked about the meaning of the word in the first place? Also, the parent poster did not seem to be complaining about any of the things you are talking about here, if you are making that claim that they are bigoted it's very serious I hope you have some good reason to do so. I would go so far as to say it's totally against the site rules so you need to clarify.
I did read the web link you sent but I am genuinely unsure how often people mean “any minor progressive thing is wokeism” or they mean “token gestures that are ultimately meaningless” is wokeism. And what is meaningless to one person could be very meaningful to another.
I mentioned the bigotry because honest to god that’s the times where I hear people use it - complaining about the most basic progressive representation. It really seems (to me) like people who use it tend to be straight white men who don’t like that some spaces are making room for people who aren’t like them. But the term isn’t used in my circles, so I really don’t know what the “common” use is.
Hollywood is not some united single entity. I’ve seen some powerful anti gun movies, and movies that treat them like a fetish. At the end of the day it’s a business and it’s more profitable to make movies people want to see. Be that Saw - for some people or Barney's Great Adventure for a different audience.
Fortunately my question is not predicated on Hollywood being some united single entity so the question is trivial to answer in good faith if you want to.
> I'll try an easier and more concrete one to help you out. Do you think Hollywood is at all hypocritical or insincere about their collective rhetoric about gun violence while also producing movies that glorify guns and people solving their problems with violence?
The OP's argument was that modern movies are political propaganda supporting "wokeism", so a concrete example where Hollywood movies are often - intentionally or otherwise - effective propaganda for America's gun glorification and violent self defence lobby despite actors involved in such projects insisting they are personally against gun violence seems to be the direct opposite.
On the other hand, many people [not involved in this thread] have cited the example of a black, female 007 as 'wokeism'. This does not appear to be an example of Hollywood filmmakers being insincere in their belief that black females should be cast in roles traditionally not occupied by black female actors, and it's rather more evident some objectors for whatever reason simply don't want them cast in that role.
Hollywood films allegedly being "woke propaganda", which was the claim which started this "what do you mean by woke?" subthread. Films which glorify guns are categorically not examples of Hollywood anti-gun propaganda; if they are any sort of propaganda at all, as opposed to just stuff that sells, they are clearly very non-'woke' pro-gun propaganda.
> I don't think it's necessarily an example of that although for some people perhaps it is. But the fact that Hollywood has excluded such people from such roles and then they take a specific role that was developed by a white man and put a black woman into it "because it's time", and make a big noise about how wonderful they are for doing such a thing is near the epitome of insincerity and hypocrisy in my opinion. I don't have a problem with them deviating from a checklist of skin color, genitalia, and sexual preferences for traditional roles like this (are all the previous 007s the same height, same hair color, same eye color?), I have a problem with them endlessly going on about how wonderful they are, how all those other people are racist and sexist, for us only to find out that hey it's not the redneck from West Virginia who has been writing and producing and acting in these exclusionary Bond movies all these years. Turns out it was Hollywood all along. And the "fix" they congratulate themselves for is not to actually put effort into develop characters and roles and stories that different people have the opportunity to make their own and different audiences can build a following with. They just do the cheap "this character is now a black woman" thing. I realize not everybody sees it that way, but that's my opinion and I don't see how it's invalid or based on bigotry
Do I think Hollywood not casting certain people was a Hollywood decision? Yes. Do I think they deserve massive congratulations for casting Lashana Lynch? No. And if you want to argue the black 007 character wasn't actually that great or big a deal, fine. I'd largely agree with you on both points.
But for many years prior to Lashana Lynch being cast, there were people insisting that the idea of a black 007 was "woke propaganda or "political correctness gone mad" that should be opposed. I think it's something of a heroic stretch to suggest that their real objection of the anti-'woke' crowd to the casting of a black 007 was that Hollywood ought to have done it much earlier.
I'm not sure there's much overlap between the objectors to Othello being replaced by a white woman and objectors to a 'new' agent 007 being cast alongside established Bond stereotype Daniel Craig.
Which is a moot point really, since my original point was that the objection was for whatever reason to the scripting and casting decision itself, not to the possibility that the filmmaker might be insincere in supporting black characters (there are people who rail against Hollywood for that, but they tend to be dismissed as obsessively 'woke' themselves)
Well the established book character was not recast, he's just working alongside a black female secret agent, so it definitely seems like anyone opposed to the most recent Bond film based on her presence is simply opposed to black female secret agents in general.
"White woman doing Othello" has been attempted fairly regularly in recent years, and people do indeed object to it - for two reasons.
One is that it's allegedly racist in itself ("It's a black role for a black actor") and the other that it's superficial tokenist wokeism and against the natural order of things. ("It's a black role for a black actor.")
In related news There was controversy in the UK this week about a famous Jewish actor complaining that former Israeli premier Golda Meir might be played in a new movie by a non-Jewish woman.
I find this all quite strange. The whole point of art is imagination. Expecting actors who are playing to a stereotype to actually be that stereotype makes as much as demanding that only real retired spies can play James Bond, and only real time travellers can play Doctor Who.
But perhaps that's not a popular view. These roles are tribal totems and morality markers, and casting against that reveals how they operate.
The real problem is the nature of status and hierarchy. Conservatives get very uncomfortable when status and hierarchy are challenged, and many liberals assume they're challenging status and hierarchy when really they're just challenging a certain ordering, and not the abstract principle.
Personally I find too much US media output has a lot in common with plain old everyone-is-a-warrior fascism. I'm really bored by big dumb movies and TV shows which are all about spurting blood and super-athletic ultra-violence in the pursuit of some dystopian Randian mix of self-defence and self-interest.
I don't care if the actors are male, female, white, non-white, gay, trans, or cyborgs. I do care about what they're doing, and most of it isn't that interesting.
They aren't feigning ignorance. The poster is saying people use the word in different ways from the "standard" definition, and therefore it has become unclear what any particular person means when they use the word. This is not feigning ignorance. It's just like how some individuals now call everything Democrats do in the US socialist, progressive, or leftist even though most Democrats aren't any of those things.
> That's not what woke means though, it's clearly about hypocrisy and insincerity and performative pointless acts or gestures. Did you not read the definition I gave you, or were you being insincere when you asked about the meaning of the word in the first place?
You seem to be the one asserting that the word has only one true meaning. That is absolutely false. The word originated with one meaning and has been co-opted by other groups including onew that have used word in ironic or sarcastic ways that have twisted that meaning.
It is thus perfectly legitimate to ask people, especially those who you think are using the ironic meaning, what they mean when they use the word
I don't understand the dichotomy between rational conversations and moral arguments. "Oh no, morality!" is such a ridiculous-but-common escape-hatch whenever you're having a debate about something that is even a tiny bit difficult.
Nothing is 100% objective-truth. Recognize this, and get over it.
In the 70s/80s already we had a lot of great black actors roles: Apollo Creed, Winston Zeddemore, George Martin, "B.A.", all of Eddie Murphy films and Danny Glover...
> When the space adventure story includes a massive subplot about a non-white characters search for identity in an unjust world that oppressed them, you suddenly wonder if the bought the wrong ticket.
Why is that verboten? Why is it different than any other subplot of a personal challenge? It's a common part of real life.
The vast majority of representation on my "kind" is the same shit, over and over again.
No, I do not sympathise with the Latino nor Brazilian stereotype and it is grating seeing it played straight so often. It feels like they are trying to pander to me.
That is annoying and the sort of stuff I'd rather avoid if I am consuming fiction.
It is a part of real life, but in some of these movies it’s so transparent that the plot was forced into an original “space adventure” movie.
It almost becomes a distraction to the overall plot, versus something like Starwars where the good versus evil is non-specific enough it has universal appeal.
> In the 1990s there were loads of superstar Black actors.
I think if you look at overall black representation among actors, you will see it was very low. If you look for some in your memory, you will find them of course.
Even now, almost everything is led by a white person. Even in animation, almost everyone is white. Or look at sci-fi movies, where there are often as many or more alien species as non-white humans.
> The woke with their CRT and racial segregation policies (telling children that race really matters a lot) have ruined everything.
What is being told the children by whom? What does CRT say? If you dispute that race has a large (though certainly undesireable) impact on life, you are living in a sci-fi fantasy.
> ruined everything
I think it has, or threatens to, burst many bubbles, which 'ruins' many fantasies. Just talk to people with actual experience of it, such as black people, and you will find out just how isolated we have been from reality. Most white people don't do that because they don't have many black people in their personal network, which should be a signal.
I don't know much about CRT but when I google high ranking results[1], the very first tenet is literally the opposite of your claim: Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant.
>Even now, almost everything is led by a white person. Even in animation, almost everyone is white. Or look at sci-fi movies, where there are often as many or more alien species as non-white humans.
If not "almost everything [was] led by a white person" it would be an under or over representation of multiple races, at least if it is supposed to be a "representation" of the western world*. You can google "us race demographics" and it will conveniently bring up a table showing 76.3% white and 13.4% black. I think some people forget that a motely crew of exactly one of every race is someone's utopian ideal with no basis in reality. And it's not hard to extend that idea to any arbitrary subset of humans in almost any context.
There are over 19,730 Actors currently employed in the United States. 32.1% of all Actors are women, while 63.9% are men. The average age of an employed Actor is 37 years old. The most common ethnicity of Actors is White (59.5%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (15.6%) and Black or African American (13.9%).
If someone's personal experience with actor demographics doesn't reflect that, its most likely because what they typically watch doesn't reflect it and not because of a systemic imbalance.
Calling someone a "whiny bitch" is a personal attack that's completely unrelated to the discission. If you have to do that, can you do it in a different forum please?
> blatant discrimination against men and white people in hiring and admissions
If you look at who is hired and admitted, that discrimination isn't accomplishing much!
Also, discrimination is about power; in its significant meaning, it requires power. If the owner of a tiny restuarant discriminates against you because you are a white male person, it is obnoxious but that is all the damage; you are safe, just go someplace else. If the government or the powerful majority discriminates against you, brutalizing you, arresting you, denying you work, etc. then it is very serious and damages your life and safety.
What changes - occasionally, in some places - is that white people and males no longer benefit from an affirmative action program that favors them - a ridiculous situation for the most powerful group in society. Look at sports as a simple example: Until the late 1940s, Major League Baseball only employed white players - it was a massive affirmative action program for white guys, who would not otherwise get the jobs. There was a great uproar, including among players, when they lost just a little of the privilege (the first year, in all of baseball, there were 1-2 non-white players. It took decades before the white guy affirmative action program disappeared.)
I am looking at who is hired and admitted. Whites are underrepresented at these institutions, like Harvard and Google.
Being discriminated against in hiring by the government and most major academic and media organizations is being discriminated against by power. We're not talking about mom and pop shops, obviously.
For me the biggest red flags are when people start talking about wokeism, is when you ask them about it they then continue to elaborate that they mean "communism", "lgbt-agendas" etc.
99% of people who complain about that kind of wokeism sound like alt-righters to me, or at least like people who parrot what the alt-right says without being aware of it.
That's not what woke means though. You don't let trolls dictate what you understand of any other words, do you? Woke in this context means insincere and/or hypocritical support of liberal causes, as wikipedia and urban dictionary clearly list as definitions.
Both UD and Wikipedia also list other meanings of the word.
I mean, sure, for all I know the common use where you are really is exactly what you’re saying, but one thing I’ve never noticed (caveat: easy to miss when it’s text and no faces) is a member of a minority saying “stop being woke, you don’t get us at all” (everything after the coma, yes, but never calling that “woke”). Given how big the anglosphere is (and the fluid nature of language), I don’t don’t that this use has happened at least once by someone in a position to actually use it appropriately, but I mainly see one majority person saying something and another majority person saying the first guy is woke without any apparent involvement from whichever minority is the topic. Or, indeed, the “that’s just woke” accuser insisting that the token minority person who agrees with the first person that $thing is bad is wrong and needs to shut up.
Of course, I also accept that what I see on news shows is basically entertainment these days, so I don’t trust even that experience much either.
> You don't let trolls dictate what you understand of any other words, do you?
Well, the derogatory use appears to have been created by those I would call trolls, but as for other words? Heathen, do-gooder, bleeding heart, papist, yokel, redneck, fag, nerd, socialist… trolls have [re]defined words as insults throughout history.
> as wikipedia and urban dictionary clearly list as definitions.
Wikipedia absolutely does not list it as a hypocritical or insincere thing. Wikipedia defines it as "alert to perceived racial prejudice and discrimination"
The Wikipedia definition you quote funnily enough is the one I described, "Opponents of progressive social movements often use the term mockingly or sarcastically, implying that 'wokeness' is an insincere form of performative activism."
So you're confusing me quite a bit, first you tell me I shouldn't let trolls dictate what words mean, only for then doing exactly that yourself, citing the definition trolls and opponents use.
And another thing - Urban Dictionary can certainly be used to get to know what online slang, memes mean. Using it as an official definition for a word is a bit wrong though, seeing as how UD is more about tongue-in-cheek joke definitions.
So in the end, I frankly don't really know what you want to tell me, not meaning this in a rude way.
> Wikipedia absolutely does not list it as a hypocritical or insincere thing. Wikipedia defines it as "alert to perceived racial prejudice and discrimination"
Wikipedia absolutely does.
"using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies perceived as over-zealous, performative, or insincere."
Which is basically what the top urban dictionary results say. I use that because it reacts a bit faster to contemporary usage. And it's obvious that is the definition was being used here.
> And another thing - Urban Dictionary can certainly be used to get to know what online slang, memes mean. Using it as an official definition for a word is a bit wrong though, seeing as how UD is more about tongue-in-cheek joke definitions.
That's not how English works, there is no "official" definition except how people use words. Dictionaries, whether Urban or Oxford, record their observations about the language, they do not define it. Woke is widely used exactly as urbandictionary and the quoted part of the wikipedia page say.
Don't take this in a rude way, but I'm frankly flabbergasted that people have such a difficult time comprehending this usage of the word. I suspect a lot of it is insincere, and all of it stems from not liking the definition or the people or comments that tend to use the word.
Well, yes, I wrote myself that Wikipedia quotes it as a negative thing, but in the chapter where they list examples of people using it wrongly. The official definition they write in the beginning of the article is not negative. The section we're both quoting from is literally called "Woke as a pejorative term".
> I'm frankly flabbergasted that people have such a difficult time comprehending this usage of the word
I know how people (mis)use the word. There's the original and official meanings,
- "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues" - Merriam Webster
- "alert to perceived racial prejudice and discrimination" - Wikipedia
Then there's people who use woke as an insult and changing the meaning of the word completely, the definitions we now both talked about and can be found on UD and on Wikipedia, and I'm repeating myself here, but in the section where they list the pejorative(!) usages.
One other funny detail of using UD as official definition is that it has 60 pages filled with different interpretations.
Even funnier to me is that the 6th most upvoted definition is a quote by Paul Joseph Watson, a far-right conspiracy theorist.
I still don't understand why you pretend like I don't know the different meanings of woke. I was complaining about people using the word woke to just complain about anything left from them they don't like, which is as embarrassing and childish as people on the left labeling everyone they don't like as a fascist and thus also completely misusing a pretty well-defined word.
But it seems to me that this is exactly the strategy of someone like Paul Joseph Watson. Taking a word which is used positively by people he doesn't like, start to use it negatively while hoping that this trend catches on until the word has the opposite meaning of what it once meant, while at the same time discrediting people who used it in a positive way.
The net of it is "woke" has a definition that is basically insincerity and/or hypocrisy about support for liberal causes, that definition is explained very plainly in both wikipedia and urban dictionary if people actually care to find out, and it was clearly the one that was used by the original poster who used the word.
And probably everybody in this thread knew all that full well from the start.
I am not saying that these definitions don't exist, I am confused why that relates at all to what I said in my original comment.
All I said was that it's a red flag for me when people use the word woke to slander anything politically left they don't like. When they once used "marxist", "communist", "liberal" and other words to just quickly dismiss things they simply don't like (without these things relating at all to the word they're using), now it seems to be "woke".
Basically, woke started out as a way to say that someone is aware of social issues. You seem to like to talk about what Wikipedia has to say about this word, so let me summarize,
In the 1930, woke was first being used as "referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans". In 2014 the meaning slightly transformed to "raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans" and in 2017 it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary where they (still) define it as "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice".
Only then, in 2020, did it change. "parts of the political center and right wing in several Western countries were using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies"
People certainly used woke negatively before 2020, but pretending like this is 100% the meaning of it is just a lie. Is it negative in the context of this comment chain here? Yes, of course, but your statements about "'woke' has a definition that is basically insincerity and/or hypocrisy" are not true. It's one of the definitions some people use, but it is not "the" definition of the word.
Yes, today this word has a pretty negative meaning, but that's because right-wing reactionary trolls started to purposefully misuse it to put this word in a bad light. It was used in a positive way for almost 90 years apparently, and I first heard it being used in a positive way on TikTok and other social media platforms.
I don't even know why I am writing so much about this freaking word, and I still don't know how any of this relates to my original comment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You did say that the definitions did not exist (e.g., above when you denied wikipedia had such a definition). But in any case I don't know what your initial post had to do with what was being discussed. I don't jump into any thread to post about how one or other extremist group uses some word. If you are going to accuse the original poster as being a racist or extremist or something then just come out with it. And if not, then you didn't add anything. Extremists misuse words, more news at 11.
You are misquoting me really heavily by saying that I said this definition doesn't exist.
That's what you can read in my comment: "The Wikipedia definition you quote funnily enough is the one I described, "Opponents of progressive social movements often use the term MOCKINGLY or SARCASTICALLY, implying that 'wokeness' is an insincere form of performative activism."" and then I mentioned that this is the definition for PEJORATIVE uses.
At this point I can only assume that you act in bad faith or have severe struggles with reading, seeing how you ignore most of what I say and misenterpret the cherry-picked rest.
> Recognizing that trans women are women and trans men are men? 100% that’s the bare minimum and I am happy to see it.
If women are a group historically discriminated against by virtue of their sex (female, different physicality, different reproductive role) rather than by their gender (feminine, caring, pretty, submissive, domestic, …) then is the fusing of sex and gender truly progressive? Is it medically, scientifically or philosophically true to assert TWAW, or is it a well-intentioned social fiction?
Like you, I believe there’s much to be commended in “woke” (including the full acceptance of people who wish to live as if they were the other sex, or of no sex) but I think the mechanism (identity politics, intersectionality) and the philosophy (postmodernist) are unhelpful and irrational.
> If women are a group historically discriminated against by virtue of their sex (female, different physicality, different reproductive role) rather than by their gender (feminine, caring, pretty, submissive, domestic, …)
Are they? And is that the definition of gender? submissive?! It's hard to think of someone I know now, who identifies as female, who fits your definition.
And if true, what does some historical discrimination have to do with someone's personal belief of themselves? If I think I'm non-binary, does the historical reason for discrimination against women change me somehow?
And who are you or I to tell someone else what their identity is? That just seems bizarre to me.
> postmodernist
Ironically, most people criticizing post-moderinism are using it as the mechanism of their critique - which is especially post-modernist!
I've been thinking about this and it happens I do have an answer.
Wokeism is in part an ideology and a set of political goals, but it is also a means of competition. It is the foundation for a system of verbal duelling that determines who gets the limited number of spots at the top of our hierarchy. Like the Edwardian's preoccupation with gossip and scandal or the Aztec's ritual sacrifice of losing ullamaliztli players, it's a means for an overproduced elite to thin its ranks. An excellent example of Wokeness-as-duelling is the story of Annamie Paul, a Canadian politician. Annamie Paul was a woman and lawyer from a dark-skinned Jewish family - this will become important later - who won leadership of the Canadian Green Party. From a Woke standpoint that was the desired outcome, a black woman can become leader of a political party, aren't we wonderful. But winning a position of power and wielding it well are two different things, and Annamie Paul faced a leadership challenge over her position on Israel-Palestine. It was quite mainstream for a western country, but not for Canadian Green party voters. As the back-and-forth turned acrimonious, she alleged her critics were motivated by racism. Public support for the Green party, which had been making slow advances over the preceding years, collapsed spectacularly in the next election.
It's not hard to see, with the benefit of standing outside the fray, what Annamie Paul's mistake was. A Jewish woman, asked about the situation of the Palestinian people, can only acknowledge her privilege, and if she wishes to make no concessions she must pay the political price of not using her privilege to benefit the less fortunate. She could not, in that context, allege racism because in the context of that particular debate, she was of the privileged race - technically religion, but in that context the distinction wasn't important. The rules of Woke competition are by design self-contradictory, but they are still taken seriously, and everyone could see that she had violated them. So she lost the position she had attained, and given the hit to her reputation will need more effort and luck than she spent to get it if she is to attain another as lofty.
Now, what is wrong with any of that? In my opinion, nothing. For Annamie Paul I can only say 'live by the sword, die by the sword', if she'd been able to demonstrate genuine compassion for Palestine she could have walked out of that trap as easily as she walked in. As for the broader effect on society, Woke competition actually selects for the qualities I'd want in my elite. Verbal intelligence, compassion, and tolerating paradox are all good qualities for an elite class to possess. Further, while it's easy for a hypocrite to use it to attain higher rank, it's very hard to retain said rank unless one genuinely displays the virtues Wokeness demands. But, and of course there's a but, it is a system that produces winners and losers, and the losers get to have a say. In particular, straight white men are shut out of a lot of targeted benefits and mutual aide societies others have access to, while being discouraged from forming our own. It takes the arrogance of a rich white man to look at a system like Woke competition and say, "I can win that". So of course, poor white men don't think it's a game worth playing, and when they denounce the structure of the game, any rich white man - or rich white woman for that matter - who tries to argue against them finds themselves in the same position as Annamie Paul, punching down in public. That, of course, makes it worthwhile for people winning the game to use said PWM as a vector to demonstrate their own compassion and attack their competition.
This only changes when the rules of the game adjust to be more reflective of the actual difference between rich and poor. Woke competition does allow for a change of the rules, but it's currently not clear whether such an adjustment would require an overhaul o...
I think this is a fascinating take. It certainly explains the predominance of woke dialogue especially on the left, which in the Anglo Saxon sphere probably suffers with a greater oversupply of elites.
However, that would be sufficient if it was just talk but there seems to be plenty of walk there as well.
Why thank you! By 'walk' I assume you mean there seems to be a genuine desire to upend the existing institutions? It certainly seems that way, and I would guess that's more of a feature than a bug. Getting ahead of revolutionary sentiment and co opting the parts it finds acceptable is after all something any successful ruling class needs to be good at.
This is pretty interesting but I don't think the evidence is very strong. Being the leader of the Canadian Green Party is not "elite". Green parties around the world are going through these upheavals only because they allowed and encouraged this wokeism, that's what they want and that's what they get.
Whereas look at the actual positions of political power. Biden/Harris -- they're both horrific in many wokeness metrics. Rich old privileged straight white, war monger, sexual assault allegations, top cop whose record on imprisoning black people is problematic, descendant of slave owner, and of course staunch supporters of Israel just to name a few (I'm not saying these are fair or valid criticisms but it's all prime woke ammunition).
Yet somehow it doesn't affect them. For all the dueling and competition among the elites (or at least their political representatives) you're imagining, very little wokeism was used against them as far as I could see. They also required very little verbal intelligence, compassion, or tolerance.
What they had is an elite and their corporations who consolidated around them and protect them, don't ask the wrong questions and don't bring out the woke attack dogs. The opposite of dueling and infighting.
And in your last paragraph you're acting like the systems are set up by (or at least is able to be changed by) and for the benefit of people who are not the rich elites. The evidence points to the opposite. It is clearly a tool to divide the underclass and insulate the ruling class.
I think the disagreement here is mostly about the meaning of the word 'Elite'. The way I use it I'm thinking more of the most influential 10% than 1%. People who have it better than most citizens, but their position is precarious. So more the democratic party insiders Biden/Harris bullied into tilting the odds against Sanders/Yang/Gabbard than just Biden/Harris themselves. Of course, my theory does require that Biden/Harris spent a long time in the trenches honing their skills in this kind of dominance struggle. If you don't think they thrived in that environment for so long through being better at earlier versions of woke competition I'd be curious what you think the selection mechanism was. Another thing you might not have noticed about Woke Competition is that it's not about being a perfect person or having no skeletons in your closet. One of the presuppositions is that we all have something undeserving about us and need to keep that fact constantly in mind.
I disagree with the idea that even the kind of elites you mean aren't affected though, and I'd point to the example of Andrew Cuomo for evidence. It's very plausible that Andrew Cuomo's calls in the early days of covid cost a number of people their lives, that's all the reason any party would need to remove a prominent member. But when he was removed it was through a set of sexual assault allegations that someone had clearly been sitting on for some time. When infighting did erupt, woke competition was the weapon of choice.
As for my last paragraph, that was in small part assertive optimism, in large part a rhetorical device, and just a touch of sarcasm. People like you after all don't need convincing there's a problem with woke competition, it was addressed to people who buy into it. That woke competition is only intended to divide the underclasses can be easily dismissed as the author hiding from his racial privilege, that it has that effect unintentionally because of unconscious privilege by the rich... the rules of the game practically require believing that.
> I think the disagreement here is mostly about the meaning of the word 'Elite'.
We are. I have no doubt that "woke" is used by lots of people to attack one another. It's a great tool that divides people against one another and insulates the ruling class.
>The way I use it I'm thinking more of the most influential 10% than 1%. People who have it better than most citizens, but their position is precarious. So more the democratic party insiders Biden/Harris bullied into tilting the odds against Sanders/Yang/Gabbard than just Biden/Harris themselves. Of course, my theory does require that Biden/Harris spent a long time in the trenches honing their skills in this kind of dominance struggle. If you don't think they thrived in that environment for so long through being better at earlier versions of woke competition I'd be curious what you think the selection mechanism was. Another thing you might not have noticed about Woke Competition is that it's not about being a perfect person or having no skeletons in your closet. One of the presuppositions is that we all have something undeserving about us and need to keep that fact constantly in mind.
I'm not sure what you mean. Biden and Harris simply weren't attacked with any of the woke stuff which they both have ample material including support for Israel! It's not that other people didn't want to be president or other big donors did not want others to be president.
> I disagree with the idea that even the kind of elites you mean aren't affected though, and I'd point to the example of Andrew Cuomo for evidence. It's very plausible that Andrew Cuomo's calls in the early days of covid cost a number of people their lives, that's all the reason any party would need to remove a prominent member. But when he was removed it was through a set of sexual assault allegations that someone had clearly been sitting on for some time. When infighting did erupt, woke competition was the weapon of choice.
Well firing someone for sexual assault is not woke. Covering up the sexual crimes so it can be used as leverage and/or blackmail while at the same time contgratulating yourselves about how you're the hero of women and denouncing others is woke, but it's that hypocrisy. Using blackmail and little black books to sink politicians who outlive their usefulness is just standard operating procedure in politics and predates woke by centuries.
> As for my last paragraph, that was in small part assertive optimism, in large part a rhetorical device, and just a touch of sarcasm. People like you after all don't need convincing there's a problem with woke competition, it was addressed to people who buy into it. That woke competition is only intended to divide the underclasses can be easily dismissed as the author hiding from his racial privilege, that it has that effect unintentionally because of unconscious privilege by the rich... the rules of the game practically require believing that.
I didn't get that. It sounded like you thought woke was good (selects for qualities you want in your elites, only needs small tweak to improve), and that you thought your elites are interested in your interests ('which they will remedy with all haste once it is brought to their attention').
As a non-native English speaker not living in the US, I've heard the word (or rather, read) multiple times but I honestly have never bothered to research what it actually means but I think I've kinda gotten the context around it(?)
I've seen it being tossed around on Reddit when there's post about US politics/US social issues and it always looked to me like a generic insult thrown at somebody who doesn't like the more conservative "side" of the US political spectrum. I basically got the impression that it's a shorthand for "You think your opinion and views are modern and hip but I don't share the same view on the world and you are stupid due to that". Reading now Urban dictionary, I see that I was.. kinda on the right track?
I don't see what urban dictionary entries lead you to believe you are on the right track, but the top voted 2-3 do not. Those are what it means: hypocrisy and insincerity about progressive causes.
Might be a language thing then. I'm reading through Urban Dictionary and most of them read to me like "I think I know the other person is dishonest or stupid".
Let's take the most popular definition there:
Woke - The act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue
Again, as a non-native English speaker I have to click through "pretentious". The most popular definition:
Behaving in an attention-seeking manner via presenting oneself on the surface as being intelligent, provocative, important, avant-garde, humorous or significant, yet harboring ulterior motives, typically involving some form of personal gratification or material gain (e.g. advancement in social status, career, wealth, etc.).
Note that using this word is often conflated to be a pretentious act in and of itself, as this word is frequently used as a way to easily discredit people, works of art, ideas or statements while simultaneously boosting one's own status.
(btw, as far as I can tell, there's no word or phrase for the same thing in my native language. Which might already start to explain why the whole concept is hard to really understand for me)
So somebody who calls someone else "woke" looks to be, often, trying to discredit the other person, while simultaneously boosting their own status by making the statement that the other person has ulterior motives and does not actually hold the beliefs that they are saying that they hold.
Idk.. it looks like I'm too far from the US culture to really understand this.
When somebody says that they think that gay people should not have equal rights to non-gay people, then I see no reason to assume that they don't actually hold that belief and that they would be pretentious.
When somebody says the opposite - that gay people should have the same rights than non-gay people then again, I see no reason to assume that they don't actually hold that belief and are pretentious.
Nothing about this looks to have anything to do with progressiveness or hypocrisy or insincerity as far as I can tell but for some reason there's a made-up word to tell the other "side" that "I know you are full of shit and you don't actually believe in what you say".
Be careful about trusting Urban Dictionary too much. It can serve has a useful hint about what some slang means, but is often heavily biased towards the slang used by certain demographics and subcultures (and is vulnerable to brigading). It certainly is not a source of the "one true meaning" of a word.
I am sure your language does have a word that is pretty similar to "pretentious" though it may not have all of the conotations. I recommend a real dictionary that has multiple good definitions or a good cross-language dictionary that can give you several alternate words in your language that map to the various uses of "pretentious".
"Woke" is even more complicated. It is a word that originated over half a century ago in African American culture as part of the civil rights movement. It meant being aware of and working to fight racial injustice. It was then coopted a decade ago by progressive people working on a broader range of social justice issues to describe awareness of those issues. It was then further co-opted by conservative people to mock progressive people as pretentious.
The poster is trying to pretend that only this last meaning is real and valid. They are either ignorant or a racist troll working to further the co-opting of the term.
I used Urban Dictionary for "pretentious" due to the OP explicitly referring to it to understand the meaning of woke.
But this got me intrigued now :) I still can't think of a phrase or word in Estonian that would convey the same (or even similar) meaning. I searched through a couple of dictionaries now and the translations provided there are really not useful. They mean either "complains a lot" or alternatively "has unreasonably high standards / is high maintenance", "braggy" and "pedantic". And these doesn't sound even remotely close to the English explanation of the word.. at all.
Any fellow Estonians wanna help me out here - is there a phrase or word that would capture the essence of "pretentious" in Estonian? :)
"Braggy" and "pedantic" do share some meaning/conotation overlap with "pretentious" but I don't think "complains a lot" or "has unreasonably high standards" really overlap (though terms for those may in Estonianl.
Another English word that is very similar in meaning is "ostentatious".
If I had to write out my own definition of "pretentious" it would be: Pretending to be higher class, more refined, more educated or more moral than you actually are and implying that makes you superior to other people.
Some further insight if I may. The urban dictionary definitions provide some of the current interpretation. And one interpretation is that the woke movement is pretentious.
You could argue that accusing a target of being pretentious is being pretentious, except that it may be a fact. So we have to keep digging, a quest for the truth rather than just adopting one of the existing interpretations.
Also to note, being pretentious doesn't imply conscious act. Like arrogance, the subject isn't necessarily aware, although it may be.
Are woke supporters pretentious? Either way, let's accept some may well be, and if so, it wouldn't be reasonable to dismiss anyone calling that out as pretentious. Not dismissing the fact some of the wokes opponents may well be the ones being pretentious, or as pretentious as the woke. In any case it has become a sided political clash, we will only settle to a predominant interpretation on this matter once fight is over.
Urban Dictionary is a wisdom of the crowd. The most upvoted entry is sometimes a troll or funny (if the latter: let's say we disagree on taste of humor). As another poster said, need to be cautious, and read multiple entries. Or simply don't use it unless you don't have another source (this word is in the dictionary [1]).
Calling someone woke is discrediting the other person. Its like a signal to other people (especially the people who also often use this word), 'this person is politically aligned with X, this person cannot be right'. Its an insult, but so is the term 'wappie' (used in The Netherlands for people 'who don't believe in corona'). Faggot (when not in UK referring to gay person), nazi (when the person clearly isn't). These are all examples of insulting terms. They're polarizing. Even calling someone a communist when they clearly aren't is insulting, because communism is historically related to dictatorial regimes as well as purges (Stalinism comes to mind).
If they call themselves a communist (or a liberal, or a conservative, a nazi, woke, or whatever), fair game. But calling someone else that way when they did not identify with such is uncalled for. Because you put them on a political spectrum, with all kind of strings and assumptions attached to it.
Now, interestingly, calling someone a nazi or a faggot gets you downvoted or banned on most forums, but with a term like woke people still get away with. Not sure why.
According to Google Translate, pretentious translates to pretensioonikas in Estonian as the most popular translation, so it seems like it got borrowed from English (not implying it originates from English, I don't know about the etymology).
[1] $ dict pretentious
3 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Pretentious \Pre*ten"tious\, a. [Cf. F. pr['e]tentieux. See
{Pretend}.]
Full of pretension; disposed to lay claim to more than is
one's; presuming; assuming. -- {Pre*ten"tious*ly}, adv. --
{Pre*ten"tious*ness}, n.
[1913 Webster]
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
pretentious
adj 1: making claim to or creating an appearance of (often
undeserved) importance or distinction; "a pretentious
country house"; "a pretentious fraud"; "a pretentious
scholarly edition" [ant: {unpretentious}]
2: intended to attract notice and impress others; "an
ostentatious sable coat" [syn: {ostentatious}, {pretentious}]
[ant: {unostentatious}, {unpretending}, {unpretentious}]
3: (of a display) tawdry or vulgar [syn: {ostentatious},
{pretentious}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thesaurus]:
> Idk.. it looks like I'm too far from the US culture to really understand this.
For what it’s worth, I am a native English speaker from the UK and living in Germany, and I kind of agree with you about how the word “woke” appears to get used in practice. I’ve certainly never witnessed a member of a minority saying “your support for people like me is just insincere woke nonsense, stop it”, despite my ex being a stereotype of Champagne socialism and therefore getting the opportunity to see what happens when she did make mistakes while trying to support minority causes.
If this is a US cultural thing, that might also explain it.
Sure. But I don't run around daily acting like I have a moral high ground and constantly baiting people. I took your bait, and I'm the bad guy? Okay bud. Maybe try not being so angry about stuff that literally doesn't matter. You're constantly enraged on here. I'm not here often and if I can tie your screen name to rage inducing you're doing something horribly wrong with your life.
Why are you calling me these names? Who am I calling up hate or rage against?
I answered a question about the definition of the word as it was being used. Obviously the definition is making you very angry, but I'm just the messenger here I did not make the post that used the word in the first place, and I didn't make up the definition.
You didn't read the thread where they used other names. Thanks that that gives me a good understanding of the usefulness of your opinion, so I don't need to bother asking how you came to it.
"Woke" as a political term was originally used to describe someone with political views focused on what they saw as the historical and modern forms of societal oppression: subjugation of women and sexism, racism and forms of societal bias against minorities, homophobia and anti-LGBT views found in mainstream society. To be "woke" was to be someone who was aware of the ways in which American society was and still is unjust to these various minority groups.
Over time, as some of this progressive-minded population became more extreme/absurd, the term came to represent that absurdity and became more of an epithet. Students protesting because they believed the proprietor of a shop on campus was racist when he physically stopped some students attempting to shoplift, because they were black. A rich black female college student who entered a cafeteria was asked to leave, and became the center of a large movement (with ACLU support) outraged at being targeted for eating while black, resulting in the staff members being fired. Members of the ACLU supporting a campaign to censor a book for trans-related wrongthink. These sorts of excesses began to be associated with the term, so now, while it can be used both ways, is more commonly associated with the loud, militant, and extremist portions of the progressive movement, and is generally used as a derogatory term.
> For all the feigning of ignorance, 'woke' is well entrenched in in mainstream language now.
I can't speak for the other person, but the term is so loaded that it's lost meaning, and it seems important to define your meaning if we are going to talk about it. I agree that it's a bit disingenous to just ask for a definition rather than say, 'that term is so loaded; what do you mean by it?'
It hasn't lost meaning at all, it's just that some people don't like the meaning so they misrepresent it or pretend not to know what it is.
It basically means hypocrisy and/or insincerity toward popular progressive causes. That's the meaning. There's also an older one which has mostly been displaced as far as I'm aware, but if it's still used it also has a pretty well defined meaning. In context, at least in this context, it was not ambiguous which meaning was being used.
You saying you’re completely baffled by this term, or asking for the poster’s particular meaning?
I’d draw a parallel to “White supremacy”. Given the wild range of applications for the term, you need to get a sense of what any one wielder really means.
But it’d be quite obtuse to reply “what’s White supremacy?”
White supremacy is the belief that white people and whiteness should hold power over black and brown people.
No one in my social circles uses “wokeness” at all, certainly never seriously. It always seems like people upset at “wokeness” are actually just upset that people producing popular media support very simple concepts of diversity. Like when black actors get representation in media previously dominated by white people, to me that is just a good thing, but I see reports that many think this is “wokeness”, which they think is bad. This ultimately reveals that they simply do not like it when white people have to share space with people of other skin tones. Their concerns always seem to me to be… misplaced. In other instances the person may be unhappy about female representation, or trans, queer and non-binary representation. Those are all thinks I think are great. I’m non-binary and it’s really meaningful to me. So when someone calls those things “wokeism” I don’t actually see “wokeism” as the problem I see that persons ideas as the problem.
> Like when black actors get representation in media previously dominated by white people, to me that is just a good thing, but I see reports that many think this is “wokeness”, which they think is bad.
In the 90s Will Smith starred in Independence Day, and absolutely no one complained (as far as I know) because Will Smith is awesome and he deserved the role. See also Blade from the same era.
People get upset when it's clear that a person has been chosen for a role/position just because of their skin colour/gender/sexuality rather than their talent. I can't actually think of any movies that have done this, but plenty of TV shows (Star Trek Discovery).
Obviously some roles require the person to be of a certain race for it to appear authentic. Lots of older films used white actors for middle Eastern roles, which is seen as "white washing" and is therefore wrong. The latest Ghost in the Shell race swapped the main character to be American, and was rightly called out for doing so.
Basically we should be allowed to criticize both ways...
In this case, though, the roles are reversed. The supposedly "woke" studio system didn't want to put a black guy in the lead, whereas the public were more open to the idea.
Look I hate Discovery as much as the next guy but are you really saying that some of the women or POC on that show are worse actors than the white men that would have been cast a few decades ago? Is Discovery the only Star Trek show you've seen?
>I can't actually think of any movies that have done this
The Dark Tower was a sore spot for me. The protagonist was a character inspired by Clint Eastwood and was depicted as fair skinned in every piece of cover art and spinoff before Idris Elba was cast in the role. Blackwashing a character fans of the story all imagined as white really underscored how little appreciation the movie makers had for the source material.
It is a headstone marking the semantic battlefield where competing definitions killed the possibility of clear communication, and now it means nothing.
It's the name of a fairly recent kind of cult, more or less related to the left, and trying to influence a lot of the political/corporate/cultural world.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
“ Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.”
I’m wondering what specifically you disagree with and why that is a cult?
Before the mid 2010s, we talked about how the 99% could avoid concentration of power and wealth in the 1%. Now the richest and worst companies in the world paste BLM rainbow flags on their website, and suddenly large swaths of society have decided that, coincidentally, the folks with the big money are the good guys, while random middle and lower class people with slightly outdated beliefs are the actual problem.
There are many long magazine articles discussing whether wokeness is a religion or cult. Either way, it has completely derailed all political discourse for the benefit of the most privileged (as defined by money).
And in the media world, it means that everything is now over-the-top preachy, and that scoring political points has become more important than making good art. Sucks, but at least there are plenty of classic movies to re-watch.
I saw it used a bunch in early 2000s to reference hip hop that strongly focused on class struggles, race issues, etc.
It was also used in stoner / party culture around that time to describe being in on the secret that the government was bad, capitalism was bad, etc.
Maybe directly influenced by the movie “waking life” but not sure on that. I was a stoner party kid and my memories of that time are pretty hazy. The culture was super accepting, early advocates for lgbtq before it was an acronym, etc. I also remember that group being very very accepting of everyone who had good intentions regardless of views. “___ is good people” was what we used to say. Probably why I dislike the modern version of woke so much.
That's not what it means now, or at least it has grown a more popular meaning which is clearly what the original poster was using. The alternate definition is explained in the 3rd paragraph on wiki
"The terms woke capitalism and woke-washing have arisen to describe companies who signal support for progressive causes as a substitute for genuine reform. By 2020, parts of the political center and right wing in several Western countries were using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies perceived as over-zealous, performative, or insincere."
That Wikipedia definition is one part only of what the woke movement is. There are not just "alert". They are actively trying to censor, burn books (Tintin in some Canadian school), remove statues, etc. They invent words, have weird ceremonies, etc... (cf. the university of Evergrande), which are indeed the signs of a cult.
And by the way, any cult of group of thoughts, will define themselves as "we are for the good and against the evil; therefore, what exactly do you disagree with ? are you for the evil ?"
In the case of removing civil war statues most of the ones being removed were erected long after the civil war ended, and were erected in opposition to rising pressure for civil rights for black people. See [1] and [2].
There's an additional very blatant theme I've been seeing of "science and engineers are the coolest!" that cropped up in, e.g. The Tomorrow War and another recent military themed US movie whose name I forget. They made me wonder if the army is fretting about its access to STEM skills.
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.
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 never watched Mr. Roboto, but that sounds like what I heard it was about... I think the issue may be social status, software gurus aren't viewed the way doctors or lawyers are. They're paid well, but they aren't respected the same way for some reason.
It's probably also an issue of writing - walking the line between realism and cool isn't easy, doubly so if the writers aren't themselves technical people. People are still referencing Mcguyver, but nobody's had the hubris to try and reboot that classic.
> People are still referencing Mcguyver, but nobody's had the hubris to try and reboot that classic.
They did. And it probably got the same treatment mentioned in the article. It survived 5 seasons despite receiving abysmal reviews.
"Young Angus "Mac" MacGyver works for a clandestine organization within the U.S. government, relying on his unconventional problem-solving skills to save lives." [0]
Mr. Robot is less House M.D. and more Paper Trail, only with a definite protagonist and a whole lot of mental issues. At least as far as first season (of Mr.Robot) is concerned.
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
Tony Stark is a "next level" rich scientist, engineer/inventor, and ladies man. His IT related sides are incidental at best.
The only recent and decent "IT guy" series was Mr. Robot and the differences from any other field are obvious. The main "IT guy"-character is presented as socially dysfunctional. The supporting IT-people are tiny little gears turning in their cubicles.
Military - always fighting in the harshest condition, against the toughest enemies, saving the world.
Lawyers - good looking people, living a lavish lifestyle in corner offices of New York skyscrapers, having the cool monologues that wow the courtroom.
Doctors - brilliant but otherwise normal people facing very difficult decisions every day, making brilliant decisions to save life after life, and dealing with loss.
Spies - absolutely superhuman skills and knowledge, constantly capable of turning the tide of any way with a single person concentrated effort. (The more you go towards the "military/spy" side of things, the more likely it becomes about superhumans.)
IT focused movies/characters are probably just not attractive to the wider audience. Or at least nobody really proved that they can be. So even in Mr. Robot didn't focus on the hacking as much as on the larger plot. It simply made a very realistic point of that hacking.
On NCIS everyone is a superhuman at whatever they do. In addition to the traditional super-cop there's the super-forensics genius and the super-hacker from MIT. I think it's just the kind of show more than the kind of character. And people who watch (and write) hero shows are probably older generations and far less aware of modern job roles beyond the old professions.
But TV always veers off into personal drama, presumably to chase ratings, whether it's doctors or cops or anyone else.
You mean because the show is about them? In the scheme of things they seem to be basically rank-and-file detectives.
All the science/tech stuff they do tends to make me cringe. A hair from a nearly-extinct field mouse found in just one park? whatever. I guess that beats big "revelations" you can see coming a mile away.
You are contrasting “wokeism” to military and secret agencies propaganda of a nation that has been warring, invading and coordinating coups for almost a hundred years?
"Wokeism" is just another way to practice racism, sexism, limit freedoms and to divide society in very damaging way. It eventually will lead us into tyranny and all these bad thing that you have mentioned.
> That billions of equipment and resources provided by the woke cabala?
Hundreds of millions are spent worldwide on endowments for universities to push this specific agenda. So, yes, I wouldn't find it surprising if the movie makers are sponsored, too. Now, it's clear why US army would want a positive optics. But who's to benefit from, say, Tajiks internalizing the "oppression scale"?
On the contrary, I asked OP because often times when people talk about woke-agendas, they mean "I don't like seeing black or gay people in my movies", so I tend to wonder what they mean when they say woke.
Please stop this. Every instance of someone referencing something that originated from a culture other than their own is not "appropriation" or "racism".
They're not talking about mere referencing, though. The problem is one of intentional redefinition in an attempt to counteract a movement. And indeed, the motivation for doing so is often racism.
"Woke" is a word, which describes/refers to a concept. The use of the word may be culturally and temporally specific (and that usage, like all use of language, may change over time), but the concept is one found in many different cultures and communities across time and space - put simply and broadly, the notion that one needs to "wake up" or "awaken" to what is actually happening. There are ways of describing this in many different languages. So while the current use of the word "woke" within the US may indeed be traced back to the African American community, the concept/idea has a much longer and broader history than that.
White supremacists are specifically attacking the 'black liberation' definition because it gained a worrying amount of traction among the global youth and the ruling class is not happy about that.
It's not a coincidence that the establishment in other major genocidal powers (ZA, AU, and UK) jumped on the anti-woke train early on to assist the US in fighting/redefining the concept.
Reminds me of a quote from a history prof, "The main problem with black history is it exposes too much of the fraud in white history... "
The global cultural influence of African Americans is massive, possibly bigger than any other single group in the US, even after centuries of gatekeeping. A notable style trait of Ebonics is purposely butchering English grammar.
Are you claiming you would use the past tense of 'wake' as the present tense (as in 'stay woke') without African Americans popularizing it? This may be the strangest claim I've heard recently.
BTW, redefining established civil rights concepts to undermine the people and movements tied to them is extremely racist...
"Woke" is simply the left's word for what the right calls 'Redpilled'. In both subcultures it means 'a recognition of some fundamental truth that does not bring joy'.
Done well, it can be a vehicle for criticising one's own culture in a constructive way. Done poorly, it can be a vehicle for oikophobia and gatekeeping, a means of distinguishing oneself from the naively patriotic proletariate.
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 many, you can see how the blue pill world is created.
> Woke in my experience is more used to describe progressive people and their opinions
Like any hot cultural term, it has become loaded with plenty of other meaning. However, to a degree I think you are talking about the reactionaries' use of the word, which they have adopted to politicize it - to use their endless (and successful) rhetorical technique of attacking the messenger; of saying 'it's just liberals' to shift the discussion from the actual problem, racism. For example, you can see the same technique used for climate change.
> 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.
My first encounter of the red/blue pill dichotomy was the first Matrix film. With social media like reddit, this idea spawned via memesis and certain communities began imitating their interpretations of what it meant for them. For example, the contrasts between r/theredpill and r/thebluepill and all the other subs it may have spawned as well, eg: r/mgtow.
Richard Dawkin's wrote a fantastic book called The Selfish Gene on exploring the difference between memetic and mimetic theory that's worth the read.
> 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."
I think the definition is narrower. I think it's something that completely shifts your persecptive, that is relvelatory. I know things about certain policy issues that the mainstream doesn't - or about IT, but it's not the same.
> 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.
This is the nature of all knowledge - there is no way around thinking critically, using all the skills (empiricism, post-modernism, etc.); it's never easy.
I first read it as in “stay woke”, a reminder that your survival depends on seeing through people’s bullshit.
And the most harmful bullshit is that racism is a personal failing rather than a system working as designed; designed by people who will not peacefully let it go.
> the most harmful bullshit is that racism is a personal failing rather than a system working as designed; designed by people who will not peacefully let it go.
Yes, an essential point. But it's also a personal choice.
I honestly don't understand how you can't see that "being woke" is synonymous with being aware of facts that other don't see. Literally derived from "awake" and there by seeing the truth correctly.
One way or the other you might be having a difficult time seeing that they're both essentially propaganda, but its just the mirror image of the same thing.
I've actually only seen it used on the right, nearly always by friends or family who constantly read the news, always in a derogatory sense. Was it common on the left at some point?
Yes, it originated there, though I guess it didn't last very long. It's a common rhetorical tactic used by partisans on the right - use the other side's own terminology to describe it, always with a tone of disgust, and repeat it until the sound of it becomes grating. "Social Justice Warrior" was similarly exclusively used by people describing their own political convictions when I first encountered the term.
I'd say both sides make the other side's terminology into epithets. But mostly only the left seems to take it personally and stop using the word. Meanwhile the right will continue to embrace being labelled by what the left treats as epithets. Maybe it has something to do with individualism which is a sort of rebellious mindset on the right.
I just realised an interesting symmetry - The right is more successful at loading the left's own terminology with negative connotations, while the left is more successful at adjusting definitions of shared language. I wonder whether this has something to do with the implicit communication styles of the respective tribes... Any theories?
>>What exactly does this woke agenda push, if I may ask?
I don't know anymore.
In some circles / historically it is used to denote liberal/progressive agenda. It's sometimes (often?) meant to be negative/slur, just like some people will use "Socialist!!!" believing it a derogatory term.
However, increasingly it's used as generic term in various conspiracy circles - "Wake up to the truth!" transmogrified to "Woke!". So Woke will be claimed by those who understand the truth about Illuminati/Freemasons/Rothchilds/Vaccines/5G/EM/Israel/etcetcetc.
So between whatever original use there may have been designed, vs today's actual usage on the interwebs, I don't personally find it a useful nomenclature that I can interpret on its own with any degree of confidence. 90% of the time I find it in short rambling sentences of the format of either "Their pushing their fascist woke agenda!!!" or "be woke, don't be sheeple". I generally don't find the term used in any discussion that ends up being in any way productive or enlightening.
(note also my experience that, anybody using it, in any of the above and myriad other senses/terms, will strongly believe their is the only obvious correct usage and resent the notion that there's lack of clarity)
Hard to answer, you might as well ask "what exactly does this not very defined group want?".
Let's take feminism for example, which is generally considered as pertaining to woke culture, what do feminists want? Well you have sex-positive feminists, sex-negative feminists, you've got the ones that want to legalize sex work, the ones who don't, abortion at every stage no matter the circumstance, abortion in hospitals depending on term, trans inclusive, trans exclusive, men inclusive, men exclusive, men-can-only-be-allies... And I'm not even mentioning different waves of feminism.
It's hard to nail down what it pushes, exactly, but I'd say that a focus on identity politics as opposed to economic issues is a constant. A character existing solely because of their identity, disregarding if it adds anything is, I'd say, peak wokeism.
And I've no doubt many will disagree with that, as some others will with any other take.
To add to your points, as much as people may use identity politics to realize their interests, I think we should not forget the people who label simple and needed social changes as identity politics and peak wokeism, just because they disagree with said changes.
As an example, some people think that showing homosexual people in media is part of some wokeist agenda, just virtue signalling and an act of identity politics.
I guess to sum it up, we should probably stop using such general terms and just explain what we think in a couple of sentences. I guess that's where Twitter can be blamed a bit, when you don't have the space to thoroughly explain what you think, you have to resort to abbrevations and single words, in turn making it more confusing for everyone.
Fox News in the US. I agree mostly with your point that the film industry and the majority of print and cable news falls in line with progressive/leftist/"woke" talking points, but Fox is an absolutely massive propaganda vehicle with dozens of millions of daily viewers. They regularly promote trans-exclusive views.
I'd say Fox exists as a reaction against the left-leaning bias of media. If audiences want anti-woke content all day (or conspiracy theories, or commie-stomping superagents, or...) I don't think a business that chases ratings and profits by giving it to them is fairly described as propaganda. Entertainment is commonly centered on the fears of its audience.
I don't think there's any difference in most entertainment and propaganda. The "official" definition of "propaganda" is:
> Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
I would say that almost all entertainment is of a biased nature and is used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
Pamphlets about the end of the world and Christianity--propaganda. The Glenn Beck show--propaganda. NYT editorials about defunding the police--propaganda. Tucker Carlson--propaganda. Joe Biden's Twitter account--propaganda. Portrayals of white men as problematic or evil in Netflix shows--propaganda. Portrayals of black men as problematic or evil in archaic books, shows, movies, etc.--propaganda.
Edit:
I realize I sound a little unhinged. Let me try to be more clear about my point.
If media is deployed with the intent to promote or distribute a worldview, I think it is propaganda. Fox News meets the definition of propaganda because it promotes the worldview "cable news, specifically Fox News, is a source of authority". The fact that it is entertainment is not relevant to its status as propaganda; it gains that status by having a perfect propaganda-like effect on the public. The content of the media that's consumed by the public is less important than what the public believes about the sources putting out the media, and what authority the public lends to the media it consumes.
Here is an article by an anonymous psychiatrist who writes a great deal about how the effect of media is less related to the content, and more related to how media dissemination of information infects and shapes its viewers' model of reality. They are taught how to learn, rather than what to learn, and the how always includes "more listening to the source putting out the information".
Yeah I can certainly agree that some would use a broad definition of propaganda.
But it's a very loaded word. One should avoid using loaded words where a less emotional description is applicable. One could as well argue that the use of loaded words is propaganda itself.
I argue both of those points, and that's why I specifically choose loaded words. I am spreading my own version of propaganda, because I want people to hold a certain set of political beliefs.
You could say "Fox News is a conglomerate of acting/direction/production teams managed by a central financial-focused corporate structure who release carefully curated entertainment segments in order to maximize views from certain demographics", and then describe its effects by saying "People who unironically consume and believe what is said by Fox News representatives typically end up believing verifiably false information".
That would be a very emotionless and more strictly accurate phrase to say than "Fox News is one of the propaganda arms of the broadcast media cartel", which is how I would say it.
Unfortunately, saying it your way allows people to believe they understand it and are protected from its effects. This is not true, in the same way that people are not protected from the propaganda-like effects of advertising just because they can see an ad and not immediately want to go buy the target product.
Fox News is not benign entertainment; do not underestimate its handlers so.
The (literal) billions described in the NYT article above are just one aspect of the woke, they have many more. They don't just have the money, they have tons of money.
I just watched Don't Look Up on Netflix and the propaganda was so thick it actually made the whole movie painful to watch. I suppose it's naive to think that old movies are propaganda-free. But I find myself missing the narratives I grew up with. The new ones are whiny, cynical and uninspiring. At least the old ones inspired me towards positive things.
I'm incredibly anti-Trump and I still fully agree with you.
But I don't think the problem was that it was so "thick" so much as that it was so poorly done. Instead of being funny, it just reminded me of school bullies and general idiots, and was far too easy to write to be good satire.
What defines propaganda? The government manipulating people, often without reveling the source, is propaganda. A privately made movie with a point of view is not. You may not agree with the movie's perspective, but that certainly doesn't make it propaganda.
> Comparing war propaganda, downplaying of war crimes etc, with a civil rights movement.
Wokeism in mass media is big corporations' fear of missing out and losing customers. Those ideals were shared values of the younger generation decades before the industry adapted to it. Now that these kids have grown up, they are valued as consumers.
As we age these tells pile up and if we don't change the world around us we drown in tropes and cliches that are pushed by carpet baggers. So many different things that can't be unseen.
I thought this has been common knowledge forever. I mean, if you see before the closing titles something like
"With grateful thanks to the US Navy and Airforce, without whom this film could not have been made"
then you have to assume that the helpful armed forces at least got approval of the final cut. At any rate, I've always thought that stuff like The Green Berets with John Wayne was pure war propaganda.
I guess some people don't realize that stuff like the Transformers movies were all done with help from the US Military as well.
Probably the same people who don't make the connection with the military displays associated with sporting events (and the national anthem and its military theme before domestic sporting events). Stuff like the Blue Angles. It is all very Roman Empire the way we display our weapons of war, but lots of people can't even see it.
There are obvious exceptions - The Hurt Locker doesn't look to me like anyone in the military signed off on it. Nor Platoon (which I understand is much-liked by veterans).
One of the most interesting and moderately uncomfortable experiences for me was being in another country and seeing a war movie in that country’s theatres made by a director in that country
It was about a conflict I never thought about before, and also had me rooting for an anti-hero that on a side that would go on to oppose America, although acknowledgement of the US’ future involvement wasn’t even a part of the movie
Visitors and immigrants to the US must face that all the time, or dont have such nationalistic conditioning to care in the first place
In any case, the most interesting thing was how different the movie was. Like the things they focused on werent an unrealistic show of force and winning. I am enough of a film buff to put this on the specific director’s prowess, instead of culture, but I do think the surrounding culture is what helped the director greenlight working on that film.
“[George] Creel urged [Woodrow] Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate "not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'"”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
"Creel later published his memoirs of his service with the CPI, 'How We Advertised America', in which he wrote:
“In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited the freedom of speech and press. In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventures in advertising… We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the facts.”"
one graphic that stuck with me, that I saw a few years ago is this one (https://imgur.com/svsB0Ub) (question being: which nation, according to you, contributed most to the defeat of Germany?"
Being German and having Russian relatives the perspective on the war on the continent has always been interesting to me. The sheer scale and brutality of the Eastern front, the war crimes and death (The Soviet Union lost more than 15% of its population!) is astonishing.
I don't think popular media reflects this at all, not even necessarily maliciously or as propaganda intentionally. But that disconnect between the reality, and the recognition of it in Russia itself, has had vastly negative consequences when it comes to other countries trying to understand Russia even today. (and I suppose it's not by accident that in Germany for example, often only elder statesmen point this out)
Try asking most people about the Vietnam War, then visit Vietnam, especially the war museum in Saigon. Then pay a visit to the Landmine museum outside of Siam Reap, in Cambodia, to learn about Nixon's secret war that carpeted the border between Cambodia and Vietnam with bombs and landmines without anyone knowing.
That's a trip that would make you rethink America big time. It absolutely did for me. As an Italian, I was raised with the American Dream firmly in mind. When I turned eighteen I even started applying for the Green Card lottery every year for like six times. In the last 10 years I've grown so deeply disenchanted it's disturbing. The feeling of being force-fed a fake story by media for all these years is so bitter. But it's not just me. I would say that an entire generation of Europeans has been growing up to become deeply skeptical about anything Americans do.
I can say the same about Americans. In the California Bay Area I have very few friends who think positively of the United States, it’s flag, or it’s history. The facts of the trail of tears, slavery, endless meaningless wars, corporate sabotage of governments and people, selfish oligarchs…that’s what they think when they think “America”. Do I think it’s all bad? Of course not. In fact I personally think any good history is completely forgotten to our extreme detriment. But I see where they’re coming from.
What was bad about it? The idea was to make overland transport through Cambodian territory (which U.S. did not want to outright invade) to supply Vietcong as difficult as possible.
Vietnam war may have been brutal, and eventually lost, but it disincentivised everyone else in the Southeast Asia from turning to Communism, so in the end it was a net benefit for the free world.
This answer here is exactly why you should visit the landmine museum near Seam Reap. Because if you don't grasp how carpet bombing civilians in a country you're not at war with doesn't strike you as bad, you just really NEED to stick your damn nose in it. You need to see what it means to carpet bomb a country. To plant landmines and forget them there. Vietnam's socialism has never been Russian or Chinese socialism, by the way. Ho Chi Minh was a peaceful intellectual, who studied in France under illuminist and progressive mentors. I disagree with the basics of communists society, but the neoliberal spirit that opposes that has been way more detrimental to the world than what they were trying to fight.
The best thing is what this person would cry about "russians bombing/blowing up Afghanistan kids with mines" [0] completely ignoring what BLU-43 is almost exactly the same.
Which means, Cambodia never became a Soviet asset or was in any way beneficial to the Soviet Union (and this was the main goal of the Vietnam war: to prevent Soviet assets from appearing in the Southeast Asia). Pot Pot's regime was even a detriment to the Soviets as it tainted the 'good name' of Communism in the eyes of Western intellectuals.
"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević"
Anthony Bourdain, in "A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines"
It's not about absolving the others, but pointing out main perpetrators. Should we not point out the central roles of Hitler or Himmler in the holocaust? At some point there is personal responsibility.
I think the point is that just because Kissinger was a very influential diplomatic who as far as I'm aware revolutionised that field, people have glossed over the effects of his actions on places like Cambodia.
I'm glad that thanks to the internet and proper journalism, we have a better view on things. I grew up mainly in the 90's, with action movies from the time - think Rambo and co.
I don't remember watching anything that glorified the Vietnam war though. Full Metal Jacket showed how it was a shitshow. On a weird kind of lighter note, Forrest Gump showed how people died or were gruesomely injured. Rambo may have been the only one that tried to portray it somewhat positively? I don't quite remember.
The movies you mention always only show the atrocities from the American side, ending up justifying, pitying and damning or saving the American protagonist.
America is just always front and center. Americans just can't help being up their own ass so deep that even when they express criticism they can't not make it all about themselves.
I'm really sorry about the generalization, but as someone living in a city where US expats come to escape and complain about their own bubble by forming another, I'm reminded on a daily basis how that generalization never fails to hold true.
American movies are the only ones I can think of that tell GLOBAL stories from a purely American-only perspective. Local American stories are of course great! I love movies made by Americans who tell me American stories.
Apart from that they all suffer from some degree of America as the savior syndrome, or as I like to call it “World Series” syndrome. Only a country like America could call “World” something that is purely American.
So no, sorry, it’s not just a matter of perspective.
FMJ wasn't really a hollywood movie (other than the production company being Warner); the director lived in St. Albans (north of London). It was shot in England.
The reason you can find a description of the atrocities committed by the US in Vietnam is that the US lost that war, and Vietnam today is functioning society. If you take the largely comparable Korean war, the non-US perspective is completely absent from the western public conscience. Though with a raising China, that may one day change.
Yes, Russia had pushed Germany the whole way back into Berlin by 1945. Russia defeated Germany in Europe in WW2 the other allied powers basically showed up when it was all over.
I feel like this is a facile view of the situation, especially if you take Lend-Lease into account. The fact that U.S. schools and media tend to downplay the importance of the USSR war effort in favor of Western allies doesn’t mean we should immediately take the polar opposite stance.
I’ll quote British historian Anthony Beevor (who, by the way, agrees that the Soviet Union was key in defeating Germany):
“[T]he reason why the Russians got to Berlin before the Americans was quite simply that fact that it was American Dodge, Studebaker, Chevrolets and all the trucks that had been given to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease had made their advances in '43 and especially in '44 possible. They'd never have got anywhere near it.”
And if the Eastern front hadn't existed Germany would have a lot more forces to fight against the channel invasion. So... nobody fought in isolation, the world always was connected, and trade and impact of what others did elsewhere always existed since there as no force field around any two parties to ensure they had a "fair" fight 1:1.
The US supported itself with Lend-Lease. Giving weapons to others ensured they didn't have to deal with a victorious Germany.
Quoting:
> David Glantz, the American military historian known for his books on the Eastern front, concludes:
> Although Soviet accounts have routinely belittled the significance of Lend-Lease in the sustainment of the Soviet war effort, the overall importance of the assistance cannot be understated. Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941–1942; that achievement must be attributed solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates. As the war continued, however, the United States and Great Britain provided many of the implements of war and strategic raw materials necessary for Soviet victory. Without Lend-Lease food, clothing, and raw materials (especially metals), the Soviet economy would have been even more heavily burdened by the war effort. Perhaps most directly, without Lend-Lease trucks, rail engines, and railroad cars, every Soviet offensive would have stalled at an earlier stage, outrunning its logistical tail in a matter of days. In turn, this would have allowed the German commanders to escape at least some encirclements, while forcing the Red Army to prepare and conduct many more deliberate penetration attacks in order to advance the same distance.
> Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht; the ultimate result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers could have waded at France's Atlantic beaches.
There are some inadvertent reflections, though, since some of the communism death count figures include both the Soviet and Nazi casualties from the Eastern front.
I recently finished "The Phoney Victory" by Peter Hitchens which is certainly an interesting book. While one may not agree with every point or conclusion he makes in the book, I think he proves his overarching point rather well, which is essentially that WW2 was perceived in a skewed way during and right after (not that surprising really), but the perceptions have been getting more skewed as time passes (and especially so in Britain).
This is completely true, but I wouldn't forget the role of the US Lend-Lease Policy in this [1]. After the German attack, the SU wasn't really able to defend itself on the material side (same as the UK after the Dunkirk loss), and supplies were provided heavily by the US.
> Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.
Not sure what to make of this. The lend-lease stuff is hardly extraordinary, it would have been crazy if they _didn't!_. Furthermore, the US received almost a similar amount of goods in return (US received 8bln from allies when they lended out 11bln to USSR). All usual and unremarkable stuff. Furthermore, it's hardly fair to equate suppy of aid (which the US can afford because of their capitalist practices of exploitation etc) with supply of human life.
11 billions went to the Soviet Union alone. The overall program was almost 50 billion. The reverse program of 7 billions is basically a calculatory sum of the lend and lease of military bases by the British Empire to the US.
> suppy of aid (which the US can afford because of their capitalist practices of exploitation etc)
That's a pretty wild statement considering how the Soviet Union created its resources (with slave labor of millions of people in the Gulag system).
Yeah sorry updated above, 11bln to USSR specifically, thanks for correcting. Nevertheless, it seemed odd to almost suggest the Us were financing the USSR in their fight in order to obtain some credit.
Noted RE Soviet practices, though it's besides the point I think (i.e. it would be a scandal if the US didn't send aid in this form).
Yes, my argument wasn't so much that this was pure charity, but merely stating that the role of the US was a considerable factor in the fight of the SU.
In addition to the other reply, if you want to bring up industry, Russian achievement on that front is actually even higher. Most of the industry was in the European part and soon unavailable because it was overrun by Germans. Russians moved entire factories far to the East and started
> German forces managed to occupy or isolate territory which prior to WWII accounted for over 60% of total coal, pig iron, and aluminum production. Nearly 40% of total grain production and 60% of total livestock was lost. Moreover, this area contained 40% Soviet population before the war, 32% of the state enterprise labor force, and one-third of the fixed capital assets of the state enterprise sector.
The reality is far more horrific. The Japanese were preparing to surrender to the Soviets, but the US couldn't have the Soviets take credit for winning the war on both fronts so they dropped a couple of nukes on Japan.
I thought it's because the US demanded unconditional surrender and the Japanese thought their emperor would be deposed so they refused. Two bombs later the Japanese agreed to an unconditional surrender. And guess what, they got to keep their emperor...
That’s about as facile as the Pollyanna view that America nuked Japan reluctantly and purely out of necessity.
The reality is that it was a complicated decision and there were many factors that went into it and many subsequent interpretations of the history on all sides.
I am a French citizen 65 year old. I remember that my father was bombed by US in Rennes (luckily he went out safe). Most ports on Atlantic coast were completely destroyed by US bombers and many towns (Lorient, Saint-Malo, Brest, etc) had to be completely rebuilt. Many people were displaced, homeless and had to be relocated in shelters. This lasted until the 60", see [0]
Yet now, for French people and media, destructions and people displacements were all the fault of Nazi's Germany. And for medias, the time after war was an happy time "les trente glorieuses" [1].
St. Malo, in particular, was shelled to destruction by US troops. It was rebuilt over 12 years, which seems to me rather an incredible achievement. It looks like an 18thC fortified city.
It sounds like most French citizens and the media are correct in that view.
For you though, the Nazis invaded and occupied France, taking over the ports. The US bombs them to stop their takeover of France... and it's the US you blame?
If your house catches fire and you call the fire department to put it out, do you then blame the fire department for the water damage caused while putting it out?
That's not my point, my point is about the change of narrative which is also the topic of this thread. After the WWII it was wide misery in France up to 1960 and now it is supposed to have been the "30 glorious years".
You know, even if I was born in 1956, I have seen lot of those shelters.
The person who first wrote about the "30 glorious years" was Jean Fourastié. Jean Fourastié had strong link with Jean Monnet. Jean Monnet had been an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1940 to 1946 [0].
[0] Jean Monnet (1988). Mémoires (in French). Fayard. ISBN 978-2-213-65802-5.
> The Soviet Union lost more than 15% of its population
Yeah, but that number is so high because they were effective at killing their own people. The number of needless victims during the fighting and those of the "cleansing" after a win is incredibly high.
I don't know anything about running a country but propaganda is something everyone does because it makes sense. Can't blame them.
I always (as an adult) assumed the countless war movies and cop TV shows are just that.
That said, a few years ago I stumbled upon some hideous cover of Offspring's gone away. Someone had turned that tune into a cheesy pop tune and made the video about young beautiful housewife and mother getting informed that her darling was killed in line of duty. No way some music production company just decided to do that on its own. Man, it was bad
I cringe every time I hear the US president being described as the leader of the free world, as if there were 2 specific sides and USA were leading it and as if USA was an advocate for freedom.
Up until 1990 that was a reasonable approximation to the truth. The USA certainly had its issues, but in a comparison between the USA and the USSR there was no question about who the relatively good guys were.
Since the USSR collapsed, and especially since 9/11, things have gotten a lot murkier.
It's literally a dichotomy by definition. If I say "in a comparison between chocolate and vanilla" I'm literally comparing those two specific flavors. To tell me it's a false dichotomy is silly.
I guess they are saying that there are other options. So for example if I asked you "what is your favorite ice cream flavor, vanilla or chocolate?" you might respond to me with "that's a false dichotomy, there are more than two ice cream flavors, my favorite is banana which you have not listed as an option". At least that is my understanding of the context.
That was the dichotomy everyone had to deal with back in the day. Trying to be "unaligned" merely got you interference from both sides, with the possible exception of Switzerland.
I seriously challenge you to read up on the history of the Latin Americas or many African nations. The "leader of the free world" was installing and supporting fascist dictatorships left right and center, who killed thousands of people in their torture chambers (often using CIA resources). It's correct that the US was generally better to its own people (unless you were black of course), but it certainly wasn't a beacon of freedom to the world.
I assume you are American? As resident of one of the dozens of countries that suffered US led coups our opinions differ. The US has influenced with undemocratic methods a lot more countries than the USSR even before the 90s. Just compare Europe and US sphere influence (Latin America and Africa) with USSR sphere of influence (Eastern Europe and Caucasian) Also look what happened Foreign interventions in the USSR sphere of influence for Freedom (Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia, Former USSR naval bases in the Mediterranean) those were rebellions against dictatorships. All the others are insurgencies against democracies.
That’s only possible with an extremely euro centric world view. If you were to focus on say, South America, you would’ve come to the exact opposite conclusion.
You are clearly American. American administrations preferred and supported third-world tyrants during the Cold War over functional democracies since the former could be easily controlled. This is extensively documented and even admitted by several ex-DC head honchos.
Public messaging by POTUS for national consumption is very different from actions on the ground.
If the US ever had good guy status, it's because of the principles it was founded upon. I'm not even sure up to which point those principles stood. Certainly not as late as the 90s. The second world war seems to have been the major turning point.
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.
Now, as China is becoming an ever more stronger player, we again see that there are two sides arising. While party lacks expansive ambitions in the traditional sense of landborders (except for Taiwan), they would very much like everyone to kotow to the party.
We are in a world where democracies are in decline and autocracies are in the rise. USA is still the biggest democracy. Leader of the free world? It's hyperbolic, but not _obviously totally wrong_.
This is not to say we are in some sort of manichean conflict world were one side is good and one is evil, or that US is good and the autocrats are evil. US is obviously a state actor that acts in it's own benefit and in the benefit of it's elites and so on, and these actions sometimes are very bad for civilians.
> 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 (which came out of a US supported coup after democratic elections resulted in a win for the left). Things are by far not as clear cut. Both blocks supported atrocious regimes if it was in their economic interests and worked against "the other side". That we largely only hear about one side shows how well the propaganda was/is working.
Yes, that is absolutely right. Even Greece had it's anti-communist junta which massacred students. It's never clear cut, but on the _average_ I do think the pro-USSR side was less-free.
I would agree that for the (majority parts of) populations of the main countries that is likely the case. I certainly am happy to have grown up in Western not Eastern Germany. That said things get murkier beyond that quite quickly. I'm not sure I would have preferred to grow up as a black teenager in e.g. Baltimore over being a teenager in Eastern Germany and I certainly would have preferred to grow up in Estonia in the USSR over Guatemala.
I think this would depend on time period. 1930s sure, later I'm not convinced (to be honest I don't know enough about the period after the 30s in Ukraine). For example during the Guatemalan "Civil War" between 150 000 and 200 000 people were killed and disappeared (~25% of that number). That is a lot of people for a population of 17 M.
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.
They were targeting USSR military bases. And it was "known" already during the cold war, not a surprise after the cold war ended. At least in Estonia, every sane person assumed that when there's a nuclear conflict, then the rocket bases and airfields of the occupation forces here would be the first to be taken down by the west because they were the most west-facing USSR military bases.
You are correct. Just like the US was targeting military installations in Moscow, etc that had millions of civilians and USSR was targeting US cities that had millions of civilians.
I'm just saying that it was not actually something that people "found out" after the cold war and it wasn't specific to the Baltic nations nor the US or USSR. All nuclear capable superpowers had set potential targets which would have killed tens of millions of civilians. Singling out some of the countries occupied by the USSR (Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania) is minimizing the situation IMO :)
Not just Moscow. Also Warsaw. And Cracow. And so many other cities in countries that believed US is an ally in their struggle, who'll be aiming to liberate them from USSR. Not turn their most beutiful cities into cinders.
. Usa did play a big role in liberating eastern Europe from communism and at the same time in Poland we're all aware of brutal reality that a war between west and Russia will leave Poland in ashes.
A full US nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and its allies in the early 1960s was estimated by the Pentagon as probably killing ~100 million in Western Europe due to fall-out and 600 million in total - "100 holocausts" as Daniel Ellsberg described it.
> 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 the world to exploit it better, and Russia is still insular country that doesn't want to allow any of that on their turf.
The only thing that changed with the end of the cold war was that US could no longer credibly spin the narrative that Russia wants to take over the world and turn Texans into communists.
Fortunately, after a bit of mucking around USA could brand terrorists as their global super dangerous enemy and business could continue as usual.
Currently when terrorists turned out to be a very limited threat and USA proved to be very incompetent at fighting them long term, USA again began shopping for a narrative enemy. Obvious choice is China, but USA leaders with more than two brain cells are little hesitant about that, because you don't necessarily want to frame yourself as enemy of someone who could very likely seriously eff you up.
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) in the US would scream bloody murder if the tap of cheap consumer products was turned off.
I also think that the end of the Cold War, the failure of the forever wars, and our bungled pandemic response has taken a lot of gloss off the old propaganda. The interruption of having the USSR fall has made a lot of Americans look around and saw “wait, why does life kinda suck here though?”, and it’s kind of hard to rebuild that propaganda machine once it’s stopped.
It's not entirely a US based fiction. In some areas the question was between choosing a western US led order or the USSR based one. Not everywhere, of course.
US is of course a selfish actor. But it's not black and white, and while US has never been "the good guy" they are still a stabilizing force that for most parts promotes rule based order. Yes, they assault sovereign states and all that, I'm not disagreeing US has pathologies to bear.
But in some regions it's influence benefits the local population (even though the goal is not directly to help anyone but to promote a specific selfish policy).
On the Eurasian theater Russia is not a neglible actor. Given it is being lead by a mafia more or less, in regional matters Russia is still a looming threat (ahem, Ukraine, ahem).
As a citizen of country which shares a very long land border with Russia (Finland), and given the realpolitik fact small nations are at the mercy of larger powers, I much prefer a situation where US can politically and financially influence events in my local vicinity to a one where Russia would be the larger presence.
If I was for example Vietnamese I might hold quite different views. Or if I lived in an area that was a theater of conflict for drone strikes and my family suddenly died as collateral damage.
Or just the fact that whenever there is an alien invasion, worldwide apocalypse or destruction, the effort to rebuild always starts from the USA. Every time I watch any of those movies I think "I wonder how Europe is faring..."
Tangentially: Isn't it interesting that no anti-war movies are being produced anymore? I'm guessing it might be because we're living in a bit more peaceful times than before and there is no need for such movies, but also access to military equipment for producing such movies would be very limited.
Or it reflects that the two genres merged to a degree, because of a more nuanced understanding? Recent war movies like "Dunkirk" don't really show traditional heroism, they show a very bleak version of war, with the soldiers mostly surviving rather than fighting. "1917", while showing a heroic act of one (or two) main characters, also used imagery and portrayal of military and higher ranks that is essentially a reference to classical anti-war movies.
I am very interested to ready the comments and see where the votes land. From my experience any time you criticize the US here on HN you are heavily criticized or downvoted. Sometimes after making a valid point. I have learned to not take it personally and have always told myself I am sure there are state actors from many nations on many forums trying to persuade a perspective. If someone wants to downvote but not provide a rebuttal they probably are just offended by the posters comment or part of some mechanism trying to sway a narrative. I don’t think it is just state actors but also commercial interests.
Really? I think you can make a generic “US bad, <insert other country name, typically from Europe> good” and you’ll get a cheering chorus from HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc. on… almost any topic these days.
As a US citizen I just don’t really care anymore, I sometimes get a good chuckle every time someone tells me I’m oppressed or living in a hellhole. I’m happy where I live and though I recognize there’s faults and I do try to improve them where I can. Maybe it’s state actors, maybe it’s not; I wouldn’t care about a stranger’s opinion in real life, so why would I bother caring about a stranger online? Too little time in life for that.
I don’t know much about Europe or other countries so haven’t made many critical comments towards those countries. But when I’ve been critical about the US, my neighbouring country I’ve always had a lot of flack for it here on HN. But you are right life is too short so I say my piece and not worry if people vote down or up I am just trying to be part of the conversation.
I think there are actually many posters on HN that are critical of the US. I would say that such opinions are more popular than they were a few years ago. On the other hand there are also a fair amount that have an idealized conception of that country.
This is my first exposure to the organization 'world beyond war'.
I absolutely agree with its stated aims and intents. I would love to believe that what they are suggesting could be achievable - but the cynic/skeptic in me worries that this will end up being steamrolled by the people in power as some sort of fringe hippie movement.
Does anyone have direct experience with working with this organization that could relay how effective they are in their approach? Any thoughts on how their stated aims could be realizable?
Aside from military, this tactic became obvious to me when space became (again) a theater of conquest around 2010, involving both private and public sectors, internationally.
The narrative around space became very strong, sending messages of conquest, entrepreneurship, science, dreams, you name it.
At the exact same period, bloomed movies like: Mission to Mars, Gravity, Interstellar.
I won't be surprised to see a surge of interest in space-related careers in younger generations in years to come.
While that's true, the fundamental missions in space that we are likely to fly are basically all about science and engineering. Even (I speculate) the classified ones. Satellites provide either telecommunications or fundamental information about our world or the universe in which it sits. That information is not going to beinherently military -- it's the purposes that it is put to that may be.
On the other have, every American action movie seems to feature guns and explosions and quite a lot of glorification of the military. The military exist to kill people, and to deliver the utmost brutality to others whilst remaining organised, logical and efficient themselves. Guns exist to kill things. Explosive munitions are fundamentally excellent at killing people from a surprisingly long way away, larger than what Hollywood shows. When was the last time you saw a film highlight the loss a family of a minor villain felt when the hero shot him? The true aftermath of an air strike in a foreign country -- lifelong resentment and hatred about the country that provided it? (Vietnam is an interesting place to visit, but don't mention B-52s to the locals). It is an unfortunate but unavoidable fact of humanity that armies are required to exist. There is definitely good that comes from them, ranging from humanitarian aid to the research into high end technology, and I'm not calling for their abolition -- I am not naïve. That is fundamentally why the glorification of the military at all costs is problematic. The ethical arguments for their existence require exploring.
American films, on the other hand, will quite happily show a commando killing hundreds or thousands of people in a teenager-friendly film, yet American culture decrees that showing a single naked person mandates that the film is restricted. That mindset -- boobs bad, guns good, explosions fun and exciting -- is slowly but surely exported across the globe.
I'm going to look forward to the sci-fi space films where the drama is survival in a hostile environment, and infinitely prefer them to war films.
> It is an unfortunate but unavoidable fact of humanity that armies are required to exist.
Is it really unavoidable? I'll play the naïve part here and say that the military is an extension of humanity's tribal nature. The entire concept of countries and borders is rooted in our deep desire to belong to a specific tribe, be defensive of other members of our tribe, and offensive towards other tribes that might want to do us harm. The fact we manage to communicate and exchange goods and ideas is a testament of our collaboration skills, but this "us vs. them" mentality is always present in the back of our monkey brains.
If we ever manage to overcome this innate distrust—either via natural evolution (unlikely) or merging with a neutral AI (more likely?)—it would boost our capacity of working towards common goals as a species to unprecedented levels.
> There is definitely good that comes from them, ranging from humanitarian aid to the research into high end technology
There's no reason these efforts couldn't come from a nonmilitary organization. While competition and developing better weapons of war than other countries is a large component of technological advancement, I'd argue that global collaboration without distrust and politics would accelerate that progress even more. It would certainly help with current issues like climate change, space exploration and pandemic mitigation, while avoiding all of the pain, death and misery that wars and conflicts have brought us throughout history.
Yeah. I used to think space exploration was about pushing the whole human race forward. Now I realize it's about geopolitics. Superpowers competing for even more power. While we consume optimistic media like Star Trek, the USA is busy setting up constellations of surveillance satellites as well as a literal space force.
Wikileaks is such an incredible gift to mankind. Diplomatic cables leaked there showed me that the USA explicitly interfered in my country's attempt to develop a space program because they don't want us to have rocket and therefore missile technology. They actually wanted to use my country for launches due to it being under the equator but only if they could leave us out of it entirely, no one would even be able to enter the premises.
> We know that the Pentagon knows this, and what military officials scheme and plot as a result of knowing this, because of the work of relentless researchers making use of the Freedom of Information Act.
In France, the french secret services (DGSE) worked hand-in-hand with the production of a TV show called The Bureau (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4063800).
The services were supposedly lacking diverse resources for both operators, admins and field agents of diverse backgrounds.
This series drew a very strong, credible and positive narrative that led to a massive number of people knocking at the doors of the DGSE to join the forces.
Propaganda? I think not. Well thought out recruitment strategy as entertainment? Most likely yes.
Is there a difference between the two? To be discussed... ;)
You are being manipulated in this very second. That you skim HN while watching the show was actually anticipated. This comment will auto-destruct in 60 seconds.
There is no evidence the show was designed as an advertisement for the DGSE. This is simply a happy side-effect of it being popular...
I see a big difference with using movies as propaganda to influence the planet's opinions.
At the same time, one has to be blind to not see that any cinema industry has a political agenda, I mean, just watch the average Netflix production and it is striking.
> There is no evidence the show was designed as an advertisement for the DGSE.
It is for me inconceivable that the DGSE did not think of the outcome before agreeing to be an active collaborator of the show, and act accordingly to it's own benefits.
Intelligence services are not a random subset of humanity, though.
As one of us two seem to have a definitive argument, I guess we'll have to stick to our beliefs for now. I'm more curious now to know how much of it all was planned than I was before this conversation started.
Speaking about movies I am more confused why modern Russian movies portray Soviet soldiers as a bunch of idiots either drinking, shooting each other or being killed by KGB. And most of such movies are sponsored by the government. Go figure!
The propaganda effort shown in popular movies is just a small tip of the iceberg.
The United States and its state-run propaganda and terrorism organisations cannot be allowed to walk through the 21st century without answering and making amends to the crimes committed.
It has never before been more urgent to question and criticise the United States for its past decades of war, propaganda, sowing discord and effort to partition the world into those who are with them, subordinate, and those who are against them.
It is a good thing that we are still allowed to speak about it without being accused of being shills, spies, or "Russian trolls". But it might not last if these people get their way.
Yes, another convenient excuse and something to grasp for when all that matters is to discredit someone whose opinions they do not want to see in the debate.
I would not publish any of my political views with my identity in this cancel culture. It makes sense some people want to be anonymous with those statements.
most of us are anonymous here I think? And the cancel culture has been here for at least 20 years, I remember what it was like to dare say that you didnt think it was a good idea to invade Iraq..
my comment was more on suspicious accounts that single post over the top propaganda and then disappear
What about my account is suspicious? What in my post is propaganda or untrue? How many posts and comments should I have made before and after this one in order to not seem suspicious? Would anything change had I kept a permanent account and frequent activity?
You do not like what I post, but you have nothing to respond with and so you are instead clawing for anything in order to discredit me and my fresh YC account.
To me, you are the one who is behaving suspiciously.
I feel they have overplayed their hand in the 2020 US elections, not just Hollywood but all media.
In some ways it is a bit sad and pathetic looking behind the curtain and the seeing the puppeteer pulling the strings.
C'est la vie I guess.
It's even more obvious when it's the other way around; i.e. movies that criticize them have to create war scenes without the all the free fighter jets and Apache helicopters. One of the worst (war) movie scenes in history have to be the one in "Lions for lambs" [1]. It looks like some low budget / film school creation even though it's a massive production, with Tom Cruise, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.
Why do they even need the military for this? Can't they just use some computer graphics instead? We have video games full of photorealistic fighter jets and helicopters.
Chomsky is very good! It does not matter if you agree with his political stance or not, the fact based argumentation mixed with political rhetoric is a masterpiece of cerebral political writing, and a very good snapshot of some aspects of modern US history.
Manufacturing Consent makes a really good argument that the news media are complicit in propaganda. It's very dry reading, and repetitive; loads of examples to prove their point.
John Pilger: ""The BBC is and has long been the most refined propaganda service in the world".
> [Hu Shih] was among the first contributors for radical ideological change and modernity in China. His article on the 'Indianization of China' presented a scathing criticism of Indian influence on China that inhibited the blooming of 'indigenous modernity', progressivism and dynamism there. Hu’s views supported contemporary 'modernist' Chinese intellectuals' labelling of India under the British as a 'ruined' civilisation, 'failed' state or incapable role model for the agenda of modernity. Yet, he did not overlook affinities, mutual respect and admiration for those in India searching for 'indigenous roots' to modernity. His famous observation that 'India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border' is one of the most quoted sentences in any study of Sino-Indian encounters and connections.
Iranians and later Turkic Mongols had a similar affect (Persianisation) on India itself before imperialism took hold, and westernisation came to the fore; for ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaulayism
This is different than Hu Shih's point about non-military cultural influence. Military led cultural influence happens by force. Non military cultural influence happens attraction to culture. Post-WW2 United States had both in combination.
Didn't know about Hu Shih otherwise, so thanks for sharing.
China has always done this and it is always comically obvious.
The propaganda coming from the US against the Chinese is more subtle and convincing. It's scary not only because of how good it is, but because people here don't even realize they are being manipulated.
Perhaps you think the US propaganda is more subtle because it's very similar to your world view, as a member of the Western world. I bet a Chinese citizen would find the Hollywood propaganda hilariously over the top, though don't forget that the US propaganda is so widespread it already has infected everybody, including the common Chinese citizen, for decades.
Hah! Our enemy’s propaganda is such foolish nonsense—no one would fall for that! However, I am quite concerned for the little people of our enemy’s nation, because our propaganda is so subtle and intelligent…
>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 of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption," John Hudson of Foreign Policy reported on Sunday.
>The content arrives with the enactment of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry (R- Texas) and Rep. Adam Smith (D- Wash.), which was inserted into the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
>The reform effectively nullifies the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which was amended in 1985 specifically to prohibit U.S. organizations from using information "to influence public opinion in the United States."
>The new law enables U.S. government programming such as Voice of America (VoA) — an outlet created in 1942 to promote a positive understanding of the U.S. abroad — t0 broadcast directly to domestic audiences for the first time.
The act "geoblocked" propaganda that was ment e.g. for us European's from being received in the US. I think the argument is by "unblocking" it for US audiences there is indirectly a legalization of national propaganda. Particularly as such propaganda is excempt from the freedom of information act, it might be rather hard to prove that such propaganda only targeted an international audience (which is quite aware that Hollywood movies are all propaganda for the American way of live, I guess)
> The cyber world will progressively become both a boon and a bane to IO personnel, allowing them to reach a global audience, but also providing a large vulnerability to enemy deception and PSYOP efforts that will require a near immediate response to worldwide, operational events .. Update US Influence Operations doctrine to .. develop TTPs for employing PSYOP, MILDEC, and Public Affairs using the new cyber technology. Once developed, the TTPs must .. allow the military IO operator an avenue for developing proficiency in the release of “precision guided messages” to foreign audiences.
> ..government bureaucracy advanced measures aimed at controlling the global online environment. Commercial companies further exploited their geographical flexibility, minimal accountability and ‘black boxed’ practises, to profit from this desire to side-step awkward bureaucracy designed to protect the public ... the ‘merging’ of PSYOP and PA raised concern in academia and beyond ... This article engages in deep exploration of struggles between subfields of propaganda. It shows how PSYOP and Information Operations (IO) personnel struggled against Public Affairs over the adaptation of systems..
Other search terms:
Information Operations (IO)
Influence Operations (IO)
Inform and Influence Activities (IIA)
Interactive Internet Activities (IIA)
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
During the Cold War, the US government, via the United States Information Agency (USIA)[0] delivered all sorts of propaganda to our ideological adversaries, in particular communist countries. They usually tried to reach the average person and thus skew opinion in our (America's) favor.
I got a glimpse of some of this because I was an exchange student in the 80's, in a program sponsored by Congress and considered relevant to said Cold War. It was pretty interesting! Plenty of eagles and big cars and class mobility, but also a lot of stuff about freedom of thought and expression.
I remember at the time being quite miffed that they were not allowed to intentionally expose US citizens to any of this propaganda -- US expats were not even allowed to use the America-sponsored libraries abroad -- because it seemed like keeping it open would encourage the government to send a message that, broadly speaking, Americans agreed with.
Now that I'm older, I'm not sure. I think maybe it was better for them to have a freer hand in propagandizing, without having to argue about every point in a domestic context. Nowadays, however, it's hard to imagine that secrecy working at all so it's just as well they gave up.
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.
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.
> psychological methods learned from Guantanamo and CIA Black Sites,
What would those be? If CIA and such has some special "psychological methods", how comes they never actually used it to achieve anything related to their direct job? I mean, let's embrace the conspiracy and assume they have these spectacular methods that can make anybody think anything and they are willing to use it on anybody, including Americans. Why won't they use it on Taliban or Iranians or Hezbollah and make them love America and crave McDonalds burgers and Starbucks coffee? Why didn't they use it for anything, even if just to get promoted and look good on the annual report?
I think much more realistic hypothesis would be that they have no magic spectacular "psychological methods" at all and are as (in)competent in persuasion as a random politician is, and are forced to muddle through with what they got, and they need "black sites" so that public wouldn't actually learn how low their success rate is and how lucky we are because their opponents aren't exactly geniuses either.
There's nothing magical about it. All that's needed is control of the media your target consumes. "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky covers how this works.
The Taliban consume the Koran. They reject most forms of mass media. Thus it's very hard to manipulate them into a western lifestyle. The alternative would be to find their "opinion leaders" and coerce them. Anyway, it's naïve to think these techniques are not used at home and abroad.
It'd be naive if there were any indications of "these techniques" existing beyond extremely vague hand-wavy conspiracy implications. Just throwing out the name of Chomsky's book is not an actual evidence of anything. Tell me which specifically Gitmo-CIA-black-site-derived techniques you mean. You don't have to spell out the whole Chomsky, just name a couple, 2-3 sentences would be enough.
Well when you have technical systems that have the ability to influence what you buy, what movies you see, what you eat, how you view politics and so on it tends to take on an insidious role in peoples lives without them even realizing it. I also tend to subscribe to the notion that large groups of people tend to jump through various states of psychosis based on external input from media and things that happen in the world. This puts people in an emotional state where what the see and hear can have a different impact than if they were thinking rationally. It's one reason why something like QAnon worked so well as a mind virus, it's the one thing that triggers the emotional versus logical response for everyone.
Then I think you can look back at recent events from the past decade or more and see the impact of this. Whether you want to start with Kazakhstan this past week, the way opposing groups were targeted to fight each other in real life like was seen in Houston, or the reaction to a "youtube video" during Benghazi in Libya, the way that Trump and Cambridge Analytica kind of took over the GOP, or maybe even how Obama went from a relatively unknown politician to having a cult of personality around him a few months later. Another part of the psychological aspect of it is something called the information-action ratio. Basically people are overwhelmed with information that they can do absolutely nothing about. This leads to certain emotional responses caused by feeling a loss of control that also makes people more easily manipulated by what they are fed by these systems.
It's not much of a conspiracy if you have used technology and tried to pay attention to how it makes you feel and act at times. This is a large part of how so many people became radicalized from recommendation engines and targeted advertisements. It's like mind hacking in a way. But that's just like, my opinion, man.
Yup, Obama under the radar a few days before leaving office to Trump approved the creation of a propaganda department specifically targeting US citizens. Its no wonder we hear the same talking points across corporate media.
At this point the only thing we can truly trust is independent journalists. Most concerning is the rampant and normaliced acceptance of censorship in social media. Democracy depends on free speech. Its time we start dictching Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google search for more open platforms that allow a broad and unfiltered exchange of ideas. We the people, not the other way around.
I came to know about the Marvel movie military involvement from a youtube video essayist. I don't know whether it's good or bad. It's somewhere in the middle probably. Also every other country does the exact same thing afaik. The opposite of this would be potraying everything about the armed forces in a complete negative light. Now that won't be liked a lot I guess. The important thing here I believe is people should learn to detect if something is a propaganda or not. And the problem now is that its very subtle. Most people with whom I have discussed already detect the blatant propaganda movies instantly. The subtler ones like the marvel movies are the ones which they are very suprised about.
I suspect something similar is going on with all the cop/crime shows that show the "hero" cops completely disregard the law and due process. This always happens in situations where all the viewers completely agree that it is justified, e.g. a clear bad/evil guy (we already know he did it) and a small child that has to be saved from a prison...
I think this is essentially suposed to make us conceive law enforcement as always right and doing everything to "keep us safe" even if they have to disregard the law. You can clearly see it's working in how many people unquestionably support the police.
Is this some kind of marketing for the mentioned movie? The article mentions documents that are supposed to substantiate it's claims but then it just goes into speculation and only linking to other articles the author wrote. The mentioned movie doesn't even seem to be publicly available. Weird to see this here.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadSome scenes:
https://youtu.be/g7y36UIRAjo
IP Man 4, which is more well known to western audiences:
https://youtu.be/OlW2VphUNd4
https://youtu.be/JFmaPK0JyVQ
You get the idea. Americans make movies where America good, everyone bad. China is now making movies where China good, everyone bad, specially white Americans.
Anyways, along with the glorification of US might and power by the pentagon, their recruiting tactics have also used video game stylization to attract young people:
https://youtu.be/N0f_ZUgqvxE
^ That is a fucking video game ad as far as I’m concerned. No mature person should be turned on by that.
The thing is, everybody expects a Mosfilm flick to toe the party line. What the U.S. has done was sneakier.
But it's a very effective tool to shape public opinion. I'm fairly certain without the overwhelmingly heroic portrait of (members of) the military, the public would be more inclined to question the huge investments that go into warfare. Particularly the display of highly achieved individuals in the military leads to both public respect of military members, and enlistings to service.
Michael Douglas on why he doesn’t get why Gekko was an inspiration:
https://youtu.be/I8ruk8wjhuQ
We’re all vulnerable to this. Just here in tech we’ve deified the guy in a t-shirt/hoodie (zucks of the world) or mythical 10x programmers, built up and tore down people like Adam Neumann, all caricatures.
Propaganda works sadly.
With respect to war, it takes observing a war play out to realize how stupid it actually is. It took Americans 20 years of just watching Iraq/Afghanistan to conclude all that nationalism stuff is just not worth it at all. I don’t know how it’s all going to play out in the next 50 years, but I’m pretty sure in the aftermath of any American/Chinese conflict the conclusion of america-bad by the Chinese and China-bad by the Americans will just seem quite silly also.
Curious why India came to mind especially if you are not able to make an assessment of this topic as you put it.
More recently, a certain Canadian national has carved out a niche for himself by staring in ultra patriotic movies that are very popular with the Indian audience.
Still, it is clearly working because he’s ubiquitous while the erstwhile big 3 of Indian cinema have all but disappeared from ads.
FWIW, I hear he’s applying to become an Indian citizen again.
He claimed to have applied for an Indian passport in 2019. But then again he claimed he was an honorary citizen of Canada in the past. He's not exactly a reliable source.
Are you joking? Ever since 9/11 the US has been pumping out propaganda disguised as entertainment like gangbusters! It's really obvious when you go and watch reruns of old copaganda shows from 03 to 06, and then there's "24". Of course there's also blatant ra-ra Military propaganda like J.A.G. and NCIS
It's not surprising to see outright propaganda from the US, it's surprising how many decades it's taken for people to begin to call it what it is. Surprising and depressing.
"republic" and "democracy" are in no way mutually exclusive terms.
On the contrary, the overlap very often. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic for a definition.
Less the Chinese audience and more the CCP State Censors.
Basically, if there's a Chinese secondary actor and / or a Chinese location and they're not the definitive bad guys, it's been tweaked for and co-developed with China.
Now I don't say that's a bad thing per se, I kinda like there being a propaganda force in blockbuster films to compete with that of the US. I would much prefer no propaganda, but at the same time I feel like high budget action blockbusters can't do without.
Also take the word 'propaganda' with a grain of salt, it's usually nothing over the top, or limited to "this country or these people are not put in a bad light"
I for one would love to see more films where the Americans aren't considered the heroes.
The second aspect is vastly more important, but then again some people believe in the concept of a 'white lie' or lying for the greater good, which is very dangerous, especially in a world where you cannot be certain that you're the only one who knows a piece of information.And on top of that people who seek to hide the truth or lie by omission often do a lot of worse things than merely not presenting the whole facts.
The difference being that while state propaganda has infected Hollywood it does not wholly control Hollywood. You’d be hard pressed to find any rough equivalent to Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post etc in China.
Those movies are also propaganda, but in a more subtle and effective way; The message of these movies being that while america sometimes makes mistakes, in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven.
You don’t see in these movies american soldiers raping civilans, laughing about it, and suffering no ill consequences
Have you watched Apocalypse Now Redux? Because I can remember a scene that is very similar to that description. In this movie, the American military or government has no good heart, no conscience and breeds madness and senseless death.
Nobody cited 'Rambo' or 'Top Gun'
Here is a twitter thread about it: https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1433597396613832706
This is something the US really doesn't want to admit happened.
Nothing about Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket says that at all. Have you even watched them? They’re both about how war and the military machine are devastating and dehumanizing to the soldier, and to the enemy. All words seem like egregious understatements for them so I recommend seeing them (or seeing them again).
To my horror I did find out that the first half of Full Metal Jacket was attractive to enough teenage boys in the late 80s to eventually cause Jarhead to be produced [1]. I guess they stopped watching after the first half, or the idea of murdering teenage girls was attractive to them? Either way it is anything but propaganda.
As for the other movies that do involve righting a wrong or at least exposing them, that’s not state propaganda. Primarily because the state is the villain in them and they encourage suspicion of the state, neither of which promotes state power. A movie which gives the feels about being an American doesn’t make something propaganda it makes it a movie that wants to sell to Americans.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/magazine/full-metal-jacke...
This is because the same movies are also distributed in China, which is a huge market.
It’s false advertising at best, predatory at worst. Do you know who are selling a bag of dreams to? Do you care? You’ll take their time, money and lives, and it won’t matter to you in the least, will it?
It is always comically obvious (like in the videos you posted above). Pick any movie and you're likely to see something similar.
On the other hand, consider the last time you saw an Asian male in a Hollywood production that wasn't:
a) a kung-fu caricature b) the joke
Western propaganda is more subtle and effective.
(I am probably on some kind of list now)
And please tell your FSB handlers to stop living in the past ;)
"Comrade Hitler. Part II. Hanged Churchill"
Aside: I find the WWII era military training/propaganda videos pretty entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QgXuhv7-54
It's just that the propaganda for that war was so incredibly effective for so long, it is nearly impossible to find people who see it in a realistic light.
Normally the magic line goes the other way -- people think propaganda or such may have existed in the bad old days but in "modern times" of course everything is copacetic.
> In 1939, estimates of the Army's strength range between 174,000 and 200,000 soldiers, smaller than that of Portugal's, which ranked it 17th or 19th in the world in size. [1]
Despite of the abundant resources, it was largely a sleeping nation militarily prior to WWII. Air Force was essentially non-existent. Pearl Harbor was the critical moment that kicked the US Military machine in top gear. It only accelerated in the Cold War where there was serious FUD. It is difficult to put into context without having lived in that era. Propaganda, whatever you think of it, was necessary to convince the tax payer for their own security as well recruit enough people to sustain defense. The allies had seen the eye of evil and walked into its belly so it was straight forward to sell. Today's generation is largely detached from that reality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army
Last time I bought that line I gave 5 years of my life to Uncle Sam.
This is hilarious, yet I’m not laughing.
> The allies had seen the eye of evil and walked into its belly so it was straight forward to sell.
Tell that to Poland.
The concepts of "good" and "evil" are interesting, for example the discussion of the Banality of Evil (Arendt) etc.
I grew up during a time when quite a few witnesses were still alive and I did talk to some, no need to read a history book (although it definitely helps your overall formation as a reasonable person).
WWII being the fight of good versus evil is the foundation myth of post-1945 western civilization. It is the central dogma of the western pseudo-religion, which prevents meaningful discussion of these matters.
The actual myth is that the West is/was systematically engaged on the good side in good vs evil conflicts, when in reality WWII was more of an exception in that regard.
The holocaust, which is undeniably evil, is used to to hide all the other evils that lead up to WWII or were committed during it. This capped by the completely unnecessary nuclear bombing of Nagasaki by the US. WWII was not actually an exception, we just pretend it was.
Also, the systematic destruction of civilian targets by allied bombing campaigns: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_bombing_directive
Another example is the systematic starvation of German populace in the post-war years, due to the allord policy of deindustrialization. The average daily food intake was estimated at 1000kcal! And it was not a matter of food scarcity - it was a deliberate allied policy:
>Germany received many offers from Western European nations to trade food for desperately needed coal and steel. Neither the Italians nor the Dutch could sell the vegetables that they had previously sold in Germany, with the consequence that the Dutch had to destroy considerable proportions of their crop. Denmark offered 150 tons of lard a month; Turkey offered hazelnuts; Norway offered fish and fish oil; Sweden offered considerable amounts of fats. However, the Allies disallowed the Germans to trade.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_plans_for_German_indu...
Real history is complicated and messy. If you believe any war was just "good vs. evil" you are buying into propaganda.
The Nazis were evil, but that doesn’t imply that the allies fought against the Axis powers because they were good. You can do the right thing for the wrong or neutral reasons.
“US and allies”—that the US fought the whole war with the rest of the allies as support is another artifact of Hollywood’s portrayal of WWII. Although it’s understandable that there are less American movies about the Eastern Front, so it’s not like that has to be caused by some propaganda effort.
But the naval war in the Atlantic mattered. And, US supplies (particularly SPAM, and trucks, tires, and fuel) delivered through Iran were helpful late in the war.
But aside from naval work that denied Germany South American resources, the Soviets could have done the whole job on their own, and would have overrun all of Europe. In particular, there is no evidence that British and US area bombing achieved anything, although point attacks on rail locomotives did.
The good side in WWII includes Stalin and his regime. I do think that Hitler was bigger treat to everyone (including Easter Europeans themselves) and the alliance was needed. However, that does not mean Stalin represents "good guy".
The anitisemitism was not limited to Germans. Plenty of non-Germans people cooperated with it for own benefit or out of own anti-semitism. That includes people who were victims themselves - but still disliked Jews.
Also, closer to America, in movies American army simply can not possibly commit blunder, make really bad decisions (whether practically or morally). Real WWII featured a lot of those.
Also, speaking about movies, in American war movies war essentially feel good and heroic. The good and heroes wins. civilians basically dont exist and literally never are a real character with personality, motivations or agency (as limited as it is). The damage dont to them, the moral choices they have to do or their reaction to it dont exist.
An extreme caricature of American Military! Amazing game too.
I get the sense most blockbuster Hollywood movies fit that bill quite well with minimal edits. The more niche, gritty movies that talk about the unpleasant/controversial events/aspects probably don’t even ask for help.
As for the CIA??
Inferring tone from text is a bitch.
Also being a young and rich state probably pushed things to eleven.
"This is a story of the Battle of the Atlantic, the story of the ocean, two ships, and a handful of men. The men are the heroes; the heroines the ships. The only villain is the sea, the cruel sea that man has made more cruel."
Start looking out for any online discussion involving anti-Asian racism / attacks, the housing crisis, etc. and you'll see posts like "but what about the CPP?" and "aren't Asians the most racist against blacks?"
https://twitter.com/alanrmacleod/status/1474350856476762115?...
That’s like anti-Putin sentiment being equal to being racist against Slavs.
In what way is "but CCP bad" an appropriate response to "another old Chinese lady brutally attacked on the street"?
Also bold of us to assume the media is honest about the CCP when it is not even honest about domestic politicians.
I think the past efforts were pretty blatant. I think we just know more about how they operate and so it becomes easier to see.
> wokeism
Would love to know what this means.
https://twitter.com/raytheontech/status/880497266255175685?l...
It's not that there's something wrong with gay rights, or any other specific social cause powerful organizations adopt. It's just that it's a very cheap way to win a positive image for things that ... would have trouble getting a positive image if focus was on their core business.
Also, I don't really see the connection between this tweet and Holywood.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/09/yemen-us-made...
Raytheon lobbies for Mideast arm sales. In the hierarchy of shit they need to be ethical on, LGBTQ rights is not really top of the list. It’s nice though, nonetheless.
No connection to Hollywood of course, Raytheon would love nothing more than war never being mentioned. The more they can sell outside of the US and not have anyone know it’s causing genocide in places like Yemen, the better.
Twitter is a lot of posturing, and the tweet is posturing "look how progressive/ethical/whatever I am". GP is simply pointing out that yes, supporting gay rights is a good thing, but the person overall is still a piece of shit for all the atrocities they implicitly support. The gay rights stance, even if genuine, simply can't balance that out.
You may view the tweet as 'posturing', but we have seen no evidence that it is not the expression of a sincerely held belief. This is the sort of attitude that I was talking about when I said that HN seems to like to spin complex narratives around LGBTQ rights advocacy. Sometimes people speak out for LGBTQ rights because...they support LGBTQ rights. And that's all there is to it.
If you don't like other stuff that Raytheon does, then it makes a lot more sense to criticise them for doing that other stuff than it does to spin speculative narratives around the motivation behind their pro-LGBTQ tweets.
Imagine, in the age of chivalry, a lord who arrives at every battle with his forces - but who delays his arrival until the battle is already won, and always joins the winning side.
You might well say arriving late is better than not arriving at all. Perhaps there are some last pockets of resistance, you wouldn't turn down his help sweeping those up.
Alternately, you might say they are cowardly, insincere opportunists. They ended up on on the right side, but the timing calls their sincerity into doubt.
To some people, all LGBTQ 'activism' by Fortune 500 companies looks like this. Especially if their 'activism' doesn't extend to their middle east or russian divisions.
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 opportunist if they weren't speaking out in favor of gay rights then? What if they were an adult in the 1960s and didn't support the Stonewall riots?
As a gay person, it means something to me that a company is willing to speak out publicly in support of its LGBTQ employees. No-one is perfect and no-one is free from hypocrisy. All of us have probably blown with the wind on certain social issues where we could have spoken up earlier if we'd had more courage and moral clarity.
This holier-than-thou cynicism about corporate LGBTQ activism is extremely destructive, in my opinion. In the final analysis it only gives succour to those who are opposed to LGBTQ rights. For actual gay people, the massive shift in corporate attitudes to LGBTQ employees is a huge deal, and has real practical benefits in our lives.
Edit: By the way, a little bit of internet research suggests that Raytheon are actually pretty above average in their support for LGBTQ rights. E.g. they have been praised by the HRC: https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/defense-giant-raytheon-pr... And here's some news coverage dating back to 2006: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006...
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.
I do agree that people back then appear to care less about arm dealings. I beleive they care more today then back then. And that people also care about a lot of other unethical practices certain large corporations get involve with. I think people always cared, but information didn't flow as fast, broadly, and independently as today, and even that is being fought against (again by large corporations). If you don't think diversion coupled with virtue signaling is a thing and that it is elaborated precisely for their desired effect, fine. I shared my perspective and the one many people beleive is undoubtful at this point.
Weapon dealing / wars are beside the point perhaps but directly relate to the whole thread: Hollywood propaganda.
Gay rights and a few other issues satisfy both groups.
Whenever I see someone use “woke” as an insult… it’s been an inconsistent mishmash that matches what was called “political correctness gone mad” when I was a kid — stuff the user doesn’t like but knows better than to say plainly that they don’t like.
Of course, I know plenty of people who have used the word “woke” positively, in the same way I know people who respond to “X is PC gone mad” with “X & PC is just being polite to people”.
Hard to tell what the common current use is though, given the lack of social connection during the pandemic and living in a non-English speaking country. Online polls have a self-selection bias, but I wouldn’t know in which direction that bias alters results.
Once it stops being about fighting back against the black community being murdered in broad daylight by police or striking for $15/hour and starts being about "unthreatening-to-state-and-capital" topics like pronoun choice and diversity quotas in the C suite it starts to look a bit ridiculous.
And thats the point where a lot people start to hear about it and reject what they see.
Urban dictionary can help you out if you really don't know https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woke
Pretending to be bravely battling fascism and tyranny on behalf of the oppressed while censoring for theocratic and communist dictatorships is Hollywood's bread and butter. Not just Hollywood for that matter, a lot of multinational corporations in other industries too.
Giving black actors roles in areas normally dominated by white actors? That’s awesome! But whenever this happens loads of people online will claim that is “wokeism”.
Representation for gay, lesbian, queer, and trans people in media? Wow that’s great! Many complain this is “wokeism”.
Recognizing that trans women are women and trans men are men? 100% that’s the bare minimum and I am happy to see it. “Wokeism”
The real reason I asked was to get people on here to reveal what kind of progress they are against.
Of course there is sometimes an element of hypocrisy suggested in the “wokeism” complaint. But there’s always hypocrites. Sometimes accusations of hypocrisy are used as a smoke screen to simply complain about there being gay people on the television.
Forgive me if you were being genuine, but frequently when I see the word used on the internet, I see replies from people who seem utterly bewildered and claim that they really want to know what the word means. But it's trivial to find out what this or any other word or slang word means with a simple internet search, so it doesn't really seem like they care to learn what it means but rather they are trying to make a statement or trying to use cheap rhetoric to cast aspersion on the post being replied to without actually addressing it in any coherent way. Then when definitions are proffered, they are often not met with gratitude and understanding but with argumentation -- suddenly they do know what it means.
EDIT: Ah I misread your post you indeed were not asking sincerely, you were actually feigning ignorance as I thought. Worse, you're misrepresenting what the word means and baselessly attacking the parent poster as a bigot, and you have refused to walk that back or provide any evidence for these insults. This is a good example of behavior that is described as wokeism.
> they’re complaining about things that I think are good.
That's not what woke means though, it's clearly about hypocrisy and insincerity and performative pointless acts or gestures. Did you not read the definition I gave you, or were you being insincere when you asked about the meaning of the word in the first place? Also, the parent poster did not seem to be complaining about any of the things you are talking about here, if you are making that claim that they are bigoted it's very serious I hope you have some good reason to do so. I would go so far as to say it's totally against the site rules so you need to clarify.
I mentioned the bigotry because honest to god that’s the times where I hear people use it - complaining about the most basic progressive representation. It really seems (to me) like people who use it tend to be straight white men who don’t like that some spaces are making room for people who aren’t like them. But the term isn’t used in my circles, so I really don’t know what the “common” use is.
There is nothing hypocritical about denouncing A while someone else does X.
The OP's argument was that modern movies are political propaganda supporting "wokeism", so a concrete example where Hollywood movies are often - intentionally or otherwise - effective propaganda for America's gun glorification and violent self defence lobby despite actors involved in such projects insisting they are personally against gun violence seems to be the direct opposite.
On the other hand, many people [not involved in this thread] have cited the example of a black, female 007 as 'wokeism'. This does not appear to be an example of Hollywood filmmakers being insincere in their belief that black females should be cast in roles traditionally not occupied by black female actors, and it's rather more evident some objectors for whatever reason simply don't want them cast in that role.
Hollywood films allegedly being "woke propaganda", which was the claim which started this "what do you mean by woke?" subthread. Films which glorify guns are categorically not examples of Hollywood anti-gun propaganda; if they are any sort of propaganda at all, as opposed to just stuff that sells, they are clearly very non-'woke' pro-gun propaganda.
> I don't think it's necessarily an example of that although for some people perhaps it is. But the fact that Hollywood has excluded such people from such roles and then they take a specific role that was developed by a white man and put a black woman into it "because it's time", and make a big noise about how wonderful they are for doing such a thing is near the epitome of insincerity and hypocrisy in my opinion. I don't have a problem with them deviating from a checklist of skin color, genitalia, and sexual preferences for traditional roles like this (are all the previous 007s the same height, same hair color, same eye color?), I have a problem with them endlessly going on about how wonderful they are, how all those other people are racist and sexist, for us only to find out that hey it's not the redneck from West Virginia who has been writing and producing and acting in these exclusionary Bond movies all these years. Turns out it was Hollywood all along. And the "fix" they congratulate themselves for is not to actually put effort into develop characters and roles and stories that different people have the opportunity to make their own and different audiences can build a following with. They just do the cheap "this character is now a black woman" thing. I realize not everybody sees it that way, but that's my opinion and I don't see how it's invalid or based on bigotry
Do I think Hollywood not casting certain people was a Hollywood decision? Yes. Do I think they deserve massive congratulations for casting Lashana Lynch? No. And if you want to argue the black 007 character wasn't actually that great or big a deal, fine. I'd largely agree with you on both points.
But for many years prior to Lashana Lynch being cast, there were people insisting that the idea of a black 007 was "woke propaganda or "political correctness gone mad" that should be opposed. I think it's something of a heroic stretch to suggest that their real objection of the anti-'woke' crowd to the casting of a black 007 was that Hollywood ought to have done it much earlier.
Which is a moot point really, since my original point was that the objection was for whatever reason to the scripting and casting decision itself, not to the possibility that the filmmaker might be insincere in supporting black characters (there are people who rail against Hollywood for that, but they tend to be dismissed as obsessively 'woke' themselves)
One is that it's allegedly racist in itself ("It's a black role for a black actor") and the other that it's superficial tokenist wokeism and against the natural order of things. ("It's a black role for a black actor.")
In related news There was controversy in the UK this week about a famous Jewish actor complaining that former Israeli premier Golda Meir might be played in a new movie by a non-Jewish woman.
I find this all quite strange. The whole point of art is imagination. Expecting actors who are playing to a stereotype to actually be that stereotype makes as much as demanding that only real retired spies can play James Bond, and only real time travellers can play Doctor Who.
But perhaps that's not a popular view. These roles are tribal totems and morality markers, and casting against that reveals how they operate.
The real problem is the nature of status and hierarchy. Conservatives get very uncomfortable when status and hierarchy are challenged, and many liberals assume they're challenging status and hierarchy when really they're just challenging a certain ordering, and not the abstract principle.
Personally I find too much US media output has a lot in common with plain old everyone-is-a-warrior fascism. I'm really bored by big dumb movies and TV shows which are all about spurting blood and super-athletic ultra-violence in the pursuit of some dystopian Randian mix of self-defence and self-interest.
I don't care if the actors are male, female, white, non-white, gay, trans, or cyborgs. I do care about what they're doing, and most of it isn't that interesting.
You seem to be the one asserting that the word has only one true meaning. That is absolutely false. The word originated with one meaning and has been co-opted by other groups including onew that have used word in ironic or sarcastic ways that have twisted that meaning.
It is thus perfectly legitimate to ask people, especially those who you think are using the ironic meaning, what they mean when they use the word
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
I am not the GP but this sort of "this is good"/"you are a bad person" litany is exactly what is off-putting to many people.
I won't even comment on "The real reason I asked was to get people on here to reveal what kind of progress they are against."...
And as for entertainment strong moral undertones are enemies of fun.
Nothing is 100% objective-truth. Recognize this, and get over it.
Why is that verboten? Why is it different than any other subplot of a personal challenge? It's a common part of real life.
The vast majority of representation on my "kind" is the same shit, over and over again.
No, I do not sympathise with the Latino nor Brazilian stereotype and it is grating seeing it played straight so often. It feels like they are trying to pander to me.
That is annoying and the sort of stuff I'd rather avoid if I am consuming fiction.
It almost becomes a distraction to the overall plot, versus something like Starwars where the good versus evil is non-specific enough it has universal appeal.
I think if you look at overall black representation among actors, you will see it was very low. If you look for some in your memory, you will find them of course.
Even now, almost everything is led by a white person. Even in animation, almost everyone is white. Or look at sci-fi movies, where there are often as many or more alien species as non-white humans.
> The woke with their CRT and racial segregation policies (telling children that race really matters a lot) have ruined everything.
What is being told the children by whom? What does CRT say? If you dispute that race has a large (though certainly undesireable) impact on life, you are living in a sci-fi fantasy.
> ruined everything
I think it has, or threatens to, burst many bubbles, which 'ruins' many fantasies. Just talk to people with actual experience of it, such as black people, and you will find out just how isolated we have been from reality. Most white people don't do that because they don't have many black people in their personal network, which should be a signal.
I don't know much about CRT but when I google high ranking results[1], the very first tenet is literally the opposite of your claim: Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant.
[1]: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
If not "almost everything [was] led by a white person" it would be an under or over representation of multiple races, at least if it is supposed to be a "representation" of the western world*. You can google "us race demographics" and it will conveniently bring up a table showing 76.3% white and 13.4% black. I think some people forget that a motely crew of exactly one of every race is someone's utopian ideal with no basis in reality. And it's not hard to extend that idea to any arbitrary subset of humans in almost any context.
*The entire world isn't any "better": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_world
Edit: googled "actor demographics":
There are over 19,730 Actors currently employed in the United States. 32.1% of all Actors are women, while 63.9% are men. The average age of an employed Actor is 37 years old. The most common ethnicity of Actors is White (59.5%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (15.6%) and Black or African American (13.9%).
If someone's personal experience with actor demographics doesn't reflect that, its most likely because what they typically watch doesn't reflect it and not because of a systemic imbalance.
If you look at who is hired and admitted, that discrimination isn't accomplishing much!
Also, discrimination is about power; in its significant meaning, it requires power. If the owner of a tiny restuarant discriminates against you because you are a white male person, it is obnoxious but that is all the damage; you are safe, just go someplace else. If the government or the powerful majority discriminates against you, brutalizing you, arresting you, denying you work, etc. then it is very serious and damages your life and safety.
What changes - occasionally, in some places - is that white people and males no longer benefit from an affirmative action program that favors them - a ridiculous situation for the most powerful group in society. Look at sports as a simple example: Until the late 1940s, Major League Baseball only employed white players - it was a massive affirmative action program for white guys, who would not otherwise get the jobs. There was a great uproar, including among players, when they lost just a little of the privilege (the first year, in all of baseball, there were 1-2 non-white players. It took decades before the white guy affirmative action program disappeared.)
Being discriminated against in hiring by the government and most major academic and media organizations is being discriminated against by power. We're not talking about mom and pop shops, obviously.
I mean, sure, for all I know the common use where you are really is exactly what you’re saying, but one thing I’ve never noticed (caveat: easy to miss when it’s text and no faces) is a member of a minority saying “stop being woke, you don’t get us at all” (everything after the coma, yes, but never calling that “woke”). Given how big the anglosphere is (and the fluid nature of language), I don’t don’t that this use has happened at least once by someone in a position to actually use it appropriately, but I mainly see one majority person saying something and another majority person saying the first guy is woke without any apparent involvement from whichever minority is the topic. Or, indeed, the “that’s just woke” accuser insisting that the token minority person who agrees with the first person that $thing is bad is wrong and needs to shut up.
Of course, I also accept that what I see on news shows is basically entertainment these days, so I don’t trust even that experience much either.
> You don't let trolls dictate what you understand of any other words, do you?
Well, the derogatory use appears to have been created by those I would call trolls, but as for other words? Heathen, do-gooder, bleeding heart, papist, yokel, redneck, fag, nerd, socialist… trolls have [re]defined words as insults throughout history.
Wikipedia absolutely does not list it as a hypocritical or insincere thing. Wikipedia defines it as "alert to perceived racial prejudice and discrimination"
The Wikipedia definition you quote funnily enough is the one I described, "Opponents of progressive social movements often use the term mockingly or sarcastically, implying that 'wokeness' is an insincere form of performative activism."
So you're confusing me quite a bit, first you tell me I shouldn't let trolls dictate what words mean, only for then doing exactly that yourself, citing the definition trolls and opponents use.
And another thing - Urban Dictionary can certainly be used to get to know what online slang, memes mean. Using it as an official definition for a word is a bit wrong though, seeing as how UD is more about tongue-in-cheek joke definitions.
So in the end, I frankly don't really know what you want to tell me, not meaning this in a rude way.
Wikipedia absolutely does.
"using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies perceived as over-zealous, performative, or insincere."
Which is basically what the top urban dictionary results say. I use that because it reacts a bit faster to contemporary usage. And it's obvious that is the definition was being used here.
> And another thing - Urban Dictionary can certainly be used to get to know what online slang, memes mean. Using it as an official definition for a word is a bit wrong though, seeing as how UD is more about tongue-in-cheek joke definitions.
That's not how English works, there is no "official" definition except how people use words. Dictionaries, whether Urban or Oxford, record their observations about the language, they do not define it. Woke is widely used exactly as urbandictionary and the quoted part of the wikipedia page say.
Don't take this in a rude way, but I'm frankly flabbergasted that people have such a difficult time comprehending this usage of the word. I suspect a lot of it is insincere, and all of it stems from not liking the definition or the people or comments that tend to use the word.
Well, yes, I wrote myself that Wikipedia quotes it as a negative thing, but in the chapter where they list examples of people using it wrongly. The official definition they write in the beginning of the article is not negative. The section we're both quoting from is literally called "Woke as a pejorative term".
> I'm frankly flabbergasted that people have such a difficult time comprehending this usage of the word
I know how people (mis)use the word. There's the original and official meanings,
- "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues" - Merriam Webster
- "alert to perceived racial prejudice and discrimination" - Wikipedia
Then there's people who use woke as an insult and changing the meaning of the word completely, the definitions we now both talked about and can be found on UD and on Wikipedia, and I'm repeating myself here, but in the section where they list the pejorative(!) usages.
One other funny detail of using UD as official definition is that it has 60 pages filled with different interpretations.
Even funnier to me is that the 6th most upvoted definition is a quote by Paul Joseph Watson, a far-right conspiracy theorist.
I still don't understand why you pretend like I don't know the different meanings of woke. I was complaining about people using the word woke to just complain about anything left from them they don't like, which is as embarrassing and childish as people on the left labeling everyone they don't like as a fascist and thus also completely misusing a pretty well-defined word.
But it seems to me that this is exactly the strategy of someone like Paul Joseph Watson. Taking a word which is used positively by people he doesn't like, start to use it negatively while hoping that this trend catches on until the word has the opposite meaning of what it once meant, while at the same time discrediting people who used it in a positive way.
And probably everybody in this thread knew all that full well from the start.
All I said was that it's a red flag for me when people use the word woke to slander anything politically left they don't like. When they once used "marxist", "communist", "liberal" and other words to just quickly dismiss things they simply don't like (without these things relating at all to the word they're using), now it seems to be "woke".
Basically, woke started out as a way to say that someone is aware of social issues. You seem to like to talk about what Wikipedia has to say about this word, so let me summarize,
In the 1930, woke was first being used as "referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans". In 2014 the meaning slightly transformed to "raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans" and in 2017 it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary where they (still) define it as "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice".
Only then, in 2020, did it change. "parts of the political center and right wing in several Western countries were using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies"
People certainly used woke negatively before 2020, but pretending like this is 100% the meaning of it is just a lie. Is it negative in the context of this comment chain here? Yes, of course, but your statements about "'woke' has a definition that is basically insincerity and/or hypocrisy" are not true. It's one of the definitions some people use, but it is not "the" definition of the word.
Yes, today this word has a pretty negative meaning, but that's because right-wing reactionary trolls started to purposefully misuse it to put this word in a bad light. It was used in a positive way for almost 90 years apparently, and I first heard it being used in a positive way on TikTok and other social media platforms.
I don't even know why I am writing so much about this freaking word, and I still don't know how any of this relates to my original comment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's what you can read in my comment: "The Wikipedia definition you quote funnily enough is the one I described, "Opponents of progressive social movements often use the term MOCKINGLY or SARCASTICALLY, implying that 'wokeness' is an insincere form of performative activism."" and then I mentioned that this is the definition for PEJORATIVE uses.
At this point I can only assume that you act in bad faith or have severe struggles with reading, seeing how you ignore most of what I say and misenterpret the cherry-picked rest.
If women are a group historically discriminated against by virtue of their sex (female, different physicality, different reproductive role) rather than by their gender (feminine, caring, pretty, submissive, domestic, …) then is the fusing of sex and gender truly progressive? Is it medically, scientifically or philosophically true to assert TWAW, or is it a well-intentioned social fiction?
Like you, I believe there’s much to be commended in “woke” (including the full acceptance of people who wish to live as if they were the other sex, or of no sex) but I think the mechanism (identity politics, intersectionality) and the philosophy (postmodernist) are unhelpful and irrational.
Are they? And is that the definition of gender? submissive?! It's hard to think of someone I know now, who identifies as female, who fits your definition.
And if true, what does some historical discrimination have to do with someone's personal belief of themselves? If I think I'm non-binary, does the historical reason for discrimination against women change me somehow?
And who are you or I to tell someone else what their identity is? That just seems bizarre to me.
> postmodernist
Ironically, most people criticizing post-moderinism are using it as the mechanism of their critique - which is especially post-modernist!
Accepting trans people is about separating gender and sex, not fusing them.
Wokeism is in part an ideology and a set of political goals, but it is also a means of competition. It is the foundation for a system of verbal duelling that determines who gets the limited number of spots at the top of our hierarchy. Like the Edwardian's preoccupation with gossip and scandal or the Aztec's ritual sacrifice of losing ullamaliztli players, it's a means for an overproduced elite to thin its ranks. An excellent example of Wokeness-as-duelling is the story of Annamie Paul, a Canadian politician. Annamie Paul was a woman and lawyer from a dark-skinned Jewish family - this will become important later - who won leadership of the Canadian Green Party. From a Woke standpoint that was the desired outcome, a black woman can become leader of a political party, aren't we wonderful. But winning a position of power and wielding it well are two different things, and Annamie Paul faced a leadership challenge over her position on Israel-Palestine. It was quite mainstream for a western country, but not for Canadian Green party voters. As the back-and-forth turned acrimonious, she alleged her critics were motivated by racism. Public support for the Green party, which had been making slow advances over the preceding years, collapsed spectacularly in the next election.
It's not hard to see, with the benefit of standing outside the fray, what Annamie Paul's mistake was. A Jewish woman, asked about the situation of the Palestinian people, can only acknowledge her privilege, and if she wishes to make no concessions she must pay the political price of not using her privilege to benefit the less fortunate. She could not, in that context, allege racism because in the context of that particular debate, she was of the privileged race - technically religion, but in that context the distinction wasn't important. The rules of Woke competition are by design self-contradictory, but they are still taken seriously, and everyone could see that she had violated them. So she lost the position she had attained, and given the hit to her reputation will need more effort and luck than she spent to get it if she is to attain another as lofty.
Now, what is wrong with any of that? In my opinion, nothing. For Annamie Paul I can only say 'live by the sword, die by the sword', if she'd been able to demonstrate genuine compassion for Palestine she could have walked out of that trap as easily as she walked in. As for the broader effect on society, Woke competition actually selects for the qualities I'd want in my elite. Verbal intelligence, compassion, and tolerating paradox are all good qualities for an elite class to possess. Further, while it's easy for a hypocrite to use it to attain higher rank, it's very hard to retain said rank unless one genuinely displays the virtues Wokeness demands. But, and of course there's a but, it is a system that produces winners and losers, and the losers get to have a say. In particular, straight white men are shut out of a lot of targeted benefits and mutual aide societies others have access to, while being discouraged from forming our own. It takes the arrogance of a rich white man to look at a system like Woke competition and say, "I can win that". So of course, poor white men don't think it's a game worth playing, and when they denounce the structure of the game, any rich white man - or rich white woman for that matter - who tries to argue against them finds themselves in the same position as Annamie Paul, punching down in public. That, of course, makes it worthwhile for people winning the game to use said PWM as a vector to demonstrate their own compassion and attack their competition.
This only changes when the rules of the game adjust to be more reflective of the actual difference between rich and poor. Woke competition does allow for a change of the rules, but it's currently not clear whether such an adjustment would require an overhaul o...
However, that would be sufficient if it was just talk but there seems to be plenty of walk there as well.
Whereas look at the actual positions of political power. Biden/Harris -- they're both horrific in many wokeness metrics. Rich old privileged straight white, war monger, sexual assault allegations, top cop whose record on imprisoning black people is problematic, descendant of slave owner, and of course staunch supporters of Israel just to name a few (I'm not saying these are fair or valid criticisms but it's all prime woke ammunition).
Yet somehow it doesn't affect them. For all the dueling and competition among the elites (or at least their political representatives) you're imagining, very little wokeism was used against them as far as I could see. They also required very little verbal intelligence, compassion, or tolerance.
What they had is an elite and their corporations who consolidated around them and protect them, don't ask the wrong questions and don't bring out the woke attack dogs. The opposite of dueling and infighting.
And in your last paragraph you're acting like the systems are set up by (or at least is able to be changed by) and for the benefit of people who are not the rich elites. The evidence points to the opposite. It is clearly a tool to divide the underclass and insulate the ruling class.
I disagree with the idea that even the kind of elites you mean aren't affected though, and I'd point to the example of Andrew Cuomo for evidence. It's very plausible that Andrew Cuomo's calls in the early days of covid cost a number of people their lives, that's all the reason any party would need to remove a prominent member. But when he was removed it was through a set of sexual assault allegations that someone had clearly been sitting on for some time. When infighting did erupt, woke competition was the weapon of choice.
As for my last paragraph, that was in small part assertive optimism, in large part a rhetorical device, and just a touch of sarcasm. People like you after all don't need convincing there's a problem with woke competition, it was addressed to people who buy into it. That woke competition is only intended to divide the underclasses can be easily dismissed as the author hiding from his racial privilege, that it has that effect unintentionally because of unconscious privilege by the rich... the rules of the game practically require believing that.
We are. I have no doubt that "woke" is used by lots of people to attack one another. It's a great tool that divides people against one another and insulates the ruling class.
>The way I use it I'm thinking more of the most influential 10% than 1%. People who have it better than most citizens, but their position is precarious. So more the democratic party insiders Biden/Harris bullied into tilting the odds against Sanders/Yang/Gabbard than just Biden/Harris themselves. Of course, my theory does require that Biden/Harris spent a long time in the trenches honing their skills in this kind of dominance struggle. If you don't think they thrived in that environment for so long through being better at earlier versions of woke competition I'd be curious what you think the selection mechanism was. Another thing you might not have noticed about Woke Competition is that it's not about being a perfect person or having no skeletons in your closet. One of the presuppositions is that we all have something undeserving about us and need to keep that fact constantly in mind.
I'm not sure what you mean. Biden and Harris simply weren't attacked with any of the woke stuff which they both have ample material including support for Israel! It's not that other people didn't want to be president or other big donors did not want others to be president.
> I disagree with the idea that even the kind of elites you mean aren't affected though, and I'd point to the example of Andrew Cuomo for evidence. It's very plausible that Andrew Cuomo's calls in the early days of covid cost a number of people their lives, that's all the reason any party would need to remove a prominent member. But when he was removed it was through a set of sexual assault allegations that someone had clearly been sitting on for some time. When infighting did erupt, woke competition was the weapon of choice.
Well firing someone for sexual assault is not woke. Covering up the sexual crimes so it can be used as leverage and/or blackmail while at the same time contgratulating yourselves about how you're the hero of women and denouncing others is woke, but it's that hypocrisy. Using blackmail and little black books to sink politicians who outlive their usefulness is just standard operating procedure in politics and predates woke by centuries.
> As for my last paragraph, that was in small part assertive optimism, in large part a rhetorical device, and just a touch of sarcasm. People like you after all don't need convincing there's a problem with woke competition, it was addressed to people who buy into it. That woke competition is only intended to divide the underclasses can be easily dismissed as the author hiding from his racial privilege, that it has that effect unintentionally because of unconscious privilege by the rich... the rules of the game practically require believing that.
I didn't get that. It sounded like you thought woke was good (selects for qualities you want in your elites, only needs small tweak to improve), and that you thought your elites are interested in your interests ('which they will remedy with all haste once it is brought to their attention').
I've seen it being tossed around on Reddit when there's post about US politics/US social issues and it always looked to me like a generic insult thrown at somebody who doesn't like the more conservative "side" of the US political spectrum. I basically got the impression that it's a shorthand for "You think your opinion and views are modern and hip but I don't share the same view on the world and you are stupid due to that". Reading now Urban dictionary, I see that I was.. kinda on the right track?
US is really weird :)
Let's take the most popular definition there:
Again, as a non-native English speaker I have to click through "pretentious". The most popular definition: (btw, as far as I can tell, there's no word or phrase for the same thing in my native language. Which might already start to explain why the whole concept is hard to really understand for me)So somebody who calls someone else "woke" looks to be, often, trying to discredit the other person, while simultaneously boosting their own status by making the statement that the other person has ulterior motives and does not actually hold the beliefs that they are saying that they hold.
Idk.. it looks like I'm too far from the US culture to really understand this. When somebody says that they think that gay people should not have equal rights to non-gay people, then I see no reason to assume that they don't actually hold that belief and that they would be pretentious. When somebody says the opposite - that gay people should have the same rights than non-gay people then again, I see no reason to assume that they don't actually hold that belief and are pretentious.
Nothing about this looks to have anything to do with progressiveness or hypocrisy or insincerity as far as I can tell but for some reason there's a made-up word to tell the other "side" that "I know you are full of shit and you don't actually believe in what you say".
I am sure your language does have a word that is pretty similar to "pretentious" though it may not have all of the conotations. I recommend a real dictionary that has multiple good definitions or a good cross-language dictionary that can give you several alternate words in your language that map to the various uses of "pretentious".
"Woke" is even more complicated. It is a word that originated over half a century ago in African American culture as part of the civil rights movement. It meant being aware of and working to fight racial injustice. It was then coopted a decade ago by progressive people working on a broader range of social justice issues to describe awareness of those issues. It was then further co-opted by conservative people to mock progressive people as pretentious.
The poster is trying to pretend that only this last meaning is real and valid. They are either ignorant or a racist troll working to further the co-opting of the term.
I used Urban Dictionary for "pretentious" due to the OP explicitly referring to it to understand the meaning of woke.
But this got me intrigued now :) I still can't think of a phrase or word in Estonian that would convey the same (or even similar) meaning. I searched through a couple of dictionaries now and the translations provided there are really not useful. They mean either "complains a lot" or alternatively "has unreasonably high standards / is high maintenance", "braggy" and "pedantic". And these doesn't sound even remotely close to the English explanation of the word.. at all.
Any fellow Estonians wanna help me out here - is there a phrase or word that would capture the essence of "pretentious" in Estonian? :)
Another English word that is very similar in meaning is "ostentatious".
If I had to write out my own definition of "pretentious" it would be: Pretending to be higher class, more refined, more educated or more moral than you actually are and implying that makes you superior to other people.
You could argue that accusing a target of being pretentious is being pretentious, except that it may be a fact. So we have to keep digging, a quest for the truth rather than just adopting one of the existing interpretations.
Also to note, being pretentious doesn't imply conscious act. Like arrogance, the subject isn't necessarily aware, although it may be.
Are woke supporters pretentious? Either way, let's accept some may well be, and if so, it wouldn't be reasonable to dismiss anyone calling that out as pretentious. Not dismissing the fact some of the wokes opponents may well be the ones being pretentious, or as pretentious as the woke. In any case it has become a sided political clash, we will only settle to a predominant interpretation on this matter once fight is over.
It doesn't imply "deliberately trying to appear pretentious", but it does imply "deliberately pretending to be something"
Calling someone woke is discrediting the other person. Its like a signal to other people (especially the people who also often use this word), 'this person is politically aligned with X, this person cannot be right'. Its an insult, but so is the term 'wappie' (used in The Netherlands for people 'who don't believe in corona'). Faggot (when not in UK referring to gay person), nazi (when the person clearly isn't). These are all examples of insulting terms. They're polarizing. Even calling someone a communist when they clearly aren't is insulting, because communism is historically related to dictatorial regimes as well as purges (Stalinism comes to mind).
If they call themselves a communist (or a liberal, or a conservative, a nazi, woke, or whatever), fair game. But calling someone else that way when they did not identify with such is uncalled for. Because you put them on a political spectrum, with all kind of strings and assumptions attached to it.
Now, interestingly, calling someone a nazi or a faggot gets you downvoted or banned on most forums, but with a term like woke people still get away with. Not sure why.
According to Google Translate, pretentious translates to pretensioonikas in Estonian as the most popular translation, so it seems like it got borrowed from English (not implying it originates from English, I don't know about the etymology).
[1] $ dict pretentious
3 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]: From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thesaurus]:[...]
"pretensioonikas" means basically "one who has high demands / expectations" in Estonian :(
For what it’s worth, I am a native English speaker from the UK and living in Germany, and I kind of agree with you about how the word “woke” appears to get used in practice. I’ve certainly never witnessed a member of a minority saying “your support for people like me is just insincere woke nonsense, stop it”, despite my ex being a stereotype of Champagne socialism and therefore getting the opportunity to see what happens when she did make mistakes while trying to support minority causes.
If this is a US cultural thing, that might also explain it.
I answered a question about the definition of the word as it was being used. Obviously the definition is making you very angry, but I'm just the messenger here I did not make the post that used the word in the first place, and I didn't make up the definition.
Over time, as some of this progressive-minded population became more extreme/absurd, the term came to represent that absurdity and became more of an epithet. Students protesting because they believed the proprietor of a shop on campus was racist when he physically stopped some students attempting to shoplift, because they were black. A rich black female college student who entered a cafeteria was asked to leave, and became the center of a large movement (with ACLU support) outraged at being targeted for eating while black, resulting in the staff members being fired. Members of the ACLU supporting a campaign to censor a book for trans-related wrongthink. These sorts of excesses began to be associated with the term, so now, while it can be used both ways, is more commonly associated with the loud, militant, and extremist portions of the progressive movement, and is generally used as a derogatory term.
I can't speak for the other person, but the term is so loaded that it's lost meaning, and it seems important to define your meaning if we are going to talk about it. I agree that it's a bit disingenous to just ask for a definition rather than say, 'that term is so loaded; what do you mean by it?'
It basically means hypocrisy and/or insincerity toward popular progressive causes. That's the meaning. There's also an older one which has mostly been displaced as far as I'm aware, but if it's still used it also has a pretty well defined meaning. In context, at least in this context, it was not ambiguous which meaning was being used.
A bizarre claim only made by people who attack progressives.
You saying you’re completely baffled by this term, or asking for the poster’s particular meaning?
I’d draw a parallel to “White supremacy”. Given the wild range of applications for the term, you need to get a sense of what any one wielder really means.
But it’d be quite obtuse to reply “what’s White supremacy?”
No one in my social circles uses “wokeness” at all, certainly never seriously. It always seems like people upset at “wokeness” are actually just upset that people producing popular media support very simple concepts of diversity. Like when black actors get representation in media previously dominated by white people, to me that is just a good thing, but I see reports that many think this is “wokeness”, which they think is bad. This ultimately reveals that they simply do not like it when white people have to share space with people of other skin tones. Their concerns always seem to me to be… misplaced. In other instances the person may be unhappy about female representation, or trans, queer and non-binary representation. Those are all thinks I think are great. I’m non-binary and it’s really meaningful to me. So when someone calls those things “wokeism” I don’t actually see “wokeism” as the problem I see that persons ideas as the problem.
Hope that answers your questions!
In the 90s Will Smith starred in Independence Day, and absolutely no one complained (as far as I know) because Will Smith is awesome and he deserved the role. See also Blade from the same era.
People get upset when it's clear that a person has been chosen for a role/position just because of their skin colour/gender/sexuality rather than their talent. I can't actually think of any movies that have done this, but plenty of TV shows (Star Trek Discovery).
Obviously some roles require the person to be of a certain race for it to appear authentic. Lots of older films used white actors for middle Eastern roles, which is seen as "white washing" and is therefore wrong. The latest Ghost in the Shell race swapped the main character to be American, and was rightly called out for doing so.
Basically we should be allowed to criticize both ways...
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/07/independence-day-studio-re...
In this case, though, the roles are reversed. The supposedly "woke" studio system didn't want to put a black guy in the lead, whereas the public were more open to the idea.
Could you prove to us in some way that these actors are chosen because of their skin colour/gender/sexuality, and not because of their skills?
I'm not sure any amount of acting talent could save Discovery. The problem is the writing.
The Dark Tower was a sore spot for me. The protagonist was a character inspired by Clint Eastwood and was depicted as fair skinned in every piece of cover art and spinoff before Idris Elba was cast in the role. Blackwashing a character fans of the story all imagined as white really underscored how little appreciation the movie makers had for the source material.
It is a headstone marking the semantic battlefield where competing definitions killed the possibility of clear communication, and now it means nothing.
I’m wondering what specifically you disagree with and why that is a cult?
There are many long magazine articles discussing whether wokeness is a religion or cult. Either way, it has completely derailed all political discourse for the benefit of the most privileged (as defined by money).
And in the media world, it means that everything is now over-the-top preachy, and that scoring political points has become more important than making good art. Sucks, but at least there are plenty of classic movies to re-watch.
It was also used in stoner / party culture around that time to describe being in on the secret that the government was bad, capitalism was bad, etc.
Maybe directly influenced by the movie “waking life” but not sure on that. I was a stoner party kid and my memories of that time are pretty hazy. The culture was super accepting, early advocates for lgbtq before it was an acronym, etc. I also remember that group being very very accepting of everyone who had good intentions regardless of views. “___ is good people” was what we used to say. Probably why I dislike the modern version of woke so much.
"The terms woke capitalism and woke-washing have arisen to describe companies who signal support for progressive causes as a substitute for genuine reform. By 2020, parts of the political center and right wing in several Western countries were using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies perceived as over-zealous, performative, or insincere."
But perhaps you knew that already.
And by the way, any cult of group of thoughts, will define themselves as "we are for the good and against the evil; therefore, what exactly do you disagree with ? are you for the evil ?"
What's the case for not removing them?
[1] https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confede...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues...
TV lawyers and doctors however get to hold jargon-filled monologues and be in lead roles.
/rant
It's probably also an issue of writing - walking the line between realism and cool isn't easy, doubly so if the writers aren't themselves technical people. People are still referencing Mcguyver, but nobody's had the hubris to try and reboot that classic.
They did. And it probably got the same treatment mentioned in the article. It survived 5 seasons despite receiving abysmal reviews.
"Young Angus "Mac" MacGyver works for a clandestine organization within the U.S. government, relying on his unconventional problem-solving skills to save lives." [0]
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1399045/
I’m looking for a Walter White money fiend
Who is tony stark?
The only recent and decent "IT guy" series was Mr. Robot and the differences from any other field are obvious. The main "IT guy"-character is presented as socially dysfunctional. The supporting IT-people are tiny little gears turning in their cubicles.
Military - always fighting in the harshest condition, against the toughest enemies, saving the world.
Lawyers - good looking people, living a lavish lifestyle in corner offices of New York skyscrapers, having the cool monologues that wow the courtroom.
Doctors - brilliant but otherwise normal people facing very difficult decisions every day, making brilliant decisions to save life after life, and dealing with loss.
Spies - absolutely superhuman skills and knowledge, constantly capable of turning the tide of any way with a single person concentrated effort. (The more you go towards the "military/spy" side of things, the more likely it becomes about superhumans.)
IT focused movies/characters are probably just not attractive to the wider audience. Or at least nobody really proved that they can be. So even in Mr. Robot didn't focus on the hacking as much as on the larger plot. It simply made a very realistic point of that hacking.
But TV always veers off into personal drama, presumably to chase ratings, whether it's doctors or cops or anyone else.
All the science/tech stuff they do tends to make me cringe. A hair from a nearly-extinct field mouse found in just one park? whatever. I guess that beats big "revelations" you can see coming a mile away.
So it's a stretch but as the team was designated Major Case Team i could see it working
The protagonist is a female programmer, and the male programmer involved becomes a hero and "gets the girl".
As an aside: It's one of the best movies I've seen in the past 2 years. Watch it if you like Ryan Reynolds and are looking for a movie to watch.
That billions of equipment and resources provided by the woke cabala? Let's talk about that instead of military covered intervention in society.
As a citizen from An USA allied country, I find disturbing how much propaganda the military pushes for at global level. That's a very serious matter.
Hundreds of millions are spent worldwide on endowments for universities to push this specific agenda. So, yes, I wouldn't find it surprising if the movie makers are sponsored, too. Now, it's clear why US army would want a positive optics. But who's to benefit from, say, Tajiks internalizing the "oppression scale"?
On the contrary, I asked OP because often times when people talk about woke-agendas, they mean "I don't like seeing black or gay people in my movies", so I tend to wonder what they mean when they say woke.
Please stop this. Every instance of someone referencing something that originated from a culture other than their own is not "appropriation" or "racism".
It's not a coincidence that the establishment in other major genocidal powers (ZA, AU, and UK) jumped on the anti-woke train early on to assist the US in fighting/redefining the concept.
Reminds me of a quote from a history prof, "The main problem with black history is it exposes too much of the fraud in white history... "
Every other usage is metaphoric drift from that.
Casual and false accusations of racism are as wrong as racism itself.
>Every other usage is metaphoric drift from that.
The global cultural influence of African Americans is massive, possibly bigger than any other single group in the US, even after centuries of gatekeeping. A notable style trait of Ebonics is purposely butchering English grammar.
Are you claiming you would use the past tense of 'wake' as the present tense (as in 'stay woke') without African Americans popularizing it? This may be the strangest claim I've heard recently.
BTW, redefining established civil rights concepts to undermine the people and movements tied to them is extremely racist...
Done well, it can be a vehicle for criticising one's own culture in a constructive way. Done poorly, it can be a vehicle for oikophobia and gatekeeping, a means of distinguishing oneself from the naively patriotic proletariate.
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.
> Woke in my experience is more used to describe progressive people and their opinions
Like any hot cultural term, it has become loaded with plenty of other meaning. However, to a degree I think you are talking about the reactionaries' use of the word, which they have adopted to politicize it - to use their endless (and successful) rhetorical technique of attacking the messenger; of saying 'it's just liberals' to shift the discussion from the actual problem, racism. For example, you can see the same technique used for climate change.
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.
Richard Dawkin's wrote a fantastic book called The Selfish Gene on exploring the difference between memetic and mimetic theory that's worth the read.
I think the definition is narrower. I think it's something that completely shifts your persecptive, that is relvelatory. I know things about certain policy issues that the mainstream doesn't - or about IT, but it's not the same.
> 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.
This is the nature of all knowledge - there is no way around thinking critically, using all the skills (empiricism, post-modernism, etc.); it's never easy.
And the most harmful bullshit is that racism is a personal failing rather than a system working as designed; designed by people who will not peacefully let it go.
Yes, an essential point. But it's also a personal choice.
One way or the other you might be having a difficult time seeing that they're both essentially propaganda, but its just the mirror image of the same thing.
I see it used much more on the right, such as in the comment that started this subthread.
EDIT: But otherwise, I think that's an excellent definition.
I don't know anymore.
In some circles / historically it is used to denote liberal/progressive agenda. It's sometimes (often?) meant to be negative/slur, just like some people will use "Socialist!!!" believing it a derogatory term.
However, increasingly it's used as generic term in various conspiracy circles - "Wake up to the truth!" transmogrified to "Woke!". So Woke will be claimed by those who understand the truth about Illuminati/Freemasons/Rothchilds/Vaccines/5G/EM/Israel/etcetcetc.
So between whatever original use there may have been designed, vs today's actual usage on the interwebs, I don't personally find it a useful nomenclature that I can interpret on its own with any degree of confidence. 90% of the time I find it in short rambling sentences of the format of either "Their pushing their fascist woke agenda!!!" or "be woke, don't be sheeple". I generally don't find the term used in any discussion that ends up being in any way productive or enlightening.
(note also my experience that, anybody using it, in any of the above and myriad other senses/terms, will strongly believe their is the only obvious correct usage and resent the notion that there's lack of clarity)
Let's take feminism for example, which is generally considered as pertaining to woke culture, what do feminists want? Well you have sex-positive feminists, sex-negative feminists, you've got the ones that want to legalize sex work, the ones who don't, abortion at every stage no matter the circumstance, abortion in hospitals depending on term, trans inclusive, trans exclusive, men inclusive, men exclusive, men-can-only-be-allies... And I'm not even mentioning different waves of feminism.
It's hard to nail down what it pushes, exactly, but I'd say that a focus on identity politics as opposed to economic issues is a constant. A character existing solely because of their identity, disregarding if it adds anything is, I'd say, peak wokeism.
And I've no doubt many will disagree with that, as some others will with any other take.
As an example, some people think that showing homosexual people in media is part of some wokeist agenda, just virtue signalling and an act of identity politics.
I guess to sum it up, we should probably stop using such general terms and just explain what we think in a couple of sentences. I guess that's where Twitter can be blamed a bit, when you don't have the space to thoroughly explain what you think, you have to resort to abbrevations and single words, in turn making it more confusing for everyone.
Can you list any media (mainstream news, or Hollywood) that are promoting sex-negative or trans exclusive views?
There is no discussion or dissenting views allowed for most “woke” people.
> Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
I would say that almost all entertainment is of a biased nature and is used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
Pamphlets about the end of the world and Christianity--propaganda. The Glenn Beck show--propaganda. NYT editorials about defunding the police--propaganda. Tucker Carlson--propaganda. Joe Biden's Twitter account--propaganda. Portrayals of white men as problematic or evil in Netflix shows--propaganda. Portrayals of black men as problematic or evil in archaic books, shows, movies, etc.--propaganda.
Edit:
I realize I sound a little unhinged. Let me try to be more clear about my point.
If media is deployed with the intent to promote or distribute a worldview, I think it is propaganda. Fox News meets the definition of propaganda because it promotes the worldview "cable news, specifically Fox News, is a source of authority". The fact that it is entertainment is not relevant to its status as propaganda; it gains that status by having a perfect propaganda-like effect on the public. The content of the media that's consumed by the public is less important than what the public believes about the sources putting out the media, and what authority the public lends to the media it consumes.
Here is an article by an anonymous psychiatrist who writes a great deal about how the effect of media is less related to the content, and more related to how media dissemination of information infects and shapes its viewers' model of reality. They are taught how to learn, rather than what to learn, and the how always includes "more listening to the source putting out the information".
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/04/im_not_the_one_you_s...
But it's a very loaded word. One should avoid using loaded words where a less emotional description is applicable. One could as well argue that the use of loaded words is propaganda itself.
You could say "Fox News is a conglomerate of acting/direction/production teams managed by a central financial-focused corporate structure who release carefully curated entertainment segments in order to maximize views from certain demographics", and then describe its effects by saying "People who unironically consume and believe what is said by Fox News representatives typically end up believing verifiably false information".
That would be a very emotionless and more strictly accurate phrase to say than "Fox News is one of the propaganda arms of the broadcast media cartel", which is how I would say it.
Unfortunately, saying it your way allows people to believe they understand it and are protected from its effects. This is not true, in the same way that people are not protected from the propaganda-like effects of advertising just because they can see an ad and not immediately want to go buy the target product.
Fox News is not benign entertainment; do not underestimate its handlers so.
https://archive.ph/gNSym
The (literal) billions described in the NYT article above are just one aspect of the woke, they have many more. They don't just have the money, they have tons of money.
Propaganda != opinion that you disagree with
And I didn't say I disagree with the point they wanted to make. It just seems like a point made so poorly it was painful to watch.
But I don't think the problem was that it was so "thick" so much as that it was so poorly done. Instead of being funny, it just reminded me of school bullies and general idiots, and was far too easy to write to be good satire.
What movies are you thinking of?
Wokeism in mass media is big corporations' fear of missing out and losing customers. Those ideals were shared values of the younger generation decades before the industry adapted to it. Now that these kids have grown up, they are valued as consumers.
The history of this matter remains very clear in most documentaries on the subject both old and new, such as describing the marathon sprint of Zhukov.
I guess some people don't realize that stuff like the Transformers movies were all done with help from the US Military as well.
Probably the same people who don't make the connection with the military displays associated with sporting events (and the national anthem and its military theme before domestic sporting events). Stuff like the Blue Angles. It is all very Roman Empire the way we display our weapons of war, but lots of people can't even see it.
It was about a conflict I never thought about before, and also had me rooting for an anti-hero that on a side that would go on to oppose America, although acknowledgement of the US’ future involvement wasn’t even a part of the movie
Visitors and immigrants to the US must face that all the time, or dont have such nationalistic conditioning to care in the first place
In any case, the most interesting thing was how different the movie was. Like the things they focused on werent an unrealistic show of force and winning. I am enough of a film buff to put this on the specific director’s prowess, instead of culture, but I do think the surrounding culture is what helped the director greenlight working on that film.
"Creel later published his memoirs of his service with the CPI, 'How We Advertised America', in which he wrote:
“In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited the freedom of speech and press. In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventures in advertising… We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the facts.”"
Being German and having Russian relatives the perspective on the war on the continent has always been interesting to me. The sheer scale and brutality of the Eastern front, the war crimes and death (The Soviet Union lost more than 15% of its population!) is astonishing.
I don't think popular media reflects this at all, not even necessarily maliciously or as propaganda intentionally. But that disconnect between the reality, and the recognition of it in Russia itself, has had vastly negative consequences when it comes to other countries trying to understand Russia even today. (and I suppose it's not by accident that in Germany for example, often only elder statesmen point this out)
Vietnam war may have been brutal, and eventually lost, but it disincentivised everyone else in the Southeast Asia from turning to Communism, so in the end it was a net benefit for the free world.
There is a strange perspective around all the US-led wars; all of them were/are good and justified except some how the Vietnam war ...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFM-1
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-43_Dragontooth
Anthony Bourdain, in "A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines"
I don't remember watching anything that glorified the Vietnam war though. Full Metal Jacket showed how it was a shitshow. On a weird kind of lighter note, Forrest Gump showed how people died or were gruesomely injured. Rambo may have been the only one that tried to portray it somewhat positively? I don't quite remember.
Inconceivable!
I’m currently visiting DC, and I hate to break it to you.
Every nationality, in any country, forms their own bubbles if they can.
People gravitate to what they know.
I’ll quote British historian Anthony Beevor (who, by the way, agrees that the Soviet Union was key in defeating Germany):
“[T]he reason why the Russians got to Berlin before the Americans was quite simply that fact that it was American Dodge, Studebaker, Chevrolets and all the trucks that had been given to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease had made their advances in '43 and especially in '44 possible. They'd never have got anywhere near it.”
https://www.c-span.org/video/?306662-1/qa-antony-beevor
Also see my other comment, about the production issue, Russian achievement is really huge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29836874
The US supported itself with Lend-Lease. Giving weapons to others ensured they didn't have to deal with a victorious Germany.
Quoting:
> David Glantz, the American military historian known for his books on the Eastern front, concludes:
> Although Soviet accounts have routinely belittled the significance of Lend-Lease in the sustainment of the Soviet war effort, the overall importance of the assistance cannot be understated. Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941–1942; that achievement must be attributed solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates. As the war continued, however, the United States and Great Britain provided many of the implements of war and strategic raw materials necessary for Soviet victory. Without Lend-Lease food, clothing, and raw materials (especially metals), the Soviet economy would have been even more heavily burdened by the war effort. Perhaps most directly, without Lend-Lease trucks, rail engines, and railroad cars, every Soviet offensive would have stalled at an earlier stage, outrunning its logistical tail in a matter of days. In turn, this would have allowed the German commanders to escape at least some encirclements, while forcing the Red Army to prepare and conduct many more deliberate penetration attacks in order to advance the same distance.
> Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht; the ultimate result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers could have waded at France's Atlantic beaches.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
Interestingly this American historian seems to believe Russia would have won anyway - with grave consequences for the West.
> Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#US_deliveries_to_th...
11 billions went to the Soviet Union alone. The overall program was almost 50 billion. The reverse program of 7 billions is basically a calculatory sum of the lend and lease of military bases by the British Empire to the US.
> suppy of aid (which the US can afford because of their capitalist practices of exploitation etc)
That's a pretty wild statement considering how the Soviet Union created its resources (with slave labor of millions of people in the Gulag system).
Noted RE Soviet practices, though it's besides the point I think (i.e. it would be a scandal if the US didn't send aid in this form).
> German forces managed to occupy or isolate territory which prior to WWII accounted for over 60% of total coal, pig iron, and aluminum production. Nearly 40% of total grain production and 60% of total livestock was lost. Moreover, this area contained 40% Soviet population before the war, 32% of the state enterprise labor force, and one-third of the fixed capital assets of the state enterprise sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_industry_in_World_War_I...
Even with support from abroad, I don't see how this takes anything away from Russian war achievements.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War
The reality is that it was a complicated decision and there were many factors that went into it and many subsequent interpretations of the history on all sides.
This Twitter thread provides an interesting overview of some of the historiography: https://twitter.com/wc_quinn/status/1458891500344029189
Yet now, for French people and media, destructions and people displacements were all the fault of Nazi's Germany. And for medias, the time after war was an happy time "les trente glorieuses" [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abb%C3%A9_Pierre#Winter_1954:_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses
For you though, the Nazis invaded and occupied France, taking over the ports. The US bombs them to stop their takeover of France... and it's the US you blame?
If your house catches fire and you call the fire department to put it out, do you then blame the fire department for the water damage caused while putting it out?
You know, even if I was born in 1956, I have seen lot of those shelters.
The person who first wrote about the "30 glorious years" was Jean Fourastié. Jean Fourastié had strong link with Jean Monnet. Jean Monnet had been an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1940 to 1946 [0].
[0] Jean Monnet (1988). Mémoires (in French). Fayard. ISBN 978-2-213-65802-5.
When?
Yeah, but that number is so high because they were effective at killing their own people. The number of needless victims during the fighting and those of the "cleansing" after a win is incredibly high.
I always (as an adult) assumed the countless war movies and cop TV shows are just that.
That said, a few years ago I stumbled upon some hideous cover of Offspring's gone away. Someone had turned that tune into a cheesy pop tune and made the video about young beautiful housewife and mother getting informed that her darling was killed in line of duty. No way some music production company just decided to do that on its own. Man, it was bad
Since the USSR collapsed, and especially since 9/11, things have gotten a lot murkier.
That's a false dichotomy if I ever seen one.
There's a reason why "I'm not as bad as <other person>" is not an acceptable legal defense.
- Guatemalan genocide
- Operation Condor
- Mass sterilization in Puerto Rico
- Panama as a country
- Arming the Taliban
- And more...
I think both governments had really shady people and cannot be characterized as "good".
Just a massive history of interfering with democracies with the sole aim for furthering the economic goals of the US.
This is a child’s way of seeing the world.
Public messaging by POTUS for national consumption is very different from actions on the ground.
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.
Now, as China is becoming an ever more stronger player, we again see that there are two sides arising. While party lacks expansive ambitions in the traditional sense of landborders (except for Taiwan), they would very much like everyone to kotow to the party.
We are in a world where democracies are in decline and autocracies are in the rise. USA is still the biggest democracy. Leader of the free world? It's hyperbolic, but not _obviously totally wrong_.
This is not to say we are in some sort of manichean conflict world were one side is good and one is evil, or that US is good and the autocrats are evil. US is obviously a state actor that acts in it's own benefit and in the benefit of it's elites and so on, and these actions sometimes are very bad for civilians.
> 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 (which came out of a US supported coup after democratic elections resulted in a win for the left). Things are by far not as clear cut. Both blocks supported atrocious regimes if it was in their economic interests and worked against "the other side". That we largely only hear about one side shows how well the propaganda was/is working.
Ah yes, proximity. Now go ask the small Central American nations if they enjoyed living close to the USA during the 70s and 80s.
It's quite funny that after the cold war it came out that nukes of 'the more free side' was targetting Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvia cities.
USA never had any qualms about targetting civilians. Foreigners don't have any rights.
I'm just saying that it was not actually something that people "found out" after the cold war and it wasn't specific to the Baltic nations nor the US or USSR. All nuclear capable superpowers had set potential targets which would have killed tens of millions of civilians. Singling out some of the countries occupied by the USSR (Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania) is minimizing the situation IMO :)
https://futureoflife.org/background/us-nuclear-targets/
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 the world to exploit it better, and Russia is still insular country that doesn't want to allow any of that on their turf.
The only thing that changed with the end of the cold war was that US could no longer credibly spin the narrative that Russia wants to take over the world and turn Texans into communists.
Fortunately, after a bit of mucking around USA could brand terrorists as their global super dangerous enemy and business could continue as usual.
Currently when terrorists turned out to be a very limited threat and USA proved to be very incompetent at fighting them long term, USA again began shopping for a narrative enemy. Obvious choice is China, but USA leaders with more than two brain cells are little hesitant about that, because you don't necessarily want to frame yourself as enemy of someone who could very likely seriously eff you up.
We'll see how it all unfolds.
I also think that the end of the Cold War, the failure of the forever wars, and our bungled pandemic response has taken a lot of gloss off the old propaganda. The interruption of having the USSR fall has made a lot of Americans look around and saw “wait, why does life kinda suck here though?”, and it’s kind of hard to rebuild that propaganda machine once it’s stopped.
US is of course a selfish actor. But it's not black and white, and while US has never been "the good guy" they are still a stabilizing force that for most parts promotes rule based order. Yes, they assault sovereign states and all that, I'm not disagreeing US has pathologies to bear.
But in some regions it's influence benefits the local population (even though the goal is not directly to help anyone but to promote a specific selfish policy).
On the Eurasian theater Russia is not a neglible actor. Given it is being lead by a mafia more or less, in regional matters Russia is still a looming threat (ahem, Ukraine, ahem).
As a citizen of country which shares a very long land border with Russia (Finland), and given the realpolitik fact small nations are at the mercy of larger powers, I much prefer a situation where US can politically and financially influence events in my local vicinity to a one where Russia would be the larger presence.
If I was for example Vietnamese I might hold quite different views. Or if I lived in an area that was a theater of conflict for drone strikes and my family suddenly died as collateral damage.
Um, no. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement
"many of the Non-Aligned Movement's members were actually quite closely aligned with China or the Soviet Union"
Ask the people of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, eastern Ukraine, Iran, etc. if they feel we are living in peaceful times.
As a US citizen I just don’t really care anymore, I sometimes get a good chuckle every time someone tells me I’m oppressed or living in a hellhole. I’m happy where I live and though I recognize there’s faults and I do try to improve them where I can. Maybe it’s state actors, maybe it’s not; I wouldn’t care about a stranger’s opinion in real life, so why would I bother caring about a stranger online? Too little time in life for that.
I absolutely agree with its stated aims and intents. I would love to believe that what they are suggesting could be achievable - but the cynic/skeptic in me worries that this will end up being steamrolled by the people in power as some sort of fringe hippie movement.
Does anyone have direct experience with working with this organization that could relay how effective they are in their approach? Any thoughts on how their stated aims could be realizable?
The narrative around space became very strong, sending messages of conquest, entrepreneurship, science, dreams, you name it.
At the exact same period, bloomed movies like: Mission to Mars, Gravity, Interstellar.
I won't be surprised to see a surge of interest in space-related careers in younger generations in years to come.
On the other have, every American action movie seems to feature guns and explosions and quite a lot of glorification of the military. The military exist to kill people, and to deliver the utmost brutality to others whilst remaining organised, logical and efficient themselves. Guns exist to kill things. Explosive munitions are fundamentally excellent at killing people from a surprisingly long way away, larger than what Hollywood shows. When was the last time you saw a film highlight the loss a family of a minor villain felt when the hero shot him? The true aftermath of an air strike in a foreign country -- lifelong resentment and hatred about the country that provided it? (Vietnam is an interesting place to visit, but don't mention B-52s to the locals). It is an unfortunate but unavoidable fact of humanity that armies are required to exist. There is definitely good that comes from them, ranging from humanitarian aid to the research into high end technology, and I'm not calling for their abolition -- I am not naïve. That is fundamentally why the glorification of the military at all costs is problematic. The ethical arguments for their existence require exploring.
American films, on the other hand, will quite happily show a commando killing hundreds or thousands of people in a teenager-friendly film, yet American culture decrees that showing a single naked person mandates that the film is restricted. That mindset -- boobs bad, guns good, explosions fun and exciting -- is slowly but surely exported across the globe.
I'm going to look forward to the sci-fi space films where the drama is survival in a hostile environment, and infinitely prefer them to war films.
So, movies like The Martian? I wish I could come up with more examples, and I hope someone replying to me does...
Is it really unavoidable? I'll play the naïve part here and say that the military is an extension of humanity's tribal nature. The entire concept of countries and borders is rooted in our deep desire to belong to a specific tribe, be defensive of other members of our tribe, and offensive towards other tribes that might want to do us harm. The fact we manage to communicate and exchange goods and ideas is a testament of our collaboration skills, but this "us vs. them" mentality is always present in the back of our monkey brains.
If we ever manage to overcome this innate distrust—either via natural evolution (unlikely) or merging with a neutral AI (more likely?)—it would boost our capacity of working towards common goals as a species to unprecedented levels.
> There is definitely good that comes from them, ranging from humanitarian aid to the research into high end technology
There's no reason these efforts couldn't come from a nonmilitary organization. While competition and developing better weapons of war than other countries is a large component of technological advancement, I'd argue that global collaboration without distrust and politics would accelerate that progress even more. It would certainly help with current issues like climate change, space exploration and pandemic mitigation, while avoiding all of the pain, death and misery that wars and conflicts have brought us throughout history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_war_game
Wikileaks is such an incredible gift to mankind. Diplomatic cables leaked there showed me that the USA explicitly interfered in my country's attempt to develop a space program because they don't want us to have rocket and therefore missile technology. They actually wanted to use my country for launches due to it being under the equator but only if they could leave us out of it entirely, no one would even be able to enter the premises.
Any links?
The services were supposedly lacking diverse resources for both operators, admins and field agents of diverse backgrounds.
This series drew a very strong, credible and positive narrative that led to a massive number of people knocking at the doors of the DGSE to join the forces.
Propaganda? I think not. Well thought out recruitment strategy as entertainment? Most likely yes.
Is there a difference between the two? To be discussed... ;)
I see a big difference with using movies as propaganda to influence the planet's opinions.
At the same time, one has to be blind to not see that any cinema industry has a political agenda, I mean, just watch the average Netflix production and it is striking.
It is for me inconceivable that the DGSE did not think of the outcome before agreeing to be an active collaborator of the show, and act accordingly to it's own benefits.
Why then would any other part of society be different? Competence is not a widely spread feature of humanity.
As one of us two seem to have a definitive argument, I guess we'll have to stick to our beliefs for now. I'm more curious now to know how much of it all was planned than I was before this conversation started.
Things get done, but almost in spite of the planning.
I certainly wouldn't mind knowing too.
(edit: I only get called when planning fails, or things have gone off the rails, now that I think about it, so maybe an unfair opinion.)
The United States and its state-run propaganda and terrorism organisations cannot be allowed to walk through the 21st century without answering and making amends to the crimes committed.
It has never before been more urgent to question and criticise the United States for its past decades of war, propaganda, sowing discord and effort to partition the world into those who are with them, subordinate, and those who are against them.
It is a good thing that we are still allowed to speak about it without being accused of being shills, spies, or "Russian trolls". But it might not last if these people get their way.
my comment was more on suspicious accounts that single post over the top propaganda and then disappear
You do not like what I post, but you have nothing to respond with and so you are instead clawing for anything in order to discredit me and my fresh YC account.
To me, you are the one who is behaving suspiciously.
1: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0891527/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
John Pilger: ""The BBC is and has long been the most refined propaganda service in the world".
> [Hu Shih] was among the first contributors for radical ideological change and modernity in China. His article on the 'Indianization of China' presented a scathing criticism of Indian influence on China that inhibited the blooming of 'indigenous modernity', progressivism and dynamism there. Hu’s views supported contemporary 'modernist' Chinese intellectuals' labelling of India under the British as a 'ruined' civilisation, 'failed' state or incapable role model for the agenda of modernity. Yet, he did not overlook affinities, mutual respect and admiration for those in India searching for 'indigenous roots' to modernity. His famous observation that 'India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border' is one of the most quoted sentences in any study of Sino-Indian encounters and connections.
Iranians and later Turkic Mongols had a similar affect (Persianisation) on India itself before imperialism took hold, and westernisation came to the fore; for ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaulayism
Dominant cultures have always sought influence.
War, Capitalism, ownership and control?
This is different than Hu Shih's point about non-military cultural influence. Military led cultural influence happens by force. Non military cultural influence happens attraction to culture. Post-WW2 United States had both in combination.
Didn't know about Hu Shih otherwise, so thanks for sharing.
Let that thought sink in.
The propaganda coming from the US against the Chinese is more subtle and convincing. It's scary not only because of how good it is, but because people here don't even realize they are being manipulated.
Consider the examples elsewhere in this thread.
The Chinese propaganda is the Chinese soldier essentially doing an unrealistic magic trick.
American propaganda is often in the form of omission or social stature.
Consider the last time you saw an Asian male in a Hollywood production (which are few and far between to begin with) that wasn't:
a) a kung-fu caricature
b) the joke
But consider the examples elsewhere in this thread.
The Chinese propaganda is the Chinese soldier essentially doing an unrealistic magic trick with very obviously over the top body language.
Body language and non-verbal cues are universal, doesn't matter what country you're from.
American propaganda is often in the form of omission or social stature.
Consider the last time you saw an Asian male in a Hollywood production (which are few and far between to begin with) that wasn't:
a) a kung-fu caricature
b) the joke
It is indeed more subtle. It's hard to notice something when it's simply not there.
That changed in 2013:
>The U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm has begun the "unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption," John Hudson of Foreign Policy reported on Sunday.
>The content arrives with the enactment of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry (R- Texas) and Rep. Adam Smith (D- Wash.), which was inserted into the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
>The reform effectively nullifies the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which was amended in 1985 specifically to prohibit U.S. organizations from using information "to influence public opinion in the United States."
>The new law enables U.S. government programming such as Voice of America (VoA) — an outlet created in 1942 to promote a positive understanding of the U.S. abroad — t0 broadcast directly to domestic audiences for the first time.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-domestic-propaganda-offic...
2010 paper made a case for Smith-Mundt act changes, https://web.archive.org/web/20220107123332/https://www.hsdl....
> The cyber world will progressively become both a boon and a bane to IO personnel, allowing them to reach a global audience, but also providing a large vulnerability to enemy deception and PSYOP efforts that will require a near immediate response to worldwide, operational events .. Update US Influence Operations doctrine to .. develop TTPs for employing PSYOP, MILDEC, and Public Affairs using the new cyber technology. Once developed, the TTPs must .. allow the military IO operator an avenue for developing proficiency in the release of “precision guided messages” to foreign audiences.
2018 analysis, https://web.archive.org/web/20180720063648if_/http://reposit...
> ..government bureaucracy advanced measures aimed at controlling the global online environment. Commercial companies further exploited their geographical flexibility, minimal accountability and ‘black boxed’ practises, to profit from this desire to side-step awkward bureaucracy designed to protect the public ... the ‘merging’ of PSYOP and PA raised concern in academia and beyond ... This article engages in deep exploration of struggles between subfields of propaganda. It shows how PSYOP and Information Operations (IO) personnel struggled against Public Affairs over the adaptation of systems..
Other search terms:
>allow the military IO operator an avenue for developing proficiency in the release of “precision guided messages” to foreign audiences.
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
I got a glimpse of some of this because I was an exchange student in the 80's, in a program sponsored by Congress and considered relevant to said Cold War. It was pretty interesting! Plenty of eagles and big cars and class mobility, but also a lot of stuff about freedom of thought and expression.
I remember at the time being quite miffed that they were not allowed to intentionally expose US citizens to any of this propaganda -- US expats were not even allowed to use the America-sponsored libraries abroad -- because it seemed like keeping it open would encourage the government to send a message that, broadly speaking, Americans agreed with.
Now that I'm older, I'm not sure. I think maybe it was better for them to have a freer hand in propagandizing, without having to argue about every point in a domestic context. Nowadays, however, it's hard to imagine that secrecy working at all so it's just as well they gave up.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agen...
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.
/conspiracy
What would those be? If CIA and such has some special "psychological methods", how comes they never actually used it to achieve anything related to their direct job? I mean, let's embrace the conspiracy and assume they have these spectacular methods that can make anybody think anything and they are willing to use it on anybody, including Americans. Why won't they use it on Taliban or Iranians or Hezbollah and make them love America and crave McDonalds burgers and Starbucks coffee? Why didn't they use it for anything, even if just to get promoted and look good on the annual report?
I think much more realistic hypothesis would be that they have no magic spectacular "psychological methods" at all and are as (in)competent in persuasion as a random politician is, and are forced to muddle through with what they got, and they need "black sites" so that public wouldn't actually learn how low their success rate is and how lucky we are because their opponents aren't exactly geniuses either.
The Taliban consume the Koran. They reject most forms of mass media. Thus it's very hard to manipulate them into a western lifestyle. The alternative would be to find their "opinion leaders" and coerce them. Anyway, it's naïve to think these techniques are not used at home and abroad.
Perhaps next you'll ask me to list three NSA zero-days?
Then I think you can look back at recent events from the past decade or more and see the impact of this. Whether you want to start with Kazakhstan this past week, the way opposing groups were targeted to fight each other in real life like was seen in Houston, or the reaction to a "youtube video" during Benghazi in Libya, the way that Trump and Cambridge Analytica kind of took over the GOP, or maybe even how Obama went from a relatively unknown politician to having a cult of personality around him a few months later. Another part of the psychological aspect of it is something called the information-action ratio. Basically people are overwhelmed with information that they can do absolutely nothing about. This leads to certain emotional responses caused by feeling a loss of control that also makes people more easily manipulated by what they are fed by these systems.
It's not much of a conspiracy if you have used technology and tried to pay attention to how it makes you feel and act at times. This is a large part of how so many people became radicalized from recommendation engines and targeted advertisements. It's like mind hacking in a way. But that's just like, my opinion, man.
At this point the only thing we can truly trust is independent journalists. Most concerning is the rampant and normaliced acceptance of censorship in social media. Democracy depends on free speech. Its time we start dictching Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google search for more open platforms that allow a broad and unfiltered exchange of ideas. We the people, not the other way around.
Not true. US, Russia, China, North Korea - sure. Can you name any other countries? Can you give examples for even a fraction of "all other countries"?
I think this is essentially suposed to make us conceive law enforcement as always right and doing everything to "keep us safe" even if they have to disregard the law. You can clearly see it's working in how many people unquestionably support the police.