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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27136 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Is it rational to care or even know about propaganda in otherwise good media?

Imagine a person who doesn't know anything about Soviet Union and the concept of communism that decides to watch some movies from there. In the process of watching soviet cinema he will encounter not only direct propaganda of communism and Soviet Union itself but something more subtle, small, background details that show when and where this film was made and that it passed the eye of always hard-working socialist censors.

I think some already guessed where it goes. I was this person in relation to modern American progressive liberal views that are so common in Hollywood and general intelligentsia of United States. Without knowledge of internal us politics your mind just skips over all of the deliberately put messages in movies: specifically chosen race and sex of good characters and of evil ones, non spoken but painfully obvious and politically compliant moral of the story, slogans and signs hidden in plain sight. Many parts of it can be seen without the deep dive(the existence of same-sex relationships is the big one), in Russian, word "повестка"(agenda in English) come to represent all of the most obnoxious signs of progressive propaganda(or again just the existence of gay characters, there are living strawmans and steelmans like in any other social group), but majority of local and subtle things go over the public heads.

Of course there is a big difference here - modern progressive censorship and propaganda is not(at least not directly state-based) it emerges from a self organizing space of intellectuals who are very close to each other ideologically, but this is not very important to me personally if the outcome in the media that we consume is the same. From society-level point of view I am very grateful that there is little to no threat of state censorship in the US and America became the global cultural hegemon, not China or USSR/BigAutoritarianRussia.

And after I started noticing propaganda I saw small signs of it in almost every high-budget product. I am not only talking about the cinema here. To the point that I started to asking myself this question: "Was I wrong in learning this new information about american coming and goings if this information is useless to me and at the same time genuinely negatively affected my ability to enjoy modern media?"(As an example I can bring up Spiderverse films). Is it better to just ignore other cultures' political context to peacefully enjoy their best fruits? Knowledge is valuable by itself but the question is how much?

Yes, it is rational to care about propaganda in movies. From "The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence":

In the ancestral environment, there were no moving pictures; what you saw with your own eyes was true. A momentary glimpse of a single word can prime us and make compatible thoughts more available, with demonstrated strong influence on probability estimates. How much havoc do you think a two-hour movie can wreak on your judgment? It will be hard enough to undo the damage by deliberate concentration—why invite the vampire into your house? In Chess or Go, every wasted move is a loss; in rationality, any non-evidential influence is (on average) entropic.

And from "Boycott people who hate you":

Using their products will harm you. Seek out alternative products

Boycott the Star Wars movie Rogue One. All the villains are white males. All the heroes are not. Not only will this depress you and persuade you that you are evil and villainous and doomed to lose, but this guarantees bad writing and a boring show for the reasons explained by Orwell. If it is written to political formula, it is written to formula, so all the characters are living dead, placeholders and formulae, not people that you might care about. They kill a few of the heroes to try and make you care, but you won’t care.

And that's just for adults who are aware they are watching propaganda. As @WhiningCoil says, it is ten times worse if you have children. From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out":

First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.

Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.

The Amish understand this very well, which is why they do not have televisions:

I once heard David Kline tell of Protestant tourists sight-seeing in an Amish area. An Amishman is brought on the bus and asked how Amish differ from other Christians. First, he explained similarities: all had DNA, wear clothes (even if in different styles), and like to eat good food.

Then the Amishman asked: “How many of you have a TV?”

Most, if not all, the passengers raised their hands.

“How many of you believe your children would be better off without TV?”

Most, if not all, the passengers raised their hands.

“How many of you, knowing this, will get rid of your TV when you go home?”

No hands were raised.

“That’s the difference between the Amish and others,” the man concluded.

I don't have children (yet; growth mindset!), but if I did, I would endeavor to make sure they did not have access to over-the-air television or streaming media like Netflix. Rather, I would take advantage of the decades of existing work that @quiet_NaN points out and provide them with a library of titles composed of classic Disney movies (Snow White, Pinocchio, etc.), Don Bluth Movies (The Land Before Time, The Secret of NIMH, etc.), and Studio Ghibli movies (Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, etc.). As Gwern says, "Culture Is Not About Esthetics".

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