~ Behind the propaganda engines ~
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propaganda engines
Version May 2005
[Need for searching the truth] [Rare snippets of real info]
[Circumventing censorship] [Circumventing political correctness]
[Essays] [Exegesis] [News feeds & archives]
Quamis Suquamis?


...The leader of Suquamis Tribe replied: The president in Washington tells us that he wants to buy our lands. But, how can you buy and sell the sky? It seems completely inappropriate to us. Shining leaves of a particular pine tree, even smallest particles of sands in our beaches, all the pastures, all the insects mean unforgettable memories for my people. Although we don't own the least bit of this fresh air and water how can we sell these in order you to waste? No, the land and sky are of Great Manitu. Our Great Manitu is also your God. Will these beautiful forests remain when the last indian living in these wild lands disappeared and became only a memory living in clouds? Your only aim is wasteful expenditure and to poison our rivers for gold and perhaps to darken the sky so to make us not to be able to breath. What will happen when white hunters completed to murder all our wild buffalo flocks? Do you think the excellent fresh odour will remain when all the wild hourse flocks are domesticated?"

Now, er, is this snippet "true"? See evaluation lore:-)
Need for searching the truth - a rant


Well... please excuse this rant.
See: I strongly believe that you should feel by yourself the need to reverse the distorted information patterns, news-propaganda and advertisement - that abound so evidently around us (just have a look at my reality cracking section). If you don't feel such a need, or if you believe you already have your own valuable sources of real information, this part of my site will probably not interest you much (even if I think you'r in for a surprise).
Note that it is not only a matter of pushed advertisement, whereby we find ourselves - faces down - in the sorry situation where we now remember better some ads we have heard (a thousand times) in our youth than we are able to recall the names of the friends we had (don't you too believe that somebody should pay for this?). Shouldn't we [retaliate] ("anti advertisement": an ongoing project) ?

The Ancient Greeks believed that you could not rely on someone else to tell you what is right or wrong: everyone he himself must be a researcher in search of truth.
Today, people rely on all sort of media to tell them "the real news". The problem - and the ironical aspect of such an attitude at the same time - is that in the awful commercial society we live in all medias - bar some parts of the Internet - are OWNED by someone, who will obviously pursue his own interests. You can bet that these media's "search for the truth" - in the unlikely hipothesis that it will be at all pursued - will never be allowed to contrast the interests of their owners.

Unfortunately it is NOT ONLY a simple problem of 'ownership' (whereby a newspaper owned by -say- a car-factory-owner will always be against bykes and against any "pedestrian solution" for our cities and will continuously (and viciously) push in order to compel people to use a stinking car to fetch their beers two-hundred meters from where they happen to vegetate).

There are MANY more cases of 'orchestrated propaganda', as I tried to show with my old "propaganda cracking" essay about Common propaganda techniques in the context of the NATO / Yugoslawjan war.
Indeed it is so easy to 'orchestrate' mass media, that curious "ethically correct" censorship phenomena now appear. It is for instance in all "mainstream" European media nowaday practically "forbidden" to deal with all the (huge) criminality problems due to immigration (this is most evident for instance in France).
Alas! Since a lot of poor and simple people, that do not happen to have a villa in a closed and well behaving part of the town have to deal with these very problems in some peripheries, it is no wonder at all that -as a a consequence- quite a lot of zombies lean more and more towards little pathetical (and nazistical) "simplifiers" like LePen in France, the Vlaamsblock in Belgium, Haider in Austria or Bossi in Italy.

The real problem is that reality is quite complex, not simple: therefore there are MANY "news" and MANY truths, and of course there is nowhere any simple "miracle explanation" you could use to interprete the global complexity of the world surrounding you. Lot of gains for those that profess a "simple" solution for everything. The fact that such a solution is complete nonsense does not mean NOTHING in the real world of politics. Big industries in Germany were in 1944 still paying the nazi, even as russian and american bombs were destroying them black and blue. There is an ineluttable logic in stupidity. Moreover: profit and cynism are both very strong forces, that you -as a reverser- should always take account of. Actually the very moment you meet somebody who preaches to have a "solution" for all problems, you better try to remain some steps "behind" him, so that you have the time to sneak into a side-alley when the shooting starts and that moron gets what he jolly deserves.

This makes things quite complicated of course: "What? No compass? No weltanschauung as simple as "I understand everything through this gimmick philosophy"? Yep: this complicates things... on the other hand propaganda and his ugly offspring: advertisement are simplifiers, and corresponds thus better to what people await: most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, they want to have their prejudices confirmed, they want to feel that they 'belong' somewhere (with the implications that others do not), and need to pinpoint one or more "enemies" to blame for their frustrations.

That is where the capability of searching can be quite helpful. But it will not be sufficient alone. Evaluating what you find is also very important, in a web of rumors, conspiration theories, balooney sites.
The web gives tremendous opportunities for propaganda, but it gives also, for the first time in the history of mankind, tremendous opportunities to COUNTER propaganda. Some snippets of "real" information MUST be exchanged behind all the "fog" by the puppet masters, the problem is to find them.

Propaganda and advertisement take many forms and affect all of us, mostly in a negative way. The printing press, and mass communications technology, have facilitated greatly the use of propaganda by governments, large corporations the wealthy and the powerful. They control the outlets of information sources and use it - of course - for their own benefit. The purpose of propaganda is to distort the truth.

Finding the truth was never easy. It is like searching for a needle in the haystack. It takes lots of effort. I hope the resources I have tried to gather will help you on your own quest.
Rare snippets of real info

In a world where almost all main media, and almost all other information sources are OWNED by the slavemasters, how can you hope to gather some real info?

The fact is that slavemasters need some real info as well, not least in order to fight effectively against knowledge, therefore -- on some places -- some short snippets of true information are still presented... hidden below the dull iceberg of unskilled Guinea-Pig conditioning called "news".
Moreover you can always reverse some information out of their disinformation.
"When somebody points at the moon, 
only a fool looks at the moon, 
reversers look at the pointing finger, 
and sometimes bite it off"
(Ancient reversers' lore)


[General information] [The Chomsky's papers]
[Satyrical information] [All the newspapers of the world]
[News feeds & archives]

General information 


[Le Monde diplomatique] MONTHLY: *very* good, one of the best sources of information of this planet, a little 'pauperistic' and 'whiny', but they see through reality better than many others. This is one of the BEST KNOWLEDGE SITES of the whole web, without any doubt... hope you can read some french... anyway there is also a on-line version [in english].
This magazine will give you every month enough material to easily crack most newspapers (or TV-info) around you. Best buy.

Average search engine: s=iraq+iran

[Neue Zürcher Zeitung] DAILY: among the best information sources in the whole world... of course swiss need a 'unfogged' world image in order to sell their chocolate and their watches... and could not care less about "ready-made" truths!
An [english version of the NZZ] is also available.

Good "htdig style" search engine: &words=iraq+iran

[The Guardian] DAILY: very UK-centric, but quite good foreign politic analysis. Has the advantage to be in english and to have one of the best cartoonists of the world (Steve Bell). If you just manage to avoid all the useless crap about england, this is a good font of all-around information. Has almost ALL its articles on line.

Good "verity style" search engine: QueryText=iraq+iran

[The Economist] WEEKLY: there is of course MORE disinformation than information, but the former is -at least- VERY cleverly presented. These people are in touch with the real slavemasters: must read (and reverse) for all those interested in "high level" propaganda (where some snippets of true information are continuously presented below the dull iceberg of skilled Guinea-Pig conditioning). Besides Karl Marx himself was an avid reader of the Economist :-)

The Economist's search modules have a NorthernLight type engine that can be quite useful for quick references and 'angles' fishing purposes...

Find:
within
from
to
sort by



[El Pais] DAILY good to average "european style" information, especially valuable for people interested in south American affairs (seen from an european perspective :-)
 

Do not forget to check the [News feeds & archives] section!


The Chomsky's papers 


Keeping the Rabble in Line by Noam Chomsky, interviewed by David Barsamian, is for instance a very cool and precise analyse of the world affairs (a little too much anti-Israeli obsessed imo, for the rest quite correct).
You'll find a small part of Chomsky's cutting interpretations [here]. Read these pages as soon as you can, you'll not regret it!
I'm not Chomskian myself (far from it), but his views and mine do actually converge on so many points that I'm glad he exists and teaches :-)

"Q:   Why is it important to keep the rabble in line?
 A:   Any form of concentrated power, whatever it is, is not going to want to be subjected to popular democratic control or, for that matter, to market discipline. Powerful sectors, including corporate wealth, are naturally opposed to functioning democracy, just as they're opposed to functioning markets, for themselves, at least. It's just natural. They do not want external constraints on their capacity to make decisions and act freely. It entails that the elites will be extremely undemocratic."

" Democracy should produce free people. That's the "ultimate aim" of a democratic society: not the production of goods, but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality."

Satyrical information 

Castigat ridendo mores... who can ever forbid you to say the truth when laughing?

[The Onion] quite light, but not bad at all, could be dubbed "the reversers' paper", since it is actually very often a good source of reversing thoughts. Sarcasm is a truly powerful weapon against propaganda, conditioning, advertisement-induced cliches and censorship.

And the importance of pda to avoid crap...

Note, especially with ad infested newspapers like the onion, how important it is to use the "pda-web": http://mobile.theonion.com/. Compare speed and Signal / Noise ratio with the previous (ad-infested) link.

Note that if you use opera as a browser (which you should), you just use the SHIFT+F11 trick (View, small screen), which automatically kills all frills (well most frills) on a given page.

[McSweeney's Stories] by David Eggers (parodies Esquire)

[The Baffler], each issue seeks archly to debunk the hip-seeking excesses of the corporate culture business (it's not completely on-line yet, though)

All the newspapers of the world 


Feel free to visit [fu_speci.htm] and fetch whatever newspaper you need, but don't old your breath for truths... being able to read any newspapers of the planet does not mean much if you don't know how to filter out the very rare snippets of information and to recognize the few valuable sources of information that are not simple progandistic megaphones of their owners' interests. This said it is for sure quite instructive to learn that slightly different soups of commercial advertisement, hysterical nationalism & ridicolous propaganda are served - under all latitudes - to the zombies...
Essays


Check the [reality cracking] essays


Exegesis (text reversing)


See the [ad hoc] section

Circumventing censorship


Of course there's not only propaganda, but also a lot of CENSORSHIP being enforced. Often enough propaganda techniques are used to enforce censorship. You may wanto to check (and fight against) the recent european laws about copyright under preparation at the Council and the European Parliament, that the political lackeys of the commercial powers that be are going to adopt following the recent two frightening Communications of the European Commission COM(2000)789 "Follow-up to the Green Paper on combating counterfeiting and piracy in the single market" and COM(2000)890 "Creating a Safer Information Society by Improving the Security of Information Infrastructures and Combating Computer-related Crime" (Euphemisms are particularly abundant during propaganda indoctrination campaigns, therefore they're of course pounding quite heavy with 'euphemistical rhetoric' in these texts... the commercial puppetteers and slavemasters are for instance called "interested parties" in the Commission's Jargon... allow me to puke :-(

Yet against propaganda and against censorship we can always use the same old weapons: transparence, knowledge spreading and of course the most powerful one: sarcasm (as I said above: Ridentem dicere verum Quid vetat? )

There are many ways to ridiculize censorship attempts. Some interesting ones have been devised and/or collected by defenders of the CSS Descrambler (see, for instance Dave Touretzky gallery). Since some American clowns, under commercial pressure, stated that executable source code was not subject to First Amendment protection against prior restraint of speech, and thus its publication could be prohibited, other ways to publish the code had to be found for the United States. Some of them quite inventive. Such approaches are interesting because they can be applied mutatis mutandis to many other similar cases.

Just one of these examples will clarify what I mean: the complete C-source code of the CSS Descrambler (for reading encrypted DVDs) is for instance located INSIDE the image below :-)

Petit image

To extract css-auth.tar.gz from the graphic file above, use an hexeditor, go to byte 0x00799D and copy the next 0x547E bytes to another file. Voila: the clownish censorship attempt brilliantly rebuked.
(Of course all this is nonsense: should you really need a Cssdescrambler you would immediately, since you'r supposed to be a searcher, just find one of the many copies of the complete C source code that exist all over the web :-)
Circumventing political correctness


A case of signal drowned by noise

http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1120725 ,00.html: Kilroy-Silk defies critics and insists: I'm no racist

It took me quite some time to find the REAL article (not just the citations) by Kilroy-Silk, see if you are quicker, it seems to me that many of those discussing thesed things on their racist/anti-racist blogs all over the (UK-related) web never happened to read the real stuff.

Not that what kilroy -- a politician turned media presentator for housewives, quite a slimy figure, btw -- writes in his text makes much sense (even if some does), but that's not the point: the point is that when something happens the real data "disappear" and a lot of noise, like huge clouds, settles on the web. This is annoying, to say the least, for Seekers.

See if and how you can find the article yourself... starting from the guardian link above and without using the google link below until you have solved this.

btw: i finally got the article with the simple string http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_qdr=al l&q=%22Original+Kilroy+article%22&btnG=Google+Search but it took me some time to get to it, i kept using snippets from the citations found trough the guardian article above, and they all brought me to other citations, like matrioskas, never to the real target.

Seems to me that people really love and enjoy to discuss things they hear from second hand, almost never using sources. Note how ALL the official links you will find using the guardian artice above will bend backwards in order NOT to report the complete text.

"There is not one single British asylum seeker in any Arab country."
That's a rhetorical little gem :-)

(You will find the complete text of the "racist" article by Kilroy-Silk on our messageboard, but this would mean that you are not capable of finding it by yourself on the wide wide web :-)

Re: politically correctness hinders searching? A case of signal drowned by noise 
by Nemo: (11/01/04 13:49:56) We live in a society obsessed by plagiarism... wich is *not* necessarily bad from a seeker's point of view, because that way we can trace to the source who said what :=)

When someone cites somebody, in written works, he must enclose the cited phrases in quotation marks (i.e. ',",?) if those are small, or double indent them if they are big, and give credit to the author providing his name.

Seekers can take advantage of these habits by getting strings that must be in the original text...

(c) Nemo


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