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Lessons on Propaganda, 101; Brought to you by Nikolai Veli!
Topic Started: Jul 21 2009, 10:42 AM (770 Views)
Nikolai Veli
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To begin with, I thought I would start a thread with something I find personally interesting, and that is propaganda,or "Art of Control".
To begin with, we need a discussion on what propaganda is. Now, I'm sure this is old hat to everyone by now, but it is (for a simple definition) the act of communicating with the intention of influencing the attitude of a community, which is opposed to impartial communication, or the act of simply informing a community of the "happenings".

There are many techniques that can be utilized for the desired outcome, including but not excluding : Ad hominem(attacking the person, not the argument) Ad Nauseam(Repetition of a "fact") Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Fear, Appeal to Prejudice, Bandwagon, Black-and-white Fallacy (Presenting only two choices usually extremes)Common man approach, Demonizing the enemy, Disinformation, Euphoria, Flag-waving, Oversimplification, Slogans, stereotyping, Unstated assumption, Virtue words etc.

Most of these are fairly self explanatory, (but for the few that aren't if you have any questions, I could answer them)

Now, tactics to defeat these techniques are usually tailored to the type of technique, but a basic generalization is R.I.C.D., or Recognize, Identify, Combat, Defeat.

Recognize That propaganda is being used.
Identify The technique being used.
CombatThe technique.*
Defeat The technique.

(*Combat should be used to win the minds and/or hearts of the community you are arguing for, remember: Hearts haven't been won with sarcasm and insults. Common combat tactics include anti-propaganda...propaganda and disillusionment[show your community how your opponent seeks to use them for their ends, most importantly, break the propaganda, show it flawed])

There's my first little seminar for everyone, I hope it wasn't tl;dr and everyone enjoyed; I'd be more than happy to write more if the reception is well.

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A society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything.

"Did you hear about how healthcare will make us a socialist-facist-musli-warblgarblwarblgarbl"
-Standardized nutjob talking points, summarized for your convenience.

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Daniel Jacob Asher
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Affinity member, sometime writer
I think the most used here in eWorld, especially with the rampant misunderstandings of the game itself, would be "argumentnum ad populum". I see it used a lot when trying to persuade, especially in Congress.
~Daniel Jacob Asher, XO US Army 5/3, eNova Communications
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Osmany Ramon
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Director of International Affairs
Appeal to authority as well. Particularly when it comes to arguments about little known game mechanics. How many times do people get attacked for only being here <insert time here>?
"I'd rather die on my feet than continue living on my knees." - Emiliano Zapata

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Osmany Ramon
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Director of International Affairs
And just to be clear, while propaganda is certainly effective, it is not something which promotes critical thought but rather provokes an emotional response. A solid revolution cannot be built on propaganda alone.
"I'd rather die on my feet than continue living on my knees." - Emiliano Zapata

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Josh Mahurin
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A revolution shouldn't be built on propaganda at all am I not correct? Because isn't it propaganda that is stopping the revolution while simple knowledge and acceptance of truth would fuel it?
PARTY IDIOT
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
Voltaire
French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778)


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Nikolai Veli
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On occasion propaganda can be unfortunately quite effective, and while the truth is strong in and of itself, it usually needs an education to help foster the critical thought that allows one to perceive their being lied to. (I.E. Go out and tell someone in the U.S. about socialism, just the facts, see how it goes.)
Programming of the human mind is one of the strongest mental forces known.
A society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything.

"Did you hear about how healthcare will make us a socialist-facist-musli-warblgarblwarblgarbl"
-Standardized nutjob talking points, summarized for your convenience.

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Phoenix Quinn
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Director of Public Relations
A few random notes:

Interesting article on cognitive biases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_biases

In the sense it is usually used, propaganda = advertising, especially the kinds of false advertising outlined by Nikolai and DJA. One antidote to this is anti-advertising in the form of satire and deconstruction. The (RL) group adbusters has lots of good material in this vein: https://www.adbusters.org/

In Marxist, especially Marxist-Leninist, traditions, propaganda also has the more positive sense of theoretical work made available to the masses. This kind of writing is not easy to do well, especially in a virtual context like eRep, where the tendency is towards sound-bites, preachiness and argumentation. There is a small Italian left group that recently posted to the Internationale which seems to have an interesting theoretical "theme" of something like "bringing the revolution to RPGs". Nice, I think, because it provides an interesting overall context that is clearly linked to practice.

Not to get all buzzwordy, but the role of "agitation" and "exposure" is also important in the conflict of ideas. This means, basically, doing real journalism, focusing on a particular event, fact, incident or observation, as opposed to editorializing, theorizing, deconstructing lies, or arguing. The work around exposing the election freeze was a great example of this and there are a number of good eRep newspapers that do this kind of thing pretty well in various contexts. For SFP's & associated & friendly presses to get a reputation as good sources of "hard news" in this sense would likely do the most good in combatting bourgeois and dogmatic propaganda.






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Monsieur DuPont expects not a discovery of solutions, but an appropriately scaled and directed revolt against reflexive conditions.
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Nikolai Veli
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Very nice article Quinn, an enjoyable read. I do agree with you that the "Hard news" ideal for the SFP and associated newspapers would be great indeed. Your citation of the Election freeze was interesting, as it was a big hard news story, but when I wrote it, I had to include (I believe it's nearly impossible not to when writing from *any* biased perspective) a few of the tactics I listed in the thread lead. Unfortunately; I think that this has its place within the media, as long as it's not used for disguised motives. Because (disregarding religious/philosophical bent etc) Mussolini was much more effective at raising a mass in a short time, then say, the Dali lama. (In terms of new people per year).

I'd like to add, on a somewhat different note, I find it interesting the inner conflict between the libertarian and the Totalitarian sides of ourselves. We may see something happening and want to change it, and there is the democratic, libertarian way, in which we try to evoke change by changing minds through the revelation of the truth, or the totalitarian way in which we attempt to "force" a change in the populous to our viewpoint through propaganda and quite possibly augmented with the "truth". (Truth from a relative perspective, for both examples). Fine lines and slippery slopes no?
Edited by Nikolai Veli, Jul 22 2009, 08:16 AM.
A society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything.

"Did you hear about how healthcare will make us a socialist-facist-musli-warblgarblwarblgarbl"
-Standardized nutjob talking points, summarized for your convenience.

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Daniel Jacob Asher
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Affinity member, sometime writer
lol. . . speaking of "lessons in propaganda" we are getting one right now.



the message is "I'm Hungarian, and I will report you to the Hungarian admins in Bucharest. And they will see it my way".

I have to admit, it may be somewhat effective if people have been, or begin to be banned for using words like "greedy, totalitarian, militaristic, or fascist"

"Nazi" I could see. "Skinhead Holocaust Deniers" I could see. "Pig-headed, sheep-fondling, degenerates with email accounts and a mouse" I could see.

This, I cannot.
~Daniel Jacob Asher, XO US Army 5/3, eNova Communications
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Osmany Ramon
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Director of International Affairs
The complaining about using the word "fascist" to describe certain groups of people in the New World is from people simply believing it to be a synonym for "Nazi". We aren't using it in that pejorative way but its not like the admins are supposed to know their political science. This is an interesting dynamic: when politics is contingent on a computer scientist. This may be a glimpse into the future of democracy as people become less engaged in seeking real information about politics: when politics is contingent on "the average Joe".
"I'd rather die on my feet than continue living on my knees." - Emiliano Zapata

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