I'm excited to announce the publication of my new, short volume, Propaganda: The Basics. Providing tools for criticism and #medialiteracy, it exposes its abuses and manipulations, but also presents #propaganda as a means of #protest, #activism, and #politics. It presents propaganda as power.
I don't know about you, but I can't wait for that Office of Shipbuilding.
Despite his boasts, #Trump is no #Machiavelli . His lack of #virtu is leading us right into the pit, making himself and this country universally hated on the world stage. But if we watch closely, we might "learn the way to Hell in order to steer clear of it." www.uapress.ua.edu/978081736158...
Everything I despise about arrogance in power was on grotesque display in the Oval Office. Anyone who cannot see this setup for what it was, hubris and contempt for honor and suffering performed as a media spectacle, has truly lost their way. And now we must choose our path, lost in a dark wood.
Grotesque.
Plato's relevant definition of #oligarchy : "The treasure house filled with gold, which each possesses, destroys the constitution. First, they find ways of spending money for themselves, then they stretch the laws relating to this, then they and their wives disobey the laws altogether."
The irony of AI video is that it allows us to clearly visualize and lay bare the dystopian horror landscapes of the fascist imagination. Then again, this also allows them to become real. www.politico.eu/article/dona...
"The tryant wants no law above his own will, no associates but men of his own stamp of baseness. He is willing administer the laws when he can bend them to his will, but he will break them when he can no longer bend them." ~ #FrederickDouglass
"Consistent arbitrariness negates human freedom more efficiently than any tyranny ever could. One had at least to be an enemy of tyranny in order to be punished by it." ~ #HannahArendt
The proper name for the new Putin-Trump foreign policy is a protection racket.
It's interesting that only people not constantly accused of being Nazis never accidentally make Nazi salutes.
"Those demons of diseased ambition who can destroy a countryside without compunction, if there be but a certain quick profit to be gained by the devastation, are but letting loose a brutality of motivation that in the end comes back to plague mankind itself. " #KennethBurke
"A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself...The citizen can repeat indefinitely 'the sacred formulas of democracy' while acting like a storm trooper." ~ Jacques Ellul
As Ralph Waldo Emerson says (I randomly opened his Essays and found this quote) "Nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms." In any case, thank you, and so into the "blue sky" I go.