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The Coming "Propaganda Blitz" Against El Salvador
449 sats \ 6 comments \ @Atreus 1 Dec 2022 bitcoin
Ordinarily I would say such things are easily defeated with the ol' "Trust, But Verify," but considering FTX and other events since 2020, I'm really not sure just how many BTCers are left who trust the media at all. It's basically factory journalism at this point, and many of us have long since turned to organic, free-range media sources as an alternative. True, there's less regulation, but there's also less control and manipulation.
Know your farmer, know your journalist, know your sources?
Alright enough of that metaphor. I just wanted to point out the easiest and fastest way for TPTB to 'stop' (or slow down — slowing adoption down is also a good objective for them) more nations from adopting BTC, is to use El Salvador as a prototype for what can happen when you adopt BTC. "You're adopting BTC? Don't you know what happened to El Salvador?" The association would be enough to do the damage. Some people view the Human Mind as another natural resource to be fought over, after all.
Even if things are fine in El Salvador, you can technically create a narrative that allows TV talking heads to say, "You're adopting BTC? Don't you know what happened in El Salvador?"
Writing this it occurs to me I might just be preaching to the choir, considering the Bitcoin space has been dealing with, loling at, and ignoring propaganda directed at it for 10+ years; some subtle, some overt, some insidiously clever, some plainly idiotic. But if "repetition is the mother of memory," it seemed worth repeating.
Should we just modify the old saying "Trust but verify" to "Verify?"
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235 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 1 Dec 2022
Man, I love your updates about El Salvador! Please continue all your posts about it, here.
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33 sats \ 4 replies \ @TomK 1 Dec 2022
Watch who is financing mainstream media. Buckle up for a rough ride to adoption BUT: like Marshall MacLuhan analyzed, propaganda disappears out of the heads so fast as it enters. Incentives are forming our thinking, incentives are building the world we will be living in. And BTC offers the perfect incentive for building, saving, working on it
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1 sat \ 3 replies \ @chungkingexpress 1 Dec 2022
I had not heard the MacLuhan quote about propaganda before. But make sense, how many of the covid mantras have become memes at this point ‘2 weeks to flatten the curve’ etc
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11 sats \ 2 replies \ @Atreus OP 1 Dec 2022
A lot that could be said & studied viz., propaganda and what @TomK said. There's been a background "arms race" for decades to develop the best means/instruments to influence populations; Cyberspace happens to be the optimal "battlespace" for their deployment, and I think people are catching on to that since '20.
To quote Ellul — 
Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propa­gandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver...
Just as people have learned to recognize the sound of "gunfire" and "explosives," they have to learn to recognize the 'sound' of manipulation. It's become an imperative, both for our communities & people in general.
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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @chungkingexpress 2 Dec 2022
Very well put, thank you. I experienced this first hand during the covid mania of '20-'21. My educated friends, almost without exception took the "trust the science" approach. It was an example of Clown World in action as the actual truth became propaganda and the propaganda became truth.
I am not a particularly smart person, I have always struggled with mathematics, programming, and science, but I have a deep appreciation for philosophy, art, and language which somehow I feel gave me a slight inroad to understanding the "sound of manipulation" as you say. I could see it on the faces of the media personalities, I could read between the headlines of the newspaper, it slowly became more and more clear to me.
I have since developed an ability to happily parse a newspaper or headline, however clearly Clown World-aligned, not for its "truth content" in any objective sense, but for its signifiers of the next move. I read the national newspaper of my country like the script of a television show, with plot twists and guest appearances, with deus ex machina and season finales and product placement.
Does this make me vulnerable as I blindly reject all and everything coming out of the media apparatus, even on the off chance that it is beneficial for me to actually follow that advice? Yes it certainly does. But that is a risk I am willing to take.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @TomK 2 Dec 2022
And in the wider context: the simple fact that this cartel of power lets SBF running around and is trying to white-wash him morally is very telling. He is the big authentic propaganda machine that crypto doesn't work. But again: 99.9% didn't see his interview, laughed about it or simple forgot the shitshow!
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