I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view!
They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet.
It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s always a safe choice in the bureaucracy.
Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise.
There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.
Too many people believe you have to be one side or the other. Just because there are two choices doesn't mean (A) they are different and (B) one is better.
CONINTELPRO was FBI and was based on domestic surveillance against real and perceived communist influence. It did indeed have significant funding and push behind it.
90% of what they did was aggressive and likely unconstitutional, but make no mistake there were absolutely agitators in the US being pushed by the USSR -- and which date back to the original "Active Measures" pushed by the USSR.
Main funder of the US Communist Party during the COINTELPRO era was... surprise.. the FBI, they wanted to use the CP to keep tabs on possible spying or agitation efforts by Soviet Union's in the US.
I don't think dividing opinions into conspiracist and not conspiracist is not a good epistemological basis.
Opinions can be judged on the facts they are based on facts and how they are based on logical arguments or not regardless of their conspiracistness.
Top Gun is obvious stuff. Recently they are doing SEO too. "Project Monarch" for example is mostly known to the younger generation as a (fictional) CIA project to kill Godzilla ... I love the openning sequence of that film - obfuscating all sorts of stuff. Nothing wrong with "high brow conspiracist" which in straight forward language is more like 'looking into top down efforts to social engineer society and control masses'. Or you going to actually argue that has never been a thing in US and the West?
I’m not saying there aren’t attempts to control society. It’s what governments, think tanks, ad agencies, activist groups of all stripes, etc do for a living. There’s just tons of them and they’re at each others throats half the time.
There are groups of people who think they run the world. They’re delusional. There’s people who aspire to run the world who are also delusional. They can do a lot of damage sometimes before they fail.
I think you are overmodulating the conclusions bit here. It is more than just "attempts".
Possibly the difference in our views here have to do with what degree of (collective mind) control is of sufficient utility to various interested parties. Does one need to "run" the world or "100% control everything". I doubt it. I am thinking of the analogy of shifting the course of rivers here, where the (collective) river ends up behaving in the expected manner, and (individual) water molecules are (relatively) free to do wheelies or flow the other way or whatever remains possible within the overall boundaries of the river and its 'set course'.
This. People have a hard time wrestling with the fractional nature of it.
You don't need to convince everyone that Iraq has WMDs or that Stanley travel mugs are hot shit, just enough people to get done what you're trying to get done.
The distinction (as others make) is between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Of course conspiracies exist. Conspiracy theories, however, are flaky, unsubstantiated substitutes for genuine explanation that hinge on improbable or impossible conditions and powers to hold [0], often in the face of contradictory and much more reasonable alternatives.
It definitely was. There's nothing more annoying than the "of course all of this is true, but only crazy people think that people planned and did it on purpose."
The real conspiracy, it always seems, is that intelligence agencies ever do anything on purpose, or have any goals. They were supposed to fight the Soviets, but who decided on that? It is a mystery. Did they come up with plans? No, everybody just blundered around and did their own thing.
People are claiming that there were no plans and no coordination in offices where the same people sat at the same desks for 40 years, and were replaced by their children. It would be bizarre if you were talking about any other subject other than praise for authority and the diagnosis of people who deny its selfless goals.
> Not saying it was great.
How generous of you.
> There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.
You don't know that there are offices that deal with this in the military all day, and that they both help finance films and deny access to equipment and depictions of equipment to productions who don't agree to their terms? The military provides soldiers and equipment to films. This is true for all military divisions and intelligence agencies, and to my knowledge has been true since the FBI started funding and working productions in the 50s.
If you think all this stuff just sort of happens through random collisions, it's going to distort your perceptions of the world. Or specifically in my experience, to ascribe magical qualities to "the market."
One of the current funny clips is Claire Danes being silenced on the Colbert show when talking about the relationship of the show Homeland's creators to the CIA (one's father and cousin), how all the actors were invited to "spy school" every year, and how it was explained to her by somebody at CIA school that the CIA was having to deepen its similar partnerships in media to bolster support for itself against Trump (during the first term) before being quickly silenced by Colbert. She's a perfect example of people participating in every aspect of this process, yet still being unaware that it really exists. She'd call you a conspiracy theorist for mentioning it.
>One of the current funny clips is Claire Danes being silenced on the Colbert show when talking about the relationship of the show Homeland's creators to the CIA (one's father and cousin), how all the actors were invited to "spy school" every year, and how it was explained to her by somebody at CIA school that the CIA was having to deepen its similar partnerships in media to bolster support for itself against Trump (during the first term) before being quickly silenced by Colbert. She's a perfect example of people participating in every aspect of this process, yet still being unaware that it really exists. She'd call you a conspiracy theorist for mentioning it.
Watched it on mute with subtitles because work. The body language there is amusing. She's just blathering away unaware until Colbert throws a "shit shit shit we don't talk about how the sausage was made on the air" exception.
We don't need conspiracy, we have dialectic materialism. Similar to how for the most part manufacturing consent also doesn't rely on conspiracy (the New York Times and Dick Cheney nonwithstanding).
The failure of liberals may be a failure to read and understand the past.
The colloquial muddying of language concerning "conspiracy theory" was probably a government psyop in response to the JFK assassination. There, the officially endorsed theory was a lone wolf theory, that one guy did it by himself without any help or encouragement, and virtually all other theories were theories that involved one or more people conspiring in some way. From there, "conspiracy theory" morphed in media to mean any theory running counter to the official theory, even when the official theory was itself a theory about a conspiracy.
So, right-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: these three people secretly own everything through a hidden system of written contracts. Like "there's a secret room beneath Comet Pizza, specifically, where they buy and sell a chemical extract from the blood of scared babies"
And left-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: all the people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. Like "billionaires are fucking us over. Since media companies are owned by billionaires a large part of what they broadcast is just pro-billionaire propaganda."
Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is.
And the right definitely believes that people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. The "they" behind Pizzagate was "the Democratic Party."
And then there's "Cultural Marxism" (a conspiracy theory about the nefarious communist influence of Jews in academia), the "groomer" panic (a conspiracy theory that transgender identity is a cover for organized pedophile rings) white replacement theory, DEI, China anything and countless other conspiracies the right believes in that are based on some kind of racial or gender essentialism or prejudice.
The left has its share of that too, but the distinction you're trying to draw here makes no sense.
> "Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is."
No, that's not conspiracy. Conspiracy requires deliberate collusion between members of the conspiracy, it requires conspiring. If you have several people behaving in a way that appears coordinated because those people have aligned values and incentives, then it might be possible that those people have talked to each other and come up with some sort of a plan, which would make it a conspiracy, but it's also possible that no such organization exists and they're each independently doing whatever they think is correct in their circumstance. In that case, the emergent group behavior looks like a conspiracy but literally isn't a conspiracy.
This is what Manufacturing Consent talks about. I wish people would read it.
I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view!
They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet.
It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s always a safe choice in the bureaucracy.
Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise.
There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.