I don't normally watch TV, so it's easy to forget, but it's frankly horrifying just how heavily propagandized the average American is.
I don't normally watch TV, so it's easy to forget, but it's frankly horrifying just how heavily propagandized the average American is.
When I moved out on my own I never bothered getting a cable subscription. It's been several years now. On my PC or my phone, I use ad blockers. On the TV we pass around account credentials for streaming services. I almost never even see advertisements any more (in media, anyway), aside from when Mike Duncan is hawking razor blades or mattresses at me for the first minute of his podcast.
On rare occasions my wife turns on a stream of CNN, John Oliver, the Super Bowl, the Olympics or whatever, or when I go to see family or somewhere in public where cable news is playing, I begin to feel physically ill. It is all just so fucking slimy and duplicitous. They literally cannot go a minute without reinforcing some sort of big lie about American exceptionalism, empire, or the innate benevolence of American institutions, the global free market, or their new favorite term, the American led "rules based international order."
It is, as Zizek would say, pure ideology. It is nothing but ideology. Doesn't matter if it is MSNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR, local broadcast TV. It is always like fucking astrology. It is always working backwards from the assumption that the United States is legitimate and justified in all circumstances to explaining how domestic and world events uphold that assumption. It is never an investigation into how or why crises take place, what the root causes are, or how they might be avoided or mitigated. It is never about holding powerful people accountable.
Then after 6 minutes of that slop, it is time to cut to the advertisements so you can learn about how the new Tide Pods are environmentally friendly(TM) because you can run the machine on cold (as if you were going to waste money washing your socks in a separate machine at the laundromat), some new TV series about being Black in America which frames all problems of living in the inner cities on a bunch of yokels in the hills and prescribes national unity as the solution, how the newest Ford pickup is bigger and stronger than all previous iterations but we're working on becoming environmentally friendly(TM), or some patriotic spiel from Bruce Springsteen about how great America is, followed by a sales pitch for the new Jeep Wrangler. Then three or four ads about the newest prescription psychiatric drugs with animations of sad bumblebees turning into happy bumblebees while someone reads an entire page of disclaimer copy.
It is fucking bleak. It is worse than any picture they try to paint about the conditions of propaganda in our Official Enemies(TM) like China or DPRK. It is like a very bad methamphetamine-enhanced acid trip.
I actually haven't had cable in close to a decade now and everytime I see the TV at the breakroom at work I feel the same way. (American) capitalism is shockingly "totalitarian" and it's very bizarre to feel that way because literally no one besides the 0.00000000000001% of crazies like us seems to notice it. Some reactionaries do but they just call it "globohomo" and want to replace it with heckin based 1950's ads instead
only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds
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That's the power of anti-revisionism.
Pick one I guess.
And yet juche hasn't introduced ads, mass markets, landlords, etc.
I may consider it revisionist, but it's far better than ACR and such
goddamn, well said.
:data-laughing:
To be fair to Mike, someone on Twitter pointed out that all of his ads end at exactly like 90 seconds into his podcasts (so it's easy to set it up so it just skips the ads automatically every time). I remember Mike actually responded with a wink emoji or something like that
Yeah I just spam the >15 s button until I hear the music start