Art----IS---"Propaganda", O.K.???????? (F911)

[UTUSN]

1) There is nothing NOT true, factually, in that movie.

2) Criticisms heard, that MOORE is "manipulative" and pulling "emotional strings".

Uh, "Art" MEANS pulling emotional strings. SHAKESPEARE was a manipulator. The painter who painted fat, naked broads was a MANIPULATOR. When whassisname, VAN GOGH painted a wheatfield with black crows, he was being MANIPULATIVE. When Michelangelo painted a naked dude and called him "David", he was being manipulative. When ANY artist, composer, sculptor, movie-maker does his thing, he is BEING MANIPULATIVE. When I wrote my poem, I was being MANIPULATIVE.

Art means "using" emotions.

Art--------IS-----------propaganda, O.K.?????

(What to respond to wingnut "art critics".)

[nolabels]

1. Everything you encounter in life is PROPAGANDA (if you think about it)

But in that Manual they say:

PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES

"Propaganda Techniques" is based upon "Appendix I: PSYOP Techniques" from "Psychological Operations Field Manual No.33-1" published by Headquarters; Department of the Army, in Washington DC, on 31 August 1979
(snip)
- Humor: Humor can be an effective form of insinuation. Jokes and cartoons about the enemy find a ready audience among those persons in the target country or military camp who normally reject straightforward accusations or assertions. Jokes about totalitarian leaders and their subordinates often spread with ease and rapidity. However, the psychological operator must realize that appreciation of humor differs among target groups and so keep humor within the appropriate cultural context.

- Pure motives. This technique makes it clear that the side represented by the propagandist is acting in the best interests of the target audience, insinuating that the enemy is acting to the contrary. For example, the propagandist can use the theme that a satellite force fighting on the side of the enemy is insuring the continued subjugation of its country by helping the common enemy.

- Guilt by association: Guilt by association links a person, group, or idea to other persons, groups, or ideas repugnant to the target audience. The insinuation is that the connection is not mutual, accidental, or superficial.

- Rumor: Malicious rumors are also a potentially effective form of insinuation.

- Pictorial and photographic propaganda: A photograph, picture, or cartoon can often insinuate a derogatory charge more effectively than words. The combination of words and photograph, picture, or cartoon can be far more effective. In this content, selected and composite photographs can be extremely effective.

- Vocal: Radio propagandists can artfully suggest a derogatory notion, not only with the words they use, but also by the way in which they deliver them. Significant pauses, tonal inflections, sarcastic pronunciation, ridiculing enunciation, can be more subtle than written insinuation.
(snip)(index at bottom)
http://www.mapinc.org/propaganda/propaganda/proptech.htm

[UTUSN]

2. Thank You n/t

[nolabels]

5. But to pull it off with the greatest success you need an actor or salesman

That's why Poppy was such a failure, but his son, the clown, has gotten away with so much. Poppy would have never been able to pull the crap dim-son did (so far).

All of Poppys stuff was really scripted. He would have never made it out the gate if he had Dim-sons problems with the elections and stuff. He is evil as far as can see, but if we know anything about *, it's to not misunderestimate *

The media is letting * flounder now, but I can bet we will see some crap (incidents) go on later in the year, and they will rehabilitate *. I never trust people with a bigger pile of chips than me, they always cheat so they can steal more.

M.Moore has some of them qualities, but he isn't running for pOTUS.

I am not trying to pump anything up, I am just relaying what I think I see

[dumpster_baby]

3. DUers are typically almost as clueless as the general public about ....

....propaganda, although there are some who are clued in.

Politics IS propaganda. What Americans want and think is basically created through propaganda.

Moore is totally about propaganda. In fact, he is the premiere leftist propagandist in America. I just wonder what he plans to do in the future.

[nolabels]

6. "What Americans want and think is basically created through propaganda."

When you try to show people how that works, they get angry, but once in while you get that hundredth monkey that goes "ah-ha"

I am damn sure I am not no expert on anything, but the best clue I found is to keep stumbling around, you will find eventually

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. ~Buddha"

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.'- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)"

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.' - Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)"

http://www.miniluv.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=471

[HawkerHurricane]

4. Originally...

art (pictures and sculpture) was attempting to do what we use a camera for nowadays... preserve an image for posterity. But it quickly becomes propaganda, in that what gets preserved is picked by those in power... shaman, priest, king, emperor, wealthy patron... usually to reflect glory upon themselves or thier beliefs...

ok, so I guess I agree after all.

[markses]

7. Michelangelo's David is a sculpture

Just saying.

I'd take it a step further. The whole modern argument against "using emotions" is bollocks from the outset, smuggling certitude into a sphere where it does not function. Postmodern garbage? Hardly. Even Aristotle knew this, which is why "pathos" - or appeals to emotions - is one of the three main categories in his Art of Rhetoric. Hard to get more canonical than Aristotle. Oh yeah, Aristotle also "invented" logic, as it were, or at least categorized the forms of logical argumentation already in use. But syllogism was proper for particular kinds of arguments, while rhetoric was proper for other kinds of arguments (among them, political argument). ALL political argument uses emotional appeals. The flag is an emotional appeal. The appeal to the welfare of the "Iraqi people" is an emotional appeal. Any right-winger who thinks that yellow ribbons and "rape rooms" function as "logical" rather than "emotional" appeals is an imbecile of first order.

[nolabels]

8. To categorize and place in neat little boxes is why

You cannot add and subtract without it.

The sculpture is the mechanism of placing the human in a static position (from which they dissect it)

They are not happy unless they own it, can control (the little child inside us that fears the outside world does that)



Regarding the Torture of Others
By SUSAN SONTAG

Published: May 23, 2004, New York Times Magazine

I. For a long time -- at least six decades --photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.

The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the
photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted.
(snip)
The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged, it's hard to censor soldiers overseas, who don't write letters home, as in the old days, that can be opened by military censors who ink out unacceptable
lines. Today's soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, ''running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The administration's effort to withhold pictures is
proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if they are made public.
The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners, said he felt ''very strongly'' that the newer photos ''should not be made public. I feel that it could possibly endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are serving and at great risk.''

But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a
campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an implicit criticism of the war to show on television photographs of American soldiers who have
been killed in the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of America.

After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders
choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.
(snip)
http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/article.php?sid=2054&mode=&order=0

[markses]

9. I'll give it a shot

1) I noted that Michelangelo's David was a sculpture because the original poster seemed to think it was a painting.

2) I certainly understand your general statements on categories (and even scuplture, although i think the point here is a bit simplistic), but I do not understand how they apply to my post.

[nolabels]

11. Yea, I am a dumb dumb

But hey, he could of painted him after the sculpture :D



http://cssa.mit.edu/worldheritage/h_py.htm

What I was referring to was "three main categories in his Art of Rhetoric". The Greeks were kind of tribal and great thinkers, but they also were very successful at borrowing ideas from others because of the limited rocky land didn't give them much overage. Where as the Romans borrowed from them and others like the Jew, Egyptians Sumerians etc.

Some is written about and some of it is just understood like propaganda without words. I only took issue with trying to understand the statement which had many complex terms and ideas, but didn't say much but accept this or else, which I didn't. Many cultures except the entirety of all creation, where this western thought has divide and conquer everything and anything attitude.

The parable having the whole world but missing ones soul seems very apt for some of the western cultural ideas

[markses]

12. The types of appeals

In Aristotle are just meant as heuristics for invention. And while I don't necessarily disagree with your point about categories being used to segment more complex encounters, I think we'd be getting rather far afield there. And all cultures segment in order to DO things, so I also wouldn't limit categorization to western culture.

[nolabels]

13. Oh no, I hate rules as much as the categories (jokingly, of course)

I am too close to it for me to really be totally objective. But the world on a treadmill is what it looks like to me. We can run as fast as we want but we are not really getting anywhere, and if you haven't noticed, nobody is taking any of it with them when they check out.

It is religious too, because that space between our ears is the only thing no one else can posses, That's why I "say everything a person encounters is propaganda"

[Cat Atomic]

10. I got a chuckle yesterday from a CBS reporter's insinuation

that F911 is nothing but propaganda. She turned right around and began talking up the "hand over of sovereignty" to the new Iraqi government, and mentioned how no one disagrees that the world is better of now that Hussein is out of power. Now THAT'S propaganda.

[durutti]

14. Yup. All good art is propaganda.

Perhaps all art, period.

[Swamp Rat]

15. Hmm... Interesting approach.

Yes, I can see how this tactical approach could be used to attack the foundation of their criticism.

[T Town Jake]

16. SOME Art - sure...and

...damn effective it can be at times, as with this powerful movie. But the notion that ART as a concept is all-propaganda-all-the-time is a dehumanizing, discredited notion - and reductively Marxian. A better formulation might well be: all political "propaganda" (per se) is ART in a sense, but not all ART is political. The idea that ART should be - or is - at all times subservient to politics is a depressing one, because politics is so often employed in the service of inhumane and lifeless endeavors. ART, at its' best, serves as a reminder of interlinked human experiences everyone can recognize - and either smile, guffaw, nod, or weep over, accordingly. "Politics" has its' place in ART, to be sure, but not to the exclusive relegation of this sweet thing we call LIFE to the shadows of ART'S intrinsic allure, beauty, and summons to our deepest yearnings and greatest hopes. EOM.

[UTUSN]

17. Two Corrections to Myself

1) Apologies for typing (as I frequently do) in the throes of some kind of emotion and speed, cough, thereby giving the impression I thought The David was a painting.

2) To the immediately preceding poster "Some art--sure"-------I did not intend to imply that "propaganda" equates with "politics". I meant to say that the ARTIST's VISION, MESSAGE is his personal propaganda. He is seeking to impose, or insinuate, HIS vision--OF WHATEVER---into our sensibilities. I dispute that ONLY SOME art is propaganda, or that "good" art is, or that propaganda is limited to Art. Every effing thing we say in whatever format is propaganda, trying to SWAY, CONVINCE---------we are SELECTIVE in the details we choose to include and to exclude.

My propaganda in this thread was to deflate wingnuts' arguments about F911 on this score.

[sangh0]

18. Propoganda is about disseminating ideas

which is not necesarily a bad thing and does not necesarily require dishonesty. If disseminating an idea is it's purpose, then it's propoganda.

[UTUSN]

20. I Agree with You, But Then

I always do, insofar as I recall.

[tjwash]

19. "David"

I always thought the "David" statue, was very manipulative. Here he sculpts an obviously European looking young man, when David in real life was from the middle east, and probably looked like what B* would call a terrorist.