Jang Jin Sung, a famous North Korea defector and former poet laureate who worked in North Korea’s propaganda bureau, calls this phenomenon “emotional dictatorship.” In North Korea, it’s not enough for the government to control where you go, what you learn, where you work, and what you say. They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.
from Chapter 5 (“The Dear Leader”) of “In Order to Live” by Yeonmi Park
It seems like John Lennon was not an uber-grammarian — whatever.
“What’s left?” (Bridget Phetasy, Dumpster Fire Episode #127 @ 23:40)
Yesterday I watched “Wag the Dog” (1997) again (see “Who’s on Top?“).
In her podcast episode, Mrs. Phetasy goes on a long rant about a wide variety of things (she briefly compares herself to a “Dollar Store Walter Cronkite” before she gets to her segment named “Breaking Bridget” about conflicts in the Middle East), including propaganda.
Mrs. Phetasy could probably could name quite a few influencers besides so-called governments about which she might get upset about time and again. She often does — when she refers to “feeding the algorithm” (I guess she also seems somewhat challenged when faced with distinguishing between single instances and collective pluralities).
In summary, I want to recommend this episode because of her own abilities to act as an influencer — and that is where the link to “Wag the Dog” comes from 😉 ). Yet the distractions of the hour, the day, the month, the year, … the main distraction of our times is that there is (purported to be) a clear distinction between mainstream media which many people seem to distrust and the so-called “search engines” which most people seem to trust with blind faith.
For more about such fun & games, there is so much more to “read all about it” in pretty much each and every post over at the “Social Business” blog. 🙂
The only real answer, to Trump and plutocracy both, is a mass movement of ordinary people, hailing from all different backgrounds, joined together by a common desire to understand and dismantle the forces that make their toil so profitless.
Emotional Politics 