Animals can also reveal divine qualities. The cow or cow-human forms of Hathor refer to her role as provider of milk to Horus and to young kings of Egypt.
Bronze, gold, and electrum. Late Period to Ptolemaic Period, ca. 664-30 BC. Now in the Brooklyn Museum. 37.356E
it’s absurd, the amount of time and energy it takes to refute good propaganda. well made shit packs so many layers of assumptions and conclusions into a single paragraph, or a single sentence, that it ends up takes multiple pages of refutation to unravel.
leftists, progressives, and especially revolutionary queer activists NEED to get better at making good propaganda.
a lot of us are too concerned with being perfectly nuanced and perfectly factual to be pithy or make good propaganda, and that’s how we keep losing these fights. that’s how we keep getting teens in queer space telling other queer people to kill themselves for being freaks, or unironically saying that human rights are a scam that child molesters came up with to let them rape children.
good propaganda doesn’t concern itself with factuality. it can be factual, sure! and progressive propaganda should be factual!
but facts are not the tool being used.
emotions are. leading questions are.
propaganda is about getting someone to agree that you are right first, then explaining to them how and why you are right later, once they’re open to it because they already agree that you’re right.
propaganda is a shortcut.
and we need to start taking it.
The word you are looking for is not propaganda, and if it is, the answer is no. No, no, absolutely fucking not.
What we should be doing? Teaching skills to RESIST propaganda. To instill in people a desire to know the truth and understand nuance.
What we should also be doing? Crafting good thesis statements, headlines, emotion-grabbing things—but not stopping there. Still focusing on facts, and nuance, which I would like to point out, ARE NOT THINGS USED IN PROPAGANDA, that is not what propaganda means.
propaganda isn’t a dirty word. propaganda isn’t evil.
the problem is, when only evil people use propaganda, then it becomes associated with evil.
and thus, people agitating for human rights and progress are left without a critical persuasive tool.
propaganda is the selective presentation of facts to make your conclusion seem obvious.
you know the phrase, ‘trans rights are human rights’?
that’s propaganda.
and i struggle to see how it’s immoral or indefensible.
here are some other examples of progressive propaganda.
a graphic titled, “how to distinguish capitalism from corporatism, a guide for libertarians.” the left image shows uncle sam and a rich businessman partying with cigars and bags of money, titled, “capitalism when we like it.” the right shows the same image, labeled, “corporatism when we don’t.”
a four panel comic. millenials and boomers are fighting with each other, each shouting, “:your generation ruined the economy.” a wealthy business owner watches, pleased. millenials and boomers stand in solidarity, each shouting, “capitalism ruined the economy!” the wealthy business owner is horrified.
an image titled ‘chug chug chug’ showing someone drinking an entire 5 gallon water bottle labeled, ‘respecting trans women juice.’
all of these are simple statements that present conclusions rooted in facts, but do not necessarily present the facts themselves.
propaganda presents the conclusion without the evidence. in plenty of cases, that’s because the evidence doesn’t exist. in the case of progressive propaganda, it’s because the evidence would literally be distracting from the point.
would the comic about people of different generations uniting to overthrow capitalist wealth inequality be made better, more accessible, or more effective by taking a fifteen minute detour to explain in perfect, nuanced detail all the ways capitalism created the current situation?
does saying, ‘trans rights are human rights’ work better if the speaker then tells their completely neutral and probably disinterested audience to settle in for an hour long lecture on the nuances of trans identity and history, and the necessity of human rights, and the ways human rights are encroached upon by misrepresenting restriction of rights as ‘safety’ for unrelated groups?
no. all of those discussions are great for people who are already interested in haing them. and they will do nothing but make progressive movements intimidating, dangerously purity driven, and inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know where to start.
propaganda is a tool. it is a means by which you can pressure neutral parties into giving you an opening to actually make your arguments. it is a means by which you can force opposition parties into going on the defense rather than following their own agendas.
it’s a tool.
it does not hae deep moral weight.
but it is a tool that cruel, and indeed evil, people are often more willing, and as a result more skilled, at using.
and this is exactly why progressive people need to get better are using it.
let’s say radical rather than progressive but good post
@intersex-ionality over here during Thatcher’s reign there was a sort of parody tabloid newspaper called Class War that dedicated itself to the tactics you’ve described
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