Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

7/30/19: Propaganda: Manufacturing Proselytes & Militants


Propaganda isn't what you may think. Ellul's ideas on pre-propaganda, propaganda's conditioned reflexes, myths, and "orthopraxy". Including the triggering of active and passive action (activists, influencers, collaborators), widespread participation by "committed" zealots, the separation between thought and action, exploiting the abyss between what we say and what we do, mobilizing men for action counter to their own values, and being unable to reverse ourselves once "action" has begun.



ALSO:
  • Exiling naked sectarians
  • Agitation and organization
  • How the Internet rejuvenates and revives conditioned reflexes
  • Technology indoctrinates us much faster than before
  • Presuppositions, stereotypes, and political education disguised as universities
  • Mind-hacking thru a broken firewall
  • Seizing your intellectual autonomy
  • Excommunication is painful. But Necessary.

Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747


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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net

Sunday, July 28, 2019

7/28/19: Propaganda's Mindcrime, Partitioning, The Verbal Universe

More on agitation propaganda and the psychological effects of propaganda including: loss of individuality, the suppression of critical thought, creation of the mob and how critical thought is literally impossible as part of a group, the creation of a fanatically self-righteous social conscious leading to the demonization of the out-group, and more on the sphere of the sacred. Then, how propaganda partitions society (identity politics) via verbal fiction creating sects of victims who only speak "to themselves."


Also: 
  • Propaganda's only heard by its choir creating alternate factual universes
  • Manchurian activists primed for provoked outrage and action
  • The creation of an abstract verbal universe: fake news
  • Sacrificing self-dignity to "the cause"
  • The danger of surrendering to "something bigger than yourself"
  • Stereophonic propaganda
  • Reclaiming individuality by removing your dog from the fight

Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda":
https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

READ IT!


*Like it? SPREAD IT!  F**k The Zuckerbeast & Twitter. YOU are my marketing team.

*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com

Thursday, July 25, 2019

7/25/19: Spinning Mueller & The Sacred Cows

Congressional grandstanding for the cameras, Mueller's testimony: viewed and spun in parallel universes, deciding whether to read the report, voting your own self-interest (Yes! Do it!), the Current Events Man, asking the right questions, when boutique news becomes fatal, and the sacred Golden Calves.



Also: 
  • Leaving the mob
  • Evolution lurks
  • Mythology and the Devil within

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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com

Friday, July 19, 2019

7/19/19: Renouncing Patriotism And The Nationalist Boomerang

Todd, Chris, and Rich discuss how the left always inadvertently triggers heated nationalism with its self-defeating renouncement of patriotism, Zinnification: exploiting idealistic naiveté; how Zinnified agitation propaganda attacks national unity by destroying symbols and cohesively fictitious myths.



Also: 
  • “Racism” isn’t a "white thing" nor exclusively an American trait
  • The ridiculous notion that propaganda-farting fleshbots are “changing minds”
  • The slow crawl of social progress 
  • Paying Granddaddy’s social debts
  • Immigration and "becoming American"
  • “Socialism rules!" Then why was there a Berlin Wall?
  • Your special personal experience doesn’t matter
  • Child Worship? But, children are literally ignorant
*Like it? SPREAD IT!  F**k The Zuckerbeast & Twitter. YOU are my marketing team.

*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

7/17/19: Guidance Is Internal

Chris & Rich sit in on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. We discuss the achievement, the courage of those undertaking it, and how subsequent generations were cheated of their signature crowning moment in history.



ALSO: 

-Data overload, informational suffocation, and how the compulsive "current events man" is actually less informed.

-Are we "really" evolving?

-Patriotic appreciation vs. copycat anti-Americanism



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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net

Friday, July 5, 2019

7/5/19: Agenda + Journalism = Propaganda

Definitions, journalism as a euphemism for propaganda, Amash goes rogue, Antifa gets played by Patreon's punching bag, I have a creative reparations solution, FOX gets savvy and begins filling a glaring void. Part two coming soon.




Also:

-What happened to our Nuremberg rally?
-More on these ridiculous Democratic debates
-Justice isn't real
-Is the extremist worm turning?

*Like it? SPREAD IT!  F**k The Zuck & Twitter. YOU are my marketing team.
*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com

Thursday, June 13, 2019

6/13/19: The Social Media Disease - The Virtue Batsignal, Moral Authoritarianism, The Exhausted Majority

Todd, Rich, and Chris discuss the unwiring of social evolution, totalitarian tribes spawning skittish clones, and an exhausted "center" with nowhere to land that's not infested by puritans.




Also:
- Is your child "really" transgendered, or is their gender voice really yours?
-The outright refusal to see our own team's propaganda.
-The "wisdom" of youth.
-More on thoughtless opinions.
-More on Social Media Intellectual Influencers and their "brands".


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Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Google Play, Spotify, & Stitcher.
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

Friday, May 31, 2019

5/31/19: Propaganda 101: Corrupt Data & Distinguishing Truth From Falsehood

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”  
“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” -Walter Lippmann

Also: The difference between clever & smart and more on the DIKW pyramid and what happens when citizens ignore corrupt data.

- Justin Amash and the criticism from the left.

- Mueller's fumble and the Democrat's ensuing demand that he star in their 2020 reality show/campaign ad.

- To Impeach or not Impeach: just do it or STFU!

- Democrats are politically impotent to stop anything Trump does. How does that "protest vote" look now?



More episodes/subscribe:
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

Subscribe: iTunes and Google Play
Also on Stitcher and Spotify

Thursday, May 23, 2019

5/23/19: The Social Media Disease - Illusion of Knowledge & Democratized Opinion

Technology enables, and social media perpetuates, prioritizing the cheap appearance of knowledge instead of fostering knowledge itself.  Also, how the Internet changes cognition and the abandonment of expertise to the holy opinion: "my ignorance is equal to  your knowledge."

Also: 
-The DIKW pyramid and drowning in data.
-The Id on Parade, the natural state of man, and Leviathan.
-What happens when reasonable voices abandon the public square to mindless mobs of roving avatars?
-When avatars attack
-A classic full-frontal Toddzilla rant salvaged from The Lost Episode about Twitter, and more.






Elias Aboujaode's Virtually You: 
https://www.amazon.com/Virtually-You-Dangerous-Powers-Personality/dp/0393340546

Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: 
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death: 
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558613196&sr=1-1


More episodes/subscribe:
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

Subscribe: iTunes and Google Play

Monday, April 29, 2019

Media 101 - It's The People

Escaping The Cave returns! 

Are you wondering why every source of "news" and information sucks? It's because everyone from MSNBC to NPR to FOX to Alex Jones to Social Media "Influencers" operate according to the same for-profit model: drawing eyeballs to their product to sell someone else's.



Need more Toddzilla? 

1) Seek help. 
2) Click below. 
3) Listen on your way to therapy.

*Like the pod? SPREAD IT!  F**k The Zuckerbeast & Twitter. You are my marketing team.

*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net

Saturday, March 24, 2018

3/24/18: The Social Media Disease - Cyber Space Monkeys

First Social Media Disease antibiotic treatment. Starting with an X-Pod flashback to 2014, Todd discusses Cambridge Analytica before turning to more recent effects of our collective addiction to social media on society and how a bilateral abandonment of a commitment to basic common facts--in favor of tasty propaganda--is having a dehumanizing effect and rapidly eroding the social contract. Also: cyber space monkeys, avatars showing off for each other in the Matrix, and the digital-organic hybrid: meme belching cyborgs.




Need more Toddzilla? First, seek help. Second, click the links below. Third, listen on your way to therapy.

I was a guest on two Christopher Media shows this week:

Politics, society, social media: Unregimented - http://christophermedia.net/229-its-still-all-about-trump/

Baseball! And other unfortunate things: Sporgy- http://christophermedia.net/093-03-22-18/


More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

Thursday, March 15, 2018

3/15/18: The Demon (2014 Throwback)

Recorded shortly after Robin Williams committed suicide in 2014, this was one of the most popular episodes from my old podcast. It covers many topics Friar Chris and I discussed in the previous podcasts, including the fraud of "normal",misguided identity, the emptiness of success, depression, and the performers need for praise and validation. Some of the early ideas surrounding the Social Media Disease, such as personal “branding” and virtual facades, are here as well as kernels of things that will become familiar to the regular listener, such as The Marrow of Humanity.





More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com

Monday, March 12, 2018

3/12/18: Hitchhiking and Philosophy

The final episode of the Friar Chris Series begins with a discussion about the differences between bicycle touring and backpacking then moves on to deeper topics, including (@ 15:45) my experience volunteering on the Gulf Coast in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and the corrosive and corrupting effects of tribalism and dogma in the Disaster Relief Industrial Complex. We then move on to (mostly) explore the fundamental ideas behind why he and I chose hitchhiking and what we learned and experienced while traveling the country as “disposable” vagabonds loitering out on the fringe. 



SPOILER ALERTSausage Party Hope lies within!

More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com

Cheat Sheet follows:

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

2/6/18: Media 101: It's (We) The People

In this episode: thoughts on the popular escapist conspiracy theory about the mainstream media “dumbing us down to keep us docile and ignorant." I also dissect the reasons why our media is now composed nearly exclusively of boutique news outlets producing chum for echo chamber sharks, media desensitization and the cure, as well as the need for sugar-coated truth, and our insulated and self-cleansing propaganda ecosystems (news, standup, and Hollywood). 

Also: thoughtless “opinion”, white inheritance, Sausage Party Hope, Fleecing The Fucktards, and more. Not for everyone. Ask your doctor if Toddzilla is right for you. Use only as directed.


(This is the edited-for-time 2019 version. Original file linked below)



Tuesday, January 30, 2018

1/30/18: Ideological Religions and The Talking Dead

Identity politics being mutually exclusive with “equality”, ideological drift, political doctrine as competing and hostile secular religions, online mobs, and the zombifying effects of dogma. Not for the easily triggered or those requiring intellectual safe spaces. 

Subscribe: iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher

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Monday, January 29, 2018

1/29/18: He Is Risen!


Please update your iTunes and Google Play subscriptions to download future episodes.  

Stitcher: Coming soon
The rebranded X-Pod returns! Toddstradamus discusses his return to podcasting, social media, misguided consistency, fires his opening salvo at political religions and bilateral extremism, synapse pruning and The Useless Shit Epiphany, and establishing a solid signal to noise ratio. He also lays the foundation for exposing The Talking Dead and creating a more sophisticated media consumer while weeding his garden of that pesky Green Tea.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

(2014) - The X-Pod 007: Slithering Fascism & Tribal Warfare

Recorded in 2014 shortly before the first podcast ended, this episode discusses my initial Facebook purges, Trumpism (before Trump), the social damage inflicted by echo chambered disinformation (fake news) on facebook as well as the human inclination toward delusional tribalism. Not recommended for those looking for Sausage Party Hope! Definitely recommended for those wanting to reflect back on the not-so-distant past and reminisce on how we got here. And how things not only haven't changed, but gotten worse.


More:www.escapingthecave.com
www.upperworldphoto.com

Thursday, October 19, 2017

When Avatars Attack


A Recycled Prelude

An excerpt from an earlier post. This tells of what turned out to be a personally profound moment that took place in Phoenix on Halloween, 2016 just before Trump's election. It sets up nicely what you'll see sprouting here over the next several days and/or weeks. 




Facebook Avatars Escape The Matrix

Jeff and I went to a tiny Halloween get together at his apartment complex and toward the end of the night, the host’s neighbor stopped to chat. Seemed like a decent kid. Personable. Pleasant. Mid 20’s. I didn’t think anything of it. Suddenly, while he and the token liberal/anti-Trump partygoer were having a nice conversation, the liberal gun slinger decided to show off his ideological marksmanship and, out of the blue, yanked his Progressive Facebook Avatar from the Matrix dropping it, meme guns a-blazin’, into the Desert of the Real. The Trump supporter naturally reacted in kind and it predictably, and quickly, devolved from friendly polite banter into The Battle of Arizona and almost a physical fight.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

A Brief Facebook Relapse and The Last Bender


I’ll begin this expansive multi-part project with two quick anecdotes.

Over the years, I tried to stop smoking several times. Whenever I found success, I’d kill it by letting myself have “just one”. Yep.  “Just one” Swisher Sweet always turned into ten then another pack of Marlboros.

Friday, November 11, 2016

11/11/16: Grand Island to Des Moines - Why Did You Stop?

Grand Island, NE


My main concern late Thursday night: be prompt. Don’t miss John’s 1:15 am resurrection and the ride thru Nebraska. There was little to worry about. Nebraska’s November made sure I didn’t fall into actual sleep beneath my tree. John filled up on diesel and coffee while I settled back into his passenger’s seat excited and wondering where this 48-hour day would lead.

To recap: Before bedding down, John offered a ride clear to St. Louis. Closer to Chicago, but also another urban center and St. Louis, to steal a line, "aint nothin’ to fuck with." Instead, I suggested Council Bluffs, where John would turn south toward Kansas City.