9/27/19: Propaganda Blindspots & The Constituent Mob

Institutions fail and democracy descends into mob rule when representative are paralyzed and terrorized by fear of their voters. Trump, Ukraine, and 2020's year-long electoral reality show disguised as an idealistic impeachment. Informational sectarianism and how it's easy to see "their" propaganda. Yours? Never! Their demagogue is your savior. There may be a way for a detaching informational unicorn treat that. MSNBC, CNN, and FOX are Pepsi, Coke, and Dr. Pepper; when everything is spin and propaganda, who's a political infidel supposed to believe?



Also:

• Alternate Informational Universes 
• Half-assed media sophistication: not enough
• Why can't we watch the opposition's media without going nuts?
• Our dueling scandals aren't automatically mutually exclusive
• More on the the Current Events Man 
• Media isn't free. You are the product being sold. 

 

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8/2/19: Propaganda: Slogans, Rationalizations, The Religious Mind

The conclusion of Ellul's psychological crystallization segment featuring the makeup of its slogans & how they're used to replace thought, collective belief and obsessions, self-justification/rationalizations and how they spawn the self-righteous Puritan, the closing of the crystallized mind, propaganda's religious personality, and a bizarre 21st century media phenomenon: monetizing mind rape.




ALSO:

- Marianne Williamson: The New Trump?
- Introducing the father of American propaganda: Edward Bernays
- They know you better than you know yourself
- Propaganda's side-effects and how they mirror the '60's definition of "neurosis"

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


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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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7/22/19: Humanist Puritans, Wokeflake Jesus, Manchurian Crusaders

The extreme left's totalitarian purity test and its search for Utopia's messiah; self-righteous moral certainty and the narcissistic narratives of the secular humanist religion. Then, agitation propaganda creates armies of proselytes and militants while unleashing an uncontrollable and destabilizing primal hatred for "the evil other." No one's immune; would you even know if you're devouring propaganda?



ALSO: 

• Silent Collaborators
• The Sunday School of political insemination
• Political missionaries always rapping at the smart phone's door
• Being right vs. "looking" right
• Ignoring history
• You're solely responsible for protecting and maintaining your own mind 

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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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7/8/19: Wordknapping, Propaganda's Effects, A Reckoning

"He who defines is your master." More on twisting definitions as a malicious propaganda tool, how institutional propaganda systems affect a population, and where a species oblivious of its own shortcomings ultimately ends up.



Also: 
-Communing with the organic dead
-There's no such thing as collective critical thought
-Intelligence as a handicap
-Foreshadowing a Walter Lippmann re-think

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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?

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7/3/19: Broken Beasts of Intellectual Burden

A digital detox update and re-connecting with the organic world, Trump's 4th of July spectacle and the predictable "outrage", why I'm rooting against the US women's soccer team, the ridiculous debates, and half as many young people consider themselves "gay allies." Why? Beware the boomerang!



Also: 

-Social media is the new talk radio
-Visceral emotive manipulation and monetized propaganda
-Algorithms as propaganda delivery systems

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6/27/19: Convulsive Twitch and The Damage Done

Are we representing ourselves accurately via these one dimensional social media avatars? I update the digital detox progress and talk about my over-amplified virtual projection, Toddzilla, destroying meaningful relationships, how the tweet is in the eye of the beholder, missing a funeral for a friend, and maybe a faint glimmer of not-so-Sausage Party Hope.



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6/25/19: The Signal To Noise Ratio and A Digital Pretox

How does someone whose life is based online digitally detox? Good question. Let's find out; here's how it's going to start.  Should be a hoot!



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6/21/19: The Social Media Disease - Distraction Sickness, Electronic Eyes, Thought Shaming

Hi New Zealand! Find yourself logging onto to the LaBrea Twitter Pit or Facebook and suddenly you've lost far more time to it than you intended?  Me too. More on Digitally Enhanced Avatars, Digital Detox as a treatment for a distorted virtual perception/socialization as well as depression, anxiety, cynicism, and generalized anger.

Also,
-The universal nature of both our inner and shared stories
-Propaganda is a story
-What happens when conflicting propagandas collide?
-Social Vengeance Warriors moving beyond "justice" and discrimination into thought control




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6/17/19: Pick Your Authoritarian Wisely

Wrapping things up with Chris & Rich, we discuss how public relations is, literally, a euphemism for propaganda, manufacturing opinion, euphemisms and twisting words to fit the propagandist's purpose, informational overload creating political non-entities, and partisanship rotting political, cultural and social institutions.

Also:

-Abandoning basic American principles; Patriotism's vicious backlash
-Social upheaval or an authoritarian police state resulting from the governed revoking their consent
-The Great Utopia is not only impossible, its illusion is held together only by chains
-The ridiculous argument that people are voting "against their own interest"
-Morally self-righteous bigotry and Wokeflakes poking the Crackerbear




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6/7/19: Hey, Hilltucky! Reptilian Truth & The Outrage Fever

No Politics! Lots of drilling to the "get the f**k away from me!" meltdown core.

-Bulls**t Jousting
-The truth probably won't set you free
-Sausage Party Hope and the fueling Audacity of Belief
-How & why disinformation works: a first person play-by-play.


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Also visit: www.christophermedia.net
More: www.escapingthecave.com

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?



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Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

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Also on Stitcher and Spotify

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


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Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

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5/14/19: The Social Media Disease - Virtual Mobs, Conformity, External Truth

Unsophisticated media consumers and the failure to take personal responsibility for our own intellectual maintenance. The surrender of the individual's intellectual autonomy to the conformist mob. How mobs-cells no longer need to leave the couch and are now free to anonymously molest & terrorize the "other" via Twitter, Facebook, and their phones.

Also:

• Social Media Influencers and how the Media 101 Model applies to them
• Emerson on independent thought, conformity, and consistency
• The abandonment of external truth and the path to authoritarianism 

Need more Toddzilla?

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2) Click the links.
3) Gorge on your way to therapy.

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Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

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5/9/19: The Elephantitis Pandemic; Winter Is Here

Haidt's elephant and how it relates to our constitutional crisis, rising authoritarianism, and our likely dystopian future. "Evolution didn't end with opposable thumbs."

• The thin veneer of civilization
• Self-dehumanization
• Extremists v. Moderate
• The Social Media Disease

Need more Toddzilla?

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2) Click the links.
3) Listen on your way to therapy.

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5/7/19: Political Orphans & Constitutional Hospice

Parties, their power-first representatives and constituents, fundamentalist ideologues, extremists, etc. are failing everyone. Government institutions are melting down and the faith of the governed along with it.

Hey! What could go wrong?!?




Need more Toddzilla?

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33 Listen on your way to therapy.

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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.

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2) Click below. 

3) Listen on your way to therapy.

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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