In the future, people will study propaganda like “Adolescence” in the way they study “Triumph of the Will” as a way to understand Germany in 1935.
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Samizdata quote of the day – you can learn a lot by watching the other side’s propagandaApril 12th, 2025 |
 30 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – you can learn a lot by watching the other side’s propagandaLeave a Reply |
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One of the key beliefs of Leftists is that we are all born as ‘blank slates’ who may be ‘educated’ into socially acceptable behaviours. This allows the Left to dream of an Utopia where all shall behave well.
It explains why a fiction about a boy being ‘educated’ away from his blank slate into an evil killer is so popular. Why other oppressed people are really nice after all. Why people can ‘choose’ a different gender because their blank slate can be edited.
But we are not born as ‘blank slates’. We have predispositions which may, or may not, be in line with socially approved behaviours.
Agreed Perry.
It reminds of the ways leftists push productions (books, plays, films whatever) as explained in Ayn Rand’s “Fountainhead”.
“Adolescence” is being pushed by all the normal establishment types – from the Prime Minster to the bores who run the clinically unfunny “Private Eye” magazine. All the normal propaganda – “it should be taught in schools” say the “experts”, white-males from married two parent families are the-source-of-all-evil.
As for the real main threats to women and girls – shut up you “ist” and “phobe”.
Behold the new Western mentally-ill matriarchy.
Fear and shun white males.
DiscoveredJoys
Yes – the message is pro censorship. Although the television show itself does NOT show the boy watching Andrew Tate and co – the Prime Minister says this is what the “documentary” (yes he pretended the show was a documentary) shows, and proves the case for censorship.
And, of course, it also “proves” the case that, unless you are a servant of the state, you should be totally unarmed – after all if you have a Boy Scout style knife (the Boy Scouts and Boy’s Brigade used to teach shooting – but if you tell people in Britain that, they will not only not believe you – they are quite likely to report you to the police for what you have said), you are going to use the knife to murder a girl. At least if you are a white male from a two parent family, you will.
While the content is undoubtedly sinister, Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is also undoubtedly worth watching as a piece of excellent cinematography, a bit like DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was.
Adolescence on the other hand is some flavour of the month Netflix slop.There’s something grimly amusing that PM Keir Starmer has more than once called it a ‘documentary’, but it doesn’t surprise me as the same man has said in interviews he has no favourite novel or poem, and doesn’t dream.
With the mention of Riefesthal i am so tempted to make the most puerile comment on this blog ever hahahah
I gave in and watched it yesterday afternoon (as a displacement activity to put off assembling the garden planters I’d unwisely bought from Lidl!), and as a drama, I gave it 10/10, well acted and directed.
As a searing social commentary on the lines of ‘Cathy Come Home’, I couldn’t even give it 1 out of 10.
Lidl is great. I’ve just had some of their Stilton at beakfast, delicious, and I commend to all readers the song ‘The Middle of Lidl’ by Goldie Lookin Chain on youtube.
Back on topic now, and considering the merits of looking at the other side’s propaganda: read the Koran and Hadith to see what that religion is really about (those texts tell you) rather than listen to Westerners and their false claim that it is a religion of peace.
Is Saudi Arabia the only country in the world that displays a weapon on its national flag?
No – Mozambique’s flag has an AK-47 on it.
Plus Kenya’s flag has spears on it and Angola’s has a machete.
The show “Adolescence” is joining a long, inglorious list of TV shows I intend to avoid.
Martin: Mozambique’s flag has an AK-47 on it.
According to this video, that weapon works and can be fired under water.
DiscoveredJoys: But we are not born as ‘blank slates’. We have predispositions which may, or may not, be in line with socially approved behaviours.
True. We are not born as blanks in the sense of having no predispostions; we are not, however, born with specific ideas. I wasn’t born (ask my Dad) with a knowledge of how to do algebra or French irregular verbs. I had to learn these things, and master them and grasp concepts around maths, grammar and so forth. That took actual effort and a choice to focus; it was not a predisposition.
The problem with all this is that we can swing between extremes: on the one side, a sort of determinist idea that we are pre-programmed to do X or Y, either as a result of nature or nuture, or both, or, on the other side, the idea that we are blank sheets of paper, on which our alleged betters can stamp their approved ideas. The truth is far more nuanced: we have our drives, our tendencies and natures, and part of that nature is that we have agency, and can introspect, learn, adapt, and teach. We understand our natures and drives, and as a result, are better able to mould and give them a healthy direction. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed, as Roger Bacon once put it.
Last week while on holiday in Florida, arguably the least woke and best governed US state, I visited the private school where my niece teaches to see their “Multicultural night to celebrate the global community”.
Relatively harmless stuff – around 20 tables set up in the cafeteria with kids and teachers in national costume (ok, mainly in South and Central American football shirts) handing out sugary nibbles and stamping “world passports” for the youngsters.
I was disappointed, in this otherwise praiseworthy institution, to see one table extolling a country called Palestine complete with keffiyah-clad teachers and posters/maps/books showing the “homeland”. No mention of Israel anywhere.
Am I being over-sensitive? I don’t think so, this is what highly impressionable kids are being taught and the end results are visible in schools and colleges across the western world. I had hoped Florida might do better.
Hopefully yes, but the other way round.
I don’t know which way the world will go right now, but people who are cribbing about something like Adolescence are…I mean, frankly, they are fucking questionable at best.
If your response to *that* is to go “oh noes leftist propoganda!”, then you need to have a very, very deep look at yourself in the mirror, and if you still think it is, there is something very, very badly wrong with you.
John, no, you are not being over sensitive. In fact that is just the sort of event where this bile needs to get pushed back against. Maybe a counter-protest?
Next time that school has “Multicultural night”, add in an historical table: Germany, 1939! Nazis in full uniform, Swastika proudly flying over the table, and a couple of shaved head students standing under a gas shower head! Now, that’s balance! See if you can get it positioned right next to the “religion of peace” table so that the parallels can be talked about.
OK, maybe wait until those kids are in high school for that stuff, but your serious point is important: teaching the important things starts early.
Greg
I should have stated that this was an elementary school. By the time the students are 7 or 8 the damage will have been done.
Although tempted I said nothing to the principal for fear of damaging my nieces prospects as contracts are generally reviewed and renewed annually. It’s her career after all. In any event in their own minds they’re “educators” on the right side of history. Not bad people but horribly dangerous.
“Everybody is born a completly mallable blank slate, they can become anything”
Ah, so being gay is a *choice*, is it, and so can be learned out of it?
“No, no,! That’s not what we meant, being gay is innate and unchangable!”
Oh, like intelligence, it’s in your genes.
“No! That *is* a blank slate!”
Florida, arguably the least woke and best governed US state . . .
Nah. That would be Indiana. But Indiana isn’t at all glamorous, so it slips under the cultural radar.
Which is, come to think, a good thing . . . for Indiana.
(I have not seen the show. I have only read about it. And, “cribbing” means complaining, right?)
Toxic masculinity? Incel culture?
Another solution in search of a problem.
A bigger problem these days is toxic anti-masculinity from women.
“Male involuntary celibacy”? Again, strikes me as a problem with females.
All of this strikes me as pushback by females when males won’t act less male. That’s not toxic masculinity. That’s toxic femininity.
😉
I genuinely LOL’ed at this. The UK government has been pushing this into schools, so yes, it is leftist propaganda & to claim otherwise is literally laughable. So yeah there is certainly something wrong with one of us 😀
@IrishOtter49
Nah. That would be Indiana. But Indiana isn’t at all glamorous, so it slips under the cultural radar.
First question to ask to determine if a state is well governed — how high is the income tax? Sorry Indiana, try again next time. There are about a dozen states in the USA that get by with no income tax and all its massive intrusions. Mississippi just passed a law eliminating theirs. So why can’t Indiana? Indiana’s tax rate is only a little lower than the Socialist State of Illinois. I thought about moving there but decided it wasn’t worth it.
DeSantis is, in my opinion, one of the very best governors in the history of the United States. He does get sucked into some silliness sometimes, but OMG does he get things done.
I just wish he had a better stage presence.
@bobby b
I just wish he had a better stage presence.
He is term limited, but I think his wife is running to replace him. And she is a total babe. Is that the same as stage presence?
Several Floridians I have spoken to despair of the Republican Party.
Given the option of continuity DeSantis after he is term-limited next year by simply electing his wife as the next Governor the party, and regrettably also President Trump, seem instead to be coalescing behind Rep Byron Donalds.
A worthy conservative by all accounts but when something is working so well why change is the oft-repeated message.
bobby b,
I think here cribbing is meant here in this sort of sense…
Nickm: so, like telling someone a “secret” that contains “McArthur”, and then solving their resulting coded messages for that name?
A bigger problem these days is toxic anti-masculinity from women.
Some years ago I read some research reports that showed the women taking hormonal contraceptives changes their sexual attraction away from “masculine” men and more towards “non-masculine” men and increased repulsion of “masculine” traits in potential partners.
Now, it’s not much of a step from that to “toxic” masculinity just being *normal* masculinity but increasingly perceived from a position of distaste of the traits of normal masculinity.
jdh – the regular use of powerful drugs may well be leading to severe problems.
The steady drop in fertility since the 1960s, and the general decay of society since the 1960s, may well be linked.
But powerful interests (political, cultural and commercial) do not wish people to notice this.
The fact that Kier “wetwipe” Starmer is pushing it is a point against it being “leftist” – he’s by no stretch of the imagination a leftist, and has in fact purged the Labour Party of people who are. He’s a centrist neo-liberal at best.
(He’s a “Marxist” only in the sense of Groucho. He has principles, and if you don’t like them, well he has others)
I’m not sure I’d recommend it to you. It’s…very well made, incredibly well shot, and all the actors (especially the lad) are on top form.
But it’s a bit of a passion project – it was created after Stephen Graham read a story about a couple of (white) kids who got into a fight and one knifed the other at a bus-stop. It then developed into a broader thing about incel culture, the manosphere, and very much runs the risk of conflating several interconnected but arguably distinct facets of life in the UK. It also slightly uncomfortably ignores the victim (a young girl), in favour of concentrating on the lad. I can see why, and I think it’s a valid choice, but it’s noticeable enough.
(a lot of the – poorly thought out, IMHO – criticism has focussed on the lad being white, and how it demonises the “white working class”. Which…ok, but it was written by a white working class (ish) bloke about the white working class, in an area which is predominantly white working class, and his thought process was set-off by an incident between two white working class lads. He’s just writing about what he knows, and that particular critique strikes me as bad faith)
I only watched it because it did the rounds at one of my friend’s school-groups (she’s a young widow with two young sons, so…relevant to her); I wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. I’m aware enough of the incel thing, of toxic masculinity, and how it’s weaponised by all sides; but she asked me to watch it and give her a precis – for very understandable reasons as a mother without a father-figure to her sons in her life.
Strikes me as a problem with the blokes in question, tbh 🙂
In my day (get off my lawn etc etc), the lads who couldn’t get laid didn’t make up subcultures to explain it, they just went to the gym, stopped eating greasy food that gave them acne, and worked on their banter, clothing choices and personal hygiene.
bobby b,
“crib” seems to have a loy of uses. It can refer to a “cheat sheet” for exams which is I suspect something close to the usage he but it can also refer to a form ofdistress in domestic horses. Sometimes I’n glad I work with computers which don’t do have the semantics thing.
Colloquially, at least where I’m from, it means “complaining and disapproving”, which is the sense I’m using it in here 🙂