this is the fucking funniest thing ive ever seen im in tears of laughter. (right axis) . this is a work of fucking art
As you all can see when I started to purchase $10 pocket knives at gas stations in late 2017 and continued to do so once a year every year the gap between my annual military expenditure and that of the U.S. quickly began to close.
here it is on one axis lmao
Thank you for this simplified lesson in what propaganda looks like.
Someone smarter than me has probably gone into the semiotics of it but this kind of non-graph – whose primary purpose is to mystify readily available and perfectly readable information which suggests a conclusion disagreeable to the graphmaker – it has to serve some function beyond simple lying. It has to reflect some kind of magical thinking, a belief in taking an inconvenient truth and physically overstriking it on printed paper as a form of curse. The reliability with which graphs like this appear on major news networks and prestige periodicals, where the audience includes the nation’s most powerful businessmen and politicians, has to reflect some kind of ritual behavior. My money’s on its use as propaganda itself being ritual behavior, a blunt assertion that the truth is whatever the powerful make of it. The availability to the public is not an accident and the clarification of how asinine it is by regime opponents seems to be part of the ritual
The information is being deliberately obscured to A) partially encrypt the information from the average persons understanding, and B) reify the information to a more abstract yet politically specific sense of Importance.
Imo this fits the definition of Occult. This graph has been Occluded.
Advertising is an incredibly wasteful, ecologically destructive industry that intrudes on our everyday lives pretty much constantly. We’re absolutely fucked if we can’t even question one of the most distinctly obnoxious and useless facets of the ecocidal economic system we live in. Like this isn’t even something that powers our day-to-day existence like the energy sector (literally killing us but also keeping our AC/heat, transportation, etc running)—advertising just pollutes, wastes, and annoys, yet it’s been assimilated into many peoples’ sense of self and their ability to “enjoy things”
Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintaining planetary ecological equilibrium. The criterion by which an authentic need is to be distinguished from an artificial one is whether it can be expected to persist without the benefit of advertising. How long would the consumption of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola go on if the persistent advertising campaigns for those products were terminated? Such examples could be indefinitely multiplied.
“Of course,” pessimists will reply, “but individuals are motivated by an infinity of desires and aspirations, and it is these that will have to be controlled and repressed.” Well, the hope for a paradigmatic change in civilization is indeed based on a wager, as propounded by Karl Marx, that in a society freed from capitalism “being” will be valued over “having.” Personal fulfillment will be achieved through cultural, athletic, erotic, political, artistic, and playful activities, rather than through the unlimited accumulation of property and products—the sort of accumulation induced by the fetishistic consumption inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising and having nothing to do with some “eternal human nature.”
As capitalism, especially in its current neoliberal and globalized form, seeks to commodify the world, to transform everything existing—earth, water, air, living creatures, the human body, human relationships, love, religion—into commodities, so advertising aims to sell those commodities by forcing living individuals to serve the commercial necessities of capital. Both capitalism as a whole and advertising as a key mechanism of its rule involve the fetishization of consumption, the reduction of all values to cash, the unlimited accumulation of goods and of capital, and the mercantile culture of the “consumer society.” The sorts of rationality involved in the advertising system and the capitalist system are intimately linked, and both are intrinsically perverse.
Advertising pollutes the mental landscape, just like it does the urban and rural landscapes; it stuffs the skull like it stuffs the mailbox. It holds sway over press, cinema, television, radio. Nothing escapes its decomposing influence: in our time we see that sports, religion, culture, journalism, literature, and politics are ruled by advertising. All are pervaded by advertising’s attitude, its style, its methods, its mode of argument. Meanwhile, we are always and uninterruptedly harassed by advertising: without stop, without truce, unrelentingly and never taking a vacation, advertising persecutes us, pursues us, attacks us in city and countryside, in the street and at home, from morning to evening, from Monday to Sunday, from January to December, from the cradle to the grave.
Ecosocialism, Michael Löwy
Legitimately abysmal. Like a dog finding a secluded place to die alone because it feels itself growing weak and you can’t explain to it that veterinary medicine exists
me when i have a reliable public transport network and guaranteed housing and food and water and electricity and healthcare and democratic control over my workplace and no boss who can threaten to fire me and destroy my life and no landlord who can threaten to evict me and do the same but i can’t buy a banana at the grocery store: my life has been immeasurably ruined
like not that “every worker in the imperial core will have a miserable ascetic monk-like life to atone for their sins” isn’t a real position held by like some fringe maoist-third-worldists i guess but people framing “under socialism the citizens of the imperial core will no longer experience the benefits of imperial exploitation” as “socialists are saying they’ll make people’s lives worse!” is so silly. life quality is when many banana product and the less banana product you can buy the worse your life is
SF is such a perfect case study of how extreme wealth inequality organically produces authoritarianism, even when everybody’s ideological instincts are against it
tl;dr: author is Cishet White Guy From Canada In 2011. he ostensibly thinks he is progressive. this does not change his proclivity for tossing his Cishet White Guy From Canada Biases into the books and then saying even more bigoted things in defense of those writing decisions on forums. wildbow is just some cunt on the forums with bad opinions on wildbow’s writing. the book is 1.7 million words long but i believe in my ability 2 categorize this shit with decent accuracy. everyone who has ever said worm’s CWs can’t be categorized, including wildbow himself, is a lying ass bitch. this will include some vague spoilers, because i can’t really go in-depth without a few examples, but i’ll stay away from anything too plot-critical.
sadly, killing any oil executive will not cause a work stoppage or any reduction of production at any oil corporation. because companies are unsentimental and many of these executives are entirely extraneous to production. you know what will slow production? a concerted strike by workers.
so this post has been going round today. don’t want to pick on the op at all but every time someone tries to use new coke as a some kind of parable or analogy I feel an electric thrill of schadenfreude because oh my god, what a pandora’s box, you have no idea the level of interpretive ambiguity you are unleashing. let’s do it bro, let’s be resistant readers
(person who doesn’t give money to homeless people because they might spend it on drugs voice) That feeling when you need a little treat to get through another day of adulting
ALT
