a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  4000 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "Propaganda: The fake North Korean documentary that fooled the world"

Man, what a douche. "No one has ever done this before, there's no precedent" - well, other than that whole Orson Welles thing. Or the entire genre of Alternate Reality Gaming.

This stuff really grinds my gears - by saying "here's my idea of North Korean propaganda presented as factual North Korean propaganda so that I can make a callow commentary on my understanding of Western media" they're denigrating real North Korean propaganda, which is far more insightful, far more interesting and has a lot more to say about us than some fucking Kiwi's interpretation of the problem.

There's a great series of cartoons available from Netflix called Animated Soviet Propaganda. There's an easy four hours of it. I found them fascinating - the criticisms leveled by the USSR against the West were not what we'd been led to believe. A lot of them hit home. I think it's far more important to have that discussion than some dipshit who can't tell a story without an alternate framing device.

'cuz really, that's all it is. It's an old storyteller's trick: when your core story is weak, wrap it in a frame that elevates the message. When all you're doing is recutting Michael Moore films to say something about "media" you're not being interesting, you're being derivative.