All good points. Sorry I’m coming from a non US perspective where climate change denialism is present, but less fervent. I like your definition of “truth from a rarified point of view”, though I might also considered non-rarified or pervasive, and factually well substantiated truths can be used as propaganda as well. The 95%+ consensus of scientists on climate change is both factually/meaningfully/importantly true and also used with a propagandistic flavour in many examples of political persuasion for example.

My post was more aiming at acknowledging propaganda as a vehicle of persuasion for any and differing representations of reality (political groups) that exists in parallel with the the establishment of facts of reality. Some representations will adhere more or less with the factual arguments.

An interesting exercise is to replace “Communism is bad” with “Climate change is coming” and interrogate how we feel about that and why.

It is interesting to reflect that propaganda is involved for all kinds of policy application, including science. As someone trained in sciences, it’s always a bit uncomfortable seeing folks extolling science as the exclusive solution to everything. The role of science in society is deeply tied up with values, norms, and policy. I think it’s always good to have a healthy dose of critical self reflection, so we can engage better on the level of humanized reasoning, rather than on the level of regurgitated propaganda.

I would too. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure most places that check even half those boxes still fail in the market. You often have to drag consumers kicking and screaming towards something more equitable and less exploitative, even when they’re the ones being exploited.

But you have to save those girls for when you need to spew toxic abusive shit at them for daring to be present in a space you feel you have ownership over. /S

https://youtu.be/46ms4LAhdrE?si=iewRBXdPj07Mo7e0

Imagine there was a group of people in your school, in your workplace, in your city who for some reason feel that Kazakhspy should not exist. They’re not allowed to kill you, that’s against the law, but they would if they could. Instead, they say fuck Kazakhspy, go kill yourself Kazakhspy, I can’t stand you Kazakhspy. Hearing that kind of thing on a regular basis might be a little hurtful. Now imagine some game studio heard about this and thought hey, let’s include Kazakhspy in our game. And then that group in your community was like “what the fuck is this! I hate Kazakhspy and now they’re shoving Kazakhspy down my throat in a videogame? I will not stand for this.” And goes through the effort of making a mod to remove you from the game and puts it on the website. You hear about this and see that it’s up there with a few downloads. You might be a little hurt to know some people hate you so much they’ll mod a game to spite you just because they don’t like your existence. Then the website owner is like, “Wow, this is weirdly hateful and doesn’t belong on my website. Let’s not perpetuate hate against Kazakhspy.”

That’s why. In context it’s hurtful to people because the intention of creating it was to hurt people through hate.