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I personally believe every person is a rational being responsible for themselves
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well, clearly every person isn't rational, but I do agree, ideally everyone should be responsible for themselves. this is an ideal, but we live in reality. ideally everyone could start on a level playing field and could be expected to have enough education to comprehend the storm of conflicting media coming at them. but in reality vast amounts of the public are born into economic and intellectual squalor.
further, 'the media' is a small group of people communicating
on mass to the country(s) and I just don't see the concept of individual responsibility being on 'the masses' so much as these individual media pundits such as Glen Beck or Rush not to mention the owners like Rupert Murdoch. they all have agendas and it's to all of their advantage to keep the masses doing and thinking what they want.
if I were to throw rocks at a murder of crows I know, most if not all of them would fly off, feeling threatened. even though I know crows are very smart. if you want the sheep to go right, bark at their left. it may be sad to think that humanity for all it's brain power can't be controlled so easily but they can and are.
Mein Kampf
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Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood
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Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side. The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.
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NPR mentioned quite a while back the death toll in Iraq had met the 1000,000 mark but I have NEVER heard that being addressed on any commercial news ( granted I may have missed it if it was)