Dr. Seuss

Stumbleupon is this great website where basically you hit a button and it finds really cool websites based on what you like and dislike. I typed in the keyword propoganda the other day and what came up were some vintage propaganda cartoons from world war I. Some of the illustrations looked really familiar and i realized that i had seen really similar cartoons before. Thats when i realized that they were done by Theodor Seuss Giesel a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. I think it is pretty interesting that a man who was once responsible for propogating stereotypes about other countries to further a war agenda is the most well known childrens author in America. I think it is also interesting that the people who were enticed by the cartoon propaganda were being enticed by a guy who wrote childrens books where the main character was a cat that wore a top hat. Also, that Dr. Seuss's later work, like that Butter Battle Book one, denounced war.

Chapter 4

Something struck me while reading the beginning part of chapter four about the UFO cult. Actually it was one word: Proselytizing. I had never seen the word and i looked it up. Basically it is the practice of conversion, or trying to convert people to an ideology. The more i thought about it, it occurred to me that almost all fundmental ideological movements share this one commonality. From evangelical christians to fundamentalist muslims to UFO cults, it seems that prosyletizing is being utilized as a form of propoganda. Not only does it promote the image of the group to those outside ("Look at all these people joinin! They cant all be wrong!"), but it also goes a long way in keeping the already converted steadfast in their beleifs. There must be some sort of rationalizing effect in being able to bring a new person in to an group with such preposterous beleifs. I can imagine it also goes a long way in reinforcing the notion that the person doing the converting is "on the right track" or "spreading the good word". But then again there must be a certain type of person that is more apt to proselytize as well as a certain type of person that wants to per proselytized.

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 1-3

It seems that there is an underlying theme about all of the deception strategies listed in chapers 1 through 3 of Unspun: all of these techniques work because the general public is basically incompetent and incapable of coming to their own conclusions. Whether this is true or not is arguable, but in a way, irrelevant. What matters more is how we came to be this way. We were once a race of people who evolved from neanderthals to create vast empires and complex schools of thought, and now, now we buy snake oil because we beleive it will cure aging. It seems that there is a massive campaign of distraction underway to dumb down society and make them into mindless consumers. I dont want to come off as some conspiracy theorist, but we did not do this too ourselves. There has to be an agenda being perpetrated by someone somewhere to make us this submissive mass that eats whatever is fed to us.