From Folding Ideas’ “Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda”:

‘Triumph of the Will’ is not a triumph of film-making. I just want to lay that out before we even start. Chances are good that you’re familiar with ‘Triumph of the Will’ by reputation but have never actually watched it beyond referential clips, and a sizable portion of that reputation is in its value as an advancement of the art of filmmaking. This is propaganda.

Like, that belief is in and of itself propaganda.

Nazi sympathizers spent a lot of time between the film’s release in 1935 and the war promoting the idea of ‘Triumph of the Will’ as an advancement of filmmaking. It was an intentional message to promote Nazi state art as superior, to suggest that the Nazi mechanism can produce better more proficient art than the artist the Nazis were busy throwing in jail.

It is however not a triumph of filmmaking; it is a triumph of budget. None of the ideas or techniques were new it is simply that no one had previously thrown enough money and resources at propaganda on this scale before. We’ll come back to this and develop it in more detail, but I want to be upfront with the fact that you should be highly suspicious of any messaging surrounding propaganda.

I enjoy her writing too. Her piece on the threat of Facebook entering the Fediverse does a great job of making the case.

Fuck the Heritage Foundation.

Threads.net federation status on major Lemmy instances:

• Awful.systems - Blocked
• Beehaw.org - Blocked
• Blahaj.zone - Blocked
• DBZer0 - Blocked
• Dubvee.org - Blocked
• Eco.br - Blocked
• Feddit.org - Blocked
• Feddit.nl - Blocked
• Feddit.uk - Blocked
• Hexbear.net - Blocked
• JLai.lu - Blocked
• Leminal.space - Blocked
• Lemmy.best - Blocked
• Lemmy.ca - Blocked
• Lemm.ee - Blocked
• Lemmings.world - Blocked
• Lemmyf.uk - Blocked
• Lemmygrad.ml - Blocked
• Lemy.lol - Blocked
• Lemmy.ml - Blocked
• LemmyNSFW.com - Blocked
• Lemmy.one - Blocked
• Lemmy.zip - Blocked
• Literature.cafe - Blocked
• Mander.xyz - Blocked N
• Pawb.social - Blocked?
• Quokk.au - Blocked
• Reddthat - Blocked
• Sh.Itjust.works - Blocked
• SLRPNK.net - Blocked
• Szmer.info - Blocked
• Tchncs.de - Blocked
• Aggregatet.org - Not Found
• Aussie.zone - Not Found
• Feddit.cl - Not Found
• Feddit.it - Not Found
• Futurology.today - Not Found
• Infosec.pub - Not Found
• Lemmy.one - Not Found
• Lemmy.pt - Not Found
• Midwest.social - Not Found
• Monyet.cc - Not Found
• RBlind.com - Not Found
• SDF.org - Not Found
• Lemmy.world - Linked
• Sopuli.xyz - Linked

Also, in memoriam:

• Feddit.ch - Blocked

I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.

Regardless of who it was targeted at, I’ve definitely experienced my share of similar accusations. Lemmy.world culture seems to favor low effort ‘bad faith’ accusations, and I wish that weren’t the case.

Ask a socialist what’s wrong with Lemmy.world, they’ll give you a myriad of issues. Ask a capitalist what’s wrong with Lemmy.ml, they’ll describe Lemmy.world.

A appreciate your work demonstrating The Cradle’s support for the Russian state. It’s the first time I can remember seeing The Cradle posted on here, and in between being subscribed to these communities and my contributions to LemmyWorldDefenseHQ, I have not seen The Cradle spam as a reported or observed problem.

I’ve read the article, and I find it valuable. I’m alarmed that the Lemmy World !politics and !news mods have failed to demonstrate the pressing need for the ham-fisted gatekeeping and censorship regime they’ve implemented.

Lemmy.World is the largest instance, and !politics and !news are flagship communities. I would like to see the Fediverse overtake corporate forums, and learning to approach the spectrum of journalistic credibility with nuance is an essential feature of a better version of social media.

deleted by creator

Maybe read the article and make those determinations for yourself?

I can’t for the life of me understand why this particular article is so threatening to LW !news mods. It provides valuable insight into how Facebook’s community guidelines are experienced by journalists outside of the political mainstream and has useful lessons for why and how we might do things differently in the Fediverse.

Oh, so if he sincerely believes in genocide, it’s fine.

Regardless of our conflict, we can agree that Pepe Escobar is a shithead.

There’s an old joke that goes:

Two people, a Hexbear and a Solarpunk were arguing. One said,

“On my server I can reply to an admin and say “I don’t like how you’re running things on this instance!”

“I can do that too!”

“Really?”

"Yes! I can reply to an admin and say, “I don’t like how the SLRPNK admins are running things on their instance!”

My concern is that the criteria you are using to justify banning The Cradle would also ban most United States media as well. I value the principle of a free press, and what you’re proposing is inconsistent with those values. It’s easy to call for the ban of information that disagrees with us, but unless we develop a more nuanced approach to combating propaganda, we risk replicating the values of the authoritarian systems we oppose.

If you’d like to see it discussed elsewhere, you’re welcome to cross-post it.

This is part of culture clash between old social media culture and Fediverse norms. If moderators choose to censor this discussion as well, it’s only going to get bigger.

How do you distinguish between opinion and propaganda? Its entirely credible that Pepe Escobar sincerely believes the positions he holds.

Should the corpus of every news source that includes opinion pieces that serve the interests of a war criminal state be banned?

I disagree, and that’s part of the reason I’m so strongly opposed to Lemmy.World’s use of Dave Van Zandt’s site in their bot. Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality.

This is why a consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website. You can read more about those principles here.

MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.

Yeah, that’s not great, but it’s not outside the bounds of what you’d typically find in the uncritical reporting of Western politicians in periodicals like Reuters.

The issue isn’t that The Cradle is biased, all journalism is biased. The issue is that they’re being treated with the tools that should only be reserved for conspiracy mills and AI fake news farms. I find that alarming.

I agree, Pepe Escobar’s take in that opinion piece is complete garbage. It should be noted that it is an opinion piece with the sub text “The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.”

Shutting down the entire journal because one columnist is a Putin apologist isn’t what the concept of a free press is about. I’d be less alarmed by mods shutting down a post of that columnist for genocide apology. It looks like it’s only one featured columnist out of five occasionally posting garbage like that, and the bulk of their focus is on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Alan Dershowitz, famous for his shit takes, has apologized for torture and genocide and continues to be frequently featured in The Boston Globe, Haaretz, and The Wall Street Journal. Since those sources are posted freely, it would be inconsistent to ban The Cradle over Pepe Escobar.

I support Ukrainians against colonization by Russia, but I’m not threatened by journalists who cover the facts from a different perspective from mine.

Can you demonstrate your claim? I did a perfunctory search, and the stories I found involving Russia seem informative and typically even-handed based on the standards of western journalism.

• Russia steps in to quell tensions between US proxies and Syrian tribes
• Putin hosts PA president in Moscow

Where besides Dave’s assessment are you sourcing your information? Isn’t it one-sided to only listen to Dave M. Van Zandt’s opinion without doing additional investigation?

I’m sharing the screenshot posted to Reddit, I haven’t seen the article. You can follow the link to the Reddit thread.

Via Reddit