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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 4th, 2023
  • Propaganda was short for “congregation for propagating the faith” in 1718, and meant a movement or organization for the propagation of ideology before the end of the 1700s. The modern usage refering to the information disseminated is from after WWI (which wasn’t perjoritive at the time), when German telegraph lines to other countries were cut and they turned to high-power radio communication. The negative connotation comes from WWII after Germany’s very effective use of it.

    Nevertheless, propaganda has been used as long as humans have existed, and much like the subcategory “advertisement”, is more effective with as many lies as one can get away with. There’s nothing inherently untruthful about propaganda, but neither is it inherently truthful. It’s manipulation, and can still be effective without lies. It’s much broader than papers to circumvent censure.

  • It’s more inherent than that in most cases. The job attracts power trippers, the culture and standards in most precincts encourages abusive assholes and corruption, and once the cops can cover for each other it becomes self-selecting for abuse. At least in North America, cops are heavily pre-disposed to being bastards, even before the reality of their purpose.

  • In a very technical sense, you can turn any distro into any other distro, in the same way you can turn Windows into OpenBSD.

    It’s probably also true in a smaller way, where you could technically reengineer a distro manually by replacing components and reconfiguring things until it works, but why? Someone already did that.