FourthBase wrote:Has it occurred to you that enlistment levels might have been on their way to even more miniscule numbers, and that the propaganda tools and then 9/11-related emotional blackmail have saved enlistment levels from being dramatically lower than the lows they've been? So that even though enlistment overall dropped, the propaganda still increased it from where it would have gone naturally (because the default sensible thing to do is not enlist).
As far as recruitment tools, my hunch is that overt advertising and more recruiters on the ground are going to be more effective than all the Tom Clancy spin-offs combined.
That and maybe one or two false flag car bombing incidents (which I'm actually surprised hasn't happened yet).
It's hard to judge, because there is no easy baseline to work with, but ultimately it's those proposing the theory to explain it.
Heavy metal doesn't have to directly cause a person to kill in order for it to have a lingering effect of some kind on the mind. Child A & Child B are raised identically, except that Child A listens exclusively to heavy metal, industrial music, hardcore punk, etc. and Child B listens exclusively to pleasant, melodic pop. Now maybe there's something individual to each Child that initially draws one to metal and one to pop, but don't you think the disparate music experiences would have some measure of a cumulative long term affect on the listener's brain and personality?
Sure, I agree that to some extent that we are what we eat, but early childhood behaviour will have a greater influence. As for the music example, depending on the bands Child A listens to, I'd expect a healthier sense of the individual with an anti-authoritarian bent, or a raving skinhead nutjob (depending on lyrical content of said bands). Child B would probably be a wet blanket, or more likely a wet sponge that absorbs whatever it's told is the most popular and grow up to be a happy consumer.
Seriously though, it's been my experience that whatever allegiances one had to music as a teen may still linger but as one gets older that influence changes, as musical influence doesn't exist within a vacuum.
It's literally crammed down our throats.
It really is.
That's why I find those areas of manipulation more interesting, and more in line with the gov't influence than the possibility of some fictional media possibly being propaganda.
Historically, there is a clear case of art/entertainment as propaganda, overt and covert, but that doesn't mean that all or anywhere close to most of it is.
