• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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    13 hours ago

    Sorry, but English-speaking countries have basically invented “narrative manipulation”. For most of history it was normal that there are many competing narratives from interested parties on anything. But such sophistication at making one side’s narrative seem impartial, perpetually contested and self-healing has never been achieved before.

    It’s as if you paint a lake red, it’s expensive, and people may get used to it and even believe that’s kinda normal, but one can still see that it’s just one lake. If you paint the world oceans red, so that it rains red and mists red, that’s far more persuasive, and that’s what the “collective West” has achieved.

    To make a lake painted red seem normal, you need to prevent most of your population from looking at other lakes. But when you’ve managed to paint the ocean red, you don’t need to limit them at all. The fence and the punishment would hurt trust, but without them your and other people looking at the red oceans and rains will think they are also free.

    Despite being just one alliance of former and current colonizing powers on this planet.

    It’s very sad to live in an era of frustration where we can see that it can’t reform itself further in humanist direction, than it already has by about year 1988.

    Sort of like a planetwide revolutionary situation by Lenin, where the dominating powers can’t keep the order the old way (that persuasion still slowly dies), and the dominated can’t live the old way. But, as we know, revolutionary situations by Lenin generally don’t lead to what one would hope for.

    EDIT: Oh, I forgot. The point is that it’s actually nice sometimes to have alternative pages in smaller languages on niche subjects, explained better to my own taste. And in the bigger languages articles are sometimes removed for no good reason, say, Hotline\KDX have been butchered simply for being not popular anymore.

    • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
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      10 hours ago

      Sorry, but English-speaking countries have basically invented “narrative manipulation”.

      You have no idea how wrong you are. I could claim it was the roman catholic church and there’d probably still be older examples. More likely, no entity “basically invented” it.

      Nothing against you personally, but this is not the edgy take you think it is.

      Oh, I forgot. The point is that it’s actually nice sometimes to have alternative pages in smaller languages on niche subjects, explained better to my own taste.

      No, the point is that there are countries where people speak these languages and they want to read things in their own language. Sheesh.

      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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        10 hours ago

        “Basically invented” here meant the last huge leap, to having one cluster of narratives perceived as “normal and clean” almost globally. Of course literally not. The roman catholic church didn’t have such means.