Who is not affected by propaganda?

Why do you think not?

Although, you'd probably have to strap me down and force-feed me propoganda in anything for many months before I start believing it. One good thing is just avoiding all of the propoganda that conflicts with you beliefs. For example, I NEVER watch Fux News on my TV, but If I see it on TV in another place, I could watch it and not be swayed in any way. In fact, I would be laughing at the vain attempts at news anyway.

your beliefs and ideas came from somewhere, and who's to say it wasn't propaganda also?

Good propaganda can be a good thing!

...and my dad had formed more liberal viewpoints from those experiences. My mother was a communist from the beginning, that's another story.

One thing was that my parents always taught me not to get my political beliefs from soundbites and demagogues. They tought me to always form my opinions by educating myself and looking for information and forming my own conclusion. That's why I hate dittoheads so much. They get all their political thought from an obnoxious windbag, getting their beliefs from soundbites and spoon-fed rhetoric. I don't care if anyone is conservative, just so long as they came to the conclusion THEMSELVES by looking at the information, objectively comparing circumstances and forming a desicion on an issue based on that.

those who know magic tricks dont believe in magic

But I will say that I am the hyper-suspicious type. I trust almost no one. I trust few sources for information. I'm a terrible delegator because I don't trust anyone to do anything anymore. I've been burned too many times, on big issues as well as small ones.

Yet during most of my youth, I was such a sweet, optimistic Pollyanna. Isn't that sad? What happened?

I do find it fun to entertain various ideas and theories, to try them on for size, to wonder about them. But there are few, few things that I absolutely believe 100%.

God, what a dark post this was.

The British "magician" (for want of a better word) Derren Brown, proved this with a little experiment he did with a couple of advertising execs.

Here is how it worked: The idea was these two advertising executives were given a short period of time to come up with an advertising campaign based on a description of a ficticious business. Firstly, the two executives were driven around in a car for a short period before being taken to an office, and having the business explained to them.

The business was a taxidermist, and at the begining of the time period Brown placed a sealed envelope on a desk, and then left the two advertising execs to come up with a campaign.

At the end of the time period these two execs showed the campaign they had come up with to Brown, who then got them to open the sealed envelope, to reveal that he had "predicted" almost exactly what the campaign would look like.

Remember, these two are supposed to be the kind of people who would know how advertising works, and thus should be more immune to it's effects.

Brown then replayed the drive that the execs had been taken on to show the audience that he had not read the execs mind, nor predicted the future, but had in fact told the execs what to come up with.

During the drive, very subtle hints had been displayed before the execs, for instance, at one point the car they were in had to stop for a group of children to cross the road. Each child was wearing a t-shirt with a pair of angel wings on it. Both the execs and Browns prediction featured a pair of angel wings prominently displayed.

In fact, it was shown that every aspect of the campaign, from the images, to the slogan itself had ben subliminally planted in the execs minds during this drive, including a harp, the "pearly gates", a bear sitting on a cloud, and so on.

What I am trying to point out, is that the best propaganda is the propaganda we never conciously notice, and that propaganda is almost impossible to be immune to. It never registers on our concious mind, and thus we never engage our scepticism, it merely implants itself directly into our subconcious and to us appears to be nothing more than our own thoughts on an issue.

This is why viral marketing is so dangerous. It never occurs to us that we are seeing an advertising campaign, and so our natural scepticism of advertising doesn't get in the way of the message.

Of course, clumsy propaganda is easily seen and ignored, but it is the propaganda you don't see that gets you, and from everything I have seen, such propaganda surrounds us far more than we would think.

In fact I personally believe we live in an artifical reality, where the media leads us to believe that the world works in a certain way, when in fact it doesn't.