Found a word I haven't ever seen so I thought I'd share.
I just finished reading Confessions of a Street Addict, written by James J. Cramer also know as Jim Cramer or the crazy Mad Money guy on CNBC. I have never seen the word Agitprop before and couldn't delve any meaning out of the context so here is the semi-official definition from Wikipedia.
Agitprop is a contraction of agitational propaganda. The term originated in Communist Russia, where the term was a shortened form of отдел агитации и пропаганды (otdel agitatsii i propagandy), i.e., Department for Agitation and Propaganda, which was part of the Central and regional committees of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The department was later renamed to Ideological Department.
The term propaganda in the Russian Language didn't bear any negative connotation at that time. It simply meant "dissemination of ideas". In the case of Agitprop, the ideas to be disseminated were those of communism, including explanations of the policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet State. In other contexts, propaganda could mean dissemination of any kind of beneficial knowledge, e.g., of new methods in agriculture. "Agitation" meant urging people to do what Soviet leaders expected them to do; again, at various levels. In other words, propaganda was supposed to act on the mind, while agitation acted on emotions, although both usually went together, thus giving rise to the cliche "propaganda and agitation".
In the western world, agitprop has a negative connotation. In the United Kingdom during the 1980s, for example, socialist elements of the political scene were often accused of using agitprop to convey an extreme left-wing message via television programmes, theatre and even children's books. However, in a more general sense, a television cartoon might be described as 'agitprop' if it could be interpreted as a marketing ploy to sell toys.
The term is frequently used in the modern Russian language to describe information provided by mass-media, if it is considered to be pro-government and biased.
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3 comments:
I'm glad you read the book. There is no way in hell I could be a hedge fund manager. The stress of managing somebody else's millions of dollars is too much for me. Kudos to Cramer for sticking through it, his job really paid off in the end.
Jon, get on Tyler's stock challenge because you need to redeem yourself from last year. Ryan do it because you're getting your MBA and you need some real-life exposure to something finance related.
I heard once that a monkey and a stock broker went head to head picking stocks and the monkey won, that is why Eric needs to sign up. I bet he'll destroy us, not that he's a monkey but because he has no university business background.
The sooner you sign up the quicker you can start making money. Don't fall behind.
That monkey thing got me thinking, so I will have laura do the picking.
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