(no subject)

[gfish]

What do these headline all have in common?

• Wildfire murder charges filed


• U.S. officer describes disarray in Iraqi army


• General: Abuse scandal killed my career


• Seafood faces collapse, report says


• DEA: Gang of corrupt cops nabbed

They are all, according to CNN, less important than Cruise named studio top gun. We're only 5 days out from the most important and interesting midterm election of my lifetime*. Fuck you, CNN.

* This might be slight hyperbole. (Though I hope not.) Certainly the biggest since 1994.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

It's difficult to convince myself it's not purposeful, but then the question becomes: is that just what people want to see? and then we ask: have people been purposefully conditioned to want to prefer this?

That's what they want to tell us

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

You'd be hard pressed to convince me that free market economics has anything to do with what choices consumers are presented any more, especially in the media. Back when there was more diversity of ownership, you could make a case that some kind of consumer preference was at work, but these days? It's not a choice between CNN and Indymedia, it's a choice between TV based reporting, and web based reporting. And no one's really tracking how much news we get through the web.

Re: That's what they want to tell us

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Free-market economics presupposes informed consumers, but there's a feedback loop here: we only buy/believe what we see, so by restricting our choices, they select what we're looking for, right? So that asks what the root cause is. I think that many people are trying to avoid uncomfortable truths, like how bad things are and how bad they could become, so are looking for glittery shiny meaningless stuff as distraction. However, I won't argue much if you get all Bill Hicks on me:
"I'll show you politics in America right here," Hicks told audiences, miming like a puppet master. "'I believe the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'Well, I believe the puppet on the left is more to my liking.' Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding up both puppets! 'Go back to bed, America, your government is in control. Here's Love Connection, watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer.'"

And that stuff is ten years old.

Re: That's what they want to tell us

[xiadyn.livejournal.com]

Hicks is still disturbingly relevant. I should put more of his stuff in my playlist to listen to.

manufacturing informed consent

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

Y'know, it's not often I get to examine these assumptions about democracy... I think you have a point, in that the 'consumer' shares some complicity in their own deception... It's a fine line between acknowleging responsibility and blaming the victim, the kind of morass I always seem to get caught up in whenever I suggest abused women have some responsibility to change their circumstances.

Where it really gets troublesome, is when I cop to my own elitism, and acknowledge that I don't really think people on the whole are smart enough to run this complicated a civilization democratically. Which begs the question of who *is* smart enough.

When I think about how this experiment in democracy began, the agrarian economy that Jefferson was so in love with is a couple orders of magnitude less complex than what we live in now. And history is chock-full of civilizations that outsmart themselves to beyond the point of sustainability, so there's this huge, slow crash.

The Briscoe Gap fantasy in Fire Upon The Deep is just another version of this wish for really clever good guys to swoop in on a spaceship and make things really simple for a change.

I've concluded that the defining point of any society is not when one peron says to another, "You've got to do it this way, or I'll kill you." It's actually that point at which the person of lower social rank says, "OK, teach me how this works" and consents to being led. It's hardly surpprising to me how few people of good conscience want to step up to bat as leader-teachers, given what keeps happening to the best ones...

Re: manufacturing informed consent

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Plus, as a nearly infinite number of books have fictionalized, a good person stepping up to bat and getting extraordinary powers, goes rotten amazingly quickly. People are lazy and want to follow, so anyone who wants to lead is a suspicious character. I dunno. Maybe we should just select people randomly and appoint them President. Maybe we should make like that old Dr. Who episode, where leaders got wired up to high-voltage voting machines and if they lost a vote of confidence they got really seriously screwed. (although that'd just make the condition-the-populace a matter of self-defense, rather than just a power grab technique.)

Re: manufacturing informed consent

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I think randomly choosing leaders is a bad idea, but I have been playing with the idea of randomly choosing a list of people who are allowed to run.

On the other hands, I'm not sure career politicians are really a bad thing. I kind of like my leaders to be experienced professionals...