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Scarmoge posted an update 7 years, 3 months ago
I want to believe Postman wrong … but with the continual shredding of The Constitution by “policy” and the loss of the rule of law …
“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action…You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
The Giza Forum (Legacy)
Closed Archive of The Old Forum
Tavistock Institute is holding its sides and laughing…
No doubt, along with many others of similar ilk I’m sure. Though one has to admit it is an example of evil genius at work. When one pays attention to such things it surely produces a great deal of anxiety and occupies a great deal of time with
“mental busy work” also known euphemistically as “mental self-pleasuring”.
At least one result of this continuous stream of conventicius (I suggest the Latin here to connote “a screwing that seems to come from everywhere and yet nowhere”) that no one wonders what happened to stories such as the recent death of the Brexit lawyer Geraint Thomas or the strangeness of the closing of the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico. If one only had sufficient resources to have the means to continually place in front of folks on a widely distributed scale, not news, but important meaningful stories, such as the two above mentioned, that have as yet not had genuine closure or to continually present and enlarge on the dot connecting (both their inferences and implications – there is a difference) associated with them.
Not necessarily related, but nonetheless a good yuk connected to countering Nominalism in all of its forms. … A story about a professor who taught intro ethics at UNC Chapel HIll. Upon the first occasion in the semester a student relativised an ethical claim to a person, as in “Eating meat is wrong for you but it isn’t wrong for me” he would have them removed from the lecture hall by a couple of grad students in white coats. When the student (invariably) protested that this was wrong, the professor would reply, “well it might be wrong for you…”