In my earlier post on this topic, I looked mainly at phenomena related to modern mass media. Most of the problems I'm going to look at today aren't nearly as new, but in combination with one another and with the problems I discussed last time, they've become particularly prevalent, and their effects are often extremely nefarious.
Hunger for a Panacea
As problems become more complex and harder to solve, there is a natural human tendency to look for simple, catch-all answers and solutions. It's a search for a sense of control in a world too complex for any of us to fully understand. But however natural this tendency may be, it's unhelpful when it comes time to grapple with problems in the real world. This tendency deceives people into thinking that shallow soundbites are meaningful, and worse, it makes them susceptible to dogma, ideology, demagoguery, and various other sorts of false salvation which make them even less able to address the problems they face in an honest and effective way. This tendency is also what gives so much potency to many of the other problems I'll discuss below.
Demagoguery
Demagoguery is nothing new, but with fear and anxiety about the future at fever pitch in our society today, and in an age when the average teenager has at his fingertips communication tools which Hitler and Goebbels could only have dreamed of, demagogues are making lots of problems and have the potential to make even more.
Logical Fallacies
It's shocking how many people can't assess the validity of the the logic of anything beyond the most basic "if-then" statements. It's not sexy and exciting, but solid logic is an indispensable tool in any critical thinking toolbox, and it's also a key facilitator of meaningful and constructive dialogue between conflicting ideas.
Backlash against Science
The backlash against science in our society today is remarkable. I don't know the latest statistics on how many Americans believe in evolution, but I suspect that it hasn't improved much since this stunning 2009 survey.
The treasure and human effort this country has poured into science and the benefits it has reaped from its investment are staggering in their own right. The dismissal of science by so many Americans is also breathtaking of its own merit. Taken together, these things should constitute a gargantuan mindfuck. Your everloving head should explode. But sadly, it's come to seem almost normal. Contemplate it next time your mind is in an altered state and tell me what the fuck happens. Maybe you can get it to seem weird again.
The effects of the dismissal of science go way beyond turning some of our most profound insights into the natural world into casualties on the bloody battlefields of the culture wars. It has also created an atmosphere in which religious ideologues can perversely claim that they are being persecuted when the rest of us insist that facts and working theories established by science form a better foundation upon which to base our shared understanding of the world around us than religious myth.
And then we get Glenn Beck on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial taking a messy liquid shit on the memory of the struggle for civil rights by blacks.
But worse, this creates an environment in which religious myth becomes a viable contender with scientific fact in influencing public policy. Science is stigmatized as an oppressive ideology (how ironic when a core tenet of science is that the body of knowledge should constantly be updated, with old understandings replaced by newer, better ones through a process of dispassionate trial - anathema to the static, inflexible nature of most ideologies as we define the concept of ideology today), and teaching of the scientific method becomes viewed as some kind of a Trojan Horse for scientism, and voila, our critical thinking toolbox just got lighter again. Soon the toolbox will be empty and we can just replace it with a sledgehammer, faith, or whatever other blunt instrument the next demagogue or snake oil salesman or conspiracy theorist foists upon us. With our powers of critical thought so weakened, it will be damn near impossible to see him for what he is.
And fuck, I'm out of steam. I guess this is going to be a three part deal. More soon.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Fuck The Truth. Long live truth.
Long live those who know what it means to think, and who give us the courage to never stop doing so.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Stop pretending that you know a politician's character
Does character matter when we choose our leaders? Of course it matters. The problem is that we delude ourselves into thinking that we know far more about a politician's character than is possible to know.
Is there anything your close friends know about your character that, say, your boss and coworkers don't know?
Is there anything your best friend knows about you that your family doesn't know?
Maybe there's even something no one realizes about you?...
Yes? Then how can you believe that you truly know the character of any major American politician, the most stage-managed motherfucker in humanity's long and illustrious history of spewing self-serving bullshit for the purpose of currying advantage with others?
It's not that it's impossible to know anything of a politician's character, it's just that it's not to be learned in the places where we look for it. Do you really think that a preplanned photo opp at a church or the number of times a politician says "family values" tells you anything about his character?
Want to know something about Newt Gingrich? What does his cheating on his wife as he lambasted Clinton for the Lewinsky affair tell you? Perhaps that he's a shameless hypocrite?....What do his present denials of the significance of it tell you? You don't have to be a psychologist to recognize the telltale signs of a narcissist.
Want to know something about Barack Obama's character? What can be learned from his praise of "the power of human dignity" in response to the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt while he largely remained mum on the violent suppression of the uprising in Bahrain (where it just so happens that the US Fifth Fleet is based)? Perhaps that he's just as shrewd and cynical as any other politician who has ever reached the apex of power?
Yet still, I don't claim to know the character of either of these men. (Politicians are as multidimensional as the rest of us....Why do we think we can meaningfully distill them down to one or two anecdotes?) I simply mean to point out that there are sources of deeper insight into a politician's character than the superficial and often contrived indicators upon which American voters fixate. We love to remind each other that "actions speak louder than words," yet we seem to forget this when it's time to read between the lines of politicians' platitudes.
Picking leaders from among a pool of candidates we don't know personally is always going to be a messy process fraught with uncertainty, and from time to time we're going to make misjudgments that we have to wait until the next election to correct. But that doesn't mean we can't be a bit more savvy and realistic in how we approach it.
As long as American voters remain shallow and uncritical in their understanding of who politicians are (and most everything else in the fucking universe), the debate over character will continue to repeat itself according to the same hollow script.
And we'll continue to get the leaders we deserve.
Is there anything your close friends know about your character that, say, your boss and coworkers don't know?
Is there anything your best friend knows about you that your family doesn't know?
Maybe there's even something no one realizes about you?...
Yes? Then how can you believe that you truly know the character of any major American politician, the most stage-managed motherfucker in humanity's long and illustrious history of spewing self-serving bullshit for the purpose of currying advantage with others?
It's not that it's impossible to know anything of a politician's character, it's just that it's not to be learned in the places where we look for it. Do you really think that a preplanned photo opp at a church or the number of times a politician says "family values" tells you anything about his character?
Want to know something about Newt Gingrich? What does his cheating on his wife as he lambasted Clinton for the Lewinsky affair tell you? Perhaps that he's a shameless hypocrite?....What do his present denials of the significance of it tell you? You don't have to be a psychologist to recognize the telltale signs of a narcissist.
Want to know something about Barack Obama's character? What can be learned from his praise of "the power of human dignity" in response to the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt while he largely remained mum on the violent suppression of the uprising in Bahrain (where it just so happens that the US Fifth Fleet is based)? Perhaps that he's just as shrewd and cynical as any other politician who has ever reached the apex of power?
Yet still, I don't claim to know the character of either of these men. (Politicians are as multidimensional as the rest of us....Why do we think we can meaningfully distill them down to one or two anecdotes?) I simply mean to point out that there are sources of deeper insight into a politician's character than the superficial and often contrived indicators upon which American voters fixate. We love to remind each other that "actions speak louder than words," yet we seem to forget this when it's time to read between the lines of politicians' platitudes.
Picking leaders from among a pool of candidates we don't know personally is always going to be a messy process fraught with uncertainty, and from time to time we're going to make misjudgments that we have to wait until the next election to correct. But that doesn't mean we can't be a bit more savvy and realistic in how we approach it.
As long as American voters remain shallow and uncritical in their understanding of who politicians are (and most everything else in the fucking universe), the debate over character will continue to repeat itself according to the same hollow script.
And we'll continue to get the leaders we deserve.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
What's so bad about public discourse today? (Part 1)
I received a great suggestion in response to my first post: Hit the brakes, back the fuck up, and explain what I mean when I talk about the dismal state of public discourse in the US.
What follows in this post and another soon is a list - in no particular order, in places overlapping, and without distinction between symptom and cause - of what I consider to be major problems. I'll elaborate on some of them in subsequent posts.
The "News Cycle"
Why the fuck does news need a cycle? When stuff happens, report it. If nothing that matters happens, there's nothing to report. That should be the end of the story. Instead we have news makers deliberately timing their actions and announcements in relationship to the cycle as though the cycle were some force of nature like the earth's orbit around the sun, and we have news media blowing stories out of proportion in order to fill gaps in the cycle as needed. The tail is wagging the dog so hard that the dog is nearly dead. And the average person's sense of the flow of major events in the world has become attuned to this artificial cycle.
Competition to Report News First
This is why we used to get TV news incorrectly announcing election winners based on exit polls. This is why, when anything big happens in the world, particularly involving loss of life or property, we have to listen to commentators speculating about how bad the loss might be, just to keep us glued to our TVs and keep their ratings high. And we eat it up. "As of two seconds ago, authorities are estimating that 23 people were killed.....wait, wait, wait, we're now hearing that that number may be as high as 24." We're junkies for the late breaking news, and the news media are our pushers.
Accuracy? If we don't care about it, why should the media? It's out the fucking window and splattered on the sidewalk like some poor middle manager who decides to end it all when he realizes that what he does doesn't matter anymore. Even if we can scrape accuracy's mangled carcass off the sidewalk and do a reasonably good job of reconstructing it, it makes little difference, because myriad decisions have already been made and actions taken based on the earlier deluge of Up To The Minute Bullshit Speculation.
Reduction of Complex Issues into Soundbites
The cokehead speed of the news cycle and our society's expectation that all information be delivered to us in cute, punchy little slogans (can we still call it information at that point?...) cause complex ideas and problems to be reduced to trite, vacuous soundbites. Nuance? DOA. Substance? On life support, but things aren't looking good.
Loss of Distinction between Reporting and Editorializing
Sure, reporters' views can color the information they gather for their stories, but there's still a line between reporting and editorializing. Or at least there used to be.....And the only thing fading faster than this distinction is the news consuming public giving a shit whether this distinction even exists. Breaking down the wall between fact and opinion serves all douchebags when it comes time to spew their inane, knee-jerk views on things they don't really understand, be it on network TV, or at your shitty Thursday happy hour.
Elevation of Opinion to the Importance of Fact
Back in 2010, during the shitstorm over President Obama's religion, Michael Kinsley wrote a great piece pointing out the role the pollsters themselves had played in stoking the controversy. They polled people on "the view that Obama is a Muslim" without mentioning that he is in fact Christian. They elevated the opinion of respondents over an established fact. A great way to manufacture a controversial poll result sure to get high ratings. Also a great way to fellate the egos of ignorant dipshits and make them think that their uninformed views on any number of other issues are worth a flying fuck at a rolling donut.
Infotainment
As infotainment supplants real television news programs, the only standard for newsworthiness is whether a story will keep you glued to your TV and keep the ratings high, at the expense of all other concerns.
News Reports on......the News
Does anyone remember when Heidi Fleiss was in court back in the '90s? It was a slow month for real news (or at least for real news which would have kept the ratings high), so Madam Fleiss got disproportionate coverage. But then, to elevate it to true farce, TV news started reporting on the fact that TV news was paying too much attention to Heidi Fleiss. I was surprised that no network took it up a level to report on the hypocrisy of TV news reporting on TV news reporting on Heidi Fleiss. The irony would have been exquisite.
All I could think was "Have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up guys. What makes you the 'watchdog'? You're all doing the same shit."
This kind of faux self-enforcement of journalistic standards continues unabated.
What follows in this post and another soon is a list - in no particular order, in places overlapping, and without distinction between symptom and cause - of what I consider to be major problems. I'll elaborate on some of them in subsequent posts.
The "News Cycle"
Why the fuck does news need a cycle? When stuff happens, report it. If nothing that matters happens, there's nothing to report. That should be the end of the story. Instead we have news makers deliberately timing their actions and announcements in relationship to the cycle as though the cycle were some force of nature like the earth's orbit around the sun, and we have news media blowing stories out of proportion in order to fill gaps in the cycle as needed. The tail is wagging the dog so hard that the dog is nearly dead. And the average person's sense of the flow of major events in the world has become attuned to this artificial cycle.
Competition to Report News First
This is why we used to get TV news incorrectly announcing election winners based on exit polls. This is why, when anything big happens in the world, particularly involving loss of life or property, we have to listen to commentators speculating about how bad the loss might be, just to keep us glued to our TVs and keep their ratings high. And we eat it up. "As of two seconds ago, authorities are estimating that 23 people were killed.....wait, wait, wait, we're now hearing that that number may be as high as 24." We're junkies for the late breaking news, and the news media are our pushers.
Accuracy? If we don't care about it, why should the media? It's out the fucking window and splattered on the sidewalk like some poor middle manager who decides to end it all when he realizes that what he does doesn't matter anymore. Even if we can scrape accuracy's mangled carcass off the sidewalk and do a reasonably good job of reconstructing it, it makes little difference, because myriad decisions have already been made and actions taken based on the earlier deluge of Up To The Minute Bullshit Speculation.
Reduction of Complex Issues into Soundbites
The cokehead speed of the news cycle and our society's expectation that all information be delivered to us in cute, punchy little slogans (can we still call it information at that point?...) cause complex ideas and problems to be reduced to trite, vacuous soundbites. Nuance? DOA. Substance? On life support, but things aren't looking good.
Loss of Distinction between Reporting and Editorializing
Sure, reporters' views can color the information they gather for their stories, but there's still a line between reporting and editorializing. Or at least there used to be.....And the only thing fading faster than this distinction is the news consuming public giving a shit whether this distinction even exists. Breaking down the wall between fact and opinion serves all douchebags when it comes time to spew their inane, knee-jerk views on things they don't really understand, be it on network TV, or at your shitty Thursday happy hour.
Elevation of Opinion to the Importance of Fact
Back in 2010, during the shitstorm over President Obama's religion, Michael Kinsley wrote a great piece pointing out the role the pollsters themselves had played in stoking the controversy. They polled people on "the view that Obama is a Muslim" without mentioning that he is in fact Christian. They elevated the opinion of respondents over an established fact. A great way to manufacture a controversial poll result sure to get high ratings. Also a great way to fellate the egos of ignorant dipshits and make them think that their uninformed views on any number of other issues are worth a flying fuck at a rolling donut.
Infotainment
As infotainment supplants real television news programs, the only standard for newsworthiness is whether a story will keep you glued to your TV and keep the ratings high, at the expense of all other concerns.
News Reports on......the News
Does anyone remember when Heidi Fleiss was in court back in the '90s? It was a slow month for real news (or at least for real news which would have kept the ratings high), so Madam Fleiss got disproportionate coverage. But then, to elevate it to true farce, TV news started reporting on the fact that TV news was paying too much attention to Heidi Fleiss. I was surprised that no network took it up a level to report on the hypocrisy of TV news reporting on TV news reporting on Heidi Fleiss. The irony would have been exquisite.
All I could think was "Have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up guys. What makes you the 'watchdog'? You're all doing the same shit."
This kind of faux self-enforcement of journalistic standards continues unabated.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Keywords for Bullshit
To kick off my search for good topics for this blog, I've spent the last few days brainstorming a list of words and phrases I associate with bullshit. Some are bullshit words, and some are words used to name a bullshit phenomenon. Here, in no particular order, is what I have so far:
doublespeak
spin
PR
propaganda
stay on message
buzzwords
sound bite
taboo
convention
elephant in the room
dogma
ideology
the natural order of things
slogans
mottos
fear mongering
demagogy
manipulation
mass communication
mass media
marketing
political correctness
fallacy
fine print
corporate responsibility
greenwashing
news cycle
infotainment
black and white
industry self-regulation
coercive persuasion
brainwashing
public opinion
totalitarianism
authoritarianism
fascism
politics
infomercial
security theater
abundance of choice
false gardens of eden
I'd love to know what else you'd add to the list.
doublespeak
spin
PR
propaganda
stay on message
buzzwords
sound bite
taboo
convention
elephant in the room
dogma
ideology
the natural order of things
slogans
mottos
fear mongering
demagogy
manipulation
mass communication
mass media
marketing
political correctness
fallacy
fine print
corporate responsibility
greenwashing
news cycle
infotainment
black and white
industry self-regulation
coercive persuasion
brainwashing
public opinion
totalitarianism
authoritarianism
fascism
politics
infomercial
security theater
abundance of choice
false gardens of eden
I'd love to know what else you'd add to the list.
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