Posts by Dennis Frank
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to andin,
I agree. Democracy is discrediting itself by means of the results it's producing. With a meritocracy, competence determines the outcome. Since such a positive alternative has never been tried, it's reasonable to assume that lowest-common-denominator thinking prevails by default. I've heard that called `muddling through'. Perhaps the most positive gloss advocates can think of?
How about voluntarism as primary social ethic? A system that provides a way for volunteers with confidence & expertise to volunteer for solution implementation roles. Know how, can do. A traditional kiwi social ethic proven successful for generations before some goddam corporate privatised it. Crowd-sourcing intelligence, then enabling it to achieve required results. Better than the usual left/right shambles, I reckon.
People ought to wise up to why democracy failed in the classical era so spectacularly that nobody wanted to try it again for a couple of millennia. Younger generations need suitable innovative role models to give them hope for the future. Loomio shows how that can be done: social media designs that are solution-focused. The incentive-structure must be more than just money.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to mark taslov,
Mark, I agree that his propensity to shock came across as the style you mention, and you could even liken his speeches to the anti-establishment voters as tossing bits of red meat to a pack of hyenas - but the farmer is right also.
Speaking from the heart is a sign of authenticity - a quality that often proves essential to the success of political contenders. [I wish the Greens would learn this and reconnect to their traditional voter base accordingly.] I think the stylist is just the front the guy feels he must use to play the democracy game well, and the real Trump shows in his words.
Joe Bennett, on the RNZ panel today, commented that his self-contradictions prove that he has no beliiefs. A very good point. Yet human nature is often like that and politicians being all things to alll people has long been known to be typical and is often seen as the key to political success. I get the impression Trump just blurts out what seems the best thing to say at the time. It worked a treat, so we could draw an obvious conclusion. Tactical genius. I'd rather wait & see if he replicates it on the global stage - when in office.
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to Farmer Green,
Indeed. I meant a participant observer. Graduated BSc in phiysics myself long ago. I often reflect on being told at college in '65 (physics intro) that the theory of the subject had been erected on the basis of metaphysics. Such intellectual honesty would be impossible nowadays due to subsequent decades of dumbing down & pc mind control (I presume). But the teacher was careful to refrain from drawing the obvious analogy to building a castle on a foundation of sand. No point spooking the horses (students) while they are being trained to pull civilisation forward into the future.
The metaphysical relevance to fake news lies in relativity. All one need do is apply it as a metaphysical principle (as in `all meaning is relative to context'). So whereas postmodernism tried to persuade people that facts don't exist, only opinions, and tradition says they coexist, a metaphysician would assert that the difference between fact and opinion depends on the social context of the user. Thus culture: things seem factual when you're in a group that beliieves it.
Reality is socially constructed via consensus. Physicists proved that absolute reality doesn't exist almost a century ago, but we cc-create consensus around the elements of our natural & social environment and they seem relatively real as a result. Thus children naturally take as real the world-view they acquire via enculturation. Culture wars emerge as the natural consequence of competing groups, which leads us into group selection, a topic for another day...
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I spent a while last night reading Russell's report on fake news & the commentaries and I endorse his analysis & share his concern. I made news & current affairs stories in the TVNZ newsroom for a decade. Working with journalists & reporters does inform one of the prevalent syndromes governing msm interpretation of political events: the primary bias requires them to toe the establishment line. Some hew to the left side of that line, some to the right.
As an anti-establishment '60s rebel I learnt to be diplomatic in alerting them to significant subtle dimensions of situations (with eventual gratifying results). Banality & vapidity are no longer the norm they were up until the late '80s. TVNZ political reoortage errs obviously nowadays mostly in uncritical acceptance and recycling of biased stories from overseas - such as that designed to help the Democrat candidate.
The solution to the fake news problem would, in principle, require a suitable clause in a media charter. I believe the media convention that requires balanced reporting is enforced by management of large media orgs to the extent that public perception of fairness is maintained - by and large. Fake news therefore proliferates at the margins, where a free market fosters enterprising media in search of a resonating audience. The danger is sociopathy generated by a shared perception that snowballs so well that it simulates reality for a politically decisive sector of the electorate. That's how Hitler became a dictator.
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to Farmer Green,
Experiments that introduce a foreign ethos into a cultural niche tend to end badly. Probably due to the instability inherent in complex systems: they can take off suddenly on radically different trajectories in response to a tiny stimulus.
You could argue that the natives in this cultural niche wouldn't find rationality stimulating & I'd suspect you'd be proven correct in the experiment, however some would think they'd been abducted by aliens during the night and dropped down on a different planet and traumatising people is cruel. Not to mention the cost of counselling. No, it'd be better to be an observer in such a cultural niche that has evolved naturally...
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to B Jones,
Now you've got me interested. There's a part of the blogoshere where people actually conduct a rational debate? Tell us where. As an amateur sociologist, I'd be fascinated to observe the denizens of that social ecosystem doing their thing.
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to B Jones,
Actually, I don't have to. I really don't care how much you misinterpret what I wrote. Writing about such chemical experimenting on consumers, I actually referred to an addling of the brain. Old-fashioned language for people unable to think clearly - nothing to do with mind control. And it was a flippant surmise, not expecting any reader to assume it was more than partly true.
We don't know how such additives affect us. Neither the govt nor the manufacturers are even slightly interested in spending the money it takes to find out. When Muldoon was PM I was given the task of conducting a survey of lead pollution in Auckland city, which included writing in my report the primary finding from similar research overseas. The most interesting of those was that the populace in countries on western manufactured food diets already had blood lead levels substantially over the World Health Organisation safe level. Lead causes degeneration of the nervous system (of which the primary organ is the brain). I wondered how Muldoon would react to this news: he disestablished the Environmental Laboratory of the Health Dept (my employer) the following year - a subtle yet effective way of shooting the messenger.
Fortunately I had already moved on to running an alternative rock music venue, and the lead solder that was traditionally used to join the tin fruit cans (and poison everyone's blood) was phased out within a few years. Not all capitalists are evil - many are just lazy & delinquent - just as many are worthy citizens...
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to B Jones,
There's normally a list of them on the product label. In very small print, to deter consumers from reading it. Not that they need worry: just about nobody has time to do the research required to get an inkling about what function they are meant to perform. Nor are the producers legally bound to ensure that they are proven to be not harmful to health. Caveat emptor. So we all became willing volunteers for their biochemical experiments, and those of us who haven't died yet seem to be living proof that they aren't noticeably harmful, right?
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Seems to me we're looking at a failure of the social contract. From our perspective here in kiwiland we're fortunately somewhat insulated (neoliberalism creating less victims) currently but that may not last much longer.
Rousseau's notion strikes me as a conceptual take on mass psychology, which can be restated simply via `trickle-down' (myth or theory) generating enough mutual benefits to prevent mayhem & anarchy. You have a class that creates employment and a class of employees dependent on them for survival. Is the relation between these two classes parasitical or symbiotic? Obviously a true symbiosis would be sustainable in perpetuity (green political ideology).
Harmony would be generated as a social norm from the bipolar balance. We ain't got that! Therefore it must be parasitical. Corporations suck the economic life-blood out of consumers & workers, the left tries to get into power to suck tax dollars out of everyone (would rather just suck the rich but the rich are too clever to become victims).
To finesse the current impasse we need a new social contract. Unfortunately that means people using their brains: never gonna happen. Too addled by chemicals in the food injected by capitalists & a cocktail of designer drugs to alchemise the result. Ignoring reality becomes the default stance of most people - even those potentially capable of solving the problem. In the early years of the green movement Mondragon seemed a good model for a mutual-benefit alternative economy. I'm still puzzled that the left preferred dependency on the capitalists and chose to reject such clever innovation.
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Kirk, that was a good all-round appraisal. I suggest you rethink this bit: "I honestly have no fucking idea why all the progressive white males I know keep saying we need to listen to the angry and disenfranchised people who voted for Trump. ..It’s beginning to scare me that you want to listen to what is very clearly a solid core of racism and misogyny."
I agree that listening to racism & misogyny is unpleasant & share your dislike. However I suspect all those progressive white males are more open-minded than you think: they probably are actually referring to anti-establishment voters.
The establishment destroyed most of the american middle class eight years ago in the gfc, thereby alienating a huge number of voters who had hitherto been supporters of the establishment. Tne american dream, the primary collective motivator for most of the past century, became a nightmare. Hillary Clinton decided to front as the establishment candidate regardless.
She & Bill no doubt assumed middle-class folk are too stupid to understand the relation between cause & effect - but the vote tally suggests only half of them are. In some of those states the experts predicted she'd win, too many voted against the candidate funded by the class who profited by taking their homes - voted against the likelihood of being screwed again.
Also consider the possibility that viewing the situation through a left/right frame is misleading. A visceral political reaction usually doesn't incorporate traditional political alignments for most people. Polls have been showing in recent years in the USA that the non-aligned have passed both left & right in size. All political commentators must therefore adopt a triadic frame (instead of the antique binary) to avoid becoming irrelevant.