Many of them are Baby Boomers or Gen Xers who were exposed to plenty of education and critical thinking as they were growing up. However, there's the idea that in the information age, we are bombarded with so much information and stimulation that it is hard to begin to filter out the junk. It becomes much easier to simply pick a single source of information and label that as "trusted", than to be constantly scrutinizing all the information you get from everywhere.
This phenomenon was predicted as far back as the 80s, with the rise of cable TV and mass media advertising. There's an interesting part of a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death (https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X) where the author proposes that modern governments don't need to limit the amount of information their citizens have access to in order to control them. All they have to do is overload them with nonsense, making them unable to effectively process the quality information they do receive.
I am hopeful for the future, because our current generation was raised in the Information Age, and we've been exposed to this environment since our early years. We are more adept at navigating the internet, and therefore investigating the reliability of our sources of information. Our relative youth makes us less stubborn than people in their 50s or 60s.
Or just Chomsky's essays on Vietnam, widely available for free online.
The US were the aggressors in a war of imperialism at first to maintain French colonial control of Indochina and then excused their Holocaust of Vietnamese civilians and combatants defending their homeland from bombs and genocide and torture with unverified notions of "domino theory" as part of a larger ideological war repeatedly used to excuse imperialism, torture, surveillance, genocide, repression, and domestic wealth disparity.
They engaged in widespread, consistent carpet-bombing, torture, repression, chemical and biological warfare, environmental destruction, Roman Plowing, and massacre on the people of South Vietnam. They installed a puppet regime and eliminated democracy and purged dissidents and civilians alike. They marched through destroyed villages and massacred the survivors after bombing them with millions of tonnes of bombs, far greater in a few years, than all the bombs dropped during WWII. Their environmental destruction is still devastating and lead to widespread famine and starvation and poverty.
Some reliable historians estimate 2 million Vietnamese died, or some figures have it at 1.5M. A great, great many were civilians and the combatants were defending their homeland against these atrocities, so they were also innocent. The war accomplished nothing but a communist victory in Vietnam and the US repeatedly broke their own peace agreements concluding the war. They pushed Vietnam into systemic, long-lasting poverty thereafter. The only thing the war accomplished was widespread suffering.
>More specifically, it's Disney lobbying very hard
Yes but lets not mince words here, there has been many times the government has been able to protect the public interest but didn't.
Our governments do not work like we think they do because we've been mis-educated.
Manufacturing consent:
https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/
Public attitudes are shaped and driven by the media. If the public doesn't care, it's because we've spent years conditioning them not to care. If the public in general can't name many middle eastern cultures beyond "Muslim", that is very much the fault of the media.
If prominent newspapers started giving front page headlines to the plight of the Kurds, you'd certainly see a considerable public reaction, but right now the cycle is dominated by the anti-communist Hong-Kong protest coverage because it serves an agenda for the United States. Kurds being killed because the American government made the decision to abandon them? That's a bad look on America and the media won't give it nearly as much attention. See Manufacturing Consent on this dynamic.
You might find Mick West's book, <em>Escaping the Rabbit Hole,</em> to be helpful. It's all about how and why otherwise smart and reasonable people can fall into conspiracist beliefs, and how to approach the topic with them. It also goes into some of the details of the arguments behind specific conspiracy theories like the 9/11 ones. And it's a surprisingly good read, IMO.
I really really recommend reading Manufacturing Consent to anyone who hasn't. Its as relevant today as when it was written. One of its focuses is on New York Times: https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499 or however the heck you read books. I don't think Noam would give a crap if you pirate it.
Prof. Chomsky literally co-wrote the book on how the media is used by the ruling class to get the public to buy into the establishment narrative.
Give this book a read. https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499
> The net is that the article isn’t really about DC or the protesters, but rather to raise awareness about the reliability of video as a medium and how we should be critical consumers in this viral video age.
And take it one step further, with a sprinkling of Chomsky salt: the media has an agenda and they will do their best to exploit cherrypicking of video, text, audio, etc. to tell their own narrative. Viral videos are certainly dangerous since there's no level of editorial oversight. But even editors at large corporate media see their "wall" between content and business broken down to spin stories a certain way. The most common tool is "lie by omission" since it technically isn't lying or dirty. In fact, it's even similar to the original Lincoln Memorial video.
edit: I realize a book isn't the most accessible source for /r/neutralnews, but the wikipedia article does a decent enough job summarizing the main topics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Does anyone have an opinion on the quoted book?
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business By Neil Postman
Haven't watched it yet but I suppose he's promoting his book The Madness of Crowds, which was pretty damn entertaining tbh, especially the Audible version narrated by Murray himself.
I guess the biggest impression I got from the book was that minority groups are being used as battering rams for leftist ideology. A quaint example was when Peter Thiel was declared not gay after showing support for Trump.
IMO with very few exceptions, journalists have done a good job of reporting every blip but a piss-poor job of helping people understand what those blips add up to. They have made the public savant-idiots: we have heard so much about everything -- blip! blip! blip! blip! -- that we end up knowing nothing at all.
That is exactly why I came to this sub-reddit in the first place, and why I've ended up participating: to try to sort out what is indisputable fact, what is interesting speculation, what is interesting but non-essential, etc.
I have found Seth Abramson's work in my personal sorting-out process to be extremely useful -- and far more useful than the confusing "battle of the talking heads" that goes on at CNN, for example. The coverage at The Atlantic has been stellar, but it tends to be siloed where Seth finds interesting and revealing bridges across silos.
I thoroughly agree that we are at a moment when truth is under daily, cynical assault. But I think Abramson generally does a better job of separating "this is true" from "this might be true" than most of what passes for journalism these days.
P.S. Used carefully, digital as a medium is far superior to TV for purposes of sorting out truth from speculation. CNN, MSNNC, Fox et al are mostly useful for Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Abramson isn't perfect, but he's light years away from spreading Pizzagate-like nonsense. I think most of us can read what he has to say without getting carried away.
Yep. I've been recommending Postman's book for years:
>What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X
The 1996 Telecommunications Act wasn't the beginning, not even close. Benjamin H. Bagdikian wrote a book in 1983 called The Media Monopoly, in which he warned that mergers and deregulation had caused 90% of US media to be controlled by 50 companies. Critics called him an alarmist. By 2011, 90% of US media was controlled by just 6 companies.
I think T-shirt slogans and Twitter hashtags are just another type of "performative wokeness" that lets your colleagues demonstrate to one another how seriously they take racial injustice. It's really not attacking white people, because it's more likely than not to be a white person wearing the damn thing.
At this point, these activists are not interested in generating a dialogue with others outside their in-group. They're looking to solidify bonds with each other. It's a bit of ass-backwards tribalism, but liberals are sick and tired of having to be the adult in the room, so college-aged academics are happy to adopt a sarcastic, countercultural, 4chan-style "burn it all down" approach in order to build a foundation to stand on against out-group members. It's an emotional release rather than a productive move in favor of social liberalism.
I really enjoyed reading Kill All Normies, which breaks down the politics of transgression (attacking what we think is socially acceptable or polite) that both Tumblr reactionaries and alt-right superstars have engaged in. I see the "white tears" stuff as a natural extension of that, an attempt to reclaim a transgressive voice on the left that falls on a lot of deaf ears because of its inherent contradiction.
In other words, those slogans are not inflammatory or counterproductive to social liberalism, because they never were intended to advance social liberalism. Instead, they have been successful in uniting certain voices in this blip of time during the Trump era (for better or for worse), though I'm not sure how much longer that kind of rhetoric can sustain itself beyond that.
Stossel's a straight shooter. Until the madia mob dissolved the investigatory program with him and Diane Sawyer. Course, she was sleeping with the boss.
It's all written about in "Media Monopoly "1980's by Ben Bagdikian, of Pentagon papers rep. That predicted the Madia current mess.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Monopoly-Completely-Chapters/dp/0807061875
I've for quite some time thought that the "ego" or "esoteric knowledge" thing was part of it and it may be but I'm reading Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect and the author points out that although there has been a study done on having special knowledge that the relationship between the need for this knowedge and conspiracy belief is very weak. I'm paraphrasing a bit but I was surprised to see that. This is one of those cases where the media promoted this with a sensational headline when the evidence wasn't very strong. I can't find the specific article but I think it was from Psypost.com
It's well known that negativity bring much more youtube (and social media in general) attention and views than positive engagement. I think there's even a scientific paper out there saying that out-group hate is the most prolific way to go viral on the internet. The social media companies know this and they have adjusted their algorithms accordingly, creating a perverse incentive structure which rewards negativity and conflict. Most content creators sooner or later learn that instinctively. Of course, social media companies are not the ones who invented this, or are the only ones who use it. News media has been going down this path for over a decade, and they're the ones who pioneered it. It's the reason why you have partisan news networks that cater to certain sections of the political body, for example Fox News, MSNBC, etc. They've figured out that hate and fear is the best way to keep their viewers glued to the screen, and that they get much more engagement that way. There's actually a really good book about this written by a journalist, called Hate Inc., I would recommend to anyone that wants to get an introduction into the issue.
It sure can seem that way when you only consume media that is pro-Israel, as almost all mainstream western media is. Bear in mind that Israel is a hegemonic underling of much importance to the US and the west, and our media essentially functions as state propaganda. Hence, there is a vested interest in making sure that you, as a voter and citizen, are Pro-Israel and Anti-Palestinian.
The simple fact is that Palestinians are kept in an open-air prison and are second-class citizens - people who are denied a nation. Israel is a settler-colonial state who used the vast power of the failing British Empire to create a country for themselves while pushing the actual natives out. That's right - Israel is yet another example of Europeans pushing natives out of their land for their own use. Yes, the Holocaust is a big reason for that and is of course horrifying, but try telling that to a Palestinian mother whose children got incinerated by an Israeli missile, or who just lost her family home to settlers.
The real answer to your question is that Palestinians are a diverse group of people with a lot of opinions. Of course, replacing Zionism is Arab nationalism isn't the right call - you'd just be flipping the roles and that isn't justice at all. What is justice is true equality, and that's what we should aim for. Those who want nationalism of any kind there should be dismissed out of hand as the psychotic lunatics they are.
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X
The title in the comment was a joke.
‘Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right’ by Angela Nagle
It’s a book that was published in 2017 and it references the ‘Exiting the Vampire’s Castle’ piece mentioned below.
Product Description:
> Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.
Fair warning - it’s about online culture as a whole, so not specifically all about cancelling and not from one political perspective.
It is good though, and I do recommend it if you’re looking for something to pick up that touches on this.
*sigh...*
Again please... please provide any prove of "genocide". Where are the mass graves? Where are all the refugees? Where is all the outry showing us the horrible depictions of burnings, war crimes, ethnic cleansings etc. like there was during the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar? Where are the horrible stories about all the executions, mass murder and so forth?
What makes you think there is a "genocide"? If you can show me any credible source (that is not already disproved in the post) of something even remotely close to "genocide" I will immediately reverse my position and whole-heartedly condemn the CCP for their atrocitites. If your only source for the worst possible crime against humanity is "I heard it", "it is consensus" or "everyone knows" then Im sorry I cannot accept it. As every leftist knows, the media is Manufacturing Consent and Inventing Reality.
No problem man! I just realized I got the author's name wrong, it's actually Mick West. Here's an amazon link if you're curious:
https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Rabbit-Hole-Conspiracy-Theories-ebook/dp/B077YS5G2N#ace-g7448806443
You’ll enjoy it. It’s about the way media has been deliberately dumbed down to the point where actors and idiots are now treated as serious sources of information, and how that process has poisoned modern life and politics.
Just look at the reviews on Amazon!
Ben Bagdikian called it back in the 80's and was either ignored or trashed in the mainstream media. Everything he predicted has come true, and worse.
This obviously may not be the time to take this on, but here’a a great book about how to help people see that their conspiracy theories are baseless without making them feel threatened. In the meantime, I’d recommend individual therapy for him and couple’s therapy for you both.
I think Neil Postman should be required reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X
Noam Chomsky lays out in Manufacturing Consent how the major media entities have acted as an arm of the US intelligence agencies since the start of the Cold War, AP in particular. Also be aware the CIA uses "anonymous sources" to pick winners and losers in journalism, feeding the story to those who "play ball".
I don't, I remain cynical of everything I hear coming out of government agencies and politicians and then I laugh at mainstream society as they argue and fight each other over stupid things like masks and mayo sauce on hamburgers.
We've got to do better, but public opinion is easily controlled and divided. Check out the book https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499 if you have never read it before.
I hope society changes and people do better but I'm certainly not optimistic about it :(
No, es sumamente dificil hacer un argumento completo en un comentario de reddit, pero te dejo un par de libro para que los leas.