The News Just Ain’t The News No More
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M. C. Escher The Tower of Babel 1928 Two thirds of Americans get at least some of their news on social media. Google and Facebook receive well
[See the full post at: The News Just Ain’t The News No More]“Until all you’re left with is the illusion that your opinion is actually your own.”
I have no illusion that my opinions are unique.
proof …
If the UK does not have a deal with the EU then the social/economic life will continue. It will be different
Here’s a dystopian possibility, already off the drawing board and operational.
Yeah, lightly, that piece was in one of our Debt Rattles this week. My comment then was in the vein of: if the Chinese can do it, do you really think we won’t?
My article now is like one step back from that: how are we changing right now? Ithink people should think about that more, not accept it all as some natural progression.
“Until all you’re left with is the illusion that your opinion is actually your own.”
This has always been an illusion for the vast majority, habitual, emotion-driven creatures that we are. Maybe one in a thousand is an independent thinker, and that may be a generous assessment.
Two thousand years ago the opinions needed to control the low-born ‘deplorables’ were dispensed by the local lord or parish priest. After Johannes Gutenberg came along, literacy became a requirement and the torch was handed to print journalism. Then along came the hypnotic inventions of radio and television, with broadcast media indoctrination piped directly into each and every home. Today we have the internet; unconstrained by time and space we are able to carry what seems to be the whole world in our pocket.
It was fun for a while, like an informational Wild West, but our masters underestimated its power to shape opinion, especially unapproved opinion. Hello internet censorship! That should do the trick… maybe. Although the technology has changed, man is still as he was two thousand years ago, an emotion-driven creature waiting for someone in authority to give him an opinion.
For us westerners (mostly Usians) I would trace it back to the introduction of forced education. It teaches us dependence and destroys any vestige of self-confidence; by intention.
By the time the educational system has had one for 12+ years, the job is pretty much done.
It is said that everything “you” know you were taught, and for most, that is probably true.
It is however, not true for everybody; some know things they learned of their own volition.
As long as, “oh look, a squirrel” works, not much to hope for…
The art of critical thinking is likewise very badly taught, it it’s taught at all.
We’re waitng for, looking for, the second coming, Klatu.
The media has not only failed, but is now a weapon against humanity and very much, is leading us to the second age of darkness.
Oh look, a squirrel…Most of the USians I know, think they understand the way propaganda works and don’t trust their Government at all, but nevertheless believe that “Putin is a thug”, Kim is a stupid fat boy, Venezuela is a communist wreck of a country , and China murdered millions in Mao’s time. Eventually they tired of my “Stalin had a bad press” explanations and I was driven out. It was quite an eye-opener to see the pervasiveness of the power of propaganda at work.
My efforts to instill some basic computer security into them were met with “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear”. It makes you wonder why NSA is capturing ALL that data.
1. don’t use Windows, (use Ubuntu (Linux) instead)
2. don’t use Android (that only leaves Apple)
3. don’t use Google/Microsoft/Yahoo to handle your email (use Citadel to do it yourself)
4. learn how to set up your own encrypted messaging system (GPG4USB)
5. use a paid VPN service to anonymise your IP (PIA) to a non-friendly country (Hong Kong)
6. don’t use Google for searching, use DuckDuckGo or Yandex instead
7. don’t use Facebook or Twitter or ANY of those money-making sitesThe Empire is falling, and the crash is going to be terrible, affecting your imperialist-consumerist way of life.
palloy
Duck duck go is google “enhanced” (whatever that means) so that’s a no no IMO. Yandex works very well for me; it’s all I use.
Other than that you seem to have Usian’s down pretty well.
A pretty boring lot, all-in-all; not much in touch anymore…> Duck duck go is google “enhanced” (whatever that means) so that’s a no no IMO.
I think duckduckgo says it doesn’t keep logs and never clicks on ads, so Google does all the work and never gets paid or builds any profiles on people.
8. use vimeo.com for your videos, not youtube.com
9. use Firefox+Privacy Badger + uBlock Origin to avoid ads
10. use WordPress.com for free blogging, not Google Bloggerpalloy
Thanks for that additional info.
I also quit Firefox and went with Yandex browser.
It’s been trouble free and easy to use.
I also do not use google or yahoo mail any longer.
Haven’t made the jump to Ubuntu though; a bit intimidated to learn a whole new operating system at this point in my life.What happened to the Journalists? Where did they go? Pulitzer Prize winner, John Pilger (who is getting older…)
The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was “a trailblazer for independent journalism”, wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.
Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.
Driven from the “mainstream”, Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism’s veneration of “approved opinions” while “unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality.”
Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies...
Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of “fake news” is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox News, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it...
When he was U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called “a war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media.” What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home...
In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerized the German public.
She told me the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above”, but on the “submissive void” of an uninformed public.
“Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked.
“Everyone,” she said. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.”> Haven’t made the jump to Ubuntu though; a bit intimidated to learn a whole new operating system at this point in my life.
If you use Firefox and Thunderbird then the Ubuntu versions are exactly the same as the Windows versions. Everything is “point-and-click” as before. There are a bewildering number of distributions of Linux OSes, for no apparent reason. Ubuntu itself comes in several varieties, I use Lubuntu. You can set it up alongside Windows to try it out.
palloy
I wouldn’t know how to do that (run parallel systems).
Obviously I’m no computer expert.
I have been considering buying a second computer for Linux/Ubuntu…
We’ll see, thanks.> I wouldn’t know how to do that (run parallel systems).
You need an empty partition on your main HDD or SSD to hold the Lubuntu OS. You can get one by resizing something else. Then when you install Lubuntu, you tell it to use the empty partition. Then when you start up, a menu with Windows and Lubuntu appears and you choose which one you want – if you get horribly stuck on Lubuntu, you still have Windows available.
palloy
Oh, that sounds pretty easy; my hdd is partitioned into 3 different areas. I’m sure one is empty.
I’ll start checking into this, thanks.
I’ve been thinking about this for years… 😉
Thankspalloy
Well, I dl’d Lubuntu from its official site and now can’t get it to open.
The top choice is Mount, which I have no idea. I was offered Windows Explorer as well, but that didn’t work. No idea what to do; any ideas?You’ll have to be a lot more specific than that.
The exact filename you downloaded – should be *.iso.
That you burned it DVD OK.
That the computer you are loading to has boot settings to use DVD if present.
Precisely what happened, error messages etc.“Mount” means to make a disc drive recognisable to the users programs.
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