In the case of general conversation, the general rule is that the more important the point the further it will wander from The Latest News.
I keep repeating that all these observations relate to each other. This goes into the category of “Why is this information produced?”
Crises very seldom hit us from the direction in which everybody is looking. The clutter and the noise news makes fixes our attention in a different direction each week. Commenters have columns which discuss whatever story people are buying right now.
When you ask why this information is produced you run right into the inevitability of its not being important information to use for commentary on any real society.
But when I did direct mailing and speech writing I had to have a “news hook” for whatever I was talking about. Direct mail is solid statistics, down to the long letter, short paragraphs. You can tell down to several percentage points exactly what works and what doesn’t.
People do not give money to groups that are not on issues that are in the media.
Period.
I know that BUGS would be lot more popular if it dealt with more late-breaking stories, but the world in which I earned my present financial comfort was one in which I competed with those who think of nothing but a “news hook,” and I have had enough of it.
To a person with a mind a “news hook” is a prison.
Besides, you don’t contribute any real ideas if all your thinking is obsessed with whatever has the sex appeal at this moment to appear in the newspapers.
I have given many examples of this. In November of 1932 Time Magazine reported that nothing was more certain than the Kaiser would be returned to power in Berlin. Everybody had read that and Belgium, which had its own Holocaust that was discredited, had directed a major statement to President Hindenburg on the subject.
They thought Hitler was a monarchist.
You can immediately compare this to the fact that not one paid Sovietologist had the slightest idea in 1981 that the USSR would not live out the decade.
It would be a better world if ANY Futurologist were called on his predictions. But when media speak of the future, they always consult “experts.”
#1 by Dave on 07/03/2011 - 11:26 am
End running the white noise of news is precisely what makes the Internet so important.
BGlass did an excellent post a while back on the survival value of information. She could not have been more correct.
There are people in this world in possession of real information. Robert Whitaker is one of these people. But there is also another type, who is a leaker, who answers questions that are not going to get reported in the news, because they are answers to questions the news never asked.
This was not possible before the Internet.
It is absolutely amazing how the truly important questions get ignored. But in a way the Mantra is a leak. It is an answer to the question, is there a full blown race conflict going on in America?
Of course, it is the presence of that race conflict that is prior to everything AND IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING, right down to the tiniest detail of our politics. And, of course, the news resolutely ignores the question, because it cannot tolerate the answer.
But the answer gets leaked anyway on the Internet even though the news never asked the question.
That’s the Internet and stuff like this is really new under the sun. It isn’t that leaking is new. But the news never reports leaks unless those leaks answer questions the news itself asked. In contrast, the Internet reports leaks that answer questions the news NEVER asked. This is the singularly most important aspect of the Internet.
#2 by dungeoneer on 07/04/2011 - 5:32 am
Shameless N+J`ing I know,but I thought this might make my fellow BUGSters smile:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13989455
Why London is getting a statue of Ronald Reagan
Inevitably, the effort to “preserve and promote” Reagan’s legacy comes with a big injection of political spin. A quotation attributed to Lady Thatcher, “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot,” is etched on to the Reagan statue’s plinth.
Actually, there were plenty of shots fired during the Reagan presidency. It’s just they were fired by proxies out of earshot of Washington and London and so are easy to forget.
Shared enemies
The epitaph glosses over the pair’s good fortune in arriving in power just as the rot inherent in the Soviet system had fatally weakened the whole structure of the society. It also helped that the USSR was bogged down in an unwinnable war (with US proxies) in Afghanistan.
And it altogether fails to acknowledge the courage of ordinary men and women in the Eastern Bloc who created mass movements out of thin air that ultimately led to the revolutions of 1989.
“…..rot inherent….”
“… fatally weakened the whole structure of the society….”
🙂
#3 by Epiphany on 07/04/2011 - 7:58 am
The 66 MILLION Christians, who, perished at the hands of the Soviet Communists, should never be forgotten!
#4 by Fourmyle on 07/05/2011 - 9:41 pm
I suspect this is true for the public
indoctrinationeducation system, including college; perhaps especially, college. I have spent a lot of the time over the last year or so considering Bob’s Insight : All information that is produced, is produced for a reason. I knew that as a much younger man, but forgot to keep it foremost in my mind, as I became part of “The System.”I have been juxtaposing this with Horus the Avenger’s Consensus Trance model, using the Matrix “Red Pill/Blue Pill” metaphor to remind myself that all that we see as “news” is designed to keep us Asleep, to keep us as eternal Children in a world of ruthless predators.
The Truth About Race – the de facto, intentional genocide of the White Race – is as far from the headlines, or the “below the fold” news stories, or the insider section news stories, as can be imagined.
There is a reason for that, “but first, a word from our sponsors.”
We will pay such a price for Wordism, for misapplying Christian Universalism, and for being rational with those posessed of an irrational hatred of us, and all we symbolize to them.
I focus, daily, on doing what I can, starting where I am, in an “apple-pie, strictly legal, sort of way.” (HT: Jim Giles)
It’s not enough.