On May 5, 11:51 pm, pseudomodo <sinohege...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> My friends & I have been talking about media stampedes, especially about
> the recent hoarding of rice in the USA and Canada. The headlines scream
> "rationing" and "shortages," but in America all that means is people are
> being limited to buying two 50-lb bags of rice at Sams or Costco.
>
> It's no news that the rate-of-cycle on news stories has increased
> dramatically in the past twenty years along with a general shelf life
> decrease in all media. I see this going hand-in-hand with an increased
> use of anxiety-inducing media techniques, from screaming headlines to a
> broader negativity in popular arts and culture. The advertising
> profession is renown for employing anxiety-inducing imagery (status
> differential, solution-to-problem) to appeal to unconscious motivations,
> to reify in the mind of the consumer "need for product." These
> techniques have evolved to a dark art for quite a while (from the almost
> inobtrusive "Burma Shave" ads to the insidious "Get laid with a
> quadruple-blade razor" images on TV) and are now firmly planted in
> attention-grabbing statements in politics and media. Remember the
> Reagan-era concern about the use of "hot buttons?" It didn't go away, it
> was simply flushed down the memory hole.
>
> Anxiety is the hardest-to-identify of our base instincts, it's integral
> to the problem-solving and risk-assessment engine of ego - the grand
> mechanism that defends the elusive specter of Self. Gotama used a
> didactic style to address this, through long discourse employing
> empirical disproof (not this, not that). It's a method of bring a mental
> feature into starker relief against the background noise of the those
> infernal and distracting aggregates.
>
> The implications for a civil culture are clear when societies might rush
> to a premature solution against a perceived threat, but it's also
> problematic in the sciences where the regime of falsification is
> required to decouple evidence from belief and professional ego.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_cascade
>
> OK, those are your talking points. Now lemme see watchugot.
>
> /leebert
This isn't new information - there is no free media which is
simultaneously pervasive - but you have to THINK about it. For example
i'd ask a few questions: First of all, the obvious, who is doing it -
thats easy, the government. Even if it is a secret government it's
still a government. So it's the government. Secondly, why. Wrapped up
in why, is the question if it is a good thing or bad thing.
Some of the answers may not be what you expect. For example, the world
has not blown itself up fifty times over with nuclear weapons; we may
therefore safely assume that (at least since nagasaki), the world has
been run by level-headed people in this regard. So, to insinuate it's
being run by power hungry madmen is probably taking things a little
too far. Traveling down this path of thought, we realize that although
many people cannot resist eating mcdonalds when they watch a
basketball game, because they are affected by advertising (information
cascade) there are those of us who see the M and recoil, completely
aware of what is going on. So what would you have? The world run by
the kind of people that eat mcdonalds, or the world run by the kind of
people that so far haven't gotten everyone killed?
What would you have - a food shortage because people start buying up
and holding, or things continuing as they are (no shortage, lower
prices, food for all)?
So maybe it boils down to - do you think you could do a better job? So
much is self-evident to you already, maybe that's part of the puzzle.
Maybe, just maybe, people JUST LIKE YOU run things, and have set
things up so that people, JUST LIKE YOU will be successful in the
world. After all it's not a socialism. Nothing ever really is, I mean
come on, everyone in power in russia was embezzling for themselves and
their families, everybody knew it, and the common people with no real
skills or intelligence got the ****y end of the stick.
Then again maybe there is no bought media but this is mass
hallucination on a planetary scale; maybe this is just how people
react when there's a lot of them, kind of like how locusts suddenly
start swarming.
I mean think about it. Let's say that you buy into the theory - just
as an example - that a banking elite behind the federal reserve
sparked the panic of 1920 (or whatever) by ordering the press to print
false information about banks not having enough money. Right - then
given that, what is the logic behind the bear stearns bailout? It's
intended to be perceived to insinuate a market bottom, in such a way
that it is holding the financial system together. But wait a minute,
does this not imply that the people in power are actually *acting for
the good of the common man*? That the "TECHNIQUE" you speak of is not
actually being used for GOOD - and precisely because it DOES work?
Doesn't this for example imply that deluded people are actually being
taken care of, cared for, *instead of* being taken advantage of?
And at any rate, for the sages such as you who can see through
everything, at least you will have more time to buy rice, and pay less
money for it, before the world food shortage hits home and people are
rioting in the street and burning down the white house. Right?
I mean ****, if they're going to starve *anyways* why should you, who
figured everything out, also die? We need people like you to rebuild
the world after "the event".
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