Renli wrote:
> 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.
The gov't?
You're propping up a simplistic strawman. Try again.
>
> 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.
Yes. But a few mistakes brought us to the brink, which were averted.
That's not really the issue.
> So, to insinuate it's
> being run by power hungry madmen is probably taking things a little
> too far.
That's really not the issue.
> 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.
I'm really not the issue. And yes, I could do a better job. See below.
> 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.
OK, yes. The pebbles have voted, so the avalanche can't be stopped.
>
> 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?
The Bear-Sterns debacle was heavily forced by a network of analysts
functionally agreeing to bad-mouth the stock while they sold short. The
guy that started it plead guilty & paid a pretty big fine.
> Doesn't this for example imply that deluded people are actually being
> taken care of, cared for, *instead of* being taken advantage of?
Good q.
Let's say two people want to steer a system. Stability is im****tant, and
the application of corrective pressures results in a win-win for both
persons. They have slightly varying motivations and interests, but
largely they are in agreement about goal, not method. They both use an
implied threat of excessive counter-steer to avert the other party's
excessive counter-steer, much like a stalemate. If you don't over-steer,
I won't have to counter-steer and we won't capsize.
A functional stalemate leads to stability, the functional game is more
predictable and brinksman****p isn't required.
Apply that to political groups and their constituents. Galvanizing
constituents is the way parties keep their basis and influence while
actually pursuing less-published goals. What does the steering? The
fingers on the wheel or the rudder? They're connected, but the wheel
doesn't actually steer the boat, the rudder does.
Back to the back-and-forth corrective oscillations of two different
people holding the wheel, that's the dialectic. The net effect is the
rudder stays straight and the boat doesn't capsize.
What happens when one party starts upsetting the balance, what then? The
other party has to respond in kind.
If the Repubs first started playing dirtier pool in the 1980's by using
"hot buttons" and sullying the word "liberal," where do we find a
response? Green alarmism has hit a fever pitch. Oversteer vs.
countersteer.
The problem with this level of manipulation is that it inculcates into
the polity a need for the leader****p. Pied pipers are dangerous.
Increasing dependency on them is worse.
> 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".
Eh? Oh I see. We weren't going to starve. In fact lots of our excess
rice could've gone to meeting the shortages elsewhere in Asia instead of
spoiling on kitchen shelves belonging to hoarding westerners.
/leebert
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