Sunday Afternoon Reading

Way better than the French Olympics!

Brad Smith, Guest Scribbler

Do you know what does work? Instilling fear works, so does Repetition, etc. There is also the carrot, you reward good behavior.

In psychology they have two main ways to condition people and several offshoots, but they all work using various punishments and rewards. We have all heard of the different ways they use these tricks on animals, Pavlov stuck to animals, some went further.

Do you think we are any different? Well, I know we learn tricks faster and the smarter we are the more tricks we can learn, that much is true.

We are smarter and we learn faster, but once we have learned something, true or not, we tend to believe it for a very long time. It's much easier to help someone FORM their opinion than it is to get them to change it. This is why control over education is key, but I digress.

There is a reason why people use the term Red Pill. It's that moment when their conditioning brakes down and you realize they are lying, then you start looking for lies and finding more and more. You peal back one layer and another is just waiting underneath.

The hard part is finding the truth among so many lies. So many people, even the good guys have their own bias and blind spots, me included. By the way, I try to keep in mind that mistakes are different than lies but if you repeat lies often enough, people will stop believing you anyway. I try not to repeat lies. I'm not perfect, sometimes things make it through my Bullshit filter, but I promise that I will always try to give my honest opinion and that I will not knowingly share false information. I do my best to vet anything I say, when it comes to factual information.

One last thing, there usually is.

The founding Feds argued that there was no way they would ever stick their nose in something like individual state education. In fact, they laughed at the idea that the feds would do most of the stuff they do today. Were they being honest? No, Hamilton, in particular, knew his arguments were BS; he knew the power that they were granted would only grow stronger and more intrusive. He actually argued in later papers that the feds needed to stick their nose in your business so you would grow accustomed to their daily presence; only then would you accept the endless taxation needed to maintain a strong enough military. In other words, the feds needed to do good work in your community and you had to view them as the good guys, so that you would willingly pay for their wars.

Have I said before that Hamilton was an Ass?

And this, from Michael Walsh via fellow Substacker, Elizabeth Nickson of Welcome to Absurdistan

42 ways the press hates you.

Today’s journalists now openly celebrate the death of objectivity, arguing that reporters have biases like everybody else, so why pretend that they don’t? In clear violation of their own—and now very much outmoded—Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, they happily ignore such tenets as:

• Identify sources clearly.

• Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity.

• Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.

• Expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their
  organizations.

Thus, after nearly a century’s consensus about journalistic best practices, we have come full circle to the days of naked partisanship that marked the earliest American newspapers. Gossip has become news, journalistic crusades are fabricated out of whole cloth and attributed to anonymous sources as justification. It’s noteworthy that the word “objectivity” nowhere appears in the current SPJ code, which was revised in 2014. Why would it? Objectivity has become the mortal enemy of the current vogue for “explanatory” or “advocacy” journalism—otherwise generally known as propaganda.

The transformation of journalism from rank advocacy to lukewarm “objectivity” and back to even ranker political propaganda (nearly all news stories today are couched in political terms, including those about pop music and sports) is one of the principal subjects of this book. Accordingly we have assembled a corps of forty-two journalists—some grizzled veterans, some newcomers, some of whose primary occupations lie in the wider fields of book publishing, fiction, non-fiction, television, and even Hollywood—to analyze the startling changes that have come over the profession in our lifetimes.

You really can't hate them enough.

Even greater than the abandonment of “objectivity” as a pernicious influence on journalism is the internet, the great destroyer of printed periodicals, which has laid waste to the newspaper and magazine industry and has fallen under the control of the social-media giants, such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, and is now subject to favoritism and even censorship by near-monopolies like Google, a search engine that also now controls visual media via its ownership of YouTube. Whether the patrician Walter Lippmann would have admired his wishful handiwork now that it is a reality is open to question, but surely he would celebrate the intrusion of the American federal government, along with governments around the world, into both de facto and de jure informational control of cyberspace. In many countries around the world, the press and attendant broadcast media are now directly and unabashedly controlled by government entities which, in many cases, openly fund and censor them.

Even in a work of this length, it is of course impossible to touch upon every aspect of the current state of the media. From the point of view of one who has labored in it, off and on, for more than half a century, it is parlous and getting worse. Ask someone with less than ten years’ experience in the field and you may well—very likely will—get a different answer: that it’s liberated, responsive, unfettered. Still, my work as a historian has convinced me of the truth of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s famous axiom, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The Paris-born Karr, who lived from 1808 to 1890, was, of course, a journalist himself, in addition to being a critic, novelist, and flora-culturalist. But that was back in the day when “journalists” were men of accomplishment in other fields.) That is to say, the fundamental things apply in all walks of human endeavor, and among these things is mankind’s innate desire to convince others of the rightness of his position on any given subject. The question always has been: What’s the best way to go about it?

Pre-order here. 

BW

Thanks for reading this far. The coming week should be another one for the books. Or at least for Brianwilsonwrites!