How Fox News created a culture of idiots
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Assholes largely share a thick sense of moral entitlement. Just as hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, late 19th and early 20th century businessmen like Cecil Rhodes, Albert Beveridge and John D. Rockefeller all felt a need to invoke entitlement on a cosmic scale, in effect sensing that something might be majorly amiss. In stark contrast with the grandiose reasoning of the era of colonialism, the asshole in more recent modern life often requires little or no pretext of larger cause for the special privileges he feels entitled to enjoy. He will usually have some sort of rationalization ready at hand — he is not the psychopath who rejects moral concepts altogether — but the rationalizations are becoming ever thinner, ever more difficult to identify. This newer, purer style of asshole often just presumes he should enjoy special privileges in social life as a matter of course and so requires little by way of reason for taking them as the opportunity arises.
The older style of asshole is comparatively easy to sort into types, according to their different thick entitlements. To the extent we can identify a definite moral outlook and confidently reject it as wrong, we can even take comfort in our sense of clarity about how the asshole goes awry. The newer style of asshole is more disquieting because he is harder to pin down. His thinned-out and shifting rationalizations won’t necessarily settle into any particular sustained moral perspective that we can confidently identify and challenge as wrong. Instead, his sense of entitlement is mainly identifiable in functional terms, as the stable disposition to come up with some such rationalizations or other, as the situation requires. Because the newer breed of asshole is harder to pin down, we will pay even greater attention to the details of our exemplars, if only to illustrate that there is indeed a newer, thinner, and purer asshole style. (And, again, where you don’t share my moral and political opinions, you might think of different examples of the same general type.)
Earlier assholes presented examples of self-aggrandizement in the name of a larger moral cause. The newer style of self-aggrandizing asshole needs little or no such pretext.
Donald Trump plainly likes being on the air. He is convincingly portrayed as an asshole in the documentary “Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?” (answer: Trump, as one man’s greed and ego brought down a whole sports league). Lately, however, Trump has become something closer to a media buffoon—except that he does not seem to be joking. Like Falwell, Trump believes there is something important in his appearing and reappearing in the news and on TV, without betraying any sense that a lot of us have a hard time seeing what that important something would be.
In Trump’s defense, it may be said that he is merely an “ass-clown” or, still more charitably, an elder master of the attention-getting game now played daily by the Facebook youth. He may in that regard seem a role model, an accomplished media entrepreneur, and while this isn’t quite a public service, it is at least the kind of thing modern society loves. In a culture of narcissism, you don’t need any special reason to lay claim to the attention of others; you simply get attention as you can, as anyone else of course would (“if you don’t flaunt it, you don’t got it,” to reverse a familiar saying). On the other hand, if we find our current zeitgeist mistaken, on the grounds that laying claim to the attention of others does require good enough reasons — whether for the sake of modesty or just for the sake of not adding to the deafening contemporary media noise machine — then we can view narcissistic attention seeking as a way of acting like an asshole. Our narcissistic age thus might help explain why assholes seem to be everywhere of late.
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/28/aaron_james_excerpt/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
And the billionaires want the intelligence quotient of this nation to decrease, not increase ... dumb voters == republicant voters
= new reply since forum marked as read
WOW. What a philosophy. What a game-plan. SHEESH!!! And then they'll turn around one day when the Malaysians and Croatia and Micronesia have surpassed us in all the academic and higher-education and research & development/economic metrics and they'll wonder what the hell went wrong.
I believe with the dumbing down of America, which has been happening for quite a while (I will let someone with more skill at statistics relate the facts), that the use of tools like O"Really and other talking heads on the Fake News side have hammered away relentlessly at those with less mental skill sets than others to inform them on what is happening in our political culture/society ... this misinformation/exaggeration/conflagration and YES demagoguery is where we are at today ... a terrible injustice to our USA and one that my 94 yr old father and I wring our hands and wonder just exactly who is going to lead us out of the mess we have allowed to happen ... ?
Last edited Wed Apr 9, 2014, 06:53 PM - Edit history (1)
misinformation.
How many times (in the thousands?) have we seen 'discussions' about President Obama's 'leadership' and how many times has the word "filibuster" been mentioned on M$M since Obama took office (how about ZERO). The 'discussions' of Obama's "leadership" are right out of a Frank Luntz play-book on framing (twisting) the presentation of an issue. They've had probably thousands of these 'discussions' framed on Obama's 'leadership' but never have the M$M ever mentioned during Obama's administrations that the Repugnants have set records for filibustering legislation (they have madereport on the GOP filibustering Presidential appointments).
I don't know if the meeting, organized by Luntz, the GOP had on the day of President Obama's innauguration, detailed in Draper's book: "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives", has ever been brought up on M$M (possibly on 60 Minutes before Don Hewitt retired). But I do know, I have never seen it or heard of it. The GOP toadies making up the M$M prefer to have discussions of Obama's leadership rather than bring up the fact that the GOP leadership, at that meeting, decided on a strategy to fight everything Obama and the Democrats tried to do - in particular anything he tried to do to rebuild the economy after the Republicans Trickle Down - Deregulation disaster.
This is why millions are running to the internet and away from NBC's Brian Williams, ABC's Diane Sawyer, CBS's Scott Pelley and PBS (Fox News - light) Gwen Awful and Judy Woodruff, to try to find out what's really going on. M$M carefully edit's their reporting so as to not offend the GOP.
For one of the best articles on the GOP mission of Government destruction/sabotage (so they could then campaign saying: "See, the Democrats/Obama can't get anything done/ Obama lacks 'leadership'! "
by Peter Beinart, published in Time magazine, read "Why Washington is Tied up in Knots".
For more on Frank Luntz see: Introducing a Searchable, Easily Accessed, Text-Version of the Frank Luntz Republican Playbook
the Luntz Republican Playbook was noted way back by DUers: freeandbrave, and Papau and NAO.
also from the Frank Luntz Republican Playbook PART X "APPENDIX: THE 14 WORDS NEVER TO USE" - this is a good short indicator of the crafty machinations of the Luntz mind.
[div style="border: 1px solid #000000;" class="excerpt"] NOte to anybody interested: note that I used names of celebrity news readers of M$M. This increases likelihood that the criticism of M$M will be seen by them. They all google their names to see how the public is responding to their performances. I suggest that when critiqueing M$M use names and any other terminology (i.e. if your criticism is specific to an issue) relevant to the issue/coverage you are talking about to increase the likelihood that it will be seen.
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ON EDIT:
I checked this out a bit. Found that FRONTLINE had something about the meeting on Obama's innauguration day. They talked to Draper, among others (Republicans) about the meeting: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/inside-obamas-presidency/transcript-36/
(emphasis my own)
ROBERT DRAPER: So they decided that they needed to begin to fight Obama on everything. This meant unyielding opposition to every one of the Obama administration’s legislative initiatives.
NOte Gingrich said "we had to see how Obama behaved and to offer an alternative to what he wanted to do"... this is exactly how the GOP operated. They didn't have any ideas of their own. They just waited to see what Obama wanted to do and then they came up with a plan that would obstruct delay or kill whatever it was Obama wanted to do. They brougth no ideas of their own to the table. This is nothing new for the GOP, but it was much more blatant.
PBS Frontline gave Luntz a chance to RE-FRAME "the meeting" of the GOP leaders (no doubt because Luntz knew the account of 'the meeting' in the broadcast of Jan 15, 2013 "Inside Obama's Presidency" sounded pretty bad, the GOP probably demanded a Luntz Reframing of "the meeting" which appeared on Feb 12, 2013 as a part of the broadcast "Cliffhanger: "How how Washington has failed to solve the country’s problems of debt and deficit". (don't expect anybody at PBS to agree this is how the interview came to be and came to be included in Cliffhanger). The Frank Luntz interview transcript is here: "How the “21st-Century Republicans” Changed Washington". The part about the meeting is pure Luntz disinformation wizardry. Luntz could get a murderer on trial off by convincing a jury that the murderer was using the gun as a fireworks display and unfortunately: "the victim ran into the bullets ... 24 times."
