I’m sitting down after a nice, solid bout of exercise. What’s good about exercise is - you get what you put in. It’s very honest. There is no trickery. No, sorry. Those 4 minute workouts don’t “work out”.
If only the real world were so honest and transparent. But it isn’t.
I wrote a bit last week about the hidden hands with dollar bills behind the curtain in their land of Oz - controlling our beliefs and thus our actions. Making us believe we are free, are living in truth, doing the right things when we aren’t. Truly, we aren’t.
I’d like to follow up on those thoughts and write something more direct and practical about this witchcraft. In education, we call it media illiteracy. I’ve long pushed the need for less of it in our schools. I’ve done a good number of talks on the subject, this so important part of our wider digital literacy. But alas, media literacy, getting our students (and our wider society) educated and skilled in the art of smelling rats - is very seldom part of the school curriculum. So busy teachers are with testing, preparing for the tests, getting better results while the child gets just a temporary jolt of learning - nothing that will last.
Astroturfing, buying support, manufacturing consent (thank you Walter Lippmann - a true mind that spoke to truth) is all around us. There is no grassroots anything, anymore. It’s all about money and to get money you need to spread that get believed. I just linked to Wikipedia above. Standard, neutral source right? Not. With an agenda. A controlling agenda. Gone is the spirit of its original birth. The People’s encyclopedia - my ass.
Everything is bought and paid for these days. It’s so easy too, given technology. Father Pharma is especially busy on that count. Preparing false studies, buying off researchers with awards and expensive cookies and milk.
Media literacy, to cut to the quick, is being skeptical of all sources of information, challenging the information you receive, sourcing it, and becoming aware that so much, almost all of the information around us IS biased and bought and paid for. Yes, even that stuff pretending to be hard science. It is in effect, vigilance and a kind of continual disobedience. An improved shit detector.
“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” - Oscar Wilde
Ms. Atkisson wrote the book on this long before our present days of direct censorship and control. Necessary viewing. I won’t ruin it - just watch her talk.
Like quirky Hegel, I used to love getting up in the morning and finding out what’s new in the world. No longer.
Al Jazeera, the source I most trusted, has turned almost 90 degrees into a bought and paid ad agency. Like all the rest. Fear mongering, more cases, take your booster. Not an iota of discussion about the salient issues of the pandemic. Just a blowhorn of “that’s just the way it is”.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were notified when things got censored. There was a nice warning posted in lieu of the content. But have you noticed, this doesn’t even happen anymore. Sure, if you post something the lords don’t like - you’ll be notified. However, nobody else will be. We’ve now gone into the complete invisible brush on the chalkboard of our mind.
On electronic media, you see once free people now having to go on and on with code words and disclaimers in their public discourse. That is a shame. One guy I watch takes up most of his precious video airtime, placating the censors and saying, “I have no opinion about X, I’m just talking about this issue, I don’t advocate anything …” That is sad.
I don’t care what side of the issue you are on. There just isn’t any debate about the freedom of others to voice their thoughts. No issue unless you really want to take a BIG step back - for your children and their children.
I’ll continue to call out the liars and their tidy little world of black and white. I hope more do too. It’s crunch time.
And yeah - got to get back to a free and open society where the media is front and center, the source of that flame. Right now, it’s a pretty wet and damp world out there.
On Privacy
When they lop off my head
erase every god damned word.
When they mop up all the blood
one thing will remain —
the fact I was heard.
…..
The mind moves and nobody knows.
This alone, salvation.
A light goes on, yet nothing shows.