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By Shoq, on April 23, 2012, at 12:39 pm
In an op-ed today, Rex Huppke discusses a problem any thinking person knows about and discusses, nearly as often as they shrug off any notion that there could be a solution for it. A frequent subtext of many things I write about in this blog is that finding answers to problems like these must become a national—even an international—priority, or humanity is in for a world of hurt.
“It’s very depressing,” said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of A History of the Modern Fact. “I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts.
Thanks to a deliberately promoted anti-intellectualism, which generously serves the interests of the plutocracy at large, America and the world are both in grave crisis on a dozen levels. We need many more articles like Huppke's before we will even begin to redress the damage done by 35+ years of radical conservatism and its many propaganda proxies like Fox News, which have both nutured and exploited this ecosystem of rabid dumbshittery. Together they have been alarmingly effective at obliterating any operational respect for science and all those pesky and often politically inconventient things called facts.
But these agents of assholery have merely been the high priests of this Church of Stupid with its anti-englightenment agenda. They have been all too enabled and supported by the mainstream meda which has selfishly abrogated any sense of responsiblity to the common good by letting such issues roll over in the public's consciousness again and again without any effort whatever to propose a solution, or consistently voice a need for one.
Every day, another pundit like Huppke decries this mendacious mess, while cashing the checks of the increasingly conservative-owned and controlled newspaper and broadcasting industries which knowingly allow these toxins of falsehood to metastisize into a full-blown cancer on the body politik of humanity itself. It is a disease that has all but crippled our ability to respond to even the smallest of political issues, and anyone that doesn't see that is either not paying attention, or probably on the payroll of the larger pertetrators of this cultural homicide in progress. .
If we don't find a way to rebalance the scales and make thoughtful inquiry and dialog fashionable again, we are probably finished as culture, and perhaps even as a species. Greed, war, disease, social injustice, econonmic inequity, and countless other man-made issues may be solvable, despite our worst instincts. But global ecocide courtesy of preventable climate change may not be.
I have my own ideas about how we must reset global society by reinventing how we organize, process and share human knowledge and actionable intelligence on nearly everything known or knowable. If we can better account for what we know, and what we do—or have done—with what we know, we can establish more normative guidelines for agreeing on what is real, and what is mere polemical masturbation, propaganda, and agenda hawking.
Whatever it is that we do, we'd better do something… and fast. And that's a fact.
By Shoq, on April 6, 2012, at 8:30 pm
It’s time to restore corporate power to the people by blasting through the myths about how corporations should be run, and for whom.
This article, by an economist who specializes in corporate wealth, with two talented journalists sitting-in, absolutely destroys one of the most enduring and rapacious myths to be found anywhere: that public corporations are market-driven examples of "free enterprise" at work.
I was planning on doing a kind of explainer site on just this topic this year, so this article landed at just the right time, and in just the right place: my laptop. It's absolutely required reading for anyone who has never fully understood just why "public" corporations behave like private ones, and are so beholden to their shareholders, board members and senior management, many of whom live way up there atop that cherished 1%, and mostly at the expense of all of the rest of us.
Unfortunately, while chock full of important facts and historical sound bites,like so many other articles of its type, it is fatally flawed in the remedy department. Such works do a reasonably good job of diagnosing a problem, but any attempt at even guessing about remedies is relegated to afterthought; something left to those mysterious "other voices" we never seem to hear much from. The authors toss in a smattering of events or movements like May Day and Occupy Wall Street as things we can do to fight back against this contemptible state of corporate hegemony run amok. All of them romantic, perhaps, but ridiculously timid when not already proven to be woefully ineffectual. Perhaps the authors are writing a book and saving the juice for later.
Since authors of their caliber can't afford to spend too much time truthtelling, we really need to find a way to crowd-source intelligent discourse about our problems.The cost of producing human knowledge is high, and the cost of distributing that knowledge is even higher. All the free Internet in the world won't provide the promotion and awareness of the important words and ideas that need widespread exposure.
And so long as nothing is doing that, the people who profit from our collective ignorance and inaction will thrive. At least until the entire system breaks down completely. And that, I fear, is a day not too long in coming if we don't find ways to channel our anger into effective social action that can do even the simplest of complicated things. Things like regulating about 900 massive Public corporations to reduce their self-serving ways as they are so well described in this article. It would be a nice start. And we need a nice start. No, I mean we really need a nice start.
Please retweet this post. It's a story we all need to be telling and talking about. Thanks
By Shoq, on April 5, 2012, at 5:36 pm
My friend Krystal Ball is getting really aggressive about taking on Republican douchebaggery. She wanted to get this out right away, so she asked me to post it here. Feel free to copy and distribute far and wide (with attribution, please).
See Krystal discuss this in the @MSNBC video below!
How the War on Women
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By Shoq, on March 29, 2012, at 12:39 pm
See important update at the end.
Forgive my link-baited title, but it was just as contrived, gamed, and inaccurate as this one from Paul Farhi in today’s Washington Post:
Limbaugh sees heat over comments turn down to a simmer
That awful bit of non-reporting spawed these (and other) derived items from so-called “journalists” sucking
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By Shoq, on March 17, 2012, at 7:55 pm
It is our eternal shame as country that such intellectually weak sauce as Ayn Rand should attain an almost mythical status among the very people who should revile her the most. But attain it, she has, and it’s got to be pushed back on. Vigorously.
I have shrieked for years that if something wasn’t done to
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By Shoq, on March 10, 2012, at 2:03 pm
An old and dear Candian friend of mine wrote this to some of his inner circle. I thought I'd share,
Dear Americans,
We have been so entertained over the years by your television broadcasts, but never more so than the past few months with your election primaries. We find ourselves huddled by the TV each night,
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By Shoq, on March 3, 2012, at 1:12 pm
This page has moved to the new http://sn.im/stoprush wiki site's Project Tracker Page.
By Shoq, on February 23, 2012, at 9:37 am
As we listen to Republicans waste time discussing culture war issues we all thought had been settled long ago, the world moves on around us, mostly out of sight to ordinary Americans.
Some call Occupy Wall Street a revolution. Well, perhaps it may be, and it may be a peaceful variant, but this PBS video is
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By Shoq, on February 21, 2012, at 4:25 pm
I dislike using the “rape metaphor,” because I agree with most feminists who believe that when it is overused, or used inappropriately, it trivializes the seriousness of rape.
In this case, however, I will rely on Webster’s dictionary, which defines these two relevant words thusly:
Rape — any
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By Shoq, on February 15, 2012, at 9:32 am
Note: This article, by Retired Republican House and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren wrote a piece in 2011 called “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” went viral, drawing over a million unique views on Truthout, whose reporter, Jason Leopold has widely documented ethical issues.
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