I would call that healthy, especially when you can’t make heads or tails of its importance (given that it mostly doesn’t lead to any social change, except via fear, loathing, etc., constantly being stimulated due to their choice of topics, and the way they report on it).
I stopped watching TV when I went to college, and never felt any inclination to resume doing so since, as constantly thinking about what’s happening now makes it really hard to zoom out and see the larger patterns.
You might consider reading Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, though given your interest in socioeconomic developments, I’d say David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital might also provide you with a fresh take / new lens through which to understand those and other developments.
When Trump was elected, two million women marched in peaceful protest, the largest one in US history. Unfortunately, they represented less than 1% of the population. When Babylonians get serious about change I might start to listen to what their media has to say. Voting for whichever clown screams the loudest is not being serious, nor is voting for Obama just because he’s the only alternative when the shit hits the fan.
True, but I would emphasize that the march was mostly about outrage over the fact that someone who says ‘such things’ could be elected, and not a march in support of or pushing a program of solidarity, because what the D party stands for is not mitigating precariousness / economic insecurity, but ‘breaking the glass ceiling’, which is something that at best a few % of women who manage to end up at the top will benefit from.
Furthermore, it was outrage over something that is a harsh reality for many working women, who mostly simply have to put up with bosses and managers just like Trump, not in small part due to the fact that you can’t live without a job, and pretty much every work place providing ‘low skill’ labor has that problem, because of the power imbalance economic insecurity creates. Which, again, is not something the D party is even trying to grapple with, because of the fact that those sorts of issues are much less prevalent in places employing members of the professional class. There, you are mostly bothered by death through overwork, office politics, and the ‘rat race’. Far from great either, but economic insecurity is at least less of an issue, and you don’t have to work 60-80h a week just to get by. Which is to say, the outrage embodied by that march was at the least misguided/myopic, and to the extent it was claimed by the D party, fake.
Chickens are the masters of acting indignant, precisely because the lights are on, but nobody is home. If just ten percent of the population walked out that door right now things would change. In the meantime, I eat more popcorn.
If they have a coherent idea why they’re doing it and what they want to improve, yes. But if those who walk off are all invested in the meritocratic status quo, in which everyone gets one chance to ‘prove themselves’, and anyone who doesn’t is human waste, then not so much.
We’ve been here before, after all, and the only reason it got better because half the developed world got destroyed and had to / could be rebuilt. As solutions go, I’d say I would prefer a different catalyst.
It was anarchists like myself who thought up Occupy Wall Street. They were just willing to try something, anything, and it worked far better than any of them imagined. They taught those who showed up how to shut your mouth, wait your turn, stop spouting bullshit nobody else wants to hear, and learn how listen if it kills you. Then they left, knowing the Babylonians had a long road to go down, teaching them how to learn to be still and appreciate silence as golden was beyond their ability.
Sure, but they had a well-developed idea of what they wanted to try (developed through decades of similar attempts to get people to organize), and the people to teach the process, and to convince those attending to go along with it (and the ability to mostly shut out those who wanted to hijack it). But introducing the process (of radical democracy) was the main goal, besides uniting (the 99%).
Yes, it’s quite frustrating that people get distracted so easily. But you are drawing a false dichotomy – you need both the right ideas and moral concern and impulse to engender desirable change, because without the former, you will just reproducing yet another variation on the thing you think you are rejecting and dismantling.
Aside from that, it seems to me that by thinking of the world as babylon, you are being far too manichean, and that this will make it very hard for you to actually reach anyone. Similarly with the frequent suggestion that people are ‘chickens’, or ‘sheep’ with no ‘light on’ – that’s the game reactionaries play, not radical egalitarians (which is what anarchism, properly understood, starts from). The only way to get from here to anywhere is via education (including prefiguration), and educating fellow human beings only works if you treat them with the respect you would want to be treated with, and when you recognize and acknowledge within yourself their full and shared humanity.
LOL, I’m not interested in changing Babylonians. I write what the Chinese call “The Book That Can Never Be Written”, in part, because a few poems are pornographic in Chinese. If it isn’t obvious already, the Tower of Babel is ready to collapse again, while our poems have survived and thrived for over 12,000 years and helped us to avoid the same mistakes. With any luck, the mathematics from my poems might help Babylonians pick up the pieces.
Seriously, if I tried to save Babylonians from themselves, they would nail me to a cross.
Chompsky is another babbling idiot who just happens to be entertaining with classical logic, even his theory about language has been proven wrong. Harvey’s cool, but just another Babylonian who doesn’t comprehend the simple fact they organize like a flock of chickens and his own institutionalized stunted sense of humor is the problem, and he is teaching people to over-complicate things.
Tribals often suggest studying the humor of chickens and cockroaches, as a folk-cure for whatever ails you. That’s the humor of the Three Stooges, Gonzo the Muppet, and the Marx Brothers. Babylonians could not be more transparent to me. Like a bunch of two year olds. They don’t call themselves the “mindless masses” for nothing, and Harvey needs to work on his character drawings.
I usually just point to CNN is the perfect example of fake news.
Also, as a Canadian, I would like to point out that the CBC and networks like Global Canada are really heavily into the bi-partisan politics of the Liberal party and Justin Trudeau. They are absolutely horrible and will defend anything Justin Trudeau does at all costs, despite Trudeau being a complete retard and making horrible decisions (or just paying favors to big business and corporate Chinese takeover) for this country.
That’s what I’ve heard, the result of an institutionally stunted sense of humor, and spending a lifetime dwelling on lowbrow slapstick without ever getting the punch lines.
on Democracy Now etc. you mean? I haven’t really bothered following his news appearances in the past year because I find talking about one of the symptoms (Trump) of the underlying disease (meritocracy) pointless and dangerous (because it perpetuates the distraction from the underlying patterns). That said, if you’re willing to elaborate, I’m still curious to know what you experience as ‘being curmudgeonly’, because I’m not really able to look at the news that way.
Well lately everything he says is coming true and he just says “told you and it will get worse” . I’m already depressed enough with recent news and happenings.
Ah, I see. Yeah, I can see how that might be less than fun to attend/watch. I would’ve hoped he did more to help people educate themselves, though, because education is the only way out, and even then only once enough people start moving in a different direction, and stop performing their parts in this grandiose play in which we all have our parts (mostly as cogs needed to keep the sets moving).
That said, I’d still recommend you check out Harvey’s work, and perhaps also this, because that seems to me to be another part of the puzzle that will lead to the key with which to unlock the door to new possibilities.
