The Daily Vitriol

[davidn]

I was pointed to this by someone else a couple of days ago. It's from a TV channel here that despite calling itself "Fox News" is really a 24-hour right wing propaganda machine, and I'm sorry to tarnish your browser history with the address but it's worth watching to see the level of politics around here.

College Skews Political Spectrum

Nothing wrong with that headline, is there? Yes there is, as e_to_the_ipi explains in the comments. But there's never been a country more afraid of words, or a party that is better at using them, and just by planting ideas into such a negative context they can hack at the minds of their gullible audience. You can put a bad spin on anything if you disagree with it, but this attempts to take the pure school bullying approach of making things like just being educated or having an awareness of the wider world into negative things.

A question - why aren't we out there screaming like the Party of Teabags or whatever they want to call themselves now, protesting that yes, we want America to take great steps forward among Western society and have healthcare available to all, or that people should be able to get married to each other as they choose and not as we choose based on what an unknown person wrote two thousand years ago? Because we're too quiet, and too reasonable, and it's only the loudest and most hateful voices that are heard. Don't send your children to college where it'll somehow erode their civic knowledge - let them turn into these people instead.

This is the reason why I'm honestly indifferent about Britain becoming conservative in the next general election (apart from the lack of any promise from Labour anyway) - no matter how much I may disagree with any of their ideas they are positively saints compared to the willful idiocy that so many people of this country take an immense amount of pride in exhibiting.

Besides, ours dig themselves holes so deep it becomes funny again.

Comments

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

I'd argue that there is a problem with the headline: it seems to start from the position that the political spectrum presented across the US populace is somehow the objectively correct one.

My essential issue with their argument that you need more moderate professors is US liberal tends to average as right-wing to moderate, worldwide.

The real problem with conservatives is that David Cameron is the worst type of vacuous. I honestly don't think there's a single thing he really believes in, and he's not actually got any policy's. He's campaigning on the "Gordon Brown looks and talks funny, and we're fed up with New Labour" ticket. This is not a good thing. Of course, the fact that someone working for a Labout MP, who I was on the train with the other day, told me they just are planning to lose the election and then clear out deadwood doesn't help. I really hope we've got a hung parliment.

[davidn]

You're right, actually - I'd overlooked that but using "skews" rather than simply... saying that it changes or affects it is surely very deliberate as well.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Well, that is the aim of Fox News. Make so many ridiculous big claims that people overlook and grow to accept the tiny little ways you're skewing things.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Also on the topic of stupidity, have you seen Ubisoft's latest (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=235596&site=pcg)?

Along with the current posters advertising Labour's new ID cards as "Freedom passes", it makes me think that people have lost track of the difference of "bad, over-bearing policies" and "ridiculously over the top satires of bad over-bearing policies".

[davidn]

Goodness gracious me. Guesses as to the amount of time before all that gets hacked away? Pirating PC games - it's honestly easier than buying them.

When you said "ID cards" I thought they were actually trying to sell the idea of government-issued ID again and nobody had realized the intense irony of the phrase, but what I got on searching was a free travel pass - is it worse?

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are totally right. Having just seen these posters (in particular, when just arriving after coming through passport control in Gatwick), I was assuming this was a stupid new name for ID cards. Goes to show, you can be too cynical.

The Ubisoft comments after PC Gamer ask them to commit that they will definitely, ultimately, release a patch if they take down the servers is terrifying. Really makes you wonder why they wanted to give that interview...

[davidn]

And it worked on me D:

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I had actually never thought about it that way, and that is fairly chilling.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Framing the question affects thinking as much as the question that is framed. The big issue with things like Fox News is that they claim credibility and people accept their existence.

Accepting the existence of that which has no right, and making allowances for it is very easy, naturual, and a lot of the time wrong.

[kjorteo]

"Framing the question affects thinking as much as the question that is framed."

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/02/11/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry6198284.shtml

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping for a hung parliament too, but mainly because it'll be more interesting to watch. This may be a selfish and shallow reason, but I can't see either of the two main parties doing anything useful with their majority, so it might not be a bad thing if they descended into some kind of reality tv-esque nightmare, because then people might care a bit more in 2015 (or sooner if they start metaphorically clawing each other's eyes out like the last time there was a hung parliament).

If US college graduates can't answer civics questions that are on the Modern Studies syllabus in Scotland, then it's not so much an issue for their universities as it is for their schools. Although what knowing the mechanics of government has to do with issues that the Right see as intrinsically moral, is anyone's guess.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Well, a hung parliment would definitely be the most interesting thing to watch, and the fairest thing. I don't think anyone can really say that either of the two major political parties presents a good way forward. A period with a hung parliment, and consensus-driven policy making would be the best thing, really.