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

[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