A bit of a tangent, I am re reading One River, by Wade Davis. I just finished the part where he out lines how the panic around cocaine in tonics in the USA was twisted into a form of cultural genocide (not a term he uses) against the Indians of South American. How coca was a staple food product for thousands of years before cocaine was i…
A bit of a tangent, I am re reading One River, by Wade Davis. I just finished the part where he out lines how the panic around cocaine in tonics in the USA was twisted into a form of cultural genocide (not a term he uses) against the Indians of South American. How coca was a staple food product for thousands of years before cocaine was isolated from the plant. That coca is one of the most nutrient rich editable plants known to man and the alkaloid cocaine makes up a fraction of a percentage of the overall plant and during the frenzy and following panic the words coca and cocaine were used interchangeably even though they are very different things.
On the main topic here, I think what your looking for is a more educated general public. educated in the broader senses has having an ability to critically think about the information we are being fed. where does the media fit into that. Telling us what to think is always going to back fire. giving us things to think about is probably right. The question about who is responsible for teaching us how to think about things is more difficult to answer.
In the words of George Carlin “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
I am skeptical of the idea that we just need more education. We're more education now than we ever have been. Those going through school right now have a digital literacy level far beyond their elders. So there's no doubt there's a bit of a gap between ages.
But I think the more important factor is ideology. The media, for years, has exacerbated that problem — we've been speaking to narrower and narrower subsets of people. I think the rise of the fact check proves exactly that.
Also: The appropriation of Indigenous customs by the patent medicine industry is super interesting! (And sad.) I didn't get into it here, but there's a lot going on there.
Oh, you want fact-check tangents? This one haunts me. Gwynne Dyer's "Future Tense" gave the fact-check to six months of GW Bush propaganda:
"Saddam was a secular dictator, leader of the pan-Arab nationalist and socialist Baath Party, and an accomplished killer and torturer of Islamist radicals, whom he rightly saw as a threat to his regime. Bin Laden was an Islamist zealot who preached the overthrow of secular rulers, the suppression of Arab nationalism and other national identities among Muslims in favour of a single borderless Muslim loyalty, and quite specifically the destruction of the Baath Party and of Saddam Hussein"
I typed that in to get a word-count: 78. If those 78 words had been appended to most of Bush's claims, as a fact-check, in 2002 and 2003, the war would not have happened. It was journalism's job to do that. Gwynne Dyer was doing it at the time, and a whole movie, "Shock and Awe", A-list cast, was made about the Knight-Ridder journalists who got a series of stories out about how the "Iraqi A-bomb program" was just not there.
But larger papers and all the networks (yes, even MSNBC) were just amplifying the Bush messages and not providing the fact-check.
I'm just not worried about lack of fact-checking of minor political figures that are clearly not mainstream, have little following. Fact-checking rants from Tamara Lich accomplishes nothing. It's the lies from those in power that get the least fact-checking.
A bit of a tangent, I am re reading One River, by Wade Davis. I just finished the part where he out lines how the panic around cocaine in tonics in the USA was twisted into a form of cultural genocide (not a term he uses) against the Indians of South American. How coca was a staple food product for thousands of years before cocaine was isolated from the plant. That coca is one of the most nutrient rich editable plants known to man and the alkaloid cocaine makes up a fraction of a percentage of the overall plant and during the frenzy and following panic the words coca and cocaine were used interchangeably even though they are very different things.
On the main topic here, I think what your looking for is a more educated general public. educated in the broader senses has having an ability to critically think about the information we are being fed. where does the media fit into that. Telling us what to think is always going to back fire. giving us things to think about is probably right. The question about who is responsible for teaching us how to think about things is more difficult to answer.
In the words of George Carlin “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
I am skeptical of the idea that we just need more education. We're more education now than we ever have been. Those going through school right now have a digital literacy level far beyond their elders. So there's no doubt there's a bit of a gap between ages.
But I think the more important factor is ideology. The media, for years, has exacerbated that problem — we've been speaking to narrower and narrower subsets of people. I think the rise of the fact check proves exactly that.
Also: The appropriation of Indigenous customs by the patent medicine industry is super interesting! (And sad.) I didn't get into it here, but there's a lot going on there.
Oh, you want fact-check tangents? This one haunts me. Gwynne Dyer's "Future Tense" gave the fact-check to six months of GW Bush propaganda:
"Saddam was a secular dictator, leader of the pan-Arab nationalist and socialist Baath Party, and an accomplished killer and torturer of Islamist radicals, whom he rightly saw as a threat to his regime. Bin Laden was an Islamist zealot who preached the overthrow of secular rulers, the suppression of Arab nationalism and other national identities among Muslims in favour of a single borderless Muslim loyalty, and quite specifically the destruction of the Baath Party and of Saddam Hussein"
I typed that in to get a word-count: 78. If those 78 words had been appended to most of Bush's claims, as a fact-check, in 2002 and 2003, the war would not have happened. It was journalism's job to do that. Gwynne Dyer was doing it at the time, and a whole movie, "Shock and Awe", A-list cast, was made about the Knight-Ridder journalists who got a series of stories out about how the "Iraqi A-bomb program" was just not there.
But larger papers and all the networks (yes, even MSNBC) were just amplifying the Bush messages and not providing the fact-check.
I'm just not worried about lack of fact-checking of minor political figures that are clearly not mainstream, have little following. Fact-checking rants from Tamara Lich accomplishes nothing. It's the lies from those in power that get the least fact-checking.