I started a new thread to reply to JoAnn since I steered it off topic

Hi Hendo,

I've been pretty busy, which is why I have not been haunting this corner of cyberspace, and my wife has been ill. Unfortunately, she had a rather long illness at the same time she injured herself slipping in the bathroom, and I have been trying to take care of her while working full time. Fortunately, she did not break any bones, always a worry in senior citizens, but she got a very nasty painful bruise on her ribs. So my hands have been full.

I'm moved to write now, just before going to bed, because I wandered over here to see what the happenings are.

What I've noticed in your recent postings is that you seem to feel that liberals aren't too intelligent, and the proof is that they're not libertarians like you. You also seem to feel they have short attention spans.

Like you, I am politically opposed to liberalism, being a socialist.

But disagreeing with your libertarian viewpoint is not the same thing as shallow thinking. Liberals have a pro-capitalist political outlook too. They just disagree with you how best to advance capitalism. There are various political tendencies that aim to support capitalism, you know, not just one monolithic one, and not just one "true" or "pure" one revealed by God on high. Perhaps you may not have noticed, but informed and intelligent people can hold opinions contrary to your own. Lots of liberals are just as smart, or even smarter, than you or I.

You also say that you're a "capitalist." Of course, I understand that you support capitalism, the economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution that operates under the market system. Perhaps it would be better to call yourself a supporter of capitalism if you're really either an employee (that is one who sells his labor power to an employer) or a small businessman, as opposed to being a member of that small minority of humans that are the owners of the major means of production and distribution (and I'm not talking about having some stock in some big corporation). Thus, that political liberal George Soros is a true capitalist, more of a capitalist than you are, I'll wager, whereas you are probably merely a supporter of the capitalist system, albeit of the Libertarian persuasion.

You might also note that sound bites are the way the mass media communicates with us, and the mass media are dominated by large capitalist enterprises who sell advertising time to other large capitalist enterprises wishing to have a presence in the marketplace. Incisive observation of the state of our society and quality programming do not cultivate a fertile ground for effective advertising, which is why so much of the mass media are so vulgar and shallow. With apologies to Marx, I could say that advertising is the opiate of the people as administered by the doctors of capitalism, in the service of the god of the golden calf.

It is really the think tanks like The Cato Institute and organizations like PNAC who generate the more extensive and thoughtful analyses of strategy and tactics for capitalism, but then they don't aim them at the so-called "middle class," that is wage earners like myself, do they? Rather, their journals actually reflect the operational strategies of pro-capitalist elites that have been guiding the disastrously self-defeating policies past 20 or so years.

And a big howdy to you too, Wynn.

You mean you don't think Hendo's post is a good example of sober and reasoned analysis, a foray against the sound bite, an incisive repudiation of stereotyping, an altogether balanced and fair-minded exposition?

He's against sloganeering, I guess.

Sound bites are marketing. They bypass reason and appeal to emotion. We are a nation of consumers, and everybody wants to sell us something. Politics is marketed like soft drinks or toothpaste.

Advertisers act in their self interest and wouldn’t mind you acting against yours. Nobody needs a soft drink, but if you can sell sugar water for a dollar a bottle, why not? For a few cents worth of high fructose corn syrup somebody makes an obscene profit.

Think tanks are sound bite factories, they produce rationalizations for the crap the politicians are selling. They supply talking points for people that can’t be troubled to gather facts and form their own opinions.

Facts are in short supply, due to the dearth of substantive journalism. Any point of view, no matter how wacky, can be corroborated on the internet. Fact checking is optional, essentially a lost art.

— Wynn

Hiiiii HandyMan,

I’m sorry it’s taken me sooo long to get back to you. But I see others have added comments & that’s a Good thing! & I hope you won’t be disappointed with my comment either. It mostly consists of a quote from a speech from a book I am currently reading. I said this in the religion forum:

I also want to say it’s not necessarily laziness that induces me to use this quote. Who said, “Laziness goes with mental brilliance. Long hours of waste that accompany intellectual activity, inertia & dullness, are necessary.” It surely wasn’t me!!

I think Mr. Vonnegut expresses brilliantly many of the things I wanted to touch on with You. The difference between what he says & what I would have said I guess can be described in this colloquial expression: When you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullsh*t.
This is the brilliance of Mr. Vonnegut:

I hope this little analysis is not too shallow for Hendomatic. Hendo does not suffer fools gladly. But perhaps he and a few others who more-or-less agree with him politically will condescend to consider some of these points.

The French novelist Anatole France said "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." In a similar spirit, one may say that freedom of the press exists for everyone, whether they own the New York Times or a small inkjet printer and a 10-dollar-a-month web presence.

However, the curmudgeon in me suspects that the guys with the money to buy the heftiest megaphones are likely to have the most success in exercising their free speech.

Now let's consider Hendo's theory that the media are in the hands of those cursed liberals, enemies of capitalism, or as VR says, useful idiots, who dull the wits of the masses, drug them with vulgar programming, and then ply them with the demon rum of liberalism. Thus they stupefy the unwashed masses so they become too bored, too lazy, and too impatient to read the libertarian screeds that have set Hendo free....subtle analyses and philosophy that mark the pinnacle of capitalist brilliance and academic achievement, represented by the musings of such heavyweights as Ayn Rand, Gingrich, Horowitz, Krystol, Wolfowitz, Feith, etc.

So just who are these traitorous scoundrels that own the media? Those heathens who deserve to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail? Those subversives who would undermine the blessings of our capitalist paradise?

Oddly enough, I'm not the first to have wondered that. A fellow named Ben Bagdikian (click here for bio) asked just the same question some years ago and wrote a book about it in 1983 called The Media Monopoly. He has been a journalist since 1941 and is the Dean Emeritus of University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism. In his 1983 book, he received hoots of derision for stating that the major media were controlled by about 50 corporations and that the trend was for fewer and fewer corporations to own and control the media. There have been several revisions of this book, the last being in 2007, and now that number has dropped to 5 or perhaps 6. Click here for a graph that shows this. And click here for an article about that graph.



Perhaps Hendo can explain to us how it is that the scions of American and international capitalism seem to be so pro-liberal if liberalism is such an anticapitalist outlook? Does Hendo actually believe that those 6 corporations that own the vast majority of mass media, they who appoint the editors, hire the journalists, make the programming and message content decisions, and who depend on the rest of the corporations for advertising revenue have some sort of super-secret anticapitalist agenda? Or could it be that the picture is really more complex than that? Maybe the corporate class are not a monolith, and those who would advance capitalism are not all of the same view as to how to do that or even have conflicting market interests. Maybe there are factions among the capitalists and corporations. Maybe the media moguls figure the news is so appalling that it is better to have news-as-entertainment and titillation, as opposed to in-depth coverage, so as to attract more advertising dollars? After all, is it not a bad idea to get people thinking too critically if you want to convince them that XYZ Deoderant works better than ABC Deoderant?

Bear in mind that I personally am an opponent of capitalism, thus opposing both liberalism and conservatism. But one thing I have noticed as I have gotten older and moved closer towards the end of my life is that it is folly to assume all, or even most, of those who disagree with me must be either knaves, fools, or both. I confess that I had that suspicion as a young man many years ago, but no more. For example, I think you are probably a very bright fellow, decent and generous in your personal life, but just wrong about your politics.

So, do you, Hendo, think that most of those who disagree with you are not very bright? Have you forgotten or perhaps not noticed that intelligent and thoughtful people of good will can have very different viewpoints? Because disregarding that fact leads one into the mire of elitism, sectarianism, and mindless pissing contests, my friend, and that's not too productive, politically speaking.

Hi Alan,

I don't think Your analysis is too shallow at all. & I don't think HandyMan will think it is either.

& How is Your Wife doing? I saw that You wrote she wasn't feeling too well. Hope She's better.

Love,
JoAnn

•´¯`•.. ><((((º>

Alan,

While I respect my elders and if related, you would be one, I'll not take kindly to your down-the-nose commentary.

You have no idea what "libertarian screeds" I have read, if any.

You dont even know me beyond what you read here.

I respect the fact that you claim to be a socialist. Good for you.


So do I think that people that disagree with me are not bright? Heck no. But I do have my suspicions about posters that will not tackle my questions directly and sidestep with mindbending commentary and reference.

I do look forward to your posts as they do provide a reason for more research and do have an effect. For that I do appreciate your point of view. Your knowledge and wisdom, while politically contrary to my point of view has been mentally expanding and is sometimes indirectly topics of discussion with my dad on our daily walks. He is probably your age and shares several of your ideas, but yet still has a different outlook on life. The human mind is fascinating.

I do my best to present my arguments without deriding those that counter-post. But you can be sure the same respect is not afforded likewise.

I believe that our life experiences and our environment help shape what we believe and I'm certain that had I been along side whatever you do long enough, I would think differently to a degree.

Anyway, back to media bias.

You make it all sound so simple when you know its not. You even state it in your posts.

The people that own mass media are who they are. Some are liberal, some are not. They make a lot of money running a business. It just happens to be a news business. If it werent for the success of capitalism, the US would not be the economic super-power that it is. And that is what grinds the liberal apologist and especially the socialist.


The latest hilarity, brought to you by the Times.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/04/14/ccview114.xml


That the US has decided to make economic use of its grain surplus instead of giving it away seems to be the most selfish act in man's history, according to the media. This article probably makes perfect sense to the socialist as now, not everyone is getting what they need according to their means. To the liberal, its heart wrenching and totally unfair. And I found it on Drudge..

Anyway..


I never said the fact the media was liberal was due to the owners. That you assumed that just exposes your anticapitalist bent further.


So lecture someone else Alan. I apologize if you think I post just to diminish others. I wouldnt waste my time here doing that. I post because I found a place where I saw "vastly" opposing viewpoints and felt there was room.

If people are offended by my posts, then say so. I'll try to do my best to present my point of view in a manner that is less offensive.

But if facts are offensive, then we're in trouble.



Dennis

well met Hendo, I too question what the liberal bias had to do with who owns the various outlets. Does anyone here actually believe that they consist of wealthy oligarchs micromanaging every story and action line?
I suspect the statist toxin exists at every level. Being rich hardly qualifies one as a die hard capitalist [ie George Soros]one need not like a game to learn how to play it.
Socialism,like a malignant cancer destroys the organism from within.Healthy cells being crowded out by the malfunctioning diseased ones.In fairness to the low level socialist drone A malignant tumor doesn't know that it's expanding presense will ultimately kill the organism either.