As Dr. Richardson says in today's letter, "... it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” In life, who we listen to is profoundly i…
As Dr. Richardson says in today's letter, "... it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” In life, who we listen to is profoundly important. Our society really has to address the big business of media misinformation and lies put forward as truth. It is antithetical to democracy, not only because it obfuscates facts and choices, but because it makes consensus building and fruitful communication impossible.
Unfortunately, I personally think the media is less of a problem than people make it out to be in 2020. The bigger issue plaguing society right now seems to be SOCIAL Media, and the ability for people to spread whatever misinformation they want to a group of not very savvy individuals who believe everything they read on said platforms. They also have the ability to join up with likeminded individuals from hundreds and thousands of miles away (which was not really easily possible before about 12 years ago), which often times gives them the false idea that their totally baseless thoughts and beliefs have validity and truth to them. It is also teaching people to be less empathetic and more brazen, without any sort of physical social norms to keep them grounded as they hide behind their keyboards spewing anger and hate, with little care for anyone else.
Garin W and Cathy Learoyd, you both must have watched the documentary "The Social Dilemma". Tristan Harris was interviewed on Bill Maher last night. It is scary how effective those algorithms are. I have a dear friend who falls hook, line, and sinker for it. She goes on about Joe Biden having dementia. Don't get me started on the pedophile claims. One of the craziest things was Joe Biden saying he was running against Bush. She claims she saw the clip. I have my doubts. I looked it up. There is a clip, however according to fact checkers the clip was doctored. I tried to tell her that. No luck. There is a great movie about the investigation into the Challenger Disaster. William Hurt played Richard Feynman. Bruce Greenwood played General Donald Kutyna, another member of the Commission. Feynman and Kutyna were having a discussion about Feynman's work with the Manhattan Project. As I recall from the movie, Feynman calculated how much uranium would be required for the "A bomb". He indicated it was a bad use of science. A good use of science is finding out why the Challenger exploded. That said using Social Media to turn people against one another is a bad use of Social Media. Social Media has good uses. It is how I found about HCR. Definitively, a good use of Social Media. Unfortunately, there are too many people out there who cannot think critically and they fall for the "created narrative".
Sharon, No, I didn't see the documentary you mention. I'm a technologist with a lot of curiosity about how things work. I bought a copy of the Commission's reports on the Challenger Disaster. Incredible reading. All the data was there to show they should not have launched on that cold day and the engineers knew it but the management wouldn't listen. One piece of chilling piece of information was the fact that the pilot's oxygen had been turned on. That's the job of the crew member sitting behind him. That meant the crew cabin was intact and the crew conscious as it plummeted back to earth. For me, the answer to the gullibility of all these people is education and, yes, the ability to think critically. Education has been defunded over the years and we're paying for it now. Actually, long before the Challenger Disaster, I had a VIP tour of the training facility in Houston. I got to climb inside a mock up of the shuttle. It made quite an impression on me.
Cathy, I love Feynman. He got right to the heart of the matter of everything he did. If he was here now, he'd probably have started the government (and the rest of us) working on climate change in the 1990s.
Quite a mind! On climate change it is disheartening that so many greedy people want to keep making buggy whips and fracking that have a limited future instead of moving to sustainable energy that will create good jobs for the immediate future.
The FAANG group of businesses probably has enough money right now to start moving everything to fossil free. They could devote all the negative energy on their platforms to this!
That mock-up is the shuttle trainer that was used to train all of the astronauts. It's now in the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where visitors can climb inside it.
I'm glad visitors get to climb inside. I remember standing on the flight deck looking out the aft windows over the sixty foot long bay. There was also another mock up of the cockpit in the vertical launch position to practice egress in case of a fire on the launch pad for one thing. Must have been around 1984 or so. Also, rode the bull at "Gilley's" that trip.
Sharon, I have watched the Social Dilemma, and it is equally fascinating and horrifying.
Cathy, as a technologist, you probably won’t be surprised by any of it and probably know a lot of it (as I did, because I am tech nerd hahaha) but you would enjoy it. Definitely an important watch for anyone who uses social media.
I have not looked into the Challenger stuff at all, as it happened before I was born, but I just recently saw that Netflix released a Docuseries on it, so I will definitely watch that soon. Sounds very interesting!
Cathy Learoyd,. I am so jealous you got a VIP tour of the training facility in Houston. I visited the Johnson Space Center in the mid-1980s. It was an interesting tour. My grandmother took us to see Apollo 11 blast off. We toured the Kennedy Space Center a day or so before the blast off
My son-in-law has been urging our family to abandon Facebook. We no longer feel comfortable sharing many photos, particularly of our 4 year old granddaughters. We certainly don't get news from Facebook, unless it is off a verified and trusted source. We would all leave now, but it would spell the end of many friendships around the world for all of us, particularly with the pandemic. And Twitter. Yikes. I think with the election over I will be abandoning Twitter again. I would love to see a secure and trustworthy site for families and friends to share.
I have never been on Facebook and I never will be. If it were ever clean, or if a clean alternative ever appeared, that’s a different story. Facebook is dirty, it is not a good thing.
The book is called "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" Like other books by/about him, it is a collection of stories that he told to one of his friends/grad students, and written down for the rest of us to enjoy. It was published in 1988 just after he died. Thanks for the movie reference. BBC production is interesting to note.
A major part of the problem with Social Media is the algorithms aimed at making more profit for the people buying ads which has the effect of putting us in bubbles of like-minded people distorting our world perspective.
Alternate reality created by the press, the powers that be and moneyed interests has been a salient fixture of of the development of America. You can start with Columbus and the Spanish conquest or just go back to the myths told about of the original "pristine, empty environment, the colonists, Native Americans or the mountaineer trappers and then move on to the rational for the fight for independence, for the Civil War and the opening of the West without even entering the 20th C never mind the 21st C and Trumpspeak. Just take a look for a moment at the importance of the cowboy, the gunslinger and the covered wagon pioneers in developing the American culture of self reliance, hardy individualism, economic success and social climbing. The dime novels and speculative interests created the major part of the narrative on the basis of a practically total fantasy and it hasn't gone away even now. Many of these myths were devised to give a more advantageous view of what really happened, to hide embarassing parts of history and to make a lot of money. What Heather does and her colleagues do at all levels when political and ideological censureship allows it....teaching history as it really happened and interpreting today in real terms....is what needs to be massively multiplied to bring the American people of all persuasions to life in REALITY. This cannot be achieved without an understanding, comprehension and acceptance of the past.
I have been joking that we need to hire every available cult de-programmer and put them to work immediately. We have a lot of citizens who are “media illiterate,” gullible, without critical analytical skills. No one is born with these skills; they can be taught. This isn’t on Biden’s list of core projects, but if they/we don’t address this issue, I am not sure there can be success with the other items on their important agenda.
We didn't use to have to train people on this as people had a good general culture acquired through reading ...which was both encouraged and facilitated. And now...internet commentaries replace individual thought and knowledge. Our collective unconscious has been subcontracted to Google etc and is lost somewhere in the "cloud" .
Stuart: " Our collective unconscious has been subcontracted..." Great line! Walter Ong, a McCluhanite, argued that the very technology we are constructing is, in turn, constructing us.
Oh! That made me recall that Marhall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” was required reading in the summer of 1965, just before my freshmen at college. Good read.
I used to discuss current events with someone who worked at my institution. When it became clear he was misinformed I asked where he got his news. He answered that he never watched or read news. All his information came from his church pastor and he didn't need to know anything else. That attitude horrifies me.
Let's imagine that this "other" carries in it some truths important for Progressives to recognize and open to. Yes, given the well funded conservative talk radio/Fox News inundation with its propagandized often largely fictional "news", millions of people have been more or less captured by its narratives. Still, that suggests citizen vulnerability. A population largely, generally "happy" is, I suspect, unlikely to be vulnerable to BS that's targeted to vulnerabilities. We all want connection. We all want agency. We all want respect. We all want decent paying jobs. And some kind of "meaning". Think of our history the past 40 years. When has there been an event in which the "government (Republican or Democrat) demonstrated that it had your back in times of massive social trouble. BP & Exxon oil spills, New Orleans ravaged by Katrina, 2008 Wall Street crash, the poisoning of Flint's children and adults, the illegal Iraq War? The Opiod Epidemic. Where and when were the People treated decently and with respect? Who was "indulged" by the governmental stance/position in each of these cases? Where was the overwhelming uproar by the citizenry in witnessing our People getting the short shrift, the neglect in spite of these governments receiving our tax dollars (except those by blood sucking corporations paying zero in taxes). We need to drop a tendency to broad brush the "other" and penetrate deeper into how they came to vote as they did.
I fear that just as the far right has turned the word liberalism into something negative, it will also turn the phrase "reality-based community" into something Trump supporters will be afraid of. Maybe we need some T-shirts that say "Reality. It's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Or perhaps just, "GET REAL!"
We have a truly fundamental problem here, in that people are too-ready to eat mental garbage.
If I say in public, with witnesses present, that John Smith, that fellow right over there sitting on that park bench, is a (Communist Spy/Cannibal Pedophile/Space Alien Synthetic Human), and that we should all get together and kill him, and and John Smith comes to harm at our hands, there are a number of laws that might be used to prosecute me. Slander, incitement to riot, collusion, conspiracy....
If I say that "there are" (Communist Spies/etc.) and describe them in specific terms that look a whole lot like John Smith, and he comes to harm, there are probably some laws that cover the matter, depending on how specific the description was, and if it crossed the line on various racial/ethnic minorities.
If I get on television and tell a hundred million people that there are (Communist Spies/etc.) and describe them in general terms that resemble a whole lot of John Smiths, and some of them come to harm, there just might be some laws that cover this: hate crimes, perhaps. There might not. I don't know.
If I get on television and tell a hundred million people that there are (Communist Spies/etc.) without describing anything specific that would single out John Smith as one of them, and people who believe me decide for themselves that John Smith is one of them and he comes to harm, THEY get prosecuted, and I can't be touched by law. I'm protected by the First Amendment.
Now, I COULD be shut down by the television broadcaster. Just like I can -- in fact -- be fired by my corporate employer for making racist remarks in the workplace. They are quite clear about that.
But if my name is Alex Jones, or Rush Limbaugh, or Steve Bannon, or Tucker Carlson, my employer IS the broadcaster, the broadcaster isn't going to shut me down, because I have a "following," and they can sell the eyeballs of that following to advertisers. My demented talk represents big profits for them. No one -- no one -- in this chain cares about John Smith, who is now dead.
It's one of the fundamental flaws in unrestrained capitalism.
If I am a funeral home director, my bottom line benefits from dead bodies. It is in my economic self-interest to go out and make sure there are more dead bodies. It's not in my general interest, however, to go out and make sure there are more dead bodies, because murder is a crime, and it's hard to run a business from a jail cell.
It is in Rush Limbaugh's economic interest to promote madness and hate. Right now, there doesn't appear to be anything to counterbalance this.
As Dr. Richardson says in today's letter, "... it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” In life, who we listen to is profoundly important. Our society really has to address the big business of media misinformation and lies put forward as truth. It is antithetical to democracy, not only because it obfuscates facts and choices, but because it makes consensus building and fruitful communication impossible.
Unfortunately, I personally think the media is less of a problem than people make it out to be in 2020. The bigger issue plaguing society right now seems to be SOCIAL Media, and the ability for people to spread whatever misinformation they want to a group of not very savvy individuals who believe everything they read on said platforms. They also have the ability to join up with likeminded individuals from hundreds and thousands of miles away (which was not really easily possible before about 12 years ago), which often times gives them the false idea that their totally baseless thoughts and beliefs have validity and truth to them. It is also teaching people to be less empathetic and more brazen, without any sort of physical social norms to keep them grounded as they hide behind their keyboards spewing anger and hate, with little care for anyone else.
Garin W and Cathy Learoyd, you both must have watched the documentary "The Social Dilemma". Tristan Harris was interviewed on Bill Maher last night. It is scary how effective those algorithms are. I have a dear friend who falls hook, line, and sinker for it. She goes on about Joe Biden having dementia. Don't get me started on the pedophile claims. One of the craziest things was Joe Biden saying he was running against Bush. She claims she saw the clip. I have my doubts. I looked it up. There is a clip, however according to fact checkers the clip was doctored. I tried to tell her that. No luck. There is a great movie about the investigation into the Challenger Disaster. William Hurt played Richard Feynman. Bruce Greenwood played General Donald Kutyna, another member of the Commission. Feynman and Kutyna were having a discussion about Feynman's work with the Manhattan Project. As I recall from the movie, Feynman calculated how much uranium would be required for the "A bomb". He indicated it was a bad use of science. A good use of science is finding out why the Challenger exploded. That said using Social Media to turn people against one another is a bad use of Social Media. Social Media has good uses. It is how I found about HCR. Definitively, a good use of Social Media. Unfortunately, there are too many people out there who cannot think critically and they fall for the "created narrative".
Sharon, No, I didn't see the documentary you mention. I'm a technologist with a lot of curiosity about how things work. I bought a copy of the Commission's reports on the Challenger Disaster. Incredible reading. All the data was there to show they should not have launched on that cold day and the engineers knew it but the management wouldn't listen. One piece of chilling piece of information was the fact that the pilot's oxygen had been turned on. That's the job of the crew member sitting behind him. That meant the crew cabin was intact and the crew conscious as it plummeted back to earth. For me, the answer to the gullibility of all these people is education and, yes, the ability to think critically. Education has been defunded over the years and we're paying for it now. Actually, long before the Challenger Disaster, I had a VIP tour of the training facility in Houston. I got to climb inside a mock up of the shuttle. It made quite an impression on me.
Cathy, I love Feynman. He got right to the heart of the matter of everything he did. If he was here now, he'd probably have started the government (and the rest of us) working on climate change in the 1990s.
Quite a mind! On climate change it is disheartening that so many greedy people want to keep making buggy whips and fracking that have a limited future instead of moving to sustainable energy that will create good jobs for the immediate future.
The FAANG group of businesses probably has enough money right now to start moving everything to fossil free. They could devote all the negative energy on their platforms to this!
That mock-up is the shuttle trainer that was used to train all of the astronauts. It's now in the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where visitors can climb inside it.
I'm glad visitors get to climb inside. I remember standing on the flight deck looking out the aft windows over the sixty foot long bay. There was also another mock up of the cockpit in the vertical launch position to practice egress in case of a fire on the launch pad for one thing. Must have been around 1984 or so. Also, rode the bull at "Gilley's" that trip.
Sharon, I have watched the Social Dilemma, and it is equally fascinating and horrifying.
Cathy, as a technologist, you probably won’t be surprised by any of it and probably know a lot of it (as I did, because I am tech nerd hahaha) but you would enjoy it. Definitely an important watch for anyone who uses social media.
I have not looked into the Challenger stuff at all, as it happened before I was born, but I just recently saw that Netflix released a Docuseries on it, so I will definitely watch that soon. Sounds very interesting!
Garmin W, the Netflix docuseries on Challenger is great too.
Cathy Learoyd,. I am so jealous you got a VIP tour of the training facility in Houston. I visited the Johnson Space Center in the mid-1980s. It was an interesting tour. My grandmother took us to see Apollo 11 blast off. We toured the Kennedy Space Center a day or so before the blast off
My son-in-law has been urging our family to abandon Facebook. We no longer feel comfortable sharing many photos, particularly of our 4 year old granddaughters. We certainly don't get news from Facebook, unless it is off a verified and trusted source. We would all leave now, but it would spell the end of many friendships around the world for all of us, particularly with the pandemic. And Twitter. Yikes. I think with the election over I will be abandoning Twitter again. I would love to see a secure and trustworthy site for families and friends to share.
Look into MeWe
I have never been on Facebook and I never will be. If it were ever clean, or if a clean alternative ever appeared, that’s a different story. Facebook is dirty, it is not a good thing.
I just finished reading Feynma's account of working on the Challenger disaster, but have never heard of that movie. What is it called?
Robin Jett, I want to read that book. The movie is called "The Challenger Disaster". It was produced by the BBC. I found the movie on Amazon Prime.
The book is called "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" Like other books by/about him, it is a collection of stories that he told to one of his friends/grad students, and written down for the rest of us to enjoy. It was published in 1988 just after he died. Thanks for the movie reference. BBC production is interesting to note.
I wasn't aware of the movie either. Just found the trailer on Youtube. The title is "The Challenger Disaster" appropriately...
Thanks.
Interesting Sharon, it is unfortunate social media has been used to divide and keep communities far apart. Thanks, Don
Yes, D Munson, I agree it is unfortunate social media has been used to divide
A major part of the problem with Social Media is the algorithms aimed at making more profit for the people buying ads which has the effect of putting us in bubbles of like-minded people distorting our world perspective.
So true.
Alternate reality created by the press, the powers that be and moneyed interests has been a salient fixture of of the development of America. You can start with Columbus and the Spanish conquest or just go back to the myths told about of the original "pristine, empty environment, the colonists, Native Americans or the mountaineer trappers and then move on to the rational for the fight for independence, for the Civil War and the opening of the West without even entering the 20th C never mind the 21st C and Trumpspeak. Just take a look for a moment at the importance of the cowboy, the gunslinger and the covered wagon pioneers in developing the American culture of self reliance, hardy individualism, economic success and social climbing. The dime novels and speculative interests created the major part of the narrative on the basis of a practically total fantasy and it hasn't gone away even now. Many of these myths were devised to give a more advantageous view of what really happened, to hide embarassing parts of history and to make a lot of money. What Heather does and her colleagues do at all levels when political and ideological censureship allows it....teaching history as it really happened and interpreting today in real terms....is what needs to be massively multiplied to bring the American people of all persuasions to life in REALITY. This cannot be achieved without an understanding, comprehension and acceptance of the past.
I have been joking that we need to hire every available cult de-programmer and put them to work immediately. We have a lot of citizens who are “media illiterate,” gullible, without critical analytical skills. No one is born with these skills; they can be taught. This isn’t on Biden’s list of core projects, but if they/we don’t address this issue, I am not sure there can be success with the other items on their important agenda.
We didn't use to have to train people on this as people had a good general culture acquired through reading ...which was both encouraged and facilitated. And now...internet commentaries replace individual thought and knowledge. Our collective unconscious has been subcontracted to Google etc and is lost somewhere in the "cloud" .
Stuart: " Our collective unconscious has been subcontracted..." Great line! Walter Ong, a McCluhanite, argued that the very technology we are constructing is, in turn, constructing us.
Oh! That made me recall that Marhall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” was required reading in the summer of 1965, just before my freshmen at college. Good read.
I’ve been saying all along that the most important course that should be taught in school is deductive reasoning. Without that, nothing else matters.
I used to discuss current events with someone who worked at my institution. When it became clear he was misinformed I asked where he got his news. He answered that he never watched or read news. All his information came from his church pastor and he didn't need to know anything else. That attitude horrifies me.
Let's imagine that this "other" carries in it some truths important for Progressives to recognize and open to. Yes, given the well funded conservative talk radio/Fox News inundation with its propagandized often largely fictional "news", millions of people have been more or less captured by its narratives. Still, that suggests citizen vulnerability. A population largely, generally "happy" is, I suspect, unlikely to be vulnerable to BS that's targeted to vulnerabilities. We all want connection. We all want agency. We all want respect. We all want decent paying jobs. And some kind of "meaning". Think of our history the past 40 years. When has there been an event in which the "government (Republican or Democrat) demonstrated that it had your back in times of massive social trouble. BP & Exxon oil spills, New Orleans ravaged by Katrina, 2008 Wall Street crash, the poisoning of Flint's children and adults, the illegal Iraq War? The Opiod Epidemic. Where and when were the People treated decently and with respect? Who was "indulged" by the governmental stance/position in each of these cases? Where was the overwhelming uproar by the citizenry in witnessing our People getting the short shrift, the neglect in spite of these governments receiving our tax dollars (except those by blood sucking corporations paying zero in taxes). We need to drop a tendency to broad brush the "other" and penetrate deeper into how they came to vote as they did.
I fear that just as the far right has turned the word liberalism into something negative, it will also turn the phrase "reality-based community" into something Trump supporters will be afraid of. Maybe we need some T-shirts that say "Reality. It's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Or perhaps just, "GET REAL!"
The right turned on the word “liberal” in the 80s, under Reagan and his communications strategist, Grover Norquist.
otoh, we liberals do not have the clear language for a ‘liberal government’ that assures ‘liberty and justice for all'
I love "Reality-Based Community"
Or maybe: “Reality, it’s not all that bad.”
There are several VERY good ideas for t shirts from various commenters on this blog! Or maybe plaques to hand on the wall??
This is Heather at her most cutting. :)
We have a truly fundamental problem here, in that people are too-ready to eat mental garbage.
If I say in public, with witnesses present, that John Smith, that fellow right over there sitting on that park bench, is a (Communist Spy/Cannibal Pedophile/Space Alien Synthetic Human), and that we should all get together and kill him, and and John Smith comes to harm at our hands, there are a number of laws that might be used to prosecute me. Slander, incitement to riot, collusion, conspiracy....
If I say that "there are" (Communist Spies/etc.) and describe them in specific terms that look a whole lot like John Smith, and he comes to harm, there are probably some laws that cover the matter, depending on how specific the description was, and if it crossed the line on various racial/ethnic minorities.
If I get on television and tell a hundred million people that there are (Communist Spies/etc.) and describe them in general terms that resemble a whole lot of John Smiths, and some of them come to harm, there just might be some laws that cover this: hate crimes, perhaps. There might not. I don't know.
If I get on television and tell a hundred million people that there are (Communist Spies/etc.) without describing anything specific that would single out John Smith as one of them, and people who believe me decide for themselves that John Smith is one of them and he comes to harm, THEY get prosecuted, and I can't be touched by law. I'm protected by the First Amendment.
Now, I COULD be shut down by the television broadcaster. Just like I can -- in fact -- be fired by my corporate employer for making racist remarks in the workplace. They are quite clear about that.
But if my name is Alex Jones, or Rush Limbaugh, or Steve Bannon, or Tucker Carlson, my employer IS the broadcaster, the broadcaster isn't going to shut me down, because I have a "following," and they can sell the eyeballs of that following to advertisers. My demented talk represents big profits for them. No one -- no one -- in this chain cares about John Smith, who is now dead.
It's one of the fundamental flaws in unrestrained capitalism.
If I am a funeral home director, my bottom line benefits from dead bodies. It is in my economic self-interest to go out and make sure there are more dead bodies. It's not in my general interest, however, to go out and make sure there are more dead bodies, because murder is a crime, and it's hard to run a business from a jail cell.
It is in Rush Limbaugh's economic interest to promote madness and hate. Right now, there doesn't appear to be anything to counterbalance this.
There needs to be.