Month: November 2020
Set Piece
I am increasingly convinced – especially over the last few months – that the national news media, with the assistance of a wide swath of academia and those in the business of providing entertainment, are and have been for years constructing a kind of stage set which in their minds represents America. Fake buildings, fake trees with plastic leaves, a painted sky backdrop, concrete boulders and buildings which are either three-fourths actual size or mere painted false fronts with curtains or blinds hung in empty windows. In front of these sets, between the fake trees and the concrete boulders, all sorts of improbable and gruesome things are happening – race riots, fiery car crashes, anti-capitalist social unrest, cartloads of dead from the Commie Covid Virus rolled through the streets, and meanwhile Joe Biden is an honest and upright long-serving member of Senate and former VP who never put a foot wrong, and Hillary Clinton is the most qualified and respected woman ever, Michelle Obama a glamorous and tasteful former First Lady, and meanwhile the whole United States is rancorous with race-hatred, and everyone who has ever attended regular religious services is panting to transform all society into The Handmaid’s Tale.
You Knew This
I like Bing because of the photos, and I think they are marginally better on privacy than Google. I use DuckDuckGo most of the time. Yet i have been annoyed at the bias of the Bing newsfeed, those clickable stories along the bottom of the page. At the moment it is a refutation of the video claiming that Biden misidentified the state he was talking to. I’m on conservative media pretty regularly, and I hadn’t seen that one. I’ve seen links to lots of other videos with Biden gaffes but not that. You see the effect? By telling you the one that is discredited, without reference to how commonly viewed it is, it casts doubts on all those other, accurate Biden videos.
Next is that Lady Gaga “hits back” at Trump, with headlines that the Trump campaign has “chosen a celebrity target,” as if the poor girl was hunted down and selected out of nowhere to be criticised by the Trump campaign. She chose herself. Maybe it’s terrible optics for Trump to even acknowledge it, but now a whole slew of folks claim Trump is drowning who have thrown themselves into the deep end quite on their own.
And the GOP “can’t stop count” in Nevada county, as if the Republicans didn’t want votes from that county from being counted, rather than an objection to the way this is proceeding.
Multiply this by a thousand days and ten thousand stories, creating an impression based on selective reporting. I think I read something somewhere recently about the indoctrinated believing they have come up with their opinions entirely on their own. That is not only ironic, it is part of getting them to believe their misapprehensions forever. They consider arguments carefully. They weigh pros and cons. They check on alternate opinions (or more usually, what their usual sources tell them are the opinions of those stupid people over there). And then, with furrowed brow and a quiet nod of the head, they conclude that their tribe is the most intelligent, the arguments of the people who control their social destiny are superior, and none of their authorities need Air Wick.