by mos6507 » Fri 30 Apr 2010, 13:33:44
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')A more insidious version is the New York Times, the "Paper of record". Its claims for "objectivity" are merely an advertising-driven cynicism--the paper creates division and plays off the left and right constantly
The story of
the blind men and the elephant comes to mind. We will fumble around in a demon haunted world of superstition and subjectivity unless we use the scientific method to derive universal truths. This is the only way we've been able to rise up to the level of being able to communicate on the internet like this.
You know the saying, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I would go farther to say that any extraordinary event that takes place, whether it be the moon landings, presidential assassinations, the death of celebrities, 911, etc... tends to cause people not to accept the story at face value because we have a hard time reconciling our vision of a stable world with one that contains a bunch of black swans.
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Human beings at our core are sensualists with a very narrow field of vision. The only reason we've come so far is that we've developed trust relationships with indirect information streams. The reason we're in such a dangerous political climate now, is that there is very little trust left. We've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. And without trust, there can be no working together. Everyone builds a vision of the world outside of their peripheral vision based not on scholarship or journalism, but on their own fears and anxieties. And because everybody's been given a venue in order to publish their opinions, there is a buffet of pseudo-research one can do in order to falsely validate. (You see this, for instance, with all of the incessant cross-posting of Alex Jones' sites into here, as if those sites are in any way real journalism.)
That is how we will balkanize and tribalize ourselves down to the point of peering through a gun slot in the doomstead, paranoid that our neighbors are out to get us, which is the last thing we need in a post-peak world.