Tag: reagan

Day 40: What is the Ministry of Truth?

Facebook’s announcement of an experimental partnership between third party fact checkers: Snopes, PolitiFact, the AP, ABC news, and factcheck.org. Where people request certain links to be factchecked and if they are and found to be false or misleading a warning without reasons behind the warning will pop up before the article opens. Many people on the left and right are wary of this development. For many conservatives, a third of the fact checkers (AP and ABC news excluded) have a liberal bias. For many on the left, this is an expansion of corporate control of media trying to take away their “truth”.

 

Facebook has the legal right to control its platform that it lets us use. I do think that it can be worrisome to think that there will be blind faith in the warning. I think that this is an opportunity for us all to challenge our dogmas. We all could use a hand in expanding our worldviews and many times that hand needs to come from the opposition. Not saying we are all wrong all the time, but we need to be fluid in our responses. Adapt to the situation at hand not the one in the mind. I think that this experiment is a good step forward and should be expanded to include more viewpoints. We need some radical changes but those changes aren’t possible without agreement and I am speaking about Climate Change. It truly is a bipartisan problem that will alter every human’s life. In the age of Elon Musk, no one can question the possibilities in renewable energy that could occur. I believe we need to support if not with funds than beneficial regulations that aid his innovations while improving the quality of life for his labor. We need to use Capitalism to challenge ourselves for real innovation rather than use our money for novelty add ons. We need the hoarded wealth to be reinvested into the American Dream. None of which is possible without dialogue. If fact checking and discussions not in comments but in researched detail can engage us with each other than it is worth trying. Facebook as a form of communication and a company must respect their power. I think this is a step towards a better social media environment in the age of bullshit heralded by Trump and Putin.
-E. C. Fiori

Day 26: There is no House

Everyone knows the house always wins. The American republic may have an elite, but as this election show, they don’t own the system. Trump showed that for both media output, both left and right publishers endorsed Clinton. They might pay eighteen bucks to see a celebrity, but they won’t let that celebrity decide their fate. There is no house in America, just we the people.

-E.C. Fiori

Day 24: The Bite is Worst

Much of the news, I have seen lately has discussed the president elect’s tweets or phone calls to foreign leaders while the content is not presidential at best and possibly damaging. It has obscured the creation of a vile machine. Steven Mnuchin was a Goldman Sachs executive is going to lead the Treasury department. Tom Price as Health and Human Services Secretary will oversee the destruction of the ACA, which will be most likely repealed and delayed. The GOP hasn’t come up with a replacement concept in the past six years. I think it deserves attention that they campaigned on repeal and replace in 2010,2012, 2014, and 2016 without figuring out the fix. Even now, they want to repeal it and buy time. The market will panic with any repeal even with a delay. Maybe it is another nuclear tactic of negotiation. The Democrats don’t want to cause the people to lose their insurance, but voters didn’t hold any of the government shutdown against the GOP and that was over the funding of the act that came them the insurance in the first place.

We have a problem in our country and it has existed for a good amount of time. We cannot handle our technology in many ways it drives us more than we let ourselves believe. In Bill Moyers documentary “Illusions of the News” back in 1989, there is a great discussion about the ear vs the eye in news. Michael Denver, an advisor to Reagan, says “The problem with it was that she had to put on during her piece all these wonderful visuals that we created. And if you really believe that the visuals are going to outlast the spoken word in the person’s mind, then we were delighted with it. We’d gotten one more shot of all the things that we created that we wanted on television.” The White House media strategy would place Reagan at an event looking great and nice like the Handicapped Olympics while defunding the disabled safety net. The scathing reporter critique wasn’t remembered by most after. The image remained context-less within the viewer until it became its own context.

Trump takes this further and harder than Reagan than Bush who failed spectacularly with “Mission Accomplished”. The Teflon Don survives by creating outrage. Impotent outrage, we must of course object but with so much rejection the pressure cannot pierce his orange skin. His refusal to behave as a man of his position should is the most media outlet friendly way to interrupt the news cycle. There are so many different experts in manners, historically statistics to divulge in the notion of creating context to a contextless narrative. His social media musings are no more a window into his mind’s eye than his speeches or proclamations. He used the new legal bribe tax incentives, which go against the spirit of the constitution. Taxes are the shared burden of liberty for all citizens to be used for the public service. Medical and technological research especially military are within the shared purview of the public. We all have life as a right. When it goes to private interests who personally profit from the exchange, I think a line has crossed. At some level the government is payrolling private industry. Unlike previous government work programs like the CCC where roads and bridges and parks the things we love to have and use. We still have to pay the same price as the air conditioner. At least in the bailout, we made money. I believe the bailout shortended the working class. I think that the inequality in this country has created a crisis. But as long as we the citizen expect the government to fix our problems, there will be no tomorrow that wasn’t today.

We must address the inherent moral decay that creates such disparity in quality of life. America was founded on the notion that the revolutionaries were one people of a large (and getting larger) country that agreed to be civil to another with freedom being the ultimate civility. The experiment had its own moral failing that have been corrected no without regrettable horrific suffering by millions and some of those moral failings continue today. That must be addressed as well I speak of discrimination and hate crimes. We must consider not just class but what is the ceiling and how long entrenched can wealth be before their is an aristocracy and effectively a noble ruling class. It must be a choice of the citizens not forced on them by big government that will correct the ills. A revival of the public commons and modest luxury.

-E.C. Fiori