INTERVIEW: “Journalism Should Be About Truth, Not Career” / Chris Hedges / Part 2 of 7
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Category Archives: Media
INTERVIEW: “Urban Poverty in America Made Me Question Everything” / Chris Hedges / Part 1 of 7
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM: “Investigative Journalist Glenn Greenwald Schools Political Parrot David Gregory on Criminalizing Investigative Journalism”
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- David Gregory Is What’s Wrong With Washington (dish.andrewsullivan.com)
- David Gregory, Glenn Greenwald and the First Amendment (truth-out.org)
REASON: “Gun Homicides v. Terrorist Attacks”
h/t: Being Liberal
INTELLECTUALISM: “The Treason of the Intellectuals” / Chris Hedges
The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false.
[…]
The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.
The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.
[…]
Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally.
[…]
“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”
AMURIKAN IDIOCY: Thirty-seven Percent of Amurikans are Absolute Idiots! / Mark Morford
. . . A whopping 24 percent [of Americans] believe dinosaurs and man hung out together. Eighteen percent still believe the sun revolves around the Earth.
Do you believe in angels? Forty-five percent of Americans do. In fact, roughly 48 percent – Republicans and Democrats alike – believe in some form of creationism.
In sum and all averaged out, it’s safe to say about 37 percent of Americans are just are not very bright. Or rather, quite shockingly dumb. Perhaps beyond reach. Perhaps beyond hope or redemption. Perhaps beyond caring about anything they have to say in the public sphere ever again. Sorry, Kansas.
Did you frown at that last paragraph? Was it a terribly elitist and unkind thing to say? Sort of. Probably. But I’m not sure it matters, because none of those people are reading this column right now, or any column for that matter, because reading anything even remotely complex or analytical is something only 42 percent of the population enjoy doing on a regular basis, which is why most TV shows, all reality shows, many major media blogs and all of Fox News is scripted for a 5th-grade education/attention span. OMG LOL kittens! 19 babies having a worse day than you. WTF is up with Justin Timberlake’s hair?!?
It is this bizarre, circular, catch-22 kind of question, asked almost exclusively by intellectual liberals because intellectual conservatives don’t actually exist, given how higher education leads to more developed critical thinking (you already know the vast majority of university professors and scientists identify as Democrat/progressive, right?) which leads straight to a more nimble, open-minded perspective. In short: The smarter you are, the less rigid/more liberal you become.
POLITY IDIOCY: “Are Americans Too Stupid For Democracy?” / Joshua Holland
[…]
Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.
The way representative democracy is supposed to work is pretty simple: you protect the fundamental rights of the minority (so it doesn’t become two wolfs and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner), and then the majority of citizens, acting in their own rational self-interest, elect representatives who will pursue the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens.
That’s the theory, but “rational” is a key word in that formulation. What happens when lots of citizens don’t have a solid grasp of what’s going on in the real world?
Consider some examples that are especially relevant to our current political scene.
– People Don’t Recognize Their Lack of Competence, Can’t Judge the Competence of Politicians
– Politicians Think Their Constituents Are Much Further to the Right Than Polls Suggest
– The Wealthy Think the Wealthy Should Pay More Taxes, But They Don’t Think They’re Wealthy
– Americans Like Sweden’s Distribution of Wealth, and Think They Already Have
– Government Spending Has Decreased Under Obama, But Nobody Knows It
– The Deficit Has Been Stabilized and Is Shrinking, But Only 6 Percent of Americans Know It
– Foreign Aid Is Pocket Change
– So, Should We Just Give Up On Democracy?
REASON & LOGIC: “Marco Rubio’s Climate Change Response to State of the Union ‘Pitiful,’ ‘Dangerous'” / Al Gore
U.S. EMPIRE IMPLOSION: Chris Hedges / “Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All”
Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.
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- Egypt Tells Gazans They Aren’t Alone (eurasiareview.com)
Always Question Authority 