I tried a total political media blackout last week.

TSRF,

Sounds like a great vacation.

I’ve always wanted to go to Prague and see the place that fired up Kafka’s imagination. Walk those streets. See the Charles Bridge. Drink Czech coffee and drink Czech beer.

One of my favorite movies, ever, Kicking and Screaming, has a cool scene about that city too:

Grover: Oh, I’ve been to Prague. Well, I haven’t “been to Prague” been to Prague, but I know that thing, that, “Stop shaving your armpits, read the Unbearable Lightness of Being, date a sculptor, now I know how bad American coffee is thing… ”

Jane: They have good beer there.

Grover: “… now I know how bad American beer is thing.”

Oh, and I agree with ya about the smoke screen part.

Perhaps it’s because of the 24/7 news cycle, and the Internet, and up to the second news, and this has been naturalized . . . and before all of that, things took just as long to play out . . . but the drip drip drip of the investigation is agonizingly slow and tedious. I think I could go full Cold Turkey for months and months, and nothing really new would come to light after all of that time away from political stories of any kind. I could come back and the same old same old thing would be there. Trump dropping bombs without rhyme or reason; killing environmental and workers’ protections to line the pockets of capitalist friends and family; slashing taxes on the rich to line his own pockets; scaring the undocumented to death with real and imagined round-ups, etc. etc. The same old nightmare, never-ending.

Again, it’s my plan to wean myself from all of that. But to make it work, gonna try to do it over time. Media blackout returns tomorrow thru Friday. Weekends only to catch up. Eventually leading to no political media at all.

I’d rather be in Prague, or Barcelona, or Paris, or the along the Ring of Kerry, or a dozen other places where, hopefully, if it’s possible, if they’re smart, no one cares about Trump or our politics. And they just live.

nittany ram wrote:

Generally speaking, I don’t go looking for political stuff. I tend to avoid it unless I stumble across a headline that piques my interest or pisses me off (usually the latter) and then I’ll read up on it and generally post about it here and maybe facebook.

Part of me wants to close myself off from it but another part of me thinks it’s my duty to expose the lunacy in any way I can, which for me is posting about it. Here I know I’m pretty much preaching to the choir but I post stuff here to make sure my comrades have heard about the subject and because the great responses often challenge and help inform my own opinion. Once my opinion is crystallized I’ll talk about it someplace where there are a lot of opposing viewpoints in the mostly futile hope that I’ll change some minds. Most people are rigid in their stances and unreachable but there are some people out there on social media who are still trying to figure things out for themselves. My hope is to influence them.

I can see all of that, Nittany. My motives and rationale in the past have been pretty much the same, regarding the political. But another thing that worries me, and it’s about that “rigid” thing you mention. I don’t remember another time in our history — at least with my own lifetime — when people have gone back to their own tribes like this. There’s never been this kind of automatic dismissal of opposing views, with retorts like “fake news” at the ready.

Again, I’m not saying anything original here, but we’re really in this weird moment in history beyond truth, and I don’t think this is what Nietzsche and those who followed him had in mind when they dissected and analyzed and pushed the ideas of perspectivalism . . . and then modern artists, writers, musicians like Picasso, Duchamp, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Woolf and Schoenberg pushed the democratization/personalization of viewpoints still further . . . and scientists kicked in their share, like Einstein with relativity and so on. They still all operated with at least some fundamental, agreed upon “facts,” etc. etc. They were able to riff off of those to open things up as much as they did because they were certain of those elemental foundations.

I don’t know if enough people see, feel or sense the ground anymore, and that’s terrifying (to me).

nittany ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

But another thing that worries me, and it’s about that “rigid” thing you mention. I don’t remember another time in our history — at least with my own lifetime — when people have gone back to their own tribes like this. There’s never been this kind of automatic dismissal of opposing views, with retorts like “fake news” at the ready.

Yeah, my brother is one of those of which you speak. The other day I posted a WAPO article about Trump repealing the Clean Power Plan which regulates CO2 emissions from power plants and removing the regulations which prevented coal companies from releasing arsenic and mercury into waterways. His response was simply “the Washington Post lies alot”. No attempt to engage the issue at all. I think he knows the article isn’t fake news. He’s won’t engage the issue because he knows there’s no defense for Trump’s actions in this particular case. How can you argue that an increase of mercury in our water is a good thing? So he’ll ignore this and prepare to cheer on the bombing of Pyongyang or whatever the fuck Trump does next. Another rightie responded to the article with “hey let’s get together and protest this and leave tons of garbage behind when we leave” in reference to the DAPL protests. As if a one time event confined to a relatively small area is equivalent to the entire coal industry fouling the nation’s streams and rivers. Here again, he can’t engage the actual subject without admitting Trump did something that was not in our best interest so he ignores it. It’s incredibly frustrating to get those sort of responses but hopefully someone on the fence about Trump read that and was nudged in the proper direction.

Generalizing here: I think a key thing in debate is the ability to go straight to the horse’s mouth. Video, audio, transcripts, etc. In the case of Trump’s executive orders, making it far easier to pollute our waterways, air and land . . . it’s not difficult to find those actual EOs. You may get his spin too. But you can actually confirm the paperwork, so the WaPo is gonna be vindicated. But, more often than not, the arguments I see from the right just never have that verifiability. They’re third and fourth hand accounts of some remote Op-Ed ravings, based solely on some dude believing he can read some “liberal’s” mind and just knows their real and dastardly intentions. Or, worse, that leaked emails contain secret code that “proves” X has been running a child sex-slave ring out of a Pizza shop.

Now, in 2017, of course, it’s gonna be a lot more difficult for righties, because they own it. They hold all three branches of government, and there’s no one left to blame but their own side of the aisle. It’s going to take far more than the usual pretzelization of logic to avoid accepting blame, but I do see one tried and true method shining through still:

“Everyone does it!”

I ventured back on a forum today (to read, not post) that I left months ago and noticed a regular “conservative” try this. The discussion was all about Trump’s conflicts of interests, so, naturally, the conservative guy retorted, “Paging John Podesta! Paging John Podesta!”

Not sure how that’s supposed to undo Trump’s conflicts, but it must have made the conservative feel better.

I wish Monty Python were here today, and in their prime. We really, really need them.

Zooey wrote:

Check your email box. This is 2017. When I send something to you electronically, you’re on the clock.

Does 2016 still count?

;>)

The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali. 1931