Wanna Know Why We the People Really Don't Know Squat?

[hfojvt]

54. no argument about the pollution

I said something similar in my journal a while back

"One of the troubles with supposed trolls, is that we, as Americans are swimming in a sea of excrement, crap that fills the airwaves and newspapers and books and the internet. False ideas and lies and distortions and propaganda - excrement. Our public discourse is so full of excrement that everybody who swims in it is bound to get some in their mouth, or in their head, and then spew it out like its not some crap that was catapaulted into their mind.

Some people, true trolls, embrace the crap, believe enough of it that they have gone over to the dark side."

Which I cannot link to because it was posted in "meta".

But I am not sure I would go so far as to say that the "sea of excrement" or the "information pollution" is enough to make it true that a small group of people "run this country". Class warfare would make more sense, but in some sense many are not fighting that, but really just working to grab a piece of the pie. I don't think there is really any organization uniting the top 1% or top 0.1% or top 5% or top 20%. They just sorta all pull together by having common interests.

But there is a common theme that the corporate world uses to defeat the left, and the left, such as it is, uses to defeat itself. As Somerby put it, the rightwing tells the public "liberal elites think they are better than you". And liberals, for their part run around proving those rightwingers correct, as they/we constantly gripe about how stupid and uninformed "the masses" are.

Now you may say "but it is TRUE". The question is, how are you gonna frame it? If you lead with "the public does not know squat" it reads as a typical attack on the public by some liberal elite who thinks he knows more than anybody else. If, instead you lead with "the public is bombarded with lies" then your attack is on the lying liars and not on the public which swallows those lies.