Can we please have a forum with a moritorium on outrage? [View All]

[arendt]

Can we please have a forum with a moritorium on outrage?

Last week, I shot myself in the foot trying to raise the issue of the Huxleyan state of America, and its influence on DU, in the General Discussion Forum. I was upset by the dominance of media-generated controversies and horse-races and the way they shoved important issues (Iraq, civil liberties, the budget, voting machines, etc.) down the discussion boards. But, I wrote hurriedly, and stepped on my own message.

Nevertheless, this topic is too important for me to just give up, despite the shellacking I took. (It was stupid to start a thread five minutes before going to work, so as to present a passive target for abuse all day long.) In order to prevent a rehash of that discussion in this thread, I have tried to deal with that discussion in some footnotes at the end.

The footnotes are relevant to this, but you can skip it if you want. I just want to state my case about Huxleyan tendencies clearly.

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It is generally understood by the majority of Americans that the Bush Administration is Orwellian - witness the Emanuel Goldstein-like use of the terrorism threat, the incipient police state on display in Gitmo, the largest prison population on the planet, the proliferation of para-military SWAT teams, the overall thrust of the Attorney General's office, and the obscene euphemism of the "unitary executive".

But the only reason that such thuggery has advanced so far in America is because the Bush Administration swims in a Huxleyan sea, prepared for it by media consolidation.

...."In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch
....him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a
....population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is re-defined as a round of
....entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk,
....when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville
....act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility...

...."America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future...
....An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan...
....We take arms against a sea of troubles...But what if there are no cries of anguish to
....be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom
....do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse
....dissolves into giggles?

........- Neal Postman, "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

The late Neal Postman studied the impact of technological media upon the culture. The quote above, written in 1985, is an almost perfect prediction of where we are today, vis-a-vis a Huxleyan State. Truly, we are amusing ourselves to death.

It is my sincere belief that the Huxleyan burlesque of political discourse, manufactured by the corporate media (CM), is displacing what used to be a more genuine and thoughtful discourse here at DU . This burlesque can be seen both in the slavish attention paid by DUers to the topics and framing of the CM, and in the shallowness and shrillness of the discourse on the boards.

<RANT>

Why don't GD and GD-P have more pro-active conversations about what actions we are going to take, instead of whining sessions about bums like Ben Nelson and Joe Biden? For example, exactly how we are going to organize to force Democrats in Congress to do their Constitutional duty and impeach Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and all the other corrupt and traitorous officials who have lied us into war and domestic despotism while looting the middle class blind.

Why do I have to get worked up about every provocative insult hurled by the troglodyte right? Why can't I, instead, read how we are going to organize to pull the tax-exempt status of the Catholic League? Why can't I read about how we are going to get the drug-felon and parole violator Rush Limbaugh and the vote-fraud felon Ann Coulter off the air?

Why do I have to wade through the National Enquirer garbage about Anna Nicole Smith on a political board?

</RANT>

It is all about the framing. A while back, people on DU were quoting George Lakoff on framing; and that was good. But, since the election, the media has cranked up the framing, and DU has felt that it is our duty to step into each frame and refute it.
That is exactly what the CM wants us to do. They want to distract us, to get us to fight on issues that are off-topic.

The framing of issues in the CM is toxic. First of all, context is excluded - except for the biased talking points with which the CM wants to frame the issue. (Context is a well-discussed issue, if you are aware of the discussion - for example, the book "In the Context of No Context"). Second, complex issues are reduced to stories with heroes and villains. (An immense amount of Joseph Campbell material is relevant here.) These heroes and villains are part and parcel of the celebrity addiction of both the CM itself and the people who consume too much CM. Third, no story is complete without someone being "outraged". Of course, the GOP has turned being outraged into a high art form. If they are caught red-handed, they are outraged that you caught them.

To summarize: no context, stories, celebrities, and outrage.

And those four things are just what I am seeing more and more of in GD and GD-P. Worst of all, we talk about the same stories as the CM.

DU is a political discussion board, not a general news board. You want news? Go to your favorite news sites, which is where all the LBN stories come from anyway. The point of DU is to discuss politics, not any old news we find interesting. Has everybody forgotten the old saying "What interests the public is not necessarily 'the public interest."?

I come to DU to find out what is happening politically and how to make a difference. I have a technical job that requires a large percentage of my time and mental resources. I don't have a lot of time to acquire truthful political information. I come here to find such info and to find people who share my political priorities.

At this moment, I can think of more than a dozen things that need to be done, or our lives will soon become very bad for a very long time:

1. Get Congress to prohibit an Iran War, ASAP.
2. Get Congress to get us out of Iraq ASAP.
3. Restore Habeus Corpus and the right of soldiers to refuse an illegal order.
4. Impeach Cheney, Gonzales, and Bush, in that order.
5. Ban e-voting machines without paper trails. De-privatize e-voting software.
6. Shut down Guantanamo
7. Rein in the power and growth of the Military-Industrial-Prison Complex
8. Spend reasonably on first responders, cargo inspection, and chemical plants
9. Re-regulate and de-consolidate the media.
10. Start a crash program on energy independence and global warming
11. Restore the budget of the EPA, re-build its databases, and make it enforce the law.
12. Stop the wholesale export of productive jobs to East Asia.
13. Reverse the gutting of social programs.
14. Rebuild the wall between Church and State
15. Balance the budget by repealing the Bush tax cuts to the rich and to corporations
16. Make some kind of sensible and enforcable laws about immigration in this country
17. Open the black budgets and get some oversight on the intelligence community

These are the issues I want to find out how to work on in my limited time. But GD and GD-P are full of CM-dictated topics.

The 2008 campaign threads are the WORST. People - do you really want "the permanent campaign", where raising money and doing polls is all that politics is about? That is what you are voting for with your mindshare when you start threads for candidate selection so pre-maturely in the election cycle. How about pressing potential candidates to take some substantive political action first, and only talk about their prospects as candidates after they actually have done something, besides posturing and triangulating?

As far as the other "fluff" topcs, please, someone explain to me how what Joe Biden said about Barack Obama is more important than any of the above absoluetly vital issues? How is screaming at the Mars Candy Company about the Snickers commercial going to affect any of the above issues? Why do I see the same bloody set of red herrings here as I do on the CM?

My point is that its all about PRIORITIES. What are the priorities of DU?

We have to have priorities because we have a finite amount of resources. We ask moderators to enforce policies that maximize the value we get from our finite time spent here. The mindshare and bandwidth of DUers are precious. Just because everything is on the Internet (or because, for the sake of argument, all serious topics are discussed somewhere on DU) doesn't mean we all have time to independently dig it up on our own. With the rise of the net, we have learned that we need places that filter information, lest we drown in it. What would the net be without Google? What would DU be without moderated forums?

Perhaps the nature of the GD forums invite this kind of problem. LBN enforces some kind of rules, but what rule can be written for GD?

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Therefore, I return to my second proposal (see footnote 2). I propose that we set up a "serious" discussion forum. I propose that DUers vote on what topics are "serious" - think of my list above as candidates. I propose that we keep only 20 or 25 serious topics at a time (they can change with periodic votes). I propose that (if someone pushes the Alert button) the moderators of this forum will evaluate a poster's claim that his/her post is truly about the serious topic that the poster claims it is.

So as not to have the Shiny Object of the Day discussion again, this is all completely voluntary - in its own forum. You can still have your GD and GD-P forums. Just give me one forum where people want to focus, without constant distraction, on stuff that they fear will soon hurt us badly.

Oh, and while we are doing this, could we please ban expressions of "outrage" from this forum. Couldn't we have just one forum where people have to use reason and rational debate instead of "outrage" (which usually translates to sarcasm, snarkiness, ad hominem insults, and disingenuous sophistry)? If you really need to express your outrage, you can cross-post to any other forum.

Is this proposal elitist / group-phobic ? Is it censorship? You tell me.

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FOOTNOTES on my previous thread:

1) Topics like "the Snickers commercial" and the Biden "clean" flap create legitimate outrage in the insulted communities.

Not being a member of those communities, I was unaware of the passion level and become a target for outrage when I objected to the volume of threads on those topics. I admit this was a mistake. I apologize. Now, could those offended please listen to what I say below with an open mind.

2) Hiding/ignoring threads will do for now

I heard everyone loud and clear on that topic. GD is GD.

But, I made TWO proposals. One was to create a forum for what I called "fluff" (roundly rejected as censorship); but the other was to create a forum for people who like a more academic and mannered style of discussion, which I called "serious". I will merely point out that people enjoyed blasting the "fluff" proposal while ignoring the "serious" proposal. (except for two who suggested that GD-P was such a more serious forum).

In the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy chose to respond to an acceptable proposal from Kruschev while ignoring a belligerent and unworkable proposal, possibly averting WW3. In the thread (not to be equated to a world crisis), the bulk of responders chose to respond to the unworkable proposal. My only point is that there is very little "diplomatic" behavior left on DU.

3) I post long articles that require some awareness/educational level.

In the GD thread, this was thrown in my face. Sorry, you can't have it both ways. I am supposed to respect the sensitivities of all oppressed minorities; but its OK to make fun of the whole style of writing that academics use every single day. I am not going to get "outraged" over this anti-intellectualism. America is noted for anti-intellectualism. Politicians make their careers on it. (George Wallace's "pointy-headed bureaucrats". George Bush: "I don't do nuance.") I would warmly welcome any of the people who implied that I'm a racist or a homophobe (both untrue) to dispassionately acknowledge, in the same spirit I just did, that America, regretfully, is noted for its homophobia and racism.

I will do my best to keep the writing interesting (not entertaining), but readers need to have some awareness of history and government. If you don't, then I respectfully suggest that you hide my threads.

Keeping it interesting does not mean keeping it simple-minded. We cannot beat the primitive "common sense" of reactionary counter-revolutionaries with nothing more than the "common sense" of liberals. That is just a shouting match between equally self-righteous tribes. We are fighting for the rule of a legal system that requires a degree of education. Without that education, we cannot categorically refute the absolutist garbage pushed by John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, and Justices Alito and Scalia. And, it is absolutely vital that we do that.