Deconstruction

[nadinbrzezinski]

Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded - showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, literary analysis, or other fields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

This is what the rally was about.

It was not a false equivalency.

These were some assumptions made.

ALL media are part of the establishment.

ALL media has an agenda...

ALL media play the fear card.

ALL media play the us vs them.

That is the problem.

Jon was not talking about who is right or wrong... just that all media does it. And truth be told, all media does. Another icon in the US has mentioned this, and there are oodles of academic papers where you can go and see this. Now if any of you have your feelings hurt, this was not about false equivalencies but a system. And Du does not do deconstruction well. This was the Crossfire smack-down all over again, in front of 250K people.

And you know what? Jon is your, to a limited point, alternate press. He is the national clown, jester if you will, allowed to point to the king and tell him, you have no clothes.

Now does "one side" deal with facts and the other does not"t? Yes.

Does one side call for physical violence and the other does not? Yes.

But are both involved in some of the issues? Yes. They COULD focus on real problems, instead of missing blondes... and that was exactly what that deconstruction was about.

Now let me join the bed bugs for fear group... I wonder if they have meet ups?

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Kick because this is important

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. Well said.

I never thought of applying Derrida to The Daily Show, but I think you make a very good point.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. Some of the crap one reads in graduate school

:-)

[mdmc]

3. k

r

[Gormy Cuss]

5. Wait -- it wasn't a liberal equivalent of Glenn Beck's rally?

I'm shocked.


p.s. bed bugs for fear: :spray:

[apocalypsehow]

6. You know, I don't really disagree with your OP, but that "missing blondes" meme really offends me

every time I see it posted here at DU. I have a young daughter who has blond hair: if she went "missing," I'd certainly want every resource available "focused" on getting her back home safely. Wouldn't you? :shrug:

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. It is not about your daughter...

but it could easily be about exploding ants...

And as a rescue worker I have spent all available resources in finding people.

But a LOCAL missing persons case does not need to be on Nancy Grace for months... again perspective and... deconstruction.

[leveymg]

9. Isn't Nancy Grace the ultimate missing blonde? She isn't mssing, and was never there, and she's

pure Simulacra, as is the medium for which she works, to apply a Situationist term.

It's all irreducibly fake. I agree with Jacques Derrida on that, even if he was a quasi-Fascist and a not-nice man. But, so are some of his principal critics . . . so there. But, it's enough for a Doctoral dissertation.

Now, Nadine - you are real.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. Ph.D indeed

I prefer the Archeology of Knowledge myself...

Too much inside baseball I fear.

:hi:

[leveymg]

13. French post-positivist anthropology - always appeals and explains things well . . .

the purists would call that a fault - sacrificial instincts and memetics aren't falsifiable enough for them. Damn the schoolmen . . . what we need is another sacrifice, and another glass of wine! Now, that's the French way!

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Well I have been doing some Annales school myself

actually need to go get a copy of Bloch...

[leveymg]

15. I'll take class analysis over Annales, and a nice Savignon Blanc over Bloch

Cheers, dears!

The focus upon the everyday life of the premoderns reached its limit for me a long time ago. Give me a nice Tilly or Skocpol, or better Goldstone and the other theorists of revolution. Always satisfying to see the founders of counter-insurgency doctrine -- like Chalmers Johnson -- turn their analysis on the process of the decline of the Empire, itself. Wisdom comes with age, in some cases.

What do you think of Brazil, yesterday?

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. Amusing... while we have been playing games

where empires go to die, Brazil has been busy becoming a real regional power or headache.

Annales has a use when looking at labor though... why I am doing that.

And cannot find any bloch on the nook or kindle... drats that means getting a physical copy, no room where to put them.

[leveymg]

20. Part of Bloch's "Historian's Craft" is on Google Books

http://books.google.com/books?id=YZdCcT_1Z8YC&pg=PP1&dq=intitle:The+intitle:Historian%27s+intitle:Craft+inauthor:bloch&lr=&num=30&as_brr=0&ei=ObJnR7LDFIiUtgPAxdyhAw&sig=MM6otw23Cw_plPOu12kJ77tMJLw#v=onepage&q&f=false

But, you've probably already read it. Someone mentioned it's a good accompaniment to Carr's "What is History?" (which I have read, and recommend).

I've dabbled in this. I've dabbled in that. Found a lot to like. Thanks for turning me on to Bloch - he definitely influenced Rene Girard, whose work on how ritual sacrifice is hardwired into human consciousness turned on a light bulb for my understanding of politics and conflict.

[nadinbrzezinski]

24. Ended up ordering it

(with Carr)

[leveymg]

25. Enjoy.

Carr's book is really about the causes of World War Two. My paperback copy is fifty years old and coming apart. Inherited it (along with a ton of other books) from my late father-in-law who was an agent handler in Germany at the height of the Cold War and an analyst at the Pentagon.

Talk to you again, soon.

[RaleighNCDUer]

17. It's not about your daughter (who likely would get non-stop coverage)

but about all the non-blonde girls who go missing every year and the nation press never mentions it.

It's the disparity of focus, not the focus itself, that is the issue.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. or the fact that local stories do not deserve

national focus either. It is not like it is going to help anyhow.

I wish I could recommend this post btw.

[apocalypsehow]

27. So, in your perfect world, if my daughter went missing, she & her family are just out of luck.

I'm always amazed that folks type the most insensitive, non-compassionate things, and still expect others to take them seriously as some kind of "progressive" or "liberal." Sentiments like that, and the one expressed by the OP, are neither.

[nadinbrzezinski]

28. No, in a perfect world, and in a less perfect one too

Like the present one, you will get somebody like me, actually a bunch like me...taking reports, doing searches and going to the LOCAL media asking for volunteers and leads, as well as interviwing all kinds of people.

In fact the last thing we want is Nancy Grace... For complex reasons she and other national media are ahem.. Actually unhelpful.

Media involvement is actually somewhere low in this though...

Of course talking from real world experience, what would I know? And yes we'd bust our asses until we get an outcome.

[Posteritatis]

31. I think you might be missing the point there

This isn't a case of "your daughter should be out of luck" as much as it's a case of "many, many other people are being cast to the wolves because they don't get as good ratings."

Meaning absolutely no disrepect to your daughter - two of my cousins were kidnapping victims (recovered safely, but still), so I have at least a little experience with that whole nightmare - the media really does actively go out of its way to prefer missing white middle-or-upper-class usually-blonde women in such situations, to the point where "Missing Pretty Girl Syndrome"* is used formally to describe it in studies of how the news presents this sort of thing.

Prime time news generally won't raise an eyebrow to cover, say, a missing Hispanic girl, to say nothing of a missing black boy. All three people warrant exactly the same level of concern, resources, attention and effort, but two of them are completely and deliberately ignored by national media for ratings purposes, while the third will often remain in the news for months or years after - one way or another - the actual case is over.

Of course, if any instance of any kid matching any of those descriptions got wall-to-wall coverage on all the networks, given the number of them out there, nothing else would ever get discussed. I don't pretend to know where the balance should be there.

* - And there's a whole new level of problems implied in that term, isn't there?

[apocalypsehow]

32. If I wasn't concerned by all kinds of privacy/invasive issues, I would post a family picture.

I sometimes think folks post dismissive, ugly stuff about "blondes" - or whoever - without thinking it through. I think if the OP, or you, saw a picture of my kids you'd respond to me in a lot less ugly fashion as regards my expressed concerns regarding the dismissive language on display here.

However, I am a Widower, raising two kids, both of whom happen to carry the "blonde" genes of their beautiful, now deceased, Mother (fucking useless godamned Cancer).

I simply have little patience for it. And never will.

[Posteritatis]

33. I certainly don't mean the term in a dismissive way

And I can understand how you'd see the OP's use of it in that sense. I'm simply referring to the absolute, verifiable, profoundly documented, objective capital-T Truth that the media has a policy of fixating on missing white blonde girls to a degree that they consciously refuse to direct towards missing humans of any other appearance.

It's not something you can deny, and I certainly hope you aren't seriously trying to argue that things should be as they currently are in that department.

It is very, very hard not to hear a tone of "your black-haired, olive-skinned cousins, had they been kidnapped today, would deserve to be ignored because their appearance makes them less important as well as less mediagenic" through your own posts.

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. Hmmm...

No, I'm gonna stay out of this one.

:-)

[uncommon]

11. k&r -

liberal media outlets do the same stupid shit a lot of the time that conservative media outlets do. Less lying, but the sensationalizing is still there.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. And that was the point

I guess it was too complex of a point.

[CrawlingChaos]

19. That's really a stretch

I think you're crediting them with motives that never occurred to them until possibly after the fact, as a way to deflect criticism.

My impression is that this rally was about convincing people it's uncool to get unruly and become a problem for TBTB. We can't have Americans following the French example and pushing back, now can we? "Use your indoor voice" my ass.

And if Jon Stewart is our alternate press, then we are in deep shit. Did you see him kissing Condi Rice's ass last week?

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. He is the jester

And i guess the fact the snack downs go back to at least cross fire...

By the way he is not telling you to use your indoor voice. He is telling the media to do it's fucking job.

[BuelahWitch]

21. Yes, the Pundits are all about theater

All the 24/7 news channels want are ratings. True, Fox has an agenda behind it, but MSNBC keep Keith, Rachel, etc. because they get RATINGS. And that is because they give good theatrical performances. Someone like Walter Cronkite probably couldn't get hired on one of these 24/7 channels because he wasn't loud enough. Unfortunately our guys have to be over the top too to "compete". That's the only way they can get the ratings and stay on the air.

[nadinbrzezinski]

23. It is also about control...of the message.

What is covered and what is not...

And all have an agenda.

[AspenRose]

26. Correct.

[spanone]

29. k&r...best analysis yet...

[nadinbrzezinski]

30. Thanks

and here is the crossfire smackdown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE