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Politics : Bush-The Mastermind behind 9/11? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Earl who wrote (8372)	9/26/2004 3:17:30 PM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20039

Don > it hasn't been kept secret, otherwise it wouldn't be possible for so many of us to know about it. We know, but only by dint of our own analysis. And, even then, we don't know what actually happened -- only what we think happened. Those who were actually involved are always at risk they could be found out even if they took great pains to cover their tracks. But it's clear that no-one "official" wants anything to come out -- and that is what is so extraordinary to me -- the extent of the tacit collusion -- even by those who were not involved. A cover-up extraordinaire! > it's far more comfortable for them to stay fooled than it is to admit something very terrible happened, especially if it's something terrible enough that something has to be done about it. You've put your finger on it. Denial. Self-deception. Control of reality by the imagination. Call it what you will. But there's no doubt that people are perfectly happy to accept and to believe that bin Laden and his bunch of terrible jihadist killers did it rather than confront the reality that it was done (or even could have been done) by a bunch of nice Christian and Jewish boys -- in fact, people -- JUST LIKE US. And why? Simply to make trouble for the Muslims so that we could go into their countries and kill them and steal their oil. No, for most people to accept that is just too much to ask for. It cannot be true. Nice people like us don't do things like that. > think the real issue is there is a great deal of unjustified faith in the media I think it's more about faith in anything "official", and the media is "official". That's why most people think that any information gleaned from the internet is the equivalent to a fish caught in a sewer -- rotten and tainted. Likewise those who purvey it. As for those who frequent the internet --- yeccch! > a person almost has to wonder if there would actually be a market for news that told the truth Eureka! As an extension of that, consider how many people are prepared to die for a "god" that exists only in their imagination. If someone were to try to convince them that there is no such thing as "god", they simply couldn't/wouldn't believe it. Likewise, if their president who, in fact, is their "god" proxy, tells them that bad Muslims killed our people on 9-11 because they "hate our freedoms", they believe it like they believe the sun will rise tomorrow --- and they will die in defence of that belief --- and the president. Now that's called mind control. PS. Be careful when you use HTML tags <<<>>> to surround text. It seems the interpreter on the new SI wipes out anything within them it cannot parse, particularly in the header.

To: Don Earl who wrote (8372)	9/26/2004 7:13:50 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 20039

Re: In the final analysis, a person almost has to wonder if there would actually be a market for news that told the truth. There certainly is a market for this. It's called the rest of the world. :) OTOH, Amy Goodman is doing a great job with Democracy NOW! She's syndicated on nearly 300 stations across America today. democracynow.org

To: Don Earl who wrote (8372)	9/28/2004 7:15:45 PM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 20039

Don > the real issue is there is a great deal of unjustified faith in the media (2) Such a fascinating subject that I keep returning to it. I came upon this piece which discuses how the US electorate views political candidates. It seems the people do anything to avoid having to think. newyorker.com >> It’s not that people know nothing. It’s just that politics is not what they know. In the face of this evidence, three theories have arisen. The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as “the will of the people” is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, “fire alarms” (sensational news), “October surprises” (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and “gotchas.” Even when people think that they are thinking in political terms, even when they believe that they are analyzing candidates on the basis of their positions on issues, they are usually operating behind a veil of political ignorance. They simply don’t understand, as a practical matter, what it means to be “fiscally conservative,” or to have “faith in the private sector,” or to pursue an “interventionist foreign policy.” They can’t hook up positions with policies. From the point of view of democratic theory, American political history is just a random walk through a series of electoral options. Some years, things turn up red; some years, they turn up blue. A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is élite opinion. Political campaigns, on this theory, are essentially struggles among the élite, the fraction of a fraction of voters who have the knowledge and the ideological chops to understand the substantive differences between the candidates and to argue their policy implications. These voters communicate their preferences to the rest of the electorate by various cues, low-content phrases and images (warm colors, for instance) to which voters can relate, and these cues determine the outcome of the race. Democracies are really oligarchies with a populist face. The third theory of democratic politics is the theory that the cues to which most voters respond are, in fact, adequate bases on which to form political preferences. People use shortcuts—the social-scientific term is “heuristics”—to reach judgments about political candidates, and, on the whole, these shortcuts are as good as the long and winding road of reading party platforms, listening to candidate debates, and all the other elements of civic duty. Voters use what Samuel Popkin, one of the proponents of this third theory, calls “low-information rationality”—in other words, gut reasoning—to reach political decisions; and this intuitive form of judgment proves a good enough substitute for its high-information counterpart in reflecting what people want.<< In other words, the American people generally do as they are told.