TylerDurden said:
It's biased, it's dumbed down, it makes extremely simplistic conclusions on very, very complicated subjects.
I find it hilarious that so many US Conservatives are spending so much of their energy trying to discredit it because it is those things, then they'll go home and get in front of the tv and cheer on Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity or any of the other biased, dumbed down, simplistic fools on Fox.
Can they honestly not see that they are the EXACT same thing, just sitting on different sides of the political fence, and the Fox regulars have a MUCH larger audience than Michael Moore's movie will. And who do you think is more dangerous? The ones demanding unwavering, unquestioning support for a government driving it's country to war after war, or the one who is demanding that people ask questions and get answers?
I think you all should get together and demand more intelligence from your media.
I find myself making this argument the most, but I think you've articulated better than I have thus far. As for whether we'll find the answers, the cynicism of postmodernism tells me that we won't. Even if the answers are sitting right in front of us, we'd likely dismiss it as not being "balanced" enough. The messenger has become more important than the message it seems, and perhaps not unjustifiably.
And you're right on the mark. Liberals and conservatives are guilty of exactly the same things, in terms of rhetoric, and that's why I find this hoopla about Michael Moore to be nothing more than empty rhetoric, except that, with each successive turn, the vitriol of the rhetoric gets worse. Conservatives had no problem at all bashing the Clinton Administration to levels that, in some moments, paled in comparison to how liberals bash Bush. Yet, liberals are "un-American" for criticizing Bush. I'm sure that the tables will turn if Kerry gets elected; suddenly, conservatives will talk about how "American" it is to criticize their leadership and how they have First Amendment protections to do so. Suddenly, they'll become the greatest champions of the Bill of Rights!
But shifting from postmodernism to Marxist "hegemony," I cannot help but notice that, outside of the rhetoric, the two parties have almost the exact same positions. Both the Democrats and the Republicans, for instance, are officially against gay marriage; they just differ on how much it should be banned.
Further tax cuts are likely going to happen, even if it is likely irresponsible. It just really depends on where it will go, and, even then, in both instances, tax cuts are meaningless. People will still complain that they pay too much. And the "war on terror"...it won't go away. Kerry and Bush will likely end up doing the same things; Bush just colors his rhetoric in bombastic colors, but, rest assured, there won't be another war at least until after Afghanistan and Iraq are cleaned up, which may take another year or two.
And right in the middle of it all is the muckraking media. For those who paid attention at all to U.S. History in school, newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, is not portrayed in a positive light, due to how he invented the Spanish-American War and passed off tabloid rumors as "news." Yet, this is *exactly* what American media is today! Our news is about as real as "reality television," and we will only hear what will get good ratings. Question the accuracy of "Bowling for Columbine" all one wants, but the thing I got the most out of it was just how American media thrives on fear. I cannot watch television news anymore, because I'm tired of being told to be afraid of something, whether it be terrorists or some food that *may* cause cancer, and, yet, when these studies are disproved, there is *never* a follow-up. Fear...fear...fear...fear...and anyone who tries to call it out will essentially be challenging the dominant hegemony's manner of remaining in power, and, thus, you will be deemed subversive or "anti-American." That's what it boils down to.
I really don't know if F911 is mostly contrived or not, merely because I trust none of the sources to tell me, one way or another. Back to postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard's "The Gulf War Did Not Exist" is a great book on this subject, arguing that the "reality" of the war was solely presented to us on how the media fed it to us; thus, since the media is fake, the war "does not exist" to us outside of these images. We trust that Iraq exists merely because we are told it exists, but how accurate are these messages we receive? People who take the title too literally will balk at the book likely, but it's great postmodern theory. In other words, we can't trust our media to tell us the "Truth," because "Truth" does not exist through subjective ("human") sources, and since it is impossible for us to discover everything first-hand, the quest for "Truth" is impossible.
Ahhhh...why didn't I just go to culinary school? I could have been a good French chef methinks.
Melon
