Billy mentioned in the comments below a recent essay by columnist Michael Ventura. I want to draw more attention to it.
I know how it is on weblogs – on the web as a whole, actually – you see someone saying “check this out, it’s great!” and you might check it out but you probably won’t. I usually don’t.
Make an exception this time. It’s worth reading. Short, too, so don’t worry your eyes will fall out.
Read it here.
3 thoughts on “Ventura: “You’re too busy for that?””
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I liked how the answer to “What can I do?” seemed to be “That’s up to you!” Following someone else’s ideas like sheep is exactly not the point. Nice article.
Yes and no.
Sometimes we need to follow other people, it’s human nature. no one can be totally original in all that they do and think. No one is educated enough to know and understand well the issues surrounding various points of view of various problems.
The “it’s up to you” is as much advice saying; “Chose someone who you think is informed and follow them.” With the addendum that you shouldn’t compromise on values you think are importannt.
It’s advice to know yourself, to seek out different points of view so you can better understand them and your own though seeing thiers.
Personally I found the article long on vacant platitudes like “It’s up to you” and short of really practical advice. Like, given that it’s up to you, where would be a good place to start.
Rather tangential, but this was a pretty fascinating article. (Long.)
http://billmon.org/archives/001771.html
Quote:
“What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques – as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.
The Boxer
All this, I suppose, is just another way of saying that people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest (li la li). But the implications for me at the time were pretty clear: What the progressive left, not to mention the Democratic Party, needed weren’t dogged investigative reporters or eloquent bloggers or wiser candidates, what it needed were more skilled corporate propagandists, more trained information warfare specialists and more cunning, ruthless PR manipulators. ”