It’s easy to just scapegoat a group, and mix in a few wildly exaggerated and in most cases idiotic stereotypes that appeal to our deepest and most base emotions.  It’s the exact opposite of leadership. It’s cowardly, it’s insecure, it’s mean spirited. It’s ignorant.

At CPAC today, Tim Pawlenty went off an a really nasty rant about how liberals all sneer at conservatives for not having gone to Ivy League colleges and for not liking “brie and chablis.”

As this country moves further and further to the right, and– as we continue to have the opposite of our best and brightest, but the most gifted spinmeisters, seek to inform and lead our debate — misleading rhetoric continues to replace fact and understanding, America is beginning to slowly change. We are starting to enter the age of ignorance.

With all this information and misinformation abounding, in journals, magazines, books, universities, Internet sites galore, few can tell anymore what is spin and what is fact; with that which appeals to the lowest common denominator often rising to the top.  Like a shipwrecked crew in an ocean locked lifeboat, water all around yet dying from dehydration, our democracy — with information all around as misinformation continues to lead our national debates, is itself being threatened. From the inside.

For the record, Chablis is pretty lame. But we’re not liberals, so maybe we just don’t know — like 12 year school yard kid Pawlenty clearly does.  But this 12 year old prejudiced, ignorant, snob is a Governor of a state.

Maybe some Liberals can come off as a little elitist at times. Some, not understanding conservatives, sometimes do show disdain. It’s not helpful, and the disdain, with far more effective framing and messaging, is often shown right back.

But it’s idiotic, to bring brie and chablis into it. It’s not a metaphor. It’s a friggin’ cheese, and a crappy wine.  It’s the fallback for the weak, the lazy, the unthinking mind.  Exactly what Pawlenty seems to be insecure about being accused of, or, more likely, is trying to capitalize on, exploit, appeal to, foment,  in others.

Incidentally, Pawlenty graduated from one of the best law schools in the country.  He (theoretically) should know better. As should those putting up with this kind of lame reverse elitist snobbish contempt from the anti Chablis one time junior varsity Hockey Player.

One who, by the way, is considering a presidential run in 2008. No, not president of the local crass and lame divide and conquer stereotyping club; president of the United States.

A potential presidential candidate who — in addition to railing against any personal preferences for the easy targets of brie and chablis, picked an odd time to use a violence against Government metaphor:

Conservatives could learn a lot from Tiger Woods’ wife Elin, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said at the Conservative Political Action Conference today.

“She said, I’ve had enough,” Pawlenty said. “We should take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government.”

One day after one Andrew Joseph Stack, using an airplane as a missile, did just that.

Pawlenty, in this same CPAC speech, also rails against Liberals trying to take away freedoms, and how conservatives will “fight back.”

It’s not clear which freedoms he is talking about, since neither group has a full monopoly on taking away freedoms, but it seems conservatives have the clear if not lopsided edge here.

Yet clearly Pawlenty is not talking about the most basic freedoms of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, because once we “suspect you” of something, you have no more rights. Which defeats the ENTIRE purpose of having rights, in the first place. But that’s okay, just rail about protecting freedoms and at the same time rail against those laws and constitutional provisions that actually protect them, while blaming, of course, “Liberals” for everything once again. Classic rhetoric. The new fuel for America.

Today, Dowd wrote a column in the NY Times very space limited op ed pages, essentially saying that 3d movies are cool, or might be cool, or that people like them, or some such. In response to the column, one of our 82,000 or so Deputy Editors happened to witness the posting of the following comment to Dowd’s post. In full:

Times’ op-eds have nothing better to cover than 3d movies??

Why don’t you write about this — good update to a NY times comment on the issue, too.

Or this.

Nah. Bring us movie talk on the oped page. Maybe Entertainment magazine’s editorial pages can cover the substantive stuff.

Who knows who monitors these, but the comment was blocked from readers’ gentle thought considerations. Unlike the one just below that makes a small fraction of the same point, while taking two ridiculous shots at President Obama for using a teleprompter (similar to essentially every other president ever since teleprompters have been in existence), and more. Or perhaps it was double reverse sophisticated satire, that few readers would ever get. We don’t know:

I wondered what compelling issues you would write about with the departure of the Bush administration. Movies, how fascinating! There is plenty of farce to be found in the Obama administration and the Democrat lead Congress. Tell us what you think about the teleprompter President please. No sarcasm needed, just the facts, and we can weep or laugh as prompted by his deeds.

The links from the blocked comment — the one that was too thoughtful to actually allow in examples by way of contrast — go to substantive pieces regarding critical issues that go to what our country is all about. Yawn, snooze, ready?:

One on a subject that has been occasionally covered; the undue influence of corporations now, in addition to everything else, upon our election process in the wake of the abysmal decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. (Some more analysis on Citizens that misses the point and paints a false paradox, with good commentary following).

The other on something that has not been very well covered; clandestine government infiltration into non governmental speech, influence and information activities, and its parallels to the anti Constitutional theories upon some of the Bush Administration’s unchecked and clandestine actions to set aside Congressional Statutes — and even potentially set aside provisions of the Bill of Rights — were based.

Maybe this stuff is too highfalutin for Dowd. Fair enough. But entertainment merging as news is not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said the given the choice between newspapers and government itself, he should take newspapers. And it was not because of their official op ed page opinions on 3d movies.

But then again, this is the NY Times. It’s not like it’s a leading newspaper or anything. How could it be with op ed pieces like this?

Talking head and blogger Sarah Palin spoke out on Fox News saying that Alito’s “Wilson moment” was OK, and that Justice Alito was just “calling him out.” She based her careful judgment on her longstanding and intimate knowledge of Supreme Court protocol. Oh, wait.

In other deep layer of Palin analysis, she went on to discuss health care “mandation.” What’s “mandation” you ask? According to Dictionary.com it means “No dictionary results.” Strange…

And finally, she described the entire state of the union from President Obama as being like “a lecture.” And we all know how she feels about lectures. Maybe that’s why she went through five different colleges.

Palin was also basing her support of Justice Alito’s “calling out” the President on the history of the law and the Supreme Court,  upon her intimate knowledge of Supreme Court cases.  Where it appeared she couldn’t name a single Supreme Court case.

Note, however, that after the aforelinked debacle, Palin crammed for a crash course, and got to pimp some misleading political spin at the same time, all while Fox’s  Carl Cameron did his magician like “Fair and Balanced” act, craftily veiling his two minute TV rehabilitation commercial for her even while,  rather emphatically, getting in Palin (and Fox’s) anti mainstream media message at the end.

The mainstream media is poor, as Cameron, and Palin, subtly, and not so subtly, imply.  But not because it is unfair to Palin;  but because of quite the opposite.  As an example, the ideologically fervent, and almost always incorrect, misleading, or simply rhetoric stuffed Palin is treated with kid gloves relative to the facts.  And the media has done a better job covering Palin than many other things, in fact, and it still has not covered Palin correctly.

Notice that at the same time Cameron also renovated this snafu on Palin’s part as well — where Palin apparently could not name a single source of news she routinely read. Now, according to her and her fair and balanced mouthpiece Cameron, easily explained by how ”annoyed” she was at that same media, even though in the video itself (just linked to), Palin expresses her “great appreciation for” that very same media.

If Palin was thus acting sycophantic here by telling the world her “great appreciation for the same media” she would later tell her rehabilitator Cameron that she was so annoyed at she would not answer critical questions, wouldn’t it have made far more sense to have simply name some sources (if she really dutifully reads them) and some Supreme Court cases (if she really knew any) rather than come off as looking extremely uninformed when that was already a chief concern to begin with? And then make her point about media annoyance?

You betcha.  Palin didn’t because she froze. And she froze because, as evidenced by her constant misleading rhetoric, it is unlikely that she really had read very much of substance, or knew much about the Supreme Court or its decisions at all.

But that’s nothing that spinmeisters Fox and Palin (and now back, naturally on the “Fair and Balanced” station, together again), couldn’t cobble back together, as the link of  Cameron and Palin above, aptly illustrates.  (Just not to active hard core Democrats perhaps, who sometimes don’t seem to want to grasp that just because they think something is purely empty, doesn’t mean everyone else is not being somewhat influenced by it on some level, or that being the most watched cable “news” source is not just coincidental with the movement of this country that past ten plus years. But then it’s not clear that Democrats see the movement of this country the past ten years, either. )

As noted in the Anchorage Daily News piece just linked to, also consider Palin’s suggestion from her recent book  that the media is “worthless as a source of factual information anymore.”

This is sometimes true. But mainly because they will publish wildly misleading and incredibly ill informed pieces like this one by Palin herself, and play to the same propaganda as a legitimate “side’ to a ‘factual debate” that Palin repeatedly, and erroneously, promotes herself.

The irony is unbounded.

]]> http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/28/worth-repeating-palins-expertise/feed/ 2 http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/23/the-slippery-slope-toward-big-brother-ness/ http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/23/the-slippery-slope-toward-big-brother-ness/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:54:50 +0000 admin http://donkasauruspost.com/?p=476 The slippery slope toward a pseudo Big Brother-ish type of American Society just got a bit steeper and more slippery:

Could stacking your Twitter or Facebook contacts lists with financially-responsible friends help improve your chances of getting a loan?

The answer could be yes, according to a report out this week from CreditCards.com. In a story entitled, “Social networking: Your key to easy credit?” reporter Erica Sandberg writes that, “In their quest to identify creditworthy customers, some (creditors) are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal in the virtual stratosphere.”

There’s something pretty eerie, and undemocratic,  about this.

High School was cool.  But Facebook is turning us into one really, really bad high school.  Virtually.

But it gets worse. Facebook also now, apparently, has taints of Big Brother, and is only helping to further, very slowly, lead us there.

The employee claims that everything you do is not only permanently stored and saved, but completely available to Facebook staff and associates.  The site….has expectedly and deservedly retaliated to the whistleblower claims, and has dismissed the supposed revelations as common knowledge with which all Facebook members should be completely familiar.

Speaking to the Rumpus, the Facebook worker asserted that when a member makes “any sort of interaction on Facebook — upload a photo, click on somebody’s profile, update your status, change your profile information,” that activity is stored on Facebook’s servers. In order to identify a member’s “best friends,” a feature which quietly debuted recently, the site tracks and stores (at one of four massive data centers) every possible interaction. All Facebook countered by saying this practice is “widely known,” and that “if you don’t want Facebook collecting information about you, don’t give it to them.” (Excellent customer service — MySpace would be thrilled if Facebook adhered to an official “take it or leave it” approach.)

One of the most troubling revelations in the anonymous interview is the claim that any Facebook employee could log into any member account with a single master password (which was some derivation of Chuck Norris — not so funny in this scenario). The shadowy interviewee also said that various employees (at least two of whom were terminated) were caught inappropriately using that password to gain access to accounts.

Note that Facebook says they have a “zero tolerance” policy toward employee snooping.  As if they wouldn’t, but would instead say to their employees: “Facebook employees, please use company time to view private Facebook data that is not supposed to be available to the public” for your own sordid creepiness or other social spying, just so we can purposefully freak people and undermine their confidence in us even more.”  Of course Facebook has a zero tolerance policy.

Where did this idea come from that just because society gets “advanced” that privacy should be given up? Our Supreme Courts have wrestled with the idea of privacy as an inherent right — is it never necessarily spelled out literally in the Constitution.  But if one goes back to the time when this rather sparse, government and power limiting founding document was crafted, it is easy to see that the idea was perhaps considered so simple as to be taken for granted within all mentions of liberty within that document.

So what happened? What happened to us that we are so desperate to who are “friends” are in some cyber world non reality, and tell the entire world what our favorite songs are, that are we are going along with this rat pack march toward cyber big brother?

Remember last year when Facebook briefly instituted a policy (before uproar caused slight modifications, we assume) that essentially gave it unlimited ownership right to anything you ever put on there, irrevocably, and in perpetuity — that is, forever?

That should have been a warning sign. That should have been a warning sign not just about Facebook, but about what we are doing.  It might not seem like much now; but in ten, fifteen, twenty five years, when we ask “how did we get here, what did we do to produce this?” we will find some of our answers in the present, right now, as we flock like sheep to this privacy destroying, soul sapping, false socially validating online big brother like out of a really bad dork nerd I so want to be liked high school B class movie.

Get a grip. Give up Facebook.  If you are using it to network, or get ideas or links across, there are plenty of other, less Big Brother like, less intrusive, and less socially vacuous and enervating ways to do so.  Just because we become advanced as a society doesn’t mean we need to jump into every single mass conglomeration idea of immediate online “self verification” that comes down the pike. And ultimately, while it might provide some information for you or that you want to share, that is all Facebook is.

There’s a real world out there.  Explore it. While that’s not necessarily an argument to ignore computers or virtual world possibilities, it is certainly a strong argument to ignore the worst of those two categories. And Facebook falls into that category, several notches below porn.

And that’s pretty low.

What makes Facebook worse than porn, is that porn is not a “prisoners dilemma” problem.  The more people use Facebook, the more it supplants other, more beneficial, positive means of social reinforcement, interaction, and information sharing.  And the more others then feel compelled to also partake, or “miss out,” thereby leading to even more amassed corporate Big Brother overseeing over more and more private and minute details of each and every one of your — our — lives.