04-01-2017, 09:07 AM
(04-01-2017, 06:07 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I seldom watch TV news and never buy newspapers. I get news from the web. As many of the web sites I visit also do broadcast or hardcopy, I don't think this a big deal. The significant difference on the web is in picking up links to the fringe extreme sources. Forums like this one do make available alternate perspectives.
But, you have to be a bit careful. If you want to review Black Lives Matters' agenda and policies, you visit their web site rather than trust opinions of extreme partisans. The web is full of a lot of garbage.
The Internet has allowed the proliferation of data without the building of wisdom necessary for judging the merit of what exists. One can find porn, racist garbage, links to totalitarian causes, the prosperity gospel, homophobia, quack medicine, and get-rich-quick schemes taking advantage of suckers on a scale impossible for the hucksters and shysters of the past to deal with. But fall for this stuff and you are a loser. Whether the Tsarnaev brothers, Dylann Roof, or Benjamin Nathaniel Smith one has plenty of opportunity for self-radicalization. With the radicalization that these four people got, the consequences for others is great personal tragedy. For themselves it was ruin. That's before I even discuss hucksters who offer legerdemain that says that you need not pay income or sales taxes or that some proprietary concoction of lemon, paprika, and honey will uniquely cure cancer (Accept no substitutes! A usual appeal of the medicine show of the 19th century). Yes, the Internet has a way of bringing back to life old ideas that most of us thought could never emerge from the grave of bad ideas.
People with the capacity to discern nonsense from reason are precious. The Internet has brought forth much of the same stupidity that many of us thought died a century ago. But that stuff lives.
I did check the website of Black Lives Matters. It looks much like a reversion to the Black Consciousness movements of the Awakening Era.
So white people aren't completely trustworthy with the obvious interests of black people? Nothing new there. Take care of yourselves because Whitey isn't your friend? Self-help, including the advocacy of starting businesses that 'Whitey' has no obvious role.
Don't fool yourself. White racism is real. I hear it often enough because many white people feel free to express it so long as there are no blacks around. It's ugly. It's much the same stuff as people said a century ago everywhere in America or fifty years ago in the South.
So why does it return from the dead? Because people stupefy themselves on brain-rot and soul-rot that emanates from the television, whether broadcast or from video devices. Human nature does not change. The Greek philosophers and the Hebrew prophets remain relevant because we have the same potential for crass stupidity and selfishness as ever. We transcend our worst lest we fall for the worst.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.