haven't we had enough yet? enough of this corporate-sponsored consumer culture that penetrates our existance on every level.
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Livity
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Written by Les Visible
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The news of every day could be the news of any day. What's happening and what gets reported are on separate planets. It's as if we are looking at a simulated ocean and watching the waves of collective emotion rise and fall according to the whim of whoever is controlling the oscillations; as in the present electoral circus. The ocean isn't real, the feelings aren't real. It's just another distraction to pass the time as the real world gets shaped by unseen hands behind the fabricated scenery. At some point the curtains part and you finally see what all the mis-direction was about but you can't do anything now. |
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Philosophy
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Written by Nietzsche
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What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...
'On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,' The Viking Portable Nietzsche, p.46-7, Walter Kaufmann transl.
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Politics
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Written by Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now!
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From the State Department to Agriculture to the Transportation Security Administration, federal agencies under the Bush administration have been producing hundreds of pre-packaged TV segments that have been broadcast on local stations as real news. Amy speaks with John Stauber of PR Watch, which has been tracking the rise of government and corporate-produced news for years. |
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Politics
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Written by Wendell Berry
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LET US BEGIN BY ASSUMING what appears to be true: that the so-called "environmental crisis" is now pretty well established as a fact of our age. The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are not denied. Concern for these problems has acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, in the media and in some scientific, academic, and religious institutions.
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Politics
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Written by Noam Chomsky
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Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare yesterday?s version to today?s version. There is a lot of evidence about what?s played up and what isn?t and the way things are structured.
My impression is the media aren?t very different from scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual opinion?there are some extra constraints?but it?s not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite easily among them.
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