#347

Man, information. That's some fucked up drugs right there. 

Wishing to retain for myself the most neutral possible starting-point for analysis, I try to limit my daily informational intake, and I try to stick to sources that present their information professionally, source it properly, and provide various perspectives and contrasting commentary as well as a broad assortment of material in writing. One should not listen to people say the news if one can at all avoid it, in my opinion. I also regularly check sources and aggregates I know are ridiculous or obscurantist, so as to remain informed about those varieties of jargon and mindset. Least often, grudgingly, understanding that a lot of people read or watch their news and understand their worlds thereby strictly from materials provided by either msnbc news or fox news, with everybody referencing to cnn news when they're feeling broadminded--in other words, sources which make obscurantism blush--I take a look at what they're up to.

Visiting these nightmare websites this morning, as I do every few months because it is important to see what techniques corporate overlords are using on the news as part of their communications warfare, I am amazed as always, even shocked, at the naked brigandry, the boorishness of their techiques. 

Saw the word "bogus" in two separate headlines on msnbc--is that seriously how motherfuckers edit over there? The entire website bristles with attacks on a bewildering variety of fronts and moral postures, shame running a bright common thread through it all. It's a temple to the pointed finger, to the shrill note that sings in the voice when one is angry to be disagreed with by someone they believe less intelligent, less morally developed than themselves.

The fox news flow is like a hallucination, naked pyschology, not much content. Like experiencing a paranoid delusion firsthand. Larger type, headlines only, less targeted fury, a broader outrage, like a beast whose flank is pierced by arrows breathing fire into the air. Each headline a little angry blast on a cornet or the pleading grief of a fife.

Father to both and cynical heir to their innovations, cnn roars like the one and stings like the other, insinuates and declares and allows headlines whose syntax is built to make head-nodding sense to acolytes and make the outsider cock their head at an angle and squint their eyes. 

These motherfuckers are becoming churches. That's all I'm trying to say. Creepy churches.

*

Dang, I really bum myself out. This is why I adress the concrete matters of the world less and less on the blog. My insights offer me no comfort, and serve as a fairly mealy form of entertainment. 

Read Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alice Wong recently, not a planned book but a very excellent read. Other than that, reading has been mostly in service of school of late. It really does happen like that. I fight it, but the battle is indeed uphill.

Best wishes, dear reader. It's foggy today, that's pretty cool. 

--JL