CSotD: Misperception is reality
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Starting, for a change, with the Juxtaposition of the Day:
(The New Adventures of Queen Victoria)
(Blondie)
Normally, I save the Juxtaposition of the Day for the end, sort of a "Moment of Zen" thing (don't worry, you'll get one), but these two strips tie into my recent theme of unscrupulous efforts to capitalize on people's natural gullibility.
Reality shows are fake and it doesn't seem to matter. This absolutely falls into line with yesterday's discussion of the Gump Effect, where the line between truth and fiction is not simply blurred but destroyed completely.
And while there's no global crisis because Storage Wars is staged and the things they find in the compartments are planted, we are creating a world of "sure, it's bullshit, but that doesn't matter," and that matters very much indeed.
(BTW, here's a lengthy but interesting legal discussion of how Storage Wars is protected by the First Amendment. IANAL, but I think it says that, if Charles Van Doren had been an employee of "Twenty-One" instead of an actual contestant, it would have been okay to give him the answers to hype the show's ratings.)
Anyone on Facebook knows the amount of fraudulent garbage floating around. Some, like the repeated bogus pictures of sick children who will get a donation if you "like" the page, or the "Can You Name A State That Begins With A Capital Letter?" postings are tricks to harvest your address and that of your friends for the purpose of spamming you.
Annoying, but basically harmless in the grand scheme. And no matter how often you send people to Snopes, they will continue to fall for this crap. There is indeed a sucker born every minute and they post a lot.
Once actual money is changing hands, however, the game changes slightly. New York's attorney general just cracked down on fraudulent on-line reviews. That should be good news, but, given the culture of cruelty and "I'm alright, Jack" of the Internet, a lot of comments have been, "So what? I knew they were bogus. Why should they be illegal?"
Well, because the law is there to protect victims. Rejoice you are not one of them, but don't be a jerk about it. Maybe it is foolish to walk down a dark alley, but does that really mean it shouldn't be illegal to hang out in dark alleys, knock people over their heads and take their money?
Real people have a First Amendment right to be as phony and dishonest as they like in their reviews, but when positive material is paid for, it becomes advertising and the game changes. Deceptive advertising is an exception to "free speech," unless Citizens United means that Campbells can now put the marbles back in the soup for its TV commercials.
More than that, it's one thing to laugh at people who are more gullible than you are, and to allow them to be robbed by liars. It's quite another to have to live in a country where the easily-deceived get to help choose our leaders. And when all that the liars, race-baiters and fringe lunatic activists have to do to set the gullible voters off is to crop a photo, flip it and accuse the president and his wife of hating America, well, Internet fraud becomes your problem, too.
Jefferson famously said he'd rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than a country with government and no newspapers, but hearing the entire quote rather than that snippet is critical to his meaning:
The people are the only censors
of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep
these to the true principles of their institution. To punish
these errors too severely would be to suppress the only
safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these
irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full
information of their affairs thro' the channel of the public
papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate
the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments
being the opinion of the people, the very first object
should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to
decide whether we should have a government without
newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I
should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I
should mean that every man should receive those papers
and be capable of reading them.
In other words, voters need to be educated in order for them to be informed by a free press. To that end, the media should not promote lies, either to separate fools from their money or to further the goals of dishonest politicians.
Instead, we have legitimatized deceptive political advertising and excessive classification of governmental information as "secret," while defunding public education. It's not a conspiracy, exactly, but it sure isn't a good combination for the country.
Here are some signs of hope:
1. It's one thing to have Pab Sungenis point out the ridiculous nature of reality TV. When Blondie goes after it, that might (pleasepleaseplease) signal the emerging of a mainstream trend.
2. I wasn't too impressed when Ariana Huffington announced a change in comments at HuffPost, given that the site is powered by moronic click-bait to start with, but the suspension of comments at Popular Science, if it stirs up enough of this sort of chatter, might have an impact. (pleasepleasepleaseindeed)
Okay, this, then, is your moment of zen:
Speaking of the president, and why so many people hate him, here's Keith Knight with a courageous though somewhat sinister commentary on what he and the prez have in common:
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