Cultural Dementia by David Andress
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
One of those books which function as a magnifying mirror.
The older you get – and the more mistakes you’ve made, the less you like of what you see when facing it.
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My friend and coworker asked me the other day:
“Why do these people hate each-other so passionately?”
“Because they are rational. They have reached their present convictions as the result of a rational process. Hence they are convinced they are absolutely right. Then, when anybody expresses a different opinion, they interpret ‘dissent’ as a personal attack. My ‘truth’ having been reached in a rational manner means that all other opinions must be false. Defending them – against all ‘evidence’, means that these people are either provocative or, even, outright destructive.”
“But being rational doesn’t include being open to the possibility of being wrong?”
“I’ll have to rephrase. ‘They are convinced they are acting in a rational manner’. In fact, we, humans, are ‘rationalizing’ rather than ‘thinking rationally’. We use whatever arguments/information we have at our disposal to justify whatever conviction we already harbor. And only when reality slaps us in our faces we ‘open up’. Even science and justice work out this way.
“Innocent until proven guilty”. Only scientists and law-enforcers are already accustomed to the possibility that things may not be exactly as they previously thought they were. Politically minded people are still learning.”
Some of my right-of-center friends maintain that political correctness is a leftist aberration while some of my left-of-center friends are convinced that most conservatives are bigoted male chauvinists cum white supremacists cum LGBTQ+ haters.
I’m afraid both are mistaken.
The way I see it, none of this has anything to do with left nor right and everything to those on each side of the divide driving themselves into self allocated and mutually exclusive corners.
Otherwise said, this dichotomy is a consequence of populism.
People residing in each ideological corner are constantly barraged with messages telling them exactly what they have prepared themselves to hear.
People residing in each corner are constantly barraged with messages deemed appropriate by those who reckon there is something to be gained, by ‘them’, from keeping those people as far apart as possible.
Maybe now, that Cambridge Analytica has just hit the fan, we’ll start to understand how fake this whole thing is.
And I can’t wrap this up without mentioning something which really bothers me.
Scott Adams, blog.dilbert.com
The ‘run of the mill’ populism is directed towards the ordinary people. Which have a valid excuse for not knowing what’s happening to them.
Political correctness is a self sustaining bubble which was generated and is maintained inside a supposedly more sophisticated medium.
Intellectually more sophisticated medium….
Hopefully, Zizek’s arguments will help us puncture this bubble!
Click on the picture above and see for yourself.
The current “Me too” campaign – long overdue, should be an eye opener.
Pointing out the perpetrators is a good start and we have a long way to go.
If we want to significantly reduce sexual harassment we need to examine ourselves, men and women, in a mirror.
How many times, as men and women, have we heard other men bragging about their sexual exploits, and said nothing?
How many times have we learned about other men using their rank/position to sexually impose themselves upon women, our colleagues, and did nothing?
And these were the easy ones…
Who raised and educated the present generation of sexual predators? Their mothers and fathers? Their teachers and neighbors? Who had put together the ‘sex sells’ culture which currently permeates everything?
How many women had voted for the ‘American Pussy Grabber’, despite the fact that he had proudly bragged about the whole thing? Why so many women, including ‘his’ wife, agreed that receiving oral sex in the Oval Office was something completely different from ‘having sex with that woman’?
How many women, including actresses, have used their charms to snare their bosses/business partners? And got away with it?
Why is it that in most countries the legislation which punishes the ‘working girls’ does not incriminate their clients?
A lot of pundits on both sides of the aisle are bending over backwards trying to explain how come Trump has captured so many ‘hearts and souls’.
Here’s a very poignant explanation from a seemingly independent minded, hence free, commentator who calls himself Tonkerdog1:
“This is a different cat. This is a different phenomenon,” Luntz told reporters after conducting the focus group. “This is real. I’m having trouble processing it. Like, my legs are shaking,” he added.
What we seem to have here is a classic case of people so fed up with what they perceive as happening around them that they fall for the first con man callous enough to grab the opportunity.
I’m not going to bore you with facts about how many times Trump changed his mind and things like that. You can read them by yourself. Just click here. I’m not even going to ask you why didn’t you saw this coming when he said that:
‘You have to take out their families’
What I am going to ask you is:
What if he’s actually sincere when he says that he doesn’t really care (for anything else but his own ego)?
And why should he?
It seems that his ‘bellowing’ followers do not read much.
“Trump Wrongs the Right”?
So what?
The Internet is choke full with ‘the Media is full of shit’ messages. Why should people start believing what the media publishes now?
When are we going to understand that the Trumps of this world don’t come out of the blue?
Not a single one of them could have become what he is today without enough of us giving him a lot of credit.
Despite the fact that not a single one of them cares a iota about any of us.
A twenty year old intern was “fired for posting a photo of herself and a friend in a cotton field with the caption, “Our inner [n–ger] came out today.” She later apologized invoking a “lack of my better judgment.”
Looking from the other side of the Atlantic this is rather exaggerate.
OK, I understand why calling someone a ‘nigger’ could be seen as an insult. But if you refer to yourself as such?
In fact, all what she said was that the two of them were doing work which not so long ago was done by ‘niggers’. While they seemed to be enjoying performing their duties.
I don’t think she erred there. She just doesn’t seem to understand (anymore?) the world as people our age do. Could this be a sign for us to let the old ghosts find some peace?
‘Politically correctness’ hits again, and some of us are not even aware of what’s going on.
I know, it’s easy for me to speak like this. I don’t live there. But what if my emotional detachment from this issue allows me to look deeper into the matter?
And no, we should not simply forget what had happened. Just learn the lesson – so that we’ll never have to repeat it – and move on. If we keep pestering that wound in an inappropriate way (nigger is just a word, we give it its meaning) it will stay open. For as long as we encourage it to fester. Do we really want this?
PS Politically correctness “involves changing or avoiding language that might offend anyone“. If we keep sliding down this slope we’ll soon end up unable to open our mouths. It’s damn hard not to offend ‘anyone’, sooner or later.