Post by midcan5 on Jun 26, 2016 13:42:03 GMT -5
Long ago I wrote a piece in which a holocaust survivor and a concentration camp authority sat opposite each other on America's modernist media while the interviewer and audience listened to each point of view. I wanted to capture the absurdity of modern journalism in which nothing is really right or wrong. They are only points of view. Say anything, you won't be challenged. My example was a extreme stretch, but listening last evening to our media on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton my head spun. It is difficult to tell is it media which is uncritical or the counterpoint: in order to appease the audience must all sides be presented as valid points of view? Objectivity is fine, but listening to complete balderdash as if it was a valid viewpoint says lots about the listening public. Is America growing totally uncritical or has partisanship so blinded people they only hear what fits into the place they call their head?
'Peter E. Gordon — The Authoritarian Personality Revisited'
"If Adorno was right, then Trumpism cannot be interpreted as an instance of a personality or a psychology; it would have to be recognized as the thoughtlessness of the entire culture. But it is a thoughtlessness and a penchant for standardization that today marks not just Trump and his followers but nearly all forms of culture, and nearly all forms of discourse. The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche-markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourses today. Instead of a public sphere we have what Habermas long ago called the re-feudalization of society and the mere performance of publicity before an abject public that has grown accustomed to inaction. The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network. Expression is displacing critique. It should astonish us more than it does that so many people now confess to learning about the news through comedy shows, where audiences can experience their convictions only with the an ironist’s laughter. A strange phenomenon of half-belief has seized consciousness, as if ignorance were tinged with the knowingness and shame that ideology enables not actual criticism but mere thoughtlessness. A critical public sphere would involve argument rather than irony. But publicity today has shattered into a series of niche markets within which one swoons to ones preferred slogan and one already knows what one knows. Name just about any political position and what sociologists call “pillarization”—or what the Frankfurt School called “ticket” thinking—will predict almost without fail a full suite of opinions. This is as true for enthusiasts in the Democratic Party as it is for the zealots who support Trump. This phenomenon of standardization through the mass media signifies not the return of fascism but the dissolution of critical consciousness itself, and it heralds the slow emergence of something rather different than political struggle: the mediatized enactment of politics in quotation marks where all political substance is slowly being drained away." www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-personality-revisited-reading-adorno-in-the-age-of-trump/
Slogans = tweets = slogans = Trumpspeak
www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/06/spitballing.html
Schoolyards never change?
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/09/california-primary-trump-rhetoric-school-bully
"In 1964, the Republican Party made a fateful decision to “go hunting where the ducks are” in Barry Goldwater’s (in)famous words."
balkin.blogspot.com/2016/06/hunting-where-ducks-are-part-ii.html
'Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem'
"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html
"It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." Harry Frankfurt
'Peter E. Gordon — The Authoritarian Personality Revisited'
"If Adorno was right, then Trumpism cannot be interpreted as an instance of a personality or a psychology; it would have to be recognized as the thoughtlessness of the entire culture. But it is a thoughtlessness and a penchant for standardization that today marks not just Trump and his followers but nearly all forms of culture, and nearly all forms of discourse. The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche-markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourses today. Instead of a public sphere we have what Habermas long ago called the re-feudalization of society and the mere performance of publicity before an abject public that has grown accustomed to inaction. The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network. Expression is displacing critique. It should astonish us more than it does that so many people now confess to learning about the news through comedy shows, where audiences can experience their convictions only with the an ironist’s laughter. A strange phenomenon of half-belief has seized consciousness, as if ignorance were tinged with the knowingness and shame that ideology enables not actual criticism but mere thoughtlessness. A critical public sphere would involve argument rather than irony. But publicity today has shattered into a series of niche markets within which one swoons to ones preferred slogan and one already knows what one knows. Name just about any political position and what sociologists call “pillarization”—or what the Frankfurt School called “ticket” thinking—will predict almost without fail a full suite of opinions. This is as true for enthusiasts in the Democratic Party as it is for the zealots who support Trump. This phenomenon of standardization through the mass media signifies not the return of fascism but the dissolution of critical consciousness itself, and it heralds the slow emergence of something rather different than political struggle: the mediatized enactment of politics in quotation marks where all political substance is slowly being drained away." www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-personality-revisited-reading-adorno-in-the-age-of-trump/
Slogans = tweets = slogans = Trumpspeak
www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/06/spitballing.html
Schoolyards never change?
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/09/california-primary-trump-rhetoric-school-bully
"In 1964, the Republican Party made a fateful decision to “go hunting where the ducks are” in Barry Goldwater’s (in)famous words."
balkin.blogspot.com/2016/06/hunting-where-ducks-are-part-ii.html
'Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem'
"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html
"It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." Harry Frankfurt