Category: Media Literacy

Why Is Sanders Running As A Democrat?

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(Somewhat ironically, a technical error prevented me from getting an archive of the first night with the “new set.” I’ve embedded the livestream from Facebook here, but I’ve only got the last ten minutes locally and right now FB is not letting me download the video directly. If/when I can get this archived on YouTube, I will. For now, you can find it here: https://www.facebook.com/144898762238389/videos/496311224370776). Yes I know the audio’s out of sync.)

Why is Bernie running as a Democrat?

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders takes the stage on the first night of the second 2020 Democratic U.S. presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan, July 30, 2019. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

One of the most-often asked questions I see – or depending on who’s talking and what their purpose is, accusations – about Bernie Sanders is why he’s running on the Democratic ticket. There are a number of reasons, some easier to see and obvious, some not so much.

First and foremost, he’s running on the Democratic ticket because the two major parties have the process locked down and an independent candidate doesn’t have a chance in hell at winning.

Now maybe – MAYBE – if he finds a way to get on the national ticket without the democratic party at this point, if they decide to keep playing to power, depending on how things go over the next couple of months – after all this work and in this time of great crisis that screams out with the voice of millions that the things Sanders has worked for must be done now, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that he could win the electoral college as a write-in. He needs 270 votes. 9 states, for a total of 53 electors, don’t allow write-ins.

The rest – 483 – do, with various requirements. In Michigan, for instance, you have to file a letter of intent by the beginning of September and have a list of electors. Each of them must have been a resident of the congressional district for which they’re voting for one year, and a US citizen for ten. But right now I think the inclination of the campaign is to do everything possible to save the one remaining party structure that *could* be saved to energize a united President and Congress to get some things done. Certainly that’s not the Republicans, so the Dems are what’s left.

But in the end, Bernie’s allegiance is to this country, not a party. How that will lead him to decide the best way to pursue this situation, I don’t know. I think if he made sure to dot his I’s and cross his T’s he could be an eligible write-in candidate. Depending on how many districts in which he can win the popular vote at that point, he’s got a margin of 213 electoral votes to work with.

But in the end his allegiance is to doing the right thing for the people of this nation. He’s entirely uncorrupted by special interests.

That’s. Why. The. Party. Doesn’t. Want. Him. To. Win.

That’s why the power that props the party up, including all the media companies who make all the big campaign donations, do not want him to win.

That is why it does not require a conspiracy. The big money interests, including those who control most of the information you see, do not want a healthy, educated population. Having a healthy, educated population creates opportunity for you which means it creates competition for them in an “open market.”

This is not an open market. If this market was open, we’d all be making plenty. We’re not.

This is not a free country.

You are not free when you don’t have your health.

You are not free when you aren’t taught quality critical thinking skills. You can not be free if you can’t think clearly. You can’t think clearly if you’re surrounded by carefully crafted messaging with the direct purpose of keeping you stuck where you are and falling like you have been for decades.

It would be easy and poetic to say that we’ve become so advertising-besotted that we can’t tell a real message from an ad anymore, but sometimes poetry doesn’t tell the story. The reality is not that you are stupid.

The reality is that you have been kept ignorant. What you hear and see shapes what you believe, and no matter what your race, class, culture, identity, background, current status, that is the truth.

There is a very small group of people who control what you hear and see for their own interests. That is also the truth. In much the same way it does not require a formal conspiracy for like interests to pursue like ends, it does not require traditional authoritarianism to keep at least enough people at heel to discourage the rest who aren’t from rising up in protest.

One of the ways that works is through recursive authoritarianism. So and so has this going on at worked that could be improved or has ethical considerations that concern you, but it’s clear that your best interest, and the company’s, is to simply not acknowledge that out loud. So you agree to say nothing and now whatever your position, you have to use it to ensure nobody else does either. Authoritarianism.

You are constantly at risk of losing your livelihood if you do the right thing ethically when you’re doing business. I have been constantly paraphrasing a line from Robert Heinlein lately: the survival of the species is the only universal morality.

Willful ignorance – the selfish pretense to stupidity

A whole BUNCH of people are about to hit what a lot of people, including people like me, have lived with most or all of our lives. It is not going to be pretty.

And where we are mostly not prepared is in our own minds and hearts to just admit that we have been wrong, and do something about it.

You are watching everything change, right now. It is changing precisely because IT HAS TO.

It’ll happen the easy way with good leadership – leadership that has consistently stood *against* all these abuses of power and resources, who has consistently worked in the best interests of *the people* and *the nation* and long-term sustainability and health and education and all the other things that go along with REAL freedom.

This is not an acute problem. This is the predictable result of a systemic problem. We can face that, or we can KEEP trying to pretend “it can’t happen here, not to us, we’re good people, my deity wouldn’t do that to me, we’re just trying to [insert euphemism to rationalize all the ego-driven bullshit of this planet], we’re doing the right thing, all these people who want all these changes are just self-interested, I just want what’s best for me.”

What’s best for all of us is to start working together instead of against each other. Abundance is everywhere. We have everything we need. We just refuse to let go of the things we don’t, because they’re comfortable. Because of that, we’ve all become far LESS comfortable than if a few of us weren’t so obstinate about their comfort.

The future is scary. The unknown is scary. The future is unknown. What is known is that we are at a key point in human history when we can no longer continue to pretend and act at the game of political leadership. We must lead, individually starting with ourselves, and in the world starting with a capable, competent, non-nonsense president who walks into the office with zero allegiance to anyone but the people who elected him.

The global coronavirus pandemic absolutely must be dealt with in an immediate fashion, and it is – as much as the ham-handed boobs currently running the country can manage it. But we absolutely must not ignore the lessons it brings, because frankly there will be more if we don’t re-prioritize IMMEDIATELY. To simply deal with the immediate problem is to remain unprepared for the next one.

Bernie Sanders understands that and is doing his best with a system that has been corrupted almost beyond repair. Personally, I hope if he loses the Democratic nomination he chooses to move forward as a write-in candidate in any state where he can’t get on the ballot as an independent, immediately if he loses the Democratic primary, which *right now* it appears he may, but we’ll have to see what happens. The concept of faithless electors exists, too. We have no idea how the national conventions, which are traditionally where the nominations take place, will turn out yet. A lot can change between now and then. I think it would be a mistake to start running independently *before* the official things are officially official, unless they try to drag ass past the deadlines for indys or write-ins to get on ballots.

But if they officially reject Sanders as a nominee…boy. I just can’t see him as head of the Senate. That’s not his job. And the offer would have to be made – which would immediately break Biden’s campaign promise – and he’d have to accept, neither of which we know anything of right now.

March 19, 2020
Doublespeak
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Say One Thing, Mean Another

This started out being a “classic” repost and by the time I got done fixing the twenty-year-old writing, it was a new article. The original article has been reposted as originally written in late 2001/2002, at this link. Doublespeak (2001)

Doublespeak is the art and subterfuge of using language to misdirect, misinform, or flat-out lie. It often involves logical fallacy, intentional appeals to emotion over fact, and other crimes against critical thought. It can take the form of euphemism, “soft” language, the use of words and phrasing that have a high emotional valence but low informational content to appeal to the baser instincts rather than the intellect.

As a huge fan of artists like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, the use of language and euphemism is simultaneously fascinating, horrifying, and hilarious to me. The contortions people will go through to avoid acknowledging a simple reality are just insane.

A great example of this came up in my personal life while this article was in draft: apparently it’s now fashionable to refer to yourself as “sober” if you’ve used “hard” (physically addictive) drugs in the past (e.g. opioids, amphetamines and methamphetamines, cocaine) but now you only smoke pot.

This is, of course, absolutely silly; a self-serving, dishonest, manipulative, and disingenuous word game played by addicts (and I am one so please spare me the complaints about your value judgements relating to that word) so they can pretend their addiction is somehow “different” from the addiction that has social stigma attached. You’re not sober if you’re high – that’s not even an observation, it’s a tautology. No amount of self-serving wordplay will change that – and in the context of addiction, it’s potentially fatal bit of self-deceit, due to the nature of addiction and what it does to the thought processes of the addict.

This underscores just one of the reasons doublespeak is so insidious and harmful; it helps people maintain self-destructive lies. What amazes me is people craft these excuses for their spin and jive, and they’re all self-serving bovine excrement. “I don’t want to be stigmatized as an addict; so I just stigmatize everyone else who’s an addict and then reject that label for myself because I’m better than those people I’m unfairly stigmatizing in the very process of complaining about being unfairly stigmatized.” And we’ve become so corrupted in our thinking that people don’t even hear themselves when they say this stuff.

Fundamental Dishonesty

Doublespeak is destructive in that it is essentially dishonest. It can be, and often has been, used as a tool of manipulation by governments and other leaders and officials to attempt to avoid consequences of egregiously terrible actions by making them sound less terrible. It is this particular aspect of doublespeak that will consume most of the rest of this article.

Each year, the National Council of Teachers of English announces the Doublespeak awards. They describe the award as “an ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.”

Source material for this article includes the Book of Lists #3, and the Book of Lists of the 90’s, both from the editors of The People’s Almanac, with additional material provided by the NCTE website.

Without further ado, I present you with some shining examples of doublespeak.

President George Herbert Walker Bush – When the US invaded Panama in 1989 to bring Manuel Noriega to justice for allegations of drug trafficking and a host of other charges, Bush was positively bent over backwards trying to avoid using the word “invasion.” Instead, he “sent troops down to Panama.” He “deployed forces.” He “directed United States forces to execute…preplanned missions in Panama.” Never once did we “invade.”

During his campaign for President in 1988, Bush swore that there would be “no net loss of wetlands.” After he took office, he “clarified” his promise to really mean there would be no net wetlands loss “except where there is a high proportion of land which is wetlands.”

In English, this means “except where the protection is needed most,” like the Alaskan Tundra, the Florida Everglades, and the Outer Banks and Great Dismal Swamp areas of North Carolina.

After the first US-Iraq War in 1990 (as Bill Hicks pointed out so eloquently, even referring to this event as a “war” is an exercise in doublespeak), Bush proposed a Middle East disarmament initiative that was supposed to stop “the proliferation of conventional and unconventional weapons in the Middle East.” Less than a month after this proposal was made, the Bush administration announced plans to sell over $5 billion in new weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

President George W. Bush – Ol’ Gee Dubya’s presence on the awards list should come as no surprise. Indeed, I predicted it in the original (2002) version of this article:

Although he hasn’t won one yet, I suspect that GHW’s little boy is gonna get a nomination himself, for declaring a war on terrorism and then announcing the sale of 50 brand new F-16’s to Israel, a country which is by any standard engaged in terrorist acts, covertly and overtly. Even more disconcerting is the fact that this author is questioning whether to delete this entry altogether, because one of the first acts in the “war on terrorism” was to make dissent against the actions of the US Government in this “war” a crime in and of itself.

Bush II ended up winning twice by himself, and once with his entire cabinet. Among the linguistic felonies NCTE selected:
- In 2003, NCTE’s award centered around the heavy euphemism employed in the search for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (which, at the time of this writing 17 years later, still haven’t been found). Use of phrasing like “a growing fleet of…aerial vehicles” and the assertion that “Iraq continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised” were complete fabrications, with these and many others intended to suggest that we actually knew the weapons were there but hadn’t found them yet, when the functional reality was that all we knew is that we had sold Iraq various materiel that could be used to create weapons, but never had any evidence they had done so.
  - I will bolster NCTE’s award citation by pointing out that one of the most egregious uses of doublespeak in the contest of the second Iraq War was Bush II’s repeated reference to Saddam Hussein “gassing his own people,” “a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people,” and so forth, but never once mentioned that not only did we sell them all of the gear and intelligence they used for those attacks, it was Bush’s own Defense Secretary, Don Rumsfeld, who demanded Iraq be removed from the State Department’s list of terror sponsoring nations so we could sell that materiel to them, back in 1983 when he was acting as Special Envoy to the Middle East under Ronald Reagan.
  - Worth noting: to this day, most people either don’t know that we sold Hussein “dual-use material” including anthrax, botulism, tetanus, and c. perfringens, or they think it’s a wild-eyed conspiracy theory in spite of the reality that everything we know about it comes directly from US Senate Committee reports.
- Bush’s 2006 award was given in recognition of his September 15, 2005 speech regarding Hurricane Katrina, in which he made lovely, flowery remarks about poverty and racial discrimination and how we needed to ‘confront this poverty” and “rise above the legacy of inequality…” a week after he signed an executive order allowing federal contractors rebuilding from Katrina to pay less than the prevailing wage, suspending a sixty-four year old law to do it.
But wait, there’s more!

More Examples

I don’t want to get into the underhanded and dishonest game of simply re-writing press releases and calling it original work; you can view the historical list of winners of the Doublespeak Award at the NCTE website.

There are, of course, plenty of examples that haven’t won awards.

President Bill Clinton – Many readers here should be able to remember Clinton’s most egregious assaults on critical thinking fairly well. His most famous, of course, came during the Lewisnki scandal, during which Clinton (and his wife, Hillary) engaged in some of the most comical linguistic calisthenics ever recorded. Clinton’s initial position was that he was entirely innocent of wrongdoing, going so far as to say “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski” during a press briefing prior to the 1998 State of the Union address. It subsequently came to light, however, that Clinton was deliberately misleading. He later testified that his intent was to use the definition of “sexual relations” laid out in the investigation documents, which were worded in such a way that, by the letter of the given definition, simply receiving oral sex was not “sexual relations” because Clinton didn’t touch any sexual part of Lewinski’s body, and the definition given during the impeachment investigation required that touch to qualify as “sexual relations.”

Several months later, Clinton finally admitted that “we did have a relationship that was…inappropriate,” but this was only after a series of grammatical distortions that confounds description. Aside from the core deceit, other “highlights” of this episode include Hillary’s “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring…” interview, and the infamous exchange described in the Starr Report where Clinton’s prevaricative response to a question about whether a lie had been told went as follows:

QUESTION: “Your—that statement is a completely false statement. Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with President Clinton was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?”

CLINTON: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is means. If is means is, and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means, there is none, that was a completely true statement.

No matter your definition of “is,” it’s safe to say that the above is a prime example of doublespeak.

President Jimmy Carter – In late 1979, when the US military failed miserably in trying to recover US hostages being held in Tehran, Iran, Carter reported the action as an “incomplete success.” Carter went on to justify the government bailout of the Chrysler corporation by saying that “this legislation does not violate the principle of letting free enterprise function on its own, because Chrysler is unique in its present circumstances.” Like his successors, Carter was less than forthcoming about foreign diplomatic policy relating to arms reduction. He bragged that his administration never supported “nations which stand for principles with which their people violently disagree, and which are completely antithetical to our principles.” In spite of this heroic stance, the US under the Carter administration continued to provide aid both military and financial to some 26 governments which were known to systematically violate the unalienable rights of their people.

Lest we think this is only about Presidents, let us turn our attention to the Judicial Branch and the 1991 US Supreme Court – The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

In 1991’s case of Harmelin v. Michigan, the Supremes heard a case in which the defendant had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole for possessing 672 grams of cocaine. In their ruling, it was decided that while such a punishment might be cruel, it was not unusual, and therefore it was constitutional.

The logic behind this ruling, in simple English, is that as long as a punishment is frequently inflicted, it is constitutional, regardless of how cruel it is. Perhaps our founding fathers should have said “cruel or unusual…”

The court also offered an early preview of the current kerfluffle at the southern US border and the endless game-playing about refugees seeking asylum.

In 1980, the Refugee Act was passed, authorizing political asylum to a person with “a well-grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, membership in a particular group, or political opinion.” In a small town in Guatemala in the late mid-80’s, Jario Elias-Zacarias, 19, was attacked by masked guerrillas wielding automatic weapons in his home. The guerrillas demanded that Elias-Zacarias fight with them against the Guatemalan government.

Rather than fight, Zacarias fled to the US to seek political asylum, but was denied. He appealed, and eventually the case made it to the US Supreme Court where Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing his judgment to deny the young man asylum, said that he had failed to show that the guerrillas would persecute him for his political opinions “rather than because of his refusal to fight with them.” Justice Scalia never got around to explaining how refusing to fight with rebel guerrillas against his government isn’t a political opinion.

US Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) – Hatch, a proponent of the death penalty, once said that “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.” Read that again: state-sanctioned killing of human beings is “our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”

Yep.

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February 11, 2020
Conspiracies: The Truth Is Not “Out There”

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(This is a curated combination of two different related pieces; the video, “See Oh En Spiracy,” and this article which originally appeared at https://web.archive.org/web/20100816230908/http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/08/15/The-Truth-Which-Is-NOT-e2809cOut-Theree2809d.aspx. A few minor edits have been made; the only substantive change is the addition of information relating to “Heinlein’s/Hanlon’s Razor.”)

We as a nation have become seduced by conspiracies. The latest: That BP is actually showing a *second* well in the gulf on their cameras, because the first is still leaking and they don’t want us to know.

Bullshit. We have to stop passing on bullshit information like this when there are important things we can be doing that actually matter and will make a difference to our ultimate survival.

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Known variously as “Hanlon’s Razor” and “Heinlein’s Razor,” this basic idea forms a solid line between healthy skeptic and frothing whackjob. (On the ambiguity of sourcing; I first read the phrase, in precisely this working, in Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love,” published in 1973; the Wiki article that insists on attributing the phrase to Robert J. Hanlon cites his first publication in 1980. While in fairness it must be said that the basic formulation is at least a couple of centuries old, if the choice is between Hanlon and Heinlein, Heinlein clearly gets the nod.)

– The wells in question are less than 250 feet from each other. Not “miles” as has often been asserted.

– Several of these videos tie everything back in with “The global banking elite.” This phrase inevitably proves, when one follows the trail of paranoid conspiracy theorism back from the person who utters that phrase to the identity of the “global banking elite,” to be “OMGJOOZ!” This has been so consistent that I don’t bother following the trail anymore when I see this phrase. I know where it’s going – to THE J0000Z THE EVUL JOOOOZ WHO CONTROL EVERYTHING IT’S THE JOOZ THE JOOZ THE JOOOOOOZ ZIONIST ROTHCHILD BILDERBURG CITY BANK OF ENGLAND FREEMASONS UFO’S BLACK HELICOPTERS AND JOOOOOOZ. F’n ridiculous bullshit is what it is.

– Nobody has managed to explain what purpose there would be to this GREAT BIG CONSPIRACY, nor have they explained how enormous companies with the power and resources to push governments around and demand carte blanche to destroy the planet at will for profit are suddenly so inept that a couple of rednecks and slackers with nothing to do but stare at a live fed of the ocean floor all day can see through their clever ruse…a ruse which is designed to what, convince us there’s no oil spill? If they were going to do that, why not do it two months ago? You know, before everybody started worrying about Armageddon, before BP took a multi-billion-dollar stock hit and destroyed their brand name, before people were pissed off and scared to actually start getting off their asses and thinking about how to reduce their dependence on oil? Because you know, THAT kind of conspiracy would have made sense. This is like a conspiracy to go close the barn door after the horses have escaped.

This horrendous catastrophe has emphasized, in the strongest terms possible without causing immediate profound loss of life, that we must eliminate our dependence on petroleum. Not on “foreign oil,” on oil period. It has shined a bright light on the stark reality that we must find alternatives to petrochemicals, and we must, immediately begin doing everything that we haven’t but should have been to reduce consumption, or these kinds of things will keep happening and building on other things until this planet is no longer suitable for human life.

People don’t want to deal with that. At ALL. They’d rather ignore it and fiddle while Rome – or Moscow – burns. Tell you the truth, I’d rather myself. I’m sure you would as well – who among us wouldn’t rather have fun than worry about all these heavy issues? I understand and I sympathize…but that attitude is so dangerous and so hypnotizing. You can already see it – the discussion has already begun to shift away from “we must reduce our consumption” to “we must find someone else to blame.”

Because we don’t want to blame ourselves. If we do that it means we have to give up our comforts and go through the difficulty and expense of learning new habits. It’s almost a really gigantic, society-magnitude manifestation of the suicidal hopelessness response. I’m sure you learn of this in Finland – the danger of being lost out in the cold and thinking “I’ll just lay down for a minute, a nap would be so nice,” and then you wake up with your ass frozen to death.

I’m afraid that’s what we’re seeing right now in many people, this kind of response. Ignore it and it will go away. Stop thinking about what I have to do to make my little difference and start trying to force the Big Evil Oil Company to solve everything. If we can just be angry enough at them we can make them fix it with their Big Evil Company magic and we’ll still be able to drive our Humvee’s and Escalades in the suburbs, we won’t have to change our own behavior.

We’re wrong. We will have to change our behavior. If we don’t, we will die. We must stop trying to divert our own attention from the things we need to do to stop abusing this planet.

August 20, 2010
Shearing “Sheeple”

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Once upon a time the word “sheeple” was a clever little riposte reflecting the frustration of some parts of our culture with others who seemed to be thoughtless and easily led.

That time was around the time Hendrix got done playing the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock, and since then it’s usually more a like a trite contrived attempt at in-group signalling because it generally comes from a fairly well-defined range of the ideological spectrum.

This is a snarky li’l rant about how lame it is to be saying it fifty years after the last time it meant anything and thinking you’ve just won the game.

August 1, 2010
Right Wing Media Is Professional Wrestling (2010)

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I created a bunch of videos and other digital between 2009 and 2015 or so about a variety of topics, sort of the first version of my official career as a media critic and political analyst and all-around demagogue. Much of it was just free-form ranting on whatever subject I might find at hand, as is this video from 2010, the first zombie content I’m digging up and gathering together under the heading of “JH Classic.”

In this video, we discuss the similarities between how right-wing media builds a disinformation narrative using the same tools employed by professional wrestlers and promoters back in the days when “exhibition wrestling” was a carnival sideshow and often involved conning local men into the ring for fights, which the promoter and his assistants would take bets (“make book”) on from the crowd while suckering their hometown boy into a fight against someone who had already lost a couple of matches and clearly couldn’t fight, but then magically became a martial arts master when Local Boy gets in the ring with him…after all Local Boy’s friends have made bets on him to win.

The scheme varied, and continues doing so to this day, but that was the core scam, the main “work” of the spectacle. In this video I discuss how the same basic psychology is used to befuddle and mesmerize consumers of mass media – and make no mistake, although my focus here was on Fox News and the right, the rest of the spectrum is not walking the moral high ground on this either. You may be able to rationalize some of it by noting it’s not as extreme or as misleading, or even fall into the “ends justify the means” thinking by noting that even if it’s the same tactics, the goal of the strategy is more ethically supportable from the left.

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It really isn’t; the goal is profit, not ideology, and neither your heroes nor mine are any less susceptible to its allure than those we disagree with ideologically.

I’m not going to re-litigate the video here. I chose this particular video because it’s one of several I filmed while staying with my friends Vince and Kym in Royal Oak, Mi. during the spring and summer of 2010. It was they who suggested I go to college, which I did shortly thereafter. I’ve often discussed how I felt like I’d reached the limits of my ability to self-educate in terms of nomenclature and terminology and tools to present and defend my positions in the “big leagues,” e.g. in a context where that level of academic knowledge is expected as a sign of competence like public speaking, or being an effective activist. Plus it gave me source content to use for playing around with filters and effects in Adobe Premiere. So this video is kind of a snapshot of that moment, basically.

It’s well worth noting how well this strategy has played out and how much more pervasive it’s become in the last decade; we’ve elected Donald Trump, a guy who has literally been an entertainer in the professional wrestling business, to the United States Presidency. Maybe if his fans understood some of this stuff – or if his opponents in the “independent liberal” Facebook Page-o-Sphere understood why they shouldn’t have embraced these tactics in spite of their equal utility as clickbait to generate ad revenue – we wouldn’t have that problem.

Enjoy, and please remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel, there’s a bunch of old content that will be visible there over the coming weeks, plus I’ll be creating and publishing new stuff there as well!

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxSU-ajrcL4[/embedyt]

August 1, 2010
Mediacrity

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Examining media framing and how information is reported and tilted in ways that are destructive to useful discourse, and other failures of journalism in the context of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. More of a rant by the end. Interesting to note it was right around this time – and I mean it literally may have been the day I filmed this – that I made the decision to go back to college and elevate my own skills. Also, I used to make a lot more puns and little in-jokes and things in my titles, I wonder when I stopped doing that. Probably because it’s crap for SEO.

This is what my media criticism looked like *before* I was objectively qualified to do it at a professional level.

Original description: JH uses an unjustifiably cheery headline as a starting point for discussing the ethical obligations of media.

July 22, 2010
My Apology To Rush Limbaugh

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Introduction & Opening Remarks

Back in 2009, there was this weird rash of situation where noted and thankfully now deceased right-wing propagandist-agitator and all-around anthropomorphic feminine hygiene product Rush Limbaugh would say something ridiculous and obnoxious, then a right-wing politician would call him out on it, then a week or two later that same politician would reverse course and apologize to Mr. Limbaugh.

As additional background context, back in the day on usenet’s alt.usenet.kooks group and other places, there was this fella – if I remember correctly it was the now departed Jamie Eckles – who used to write the most hilarious and deeply sarcastic “apologies” to the kooks he was trolling, like being sorry their home team big sports franchise can’t play worth a damn, that kind of thing.

It was in this spirit the original was written, and having come across it recently (2021) while trying to curate archives and realizing that both the subject of the piece and the friend who inspired it are now gone, decided to make it part of the public archive as a tribute to Mr. Eckles…and a constant reminder that Rush Limbaugh was an ignorant pig of a man that far too many people took seriously.

This piece has been edited from the original; a phrase used to refer to homophobes that was acceptable language when this was written no longer is, in my opinion, and a more suitable word that doesn’t itself invoke a slur has been substituted. In making this change I intend not to hide my error in judgement and my poor display of allyship, but to acknowledge and correct it. In recognition of shifting interpretations of things, I’d also like to point out that there’s a ton of sarcasm in this so when you’re seeing things that don’t sound like they’d be coming from me, like misogynist and islamophobic stuff? Yeah, that’s sarcasm. Kinda sucks I feel like I have to say that out loud now, but here we are.

-jh
July 6, 2021

I’m Sorry, Rush

In stark defiance of common sense and good taste, it seems that Rush Limbaugh, the Pundit of Palm Beach, has some how ascended from his rightful place as a fringe agitator shilling radio commercials to a legitimized conservative “leader” and, some are suggesting, potential candidate for President in 2012.

Rush Limbaugh’s booking photo from his arrest in 2006. These charges were eventually dropped by the local prosecutor. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Over the last few months, we’ve seen his lapdogs in the Republican party make the mistake of speaking their minds, only to recant time and time again when called out by this odious oxycontin overdoser. Say something bad about Rush one day…and apologize the next.

In keeping with this new tradition of reconciliation and regret, I too wish to make a public apology to Rush Limbaugh.

*ahem*

Dear Mr. Limbaugh:

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that you had such a bitter, miserable childhood, growing up in a home where your parents could afford to send you to broadcast school instead of making you actually work for a living. In a nation where so many of our children and young adults are lucky to find work at all, indeed in a nation where so many of our children have to work to survive, I understand the incredible burden of guilt that your short-cut to a lifetime of sitting on your ass for money must put on you. I’m sorry for not recognizing the depth of intestinal fortitude necessary to bear this onerous burden.

They Were All Against You From The Start

I’m sorry that you have been so viciously used and abused by not one, not two, but three different wives. Your multiple divorces are a stark testament to your unflagging respect for the institution of marriage. Obviously, the evil feminazis you unceremoniously dumped were merely ringers for the vast left-wing conspiracy, trying to bring you down and ruin your reputation by attempting to actually give a damn about you. You poor thing.

I’m sorry you spent so many years in the Boy Scouts without ever once earning a single merit badge. Obviously, the liberal thugs who lead the BSA recognized your sheer genius at an early age, and took every possible step to stop you from succeeding in life. But you got the last laugh, as you earned the most important merit badge of all: the praise and adulation of bootlicking Republican sellouts and their hate-filled, bigoted sycophants all across this great nation.

I’m sorry that the Ivy League curriculum of Southern Missouri State University was so liberal and so beyond your own intellectual scope that you were compelled to drop out after a year. Obviously the hidden cadre of brain surgeons, rocket scientists, political leaders, and multi-billionaires who have sprung from this pinnacle of advanced learning were against you from the start; threatened by your obviously superior intellect, they simply had to sabotage you. Kudos to you for rising above and refusing to let the MAN keep you down.

I’m sorry that your corporate lapdogs at Clear Channel and Premiere Radio saw fit to award you a $400 million contract last year. With your well-known back troubles, it’s unconscionable of them to expect you to carry that weight. Fortunately for you, in Palm Beach there’s a sizable population of illegal immigrants who will happily assist you for 20% of minimum wage or less, even while you agitate your ignorant, bigoted fan base to violence against them!

Betrayal and Impoverishment

I’m sorry that your hero, Ronald Reagan, has been revealed over time for the homophobic elitist economic fumble-thumb that he was. It must truly break your heart every time evil liberal reminds us that the unquestionably failed and destructive policy of “trickle-down” economics is called “Reaganomics” for a reason.

I’m sorry that you make more in a year for sitting on your hate-filled keister for an hour a day than many families in the US will make in a lifetime. Knowing that your personal income tax burden is going to increase – potentially causing you the loss of untold necessities like your five Palm Beach homes or your half-dozen cars that cost a cool half-million or so each – for the sake of allowing yet another drug-addicted, poverty-stricken, malingering minority welfare queen to feed her family for another month must really hurt.

I’m sorry that your 24,000 square foot main home was too small to make the life-size portrait of you that hangs in the front hall any larger…but then for you, life-size is already pretty large. If I get busted with a joint, I’ll eat government potatoes for 90 days and sleep on a concrete mattress. When you get busted with enough pharmaceutical opiates to put the entire Haight-Ashbury district to sleep for a month, you eat with Supreme Court justices and presidents, and sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom

I’m sorry that activist judges trying to write laws for themselves continue to sentence young people to years in overcrowded prisons for selling a little grass, but when it came time for you to pay the piper for your illegal Oxycontin and Viagra prescriptions, you were held to a different standard.

This is totally not fair to you, and it is unforgivable that these judges should put you in such a position.

It must prey terribly on your conscience to be the victim of such judicial disparity; you too deserve to be imprisoned just like a mortal man, and I can totally understand how hurt you must be that you were robbed of this opportunity to better understand that great underclass of self-defined losers in life who so courteously provide you a target for your hate.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

And speaking of drugs, I’m sorry that the half-dozen different doctors you went to in order to feed your Oxy addiction didn’t bother ahead of time to warn you that it would cause your reproductive organs to start malfunctioning, thus making it necessary to secure more illegal drugs in the form of Viagra when you take your trips to the Dominican Republic. Of course under ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t be able to imagine what relevance Viagra would have to a single, old, man vacationing in the Dominican Republic, but after years of listening to your show I don’t think it’s any secret that you like to screw young black people as hard and as often as possible.

I’m sorry that you had all that trouble with your ears a few years back. I’m also sorry that you were forced to be able to have a qualified medical professional attend to correcting that trouble when so many in the Welfare World get by just fine without so much as a decent set of teeth. Clearly this was just another liberal plot to cast you as weak and in need of the support of a doctor. I’m glad that you can hear again – but just in case, I’m publishing this in print so you can read it. I’m sorry to be so patronizing.

I’m sorry that Michael J. Fox fakes his Parkinson’s disease for the sake of pushing his evil baby-killing agenda. As you and I both know, all liberals are baby-killers who regularly conduct satanic rituals where they consume placentas and burn the corpses of dead babies to gain the favor of Evil. Clearly Fox is either not taking his medicine or, far more likely, he’s acting in order to gain sympathy from the ignorant so they will fall in to line and promote baby-killing, thus ensuring that Evil continues to be pleased. And you with nothing for protection but a microphone and 45% body fat. Poor fella.

I’m sorry that gay people think they should have the same rights to love and be loved as straight people. Obviously, as a man who has been married three times, you know better than most what constitutes a threat to the great institution of marriage.

I’m sorry that those evil feminazis refuse to admit that they want to be groped and manhandled by mouth-breathing, overweight old perverts. Especially the ones who buy Viagra and fly to the Dominican Republic. Obviously these women know in their hearts that it is their natural duty and obligation to not only tolerate but enjoy sexual harassment, and I’m sorry that we live in a world where it seems that only you and John Norman really understand the “natural order” of things.

I’m sorry that I didn’t take the bone out of my nose before I called your show that one time in Pittsburgh. I’m also sorry that the only reason people like Donovan McNabb is because he’s black. I’m also sorry that all composite police sketches of criminals look like Jesse Jackson…but hey, you know, they all look alike to us anyhow, right?

The Final Grievances Of Poor Rush

I’m sorry that the stupid American public was so outraged over that harmless little college prank at Abu Ghraib. Obviously since the babes were involved, this was all harmless fun. Besides, we all know that Muslims aren’t human anyway, so what’s the problem?

I’m sorry that the Republicans couldn’t field a black candidate, since that’s the only reason Obama won the presidency.

And finally, Rush, I’m sorry that you had to work so hard to hone and sharpen an entertainment persona deliberately calibrated to separate the most gullible marks from the biggest percentage of their dollars.

I’m sure that as you cash that $38 million/year paycheck and kick around your 24,000 square foot home, your heart is just breaking to think of all the senior citizens dying in their homes because they can’t afford heat.

I’m sure that your unbearable burden of guilt over the way these people throw their money at you can only be relieved by the liberal (if you’ll pardon the phrase) application of synthetic opiates and erectile dysfunction remedies.

I’m just so glad that, because of your position and political connections, you never need worry about criminal sanctions as a result of using these drugs illegally.

You bear your burdens with aplomb and courage, sir, and I’m sorry that more people don’t recognize your genius.

March 3, 2009