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delayed--well yes---the guy was "captured" (retaining the bbc quotation marks, which i like for some reason) sunday and the infotainment was released yesterday.
on the discussion more broadly:
there is something about the collapsing of policy into personal political ambitions that i object to fundamentally.
analytically, it seems a pathway straight to institutional narcissism, which is the fastest way to insure that an institution cuts itself off from feedback loops and becomes irrational--this following the market logic outlined by hayek no less.
a descriptive statement that traces a logic by means of which this collapse can be understood does nothing to allay that. it simply indicates that from a particular viewpoint, a rationality can be specified.
while for you, art, ancillary committments makes this not a problem, it surely is one from viewpoints that are not shaped by those same committments.
if you could apply the above critique to any institution, things get even worse when you are considering a state apparatus.
that it would actively manipulate information flows to conform to the political objectives of the incumbent seems but a further index of the extent to which this administration would prefer to cut itself off from any feedback, any dissent, if they can manage it.
so at the symbolic level, this kind of activity is unsettling at the least.
politically, it seems even worse. systematic distortion of information seems one way in which the right has tried to counter the unseemly effects of this "democratic" process--for example, if environmental groups issue reports that condemn corporate actions for particular effects, a rightwing thinktank can be counted on to hire pet scientists to prove the contrary.
the reports circulate as points of reference that are not generally seen for arguments aimed at right listeners on am radio and repeated in tv outlets on the order of fox.
there is no easy way to construct counter arguments. you have to either actively engaged in researching all issues, or you go passive, not trusting any information, hiding in your living room, watching tv.
if the state is also actively involved in the same process, then it works toward making rational decisions by the electorate as difficult as possible--which opens wider the sapce for the politics of slogan and image, which seems the kind of bankrupt territory most comfortable for the karlroves of the world.
i dont see anything good about this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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