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there are alot of problems raised directly and indirectly via this article...first obviously concerning dobbs himself and his role in routinizing the neofascist discourse on "illegal immigration"--which i almost hesitate to raise given that the responses on this topic never seem to vary---knitting this paranoid fiction into the register of information simply via repetition and the refusal of acknowledge distinctions between types of information (factoids versus dobb's paranoiac glosses on them)...
then there is the wider framework of american mass media within whcih this kind of action is itself routine..with a particular degree of egregiousness amongst what remains of the conservative set, which appears to buy the illusion that they were previously victimized at the hands of journalists who attempted at least to make some separation between information and their view of information (whether this worked or not is another matter, and points to the level at which this issue gets complicated)....
so given that assumption, it follows that the wholesale erasure of any meaningful distinction between factoids and their interpretation followed, such that in conservativeland information becomes an extension of therapy becomes the playground of ideological claims fobbed off as other than ideological claims....which would not be terribly problematic were it not for the other, bigger blurring of information into commodities in general, "news" into entertainment, selection of information streams into comsumer choices in general, such that it somehow became routine that one would choose information the way one chooses a shirt, whatever goes better with your predispositions or with your pants or socks that day being better information....so it follows that "being informed" and "seeing what you want to see" have come to be interchangeable---and this forum is often but a multi-staged demonstration of this sad state of affairs--but then again, so are election results.
you'd think that information would be understood as fundamental to a functioning democracy and that its generation would be understood as a public function and not as a means to the end of profit on the part of entertainment conglomerates--but this pollyanna view applies at no level to the united states, which does not have a functioning democracy and for which there is no meaningful distinction between information and entertainment. and this not at the level of those who gather information, but at the level of the form that is imposed on information here.
you really have to cut in and out of american infotainment streams to get any idea of what is going on. it is only on that basis that you can acquire a number of interpretive frameworks and a range of information such that you can, critically, work out something of what is happening in the world. if you restrict yourself to american sources--PARTICULARLY american television infotainment--in terms of information, you are simply fucked.
you'd think this would be a source of concern.
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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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