2011-01-20

Anderson Cooper Joins the Liars

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Well, it's finally happened. Anderson Cooper has succumbed.

Lowered himself to the crassest elements of the Lou Dobbs syndrome. Blatantly re-parsing and re-framing. Falsifying the context of another person's statement.

He has lied.


Dem. Congressman Steve Cohen recently cited Goebbels as the progenitor of the most fundamental tenet of modern propaganda: make up a simple, tactical lie, repeat it ad nauseam, and in time the audience will come to assume it's true.

That is the meaning of Goebbelism in common vernacular. The tactic is as true and attributable to Goebbels as are fridge for refrigerator to Frigidaire, xerox for photocopier to Xerox, or kleenex for tissue paper to Kleenex.

They are elements of contemporary idiomatic English.

When Congressman Cohen recently suggested that the entire Republican, Tea Party and neocon right-wing of American political debate spent 2010 applying that tactic ruthlessly and shamelessly to Obama-care and Government-run health care, he was factually, politically and idiomatically correct.

But when Anderson Cooper repeated no less than 20 times in the space of a mere 14 minute segment that Cohen had thereby "compared Republicans to Nazis" and "abused the holocaust", Cooper himself descended into filth. Logical fallacy and rhetorical rot. For minutes on end he supplemented that audio with a capitalized ticker-subtitle shouting DEMOCRAT COMPARES GOP 'LIES' TO NAZI.

In a segment cynically titled "Keeping them Honest", Cooper didn't even have the decency to let the word 'LIES' stand on its own without the single quotation marks! Congressman Cohen had not used the word tongue in cheek, nor as metaphor; he had knowingly and deliberately called them LIES!

As Cohen parried each repetition with the simple fact that the issue and the lie were over 'insurance', not 'care', Cooper progressively raised his voice and simply shouted the congressman down with ever sharper assertions that Cohen had "... compared Republicans to Nazis".

Before our eyes, using the slimiest sort of reality-TV by example, Anderson Cooper used the very syndrome Steve Cohen was decrying, thus joining the Goebbelsian hoarde.

Shame!

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2011-01-19

Jose Kusugak - RIP

Tearing up. What a hole this leaves in our space.

Feels like some of the very air I breathe has slipped away.

Jose ... err ...

Sigh ...

2011-01-10

Nunavut in Crisis?

Have you ever read the rules that stiffle civil servants as long as they remain in the Government's employ? Have you ever wondered what risks that generates the day one of them ceases to wear the muzzle? Right now I feel like a Wikileak infopipe clogged full of Nunavutian collusion, illusions, delusions and allusions ... and ready to down a can of liquid plumber.

The worst of it? I needed a doctor's prescription before taking such medicine. Was I too much of a wuss? Too stupid to see through the sham? Or just another starry-eyed believer hoping that Nunavut would finally be different?

The mindless, knee jerk, simplistic civil service bashing that passes for political narrative in this community has become the exclusive domain of hypocrites who haven't the cojones to get into the ring and actually do something. They just take the money and run, whether as salaries, advertising revenue, or contract dollars. Do we really lack the wit or daring to confront our false assumptions?

Political scientists write books upon books advising us to "Speak Truth to Power?", but in this instance, we don't even speak to each other. We haven't a clue how influence flows in our case. Are we just lazy? Do we deliberately turn a blind eye. Are we embarrassed? Or are we just not quite sure what to do about it yet? No use shouting until we have a solution, right?

So our civil servants sit in frustrated silence while our politicians pontificate and our media messengers masticate, on the same old cud.

As our much bludgeoned linguistic saviour, Lord Noam Chumpski, says in verse 13.7 of his Sermon on the Ice, "Beware clichés and jargon, for they are the ring through your nose, not the ring in your ear; neither the embellishment in a marine mammal pelt, but the blubber of apprehension that seals your mouths and clogs the arteries of your humanity."

Nunavut in crisis? Damned right.

The good kind.

We're on the brink of a revolution, a civil war over how we think of ourselves. Over how we speak of ourselves. Over what we dare say about ourselves. And the discussion is about to break wide open.

The purveyors of jargon will call it a debate over 'governance'.

This blog will air the people's play-by-play.

(remember to click on the pics...)

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