Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Opinion Television: Choose Your Own Infotainment Enema

"From the most trusted name in fair and balanced bullshit"

"In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane" - George Orwell, 1984

The best laid plans of truth avoiders, often go awry...

Lie to me, please !
People reach an age in this society, after which they just want to be lied to constantly. And of course, the commercialized media is only too eager to pander to that ultra-wealthy segment of the "market". Like everything else, information has become "productized" and each media outlet specializes in its own unique brand of bullshit. 

Disgrace the Nation
Unfortunately, that means this society has totally conflated opinion with fact. It's a deadly syndrome that is pervasive in all aspects of this society. After all, the media propagate the flow of fallacies, bias and delusions, so they are the de facto gatekeepers of their own highly polished double-speak. And there is no shortage of buffoons in this society who just want to appear on television to be seen and heard. It's another high school popularity contest. Not one of them has the fucking brass to admit "You know what, this is all an infantile charade and everyone is making some extremely naive assumptions around the longevity of this multi-decade vacation from reality". No, they just pile one bad assumption onto another. Mostly it derives from ego. In today's society, pretending to know something is ten times more important than actually knowing something. In fact, knowing anything in detail has been devalued into oblivion. Which gets me to my next point.

Buffoonish oversimplification need only apply
All of this asinine behaviour derives from ego and from laziness. It's another signpost of a decaying society that has an overriding need to oversimplify everything. An oversimplified economy, accompanied by an oversimplifed brand of the truth. The economy itself has been under the effects of over-simplification ever since the Marketing and Finance department took control and essentially outsourced the engineering department. Engineering by definition is inherently bottoms-up and complexity-based. Whereas, Marketing, and even more so when abetted by Finance, is strictly top down alchemy and brand fantasy. Where can we simplify? Every major company right now is only focused on the exact same short-sighted profit extraction techniques: one raising debt to buyback stock and pay dividends, secondly eliminate taxes via some sort of offshore "tax inversion" merger, three cut costs via outsourcing and automation. Product development, research and development? Those things are a priority from another era and generation. You know, the ones that were not in liquidation mode.

People can question my assumptions around collapse all they want. I will start to believe the second-guessing when I meet anyone today who is capable of handling the basic fucking truth without having to change the subject and/or their underwear. So far, so bad.