The science of dumbing-down politics (even further)

Steven Hill writes:

Veteran reporter Howard Kurtz reported how the Obama campaign extensively pre-tested the president's speech last Thursday night using a ghastly-sounding technology known as "dial metre groups". Dial metre groups also were used to pre-test Obama's "State of the Union" speech last January. What is a dial metre group? It's a type of focus group where voters twist dials to register approval or disapproval of specific passages in a speech.

You can imagine where it goes from there.  (The rest of the op-ed explains, if you couldn't already guess it.)  The messages that today's politicians formulate toward voters are based on this most cynical of stimulus-and-response technologies; soulless, corporatist, philistine-oriented advertising strategy has taken over politics to extremes not possible given earlier technologies.  But what else would you expect?  There almost surely has to be parallels between the stimulus-and-response-crafted, super-unhealthy Standard American Diet and Lifestyle with the resulting obesity epidemic on the one hand, and the ever-falling quality of the American intellectual diet with its inevitable consequences on the other.  This is some dystopian shit right here.  The American public's ignorance of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle's recommendations for citizen-education is (of course) devolving into a vicious cycle.  Hell, take the ancient Greeks out of it, and just look at the United States's own founding generation to get an idea of what the American McCitizenry have methodically become oblivious to.  Franklin and Jefferson are rolling in their graves; they would be absolutely fucking disgusted by that which is the leading cause of empire-decline, metastasizing throughout this land of ours.

(Jefferson was well-versed in many of the ancient Greeks, by the way.  He was, after all, President of the American Philosophical Society.  It's a tad unfortunate that he hadn't been familiar with Aristotle, though.)

There's no way to sugar-coat what's going on here; given what American politics is now, it is "politically incorrect" to name and face these damning facts.  Right now, average American citizens are unorganized grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit, built like Private Pyle, and headed directly into a world of shit.  They have not been given the proper motivation.  Dial meters only feed into their bad cognitive habits; it is the habits that need to be changed.  That is all for now.

Sheesh!

If Kubrick directed House

One noticeable stylistic difference would be the lack of shaky camera movements. How did such amateurish shit become part of the mainstream television aesthetic today? Why do viewers put up with it? (Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?)

(I've also noticed, production-values wise, that Fox News's "static" camera is much preferable to the "floating" camera used on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Hell, Fox News is simply better, production-values wise. For the life of me I don't know why MSNBC doesn't take some hints.)

Thinking in Essentials: Huck Finn

So some PC twats have determined that an original work of art by Mark Twain is suitable material for "sanitization." Now, how much of the national discussion has centered around the very premise of this sanitization vis a vis respect for the integrity of an artwork?

All I've seen is debate over a less essential, less fundamental issue: how we should treat the term "nigger" in today's culture. Surely we don't solve that problem by going around and censoring "offending" works of art, do we? (It's not hard to imagine how, if anything, this censorship would only add to the country's racial problems. That's if you take a long-term view of these things, rather than a pragmatistic "quick fix" approach which is all these PC fucks ever know.) And where is the uproar about censoring works of art, which should be the immediate sense-of-life issue involved? WTF? What have we as a country come to, that this is even a subject of reasoned debate and discussion?

The essential here: reject "sanitizing"-censorship outright, as a corruption through and through. If the PC shits can't even get that right, how can we expect them to get the daunting matter of race relations in this country right? Failing to respect an artwork reflects so deep and fundamental a cognitive failing that we have to address that failing before we ever get to the issue of race relations. The nature of the cognitive hierarchy and cognitive integration demands it.

Jeezus Effing C, people.

(Thanks a lot again, modern philosophy.)

[ADDENDUM: Yes, I'm aware of how Rand used the term "censorship," as "pertaining only to government action." Her definition has hardly ever sat well with me, as we still need a term to cover any act of stifling freedom of expression. The term "self-censorship" does make sense. Rand was, however, making the obviously useful distinction between acts of government and acts of private parties - one that the leftist PC-fuck types run roughshod over on the premise that private capitalistic activities can be oppressive. A relevant factor from the standpoint of force and legality, in this instance, is that we're dealing with a public-domain work, so the issue has to do with respecting artistic expression in a more general sense.]

On Being an Ultimate Blogger

Without people like Glenn Greenwald around, I would not have found inspiration to become The Ultimate Philosopher. Greenwald is someone with an (almost) unparalleled ability to condense issues down to their very essence. Consequently, he sees pretty much of all that counts as "mainstream narrative and debate" in this country as corrupted through and through, in some fashion or other. His approach to the whole Wikileaks/Assange farce is one such instance of this.

(From what I can tell, the very charismatic some-sort-of-genius-figure Glenn Beck is invoking America, Ah, America (tears) against the "threat" posed by Assange, nevermind what Judge Napolitano was saying on your very network not hours before. You know, America's News Network. You know, GOP figurehead Roger Ailes's brilliant Network-ized media experiment. You know, America and Democracy. And we all have a good laugh at that one.)

Greenwald recognizes what the whole farce the "left-right" "mainstream" discourse is in this country. The politicians are . . . politicians, you idiots!. You just can't expect to have serious, honest, principled, heartfelt debates from weasels, can you? Everything in politics these days is going to the highest bidders, and those very high bidders are the same ones running the media, so what better can you expect than the kind of media we're getting? There's a reason an Ultimate Commentator like Glenn Greenwald would not get any interviews on Fox News - because Greenwald is in the business of exposing in the nakedest terms the hypocrisy of our present-day political system, and Fox News is right in the middle of all that hypocrisy. Hence, The Media get the "Julian Assange - Terrorist!" discussions going. It's so obvious what's going on here to anyone who's paying attention. Greenwald, despite his credentials for intellectual integrity, just doesn't serve "the content needs" of Fox News, Inc. Network-ized, remember. Always remember that. "But how did things get to be the Network-ized way?" asks The Ultimate Philosopher, who knows about Rand and Hegel in addition to various and sundry other items of considerable interest and how they all interconnect.

Greenwald has come to the naked essence of matters concerning him as a constitutional attorney and a Jeffersonian at heart: the political system we have today is a farce of what the Framers envisioned for us. What we have here are two distinctive phenomena: (1) America, and (2) the political system currently situated within America. No one worth taking seriously is against America or at least the idea of America. But the politicians already know that and pander to that America-love to continue their farcical political games. We as a nation have forgotten the original lesson of America: keep your affairs from the hands of politicians as much as you possibly can. Rely on your selves and your communities, governed by some basic virtues like common sense. It's the whole notion of politicians as we know them that's against the ideals of America. But Greenwald also points out how the media establishment is in on the whole cynical farce, in which case the media as we know it - a vehicle of infotainment rather than enlightenment first and foremost - is also against the ideals of America, where the media is supposed to exercise an intellectual independence from the political system.

There's a way out of all this, says The Ultimate Philosopher. Does Greenwald see things at that great a level of generality and essence? Greenwald is describing the many symptoms of severe dysfunction in regard to his areas of expertise, in a better way than anyone else in his profession has described, but has he diagnosed the core problem with the country?

Is he aware of things beyond constitutional law and politics, such as philosophy or maybe Ayn Rand? Does he diagnose things at a level a philosopher would aim to diagnose it? I don't recall any time he has mentioned a specifically philosophical issue or demonstrated a familiarity with the great philosophers in his blog. He is just really good at what he specializes in, though.

What I'm saying is that my aim is to philosophize at the level that Dr. House diagnoses illness. Perfectionism and whatnot, at least on my part. (Dr. House is lost for the time being as a person, though; I don't admire his cynical-amoral methods.) Even if that doesn't make either of us popular or well-liked by the many.

[ADDENDUM: The mainstream media coverage and discourse in regard to the shootings in Arizona has been about as low as one would reasonably have come to expect with this country lately. The fact that Dingbat, a.k.a. Sarah Palin, is at the center of it all is confirmation of that point.]