Crawl Across the Ocean

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Demeaning the Discourse

One of the things that always struck me about the U.S. was the ability of people, particularly on the right, to basically say whatever stupid blatant self serving lies they wanted without suffering any penalty or really being called on it. A key turning point in the last U.S. election was when that started to change, for example Phil Gramm being forced to step down after calling the U.S. a nation of whiners.

So it was discouraging to see Harper get away with all the blatant, obvious to anyone with a functioning brain, easily verifiable lies about the carbon tax in the last election (its not revenue neutral, it will destroy the economy, it will break up the country, it will eat your children while they sleep, etc.

Having been allowed to just fabricate whatever stories he likes during the campaign no matter how absurd, it is not surprising to see Harper keep lying after the election.

"[Harper] saved his strongest criticism for what went on before Mr. Obama, suggesting at one point that Canada really couldn't get on with much on climate change until Mr. Obama got to office. He conveniently avoided mentioning that his government joined Mr. Bush's in actively opposing aggressive climate-change policies."

If it wasn't for that nasty George Bush, Canada would be a leader in fighting climate change. It was George Bush that made Harper argue that a carbon tax would break up the country and destroy the economy, even though George Bush's reign was drawing to a certain close as Harper made those statements.

A primary objective of those who don't want to see Canada go down the same dead end streets the U.S. has gone down, should be building up a noise machine loud enough to make folks like Harper pay when they insult our intelligence with nonsense like this.

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2 Comments:

  • It's funny, but the people I work with are, as I have said, some of the most intelligent people I've ever met. They are a bunch of adult teachers who know how to study, read, synthesize, develop new ideas, etc....
    Yet....
    The simply do not follow, do not care, and do not have an attention span large enough to see these things. If it isn't contrasted in the length of a newspaper article then they do not seem to get it at all. Some one has to remind them, “Oh, btw, remember in the election when Harper said this?” and contrast to today’s story. Since newspapers are there to sell newspapers nowadays, why would they potentially alienate some readers? I mean, reporting news still gets people to read with or without the context…

    By Blogger PeterC, at 4:47 AM  

  • Yeah, I agree that people only have so much bandwidth for these things.

    Still, I think there is a market for news that does a little informing along with the reporting, but the media is just as short on bandwidth (attention span) as their audience.

    By Blogger Declan, at 10:23 PM  

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