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Why are they lying about Occupy Wall Street – and why are they getting away with it?

October 13, 2011 By 7 Comments
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The Price of Irrationality

The key to making simulated rationality work is obviously to have a populace that is susceptible to it, one that is easily manipulated. In this light the right’s stated goal to eliminate the Department of Education makes perfect sense. The right’s goal is to produce a people who do not have the facts of history at their command, who are acculturated to accept authority, who lack introspection, who wrap their unexamined moral certitude around themselves like a warm blanket, and who rarely if ever engage in objective critical thinking. The current result of the far right’s efforts is that we no longer have a shared consensus as to what knowledge and facts are. We have instead a schism between those on the Left (and Right) who employ critical thinking and reason when arriving at their political beliefs and therefore their goals, and those on the far Right who march to their own ideological drum. Nowhere is this more evident than in the differing worldviews of the Occupy Wall Street protestors and their opponents. And the cost of this? As Dr. Agre, says, it could be our sanity:

“Public reason is not only a precondition for a functioning democracy; it is also required for individuals to become and remain sane…Rationality is ultimately not about the procedures of logic, which can easily be reified in an irrational way. Rationality is ultimately about mental health: the kind of contact with reality that we can only maintain if we have good boundaries and a supportive community of similarly healthy people. To oppress people one must wound them, so that wounded patterns of thought are reproduced from one generation to the next.”

So there’s a lot at stake: our country, our sanity. In the here and now, relative to Occupy Wall Street, do everything you can to make sure the facts are known. Don’t accept the status quo, or the biased nonsense of the mainstream press. When you hear a lie, say so.

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What you can do: 

Call Mayor Bloomberg and tell him you support the right of OWS to assemble  Inside New York City you can just dial 311;  From outside NY the number is 212-NEW-YORK.

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Comments

  1. Dee says:
    October 13, 2011 at 9:34 pm

    both sides, the right and the left, distort. Not a just a rightwing thing. Its the nature of the media.

    Reply
    • Jeremy Bloom says:
      October 14, 2011 at 12:20 am

      Dude, if you got two resumes, and one of the guys claimed he had been president of his high school class, and the other guy claimed he had been president of Uzbekistan, would you shrug your shoulders and say “Both guys are distorting, so I guess it doesn’t matter which one I hire?
      Some distortion is bigger and worse. And more destructive.
      But hey, Clinton lied about a blow job, and Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam being involved in 9/11. So i guess that’s both equal too, right?
      Tell me again.. how many people died because of Clinton’s blowjob?

      Reply
      • Clark says:
        November 2, 2011 at 6:37 am

        A lot of people died because of Clinton’s blow job. If he had been doing his day job instead of getting a blow job wasting more time covering up the blow job – He should have concentrated more on terrorist attacks against Americans and less on his Mojo and lying to keep his job.

        Nov. 13, 1995 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: car bomb exploded at U.S. military headquarters, killing 5 U.S. military servicemen.

        June 25, 1996 Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: truck bomb exploded outside Khobar Towers military complex, killing 19 American servicemen and injuring hundreds of others.

        Aug. 7, 1998 Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: truck bombs exploded almost simultaneously near 2 U.S. embassies, killing 224 (213 in Kenya and 11 in Tanzania) and injuring about 4,500.

        Reply
  2. Parker East says:
    October 14, 2011 at 2:10 pm

    Here is one of my contributions to the movement…. so far. Pass it along.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6xrMZwnS-o

    Worth watching… subscribe if you like it.

    Reply
  3. Robert Fanney says:
    October 14, 2011 at 2:11 pm

    The media is lying because they are owned by the corporations being held to account by Occupy Wall Street. They will keep lying and hope that people believe. This is the philosophy of propaganda — an often repeated lie is much more likely to stick.

    Reply
  4. Derek Birch says:
    October 17, 2011 at 8:22 am

    this is an interesting article, but I wish it went into more detail about how the right use the media to distort the truth. it stops just when it should really start moving. the reason I say this because i believe this too and have for a long time, but I really don’t have the information to back it up and I need it. I want to post this to my facebook page, but there aren’t any hard facts.

    I will tell you that Sun TV in Canada, which is almost equal to Fox in the US, except that they are required by law that they are not allowed to lie, so instead they distort the truth, were out at the march in Toronto on Saturday, They were interviewing people by asking loaded questions, in the hopes of finding some Yahoo who would make the cause look bad, and then that is the person they put on TV. They probably had to interview 500 people before they found their Yahoo, but in the end they found him and used him to make the cause look foolish to their viewers.

    Reply

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