Amazingly, the BBC World Service dispenses unsolicited pity on those who have screwed up their own lives, but expects foresight of the impossible and superhuman abilities from Americans. Upon release of tapes and transcripts of the audio traffic of first responders on 9-11, they didn't reflect on methodology, patterns, outcomes, or even take much interest in what was happening in their on-air report. The lead in to the news item was «Americans angered by the Government's ability to plan for the unimaginable. »
HOW do you plan for an act of sabotage and mass murder, and find the needle in the haystack, if it is to secretive as to be unimaginable? Isn't that impossible by its' own definition?
The obsession with things that no-one can do anything about is a hint - the obsessive dwelling on helplessness reflects their own sense that they are helpless themselves to manipulate events with mood and hidden rhetoric concealed in news. Could the übermenschen of the beeb have that prescience, or even hint at a way that one could predict and locate 19 murder-kazes? If so, why the hell didn't they tell anyone?
Which disappointed Americans are they talking about anyway? The ones they always seem to be baiting over their success in life? Did they ask any actual Americans about this, and do they really think this reflects anything meaningful other that the emotional state of the ones they seem to selectively seek out?
My guess is that their writers (it's hard to call them journalists) pull most of these hidden editorials out of the thin air found circulating around an combination of who they are and what they think their audience's opinions are, but it's always rather passive aggressive. It also seems that a significant amount of their assertions are made up of bad, narrowly selective, or concocted data that takes an extreme assertion consitent with who they think their audience is, and them moderating it slightly. Through trial and error, they have probably learned that there is only so much that a producer will go along with, so what the producer can digest becomes the gold standard of opinion.
Maybe they’re worried about the fate of their imaginary "inner child". That helpless button that they'd like to push in all of us that is supposed to make us admire them for doing us all a favor by advocating something. When it doesn’t work, they retreat to running items on the dangers of margarine, the wrongness of rape, etc. etc. – in other words, things you already know.
As for out-and-out lies, an American blogger in Austria, Bill Spricht, (Ger.: Bill speaks) tunes us in to an act of true desperation. The newspaper „Der Standard” in the limited Austrian media environment is either repeating factless agit-prop and simply lie-ing when it headlined a story about the US holding 70 000 prisoners worldwide on the war on terror. A handful of German sources parroted it immediately as well. Their emotions, important as they think they are to the rest of the world, relieve them of the burden of checking up on their accusations of malfeasance. We're supposed to just accept and understand THEIR emotional difficulty with the world as it is and give them a pass, because, after all, it wounds them emotionally. It's an arrogant assertion that we shouldn't question their very familiar looking blame-a-palooza and forget about the legacy of what the US is trying to stop by short circuiting.
IF IT WORKS, IT’S OBSOLETE
It’s no surprise that the number of cults exploded a few years after the likes of Marshall McLuhan and many other media watchers could identify the power of this form of communication. It also followed a phase where the news media became far more “self aware.”
What can one do about it? First and foremost realize that your virtues are your own. The virtues of someone you don't know only become yours' when you're disconnected from real people that you know, and who know you.
Ignore shams built on trading in your own guilt. Don't take them seriously. They're defensive and unable to accept the majority of views and experiences in the world anyway, and it only feeds the thing they thrive from most: moral authority and an ability to color or control what people hear and eventually feel. Anyone who wants emotional access to someone they don't know all that well, or have instructive access outside of your consent to children who are not their own falls in this category. Deny them that affirmation that they want. Even if they don't learn from this, it counts as one less person or family group that they can harm. Keep government out of family life, and the life of individuals altogether. Even when there is "dysfunction". Dysfunction has been so overly and broadly defined that the helplessness-industry has isolated the people who are actually "whole" to about 5 percent of the population. If this really were the case, society would not function at all. When the description of a "condition" is entirely made up of subtext, and has few or hard-to-believe outward signs, it is almost certainly a lie.
«It’s also hard to ignore an analysis first published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in August 1967. Researchers followed 301 people who had been arrested for “public drunkenness” in San Diego and were randomly assigned to three groups based on the nature of the court-ordered follow-up: no treatment, referral to professional counseling, or Alcoholics Anonymous. Finishing dead last—with almost 50 percent rearrested during the following year—were the eighty-six individuals sentenced to AA. Second best was the group receiving the counseling. And most successful at staying out of jail? Those receiving no treatment at all. Now that’s self-help.»The therapy culture has brought us more harmful and destructive aberrance than it's "healed", or purports to try and "heal".
Journalists raised on a curriculum of activist "help to the world through reporting" are no different, and are certainly aware of the power of image-making and symbolic representation of the manipulative power of emotional blackmail.
Take the BBC's
Years in the media without scrutiny is a lifetime to the rest of us when it comes to being able to act unchecked. It's common knowledge that absolute power corrupts absolutely. No example of this is greater than a self congratulating, isolated press which has a massive state-mandated funding base and little competition to criticize it.
The consequence over time is a society at large that believes that the view of the world constructed and constricted by their opinions is the real background to people's lives. It works in the same way that the therapy culture has made many souls helpless receptors of an authors' inner workings in order to make them our own. The risks to real people who accept it without question is the same. Through their ubiquity, they have done more to find you then you did to find them. Like any judgmental stranger, they need to be taken with a grain of salt.
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