Tag Archives: news

Why is the News Obsessed with Unimportant, Marginalized People?

News, Politics, , , , , , , ,

ABC News ran a story today warning informing us that Sarah Palin may in fact be running for president. As a news junkie, my immediate thought wasn’t (to the shock of many) “wow” or “isn’t that interesting” but “who cares?” I mean, honestly, this is such a non-story that the level of ridiculousness borders of a word that would have to be more ridiculous than “ridiculous”. Maybe super-ridiculous. Let’s be honest for a moment here, kids. Sarah Palin has as much of a chance being elected president as I do. Yeah, not kidding here. I have as much chance of being elected president as Sarah Palin does. The only way she would ever be elected president is if 70 percent of the country had a lobotomy the day before the election, which is exactly, not surprisingly, the requirements it would take for the American population to write me in as a write-in candidate in all fifty states, garnering me enough electoral votes to finally call Starving Students to move my furniture into the White House. Then again, with a $400,000 a year salary, I’d probably just leave all my stuff in place and buy all new shit, because I’d definitely be living a completely different life. I’d keep my stuffed animals, and maybe my Playstation 3 (because it gets my streaming Netflix movies, and you know I’d be wanting Netflix in the White House). But the rest of it can go to Good Will, or Good Will Hunting, or wherever it is that you send things when you finally get elected president by a write-in vote because the country has decided it doesn’t want Sarah Palin in the White House.

But I’m starting to digress here. What I really wanted to talk about was Taylor Swift and her new album. Oh wait, that’s not what I wanted to talk about, although I will admit it’s a great album, and I really have enjoyed continuously playing it in my car each and every time I get into it. No, what I wanted to get back to was the subject of how the news seems obsessed with such unimportant stories.

Take Charlie Sheen for instance. Why has the news spent so much time talking about him? Before his ridiculous melt-down, he was really unimportant, insignificant and compartmentalized to a television show that relegated itself to the importance of appearing next to Big Bang Theory. Seriously. And somehow, because he blew up one day, he’s the next most important thing since, well, I don’t have a comparison because it still doesn’t make any sense. Yet, the news, for weeks, was obsessed with all things Charlie Sheen, and honestly, he wasn’t all that significant before it all happened, and now that it’s finally blowing over, I wonder if they’re not all thinking to themselves, “how exactly did that happen?”

Which is what brings me to the obsession itself. Why do they get so obsessed with such unimportant figures in celebrity? We live in an era where people are becoming famous for being famous, and I just don’t understand it. Kim Kardasian recently announced she’s engaged to be married. Who is this person? Why is she a celebrity? Why do we care? Why is she getting so much attention when she hasn’t done a single significant thing ever. Yeah, I understand she was some kind of reality star, but really, is that enough to substantiate all of the attention? Yeah, she’s a bit attractive, but so are a lot of people. They’re not made into media sensations that require booking agents and sit down sessions with David Letterman.

Why aren’t we hyping people for doing great things? That’s one thing I’ve never understood. If a scientist discovers a property that might change humanity and civilization, that person is important and should be considered seriously significant. But rarely is such a person treated that way by anyone outside of his or her scientific discipline or academic community. Instead, we over-hype really ridiculous characters who perform stupid antics, and then make a media career out of that one moment in time.

Could this be a symptom of our need for a 24 hour news cycle, but the reality is that we don’t have 24 hours worth of news to fill that cycle? Is that the problem here? Are we so obsessed with pretending that we have news that we’ll do anything to sell an unimportant story because we don’t want to admit that on a daily basis, nothing really significant tends to happen? Congress can’t come up with a budget. Is that news? Not really. But the day that they do come up with a budget IS news. Then it should be reported. Instead, because we have no news to report, we’ll focus endlesslessy on gridlock as if that’s a story itself. It’s not. Gridlock means you can’t make a decision, or a consensus of a decision. Try to sell that as a story, and you start to see the problem that we seem to be experiencing in our daily lives. We have nothing to report, so we report unimportant events as “events” and then we hype the hell out of them until the rest of us suddenly feel it’s important.

So, what’s our solution? Stop paying attention. Really. That’s it. Discontinue watching news that hypes stupid shit as actual news. It may mean looking for alernative avenues of news because the old avenues don’t know how to stop hyping crap as news. However, I suspect that most of us are addicted to this crap, so we’re kind of doomed to a continuous process of receiving fake news as news, and our attention will continue to be focused on unimportant people doing unimportant things while the rest of us are told to treat it as important. Mainly because we don’t have any other way of looking at the situation.

Another Writer Accused of Making Stuff Up

Books, Memoirs, News, Politics, Writing, , , , , , , ,

The “Three Cups of Tea” author, Greg Mortenson, has been accused of making up stories in his book.  Accused by Jon Krakauer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Mortenson denies the falsehood claim and is not commenting further due to a medical condition he is suffering from recently. Unfortunately, with him out of commission and not on record to defend himself, the media frenzy will probably swarm him at this horrible time for him. Hopefully, he gets a chance to defend himself, and the truth is reached, regardless of what that truth might be.

With this accusation, the writing community appears to be undergoing yet another challenge, as it did when the whole James Frey controversy occurred with “A Million Little Pieces”, a book that featured numerous made-up events in a book claimed to be entirely non-fiction. Hopefully, the accusations will not continue to paint a dark light on the many works other writers have put out there, making it so that readers walk into every bookstore, expecting fiction in the non-fiction section and accepting each memoir produced as a “quasi-” real account.

I recently published my “Neo Revolutionary Messages” on Kindle and Nook, and I promise that it is entirely non-fiction, as it is an analysis of the August 1991 Coup d’etat in the Soviet Union (where Boris Yeltsin challenged the hardliners when they imprisoned Mikhail Gorbachev). Yet, with stories like the one I linked here, there’s always the fear that a reader is going to think the author took liberties with the facts for the sake of trying to tell a better story.

“Perhaps you need to live in the real world….”

Politics, Social Networking, , , , , ,

A couple of days ago, a female reporter from CBS was sexually assaulted in Egypt. What’s unique about the whole situation is not just that it happened, but it occurred right after a number of assaults on western media entities by pro-government forces. To put it more poignantly, it happened after those pro-government forces stopped attacking and took place during the celebrations of the succeeding revolutionaries who managed to overthrow the Mubarak government. In other words, she was attacked by a bunch of Egyptians celebrating a successful revolution against oppression. In even more other words, they were celebrating their freedom by sexually assaulting some random woman.

There are a couple of things that haven’t received a whole lot of attention because right now everyone in the world is so happy that “freedom” won the day against oppression. Yet, right after this horrible oppression, a newly “free” people took it upon themselves to conduct horrific, barbaric activities perpetrated against a woman, as if freedom is great, but it should never get in the way of a bunch of guys getting together and taking sexual liberties with random women. After all, isn’t that what freedom is all about? Sadly, there is probably an entire country of people who may be thinking just that.

But what bothers me about this is not just that it happened, which does, of course, bother me, but how I first found out about it. I follow news through a number of message boards, and it just so happens that there are a couple of computer gaming boards I follow where some of the more brilliant current events people hang out. I take great pleasure in debating all sorts of issues with these individuals, and it was on that particular day when I first read a thread of this event happening. However, what kept bothering me about the thread was not that the event had happened (which again, bothered me a great deal), but that almost all of the commentary was from people indicating that Lara Logan was the one who should be considered at fault, because she should have known better than to be in a place where she might possibly be raped by men.

I remember staring at the screen, thinking to myself, how could anyone even think something like that? In all of the years I’ve been arguing with these people, not once did I ever think of them as a bunch of Neanderthals who thought that women should be treated as sexual fodder to be used randomly because they’re soft and cuddly, and men are going to do what men are going to do. Yet, in post after post, that’s all I was reading.

So, I fired off a response in which I indicated that I was shocked that we still have people who think this way in this day and age. I was astonished at this behavior, and I couldn’t believe they would EVER blame a woman for the simple crime of, well, being a woman in a man’s world. I knew I was going to rile up some people, but right after I posted my response, the usual suspects started chiming in about how “you need to live in the real world” and that the world is a dangerous place, and if I can’t handle the way things happen, then maybe I should stay inside and not dare to play with the big boys, because “your panties might get tussled.”

Shortly after this, one post after another came across indicating that I was clueless as to how people live in the real world. Then, one of the posters responded with “um, guys, you know he’s an Army veteran, right?” And then suddenly the insults stopped. But it literally took another member from the group to point out that the person they were insulting was actually someone who wasn’t some girl-like guy for them to actually stop treating me like I was some wastoid of humanity.

But that never changed the perspective of the people who were posting. They still believed it was her fault for being in a place she should not have been.

Shortly after this, Nir Rosen imploded on himself with his tweets saying almost exactly the same thing. The upshot was he lost his job, and today Rosen has tried to salvage any future career by writing a veiled article about how his undoing was really his “enemies” out to get him by taking pot shots at him for things he didn’t mean to say. Unfortunately for him, most of the comments generally aren’t buying his banter, as he already threw away his career by saying some of the stupid things he said.

But the sorts of things he said were no different from any of the people who I was talking about from that message board. Yet, what I’ve discovered is that once these people realized their comments were seriously wrong, and they were, they’ve now just stopped talking about it, moving onto the next subject and pretending nothing happened. That, unfortunately, is what happens all of the time with our mainstream media, and I don’t think people really recognize what’s going on. People feel they can get away with it as long as they move onto the next subject and pretend they never said anything ridiculous. Mainstream news pundits are filled with morons who do that sort of thing. I’ll be honest. I’ve done it from time to time where I’ve taken the wrong tact on an issue and then just tried to pretend I never said anything and moved on. So, it’s not just enough to point fingers and leave it at that.

The problem we really have is that people do not take accountability for much of what they say and do. Yet, people like Lara Logan still have to get up and try to make it through the next day, realizing that when things turned bad, the people who claim to be the voice of the rest of the people threw her under the bus and hoped no one would ever hold them accountable for doing so. I can’t imagine how it must feel for someone who has been treated like dirt, after being treated like an object, and has to face a new day alone.

That’s someone who has to live in the real world. I’m just not sure that’s all that great a world to have to live in.

Stewart/Colbert hold a real rally, but no one will probably take them seriously

Politics, Television, , , , , , ,

Jon Stewart of the Daily Show is planning to hold a major rally in Washington, D.C. that is a direct response to some of the stupidity that has been happening by pundits and/or politicians like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. The theme of the rally, being held on October 30, is “Rally to Restore Sanity”. Stephen Colbert, not one to miss out on the fun, is holding a counter rally at the same time, in the same location, titled: “March to Keep Fear Alive.”

The significance of this event (these events) is that politics and media have gotten stupid lately. So, what better way to hold them in check but to call them out on it.

The problem that I perceive is that the news media doesn’t even realize that it’s being ridiculed for how bad they’ve gotten. What is most likely going to happen is some pretty face is going to announce the success of this “event” and treat is as if they’re somehow “in” on the joke. I think that’s what pissed me off the most about whenever the news covers Stewart and Colbert. They so often are NOT “in” on the joke, but the actual butt of it, and I’m sorry but laughing about it doesn’t make it any different when they go back to doing exactly what they were doing that caused the ridicule in the first place.

Unfortunately, this is a one time event. Which means that the media will get right back to being stupid again.

Solving the Middle East Problems is like Dating a Supermodel Who Sees You Only as a Friend

Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s 2010, and politicians are still trying to solve the “Middle East Crisis”, and they’re doing so by doing exactly what everyone has done before and hoping for different results. As we all know by now, by the overused analogy by Einstein, doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results is the definition of insanity.

We really need to face it: We’re not going to solve the crisis in the Middle East by doing what everyone has tried to do in the past. Getting people to talk is not a solution. It’s not even a stop-gap until we come up with a solution. One side hates the other so much it wants to kill everyone on the other side. The other side is so angry at the other side for hating it throughout history that they’ve pretty much resorted to the same tactics of killing those guys as well. Everyone involved remembers EVERYTHING bad that ever happened, and wants justice and retribution for every bad thing that happened. Neither side remembers a single bad thing they have done, so they don’t seem to see any problems but the ones being caused by the other side.

A major part of the problem is that everyone who tries to negotiate peace does so as if everyone involved has the goal of actually achieving peace. That’s not what they want. Maybe 60 years ago that might have been the case, but some decades ago, it became much more about achieving small, specific goals. All peace negotiations were centered around not achieving those goals in hopes of achieving peace. Bad idea. Not sustainable. Obviously, because now they’re back to killing each other again.

So, how do you solve the problem? Well, here’s what you don’t do: Don’t act as if getting them back to the negotiating table is actual progress. Both sides are usually willing to talk. Neither side is actually willing to do anything to create an atmosphere of peace. They both want their own gains and the demise of the other side. You really don’t have much room to negotiate when it comes down to that.

So, again, what is the solution?

Work it out over time by investing in the future of both entities. This means just giving up on the current actors involved because face it: They’re not going to do anything to further peace. But that doesn’t mean their offspring can’t be influenced. But you have to do it by setting a new paradigm and a new way of looking at things. You also have to go out of your way to not engage the parents in any way, to show future generations that we don’t reward bad people for doing bad things. Until we start to engage this way, we’re always going to be stuck with the current generation that is only going to continue to think in the ways of the erroneous past.

So, how do you do this? I mean, the parents are still around. You can’t just ignore them, right? Actually, I think you can. That’s not to say we can’t still engage them in the hopes of getting them to see the light, but we should go into every negotiation with the belief that the parents are really the problem, so we’re probably not going to achieve any success from them any way. However, we should constantly let it be known that we’re investing in their future, not in them because we’ve already seen that no matter what we do, they’re just going to screw up the future regardless.

This doesn’t mean we just disengage. What it means is that we take a different approach in all things foreign affairs. Our goal should be to start influencing neighbors everywhere by a process of dealing with foreign countries on an honest, straight-forward approach. I know this is a lot different than the old CIA-overthrowing dictators technique we used before, but it may take a generation or two to convince people of our resolve, but once on that path, we’d have a chance of influencing the rest of the world in a new way of handling international affairs. This might also bring to the table the future generations of these countries in the Middle East whose parents we gave up on after realizing that they are never going to understand anything but hate.

I know I’ve made a lot of jokes on how to handle international affairs (Puppy Diplomacy and the Elmo Theory of Containment), but I’m pretty serious about this. I originally called this approach the Friendship Over Time (FOT) Theory, and it’s a mathematics-based foreign affairs approach that involves iterative contacts with countries rather than incremental approaches and our current method of unilateral tit for tat (but never following it up) diplomacy.

As the title of this post indicates, our current process is a lot like dating a supermodel who is only capable of seeing you as a friend. It sounds like a great idea, and it might make you look good when you’re out on a date, but in the end, you’re going to go home every night hating yourself, wondering why she can never see you as anything better. For women, it’s a lot like dating me. Okay, that doesn’t make sense, but I assure you there’s a really funny joke in there somewhere.

Right now, Secretary of State H. Clinton is trying to make a name for herself by deluding herself into believing that bringing the Middle East heads of state to the table is actually accomplishing something. Instead, what it is going to do is set up a new process of disappointment that will most definitely lead to hostilities, broken promises and further deterioration of potential peace in the Middle East. I really wish people could see that instead of leading us down a false path of hope, thinking that somehow people who hate each other are somehow going to change their natural way of being.

Is Craigslist Really the Enemy They Claim It Is?

Politics, Religion, Social Networking, , , , , , ,

Craigslist recently announced that it is going to be suppressing its listings for sex ads. Instead of the adult listing, it now shows up as “censored” on their site. Public interest groups are now high-fiving themselves because they seem to have won some sort of Quixotic victory that they believe has somehow made things better. Others, of course, still say that it’s not enough and want pretty much the universe when it comes to compliance. I thought it would be interesting to examine this and see what’s really going on.

First off, let’s look at the original problem. Craig Newmark started Craigslist back in 1995 in San Francisco. The idea was to give people a one stop marketplace where they could take care of their every need. You could find an apartment, get a job, sell that old TV you could never get rid of, and yes, even hook up with a potential partner, if that should be your current desire. Not surprisingly, that latter option has opened up all sorts of controversial issues with the online distributor of trade.

In 2002, according to Wikipedia, because of complaints, Craigslist started adding warnings to some of their personal ad areas, such as “men seeking men”, “casual encounters”, “rants and raves”, and “erotic services”. Already, these areas were causing problems with the mainstream segments of the population.

From this point forward, Craigslist has been on the attentions of quite a few public interst groups, and not surprisingly, law enforcement officials.

Up until this time, erotic services were pretty much an entity you had to search through some pretty creative methods, often involving a lot of bait and switch circumstances that one had to navigate solely on the hope that the next time would be better than the last time. Massage parlours were often a place men would go to seek prostitution, and after a lot of false leads and deception, it was not unusual for a man to pay hundreds of dollars to receive absolutely no desired experiences. Some got lucky, but most didn’t, and it was quite often a very discouraging experience.

The Internet was supposed to change all of that. At one’s fingertips was now immediate access to all sorts of information. Craigslist jumped into the game, and people were now following want ads for what they were seeking, and in conjunction with a lot of other erotic services on the Internet, people were actually finding what they were seeking. It was not unusual to see someone’s want ad on Craigslist, then check out the profile on one of the other erotic feedback sites, and then decide whether or not to book a session with that person. Very hard to find erotic services were now being much easier to find because they could now be found on Craigslist. Many people may not realize it, but there are a lot of people out there looking for some very specific types of encounters, and having everything in one place made it much easier for these people to connect.

Well, this didn’t bode well for the industy when there were people who would do everything possible to make sure that such people could never make any such connection. But this probably wouldn’t have been that much of a problem if another entity did not show up, which made things even worse. I’m talking about the scammer.

People may not realize it, but the entity of the scammer has pretty much destroyed every good thing that has ever come across on the Internet. Porn didn’t hurt the Internet, as the fuddy duddies would like you think it did (it actually served to fuel the Internet in its infancy, which is somewhat ironic if you think about it). Scammers did. Most of your email is now pretty much worthless because scammers found out they could profit off of naive people. You are required to buy special software to protect your computer because scammers discovered they could infect your computer just by hosting evil programs on sites where you wouldn’t expect them to be. Ebay used to be a great place to buy things; scammers and thieves put a wrench in the trust factor of that entity. So it is not that much of a surprise that scammers showed up and pretty much destroyed Craigslist.

Some of the biggest crimes that have rallied people against Craigslist have been people who have been cheating other people on the Internet. Call them scammers. Call them thieves. Call them the mob. Or whatever, but it’s this group of people who have caused all of the problems that have made Craigslist the cesspool that it can often be.

Because face it. Women being prostitutes has never caused all that much of a problem, unless you’re Tiger Woods. But people forcing women into prostitution has. Child predators looking for children for sex causes problems. Again, those same people are the ones that make this sort of thing available. These people are criminals who care little for the activity but everything for exploitation and making a quick buck. Unfortunately, they serve to diminish an activity that others might be providing in a more positive way, and unfortunately, there’s often very little way to separate the two.

There are a lot of honest people who are into the sex business who aren’t trying to steal from other people or to hurt other people. They easily get pushed aside whenever the bad class of people show up, and unfortunately that bad class shows up way too quickly and way too often.

All of the issues that have caused public interest against Craigslist have come from these bad elements of our societies. No one rallies around a leader seeking to stop prostitution. But everyone rallies around anyone seeking to stop child exploitation and people who wish to develop nonconsensual slavery circumstances.

This is the problem that Craigslist has fallen into because the owners of that site really didn’t care who was posting on the site. They were more interested in developing a site that brought in money. I can’t see that I blame them, but because of this, they have become the victim of their own success. With great success comes great responsibility, to steal and destroy a great line from Spiderman, and unfortunately Craigslist hasn’t really come up to the plate for the responsibility thing. It played a lot of shell games in hopes of getting people to think it was on the right side of morality, but when it came down to it, it was really only thinking of itself. When the public finally started to become a hammer to be used against them, they censored themselves and then tried to act all First Amendmentish and posted “censored” where they censored themselves.

The fact is: They could have dealt with this a lot easier by actually policing their ads in the beginning to see how much exploitation was going on. Instead, they dropped the ball and lost the whole game. But for lack of stupid analogies, I’ll take this one step further and say that they haven’t lost the whole season yet. They can still do something about cleaning up their site without destroying what they set out to do in the first place.

There are a lot of sex workers who do rely on Craigslist, and unfortunately because of this action, they are forced to start using more exploitive sites out there that are much worse, and that’s sad. Craigslist could step back up to the plate and decide where it wants to be in this debate. It can kowtow to the Bible thumpers and give in completely, like it’s doing right now, or it can bite back and work hand in hand with the communities that have grown up with them, making sure that the evil ones are ostracized, but the ones who are there for the right reasons still have a forum in which to do what they do best.

Unfortunately, it looks like Craigslist may take the easier road because it is filled with fewer obstacles. In the end, it may be a road that leads nowhere.