re: #8 filetandrelease

What we need is a high speed mag lev system criss crossing the country along interstate routes connected to a nuclear grid. But first we need a politician with the balls to confront Detroit, big oil, boeing and hell just about everyone.

No, politicians are only a secondary part of good government in a democracy. The role of the politician is to convince us, the people, of what is needed to be done. However, what currently happens is that politicians are unwilling to attempt to convince people because they are entirely dependent on media to do it, and that means that we decide what message we want to hear. Thus far, we have shown that we are far more interested in sound bites and salacious gossip, and spouting memes and slogans, than dealing in information and facts. Our media thus feeds us an endless stream of that, and our politicians, even if they were to be the wisest, most reasonable folk out there, know that they cannot get elected if they try to put out a message contrary to this theme.

We are at the cusp of a very dangerous time in society. Powerful, non-elected interests are starting to realise that buying politicians is almost irrelevant. They are starting to discover the power of an all-pervasive media - 24 hour television, radio and the internet. They are starting to realise that they can pump the necessary opinions and memes to the people directly, rather than needing politicians to do things out of the public eye. Why buy off a politician to do things that are contrary to the public interest (but in your own interest), when you can use all-pervasive media to make people insist that it really is in their interest?

It’s a very dangerous demagoguery indeed. Our human capacity for rationality has not evolved in time with our access to media. We are starting to see that you don’t need to do your dirty work out of the public eye at all - you don’t need to bribe politicians, judges, anyone. With a good enough media campaign, you can convince people that your dirty work is nothing less than God’s own truth. You can convince people that all science, which has elevated man out of caves since time immemorial, is in fact evil and dishonest. You can convince people that their neighbours are somehow part of a decades-old plot to take away everything they hold dear, and to hate everything their neighbours stand for.

I just hope the Information Age can survive its own information.