re: #52 Lupin

I have had an interesting on and off discussion about the American Constitution on Doc Conspiracy’s blog.

I realize that at this point in time, your constitution as it stands now is a rampart against those who would continue to inflict serious damage on your country — more than what they have succeeded in doing until now. And that rampart must be maintained at all cost.

Nevertheless, your Constitution has not prevented your country from becoming a rogue almost-fascist state in the first place. Something like Fox News would be unlawful in France, and there’s no doubt that Fox News is one of the reasons for the current, dismal state of things.

I see that rampart as a flawed wall, full of holes, which have enabled the enemy to gain a serious foothold inside your city and start setting fires here and there. I say that the holes must be plugged, the rampart must be repaired, buttressed, to better resist new weapons that it wasn’t originally designed to repel…

I agree that, with your city already invaded and under siege, and fires that need to be put out, this is not at all the best time to discuss rampart repairs. 🙂

But do not delude yourself: the holes are there, the old rampart has proved insufficient, and that is why, if you prevail in repelling the invaders (a big if), it will need to be fixed, or you will eventually fall once and for all.

Personally I’m not too optimistic and I think we all have seen the last of the US of A as we’ve known it all our adult lives. 21st century America will belong to Trump and its successors. Brazil on the Moskva.

Freedom of the press becomes dangerous when those in power deliberately try to weaken public education, enabling a more gullible public to be manipulated by rogue media, and deliberately create conditions where it is easy for rogue media to run free. I’m thinking here of allowing mergers and consolidations of already large media companies into even larger ones, and abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan administration. So, not only do we now have a public that is increasingly unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, or news and opinion, but the public also increasingly hears only one side of a particular issue if they stay with a single news source.

It’s almost as if the conservatives are trying to erode the First Amendment’s protections by making the FA irrelevant.

I related an anecdote from my teaching last week, involving some students who had accessed some alt-right website for a history presentation. I had to take them aside after class and point out the inconsistencies of the image they used, which included a photograph of a man who lived in the mid-1600s. Generally speaking, teaching students how to differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources is even harder now than when I was student, because now any idiot with an modicum of computer experience (or money) can slap up a website, doll up it up to look A-1 professional, and pretend to be an expert in something.

Educating people about sources once they have left school is even harder, especially when most of them don’t want to listen to you.