[moodyskeptic]

Good article! I've been cautioning this for years here: perception, for most purposes, is reality.

As a marketing pro, I help craft perceptions, it's remarkably easy once you curb the intellectual resistence. If you can portray something as hip, smart or urban, and you do it convincingly ( easier said than done) in the language of the particular consumer cult you're aiming for, viola! your job is done... let the suits fill the product pipeline.

Freepers would be wise to memorize this fact: most people WANT to be told what to think.

Television (average US household weekly viewing is 50 hours!) and a lazy corrupt school system have conspired to dull the critical thinking skills of average Joe and Jane American.

Smart politicians, journalists, news networks, marketeers and salesmen take advantage of this sad fact. The medium you're viewing this on at this very moment is the only hope of mankind. The mew media can break the grip of ignorance and we've only seen the hint of the potential.


Imagine the Nov election MINUS Free Republic, blogs and AM talk radio.

[Dat Mon]

"Freepers would be wise to memorize this fact: most people WANT to be told what to think."

Astute post...but I disagree a bit on this point....

I believe people are being CONDITIONED to be told what to think.

People are being led to believe that our world in general, our laws, our political system, our current events and world politics, are just too complicated, arcane and obtuse for the average person to make logical sense of.

People are being directed away from independence of thought...from the idea that an informed, educated, logical person can understand issues and make informed commonsense decisions.

Instead..we have a proliferation of so called experts, or "specialists".

These people are interpreting their specialty in a way which is biased towards themselves, or a particular special interest. They occupy the legal, economic, political, educational, and journalistic fields, to name a few.

I'm thinking for example, of a book several years old which chronicled the demise of practical, common sense logical interpretations of the law. Instead, legal "specialists" interpret the law in ways which lead to the types of decisions listed in the posted article.