Theory

[icycalm]

http://fabiusmayland.blogspot.de/2012/0 ... ation.html

He has a reasonably good grasp on how journalism works. Essentially, "journalism" is a synonym for "pandering". You can't get out of this by asking for "good journalism" or other contradictia in adjecto: it's included in the definition.

I will explain everything at length in the essay -- though I am debating whether I should move the theory to the philosophical book, since the subject is much more widely applicable than videogame theory, and leave only the practical examples for the videogame book. Haven't made up my mind on this yet. Or perhaps I'll put the full theory in the videogame book and just offer a short summary in the philosophy book, since it's really not that hard a process to grasp.

[icycalm]

http://fabiusmayland.blogspot.de/2012/08/elephant.html

What you should do instead is fire up google scholar, or wikipedia, or go to the library and actually inform yourself about homosexuality, what it really means, what its implications for society are, the history of gay rights, studies that determine whether or not homosexual adoption poses a problem for the child, and you should do this for a week maybe, and during that whole time you should discuss the topic with someone you know who does the same thing, and at the end of the week you should have reached a conclusion on whether homosexuality is an issue or not. Because only through this process do you learn anything about the underlying mechanics. You've probably sat through weeks of coverage about gay rights already; stories about chick-a-fil, about Don't Ask Don't Tell, about SINGULAR issues which have arisen in the past years. Yet all this time was continually spent on reiteration. Whether you have read the Reddit frontpaged post about chick-a-fil or not does not make any difference, it is a meaningless tidbit.

And what happens if you do this process of actually informing yourself about a topic for a dedicated amount of time - perhaps more than a week is in order sometimes - is that you can reach definite conclusions. The irony of the mass media is that despite probably broadcasting more than a year worth of coverage regarding the Iraq War, you do not know anything about the Iraq War through this coverage. Because none of the individual newsbits you've acquired over the years have any meaning, have any implications. Every single individual piece of coverage is interchangeable, because they all are about reiteration. You could watch TV every day for the past ten years without actually knowing anything.

You might argue that this process of thoroughly informing oneself about the underlying issues of a topic is timeconsuming. Quite to the contrary, this process is timesaving. If you research the general theory of Revolutions and perhaps the French Revolution of 1789 specifically, you will automatically have a more systematic, thorough and detailed view of every Revolution that ever was and every potentially revolutionary movement that will happen in the future. Whereas watching an hour of CNN or clicking through the frontpage of Reddit will not do anything except fill your head with trivia about a specific and entirely meaningless tidbit -"Mayor of blablabla has denounced Chick-a-fil for blablabla". The news of which will either make you clap your hands immediately ("What a great Mayor!") or shake your fist ("He's not American!"), which is the only reaction the mass media system provokes: cheap, short-natured emotions without any lasting implications.

But cheap, short-natured emotions without any lasting implications are precisely what's suitable for cheap, short-natured people whose actions have no lasting implications, so no one's scamming anyone. Things are exactly how they should be. The only question left to ask is: are you a cheap, short-natured person whose actions have no lasting implications or not?

[icycalm]

Journalistic deficit disorder
http://www.economist.com/node/21563275

There is, they say, an “almost complete amnesia in the newspaper coverage of biomedical findings”.

I like how the hack who wrote this tries to shift at least some of the blame at the scientists in the end.