Sunday, September 28, 2008
But what does it mean?
I watched the debate Friday. Who won?
"Looks like an Obama victory to me." -- USA
If winning a debate is a popularity contest, the polls say that Obama won.
An interesting question -- is the winning side of a rational argument, an argument between two thinking brains with different positions something that should determined by popular vote? If 50.1% people think X, even if the truth is Y, who's right? What if it's not as close -- say 95% to 5%? But then this is a political debate, not an academic or philosophical one, so it's not a thing in itself really, but rather a means to an end, i.e. winning an election. If you have to play defense, you play defense. You manage expectations. The fight is not necessarily fair. The superior debater is handicapped from the word go. If the favorite wins, he should have won, so no points scored ... apparently only an absolute knockout (making your opponent cry maybe?) is the only way the favorite can win. (Could the Globetrotters ever beat the Generals in this upside down world?) In presidential debates, you absolutely want to be the underdog. You want people to think you're dumb as dogshit going in, so that you're mere ability to construct (semi) grammatical sentences (even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the question, don't address the question or topic even tangentially, as if the question did not even exist) is considered miraculous. Think Bush-Gore, think Bush-Kerry. Those were wins for Bush because he managed expectations.
So this adds a new level of complexity then. Not only is the winner determined by mass acclaim, but the game is rigged as well. The bookies have set the spread.
And therein lies the biggest obfuscation of them all, the bookies. The media. I'm fairly certain they have their talking points ready before the debate even begins. Maybe they watch the debate, maybe they don't. For whatever reason, they seem to focus on the points I found irrelevant and ignore completely what I thought was important. Maybe that's me. I'm too far out from the happy warm masses that get to decide winners and losers. I'm in that 5% margin of error whose opinions don't count. I'd like to think I rarely agree with them because they are so obssessed with their own style that style is all they can ever see. Forget the substance -- that's irrelevant -- didn't you see X's facial expression while Y was talking? The horror. [Here's an idea, for once let's get a look at your stupid vapid mugs when the camera's not on you.]
The media's endless "analysis" reveals more about them than it does about anything related to reality. Here's a law of rumination you can trust -- the more something gets talked about, the less it gets talked about. Huh? I mean that if you have 5 hours of talk about 90 minutes of debate, every extra additional minute of "coverage" has less and less to do with the thing that it being covered (i.e., debate, which the purpose of it all, right?), and the more it has to do with the coverage itself. The "spin" becomes even more derivative of itself, like a whirlpool swirling ever tigher around its own center, or a black hole accumulating to itself the flotsam and jetsam of space. Oh, and by the way, the public discourse suffers as a result.
We get lots of stories about stories about reactions to stories about expectations of tomorrow's stories. I think this is a bad thing. So who benefits? On some level, I think we all know that it's not the public.
The media class benefits, that's who benefits. They sell a product. That product is electrons coming out of your TV and going into your brain. It's as simple as that. They need you to consume as much of it as they can stuff down your throat. They're no better than McDonalds or a subprime mortgage dealer. They'll gladly give you as much shit as you can handle, because, after all, they're only giving the people what they want, right?
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"Looks like an Obama victory to me." -- USAIf winning a debate is a popularity contest, the polls say that Obama won.
An interesting question -- is the winning side of a rational argument, an argument between two thinking brains with different positions something that should determined by popular vote? If 50.1% people think X, even if the truth is Y, who's right? What if it's not as close -- say 95% to 5%? But then this is a political debate, not an academic or philosophical one, so it's not a thing in itself really, but rather a means to an end, i.e. winning an election. If you have to play defense, you play defense. You manage expectations. The fight is not necessarily fair. The superior debater is handicapped from the word go. If the favorite wins, he should have won, so no points scored ... apparently only an absolute knockout (making your opponent cry maybe?) is the only way the favorite can win. (Could the Globetrotters ever beat the Generals in this upside down world?) In presidential debates, you absolutely want to be the underdog. You want people to think you're dumb as dogshit going in, so that you're mere ability to construct (semi) grammatical sentences (even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the question, don't address the question or topic even tangentially, as if the question did not even exist) is considered miraculous. Think Bush-Gore, think Bush-Kerry. Those were wins for Bush because he managed expectations.
So this adds a new level of complexity then. Not only is the winner determined by mass acclaim, but the game is rigged as well. The bookies have set the spread.
And therein lies the biggest obfuscation of them all, the bookies. The media. I'm fairly certain they have their talking points ready before the debate even begins. Maybe they watch the debate, maybe they don't. For whatever reason, they seem to focus on the points I found irrelevant and ignore completely what I thought was important. Maybe that's me. I'm too far out from the happy warm masses that get to decide winners and losers. I'm in that 5% margin of error whose opinions don't count. I'd like to think I rarely agree with them because they are so obssessed with their own style that style is all they can ever see. Forget the substance -- that's irrelevant -- didn't you see X's facial expression while Y was talking? The horror. [Here's an idea, for once let's get a look at your stupid vapid mugs when the camera's not on you.]
The media's endless "analysis" reveals more about them than it does about anything related to reality. Here's a law of rumination you can trust -- the more something gets talked about, the less it gets talked about. Huh? I mean that if you have 5 hours of talk about 90 minutes of debate, every extra additional minute of "coverage" has less and less to do with the thing that it being covered (i.e., debate, which the purpose of it all, right?), and the more it has to do with the coverage itself. The "spin" becomes even more derivative of itself, like a whirlpool swirling ever tigher around its own center, or a black hole accumulating to itself the flotsam and jetsam of space. Oh, and by the way, the public discourse suffers as a result.
We get lots of stories about stories about reactions to stories about expectations of tomorrow's stories. I think this is a bad thing. So who benefits? On some level, I think we all know that it's not the public.
The media class benefits, that's who benefits. They sell a product. That product is electrons coming out of your TV and going into your brain. It's as simple as that. They need you to consume as much of it as they can stuff down your throat. They're no better than McDonalds or a subprime mortgage dealer. They'll gladly give you as much shit as you can handle, because, after all, they're only giving the people what they want, right?
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