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Spiderbaby's avatar

After a weekend bouncing back & forth between Fox & CNN it was easy to see that each network has their own pre-arranged gripe schedule.

CNN harps on anti-vaxxers(they're mostly Republicans), the "Insurrection"(hey, they're all Republicans), condemnations of Cuomo that looked more like strategy sessions for his defense team, CRT(anyone who questions it is misinformed &/or suffering loss of white privilege) and not much else.

Fox does CRT(crazy liberals & Marxists), anti-vaxxers(they're mostly minorities), the Border(crazy liberal Marxists did it all), Covid(it's all a crazy liberal Marxist wet dream) & not much else.

I couldn't help wondering how corporations must be truly loving this time. As long as their crimes don't have a skin color or a political affiliation no one will pay attention. As long as they put the required number of minorities along with the occasional rainbow flag in their ads they instantly become "part of the solution. The "news" is, much like the dinosaurs, completely extinct, at least as far as TV news goes.

As I mentioned elsewhere I also watched Biden's Town Hall from 2 weeks ago. In among Joe's word pasta ramblings, he'd occasionally hit lucidity. At one lucid point, Joe was trying to illustrate how he was going to make corporate America "pay their fair share" because he had the experience that he gained in Delaware where "150 corporations...150 corporations...(let's repeat it one more time)150 corporations are incorporated." Of course they're incorporated there because Delaware doesn't make them "pay their fair share" or, more appropriately, pay anything at all. So Joe's example was illustrating the exact opposite of Joe's intended purpose. Yet Don Lemon, handsome teleprompter reader playing TV journalist that is, stood there nodding all po' faced and subservient as if Joe wasn't making a complete fool of himself.

Oh yeah, and the audience clapped.

This started me thinking about experiments I had read about where researchers were trying to discern if seeing is really believing or do we tend to see what what we believe we're going to see irregardless of what's actually there.

One experiment took place in a normal college classroom. A professor would be lecturing as normal and then a stranger would enter the classroom. The teacher & the man would argue & then the interloper would pull an object out and stab the teacher with it before running out of the room. The teacher stood up & revealed that it was all pantomime. He then asked the class to detail what they saw. I do believe that every witness said that the man had a knife. Of course he didn't. What did have was a banana. Yet no one noticed.

Nothing illustrates this idea more than the story of North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park. Park said she was mugged by 3 black women in Chicago. As the women tried to escape, Park grabbed the woman who had her wallet and began yelling for assistance. The black woman, much to her credit, began yelling, “You’re a racist! The color of my skin doesn’t make me a thief” as a crowd of white people gathered. The white folk prevented Park from calling the police & they also let the black woman escape. The white people then started calling Park a racist, one even going so far as pointing at Park and telling her child, “Look at that racist, that’s the problem we have.”

My point here is that it seems we've reached a weird cultural point where huge chunks of the country are so buried in their "belief systems" they can no longer discern reality. In other words, culturally, many of us can no longer see the fucking banana.

That is terrifying.

Oh yeah, told ya I was long winded.

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BillLawrenceOnline's avatar

Great article again, Matt. One thing about Cuomo that should be mentioned is while groping a woman's breast at work is bad, launching a smear campaign against her when she complains reaches the true evil category.

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