Okay, I should just stop reading the news – it just makes me mad. The main thing that infuriates me is stupidity … sometime I should go into therapy to find out why I can’t just let stupidity go, like much of the world does. I guess the problem is that I realize that the U.S. has a more or less democratic form of government (less, if you consider the Supreme Court, but that’s an issue for another time). So, people under the influence of stupidity get the same vote that I do. Therefore, stupidity affects me.
In reality, our votes mainly count in electing the people who will make the decisions for us; after that’s done, we’ve pretty much lost control, except to take part in a poll. Everyone knows that polls are really what decides things. Politicians, for the most part, have two key things they look at when voting for something: what’s in it for them, and what will help them get elected again. Granted, some actually vote on principle, but I think if that happened alot, we’d start calling it “principlics” instead of “politics.” (ever notice that the first three letters of “politician” and “poll” are the same? That should tell you something.)
Public opinion, supposedly represented by polls, is what might really run this country. Unless, you believe all of that trilateral comission & illuminati stuff; in that event, public opinion is just a clever smokescreen, the media is duped, and public stupidity is still the problem.
ok, get to the point…
Oh, yes, the news. Will Rogers once said, “All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance. ” He was talking about public stupidity, and the news is at the heart of it. The news creates its own reality, because people want to believe what they read. That’s the only excuse for all those rags at the grocery checkout stands. People figure that if it’s in print or on the air it has to be true, other wise they wouldn’t put it there. So, the media creates the opinions they want people to have, and then they take polls to see how it’s working.
That’s the only real significance of polls – to see how well the media is doing its job. And, if they aren’t doing so well, they just take the numbers and write new stories making illogical claims about what the numbers mean, and try it again. It’s a really cool system, if you’re the media. If you start to believe what you read, then you become under the influence of stupidity, and the media wins.
What prompted this rant was some article about the President’s popularity slipping in a recent Newsweek poll. What do you expect? Newsweek and the rest of the left leaning media spend a lot of time telling us the President isn’t doing his job. Most people don’t even know what the President’s job is, much less how he’s doing in it. I doubt that the pollsters even ask the people if they actually know anything. As a result, the only thing that the poll tells you is that people are believing the media’s skew.
A Plot to Change America
You know what would be really fun? If everyone started lying to the pollsters — it would throw the whole media system off. The politicians wouldn’t know what to believe, so maybe they’d have to rely on their principles a bit more. The media wouldn’t know what to say, so they’d be tempted to actually report the facts. Then, we’d all have to learn to think.
Wow… that sounds a bit anarchist, doesn’t it?