Stir the pot

Posted by on . 3 comments.

I’d like to thank Tim for setting off a firestorm. Now I feel obligated to go on Lexis-Nexis and Google and look up all this information and build a model of our society’s ignorance. Just when I thought I was going to get my homework done.
At any rate, as ideas flow in, I’ll start to post them on my webpage. My hope is that someday it becomes a manual for the informed citizen.

Comments

  1. Tim says:
    November 4, 2004 at 7:33 pm

    You know, you could always make up facts. That’s what most people do anyway.

  2. Evan says:
    November 4, 2004 at 8:17 pm

    I’m glad that we all agree now that ignorance is a problem in our country. On the other hand, I get the feeling, Chris, that you are responding to a kind of ignorance we are faced with every day–things like, “Kerry is a flip-flopper,” “Bush is a dumbass” or “Bush is a Nazi.” Plenty of people reduce everything to black-and-white jargon and it simply doesn’t do justice to the complexities of national and global politics. (Of course, I do believe Bush is a dumbass, but I’m not about to use that opinion in debate. I don’t even think Bush’s intelligence is a relevant issue.) It’s true: most people really don’t know how to research. On the other hand, the population of voters you are talking about–people who surf the net, finding opinionated, crude or unsubstantiated rhetoric and take it for fact–aren’t even close to being the biggest problem group. This active population of partisan voters, many of whom we all deal with on a daily basis, is virtually insignificant compared to the vast majority of Americans, most of whom will never even stumble their way onto a campaign website like johnkerry.com. So what’s the deal with this significant voting population? At least part of the problem is, in my opinion, coming from the type of rhetoric we are receiving from our administration. On the one hand, Bush has his first ammendment rights and is free to throw around terms like “evil” and “freedom-haters” with as much gusto as he wants. On the other hand, this isn’t exactly shedding light on the complexities of international politics, and this is certainly not doing anything positive for our apparently preexisting tendencies to look for answers in black-and-white terms. This is especially true in the fearful climate in which we are living today, when words like “patriotism” can easily camouflage certain acts that reduce the personal freedoms for which our boys are supposedly sacrificing themselves. That said, a healthy democracy should be able to expose the complexities being masked by this kind of oversimplistic rhetoric–which, by the way, I do not suppose John Kerry to be completely innocent of. The real problems, I believe, are the media and the lack of budgetary restraints on campaign spending. I’ll say more about these issues in another post, but sadly I have no more time at the moment.

  3. Chris says:
    November 4, 2004 at 11:47 pm

    I like the start. The problem is how do we get to the solution–a world where people know where to get accurate information, seek it out, and base their decisions on that info and their beliefs?

    That’s the fundamental ISSUE I. It seems to be a necessity before we start on the other issues. If just four of us are informed and honest with ourselves, there’s no point to democracy.

    Democracy of information is the prerequisite to democracy in government. (a) I think that discerning individuals can ignore campaign rhetoric and the media, but that we must be educated to distrust the media and learn to be objective analysts. (b) I’m not sure that’s enough, because it can be hard for people like me to cope when we find parts of our beliefs are irrational. I think those two things are primary in the discussion of this issue, so I’d have to differ with Evan on this one. But I think this is an important start.
    -Chris

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