"So much of the news is so obviously calculated manipulation, aimed at serving an agenda, rather than a description." Yes that....but even worse than that:
The News is one of the 20th century's greatest fictions. The whole concept - that you can know what's important at any time by tuning in to a half-hour 'bulletin' - is fundamentally bogus. Even if it wasn't willfully biased (which of course it always is) "‘The News’ and ‘Current Affairs’ cannot help but be biased; how could it not be, given its inevitable editorial selectivity. (Some murders warrant weeks of agonising and outrage while others never get a mention – some stories ‘trend’ and others fail to ‘capture the public imagination’ etc etc.) " https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
There's def something in zeitgeist atmosphere that vigorous minds instantly capture and run with on exploratory paths. Paths strongly tending towards convergence 😊 Kinda companion piece --> yakubianape.substack.com/p/the-great-american-migrating-labor 👌
🗨 Or are we a nation of transients? Do we live in cities? Or do we live in temporary, pop-up work camps? Do we live in homes, or do we live in investment properties? Do we have neighbors, or co-workers? Wives, or cohabitation economic partners?
I think of a family in the ideal as the “economy of love.” Not everyone is lucky enough to grow up in one as I was. It’s something I would devoutly wish for any child, but I don’t think the government can provide an adequate replacement, regardless of how much we provide in “mandatory spending.”
I get why some might read your posts as rage porn, but what I see is something more like *disbelief porn*, as in: “How can such utterly transparent garbage continue to pass muster? How can they keep pulling this off with anything like a straight face?”
Perhaps it’s a generational difference. Those of us who were adults before this century began still can’t quite believe how far public discourse has fallen. You keep pointing to the fall, and mapping the new territory. A kind of stunned cartographer.
super comment, EM, but a bon mot mod for 'A kind of stunned cartographer.' This ol'mechanicwould say, 'A kind of gobsmacked cartographer.'.. etymonline.com › word › gobsmacked
gobsmacked (adj.) also gob-smacked, "flabbergasted, amazed, astounded," literally "smacked in the mouth," by 1936, U.K. slang, from gob (n.2) "mouth" + past participle of smack (v.). also from 1936 Entries linking to gobsmacked gob (n.2) "mouth," 1540s, from Irish gob "mouth," and thus related to the other English noun gob (also see gobbet ).
I've been feeling like that ever since 2020. All that COVID nonsense, the left gearing up to steal the election, the GOP bending over for the steal, and the constant message that we were simply not permitted to discuss certain topics. I still feel like I'm in a Twilight Zone episode that just never seems to end.
First, Chris, you definitely don't do rage porn. What you do is point out in a precise and often entertaining way how we've been gaslighted. We know we're being lied to and it's such a relief for you to logically break it down. Please don't change!
Amen to that. Your message is never "the world is effing effed and so are you," it's "people who own the microphones are lying to you about how effed it is; don't take my word for it, GO SEE FOR YOURSELF." That's one of the many reasons why I love you, in the most platonic way.
It was inconceivable to NPR hacks that people have tuned out MSM for its having jettisoned objective reporting of facts for a calculated narrative of few selected superficial facts caked so thick with propaganda that the listener is left suspecting that most of each story gets twisted.
The writing is on the wall:
Tucker Carlson had ten times CNN's audience before Fox fired him, and Joe Rogan has 10 times what Carlson had. What makes Rogan 100 times as appreciated as CNN is he seems honest, even-handed and genuinely unafraid and curious about even controversial topics.
Perhaps it is because I worked in local Wichita TV News back in the 80's or that I have been in the Ad Business for the ensuing years up to this date. But. For years now it has been painfully obvious that what is called "news" is nothing but propaganda and narrative control. The "covid coverage" was so obviously misleading and replete with outright lies I could barely contain myself. When my Dear Wife would watch it on TV I had to leave the room. My comments regarding the blatant lies only caused her discomfort and cognitive dissonance. The objective of the "reporting" was to fill her with fear (and they did a good job of that). The sad part was that so many people I tried tried to educate as to what these "news people" were doing would not accept the blatant incongruity of statements pushed by these media hacks regarding Covid, Donald Trump and the Stolen Elections. To me, that this junk is primarily half truth, lies and innuendo has been PAINFULLY OBVIOUS but apparently it is not to a large portion of our citizenry. I'm not sure what can be done about it. Now that revelations are slowly leaking out about the Covid Fraud, Election Fraud, Ukraine Fraud, etc. I don't see any acknowledgment from folks. They seem content to make blithe statements like "Oh, it's all just politics" - whatever that is supposed to mean.
Ever since Rush Limbaugh died I get my general information from a variety of Podcasts and Blogs. Most TV and Radio "News" is not only a bad joke but also a dangerous cancer eating away at our Republic. I stay away from it. At best it is just a cheap entertainment form. At worst it is an insidious control mechanism - blatant mind control.
I feel the same way. This year I cancelled my DirecTV and WSJ subscriptions, which I had maintained for 20+ years. I'm in the oil and gas business, and the gas-lighting regarding renewables and global warming in the WSJ A section got to be too much! Plus, the constant editorializing against Trump. Don't these elites understand that every time they attack Trump, they denigrate his voters, many of whom voted for him as the anti-left option?
Brian, we share a very similar background, albeit in different parts of the country. This transition from "news as journalism" to "interpreted news as entertainment" started accelerating post 9/11, IMHO. I produced a doc shot back in 2007-2008 on illegal immigration. It got a 5-minute standing ovation at the premiere (with over 500 in the room that included people from ALL sides of the issues--both political parties (and the "neithers"), immigrants (both legal and illegal), activists of all sorts, and documentary fans).
It got a few festival plays, but we tried to release for 3 solid years and could not get a distribution deal. The main reason? Because we let both "sides" tell their stories accurately and we laid it out editorially without taking sides. More than several times, the reason I heard "It's not like a Michael Moore doc--it doesn't tell people 'how" to interpret it."
Only since the FJB administration have the issues we tackled even started to be covered in the MSM--and now they're "discovering" things we learned by sending a crew to 26 U.S. cities and Guatemala to "follow the money" 15-16 years ago! Stories about the cartel drug trade, mules, rapes, trafficking, diseases and the practice of loading people up in freight trucks or U-Hauls and taking them far into the interior of the country--then just dumping them out somewhere/anywhere far away from the border itself. The stories of modern-day slaves left to pick up the pieces after being abandoned somewhere by the "guide" they paid their life savings to, in order to get here. The underlying intent of Aztlán (and its influences on La Raza & MEChA) to re-take the southwest portion of the U.S. by getting as many illegals in to have babies to eventually vote to overtake it. (If they survived.) The number of states--especially California and Nevada (then)--allowing illegals to vote. Many of those children are now old enough to vote. It was estimated then, easily over 20 million people were here illegally. The "news" tells us that we probably have about that many here now--15 years later and after 3 years of almost a non-existent border. My bet is we're looking at well over 60 million, if not closer to 80.
Just like you, I see zero acknowledgment of the media's willful blindness to most very important issues. It's all about mind--and click--control. On the web, you can barely get to the story for all the pop-up ads and embedded ads throughout the content. And to any rational person capable of critical thinking, the lies they spread should be obvious. But the vast majority of this country is intellectually lazy. Mixing smart phones with social media makes for very stupid, easily manipulated masses.
The internet’s digital tsunami of information and emancipation of authorship shattered the traditional newspaper business model and the elite-controlled dispensation that had long endowed newsrooms with a sacrosanct authority as a gatekeeper to knowledge with a monopoly over dissemination and agenda-setting. This has led to the development of "postjournalism." The goal isn't to inform people, it's to confirm what they already believe.
I sent that YouTube video on to a lefty friend who promptly replied with something about conspiracy theories etc. Didn't even watch the video, just made assumptions. Talk about an own goal!
Never experienced rage nor the sensations of porn in reading Chris' Substack. I think the commenter using that phrase was performing his own little ritual of rejecting "wrong think", using a synthetic approved phrase, much like "harm reduction" or "gender affirming" to describe something completely different than the thing itself. In other words, to signal, not to describe. Good riddance.
Amen thanks for stating that. We have allowed the PC crowd to take away the true meaning of a lot of words in order to make them feel better about whatever “unusual” thing they are trying to push upon society as normal.
“We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.”
To quote Mr. Hemingway, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
According to the Cabal Disinformation Center (CDC), the average weight for an American woman aged 20 years and above is 170.6 pounds (at 5'4"). The average man weighs 199.8 pounds (at 5'9").
Only roughly 1/3 of American women and 1/4 of American men ARE NEITHER overweight nor obese.
Nearly 70 percent of American adults are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half take two, according to the Mayo Clinic and Olmsted Medical Center.
I could go on, and on...
I'd argue that we're very sick from bottom up AND top down.
Both ideologically, and physically. And that the two reinforce each other.
And this is not even taking into account the tsunami of mortality and morbidity that DEATHVAX™ has brought--and will bring--to us...
Here's ER doctor and HIT exercise studio owner/operator Dr. Doug McGuff on the subject:
This is a fair point. Physically sick, yes, and in good part because of the corporate sludge we have in lieu of food. A lot of that personal illness, especially the overmedication, is because of the top-down commodification of everything, and it hard for a lot of people to fight.
Don’t stop being a lighthouse on stormy night. I have been culling the rage porn, that your former reader, claims as their reason to cancel their subscription - for a few years now.
I anticipate your postings, similar to a child waiting for their parents on Christmas morning.
Looking for new postings from you are often my sole reason for opening the app.
Was that subscriber legitimately cross with your writings or are they a liberal plant (real or ai) that subscribed with the plan of sewing seeds of rage the entire time.
- Ultimately, who cares? Just don’t stop and don’t doubt yourself.
Keep your light burning bright! There are a lot of us who need help navigating this darkness.
My mom says my lefty aunt doesnt seem to know anything about current events and news anymore. It’s like since trump is out she wants to pretend to live in a world without problems. And perhaps especially doesn’t want to find out anything bad about the current president. For my part, I have not watched the news in years because I’ve felt that it was all more propaganda than actual useful information. I prefer to read, from sources I trust.
Given that media provides support for congenial status identities for those who buy into the game, it is in a way encouraging that so many people don’t want to play the status game being offered.
Chris, I’m one who doesn’t consume as much news anymore because a) after 5 minutes it is repetitive, b) a lot of it is irrelevant, and c) I’m just not that in to indoctrination. Keep up the good work.
See also, on the theme of healthy country / sick institutions:
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/go-to-america
"So much of the news is so obviously calculated manipulation, aimed at serving an agenda, rather than a description." Yes that....but even worse than that:
The News is one of the 20th century's greatest fictions. The whole concept - that you can know what's important at any time by tuning in to a half-hour 'bulletin' - is fundamentally bogus. Even if it wasn't willfully biased (which of course it always is) "‘The News’ and ‘Current Affairs’ cannot help but be biased; how could it not be, given its inevitable editorial selectivity. (Some murders warrant weeks of agonising and outrage while others never get a mention – some stories ‘trend’ and others fail to ‘capture the public imagination’ etc etc.) " https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
There's def something in zeitgeist atmosphere that vigorous minds instantly capture and run with on exploratory paths. Paths strongly tending towards convergence 😊 Kinda companion piece --> yakubianape.substack.com/p/the-great-american-migrating-labor 👌
🗨 Or are we a nation of transients? Do we live in cities? Or do we live in temporary, pop-up work camps? Do we live in homes, or do we live in investment properties? Do we have neighbors, or co-workers? Wives, or cohabitation economic partners?
Both can be true: eg our homes are our biggest investment and families are small economies.
I think of a family in the ideal as the “economy of love.” Not everyone is lucky enough to grow up in one as I was. It’s something I would devoutly wish for any child, but I don’t think the government can provide an adequate replacement, regardless of how much we provide in “mandatory spending.”
Meh 😏 Dramatic rhetorical flair does not deserve dismantling by boring literal logic 🤸
I get why some might read your posts as rage porn, but what I see is something more like *disbelief porn*, as in: “How can such utterly transparent garbage continue to pass muster? How can they keep pulling this off with anything like a straight face?”
Perhaps it’s a generational difference. Those of us who were adults before this century began still can’t quite believe how far public discourse has fallen. You keep pointing to the fall, and mapping the new territory. A kind of stunned cartographer.
Rage porn...
Those are two words never entered my mind as I read your papers. I think of your writing as more thought provoking.
“Stunned cartographer” - great description!
The level of willful stupidity, and a sort of self-absorbed apathy, in the culture is hard to accept.
Yes!
super comment, EM, but a bon mot mod for 'A kind of stunned cartographer.' This ol'mechanicwould say, 'A kind of gobsmacked cartographer.'.. etymonline.com › word › gobsmacked
gobsmacked (adj.) also gob-smacked, "flabbergasted, amazed, astounded," literally "smacked in the mouth," by 1936, U.K. slang, from gob (n.2) "mouth" + past participle of smack (v.). also from 1936 Entries linking to gobsmacked gob (n.2) "mouth," 1540s, from Irish gob "mouth," and thus related to the other English noun gob (also see gobbet ).
Great! I almost used gobsmacked, and would have if I'd taken the time to check etymology. I was thinking stunned, aghast, gobsmacked.
So I think it fits: Chris is a gobsmacked cartographer.
Well said, I often find myself in a state of bewilderment. Kind of a ‘where am I?’ Feeling.
I've been feeling like that ever since 2020. All that COVID nonsense, the left gearing up to steal the election, the GOP bending over for the steal, and the constant message that we were simply not permitted to discuss certain topics. I still feel like I'm in a Twilight Zone episode that just never seems to end.
Definitely disorienting!
First, Chris, you definitely don't do rage porn. What you do is point out in a precise and often entertaining way how we've been gaslighted. We know we're being lied to and it's such a relief for you to logically break it down. Please don't change!
Amen to that. Your message is never "the world is effing effed and so are you," it's "people who own the microphones are lying to you about how effed it is; don't take my word for it, GO SEE FOR YOURSELF." That's one of the many reasons why I love you, in the most platonic way.
This confirmation lets us know we're not alone in our skepticism, breaking the Arch Conformity spell. Hence, independent journalism must go.
It was inconceivable to NPR hacks that people have tuned out MSM for its having jettisoned objective reporting of facts for a calculated narrative of few selected superficial facts caked so thick with propaganda that the listener is left suspecting that most of each story gets twisted.
The writing is on the wall:
Tucker Carlson had ten times CNN's audience before Fox fired him, and Joe Rogan has 10 times what Carlson had. What makes Rogan 100 times as appreciated as CNN is he seems honest, even-handed and genuinely unafraid and curious about even controversial topics.
Perhaps it is because I worked in local Wichita TV News back in the 80's or that I have been in the Ad Business for the ensuing years up to this date. But. For years now it has been painfully obvious that what is called "news" is nothing but propaganda and narrative control. The "covid coverage" was so obviously misleading and replete with outright lies I could barely contain myself. When my Dear Wife would watch it on TV I had to leave the room. My comments regarding the blatant lies only caused her discomfort and cognitive dissonance. The objective of the "reporting" was to fill her with fear (and they did a good job of that). The sad part was that so many people I tried tried to educate as to what these "news people" were doing would not accept the blatant incongruity of statements pushed by these media hacks regarding Covid, Donald Trump and the Stolen Elections. To me, that this junk is primarily half truth, lies and innuendo has been PAINFULLY OBVIOUS but apparently it is not to a large portion of our citizenry. I'm not sure what can be done about it. Now that revelations are slowly leaking out about the Covid Fraud, Election Fraud, Ukraine Fraud, etc. I don't see any acknowledgment from folks. They seem content to make blithe statements like "Oh, it's all just politics" - whatever that is supposed to mean.
Ever since Rush Limbaugh died I get my general information from a variety of Podcasts and Blogs. Most TV and Radio "News" is not only a bad joke but also a dangerous cancer eating away at our Republic. I stay away from it. At best it is just a cheap entertainment form. At worst it is an insidious control mechanism - blatant mind control.
I feel the same way. This year I cancelled my DirecTV and WSJ subscriptions, which I had maintained for 20+ years. I'm in the oil and gas business, and the gas-lighting regarding renewables and global warming in the WSJ A section got to be too much! Plus, the constant editorializing against Trump. Don't these elites understand that every time they attack Trump, they denigrate his voters, many of whom voted for him as the anti-left option?
I still subscribe to WSJ for the editorials but that is kind of silly, isn’t it!
Brian, we share a very similar background, albeit in different parts of the country. This transition from "news as journalism" to "interpreted news as entertainment" started accelerating post 9/11, IMHO. I produced a doc shot back in 2007-2008 on illegal immigration. It got a 5-minute standing ovation at the premiere (with over 500 in the room that included people from ALL sides of the issues--both political parties (and the "neithers"), immigrants (both legal and illegal), activists of all sorts, and documentary fans).
It got a few festival plays, but we tried to release for 3 solid years and could not get a distribution deal. The main reason? Because we let both "sides" tell their stories accurately and we laid it out editorially without taking sides. More than several times, the reason I heard "It's not like a Michael Moore doc--it doesn't tell people 'how" to interpret it."
Only since the FJB administration have the issues we tackled even started to be covered in the MSM--and now they're "discovering" things we learned by sending a crew to 26 U.S. cities and Guatemala to "follow the money" 15-16 years ago! Stories about the cartel drug trade, mules, rapes, trafficking, diseases and the practice of loading people up in freight trucks or U-Hauls and taking them far into the interior of the country--then just dumping them out somewhere/anywhere far away from the border itself. The stories of modern-day slaves left to pick up the pieces after being abandoned somewhere by the "guide" they paid their life savings to, in order to get here. The underlying intent of Aztlán (and its influences on La Raza & MEChA) to re-take the southwest portion of the U.S. by getting as many illegals in to have babies to eventually vote to overtake it. (If they survived.) The number of states--especially California and Nevada (then)--allowing illegals to vote. Many of those children are now old enough to vote. It was estimated then, easily over 20 million people were here illegally. The "news" tells us that we probably have about that many here now--15 years later and after 3 years of almost a non-existent border. My bet is we're looking at well over 60 million, if not closer to 80.
Just like you, I see zero acknowledgment of the media's willful blindness to most very important issues. It's all about mind--and click--control. On the web, you can barely get to the story for all the pop-up ads and embedded ads throughout the content. And to any rational person capable of critical thinking, the lies they spread should be obvious. But the vast majority of this country is intellectually lazy. Mixing smart phones with social media makes for very stupid, easily manipulated masses.
You said it for me, and very well. To sum what news is to me, especially since 9-11 forward, in one word is "LIES" I stay informed. But not by liars.
The internet’s digital tsunami of information and emancipation of authorship shattered the traditional newspaper business model and the elite-controlled dispensation that had long endowed newsrooms with a sacrosanct authority as a gatekeeper to knowledge with a monopoly over dissemination and agenda-setting. This has led to the development of "postjournalism." The goal isn't to inform people, it's to confirm what they already believe.
Wrote about this concept and more here: https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/how-the-mainstream-media-commodified
One persons rage porn is another persons common sense observation I guess.
I sent that YouTube video on to a lefty friend who promptly replied with something about conspiracy theories etc. Didn't even watch the video, just made assumptions. Talk about an own goal!
Sounds like he needs the "Be curious, not judgmental" clip from Ted Lasso:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i_FofLSherM
So very true. Thanks for this. 😊
Thank you Mr. Bray. Keep up the good work. I look forward to all your posts.
Never experienced rage nor the sensations of porn in reading Chris' Substack. I think the commenter using that phrase was performing his own little ritual of rejecting "wrong think", using a synthetic approved phrase, much like "harm reduction" or "gender affirming" to describe something completely different than the thing itself. In other words, to signal, not to describe. Good riddance.
Amen thanks for stating that. We have allowed the PC crowd to take away the true meaning of a lot of words in order to make them feel better about whatever “unusual” thing they are trying to push upon society as normal.
My favorite comment of the day - thank you!!🙌🏼
“We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.”
To quote Mr. Hemingway, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
According to the Cabal Disinformation Center (CDC), the average weight for an American woman aged 20 years and above is 170.6 pounds (at 5'4"). The average man weighs 199.8 pounds (at 5'9").
Only roughly 1/3 of American women and 1/4 of American men ARE NEITHER overweight nor obese.
Nearly 70 percent of American adults are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half take two, according to the Mayo Clinic and Olmsted Medical Center.
I could go on, and on...
I'd argue that we're very sick from bottom up AND top down.
Both ideologically, and physically. And that the two reinforce each other.
And this is not even taking into account the tsunami of mortality and morbidity that DEATHVAX™ has brought--and will bring--to us...
Here's ER doctor and HIT exercise studio owner/operator Dr. Doug McGuff on the subject:
https://youtu.be/V2jc4JkcPP8
This is a fair point. Physically sick, yes, and in good part because of the corporate sludge we have in lieu of food. A lot of that personal illness, especially the overmedication, is because of the top-down commodification of everything, and it hard for a lot of people to fight.
Chris,
Don’t stop being a lighthouse on stormy night. I have been culling the rage porn, that your former reader, claims as their reason to cancel their subscription - for a few years now.
I anticipate your postings, similar to a child waiting for their parents on Christmas morning.
Looking for new postings from you are often my sole reason for opening the app.
Was that subscriber legitimately cross with your writings or are they a liberal plant (real or ai) that subscribed with the plan of sewing seeds of rage the entire time.
- Ultimately, who cares? Just don’t stop and don’t doubt yourself.
Keep your light burning bright! There are a lot of us who need help navigating this darkness.
-BB
Love this - thank you!!
My mom says my lefty aunt doesnt seem to know anything about current events and news anymore. It’s like since trump is out she wants to pretend to live in a world without problems. And perhaps especially doesn’t want to find out anything bad about the current president. For my part, I have not watched the news in years because I’ve felt that it was all more propaganda than actual useful information. I prefer to read, from sources I trust.
Given that media provides support for congenial status identities for those who buy into the game, it is in a way encouraging that so many people don’t want to play the status game being offered.
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-pravda-media-model
🗨 As the Leviathan lifts himself from the swamp that had shrouded his bulk for nearly a century...
...peeps lift their heads from anodyne humdrum of mundane motions, look around, and come horrified of what they see.
(h/t @Strathgryffe)
{Name here} had eleven children, and they all survived. None act like adults. Change nothing, your work is too important.
🙌🏼😂
Chris, I’m one who doesn’t consume as much news anymore because a) after 5 minutes it is repetitive, b) a lot of it is irrelevant, and c) I’m just not that in to indoctrination. Keep up the good work.