Yea yea, another snobby pontificating pseudo intellectual telling you how to think. Yep that's me. I make no apology for it because you still have the freedom to ignore it. But listen anyway. Sky News, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, along with the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of them know exactly which of your buttons to press. That's how they make their living, and so press those buttons they will. They set the bait, you rise to it. Every time you do the cash register rings.
These people are not in the business of reporting news. They are an adjunct of the entertainment media who use international events as their raw material. They don't want you to think, they don't want you to question them, they just need you to keep unquestioningly lapping up their bilge. They don't give a the first fuck that they toxify everything they touch or that your reaction makes for bad policy making or that the net effect of it is more death.
We have F16's, GR4's and all the high tech military equipment we could possibly want in the fight against zealots, but our enemies have the most potent weapon ever created. Our media. They use it with skill to drive a wedge between us and so long as the media keeps making a living, why should they give a tinkers damn?
But it isn't just them who use that weapon against us. Our own rulers do. They will never tell you want to think outright because they know that doesn't work. But they will lay out a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you to the conclusion they want you to reach. It is a battlefield of ideas, but mainly their ideas. Mine and yours don't get a look in.
They show a particular skill where it comes to excluding ideas they don't like. For sure, the columnists we see in the media are ordinary people just like me and you, but the ones they choose are carefully selected. There is no better way to discredit a good idea by picking a fool to promote it.
It's no coincidence that they roll out the red carpet for Nigel Farage, Owen Jones and Russell Brand. The ideas they represent threaten them, but they themselves do not. They are poor on the specifics but each in their own way represent one basic idea. That the power must be challenged and retaken from the establishment.
There is no better way to neutralise a threat than by taking their weakest spokesmen and allowing them access into the inner circle. Their egos are their undoing. Such men are tiresome, blethering egotists whose own self-regard leads them into a very human trap of believing they are infallible. From there they then speak on matters of which they hold no knowledge. It is we who do the rest in bringing them down.
Having seen us coming they know how to deal with the threat. It's like judo. Very easily can they turn our outrage into a sentiment against our own. We shout down the very ideas that threaten their grip on power. They draw their power from your outrage. That is the means through which they obtain our consent - and that is how they use use our own power against us. Left, right, divide and rule.
The bottom line is that by rising to their bait you consent to whatever they wish to do in your name. It is for this reason I watch no news programmes or read their newspapers for any purpose other than ridicule.
There's nothing I can get from the newspapers that I can't get from bloggers or by researching for myself. We do not need these people to tell us what is happening or how to interpret events. Every day I see better thinking on my own social media feeds than anything they provide. It's time we cut them out of the loop.
You can't seal yourselves off from them entirely and you cannot avoid their influence but you can strip them of their power by ignoring their output and and refusing to react. If we do that, we soon rob them of their hold over us and also rob terrorism of its power. Soon enough even the terrorists will learn that the worst atrocity they can think of holds no power over our ideas, is mourned on the first day and forgotten in the next.
Then, maybe, when those who rule us do not react to it on our behalf, on the basis of a manipulated sentiment, we will start to understand each other and not be afraid of each other.
The bottom line is that we will never be safe from the zealot and the madman. The darkest reaches of their minds are hidden from the prying eyes of the state mechanisms we have. All we can achieve by asking for more and more safety is to make a prison for ourselves and hand yet more power to the people who thrive on, and profit from our fear.
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