I started this blog in late 2010. I posted my first contribution on October 21st. I made several other posts that same day. Some of these early posts were about housekeeping issues (e.g. "Introduction" and "Correction policy"). A post that straddled the boundary between housekeeping and actual content was "DUMBTH, the blog". In that one I explained that I had originally intended to call the blog "dumbth" but I couldn't because someone had already taken that name. Mixed in with all this first day activity was another post: "dumbth, truthiness, and Steve Allen".
Steve Allen was a great comedian. He is mostly forgotten now because he died nearly 15 years ago. The "dumbth, truthiness, and Steve Allen" post is quite short in comparison to my later work, say this post. Even so, it hits the highlights of the carrier of a true giant in the comedy business. Here let me go with just one of those highlights: He was the first host of "The Tonight Show". Yes, the very same show that Jimmy Fallon currently helms. Allen hosted from 1954 to 1957, truly the stone age of television. The impetus for this post came from the last broadcast of "The Colbert Report" on December 18th. The connection between "dumbth" and "truthiness" and, therefore, between Allen and Colbert is the fact that the meaning of the two words is essentially identical.
Steven Colbert did not coin the word "truthiness". But he gave it the meaning we all now associate with it in his opening broadcast on October 17th, 2005. Truthiness is the willingness to search for truth not by applying evidence, logic, and intellectual examination, in short a "fact based" approach. Instead, instinct, "gut feelings", "what feels right", what is comfortable or convenient, is used, a "faith based" approach. In fact things have progressed to the point where faith trumps facts. Many in the faith community argue that faith must be upheld because it is contradicted by fact. People who factor facts into their faith are belittled ("oh ye of little faith") and discounted.
Allen in his time waged battle against this kind of thinking under the banner of "dumbth". Colbert has continued the fight merely substituting "truthiness" for "dumbth" but championing the same message. So how is this long running battle going? Badly. In his last show Colbert ran off a list of the things that had not changed in the nine years his show ran. The list is truly depressing but accurate. The forces of "truthiness" are still besting the forces of "truth". Now nothing in the decades, if you count the Allen era, has convinced me that I am on the wrong side. "Truthiness" is still wrong and "truth" is still right. But a position can not hold out so long without strong support so I am going to outline some of the pro-truthiness players.
The first group I want to go after are journalists. Journalists should be pro-truth. What, after all, is news if it isn't "what's actually going on". Unfortunately, in the world we now live in, of the two words in the phrase "news business" the second word, "business", now turns out to be by far the more important. The news business is no longer driven by an imperative to deliver the "news you can use". It is driven by the need to deliver eyeballs to advertisers in order to increase ad revenue. Conflict, real or manufactured, and fear, justified or not, turn out to be the best way to attract eyeballs. So all conflict is presented as real whether it is or isn't and all fears are presented as legitimate whether they actually are or are not. And investigating to see if a conflict is real or a fear is justified is just not done. Doing so would get in the way of attracting eyeballs.
Now this is not how the news business presents itself. To hear them tell it they are all "fearless seekers out after truth". And sometimes they are. They fearlessly seek out the "truth" about the poor and powerless and about anyone who is a well documented boogeyman (unless that boogeyman is a major sponsor). The distance between true journalism and what is now practiced has been on display for all to see in a particularly egregious manner for the past couple of weeks. It has to do with the Senate torture report.
The news contained in the report is pretty much all bad. And the coverage has not been all bad. The principal findings of the report have been well reported. And the story has evolved in the sense that some findings were highlighted in the beginning. Then as time has passed coverage of those findings have decreased (both the press and the audience have a low tolerance for boredom so it is critical to change up the coverage). But it has been replaced by an emphasis on other findings. As the coverage has "evolved" the public has been exposed to pretty much all of the principal findings. That's good so what's bad? Well, that is a little more complicated.
There has been a lot of push back from members of the Bush Administration and from the right wing. And this push back has been well covered in the sense of giving these people "equal time". It is in what is called the framing (a technical term) that I find fault. These people are not presented the way they should be. To understand where I am coming from let me step back and talk about journalistic standards. Specifically, what constitutes "good" information as opposed to "bad" information. And here I am talking from a strictly journalistic perspective. So I don't care whether it is "good news" or "bad news". I care about how much weight a good journalist should give to a piece of information. And here's where the problem lies.
Let's look at the Senate report. Well, technically it's not the report. The report itself is over 6,000 pages long. What has been released is a "redacted" (various short (sometimes only a word or two) "sensitive" sections have been blacked out) version of the executive summary. This consists of two short (several pages long) documents and the 499 page main document. Both the 6,000 page main report and the 500 page executive summary are based on what is purported to be 6,000,000 pages of CIA documentation. The 6,000,000 page main trove is supposed to be everything the CIA had on the torture (euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation" - I'm not going to dignify what went on by using the euphemism) program.
The executive summary contains nearly three thousand footnotes. A specific CIA document is referenced for every quotation and fact in the report. The 6,000 page main report is supposed to contain something like 30,000 footnotes. But it is not currently available to the general public so it is theoretically off limits. I say "theoretically" because these kinds of things have a habit of being leaked when it is convenient. The fact that it has not been leaked leads me to believe that the CIA brass has not found it convenient to leak from it. I further conclude that the long report is completely consistent with the contents of the executive summary. And here I am wandering into the realm of bad journalism. I have done this deliberately to show you what it looks like and to show you how easily it can be done if care is not taken. Why is it bad journalism? Because it can't be checked so I am making unsupported allegations. The torture report is available for download on the Internet. That's what I did. Then I read the whole damn thing. Back to the part that you can read for yourself, the stuff that is checkable.
The torture report (actually the redacted version of the executive summary but from here on out I will just use "torture report") is carefully written and completely supported by specific documents. These documents were the internal "work product" of the CIA and were not intended for public consumption. They were not "prettied up". Instead they were intended to be accurate and to clearly communicate up and down the chain of command. They are the most reliable kind of document for a report to depend on for its analysis and conclusions. The report conforms to the highest standard of journalism. If you are looking for a source you can depend on it doesn't get any better than this. So on one side of the argument you have a reasoned position that is massively supported by the best kind of documentation. You have the "holy grail" of journalism. Now let's look at the other side.
Is there a "good journalism" way to object to the report and its conclusions? There certainly is. The strength of the torture report is potentially its weakness. Let's say the report incorrectly quotes a CIA document or lifts a quotation out of context. That would be bad, very bad. Or let's say that there were other documents in the CIA trove that contradicted the documents the torture report depends on. This would be bad if the report did not acknowledge these other documents, characterize them accurately, and then address the contradictions. This potential objection would be bad but not as bad as the first kind of possible objection. Next in line in terms of badness would be a case where there were documents that contradict the documents the torture report depends on. This would be bad but the badness would be mitigated by the question of why they were not included in the 6,000,000 page trove. The committee can not be blamed for not studying documents they did not have access to. Any of these would be an example of a serious objection to the report. But I have not seen any examples of any of these potential objections being made.
Instead we get vague objections that the report is wrong or missed something but that's the point. They lack specificity to the point where they can't be checked. "But the supporting documentation for my objection is classified" one might argue. To which I counter "if it's convenient all kinds of classified material finds its way out into the public view". And, except for the objections the report has already knocked down, the objections I have seen are so vague, so lacking in specificity, that it is essentially impossible to check them. And assume for a minute that I had some super-security level of access so that I could check the supporting documentation. I wouldn't know where to start as no reference to any specific document or documents is provided. A "journalist" operating in this manner would immediately become the poster child for bad journalism.
This is also a problem with confidential sources. In most cases they can not be checked up on. Vast amounts of negative information was leaked during the Clinton "whitewater, et al" scandals. Much of it later turned out to be bogus. But it was not demonstrated to be bogus until years after it was initially leaked.
An example of leaked information was quickly shown to be bogus occurred during the 2004 Bush - Kerry Presidential campaign. A bunch of documents that showed that Bush had engaged in hanky panky to avoid going to Vietnam during the war of the same name were loudly trumpeted by CBS. It was quickly shown that the documents were counterfeit. Dan Rather lost his job as anchor of the evening news show on CBS but no one has ever disclosed where the bogus documents came from. In this case a "legitimate newsmen" decided to let himself be fired in order to protect the identity of a confidential source that was an out and out liar. Is it any wonder that people leak confidential information to the press? They know their secret of their identity is safe even if the leaked information is completely bogus. So here we have an example of unsourced information being treated as reliable even though we now have a long history of some of this information being bogus. That's really bad journalism. But it is also standard operating practice for the "journalists" who cover politics.
And in the case of the torture report "but wait - there's more". It is not just a situation where unsourced and vague material is treated as being on an equal footing with well sourced and very specific material. Much of the opposition has resorted to "ad hominem" attacks. This type of attack involves attacking the messenger rather than the message. "That person is a bad person" or "that person is a liar" are examples stripped of their veneer of civility. The issue is not whether the messenger is a good or bad person. It's whether what they are saying is true. It is also not whether the person lies a lot. It is whether the person is lying in this instance. Now it may increase the odds if the person actually is a bad person or a liar. But at a minimum it is incumbent upon the person making the ad hominem attack to substantiate the allegation that the person is in fact bad or a liar. This is rarely done. Instead the charges are repeated ad nauseam and, unfortunately, routinely passed on by "journalists" to the general public. I understand why the charge is made. It works and part of the reason it works is because "journalists" happily pass this sort of thing along. They do so even if the person or people making the charge never provide any evidence to back the charge up. Why? Controversy is good for ratings.
In the modern era if the news media is reporting on a "suspect" or on someone who has been charged with a crime but not yet convicted, they will insert some version of the word "alleged" in the appropriate places. "The defendant is alleged to" or the "alleged crime" is how these situations are now routinely handled. Now someone who has a poor track record for credibility should receive little or no coverage. But I guess it is at least sometimes appropriate to hear them on "free speech" grounds. The poster child for this kind of thing is Vice President Cheney. He has been shown to be wrong over and over on many things but particularly on the CIA torture program. Yet he finds a home on the Sunday morning interview shows pretty much whenever he wants one. His remarks are never appropriately framed in a way that is analogous to the way people suspected of run of the mill crimes like murder are framed. Instead of being framed with something that conveys the fact that he has been shown to be wrong over and over with respect to the subject he is about to opine on he is not framed at all. He is just presented in a straight forward manner as if he is completely credible and what he has to say deserves out attention.
And Cheney routinely engages in ad hominem attacks and vague references to unspecified "proof". The best that can be said on behalf of Cheney is that the torture report documents a systematic effort to deceive the Executive Branch, the branch that Cheney was a part of when he was Vice President. On the other hand, Cheney is well known for having rooted around in the raw data looking for terror threats he thought the CIA was overlooking. A tour through the raw data by Cheney or any of his close advisors after the torture program got under way would have easily turned up evidence that the program was being run badly and that it was not turning up good intelligence. But somehow this never happened, if we can believe what Cheney now says.
The "torture report" coverage is just the most well documented and black and white example of the news media treating poor sources as good sources when it suits them (when it is perceived to be a ratings getter). And they treat good sources as if they were poor sources when the good sources reveal the wrong thing (something that for whatever reason will be bad for ratings or otherwise be inconvenient). We see this over and over. (Insert any number of whistle blowers here. Edward Snowden was initially treated very badly by the press. He is still treated badly in some circles. Again with the Snowden case, we have one side providing detailed and specific documentation to back up their charges and the other side making ad hominem attacks and making vague "damaging national security" and "getting CIA agents killed" charges, all without any serious proof.) Before I leave this subject I want to review one more example of a poor source being consistently treated as if he was a good source. Pretty much the entire carrier of John McCain is a classic example of this.
McCain first came to prominence during the "savings and loan scandal" of an earlier era. He was caught carrying water for someone who had generously contributed to his campaigns. The same person was eventually thrown in jail for massive fraud. Apparently what McCain learned was "don't get caught" doing favors in this kind of situation rather than "don't provide cover for people being investigated without first making sure they actually are clean". He then went on to cultivate a reputation for being a "maverick", someone who would buck the Republican party line if his high minded beliefs required him to. Then he started running for President. He quickly found out that his "maverick" beliefs got in the way of getting the nomination. They were popular with the general public but unpopular with the kind of Republican that showed up to a caucus or voted in a primary.
So he dumped them all and by "all" I mean all. The position he is most noted for is his anti-torture position. He was shot down over North Vietnam and tortured extensively so he comes by that conviction honestly. But when information on the CIA torture program first started leaking out he carried water for the Bush Administration. He added some weasel words but the message he conveyed was that he was ok with what they were doing. He is now supportive of the Senate torture report and critical of his Republican colleagues but he no longer aspires to run for President. And you can go pretty much up and down the line. You can find McCain on one side of an issue at one time and on the other side at another time. But he too is a popular guest on the Sunday interview shows and his remarks are widely reported across the media. And they are never framed with any kind of "he's a flip flopper" warning to alert the casual viewer.
Another example is the coverage of Obamacare. It is a mystery to some why the program is unpopular when it is polled. The official Republican line is "it's unpopular because it is a bad program". But it has done and keeps doing what its supporters said it would do. And if you ask people about the "Affordable Care Act" (it's official title) it immediately becomes about 10% more popular than if you call it Obamacare. And here's the real clincher. If you poll each component separately ("do you like kids being able to stay on their parent's insurance until they are 26" or "do you like insurance companies being unable to deny coverage due to preexisting conditions" or "do you like the fact that insurers can no longer put a cap on lifetime payouts" or . . .) every provision of Obamacare is wildly popular as soon as you take it out of the Obamacare context. People even like the exchanges. The only real complaint they had was that initially they didn't work. As soon as they were fixed people flocked to them in droves. And a year later 80% like what they found.
The reason "Obamacare" is unpopular is due to a very successful campaign to do what it takes to make it unpopular. A classic example is the whole "death panel" "debate". Everywhere we turned for at least two years we were told that Obamacare included government run death panels that were going to "come after grandma". The law included no such death panels. And death panels actually existed at the time of the "debate". It's just that they were run by the insurance companies. They denied coverage or slowed service delivery to save insurance companies money. The official line from the media is "well, if that is true why didn't Obama and the Democrats push back?" They did. But various conservative individuals and groups pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into pushing the "government death panels" message. The Democrats did not have nearly as much money with which to get their message out.
And Republicans relentlessly pushed the "government death panel" argument at every opportunity and the media gave them lots of opportunity. What was really going on? The media was reaping vast amounts of income from the anti-Obamacare ads and controversy is good for ratings. If the "government death panel" "debate" went away the media would have had to work to gin up another "controversy". It would not have been hard to dig around a little and find out that the "government death panel" argument was bogus. And you could go down the line on the other arguments against Obamacare. They were mostly bunk too. But the news media never has done the minimal amount of digging necessary to get to the truth. After trumpeting the many bogus "controversies" about Obamacare it would have embarrassed the media to be found so wanting at the end of the day.
At one level the argument for paying attention to any news source is "we are trustworthy". But on so many stories so many news purveyors have turned out to be anything but trustworthy. Subconsciously the public knows this. The popularity of the news business is only slightly higher than that of the politicians they cover. People know they are being lied to in the sense that they do not receive "fair and balanced" news. And in some cases they are being outright lied to. The problem is so pervasive that people are stuck for some way to find reliable news. Mostly people just throw up their hands and give up. Another symptom of this is to ask what sources the public does trust. The answer turns out to be comedians. Jon Stewart has consistently been rated as more trustworthy than any mainstream journalist for many years now. He is a comedian that does a fake news show. He is using the format of a news show as the foundation of the humor he is pushing. And the people who watch him know it. But he does a better job of conforming to journalistic standards than professional journalists do and at a subconscious level this comes through. The Stewart show makes a lot of stuff up. But they are very careful to flag the made up stuff as made up. So the viewers know what is trustworthy real news and what is "just for fun" stuff.
Colbert is a more extreme example of the same thing. He created an entirely fake persona supposedly modeled after Bill O'Reilly - the highest rated talking head on Fox. Everyone (with the possible exception of a few conservatives who think he is real) knows its a fake. It's a put on. So his audience recognizes the fakery and flips it inside out exactly as Colbert expects. The mainstream news organizations frequently use the excuse that "it's too complicated and hard to explain" to doge their responsibility to explain the important. Aaron Sorkin demonstrated that while explaining complicated things may be hard it is not impossible. He consistently explained complicated political issues on his TV show "The West Wing". And he did it in such a way that the viewing public could understand the explanation. While he was doing this he also had to put out a show that got high ratings by attracting and keeping a large audience.
And then there is the example of Colbert doing actual real news 'splainin (with apologies to Ricky Ricardo). Colbert devoted a considerable amount of time over the years to campaign finance laws. He got an award for doing it better than anyone else. And he did it in the way recommended to writers for centuries: "show - don't tell". He actually set up his own superpac. He went through the process step by step and demonstrated that what he was doing was completely legal. He then went on to show all the things superpacs could legally get away with doing by actually doing them. And he did it in a way that his audience thoroughly enjoyed. In effect he force fed them a bunch of legalese and kept them coming back for more. That's supposed to be impossible. It's not that these things can't be done. They can. And it's not that doing them will depress ratings. Sorkin's and Colbert's ratings were very high. The traditional news outlets decided that since they couldn't figure out how to do it then it must actually be impossible so they didn't even try. And when they did try it was obvious they were being half hearted so the audience tuned out and they used their failure as further proof of the impossibility of doing this sort of thing.
So the news business have actively been supporting truthiness for reasons that seem sensible to them. Anybody else? Well, say you sell a product that is essentially the same as a number of similar products made by others. How do you market it? A classic example is headache tablets. There are only a few ingredients. The old standard was aspirin. Now it is Ibuprofin, Naproxin, and a couple of others. But all the popular headache remedies on the market rely on the same few ingredients. And they have all been in high volume production for some time so there is not a lot to be squeezed out of manufacturing costs. This is a common problem across the board for companies selling products. They need to convince you to buy their product and not the other guy's. So what do they do?
Well, sex sells. So you drape a babe over your car or you dress a supermodel in your clothes or whatever. Even the spokesmodel for perfume is always supergorgeous. For whatever reason pretty girls work on women as well as on men. The problem is that everyone in the ad business has known for a long time that sex sells so it has been overused. There is now a science of how sexy you want your spokesmodel to be. The idea is that less sexy is more trustworthy, at least in some cases. So the spokesmodel for Progressive Insurance is good looking but not gorgeous. It's tough selling a "me too" product so marketers look for whatever advantage they can get.
And while you are flailing around for a new idea that hasn't already been done to death consider this? If you can't honestly market your product as being better then who is easier to fool, either into believing your product actually is better when it is pretty much indistinguishable from the other products, or by using another kind of pitch like sex. Some other popular alternatives to using sex to sell are "we're more All American and wholesome than those other guys" or "out product will remind you of good old days" or "salt of the earth families use our product so you should too". The new standby is "our product is all natural". Crude oil, Uranium, and Arsenic are just a few of the "100% all natural" things out there that you definitely should not eat. Put simply, dumb people are easier to sell to than smart people.
Dumb people tend to swallow whatever message the marketer is putting out. Smart people tend to take the message apart and see if the arguments for why they should buy your product actually make sense. This increases the chances that your message will be ineffective and your marketing campaign will fail. So corporations like to sell to dumb people. The chances of a successful sale are higher. So it is in the best interests of corporations to dumb down the population.
This is especially true of corporations that do business in areas that the public is uncomfortable with. The current best example of this is Koch Industries. Koch Industries specializes in equipment and services for the oil industry. The Koch's (Charles and David) want the oil industry to grow and prosper so they can sell more stuff to them. Koch is also known for cutting corners. They think they can make more money if there is less regulation of the oil industry in particular and society in general. It is possible to use a tight regulation regime to gain an advantage for your business. If your products and services conform to all the regulations and your competitors' don't then this gives you a decided advantage. It also encourages you to support these regulations and their tight enforcement. Koch doesn't do business this way. Frankly, the Koch brothers want to dumb down society as they see that as advantageous to their business and to them personally. They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this belief.
Another industry that has followed the Koch model is coal. Frankly, there is no "tight regulation" regime that is advantageous to the coal industry as a whole nor to any of the major players. Coal is the "cheap energy" fuel. Pretty much any market for coal can be displaced by some other commodity. The reason coal still sells is that it is usually the cheapest option. But low cost is almost always the only benefit coal has on it side. So the smart move in the coal business is to drive down costs. And that usually means more destructive mining and processing options and more dangerous operating practices. Doing deep mining involves lots of labor and is hard to automate. Cutting corners on safety equipment, using worn out equipment and skipping or minimizing maintenance cuts costs.
Pit mining, where you dig a big pit to expose the coal can be automated. You can go with supersize equipment to keep your labor costs low. "Strip and leave" processes where you don't properly restore the land after all the coal has been extracted saves massive amounts of money. Explosives are cheap. So blowing off the tops of mountains in order to get at the coal underneath makes sense. And gravity provides an assist to getting the blown up rock out of the way. So the coal industry has blown the top off of a lot of mountains in the last few decades. In the abstract no one likes any of this. People like safe mines paying top wages. People like open pit and mountain top mine sites to be cleaned up after the coal is gone. And they like pollution and other issues dealt with thoroughly and carefully while the pit is operating. So the coal industry has a massive public relations problem. If they operate properly they go out of business, or so they believe. So they have to sell unpopular propositions to the public. This is much easier to do if the public is dumb and uninformed. So that's how the coal industry likes things.
But wait, you say. While it may be understandable that some industries or companies want to behave this way what about society as a whole? There you run into a dilemma that has been with us for centuries called "the tragedy of the commons". It works this way. Suppose there is a field that people graze sheep on and suppose it is owned "in common", say by the local town. Ideally you want to graze as many sheep on the commons as it can handle but no more. This maximizes the aggregate good. But each sheep belongs to a specific person. So what happens if Charles (in honor of Charles Koch) grazes a few extra sheep on the commons? Not much. The commons deteriorates but slowly. It's only a few sheep. But who gets all the benefit of the overgrazing and pays only a small part of the cost? Our boy Charles, that's who. He sees a net benefit for behaving in a way that hurts the commons. All the other sheep owners suffer some cost and derive no benefit so they suffer a net loss.
So what do they do? They do the same thing David did. They add sheep. It doesn't take long for the commons to be trashed and for everyone to lose. If the benefit goes to individuals when they overuse a common resource but the cost of overuse is widely distributed you have a "tragedy of the commons" situation. And when you do things usually go as you would expect. We have seen this in the fishing industry, for instance. Individuals catch the fish and derive the benefit when they sell them so they want to catch as many fish as they can just like our sheep man David. But a fishing grounds is a common. In case after case a particular fishing ground has been overfished. The fish population quickly crashes and pretty soon no one is making any money out of that fishing ground. It has taken a generation for fishermen to figure out how the TOTC (tragedy of the commons) scenario applies to fishing and accept much tighter and rigorously enforced fishing quotas. This has resulted in a number of fisheries recovering and the case for tight regulation becomes easier to sell to fishermen every year. When it comes to the fishing industry, we are not out of the woods but things are finally on a positive trajectory.
That's all well and good for something like coal mining or fishing but does this apply more broadly? I give you Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is famous for its value proposition. They are able to sell goods very cheaply and still make a nice profit. How? The Wal-Mart answer is that they have made their whole operation very efficient from end to end. They have done this so well that they are just better at it than anyone else. One thing they have done is outsource manufacturing to China. That may be a good or bad idea but it has nothing to do with TOTC. But there is another thing Wal-Mart does. They keep their labor costs down, way down. They do this by paying low salaries, keeping hours down, and by providing almost non-existent benefits to most of their employees. Wal-Mart touts their employee health insurance package, for instance. But it is structured in such a way that most employees can not afford it so few sign up. Wal-Mart gets the PR benefit of offering health care without incurring the cost of actually providing it.
But let's back up and ask a basic question: can Wal-Mart employees afford to shop at Wal-Mart? One answer is that they can't afford to shop anywhere else. And that's the justification Wal-Mart uses. But if Wal-Mart had to depend on customers whose income was similar to typical Wal-Mart employees they would be out of business. The recent recession (which we are still coming out of) has been hard on Wal-Mart because their traditional customer base was hit hard. It doesn't matter if something is cheaper at Wal-Mart. If you have no money at all you still can't afford to buy it. In summary. the Wal-Mart model is a TOTC model. They depend on other businesses paying better than they do. Those people who work elsewhere can afford Wal-Mart. But at a societal level this doesn't work. Those other businesses "go to school" on Wal-Mart and adopt similar business practices including paying Wal-Mart wages. It takes a while for this to work out. There are still lots of businesses paying better than Wal-Mart wages so Wal-Mart is starting to see its business recover as the economy gets slowly better. But its a race to the bottom and the bottom is not pretty.
Wal-Mart likes dumb customers. They want people to be just smart enough to see the low prices but not smart enough to figure out the bigger picture. And this is true of many in the business community. For instance, a TOTC variation takes place in the high paid high tech industries. There the trick is to import smart people from the rest of the world. The rest of the world absorbs the cost of finding these smart people and educating them. Then the high tech company gets the benefit of a cheap employee, at least cheap relative to the cost of someone who is home grown. We see top Tech people talking the talk about supporting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education. But at the same time they use every dodge in the book to lower their taxes and lobby fiercely for the right to import more foreigners. This is what the H-1B visa fight is all about. Again, this trick is easier to pull off if people are not paying attention, if they are or act dumb.
It would be nice to say that things are moving away from Truthiness and toward Truth but they are not. I will report immediately if I see any signs of a real light at the end of the tunnel. Colbert is not lost to us. He will be taking over "The Late Show" on CBS from Dave Letterman sometime in 2015. It is widely reported that Letterman's last show will be on May 20th but I have not heard a firm date for when Colbert will start. Colbert is abandoning his "conservative bloviater" character as part of the switch. But I think he will just change his tactics to those more compatible with his new personna. He will continue to fight the good fight. I wish him complete success. And I note that John Oliver, another graduate of Stewart's "The Daily Show", is doing a great job with his "Last Week Tonight" show on HBO.
I enjoy writing this blog. But Colbert and Stewart and Oliver are much more effective than I am at waging war on Truthiness. And I am OK with that. I don't care how we win or who gets credit for the win. I only hope that we win. As with Global Warming, the longer we wait the more it costs us in the present. With Global Warming the longer we wait to start taking effective action the worse the situation will become. This will mean that larger, more disruptive, and more expensive actions will ultimately be required. This is also true with the Truthiness problem, but hopefully to a lesser extend. As time goes by we will have done more stupid things so more messes will need cleaning up. And we will have more dumb people who will need more education. But I don't think the costs are accumulating as rapidly as with Global Warming so the situation is not as dire. That's the best I can come up with for a "glass half full" type rosy scenario. If you don't find that very reassuring imagine how I feel.
No comments:
Post a Comment