Is this for real?

POSTED BY: SergeantX
UPDATED: Saturday, July 23, 2005 19:40
VIEWED: 4249
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SERGEANTX

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 2:31 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by fivver:
I'll introduce a new villan here and wantlob a few smallish beagle droppings at the members of the press who are too lazy to actually investigate and report but simply regurgitate this stuff.

Absolutely! I couldn't agree more.

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

CHRISISALL

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 2:32 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by lynchaj:
Chrisisall, I don't really have a "side" on RWED per se and I do not appreciate it when you or others lump me in with other conservative posters on RWED. I am sure they don't appreciate it either.

I generally seem to get lumped in with the liberal 'side', and my furious response is: whatever. But this tells me I must sometimes reconsider my position, am I judging issues and facts through the eyes of my admittedly very left past ideas? Sometimes the answer has been yes. We are all mirrors for each other, we're not here to not learn from each other.

Oops, I'm gettin' all Buddah-like now Chrisisall

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 2:51 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SergeantX:
All it says to me is that the Bush apologists don't mind being told what to think. I don't know if the democrats stoop to the same sort of groupthink tactics. They probably have some version of it. Weak.

I don’t think that it is groupthink. Groupthink is something different. Groupthink requires a degree of self-deception and artificial consent. The GOP stating its position on an issue is not groupthink, particularly if that position can be logically arrived at without use of this GOP document. And there’s nothing wrong with the GOP stating its position on an issue. The DNC states its position on many things, for instance the DNC talking points manual in which Democrats were advised to invent non-existent voter fraud in order to question a Republican victory at the polls. That’s not groupthink either. That’s just dirty politics. This GOP document, however, is pretty straightforward.

Quote:
Originally posted by SergeantX:
I think the Talking Points strategy is bad for political discourse. If you look carefully at the points, they are mostly distractions from the main issue, not refutations. They are carefully crafted to draw attention away from the acknowledged fact that the Bush administration was engaged in an aggressive campaign to discredit a critic. (Is this what we pay them for?)

A critic that was involved in trying to discredit the Bush administration. Is there something wrong with the Bush administration defending its position against critics? One might argue that this whole attack on Rove is designed as nothing more then an attempt to discredit the Bush administration for winning an election that Liberals didn’t want him to win. This is politics.

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Qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum.

SIGNYM

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 3:52 AM

Quote:
You haven't even acknowledged the verasity (veracity) or credibility of the documents in question and you use them to disparage the Republicans.

From Sarge's response, the point wasn't to go through the list point by point top determine which point was true and which wasn't. The point wasn't to insult Republicans, sicne he said Democrats do the same thing. I think his point was to show how these snippets of thought tend to separate people and stifle thought and exchange. Do you agree with that or do you disagree? If so, why or why not?

SIGNYM

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 4:02 AM

Quote:
I don’t think that it is groupthink. Groupthink is something different. Groupthink requires a degree of self-deception and artificial consent. The GOP stating its position on an issue is not groupthink, particularly if that position can be logically arrived at without use of this GOP document. And there’s nothing wrong with the GOP stating its position on an issue. The DNC states its position on many things, for instance the DNC talking points manual in which Democrats were advised to invent non-existent voter fraud in order to question a Republican victory at the polls. That’s not groupthink either. That’s just dirty politics. This GOP document, however, is pretty straightforward.

A position statement usually has a conclusion and some sort of rationale or support. There is no identifiable "conclusion" in that bunch of snippets.

SERGEANTX

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 4:14 AM

Quote:
Is there something wrong with the Bush administration defending its position against critics?

Ok, again, it's not what I was getting at, but you've asked an important question, so I'll address it.

If they had brought this up in a public way, if they'd addressed the issue honestly instead of spreading rumors through compliant reporters, it wouldn't be an issue at all. Why do so many people insist on ignoring this point?

The issue isn't Wilson's credibility, or his wife's or even whether a law was broken. The real issue is that the administration chose to use media manipulation and 'leaks' to reporters to, rather than honestly presenting their side of things. Doesn't it bother you that they'd go to so much trouble to stifle dissent? That's what republicans ought to be questioning.

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

SOUPCATCHER

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 7:33 AM

I'm also surprised at how easily the talking points get repeated by the media. Often verbatim. Without analysis. Part of it has to do with the media's desire to present two sides to every argument, no matter how ridiculous one of those sides may be (and ignoring that very few issues have only two sides).

I also see the dissemination of talking points as part of a larger problem, the marketing of politics. It's not so much the strength of an argument on its own merits as it is dressing up something to sound reasonable to a majority of people.

Pretty much all of the examples I'll give are from the Republican party because, let's face it, they control the government and are much better at marketing.

One of the techniques is astroturfing, where things are dressed up to look grassroots. Letters to the editor appearing to be from ordinary people, for example. Because parties have found that people take those letters seriously. Check out the infrastructure they have in place to easily write a letter to your editor:
http://www.gop.com/GetActive/WriteNewspapers.aspx
Now this is less effective than it used to be. I think newspapers have wised up to the fact that they're being used. For a few years (I'm not sure when it started but it was widespread going into last year's election) you could pick a phrase from one of the suggested paragraphs, plug it into google, and see letters to the editor - signed by different people - in various newspapers that included that paragraph verbatim. I used to do this to amuse myself every time they came up with another hot button topic and the associated paragraph. Today, I wasn't able to find any.

Another is the creation of video news segments that are shipped to news stations and run as is. Various government agencies put together what basically amounted to advertisements with a paid spokesman pretending to be a reporter. Many times the news stations just plugged these reports into their night time news without saying where they got them from. This is a technique that has been going on for years with companies. Most times you see a piece on the news about a particular product, it's a good bet that it was created by the manufacturer and given to the station.

Then you have the stage managing of Presidential appearances. Advance teams go out and scout the location, setting up backdrops and lighting and making sure that, when video is shot of the President, it is a Hollywood quality production (and many of the people involved in setting up the production are veterans of Hollywood). Every little detail is important. Look at who appears on the stage with the President. Look at the text that is on the backdrop. That's the main talking point that the producers want to get out with this segment. The most hilarious example is from a talk that was supposed to highlight American manufacturing, set in a warehouse, where the backdrop included fake boxes and the advance team had covered up the "Made in China" printing on the real boxes with black tape. Or the renting of light barges to highlight the Statue of Liberty over Bush's shoulder when he made an appearance in New York. It's excellent stagecraft and the people in charge of producing the appearances earn their money.

Or the use of focus groups or public polling to determine how best to sell something. Pretty much any time you see a change in title for some proposal, it's due to negative polling or focus group reaction. The Republicans coined the phrase "nuclear option." But after it negatively resonated with the public they changed it to "constitutional option" and actively attacked anyone still using the original phrase. What they were proposing to do hadn't changed. Only the labeling. The same thing with the Social Security proposal. For years, what Bush wanted to do had been termed "privitization" by proponents. Going back to the seventies. This didn't go over well with the public. So they changed the title to "private accounts" and actively attacked anyone who called the plan "privitization". They

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 1:24 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SergeantX:
The issue isn't Wilson's credibility, or his wife's or even whether a law was broken. The real issue is that the administration chose to use media manipulation and 'leaks' to reporters to, rather than honestly presenting their side of things. Doesn't it bother you that they'd go to so much trouble to stifle dissent? That's what republicans ought to be questioning.

So when Wilson implied that he was sent to Niger by Cheney, which was picked up by the New York Time to insist that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger, when in fact Cheney never gave such an order and Wilson went without official CIA support under the suggestion of his wife, that wasn’t media manipulation to boost Wilson’s credibility?

And after it was reported that Rove suggested that it was Wilson’s wife not Cheney who sent Wilson to Niger, Wilson then claimed that the government was trying to out his wife because his wife was a covert agent, thereby exposing his wife as a covert agent, that wasn’t media manipulation? Wilson may have outed his own wife in order to attack the administration.

The real issue here is not the supposed leak, but rather how you and others can be so blind to obvious politics, simply because you disagree with the administration. That is groupthink.

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Qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum.

SERGEANTX

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 3:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
Repetition, talking points, never admitting mistakes, astroturfing, stage managing public appearances, changing labels based on public feedback while not changing policies, and other tactics are used because they are effective. But I'm disturbed by the overarching implication, that the politicians don't trust their own proposals enough to lay them out in plain English. To me, it shows an appalling lack of respect for the public. If you've got to try to fool me to get me to agree with you, well you know what they say in Arkansas .

Wow.... great post. You've hit on a lot of interesting observations. They all seem to revolve around something that has bothered me for some time, and that's the media-centric culture we've created.

We've finally reached a point in this country, where pretty much every active generation was raised on television. Most of us have been trained from birth to respond the media cues and manipulation and, more importantly, to accept these as a natural part of the public landscape.

The problem is, the political parties are beginning to understand just how powerful this conditioning can be. I worry that its going to get much worse before it gets better. The subtle psychological coercion featured in political advertising (pretty much all advertising for that matter), and the document above, are transparent to most and very effective on those without the interest or time to tear them apart.

I think we are looking at the formation of a new kind of tyranny. It's taken them a while to figure out, but those who desire power over others are beginning to realize that a democracy can be controlled just as effectively as the more traditional authoritarian models. Perhaps even more effectively, because the 'control' is transparent to so many. How can you fight an enemy, when most people won't even acknowledge it's there?

I'll have to think about this some more.

(Finn, AJ, you guys are still missing the point. I assume it's intentional, so I won't be responding to your comments.)

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

CHRISISALL

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 3:51 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SergeantX:
a democracy can be controlled just as effectively as the more traditional authoritarian models. Perhaps even more effectively, because the 'control' is transparent to so many. How can you fight an enemy, when most people won't even acknowledge it's there?

Whoah, that sounds like some kinda conspiracy, so it must not be true, and if it isn't true, we have nothing to worry about.

It's so true Chrisisall

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