Recently it dawned on me that one of the things I most like doing is acting as a filter for people. I like going out into the worlds of information, music, and technology and picking out samples that I think will appeal to people I know, or anybody for that matter. In this way, I'm a human aggregator.
This site will be focused on current news stories that I feel offer a departure from the general agenda of the mainstream media. The term "mainstream media" is loaded, though, and many if not most of the articles I post will come from established, mainstream sources.
In any institution there will be outliers. There will be stories in the (typically mainstream) New York Times that go against the grain of the US media as a whole, for example. The problem is that many of them get buried under the din of the other stories, as their antithetical counterparts get more attention, more repetition.
Choosing stories largely from established news outlets, but which don't conform to what we might call the overall narrative of the mainstream media, gives us the ability to rely on rigorous journalistic practices while still allowing a different picture to emerge. Rarely will an established news outlet publish an out-and-out lie. Usually they skew the picture of reality by omission, by suggestion of what constitutes an acceptable range of opinion across the imaginary Left-Right spectrum, and by exaggerating the extent to which certain ideas are accepted in the worlds of science and academia, and minimizing the extent to which certain ideas are actually largely agreed upon in these worlds.
The ideas I'm putting forth here are not new or original in any way. I make no secret that most of my inspiration comes from Noam Chomsky, who along with others, has provided compelling evidence of systematic distortions of reality by the mainstream media. I consider Noam Chomsky to be the great genius of our time with respect to moral/political philosophy. He has already earned the reputation of a genius in the field of Linguistics, where his work has been undeniably groundbreaking.
Unfortunately, Professor Chomsky is all too often ignored. His works are very widely read around the world, yet in the US media, he is conspicuously absent from the discussion, unlike in the media elsewhere. But if we're interested in the reducing of human suffering, not to mention the very survival of the human race, we ought to pay more attention to this genius in our midst, an Einstein of our time, always willing to speak up and offer his opinion in the here and now, though nobody knows for how much longer, as he is getting on in years.
So it is, in general, the narrative offered by Chomsky and others that I will try to present on this blog. And the narrative goes something like this:
As citizens of the United States we have a shared responsibility for the actions of our government. Many if not most of us have little inkling of some of the injustices carried out in our names. Most of these injustices are uncontroversially accepted and well known to those who bother to do the research. The problem is that most people don't and perhaps can't bother. Most of us are too busy chasing the American dream, or just scraping by, to carefully research any topic, let alone get a wide range of news sources on current events.
For most of us, it's simply enough to get a headline here and there, or maybe to watch 30 minutes of news with commercials and fluff pieces interspersed. Couple this with the general sense we have about our country's unerring goodness, and a picture emerges of a government which values freedom, always goes to war with the right intentions, and does its best to take care of its own.
Unfortunately things are worse than this. Much worse. While it's impossible to paint the entire US government with the same brush (especially when you consider that in a democracy we're all part of the government), what we can say is that if the average citizen were truly willing to accept the reality of some of the things done in our name, there would be radical change.
We live in a time when nuance is seldom embraced. You're either in this camp or that, with no in betweens. Either America is a great force for good in this world or it's not. Either you support the troops or you don't. Either your government is good or it isn't.
Well there's a descriptor for this kind of thinking, and it's "childish". As we grow older, we learn to see more nuance. We're more willing, for example, to accept that it's ok to break the pharmacy store window to get medicine for a dying person who needs it, whereas a four year old will simply tell you it's wrong to break a window and to steal.
Embracing nuance and complexity, we can see that to attack a government which is only partially democratic - and therefore does not always speak for us - is not to attack the American people as a whole. We can see that our government is capable of carrying out the greatest good and the greatest evil. We can also let go of the notion that if our government does evil that we're doomed and that we're stripped of the soothing illusions necessary to be happy and carry on in life.
For any willing to accept reality, know this: Our government has and continues to carry out and participate in some very awful atrocities. From wars waged directly and indirectly over the years in Latin America, Indochina, The Middle East, and elsewhere, we have been complicit in the deaths and suffering of millions. Our media is to a certain extent subservient to our government, as well as the general public, who are often unwilling to accept these realities. Therefore they have done a fairly awful job at presenting the truth.
As if this weren't enough, we are in a dangerous era of nuclear capability. As our actions continue to inflame extremism throughout the world, the stakes are getting higher and higher in the US's game of global domination. Not only this, but the crisis of climate change has also received shamefully little attention and has not been presented in a truly balanced way in our media.
We very well may be on the verge of extinction as a species. And in the shorter term, with the erosion of constitutional rights in this country, the US government is on the verge of becoming an extremely tyrannical regime, its people racked with extreme poverty and inequality between the upper and lower classes, leading to less democracy, less control over what our government does, and therefore less ability to slow or stop the atrocities committed in the name of power and greed by a few bad but powerful apples.
I believe that when people are properly informed, and when they're honest with themselves, they can act to make the world a better place. This is why I spend my time finding and presenting news stories to others. In addition, I believe in the value of humor, even in the darkest of times, so I will sometimes post articles which are funny, often in an illuminating way, but sometimes just for a good laugh. And then there is the occasional randomly interesting article.
Here's hoping this does some good for somebody out there.
