Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Recent Onion Articles

I love the Onion. Why? Because it adds humor to what would otherwise be a horrifying news.

Like Hell I'm Going To Let Some Black President Help Me Pay For Dialysis
Freud would have a field day with the healthcare debate and all things related to defending or attacking Obama. Then again, he'd have a field day with his mom. Zing? But anyway, it's interesting to ponder how much racism indirectly fuels opposition. I say indirect because I doubt that any significant group is actually thinking "I must oppose him because he's black." But having a slight distrust of black people would lower the threshold at which people would accept attacks on him. On the other hand, how many people defend him, perhaps consciously, because he's black and are afraid to appear racist.

Then again, the entire concept of the subconscious as some sort of active driver of behavior is quite unscientific due to the inherent impossibility of directly measuring it.

If only Obama were white and then we could viciously attack him for purely partisan reasons rather than there being possibilities of racism. Then again: "Bush doesn't care about black people." *sigh*

Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be
It is unfortunate that what is the most important document in America is practically unknown to most people. Or perhaps worse than that. If they were purely ignorant, they might recognize and try to fix that. When they're misinformed, then they see nothing to fix.

While I recognize that the Onion is not factual news, they don't usually make things up entirely out of nowhere. Instead they bring together various tendencies and exaggerate them for comedic effect.

Afghan Presidential Election A Celebration Of All Forms Of Government
I take back what I said about the Onion exaggerating.

American Muslims To Fort Hood Shooter: 'Thanks A Lot, Asshole'
Until this, I couldn't really remember the last time I saw or heard Muslims being portrayed as the bad guys. Maybe some bits during the fighting in Pakistan and of course the ever-present Taliban. The Obama administration had been working to reduce words like jihad and that sort of religious language to reduce the impression that we are at war with Islam. I guess it was working, until this.

Maybe Muslims wouldn't get the false impression that we're their enemy if our douchebag talking heads could stop saying Muslims are our enemy.

To run with that, the coverage of the story annoyed me. The initial story was just the constant every minute crap about Terrible Things, Horror, Massacre, and Oh Noes! That's the total wrong way to portray this. It is an event. It is not a football game where we need a play by play. Bring it up a few times a day as more is known, but we benefit in no way from the heartbreaking painful story of a family member watching and worrying. That reduces it to a generic Bad Things Happened to People. But since no one is ever content to actually analyze and solve a problem, now the Right has turned it into an opportunity to point fingers while the Left gets hyper-defensive. Meanwhile moderates are yelled at to pick sides.

Maybe I should form the Moderate Party. We won't have a political stance. We won't support any agenda. Instead we will be neutral on all issues with one exception: We viciously attack biased media.

3 comments:

G-Rebel said...

I'll join. All media is biased and should be blown up and started anew! Maybe instead of Moderate Party it could be Read Between the Lines Party...that's what it takes to gather any useful information from the media.

Klepsacovic said...

It's a shame we can't make a Not a Party Party. That would fit best with the visions of the Founding Fathers. But it's also a contradiction.

Besides, what the Founding Fathers wanted is terribly overrated. We threw out slavery and let women vote. Even they created a system for adding amendments.

Maybe if we had media that wasn't for profit, they'd tell useful stories rather than the hyped-up bull that they normally feed us. Did you by chance check out the public radio that I linked a few weeks back?

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