Fred and Hoi Polloi, thank you for your considerate words I was very glad to read your posts. What you say makes sense on all counts.
I really shouldn’t complain about where I work, I sound embittered when I should be excited, it is great really. It's just a bunch of kids making magazines and things. Given what I imagine corporate media companies must be like, I'd rather be where I am. I need to try and make it my job to encourage the younger lot coming through to think a bit harder about things and to look a bit further than wiki for their sources. There is so much sloppy thinking going around. I don't think there are that many liars out there, it's just that the few that are, are the ones who shout the loudest.
Getting inside the propaganda machine proper, basically means getting into PR, no thanks, I've had the misfortune to encounter a few of those types. They'll agree with anyone on anything; I've watched them alter their opinion and contradict themselves to ingratiate themselves to who ever they happen to be talking to. It’s horrible to watch, quite impressive the way they seem to get away with it, but I find all that very grim. To actually deal with those people day to day... no, I'd lose my mind and be no good to anyone. Perhaps I’m afraid I'd become like them.
Hoi: "We're like micro-financiers of information only there's nothing owed and no debt."
Perhaps it is about telling a better story. When you start looking really deep in to things you see how skewed everything is by lies perhaps it’s not enough to tell the truth to redress the balance, maybe you’ve got to tell a bigger story. It is about shouting louder and telling a better story. I’m thinking along the lines of satire. Web and zine projects that build up a very clear narrative but over time and you need a few pieces to get it, quite subtle so it doesn’t freak people out, but it gently reveals a very different picture of the world that is undeniable. Needs to be very funny though.
You mention heroes, it was a comment on Youtube calling you guys the heroes of the truth movement that led me here in the first place. I’m not big on heroes, I'm just finding it interesting reading people prepared to think about things from a different perspective and I'm not agreeing with everything said on this forum but the debate here consists of more joined up thinking than anywhere else I can find.
There is some quite smart commenting going on at the moment on some UK news forums as trickery, fakery and lies seem to keep popping into the news: BP helicopter faked images; Bono charity fraud; undercover police being exposed within the environmental movement just as the student protesters were getting a bad name, suddenly people are questioning how the violence at protests gets started (excellent timing); and most recently Cameron’s communications guy Coulson (ex-News of the World editor) who is so up to his neck in a serious phone tapping scandal just quitting, under pressure from Murdoch apparently (which ironically looks like it could derail Murdoch’s BSkyB takeover bid.
We’ll see, it seems to be dropping off the radar too quickly. So much shadiness is coming to light with this though, it involves lies being exposed in all sections of the press, the government and the police, I don’t see how it can just go away.)
In all my discussions with people about various hoaxes (and that we’ve fallen for them
is our problem) what I am finding depressing is the consensus that no one cares – "God, it was so long ago, we’ll never know what really happened anyway."
Most people I know are fine talking about serious issues until I hit on 9/11, global warming or just the general reappraisal of the way history has been written and why, and these ideas are just beyond the pale. Some get upset at being made to consider the world's even more weird than they're already finding almost too much to cope with. Some are getting downright aggressive. Most just laugh it off as ridiculous (but usually quite aggressively). No one wants their reality challenged it seems.
Is it true that the so called end of the Mayan calendar Dec 21, 2012 is also the date the “lease” runs out on the Federal Reserve deal? Distraction or disinfo tactics?
PS And you're very right the propaganda machine is in full throttle against Pakistan as we speak. (I think it was the Times who broke the story originally.)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... gangs.html
Newsnight did an item shortly after, though, talking to the police in the area and child protection people and they said it is nonsense – the police said there is no profile for whose who target children – the child protection guy said it’s 80% white men, so no, this was completely wrong. I wonder how many people watched that.