Feelings

These days it seems like everything produced by mass media is designed to inflame an emotion, facts be danged. People make decisions based on emotion, not on facts, so if you want to sway people's opinion on an issue, you need to make an emotional appeal, not a cold, calculating one, although that is exactly what the people behind the scenes are doing: coldly calculating what should go into their emotional appeal that will make it most effective.

Seems like everyone has an agenda these days, and every story that comes out is given a slanted emotional appeal designed to serve that agenda. Marc, one of our most vocal supporters of right wing politics (although I think a lot of it is just to irritate anyone who voices a liberal opinion), listens to NPR, who have some interesting stories. However, after you have listened to them for a bit it becomes pretty clear that the stories are designed to make you feel bad or guilty about whatever issue is under discussion. Never mind the facts.


CO2 and global warming popped up at Thursday lunch and things like CO2 from cow farts and rice paddies (and some other source that I have forgotten) are suspected of being bigger contributors to global warming than the burning of fossil fuels by the industrialized West. I discouraged any further exploration of the topic because it's an endless rathole. There is no bottom to it, mostly because every single story you will find has been painted with a big fat brush dripping with colored paint, red or blue.

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We finished watching season one of Goliath last night and while I enjoyed the show, it was kind of low on logic. It was basically a sequence of emotional scenes tied together with some pretty thin thread. For instance, there is a bad guy running around loose, wreaking havoc on our heroes, but he gets taken out. By who? No clue is ever given. A death bed confession is not convincing. And then there is the case of police brutality, or at least it seemed like it could have been a case, and should have been pursued, but there wasn't even a failed attempt to collect the video from police car camera. And what's with the hooker? Nothing she does makes much sense, but then if I was making $10,000 for a weekend of snorting coke and screwing my brains out, maybe I wouldn't be making any sense either.