Spin To Win: Eating Propaganda for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

So I committed the crime of watching the news during my workout this morning and got annoyed rather quickly with the panelists there spinning the government shutdown in politically advantageous ways. For those outside of the United States, I will be referring to the state of politics in America. Where the goal is to win political brownie points and manipulate the public into your position rather than telling the truth and helping people out.

My party is right. They have done everything right. It's the other party's fault.

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It seems like the goal of politics nowadays is ego-driven self-service rather than a service to one's country. Nobody ever takes responsibility for their mistakes and is ready to dish out the blame to other parties. This behavior makes it impossible to solve any real problems because the goal of the politician is not to solve problems but to score points for the party and position oneself for re-election.

And of course the party organizations have their cronies littered within every news broadcast trying to get the general public to view public policy through their particular lens. But the worst thing is that their lens is always detrimental to public at large. Rather than focus on actual problems they lure you with positions that a good human being has to agree to.

Join our side because the other side is racist. Join our side because the other side is lazy and stealing money from the taxpayer. Join our side because the other side are baby killing monsters. Join our side because the other side doesn't care about poor people.

And the weak minded find themselves members of the red party or the blue party and find themselves readily buying into the propaganda of the respective spin doctors on their team. As for me, I can see through the bullshit and I understand the techniques they use to lure those people in. They pray on emotions and use certain ethical positions to push you onto their side to fight against the evils of the other side.

The sportsification of politics has reduced the whole thing into a combination of entertainment and hooliganism where even the most rational find themselves every four years fighting passionately for a politician who doesn't give a shit about them and are using them as a means to an end.

With the internet, I feel like I can't even get actual news anymore. There's a certain degree of spin to everything. Somewhere down the line, people stopped developing their rational mind and have completely given their ideological beliefs up to their emotions. They simply accept the propaganda they hear on the news for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then bury themselves into their filter bubbles which they can't escape from.

And the loser here is the people themselves. The rich and powerful continue to win the game of mind control over the public and have a huge populace of sheep following their moves. When they fail to serve the populace, they simply turn the two groups against each other to hide their ineptitude. But is it ineptitude or effective herding? Then they pass policies that help themselves out (tax breaks, bailouts, trade agreements) while fighting over the same ethical issues in order to radicalize the populace into two distinct camps.

It's a brilliant application of divide and conquer. Whether or not the two parties are intentionally performing this manipulation doesn't matter. They are simply doing the bidding of the their donors who push for policies that benefit themselves. Sometimes things are passed on behalf of the people in order to tame them, but often there is extra pork tossed in there in order to throw a bone back to the donors.

But at the end of the day, all I ask is that people stop depending on their emotions when making long-term decisions that apply to a large population. Because emotions are not good for that type of decision making. They cloud your judgement and lead to you to encourage counterproductive behavior.

Take the arguments of both sides and compare them to each other. Try to understand what the goals and motivation of these people are. Understand who they work for and be skeptical about what they claim they fight for and what they claim to represent. Because all people manipulate each other in order to get what they want. Hell, I'm shilling my angle here. I'm try to convert you to be more skeptical of your emotions and to spinners that use those emotions to lock you into ideological positions.

At the end of the day, don't take my word for it. Think for yourself.

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Discussion Question:
(100% SBD) What are you skeptical of? What areas do you think you might be weak to your emotions and should be more skeptical towards?

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