91% of US news about Covid topics was negative – even when reporting on positive vaccine developments or low case counts in schools. The media learned that consumers demand negativity – I postulate this is because consumers who are suffering from hysteria and anxiety seek out news that confirms their anxiety, and that being anxious is okay.
A medical professional posted on Twitter that she can and will withhold care from patients based on her perception of the patient’s sex, race and political beliefs. By Monday, her hospital bio page displayed “Page not found”. Far too many engage in inappropriate emotional outbursts on social media that have led to severe consequences, including being fired from a job.
Restaurants use an arsenal of manipulation techniques to encourage you to purchase higher profit items, and even to eat food faster so they can turn around the table to another customer, more quickly.
Surprisingly, the difference between different groups with a will and those without is very tiny and the gap is closing rapidly. But the CNBC headline chooses to spin this with an emotion-laden, inflammatory, click-bait headline.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
The book “How Not to Diet” uses an appeal to authority and extensive cherry picking to formulate the author’s argument that we should all eat a plant-based diet.
Link to an essay on the role that “technical authority”, media propaganda, and how “consensus of experts” are used to influence the public and to exert control over us. This essay is an eye opener.
This is an Internet/social media phenomena that never occurred to me: “Munchausen by Internet occurs when medically well individuals fake recognized illnesses in virtual environments, such as online support groups.”
Blast from the past: the social media propaganda poster that led to the birth of this blog and web site.
Western state Governors are increasingly blaming climate change for western wild fires, as if the wild fires are a single variable. If only we could control the climate, we would no longer have wild land fires. Realistically, there is no magic control knob on climate that we can control and which will reduce fire danger for decades to come.
There are concrete steps that can be taken immediately to reduce the threats of future wild fires – but politicians would rather blame climate change – which they do not control – because to acknowledge there are factors which they can control is to acknowledge that their leadership has failed.
A common mistake people make is to focus on a single variable in a multiple variable problem. In this case, the focus is on one variable that cannot be controlled in the near term, while ignoring other variables that can be controlled.