But you’re forgetting the most important point: MONEY. Who is PAYING for the survey? Your post is fine, but you don’t discuss conflicts of interest, you make no mention of agenda-driven “information.” Information the masses consume doesn’t just spontaneously happen for free. Never before has “information” been so personally targeted to individuals’ psychometric profiles to sell us products and fear. Good FUD is a function of POWER AND MONEY, nothing more, just like science, politics and justice. George Merck expressed this poetically when he said “We don’t sell drugs, we sell disease.” One doesn’t need to “prove” bias—that is a given, it is inherent in all of us—what is needed is evidence of conflicts of interest and who has the financial firepower to do the greatest amount of mindscrewing and polluting of the mental environment. Anyone with MONEY AND POWER can mindscrew at a mass scale—the rest of us poor slobs can’t, we just take it in and regurgitate it to whomever we come in contact with.
POWER AND MONEY to mindscrew on a mass scale is what so much of the game of life is about. Talking about “facts” is useless, because “facts” are individual mental constructs; every one believes he/she sees the world clearly and sees it whole, that goes without saying.
The childish and naive use of the word “facts” often sends this forum off its rails. “I have all the ‘facts’ and anyone who doesn’t think like me is stupid and falls for propaganda. But of course, I’m so smart and unbiased, I don’t fall for propaganda/PR/ads.” Give me a break…. Ask siblings growing up under the same roof and you’ll get a spectrum of very different “facts,” from “We grew up happy” to “We grew up in an abused home.” Just like there are multiple sides to every question, there are multiple sides to every “fact.” (and I’m not talking about the epistemological foundation of brute facts, like, “is this table I’m sitting at real?” I’m talking about political/economic “facts,” like, what is really happening out there in the land of billions of people speaking different languages with different worldviews all over the globe). And if you don’t come to this realization as a young adult, you probably never will. Anyone who knows anything about advertising/public relations/propaganda knows this is the very foundation of its power and reach. We all develop our own biased mental models/stereotypes of the tiny sliver of infinitely complex reality we inhabit. You do, I do, we all do.
We don’t need to discuss "facts" here. Our goal should be trying to be less wrong so we can survive and win, to point out financial conflicts of interest, our own blindspots/stereotypes, and ask ourselves who/what is behind the same bag of tricks used over and over again to mindscrew us in different ways. Because if millions of people are frantically babbling about something at once, some entity probably paid for that message for a particular end in mind. All I want to know who is financing the story/survey/advertisement/scientific study/etc., and then I’ll come up with my own “facts” that fit my stereotypes, and you’ll come up with your own “facts” to fit your stereotypes, and then we will individually do our best to survive and win.
As for integrity, just know there are millions of people out there who will gladly lie to your face, or stab you in the back, if it helps them to win/survive. At the end day it’s all about who gets eaten and who gets to eat. Kill or be killed. Please, put the integrity and morality discussions in a different thread.
) ... IIRC, it was in same week ..
That was a we made bank on the ride down, now we make bank on the ride up, while decimating retails who thought they had any semblance of control over their investments and lives.
scared off the paper hands yesterday and us HOLD'ers just keep humming along patiently.
