JHUS Staging

Tag: misinformation

  • The John Henry Show Podcast S1E002 – Fairness Doctrine (Archive)

    In today’s podcast we’re talking about doublethink, how we fool ourselves, how we can trip over our own words without even realizing it, starting with an example from a prominent political page on FB where they invoked 1984, doublethink, and “Fairness Doctrine” all at once without ever realizing that in so doing, they were simultaneously warning against and advocating for government control of the media.

  • The John Henry Show S1E001 – Modern Monetary Theory (Archive)

    First episode of the new podcast.  Audio’s a bit clippy in spots, I’m not in the best possible environment; later eps should sound better.  These casts are archives of audio+video livestreams, most of which you can catch live at 8pm Eastern M-F at https://youtube.com/johnhenryus/live.

    In this inaugural cast, we’re talking about “Modern Monetary Theory” and what it tells us about how our money works and why the general public needs to basically forget everything they think they know about economics at the national and international levels and start over from scratch.

    Key concepts:

    • Federal taxes don’t fund federal spending, or anything else.
    • We don’t have to take from one thing to fund another
    • We must tax the rich, but not to pay for things; taxing great wealth is a preventative measure to stop the democratic process from being subverted by the ownership class
    • Stephanie Kelton and Bill Mitchell are your key figures in this concept
    • I’m a messenger, not an economist.  If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of it, start with those two websites above.
    • Orthodox and heterodox economists hate MMT, but they can’t build a cogent argument against it.  They’ve spent petabytes trying, but they can’t.
    • Fuck Paul Krugman.

  • Conspiracies: The Truth Is Not “Out There”

    (This is a curated combination of two different related pieces; the video, “See Oh En Spiracy,” and this article which originally appeared at https://web.archive.org/web/20100816230908/http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/08/15/The-Truth-Which-Is-NOT-e2809cOut-Theree2809d.aspx. A few minor edits have been made; the only substantive change is the addition of information relating to “Heinlein’s/Hanlon’s Razor.”)

    We as a nation have become seduced by conspiracies. The latest: That BP is actually showing a *second* well in the gulf on their cameras, because the first is still leaking and they don’t want us to know.

    Bullshit. We have to stop passing on bullshit information like this when there are important things we can be doing that actually matter and will make a difference to our ultimate survival.

    “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Known variously as “Hanlon’s Razor” and “Heinlein’s Razor,” this basic idea forms a solid line between healthy skeptic and frothing whackjob. (On the ambiguity of sourcing; I first read the phrase, in precisely this working, in Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love,” published in 1973; the Wiki article that insists on attributing the phrase to Robert J. Hanlon cites his first publication in 1980. While in fairness it must be said that the basic formulation is at least a couple of centuries old, if the choice is between Hanlon and Heinlein, Heinlein clearly gets the nod.)

    – The wells in question are less than 250 feet from each other. Not “miles” as has often been asserted.

    – Several of these videos tie everything back in with “The global banking elite.” This phrase inevitably proves, when one follows the trail of paranoid conspiracy theorism back from the person who utters that phrase to the identity of the “global banking elite,” to be “OMGJOOZ!” This has been so consistent that I don’t bother following the trail anymore when I see this phrase. I know where it’s going – to THE J0000Z THE EVUL JOOOOZ WHO CONTROL EVERYTHING IT’S THE JOOZ THE JOOZ THE JOOOOOOZ ZIONIST ROTHCHILD BILDERBURG CITY BANK OF ENGLAND FREEMASONS UFO’S BLACK HELICOPTERS AND JOOOOOOZ. F’n ridiculous bullshit is what it is.

    – Nobody has managed to explain what purpose there would be to this GREAT BIG CONSPIRACY, nor have they explained how enormous companies with the power and resources to push governments around and demand carte blanche to destroy the planet at will for profit are suddenly so inept that a couple of rednecks and slackers with nothing to do but stare at a live fed of the ocean floor all day can see through their clever ruse…a ruse which is designed to what, convince us there’s no oil spill? If they were going to do that, why not do it two months ago? You know, before everybody started worrying about Armageddon, before BP took a multi-billion-dollar stock hit and destroyed their brand name, before people were pissed off and scared to actually start getting off their asses and thinking about how to reduce their dependence on oil? Because you know, THAT kind of conspiracy would have made sense. This is like a conspiracy to go close the barn door after the horses have escaped.

    This horrendous catastrophe has emphasized, in the strongest terms possible without causing immediate profound loss of life, that we must eliminate our dependence on petroleum.  Not on “foreign oil,” on oil period.  It has shined a bright light on the stark reality that we must find alternatives to petrochemicals, and we must, immediately begin doing everything that we haven’t but should have been to reduce consumption, or these kinds of things will keep happening and building on other things until this planet is no longer suitable for human life.

    People don’t want to deal with that. At ALL. They’d rather ignore it and fiddle while Rome – or Moscow – burns. Tell you the truth, I’d rather myself. I’m sure you would as well – who among us wouldn’t rather have fun than worry about all these heavy issues? I understand and I sympathize…but that attitude is so dangerous and so hypnotizing. You can already see it – the discussion has already begun to shift away from “we must reduce our consumption” to “we must find someone else to blame.”

    Because we don’t want to blame ourselves. If we do that it means we have to give up our comforts and go through the difficulty and expense of learning new habits. It’s almost a really gigantic, society-magnitude manifestation of the suicidal hopelessness response. I’m sure you learn of this in Finland – the danger of being lost out in the cold and thinking “I’ll just lay down for a minute, a nap would be so nice,” and then you wake up with your ass frozen to death.

    I’m afraid that’s what we’re seeing right now in many people, this kind of response. Ignore it and it will go away. Stop thinking about what I have to do to make my little difference and start trying to force the Big Evil Oil Company to solve everything. If we can just be angry enough at them we can make them fix it with their Big Evil Company magic and we’ll still be able to drive our Humvee’s and Escalades in the suburbs, we won’t have to change our own behavior.

    We’re wrong. We will have to change our behavior. If we don’t, we will die. We must stop trying to divert our own attention from the things we need to do to stop abusing this planet.

  • Right Wing Media Is Professional Wrestling (2010)

    [su_dropcap]I[/su_dropcap] created a bunch of videos and other digital between 2009 and 2015 or so about a variety of topics, sort of the first version of my official career as a media critic and political analyst and all-around demagogue.  Much of it was just free-form ranting on whatever subject I might find at hand, as is this video from 2010, the first zombie content I’m digging up and gathering together under the heading of “JH Classic.”

    In this video, we discuss the similarities between how right-wing media builds a disinformation narrative using the same tools employed by professional wrestlers and promoters back in the days when “exhibition wrestling” was a carnival sideshow and often involved conning local men into the ring for fights, which the promoter and his assistants would take bets (“make book”) on from the crowd while suckering their hometown boy into a fight against someone who had already lost a couple of matches and clearly couldn’t fight, but then magically became a martial arts master when Local Boy gets in the ring with him…after all Local Boy’s friends have made bets on him to win.

    The scheme varied, and continues doing so to this day, but that was the core scam, the main “work” of the spectacle.  In this video I discuss how the same basic psychology is used to befuddle and mesmerize consumers of mass media – and make no mistake, although my focus here was on Fox News and the right, the rest of the spectrum is not walking the moral high ground on this either.  You may be able to rationalize some of it by noting it’s not as extreme or as misleading, or even fall into the “ends justify the means” thinking by noting that even if it’s the same tactics, the goal of the strategy is more ethically supportable from the left.

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    It really isn’t; the goal is profit, not ideology, and neither your heroes nor mine are any less susceptible to its allure than those we disagree with ideologically.

    I’m not going to re-litigate the video here.  I chose this particular video because it’s one of several I filmed while staying with my friends Vince and Kym in Royal Oak, Mi. during the spring and summer of 2010.  It was they who suggested I go to college, which I did shortly thereafter.  I’ve often discussed how I felt like I’d reached the limits of my ability to self-educate in terms of nomenclature and terminology and tools to present and defend my positions in the “big leagues,” e.g. in a context where that level of academic knowledge is expected as a sign of competence like public speaking, or being an effective activist.  Plus it gave me source content to use for playing around with filters and effects in Adobe Premiere.  So this video is kind of a snapshot of that moment, basically.

    It’s well worth noting how well this strategy has played out and how much more pervasive it’s become in the last decade; we’ve elected Donald Trump, a guy who has literally been an entertainer in the professional wrestling business, to the United States Presidency.  Maybe if his fans understood some of this stuff – or if his opponents in the “independent liberal” Facebook Page-o-Sphere understood why they shouldn’t have embraced these tactics in spite of their equal utility as clickbait to generate ad revenue – we wouldn’t have that problem.

    Enjoy, and please remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel, there’s a bunch of old content that will be visible there over the coming weeks, plus I’ll be creating and publishing new stuff there as well!

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxSU-ajrcL4[/embedyt]

  • Mediacrity

    Examining media framing and how information is reported and tilted in ways that are destructive to useful discourse, and other failures of journalism in the context of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. More of a rant by the end. Interesting to note it was right around this time – and I mean it literally may have been the day I filmed this – that I made the decision to go back to college and elevate my own skills. Also, I used to make a lot more puns and little in-jokes and things in my titles, I wonder when I stopped doing that. Probably because it’s crap for SEO.

    This is what my media criticism looked like *before* I was objectively qualified to do it at a professional level.

    Original description: JH uses an unjustifiably cheery headline as a starting point for discussing the ethical obligations of media.