american stupidity, and what to do about it...

my ire is absolutely on target. why bother to post and correct me in such pedantic fashion? i know it can't be because you are one of the people who participated in mass smashings of dixie chicks cd's...if i posted a rant complaining about paul wolfowitz and spelled his name wrong or made a typo, would you tell me my ire was misdirected, simply because of my spelling error? would be the same pettiness at work...

either one is pretty much equally outrageously petty...

gee, i'm sorry, i've never worked in the radio industry & don't read the trade papers...

since you didn't ask it in earnest, i will respond to your voting query with a question of my own: why is it that i cannot complain about the state of the world without people like you jumping down my throat and implying or outright saying that i have a superiority complex? i am not so arrogant as to assume that i have even the tiniest fraction of answers to the ills plaguing the u.s. or the world...but i do reserve the right to point out idiocy when i see it.

Alternately -- and like I said, I know nothing about the situation you're mentioning -- there's always the possibility that the whole thing's on purpose. It seems like a significant amount of the time a radio personality is suspended, it's for something that the station considers win-win: listeners think the personalities are DJ rebels, complainers think the station is taking a firm disciplinary hand, and there's plenty of free publicity for everyone involved.

really, really, answer me people! what is soooo wrong with my posts in this thread? am i offending your patriotism, do you just have zero tolerance for someone venting off steam about the horribly tragic/sad/pathetic things he sees going on around him, am i not making enough lame jokes? what's the deal?

Dallas, the reason you're getting a ridiculous response is because you're not explaining why you feel this is stupidity instead of, for example, capitalist culture in action. I mean, note that you haven't replied to nabisco.

And Dallas, I think you get the responses you do for exactly the reasons Ally says. One nice thing about ILE is that -- at various points -- what I consider pretty great political discussion goes one, discussion that goes far beyond "I'm surrounded by idiots!" and actually puts some effort into decoding what people believe, why they believe it, and how it all comes together into creating a political world. Your posts never do that. They jump from some radio jocks getting suspended to "Americans are all stupid." They're the liberal equivalent of bad Rush-style radio, just picking up insignificant little tidbits of information and using them to mock everyone and shake your head at the state of the nation. And while that might have its place, sometime and somewhere, it's usually just not very valuable.

The thing is, you can use the shock jock style posts if you're willing to back them up with any sort of explanation. He isn't.

as for your second: as i recall, the inbreeding joke was one lame sentence in several paragraphs worth of my attempting to analyze why said stupidity seems to be so rampant...in the introduction to this here thread, i am actively asking for input from people, who most likely will prove more articulate/insightful than me, on the subject of WHY the stupidity seems to be epidemic. when i complain about things in this fashion i am assuming (mistakenly, i guess) that other people share a vaguely similar worldview, and are also disturbed by what they see taking place on a daily basis in american culture/society/politics. do i have to name all the names (i could start with everyone in the bush administration) do i have to bring up all of the disturbing events/issues (the upcoming fcc ruling which is bent upon further consolidating the media, the upcoming presidential elections, where once again we are effectively limited to choosing between the evil of two lessers, the insane warmongering of rumsfeld & co. & their ties to american corporations who stand to make big $ from said warmongering, 'freedom fries', the dixie chicks debacle, i could go on and on). i'm sure i'm not the only one who is totally freaked out and disturbed by the current state of america...i'm asking for help! commisserate with me, what's going on? what's going on?

capitalist culture in action=stupidity in most cases, so far as i can see.

re: gebhardt's health plan...y'know, i haven't picked up a newspaper yet this week because everytime i do, i get nauseous when i read the latest pronouncements by bush & co. i don't doubt that gebhardt's health plan is typical watered-down democratic party bullshit...not based on actual concern for the public, but calculated for maximum political gain.

actually they were in many ways.

'why is voting for Howard Dean voting for the evil of two lessers?'

he's the least evil of the bunch, i guess...but that's not saying very much, is it?

'dallas you still haven't explained how the dixie chicks debacle is evidence of stupidity on anyone's part'

it's petty, childish, jingoistic, xenophobic, witchhunt reactionary bullshit. that to me=stupidity

anyhow, we have a thread where we can all talk about your concerns with american culture going down the dumper --> here!

is there a 'thought' in your brain that can't be expressed on a bumper sticker?

Since it's been brought up: go read up on Gephardt's health plan. I haven't looked into any of the details of it myself: I'd love to see you honestly engage with it and then explain to us why you think it's "bullshit." "Bullshit," incidentally, meaning not "something it's cool to call stuff so I look superior," but "a substantively bad policy idea."

This is exactly what I dislike about extremists on both the left and the right. They exhibit a temper of highly-charged cynicism and disgust, but don't seem to want to do anything to alleviate it -- like actually taking the time to develop a more complex, nuanced worldview. If I object to your rhetoric, Dallas, it's not because I'm a naive, flag-waving patriot -- it's because my criticism of Bush is different from yours. I don't think that he's "evil" or "fascist" as much as I think he sees things too crudely, too black-and-white. Which can be very dangerous for global politics. But ironically, for someone who's down on Bush, that's the same problem you seem to have.

i'm using the word 'stupid' in a loose sense; to mean f*cked-up in a sinister way that seems senseless, that causes needless suffering; as shorthand for the apparent insanity of the world and the people who would fancy themselves its kings

if you have enough $ behind you, it is not hard to maintain power...george w. is widely acknowledged to be a f*cking idiot, but his family and cronies are loaded, so...

anyway, thanks for the link, tracer. that's all i'm asking for. no need to jump down my throat, or post images of characters from british stop-motion animation series with 'asshat' superimposed on them...

"is there a 'thought' in your brain that can't be expressed on a bumper sticker?"

no james, i'm just another 'moran' among a sea of evil morans, asking you wisepeople for help. help, mind you, not nasty unwarranted personal insults. i don't want to try to dialogue with someone who's just going to attack and insult me.

go do a search under my name...you'll see that what you're saying is an incredible and unfair exaggeration re my posts.

"I have a serious question for you, then, Dallas. What are you politics?"

to be brief, in the 2000 elections i fully supported & voted for nader. i thought everything on his platform was wonderful. call me a green, i guess. i don't like the political setup in the u.s. i would much prefer to live under a system such as exists in western/northern europe nations. a truly viable multi-party system, parlimentary, socialist democracy...all that good stuff.

"most of the time you sound like you're just parroting back things you've heard that sounded cool to you."

'cool'? yeah, that's what i do. like, this morning, i fired up a fatty, listened to howard zinn rapping on the local lefty public radio station, and i said, "wow, man. this guy's really 'cool'." you got me pegged.

"I'd love to see you honestly engage with it and then explain to us why you think it's 'bullshit.'"

fine. i'll come back with a book report. honestly, looking back on the events of the last forty years or so in this country, can you blame me for being extremely cynical, for being dismissive when it comes to the latest glurge spewing from the public servants in washington?

"That's free market, kid."

well, i have problems with this so-called free market... & as far as the dixie chicks go, i find it disturbing that they dared to dissent and speak critically about bush & his war, and suddenly people are literally burning their cd's, boycotting their concerts, punishing dj's for playing their songs...i watched diane sawyer interview them on tv & the whole phenomenon struck me as being a witch hunt.

"I don't think that he's "evil" or "fascist" as much as I think he sees things too crudely, too black-and-white."

unlike bush, i do not use the words 'evil' or 'fascist' lightly. but in his case i don't think it's a terrible exaggeration to use such language. a man who has not ruled out the use of nuclear weapons, and wants to build more, i have no problem calling 'evil'. a man who says to the iraqis, 'you can have any kind of govt. you vote in (as long as WE approve of it)' i consider to be somewhat fascist. a man who can execute someone who is mentally retarded, i consider 'evil'. a man who insists that everything his administration does be guarded with previously unheard of levels of secrecy, in a supposedly 'free' society, i would say that's more evidence that he has fascist leanings... i could go on and on...

if yertle really is serious about working to improve the quality of news and discourse in America -- and the American media def. needs a lot of improvement -- and get average Americans to demand same and expand their knowledge, i think that there are more constructive ways to do that than posting on these boards. (i.e., ever consider turning on yer friends to the BBC, or some other foreign news source? or calling yer congressperson about FCC Chairman Powell and his proposed relaxation on media ownership rules?)

a lot of nonsense does happen because people aren't aware of what's going on and who's doing it, i agree 100% with that. but calling people "dumb" isn't the way to cause that sort of change now is it?

Oh, Nader haters are so boring. Please. I voted for Ralph in 2000, in a state that Bush won, and I don't feel the remotest bit of guilt about it. Like it's my fault Al Gore couldn't convince me to vote for him; shit, I should've been an easy sell, but he flunked in a big way, and there happened to be another guy in the race who was saying things I respected. I love how somehow all the evils of the Bush administration are the fault of the 2% of people who voted for Nader, instead of the 48% who voted for Bush or the millions who just didn't vote at all. The Democratic Party is a corrupt institution, and the fact that its still preferable to the Republican Party says more about the abysmal agenda of the Republicans than anything else. That said, I'll probably vote for a Democrat next year, but I ain't promising. The field of candidates is weak as kittens right now, and the more that any nominee prattles on about "homeland security" and the glory of our glorious victory in Iraq and the glory of our glorious God, the less likely I'm gonna be to vote for them. And I won't feel guilty about that, either.

actually, Jesse's right ... we are boring. James was right about not throwing gas on fires.

But there's nothing about him that excites me, the way some Republicans evidently get excited about George W. And since I'm theoretically part of his natural constituencey (i.e. lefty-liberal), my lack of enthusiasm doesn't strike me as a good sign. But hell, what do I know? I voted for Nader, remember.

Wow, most disingenuous statement you made so far, Tad. I'm impressed.

hey, i spent 3 years in a place where they force you to become disingenuous!

I like Dean a lot better than Gore. But man, it's going to take a pretty tough and smart and marketable Democratic candidate not to get steamrollered by the Rove/Murdoch/talk radio machine next year. I'm not very hopeful that anyone in the field has the right combination of those attributes. I will be happy to be proven wrong.

They're crap!

Several people have called pulling the Dixie Chicks from playlists "censorship," which irks me to no end. Here's how it works: the public owns the airwaves. The (now mostly corporate) stations licensed to broadcast on them "serve the public" in a purely capitalistic way, which is to say that they play whatever brings in listeners. Conversely, they don't play whatever seems like to drive away listeners -- whether that means dropping R Kelly singles while everyone's up in arms about his situation or dropping the Dixie Chicks when some segment of the listeners is pissed off about that. There's nothing censorious about this in itself. In fact, it's exactly the kind of "serving the public" most of us claim to want from radio stations.

And Ally's absolutely right: for at least some portion of the people who are incensed by the Dixie Chicks, it's no different from any other boycott, apart from the fact that it's a bit silly -- instead of a targeted boycott of something that matters, it does look a lot like people just trying to maintain their feel-good culture bubble and prevent anything from introducing dissent into the environment they've created. Fair enough, I suppose. And sure, for plenty of them the impulse definitely is censorious. I think "McCarthyite" is pushing it just a bit -- there have been plenty of actions, particularly in the Justice Department, that invoke shades of McCarthy, without doubt, and those are things to be very worried about -- but when it comes to war dissent, the McCarthy era didn't have communists protesting openly in every major city.

As for Nader, we've gone over that one on plenty of old threads. One thing I will say to Dallas -- and this is not an attack -- is that voting Green, to me, tends to tie in with a lot of the same vagueness and refusal-to-engage I was talking about above. Nader's campaign included a lot of rhetoric, plenty of which I have loads of sympathy for. But as a candidate who never dreamed of getting elected, he was able to offer only rhetoric. The part that I find missing, with both you and him, is much thought about policy, about concrete actions, which is why I asked you to think about the Gephardt plan -- or really any other substantive policy issue.

Perhaps I have not been reading closely enough.

The fascinating thing about radio deregulation, incidentally, is that even though people on the left like to claim a shadowy federal cabal is happily selling the airwaves out from under us -- and there are plenty of good reasons to claim this -- there actually IS a complete awareness in Washington, from left to right, that deregulation has been a complete and utter failure, for precisely these reasons. Even the biggest proponents of media deregulation are pissed at the radio results -- because it's an intense embarrassment that makes it a million times more difficult for them to propose deregulation in the future. Thank God for them that they have Powell, one supposes; the FCC has forestalled debate on these issues now ten times more than before, precisely because radio is such a powerful and irrefutable argument that deregulation does not accomplish any of the things free marketeers like to imagine, and does create all of the problems critics level at it. It's been a wreck, and it's wrong to pretend that the government is just winking at Clear Channel over it; they know it, too.

Pinefox: Dallas is getting hammered over a complete lack of nuances, yes, and one that leads to him casting really irritating and unbecoming accusations at everyone around him. I don't think anyone's made any secret of this fact. The bulk of ILX posters surely lean at least vaguely in his political direction, but "his political direction" is sometimes a bit, you know, crayon-drawing.

Nader had tons of policy ideas -- he talked about actual policy questions more than anyone else in the race. What you mean is that his policies weren't ever going to be enacted, because he clearly wasn't going to win. But that argument can easily slide into, "People who have no chance of winning should never run for anything." Which then leads to the question of who decides who has a chance of winning and who doesn't and how much you want to play along with that system. I disagree that voting Green (or Libertarian, or any minor party) is a refusal to engage. Not voting is a refusal to engage; not voting for a major-party candidate is a direct engagement, a way of saying, "Look, I vote, and I'm not voting for you." As with many acts of dissent, it has its drawbacks, and I sympathize with anyone who chooses not to take that tack. I generally vote for major-party candidates myself. And I'm sorry if this has been talked to death elsewhere; I'm just tired of two and a half years of liberals bitching about Nader voters, or going "See, don't you feel sorry now?" every time some new Bush evil is unveiled. I'm sorry our president is an asshole, yes. But you know what? That's why I didn't vote for him.

The thing is, for all the rhetoric about "competition" (which is generally a good thing), what industry lobbyists and a lot of Republicans are really pushing is oligopolies. Nabisco's right that deregulation does not generally lead to more competition and more options; we have plenty of examples now to show that it leads, after a brief flurry of people trying to get a finger in the pie, to consolidation and mergers. I remember watching a congressional hearing a few years back on one of the big oil company mergers (BP? Arco? I don't remember), and the lawyer for one of the oil companies was sitting there talking about how having fewer companies in the market would actually create more competition and lower prices. I watched him closely to see how long he could keep a straight face, but he didn't crack once -- a real pro.

So yeah, I think Clear Channel is a legitimate issue of concern, or at least an illustration of a larger issue of concern. Just writing it off to "capitalism" is a dodge; the question isn't whether we should have capitalism, it's what kind of capitalism is most productive and most beneficial for the society as a whole. If, for example, you think that competition is a valuable thing, then you pursue policies that encourage competition. If you think massive concentration of power in any particular market sector is a net good, then you pursue that. The problem is that for many years we have been sold the latter in the guise of the former.

Kerry: Sorry, w/r/t the tone of the discussion I just mean this. Plenty of the people posting here would normally, I think, be all about lambasting the state of radio. The fact that many of us are defending this particular decision, I think, has to do with, well ... I can only speak for myself, but even when I agree with some fundament of what Dallas is saying, I feel compelled to explain to him that he seems to be ignoring all of the real-world factors that make what he's complaining about fairly rational. I shouldn't speak for everyone else here. Personally I'm just very offput by people who try and put certain completely-rational events down to the evil and stupidity of others, completely ignoring the sensible, concrete issues you'd actually have to deal with to correct the problem. No one's saying "don't be disturbed" -- what's being said is that it helps to think out the details of the thing rather than assuming everyone must be a moron. (The radio stations dropping the Dixie Chicks aren't being "morons" -- they're reacting rationally to a great number of business, advertising, and public-relations pressures, and they're trying to react in a way that best works to their advantage.)

As for the deregulation thing: when Powell last appeared before a senate Commerce Committee hearing (chaired by McCain, I think?), he -- surprisingly -- got sort of torn into on several sides, from a lot of people who might have been expected to be indifferent to radio. Basically, Clear Channel is a such a great big blight on radio deregulation that it's created a lot of skeptics. Maybe not enough to keep further deregulation from going through, but enough to put a challenge to it even in a Bush administration -- Clear Channel is like the incontrovertible shit-stain that everyone can point to and say "this is what deregulation causes."

Actually, (not to keep harping on him, because I hardly think the guy's perfect) Nader's got a lot of very hands-on prescriptions for changing the system. He's actually done it a couple of times, in small but significant ways. Meanwhile, I don't remember much of anyone in the 2000 campaign talking about real-world impacts of their vague policy agendas. (Well, there was the part where Gore kept pointing out that Bush was counting the same trillion dollars twice -- a point Gore was completely right about, but somehow got treated as a he said/he said who-can-tell? issue rather than a simple case of a candidate lying. Ah well.) The overall rhetoric was empty and complacent and largely divorced from the actual issues the body politic ought to be concerned with. Nader at least seemed to be identifying problems in a world that sounded kind of similar to the one I live in; the other guys mostly sounded like they were talking about some other, simpler, dumber world.

I agree with you that the rhetoric of the presidential candidates was never concrete, particularly with Bush -- it never is. I guess the difference I see is that with the major parties there tend to be more concrete policy agendas floating around in general, more identifiable hard stances up there. Like I said, I don't blame Nader at all when he's lighter on these: his campaign was about attempting to inject a certain set of topics to the debate to begin with. Beyond that, it's probably best not to rehash the whole Nader issue -- we've done it a few times before, and I think most everyone can see where the others stand and why.

I mean, I'm not sure where you were headed with the question, but if the idea is that people would abandon radio if they could easily buy music, I don't think that's the case at all.

ACTION ALERT!

On June 2 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is scheduled to vote on whether to allow corporations to acquire larger market shares of US media.

Rules that are now in place:

* Prevent mergers between major US networks;
* Prevent a company from acquiring both a newspaper and a broadcast outlet in the same market;
* Prevent a company from owning TV stations that reach more than 35% of American households.

Commission members Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein oppose loosening the rules and believe it could have far-reaching, irreversible consequences. "In just over one month, the FCC will have reconfigured the media landscape and told the world, ‘Sorry, there’s no opportunity or time for public comment on what has been decided,’" Copps said.

Copps also bames the media industry itself for 7 out of 10 Americans not being aware of the upcoming vote. "I haven't seen the first network news report on media ownership. It's an important issue that affects what you see and hear and read--and they're not reporting it."

American airwaves are a $70 billion natural resource that belong to the American people. Since 1995, the number of entities controlling them have dropped by 40%*. Allowing further "comglomeration" of US media will:

* Further reduce the airtime given to community and civic news
* Limit diversity of opinion, and allow special interests to decide what you see and ear
* Stifle competition and reduce the quality of programming

The Commerce Department has been heavily lobbied by media owners and has pushed FCC Chairman Michael Powell to rule by June 2, though details of the proposed changes have not yet even been made public.

----------------------------------------------------------------
rlev1223 again --

Please email the individual members of the FCC at:

http://www.fcc.gov

as well as your Congress members and Senators -- a lot of pressure is needed right now.

FCC COMMISSIONERS
Michael K. Powell, Chairman
- for rule changes

Kathleen Q. Abernathy
- for rule changes

Michael J. Copps
-opposed to rule changes without further discussion

Jonathan S. Adelstein
- opposed to rule changes without further discussion

Kevin J. Martin
-(important swing vote)

http://www.moveon.org/stopthefcc/