Peddling Apples With Bites Taken Out Of Them To Willing Buyers - Hate Mail

Wish I had the time to work out a sufficient and clear description of the phenomenon of people with college credentials having not been educated enough in the logical content of the old-time Freshman Rhetoric class of yore and so are incapable of identifying even glaring deficiencies in their own thinking and claims and what substitutes as arguments. 

One of the idiotic bits of hate mail I got overnight denies the effect of the Sullivan decision in freeing the New York Times to publish lies with impunity, without even the worry of a court ordering them to correct themselves, a ruling which made the media even freer than before, to lie the country into the string of criminal Republican presidencies that came after that, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and now Trump.* 

The . . . um . . argument uses the snippet of American history that holds William Randolph Hearst as the cause of the Spanish American War, probably about as much of that history as most of the superficially college credentialed have heard about the Spanish American War - a snippet of history which consisted of Hearst bragging he had that power to incite war - was used in the argument as if  that exonerates the idiocy of the Warren Court in making the ruling made the media 

a.  EVEN FREER TO PEDDLE WARS BY PUBLISHING LIES ABOUT LIBERAL POLITICIANS AND PUBLIC FIGURES WITH IMPUNITY, and which

b. ignores that the Sullivan Decision was merely the first in a line of terrible Supreme Court decisions using its language and concepts that have had the effect of allowing the media to lie us into the attack on egalitarian democracy we are endangered by today. 

What Sullivan allows, what the rest of that line of "free press" rulings allows, is the very thing that is held up as terrible when it was claimed was his power by Hurst BECAUSE OF HIS POWER TO DO THAT AS A PRESS BARON at the turn of the last century. 

I suspect the denial of the effect of allowing the media held to be as elite as the NYT  to lie on our politics isn't a matter of willful blindness as to that being possible.  It's not a holding practiced, uniformly.  The very resort to an old truism of American history,  attributing that power to the Rupert Murdoch of the early McKinley era but denying it when it's the holy New York Times and the electronic mass media (powerful in ways and effects that Hurst could only have dreamed of) in the period of the transformation of merely bad corporate Republicanism to Republican-fascism is an important mental aberration to look into.  It's mandatory to recognize it as terrible when the fabled yellow journalism of Hearst did it, but it's OK when modern medic corporations do it to ever worse results. 

To try to use an earlier example of the same effect I noted, the malign effect of the media being free to tell political lies in the United States, made worse by the string of "free press" rulings in the age of even more powerful and concentrated electronic mass media, rulings that began with Sullivan, as if that made my arguments weaker is a stupid in a way that Frosh Rhetoric was hoped to warn college grads against.  What was bad in the ink on paper, hawked by news boys era of Hearst is magnified by the revolution in the media that came with radio, television, cable (the engine of American fascism) and  now the internet.  

That denial is  especially stunning since two of the worst examples of what that gets you have been media celebrities who, as public people are a 100% creation of the media.  I think this tells us a lot more about class and how when the right people do it, that makes it OK with those acculturated into those deemed to have been educated.  

This has to be related to the phenomenon of even those with a genuine instead of an ersatz education who don't seem to be able to see through the likes of Rod Rosenstein or the conclusively confirmed gangster thug lawyer William Barr without the strongest of confirmation of what they proved themselves to be even three decades ago.   

That level of denialism is likely a result of buying lines and phrases and even something standing as an argument SOLD TO THE COLLEGE CREDENTIALED CHUMPS BY THE FRIGGIN' MEDIA.  It's a different media who sold Trump to his true believers but it's the same phenomenon of chumps buying lies and distortions tailored for easy sale to a target audience using the practices of the PR industry.   College-credentialed folk are made conceited enough by their status that they can't possibly imagine themselves and those who have their respect or even mere regard as being susceptible to those things they believe only those without their credentials falling for, and if you believe that they are right, look at what I said the other day about those chumps being sold on the products peddled by Apple inc. even as they are serially shafted at enormously higher prices. 

*  If you want to point out the Gerald Ford regime, one that was never voted into office but which was imposed on the country by the choice of Richard Nixon when Spiro Agnew's crimes caught up with him and he had resign as the, up till Cheney, worst Vice President in our history.  I have argued that into that melange of criminality Ford introduced the precedent that when a president gets caught in the most serious kinds of crimes and resigns then the Vice President, inevitably his hand-picked choice of the same party, gets to pardon him so he can never be punished for those crimes.  As far as I'm concerned, that crime of Gerald Ford is as serious as many of those committed by his fellow Republicans because it has left us vulnerable to Trump.

Update:  Rereading this, I have to remark on the idiocy of, in the face of Agnew having to resign for crimes that date from the time he was Governor of Maryland from the Vice Presidency, that it was the criminal, himself, Nixon, who got to pick his successor.   Even if Nixon hadn't been a criminal, himself, the practice of allowing someone who had the bad judgement to choose an Agnew in the first place, to get a chance to pick his replacement is utter stupidity.   I don't believe I've ever read anyone who noticed that before.