Tuesday, March 21, 2006

bad guys and good guys

* damien:
"The most powerful social factor is social identity. People will believe any lie, discard any principle, so long as they belong. If you know you are going to lose your $200th job for talking about 9/11 then you will quickly decide that someone else can have the principles, someone else can stand up.
snip
Those who speak the truth have to do it for for personal reasons. That's ok."

* atrios:
"News, current events, whatever, is an ongoing story about the state of reality. It's an ongoing story with a cast of characters, a set of plotlines, a backstory. It's story told by thousands of different unreliable narrators, and every individual hears some combination of these narrators and then roughly synthethsizes it all into a basic narrative about what's going on. For a long time conservatives have had a very large and loud narrative generation machine, which has for its viewers and listeners been able create the narrative by emphasizing certain facts (true or not), by creating bad guys and good guy, by determining what the important stories of the day were, by inserting certain basic assumptions into the debate, etc. In other words, to write the story. And, this machine has been loud enough to have a big impact on how the less partisan media told their story, too."

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