Agitprop

The Inauguration of Mr Trump as US President has led to a telling contrast of three marches: The media have given splash coverage to the second march, and had to at least report on the first. Tellingly, predictably, the third — an annual march in defense of life — will receive little coverage, and that will be overwhelmingly hostile. (Notice this street level video of the second march — and no I am not endorsing Mr Jones et al or agreeing with much of what he says. But, his interaction documents the mindset of the marchers all too tellingly. Forgive the coarse slang reference in the video’s title, it is a measure of where our civilisation has reached — yes, Read More ›

This weekend, someone shared the e-YES joke now making the rounds with me, and I found it on YouTube: [youtube 0Al_V7fsL7g] It seems to be just a prank at first, but on a second look, it shows us how framing distorts perceptions and is potentially quite manipulative. As we consider the various issues now before our civilisation, let us ponder the framing challenge and let us ask ourselves how we may be being manipulated with more serious cases than e-YES vs EYE-s. For instance, we have cases of objectors to design theory who regularly come here and post long ASCII-coded text strings while proclaiming they see no evidence that warrants the design inference on seeing FSCO/I or the more general Read More ›