Sunday, January 07, 2018

The desert of diversity

Last night, ten thirty, and I was on the couch, flicking between BBC News and Sky News, and their respective reviews of the forthcoming Sunday papers.

Sky had a female and male journalist; the BBC two media women. They were all (including the hosts) fully paid-up liberals.



The main topic of the Sunday press was the continuing fallout from the Wolff book, "Fire and Fury", with Trump tweeting in rebuttal what a 'genius' he was.

The pundits were to-a-person in full triumphalist mode. Their eyes were gleaming: Wolff had sooo nailed the pig! They were outbidding each other in retelling juicy quotes from the newspaper excerpts. They were shocked, shocked!

I was going quietly crazy.

Wasn't it obvious that Wolff was not a disinterested analyst but a partisan liberal himself? Obviously he was going to use his weaselly-gained access to the White House to put the boot in.*

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We're uniformly told that television is a warm, not cool medium. Translated, this means that feelgood emotionalism works well while objective analysis stresses and upsets the audience: they switch channel.

As a consequence, television has become (in Keirsey terms) an Idealist colony. More objective, dispassionate, and analytic personality types have been classified as outgroup .. and ejected. Toby Young is just the latest iconoclast to feel the antibodies clustering around him.

Truly they have made the media an ideological desert, and called it diversity.

I rejected throwing my shoe at the TV, and changed channel.

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*  It is not that liberals/Idealists are stupid - far from it. It's that their intellectual powers are the servant of their primary emotional drives. Which are those of compassion and empathy towards imagined communities .. to the exclusion of most else. And vitriolic hostility to those who appear to question or violate those naïvely-inclusionary values.

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