When it comes to matters of great import, things which can scarcely be put into words, we rely heavily on first person communication. But when you and I seek to examine the noise of political propaganda, it is a wholly different thing. We need to strip away everything except the very essence of what the liars are trying to get us to do. Particularly on the Internet, about the only way to reduce things to their essence is by stripping out all the junk.
That means reading them in plain text.
I’ve already mourned here in previous posts how utterly shallow and silly our Western culture has become, as evidenced in part by the simple inability of people to write. So we have a plethora of YouTube videos, loaded with mountains of emotional manipulation, mimicking the propaganda tactics of the mainstream media, but we can easily reduce almost any 10-minute video to a single paragraph of text, even without sarcasm. Everyone is selling something.
They seek to overwhelm you, own your very soul for at least a few moments of time. They can’t trust you with simple facts, because you might not obey their subtext, their demand for action. It’s all part of that psychopathic control mechanism which denies your humanity. You are just a piece on a game board, so shut up, don’t you dare think and decide independently, and just play the moves.
This is a primary reason I love plain-text browsers. Even simple still images can impart an atmosphere to typed words which slants your reaction. It’s bad enough we have to struggle often to find the back-story deceptively left out. If the content of the communication is the feeling, then call it art, not information. Real art, like true spirituality, leaves the truth out there for you to handle on your own, but it’s never about politics. Even the very use of words can offer a tremendous opportunity to slant something, but as a wannabe writer, at least I’m expecting that sort of thing. I do fairly well at pushing aside the hysterical terminology to find most stuff has very little fact. But imagery is harder to ignore, and videos are perhaps the most dangerous, since the medium itself attacks the logic centers of the brain almost hypnotically.
In the school of Holy Cynicism, a primary weapon is the plain text web browser. Just give me the words.
