Loss of Rationality: Kant, Consumerism, and Democracy

06/10/2020

My current read is Net Privacy: How We Can Be Free in an Age of Surveillance, written by Sacha Molitorisz, which is unexpectedly intensely philosophical in its approach. At little over the halfway mark, whilst it seemingly hasn’t answered the question posed by the subtitle, it has still been a fascinating book that I would recommend. Although I do intend on writing a piece on it relating to the commodification of data and privacy, here I want to jump on a bit of a tangent. Molitorisz references Immanuel Kant a number of times, and it is one reference to “rational beings” that I am homing in on.

Because in the modern world, Kant’s rational beings are seemingly dwindling.

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What About Free Speech?

27/06/2020

Random short rant in response to a comment I saw underneath an Advance Australia post.

“Black Lives Matter are in fact promoting a ‘racial divide’ and perpetuating racism. The left thrive on division.”

So the post claims. Below in the comments, a response not only highlights some people’s ignorance of the Black Lives Matter movement (or any “leftist” movement, whatever that means), but, seemingly without self-awareness of any kind, advocates rather totalitarian methods of combatting them. As the post title suggests, it is, ironically, an attack on free speech.

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Trump Is A Genius

18/06/2020

The biggest genius! He has the best genes, well documented. Some great thinking done by the greatest President!

Seriously, though, regardless of Donald Trump’s actual mental capacity and capabilities, or how you perceive them to be, there are certain aspects of his reign that are so dangerous it would be foolish to not take them seriously. Intentional or not, there is method in the madness.

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Report Truth, Not Views

23/05/2020

The idea of journalism being an adversarial “pillar of democracy” is laughable, as I have written a few times on this site before. One of the books I am reading at the moment, Merchants of Doubt, provides examples of how the “fairness” and “balance” aspects of journalism, however desirable in theory, are corrupt and abused in practice. As “conservative intellectuals” of the Internet age love to say, facts don’t care about your feelings, folks.

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What School History Doesn’t Teach: The Vietnam War

29/11/2019

I never took modern history in high school, but from what we were taught in the junior years and from what friends who did take that subject told me, what we learned was an extremely watered down and pretty much propagandistically pro-West depiction. I can’t speak for the US education system, but I can only assume that US exceptionalism is a fundamental part of any history taught in school. There are a few examples one could use, but the Vietnam War is probably the most damning.

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Political Public Relations is A Form of Propaganda

13/10/2019

My political communications lecturer was at pains to differentiate between propaganda and political public relations, but even using the definitions provided to us and the reasoning for it, I’m not sold on it. It’s the only unit I’ve actually done on a political topic, and I am already starting to see how universities frame this kind of content to fit the mould that the mainstream media and academics slowly adjust to. It actually makes me interested in doing further study into it just to observe how a course on these issues is carried out.

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