Is Conservative Media Porn For Conservatives?
Happy Saturday!
Recent events have evoked in my mind an English writing class I took at UC Berkeley. It was a graduate student seminar class entitled, "Are Romance Novels Porn For Women?" The question revolves around similarities between the way women consume Romance novels and the way men consume porn.
Did you know that Harlequin Romance novels are banned from the New York Times best seller list? Why? Because if they weren't then they would always be number one. It would be unseemly to have such obscene and scripted material as Harlequin Romances topping the list or even on it.
Anyway, the plot of Harlequin Romance novel is a young women falls in love with a rake. The rake rapes her, beats her, or steals money from her and she rejects him for the abuse. After the rake is rejected due to rake behavior then many years pass by and the unhappy couple meet again by coincidence and not design. They bump into each other. She discovers that her rake is now a doctor or philanthropist who has now turned to doing good. He asks her out and she rejects him initially. Eventually over time she comes to forgive him and the climax of the book on the last page is marriage.
Why would millions and now billions of women read books about a relationship that starts with abuse that may include rape? Well, some psychologists posit that romance novels function on some primal level analogous to porn for men. To whit, porn is animal behavior and romance novels are animal behavior. The argument is that there are primal urges that we all feel and want to satisfy and each sex of our species tends to satisfy these emotional urges the same way we eat food to satisfy physical hunger.
One last word on romance being porn. This essay is not about this class I took. At the end of the class I came to the conclusion the graduate student who lead this class deliberately miss-titled the class to draw students in. A better title for the class would have been, "What Do Romance Novels Have In Common With Porn For Women?" It was clear after the class that most of the evidence was stacked against romance novels being porn and we mostly looked at what romance novels had in common with porn.
So, lets do that here and re-title this essay as:
There are two recent events that reminded me of this class.
1. The New York Times changing its editorial review policy to mob rule of allowing everyone in the company to raise concerns in order to stop an editorial from going to print rather than just the editorial staff.
2. Trump's list of campaign rally stops are all for States he is expected to win and not in battleground States.
If Trump is campaigning in places he is expected to win then why bother? Especially considering his success in 2016 was his ability to win swing States where he campaigned. The most obvious conclusion is that Trump is feeling depressed and his campaign staff feel that these rallies in States where he is loved will boost his moral. Another possible reason is that the battleground States will not allow indoor crowds due to the coronavirus and therefore the places he can campaign are limited to red States. Another possible reason is that they are not directly campaigning but instead looking to fire up the base, otherwise known as inciting a mob.
Trump firing up his base and the New York Times capitulating to the mob are mob things. Both are a case of if you can't beat them, join them. If Trump can't beat the protesters of police brutality then he will incite his own base to counter. If the New York Times can't beat the protesters of police brutality then give into them.
Trump's Presidency is the culmination of decades of hate promoted 24/7 by conservative media. Hate is the primal emotion conservative media peddles in and the fact that conservative media peddles in base emotional reaction is its similarity to porn.
I recently read an editorial by Josh Hammer entitled, "A Tale of Two Americas". Josh Hammer is a conservative and this essay was published on conservative web sites. Josh Hammer is also an editor for Newsweek, mostly considered a mainstream media outlet. The topic of the editorial was the reaction of The New York Times editorial by Tom Cotton about sending in Federal troops to squash peaceful protests. I had hope that since Josh Hammer was an editor for Newsweek then perhaps he might deviate from the conservative media script. Alas, he did not. His essay ended with the same climax every conservative "news" piece or editorial ends with: liberals are evil; liberals are unpatriotic; liberals are out to kill us; liberals are out to destroy America; and I hate liberals.
Conservative media is a lot like porn. Ever since the advent of Rush Limbaugh conservative media always has the same climax: liberals are evil and I hate liberals. Republicans never talk about policy these days. They have none. Republicans have been reduced to tribalism. Tribalism is just what it says, my tribe comes first. Conservative media going on forty years has been working backwards from a conclusion and fitting the data and the story to that conclusion. I mean why read conservative media if you are not a conservative? The formula is simple and strict, much the same as Harlequin Romances. The simple script is to find an anecdote of one liberal person who exhibits the bad behavior that you are looking for and then use that anecdote to paint millions of liberals with and fit the desired conservative conclusion. Done and done.
Conservative media does then have fundamental commonalities with porn. It satisfies primal urges using primal images. But that is where the similarity ends. Porn is about the individual. Conservative media is about the tribe.
Liberal media has been struggling with the pornographic like obscenity of conservative media since its inception. Liberal media pays for reporting and has a primary objective to some degree of relaying information called reporting. Liberal media has always had a liberal bias, but never foster sustained tribal hatred the way conservative media is singularly focused.
Capitalism is at the bottom of this all. News for profit became click-bait for profit and eventually culminated in Trump getting billions of dollars in free press because sensationalism sells.
The New York Times has come to realize that conservative media is not interested in policy or argument, just servicing hate. Why bother taking the time and effort to even present an argument if in fact your opponent is only interested in selling hate content to its tribe of consumers.
If you can't beat them, join them. The New York Times has thrown in the towel of trying to argue and is now joining conservative media with an agenda to just sell content to its tribe of consumers. I mean you can't have an argument if one side isn't interested in even presenting an argument. Every thesis of every conservative piece of media is liberals are evil. What is there to argue with?
The Republican party married the Evangelical church in 1980. Religion is tribalism. Religion long predates civilization and has always been hostile to it. Civilization thrives in spite of religion, not because of it. The founders understood this and wrote about this in great detail. The first thing that pops in my mind is what John Adams said, "Government will corrupt the church long before the church makes the government more moral." Power corrupts the church. In other words when religion functions as a tribe then power defines the church and not moral doctrine that underpins civilization. The morality then of civilization has to distance itself from religion. The Republican party in the early 1980s was desperate and as hail Mary pass decided to marry the Evangelical church to gain power. And it worked.
The Republican party since 1980 has used a tribalism of Evangelical voters for voter support independent of any reason or rational argument.
We are seeing now the end result of forty years of appealing to our tribal base nature as humans. The primal appeal has won out over rational thinking and our politics has descended into tribalism and mob mentality.
None of this could be possible without a capitalism foundation. Capitalism sells you your proclivities. Do you have a proclivity for too much alcohol? sugar? fat? porn? hate media? What ever it is the primordial need that you cannot control then capitalism will sell it to you. The Republican irrational worship of capitalism is a required foundation for its marriage to the tribe of Evangelical church to work.
Amorality is the lack of morals or otherwise stated as our animal behavior. Capitalism sells us our amoral needs. Capitalism encourages our amoral behavior. Well, you might be asking, if that is the case then what has limited capitalism up until now? The answer is Enlightenment society. For example the moral "all people are created equal" is an Enlightenment moral. Religion, by contrast, divides people into tribes. Religion teaches that those in the religion are good, those who are outside are bad. Thomas Pained wrote a book called, "The Age of Reason", if you wish to pursue the differences between Enlightenment thinking and religious doctrine further.
The marriage between the Republican party and the Evangelical church in 1980 has succeeded in debasing our civilized politics and turning our politics into tribalism in order to rest power away from liberals.
What does conservative media have in common with porn for conservatives?
1. Each writing has a climax that services a primal emotion of hate that is addiction-like requiring constant maintenance for profit.
2. A daily set of different actors and new pictures is required, it is not enough to show the same people and exact same setting daily.
3. The objective is to fulfil an irrational need.
4. A profit motive versus public policy of public good motive.
What does conservative media have not in common with porn for conservatives?
1. Tribal versus the individual.
2. Religious approved versus religious disapproved.
3. Hatred versus sex.
4. No physical component.
The Republican party has debased our politics by marrying the Evangelical church and turned our politics into tribalism. Capitalism supports tribalism over rational news because it is cheaper and creates barriers to sustaining rational, reasoned behavior when selling news for profit. The news is subverted to sensationalism when the cost of reporting is eliminated.
It is easier to destroy something than to create it. Conservatives have destroyed rational behavior in politics by the marriage of the Republican party with the Evangelical church tribe. That destruction ere these last forty years will have been much easier than any future effort needed to reverse course and raise rational thinking again to control our tribal instincts. This is because it is easier to destroy something than to create it.
The fact that destruction of civilized thinking could be so easily subverted by simply marrying one political party to a religious tribe means that even if we do somehow right the ship and get back to rational thinking the system can be easily subverted again. This is a fundamental flaw with Democracy that cannot be overcome given the defining principles of Democracy. People can freely choose the easier route of not-thinking tribalism any time over the hard work of rational thinking.
We need a better system. We need Irreni World Scale.
Is Conservative Media Porn For Conservatives?
Recent events have evoked in my mind an English writing class I took at UC Berkeley. It was a graduate student seminar class entitled, "Are Romance Novels Porn For Women?" The question revolves around similarities between the way women consume Romance novels and the way men consume porn.
During that class we read academic research papers arguing both for and against the proposition as well as having read many romance novels. The most clear cut case of similarity between porn and romance novels is Harlequin Romance novels.
Harlequin Romance novels have a strict formula down to the page count being exactly 163 pages in length. The plot is always the same. A young woman falls in love with a rake. A rake is bad man who either beats a woman, steals from a woman, rapes a women, or some combination all three. Sometimes the rake murders someone. Long before the book "Fifty Shades of Grey" was written romance novels have been using rape as a plot device that women buy. Psychologists have been trying to understand this phenomena for decades.
Did you know that Harlequin Romance novels are banned from the New York Times best seller list? Why? Because if they weren't then they would always be number one. It would be unseemly to have such obscene and scripted material as Harlequin Romances topping the list or even on it.
Anyway, the plot of Harlequin Romance novel is a young women falls in love with a rake. The rake rapes her, beats her, or steals money from her and she rejects him for the abuse. After the rake is rejected due to rake behavior then many years pass by and the unhappy couple meet again by coincidence and not design. They bump into each other. She discovers that her rake is now a doctor or philanthropist who has now turned to doing good. He asks her out and she rejects him initially. Eventually over time she comes to forgive him and the climax of the book on the last page is marriage.
Why would millions and now billions of women read books about a relationship that starts with abuse that may include rape? Well, some psychologists posit that romance novels function on some primal level analogous to porn for men. To whit, porn is animal behavior and romance novels are animal behavior. The argument is that there are primal urges that we all feel and want to satisfy and each sex of our species tends to satisfy these emotional urges the same way we eat food to satisfy physical hunger.
One last word on romance being porn. This essay is not about this class I took. At the end of the class I came to the conclusion the graduate student who lead this class deliberately miss-titled the class to draw students in. A better title for the class would have been, "What Do Romance Novels Have In Common With Porn For Women?" It was clear after the class that most of the evidence was stacked against romance novels being porn and we mostly looked at what romance novels had in common with porn.
So, lets do that here and re-title this essay as:
What Does Conservative Media Have In Common With Porn For Conservatives?
There are two recent events that reminded me of this class.
1. The New York Times changing its editorial review policy to mob rule of allowing everyone in the company to raise concerns in order to stop an editorial from going to print rather than just the editorial staff.
2. Trump's list of campaign rally stops are all for States he is expected to win and not in battleground States.
If Trump is campaigning in places he is expected to win then why bother? Especially considering his success in 2016 was his ability to win swing States where he campaigned. The most obvious conclusion is that Trump is feeling depressed and his campaign staff feel that these rallies in States where he is loved will boost his moral. Another possible reason is that the battleground States will not allow indoor crowds due to the coronavirus and therefore the places he can campaign are limited to red States. Another possible reason is that they are not directly campaigning but instead looking to fire up the base, otherwise known as inciting a mob.
Trump firing up his base and the New York Times capitulating to the mob are mob things. Both are a case of if you can't beat them, join them. If Trump can't beat the protesters of police brutality then he will incite his own base to counter. If the New York Times can't beat the protesters of police brutality then give into them.
Trump's Presidency is the culmination of decades of hate promoted 24/7 by conservative media. Hate is the primal emotion conservative media peddles in and the fact that conservative media peddles in base emotional reaction is its similarity to porn.
I recently read an editorial by Josh Hammer entitled, "A Tale of Two Americas". Josh Hammer is a conservative and this essay was published on conservative web sites. Josh Hammer is also an editor for Newsweek, mostly considered a mainstream media outlet. The topic of the editorial was the reaction of The New York Times editorial by Tom Cotton about sending in Federal troops to squash peaceful protests. I had hope that since Josh Hammer was an editor for Newsweek then perhaps he might deviate from the conservative media script. Alas, he did not. His essay ended with the same climax every conservative "news" piece or editorial ends with: liberals are evil; liberals are unpatriotic; liberals are out to kill us; liberals are out to destroy America; and I hate liberals.
Conservative media is a lot like porn. Ever since the advent of Rush Limbaugh conservative media always has the same climax: liberals are evil and I hate liberals. Republicans never talk about policy these days. They have none. Republicans have been reduced to tribalism. Tribalism is just what it says, my tribe comes first. Conservative media going on forty years has been working backwards from a conclusion and fitting the data and the story to that conclusion. I mean why read conservative media if you are not a conservative? The formula is simple and strict, much the same as Harlequin Romances. The simple script is to find an anecdote of one liberal person who exhibits the bad behavior that you are looking for and then use that anecdote to paint millions of liberals with and fit the desired conservative conclusion. Done and done.
Conservative media does then have fundamental commonalities with porn. It satisfies primal urges using primal images. But that is where the similarity ends. Porn is about the individual. Conservative media is about the tribe.
Hate is instinctual to humans, it is primal, the same as love. And like love hate requires maintenance to sustain for long periods of time. It is unnatural to hate more than just in passing as a reaction to some stimulus. The word infatuation defines love when short lived. We have no such word for short-lived hatred that I know. Perhaps we should.
I get bored reading conservative media because I always know how each writing is going to end: liberals are evil; liberals are going to kill us; and I hate liberals. From an intellectual point of view this is boring. If you know the ending of a story before it even starts then why bother? This phenomena of repetitively reading the same plot again-and-again is what drew psychologists to try and figure out why women read Harlequin Romances. However, there is no such mystery with hate. Hate needs constant maintenance and service much like an addiction in order to sustain over long periods of time. Hate resides in the Id part of our consciousness. Hate is not a product of reasoning or higher order brain function. Hate is not rational. Hate is just primordial emotion. Conservative media feeds a hate addiction. Conservative media both creates the market for hate and then again sustains the daily craving for more of it.
Liberal media has been struggling with the pornographic like obscenity of conservative media since its inception. Liberal media pays for reporting and has a primary objective to some degree of relaying information called reporting. Liberal media has always had a liberal bias, but never foster sustained tribal hatred the way conservative media is singularly focused.
You can start to see where the problem is now. If liberal and conservative represent two sides of an argument then each side presumably must present counter arguments against the other. However, conservative media has never focused on making counter arguments or pays for reporting to relay information.
Conservative media since its inception has had but one singular agenda: profit. After the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine then conservative media set out to prove that news for profit was superior because of capitalism. The free hand of the market is always superior than the regulated hand of government. This is Republican dogma. Only news doesn't sell for profit. It never has. Conservatives quickly realized in the early 1990s that news is not profitable. So they reformulated the entire concept of news to be partisan posturing of work backwards from a conclusion and finding data to fit the narrative. Partisan posturing is what is sold in the guise of news. It didn't take long for conservative media to realize that working backwards from a conclusion required no reporting at all. Instead just find an anecdote and that's all that is needed. Conservative media then finally honed its capitalist profit with an additional agenda by creating a hate market that needs daily servicing for its addicts. Thus conservative AM Hate Radio was born and so was Fox News.
Capitalism is at the bottom of this all. News for profit became click-bait for profit and eventually culminated in Trump getting billions of dollars in free press because sensationalism sells.
The New York Times has come to realize that conservative media is not interested in policy or argument, just servicing hate. Why bother taking the time and effort to even present an argument if in fact your opponent is only interested in selling hate content to its tribe of consumers.
If you can't beat them, join them. The New York Times has thrown in the towel of trying to argue and is now joining conservative media with an agenda to just sell content to its tribe of consumers. I mean you can't have an argument if one side isn't interested in even presenting an argument. Every thesis of every conservative piece of media is liberals are evil. What is there to argue with?
It would be all too easy and convenient to say that our downward spiral into tribal politics started with news for profit and the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. However, that would ignore why it is that the Fairness Doctrine came to be repealed to begin with. No, our decent into tribalism where every political issue is now just a game of capture the flag started with the deliberate conservative agenda to descend into tribalism.
After fifty years of Democrats running Washington after WWII then conservatives in the 1970s threw in the towel after Nixon was impeached with competing on ideas and went with a time honored tradition of marrying church and state. Conservatives tweaked the church and state marriage by changing that contract to church and party.
The Republican party married the Evangelical church in 1980. Religion is tribalism. Religion long predates civilization and has always been hostile to it. Civilization thrives in spite of religion, not because of it. The founders understood this and wrote about this in great detail. The first thing that pops in my mind is what John Adams said, "Government will corrupt the church long before the church makes the government more moral." Power corrupts the church. In other words when religion functions as a tribe then power defines the church and not moral doctrine that underpins civilization. The morality then of civilization has to distance itself from religion. The Republican party in the early 1980s was desperate and as hail Mary pass decided to marry the Evangelical church to gain power. And it worked.
The Republican party since 1980 has used a tribalism of Evangelical voters for voter support independent of any reason or rational argument.
We are seeing now the end result of forty years of appealing to our tribal base nature as humans. The primal appeal has won out over rational thinking and our politics has descended into tribalism and mob mentality.
None of this could be possible without a capitalism foundation. Capitalism sells you your proclivities. Do you have a proclivity for too much alcohol? sugar? fat? porn? hate media? What ever it is the primordial need that you cannot control then capitalism will sell it to you. The Republican irrational worship of capitalism is a required foundation for its marriage to the tribe of Evangelical church to work.
Amorality is the lack of morals or otherwise stated as our animal behavior. Capitalism sells us our amoral needs. Capitalism encourages our amoral behavior. Well, you might be asking, if that is the case then what has limited capitalism up until now? The answer is Enlightenment society. For example the moral "all people are created equal" is an Enlightenment moral. Religion, by contrast, divides people into tribes. Religion teaches that those in the religion are good, those who are outside are bad. Thomas Pained wrote a book called, "The Age of Reason", if you wish to pursue the differences between Enlightenment thinking and religious doctrine further.
The marriage between the Republican party and the Evangelical church in 1980 has succeeded in debasing our civilized politics and turning our politics into tribalism in order to rest power away from liberals.
What does conservative media have in common with porn for conservatives?
1. Each writing has a climax that services a primal emotion of hate that is addiction-like requiring constant maintenance for profit.
2. A daily set of different actors and new pictures is required, it is not enough to show the same people and exact same setting daily.
3. The objective is to fulfil an irrational need.
4. A profit motive versus public policy of public good motive.
What does conservative media have not in common with porn for conservatives?
1. Tribal versus the individual.
2. Religious approved versus religious disapproved.
3. Hatred versus sex.
4. No physical component.
The Republican party has debased our politics by marrying the Evangelical church and turned our politics into tribalism. Capitalism supports tribalism over rational news because it is cheaper and creates barriers to sustaining rational, reasoned behavior when selling news for profit. The news is subverted to sensationalism when the cost of reporting is eliminated.
It is easier to destroy something than to create it. Conservatives have destroyed rational behavior in politics by the marriage of the Republican party with the Evangelical church tribe. That destruction ere these last forty years will have been much easier than any future effort needed to reverse course and raise rational thinking again to control our tribal instincts. This is because it is easier to destroy something than to create it.
The fact that destruction of civilized thinking could be so easily subverted by simply marrying one political party to a religious tribe means that even if we do somehow right the ship and get back to rational thinking the system can be easily subverted again. This is a fundamental flaw with Democracy that cannot be overcome given the defining principles of Democracy. People can freely choose the easier route of not-thinking tribalism any time over the hard work of rational thinking.
We need a better system. We need Irreni World Scale.
Join an MGO today!
You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
https://irreni.blogspot.com/p/join.html
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
Comments
Post a Comment