The talk stops here

[wombat_socho]

I've been stewing about this for a few days, temporarily distracted by Valleycon, but after reading this essay by Jay Rosen and the associated comments I think I've come to a conclusion and a decision based on that conclusion.

More stuff about politics follows:

Comments

[wombat_socho]

I found the study suspicious on the face of it - it sounded way too much like the kind of reasoning the Soviets used to put dissidents into psychiatric hospitals, and being conservative, I've seen similar studies before. They never panned out, mainly because they had the kind of sampling defects that a first-year statistics student would have been flunked for trying to use and excuse...

One of the things I do worry about in the long term regarding politics in this country is an increase in the kind of overheated rhetoric, agitprop, pollution of the information stream, and thuggery that this election season has produced. We don't have a parliamentary government and so are not prone to the kind of thing that tore Weimar Germany and the Spanish Republic apart, but with a large group of public school kids who don't know how to read critically, write effectively, or use reasoning skills to analyze what other people are saying, I'm afraid we're going to have the same kind of violent political combat that led to the Spanish Civil War. I'm not talking about talking heads screaming at each other on Crossfire, either.