dianahooley Current Events

An Appetite for Propaganda

When I taught educational psychology to prospective teachers, I told them about something called “confirmation bias,” a problem they might run into if they taught high school students. Young adults can dislike having to learn new or different information.  They’d rather default to existing belief systems and confirm long-held biases as opposed to changing the way they think. Adults can also be subject to confirmation bias.  Many years ago in my role as a high school debate coach I had a parent approach me with a deep need to confirm his particular biases.  He said he didn’t want his son debating the opposite side of the beliefs he’d been taught at home.

“Why?” I asked him, thinking it strange that this man allowed his son to take a debate class if he wasn’t interested in having him learn all sides of any given argument.

“Because I don’t want his head filled with crazy ideas. I just want my son to learn better ways to defend our side of the story.”

I was not surprised when his son made certain inflammatory statements about minorities in my class, mimicking something reportedly said by a notorious commentator on Fox News. I’d watched some Fox News, channel surfing, but was always sensitive to their one-sided handling of various political issues. There are progressive news programs on television that have this same problem.  Info-tainment is news designed to make people feel good by telling them what they want to hear. Viewers inevitably find themselves smugly justified in their thinking.

Confirming our biases by only consuming media supportive of our values and beliefs can be problematic though.  Our vision of reality becomes disabled and distorted.  I remember reading back in 2012 how shocked Fox news viewers were to realize Mitt Romney had lost the election to Barack Obama.  It wasn’t supposed to happen.  News pundits on Fox had assured their Republican audience that Romney would win.  Democrats were just as stunned in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected.  I listened to the progressive film maker and political activist Michael Moore explain how people can develop misconceptions about political realities when they surround themselves with an echo chamber: they only hear voices like their own, repeatedly bouncing back to them.  Moore went on to warn that Trump was likely to win, that there was a deep stretch in the Midwest peopled with displaced manufacturing workers and their families who were gunning to vote for Trump.

Political propaganda used to be considered undesirable and something only dictators employed to manipulate thinking and enact their agenda.

Russians living in the Soviet Union during the Cold War did not have the luxury or freedom to change the channel and move away from bias.  They were stuck with “fake news.”  It’s shocking today to realize that despite our free press and the abundance of news sources available to cross-check for accuracy, we still have a sizable segment of our population willfully addicted to what is essentially broadcast propaganda.  Instead of an appetite for propaganda, we need to develop an appetite for truth.  Even if that truth is sometimes hard to hear: that for example, special prosecutor Robert Mueller found no evidence President Trump colluded with Russia to get elected.  But the full truth can be complicated, going many different directions: that for example, there is evidence the president attempted to obstruct justice.  We want the truth to be simple and reflect what we think.  But it rarely does.

Image Credit: Fox News

dianahooley Uncategorized

To Fly or Not to Fly

When I read the tragic news about another crash of a Boeing Max 737 jetliner, this time in Ethiopia, and how the pilots fought the programming and the automatic controls to keep the plane in the air, I remembered a sci-fi movie I watched about a coming war between man and machines.  This movie might have been a “flight” of some screen writer’s imagination except that the imminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking worried about the peril of intelligent machines. Hawking believed AI or artificial intelligence had the potential to threaten mankind.  Still, I doubt he ever considered malevolent autopilots becoming a problem.

Nervous flyers might be hesitant to fly after hearing about the Max 737 crashes.  I get it.  I’m not a fan of flying either.  I’ve fought irrational fears of flying for several years.  In fact, one time I boarded a one-hour flight to Portland, Oregon, and in a martini fog (acquired at the airport bar trying to bolster my courage) I staggered up from my aisle seat and blew alcohol fumes into the stewardess’s face when I begged, “Miz?  Hey miz?  I wanna get off the plane.  Can I?  Pleeze?”

There are other, more rational reasons to reconsider flying as your form of transportation, which have nothing to do with machines running amok or phobias.  According to Sciencefocus.com the amount of CO2 spewed by one jumbo jet traveling a distance of 400 miles is the same as 336 cars driving that same distance.

So, the approximately 20,000 flights taking place daily across our planet emit a tremendous amount of destructive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

That’s why, despite having largely conquered my flying phobia, I decided on a recent trip to New York City to fly one way—and take the train home.

I felt very good about taking the train back from NYC—noble even. After all, rail transportation accounts for only 2% of total transportation greenhouse gases.  I could rest easy riding the rails—and I did.  I took numerous naps in my deluxe sleeper, lulled by the gentle rocking of the train on the tracks.  Due to the research I’d done I knew taking the train meant my carbon “shoe” was a modest size 2 instead of a clown flipper size 14.  I was relaxed until our train slowed down coming into the Philadelphia rail yard.  Then I blinked my eyelids open and gazed out the window to see dozens of CSX rail cars loaded with coal.

The thing about taking a train is that you share tracks and rail yards with other trains, especially freight trains.  Coal is primarily moved by freight trains.  For some reason, pure black carbon in the form of coal seems much more threatening to me than the nebulous greenhouse gases blown out of a jumbo jet.  Our train passed one coal car after another in Pittsburg, Chicago, Omaha, Denver, and Salt Lake.  I finally stopped seeing coal cars when the train dropped me off in the middle of the night at a lonely passenger shelter in Elko, Nevada.

Traveling green can be challenging no matter what form of transportation you choose to take.

The good news about flying is, there are ways to go greener. Check the airplane statistics when you book.  Many jets now use biofuels.  Also, most major airlines offer carbon credits you can purchase to support various green initiatives.  Of course, if you really want to lessen your carbon footprint, nothing beats staying home.  But then you’d miss out on a chance to see the Statue of Liberty and who wants to do that?

image credit: airplane

dianahooley Books, Film, Art

Sex and Power

Last night I watched The Favourite, a drama based on actual historical occurrences, and one of the movies nominated for best picture in the Oscar race this year.  It was, on the surface, a weird film. The weirdness had to do with: the fantastical costumes of the 17th century, (men in long, curly wigs with red beauty patches on their cheeks); the recreation of Lordly aristocrats (they seemed to enjoy pummeling a bewigged nude man with apples); and an instance of ballroom dancing (whereby a Lord twirled his partner around his waist aka Dancing with the Stars and then proceeded to crawdad-walk the length of the ballroom).  The fascination of the film though was its theme:  the limits of sex to gain power or to comfort.

Every advertiser knows the power of sex:  sex sells.  You may be reading this blog because you saw the word “sex” in the title.

Frankly, when I was a much younger woman, I, like many women, used my sex appeal to influence.

As a twenty-something living on an isolated desert farm, I dreamed of becoming a journalist and writing for a newspaper.  Without any experience or education in journalism, I wrote seven newspaper columns about a city girl’s life on the farm.  When I marched into the newsroom of our local newspaper with my columns in hand, I had on my prettiest dress and most charming smile. The city news desk editor took notice (I could tell).  He may have liked what I wrote, but I also think he was influenced by what he saw.  A week later I got a call telling me the newspaper was interested in publishing my work.

In the movie, The Favourite, Queen Anne of Great Britain is horribly depressed.  She’s lost her husband and endured 17 failed pregnancies. What is a queen’s value in the 1700’s if not to produce an heir (or even, in Great Britain today—consider how overjoyed everyone is that Prince William’s wife, Kate Middleton, has been reliably fertile).

Queen Anne is easy pickings for the machinations of her assistant, Lady Sarah, and her chamber maid, Abigail, who both vie for Anne’s favor in the hope of gaining power.  They coddle Anne and respond to her every whim, including providing sex.  Ironically, considering Anne’s barren condition, sex appears to be the most effective manipulation.

I was both fascinated and repulsed watching Queen Anne try to comfort herself by eating cake until she vomited into the vomit bucket, or quietly sob as she participated in yet another meaningless sexual experience.

It was like watching someone with an appendix attack try to staunch the pain by riding a roller coaster.  Thrills are not going to solve Anne’s problem.  Sadly, in the film Queen Anne never overcomes her depression, and the aristocratic women prostituting themselves for her end up trapped in that role.  Here’s a movie (or a piece of history) I would gladly rewrite.  In my ending Queen Anne would find something she obviously and desperately needed: a genuine friend.  This person would ask nothing of her—and give nothing to her—except real love.  I’d call it a fairy-tale ending.

Image credit:  The Favourite