Quote:
Originally Posted by Phogg
Not entirely true.
Just none within the confines of the major political parties or the publications beholden to them.
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Outside or inside there is no meaningful debate.
Just venting. Posturing. Demonizing. And lots of lying. (Though that is integral to the field anyway.)
Debate involves exchanging of ideas and all any camp does these days is propaganda. No clean hands to be found anywhere. The greek guy with the lamp would shoot himself.
And that is what the self-important ones are involved in: propaganda, loaded with charged words, false accusations, hand-waving, and posturing, hoping the government will protect them from the realities of a changing world. They've been called on it:
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2014/1...-hachette.html
Look to the list of signatures of last year's campaign and you only see writers who succeded under the old rules trading on their celebrity, mortally afraid that the new rules will render them irrelevant. Look to LeGuin's rants, using political language of fearmongering, of "disappearing" people. That is not rational discourse, that is propaganda.
They want a political solution so they use the tools of the modern politician.
And even there they are behind the times because the propaganda of the day no longer relies on patroitism but rather on populism; politicians no longer pretend to be working for the good of the nation, just the self-interest of the voters. Even their posturing is last century.