“Three people check into a hotel room. The clerk says the bill is $30, so each guest pays $10. Later the clerk realizes the bill should only be $25. To rectify this, he gives the bellhop $5 to return to the guests. On the way to the room, the bellhop realises that he cannot divide the money equally. As the guests didn’t know the total of the revised bill, the bellhop decides to just give each guest $1 and keep $2 as a tip for himself. Each guest got $1 back: so now each guest only paid $9; bringing the total paid to $27. The bellhop has $2. And $27 + $2 = $29 so, if the guests originally handed over $30, what happened to the remaining $1?”
The answer to that riddle lies in the fact that you are being misled…you are being asked to solve a riddle based upon a fallacy, information given to you that is intended to fool you into thinking something else is going on. This is the tactic being used by the Left now as they seek to make us believe that Trump only triumphed because of supposed lies he told and the misinformation from non MSM sources that fooled stupid and uneducated people. Get you to believe that, get that narrative going so powerfully, and they will create an atmosphere that enables, gives licence to, politicians to close down or restrict certain news sites and control social media…we’ve already seen Facebook crumble under massive attack…not least from the BBC….an irony perhaps after the likes of Google and Facebook were attacked by these self-same liberal defenders of democracy when they submitted to the Chinese government’s demands.
Here’s the ‘liberal’ riddlers in operation as they try to create that message of a democratic system broken by the monsters on the internet and in the right-wing Press…..how right Apple was all those years ago…the computer and the internet is the nemesis of those who wish to impose 1984 upon us….and the BBC hates it…..
Trump triumphed and three men walked into a bar to drink themselves into oblivion. A priest, a BBC journo and a gay, bitter, ex Tory-wet politician drank until they were senseless. Then they went to work and bashed out their stream of conscious thought about Trump, Brexit and all that, pouring out their bile and venom toward a world that just doesn’t seem to care about them and their left-wing preachings anymore . And it felt good.
The BBC’s David Sillito:
Donald Trump: How the media created the president
Donald J Trump was not popular with America’s newspapers. Of the 100 top circulation print newspapers, two endorsed him.
More than 200 newspapers supported Clinton, while Trump received the backing of fewer than 20.
And even some of this support was half-hearted, to say the least.
rump’s victory, then, was a brutal kick in the teeth for those loathed pundits, insiders and “righteous mongers”. But it was also a humiliation for the thousands of journalists who had spent months trying to warn the public about Donald J Trump.
This was one almighty, two-fingered salute to much of the “mainstream media”.
After painting that picture of a Trump under massive orchestrated Media attack Sillito comes up with this:
‘The failure of journalism’
Prof Jeff Jarvis – of the Tow-Knight Centre for entrepreneurial journalism, City University New York, and an enthusiastic and active supporter of Hillary Clinton – stated it simply.
“The mere fact of Donald Trump’s candidacy is evidence of the failure of journalism,” he believes.
He, like many other members of the liberal media class, feels Trump’s success is a sign that the media failed to communicate the truth with enough force…..In essence, it’s felt that print journalism failed to tell the real story – and that TV gave Trump a free pass.
Err…the BBC spent months doing nothing but call Trump a liar, a racist, a sexist, an Islamophobe who’d destroy the world economy and allow Russian tanks to roll across Europe….the New York Times took a deliberate policy decision to be biased against Trump because he ‘represented such a danger’ to the world which meant that journalistic principles should be put aside in order to stop him being elected…and clearly hundreds of other media outlets took the same view. And yet we hear the media ‘failed to communicate with enough force’ their views…yep, their views, not necessarily the truth…which is where the BBC analysis falls down…here for example…..Sillito tells us….
What’s strange about Trump’s speeches is how much of what he says refers to issues and topics that are not part of the mainstream news agenda.
Sorry what? Immigration, Islam, the economy? Not mainstream news agenda? Well..actually, I suppose not….or not the truth about those issues.
Sillito seems to lose track of what he is saying…claiming TV is still the most powerful media force…
TV is still the most powerful medium….[this] seems to be truer than many of the digital evangelists would have you believe.
He then goes onto say how CNN broadcast a powerful critique of Trump…and yet oddly he still triumphed despite the all powerful TV…and then Sillito says it was in fact the new digital media that enabled Trump’s election….before then claiming Trump is nothing but a showman, a charlatan who beguiled the Public into voting for him just as the websites get people to click on their ‘clickbait’ news stories.
Trump was giving people more to talk about and saying it in a way that resonated. When it came to “share of voice” online, he was winning.
The need for headlines that bring clicks and stories that get shared has changed everything. Dull, balanced articles (like this one) don’t provoke fury, laughter or much in the way of emotion.
Trump was simply more entertaining and generating more passion. In a news environment moving from a world of subscriptions and long-term appointments-to-view to the vagaries of clicks, friends’ recommendations and Facebook news streams, that makes him a winner.
[Ironically this is of course exactly how the BBC operates…it gets you from a young age…grooming you to love ‘Auntie’ with entertaining children’s programmes and ever onwards as you progress to Uncle Attenborough and all those lovely animal programmes, Bake Offs and Strictly…entertaining you, forming a ‘warm’ relationship with you, before slipping in the political messages that it hopes you won’t notice the nature of or if you do, that you will shrug your shoulders as you lap up the ‘fun’ that the BBC spoon feeds you to keep you quietly content with the world.]
So….Trump’s a fraud, a showman fooling the voters with online fantasy and illusion. Curiously the exact same conclusion by our priest…the good Rowan Williams…who has the grace to admit the Elites have failed us but insists that Trump is the Devilish pied-piper leading us to Hell…
Mass democracy has failed – it’s time to seek a humane alternative
Trump’s real aim was not to do anything as president but simply to be president, to be the most important man in the Western world. This election represents a divorce between the electoral process and the business of political decision-making. It is the ersatz politics of mass theatre, in which what matters most is the declaration of victory.
As such, it is the most cynical betrayal of those who are disenfranchised. It confirms that they have no part in real political processes; they can only choose their monarch.
The politics of mass democracy has failed. It has been narrowed down to a mechanism for managing large-scale interests in response to explicit and implicit lobbying by fabulously well-resourced commercial and financial concerns. The effect has been a growing assumption that what goes on in public political debate does not represent any voices other than the privileged and self-interested. And so, for significant parts of a population, “theatrical” politics comes to look like the only option: a dramatic articulation of the problems of powerlessness, for which the exact details of economic or social reality are irrelevant. This delivers people into the hands of another kind of dishonest politics: the fact-free manipulation of emotion by populist adventurers.
Hmmm…about what was Trump not telling the truth exactly? Williams fails to mention precisely his concerns on that. Kind of important as the whole of his theory of a ‘theatrical Trump’ intent only on taking the ‘throne’ rests solely upon that claim.
Ahh…it matters not that Trump lied, or spelling out those ‘lies’…because the people can’t tell whether he did or not…they’re too uneducated and ignorant….
There is an issue here about education. Yet this can become another hostage to fortune if all it is saying is that a benighted populace should be educated out of false consciousness by those who know better.
William’s conclusion? Power to the People…but only the people who have been properly educated to seek the right answers by er….the Elite…
How politics can be set free from the deadly polarity between empty theatrics and corrupt, complacent plutocracy. What will it take to reacquaint people with control over their communities, shared and realistic values, patience with difference and confidence in their capacity for intelligent negotiation?
The leviathans of the party system will sooner or later have to look at their structures and accountability – not as a step to plebiscite populism, but in terms of what they can do to nurture discussion and decision in the actual communities to which people (not The People) belong.
Ahh yes…those who voted for Trump had no idea what they were voing for or why….they had somehow failed to discuss the issues with the right people….all those online forums and debates that the BBC is so concerned may have misled voters clearly aren’t the way ahead though for imparting the correct message. Yes people are talking but about the wrong things and coming to the wrong conclusions….perhaps the answer is a man, perhaps we can call him a ‘commissar’, in every village, town and community, who is there to ensure people have the correct information and appropriate mental attitude. Yes. I’m sure that’d work.
Our final tipsy typist is the Grand Dame of the political panto…Matthew Parris…who thinks the problem is too much communication, too much information, too much thought and too much freedom to decide for ourselves how to vote…..there’s just too damned much democracy at the moment….or as he prefers to call it…mob rule…
After Trump, I’m losing faith in democracy
The reason I am beginning to question democracy is that it is producing results I profoundly dislike.
I believed in the wisdom of crowds but not mobs. Democracy was of course about inviting the considered view of the crowd but it was just as much about keeping the mob from the gates.
The crowd — ‘true democracy’ — could be wise where a mob might be foolish, because we weren’t governed by the mob, real or virtual. There was no internet, no Facebook, no Twitter, no social media. The closest you got to the mob was radio phone-ins. Opinion polling was in its infancy, and the remark that election day offered ‘the only vote that counts’ dignified the act of voting and distinguished it from a pollster’s clipboard. The phrase ‘the privacy of the polling booth’ meant more than plywood and curtain: it meant quiet reflection, away from the noise of others’ opinions. ‘The crowd’ was a collective noun for millions of individuals, often conferring but finally thinking alone. That was what elections — general, presidential — were for.
Yes…the voter ‘alone’ with his thoughts…thoughts then of course guided and shaped by the all powerful Media and the gifted elite…now shaped by a ‘free Press’ on the internet, mass information and the ability to readily communicate with so many others with their own thoughts, ideas and reasonings…how very undemocratic and inconvenient for those who wish to keep their stranglehold on information and power….we musn’t let ‘ignorant hooligans’ have their say…
Now we can so easily discover what a ‘majority’ think they want at any one moment, and — worse — ignorant hooligans can discover with a click on a keyboard that there are millions like them out there — our faith in democracy, our faith in the ‘government by the people’ part of the trio, is being tested to its logical limit.
As with Sillito and Williams Parris has decided that the unwashed, ignorant plebs on social media must not be allowed to vote without restraint by those who know better…we must apparently find a way of limiting the damage such uneducated, misinformed and less considered manifestations of public thought can wrought once inside the voting booth….
Unless we find a way to fold the popular will into many other and sometimes opposing considerations that make for good government, and unless we find procedures for distinguishing between the evanescent and the more considered manifestations of public opinion, the Trumps and Farages of our age will kill our faith in democracy.
The answer for the Left is to close down those internet sites, newspapers and broadcasters [such as Fox] it finds don’t peddle the approved messages. The BBC and its ilk will become the arbiters of truth, deciding what is news, what is true and what is ‘morally and ethically’ right to reveal to the public…and then they will decide, after having assessed you character, mental capacity, moral uprightness and your politics, whether you will be allowed the right to vote.
1984 is fast approaching.