Posted by name on December 30, 2000, at 23:24:54
In reply to Re: Inconsistencies, posted by pandey_m@hotmail.com on December 30, 2000, at 18:52:53
It is unlikely that Discover is much more or less involved in transnational capitalist culture than is the pharmaceutical culture promoted by this web site. It also unlikely that the producer/editor who included the "garbage" quote, which was in the particular Discover program cited here as a random example, was thinking much about creating a no-holds-barred image. It is more likely the quote was edited into the program because the source said it in an interview and it accurately represented the source's point of view, and both the term and the type of generalization are a regular part of civil speech.
Sometimes we all tend to attribute motives to others that serve more to reinforce our own opinions than they serve to accurately represent the motive of others. There is not enough information in the third-hand reference here to a single word in another media outlet to provide a sound basis for an accurate characterisation of the Discover editor's motive. While the effect of transnational corporate funding of some media may be to divert attention from real problems, there is no clear evidence that the funding is provided with that motive. Many transnational capitalists do not recognize that there *is* a problem, so they would not likely be trying to divert attention from a problem they do not recognize. The miriad Discover sponsors more likely think they are solving a problem by using electronic media to rally support for nature and for a scientific understanding of nature.
To contrast this site with the Discover site is an odd stretch. This site seems slanted to attract support and education that favors a pharmacological approach to mental distress. The moderator is employed, for now, at a university that is heavily funded by the same kind of transnational capitalist interests as those that fund Discover and other for-profit and non-profit educational formats. Most notable of the University of Chicago's benefactors, (the university having until two weeks ago sponsored this site with server space) is the late John Rockefeller who, early in the last century, endowed a sectarian (Baptist) university with money he made by monopolizing the world petroleum market.
This site might indeed reflect a version of "the original Internet culture" but that culture is a decidedly miltaristic culture intent on perfecting a new world order. The early Internet was a product of Department of Defense efforts to create redundant command and control networks for war fighting, and to link university departments involved in high-tech defense work. The original participants in internet culture, according to American Heritage magazine's account of the military roots of the Internet, were young university research types in the post Vietnam war era who wanted to enjoy the financial fruits of defense spending on research but who did not want to bloody their hands or their reputations by designing rockets and bombs.
The promotion of pharmaceutical approaches to mental difficulty rather than promotion of dietary, personal and cultural approaches, and the arbitrary imposition of a narrowly defined and extremely subjective concept of civiltiy is indeed an extension of the original Internet culture. It is the electronic version of rubber bullets - it is yet another technology of political control.
> Discovery Channel and such are heavily funded by big business to present "nature" and ("other") "human-interest" issues in such a way as to divert from the public mind the fact that transnational capital is screwing up the ecosystem (Here I use the term to *include* human civil society structures.) They produce *controversial* programs and include *controversial* statements for the sake of a no-holds-barred image; and for Orwellian language-control purposes - redefining *controversy* so that the important controversies get driven out of public discourse. You can get the info from
> e.g. Monthly Review; or if you distrust information (I am not concerned with views here, but facts) from even independent marxist sources like MR; (then) ask Noam Chomsky!
>
> Psychobabble, on the other hand, is in a different paradigm - it belongs to the original internet culture (before "dotcom" largely turned it into a shopping arcade). So at psychobabble (like at gnu/free software foundation etc.) you will get moderation decisions which one may disagree with, subjectivity (in the present case, of Dr Hsuing) being unavoidable - but I think there is something ludicrous about supporting the disagreement with a parallel from a TV channel with a huge worldwide viewership like Discovery Channel (the operative word is TV).
>
> Dr Bob may well object to *this* posting as flame-ish. That doesn't affect my argument.
poster:name
thread:3628
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20001117/msgs/3634.html