Is the News worth the paper it’s written on?

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Since this is a long piece, I have split it in two.

Part 1.

I wonder how many members of this forum read or listen to the news. If you do, why? What do you get from it?

I am reading the autobiography of the BBC news reporter, John Simpson, at the moment. He has covered just about every major world event since the 1970’s. I do not know if he is still going since I have not watched TV for about 6 or 7 years.

I am enjoying the book. It is well written and gives me a glimpse into a world of which I have absolutely no experience, that of news reportage for TV, radio and newspapers.

What I do have experience of, however, is foreign travel and that allows me to assess the authenticity of much of Simpson’s assessments of the people and places he has reported on. My conclusion: the man has no understanding of human nature and reports from countries that he has had no previous experience of and which he totally fails to understand.

As an example, there was the “Tiananmen Square massacre”. Simpson got there at the start and stayed the whole time and then left. He was charmed by the Chinese, especially the students. He observed that there were 2 factions present in the square: the students, who were charming and gently and friendly, and the ordinary Chinese people who were angry and brutal and violent. Also, when he mentions Mao he describes him as the man who killed more people than Hitler, Stalin plus a couple of other 20th C dictators, all put together.

There are 3 main points:

  1. the friendliness of the students, which Simpson ascribes to innate, good-natured gentleness.
  2. the violence and brutality of the ordinary people, which Simpson ascribes to anger at the years of oppression and abuse they suffered at the hands of the communist government.
  3. Mao is presented as a monster on a scale that outdoes every other 20th C monster on the basis of the number of Chinese that died under his rule.

In order to understand these things correctly, you need to understand a few things about China.

In the first place, China is probably the oldest continuous civilisation in existence, and it suffers as a result. In common with the rest of the world, the Chinese are competitive and have degenerated as a result.

Actually, as far as I can make out, this is the situation throughout much of the Far East. 4 years previous to visiting China, I visited Thailand. The Lonely Planet guide described the Thais as “the nicest people money can buy”. That, I discovered, is absolutely accurate. And it is, I believe, a general description of that part of the world, except that some, the Chinese included, lack the charm of the Thais. But the essential point is that they have been playing their competitive power games for so long that they no longer ‘value’ anything, care for anything, but money. Life, itself, has little value in china.

Since Westerners first ‘discovered’ China the Chinese have famously been described as ‘inscrutable’. This has been treated as some exotic, quirky Chinese custom. Actually it is quite understandable. In Western parlance it is called ‘stone-walling’ and it is used as a ploy to gain advantage in arguments etc., or, in truth, it is more generally used to tease and annoy.

Stone-walling has all sorts of uses. In the UK it is often used to block conversation; i.e. when 2 people are having a conversation one will stone-wall the other i.e. will keep their face totally expressionless no matter what the other person says. It is difficult to keep talking when you are being stone-walled like this. Jokes get no response. Questions get monosyllabic answers. It makes the talker feel as though they are doing something wrong, or being boring, and they feel uncomfortable, even humiliated — which is exactly what the stone-waller wants. The stone-waller has the ‘pleasure’ of seeing the other person become more and more uncomfortable, enjoys seeing them struggle to get some response, and then watches them sink into silence. This is someone getting ‘high’ on power.

In China, however, stone-walling has been taken to the maximum extreme, is used almost all the time by everyone and in all circumstances, from individuals meeting socially, to officials from the lowest to the highest levels.

A couple of examples:

Though we were back-packing, my companion and I booked B&B in a hotel for the first few nights to give ourselves a chance to find our feet and get the hang of how things were done in China. We arrived in the evening and were asked by a lad who had broken, but serviceable English, whether or not we wanted breakfast in the morning. We said we did.

Next morning we sat and sat in the dining room watching all the other guests being served, but no-one dame near us. Eventually, the Chinese staff deputed another European guest to have a word with us. She told us that there was no breakfast for us. The Chinese claimed that we had said ‘no’ to breakfast the previous evening, and now the kitchens were empty. They could not even, apparently, provide us with a pot of tea. The European woman, an old China hand, told us they did this to every new arrival.

It was perfectly clear what was going on. The staff stood in a row outside the kitchens, their faces expressionless. They knew that we knew that of course there was food in the kitchens. But in the face of their bland statement that there was not even the wherewithal to make a pot of tea, we were helpless. We were exhausted, having flown half way round the world the day before. They knew that. Triumphant behind their expressionless faces, they drank up our frustration as they watched us drag our exhausted, hungry and thirsty bodies from the room.

Then there was the train across the Gobi desert. Every carriage, sleepers, had an attendant who sat in a small compartment at one end. In that compartment were the keys to the toilets and the switch for the fans, the only form of air-conditioning. What fun the attendants had!

The toilets would be closed randomly for long periods of time, sometimes all day, and the fans were switched on and off with equal arbitrariness. So, in the mid-day heat, suddenly the fans would go off, and they might stay off till mid-night, when you did not need them, and actually, did not want them.

You are cross-legged after the toilets have been locked for several hours. You go to the attendant and ask, please, could he let you have the use of the toilet in this emergency. You are given to understand that there is some absolutely necessary and unmovable reason for why the toilets must remain out of use, but you will never decipher exactly what that reason is. With expressionless face the attendant watches you knowing that you know that he is talking bollocks, that he could perfectly well unlock the toilet if he wanted to, and that you know that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. He is enjoying himself hugely at your expense. All you can do is hope he will take a notion to open the toilet before you have an accident!

2

Part 2.

(this follows seamlessly from part 1 and supposes that the reader has read part 1.)

This sort of thing is going on ALL THE TIME in China. Nowhere and no situation is too small, nowhere and no situation too big or serious to be exempted. It is what the Chinese do. Stop them playing that game and you would destroy them for they would find no pleasure in life.

Because of this game nothing in China happens quickly or easily and nothing is reliable.

One time we arrived in the late afternoon, after a 14 hour bus journey, in a city, Lhandjiou (?), which we intended to be only a staging post on our return journey to Beijing. We decided, with scant optimism, to try to get a train ticket for Beijing that same day. We duly went to the train station. 12 hours later, triumphant that we had managed to obtain a ticket so quickly and so easily (several days would have been more normal) we returned to our hotel.

That is what travel was like in China. That was why you took your life in your hands when you got into a ticket queue in China. The windows would open and close at random and, in spite of the information on the information boards, you never knew which window would be selling the ticked for your destination or class of carriage.

When a ticket window opened there would be a mad stampede and people would get kicked, punched and trodden underfoot. It was, quite literally, a life-threatening situation — that is why ticket offices were policed and the police carried cattle prods — it was crowd control and absolutely necessary if deaths were to be prevented.

I remember waiting for a bus one time. There were 3 Chinese people, 2 men and a woman, and the 2 of us, and we were behind them. It was a quiet time of day. The bus was totally empty. Yet as soon as the doors opened the 3 Chinese made a lunge for the entrance. They got stuck in the doorway, and the woman, sandwiched between the men and lifted off the floor, was pedalling wildly. Finally, like a cork from a champagne bottle, the trio shot into the bus, collided with the furniture and sprawled over the floor and seats.

This is China. The people are driven mad. It’s not a matter of who’s in government. It’s the games people play. They drive each other mad.

So the brutality and violence which John Simpson reported as being a reaction to government oppression was nothing of the sort. That was perfectly normal Chinese behaviour. Brutality and violence is there all the time just waiting to erupt because they drive each other mad.

You will never understand anything about China if you do not understand this, but once you have understood this you can understand EVERYTHING about China.

It is a one-weapon society, that weapon being ‘inscrutability’ or ‘stone-walling’. If you think of an analogy, say an army that has only on weapon, perhaps the sword. Than everything that army does is determined by that weapon, from the way the troops are trained to the strategies used by the generals in times of war. The people who succeed or are favoured are those who are skilled a swordplay, and so on. In just the same way everything about China can be understood as accommodating or favouring their weapon of choice: inscrutability.

People who get their pleasure from driving other people mad are not people who care for or value each other. The Chinese emperors never held the lives of their people in high regard. If the loss of millions of lives of their people would solve a problem for them then they then they would sacrifice those millions.

For example: there was one occasion when one of the big rivers flooded much worse than usual. The only way to save the lives of the millions that lived in the flood plain was to evacuate them. The emperor had plenty of warning and could have done so. However, he would then have had the problem of feeding those millions and that would have caused a problem, maybe food shortages. The emperor chose to blockade the flood plain with a resulting death toll in the millions. But he left himself with no food shortages to be dealt with ---- problem solved.

So Mao was just another Chinese ruler doing what Chinese rulers have always done.

But what about those lovely, gentle, friendly students?

For one thing, I can only suppose the Simpson did not know that black students attending Beijing University had a special compound of their own to live in so that they could be protected by the police. Protected from whom? From the Chinese students.

But that aside, Simpson is making the same mistake here as he does at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the various revolutions in the iron curtain countries, at the end of Apartheid in South Africa and many other places. He sees these ‘innocent’ people tasting freedom at last and rejoicing at the overthrow of the forces that have been oppressing them etc.

No. I wonder if Simpson has never been to a hogmanay party — or any of the hundred of other occasion — football supporters celebrating a win eg ---- when a crowd gets ‘high’.

What he is seeing is people getting ‘drunk’, in the words of Robert Burns: ‘getting fou and unco happy’. Drunks, whether they are getting high on alcohol or the home team winning, or whatever, get excessively happy and love all the world like their brother.

Sometimes, of course, it can swing the other way and the drunk can suddenly erupt in violent anger.

But the point is that Simpson is ascribing significance, time and again, to what is merely a crowd getting high and sentimental. If you want to know what is really going on in peoples minds and feelings you have to get them when they are sober.

So, from the simple level of taking a drunk seriously to the more advanced level of failing to understand a culture, John Simpson is naïve and gets it all totally wrong.

I do not suppose any of the rest of those in his profession is any better. So what value news reportage? Do the news media achieve anything more than mass misinformation? Supposedly they are informing people about what is going on in the world, but actually they are misinforming.

In fact, is their bad news reportage better than no news at all?

3

You think people having rotating work schedules is abusive barbarism, but you defend Maoist China and downplay Tienanmen Square as an exaggeration. I wonder if your communist propaganda has a limit.

4

Marx passed along/created the idea that if people profit, someone is suffering. But, if someone is suffering without a profit, it’s an OK thing. His followers, understood or ignorant, don’t understand that it isn’t where is all this suffering coming from, but where does anything good come from.

5

The message I got from OP was that China is a horrible place, so it’s no wonder horrible things happen there; that Mao’s a symptom rather than the cause. Doesn’t seem too propagandist to me.

Going out on a limb, here… I don’t think you’ve ever read Marx. Just a hunch.

6 
 I have, and he's pretty much right.  Marx was obsessed with the idea of social leveling, and while he paid [i]lip service[/i] to the idea of his reforms being better for the worker, a sober reading of him makes it pretty plain that he was driven primarily by spite and hatred towards the upper classes- a dichotomy that persists into the present, where 'fucking over the have's' is what socialism is really about, and benefiting the have-not's is a tactical talking point brought up as needed.  To turn Marx's anthropological/personal approach to philosophy back on him, I think socialism doesn't work primarily because 'working' (in the sense of creating a stable, wealth-producing economy) was never the real point of it.
7

I took it as using Imperial China to make excuses for Maoist China. It makes sense in the context of dragons’ previous threads.

8

You would fall to your death. I have, the difference is, I’ve read other things as well. Further, I understood Marx. It’s hard to wade through the arrogance and mental retardation of his writing, but if you slow down and take your time it becomes clear. May I suggest, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, the man is succinct in his destruction of Marx. Considering that Sowell was a marxist until after he graduated with a masters in economics under Milton Friedman, he should understand far better than most. Sowell believed in it until he had to apply it.

To be far, I have only started working my way through Rousseau I’ve been told Marx got most of his idea’s from him, which is why I said he passed along/created. I’m going to have to push, so far Rousseau sucks… I’m going to have to pick up Road to Serfdom, I’ve only started confessions and it is just bad…

9

Then you’ve worded your understanding of Marx terribly. Insofar as labour is necessary for profit and (industrialised commodity producing) labour is not human flourishing, you could say that suffering is necessary for profit. But the entirety of Capital, from chapter one onwards, refutes your claim that suffering without profit is OK for Marx. The entire thrust of the argument against capitalism is that the worker suffers without profit, the worker’s dispossession is the central injustice perpetrated by capitalists for Marx. And the notion of good is fairly central to both his analysis of value and the teleological goal of society.

I’m not a Marxist at all, and I disagree deeply with his prescriptions. But I’ve at least read enough to know what he said and why; you may have too, but I’m afraid your words here fail to support that. I’d be very surprised if Sowell considered Capital to be indicative of mental retardation, too.

10

He wouldn’t, he’s nicer than I am.

11

I also went to China one summer ans can report on the following incident,
Is
We were on tour and after getting through the forbidden city we stopped at Tiemen Square., and I asked the Thoreau about whether Mao was buried alongside the emperors. A chill like no other cut the air like ice, and I so forget the context, but I gathered my wits enough,to remind myself, that this is a communist tour guide and he
may very well be bugged.

The comment of Capitalism feeding off the misery of others is, a prpervasive cross cultural trait, respecting no boundaries

Marx 's proletariat was an amazing tour de force of anti monarchial sentiments sweeping the 19rh century, Capital only replaced the minor players.

As I am reading what I have just written, I amazed, about the nerve, can I be missing something ?

If I am not, then how can a Nitzchean transvaluation and an existential reduction be a reinforced nothingness signaled by Sartre’s disillusiowmt with Communism ? But if the above is factual, hadn’t Sartre known this, and if so, what could have been left for him to get disillusioned about ?

 Although he remained a Marxist, his severance with Moscow left the split off French communist party without a prototype of a workable social base, an undefined work with a,  retarded and incomplete social project. As a consequence , the international significance of Communism took a hit , and and similarly Marxism by extension became seen as a less viable system. 

I guess my response to the OP is has been faulty, on account of the idea, that even if Sartre might have seen the fraility of human nature, he may have thought, he could change it.  The reduction to a definite point of  view, from determined social process did not overcome the human bias toward agression, usurpation and oppression.
12

Yes, this is the accurate summary of what I was trying to say.

13

That just shows how little you have understood my previous threads.