Friday, June 27, 2008

Hm... Bob Barr?

Firstly, someone please post so we can have some diversity of topics on here!

Secondly, i just saw this viral ad for presidential candidate Bob Barr today. What do you guys think of him? Anyone willing to tell us who they plan on voting for this November?

6 comments:

ScrewGoogle said...

I'm not convinced that either of the popular candidates are as bad as they are portrayed in that video, and I'm not convinced that decentralizing (libertarian view) all of government is the secret sauce. I AM convinced that political opinions (propaganda) on the internet have become as biased and deceptive as those in traditional media. Even side by side candidate comparisons in tabular form are twisted by the writer's interpretation. You can pick any candidate you want and I (if I had nothing better to do) could make him to be the worst possible leader for this country. That type of campaign is pointless and frankly, I'm sick of the whole process.

shannon said...

i agree that the internet is as inundated as the MSM with propaganda. Would you say, though, that it has a bigger share of useful information?

If you could influence the election process, what kind of changes would you like to see?

What do you think is the secret sauce to our nation's problems?

What do you think of Barr?

ScrewGoogle said...

I think that the Internet(s) still has 2 advantages over MSM at the moment:
1. It allows people to seek their own information. This is good because it allows people to form their own conclusions. It is bad because whatever your hypothesis, you can search and find supporting literature, regardless of how correct your hypothesis is.
2. It allows bidirectional exchange of ideas, as we are exercising now.

As for your other questions, I haven't spent enough time to draw any real conclusions, so I don't pretend to have the answers. But with my recent venture into AI and Psychology, I am beginning to understand the effect of such a paradigm on the public. I'll spare you my interpretation and suggest one good, brief article on the neuroscience of false beliefs.

ScrewGoogle said...

BTW. if you DO want my interpretation of that article, I'll probably be doing a post about it on my blog soon.

shannon said...

Regarding your point #1- i agree! i don't know if i can blame this on the nature of the internets, but i have found myself in some alarming patterns. i'll write an email, arguing some points, and i'll do some quick Google searches for links to put down, which might give authority to my ideas. But it occurred to me a couple weeks ago, that i might have similar success searching for items supporting the antithesis of my argument! It's intellectually lazy.

Looking forward to your blog post.

shannon said...

Just read an interview of Barr in GQ. It was... interesting...