Anubis wrote:
Greed is good for progress but only in the right way. Corruption in governments and public services must not be tolerated, and neither should gross mismanagement and irresponsibility.
Well, true, corruption is bad, but still higher managers are likely to get paid better than their underlings.
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Irresponsibility, and gross mismanagement being decisions or lack of decisions which lead to great harm to the economy, avoidable accidents, irresponsible or slanderous/libellious methods of advertising which lead to undue harm- for instance, a company advertising a weight loss drug and portraying overweight people as stupid, and stigmatizing them would be socially and mentally harmful crap. Official claims by companies should be founded on fair data and facts. Nothing wrong with letting companies make claims about themselves as regards to advertising, sponsorship, slogans, and branding of their own products, however.
I know that some of those are bad. The dangers are often overstated as many of those will really bite the company back in the butt. I would think that by the time that there is a push by politicians to ban something, advertisers would already back off because of the controversy.
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Calling someone who does not buy a certain product as stupid is ok in my view, so long as it is not targeted at a particular group in such a way that would cause social or mental harm. For instance, targeting teenagers and saying that every teenager who does not get say... a new iPod, as unduly sad and pathetic, and recommending that some action be taken against that person, would have potential for harm. Such issues need to be reviewed carefully. Advertising can influence people and imprint propaganda into their minds, and needs to be regulated. Not too tightly, but watched carefully for counter-progress connotations and misinformation. A load of propaganda which denounces something such as global warming as false or impresses opinions upon young people should be banned outright. Visiting websites and reading adverts, commentaries in media, or anything else of the sort is ok.
I am not sure that teenagers are going to get that much harm. Really, I find that a lot of the influences that negatively impact my social view of myself are simply popular trends with or without commercials and in such a case nothing can really be done to deal with that. Most advertisements are rather weak, I would not consider them capable of real brainwashing as many people are not really open to the ideas within. The problem is one of finding the perfect way to find objectivity and to still keep some free speech.
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I am strongly against political/social brainwashing and media which only reports opinions without the fair representation of facts and statistics to back it up. Impressionable people can be misled into making harmful and ill-informed decisions without being aware that they have been brainwashed and indoctrinated. Informed people would look up the facts and general picture and not a biased representation. However... a good alternative would be to rate, with just 1-2 words or symbols, which opinion/theory certain media is biased towards so that people are aware of what they are reading. That could have negative impacts to a certain extent, and close people's minds when they see a word they hate in the rating.
Well, I wouldn't say that too much stuff is really in the business of real brainwashing. The real issue ends up being whether or not something is a lie or just bias, the reason saying that is that the average voting trend seems to reflect bias, if the center is biased then how do we address that?
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Facts must not be twisted by any group when it comes to political matters, statistical records, and education.(education must be totally unbiased)
Perhaps a few classes in school just so people know when they're having an opinion forced upon them, and fact-finding would better prepare people for the real world. I was pretty vulnerable to being decieved myself when I was younger, as I didn't know what to look for, and took alot of opinion as fact. I wasn't aware that they could be so deceptive. Perhaps it is an Aspie thing.
The issue is that fact twisting is almost central to the game of politics. One cannot silence it any more than the rest of free speech no matter what I would want to think. Now, outright lies can be a problem but there is a wiggle room between distortions and lies. The issue is that most political ideologues think that they are simply being intellectually honest when they teach. I think that many people take opinion as fact to be honest.
04 Jun 2007, 7:19 pm
