Your Monday morning downer from fellow Dukie (grad school, anyway) Brendan Nyhan:
“In journalism, in health [and] in education we tend to take the attitude that more information is better, and so there’s been an assumption that if we put the correct information out there, the facts will prevail,” Nyhan says. “Unfortunately, that’s not always true.”
One of these days, I’m going to get a “DOWN WITH CYNICISM!” bumper sticker. Because I’m that guy.
But Cracked has explained why “cynical” and “mature” are actually opposites:
As you grow into an adult, you find out it’s not a simple two-step process of positive illusion then negative reality, but more like the Frogurt routine from The Simpsons. When you’re a kid, you think owning a puppy will be all sunshine and roses. Then as you get older and take responsibility, you realize it’s a lot of poop and barking. But then, after a while, you find out all the poop and barking doesn’t matter when he loves you just the same no matter what stupid mistakes you’ve made. Then you realize you didn’t know how much it would hurt when you lost him. Then you get a free Frogurt from the vet. But then the Frogurt contains potassium benzoate.
(That’s bad.)
There is no final answer. Observant, curious people keep finding out more and more about everything in life, both good and bad, because life is fucking complex. The person who stops at stage 2, decides they’ve figured out “the real story” and stops looking has their curiosity stunted at adolescence.
An argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
It is NOT!
It is!
Not at all!
As a philosophy major who basically stunk at philosophy classes other than logic, I’ve often wanted to round up common fallacies and ridiculous argument tactics that have proliferated in the Web/Twitter/Facebook era. Cracked.com, the startlingly intellectual offspring of a magazine that long was to Mad magazine what Mad TV was to Saturday Night Live, compiled such a list:
For one thing, fallacies are usually mistakes in logic. Most of the five “fallacies” listed here simply tell us why human beings are incapable of admitting they’re wrong. That may explain why they take a giant misguided leap in logic, but it doesn’t describe the leap in logic itself.
That’s nit-picky, though. The bigger problem is that it’s horribly cynical.
Yes, it’s still somewhat accurate. But the optimists among us have to think it’s too generalized. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be optimists, would we? (There! Refute that argument!)
And it’s also too relativist. We don’t all share the same predilection toward intellectual dishonesty. Some people are truly open-minded and willing to concede a bit of ground. Some people have made peace with the idea that lying is a good way to further their political aims.
It’s still a great read. It’s a reminder of traits that most of us share at least to some extent. And we need to fight them within ourselves. They’re really difficult to beat out of others.
You know what’s stranger than Jon Stewart becoming the country’s most insightful media critic on a Comedy Central show? The fact that the Web site that sprang from the ashes of Cracked magazine might be a close second. They have a few pieces on weasel words and so forth that aren’t bad, and then this is a terrific bit of research:
Monday Morning Music is sick of people bashing this song. A bunch of British and Irish folks (plus Jody Watley and a few stray members of Kool and the Gang) gathered for a nice simple charity tune, launching a movement that also gave us the blistering Sun City and the wretched We Are the World. The latter seemed to imply that Band Aid should be doing USA for Africa’s catering.
Paul Young and Boy George’s nicely understated vocals blow away the ego trips on USA for Africa. The chorus is bright and hopeful, not whiny and groaning. And if you’re hung up on the “no snow in Africa” lyric, you’re obviously the target demo for those VH1 specials with Mo Rocca and other postmodern-irony hucksters reading Mellencamp lyrics literally. Congratulations.
So unless you’re Jeff and Jason writing Mellowmas entries taking down cynical Christmas cash-ins, Monday Morning Music has no patience for your Christmas cynicism. Just shut up, find your checkbook and listen.
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