Hannah Arendt: From an Interview | by Hannah Arendt
What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
Faced with existential threats from the right, the Democratic leadership remains timid; faced with demands for justice from the left, it goes on the attack.
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https://www.cjr.org/analysis/america-needs-working-class-media-end-catering-rich-audiences.php [Alissa Quart in Columbia Journalism Review]This article cuts right to the core of why media is failing to connect with mass audiences in America.
Pluralistic: Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces (17 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Noise-canceling headphones may be rewiring young brains, experts warn
The issue revolves around a condition called auditory processing disorder (APD), in which the brain struggles to interpret sounds and speech, even when a person's hearing is...
A tale of two suckers: Donald Trump’s plastic straws and Keir Starmer | Stewart Lee
The US president has scrapped paper straws because they allegedly ‘explode’ – a bit like the PM’s reputation if he keeps refusing to confront him on the big issues