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Saturday, August 23, 2014 - 8:03amSanction this postReply
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Glenn Beck never impressed me.  I watched a bit more of his shows than of The View, but they were pretty much alike in that they identified and nutured audiences with a pretense of depth.  We get into these arguments about purism. Objectivism mimics Communism in purging people who deviate to the left or revise to the right.  But at some level, you have to admit that some distinction makes a difference.  Why was William F. Buckley's Catholicism unacceptable but we are supposed to endorse, enjoy, and embrace Beck regardless of his Mormonism?  

 

In one of the Basic Principles classes, perhaps the Introduction, Nathaniel Branden cautioned against non-intellectuals who wanted to hear more clever put-downs of liberals.  Branden allowed that those can be amusing, but are not essential.  Politics is a consequence, not a primary study.

 

What we know - what theory predicts and evidence supports - is that those who have inconsistent, incomplete, or incorrect metaphysics will advocate political programs that violate individual rights.

 

I am not sure about the extent to which Comcast and Time-Warner are still government-licensed monopolies.  In the old days of cable-TV that was true, especially at the local level where town councils accepted the neo-Luddite claim that you cannot have wires running all over the place, so they gave one firm a license.  But now, everything is wifi in the cloud and clouds full of wifi. Let us know if you cannot listen to your favorite AM or FM radio station on your computer... or phone...

 

With those phones, and with YouTube, everyone and anyone can have their own "channel."  And that is just one option; other platforms and services are out there.  And if not you can start your own.

 

Glenn Beck has his own site www.GlenBeck.com  (are you surpised?) and you can listen to him on the radio, watch him on TV, or read him in print.  So what is his complaint?  That millions of coal-burning conservatives will lose access to his opinions?

 


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Saturday, August 23, 2014 - 9:05amSanction this postReply
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Michael:

 

I always found this factoid of physics interesting: fiber is not cable is not wifi; they are entirely different regimes of bandwidth.   A single fiber channel is capable of transmitting some huge factor -- like 35 billion -- as much bandwidth as our selectively opaque atmosphere.  Way much  more usable spectrum.    Picture a firehouse feeding a hypodermic needle ... and it would still be grossly the wrong scale.   Picture a million fireboat firehouses feeding a hypodermic needle.

 

Wifi is the convenient 'last 20 feet' solution.  So picture a firehose feeding a billion hypodermic needles.

 

But when the last 20 feet is also fiber, it is a whole nother ballgame.  Wifi is skateboards.   Fiber is Warp 10.   So some have long ago imagined fiber connections to key internet backbone chokepoints cloning all that moves hither and yon, and tapping into the daily drone of metered self-subscribed intelligence gathering permeating the entire globe at this point.    Some with deep pockets and alot of time to imagine such things.  This bothers some, like Snowden, who asked 'W.T.F. is this government doing just because it can?' 

 

How many fiber channels can a bundle carry?  And how many bundles can a fiber cable carry?  And how many cables can a trench carry?

 

We don't know how to fill all that bandwidth with much that is reasonable. And so, Glenn Beck is the current standard of trying.   On a % basis, porn is still king with King Consumer of all that tech.

 

regards,

Fred

 

   



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Saturday, August 23, 2014 - 10:19amSanction this postReply
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Beck has always been religious, but when I first started watching him on Fox, most of his shows had a theme that was purely political analysis and little to no religion entered the picture.  And the shows that did adhere to a religious theme, were obvious as such at the very beginning and I turned him off.  As an analyst of current political events, he was the best I'd seen and more than worth watching.  He was far ahead of everyone else in predicting which way things were going and very libertarian.

 

But at some point, he seemed to either run out of new things to say about politics, or, as I suspect, he gave up on being able to achieve a turn-around from the movement towards progressive goals, and he shifted to organizing a religious rebirth.  I quit watching him at that point.  But before then I'd say he was the father of the Tea Party grass roots movement and very much a Tom Paine of our era.  That statement will seem worthy of ridicule to those who are  religiously militant atheists and those who harbor secret leanings towards the left because they can't separate the parts out well enough to find the context needed to make an intelligent judgement on the man.

 

Those who are deeply religious will not be consistent supporters of capitalism or individual rights, and will veer off somewhere because their underlying principles aren't the right ones.  It looks like Beck veered off course pretty severely in wanting to get the FCC to block a voluntary business agreement.

 

Nathaniel Branden used to tell a story of being at a conference or debate where a large group of attendees and speakers were seated around a table eating dinner.  One of the speakers, a socialist, asked to have the salt passed to him.  Nathaniel passed it.  Later he found out that some of the students of Objectivism at the table were horrified that he did that as if it was sanctioning evil.  There is a context to each situation and for some people we need to refer to it to understand when we need to oppose that person because of their views.  For example, if a religious person is running for office, and they are libertarian on all of the issues, then we need to decide if their beliefs against mixing state and church are strong enough for it make sense to vote for them.  I found it useful to listen to, and learn from Beck without feeling that I was supporting his religious views or losing my grasp of basic principles.  I had no problem separating the wheat from the chaff.

 

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 8/23, 10:28am)



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Sunday, August 24, 2014 - 6:59amSanction this postReply
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That's a misleading title. When I first saw it, I thought it meant Beck died.

Those who are deeply religious will not be consistent supporters of capitalism or individual rights, and will veer off somewhere because their underlying principles aren't the right ones.  It looks like Beck veered off course pretty severely in wanting to get the FCC to block a voluntary business agreement.

I agree. After reading the link I knocked down my appraisal of Glenn Beck several notches. I haven't seen him a lot, but he seemed to be a supporter of free markets -- in the abstract anyway. But on the issue of this merger, he is a fascist, economics-wise, wanting the government to coercively intervene. He is way more like the author (and ex-Obama advisor) of Captive Audience. By the way I put a review of Captive Audience on Amazon and gave it two stars on March 19, 2014.

Fred is correct about the enormous capacity difference beween fiber optic cable and wireless.

 

(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 8/24, 6:59am)



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Sunday, August 24, 2014 - 10:49amSanction this postReply
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Is a phemomenon like Glenn Beck much more complicated than, he's got a markatable gig and he's selling it?   He's basically aiming at a segment of the market, and loosely.   He meanders between conservative and libertarian and religious topics at will, in a deliberately entertaining, sometimes comical fashion.  Especially his radio products, with the staged recorded bits.   Does anyone remember his 'they nuked Oklahoma City' bit from severak years back?    It was clearly a parody of some kind..but many listeners believed it.  I barely remember what the point was, but that was around the first time I ever heard of him, and that event shaped my assessment of him; he was a guy making a living selling his schtick.

 

It is a wildy successful gig, and he comes across as someone trying to preserve the brand and not spoil the gig.   Is it a sincerely held or consistant gig?   The latter isn't necessary to maintain a successful popular gig.  I think when it comes to serving the least common denominator and aiming for popular market share, you can never go wrong by aiming low.  (That explains much of our political process.).

 

I haven't listed to Rush Limbaugh in decades.   Maybe a few seconds here and there if I am out in my jeep in the afternoon.   He is another guy with an incredibly successful schtick, serving pretty much the same marketplace as Glenn Beck.    He fatfingers topics constantly, totally butchers them, but it doesn't matter, not the point.    I used to get a kick out of him in the early 90s, when Clinton came into office.   Clinton winning the White House in 1992 is what catapulted Rush Limbaugh to stardom, and those eight years of being a loud constant thorn in Clinton's side was what made him.    What is amazing about Limbaugh is that he survived eight years of Bush, but he did, quite well, and is now once again in safe and easy territory with Obama in the White House.

 

But these are entertainers, unabashadly so.   Their self claims to not be serious is what gives both of them near carte blanche to just let fly.    So why would or should any of us be concerned about either of them being consistent in their schtick?   It's a schtick.   

 

Are we as critical of Homer Simpson(another source of amusing poltiical commentary) or South Park or The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart?   They are all firmly in the camp of amusingly free political speech.

 

Maybe their efficacy is that they don't claim to be purists; they are all free to lance any boil they come across by freely asking the questions, not subject to any purity tests.   It is a tradition of sorts in America; speech unfettered by adherence to any tests of purity, however imagined.  Let the buyer beware, but at the same time, let the buyer revel in the broadest possible range of choices.

 

regards,

Fred



Post 5

Sunday, August 24, 2014 - 11:18amSanction this postReply
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Fred,

 

I tried to listen to Beck on the radio a few times, but couldn't take it - snarky, smart-alec, disjointed, no theme, and no purpose I could find that suited my interests.  

 

His TV program, on the other hand, at least in the early years, was an exemplary form of political education. He did more to provide accurate analysis of current politics that anything I'd ever seen before.  That it was a "markatable gig and he was selling it" didn't matter.



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