The media, once again

[clasou]

a + claude

[Obamot]

You may dodge with pirouettes, it will not fool anyone here. Are you brave

Do you want something concrete? Take up my words at the beginning of this thread, this is the example you give to define a "concrete" case (?). No, that's plagiarism ;-)

The basic question is the credibility of the news. It is that with the advent of the Internet, the "receivers of information" (all of us) wonder what it can be used for, if: [...]
- the information is not followed by "action" in the field, in which case it would be de facto validated by "something concrete".

lol ( )

You take people for marbles, in order to push them to react, right? Be careful because by doing flood here, it's taking risks, now ... ( )

... but let's get back to the concrete! Yet it has been shown to you by A + B that it was the role of journalists to know their subject!

This is concrete, yes concrete ...

This is not a statement, they are facts. Precisely what you suppose every good journalist should do: "report the facts" ...

Always concrete, when it is said:
- that the credibility of the news is undermined;
- that there is a global press crisis;
- that the ethics of the press are undermined;
- that intellectual honesty and morality are needed in journalistic work;
- that harmful products are unfortunately authorized in food;
- that it is wrong to believe that free will and "the law of the market" will solve problems, and to remember that it is a total utopia;
etc. all that has been said there is concrete.

When the tea is paid for at a value of "1" to the producer and is then sold 1000x the initial purchase price to the end consumer, it is still concrete (if you know what I mean ... unless you don't want a design or pretend otherwise, or pretend it's "fair")

We can well understand that being in finance, intellectual honesty and morals are not your strong points. But there you tell us salads so as not to enter into the matter ... It's a shame, because you are perfectly capable of reasoning correctly, but it probably bothers you to do it, because it calls you into question.

[clasou]

a + claude

[clasou]

a + claude

[Christophe]

one of the current challenges is: "what do we put in people's heads, why, how?". It is urgent as Edgar Morin says http://www.terraeco.net/Edgar-Morin-Nou ... omme,19890 in a recent article on "taking the time" to ask yourself this kind of question.

Very good interview that I copy pasted below but which would have its place in a dedicated subject in Society and Philosophy ...

Why is speed so ingrained in the functioning of our society?

Speed ​​is part of the great myth of progress, which has animated Western civilization since the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries. The underlying idea is that we are moving towards an ever better future thanks to him. The faster we move towards that brighter future, the better, naturally. It is in this perspective that communications, both economic and social, and all kinds of techniques have multiplied which have made it possible to create rapid transport. I am thinking in particular of the steam engine, which was not invented for reasons of speed but to serve the railway industry, which themselves have become increasingly faster. All this is correlated by the fact of the multiplication of activities and makes people more and more in a hurry. We are in a time where chronology has imposed itself.

So is this so new?

In the old days, you met when the sun was at its zenith. In Brazil, in cities like Belém, even today, we meet “after the rain”. In these diagrams, your relationships are established according to a temporal rhythm punctuated by the sun. But the wristwatch, for example, has caused abstract time to replace natural time. And the system of competition and competition - which is that of our market and capitalist economy - means that for competition, the best performance is that which allows the greatest speed. Competition has therefore turned into competitiveness, which is a perversion of competition.

Isn't this quest for speed an illusion?

In a way it does. We do not realize - even when we think we are doing things quickly - that we are intoxicated by the means of transport itself which claims to be fast. The use of ever more efficient means of transport, instead of speeding up our travel time, ends up - in particular because of traffic jams - by making us waste time! As Ivan Illich (Austrian philosopher born in 1926 and died in 2002, editor's note) already said: “The car slows us down a lot. Even people, immobilized in their cars, listen to the radio and still have the feeling that they are using the time in a useful way. Ditto for the information competition. We now rush to the radio or TV so as not to wait for the publication of newspapers. All these multiple speeds are part of a great acceleration of time, that of globalization. And all of this is undoubtedly leading us towards catastrophes.

Does progress and the rate at which we build it necessarily destroy us?

Techno-economic development accelerates all the processes of production of goods and wealth, which themselves accelerate the degradation of the biosphere and general pollution. Nuclear weapons are on the increase and technicians are being asked to do it ever faster. All this, indeed, does not go in the direction of an individual and collective development!

Why do we systematically seek utility in the passage of time?

Take the example of lunch. Time means friendliness and quality. Today, the idea of ​​speed means that as soon as you have finished your plate, you call a boy who hurries to clear and replace it. If you get bored with your neighbor, you tend to want to shorten this time. This is the meaning of the slow food movement from which the idea of ​​"slow life", "slow time" and even "slow science" was born. A word on that. I see that the tendency of young researchers, as soon as they have a field, even a very specialized one, is for them to hurry to obtain results and publish a "big" article in a "big" international scientific journal, so that no one else publishes before them. This mind grows at the expense of reflection and thought. Our fast time is therefore an anti-reflective time. And it is no coincidence that a certain number of specialized institutions are flourishing in our country which advocate meditation time. Yoguism, for example, is a way of interrupting fast time and obtaining quiet time for meditation. We thus escape chronometry. The holidays, too, allow you to regain your natural time and this time of laziness. Paul Lafargue's book The Right to Laziness (which dates from 1880, editor's note) remains more relevant than ever because doing nothing means downtime, waste of time, unprofitable time.

Why?

We are prisoners of the idea of ​​profitability, productivity and competitiveness. These ideas were exasperated with globalized competition, in companies, then spread elsewhere. Ditto in the school and university world! The relationship between teacher and pupil requires a much more personal relationship than just the notions of performance and results. In addition, the calculation speeds up all of this. We live in a time when it is privileged for everything. Both to know everything and to master everything. The polls which anticipate the elections by one year are part of the same phenomenon. We come to confuse them with the announcement of the result. We thus try to eliminate the always possible surprise effect.

Whose fault is it ? To capitalism? To science?

We are caught in a mind-blowing process in which capitalism, trade and science are drawn into this rhythm. You can't convict a single man. Should we accuse Newton alone of having invented the steam engine? No. Capitalism is essentially responsible, indeed. By its foundation which consists in seeking profit. By its engine which consists in trying, through competition, to get ahead of its opponent. By the incessant thirst for "new" that it promotes through advertising ... What is this company that produces objects that are increasingly obsolete? This consumer society which organizes the manufacture of refrigerators or washing machines not with an infinite lifespan, but which break down after eight years? The myth of the new, as you can see - and this, even for detergents - aims to always encourage consumption. Capitalism, by its natural law - competition - thus pushes towards permanent acceleration, and by its consumerist pressure, to always obtain new products which also contribute to this process.
We see it through multiple movements in the world, this capitalism is questioned. Particularly in its financial dimension ...
We have entered a deep crisis without knowing what will come out of it. Resistance forces are indeed manifesting themselves. The social and solidarity economy is one of them. She embodies a way to fight against this pressure. If we observe a push towards organic farming with small and medium-sized farms and a return to farm farming, it is because a large part of the public is beginning to understand that industrialized chickens and pigs are adulterated. and denature the soil and the water table. A quest for artisanal products, the Amap (Associations for the maintenance of a peasant agriculture, editor's note), indicates that we wish to escape from the supermarkets which, themselves, exert a minimum price pressure on the producer and try to pass on a maximum price on the consumer. Fair trade also tries to bypass predatory intermediaries. Certainly, capitalism is triumphing in certain parts of the world, but another fringe is seeing reactions arising not only from new forms of production (cooperatives, organic farms), but from the conscious union of consumers. In my eyes, it is an unused and weak force because it is still dispersed. If this force becomes aware of quality products and harmful, superficial products, an incredible force of pressure will be put in place and it will influence production.
Politicians and their parties do not seem to be aware of these emerging forces. However, they do not lack analytical intelligence ...
But you are assuming that these politicians have already done this analysis. However, you have minds limited by certain obsessions, certain structures.

By obsession do you mean growth?

Yes ! They do not even know that growth - assuming it returns one day to the so-called developed countries - will not exceed 2%! So it is not this growth that will succeed in solving the employment issue! The growth that we want fast and strong is growth in competition. It leads companies to put machines in place of men and therefore to liquidate people and further alienate them. So it seems terrifying to me that socialists can defend and promise more growth. They have not yet made the effort to reflect and move on to new thoughts.

Deceleration mean decrease?

What is important is knowing what should increase and what should decrease. It is obvious that non-polluting cities, renewable energies and large beneficial collective works must grow. Binary thinking is a mistake. It is the same thing to globalize and de-globalize: we must continue globalization in what it creates of solidarity between peoples and towards the planet, but it must be condemned when it creates or brings not areas of prosperity but of corruption or inequality. I am campaigning for a complex view of things.
So the speed itself is not to blame?
Here. If I take my bike to the pharmacy and try to get there before the pharmacy closes, I'll be pedaling as fast as possible. Speed ​​is something that we must and can use when the need arises. The real problem is to succeed in the general slowdown of our activities. Take back time, natural, biological, artificial, chronological time and succeed in resisting. You are right to say that speed and acceleration is an extremely complex process of civilization, in which techniques, capitalism, science, economics have their part. All these combined forces push us to accelerate without our having any control over them. Because our great tragedy is that humanity is carried away in an accelerated race, without any pilot on board. There is no control or regulation. The economy itself is not regulated. In this sense, the International Monetary Fund is not a true regulatory system.

Isn't politics all the same supposed to “take the time to think”?

We often have the feeling that by his haste to act, to express himself, he comes to work without our children, even against them ... You know, the politicians are embarked on this race for speed. I recently read a thesis on ministerial cabinets. Sometimes, on the advisers' desks, there were notes and files labeled “U” for “urgent”. Then appeared the "TU" for "very urgent" then the "TTU". Ministerial cabinets are now invaded, overwhelmed. The tragedy of this speed is that it cancels and kills political thought in the bud. The political class has made no intellectual investment to anticipate, face the future. This is what I tried to do in my books such as Introduction to a policy of man, The way, Earth-fatherland… The future is uncertain, we must try to navigate, find a way, a perspective. There have always been personal ambitions in history. But they were linked to ideas. De Gaulle no doubt had an ambition, but he had a great idea. Churchill had ambition in the service of a great idea, which consisted in wanting to save England from disaster. From now on, there are no longer any big ideas, but very big ambitions with little men or little good women.
Michel Rocard recently deplored the disappearance of the long-term vision for “Terra eco” ...
He is right, but he is wrong. A real policy is not positioned immediately but in the essential. By dint of forgetting the essential for the emergency, we end up forgetting the urgency of the essential. What Michel Rocard calls the "long term", I call it "fundamental problem", "vital question". Thinking that we need a planetary policy to safeguard the biosphere - with decision-making power that distributes responsibilities because we cannot give the same responsibilities to rich countries and poor countries - is an essential policy to long term. But this long term must be fast enough because the threat itself is approaching.
Doesn't the President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy embody immediacy and a permanent media presence?
It symbolizes a restlessness in the immediacy. It passes to successive immediacies. After the immediacy, which consists in welcoming the Libyan despot Gaddafi because he has oil, succeeds the other immediacy, where it is necessary to destroy Gaddafi without forgetting the oil… In this sense, Sarkozy is no different from the other officials political, but his versatile and capricious character make him a very singular person, not to say a little bizarre.

Edgar Morin, you are 90 years old. Does the state of perpetual emergency in our societies make you pessimistic?

This lack of vision forces me to stay in the breach. There is a continuity in the discontinuity. I went from the time of the Resistance when I was young, where there was an enemy, an occupier and a mortal danger, to other forms of resistance which did not carry the danger of death, but that of remaining misunderstood, slandered or flouted. After having been a war communist and after having fought Nazi Germany with great hopes, I saw that these hopes were deceptive and I broke with this totalitarianism, which has become the enemy of humanity. I fought this and resisted. I then - naturally - defended the independence of Vietnam or Algeria, when it came to liquidating a colonial past. It seemed so logical to me after having fought for France's own independence, endangered by Nazism. At the end of the day, we are always caught up in the need to resist.

And today ?

Today, I realize that we are under the threat of two associated barbarities. Human first of all, which comes from the bottom of history and has never been liquidated: the American camp of Guantánamo or the expulsion of children and parents who are separated, it's happening today ! This barbarism is based on human contempt. And then the second, cold and icy, based on calculation and profit. These two barbarities are allied and we are forced to resist on both fronts. So I continue with the same aspirations and revolts as those of my adolescence, with this awareness of having lost illusions that could animate me when, in 1931, I was ten years old.
The combination of these two barbarities would put us in mortal danger ...
Yes, because these wars can develop at any moment in fanaticism. The destructive power of nuclear weapons is immense and the destructive power of the biosphere for all of humanity is staggering. We are going, by this combination, towards cataclysms. However, the probable, the worst, are never certain in my eyes, because sometimes it only takes a few events for the evidence to turn around.
Can women and men also have this power?
Unfortunately, in our time, the system prevents spirits from breaking through. When England was threatened with death, a marginal man was brought to power named Churchill. When France was threatened, it was De Gaulle. During the Revolution, very many people, who had no military training, managed to become formidable generals, like Hoche or Bonaparte; avocados like Robespierre, great tribunes. Great times of appalling crisis give rise to men capable of carrying resistance. We are not yet sufficiently aware of the danger. We have not yet understood that we are heading towards disaster and we are advancing at full speed like sleepwalkers.

The philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy believes that disaster gives rise to the solution. Do you share his analysis?

It is not dialectical enough. He tells us that catastrophe is inevitable but that it is the only way to know that it could be avoided. I say: catastrophe is probable, but there is improbability. By "probable", I mean that for us observers, in the time in which we are and in the places where we are, with the best information available, we see that the course of things is taking us at full speed towards catastrophes. However, we know that it is always the improbable which arose and which "made" the transformation. Buddha was improbable, Jesus was improbable, Mahomet, modern science with Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Francis Bacon or Galileo was improbable, socialism with Marx or Proudhon was improbable, capitalism was improbable in the Middle Ages… Look at Athens. Five centuries before our era, you have a small Greek city facing a gigantic empire, Persia. And on two occasions - although destroyed the second time - Athens manages to drive out these Persians thanks to the stroke of genius of the strategist Thémistocles, in Salamis. Thanks to this incredible improbability, democracy was born, which was able to fertilize all future history, then philosophy. So, if you want, I can come to the same conclusions as Jean-Pierre Dupuy, but my way of going is quite different. Because today there are resistance forces which are dispersed, which are nested in civil society and which do not know each other. But I believe in the day when these forces will come together, in bundles. It all starts with a deviance, which turns into a trend, which becomes a historical force. We are not there yet, of course, but it is possible.

So it is possible to bring together these forces, to initiate the great metamorphosis, of the individual and then of society?

What I call metamorphosis is the end of a process in which multiple reforms, in all areas, begin at the same time.
We are already in the process of reforms ...
No no. Not these pseudo-reforms. I am talking about profound reforms of life, of civilization, of society, of the economy. These reforms will have to be set in motion simultaneously and be interdependent.
You call this approach "living well". The expression seems weak compared to the ambition you give it.
The ideal of Western society - "well-being" - has deteriorated into purely material things, of comfort and object ownership. And although this word "well-being" is very beautiful, something else had to be found. And when the President of Ecuador Rafael Correa found this formula of "well-being", then taken up by Evo Morales (the Bolivian president, editor's note), it meant human development, not only within society but also nature. The expression “bien vivir” is undoubtedly stronger in Spanish than in French. The term is "active" in the language of Cervantes and passive in that of Molière. But this idea is what relates best to the quality of life, to what I call the poetry of life, love, affection, communion and joy and therefore to the qualitative, that the we must oppose the primacy of quantity and accumulation. The good life, the quality and the poetry of life, including its rhythm, are things that must - together - guide us. It is such a beautiful finality for humanity. It also and simultaneously implies curbing things like international speculation ... If we do not manage to save ourselves from these octopuses which threaten us and whose strength is increasing, accelerating, there will be no good -live. -

[Obamot]

Ok Clasou, thank you for making this clarifying effort that you can be proud of.

I agree with the conclusions you draw in your last post. Totally agree.

[clasou]

a + claude

[Obamot]

I'm not sure I understood the meaning of your sentence, nor its "why" (?) But "self-esteem" is not frankly contemptible, it is even important to have some. Yet it affects the ego (a term that I did not use, it is Projetheus). Besides, I am of the opinion that it would be better to watch out for the qualifiers used. So I have no ulterior motives on this subject. Have a good day.

[Obamot]

one of the current challenges is: "what do we put in people's heads, why, how?". It is urgent as Edgar Morin says http://www.terraeco.net/Edgar-Morin-Nou ... omme,19890 in a recent article on "taking the time" to ask yourself this kind of question.

Very good interview that I copy pasted below but which would have its place in a dedicated subject in Society and Philosophy ...

Edgard Morin once trusted Sarkozy (even if that does not detract from his writings, I think he was wrong ... On the other hand, the Socialists would surely do worse!)

[clasou]

a + claude