Attention whores?

[Colonel Hogan]

A response to "Wings" from over in the GB.

Eyer annoys me mostly because of the way he writes out his arguments, which is to say in no rational way whatsoever but I'd never wish him dead. I didn't report GS's thread nor did I report Eyer's thread but I didn't like either one. Maybe my skin is thicker but I chose not to read them after the first post.

Eyer strikes me as an attention whore and the best way to defeat one of those is to ignore it. Of course I just wrote his screenname several times so I'm just as guilty of it as anyone else.

But seriously, do you think he speaks like a stroked-out Shatner? That's how I read all those ellipses.

These are two incredibly significant thoughts with greater but less obvious implications.

The way in which someone crafts and communicates their messages has a profound effect on how they are received and responded to.

"Attention whores" have a highly developed vested interest in NOT being ignored and have increasingly perfected the skills necessary to counteract that #1 defense against them. The media, political parties, advocacy groups, fundraising campaigns, commerce and economic growth -- even medical and scientific research efforts are filled with and dependent upon "attention whores." It's an increasingly bankable talent.

Think I'm being overly dramatic? Question: What's the difference between an attention whore and Paul Revere? In the case of Revere, the British really were coming. Which illustrates the opportunity for the whore: reap whatever rewards come with being the savior of the republic, or at least his principle messenger.

The stakes which are at risk are enormous. Or so they are made to seem. Ultimately, the climate change debate seems destined to play out as either a research grant funding ploy or the last alarm to spare the planet. The truth could even be somewhere in between, but you don't see too many people hammering that message. Not much "profit" in a non-calamitous middle ground. It would be like trying to whip up lottery ticket buyers into a frenzy over the prospect of winning a hundred bucks.

ISIS and Al Qaeda understand the literal power they would lose by exterminating captives with a quick bullet. The barbaric intimacy engendered by beheading people and burning them alive demands our attention whether or not we watch the video.

Do they really think they can win a violent theocratic revolution by killing people one at a time? Surely not. At least not anytime soon. But attention whores specialize in the artful utilization of the lie, and if militant Jihadists can sell their apparent belief in the application of mindless, ultimately futile violence as an actual strategy that could not possibly represent an immediate threat to the United States at large, then that could well tip our internal debate toward a new isolationism in the Middle East. Allowing Muslims to prey upon each other so that the victorious faction can eventually strengthen its hand for whatever future international adventures it can fathom doesn't strike me as the most insightful foreign policy course we could pursue.

Are terrorists really that cleverly devious? That's not the point. The point is, do you know how small the Nazi Party was in 1925?

The greater point is that attempting to discover and communicate socially relevant truth from the perspective of the most compassionately motivated prophet or peddling lies and half-truths as a scheme of the most cynically motivated profiteer can be comparably lucrative.

To be certain, there are attention whores who desire nothing more than attention itself, but the more ambitious brethren within their midst is why "benign neglect" of the lot of them may be as unwise as locking them all up and throwing away the key, the greater convenience and efficiency of idea notwithstanding.

 

[KingOrfeo]

To be certain, there are attention whores who desire nothing more than attention itself, but the more ambitious brethren within their midst is why "benign neglect" of the lot of them may be as unwise as locking them all up and throwing away the key, the greater convenience and efficiency of idea notwithstanding.

That might apply to real-life threats like ISIS, etc. But this is just a messageboard. Here, we can iggy attention whores or we can engage with them -- is there a third option? -- and it is never dangerous to iggy them.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

That might apply to real-life threats like ISIS, etc. But this is just a messageboard. Here, we can iggy attention whores or we can engage with them -- is there a third option? -- and it is never dangerous to iggy them.

The "real life threats" were more what I was thinking of when I started the thread. More and more public discourse from allegedly serious institutions and representatives is imitating internet flame wars. I don't think that is a good thing.

In that "Judge Napolitano vs. Gen. Michael Hayden" argument Eyer and I were having in another thread, Napolitano grossly distorted the context of Hayden's opening remarks. No reasonable person listening to Hayden's remarks would make such reckless accusations as did Judge Napolitano. That leads me to believe that the Judge did not listen to the verbatim speech before writing the article and wrote on the basis of a written transcript (which might have easily misled him as to context), or that he did listen to the speech and is simply a less than ethical commentator who took a cheap shot at a political enemy.

Hayden himself had an even better example of "attention whoring" during the Q & A after his speech last month at Washington & Lee. In response to a question regarding former Director of National Intelligences James Clapper's public testimony to Congress in March of 2013 where he LIED TO THE SENATE SELECT PERMANENT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE regarding NSA's bulk collection program, Hayden said, "Jim's answer was horrible. He just hosed it."

Hayden then continued, "Jim's answer was not as bad as Ron Wyden's question." According to Hayden, Oregon Senator Wyden, and every senator sitting on the panel that day along with every staff member sitting behind each of those senators KNEW FULL WELL BY THEIR VERY MEMBERSHIP ON THE COMMITTEE that NSA engaged in bulk telephony metadata collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act which, at that time (March, 2013), was still CLASSIFIED and was still three months away from being exposed by the revelations of Edward Snowden.

Thus, Wyden asked a very specific question (that he already knew the answer to) that would force Clapper to either lie to Congress or violate the law by revealing the existence of a classified intelligence program in public Congressional testimony.

Why did Wyden do it? According to Hayden, Wyden was getting beat up in committee. He couldn't derail the program. The votes were overwhelming against him. But he was determined to scuttle it one way or the other, and since he didn't have the balls to break the law and expose the program himself, he made Clapper the fall guy.

After re-watching the testimony armed with this new information, I asked myself, "how is our nation served by allowing one member of a branch of government to LEGALLY set a trap for a member of a different branch of government that effectively compels that second member to either violate federal law by lying to Congress or violate federal law by revealing the existence of a classified intelligence program?

How can he do that? How does that serve our interests of information exchange? Why can't Congress pass and implement programs which the majority of members approve, and why can't members unsuccessfully opposing those programs accept the results and live within the law?

Is it never dangerous to iggy attention whores on a messageboard? Yeah. Should I probably do it far more often than I do? Almost certainly, yeah.

But these last two aren't the questions crawling up my ass right now.

What's crawling up my ass is how public opinion is manipulated and how the public is too lazy and stupid to educate themselves to participate intelligently on civil issues.

People want to whine about telephony metadata collection when most of them STILL don't know what it is or how the phone system even works. A lot of people think they actually OWN their own phone number. Here's a hint: if you actually owned your phone number, you wouldn't have to pay the phone company for keeping it OUT of the phone directory. If you actually OWNED YOUR phone number, you could CHARGE the "phone company" and every other jack ass publisher for putting it IN a phone directory.

Sorry. I'm feeling extra crabby today.

 

[KingOrfeo]

The greater point is that attempting to discover and communicate socially relevant truth from the perspective of the most compassionately motivated prophet or peddling lies and half-truths as a scheme of the most cynically motivated profiteer can be comparably lucrative.

You might want to re-word that sentence -- it seems to say both approaches are equally lucrative, which I'm sure is not the case and not what you meant.

 

[KingOrfeo]

The "real life threats" were more what I was thinking of when I started the thread. More and more public discourse from allegedly serious institutions and representatives is imitating internet flame wars. I don't think that is a good thing.

I'm afraid that is nothing but an inevitable result of the present American political environment, which is more bitterly polarized than at any time since the Vietnam War ended. And closely polarized -- the stakes are high because so many elections, and other political fights, are such near-run things that nobody dares to play the game like a gentleman, or stick at anything that might tip the scales. That would be unilateral disarmament, it would handing the battle to the Forces of Evil -- and, yes, we have reached a point where each side views the other as not merely wrong but The Bad Guys. (Of course, it's obvious only your side are The Bad Guys, but that's another discussion. )