1. What’s something your brain tries to make you do and you have to will yourself not to do it?
I force myself to chill out on the puns.
2. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read or seen this week?
Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti
Boss media analysis
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The news media prefer surface to substance, emphasizing the eye-catching visuals, the attention-catching "special angle" report, and the reassuring and comforting stories, while slighting the deeper, more important but politically more troublesome and more controversial themes. There is so much concentration on surface events that we often have trouble grasping the content of things, so much focus on action and personality that we fail to see the purposive goal of the action.
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There are many things about which we may not have a predetermined opinion. Lacking any competing information, we often unwarily embrace what we read or hear. In those instances, the media are not merely reinforcing previously held opinions, they are implanting new ones, although these implants themselves seldom fall upon tabula rasa brains and usually do not conflict too drastically with established biases.
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The press can effectively direct our perceptions when we have no information to the contrary and when the message seems congruent with earlier notions about these events (which themselves may be in part media created). In this way the original implant is also a reinforcement of earlier perceptions. Seemingly distinct reports about diverse events have a hidden continuity and a cumulative impact that again support previous views. To see this process as one of "minimal effects" because it merely reinforces existing views and does not change them is to overlook the fact that it was never intended to change them and was indeed designed to reinforce the dominant orthodoxy.
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Along with other social, cultural, and educational agencies, the media teach us tunnel vision, conditioning us to perceive the problems of society as isolated particulars, thereby stunting our critical vision. Larger causalities are reduced to immediately distinct events, while the linkages of wealth, power, and policy go unreported or are buried under a congestion of surface impressions and personalities. There is nothing too essential and revealing that cannot be ignored by the American press and nothing too trivial and superficial that cannot be accorded protracted play.
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3. Are humans better at creation or destruction?
Destruction is the creation of a new circumstance maaaan.
4. Do people have a right to be happy or should they have to earn it?
Happiness is too fluid and relative, focus on eliminating suffering.
5. If a perfect clone was created of you down to the atomic level and someone who knows you well has a gun pointed at the both versions of you and they then have to decide which one was the "real" you, what would you say or how would you convince them to spare you and shoot your clone?
Tell them that we're not clones but twins then we all go get ice cream.
6. At what point is a technologically enhanced human not a human anymore?
When they wear glasses.