'How anti-vaxxers have scared the media away from covering vaccine side effects'
"Vaccines are one of the single greatest contributors to public health of the past century. And in recent years, whenever anti-vaccine groups or cranks have tried to cast doubt on this fact, the country's best health journalists have sprung into to action, working to present the facts and essentially debunk anti-vaccine pseudoscience. Vaccines, after all, are overwhelmingly safe. And people should know that.
But what happens when credible scientists discover real drawbacks to certain vaccines? How do we report on that responsibly — without giving ammunition to deniers?"
If only we could scare the media out of lying to the people and misrepresenting everything. Maybe we could learn from this and make it happen.
I believe that if we could educate more people to a higher degree and give them a thirst for truth, the media would have to adapt or die.
I'd drink to that. My concern is that the media counteracts that education at every turn as it seems that most major media outlets have extreme biases. Wtb honesty.
That's because education makes simple, cheap-to-produce news much less lucrative, because less and less people will watch or agree or discuss it, which means they will need to invest in actual research, non-biased good journalists, and also vastly increase the "development time" of each news article - all of that decreases profits, without mentioning that it makes it much harder to obtain lobbyists/funding from parties because most parties are extremely biased, and as such as soon as they don't represent that sight they also lose that funding. It's economical to keep people ignorant, really - because informed, knowledgeable people usually make informed, knowledgeable decisions, assessments and consumption.
You could not be more right. One more reason to move away from capitalism =D
To move away from CRONY capitalism. Capitalism, on paper, is fine - but just like communism/socialism, the downfall of the system was the abuse of sociopaths to further themselves. It's more of an incentive to fortify our economy to work for the people instead of the people working for the economy.
I feel that the only way to do that is with pure transparency. The question is "how do you take the power away from the powerful abusers?" Only thing I can think of at this point is revolution. Working within the system obviously isn't working as it gets worse and worse by the day. This is because the people (not all) with the money and power to effect change are the very people that need to be ousted for their corruption and greed. We are very unlikely to form a new government using the same relative system so Capitalism is probably a thing of America's past at this point anyway. On that note, how do you build a system that money can't corrupt?
The problem with transparency is that it will cause undue unrest. There's some moves that the government does that are logical and even the best thing to do - but the layman (or someone with his interests aligned elsewhere) will either not understand or simply oppose that action, and only large amounts of education (of which most people don't want to take because it is a complex thing to govern large amounts of resources, and I'm one of the people who has neither the time nor resources to want to learn it) would fix. See, I disagree. Working within the system definitely works, if you can get a number of allies in there. The problem is that 99% of the people who say that don't actually try to make changes by working within the system. They go against it. They're brickwalling the train instead of changing tracks. And it gets worse by the day because it gives the ones we need to oust ammunition against them, which demonizes them. And you're right, most people with money and power are people who need to be ousted, because that's how they got there. But that's irrelevant. Their money only gives them as much power as the people gives it. So at a small scale, encourage voting with your wallet - boycott (and get your community) to boycott companies that do political or economic moves that you disagree with, as long as you have a good reason (and no, layoffs are not a good reason unless it's for outsourcing, and you better have proof). Donate and participate in the political entity that you support - is there a city, state or federal person you feel you might be able to trust? Help them get in power. Do not hesitate about changing allegiances if you see something wrong. But whatever you do, stop whining and DO things - and if you have neither the time nor resources to do that, at least vote where your heart is, not where your opponent's victory is not. The only reason there's not a third party in the US that's considered is because everyone thinks their neighbor will vote for one of the two main ones. Your forefathers didn't get the USA by whining in journals and newspapers. They did it by debating, informing. And yes, that did end up requiring war - and maybe you're right, maybe a revolution will be needed. But you're not going anywhere by not doing anything - get people to do things and it'll come in order. And remember - Thomas Jefferson warned against the very scenario that's unfurling because of the inactivity of almost everyone in the US. So think long-term, as well. As for your last question? You don't simply make a system that resources can't corrupt. That's literally going against human nature - as bad as it is, resource hoarding is what got us to this industrialized era and is part of us. What we CAN do however is institute a system that makes it very easy to replace elements that are corrupt or going against the people's interest.
Very well thought out and I agree with most of your statements. Basically, education is your solution as it leads down the other paths you outlined being plausible. I agree that education goes a long way and that it is important for people to be informed so they can make informed decisions. Who has time to commit to do all of that political stuff on top of work and family and general education and still have time to enjoy life? I'm all for putting in a days work but that sound like your life being controlled by having to make sure corruption doesn't exist so you can't be taken advantage of. Doesn't that defeat the purpose? I mean essentially we would be expending just as much effort, if not more, just to keep the corrupt from living the lives (at our expense) that we wish we could live. I guess we might feel better about it all which would contribute to less crime and suicide rate. Just seems like we would be trading one bond of slavery for another self-imposed bond of slavery.
I'm not saying it's a perfect solution. But ideally, the way I might implement it, is to have some bureaus - one main government and three smaller agencies designed to watch the government. The government works as usual, elected by the people. The three agencies are also independently elected by the constituents, and if two parties agree, they can initiate a vote (then an election) against the third agency or the government itself - likewise, the government and an agency can agree to dissolve and cause an election for the two other agencies. The public can launch a motion for a vote any time - however all vote initiators will need to be proven not affiliated with any party in power or with any party that has initiated a vote in the last month (and such a process is to take no more than a week). That way, in theory, the general public could mill on with their lives in general, voting a few times a month; we'd have independent groups observing each other and the government of any signs of going against the public interest. Of course this, either, does not cover for lobbying and other corporate meddling (this is a very hard fight to fight with the current resources, and the only way I could see this being nullified by the US is by adopting a new currency, and limit the amount of currency that can be exchanged at base rate so that either the corporations will either need to deal with much less advantageous rates (possibly with a hard cap of how many new US currency could be "bought") to do that much political pressure or find other ways to do it - and that currency conversion has the advantage of also limiting how much extra capital can be done within the US - though to make things balanced and orderly, keep the Wall Street investment in old $US otherwise it would be too easy to manipulate the markets to transfer all $US to NUSC - though with a federally-controlled bank printing the money, instead of being a private bank, it might be a nil issue since there should be an actual limit to the amount of NUSC available, both digitally (as in, the government will authorize a certain amount of digital money that is not available in currency, and digital currency will only be able to be added in two ways: if an institution proves it has the physical currency in it's coffers, or if the government authorized it) and physically - though again, there will most likely be complications due to international debt - but then again, in an ideal world, it would be irrelevant because it would happen everywhere it needs to happen so a lot of debt can be forgiven, since a lot of it is money that never existed and isn't backed by anything (and only exists to magically create more money). Let the $US become an international transaction money if you want, but the US needs to take control of a currency again.) but at least it strongly discourages, if not straight out prevents corruption/public conflict of interest at the government level. Though I DID just remember that the United States techincally had 50 of these "agencies" in the form of state government - so, if we want to adapt this system without forcing the borders of states, it would take 3 sub-parties per state to do what I said, then all 50 state-governments get the power of the aforementioned agencies at a federal level - however this does mean that 26 states will need to agree to dissolve the government of any other state or the federal government, and put it back into election (though that number could vary to avoid a total shitfest of ideologies - possibly 30 states needed would be better). Of course, I'm no political/economic/legal scientist or student, I'm a layman trying to make sense of this - but I feel that somewhere in that rant above there might be an idea that could work out.