Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

Replace "life" with "server" and that also rings true for a network DoS attack. Just as you don't always have complete control over the network, you don't always have complete control over the aspects of your life that influence your day-to-day decisions.

Free will IMO is an abstract and poorly defined concept. You can define free will in terms that make "non-free will" an impossibility. On the other hand, you could also amount it to very basic particle events that are either entirely deterministic or based on seemingly random quantum wave collapses.

If something is regulated by the government, one could argue that you are still able to employ your free will and break the law. Someone may force you to do something, but by a not entirely unreasonable definition of free will it is your choice to comply or not, regardless of the consequences.

Of course, the argument that "modern media is a DoS attack on free will" employs a different, less generous definition. Whether you agree with that definition or not, the discussion on how easily manipulable people are and how external agents exploit that to influence our day-to-day decisions in subtle, often negative ways is warranted. You can call it "[...] is a DoS attack on our subconscious", "[...] on our attention" or whatever, but I think it amounts to the same discussion.

I feel a sense of agency and that I have the power to ignore many of these influences, but this also presents a cognitive load problem. I wouldn't be sad for a second if for example building regulations were used to a greater extent to limit advertising in public spaces.

You also have to consider those that aren't old enough to go to war or to vote, not to make it a blanket "think of the children" argument, but because we recognize that they are not competent enough to make informed life choices. I wouldn't want my children grow up with a poor self image just because it makes them more inclined to purchase bikinis, watches, tanning lotion and cars, but I also wouldn't want to shelter my children from society when it is ultimately our responsibility as adults to shape it for the coming generations. People have made decisions that make society what it is today, and we should continue making decisions and re-evaluating the old ones.

For public advertisement, I've always been in favor of defacing and removing it. I'm old enough to go to war and infringe on the ultimate human right by killing people, so why should I not be able to make choices that improve public spaces? If I remove an online casino billboard, who is better off and who is worse off?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/upshot/bernie-sanders-wen...

They covered a tour Sanders did about healthcare in Canada, and used it as an opportunity to spout ideological tripe slamming universal healthcare and Sanders himself.

Even the first line is a weaselly backhanded attack on Sanders. Then,

>Now he wants to make Americans fall in love with his proposal to make the United States system a lot more like Canada’s.

This is an absurd thing to say if you did your homework and know that a strong majority of Americans already support a single payer system like Canada's. However it is not an absurd thing to say if you want your reader to walk away believing Americans just aren't ready for it.

What follows is an entire section attacking Sanders for being popular because he advocates for popular political positions(how dare he?). Then their description of his bill is right out of a right-wing rag

>His Medicare-for-All bill includes free care as a central feature. If the legislation became law, no American would pay directly for a doctor, dentist or hospital visit, and co-payments for prescription drugs would be limited. (Taxpayers would, of course, finance the system.)

Indeed, you would get all of this stuff for free at taxpayer expense in a snarky parenthetical as if to suggest "you wouldn't really want to pay for others would you?" Ignoring that we already pay more for worse healthcare than any country, and that the bill would save trillions in taxpayer money.

An entire section on waiting times for non-critical procedures a common tactic for attacking universal healthcare -- ignore waiting times in the US, talk about how people have to wait in the other system and write "for non-critical procedures" in the smallest print possible so you're technically not lying. They never ask the actual explicit question: should you be able to jump the line and get your nosejob a week early, kicking a poor person with cancer out of line so they die because you have more money?

Then they cite a study that correctly assess the US healthcare system as the worst among developed countries, but it notes that Canada's is only 9th out of 11th -- doesn't look so bad now does it?! -- ignoring the fact that countries 1-10 (with universal healthcare) were ranked pretty close together, and the distance between the US and the 10th is double the distance between the 1st and 10th.

Then a series of more blatant incorrect claims without evidence about the medicare for all bill in particular.

Then the icing on the cake -- a section about how "Americans don't care about fairness or healthcare", with strong evidence this time! No, wait, their only evidence is that the Republicans control the government. Hmm. Let's look a little deeper:

>In the United States, though, Republicans control the presidency and the Congress, and many candidates last year ran on a promise to roll back government support for health care coverage.

Oh, I see. People only vote based on healthcare now. And not liking a failed overly complicated Obamacare system that forces people to buy bad private insurance is the same is disliking universal healthcare, but the article already stated universal healthcare has strong majority support...

It's almost as if someone has an agenda to portray America as a right-wing country whose people care mostly about the interests of the rich to their readers, who happen to be the rich...

This is just one article. NYT puts out hundreds of these ideological hit pieces with a shallow veneer of objective reporting every week. The amount of human labor put into this propaganda is staggering.

Wapo is even worse. Jeff Bezos did not buy it expecting to make a profit. They have rarely criticized Bezos or Amazon since the purchase. They 'fact-checked' a statement by Sanders where he describes the amount of wealth Bezos has and agree the statement is objectively correct. But it did not fit in with their ideology, so of course they rated it a 'lie'.

If this is what 'coverage' looks like, I'll pass. Reading wapo or nyt as a person on the left is what reading Breitbart feels like to a center-right Democrat or Republican nyt/wapo reading neoliberal.