Theatre of the absurd

Actor KevinO'Brien quotes Voegelin to explain three ways of communicating:

• Intoxicant communication is communication used as a drug.  Bad TV shows, most pop music, pornography - any kind of communication that people use not only as diversions, but as pain killers to plug the holes of their misery.

• Pragmatic communication is any kind of communication that tries to get another person to do something.  Propaganda is the most obvious example of this type of communication, including advertising, but so is basic instruction in skills and techniques.  Unlike intoxicating communication, which is "toxic", Pragmatic Communication is neutral, as it could encourage someone to do something good or something bad.

• Substantive communication is "concerned with the right order of the human psyche."  And the human psyche is only rightly ordered by the Love of God, or the orientation of our intellectual and moral capacity toward the Good, the True and the Beautiful, toward the transcendent reality in which we seek full participation.  

Thus, Substantive Communication is good and it is most truly called "education", but Pragmatic Communication is neutral and is merely indoctrination, while Intoxicant Communication is poisonous and is something worse than a pastime.  

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The problem is that the press is supposed to do number two and three, but they are doing number one.

In the past, only places like the National Enquirer did half vented scandals. Now everyone does it.

so when Hillary lost the election, the meme was decided: Russia.

but it goes beyond calumny: it is using headlines to make the truth obscure. With the "firewalls" up, we can read headlines but not the whole story in a lot of papers unless we pay a fee. So who reads the whole thing?

The problem is that the "alternative media" now says: Wait a second", Obama made the arrangement for the first "meeting" and the second was a routine meeting in his role on the Senate committee...

Meanwhile, as Erick Erickson points out, the New York Times recently reported that Obama administration staffers are the ones who have been pushing all the fake Russia stories being used against the Trump administration. And now we find out that they set up one of the so-called meetings with the Russian ambassador last July. Anyone else smell a rat?

and guess who tweets to ridicule the idea that anyone meeting with a Russian is evil?

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update: Reality check:

The meme of "evil russians" doen't stand up to the reality of the real game of spy vs spy: As TheDiploMad2.0 points out:

as noted in the always excellent Legal Insurrection... the slanderous implication (was) that Sessions was recruited by the Russians. As LI notes, the prog media, CNN, in particular, keeps referring to the Russian Ambassador as a "spymaster" and the lead spy recruiter for the Russian Embassy in the USA.

I happen to know something about this sort of thing; I can just about give you a 100% money-back guarantee that of all the people in the Russian Embassy charged with recruiting and managing spies, it ain't the Ambassador.  

The Russians are MUCH, MUCH smarter than that. The Ambassador is a very public figure and would stay away from involvement in that side of the info collection business. The ones to watch, as FBI, MI-5, ASIO, CSIS know, are the bevy of Secretaries and Attaches, and, of course, the famous NOC (no official cover) operatives that the Soviets and Russians have perfected.

In addition, of course, as LI points out, Sessions met the Russian while accompanied by at least one senior member of his Senate staff. Is that staffer, too, a recruit of the Russians? This is nonsense.