I’ve been saying it for 20 years. If you want political influence in a democracy, you need to control the media. That’s why I started TPN. That’s why Murdoch is king. Don’t blame the voters. They get their opinions from the media. Don’t blame the politicians. They were chosen by the media to do a particular job. It’s the media. If we want change, we need to control the media. We need to invest in independent media. Not the ABC. Truly independent media. That’s why you don’t want advertising to find your podcasts. That’s why you don’t want VC firms to invest in New Media. That’s why you don’t want Facebook to be the new publishing platform. Those things just subvert the opportunity to wrest control of the future from the rich white psychopaths.
What can you do? You can make the media. Make podcasts. Write blog posts. Write books. Make documentaries. Make comics.
“The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us. The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.”
Nader recently gave some kind of talk to college students. He explains about what’s broken with the US democracy and then details a number of very simple things college students can do about it. Excellent stuff, well worth a listen.
Well it’s officially election time once again in Australia, so pull out your official Politician Personality Disorder Bingo cards and see which politicians match the personality disorders from the DSM-5!
Is ScoMo more Histrionic or Narcissistic?
Is BarJoy more Dependent or Antisocial?
You be the judge! No psychiatric qualifications necessary, as this is the national sport that replaced two-up. Winners will get a free trip to Canberra on May 18 to watch both the winners and the losers put the full force of their disorders on public display. Second place will get a free copy of my book The Psychopath Economy. Fun for all the family!
Since then, The Guardian invited me to write some stuff about the latest series. They edited down my full comments, so here’s the full version:
For fifty years, The Doctor, even in his most pleasant of incarnations, has had a singular trait – he is a psychopath. Not the serial killer type of psychopath, which psychiatrists report are a very small percentage, but the Steve Jobs type. He’s a benign psychopath. He’s a psychopath who, for reasons as yet unknown, has decided to use his intelligence for the benefit of others. And that is a large part of the joy in the character. A quick perusal of the PCL-R test for psychopaths (or what the DSM V might classify as an Antisocial/Psychopathic Personality Disorder) will suggest a list of behaviours that the Doctor definitely exhibits. For a start, he’s a complete narcissist. He always assumes (and insists) he is the smartest person in any room – and with good reason, because he is, of course, correct in that assumption. He has an extreme appetite for risk, always throwing himself (and, often, his companions) into danger, usually with a high degree of confidence that he’ll come out of it unscathed. He doesn’t really understand people or emotions and often needs a human to explain to him what emotions he should be feeling – or, at least, pretend to be feeling. During the Classic era, he would sometimes abandon a companion or other hangers-on without a moment’s thought for what that will do to them.
I was personally very excited to get a female Doctor. I loved Chibnall’s work on BROADCHURCH and hoped he’d cast Olivia Colman as The Doctor. Whittaker was a great second choice. I loved the outfit they chose for her and the overall look. I was very excited when I first saw the “key” teaser and had high hopes that Chibnall would bring the show back to its glory days, feeling like Moffat’s run with Capaldi was huge waste of the latter’s immense talent.
Unfortunately, from the very outset, I felt like Chibnall either doesn’t get the fundamentals of the Doctor’s inherent psychopathy, or has decided to write it out of this regeneration, making her a kinder, gentler, touchy-feely, kid friendly Doctor. Which is fine – he’s the show runner and it’s his prerogative to make the Doctor the way he wants her to be. But after a lifetime of Doctor Who fandom, at nearly 50 years of age, having to justify to my American wife why I continue to watch the show even during the poorly executed episodes (“because when it’s good it makes me cry! – don’t even mention the Van Gogh episode!”), I’ve given up and decided to sit out the rest of the Chibnall era. His Doctor doesn’t talk or act like the Doctor I have been watching since I was a child. She is full of self-doubt, indecisive, and wants a hug. That’s not my Doctor.
