It is typical principle-shirking, each-way hedging.

“Just to be clear, businessmen are human — although the lords of finance have a tendency to forget that — and they make money-losing mistakes all the time. That in itself is no reason for the government to get involved.”

Having tried to secure the high intellectual ground, Krugman then proceeds to make an irrational special case for banks.  This defies logic.  The banks are only given special treatment because the public cannot bear the pain of NOT bailing them out.  Governments and voters are too greedy and weak to watch then fail.  And an attempt to justify this by manufacturing a spurious reason for intervention represents the biggest lie of all.

We don’t let business fail because we want to – it’s just an unavoidable reality, from the corner store right through to multi-national investment banks.

It is true governments act and make decisions, but only up to a point (that point being the real End of History).  American exceptionalism is founded on a pragmatic illusion, complete conviction in the idea government can “do things” and solve problems.  While Americans, on the whole, have consented to this for over 200 years, the truth is now coming home to roost.  Government was created to facilitate the idea of individual freedom – and nothing else.  It has built a base in the interim by pretending it has innate power, but cannot achieve the final step because actions and decisions must ultimately be made freely by the individual, not the collective.

Vetocracy, a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all, is the subconscious manifestation of this reality, the answering of Jefferson’s misgivings: “Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others?”  A belief the present paralysis can be fixed by “changes in institutional rules” is the essential problem!

Each side of politics continues to turn to politics for a solution, when the “solution” is a transcendence of legislative and fiscal power.  Democrats can’t deliver this because they are too pretentious, attached to the idea of government and safety nets; while detached, hard-line Republicans/Tea Party try to achieve it by destroying the body politic.  Both sides lack faith in their constituents.  Hence the rising dismay.

Want America to be great again?  Admit government, while necessary, is ultimately useless.

I think men believe we’re on a mission from God to understand why we are here, why there is something rather than nothing. And to achieve this goal we must invest absolutely in the power of reason.

Women are a (perceived) problem for us because they seem to be hardwired to favour intuition over reason, the heart over the head. This is distracting.  Men have the ability to feel but it’s infinite nature is assumed to be a threat, since it can overwhelm reason and lead to “purely emotional” decisions. Politics cannot give primacy to what feels right. Imagine where Western Civilisation would be if Man had followed such a philosophy?!

Having women around can therefore jeopardise Man’s purpose.  Since his quest, should he succeed, benefits women too, he can easily justify control, demanding you stay in kitchen and don’t temp him too much (sex is the greatest destroyer of reason going!).

Yes, America is entering a new era. I think many, especially extremists, feel the window for completing the mission is about to close, so more retrograde measures are required. Such men are too detached to see the damage they are doing or the fact that it may be poor politics.

The cult of PC is such a stain on our culture, clouding logic, convincing otherwise smart people that the shared objectives of society can somehow be realised by policies that presume the worst.

As we already know, but don’t like to admit, the trust and mutual respect desired by us all – in the media and elsewhere – cannot be consciously promoted.  And it cannot be consciously promoted for the simple reason that any attempt to do so only confirms the agitators lack the very attributes they are demanding of others.

While its do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do recommendations are deeply flawed, the Inquiry at least takes the argument back to basics.

The report cites John Stuart Mill’s radical beliefs on free speech.

Mill believed the search for truth to be a process whereby individuals sift through alternative views before applying personal judgement to arrive at what is right.  A healthy society doesn’t attempt to suppress opinions which may turn out to be correct, but rather trusts the market place of ideas to weed out falsehood.

“For Mill, we can never really be sure that the opinion we are trying to prevent is false or an erroneous one, so preventing a person from expressing her views could potentially deprive us of some truth,” said Dr Sarah Sorial to the Inquiry.

“As humans, we are unable to employ a specific method that would guarantee error-free judgment.  The methods of inquiry, analysis and evaluation that constitute rational human thought do not guarantee or generate certainty.”

Illuminating stuff, except Finkelstein and Sorial, like so many media cynics, do not properly work through the implications of such uncertainty, and in doing so ultimately contradict themselves.

If human reason is limited, unable to articulate the truth up front and in literal, black-and-white terms, what, then, is the sense of establishing “a single, properly-funded regulator with the power to enforce news standards across all news media outlets”?

The proposed News Media Council would be an arbiter of the truth, yet it has already been established this is an impossibility, the very reason why we must rely on the cut-and-thrust of the market.

The issue of market failure is a furphy.  Even if it exists, the costs of remedial action are ultimately insufferable, since intervention gives consumers the impression a well-intentioned third party can guarantee the correct result, which of course is a lie.

Finkelstein attempts to secure the high moral and intellectual ground: “What is lacking in Australia is a robust discussion on what institutional mechanisms are necessary to ensure the press adheres to its responsibilities”.

Debate is ineffective because those advancing this question already have their answer formulated, while those wanting to pose the right question are summarily dismissed as vested interests.

There are no institutional mechanisms.  There can be no assurances.  And, in the end, there is no dilemma between free speech and regulation.

The only trade-off is our willingness to go on denying reality.

She’s kinda right and kinda not.

You can’t actually lose silence, only shut it out, displace it with noise.  Nor can you generate silence or even define it.  It’s just there, like zero, as Hazanavicius notes, not nothing – it must be something since it’s the subject of this discussion – yet not something either, as that would contradict its nothingness.

Our modern malaise is about our struggle with this irony and the implication that what matters most cannot be defined or understood.  After a long, bloodied search, we’re miffed at the apparent absurdity of the Silence of existence, a life without complete, ultimate answers. The noise and busyness is our way of coping, though of course it only ends up making it worse.