Is «Tedious Propaganda» a Redundancy?

Read­ing books that only make points I already agreed with is tedious. So yeah, yeah, Bush lied, peo­ple died, what­ev­er. Show me some­thing new already.

I have a prob­lem with this kind of book. It is not intend­ed to con­vince any­one of any­thing, but mere­ly to pro­vide sound­bite-lev­el evi­dence for peo­ple who already believe one thing to use to sup­port their views. This book does­n’t chal­lenge any­one to reex­am­ine their beliefs, it sim­ply ral­lies around a point of view and declares itself fac­tu­al­ly and moral­ly superior.

The sad thing is that many of the facts in this book are valu­able, but no one who might be swayed would ever have picked it up. Chant­i­ng «Bush lied» does­n’t do any­where near as much as point­ing to specifics. He claimed that the UN had made cer­tain dec­la­ra­tions that it had not, he point­ed at evi­dence that was known to be fal­si­fied two years before he pre­sent­ed it as com­pelling. It’s impor­tant for peo­ple to see these sorts of pat­terns of decep­tion. Sell­ing this infor­ma­tion in a book whose title and cov­er will send the hawks to the book-burn­ing ral­lies and not to their arm­chairs (to read) is poor strat­e­gy indeed.

Yawn. Well, I slogged through it. I think now that I’ve read it, it’s going to the used book store. No point in keep­ing it around if it’s this use­less for learning.