Posted by Bunny.
E-mail from anonymous moron, with my comments interspersed in green:
Hey Bunny, From your past blogs I noticed that I consistently don't like you. [Please excuse me for not caring.] Your always grouchy. Why are you always grouchy? [I'm not always grouchy. You should see me with ice cream in a cone.] Why so negative? [Since I'm too "negative" for you, perhaps instead you should write to Pinky. She has very good manners and won't actually tell you what a douchebag you are.] Maybe someone forgot to brush you ha ha. [Ha ha... *bored*] So my question is this the Pinky Show is always pointing out what's wrong with the whole wolrd but you don't ever provide solutions to anything. It's a lot harder to come up with a solution and easy to complain. That's what I had to say. [That's not a question but alright...]
Okay, this is something Pinky and I used to disagree on a lot, especially when we first started working on the Pinky Show. We couldn't agree on whether or not at the end of each episode we should include spelled-out "solutions" for people to take away. Pinky's position is that human beings are intelligent and flexible enough to come up with all kinds of possible solutions; my position is that there's a lot of stupid people out there and it wouldn't hurt to spoon-feed them answers. So we've had many, many conversations and arguments about which way to go.
To make a long story short, basically we agreed to focus more on the process of asking questions (short episodes) or doing structural analyses (longer episodes) without wrapping each episode with a set of "solutions". The rationale for this is that, in general, we think too many people tend to fixate on "solving" problems they don't actually understand. By eliminating or minimizing the solution part, we're hoping to direct more attention towards understanding the nature of problems. So, it is a calculated trade-off. Pinky has a tremendous amount of confidence in people's ability to produce fair and sensible solutions to a problematic situation when the situation is seen for what it really is. (For all you postmodern losers out there asking yourself "But what is really real?" - forget it, you're hopeless) Personally I am less impressed with human beings' track record regarding fairness and logic; I'm more interested in the open nature of Pinky Show episodes because I think that lets it function a little better as a sort of ethical Rorschach test.
Next e-mail, this one from Patricia:
Hi Pinky, I enjoy your show but I am curious why you only criticize America? Why don't you have any episodes about Chinas treatment of Tibet? What about suppression of Buddhist dissent in Myanmar?...
Thanks Patricia, I'll respond to your question even though you weren't talking to me. Simplified answer: 1) Our focus is America because we live here. 2) Because 60% of our viewers are U.S. Americans. 3) The most direct way for us to reduce the total amount of violence circulating globally is to stop/reduce America's contribution to the international violence-economy (unfortunately America is #1 when it comes to cultivating and exporting many forms of violence). Which isn't to say that violence perpetrated in other places is any less worthy of criticism - we're happy to note that there are many others out there criticizing away and I'm sure they'll keep going till the cows come home. For ourselves, our main goal is to tidy up our own house before going over to someone else's house to vacuum, dust-mop, and so on. Not that "we" actually own this house, but that is a whole other can of worms.
End of Bunny Mailbag for today. See you all later.
~B.