LOL, woops!
This is how the State operates:
Stuff that happens when health care is “free”…
Don’t call regular patients ‘frequent flyers’, doctors told
Neocon-Fox News darling Sarah Palin praises Ron Paul to Sean Hannity. (Perhaps this woman can be useful for something after all.)
“50 percent of workers made less than $26,364 last year”
So someone created one of those meta-animations that you can direct and add audio to, and made it a GOP 2012 debate. There are already dozens of these up. I’ve watched a few, and they’re mostly crap, but at least this one tries. It’s still wrong, but at least it’s on the right track. (One thing I did notice is they all do seem to get Bachmann right on.)
Can you explain how it’s wrong?
@Wheylous: It repeats the “Money as Debt” fallacy, that the Federal Reserve prints more money because it has to. When coupled with the Jekyll Island story, this seems very insidious and conspiratorial but remember that the American public is extremely allergic to believing conspiracies, even true ones. When a “grown-up” such as an economics professor or a finance professional hears someone repeat the Money-as-Debt fallacy, they will quickly correct the error: “Well, sometimes the government needs the Federal Reserve to print money and, when it does, it will order the Fed to print the money so, yes, the Fed has to print money sometimes. However, this is no conspiracy and the government really is in charge of the Federal Reserve just like it is in charge of the Pentagon or anything else in the country. This is all just a lot of hysteria.”
Convincing people to believe the right things for the wrong reasons can be an effective method of preventing them from believing the right things for the right reasons. When those wrong reasons are eventually debunked, their belief in the right things will also be “corrected.” There can be no doubt that the central bankers would prefer people to believe that central banking is bad because “all money is debt!” than because “central bankers are enriching themselves and their cronies at the public’s expense simply by printing money.”
Clayton -
Great advice here…
I loved it
We’ve gone from this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWE6seINeoE
To this:
Anyone who doesn’t believe there is an active, adaptive and insidious infiltration of culture by the State apparatus has their eyes firmly shut and their head firmly buried in the sand… or somewhere.
Clayton -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws3yToTP-GM&feature=feedu
This video is absolutely excellent, probably the best little introduction to free markets in our day that I have ever seen.
Also, I’m sure there’s some easy and obvious search that woul bring me to this that currently escapes me, but how to I directly post youtube videos?
I found this funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iKEDNUd0A5s
Neodoxy:
[ view : youtube_link ]
Without the spaces
Nicholas Wapshott on BookTV right now. He seems to be a naive Keynesian. He’s talking about his book, Keynes Hayek…"
If this is real, then I’m quite amazed:
I want to take you on the journey I went with this.
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When I first read that intro sentence and noticed the freeze frame on each video, I figured it was a commentary on how music has degenerated, like “oh the good ol’ days when music was pure and kind, and now we’ve got ‘fuck this’ and ‘my bitch that’”
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Then I played the first video and he started talking about how “policemen are my friends” and how great government is, and I changed my mind and figured the opposite…that it was going to be an illustration as to how views have gotten better, and more critical toward the state (I could easily imagine a hard rock/rap video speaking out against government, and with the freezeframe of the soldier and the song called “warrior”, I figured it would be denouncing the wars and talking about all the lives lost and destroyed.)
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Then the guitar man started getting deeper and deeper…to a point of ridiculousness of “our government is always right and never wrong, our leaders are the finest men and that’s why we elect them again and again”…and the crowd started laughing. I thought it might actually be satire, and not-so-subtle commentary on the crap kids are taught in school…and the second video would be something even more overt…showing that people have gotten more aware and more willing to speak out in anger, as opposed to making cute tongue-in-cheek jokes while for the most part buying into it anyway.
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By the end of the guitar song when he said “war isn’t so bad” and “someday I might get my chance”, I honestly couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be satire anymore or if the indoctrination was so bad that it was supposed to be a serious song…cuz people didn’t laugh at that one. So now I went back to thinking it might be #2 again.
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Then I started the second video and instantly realized it was a promo for the National Guard. The kind of stuff talked about here. That’s when I figured it was showing how much worse it’s gotten, how much more sophisticated the propaganda is now.
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Then I read the comment below the videos and realized it was all supposed to illustrate that the indoctrination has always been there, and is still there.
Definitely sad…but to be fair, that was a paid promo. It’s not like Kid Rock took it upon himself to write up some pro-war song, and do a whole propaganda music video…he was commissioned for the whole gig and just collected a paycheck. …Not to say that some “artists” don’t write pro-military songs, I’m just saying that’s not a completely fair example.
As a sidebar…you just gotta love the scene with the soccer ball where the little Indian children (of course they couldn’t use actual Arab kids, as they would be too “ethnic” looking) had their jovial encounter with the friendly neighborhood military convoy. The Humvee not only stops for the kid to run out of the way, but they actually sit there while a soldier gets out and kicks the ball back. And the frightened children smile. Hell even in the mainstream film Jarhead they ran the kid over knowing that it could easily be an RPG ambush. But if you want a real take go view TheYNC or LiveLeak. We should be showing that shit on network TV.
Napolitano on The Free Market
Interesting explanation:
“A free market is a system of exchange of goods and services that is free from government intervention or interference. […] We don’t have free markets in the United States, but we do have capitalism. The free market and capitalism are not the same thing. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, and the use of such to turn a profit. A free market operates under capitalist principles, but capitalism does not necessarily require, or as we know even prefer a truly free market. There are all kinds of capitalism that don’t rely on a free market.”
Not entirely the way I would put it, but not bad.
@JJ: Awesome, I was hoping it’d have that effect. Note that I think Tom Paxton’s What I Learned in School Today (covered here by Pete Seeger) is definitely a “fuck you” to the Establishment, pure and simple. I can cut Kid Rock personally some slack on the fact that it’s a promo but this is actually pretty much what qualifies as “cool” music on MTV, consider Drowning Pool’s Soldiers which was not written as a recruitment promo. They did get paid by the USO but they voluntarily signed up to do the gig and write the song.
But there is also something more to it, and that is that the nature of popular music itself is, in fact, changing. Folk music originates in people just getting together to dance, drink, eat, sing and have fun at shindigs or on their front porch with family and friends. The Top 40 station originates in something else, not this. Folk music represents a purely voluntary culture, it is people just coming together for the hell of it. I don’t think modern tastes in popular in music are unaffected by the State.
For example, angst is one of the staples of “modern” popular music. Where is the angst in Paxton’s song? He’s verbally flaying the Establishment, but there’s no angst. The song’s tone is more like “it’s totally fucking retarded that we’re telling our kids this crap and y’all teachers are a bunch of mindless zombie parrots, so yeehaw!” He doesn’t go into self-doubt and nihilistic rage about it, he has the calm confidence that stupidity is a self-curing disease and in the meantime, he’s going to have a kick-ass time singing and having fun!
I’ve been listening more closely to the Top-40 station for the last couple years and there are tons of cues from the Establishment in those lyrics. I feel like I’m doing surveillance on the Power Elites when I analyze the lyrics. Take Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night” for example… in the first few seconds of the song she says, “Pictures of last night ended up online, I’m screwed. Oh well.” I think that’s a very significant line… the Establishment is constantly baiting the less-civilized, bourgeois children of the upwardly-mobile middle class to compromise and, hence, marginalize themselves. Or, take that song “Fly, like a G6”… what the hell is a G6? I had to look it up online, I thought it would be some kind of foreign import… turns out it’s a Pontiac of all things! And they’re singing “like a G6” like it’s something to be proud of driving! Note that this song came out right after the Feds took on GM… so, go do the math on how tight the relationship between the music industry magnates and DC really is.
These “anti-establishment” sissies today wouldn’t know anti-establishment if it bit them in the ass… now this is anti-establishment and was a total “fuck you” to the establishment:
Clayton -
I know that fans of anything are also fans of hasty generalizations that use fresh small pieces of evidence to hold up larger theories, but I have to break it to you (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_G6):
Some believed it to be a reference to the Pontiac G6,[2] however, Kev Nish clarified that the G6 reference is to an airplane