Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
Last week ABC News—obviously not clear on the concept—promoted the idea that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made the internet the center of U.S. foreign policy! I hope the ABC News watching public understands that "the center" and "a centerpiece" are very distinctly different concepts. But make no mistake about this, Washington believes that the internet is crucial to modern American jingoism—the promotion of American values and our form of government (corrupt and otherwise ... certainly not the model of representative democracy that the Framers had in mind ... certainly the form that best suits a nation reduced to selling guns and peon-izing its citizens) across the breath and length of this planet.
There is more than just a cynical thread of truth in this notion of the importance of the internet, but Washington in its hubris misses the point that the internet, whatever its sources of funding, is essentially two things: it is democratic to a fair-the-well, and it is fragile.
I shudder when my computer crashes and I imagine millions of computers "crashed" because government has gotten control of the hubs and nodes and closes us down. Absolutist Control is a work in progress in China, of course, and that is the putative model for this notion that ABC has misunderstood. When the internet goes down for political reasons, there is no substitute for what we have evolved over these last twenty years. Commerce will plummet, in fact, there will be a depression, panic, and political upheaval. The internet is extremely important, but there is one thing that it is not.
The democracy of the internet is not a form of government. It is the democracy of three billion voices and ears and eyes. The internet is what we make of it, and sex is what we have made of it. This may speak more to the weird notions we have about the sexual nature of our species, but it is what happened. Sex and political propaganda, then commerce. The American ideal, if you are to read ABC News straightforwardly, is that people have the god-given right to access (and even contribute to) the array of sexual content, the political propaganda, and especially to buy stuff. ABC believes (and maybe Hillary does too) that the motives energizing the internet are "manageable" in the same way that television audiences are "managed" into bogus "reality shows" and news media that express corporate interests. ABC and Hillary may be right, for the facts are that the vast majority of people do not stop to question authority, assertions, or much less the psychology of presentation on TV. Why would they on the Internet?
We come to the conclusion that the "centerpiece" of American outreach to the rest of the world is for the rest of the world to emulate the American way of being docile and managed citizens. The hubris of this idea is astounding, and the possibility that it is accurate utterly horrifying.
Peter Michaelson, a contributor to OpEdNews has an interest analogy to exploit in his article posted there today. He draws on a speech made at Harvard by Solzhenitsyn in which the author not only did not praise the West, but noted that for all our brain power we were not able to see the effect of the captivity of the Russian people under Soviet Communism. The analogy he draws is apt, but not likely to catch on widely. We are as much in the thrall of capitalism as the Stalinists were (and continue to be) in the thrall of Uncle Joe.
A friend told me about "Zeitgeist," the movie/video. She was upset by the message and predictions, but thought that the piece was "connecting a lot of dots" with some of them not appearing to connect all that well. So I watched the whole durned thing ... an hour and fifty-six minutes!
The reason I am posting it at ALP is because it is out there and will be attracting more and more attention. That's the main reason. I think the video is very poorly narrated, replete with illogical leaps and unwarranted conclusions, not to mention sophomoric snarky. I think this is unfortunate, because I believe from my own life experience that much of what is said is true or at least basically true.
Have a go at it. Stop and check out some of the assertions on the web. Listen carefully for the syllogism made up of asserted premises, rather than demostrated facts. Try to disagree; it will be a good experience, believe me!
There have been many articles in various places over the past year about the pitching of campaign speeches toward a predictable emotional response of the voters or, on the other hand, mispitching a political statement and evoking negative emotions, such as Michael Dukakis's remark about what he would want for a person convicted of rape and murder of his wife. He over-intellectualized his answer and brought down his campaign in one fell swoop. ABC News has taken the dichotomous road on this question recently, and it needs to be said that this is not an either-or situation, but rather a matter of common sense versus pedantic philosophizing.
The first thing to understand is that there are no facts that are not involved in emotion. Our brains operate in such a way that virtually every sensory input and certainly every conclusion reached passes through areas of the brain associated (in our meager psychophysiological science) with emotion and motor-emotional activities.
The ABC/Disney so-called docu-drama, "The Path to 9/11," is nothing but pure propaganda. It is a 30 million dollar swift-boating exercise, the largest and most sinister since the run-up to the Spanish-American War. Take a look at Keith Olberman's interview with 9/11 Report Commissioner Benveniste.
Your response to this high-handed Disney mendacity should be obvious. Do not watch ABC, let them know you are not watching ABC, make sure your public schools do not buy this piece of crap yellow journalism as a teaching aid. Sell your Disney stock. Boycott Disney stores at malls. Raise hell with local theaters that show Disney films. Do not go to The Lion King on Broadway. Send emails to every actor in this piece of crap. The whole cast including Harvey Keitel should be ashamed of themselves. Make them pay and pay dearly for this atrocity!
If you look at our current political situation from one of the other eleven planets, Ceres, perhaps, that soon-to-be former planetoid between Mars and Jupiter, our situation begins to make some kind of perverse sense. We need the distance and perspective.
I chose Ceres not because it is named for the goddess of cereal or harvest ceremonies, but because it is spherical, orbits the sun, and next week may become one of the major planets of our solar system, despite the fact that it is really only the largest of the planetoids, very much smaller than our moon, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence, if our moon is the size of this letter O. Not really in the same league with moons much less planets, you see.
In the midst of the world teetering on the edge of a full-fledged conflagration in the middle east, astronomers are arguing about whether Pluto is a planet and probably will keep it, despite the NYT advice to the contrary, thus promoting Ceres and some big iceballs out past Pluto to the status of planets. Redefining Ceres is just one of the latest examples of grown men and women redefining stuff to suit their fancies, rather than the facts. It is part and parcel of the pervasive, pathological TRUTHLESSNESS of our times.
The ABC/Disney so-called docu-drama, "The Path to 9/11," is nothing but pure propaganda. It is a 30 million dollar swift-boating exercise, the largest and most sinister since the run-up to the Spanish-American War. Take a look at 