Saturday Town Hall - America is dying due to ignorance & brainwashing

[Doctor_J]

My Congressman held a town hall Saturday, and I must say that the brainwashing performed by Hate Radio, Cable "News" (95% Fox) and the rest of Big Media is without a doubt the primary cause of the disaster we're in the middle of. Their minions are the most ignorant group you will ever find outside of the deepest jungles of South America. And the jungle residents don't think they know everything, while the Limbeciles do. People on Social Security and Medicare who want the government out of their lives, people who believe that the Canadian NHS is one step from a National Church, people who think Nancy Pelosi should drive from DC to SF every weekend (and that Repuke Congress don't take planes home), and on and on.

This country will not improve until Big Media is destroyed.

[Ozymanithrax]

1. Big media should be dismantled...

But it isn't going to happen.

[grasswire]

2. my sister is a birther and teabagger

And she is a retired librarian and pretty smart.

Her son-in-law is a very smart police sergeant who is even more right-wing than she is.

And they live in a left-leaning city!

It's nuts out there.

[izquierdista]

5. Mutually exclusive

Very smart and right-wing just don't go together. When I think of very smart, I think of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, both people who used REASON to arrive at a socialist world view. When you dissect the thinking of right-wingers, you see that they have suspended reason and give a variety of excuses for doing so: (1) it is in their economic self-interest to propagate the status quo (e.g. Wm. F. Buckley); (2) unrelenting hate; (3) fear of some other group; and (4)religion. People who are "very smart" are no longer "very smart" when they cease to engage the thinking circuits.

[mopinko]

13. there are a lot of sorts of intelligence.

not all of them relate to figuring out which end it up, and who is full of shit.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. But brainwashing works

One of my brothers turned into a wingnut after he started doing advertising sales for a talk radio station.

[bbgrunt]

23. Wow--I find it really hard to believe that anyone

who worked as a librarian wants to reduce the size of govt. Does she think that it would be better to privatize libraries? If these are the inclinations of people who work in libraries, I say we have us some major intellectual deficits in the stacks.

[Bitwit1234]

3. Something said over and over

and a lot of this reagan is responsible for. He did away with the fairness doctrine and allowed one big company to continue to gobble up smaller ones.

[John Q. Citizen]

11. The Clinton Telecommunications bill exacerbated the problem as well.

[Overseas]

4. Pushing our national dialog to the Right has been a decades long campaign.

It has been very successful, especially with the acquisition and conglomeration of our mass media into right wing hands. Amazing that they can have a 24/7 anti-democratic TV channel these days, and that Rupert Murdoch believed in its mission so much that he lost billions on it before it reached its prominence today.

Eric Alterman's book "What Liberal Media?" provides lots of detail about the many different fronts of this right wing propaganda campaign, from think tanks to lobbying to political support to social PR.

That book takes things from around the 80's, but the right has been fighting back against compassion, social and economic justice much earlier than that. Here's a link to the Powell memo of 1971 that directed corporations on how to resist that pesky social-good stuff.
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html

That's why getting President Obama elected filled me with hope. Made me think there could be a wiser group of younger people who had grown up with intense paid propaganda on TV that might see through the lies.

But the right wing propaganda machinery just cranks up into high gear when we get a Democrat into the White House. We get the likes of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks to catapult the propaganda-- oh, I mean "support genuine grass roots groups."

[Echo In Light]

10. Along w/Alterman's book, I'd recommend the doc film Orwell Rolls in His Grave

What you allude to also describes how the Dem party has been usurped by the RW, with many of the party's registrants culturally indoctrinated into not being able to perceive the obvious.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1925114769515892401

[Overseas]

20. Yes, I have that DVD in my collection.

Watched "The Power of Nightmares" online.

Have "Bush's Brain" also. And the Lee Atwater story. And Manufacturing Consent.

[Echo In Light]

22. With Charles Lewis, and Mark Crispin Miller, Orwell Rolls is essential!

I've seen the others, and then some. Manufacturing Consent is one of the older ones...anyone at all curious as to the how's and why's of the US needs to examine that one. I also recommend this oft overlooked gem which actually outlines the playbook for the phony "war on terror," Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair ... "is the third feature-length documentary produced by the Empowerment Project.
The shadow government of assassins, arms dealers, drug smugglers, former CIA operatives and top US military personnel who were running foreign policy unaccountable to the public, revealing the Reagan/Bush administration's plan to use FEMA to institute martial law and ultimately suspend the Constitution. Strikingly relevant to current events."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8476042566108039966

A lot of insider interviews, documents, Peter Dale Scott, etc

[Overseas]

26. I have an old original VHS of Bill Moyers' "The Secret Government"

about Iran Contra. And have seen the one you refer to.

It is amazing to contemplate all the high crimes I have lived through, hoping for serious change in the future, but just getting a bit less brutal warfare, a bit more social spending, a bit more diplomacy during Democratic administrations.

Yes, I am glad to see any positive changes, but this time I had hoped the Bush Depression and wholesale destruction of our national security would provide more impetus for us to go all FDR again in terms of the Second Bill of Rights. Pull out of the destructive Bush Wars and apply that spending to rebalancing our economy, correcting the abuses of Suck Up Economics (a.k.a. Trickle Down).

Sigh.

[corkhead]

6. Schauer?

I assume that's who you are talking about. He's a good man and has his hands full in this polarized district.

[arcadian]

7. I'm gonna defend the "jungle residents"

Indigenous people know more about their world than Americans or so called "civilized" people know about their's.

[Doctor_J]

17. well said. But their world is small in comparison

But I should not lump them in with the Palinites.

[arcadian]

21. Small in comparison? Hardly...

Can you navigate by the stars? Do you know which trees provide which fruit seasonally and according to how much rain there was last season? Indigenous peoples are way more intimate with the world than we are. And I'd say there range is far greater.

[Echo In Light]

8. _

[Overseas]

27. Beautiful. //nt

[Cerridwen]

9. Ignorant and *proud* of it. That's the part the truly amazes me.

Remember the "dittoheads"? They were proud of not thinking for themselves.

I truly couldn't wrap my head around that.

At the time he hit the national scene, so many people insisted rush was just a joke and nothing to worry about. I wonder how those people feel about that now?

[Uncle Joe]

12. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Doctor_J

[snot]

14. Chomsky laid it all out for us in 1988 in "Manufacturing Consent"; yet

most Dem pols and even DU'er's continue to fail to grasp the magnitude of the problem.

And efforts by conservative forces to gain control over the internet are well underway.

[951-Riverside]

15. America is dying because people have a left wing/right wing mindset

Many people are incapable of thinking rationally if the situation doesn't meet their political views. Years ago, stupidity and anti-intellectualism would be frowned upon but now its exploited and encouraged by the government and these political parties.

This is why people like Sarah Palin are taken seriously because Republicans don't see her for her lack of intellect, they see her party affiliation and you would get the same results with Democrats if she suddenly switched parties.

[Doctor_J]

16. Please name a Dem who's as dumb as Palin, whom the Dems have

welcomed as a Messiah like the Limbeciles adore Sarah.

[Vincardog]

25. Lieberman

[Doctor_J]

28. He's not a Dem, and was never deified by any

He was voted out by CT Dems, and I never remember any women writing about how seeing him on TV aroused them.

Nice try though.

[Echo In Light]

24. It's barely acknowledged since many have zero interest, & no basis for comparison

And it's not like the corp culture in general is going to promote the idea of individual, critic thought, and institutional analysis.

[annabanana]

19. "Limbeciles". . .good word. . .n/t