How about when I get a chance, I'll start a new thread with my thoughts about how the world is changing and our ideas about government probably should change too?
I would be very interested in what you, and others, have to say.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Currently, the majority of people that are above voting age grew up without the internet. They had one, maybe two sources of their news at their fingertips at the most, and didn't really have an opportunity to look elsewhere. It was much easier for them to be deliberately misinformed. We still have plenty of mis-information and apathy in the younger generations, of course, but with everything that's going on now, I think a lot of people are waking up. It may just be the area I live in, however.Quite frankly, I'm of the opinion that the Internet has increased disinformation, not lessened it. The ease of communication has led rise to far more noise than signal. I would say that the average person is a lot less informed about government these days than they were in the '60's, or even the '30's.
Agreed.
Information is readily available on the internet, but from what I have seen as a TA in college as well as someone who spends time on the internet is that many people are not able to evaluate the quality of that information. No matter how crazy, ill-informed or extreme your views are, somewhere there are news blogs and forums which agree with you. It used to be that you would generally have to go out of your way to find that sort of support, and most of the information people had access to was via television or newspapers/magazines.
People can freely chose their own reality, no matter how illogical it happens to be.
People can freely chose their own reality, no matter how illogical it happens to be.
I love those choose your own reality adventures.
.Who is the enemy?
A. Iranian islamofascists!
B. Jews control the world!
- You've selected Iranian islamofascists!
What should we do about them?
A. Stop all contact with the outside world so they'll leave us alone!
B. Bomb them! That's what we have nukes for!
-and so on.
Ahhh good times.
Its like the rule 34 of whacko conspiracy theories...
Get the B-52s ready. It's time to open up a can of instant sunshine.
Bah. It is far better to have information you can trawl through, than to have the government megaphone only. Those of us who grew up with the government megaphone aren't used to handle s+$+loads of information, most of which is not true, and claim that "it's all just noise". Kids today are far, far better than we ever were at sifting information right out of school. It's a tempting idea to say "apres nous, la deluge", but that doesn't make it so. We are not the be-all and end-all of knowledge. As always, humanity adapts, and the world goes on. One day, they'll be thinking things like "why did anyone ever pay money to listen to what the government was saying???"
People can freely chose their own reality, no matter how illogical it happens to be.
Vive le Galt!!!
You know how hard it used to be to find good, commie commentary? You'd have to write letters to all kinds of dudes and get added to newsletter subscription lists and whatnot. Now it's just a mouseclick away! Hurray!
International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
Internationalist Group
Committee for a Worker's International
International Socialist Organization
Counterpunch (Nice eulogy for Alexander Cockburn here)
Counterfire
Monthly Review
The North Star
The Unrepentant Marxist
Black Agenda Report
Lenin's Tomb
Communist Party of Great Britain
Naked Capitalism
Marxists Internet Archive
For starters...
I wonder if you are CIA funded.
In all probability a majority.
Well, I've been a member of three of those groups, and if they were CIA-funded, I never got to share in the largesse. :(
They used to give people amphetamines, didn't they?
I don't know about that, but they certainly hooked up a bunch of dudes with LSD back in the day.
(Hint, hint. If you could let the CIA dudes know, NSA dudes, I'd be much obliged.)
Presumably you're talking about MK Ultra.
Supposedly there was also use of psychotropics to create "programmable" assassins who would pull off a job then immediately forget they'd done it; the perfect agent. Allegedly, one of these men was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Normally I wouldn't give credence to that sort of thing, but it was written about in a book by a Marine buddy of Oswald's who was stationed with him in Okinawa, and so the story was was purportedly directly from the horse's mouth.
The book was written in 1962. The whole book was later classified (or whatever, "de-published") as part of the Warren Commission investigation. It's called Idle Warriors.
The writer was Kerry Thornley, who went on to write the Principia Discordia.
Well, apparently, there was a bit more than a book. 20.000 pages of documentation were declassified in 1977 after a FOIA, the rest had been destroyed by the director of the program when Watergate happened. There was a full range of senate hearings, the supreme court got involved. All in all, the crap left a pretty big paper trail. And when all was said and done, it was just as horrible as its reputation. As I understand it, anyway.
MK ultra is one of those "this is way too BLEEPED up it has to be fake" things that is incredibly real and incredibly well documented.
One of the things they found, ironically enough, was that lsd made you LESS susceptible to interrogation.
Nonsense! It was all a commie plot to make us look evil so that our employees would rise up against us!
I think MKULTRA may be one of the reasons there is such a readiness to suspect truly foul play from the government and its agencies in the US. After all, this one was beyond anything people could have suspected, and it all got out in the open. Such things leave tracks. Yes... in the fifties and sixties, people looking for horror searched for mothmen and bigfeet. After MKULTRA, that felt kind of uninspiring.
The mythological "People" are the ones who voted the people into office we have now.
No, I'm pretty sure politicians fall out of the sky. Or possibly they pass through a membrane from another reality. No way they are voted into office by the same American society that produced them in the first place.
Celebrity recipients of CIA acid:
--Ken Kesey, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, invented hippiedom.
--Robert Hunter, wrote "Dark Star" and many other tunez beloved by Comrade Meatrace.
--Whitey Bulger, flooded South Boston with heroin, sociopathic killer and mob boss.
Well, two out of three ain't bad.
Celebrity recipients of CIA acid:
--Ken Kesey, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, invented hippiedom.
--Robert Hunter, wrote "Dark Star" and many other tunez beloved by Comrade Meatrace.
--Whitey Bulger, flooded South Boston with heroin, sociopathic killer and mob boss.
Well, two out of three ain't bad.
Was that the same project that messed with the unibombers head or was that a seperate project?
I don't know. He didn't show up in any books about the Grateful Dead, sixties counterculture or the Boston mob, though.
Yeah for 200 bucks.
The mythological "People" are the ones who voted the people into office we have now.No, I'm pretty sure politicians fall out of the sky. Or possibly they pass through a membrane from another reality. No way they are voted into office by the same American society that produced them in the first place.
Nope, politicians are Flatlanders. You notice they never turn sideways in front of us? It's 'cause they're only 2D polygons. Why else do the seem to have such poor comprehension of how "Spaceland" really works?
Celebrity recipients of CIA acid:
--Ken Kesey, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, invented hippiedom.
--Robert Hunter, wrote "Dark Star" and many other tunez beloved by Comrade Meatrace.
--Whitey Bulger, flooded South Boston with heroin, sociopathic killer and mob boss.
Well, two out of three ain't bad.
At one point in the large 50s/early 60s, illicit LSD dosing was an occupational hazard of working for the CIA...or anywhere a CIA employee might happen to have access. I read about half of what seemed like a pretty competent history of the affair a decade or so ago, but then they started riffing Thomas Kuhn a bit too much for my tolerance so I dropped it and read something else.
But you know how a lot of the original OSS and CIA guys got recruited out of frat houses? It shows. They pretty clearly thought LSD was hilarious and proceeded from there. That they probably screwed up at least one guy badly enough that he jumped out of a window didn't enter into it because, well, killing people is kind of a bonus in any CIA operation.
The guy that "jumped out a window" had the back of his skull bashed in before the fall.
Nope, politicians are Flatlanders. You notice they never turn sideways in front of us? It's 'cause they're only 2D polygons. Why else do the seem to have such poor comprehension of how "Spaceland" really works?
One of my favorite books!
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
The guy that "jumped out a window" had the back of his skull bashed in before the fall.
By CIA standards, that's practically consensual.
The guy that "jumped out a window" had the back of his skull bashed in before the fall.By CIA standards, that's practically consensual.
There was no second window on the grassy knoll gnoll.
All in all, I would say everyone has a pretty darn good reason to shun the CIA, as well as those who cooperate with them. In Sweden, we even had one high-up politician ask the CIA for assistance in winning the 2006 election - which got out through Cablegate. His message was "The Social Democrats are a political party completely without visions. If the CIA were to help us win the election, this means there would be nothing preventing us from pushing through whatever reforms the CIA wanted". This is the SAME guy who instituted the UN council on human rights, that was more or less from the start dominated by the worst human rights offenders, and shot the UN:s work on human rights to pieces, btw.