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How can the people be to blame when they are intentionally fed information that encourages their reaction rather than their introspection...from people who have considered how to influence opinion?
Originally posted by Jean Paul Zodeaux
People get the government they deserve.
It is the responsibility of every individual to discern what the truth is according the dictates of their own conscience. Regardless of the intent of information or disinformation that is being fed to the people, each individual must accept responsibility for what they ultimately digest.
Originally posted by Jean Paul Zodeaux
reply to post by MemoryShock
How can the people be to blame when they are intentionally fed information that encourages their reaction rather than their introspection...from people who have considered how to influence opinion?
People get the government they deserve.
It is the responsibility of every individual to discern what the truth is according the dictates of their own conscience. Regardless of the intent of information or disinformation that is being fed to the people, each individual must accept responsibility for what they ultimately digest.
Originally posted by MemoryShock
The point of this thread is not to defend Obama. While I do believe the man to be quite intelligent I also believe that he inherited a 'subtle' battlefield that we on ATS rarely discuss because we are in the midst of reactionary behaviour.
Originally posted by alienreality
reply to post by MemoryShock
The Bush's espoused conservative things, but in back rooms they performed progressive things.
Originally posted by Jean Paul Zodeaux
reply to post by MemoryShock
How can the people be to blame when they are intentionally fed information that encourages their reaction rather than their introspection...from people who have considered how to influence opinion?
People get the government they deserve.
It is the responsibility of every individual to discern what the truth is according the dictates of their own conscience. Regardless of the intent of information or disinformation that is being fed to the people, each individual must accept responsibility for what they ultimately digest.
As to the Bush/Obama paradigm, the political war goes beyond these two Presidents, and every Administration for well over a hundred years, and perhaps longer than that, have steadily marched towards a more centralized and powerful federal government, at the expense of states rights, and ultimately at the expense of individual rights.
Even the vaunted Ronald Regan, (among conservatives), truly only paid lip service to conservative values, and while he spoke of a limited government, his own administration was guilty of expanding government, not limiting it.
It is not just money that needs to followed, but the seizure of power. Power is best utilized when evenly spread, and when centralized into a limited amount of people, this becomes not just power, but increasingly absolute power, and as Lord Acton once said; "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
[edit on 3-9-2010 by Jean Paul Zodeaux]
Originally posted by Ian McLean
What's the 'subtle agenda'?
Here's a thought: the power of human creativity is vastly greater than is generally imagined. People create change, and collections of people create great change.
It doesn't matter what system you organize that change within -- capitalism, socialism, anarchy, etc -- any system that allows change, will allow people to express and invoke that change.
But here's the problem: the expression of that change is not self-regulating. Unregulated change in a society is like a monkey scampering up a tree, blindly scrambling for the higher and further branch, regardless of how precarious the situation becomes. Eventually, the branch get too thin and snap! down goes the monkey.
Perhaps societies aren't meant to be stable, by nature. Maybe the natural course is uncontrolled growth in a new direction, followed 99% of the time by disastrous collapse. Maybe nature thinks that 1% of the time when a new meta-stable harmony is reached is worth it.
But that's not what we want from our politicians and leaders. We want stability. We want change and advancement in society, as creative and unchanneled seeming as possible. We want the best of both world, so to speak.
What's that translate to directly? Well, maybe we want everything to be controlled. But, we want to be able to believe that everything is free. Seems like an accurate description of a crypto-fascist agenda, doesn't it?
One thing I do know is that the Bush family bought a sizable chunk of land in Paraguay...during George W. Bush's administration (conflict of interest anyone?)...
Originally posted by Ian McLean
Politicians don't attempt to represent, they attempt to create reality:
Source
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
The alternatives are: 1) find an acknowledged side to believe in, and embrace the offered world-view, 2) enthusiastically analyze the dichotomies that are presented, and be eternally bogged-down in contrived ever-changing detail, or 3) ignore the process all together, and become disenfranchised.
There's no viable fourth alternative. Try and introduce one and you'll immediately be challenged with "well what's your stance on illegal immigration?" and "do you think abortion should be legal?". You can't be on the public stage without acknowledging as real the illusory planks from which that stage is built.
Politics is a tar-baby. Only the anarchists really understand this and offer a logically consistent direction. But they have a solution, only a rejection, which isn't quite a way forward.