The Rawness

Do by any chance sometimes write on other website as Whiskey? You’ve got some interesting stuff here, thanks for sharing it.

This looks like a BBC “The Dossier” program. Is that it?

They do some great work. “The Trap” was fantastic.

Thx.

Do by any chance sometimes write on other website as Whiskey?

Ooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh

Joey, this is by the same guy who created “The Trap,” Adam Curtis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

On second thought, I think I got you mixed up with someone else. Anyway, you have some interesting stuff here, that you obviously put some work into, so thanks.

Totally timely. Knew about Lipmann’s dismal opinion of the masses, but never heard of Bernays, apparently America’s first marketing shrink.

Answers the oft-heard liberal lament “why aren’t people rising up?”

Answers why I’ve felt like an alien most of my life; I’ve always hated being called a “consumer,” and have no respect for those who define themselves by what they buy. We’re awash in this propaganda, and it ruins our little lives. But at least we’re doing the mob thing.

It’s so easy to fall into a cheap conspiratorial frame of mind after listening to one of these, but the need to control the masses is hardly a secret. If you’ve ever read Chomsky, he knows so much about the systems of power and their methods, but he’s got this bordering-on-naive idealism about the ability of people to self govern. He actually thinks anarchy could work.

I think the reason why Bernays isn’t celebrated in America is the same reason we don’t use a slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant as a backdrop for a reality show.

Check out Erich Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom”. should be able to find a PDF online.

T, this is way too much stuff for one post. One could start a whole blog just to address the topic.

( no wonder why so many women are such shallow, consumerist pieces of fluff. They’ve been targeted. )

I’m glad you bring up the conspiratorial thing Joey. I realize when reading my Middle-Class Male posts or these videos, it’s easy to imagine big grand conspiracies going on, but to me I think it’s more a bunch of people from all walks of life looking out for their individual self-interests and what looks like conspiracy is actually the collective effect of all those individual acts. However I think many people see what happens and interpret it as some giant master plan concocted by the powers that be.

Century of Self was one of the best docs I’ve viewed to date (downloaded it off a torrent about 4 years ago). No conspiracies, just manipulation for profit and/or control….human nature.

I’m only halfway through these four vids, but they are SO powerful because I’m 70 and these forces were so real and, well, RAW in my life. “Conform. Have a nice personality. Dress better. Want what the other people want.” I set my jaw and would not.

I’m trying to understand why I’ve been so resistant to all this Fifties stuff but also resistant to the backlash of the Sixties and Seventies. I think it’s because when I was forming, instead of reading kid books, I read novels of the 1900′s — all pitching steady hard work, cooperation, idealism and progress. No world wars yet. The memory of Civil War still alive. And then in 1961 I came to a Montana reservation where people were barely in the industrial age. It diluted the commercialism, didn’t deny bohemianism (left it glamourous) and yet was pretty realistic about how to live. Shovel snow, feed cows, cut hay.

Prairie Mary

“they never questioned the reality”

part 2 ~18 min

The more I watch this the more I see how politics have gone from the meat of actually getting things done, but to using key words likes, liberal, conservative, moral majority etc. thats why people like Limbaugh, Obermann, Oreily and John Stewart, pat robertson and networks like fox news msnbc have become such powerful figures in politics. It has also led politicians to have a greater importance on pr advisors rather than politcial advisors.