Pictures at a Lunatics' Exhibition

[arendt]

Pictures at a Lunatics' Exhibition
by arendt

..." 'Bedlam is justly famed as the best Dry Walk in London'....

....the full range of Londoners strolled from door to door, peering in at each window
....to behold whatever spectacle lay within...maniacs carried on furious disputes with
....entities not visibly present, or raved about whatever phant'sy was most on their minds;
....the most animated drew small crowds, which laughed at those rantings of a sexual or
....political nature, and goaded them to further outbursts. A maniac was trying to tell the
....world that Louis XIV was controlling London from a secret aerie atop the dome
....of St. Paul's, employing an army of Jesuits who could, through sorcery, metamorphose
....into gray doves. A young man told him that a whole flock of such doves had been
....sighted entering the cupola of Bedlam through a broken window. This news drove the
....maniac into transports of horror and sent him back to his cell as fast as he could waddle.
....The violent jangling of his chains mixed with the laughter and applause of the onlookers,
....making the gallery too noisy for conversation."

........- Neal Stephenson, "The System of the World"

Science and technology have given us so many wonders! Before there was the corporate media, the public had to travel all the way to lunatic asylums, like Bedlam, in order to entertain itself. But now, the window to the next cell is as close as a flick of the remote clicker. Each cell contains a different theatre of the absurd - something for every taste. Let's take a stroll through this marvelous virtual gallery, pausing at a few of the Pictures in an Exhibition. (The names below are the original ones from the movements of Mussorgsky's tone poem.)


1. Dispute between Children at Play

The idiotic over-reaction of the Boston PD in the case of the Aqua Teen Lite Brites is what made me decide that, finally, American media and government spokesmen have jumped the shark. They are nuts - totally detached from reality.

The media has decided to call this event a "hoax", even though no one intended a hoax. The police have decided to call the event a "felony" (hardly clear which one that might be) and the lite brites a "bomb" (all the components of an IED except the explosives). The police seem to have no informers (lite brites were up for days), no experts in pop culture, no explosive sniffers, and no brains at all. Fatherland Security has announced that there can be no such thing as overreaction when dealing with terrorism. And, CNN has decided to legitimize the claim that some kind of crime was committed by paying a penalty. Everyone knows that CNN got a lot more than a million bucks worth of publicity out of the whole fiasco. So, its not a penalty, its a cut-rate advertising payoff to the Boston PD.

The whole episode was surreal enough to be a sketch on Saturday Night Live.

2. Cattle

"The housing market is experiencing a mild correction." How much longer can the plummeting wreckage of the $11 trillion housing bubble be swept under the carpet? As ARMs reset, more and more people are being pushed out of their over-leveraged homes. Bankruptcy rates have jumped by factors of two or three. Southwest Florida house prices have fallen by close to 50%. The savings rate is at lower levels than in the Great Depression.

The claim that the housing situation is within normal parameters is absurd. Yet, it continues to be promulgated so that banks and real estate swindlers can squeeze the last drop of blood from the suckers.

3. Ballet of the Unhatched Chickens

"Impeachment is off the table". After six years of class warfare, serial incompetence, tax giveaways to the rich, warmongering, massive corruption, the destruction of the Constitution, and three stolen elections, the Democrats are giving Bush and Cheney a clean slate to start the new Congress. The first thing the Senate GOP did in response was to introduce $70 Billion of giveaways to try to kill a minimum wage bill and to filibuster a non-binding resolution on the Iraq War.

The GOP are still firing live ammunition. The Democrats still need a spine transplant. The Democratic leadership is hopelessly compromised by traitors like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. The DLC is still a war-loving fifth column. None of these issues is given any real airtime, except to dismiss it as the ravings of the loony left.

4. The Market at Limoges

As Dick Cheney puts the finishing touches on his joint American-Israeli strike on Iran, the Congress is busy trying to negotiate a metaphorical slap on the wrist for the Iraq debacle to date. The media constantly reminds them not to undercut the troops. Hillary, Edwards, and Joe Lieberman remind us that Iran is dangerous.

Pardon me. We are the ones boxing Iran into a corner over a bunch of obsolete centrifuges that the CIA knows full well are junk, beacuse they arranged for A.Q. Khan to sell them. The world press reports that they keep breaking down. The world press, and French president Chirac, do not think this techno-junk is much more of a threat than Saddams's bogus unmanned aerial vehicles.

The misdirection and misemphasis of the American media on the Iraq/Iran situation is a total dereliction of duty. It is a replay of the WMD lies that led to the equally criminal war on Iraq. When they put the war criminals on trial, I want to see the heads of the corporate media in the dock along with Cheney and Rumsfeld.

5. The Hut of Baba Yaga, the witch

When the California blogger, Spocko, had the cleverness to tape the on-air racist comments of KFSO radio personalities (such as Lee "stomp his guts out" Rodgers) and play the tapes to the advertisers for the show, the station tried to shut him down. It took the likes of the Electronic Freedom Foundation to set the record straight about freedom of speech. (" Spocko didn't do anything that millions of bloggers don't do every day: post commentary alongside slices of copyrighted material...This is prototypical fair use of copyrighted material,")

The corporate media respect no freedom but the freedom of money to speak whatever lies it pleases. Their "integrity" is a sick joke.

----

The only difference between today's America and the Soviet Union is that the crap the corporate media publishes is not the official party line of the state, with government sanctions and interrogations for unbelievers. But, such penalties are not far off, if Spocko, the Dixie Chicks, and Bill Maher are any indication.

We have been around this loop many times before in the past six years of lunacy: Bizarro World, Faux News, the reality-based community, the inconvenient truth. But, this time around I simply cannot stomach any more of it. These vicious bastards intend to start another war they can't finish, trash the rest of the U.S. government and Bill of Rights, loot what little remains of a middle class, and impose a police state where a teddy bear in the wrong place is cause for a city-wide lockdown.

Meanwhile the nut cases in the media blather on about irrelevant crap and tell us that black is white when it comes to politics. (Barack Obama is eminently qualified to run for president, you see. How could you think he is a nobody just because he has no national experience? He is, you know, a corporate bootlicker of the first rank. The media is certainly not pumping him and Hillary up in order to frog march us into the next election cycle before anyone has done any governing in this cycle.)

From here on, if I hear someone repeat something ludicrous from the media, I am not going to argue with that person. I'm simply going to laugh my head off and ridicule the person. And that includes anyone who disagrees with this essay. Anyone who buys this stuff is as nuts as the media peddling it. If I have to walk through Bedlam, I am certainly going to appreciate the humor of the situation

[arendt]

1. The page view count of this board makes my case for me...

Snickers ad (thread 1) - 5,500+ views
Snickers ad (thread 2) - 3,000+ views
Other Super Bowl ad - 2,600 views
Prince's three foot penis - 2,000 views

Joe Biden and the word "articulate" - 4,500+ views
Edwards and Gay Marraige - 6,000+ views

Wolf Blitzer's real name - 1,500 views

------------------

These 7 threads are among the top ten at the current time.

I would expect this in a high school cafeteria, not in a serious
political discussion board.

I really think that most people will go anywhere the media
tells them to.

America is so screwed.

arendt

[JeffR]

4. Giving it a K & R, arendt - but I have to disagree

if I'd been scrolling through threads a little earlier, I wouldn't have had time to read the entire post. You're quite right that some ridiculous topics get way too much attention, and some damn good ones don't get nearly enough, but I think you're reading too much into this instance.

In any case, well done.

[arendt]

15. The sum of a lot of instances is the world we live in...

everyone has their breaking point. The point where the constant flood of
deep sociological propaganda, boundary warping, and cognitive dissonance
can't be tolearated any longer.

Having decided to completely discount the corporate media, I am disgusted
by the amount of time spent by DUers in debating pseudo-events that were
exactly designed to produce the kind of wanking that the thousands of
page views indicate is going on here.

I am calling out DU on its slavish placement of the corporate phony issue
du jour in the spotlight. This board should be discussing its own real issues,
its own plans, its own opinions of current events. Not non-events like
Snickers bars and horse farts. Those are COMMERCIALS (as in, for the
benefit of commercial - read corporate - interests).

The general drift away from the serious and into the sensational and titillating
on DU is exactly the effect that all this media garbage is designed to produce.

arendt

[JeffR]

21. Well stated and hard to argue with

Though I still believe DU casts many spotlights on many things.

Sometimes trying to find the meaningful among the dross gets difficult, certainly. It would be helpful if there were a non-event forum where discussions of junk culture and pseudo-news could go. OTOH, I find such topics (sometimes) entertaining, and as the creator of the DUzy Awards, I can probably be fairly accused myself of contributing to clogging up GD with ephemera.
:blush:

[arendt]

22. Hey, good idea: the Psuedo-Event Forum!

Don't compllain. Act.

When I get a minute I will propose it to the moderators.

I am so sick of this Snickers bar BS.

arendt

[mainegreen]

11. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! K'n'R!

[BrewerJohn]

2. This needs a kick, dammit

Already R'd

[puerco-bellies]

3. A good read... and a good reason to venture out of the lounge..

K&R

[JeffR]

5. K & R!

:kick:

[Hissyspit]

6. Millions of people, your friends and mine, who have had perfectly good educations

don't believe in evolution/natural selection.

[arendt]

14. That's another reason why ridicule is more effective than logic . n/t

[passy]

7. The Media is the enemy.

They are the enablers. In every single case for the last couple of decades, the media has constantly had a pro-money right-wing agenda.
They are after all the corporate media. They are a business not a public service like they should be.
They follow an economic and political agenda that is beneficial to the corporate entities that run them and detrimental to us, the general public.
Corporate media now completely dictates the rules of politics and seems squarely out of touch with its audience.
Politicians now worry more about how they are portrayed by the media rather than their policies.
When I mention that the media are enablers, I refer to their role in the destruction of the American society we had all come to believe in.
They perpetuate the American dream while enabling decision-makers who are actively transforming it into a nightmare.
When once people dreamed that through hard work and determination, they could somehow accumulate wealth and influence; now the dream as turned into a nightmare for millions whose only hope is to not fall into the poverty trap.
The media is the opium of the people, we are now more than ever bombarded with impressions. I say impressions because facts have become a rare commodity; just like reality TV we are led to believe that the news aren't staged, picked apart, interpreted to finally become unbiased regurgitated impressions of any given event.
There is not doubt that the corporate media is guilty of deception by omission or bias; they have allowed the most morally corrupt administration to rape the country in order to attain some quaint vision of what they believe America should be.
The rise of the neo-con cabal would have been impossible were it not for the corporate media; their prolonged stint at the helm is again due to the under reporting and uncritical approach to their leadership.
Our anger should be directed at the corporate media as they are the true enemies of democracy. Free speech is an illusion because it only belongs to the ones who have the means of decimating what is being said. The rise of the Internet has empowered a large portion of the population when it comes to free speech. We can only guess what horrors this government would have committed upon us were it not for the vigilance of the internet community as a whole.
Many see 9/11 as the moment everything changed and indeed it has. It is the first event of it's kind that has been so widely discussed and analyzed. Pearl Harbor and the burning of the Reichstag were simply accepted by the people of the time, there was no room for the news analysis or fact finding that the internet now allows.
Had the news media been the same as in the 30's and 40's, the current administration would have found the WMDs, the president himself would have heroically saved hundreds of people from drowning in NO and Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson would be double agents working for Saddam, Osama, Fidel and Hugo's league of international terrorism.
But we the people are starting to know too much, like western radio in the Soviet Union, the internet is allowing us to see beyond the curtain and witness the monster who pulls the strings. The facts are destroying the illusion, the impression that everything is OK, that even though the war we are all called on to cheer is an illegal act and that our inaction is akin to standing ringside and clapping at the beating of Rodney King. Where did the facts go, when did they disappear, why are we not reminded everyday that the administration is guilty of war crimes for starting a pre-emptive war?
Unlike the OP I do not think that the current situation is a laughing matter, although I would clearly be shouting cries of joy if I were to go loose with a sledgehammer inside FOX News' control room destroying the tools of propaganda.

PS: This reminds me of an idea I had for an action against FOX which was to have people just dropping off TV sets in front of their offices.

[arendt]

13. There is a difference between "a laughing matter" and ridicule...

I agree with everything you say except your interpretation about "a laughing matter".

I am not making light of the situation or saying its merely humorous. On the contrary,
I am saying that the only response to someone willfully denying all common sense
and logic, given you don't have the power to lock them up in a loony bin, is to laugh at them.
And laugh as nastily as you can. The media are basically shills telling the moron
majority of the country to run around with their fingers in their ears, shouting "I can't hear you"
about the mess this country is in.

Ridicule is a very effective political tactic. Heaven knows, the GOP started ridiculing liberals
50 years ago, and it certainly hasn't hurt them politically.

----

I am heartened by your take on public awareness of 911, etc. and by your general take
on the Internet. However, the Chinese are leading the way on shutting down politics on
the net without shutting down commerce. And, the new M$ OS, Vista, is loaded with DRM
garbage that is basically snoopware. They are on the verge of neutering the net.

I do like your image of a pile of TVs dumped in front of Faux Noise.

arendt

[passy]

29. I think we are on the same page.

My "no laughing matter" wasn't to contradict your approach, just a reminder of the seriousness of the situation.

[autorank]

28. Agreed and Bookmarked (this reply!)

"Where did the facts go, when did they disappear, why are we not reminded everyday that the administration is guilty of war crimes for starting a pre-emptive war?

Unlike the OP I do not think that the current situation is a laughing matter, although I would clearly be shouting cries of joy if I were to go loose with a sledgehammer inside FOX News' control room destroying the tools of propaganda.

PS: This reminds me of an idea I had for an action against FOX which was to have people just dropping off TV sets in front of their offices."

OK, the facts are on vacation in Haiti. They found a nice air-land package and they're refreshing themselves. They'll appear later this evening. I'll PM you.

And what's this action against FOX...egregious bad taste beyond the call of duty.

They'll just make up some fake news and out do any of us with really good imaginations. But if you've got a surprise, bring it on.

:hi:

[arendt]

31. I had trouble deciphering this post...

1. I am the OP, and I do NOT think the current situation is a laughing matter.
I think the situation is beyond rational argument. All that is left is open
verbal warfare, i.e. ridicule.

2. I understand your reticence to feed the distraction beast of the media.
But, if they turn everything into BS, how can they ever be confronted?

Other than this confusion, I loved "the facts are on vacation in Haiti."

arendt

[annabanana]

8. The media is the window at Bedlam. . and it is a soundproof

window. And the glass is funhouse glass. The visitors do not know that they are the one behind bars.

The internet is the new nervous system, the new eyes and ears of the people. The big question is whether or not the synapses fire and connect fast enough to keep the body from defenestration.

[arendt]

17. The internet as a "body politic" needs a thorough exploration

I have something I wrote ten years ago. But, given the small reception even
this minor rant has garnered, I doubt anyone would bother to read a ten
page thesis that the electronic media has its own Kantian "synthetic a priori".
And that that a priori is deeply biased towards fascism.

Well, I guess I will be checking into a nunnery sometime soon. Intellectualism
is more ridiculed and discounted than ever in America. Who wants to think
when you can cheer for contestants on American Idol?

Thanks for reading my stuff. It saves what little sanity I have left.

arendt

[annabanana]

20. Sadly, this is not the best medium for serious, lengthy

consideration of complicated concepts. There are many here capable of following your arguments, I have no doubt, and also slower, more deliberate parts of DU than General Discussion...

(I have the feeling that the earth, as an organism, hasn't quite reached the threshold that would insure existence much farther into the future.)

[arendt]

23. Fair point. GD is not the best. But this isn't BN, and not really GD:P material...

But, if I put it in the Media Forum, my audience goes down by a factor
of 100.

What is a person to do?

arendt

[annabanana]

35. What is a person to do?

Well...I would say...KICK!

[motocicleta]

9. That has been my MO for a while

I have given up with the sheep sucking the corporate media line - they appear to my eyes as they are, drugged, injured victims of foul play. For now, the only remedy I can find is ridicule. I think the shock of that is sometimes enough to wake them up - "What? You're laughing at me? But I believe the same as the rest of the sheep. How could I be wrong?"

K n R

[annabanana]

10. kick. . . . with a little aggro...

(Iff'n ya nominate, ya should kick too.)

[hamerfan]

12. K & R!

Beautifully written, arendt. Reading this type of post is the reason I come to DU. Just wish I could arrange my thoughts as well, but this post is the truth. K & R! Thanks for taking the time and trouble to post this.

:kick:
dumpbush

[Solly Mack]

16. !

Thank you!!!

[porphyrian]

18. They'll say you're the one who's crazy. - n/t

[arendt]

19. A kick to keep up with the Snickers bar and Prince's penis n/t

[donsu]

24. agree and kick -

there is remedy

but there is no one to administer the remedy

so the madness will continue

[scarletwoman]

25. Arendt, I've always thought of you as the finest mind on DU. I'm thrilled to see a post by you.

Your excellent piece of writing is painfully on the mark. I cannot add a thing to what you've written; all I can say is, yes, you speak the truth.

For all the threads about the coming war on Iran that I have desperately tried to keep kicked up for months against the overwhelming waves of useless chatter over the shiny object of the day, you speak for me.

Many thanks.

sw

[arendt]

27. "the shiny object of the day" - dead on target...

its unbelievable how DISTRACTABLE DU has become.

There are only two issues, all the rest are irrelevant:


FOREIGN POLICY
1. Stop the wars and all the covert ops.

DOMESTIC POLITICS
2. Reform voting machines and campaign finance.

We have about a year to do all this, or one of two
things will happen:

1. There won't ever be another election because of an
Iran War and Martial Law.

or

2. There will be an election, but it will be a total
fraud, with candidates dictated by the corporations and
results manufactured by the voting machine companies.

-----

My blood boils as I watch supposedly politically literate
people waste their time on the SOOTD.

Thanks for your kind words.

arendt

[scarletwoman]

33. I feel the same as you -- that there are only two issues, and all else is irrelevant.

However, the 2004 primary season disabused me of any notion that DU was a haven for political literacy. That the 2008 primary has already become, in the midst of a looming nuclear attack on Iran, one of the favored topics of debate, simply reconfirms it.

It's mostly just an online coffee clutch, with a notably serious-minded and politically astute minority, struggling to make themselves heard above the din of the dilettantes' chatter.

I think of DU as really just a microcosm of the shallow, overfed, narcissistic and easily distracted citizenry of a country that purports to be a free democracy.

One does what one can, fully knowing that it will most likely never be enough at this late stage in the deluded imperium we know as the United States.

sw

[arendt]

34. I grant that the 2004 election was a politico-geek fest on DU...

which should have shown me the true median level of sophistication here.

However, at that time, I felt it was important not to slag enthusiastic
people just because they rooted for a no-chance candidate.

Now, as these naive folk happily accept the "let's begin the 2008 campaign right now"
lead of the corporate lunatics, I see that I was overly indulgent.

It seemed to me that the main boards started getting many fewer responses
(and extremely few thoughtful, as opposed to one line, responses) about
a year ago. I just started to notice how long threads posted in GD-P
stayed on the first page.

So, I feel simultaneously that the volume of posts has gone down, while
the volume of stupid one liners have gone up.

----

Thinking out loud:

What is scary is that DU purports to attract serious Democratic political
groupies. It only has a registration of 100,000. If, as you suggest, only
a small percent of them - say 5% - are sophisticated, it implies that there
are only O<5,000> serious and sophisticated people behind the whole Democratic
Party in the U.S. By O<5000> I mean, on the order of 5,000. You could multiply
that number by the number of serious Democratic BB (as opposed to blogs). But,
I doubt there are more than 10 such BBs.

Even max, that says there are only 50,000 smart folks out of 150,000,000
registered U.S. voters. That is 0.03% of the country or 3 people in 10,000.

If these numbers are even close, we are doomed. Because the other side is
already paying for more than 50,000 lobbyists.

I'm not sure what's worse: that there aren't enough sophisticated folk or
that there are, but they sure aren't at DU.

arendt

[scarletwoman]

37. 3 people in 10,000 sounds like a reasonable estimate to me -- maybe even high.

It's obvious to me that the number MUST be low, or else how would we have ended up with such a corrupt and degraded political system?

Some years ago I read something -- can't for the life of me remember where it was, who wrote it, or even what the main subject matter was -- that had one small bit that stuck in my mind ever after.

That bit was this: for a society to change/evolve it needs at least 10% of its members to provide the impetus, the leading edge of that change. To put it another way, all it takes to shift the social paradigm is for just 10% of the population to embrace that shift. If one mind in ten provides fertile ground for the new idea, the other nine minds will be pulled along.

This could be complete hogwash, I really don't know. It's just something that really struck me and I've thought about it ever since. And it does seem quite reasonable to me that if just 10% of our fellow citizens woke up and realized that the status quo is unacceptable, the status quo WOULD change.

At first I found this idea cause for hope; just 10%! That's doable isn't it? It's better odds than any election! It's better odds than the pitiful 40% or so of the eligible people in the U.S. who bother to vote! Doesn't have to be a majority! Doesn't even have to be 1/4 of the people! Just TEN PERCENT!

However, after 5 1/2 years of observing the declining signal to noise ratio on DU as its membership has grown, I have come to realize just how nearly unattainable that 10% number of paradigm shifters probably is. Sadly, I think we truly are "doomed", as you said.

Not that I won't keep screaming "Wake UP!" -- a person has to do something to keep from going crazy...

sw

[arendt]

39. I hear you. Believe me, I hear you

At this point, it seems to me highly improbable that the U.S. survived for two plus centuries
as a democratic republic.

It seems that, at the moment, at least 40% of the population would be happy if the Rapture
happened soon. Most of the politicians are whoring for corporations. Anyone with any
convictions is either marginalized or under assault.

You don't need 10%. You just need to control the media. Because if you control the media,
at least 75% of the population will come along with you.

But what the media is is up for grabs. The Internet offers an honest alternative to the loathsome,
manufactured conformity and lies of the corporate media. But, even here, we are inundated
with people mesmerized by the SOODT. (One thing I got from this thread is that I will press
the moderators to move crap like Snickers bars to a forum with a name that causes some
critical thinking about what is really important.)

When human societies reach crisis points, the outcomes are highly non-linear. I don't know
if it takes 1% or 10% to flip us into another mode. But I know that the majority just tend to go
along, unless their vital interests are threatened.

The Bush Gang has been very clever. They have borrowed to hide our economic distress.
They have avoided the draft to hide our military distress. They have locked down the media
to hide any dissent. America may as well be in a political version of a sensory deprivation
tank. They go along with the massive militarization of our society, the suppression of
democracy, the supremacy of corporations.

Unless we can get the facts to move people, it is over. And, we have a test case right here
on DU. Maybe the most important thing to do is to call bullshit on all the corporate nonsense
that gets commented upon. Just say the poster belongs in a loony bin.

I'm trying to be positive here. Believe me.

Thanks for sticking with this.

arendt

[scarletwoman]

40. "Unless we can get the facts to move people, it is over." The problem is, facts DON'T move people.

That is, very FEW people are moved by facts (but that wouldn't fit in the subject line).

Being "moved" implies an emotional reaction, not an intellectual reaction -- particularily in this lizard brain-stimulated society (I WANT! I FEAR! I HATE! MUST PROTECT! MUST SURVIVE!) where everyone born after the television age took hold has been entrained nearly from birth to respond to simulations of reality rather than to reality itself, along with nonstop appeals to ego, desire and fear.

And for whatever reason, intelligence in our society has historically been suspect and subject to mockery. My own childhood was filled with taunts from my peers for being an "egghead" (along with dire warnings from my mother that boys would never like a girl who was smarter than they -- I grew up in the 50s).

All of which is to say that efforts to "move" people with facts (which involve and invoke the realm of the intellect rather than the emotional realm) is an exercise in frustration at best. (Just to be clear, I'm referring to U.S. society in general, not DU.)

So, yes, the media is THE problem on any number of levels. But as we see here on DU, even access to alternative media does not overcome the entrained fascination with shiny objects. In fact, it often appears to merely amplify the shiny object effect.

I do love the idea of a SOOTD (thanks for the acronym!) forum, it will be interesting to see if such a forum would be opened here. It would certainly ameliorate the crowding out of serious discussion in GD. I myself have begged for a separate forum dedicated to Iraq/Iran war discussion -- alas, thus far for naught.

Btw, I not only believe that you are "trying to be positive", I sincerely admire your perserverence. I have, perhaps irretrievably, lapsed into pessimistic cynicism, myself -- but not yet to point of total silence, so I suppose some ember of hope still glows fitfully in my weary heart.

And my heart has been made less weary by sharing this conversation with you. Many thanks.

sw

[hamerfan]

42. Another SOOTD Forum vote here

And, of course, a :kick:
dumpbush

PS... The main problem with the SOOTD Forum would be that the people it's most intended for would be unable to realize it.

[arendt]

43. The moderators can push stuff there, the way they manage LBN...

I will propose that the moderators of GD and GD-P be given the power to
designate a thread as SOOTD, and move it to that forum.

Maybe if you kept having your threads moved to the morons forum you
might get a clue.

arendt

[scarletwoman]

26. Another kick -- let those who have the ears to hear, hear this.... (nt)

[GoneOffShore]

30. Thank you -

And especially for the analysis of the thread count.

I've managed to avoid the Snickers threat(sic), because I didn't see the ad - until today, because curiosity got the better of me (It was damned funny, IMHO!).

Also avoided the other threads you mentioned, not having seen the StuporBowl(sic), except for the Biden fiasco - and I read the NYT on that. Far better commentary and analysis than anything posted here and it only took 10 minutes of my time.

Hey Skinner - can we get a "Media Bullshit Forum" where all these "Fluff" threads can go?

:kick:

[arendt]

32. Okay, another vote for a "media bs forum", aka "psuedo-event forum" n/t

[orpupilofnature57]

36. Marshal McLuhan ,said there'd be days like this.

http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html

[scarletwoman]

38. Time for a kick... (nt)

[NuttyFluffers]

41. i said the world was mad, the world said i was mad. and dammit, they outvoted me.

:)

wanna share this box o' crayons and draw on our cell while we wait for the world to go to hell in a handbasket?

[arendt]

44. Like Alan Bates in "King of Hearts"? It is a tempting thought. n/t

[arendt]

45. I started a thread asking the moderators for a SOOTD forum...

Its up at:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x146380

If you care, please comment in that thread.

Thank you,

arendt

[hamerfan]

47. Kicking this for good info! n/t

:kick:
dumpbush

[Jcrowley]

46. Kicking

Bread and circus in never-never land

[Robbien]

48. This is one great essay

and I almost missed it.

Great work.

[JackRiddler]

49. kick

x

[PhilipShore]

50. Please be aware that militarism is, and has been a politically incorrect topic...

I am aware of your frustrations, but the majority of people in this country have been ignoring the dangers of technology in the modern world, since the beginning of the atomic bomb. As a pacifist and liberal--- I of course find the topic of interest, but the ordinary sheep don't care.

I personally think that all of our present problems in the world --- are the result of mans inability to address the dangers of technology, in the modern world and militarism. But if you ask the average person: what is your opinion of Military-Industrial-Complex? --- they would respond is that not where soldiers go to train to be soldiers?

The only way to fix the problem is to un brainwash the sheeple, and a person or group of people such as Democrats, Republicans, Naderites, etc., cannot be un brainwashed unless they want to be.

They have to want to face reality --- before you will be able to discuss with them: the reality of the dangers that our world is in, etc.

[Clark2008]

51. Bravo!

(And, just so you know, I haven't looked at more than half of the top threads you site in your second post! Yea for me!!)

K & R'ed.

:kick: