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Chris Hedges would make an awesome guillotine salesman.

*promote first, quality later

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"Well, we’re talking about the death of a free press, the death of a civil society. This is far beyond a reasonable debate. We make the East German Stasi state look like the Boy Scouts. And if we don’t wrest back this power for privacy, for the capacity to investigate what our power elite is doing, I think we can essentially say our democracy has been snuffed out." - Chris Hedges

Honestly, I find Chris Hedges kind of one sided as well. Usually his insights aren't very deep. He's all knee-jerk leftyism.

As much as I like Chris Hedges, I think he is wrong on Al Awlaki, considering that a) AA was a top ranking Al Queda leader who planned attacks on innocent civilians, b) Yemen refused to extradite him and c) Yemen refused to allow a land capture. Killing him was much preferable to allowing him to kill innocents, and because of Yemen's refusal to cooperate, it was the best option on the table. Most of the people who complain about this issue leave out the context.

Vetoing the 2012 NDAA would have held up the military budget and would not have stopped the detention clause. It was a lose/lose game of political chicken and Obama chose pragmatism over idealism.

Obama has greatly helped the country by creating a healthcare program, by passing stimulus, by using quantitative easing to keep the recession from going depression, by ramping down military operations in the middle east, by favoring diplomacy over sabre rattling in Iran.

As far as promises go, he has kept (or at least attempted to keep to the best of his ability) most of his big promises, like ending combat in Iraq, creating a health care system, ending the use of torture, putting needed financial regulations into place, restricting warrantless wiretaps, ending denial of health coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and signing an executive order to shut down Gitmo. Congress blocked his order to shut down Gitmo, which means the timetable is dependent on getting Republicans out of congress this November. Contrary to popular belief the executive branch is not all powerful. I know you don't like Obama, but can you at least admit these are positive changes for the better that would not have happened under a McCain or Romney administration? What were the broken promises you were talking about?

I love intellectuals like Chomsky and Chris Hedges and respect their criticisms of Obama. I think it would be much more productive to be informed by intellectuals, rather than slumming it in the right libertarian gutter. This video is just as frivolous as the Jackson video, if not morso.

I wish Obama was could be more progressive too, but that isn't going to happen in a conservative country where big business and the military industrial complex wield as much power as they do. We need both idealism and pragmatism if we are going to make progress. The country is far from how I'd like it to be, but I am happy that Obama is moving us in the right direction.

This is all good fodder for discussion, but it is clear from the dishonest way in which this video was put together that the Kochs are more interested in creating a political hit piece than fostering any kind of discussion.

They claim Obama signed an executive order to kill American citizens, but they provide no context and erroneously use the plural (citizens) when in actuality it's just one guy. I'm not sure if it could have been avoided. I'm not sure how many lives it saved, if any. I'm not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing. In context, it exists in a very debatable grey area. But we see no attempt to understand any of this in this sanctimonious sermon.

As far as NDAA, it was not a bill designed to indefinitely detain prisoners, it was, (is) an annual military budget bill. John McCain attached a rider to the 2012 NDAA that allows for indefinite detention, for reasons I don't understand, because indefinite detention was already permissible under other existing clauses. Obama asked for it to be removed, but no action was taken, and it was voted in with a veto proof majority.

As to why the court case was appealed, I don't know. It might have something to do with Obama's executive order to shut down Guantanemo and provide trials for the prisoners. Congress vetoed the order by prohibiting funds to try the prisoners, leaving them in a kind of limbo. Does this clause give him more time to shut down Gitmo and give trials to the prisoners under a new and improved congress? I don't know. The point is that while it might be fun for the Koch's to drop some provocative soundbites, they do it in a superficial way that does little to further the conversation. If you want depth, read Chris Hedges, who has written some great stuff on the subject.

You could say that Reason is being superficial on purpose to mirror the Jackson video, but none of the videos they produce ever approach any level of depth.

Beyond all that, right wing libertarianism is not a viable alternative to a consensus guy like Obama or even a complete disaster like Romney. They are at the bottom of the barrel as far as our choices go. Their backwards and luddite view of economics disqualifies them from serious consideration from anyone with even a cursory understanding of economics.

Obama has kept his promises of ending combat in Iraq, getting us a healthcare system and signing an executive order to shut down gitmo (even if congress stopped him from doing it). I'd love to elect Noam Chomsky as President, but that's not going to happen, and he probably wouldn't get much done if somehow he were miraculously elected. There are many factions in this country pushing and pulling, and frankly, I can't remember a time when regular citizens had more pull. Change is slow in a democracy.

Emails sent within the last 12h, including notifications concerning this video as recently as 5h ago.>> ^lucky760:

>> ^radx:
... and since yesterday, GMail defined all VS emails as spam. Never happened in more than 55 months.Even emails sent today?
Anyone else finding emails from VS in your spam folder as recently as today?

Thank you for posting this; Chris Hedges is always interesting.

Obligatory Chris Hedges *quality

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>> ^kevingrr:

@ghark
1 - I'm not sure which swipe of Chris Hedges you are referring to. If it is in regard to the Moral Landscape I can only comment that Hedges takes every opportunity to inject himself into the spotlight. Having read the Moral Landscape I can say that the ideas Harris presents CAN be challenged by legitimate thinkers, of which Hedges is not.
Hedges game has been to misrepresent Harris' point of view as written in End of Faith. I would go so far as to call Hedges an all out liar. See my post in this thread:

2 - Where here is Sam blindly racist? He states that acts of terror are more likely to be carried out by young Muslim men than by 5 year old girls or grandmothers.
If I said that black athletes are more likely to be basketball players and white athletes are more likely to be baseball players would that make me racist? Because in terms of professional sports that simply IS the case. Note I am not saying WHY that is the case - I am simply saying it is and the statistics prove it.
As I have said before Sam is not racist, but he is honest about who is most likely to have some bad ideas and he does not like bad ideas.
3. Sam is not a pacifist but he is not a warmonger either. As I listened to the entirety of the interview I noted he had a very nuanced idea of when war, or physical violence of any kind, is justified.
One last link regarding Hedges:
Here


Shouldn't the definition of terrorism (of which there are many) be carefully examined before making that statement? I assume you are using the 'American mainstream media' version, which of course means, an act in which a colored person with a beard tries to inflict injury or death on other (usually white) people. If the definition is not looked at with mainstream-media-tinted spectacles then it would not be a stretch to say that the 105,000+ documented Iraqi civilian casualties since 2003 were caused by American (and allied troops) terrorism. Political and resource motivated civilian slaughter on a massive scale (and on foreign soil) sounds very terrorist-like to me. Using this line of logic, would it not make more statistical sense to worry about young to middle aged white males having access to military training than scanning middle aged Muslim men at airports.

My point is not to blame the US troops, Australian troops were also involved, my point is simply that someone of Harris' intellect should be above the simple fear mongering and use of blatant misleading generalizations that he's demonstrating in this video. He was one of my hero's for a while there, and seeing him for what he truly seems to be leaves me a bit hollow inside.

As far as Hedges goes, he seems to be on the mark most of the time, and is an excellent speaker, however I thought his shots at Harris were pretty poor form (during his book launch) because it just seemed to be a blatant publicity stunt, so I agree with you on that to a degree.

Please take in mind My BS meter couldn't handle more than about 25-30 mins of the video, and as @LukinStone mentions, Harris explains some of his comments in more detail later in the video, I just couldn't make it that far unfortunately. Most of what I was hearing was self-gratification, "a large American city has about a 50% chance of having a nuclear bomb set off in it within the next decade or so", racist comments and some war mongering, there's only so much I can take