Wow. Never thought I'd hear the same argument coming from Naomi Wolf and Glenn Beck.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Media Matters, Right Wing Shitfaces, Guns, FEMA Prisons, Maniacs' to 'Media Matters, Right Wing, Guns, FEMA Prisons, Maniacs' - edited by quantumushroom

In other news, Obama has a third nipple, rides a broomstick and causes cats to spontaneously implode.

Remind anyone of anything..? (The Crucible, 1996)

The movie is centered around the Salem Massachusetts witch trials of 1692. The movie is based on the play "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller. He also wrote the screen play adaptation. Written by {dfmarean@Cove.com}

A small group of teen girls in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts caught in an innocent conjuring of love potions to catch young men are forced to tell lies that Satan had invaded them and forced them to participate in the rites and are then forced to name those involved.

Thrown into the mix are greedy preachers and other major landowners trying to steal others' land and one young woman (Ryder) infatuated with a married man (Day-Lewis) and determined to get rid of his innocent wife (Allen).

Arthur Miller wrote the events and the subsequent trials where those who demanded thier innocence were executed, those who would not name names were incarcerated and tortured, and those who admitted their guilt were immediately freed as a parable of the Congressional Communist witch hunts led by Senator Joe McCarthy in 1950's America.

The american main stream media has been unreliable for some time, I mean I watch glenn beck and fox news just for the crazy! It's entertainment now, which can mean more fiction than fact!

The right wing pundits sound more and more crazy by the day. They think 11 weeks into the Obama administration we are nearing a totalitarian state?

WHERE THE F*CK WHERE THESE GUYS IN THE LAST 8 YEARS?

Under a rock apparently.


But I'm not worried. The most they head towards actual mental illness, the less people believe their horse-shit and the smaller their base will become. They lost this election because all they did was play to the base. Do they really think that continuing to do so and getting more and more hard-core is going to help them in that respect?

Keep up the good news FAWKS NEWS! Your on the brink of assuring Obama another 4 years.



Edit: And am I the only one who cannot stand Lou Dobbs anymore? He almost shit a brick when Hillary won Navada and he thought Obama might not win. Now every single day he just bitches about the administration he was so hard up for before the election.

>> ^jdbates:
The american main stream media has been unreliable for some time, I mean I watch glenn beck and fox news just for the crazy! It's entertainment now, which can mean more fiction than fact!


Can't argue with you there.
I get much of my reliable news from Jon Stewart, videosift and the rest of the internet. But as "proper" news outfits continue to get more and more diluted into entertainment, the real news bits get harder and harder to extract.

Fox news is like an all-day late-night informercial: you are certain that the product will blend, but you're not convinced it will give you a six-pack in thirty days.

When more and more of the information you get about the world around you becomes as mangled it becomes easier and easier for those corruptible by power to take advantage of their position and of you. Look at the recent Wall street collapse, the media was yelling "look over there" and "bankers" said, "hey, nobody's watching. I wonder what happens when I..." and a few people made gobs of money.

This happened with Iraq and Afghanistan with Blackwater and other contractors and arms dealers; this happened over the disaster in New York in 2001, and it happened before that and before that.

In magic acts, they call it misdirection. (Though I do not believe the kind of events I mentioned to be so carefully organized. I think it is more a case of not-so-well-meaning people taking advantage of opportunities as they see them.)

A misinformed populace at the hands of clouded infotainment may indeed be part of the environment necessary for totalitarianism to be possible. So is fear, especially irrational fear.

Whether he knows it or not, Glen Beck, and others like him, are only making it more and more possible for the worst of their fears to come true.

MediaMatters has a soothing voice that makes me just want to curl up and sleep and then ¤BAM¤ Fox gave me herpes.

>> ^mkknyr:
Wow. Never thought I'd hear the same argument coming from Naomi Wolf and Glenn Beck.


I didn't see Naomi Wolf in this video. I'm curious, where does Wolf make these arguments?

>> ^notarobot:
Whether he knows it or not, Glen Beck, and others like him, are only making it more and more possible for the worst of their fears to come true.


The only things Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and others of their ilk are afraid of is a weakening of class stratification. When the neo-cons are the closest thing this country have ever seen to fascists, yet they cry that the liberal democrats are building a totalitarian regime, I can't help but think that "The (douches) doth protest too much." to paraphrase Hamlet.

>> ^Xaielao:
The right wing pundits sound more and more crazy by the day. They think 11 weeks into the Obama administration we are nearing a totalitarian state?
WHERE THE F CK WHERE THESE GUYS IN THE LAST 8 YEARS?
Under a rock apparently.
...

Just to let you know, they weren't worried about a totalitarian state when it was going to be THEM in charge. Then it was ok.

>> ^chilaxe:
>> ^mkknyr:
Wow. Never thought I'd hear the same argument coming from Naomi Wolf and Glenn Beck.

I didn't see Naomi Wolf in this video. I'm curious, where does Wolf make these arguments?


She's not in this video, but right before the election she was harping on about the impending American fascism, how she was convinced the Republicans were going to rig the election, use the American military to quell the uprising on American soil, impose martial law. She drew a direct comparison to October 1, 2008 in America to February, 1933 in Germany. Basically, she was trafficking in fear; she certainly had me afraid.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Interview-Naomi-Wolf-Give-Me-Liberty

I get much of my reliable news from Jon Stewart, videosift and the rest of the internet.

Windup...
Here it comes...
BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Oh man - this very perfectly illustrates the intellectual vacuuity of those blinded by partisanship. Fox (& others) are biased to the right, sure. CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, AP, NYT, Jon Stewart, the Sift, and the 'internet' are pretty much biased to the left.

If you don't have to guts to admit that pretty much every information outlet is a biased pile of crap, then you yourself are helplessly biased Flavor-Aid drinker yourself. 'Reliable news...' Oh man - that just made my day.

^mkknyr: She's not in this video, but right before the election she was harping on about the impending American fascism, how she was convinced the Republicans were going to rig the election, use the American military to quell the uprising on American soil, impose martial law. She drew a direct comparison to October 1, 2008 in America to February, 1933 in Germany. Basically, she was trafficking in fear; she certainly had me afraid.
http://www.videosift.com/video/Interview-Naomi-Wolf-Give-Me-Liberty



Thanks.

Yeah, she's one of the many nutjobs who "predicted" the financial crisis. There are two problems with that: 1. At any given times there are endless numbers of people predicting financial crises, generally for different reasons aligned with whichever fringe ideology they prefer. 2. If you look at her other predictions, as a general rule, they're dead wrong, as shown in that video.

Reality is, unfortunately, much more prosaic than our wildest imaginations.

I assume that after being so wrong, she's learned 0% of her lesson, same as all the figures whose predictions about Iraq were worthless (and who are still on TV, same as her). Down the memory hole, I suppose.

If the press did their job, they'd do some work to see how much of what Naomi Wolf is saying is plausible or reasonable, and then turn the same critical eye to Beck, and then present a verdict that isn't predetermined to be "they both have about the same credibility." In other words, they should try to make an objective determination about what's really happening, even if it's closer to what one of the political parties is saying than the other.

What Wolf did was look at a sequence of events that actually happened, and plotted the trajectory towards a really uncomfortable conclusion.

Essentially, she said "hey, look at the way Republicans are using fear to achieve their goals, and it's following the playbook dictators use!"

Obama wins, and now Glenn Beck comes on TV every night and accuses Obama of using Wolf's playbook for dictators.

What's a modern day reporter to do? Both the left and the right are calling each other fascists -- this must just be a simple partisan squabble, so we'll just ignore both of them, except to condemn them for their strident partisanship (of which they're equally guilty, regardless of where the facts stand).

This is a bit like Bernie Madoff saying "hey, my clients cheated me just as bad as I cheated them!" and having the press refuse to indicate in their reporting who might be telling the truth, and who might not be, because that would be "partisan".

Wolf was wrong about martial law, but I don't think it was an unreasonable thing to say "doesn't that look like where we're headed?"

Beck, some 8 weeks into Obama's presidency, is saying it's the end of capitalism and freedom, and the rise of fascism. That's just not reasonable.

The fact that some intellectuals on the left said it in the last years of Bush's presidency, doesn't mean that when entertainers on the right make the same accusation in the opening days of Obama's presidency, both have equal weight.

I think media matters is sorta right that the press shouldn't try to evoke fear, but I think more accurately, I think they need to be judicious and just make sure that what they're reporting is valid.

Saying "beware toys made in China from these manufacturers because the FDA has found that many of them contain lead paint" is justified, even if it evokes fear. Saying "Letting the Bush tax cuts expire will crash the economy and drive us into a Communist dictatorship" isn't.

Wolf was wrong about martial law, but I don't think it was an unreasonable thing to say "doesn't that look like where we're headed?"

One could certainly have argued that was a possibility, but Wolf claimed she was making factual statements. For example, at 4:00 she states that, as of that date, we were already undergoing a coup on the part of Bush administration. She had certitude about every false thing she said, which is very different from making arguments about possibilities.

I predict that in 2010 we'll be having the same conversation about Peter Schiff's predictions about the end of civilization as we know it. (Given the available information (many unknowable factors), I give an 80% confidence level for this prediction.)

Self-doubt is a good thing, and Wolf and Schiff don't have it. It's very poor risk management on their parts. I'm a libertarian and a progressive, so I think it's my responsibility to be first in line to criticize their excesses.

I'm not saying Wolf is infallible or even terribly grounded, but I think the underlying concern about the subversion of justice and the fluid nature of what being a "terrorist" meant was a lot more realistic than Beck's worries about capitalism's demise or Schiff's hyperinflation apocalypse are.

I don't think that's just my opinion as a progressive, I think that's objectively true.

My big problem with the comparison of Beck to Wolf is that Beck is on a cable news channel every night for an hour, and Wolf is a virtual unknown. Wolf and Schiff is a much better comparison, but Schiff claims to be an objective professional economist, while Wolf is pretty clear about being a political activist.

Class had to read Obama's inaug. speech for English 102.

There is a section where he addressess the Muslim world, and other nations.

The teacher asked, "why would he specifically direct his words at muslims?"

and a girl behind me says, 'because he's muslim'

but no one heard and since she got talked over, she didnt speak up again.

this other girl by me heard it too, i think, cause she gave a 'wtf' head raise... but niether of us said anything... i dunno how no one else heard!!...


the end. true story.