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Sure.  If you were to gain control of television, madison avenue, the vast majority of churches, AM radio, and what's left of the print media.

Ok, I'll get right on that. 

I hate to sound like a rosy-cheeked utopian, but how did Gandhi shaft the Brits without the equivalent version all that stuff?  How did Jeebus manage to start a radical fringe movement in Palestine without even visiting any of the centers of political power?  (Ok, maybe JC is a bad example.  Crucifixion is a sucky way to get publicity.)  Civil Rights movement?

There has got to be some way to change things without access to conventional means of access to power.

Right?

...

-TGB

Decide.

Fuck.  This is like the jr. high game where you have to choose between two ridiculously painful outcomes involving either a giant piece of sandpaper and a vat of rubbing alcohol or a, well, you get the idea.

Why not a third way?  Why not a complete inversion of values?  If Dostoevsky can write a novel where a hooker is an evangelist and an Orthodox seminarian is a libertine cruising for easy chicks, why not make the "losers" seem cool, instead?

(For the younger crowd, think Adam Sandler and making peeing your pants on a school field trip cool.)

I get what you are saying.  I really do.  It's just that I work for the machinery on the "other side" (a government-funded program in Supertan Boner's crosshairs), and it ain't so swell when the "libs" are in power, either.  Both of them screw the masses in their own special way, and I really don't know which is worse.

And don't get me wrong, I spit my fair share of knowledge when the conservative talking points come up, but reason just doesn't work.  Even when I have verbally lashed some fresh-faced teabagger into a gelatinous mess.  They still remain where they are.  I can assplode their minds, but what I said doesn't grab the soul.

To put it another way, I read Hume's "Natural Religion" and the Ancient Skeptic "Sentences of Sextus Empiricus" and could intellectually acknowledge them as true.  But outside of that, yawn.  Sometime later, I read the Black Iron Prison, etc, and I thought, "Fuuuuuuuuuuck."  Sure, I laughed.  It's parody, but not mere parody.  It says a lot of the same things as Mumon, Hume, Nietzsche, and others.  But some things merely grab you as intellectual, others grab your soul.  Or crotch, if you don't like the word "soul."

Is doing what I'm trying to describe even possible?

-TGB

Doesn't work.  The filtering systems these people have in their heads will screen out any criticism of the candidate's positions.  You have to use those filters against the candidate.  If you can poison enough of their campaigns, their ideas get associated with losers, and that's that.  America will tolerate anything but a loser.

Even if it works, all that has been accomplished is the creation of a new division of winners and losers.  What I hate most is that we live in a culture that is increasingly less tolerant and sympathetic to "losers."  Nevermind that the rules of the game aren't fair.

What is amazing about the way things are going is that the very people who are victims of the plutarchy love them!  They elect and idolize their oppressors.  Why?  What makes Egyptians, once they've reached their fill of corruption and economic disparity, take to the streets while Americans in the same situation join the Tea Party?

Dok, all the stuff you mentioned is good.  But I'm here in "god's country" where most people don't go to discussion boards for anything other than to get a new fuel pump or see if their kids have a secret myspace account.  How do you change culture?  How do you change the <gulp> spirituality that feeds into creating people like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman?

Ideas?

-TGB

An interesting question was brought up today:  To what degree do we go to influence events around ourselves?  The question was brought up in a political context, and that's how I'm going to address it.

It's no secret that our government has become more and more authoritarian.  The Overton Window is moving to the right at a ridiculous speed, and people that would have been laughed out of town in 1975 are now serious contenders to the highest offices.  They have the backing of the mob, the hapless mullet heads who still wonder why they can't beat the hell out of homosexuals, like in the good old days.

So, what, are we gonna hand them pope cards?  Is that going to do any fucking good? 

I'd argue instead that they need to be painted with their own brush...Their own tactics, their own standards, their own propaganda.  While I don't condone any any means to shove them into their political graves, I DO believe that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

The obvious argument against this sort of asshattery is "how are you any different than them, then?"  My response to this is "because I don't want to stone them to death because they offend my sensibilities."  That being said, the idea that we should sit and do nothing is to my mind odious.  To say that we must keep our hands spotlessly clean is – to my mind – a form of vanity, a conceit that says "no matter how bad things are, at least I never did anything questionable.  Better that a certain class of people should be outlawed, than for me to get any muck on my shoes."

A spag named Edmund Burke once said "All that requires for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing."  I'm a firm believer in that.  I cannot see sitting idly by, or feebly trusting to the levers of power which have been utterly disconnected from the average man, while monsters gain office and restart the nightmares of the last century. 

Alarmism?  Perhaps.  I doubt Rick Perry will open the camps on February 1st, 2013...but the underlying message he carries is no different than that of Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot...Some people aren't actually people, and can be dismissed from the protection of the rule of law.  We've all seen the result of that, on scales ranging from casual Saturday night lynchings, through the more organized, state-controlled pogroms.

Against all this, the only weapons we have are ridicule and information (or, to be perfectly frank, disinformation).  I'm not above using those, in the right cause.  This is the right cause.  Nuff said.

Okay for now,
Dok

I agree with everything you've said here.

However, it is a difficult thing to use ridicule and information in a way that doesn't get reduced down to mere entertainment.  If you want to be the fool king of Saturnalia, and you have a narrow window of time to get your point across, how do you say/do something that will jar people awake, and not just make them think you are a crazy fool?  What can you do in the typical attention span of 20 seconds that gets people to actually think??  How do you address the illness and not just the symptoms??

I think about this a lot.  I've actually had relationships with close family severed/irreparably damaged over this shit.  I just don't know what to do.  I can pretty easily outline the influences that flipped me upside down and shook the lunch money out of my pockets, but is that sort of thing reproducible?

-TGB