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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

No Choice

This Al Jazeera interview with Jesse Ventura gets off to such a goofy start I almost didn't watch past the first minute.  It's marred by a sparkly talk-show formula reminiscent of The View or Joe Scarborough shows on tv; it's interrupted by extraneous news; and I could have done without quite so many plugs for the Governor's book even though he never fails to entertain.

All the same, it's exciting to see what became a frank discussion about the corrupt shambles that has overcome whatever pretense of democracy once governed our country.  Overall the analysis still tip-toes around the more fundamental and inherently unsustainable, self-destructive tendencies of a profit-driven capitalistic system.  But the indictment by Ventura and the audience veers close enough to make the guest - alumna of the Center for American Progress and HuffPo political director Amanda Terkel - squirm awkwardly as she tries to redeem the integrity of their thinly-veiled allegiance to exactly the phony struggle for partisan power that Ventura compares to pro-wrestling.


Some perceptive questions from viewers led me to reflect upon a couple of intriguing possibilities:  first, that more Americans, especially young people, are genuinely waking up to the wide-spread and shameless fraud that is being perpetrated upon the public by an unholy allegiance among corporations, politicians, the judiciary, and mainstream media; and second, that Occupy Wall Street had more than a little to do with initiating a widespread enlightenment.  Not that either of those those notions, if true, can overcome the shackles of the oligarchy - but still, we must take cheer where we can find it.  (Thanks to the Coming Crisis for posting...and enjoy the show!)

4 comments:

  1. You cannot fold a piece of paper more than 7 or 8 times.

    Humans also have limitations, one known as Dunbar's Number. [Dunbar, R.I.M. (June 1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution 22 (6): 469–493.]

    Mass society is like trying to fold paper 20 times. People bullshit each other how their party can do it, and lots of money is spent and made developing technology and institutions to fold paper 20 times. But Mass Society never works.

    In fact, Mass Society always devolves into a Behavior Sink hierarchy with toxic pathologies.

    A man's got to know his limitations. ~Harry Callahan

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  2. Great videos, and it honestly surprises me that Jesse Ventura has not met with any unfortunate accidents yet.

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  3. Ummm...I didn't want to be gross about it but yeah, sex sells everything, even revolution I guess. What that means, I hesitate to even guess...

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