11-12-2016, 12:22 PM
(11-12-2016, 03:34 AM)Galen Wrote:(11-11-2016, 09:01 PM)Odin Wrote:(11-11-2016, 06:12 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: https://youtu.be/nGzkchO0t1c?t=2m57s
Yes indeed. But what if, The Prisoner was my favorite show?
It's easy to get things confused, and mix up today's racist or semi-racist libertarians with the counter-cultural opposition to the depersonalizing technocracy that Patrick McGoohan railed against. And for the oligarchy to exploit racist resentments and harness them to keep themselves in power. The oligarchy-- who doesn't want "every aspect of their lives controlled by paternalistic social-engineering"-- and who resist having their ill-gotten robbery taxed and regulated so that the rest of us are at their mercy as they pollute and destroy the world for their own greed.
As usual, Eric, you have missed the point. These people want to live their lives in their communities the way they want to and don't like it when people from the Big City come and tell them what to do "for their own good", they don't want to be forced into some scheme of how society "should be" formulated by people far away who think they are just a bunch of dumb hicks whose opinions, beliefs, and values don't matter. That business interests and televangelist hucksters have tapped into those resentments for their own selfish ends does not make those resentments any less valid.
You are right about this.
Having been thrust back into one of those rural nightmares, I find myself feeling a freak. The only culture that I buy at Wal*Mart is video, as feature films often cross more lines of intellectual appeal than do pop music, books, and magazines.
I look forward to leaving. I don't feel comfortable with people who vote for Donald Trump because he has promised Supreme Court Justices who will vote to outlaw abortion and same-sex marriage in return for cutting deeply into their living standards because they are more afraid of Hell than they are of economic degradation.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.