The TeeVee Talked To Me!

[pasithea]

Stacey turned on Bush giving some speech about why we needed to keep pouring money into Haliburton and stuff. I'm so sick of this stuff that it was suddenly funny somehow.

Shrub: And enemy attacks have come down the past couple of months.

Me: NO SHIT SHERLOCK! It's the middle of summer in the middle of the fucking desert! It's a hundred and thirty degrees out! They only thing anyone in their right mind would want to attack is a giant ice-cold lager! Just THINK about this for a second. Pretend you're an Al Queda dude.

AQ1: Hey! Let's go blow up some of those capitalist dogs!
AQ2: Dude! It's a hundred and thirty degrees out. I just went to take a leak and got nothing but STEAM.
AQ1: But we must kill them! KILL THEM ALL! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
AQ2: I think you have heat stroke.
AQ1: *grabs weapon starts to run out of camp*
AQ2: *tackles AQ1* Woah hoss!
AQ1: *foaming at the mouth* KILL KILL KILL! I wanna eat dead burned bodies!
AQ2: Listen man... We can kill them LATER.
AQ1: *rocking back and forth shouting kill kill kill*
AQ2: Rolls eyes. Okay. Hey. Look. You wanna kill them... How about this. Let's spend a couple of months planning... Say until November... With a good plan we can kill MORE of them.
AQ1: *suddenly comes to his senses* You know... You're right. It's fucking hot.


It has to be hard being Bush and believing everyone is as stupid as you are.

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

To make this about me somehow I'll mention that I'm getting really tired of seeing the Iraq war pictures. The things that they would never dream of putting in the news, but they can't keep off of the internet because of the proliferation of digital cameras. The top picture on the wikipedia entry for Iraq War is a particularly tame example, even if one recognizes what the fluid in the gutter of the sidewalk is.

Awful images of people who've been dead for days; A man laying on his back with his eyes wide open, except you can see the pieces of his head laying in a trail behind him, exploded like a watermelon; Two men with machine guns laying against eachother, almost like they are comforting eachother, but they're both dead and one of them has a white flag on the rifle that's laying across his body.

These are the pictures our own troops take, you can tell because they're usually in the shot giving a thumbs up. I try extra hard to avoid the pictures the Iraqi's take of children who've had white phosphorous dropped on them, or have other mysterious injuries that don't really seem to look any better even if I imagine it wasn't our own side that was responsible.

It's hard to not see these things, they haunt me for weeks every time I accidentally see one, and I can't imagine what it does to people who are actually there.

[paka.livejournal.com]

I'm so sick of this. Enemy attacks increase? Well, obviously that means we need to step up our efforts to win. Enemy attacks decrease? We're winning and we obviously need to step up our efforts.

It's like how this stupid war started where no matter what the Iraqis did, it proved they had WMDs and we had to go in. Until of course we went in and there were no WMDs and it proved we needed to go in because of course we didn't go in because of WMDs.

[voidheart.livejournal.com]

Considering it was all based on really flawed logic. A basic philosophical precept is that it is impossible to prove something DOESN'T exist. No matter the evidence or argument, I cannot prove I don't have a ham sandwich in the fridge. Even if you look in the fridge, perhaps I hid it deeper, mybe it's invisible, glued to the ceiling, etc. If I claimed, on the other hand, to have the sandwich, then I could show it to you. Hence the reason that evidence used to be necessary in our courts of law to prosecute people. Used to be.

If something exists, you should be able to prove it. WMDs, God, etc.

Then again, hey, we're a country being run by an administration that makes Forrest Gump look like Einstein, so what did you expect? Logic?

Tangential

[paka.livejournal.com]

Something which has really been bugging me lately is how the whole thing really relies on presenting everything as fact.

When I look at all the crap I was flat-out told as a kid, at the way the Administration presents itself, at the way neoconservative types argue on the internet, it all seems to rely on expressing everything as true, whether that's a fact, an only distantly related fact, a half-truth, or an outright lie.

So. Iraq has WMDs. Al-Qaeda was involved with Iraq, Al-Qaeda is in Iran, Iraq's WMDs were transported by convoy to Syria at the onset of the war, conservatives believe in accountability and fiscal responsibility, there is no proof of global warming, and so on. There's like, several volumes of stuff which is factual only because someone said it as though it were.

Re: Tangential

[voidheart.livejournal.com]

I once heard someone say that that is the entire problem with television. It equalizes everyone when they should not be equal, vis a vie viewpoints. On a very basic level a truth teller and a lie teller have the same screentime. It all comes down to whose hair gel wins out, or who shouts louder. Facts are lost in opinions and belligerence.

In a culture where the 'common people' absorb the large majority of their viewpoints and facts about the world from television, junk television = stupid country. Or as NOFX once sang "there's no point to democracy when ignorance is celebrated."

I honestly don't know what to do. Wish I did. But every year this country gets dumber and dumber. We're like the bully on the block that has lost all muscle tone, all semblance of intelligence, and now relies on the fact he has a gun and no one else has one as big.