But their assessment is accurate when applied to many Americans. Just check the local Tea Party nuts.

should chill and enrage every American.

Our government, which is supposed to serve us and represent us.

Our increasingly corporate-owned government, which is systematically dismantling our Constitutional right to protest without meeting a brutal federal response, and our right to a free press without journalists ' being imprisoned for talking to whistleblowers and promising them anonymity.

No, this level of contempt and arrogance toward citizens from the government that is supposed to be ours isn't even remotely okay.

It is an outrage.

i bet a plurality of Americans aren't all three things all at once, BUT, if you can engage one key feature (say, emotionality) and then use that to inflate the others, then that's a "winning" strategy.

if, on the other hand, the PTB were to engage the our higher functions of rationality and empathy, then i bet you dimes to donuts, we'd see more of those behaviors manifest.

All sports event geared to inflame emotions and lock out critical thought. I play a game when watching MSM, timing the amount of screen time given to which team, the Red or the Blue, is ahead and who made a gaffe, versus actual mention of any policy. It's usually a long wait.

And regionally, at least around here, the political commercials aimed at us are at a blatant third grade level and bizarrely focused on topics like sexual violence. Not that sexual violence isn't important, but this is a national election to select the politicians who will be deciding economic policy, war, trade policy...all these issues that are driving this nation into dystopia.

But ads to those assumed and orchestrated to be coarse and crude and emotionally driven must be just like the rest of our programming...created to divert and inflame.

limbic systems rather than cerebral cortex.


did advertising for many years -- it's all the same game.

Yeah, tell me that after the midterms. Way too many of us are fucking dumbasses. We either believe the bullshit if the right, or we're too self-absorbed to event vote the fuckers out. My Congressional district is prime example.

eom

and then uses the result to indict the victims.

A thoughtful, informed, empathetic public would not tolerate the agenda of crippling austerity, corporate/mind-numbing education policy, assaults on journalism, creation of mass surveillance amd propaganda machines, and protection of corporate predators that CREATES the very coarseness the CIA indicts. The corporate elite in both parties are systematically destroying the avenues left for resistance and dramatically escalating these crippling policies.

You're not being oppressed. You can still type on the Internet!
(There's a facile argument around here somewhere...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5596182

Corporate money floods both sides of the aisle in Washington now, which is why we see these very same predatory policies actively advanced by both parties now.

eom

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What is even more chilling is seeing DUers cosigning that arrogance.

also build propaganda machines.

Obama taps "cognitive infiltrator" Cass Sunstein for Committee to create "trust" in NSA:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023512796

Salon: Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal: Cass Sunstein wants the government to "cognitively infiltrate" anti-government groups
http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/

The US government's online campaigns of disinformation, manipulation, and smear.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024560097

Snowden: ‘Training Guide’ for GCHQ, NSA Agents Infiltrating and Disrupting Alternative Media Online
http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/02/25/snowden-training-guide-for-gchq-nsa-agents-infiltrating-and-disrupting-alternative-media-online/

The influx of corporate propaganda-spouting posters is blatant and unnatural.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3189367

U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News To Americans
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023262111

The goal of the propaganda assaults across the internet is not to convince anyone of anything.*
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023359801

The government figured out sockpuppet management but not "persona management."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023358242

The Gentleman's Guide To Forum Spies (spooks, feds, etc.)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4159454

Seventeen techniques for truth suppression.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4249741

Just do some Googling on astroturfing - big organizations have some sophisticated tools.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1208351

Their analysis is spot on.

Every single day the curtain comes down a little more.

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”


― Frank Zappa

"If voting could change anything they would make it illegal."

More true now than ever.

... place the word "being" between the words when and torturing.

"when being tortured" was what I meant.

Give me a fucking break.

Talk about demented.

*Study was conducted on Democraticunderground.com during election season.

instead of the unconscionable arrogance and condescension of a government that pretends publicly to be representational while privately managing and manipulating us as though we were farm animals for profit.

'Woo me with science' fails to grasp simple humor and sarcasm while comparing people to farm animals for profit.

I usually say something within 10 minutes that makes the room go silent.

Of course they did.

And doesn't the CIA's assessment of Americans sound familiar. Every neoOrwellian society keeps a condescending eye on its proles:

civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community.

torture, gun running, dope dealing, assassination, murder and overthrowing governments is mostly beyond our grasp.

I didn't find it.

so true and a few more adjectives are missing in the word list that are very important in describing our society and its culture.

the truth hurts,



peace,
kp

CIA recruits their intel operators and leadership from the Ivy league, the boardroom, and other locations you can find people that are privileged and in power.
Their grunts or enforcement may be "talented" normal Americans or Mercs that worked their way up to a position they could be noticed and trusted to get a job done, but the CIA itself has always been a "good old boy" club that earned their keep playing the Great Game for their peers in power.

Haele

I see it every day. Condescending, yes -- but also true.

... (need to lay it down horizontal for a while... falling asleep sitting up, here.)

Coarse, emotional, and lacking in civility than be a sociopath.

Before, it was just an opinion. Let the CIA say it; it's incontrovertible fact.

If the CIA were a publicly traded company, DUers would be snapping up its stock like there was no tomorrow for no other reason than they love the message. The recs kinda bear that out.

THE ORIGINS OF THE OVERCLASS

by Steve Kangas

The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere.

The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface — and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.

SNIP...

How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"

SNIP...

Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government.

CONTINUED...

http://www.american-buddha.com/illum.originsofoverclass.htm

It's a legacy thing.

"We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times—when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse..."

It appears to be a rather accurate description... regardless of the motives many are alleging.

aren't coarse and emotional.

I think if I have ever seen a case of pointing a finger while four more point back at you, this would be the prime example.