Reply #3: I honestly believe we have passed a tipping point in our Empire, the legal strategy [View All]

employed against Big Tobacco would NOT work today.

The propaganda is too powerful, too calibrated to the weaknesses of the human mind.

Hell, I was simply staggered at the amount of prescient, relevant information modern psychology can tell us about ourselves (and the people who wish to mass manipulate us for their own purposes) even in a low-level corporate training seminar.

Ever hear of the DISC method? I sat through a two-day seminar on it. Of course, it was all geared to the "helpful" side of things as in, here's how you communicate with the different archetypes, here's what motivates them, etc. etc.

Astonishing how powerful and refined modern psychology is and, by necessity it's hidden cohort of propaganda, advertising, and public relations, which together form the very powerful Science of Lying and Manipulation.

Hell, after seven years of watching it in action,I now know that it is possible to calibrate a Really Big Lie like the Bushies tell so frequently, and do so in such a way that even though it all adds up to a BIG LIE, there is no one obvious lie among the components. All the mini-lies and half-truths have plausible deniability built right in.

I watch it, I understand how it works, and still I stand amazed at the sheer power of it. The nuclear bomb of the mind for tyrants to use on their populations, and they do.

But I digress. My whole point was the amazing success of the Big Tobacco propaganda that kept that doubt in the public's mind ("doubt is our product" as one of Big Tobacco's leaked memos truthfully stated) for 40 long years after medical science had established the link between cigarettes and cancer is now five times as powerful, five times as well-calibrated and structured ("spun", if you will, though I believe that is like using the word firecracker to describe a hydrogen bomb), and with no real Free Press in this country that means no one to even debunk the lies except the usual handful of lefty web sites that no one beyond the chorus being preached to buys, and it doesn't matter how ironclad the facts are, as we have all seen.

These days, even scientific truth is like blowing a kazoo in a crowd of blaring corporate tubas. No one can hear you no matter how loud you are.

This is a bit scattershot but my overall point is not: Not only can't (at least under current conditions of our Empire, which is something that cannot be changed by a mere election, though certainly that would help) that strategy pursued against Big Tobacco during the height of the Old American Republic couldn't work against Big Tobacco today.

Too many Bushie "judges" who aren't judges at all, but criminally complicit like Scalia and Cheney duck hunting, but on a massive scale. A pathetic Corporatized Toady media who undoubtedly would pull out all the stops which we have come to recognize so well to discredit the story and keep it from as many eyes as possible while still flashing it quickly to provide the Plausible Deniability ("what do you mean, we ran the story...once at 3 a.m on our Wyoming affiliate") we have also come to know so well. Or publishing a patently false story designed to smear the critics, blaring it 24/7 for a month, then waiting and whispering the retraction so no one hears it.

Don't get me wrong. The work that is being done in the area mentioned in you linked article is heroic, if tragic. Like being an advocate for Jews in 1936 Germany. Heroic, but mostly futile in terms of the larger society and tragic in it's doomed nobility, for every one saved, a hundred thousand die, metaphorically-speaking.

The one saved...that's the heroic part. The hundred thousands who died for every one saved, that's the tragic part.

Sorry. I hate to be a pessimist, a "can't do" kind of guy, but reality is reality. I didn't make the reality, I just live in it.

I applaud all who are trying to get this done, who are bringing the issue to the floor and forcing Big Oil to open their files (trying to anyway). But judging by the massive success of the Cigarette manufacturers in selling doubt, EVEN during the time when American Liberty and Checks & Balances were stronger (maybe strongest), makes me think that no such similar success is possible today.

Not that I would advocate people stop trying. Like all the rest of it, I will continue to hope and pray that I am wrong about this.