Re: Best speech... ever. Obama on HC

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:55:52 GMT, nico@xxxxxxxxxxx (Nico Coesel)
wrote:

John Larkin <jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 9 Sep 2009 19:10:15 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
<ggherold@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

OK I'm a liberal weenie, but Obama is the first President in my
lifetime that I respect.

You must be very young.


And F the R's if they don't want to come along, but it's time to fix
health care!

George H.

It doesn't look like he can get enough Democratic votes to pass
anything substantial in the House, much less the Senate. The D's are
pretty good at Fing themselves. He'll have to settle for something
face-saving, at best.

I still don't understand why people don't want to fix the US health
care system. Its the most expensive in the world! Do people from the
US like to get ripped off?

A friend of mine visited a family in the USSR (back when it was) and
was shocked at all the books in the home. Many of them about the US
and, in particular, about politics here as well as the formation of
the US Constitution. He had imagined that all the propaganda here
about how soviets were forced to work and think by leadership there
and that all their news was controlled by the state (okay, maybe it
was), with the implication that having wide-ranging political books to
read would be both hard to find and near-suicide.

Turns out, the family was well-read and was probably a lot better
educated about the US system than most US citizens. They understood
details about the US Congress that few here then knew, arcane details
about rules of legislation and so on, for example. They talked and
talked and my friend found them to be educated, facile, and engaging
on a host of political issues.

In the end, he asked them for their opinion about the US and explained
his own biases, a bit, coming into their home. They listened and then
said something like this.

"In our system, they don't care what we believe so long as we do what
we are told. We are free to think as we will, but we act as we must.
The force of the gun works like that and those in power here are fine
exercising their power that way. In your system, you can vote. Those
in power in your country aren't allowed to operate quite the same way
as those here do. So they have been forced to shape and mold your
opinions, and possibly work to control the voting itself, so that the
results of elections and the results of your legislative processes
still work the way they demand. This works also in concert with
advertising for business, as well. As a result, your universities and
businesses have studied thoroughly and learned a great deal more about
how to control public opinion, both in theory and in practice. They've
set up the mechanisms to bring all this into play, because they have
no other option."

"Here, they point a gun. In your country, they spend a lot of time
and money learning about and using systems to shape your very ways of
thinking about the world around you. Here, they don't care so much
about that. You just obey, or else. There, you are not so free to
think."

It was an interesting concept, he said, to face squarely. He would
have imagined propaganda being far more important in the USSR, when in
fact systems to shape behavior through media was/is still more
important here. Both for advertising purposes as well as political
opinion shaping. The skills learned for one work for the other.

In the USSR, the iron fist is publicly displayed. In the US,
advertising and shaping public political opinion are like two,
matching velvet gloves sheathing the same iron fists.

Of course, that's all just a tale. But too many here have indeed been
sold a bill of goods.

Jon
.

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