6 ms·

America's becoming the scary police state we all despise. And with good tech.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
djsumdog 9y ago
becoming? It's been this way for a very long time. Very few major media outlets cover the Democrat/Republican National Conventions, but you can watch videos online of the protests from past years going back quite a bit. Rage Against the Machine use to do protests at both the DNC and RNC which I thought was hilarious. It's very common for protesters to be smoke bombed, herded, arrested and detained. There are several cases of organizers houses being raided as well. The big mistake people are making is thinking Orwell's 1984 type world started with Trump or even W. Bush. Unlike the world of Orwell, we're not under totalitarianism. We're closer to Huxsley's Brave New World, but many aspects of 1984 do exist in our society. Our media has been very untrustworthy, long before Trump coined the term "fake news" (before him, we just called it "news"). Yet whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen, or when videos emerge of the CNN Kosovo videos from the mid 90s being filmed in front of a blue screen with reporters making fun of their audience between takes, the networks just hand-wave it away. They have the influence to bury it and make people forget, or not care. We've been living in parts of the 1984 world long before Kennedy, long before I was born and long before my parents were born.
- sidcool 9y ago
  Scary as hell
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Little known fact: 1984 is based on WW2 and immediate post-war Britain. Orwell was a propaganda correspondent for the BBC; his wife worked for the Censorship Department. 1984 was based on his experiences then, and the disillusionment of the Cold War immediately following WW2. He had initially intended to title it 1948. Actually, this is not that little-known: it's in the Wikipedia page for George Orwell and easily accessible on the net, and the text itself says it's set in Great Britain after the major powers have divided up the world and entered a state of perpetual war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War_and_Animal_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War... http://www.ministry-of-information.com/the-origins-of-orwells-1984/ http://www.ministry-of-information.com/the-origins-of-orwell... People get thrown by the title, though, thinking that it's a prediction of a future dystopia while Orwell was actually writing about the world he lived in then.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Orwell is an interesting figure; while a solid left-winger all his life, his experience in the Spanish Civil War left him with an entirely justified fear and hatred of Stalinism. 1984 and Animal Farm are about this, both allegories for the crimes of Stalin. 1984 was a fairly straightforward extrapolation of trends he could see back then. All the little details of the dystopia can be traced back to actual events under Stalin or Mao.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    Hmm...hard to believe this is not commonly known when the book is taught in schools, even in the US. I suppose the students need to be awake and paying attention..
    - jjoonathan 9y ago
      Someone calling something a "little known fact" doesn't necessarily make it any of those things.
  - gandhium 9y ago
    > 1984 is based on WW2 and immediate post-war Britain and Stalin's USSR.
- icelancer 9y ago
  >>whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen Huh? A quick Google Search shows only sources from absurd places like InfoWars. Have any conclusive evidence that can't be easily explained by motion compression algorithms?
  - dboreham 9y ago
    And there we have the real Fake News. The term originated as a label for crackpot/tinfoil-hat/state-actor misinformation ops. It was picked up by Trump who presumably misunderstood the meaning, and used by him to describe MSM he didn't like. Sort of Fake News squared...
    - aalleavitch 9y ago
      I don't think he misunderstood the meaning at all. I think he just realized he could turn the label into an attack on legitimate news sources that were printing unflattering stories about him while devaluing the use of the term against actual false reporting that benefited him in one fell swoop. I'd find his strategy brilliant if it weren't for the fact it is an all-out assault on the very concept of truth and it's likely doing irreparable damage to the very institutions this nation is founded upon.
  - jsoc815 9y ago
    Can't speak to djsumdog's allegations. While they're probably true, it's also possible that people are thinking of a key part of "Wag the Dog" w/ Dustin Hoffman et al. Anyway, maybe the following links will help: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2003/03/16/hollywood-designer-creates-military-media-center.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/2003/03/16/hollywood-designer-c... and http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/29/hollywood-and-thepentagonarelationshipofmutualexploitation.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/29/hollywood-an... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_In... I'm sure we all know that America's media has had a long history of telling the "right" story for the "right" reasons. I don't feel like digging around for cites, but it's pretty well known that the point of "embedding" journalists w/troops for the (formal) continuation of the 'Gulf War' was to make the journalists feel more sympathetic to the mission (troops) and thus tell the folks at home the appropriate story. There's also a long history of the CIA recruiting journalists, editors, owners, etc... Real example from recent history: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/corres... http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/08/mark-mazzetti-shared-maureen-dowd-column-with-cia.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/08/mark-mazzetti-s...
- uptown 9y ago
  > "Yet whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen..." When was Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen?
- heartbreak 9y ago
  > Trump coined the term "fake news" Trump did not, in fact, coin the term “fake news”.
  - fourthark 9y ago
    Didn't it mean satire, like the Daily Show and the Onion, before?
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Fake news is a term invented by the Nazis during the 30s to describe media they disagreed with. In German, Lügenpresse (lying press, literally) has the same origin and use (including the same resurgence through use by the alt-right)
      - Anon1096 9y ago
        A term can't be "invented" if it was in another language. Coining a term literally only has relevance in the language it's coined. The concept of an untrustworthy press is much older besides.
        kuschku 9y ago
        It wasn't exactly in a different language — the Nazis did also produce propaganda in english (which literally used the term fake news), and during 2016, both translations of the term came into use by supporters of the Trump campaign, from which it grew.
      - thomasz 9y ago
        There is no alt right in Germany. We are dealing with a surge in far right activism, but those people are just that: Right wing extremists. It’s not a new phenomenon, it never went away completely.
        kuschku 9y ago
        The AfD is literally the alt-right. Same ideology (which is distinct from the NPD), same marketing, same reasons for resurgence, and even similar sources of funding.
- totalZero 9y ago
  > Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen source? > CNN Kosovo videos from the mid 90s being filmed in front of a blue screen source? EDIT: the second one appears to have been debunked (was the Gulf War, not Kosovo years later). wasn't able to find any evidence of the first one. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22170/did-cnn-fake-footage-during-the-gulf-war-purporting-a-live-gas-attack https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22170/did-cnn-f... https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-cnns-fake-news-broadcasts-charles-jaco-and-the-fake-live-gulf-war-reports.t1140/ https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-cnns-fake-news-broadcasts-...
- debaserab2 9y ago
  Do you mind defending your argument with some actual sources? There's too many bullshitters on this forum (and pretty much everywhere on the web) that like to drop conspiracy theories into legitimate conversations and then never stick around to defend them or provide any credibility. It's an incredibly useless and frustrating distraction when people do this.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

becoming? It's been this way for a very long time. Very few major media outlets cover the Democrat/Republican National Conventions, but you can watch videos online of the protests from past years going back quite a bit. Rage Against the Machine use to do protests at both the DNC and RNC which I thought was hilarious. It's very common for protesters to be smoke bombed, herded, arrested and detained. There are several cases of organizers houses being raided as well. The big mistake people are making is thinking Orwell's 1984 type world started with Trump or even W. Bush. Unlike the world of Orwell, we're not under totalitarianism. We're closer to Huxsley's Brave New World, but many aspects of 1984 do exist in our society. Our media has been very untrustworthy, long before Trump coined the term "fake news" (before him, we just called it "news"). Yet whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen, or when videos emerge of the CNN Kosovo videos from the mid 90s being filmed in front of a blue screen with reporters making fun of their audience between takes, the networks just hand-wave it away. They have the influence to bury it and make people forget, or not care. We've been living in parts of the 1984 world long before Kennedy, long before I was born and long before my parents were born.

sidcool 9y ago
Scary as hell
nostrademons 9y ago
Little known fact: 1984 is based on WW2 and immediate post-war Britain. Orwell was a propaganda correspondent for the BBC; his wife worked for the Censorship Department. 1984 was based on his experiences then, and the disillusionment of the Cold War immediately following WW2. He had initially intended to title it 1948. Actually, this is not that little-known: it's in the Wikipedia page for George Orwell and easily accessible on the net, and the text itself says it's set in Great Britain after the major powers have divided up the world and entered a state of perpetual war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War_and_Animal_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War... http://www.ministry-of-information.com/the-origins-of-orwells-1984/ http://www.ministry-of-information.com/the-origins-of-orwell... People get thrown by the title, though, thinking that it's a prediction of a future dystopia while Orwell was actually writing about the world he lived in then.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Orwell is an interesting figure; while a solid left-winger all his life, his experience in the Spanish Civil War left him with an entirely justified fear and hatred of Stalinism. 1984 and Animal Farm are about this, both allegories for the crimes of Stalin. 1984 was a fairly straightforward extrapolation of trends he could see back then. All the little details of the dystopia can be traced back to actual events under Stalin or Mao.
- dboreham 9y ago
  Hmm...hard to believe this is not commonly known when the book is taught in schools, even in the US. I suppose the students need to be awake and paying attention..
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    Someone calling something a "little known fact" doesn't necessarily make it any of those things.
- gandhium 9y ago
  > 1984 is based on WW2 and immediate post-war Britain and Stalin's USSR.
icelancer 9y ago
>>whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen Huh? A quick Google Search shows only sources from absurd places like InfoWars. Have any conclusive evidence that can't be easily explained by motion compression algorithms?
- dboreham 9y ago
  And there we have the real Fake News. The term originated as a label for crackpot/tinfoil-hat/state-actor misinformation ops. It was picked up by Trump who presumably misunderstood the meaning, and used by him to describe MSM he didn't like. Sort of Fake News squared...
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    I don't think he misunderstood the meaning at all. I think he just realized he could turn the label into an attack on legitimate news sources that were printing unflattering stories about him while devaluing the use of the term against actual false reporting that benefited him in one fell swoop. I'd find his strategy brilliant if it weren't for the fact it is an all-out assault on the very concept of truth and it's likely doing irreparable damage to the very institutions this nation is founded upon.
- jsoc815 9y ago
  Can't speak to djsumdog's allegations. While they're probably true, it's also possible that people are thinking of a key part of "Wag the Dog" w/ Dustin Hoffman et al. Anyway, maybe the following links will help: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2003/03/16/hollywood-designer-creates-military-media-center.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/2003/03/16/hollywood-designer-c... and http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/29/hollywood-and-thepentagonarelationshipofmutualexploitation.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/29/hollywood-an... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_In... I'm sure we all know that America's media has had a long history of telling the "right" story for the "right" reasons. I don't feel like digging around for cites, but it's pretty well known that the point of "embedding" journalists w/troops for the (formal) continuation of the 'Gulf War' was to make the journalists feel more sympathetic to the mission (troops) and thus tell the folks at home the appropriate story. There's also a long history of the CIA recruiting journalists, editors, owners, etc... Real example from recent history: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/corres... http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/08/mark-mazzetti-shared-maureen-dowd-column-with-cia.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/08/mark-mazzetti-s...
uptown 9y ago
> "Yet whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen..." When was Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen?
heartbreak 9y ago
> Trump coined the term "fake news" Trump did not, in fact, coin the term “fake news”.
- fourthark 9y ago
  Didn't it mean satire, like the Daily Show and the Onion, before?
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Fake news is a term invented by the Nazis during the 30s to describe media they disagreed with. In German, Lügenpresse (lying press, literally) has the same origin and use (including the same resurgence through use by the alt-right)
    - Anon1096 9y ago
      A term can't be "invented" if it was in another language. Coining a term literally only has relevance in the language it's coined. The concept of an untrustworthy press is much older besides.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        It wasn't exactly in a different language — the Nazis did also produce propaganda in english (which literally used the term fake news), and during 2016, both translations of the term came into use by supporters of the Trump campaign, from which it grew.
    - thomasz 9y ago
      There is no alt right in Germany. We are dealing with a surge in far right activism, but those people are just that: Right wing extremists. It’s not a new phenomenon, it never went away completely.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        The AfD is literally the alt-right. Same ideology (which is distinct from the NPD), same marketing, same reasons for resurgence, and even similar sources of funding.
totalZero 9y ago
> Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen source? > CNN Kosovo videos from the mid 90s being filmed in front of a blue screen source? EDIT: the second one appears to have been debunked (was the Gulf War, not Kosovo years later). wasn't able to find any evidence of the first one. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22170/did-cnn-fake-footage-during-the-gulf-war-purporting-a-live-gas-attack https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22170/did-cnn-f... https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-cnns-fake-news-broadcasts-charles-jaco-and-the-fake-live-gulf-war-reports.t1140/ https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-cnns-fake-news-broadcasts-...
debaserab2 9y ago
Do you mind defending your argument with some actual sources? There's too many bullshitters on this forum (and pretty much everywhere on the web) that like to drop conspiracy theories into legitimate conversations and then never stick around to defend them or provide any credibility. It's an incredibly useless and frustrating distraction when people do this.