Double Flee A

Dale's thought of the day:

I was reading some documents over at Wal-mart watch about Wal-Mart's rapidly increasing role as a political donor:
From this article ,
"Wal-Mart is the top political action committee (PAC) donor to federal candidates so far in the current cycle. It gave $1.028 million, with 84 percent flowing to Republican candidates."
"Wal-Mart's No. 1 ranking among PAC contributions contrasts with previous years when the retailer did not even make the top 20."

Pretty drastic change. Anyway I was reading the Strib, and the metro Mineapolis area got its first Wal-mart not too long ago (last two weeks or so). According to the story some guys were outside protesting the low wages and whatnot, and a guy pulled over in his truck and was giving them a hard time. I would like to have heard what he said to them.

If I've got an interest in what other people think of me, I'm going to try to sway their opinions in whatever ways I can. My goal being to somehow leave an imprint of what I want them to think right there in their brain. These days, politics is being shoved down our throats, products, same thing. I don't watch television because it actually hurts in a way.

The last thing anybody with an interest in making you think or believe something is going to try to do is encourage you to think for yourself. It doesn't pay. That's the only idea I really care about reproducing, the idea that a person can make a decision on his or her own. The law of increasing returns tells me that consumerism breeds consumerism ad totalitarianism, so the battle is clearly lost for "people as thinkers", because they get dumber and dumber over time, as less is expected of them, and the lowest common denominator of reasonable expectations of intellectual curiousity gets lower and lower and lower.

The reason no politicians except progressives encourage people to turn their brains on, is that they've all got an interest in keeping them dumb. The American economy is totally dependent on consumer spending, and if they ask any questions at all they're guaranteed to spend less, for reasons of slave wages in Bangalore or any number of others. We've got a lot of tools out there that we use to imprint our own brains with, because it's satisfying to our egos. Rush Limbaugh and right-wing radio hosts have been literally screaming for years about personal responsibilty in order to make the common man feel he has power over his choices, that he's not a weasel squeezing money out of Uncle Sam, because that is a despicable action. This is just getting interesting, but I've got to get back to work.

So back the the original statement, look around you some time and try to see all the ways that ideas are trying to copy themselves into your brain, and notice the people who don't notice they are copying ideas for the people that they really benefit. This is the age of the clashing ideologies; things are really bleak and ugly in the dialogue-scape, which is dominated by competeing interests other than the common person's.

posted by dale @ 3:20 PM