OT - 10 steps to fascist police state

All movies, music and other entertainment is calculated based on not how
good or socially useful it is, but on how much money it makes the parent
corporation. (ie Sony.)

Do you really want movies to be made based on their "societal
usefulness"? Who gets to decide what is "societaly useful"? Who
decides what kind of society we should have?

Jose
--
Get high on gasoline: fly an airplane.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On 2007-04-24 07:42:40 -0700, "Private" said:

Well written and thought provoking IMHO

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

Yeah, yeah. This sort of tripe gets published about every politician
since Hitler. Before Hitler, you just called your political opponents
drunkards, sexual perverts, anti-Christs, and aristocrats. Both Thomas
Jefferson and King George III were compared to Nero by their political
enemies. Surely there must be some sort of Godwin's law for newspaper
editorials.

You could have said the same thing about the Clinton administration and
Janet Reno (in fact I did, largely in jest -- but one must be vigilant
about one's civil rights). Remember the complaints about "jack-booted
thugs?" And every President, Prime Minister, attorney general, and
similar person before that draws similar comparisons. The faces change,
the vitriol stays the same.
--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

"Jose" wrote in message
news
All movies, music and other entertainment is calculated based on not how
good or socially useful it is, but on how much money it makes the parent
corporation. (ie Sony.)

Do you really want movies to be made based on their "societal
usefulness"?

"societal"?

Not always, but, should we stick with the status quo, where a bleach-blonde
ex-stripper predictably ODs and gets more media time than all of the
soldiers killed overseas this month combined? Should stick with the status
quo where pictures of Cho draw viewers, which equates to higher ratings,
which equates to higher ad revenue, which equates to higher salaries for the
executives? That way, executives, advertisers and investors can make tons
of money off of things like Cho, Columbine, 9/11 and Anna Nicole Smith. I
don't happen to find "motherfu*cking snakes on a motherf*cking plane" likely
to promote intellectual stimulation, but it sure made a handful of people a
crapload of money and robbed quite a few million of $7.50 or whatever.

Who gets to decide what is "societaly useful"?

Movies about how drugs, violence and promiscuous sex are genuinely bad would
be better than Snoop Dog's Girls Gone Wild extravaganza and all its
miscellaneous internet-porn spinoffs. We put garbage into society, we get
garbage out of society. It's true that society buys into it but the only
reason it's there is because somebody figured out that if you get a
weed-smoking rap star and some naked underage drunk girls, you can make
millions.

Who decides what kind of society we should have?

In reality? The people who make celebrity cult heroes out of Michael
Jackson and Tupac, who hire only anorexic coke whores for their magazine
covers, who give record contacts to people like Tupac and Brittney Spears,
who think that what we -really- need is another Friday the 13th movie, and
who market candy and soft drinks to children, gangster rap and Grand Theft
Auto games to teenagers, and ad-driven political hate radio to adults.

In a perfect world, WE decide what kind of society we should have, not a
handful of top-level media conglomerates such as Sony, Disney, Entercomm,
etc.

-c
holy crap... I'm a rock musician; I can't believe I'm saying all this
stuff. But there it is...

Do you really want movies to be made based on their "societal
usefulness"?
...Should stick with the status
quo where pictures of Cho draw viewers, which equates to higher ratings,
which equates to higher ad revenue, which equates to higher salaries for the
executives?...

I don't even know (or care) who "Cho" is. Why? Because I choose what I
watch. Do you? If you don't, that is a problem. But if you do, then
why do you want to choose what =I= and everybody else watches?

Movies about how drugs, violence and promiscuous sex are genuinely bad would
be better than Snoop Dog's Girls Gone Wild extravaganza...

Oh. That's what you want us all to watch? What if we don't =want= to
fill our brains with purple dinosaurs? You want to make movies about
how drugs, violence and promiscuous sex are genuinely bad, go make them.
It's not all that hard. The hard part is forcing people to sit
through them.

Who decides what kind of society we should have?
In reality? The people who make celebrity cult heroes out of Michael
Jackson and Tupac,

No, that misses the mark. In rality, =each= of us, acting individually,
decide what kind of society we have. That includes a society in which
we are permitted to eat red meat and soft boiled eggs, a society in
which we are permitted to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, in which
we are allowed to swim naked in our own back yards, in which we are
allowed to raise our children the way =we= see fit, and not by vote of
the Grand Canonical Ensemble.

If you don't like what you choose to watch, turn off the TV. But if you
don't like what your neighbor watches, why is it your business?

And what if your neighbor doesn't like what =you= watch?

Jose
--
Get high on gasoline: fly an airplane.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

The Wealth Distribution
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few
hands. As of 2001, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 33.4% of
all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional,
and small business stratum) had 51%, which means that just 20% of the people
owned a remarkable 84%, leaving only 16% of the wealth for the bottom 80%
(wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth, the top 1% of
households had an even greater sha 39.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present
further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at
New York University (2004).

According to the Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 2004-2005,

Table 672,

The Top 5 percent of families got 20.8% of aggregate income

Top fifth of families got 47.6 percent
Next fifth got 23.0

So top 40 percent got 70.6 percent

The Lowest fifth of families got 4.2 percent of aggregate income
Next fifth got 9.7 percent


According to the Survey of Consumer Finances, Federal Reserve Board,

Richest 1 percent of families own 39.1 percent of wealth
Next 4 percent own 22.3 percent
Next 5 percent own 11.4 percent
Next 10 percent own 11.5 percent;

So the top 20 percent owned 84.3 percent in 1997

Bottom 40 percent owns less than 1 percent

vince norris

On 2007-04-24 16:23:53 -0700, "gatt" said:


"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in message
...
Larry Dighera wrote:

And that is a BS number.

Control != Own

So Larry, what is your definition of "Control" that can boost the number
from 33.4% to 90%?

A friend of mine who is a Statistics instructor regularly dismantles figures
such as these. The US economic system is too complex to say offhand "this
percentage owns this percentage"; it depends on how you derive your data and
how it is organized. By and large, though, corporations are run by people
like Carly Fiorina and folks who get paid hundreds of millions of dollars
despite destroying companies and costing hundreds or thousands of jobs, and
the average working-class Joe Commercial Pilot, cop, truck driver, support
technician, electrician, assembly line operator...the people who ACTUALLY
MAKE THE CORPORATION RUN...make a pittance of what these people award
themselves as hiring or firing bonuses.

-c

Of course. If the facts don't agree with the original premise, declare
the statistics to be meaningless and arbitrary.

The fact is, 1% of Americans do not control 90% of the wealth unless
you are a rabid conspiracy theorist. Then you just assume everything is
controlled by the Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission or Bavarian
Bankers or Halliburton or what-have-you. Since no one can prove you
wrong, you must be right, eh?

Of course, if you are going to do that you have to betray every
principle that liberalism supposedly stands for.
--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message


This motion picture will change your life:

Remember this post the next time you start complaining about off-topic
threads here...

--
John T
http://sage1solutions.com/blogs/TknoFlyer
Reduce spam. Use Sender Policy Framework: http://openspf.org
____________________

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 21:37:38 -0400, Jose
wrote in :

If you don't like what you choose to watch, turn off the TV.

And what of the news you'd like to watch, but because it may have a
negative impact on the news media's parent company, it isn't reported?

"C J Campbell" wrote in message
news:2007042422113016807-christophercampbell@hotmailcom...

Of course. If the facts don't agree with the original premise, declare the
statistics to be meaningless and arbitrary.

The fact is, 1% of Americans do not control 90% of the wealth unless you
are a rabid conspiracy theorist.

The fact is that I control 100% of the wealth.

If it isn't mine, it doesn't count.

If you don't like what you choose to watch, turn off the TV.
And what of the news you'd like to watch, but because it may have a
negative impact on the news media's parent company, it isn't reported?

Then watch the news on a different channel.

Actually, the problem isn't so much that the news reporting is
"controlled" by media companies, but rather, that news reporting is
under the entertainment division and not the journalism division.

Who wants to watch real news and actually analyze current events? Yes,
those kinds of people are in the minority. Most people =prefer= to
watch a white SUV drive down the highway.

=That= is the problem. It is us, collectively, who decide what is
profitable to the media companies. I agree that in doing so, we are
handing over the keys to our brains, and at some point it will be too
late. But the power was not siezed by them, it was given to them.
Whoever the "them" turns out to be.

Jose
--
Get high on gasoline: fly an airplane.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.