MovieChat Forums > clyons > Replies
clyons's Replies
Escushame?
I don’t think the movie says he was “strongly influenced” by Willian Ayers. It says he shacked up to him, made a connection with his politically influential billionaire father, and was subsequently elected to office. Makes sense.
The mainstream narrative is the one that doesn’t make any sense. “Guilty as sin, free as a bird”. That requires a better explanation than courts are unpredictable. Being a billionaire with a class conscience needs a better explanation than he just really cares about people. Patty Hearst didn’t go to jail either. The same media that venerates them holds up the TEA party as the poster child for homegrown terrorism, white Alqaeda, white Sharia, etc... If you don’t think they have their own mythology, then this movie had no chance of getting through.
It’s worse than that. Why was Stanley Ann Dunham posing nude for a celebrated black communist photographer under investigation by her CIA agent father? Coincidence.
The honest definition of fascism is that it is the merger of corporation and state. Fascism is an economic system, and I emphasize system because it is antithetical to the non-system of laissez faire free markets. It’s a form of command economy like socialism, where costs are socialized and profits are subsequently privatized by the state rather than retained. Sweden is fascist. No more a monarchy than China is a people’s democratic republic.
The supposed purpose is “efficiency” in the utilitarian sense. It was popularized by the early American Progressive intellectual class and later the Fabian socialists in England, at the behest of their corporate masters, the people who endowed their universities and lobbied their bureaucracies. People like Rockefeller. Rockefeller famously condemned capitalism, moralized that “competition is a sin” because it was wasteful. He likened fascism to rose gardening where you sacrifice the weaker bulbs for the good of the strong.
Public schools especially universities are a model of this. We pay collectively for what is essentially job training of the upper middle class and research and development for large businesses. It has the most likely effect of consolidation of society into ever larger endeavors, a natural fit for the military which is why that association is probably justified.
Utopian thinking was trendy even through WWII when it was politically correct for a president like FDR to be good friends with Stalin. Uncle Joe and Uncle Sam. Trotsky, still championed by the New York City banking class from which he came, was much more of a fascist than a straight communist although there’s no strict difference in the sense that while you might desire or claim to desire the relinquishing of state power at some point, bureaucracy has a nature unto its own. The word took on negative connotations after (and not a moment sooner) Mussolini lost the war.
So many people who are strictly fascist take on other names for themselves, “Neo-conservative”, literal Trotskyite communists. But the larger group is probably middle of the road American Democrats and establishment Republicans. Entirely devoid of philosophy, they would never recognize themselves as such, but they are for all practical purposes. For instance, what difference does it make if you support schools, police, military, or other institutions for pragmatic rather than philosophical purposes, if pragmatism lends itself to the same outcome?
Dictionaries get it wrong because they are written by fascists. They use the word as a slur against political opponents like libertarians, perhaps the most inappropriate use imaginable. It tends to be interchanged with all the garden variety moral character assassinations, racist/sexist/xenophobic/etc... Antifa is an Orwellian name for a group whose chief objective is the eradication of free speech. Schools openly teach it in terms of guilt by association. They describe fascism as an ideology, and leave it at that. Well what is the ideology? Uhh, it’s associated with militarism, nationalism, racism, strong charismatic leaders... That’s the textbook definition verbatim. It’s all nonsense. I can think of only one accurate use in recent news media. The CEO of Whole Foods described Obamacare as not socialist but fascist, in terms of it being a merger of corporation and state. Too bad he sold out for Amazon.
No, he’s right. Conservatives don’t prefer Hillary to Sanders. But something tells me you do. You’re always sticking up for Hillary vis-à-vis Trump, for the mainstream against the alternative. It’s a little late for lip service.
Hillary was the foreign agent. She collided with England to produce that dossier. She literally held funder raisers in foreign countries. Her husband sold missile secrets to China. Many foreign leaders expressed their preference for her over Trump, as a soft form of election meddling/disruption. It explains perfectly why everyone who has ever run against Hillary has been accused by her of being a foreign agent. Projection. She came up with birtherism when she ran against Obama, then cast Bernie Sanders as an Israeli dual citizen, then Trump as Russian. That was always her thing.
Blacks suffer a lot more from being poor than they do from being black. It’s no surprise that social justice is brought to us by the purveyors of economic injustice. University professors will tout the benefits of war and bank bailouts all day long for their government masters, but if you say the n word, that’s heresy. Unless you’re a millionaire rap singer for a large record label.
I wonder if OJ Simpson is in jail today because the sexism of killing his wife now overshadows being a victim of racism. Cosby will let us know.
This is just Wall Street propaganda, spoon fed to you by your loving mainstream media. They want everybody to just give everything they’ve got to Wall Street thinking it’s some magic fountain of wealth. Why didn’t anybody suggest Trump should have started an online book store? There’s a bias against entrepreneurship, because it’s harder to control.
Quite a few people had 100 million in the 80s and how many are multi billionaires today? That “two decades” investment is a fantasy based on perfectly timed entries and exits, with zero transaction costs fees taxes, etc... and astonishingly, zero cost of living expenses! They’re hoping you didn’t notice that. Trump lived a lavish lifestyle in the most exclusive city in the world. Every dollar he took out would have been a loss of over 20 dollars in your calculation. Bad deal.
Trump built that. But as you said, he’s not as sophisticated a lying cheat as the people who already had it built. How can anyone compete?
This is the kind of thing that probably doesn’t matter to most people now, but will really date the movie in a generation or two. Just as a really simple example, a lot of big budget blockbusters from the 70s had loud blaring jazz music. I don’t think that resonates with people today, and I don’t think it even evokes any sense of the time period either. Do we associate the 70’s with jazz? Some people even complain about quintessential elements like bell bottom pants, which are certainly more immersive than what will soon be outdated technology like VR goggles for a video game. Kids who don’t grow up with that won’t be able to understand that people at the time were able to their suspend disbelief in part by viewing the tech as futuristic. But because of that, even a basic Nintendo controller will hold up better due to straightforward presentation.
By the way I think Spielberg movies are generally disposable, not really art, more like an arms race. He always does this, just seizes on marketing opportunities with little thought about anything beyond outside agendas.