Alexis de Tocqueville, and "The Truman Show"

[Truthmatters]

she wouldnt know who Tocqueville was if the Koch brothers hadnt given money to give right wingers these silly ideas

 

[NYcarbineer]

All this pontification about 'liberty' and the people's 'sovereignty' from a poster who won't even acknowledge a person's right to privacy.

Ironic.

 

[NYcarbineer]

she wouldnt know who Tocqueville was if the Koch brothers hadnt given money to give right wingers these silly ideas

She's just suffering from an outbreak of euphoria that her nanny ceded her rights to the television long enough for PC to watch something.

 

[PoliticalChic]

she wouldnt know who Tocqueville was if the Koch brothers hadnt given money to give right wingers these silly ideas

She's just suffering from an outbreak of euphoria that her nanny ceded her rights to the television long enough for PC to watch something.

Why do I have the impression that you watch far more TV than I?

Oh...right...because you're illiterate.

 

[PoliticalChic]

she wouldnt know who Tocqueville was if the Koch brothers hadnt given money to give right wingers these silly ideas

When I read your posts, I have a glimpse of what Kafka was getting at when he wrote 'Metamorphosis.'



I know you won't understand that one.....but, I got a kick out of it.

 

[Truthmatters]

PC you are so wrapped up in pretending your smart you look like a complete idiot.

cock that roach

 

[NYcarbineer]

she wouldnt know who Tocqueville was if the Koch brothers hadnt given money to give right wingers these silly ideas

She's just suffering from an outbreak of euphoria that her nanny ceded her rights to the television long enough for PC to watch something.

Why do I have the impression that you watch far more TV than I?

Oh...right...because you're illiterate.

Even you were reading as much as you claim, you'd still be wasting your time. Learn to think.

 

[Truthmatters]

she is the epitome of who the right plays.

people who want to think of themselves as smart but dont want to actaully have to think

 

[dblack]

So...what did you think of the OP?

I don't think she did.

 

[dblack]

The Truman Show is one of my all-time favorite movies. It's theme runs far beyond politics though.

 

[there4eyeM]

"2. I've never seen the Matrix series."

Sorry, I forgot to address this part.

Don't waste your time, Kafka is far more interesting. There are interesting elements in the film, but mostly it is entirely incredible, repetitive, predictable and pretentious. Of the three, the first is best, so if you really have nothing other to do, it's OK, but forget the follow-ups.

 

[NYcarbineer]

The Truman Show is one of my all-time favorite movies. It's theme runs far beyond politics though.

Its distinction might be that its the only watchable movie Jim Carrey ever made.

 

[Truthmatters]

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) Joel Barish

 

[PoliticalChic]

PC you are so wrapped up in pretending your smart you look like a complete idiot.

cock that roach

So....the shoe fit?

 

[PoliticalChic]

she is the epitome of who the right plays.

people who want to think of themselves as smart but dont want to actaully have to think

Whew!

I'm sure glad you didn't claim that I was an intellectual!
Not after the book that Dr. Sowell wrote, "Intellectuals and Society," reviewed as follows
in City Journal:

1. He first examined the conflict between a “constrained” vision of politics and social change and a vision of society by which intellectuals (“the anointed”) seek permanent “solutions” to social and national problems. Modern intellectuals, Sowell writes, have a “vision of themselves as a self-appointed vanguard, leading towards a better world.”


2. Unlike advocates of the more conservative, constrained vision, this intellectual vanguard tends to take the “benefits of civilization for granted.” The “vision of the anointed” lacks respect for the wisdom inherent in experience and common opinion. Its practitioners value abstractions—dreams for a peaceful, egalitarian world where conflicts have been overcome—over the “tacit knowledge” available to the parent, the consumer, the entrepreneur, and the citizen.


3. Sowell vigorously defends wisdom—practical reason—against an abstract rationalism that values ideas over the experience of actual human beings. Intellectuals, he argues, are particularly suspicious of the ties ordinary men and women feel to family, religion, and country. They look down upon “objective reality and objective criteria” in the social sciences, art, music, and philosophy. Their “systems” tend to be self-referential and lack accountability in the external world.

4. Sowell, it’s true, denies being an intellectual, and we must take him at his word.
An Independent Mind by Daniel J. Mahoney, City Journal 18 June 2010


You agree, don't you?

 

[PoliticalChic]

She's just suffering from an outbreak of euphoria that her nanny ceded her rights to the television long enough for PC to watch something.

Why do I have the impression that you watch far more TV than I?

Oh...right...because you're illiterate.

Even you were reading as much as you claim, you'd still be wasting your time. Learn to think.

Sure....just let me know where you got your training in 'thinking'.....


....so I can avoid it like the plague.

 

[Erand7899]

if you read the preceding paragraph, it helps clarify that this absolute power already exists:

"I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country."

So, subscribe to your ADT service, and buy your oversize SUV, and tease your fleshly desires with junk food, and tune into the Two-Minutes-Hate with Sean Hannity, and plug an iPod into your cranium, and tell yourself that because it is the private sector, there is nothing to worry about there.

Your quote seems to accept the false concept that man exists for the sake of others, and not for himself. That describes a slave, not a free man.

Free people exist in communities because those communities are beneficial to the dreams and ideals of those people. They do not exist for the community, the community exists for them.

 

[there4eyeM]

It's been often stated that 'intellectual' is almost a dirty word in American English.

Arguably, there is entirely too much intellectualism in Europe, but maybe just a bit could leak stateside. Not too much, mind you! Just a modicum.

 

[there4eyeM]

if you read the preceding paragraph, it helps clarify that this absolute power already exists:

"I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country."

So, subscribe to your ADT service, and buy your oversize SUV, and tease your fleshly desires with junk food, and tune into the Two-Minutes-Hate with Sean Hannity, and plug an iPod into your cranium, and tell yourself that because it is the private sector, there is nothing to worry about there.

Your quote seems to accept the false concept that man exists for the sake of others, and not for himself. That describes a slave, not a free man.

Free people exist in communities because those communities are beneficial to the dreams and ideals of those people. They do not exist for the community, the community exists for them.

The false concept is of what constitutes the 'self'.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Given that de Tocqueville said this:

Born under another sky, placed in the middle of an always-moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which sweeps along everything that surrounds him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything; he grows accustomed to naught but change, and concludes by viewing it as the natural state of man; he feels a need for it; even more, he loves it: for instability, instead of occurring to him in the form of disasters, seems to give birth to nothing around him but wonders...

it's comical that he could be claimed as an inspiration or the like by anyone on the Right,

that bastion of relentless centuries-long resistance to change.