This is Your Brain On Fox

I thought this thread was DOA.....way to go cromwell! I wasn't even going to bother responding because it was so patently ridiculous.

This was fun to read.....I haven't seen someone coming from this angle before....I think cromwell will make some of our worn out old debates interesting....and I am quite sure he and I will be on opposite sides of the fence on many issues.

@cromwell, you've now misstated maddow's position twice. Everyone can watch the video and see that.

Heh. The only thing I have to contribute to this thread is don't be too hard on the wine and cheese people. They're delicious! The people, that is. Their livers already marinated in wine and stuffed with cheese...

What? You know we atheists eat people. Don't act so surprised. :P

It's funny how polls are are patently rediculous.

Has anybody got an answer for why Fox viewers are 50% less informed than people who don't even watch the news? I assume there is something wrong with the poll specifically that can be attacked. I might not care for Rachel Maddow but I haven't seen a study suggesting her viewers don't know what 2+2 equals. I've seen a couple for Fox suggesting that if you watch Fox you might be mildly retarded.

Polls can be rigged and often are.

Yeah, they can be. Most have questions that are designed to get a certain answer. However facts are still facts here's a decent article on it. That's about as fair and balanced as I can find.

Here's on the Occupy Movement. How can you be so against something that you don't even properly understand?

Here's one from 2010 on a whole slew of things. Note: It's okay to think the majority of climatetologists are just plain wrong, but it's not okay to think there is a massive backlash. There he been plenty of times when the majority turned out to be wrong in the end.

Maddow:

''That's what we're doing -- trying to give them [the Afghan people] the best chance they've ever had. And they may not take it. And our troops staying there may not make them more likely to take it.''

There's not a lot that's especially charming about rich white women describing the mass-homicide of people as ''giving them a chance'' at ''democracy''. Maybe people who think television personalities and radio disk jockeys are authoritative sources on questions of war and peace don't see it that way, but then again its not really well-precedented. At one time, even within my lifetime, there were men who actually exhibited an instinctively psychological understanding of processes of history who were called upon to levy opinions on the security quagmires of the day and to propose feasible strategic orientations that were blissfully devoid of cheap moralizing.

I'm frankly unconvinced that people are being afforded opportunities when America kills them - the language and narratives employed by these media pundits borders on the satirical. Its like Dr. Strangelove except the jokes aren't funny and everyone leaves the theater depressed.

Maddow's charms aside, the strategic logic of the AfPak mission is basically sound - at least in terms of the bounded rationality of America's general strategic orientation in Central Asia. The mission has never been to ''build civil society'' or ''democracy'' in Afghanistan - the mission is basically informed by Zbignew Brezinski's much-revered (albeit for dubious reasons) ''grand chessboard theory'' of the Central Asian theater. The region is a geostrategic axial pivot. In Brezinski's analysis: ''A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

“The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea." (p.125)

"In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last." ''

The occupation of Afghanistan is really motivated by the same imperatives as was the subjugation of the country by the Red Army - the retreat of which was only really occasioned by the internal structural crises of the Soviet Union itself, and not -as I am sure miss Maddow and company would believe - by the efforts of Charlie Wilson to flood the country with as many anti-aircraft missles as possible.

So with Maddow, what we really have is a woman who a) has an understanding of geopolitics and war and peace on a par with that of my dog's dick; and b) takes the Wilsonian/Nuremberg moral fiction that America seeks to dominate the planet to bring democracy to the people that it kills and conquers at face value.

I'm sorry if I don't find her to be particularly credible.

Maybe next you'll post Hulk Hogan's musings on the Hormuz Strait quagmire, as he's an expert on this matter because he's on tv and he has insight into the Iranian political culture due to his dealings with the Iron Sheik.

Maddow was making the case, as best she could, for the people she disagrees with. Cherry picking her when she was making the argument of the side she disagrees with is not fair. She then went on to explain why we should not be in afgahnistan. You conveniently leave out that part.

"God help this fucking country." That was a ways back, but what fucking country are we talking about? America or England?