whatever you
But that is how it works here too, didn't you know? Just look at the last couple Presidential elections. An elite few decided that we the people were going to have a bad president, and either way the election went, we got what they wanted.
My goodness, didn't you read my post on PDX mbutt transit? Do you think that the citizens of the city of Portland were ever, have ever, will ever be given the opportunity to vote on wasting the money on mbutt transit that the city wastes? Of course not, an elite few decided that.
As I stated:
"If the majority has been propagandized into wanting something that's bad, they will get it."
That is how it works here in the good old US of A. Other countries when the elite few decide the people should have something that is bad for them, they get it. In the US, when the elite few decide the people should have something that is bad for them, they simply propagandize the public into wanting it through a media campaign and the results are exactly the same.
Every single thing I listed as bad in my last post exists because of a large corporate-media engine that pushes it. Every last thing from blue bulbs to excessive drinking. Do you really think we would have the level of problems with DUI in the US if the beer companies were prohibited from advertising? I realize you really want to believe that people are responsible for their own choices but that is only true for an individual, not a mob. You and I may have developed enough cognitive control to do our own thing despite the advertising, but if the majority of people in the US were like that, advertising would not work and no company would bother doing it. And frankly the advertisers don't care that people like you and I who buck the system might exist anyway, since a lot of what they do is behind the scenes control.
That is why when you walk into 90% of restaurants in the country that you are only presented with 5 different choices for soft drinks, and all of them exactly the same 5. The distributors that sell to these restaurants only carry those 5 because the contracts they have with the soft drink companies effectively lock out any alternative choices. So, while I may greatly prefer to drink "Ol Bob Miller's Red Sas'parilla" the major soft drink companies have insured that I can't have that. So, the fact that I buck the system is meaningless, I still end up drinking what the rest of the lemmings drink.
It did a long time ago. You really need to read
"The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth
to understand what I'm talking about. Then check the publication date. They knew even then how the world operates.
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And I think it's pretty sad that you would accept the flaws here and not want to change them. I may agree that our system is better, but I'm not stupid enough to think that I have to take it's faults along with the good in it.
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What you seem to miss is that the elite few that are so good at propagandizing the lemmings in the US to want bad stuff, can also propagandize the lemmings into wanting good stuff. That is their moral obligation and they are falling down on doing it.
It is like McDonalds and their salads. Micprivatess comes out with salads, then a few years later goes through a big "1 dollar" campaign where they put most of the items on the menu online at the cost of a dollar - except salads - then they say that nobody wants to eat salads since the sale of salads is like 2% of that of burgers, that must prove that salads aren't worth selling. The real truth is obvious to anyone - Micprivatess doesen't want to sell salads, and only did it to take the wind out of the sales of national efforts to require minimum nutrition standards for fast food joints. Then once they successfully end that effort, they repackaged the salads they do sell into smaller and more unappetizing packaging. After another decade they will have a huge body of 'proof' that nobody wants salads and they can just drop the menu item, and if anyone tries to suggest a national nutrition standard again, they just trot out the 20 years of slow sales "proving" that nobody wants it.
Ted
