Recently I watched a few minutes here or there of episodes of Firing Line with William F. Buckley. Before I looked for the vids I figured I’d have to watch random (very) shitty uploads from VHS rips. I was entirely wrong. The Hoover Institute uploaded high quality vids of the show to their Youtube channel. I have no idea how many. 100s? Maybe all 1,504 of them?
The Hoover Institute is - of course - very old-school rib-rocked rock-ribbed GOP. They need an elaberate, tedious, complex network of rhetorical constructions for such things as why it’s a moral imperitive that the poor should be made to suffer, etc. John Kenneth Galbraith described it as “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
After Dubya got elected and 9/11 happened - the rightwing started to realize all that fancy talk maybe wasn’t so important. Power is all. And Trump and Trumpism allowed so many rightwingers to go mask off, be openly racist, be openly hateful, and not bother at all with superior moral justification jibber-jabber. I shockingly large number of them is in permanent “Fuck you. I don’t care.” mode.
Late reply I know but I love you for going back and subjecting yourself to Buckley.
I agree with everything you observed, I think you’re dead on the target, but you mentioning Buckley tickled a memory of mine watching the Buckley debate with James Baldwin.
Buckley tries a few times to deflect or deflate some brilliant point Baldwin is making with some quip that gets a few laughs but shows how Buckley thought and in hindsight look an awful lot like the kind of stuff chuds will get up to later. Buckley was smart, god curse his soul, he was a skilled orator, and he was well educated. But if you cornered him he’d pull a bullshit quip to get out of the corner. You see how he has to do it several times because Baldwin is smarter and keeps out maneuvering him.
Nowadays the chuds are all yowling hogs and baying dogs and they do that shit so often it’s basically breathing for them but you can see how originally it started with this basic phenomenon: right wing ideas are bad and eventually you run out of justification for them and you bluster and sputter and deflect. Buckley was just smarter so it took longer for him to get there but Baldwin could take him there, and did take him there, on camera in front of an audience several times. Meanwhile the modern chud, the failson heir of the Buckley birthright, has none of the education or the blue blood impulse to obfuscate the cruelty of right wing politics: they go from zero to sputter town in seconds.
I watched The Manchurian Candidate the other day. The original not the remake. It’s surreal to me that “brainwashing” has become real in the US. Chuds watch untold hours of rightwing news propaganda like Fox News plus similar podcasts and Youtube vids. They broke their brains. They no longer care what’s real or what’s true. Buckley was snide, rude, and could be a liar but at least he would debate issues.
Unfortunately I think a lot of liberals are like Axelrod and they have their own harsh and limiting blinders. They cannot accept that ~1/3rd of the electorate will be with Trump through hell or high water. The GOP can’t be reasoned with and debating them is idoicy. In fact - it’s toxic to do so because it normalizes awfulness. The chus exist in a world where they reject any information, fact, data, number that contradicts their cherished nonsense or propaganda.
Trivia about the book that is impossible to see in the movie…
The book’s title refers not to the brainwashed assassin Raymond Shaw, but to Senator Johnny Iselin, who is clearly a caricature of the anti-Communist demagogue of the early 1950s, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The basic premise of the story is that Iselin’s achievement of nomination to national office was the direct result of a Communist plot hatched in Manchuria, and Iselin is thus the “Manchurian Candidate.”
I really need to rewatch the original again one of these days.
There is something very dark that “every accusation is a confession” goes all the way back to the Korean War, which in many ways defined the entire Cold War
That wasn’t always the case.
Recently I watched a few minutes here or there of episodes of Firing Line with William F. Buckley. Before I looked for the vids I figured I’d have to watch random (very) shitty uploads from VHS rips. I was entirely wrong. The Hoover Institute uploaded high quality vids of the show to their Youtube channel. I have no idea how many. 100s? Maybe all 1,504 of them?
The Hoover Institute is - of course - very old-school
rib-rockedrock-ribbed GOP. They need an elaberate, tedious, complex network of rhetorical constructions for such things as why it’s a moral imperitive that the poor should be made to suffer, etc. John Kenneth Galbraith described it as “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”After Dubya got elected and 9/11 happened - the rightwing started to realize all that fancy talk maybe wasn’t so important. Power is all. And Trump and Trumpism allowed so many rightwingers to go mask off, be openly racist, be openly hateful, and not bother at all with superior moral justification jibber-jabber. I shockingly large number of them is in permanent “Fuck you. I don’t care.” mode.
rock-ribbed
Ribs rock!
At least it’s a funny mistake.
I just realized, rib-rocked GOP is Rand Paul
Bah boom.
Late reply I know but I love you for going back and subjecting yourself to Buckley.
I agree with everything you observed, I think you’re dead on the target, but you mentioning Buckley tickled a memory of mine watching the Buckley debate with James Baldwin.
Buckley tries a few times to deflect or deflate some brilliant point Baldwin is making with some quip that gets a few laughs but shows how Buckley thought and in hindsight look an awful lot like the kind of stuff chuds will get up to later. Buckley was smart, god curse his soul, he was a skilled orator, and he was well educated. But if you cornered him he’d pull a bullshit quip to get out of the corner. You see how he has to do it several times because Baldwin is smarter and keeps out maneuvering him.
Nowadays the chuds are all yowling hogs and baying dogs and they do that shit so often it’s basically breathing for them but you can see how originally it started with this basic phenomenon: right wing ideas are bad and eventually you run out of justification for them and you bluster and sputter and deflect. Buckley was just smarter so it took longer for him to get there but Baldwin could take him there, and did take him there, on camera in front of an audience several times. Meanwhile the modern chud, the failson heir of the Buckley birthright, has none of the education or the blue blood impulse to obfuscate the cruelty of right wing politics: they go from zero to sputter town in seconds.
Just something I noticed
I watched The Manchurian Candidate the other day. The original not the remake. It’s surreal to me that “brainwashing” has become real in the US. Chuds watch untold hours of rightwing news propaganda like Fox News plus similar podcasts and Youtube vids. They broke their brains. They no longer care what’s real or what’s true. Buckley was snide, rude, and could be a liar but at least he would debate issues.
Unfortunately I think a lot of liberals are like Axelrod and they have their own harsh and limiting blinders. They cannot accept that ~1/3rd of the electorate will be with Trump through hell or high water. The GOP can’t be reasoned with and debating them is idoicy. In fact - it’s toxic to do so because it normalizes awfulness. The chus exist in a world where they reject any information, fact, data, number that contradicts their cherished nonsense or propaganda.
Trivia about the book that is impossible to see in the movie…
I really need to rewatch the original again one of these days.
There is something very dark that “every accusation is a confession” goes all the way back to the Korean War, which in many ways defined the entire Cold War
True. There are whole college departments and stuff dedicated to propping up the neoliberal order.