Hate Mail - There Are No Bigger Suckers Than The Free Speech Absolutists - They Buy The Most Transparent Lie Ever Sold

As mentioned yesterday morning, if you diss Clint Eastwood's movies, you will get a reaction from those who need him as some kind of potency aid or other and what I said got that reaction.  I have been finding that out for at least the last six years.  That he proved himself at the 2012 Republican Convention, before the eyes of millions, to be able to rant insanely, and I would maintain, in a clearly racist, demeaning manner at an empty chair - in a manner not that different from that which a really hammy MacBeth screaming at an empty chair demonstrating his descent into fascist violence would - is nothing compared to the sexy fascist cop - a law unto himself -  he embodied or the vengeful rapist he also embodied with less sartorial sense.

I didn't really expect such people to read Marilynne Robinson's essay - at least one whose snark was brought to my attention didn't even bother to read what I'd written - or they might have seen that the point I have made a number of times was touched on in the essay, alluding to his fascistic cop in Dirty Harry, a cop licensed to kill people with his giant gun but whose grasp of doing so under the rule of law was rather weak.   I am always curious to know what movies and TV shows people who kill other people watched and enjoyed,  I would like to know how many of the cops who shoot down innocent black people watched such movies, the original or the many knock-offs.  When you're talking Hollywood, you know that there will be lots of knock-offs.  I also wonder the same about people who shoot up schools and movie theaters.   Those cases where much is known about the shooters, I suspect they're more influenced by what they watch than by what they read.

I have also mentioned, many times, to outraged effect, that the media, entertainment and alleged news, have pushed the ridiculous and hypocritical claim that what people imbibe in movies, TV, and other venues of media has no effect on their behavior.  That ideas presented to people so as to attract and hold their attention, or at least eyeballs, and make money for those producing it will have no effect, whatsoever, on the thinking and actions of those people.  The media does so even as it makes billions of dollars selling advertising, overt and covert - product placement - to alter the thinking and actions of the audience.   Social science also plays all sides of the street, giving media the strategies to more effectively sell garbage to an unsuspecting audience while providing the ersatz data to prove that what they claim to be able to do doesn't happen.  That what people are sold with the most alluring of methods - most often through appealing to the presented model of sexual appeal and gratification - doesn't have the very effects through which they peddle their expertise to the producers of those media.

The whole thing is, has been and will be the most blatant of crap.   What people take in has an effect on them, either the primary effect intended by the media - making money for their advertisers and, so themselves through ticket sales and ad revenue - or the secondary ones of molding the thinking and actions of the susceptible, which includes all of us.  Some will buy DVDs or downloads, gorging on Dirty Harry and the High Plains Drifter, some will want to buy the biggest gun and pack it in public, some will combine that with the similar paranoid inducement to violence that they get from similar media, some of it with an even more overt political intention, racial and ethnic animus and less restraint from some legal department or someone concerned with the impact that overt fascist content may have had on ticket sales.

The entire line of assertion that the presentation of such content is harmless was known to be a lie  at least since the aftermath of Klan activity after the release of Birth of a Nation.  Since it's the movies and TV we're talking about, I'll let pass the fact that it has been known since the invention of writing and even before when someone invented story telling.   It was known to the champion murderers of the 20th century, fascist, Nazi, Marxist, Stalinist, Maoist, etc. who all used the movies, radio and television to propagandize their populations and those abroad.  The America First effort to keep the United States from entering WWII in a more timely fashion was just one example.   That what people see in the movies and on TV have an especially strong effect on thinking and actions has been known in Hollywood and other centers of production since the start.  Having an effect on other people is the whole point of it.   The very people who pushed the line that it had no effect on thinking and behavior were in the same business which made money in the same way.  The very people who push that lie in its quasi-academic form are lying in order to effect peoples' thinking and their behavior, especially their political behavior.  It is a lie, sold by the media and those who champion the importance of the media, through assertions of social science - some of it bought and paid for by those who want to keep doing that.

When someone is selling you a lie that is demonstrated to be a transparent lie contradicted in the very act of lying they are engaged in, you really have to be the ultimate chump to buy it.   That some of them sit on the Supreme Court only shows that such chumpery isn't unknown to the intellectual elite.  That is those who don't have the ulterior motive of liberating the media to lie out of even more sinister political motives and to have an even worse political effect.  Their ends are the same that Clint had in 2012, only their act is different.

I knew the reaction I would get by saying what was said  and I got it.  The fools who reacted predictably proved what I claimed by their reaction to it.   And I didn't even have to use movies to do it.

Update:  I also knew that the big brains of Eschaton would snark about what was said even as they didn't read it.

Duncan,  we've had our differences but you deserve a better comment community than the one you've got.  You ever consider starting over again?   I recommend comment moderation BEFORE publication.