Friday, March 13, 2009

At last...

The moment I haven't really been waiting for has arrived.

The Obama Deception is out. It's already the most-viewed video at Google Video, I'm sorry to say. This makes me fear slightly for the fate of humanity, but meh. Maybe it will keep Jones's fanbase off the street for a couple of days.

I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I did pay attention to the opening, and left it on while I was doing other stuff. Here are some random thoughts on what I've seen so far...

First of all, the commentators brought in to wax eloquent on the state of American politics are your usual Jonesian array of conspiranoids, B list celebs, and of course pro wrestlers.

Jesse Ventura: "Politics in America today is identical to pro wrestling." Staged and vaguely homoerotic? No, just staged. Willie Nelson concurs. I don't know about you, but I don't believe anything until a one-term Minnesota governor and a fiscally dense Country-Western star believe it first.

Webster Tarpley is credited as "author, historian", leaving out "LaRouche cult propaganda minister, scammer". And which other historians say things like, "Vladimir Putin is the most intelligent politician in the world today" and "NATO killed Aldo Moro"? Which other North American historians don't know that Michaelle Jean is a woman? About the only thing he gets right in this film is that Bilderberg Group founder Prince Bernard of the Netherlands was a Nazi.

Joe Rogan: "It's pretty obvious that there's some gigantic financial institutions that've been pulling the strings of politicians in this country for a long time..." Whoa. That's, like, profound. Screw academia when you've got Joe Rogan and Webster Tarpley on your team.


----------------------

Jones's list of Bush's mistakes in office is fairly accurate until he throws in "the rise of the treasonous North American Union" and flashes that map of "NAFTA Superhighways" pulled from the NASCO website.


----------------------


Now correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't everything Bush has ever done been painted by Jones as part of the New World Order scheme? 9/11, expanded perimeters for wiretapping, Gitmo, Iraq, etc.? Well, now that Jones has a new target, that's not quite the case. Now Bush's mistakes really were mistakes, and "the globalist agenda had stalled." That's why they brought in the Saviour, Obama, to usher in the real New World Order.


Keep movin' those goalposts, Mr. Jones. You could certainly use the exercise.


----------------------


Self-proclaimed Bilderberg expert Daniel Estulin claims he had moles in the Bilderberg meeting, who told him all about the diabolical plans to bust the housing market. He must be referring to actual moles. Let's be frank: no one affiliated with Bilderberg is gonna hang with a fringe paranoid like Estulin. Unless, perhaps, "the elite" like to go slumming now and then to mess with people's heads for cheap entertainment. Maybe that's what happened with Aaron Russo, come to think of it...


---------------------


If I had to pick one scene as the saddest part of the film, this would be it: Jones in a Virginia Marriott hotel, giving one of his Bilderberg meeting dispatches over the phone to George Noory of Coast to Coast AM. Jones is certain the fire alarm that sounded minutes earlier was timed precisely to interrupt this dispatch. "I know this is a set-up!" He also comments that he's been followed, the same thing he said before infiltrating Bohemian Grove (when he was obviously not being followed).

He could be right, though. Maybe the Powers That Be don't want the UFO crowd to know about Jones's harrowing experience of standing on the sidewalk half a block away from a Bilderberg meeting, screaming into a bullhorn, and assigned their top spooks to the hotel to interrupt (doesn't the CIA own the Marriott chain, after all?).

-------------------


Needless to say, Obama doesn't get any credit for shutting down Gitmo, abolishing the term "enemy combatants", or setting a deadline for the termination of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The Obama Deception is out. It's already the most-viewed video at Google Video, I'm sorry to say."

It's time to play...
http://tinyurl.com/ConspiracyBingo

S.M. Elliott said...

That's almost too easy...you could probably bingo with each and every broadcast, never mind his *documentaries*.

odyobes said...

What people like Alex Jones fall for is the classic trap of every magic trick. To be fair the central bankers are most certainly conspiring to increase their wealth and power, but that's not really a surprise, is it? But this is the problem. Because his central attack is essentially true a deeper illusion is created. I call it the invisible thread fallacy.

First you have the magician, this can be the central bankers or Bilderberg Group, whoever. The magician waves his hands and across the table a pencil moves and slides toward him. The pencil is the economic collapse or vote fraud, again, whatever effect we all sort of know intuitively is being caused by our symbolic magician. This is why the illusion works. We know there is a correlation but the correlation isn't entirely clear. The fallacy is instead of starting simple and looking for invisible thread between the magician and the pencil people have a tendency to invent elaborate conspiracies of magic and supernatural powers to explain it. If everyone was skeptical then these sorts of tricks would be sort of boring. It's this tendency to look for the amazing before the simple that allows people like Alex Jones to have a following.

He spins a plausible, yet shallow, explanation that also happens to comfort peoples fear and anxiety about these secretive and powerful groups. What he always fails to mention or see is that just because the wealthy want to exploit the poor doesn't mean they get to. The reason they're able to, when they are, is because people pretty much let them. But it's not in his interest, or the people who buy into his rhetoric, to admit their own culpability or participation in this system they're so afraid of. This is a terrible disservice to the public. Even if Alex Jones is 100% correct and even if he was 100% successful it wouldn't actually solve any problems. It would just shift wealth and power to some other group of alphas.

The entire idea of it being a NEW world order is itself disingenuous. It's the same sort of thing described by Schjelderup Ebbe and his pecking order. It's not a NEW world order, it's the same old one we've always had. The way out is to focus our efforts there, not in soothing our paranoia with elaborate tales and supplementing our lack of control with farcical protests. You don't create a better world by destroying the old one. You have to be willing, at some point, to put down the bullhorn and pick up the hammer and put in some work.

S.M. Elliott said...

You've pretty much nailed it, odyobes.

Substituting the strings with labrynthine and/or implausible explanations and setting up an Us vs. Them dichotomy is very comforting to some. It removes all personal fault and responsibility from the equation. Meanwhile, nothing really changes.

Eugene said...

I don't get how anyone still listens to Mr Jones. First Bush was the big evil and was going to bring about the NWO and other plagues but then none of that actually happened and now he is just seamlessly moving all of his accusations to the next president. Smart money says that after all the doom fails to happen under Obama he will just move the accusations on to the next guy. Seriously, how does he have any credibility left?

Thanks for this blog!

S.M. Elliott said...

I don't get it either, Eugene. I've been hearing the "microchipped populace" rumour my entire life (it started out as a Christian lecture circuit scam), yet Jones et. al. still insist it's going to happen ANY MINUTE NOW. Ditto for U.S. concentration camps (those rumours have been around since the 1930s, at the latest) and the New World Order (remember Pat Robertson's anti-NWO campaign platform in '88?).

odyobes said...

I think their concerns are valid, which is how they get traction, but their approach is disingenuously populist.

Just to be fair the US has used camps to house people ranging from dissidents to prisoners of war through out her history and places like Guantanamo are nearly gulags save for their scope. Further the history of state IDs is a good example of erosion of civil liberties from their very inception where the states swore drivers licenses would never be used as a form of ID. I don't doubt that there are people who would just love to use microchips to enable even better tracking of everyone's movements and it would be reasonably attributed to a continuation of the same policies that have had us carrying state IDs.

There are many slippery slopes that are avoided only due to the continued vigilance of their critics, obsessed or not. It's important not to be paranoid, yes, but it's also important not to be closed to alternative perspectives. This would only be disingenuous on the other foot.

But some of the rhetoric and fear campaigns that people like Alex Jones engage in need to be watched just as closely. It's not always governments that spin out of control. It's just as often these sorts of fringe movements that can threaten our liberty and well being.

S.M. Elliott said...

"the US has used camps to house people ranging from dissidents to prisoners of war through out her history and places like Guantanamo are nearly gulags save for their scope"

True. So why haven't I heard as many complaints about Gitmo as I've heard about FEMA camps, from Jones et. al.?

Vigilance is good - but some effort must be made to be viligant about the right things.

odyobes said...

That is of course the point. If he was rallying against something actionable then he might one day be held to that action. I don't think it's purposeful but perhaps an underlying motivation for many conspiracy theorists is that the pursuit or quest is the destination. I suppose this might be analogous to a drifter, only an intellectual drifter, so to speak.

TK said...

I've just watched the Obama Deception. Excuse me while I Hoover up the crazy.

Alex Jones has this odd dichotomy which appears briefly in this and a lot on his radio show. He attempts to prove an assertion by stating it's in the mainstream press. But it's top top secret stuff he's revealing to us - the secrets of the all powerful NWO. How can they rule the world and be that incompetent?

About Me

My photo
I'm a 30ish housefrau living in Canada

Followers