Forum Post: Nothing on this group represents occupy in any significant way shape or form people! If you want to have an accurate idea of what this is about, start here!
Posted 12 years ago on Dec. 24, 2011, 8:23 a.m. EST by Fredone
(234)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
If you want to know the truth about occupy, if you want to understand the movement, then you are a complete fool to make your judgements based on ANYTHING that happens in this forum. Go. to . an. occupation. Talk to people. See for yourself. Read the statements released by the GAs by concensus if you want the most reliable picture of what this is about. It is by far the most reliable way.
And turn. off. the. t. v. People think they can somehow use the 1%er owned and controlled media and somehow compensate for the bias and gain an accurate understanding. They are WRONG. Their methods of propaganda are based on scientific principles that apply to EVERYONE. The only solution is to get your news from elsewhere.
Anyone want to post their news sources that are relatively free of the 1%'s influence as far as they can tell, feel free. The websites of the occupations are by far the best. Wlcentral is okay but there is not much there. Rabble.ca is okay though Canadian. Al-jazeera is okay too in my experience although I have yet to double check who runs them.
No matter what anyone here, or the washington post, says about anonymous, or cop-hating within occupy, it means next to nothing. It. is. not. reliable. There are probably tons of paid shills here - think how cheap it is to pay someone to be a shill on this forum. Exactly. It's not like they can't afford it.
Fredone states what all of us should already know- This site is full of disinformation- and we should believe nothing here- his sources of accurate information is correct- Al-jazeera is the best, but their is an anti us attitude there. Why would an Arabic media be biased against the us government?
I get a lot of my day-to-day news from PBS's the News Hour, NPR, and 60 Minutes supplemented with the online editions of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Anything that I'm actually doing serious research into I tend to learn about through various political science and economic journals, many of which you can get through online databases like JSTOR (and many public libraries have online subscriptions to one or more those databases for patrons to access by using the Internet on one of their computers).
I don't generally come here for information, but I do come here a lot for the debate. I've found a number of remarkably intelligent sparring partners of all different political affiliations here, ranging from an almost seventy-year old anarchist to a hardcore libertarian to our resident ex-strategist and almost everyone in between. It's really helping me get better at articulating my own political views and the constant criticism really keeps me on my toes.
Hm, journals are a good one. But that first group of news sources you listed.... sorry but they are all propaganda rags. Supposedly according to chomsky, some outlets made for businessmen actually have a significant pro-reality tilt just because the businessmen want the actual truth in order to make decisions based on, but only the articles which describe the state of the world or contain fact based stuff most likely. However the vast majority of the stuff in them is probably for propaganda purposes, even propagandizing to the business community has no reason to be off limits, obviously.
I'm not completely sure about that; generally when I look through the journals I compare the body of knowledge that I picked up through other sources to the pictures being painted by different journals, and there's not necessarily that much divergence between the picture of the world I get from those outlets and what I get from the journals.
I grew up in front of the News Hour, and I have to say that not only have they rarely if ever been wrong about any given issue but that the debate they provided on the TV (and then proceeded to spark in the house; my dad followed politics like football and watched the News Hour the same way a football nut watches ESPN, while my mother had a fairly strong humanities background) gave me an understanding of how our political process (and sometimes that of different countries) worked and which issues really mattered that then gave me the framework into which to insert whatever information I then chose to gather.
I don't necessarily trust the editorials in any of those pieces, but I tracked the fall of the Mubarak regime and the rise of the Arab Spring movement through the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and it pretty much told me enough of what I needed to know that I could pick up the rest from the Internet without a problem. My AP US History class read Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition and I own a copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States of America and I can say that while I may not fully agree with either of them they certainly did stimulate my own train of thought.
Just out of curiosity, what leads you to identify these particular sources of news as propaganda rags? Where have they deliberately twisted the truth, or failed to cover it altogether? Where have they failed to provide expert analysis and debate and instead opted for pundits yelling at each other across a table? Where have their investigative pieces (which in some cases were unwelcome enough that Bush II tried to eliminate public television funding over the stuff they ran on warrantless wiretapping and the Iraq war, among other things) stopped far short of uncovering the truth? Answer those questions, and I'll cease to listen to those news sources.
I don't think you have to worry, few seem to come into a forum to learn anything. There are the curious and there are the prophets of one point of view or another.
Turning off the TV will also protect people from the influence of the tv ads run by superpacs to convince people that lies are true and truth is a lie. Let them spend their money and let it have no effect. And thank you, Fredone, for some other news sources.
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I read the GC Declaration. It was a laundry list of complaints. There are maybe three or four I agree with out of 27. The bailouts should have happened. The rest is silly.
"They have taken our homes away" - because you didn't pay your mortgage for months and months.
"They have poisoned the food supply" C'mon you are kidding right?
"They have held students hostage" - grow up and pay the loans you took out voluntarily
"They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press" - are we talking about North Korea and Cuba here?
"They have purposely covered up oil spills accidents..." - Huh?
It goes on and on...
The other resources on the GC site are pretty vague.
That's not anything to do with what I said, except that you are a sterling example of someone the propaganda machine has been particularly good at affecting. Don't take that personal, just take it as advice that you really need to try getting your news from elsewhere, and have some self awareness that this system has been used on you for many years and you need to question your beliefs and ideals seriously because they have been poisoned, basically.
It's just a news source, not an encyclopedia or textbook. They can't go into all the minutia of everything. If you want to understand what they are talking about go down there and talk to them.
Huh?
You said "Read the statements released by the GAs by concensus"
I clicken on the link above NYCGA and read everything on the Resources link. What I posted was from the first link called "Delclaration"
The first paragraph states
"This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on September 29, 2011"
So how can you say "That's not anything to do with what I said"???