http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/glenn_beck_to_end_daily_program_on_fox_news/2011/04/06/AFFU8wpC_story.html?wprss=rss_politics

It's a bit lower on my prayer list than seeing to the needs of the nation of Japan and a US government shutdown (seriously, Belgium's gone a year without one and they're not in such bad shape), but apparently God was listening to at least one of my prayers. Now can we get rid of the rest of the pundits (on both sides?) and get some serious broadcast journalism instead of opinion information, faked newsreels and a bunch of blustering?

Syd Lexia wrote:

Hate to rain on your parade, but Beck is expected to either sign a deal with another network or start his own channel. Plus, he still has his radio show.

I'm aware of it, but less is still great in my opinion. He's even expected to do programs for FOX, I know that too, but still, less is more me happy. If he does start his own channel he'll probably encounter about as much success as OWN did, hopefully even less. I know that his hardcore following'll probably be willing to shell out some bucks for it on satellite or cable or whatever, but it's not going to be in your basic package in all likelihood unless the channel/his company pays out the dick to get it on there. In that case, he also has to compete with people watching whatever jerkoff replaces him on FOX and their other programming. I really doubt he'll go over to another network after all the money he made after getting over thanks to Murdoch's help, especially because a lot of people view him as too volatile or controversial.

I'd love to see him just hemorrhage money on the venture, and I'm sure that since FOX'll invest, they'll bleed a little green too. That said, I hope the same fucking thing happens to Keith Olbermann on Current TV and Comcast. These people have a platform to do what Murrow did when McCarthyism and the Red Scare was running batshit and instead they're using the influence that they have to widen the partisan bullshit divide between people in a country that desperately needs solidarity, to acknowledge we've got some serious, serious problems and pull our shit together.

Jack Slater wrote:

I'll have you know that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was almost completely right and not on a witch hunt. The fall of the USSR and the release of KGB files did much to prove that. He was set up for the fall, because the infiltration was so thorough that even some of the people above McCarthy were in on it. This country was fucking INFESTED with Communists.

Is that why we're so shitty at capitalism and China isn't?

Jack Slater wrote:

aeonic wrote: Is that why we're so shitty at capitalism and China isn't? China's not Communist, despite the name and logo. They are simply an ultra-nationalist, generally homogeneous society. They would succeed at whatever they chose to do with those working for them. I suggest you take another look at what Communism, particularly that of the NYC Bolshevik bent, was really all about. It had very little to do with economic policy. Here's another question: if we were so capitalist and anti-Communist, why did we subsidize the USSR for basically its entire lifespan? Do you have any idea how many bailouts we gave them over the decades? You might as well say we financed them. Well, actually we basically did at first, seeing as how most of the top Bolsheviks back circa Lenin et al came not from Moscow but from Brooklyn.

Have you ever met/interacted with any Chinese people? Homogeneity is not a term you could really use to describe them as a people. Especially with the booming economy that the country's been enjoying, people over there are very much becoming interested in things like freedom, democracy and government participation. Their primary problem is that they're operating under a fairly repressive regime that believes dissent works against the bottom line, one of the leftovers from the old Maoist hardliners that's translated into the capitalist kleptocracy that's their government now. The idea that anything is for 'the people' in China, quite frankly, makes me laugh. I know full well that they're not Communists, which is why I never indicated I believed they were.

As for your suggestion, I don't think more reading's going to be the answer. I've read Mao, Engels, Marx, Trotsky and a host of other writers/demagogues in that vein, and I've found, roundly, that all the theories and machinations that they had usually result in perpetuating a rough two-tier system that pretty much goes proleteriat/people far < the bourgoise/bureaucracy. In that respect, they've pretty much developed parallel to us, albeit in a better fiscal footing (at least when you're dealing with the Chinese Communist apparatus or the ex-KGB remnants holding the reins of power in the old USSR). Apparently it has everything to do with economic policy, and that's not surprising, as money, the access to and accumulation of which is the primary and overriding drive for the vast majority of the world's populace. Cash, not love (unfortunately) makes the world go 'round.

And for whatever monies the US gave the USSR (and to be generous, we can leave out what they received in '41-'45, since we were ostensibly allies at that point), it's likely that we spent the same, if not more, not only attempting to beat them in terms of technological advances, but also in the protracted fight against Communism that the country participated in (Vietnam, arming/training Afghanis to fight against the Soviets, training/funding Contras to fight the SNLF in Nicaragua, etc).

Also, you misjudge my feelings on McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Regardless as to the actual percentage of Communists active in the US at the time (which, in and of itself, was nothing really new, just an evolution of the struggles between socialist groups and big business during the late 1800s and early 1900s), McCarthy still took the right aim and attempted to achieve it in probably the most dangerous and haphazard fashion possible. He turned things into a witch hunt by stoking paranoia and divisively dividing the public, a la Mr. Beck some fifty years later, and that's the reason that he failed. Whipping people into a frenzy is a piss-poor way to achieve a long-term goal because, ultimately, people fall out of their lather and realize they've been manipulated by their baser instincts, usually causing them to sway to the opposite portion of whatever issue's spectrum they're dealing with. His zealotry actually hurt the anti-Communism movement, much the same as pundits like Beck and Olbermann hurt the American populace with their divisiveness and partisanship. As long as people are obsessing over minutiae and imagined party lines, we're not addressing the important problems.

And if you can sit and say (or type) with a straight face that the dangers of Bolshevism/Communism in the US was any worse than us employing monsters like Hubertus Strughold, Werhner von Braun and the other Nazis who had their records 'bleached' despite imploding people in high pressure tubes and hand-picking starving slaves to work on V-2 rockets at Dachau, I'd say you're stretching credulity. For the record, are you relying on the Venona documents for your substantiation, or was Ann Coulter's rousing defense of McCarthy the basis for your argument?

Syd Lexia wrote:

He is right about China in so far as the communist movement in China (as well as in Cuba and Vietnam) were originally primarily nationalist movements against outside Imperialism. And since the West wasn't willing to support such movements, the leaders of these movements were pretty forced to fly the communist flag in order to get help from the Soviets.

I'm aware that the nationalist forces were reacting against imperialism, hence the downfall of the Qing dynasty and the results of the Chinese Civil War after the Second Sino-Japanese War, but to indicate that China is still a highly nationalist country is a bit of a misnomer, especially with Kai-Shek and the nationalist forces retreating to Taiwan and parts outlying after the dominance of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai with the rest of the PRC took over the mainland. The government, as it stands now, is based on a Communist bureaucracy, but again, is primarily interested in capitalist expansion and even, it could be said, capitalist imperialism (if they ever called the debt that the US has to them, or even just pumped all the money they have of ours stored back into the economy, we'd be pretty much owned).

Syd Lexia wrote:

The Chinese government is pretty fascinating right now. They seem to realize that economically, they have to move towards a free market in order to survive and thrive, but they are also seem quite content to utilize the old Stalinist model for freedom of speech and human rights, specifically, that such things don't exist.

I have to agree, even if it's a sort of disturbing thing to view. I am also very interested in the idea of a Jasmine Revolution, but I think it's just going to develop into another Tienamen Square situation. Personally, I think that a shift from group identification to individualist identification (facilitated by technology) is causing the wave of seeming political destabilization across the world, but that's the closet futurist in me. Staying in the Chinese vein of things (since we're already wildly off-topic), "May you live in interesting times..."