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I'll watch more of it and get back to you.
A.
Sorry for the confusion. I considered it an interview. What did you think of the worst gig ever? to me, the description of the "club" in Baton Rouge were histerical.
Another atheist comic to get into is Doug Stanhope. Equally as controversial at Bill Hicks.
Rich...The link went to "worst gig ever." Did you have something else in mind?
I'm happy I had the chance to turn you onto Bill Hicks. I go back with him a long time to when he first appeared at the Rodney Dangerfield Comedy Club on 2nd Avenue, NYC. Here’s a great place to start, an interview that you’re not going to believe, but still it would be awfully hard to make this stuff up. Makes one ask, “What the heck kind of country are we living in?” Surreal is the only answer.
His death was a great loss and he was way ahead of his time. Don't miss the one on Rush Limbaugh. I laughed my head off.
PS. I will look into Bill Hicks - not familiar.
Rich...I remember your connection with Zimbardo. You were so fortunate to have this kind of enlightenment.
I have no doubt that obedience is hard-wired and it takes the greatest of effort to discern, as we grow up, which directives are really for our own good and which are simply perpetuated in the name of authority and tradition. Most people never escape.
In line with my speculation that people need ever-larger doses of hype as an anodyne to their fear, guilt, dread, and pain, I note that the annual trampling and door-busting is a fairly recent phenomenon. There was, in my memory, always a Christmas shopping rush, but this takes it up several notches.
As a linguist, I'm interested in the way "Black Friday" (do the tramplers even know what "black" means in this context?) has morphed 180 degrees, from an expression of catastrophe (didn't it refer to the stock market crash in 1929?) to one of joy and anticipation. Weird.
Do I remember the Milgram experiments? The Yale researcher first published the astounding and alarming results in 1963 and I took Phil Zimbardo’s social pysch course in 1964. The latter was a major player in the conception as well as overseer of the reliability and validity of the experiment.
Interestingly, after 50 years, submission to authority is the second of three parts of Zimbardo’s “Lucifer Effect”, published in 2007. He spent much of his career answering the question, “why do people commit evil”. Again I take a genetic approach, realizing that obedience and gullibility of a child are ingrained in human DNA. When a mother said in earlier times, “don’t go in the river, there’s alligators,” the rebellious kids that didn’t obey, didn’t survive. Most young children readily believe in Santa Claus.
To suspect that "you" are not in control of your behavior -- that's asking for a lot of insight from people whose main goal at the moment is to burst into Wal-Mart at 6:00 am and sample the treasures therein.
Well said. I could scarcely believe the news clips. People got hurt nearly trampling one another over some clearance of five-dollar earphones. Are you into Bill Hicks? Just as the war mongers, the marketers have sure gotten their way in the new century. Hicks showed quite an insight here as he warned people about unbridled consumerism.
Gotta go. I’ll get to Jay’s comment later in this interesting, and important, discussion. He’s certainly right about the “fuzzy mysticism” of hippie days. Allen Ginsberg where are you?
Jay,
You came out of the 60s prety much as I did: four decades later, the govt. is still making up wars, legality of pot is FINALLY starting to happen, and -- I'm responding to Rich here as well (thanks for kind words on the writing), half the world lives on $1 a day, and the ecological destruction of the planet is MUCH worse than when first noticed. WTF happened?
It has to do with the people who get elected to office in democracies (or take office in 3rd world countries): they are first and foremost political animals, cloaking their power lust in government "services" that wed increasingly large numbers of people to the govt., pretending in a hundred ways to "serve" the people while benefiting their cronies and getting themselves reelected.
Worse, although they disingenuously say that government should be run like a business, there are may reasons why it can't, notably that the politicans are by and large losers who couldn't hold real business jobs. In govt. there's none of the deadines, budgetary responsibility, and accountability that business requires. Even if they do have job skills (other than lawyering), they would rather be busybodies and tell everyone else how to live (e.g., Henry Waxman, David Kessler).
I totally agree that the anti-scientistic bent of the 60s was not productive. There's way too much New Age swill around today. Hipppies' imagination was too limited to see science harnessed for the betterment of humanity.
You're quite right about the govt. contradiction. Liberals want to solve every problem with a beneficent government. They are not libertarians like me.
All it says is that the human brain changes slowly, if at all. The resurgence of religion, the ever-larger government, ALL war ALL the time!, skyrocketing debt and more instead of less concentration of wealth...it all means that humans gravitate to the same few tricks for getting by: follow anyone who says he knows what he's doing; work, buy, consume. Salute the flag. Honor vets who defended my freedom.
Questioning the government is treason. With the hated draft gone, Americans don't give a shit. The Iraq war protests were pathetic compared to Vietnam, which actually made the govt. change course.
How about a movie (Bruce Willis) in which the American people refuse to participate in another unnecessary war, with acts of protest and even sabotage. It gets so bad that the govt. has to beck down (and Demi Moore, too)
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