September 11 redux

[sexy-girl]

i beg as many people as possible to watch this clip and post what you think ... im not sure if they've been posted before

http://www.guerrillanews.com/redux/

Windows Media : (best for PC's)

broadband medium

QuickTime: (best for mac's)

broadband medium


S-11 Redux:
(Channel) Surfing the Apocalypse


It is a well-known and widely accepted fact that, during wartime, news companies and governmental representatives fuse their voices together into one univocal beam of support for the national military objective. And, while, for many, this is a vital aspect of institutional patriotism, it is also a very dangerous and troubling reality. For, if the news media have abandoned their responsibility to objectively inform the population, then our concept of a democracy (which is founded on the ability for all citizens to choose their nation's destiny based on a full spectrum of information) is in desperate peril.


But imagine a mediascape in which politicians actually said what they meant and meant what they said. One where the talking heads on broadcast news actually challenged the powerful interests in Washington not with fangless sensationalism, but with insightful deconstructions of true power and its manipulations.


We can't.


At least, not in the current corporate controlled environment of media ownership. And especially not with the so-called War on Terrorism and its burgeoning McCarthyistic clampdown on open displays of dissent.


So, in the face of our media's shameless propaganda campaign, we have taken it upon ourselves to intuit what the intentions and goals of this war truly are. In what is surely a departure from our traditional NewsVideo format, GNN presents S-11 Redux: (Channel) Surfing the Apocalypse. Culled from over 20 hours of television footage recorded over a one month period and across 13 networks, S-11 Redux is a sound-bite blitzkrieg that challenges the messages we have been fed from our mainstream media and the government it serves. Be warned - this video moves quickly and will require at least two viewings to digest its full impact. You may never be able to look at the coverage of S-11 and its post-impact coverage the same way, ever again.

 

[sexy-girl]

i will bump this up if everyone keeps ignoring it

 

[metal_minx]

i will bump this up if everyone keeps ignoring it

so much to read....head hurts...

 

[RawHumor]

<snip>For, if the news media have abandoned their responsibility to objectively inform the population, then our concept of a democracy (which is founded on the ability for all citizens to choose their nation's destiny based on a full spectrum of information) is in desperate peril. <snip>

I couldn't watch it because I'm behind a firewall and couldn't connect, but that sentence stands out to me.

I agree with it.

I just think that most of the media abandoned that responsibility long before 9/11.

 

[p_p_man]

The imagery of the video was excellent...

we need more sites like GNN and more people who think the same way as GNN's founders.

As they said on the site:

"What is GNN?

Guerrilla News Network is an underground news organization with headquarters in New York City and production facilities in Berkeley, California. Our mission is to expose people to important global issues through guerrilla programming on the web and on television.


What is a Guerrilla NewsVideo?

Guerrilla NewsVideos are music videos for people who think — mini-documentaries that combine high-impact imagery, tracks from top recording artists and interviews with leading experts about important issues underexposed by the big media outlets. They aim to rock as hard as they inform, shock and inspire."

The impact of too much information from one source has the negative affect of blinding people to the broader issues at stake.

Question everything declared by Government.

Accept nothing.

Thanks sexy-girl for posting the link and the video...

ppman

 

[phrodeau]

Their website caused my computer to lock up.

I guess I just don't have the resources to be objectively informed.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Berkley lost its sheen around Watergate, and has been pissed about it every since. Everyone in that town walks around playing "Ohio" on their Walkmans. I think they have a Billy Jack film festival.

Moving right along....

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Be warned - this video moves quickly and will require at least two viewings to digest its full impact.

It took about six seconds to "digest its full impact", though I watched the whole thing.

For those of you without DSL, don't bother. It's a childish, basement-video piece of idiocy that any angry young man of 12 could edit together with his Daddy's iMac. Esentially it's a bunch of sound bites from the talking heads voicing their opinions on the War on Terrorism, mixed in with WWII and Vietnam stock footage, and other pop culture imagery and sounds, like "Dueling Banjos" and Walt Disney saying "Here we go!"

This, they think, requires two sittings to "get".

I "get" it. The media and the government and the entertainment industry are acting like a propoganda machine, gearing us up for war.

There, I just said in one sentence everything their video staff took a couple of weeks to edit together. And, you know what? I'm pretty sure you all "got" it. I just treated you with more intelligence than this "Guerilla Network".

And I wonder if anyone in their organizaiton has yet picked up on the irony of rallying against tunnel-visioned propoganda with their own tunnel-visioned propoganda? When Oliver Stone created the film "JFK" he said, outright, "I'm creating a new myth about the assassination to get people to question the old myth of the Warren Report". Yet GNN would have this edited fluff speak as "commentary".

A typical tactic of Creationists, Holocaust deniers, and other supporters of the unsupportable, is to put all "arguments" of their oppponents on equal footing. Therefore, everything George Bush says in the State of the Union is equal to something Dan Rather says off camera, which is equal to an offhand silly remark by Larry King, etc. etc. It all becomes one GIANT campaign of propoganda, and all voices are the same, and therefore do not need to be listened to, regarded, or reponded to in their own, individual context. It's a happy box of "Bad" to skewer. The only way to win all the arguments is to make them one argument. Edit them all together into a sound bite movie, and stick in Walt Disney. See? See how "Bad" they ALL are?

And remember to "watch it twice". It's that deep.

 

[sexy-girl]

thanks for watching it DCL i agree with you in some respect i dont think its "that deep" ... however i do think its a interested approach in highlighting some of the news reporting and language used by politicians which in my opinion has been disgusting

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

But my point is that no one needs it "highlighted", and then passed off as some kind of underground performance art we're supposed to "get" intrinsically, like a poor man's Kubrick picture. Name ONE person who watches the the talking heads on TV every night and says, "Yup. Bought it all." Nobody.

GNN is getting all guerilla trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

 

[Starfish]

What problem doesn't exist?

That people are happily spoon fed a bunch of mediocre media drama, and they buy it, posing a sense of false security on them, but they love it, because they can go back to shopping at their favorite stores, and shit without worry because our military is out there bombing the fuck out of everything? Oh no, that's not happening AT ALL....

DCL, As you sit there in your intellectual throne, you must really have some heavy parepheral blinders up about the state of mentality that the common American has. You're so utterly preoccupied with the lack of unique theatrics of this peice that you can't see that there is a point that has to be so utterly simplified to the average American. The point made here may be obvious, dull and mythical to you maybe, but you are not everyone, and most people.

We are not that great.

We fuck up, a lot.

We consume too much and show the world our greed.

It is pathetic, and it is up to us to make the changes that are needed to not be hypocrites any more.

*yawn* right?

Well, maybe you find that so utterly mundane because you aren't like most people. Most people are ignorant and need to be shown the way. Many people aren't gifted, but have something to say. Many others are gifted and most of them tend to spend a lot of time making it out like everything that is below them isn't worthy of any recognition.

You are brilliant, but sometimes you can be a very dumb shithead.

(Edited to say I am sorry for calling you that. I feel guilty. I hope I didn't make you feel bad, but if I did, I apologise. I have a harsh way of trying to make certain points and you didn't deserve that.)

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

The government isn't them, it's us, and we are a lot smarter than you give us credit for. The problem, as GNN shrilly states it, doesn't exist. The American public is not a mob with torches being urged to burn down Frankenstein's castle.

Double "dumb shithead" on you.

 

[sexy-girl]

sorry dixon i still disagree with you ... the public is a mob ... (i didn't say american) ... and that mob is led by media and government ... it should be the other way around though the public should be leading the media and government but its not working like that right now ... especially since september 11th


i think the media works well using satire and i think that is what this video piece was trying to do ... i dont think it was trying to be art at all ... it was perhaps trying to be a political satire commentating on the things that i see and feel strongly about i thought it did it pretty well


thank you starfish too ... i agree with you on the whole ... although i wont call dixon any names ... i can tell you feel pretty strongly about this though too and i admire it ... i think at the moment in the media environment we're living in its hard work to find out real facts and not everyone can be bothered


pp man i knew you'd like it

 

[RawHumor]

sexy-girl, I respect you and all, but if ppman agrees with your post, then it's time to modify your position on things.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

You're looking at this too simply (much like the "guerillas" at GNN). Representative government with a system of checks and balances wouldn't survive without a public able to change the government. The bulk of the political life in this country is not a group of rednecks in Mississippi bedazzled by them there TV graphics, but an astonshing amount of perfectly level-headed savvy action groups that lobby and foist change every day. Stop watching Leno's "Jay-Walking" segments and take a walk over to your local city hall, watch your local government access channel, find a cause you care about and join the local office, give to Emily's List, support your uncle for City Councilman. Jesus. Who do you think all these people running grass roots campaigns and writing bills and doing environmental impact studies are? Canadians?

There is so much you can DO in this country, and so much that IS being done, to shape the near future. To sit back and bitch about how we're all being led by the nose is lazy in the extreme.

 

[Starfish]

Did you see my apology? You are double doody heading me and I apologised to you?

Dixon, take the time to differentiate your posts to me or to sexy girl. I didn't say anything about mob mentality. To acquire that you have to be somewhat unified in theory. This nation is split and will remain so as long as we cling to archaic idealisms that prove everyday to be faulty and lacking a understanding of our place in the scheme of things.

I do not watch television shows. I live. I have lived in towns and met people and seen things you don't even know exist. Oh, but right now, I can't take you back there to prove I did, so I must be lying, or seeking patterns. I must not know what I am thinking. I must have hallucinated the past 15 fucking years of personal experiance with making interpersonal human contact with enumerable people. Humph. Jay leno, my ass.


I didn't say you were stupid. I didn't say Americans were stupid. If you were going to generalize about what I said the best you could come close to accurately is that I said that most of them are blind to their own best interest. How much do you really really really care about starving and persecuted people? I know I care, but appearantly not enough to really do anything about it. Oh, wait, I am the government. I guess I'll just go take care of that right now. Oh, wait, better yet, You are the government too, so why don't you handle it.

The other government members want that reforandum on their desk Monday morning asap.
Got it?

 

[Starfish]

I have to add that what you are not getting here is that most of the level headed people you speak of have an appointed agenda to follow because they fit into the mold of either reform maker via a special interest group or political party memebers who actually spend most of their time lobby against lobbists who are against them. OH boo! Talk about the blind leading the blind. Change? How can change occur when most of those people you speak of don't have a grip on where we should be headed to make things right. We talk a lot. We don't accomplish shit. For example, what exactly has changed in our government that overall, enables your average person, consumer, whatever to be economically intelligent, while being ecologically friendly? It isn't common. I am not talking about inbreeds.

Get real. Spend an average day in isle 5 of your grocery store. Just do it. Sit down in the isle and hang out. You'll soon see how truely good and intelligent common people are when you start being looked at like you are psycho. Like you are in the way. Like you are fucked up for doing that. Impulsiveness rules, not levelheadedness. Doody head.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Did you see my apology? You are double doody heading me and I apologised to you?

Yeah, but you left in the "shithead".

Millions, not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of Americans are shaping the country every day. Major elections happen every two years. You are the government. Welcome to an adult world, free of tea leaves.

 

[Starfish]

Shaping it to look like what? A giant mini mall suburban nightmare?


Thank you but I've been in the adult world for ten years now.

Insult taken.

 

[Starfish]

I didn't edit out what I said, because I edited in the apology.

If I was going to take the shithead out, I would have just erased it all, and pmd you the apology.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Observation, not insult. I called you naive and uninformed, not a shithead.

 

[Starfish]

Double "dumb shithead" on you.

Oh, really? Is that so?

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Yeah. That's so. Stop taking things out of context.

 

[Starfish]

Stop ignoring the fact that I am not clueless. You can't deny that the direction this country is headed in is very fucked up. We have children killing children over games. Greed should be classified as an American value.

You seem to want to distract from my points with counter points that aren't even relevent to why I brought up that you are not justified in deeming that video as juvinile crap.

You just aren't comfortable with the fact that my observations about most, commonplace people are justified. You feel you must try and distract me, in a rather juvinile manner if you ask me, by trying to 'convince' me that the change that those who do push for it, is really making that much of a difference to those who need it. Tell that to the people by the lake who are dying of Chronic Beryllium disease. Millions of level headed people push each day to try and stop it. Can they? No. At least not yet, because the common American is ignorant to that which they buy, and consume that creates this problem.

Multiply the amount of people who do care and are shaping the country, by 6 and you've got the number of mind numbingly complacent people who need a simple wake up call. That is fact. Stop distracting from that point with your insistance that those who work toward change are winning the fight at some pace that is deemably effective. It just isn't happening at the rate we need it to, so that if it takes simple minded approaches to get those who are blind to open their eyes, then that is what is needed. Not more political retoric that is full of complicated, agenda laden spew and that when it boils down to it, has a blurry vision of true human need, but focuses more on our own wants and desires and the gains that can come of it for 'we' the government.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

You can't deny that the direction this country is headed in is very fucked up.

Sure I can. It's not.