These good folks are standin’ up fer God and their freedoms, praise Jeezus:
I think I felt my IQ drop a few points after watching this.
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“I think I felt my IQ drop a few points after watching this.”
Seriously.
I feel so bad for that kid they interviewed. It makes me sick really.
It is so sad that they are teaching children this garbage.
Proof that we REALLY need to work on the educational system in our country.
Well…
Yes, stupid and/or uninformed people can be amusing. My favorite line? “McCarthy and John Wayne were right!!!” And the whole ‘czar’ discussion.
But on the other hand, the producer of the video (who is not neutral by any means) was able to create any picture he wants from a crowd that size; he could have interviewed people all day and then cut together the most ridiculous people (and if you’ll notice, he only ended up with a handful of folks). In any crowd of 200,000 people or so, given enough time, anyone can find enough idiots to fill nine and a half minutes of footage.
I do have to say, the “Gleen Beck is such a logical thinker!” near the end made me a little nauseous.
Especially if the crowd is composed of 200,000 idiots.
I don’t doubt there are informed, thoughtful, intelligent people who are against universal health care. I know some.
I do doubt, however, that there were many of those people in that crowd.
Fascism, socialism, communism…
So sad to see so many inflicted with a dire case of rectocranial impaction.
Great video, shows how much ignorance there is out there about our government in general. Remember what the great philosopher Forest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” There was a great deal of stoopid in there!
My favourite on this subject (sorry, I cannot remember the source) – “If Stephen Hawking was British, he’d be dead by now”
I wouldn’t even trust any of those people to sit the right way on a toilet seat…
Thankfully, that’s between them and the toilet seat.
That just scares me.
“So what kind of lies and spending in particular do you have a problem with?”
The bailout…..ummm…(looks around)…uhhh…
They should have called it “Tea Party of the Dead” (no offense Mr. Romero). Most of those zombies don’t even know why they’re there.
They’re there because they are angry and scared, and some moron called Glenn Beck said that all angry scared people ought to go there and mill about ineffectually with signs.
Articulation and logical reasons are the lat thing you should be looking for from folks, by and large. I imagine if you took a scientific sample of Obama voters, and asked them simple fact-based questions about government, politics, and history, the results would make you cry. I say this having voted for Obama, and knowing full well that I am far outnumbered by morons who made the same choice I did (for who knows why).
Voting is easy. Marching, however, requires effort. People drove from all around to go there for that(Hell, some probably flew), and they don’t know why they’re there. You’d think they’d at least know why they’re there and what they’re protesting.
Marching doesn’t require effort (unless you’re somewhat less than mobile for some reason). Marching is *fun*. I went to a march in NYC against the Iraq War a few years ago. It was a party. I also got the sense that most of the people there were either there for a barely related or unrelated reason, or had a poor grasp of the facts surrounding the Iraq War, terrorism, not to mention basic geography and civics.
The masses go where they are pointed. It does not avail to ask them questions about their trajectory, for they did not choose it.
The cultural level of the Obama voters is not the point. These people has no legitimate reason to be angry or scared. And before organizing a protest the least you can do is educate yourself and know exactly what you’re protesting.
These people has no legitimate reason to be angry or scared.
I tend to think, despite general ignorance, that people are ultimately better judges of what they should be concerned about than someone else deciding for them. If they are angry or scared, those feelings come from somewhere, and whether they are misdirected or not you cannot claim that the emotions themselves are not real.
And before organizing a protest the least you can do is educate yourself and know exactly what you’re protesting.
By this principle every single mass movement in history–every single one–would have been dead on arrival.
I don’t care if their emotions are real or not, but they are not legitimate. Those emotions are generated by ignorance, hate and stupidity, and should not be respected. And you said it yourself: they are there because Glenn Beck told them so. They are not ‘judges of what they should be concerned’. They are brainless morons and deserve to be mocked.
By this principle every single mass movement in history–every single one–would have been dead on arrival.
Maybe, but again you miss the point. I think that a democratically elected president trying to provide all citizens with affordable health care is not justification for a revolution.
I don’t care if their emotions are real or not, but they are not legitimate. Those emotions are generated by ignorance, hate and stupidity, and should not be respected. And you said it yourself: they are there because Glenn Beck told them so. They are not ‘judges of what they should be concerned’. They are brainless morons and deserve to be mocked.
I prefer not to imagine where people’s emotions come from, particularly anger. It’s much easier to have them tell you. And, what I said was merely that they were angry and scared and Glenn Beck provided them with an explanation as to who to blame and why. He’s an idiot so that explanation is crap. It doesn’t mean that the emotions and prior conditions which would leave millions of people susceptible to accepting such an explanation are themselves necessarily illegitimate. Some of the reasons probably are illegitimate (racism, partisanship, and so forth), but some of the emotions and their sources are quite legitimate. Loss of jobs, alienation, general desperation. Past experiences which would lead one reasonably to the belief that the government is not to be trusted. The general track record of politician’s promises as compared with their results. One can come up with many others.
Maybe, but again you miss the point. I think that a democratically elected president trying to provide all citizens with affordable health care is not justification for a revolution.
Says you. I happen to agree.
They do not.
As a matter of fact a conservative filmmaker did exactly that, in conjunction with a pollster. Nate Silver had a rather heated exchange with him in which both parties acted somewhat like asshats.
I can’t remember the name of the guy, but the film was about “stealing the election”, and the filmed interviews with Obama voters were horribly depressing.
I wish everyone could vote for the right reasons, but idiots on both sides get to vote, and both parties are awfully good at instilling loyalty in their particular batch of idiots.
John Ziegler. That was the guy. His movie was called “media malpractice” and he has youtube videos showing just how ignorant and stupid many Obama supporters were/are.
However, Elemenope… 200,000? The police/fire estimates were 65,000 to 75,000. Don’t be one of the number-inflators. Leave that job to Glenn Beck. (His estimate was, no kidding, 1.7 million!)
My general thinking is the police/fire estimates are historically very conservative (regarding all sorts of events), and the event throwers have a vested interest in inflating their numbers. They got all the lawn of the Capitol Building and about 3/5ths of the mall (according to aerial photos), which if it were as densely packed as a sitting crowd at a football game, would be about 500,000-600,000. Given that the actual density of a marching crowd once they’ve reached their destination is about half that (perhaps a little less), 200,000 is a reasonable estimate. A halted crowd of 65,000 would have barely spilled onto the mall, if at all. A halted crowd of 1.7 Million would have overflowed the mall.
An official estimate that is far less than half of the actual number of people isn’t just “conservative”, it’s flat wrong.
So, where are you getting these facts/photos that give you the confidence to dismiss the official estimate as invalid?
We’ll start with the notion of official estimate.
This is a decent introduction to how much stock should be put into *any* estimate of crowd size. There are many techniques used for estimation of crowd size, all of dubious scientific merit. The more popular ones are used by police/fire departments, but as the article notes training in their use is thin-to-nonexistent, and so this combined with the general fallibility of technique means there is no rational reason to prefer the official estimate to any other.
Given that, while people disagree vehemently about how many people fit into the area which was occupied, nearly nobody disagrees what spatial area was occupied (except there was one photograph circulating for a few days which was improperly attributed to the 9/12 folks that took up the whole mall, but was in fact from the Promise Keepers march a decade ago). This schematic I found helpful for visualizing the scales involved.
My thinking was that, given the relative spaces involved, and the person capacity of a known area (a stadium) for comparison, if we grant that the density will differ by a factor of 2-3 we get estimates from 250,000-400,000, and I figured I’d low ball the low end of that by about 50,000. (Why? Gut instinct, I suppose. It isn’t a science, for sure.)
Given the area’s size, 65,000 strikes me as ridiculous, as does any estimate over 400,000.
A couple of quibbles.
First, any comparison to a stadium, in which the vast majority of attendees are literally elbow-to-elbow and knees-to-back, is even more off than you have accounted for. Look at the video again. many attendees had yards of empty space between them. In a stadium, your elbow is often endangering the beer in your neighbor’s hand. To get from 1 inch of elbow room to 3 feet of elbow room, requires scaling up the area by 3600%. (but only along one axis.)
Also, as I expected, your source appears to be a libertarian source, contributing to reason.com . I would hope for a more disinterested party to get my facts on what area was/was not occupied by tea partiers at any given time.
I agree that there is no reason to believe that the “official” count is particularly accurate, but I’m still not convinced that your source is any more accurate. Me and Nate Silver are gonna meet you in the middle:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/how-many-attended-tea-parties.html
sorry, disregard that link, I posted the wrong thing.
If you are right about the crowd density, that would knock the number down quite a bit. On the other hand, I doubt that few areas filmed are actually a representative sample of the crowd density over the whole event area.
120,000 still sounds a bit reasonable, if on the low end.
FWIW, while reason.com is not exactly disinterested when it comes to politics generally, the level of general mockery by the regulars of the site of the 9/12 event indicates to me that they have no vested interest, at least, in supporting them.
“I don’t care if their emotions are real or not, but they are not legitimate. Those emotions are generated by ignorance, hate and stupidity, and should not be respected. And you said it yourself: they are there because Glenn Beck told them so. They are not ‘judges of what they should be concerned’. They are brainless morons and deserve to be mocked.”
Exactly, they don’t even know what they’re protesting against.
I agree, they just protest because someone told them to do so.
These people are behaving exactly like the Germans did when Hitler told them to protest against some other people. And agter the war they sais, “we did not know”
You know a year ago I did not care about religion and atheism. I did listen to skeptical podcasts and found it funny that people actually believed that Earth is only 6000 years old and not as a undiscovered Amazone tribe.
But then some people start to write in our news papers about that evolution is wrong! This meant these wier US people actually crossed the Atlantic ocean and it was time to do something about it.
So far, these creationists people trying to infiltrate Europe are still shot down with big laughs from people that do know that these are people crazy so they do not get a foothold so far. They remain hidden. I think you have a concentration in The Netherlands, the only Dutch forums I have noticed that has creationsist.
Yestarday I also encountered these 2 young men with some Jezus logo on them in uniform trying to convert people to believe in Jezeus in Brussels. The wierd thing is that they are doing this in the area with the biggest concentration of muslims that do not integrate.
^ Try to force me into believing something and I’ll have no problem using lethal force against people like that.
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”
-Epicurus
I’d like to add:
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
I love my brother to death but cannot convince him the grand canyon took thousands of years to form. God spoke to him he told me. It’s like saying there are 10 minutes in the color yellow. He has left to live out the rest of his life on a farm – as a monk.
“It’s like saying there are 10 minutes in the color yellow. ”
Wow, I like that. Totally gonna steal it.
I like how some of these people received reason – the one woman in particular so put off by the word ‘czar’ that she didn’t know (or didn’t remember) Ronald Reagan appointing a Drug Czar and calling it that, as well as George W. Bush, and deciding then that voting Republican may no longer be for her. I wasn’t even old enough to vote, nor have I paid due attention to politics during the Reagan Administration and I even heard of the Drug Czar, from just the slightest awareness of broadcast-channel evening news.
I don’t claim to have a clear understanding of what’s going on; I have tried to bone up on my studies of this issue however. I think I know where I stand, but then there are people like Elemenope who defend this right to peaceful assembly as anyone should, and the message I’m getting primarily is these people sure are dumb and I don’t want to be like that, so probably disagree with them on principle? I don’t want to react on this principle. I think I disagree with them because it’s the right thing to do and the right way to think. The things they think are so bizarre and their reasons for being so scared are getting more and more outrageous, but if these people for the wrong reasons agree with something that might be right (and by ‘these people’ and by ‘right,’ I mean in any given time over any issue during any administrator protested by any groups of people), is it any better to observe this phenomenon and choose whatever the opposite is?
I generally think this is how public opinion tends to work – people hear what they want to hear and don’t take care to inform themselves, like what a CZAR is appointed to do and how much power they have, before they go batshit over words and symbolic relations to Communism/Fascism/Socialism, that despite all evidence, Obama is a Muslim, and he wants to arm citizens and make a citizen army (I thought this would have been what they want, as the 2nd Amendment actually appears to most people to intend). How this idea, true or no, scares them, really confuses me. But I think footage of any protest at any time over any issue has the fascinating capacity to come off just as brainless.
What happens is some guy invents a story that sounds believable so people ecomes scared. And scared people are in some kind of hypnotic trance genetically programmed to look at the first person that acts like he knows what to do; So this person that started the scare with BS and pretend to know what is the right thing to do will guide these people that are in trance like mindless zombies.
He loses these brainless zombies the very moment these people start to ask questions and realize that they are in hypnotic trace when they are scared. If only one such person starts to wake up from the trance then he can deal with him by isolating him, trying to put him into trace again trying to put people against him since he is now posessed or even dispose of him by killing since he is a treat to expose the hypnotic trance all these other people are in.
What seems to work is confuse them. Logic and reasoning does not work but confusing them means that somehow they are forced to think about it. Especially when they are confronted with new unexpected stuff. For example you could tell them that you also believe in a one god out there called Zork? And Zork had his appreantace called Jezus that gave birth to Jahweh by cracking a nut…
What really gets me is that these people consider themselves informed. These are people who may or may not listen to the president but they feel they are being lied to by him, misled, and with vigilance, absorb all they can about the things that scare them, the “truth” someone else tells them, that keeps telling them not to let their guard down and let the government get away with all their lies, and what a slippery slope to Nazism it is if they shut their eyes, turn their backs, and let it happen.
These people are far more informed on the subjects than I am. Whether or not they are informed of the wrong information or being manipulated by some idiot with an agenda against the bills and policies introduced is irrelevant.
Your ‘trance’ analogy was very fitting. The comparison of Obama to Hitler, the charisma and influence and charm to move people, they cannot tell that this is what is happening to them from who influences them. And if I know anything about religion and Christianity in particular, they are scared of Obama because the anti-christ is supposed to be someone charming and seductive and they are maintaining high vigilance against the brainwash – by being easily convinced into voice and action by someone who no doubt is claiming to represent Jesus, don’t know by direct or indirect reference. I don’t have cable tv, but if I watched the FOX news, I can imagine it looks a lot like this youtube (don’t watch if you’re epileptic):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UMcHAh3v04&feature=related
“Stupidity is a force unto itself..” ~ Latin Proverb
Many, if not most, of the people voicing opinions in that crowd could have stepped directly out of the pages of C.P. Pierce’s “Idiot America”. An enlightening read, and especially for those who still live there.
[I left the U.S. some 20 years ago and have never regretted my decision.]
I’ve considered leaving the US when I’m able, but I really do love this country. I love America, I love our political system, I love our freedoms, and it really pains me to see the general populous be so woefully ignorant. It’s depressing how dumb my country is and how resistant to education they are. As Bill Moyers said, “We are a crippled giant suffering from self-inflicted wounds, which if left untreated will bring us to our knees and ultimately to our doom.”
I won’t leave America until everywhere else gets Netflix.
“it really pains me to see the general populous be so woefully ignorant.”
The more educated you become the more you start to think that everyone else is crazy.
You know, there didn’t seem to be a lot of black people in the crowd. Weird.
^ Careful mitch, you might be accused by republicans of “playing the race card” and are therefor the REAL racist.
lol…
You’re right Michael. Good point.
Actually, this kid has a second video on youtube from the rally and he asks someone why there are no black people there. The answer is something like, “well there are some on stage.” Awesome.
I am very scared right now. I am in Australia right now and I don’t feel safe after watching this.
One ignorant, irrational person is not a problem. They can be rendered impotent by their own ignorance and irrationality.
But when they get together in sufficient numbers … there is perhaps no more dangerous a force on earth, than that.
Didn’t September 11, 2001 teach us that, 8 years ago?
These people are frightening.
Bleh, I now see the whole foundation behind “Unreasonable Faith” — so many of you suffer from a such a warped version of Christianity over there that atheism feels like a breath of fresh air. If you were to give me the extremist/fundamentalist Christianity vs. atheism, I’d pick atheism any day :)
Fortunately, I don’t have to make that choice =P In fact, none of you do, because crazy fundamentalist Christianity ISN’T Biblical Christianity! That shizz is just scary
-Alastair, from Singapore
alastair, can you please state the differences between a fundamental christian and a biblical christian for those of us who see them both as basically the same thing
“Biblical Christianity!”
Please define what Biblical Christianity is?
I like how “biblical Christianity” is a little different for every Christian. There are millions of kinds of “biblical Christianity” and yet each person thinks their flavor is always the TrueBiblicalChristianity™
This was simply too painful to watch beyond about four minutes. Illogic concentrated in astounding abundance. I’d enjoy hearing the interviewees’ opinions of their performances. One might hope that in a fraction of the attendees, awareness of their idiocy could be achieved by such means. But I guess that would require a miracle… oh,well… I give up.
I really liked the text at the end of the video, and frankly, I think they get it exactly right. There are three obstacles that stand in our way of reform: greed, lies, and gullibility.
I should also add that I got very angry when the guy started talking about Obama as the antichrist — angry because there’s no way he thought of it himself. Some irresponsible pastor/preacher told him that lie, someone he trusted as being knowledgeable.
Great video. The kid is awesome, he just let them talk, and ask what they mean. “Facism, socialism and comunism are interchangeable when you don’t know what it means” is great. The look on their faces when tells he them that a “czar” have no executive power, it’s only an advisor is priceless.
makes you wonder why people want to come to this country, when i for one want to get out.
@cynic, bill, daniel:
its a bit hard to say it in a breath, but haha for now, would it suffice to say that this stupidity isn’t part of Biblical Christianity? In reaching the world, Jesus advised His disciples to be “as cunning as serpents” but to be as “innocent as doves” at the same time. I think many of these Christians end up being as “cunning as doves” and as “innocent as serpents” instead.
Daniel, you’re absolutely right in saying that there are thousands of denominations who claim to be “bible-believing”… so how do u differentiate between the “True” and the “False” ones? to answer this, i think its important to have a knowledge of history and philosophy of many of these religious movements, plus a very solid understanding of the Bible. I’m still young and searching so I’m not quite qualified to give an answer yet, but I’ll promise to provide an answer soon. I’ll be going over to the States to study next year so I greatly look forward to that :)
Anyway, contrary what to you guys think, the term “fundamentalist Christian” isn’t universal, but cultural and historical. 100 years ago, “fundamentalist” would have a totally different set of connotations. Today, its become a politically loaded term that has been incorrectly slapped to describe every Bible-believing Christian in this day and age, to give the impression we’re a bunch of hokus-pokus believing Jesus freaks. Lol
I think ‘biblical christianity’ more often than not is just another way of saying, “this is what I understand the Bible to mean, and if you disagree, you’re disagreeing with God.” It’s an appeal to an ultimate authority that gives legitimacy to one’s own position.
The bible is not univocal. As someone who has done all that you said, (i think its important to have a knowledge of history and philosophy of many of these religious movements, plus a very solid understanding of the Bible.), I would encourage you to read Proverbs and then move directly to Lamentations and/or Job. Those books communicate very different theological messages, which at times, are polar opposites.
Biblical Christianity? I think you mean “cherry-picking.” It means different things to different Christians based on what they want it to mean or what someone convinced them it means, but it’s all in there. You are all a bunch of hokus-pokus believing Jesus freaks, you’re just not the same exact kind. You do fundamentally all believe the same fundamental thing, that’s what fundamental means. Jesus, the son of god, took the execution like the martyr he wanted to be and was raised to believe was his destiny – for all who believe and may come to believe that it was true, and meanwhile, the bible is true, or at least the parts we like, we can justify as being the real message of god and discard the rest. I don’t say which parts you believe, but you are all fundamentally hokus-pokus believing Jesus freaks. You just happen to be not like the same kind in the video. You all have the same fundamental beliefs. (1) Jesus is your Lord and Savior, and (2) the bible’s right.
How can someone be so stupid to get tangled up in such obvious self-contradictions like most of the interviewed people do? Holding up a sign “I support XYZ” and simultaneously saying “I DO NOT support XYZ”… ridiculous. If you don’t know what you’re about to demonstrate for, then don’t demonstrate. Just that simple. ‘Cause maybe afterwards you achieve an aim that you actually didn’t want to achieve, but you get it anyway just because enough people (including yourself) demonstrated for that aim.
There’s a simple paraphrase for every comment in that video: “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.”
this reaffirms my view that the vast majority are crazy, ignorant, or just plain morons.
Am I the only one spotting a certain type of accent….