Every television station, every radio station, every newspaper …
Every mainstream blog that mentions the topic is being spammed with suspiciously repetitious comments. An abrupt and coordinated attack, endlessly repeating a single message, is like an army, its behavior showing it is thrown into action by a single command, issued by a single commander.
And what is that single message?
That Clint Eastwood is a poopy head.
But it is a stupid command, since of course it generates publicity for Clint Eastwood’s message. For actors and directors, any publicity is good publicity, so long as they spell your name right. Even if they successfully convince large numbers of people that Clint Eastwood is an ignorant senile poopy head, it is not Clint Eastwood that is running for President. Attacking Clint Eastwood is a diversion from attacking Mitt Romney.
So what most likely happened, is that Obama was watching, was offended, and reacted exactly like the spoiled angry arrogant petulant child Clint Eastwood depicted him as being: “Call me a poopy head will heâ€, thought Obama, “I will show him! I will have my millions of faithful minions call him a poopy head! That will show him!â€
But not one of his faithful minions is as funny or entertaining as Clint Eastwood.  As Galileo observed, one racehorse can outrun a team of carthorses, no matter how large the team.
Every “umâ€, “err†and “ahhâ€, every rambling change of subject, led into Clint’s next punchline with perfect comedic timing, like a clown who trips over his big clown shoes but somehow lands upright without spilling his drink, resulting in mighty gales of laughter exactly at the laughter pauses. Although widely advertised as unscripted and unrehearsed, actor/directors do not do unscripted and unrehearsed in front of an audience of millions.
So what we are getting from Obama’s mighty horde of minions is a bunch of childish badly written whines complaining that Clint Eastwood, a great actor and director, who had the convention howling with laughter, delivered a bad act. When Obama’s minions can get a big crowd roaring with laughter at their enemies, then they might be able to criticize Clint Eastwood’s delivery.
[…] The reaction to Clint Eastwood’s speech « Jim’s Blog […]
Well said. Especially the sentence about the clown, which earns my highest compliment: I wish I had written that!
The butthurtiness on this one is amazing. The fact that they must spend so much effort to rewrite the “narrative” on this one really tells you all you need to know. Eastwood is hilarious, and I would not even have looked it up had they not made a stink.
college football lines…
[…]The reaction to Clint Eastwood’s speech « Jim’s Blog[…]…
These links show that Romney holds a lot of the same positions as Obama:
Mitt Romney Open To Value Added Tax (VAT) !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsMIa6E_KUk
Romney supports automatic hikes in minimum wage
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/01/romney-supports-automatic-hikes-in-minimum-wage/
Romney Obama the Same?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWDJEc92d38
The title of this one says it all:
The Ultimate Mitt Romney Flip-Flop Collection
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_pgfWK3sxw
And then use these to show that Paul Ryan doesn’t know economics, either:
Paul Ryan BEGS Congress to Pass TARP ( PATHETIC )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyJBZYz858M
Is Budget Austerity Modern-Day Hooverism
http://mises.org/daily/5215/Is-Budget-Austerity-ModernDay-Hooverism
Ron Paul: Paul Ryan’s budget doesn’t cut anything of substance – Cavuto, Fox Business
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHTEF3T31Tg
Fact Check: Ryan budget plan doesn’t actually slash the budget
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/14/fact-check-ryan-budget-plan-doesnt-actually-slash-budget/
Yes, I don’t want Romney to win, because if he wins, that closes the Overton window: The only thinkable policies will then be the Obama/Romneycare policies. But it does not matter anyway, since politics with universal suffrage does not work, and nothing can make it work.
“behavior showing it is thrown into action by a single command, issued by a single commander.”
This is the critical point. That the modern mass media is, in fact – contrary to expectation and appearances – in essentials just as much of a command economy as was the Soviet Union steel industry – indeed, more tightly and effectively coordinated.
The disconnect between reality and the official statistics of steel production is just as extreme.
I notice no one in the comments has pushed back against the proposition that it was centrally commanded.
If every member of a group does the same thing, like an army maneuvering, that might be because each member of the group has the same interests and the same outlook, so each independently makes the same decision in response to events.
If every member of a group gradually over time tends to wind up doing the same stupid thing, that might be because that stupid thing has become fashionable, a marker of status or group identity.
If every member of a group abruptly and suddenly does the same thing, like an army maneuvering, and that thing is stupid then someone in command made a stupid decision.
Fighting Clint Eastwood over this is stupid because he is not running for election, because he is much loved, and, most of all, because he is very good at it.
We know the whom.
But nobody knows the who. Who’s the central command?
Yeah, what Spandrell said. I accept that you’re probably right about there being a central commander. Anyone got any clues in what institution (or person) that command is located?
“Who’s the central command?”
“Anyone got any clues in what institution (or person) that command is located?”
Didn’t Jim just answer this for this instance? – the one person who was seriously annoyed by C.E.’s performance?
*
What is interesting about this presidential campaign is that despite everything, all the objective evidence, and some dissent among other social systems; the international mass media (not just the US media) remain obedient to their leader.
I guess this is not surprising in the sense that they chose and installed the leader, he is *their* leader, but (again) it is a graphic depiction of the qualitative disconnect between the media’s representation of the world, and the world.
The media construct their own reality, they laboriously make-up lies which they tell themselves – and immediately believe those lies are reality.
*
This would seem strange to me if I had not worked in a government public administration bureaucracy, where this was the daily work.
The agenda came from above. Initially there was a mismatch between the bureaucrat’s opinions (based on previous policy) and the new instructions. There was a meeting, there was a period of discussion (i.e. rationalization of the new government agenda – this was the only acceptable outcome, sometimes it took a few hours to get there – but that was where we got in the end).
Then reality had been reconstructed in policies and in minds. The supreme and only reality-check was the expressed opinions (the vote) of other people at the end of the meeting. The new reality was reflected back at you by policies, words, the people around, the people who mattered, the people above – the people upon whom your career depended.
This mechanism is, and has been for decades, the systemic basis of all government, all major decision making, in the West.
I see. Thank you for the insight.
I would love to be a bug on the wall watching one of those crazy bureaucracy meetings, just to see concretely how it works.
Power is divided into a vast number of small bite sized chunks, so every time something is done, a consensus has to be constructed. But, of course, some people have one hell of a lot more influence on the consensus than others, so one guy, when seriously pissed, can, at least some of the time, provided no substantial number of others get in his way, have his way.
In this, government differs from the market, where no one gets their own way, and from the corporate form, where the CEO always and automatically get his way, except to the extent that he has delegated power to someone he chose, and that he can fire, and except to the extent that if the board concludes he has screwed up, they will fire him.
Your mistake is calling it abrupt. It’s not like the backlash of Clint Eastwood’s speech is the Black Swan of speech backlashes.
It was not centrally commanded. I chalk it up to their thought consensus and their thought bias.
@Jim “Power is divided into a vast number of small bite sized chunks…”
I’m familiar with the idea from MM, but is it true?
We have a new kind of distribution of power to convict-by-accusation, a reversal of the pattern of discrimination (i.e. groups which are openly, explicitly and coercively favoured are regarded as oppressed), a reversal of he meaning of measurements like crime (i.e. groups which commit most crime are not the victim groups); but mostly we have a system which contains less power – it simply has enormous delays, inefficiency (in the sense of using vast resources to generate very little real world change in the desired direction), and randomness.
Or maybe it could be thought of as power dispersed (as you say) working rather like a heat sink is heat dispersed – i.e. that power can only do work when there is a sufficient *gradient* of power (as heat can only do work with a sufficient gradient).
Or maybe it is that power is no longer focused directly upon real world change, but directly on the mass media – and only indirectly (which may mean not at all) concerned by real world change. For most people reality is the mass media, not their experience.
Certainly power does not seem to be concerned by what happens in the real world, except in a rhetorical way, to refute it.
I know it is true from direct personal experience, since in Hawaii I needed to pay out large amounts of money to large numbers of people each of whom had power to stop a project of mine by opining it would have bad consequences for one of a long laundry list of things supposedly sacred to progressives.
Whereas in Dubai, it is easier to get things done since you only have to bribe one mullah.
Perhaps in Britain things work differently. Maybe you only have to pay of “Health and Safety”. I would not know what happens in Britain. Australia is a friendlier environment than the US if you are an insider, but outsiders find the the same problem as in the US, only even more so, a never ending stream of hands each demanding a payout before any project can go ahead. Small projects, however can go under the radar in Australia, and if you have a friend in the right place, quite large projects can go under the radar. A lot of things can get done in Australia without the necessary permits and approvals, particularly if you are a long way from a capital city. Conversely, if you are close to a capital city, a single “friend” can cause a large number of permits and approvals to go through without any fuss. But for outsiders, foreigners, or even insiders who are in the wrong pond, they can find themselves dealing with a hydra that grows two new heads for every head they pay off.
Ayn Rand’s description of the process is spot on accurate. If you don’t have the right connections, you cannot directly pay off the official. Instead the official directs you to a “consultant”, aka bagman, who is invariably from a prestigious university. You pay the “consultant”, and the official finds the consultant’s words magically persuasive, whereas your words, being greedy and self interested, would be entirely unpersuasive. But if you don’t have the right connections you can find yourself dealing with quite a lot of officials and their “consultants” and getting no closer to approval.
Given today’s technology, this might be due to a handful of people spamming the net.
On the other hand, one of the best pieces of evidence that Someone is issuing orders comes from an event that didn’t happen: There were almost no protests over the plutonium-powered Curiosity Mars Rover. If the protests against Cassini were spontaneous, they would have recurred.
website design…
[…]The reaction to Clint Eastwood’s speech « Jim’s Blog[…]…
I’ve only just realized that you wrote ‘poopy’ head, while I had consistently read it as ‘poppy’ head – on the assumption that this was US slang for someone stoned on heroin, or something…
And now we await the reaction to Clinton’s speech… and let me tell ya, it’s been very amusing so far.
Clinton can bullshit and manipulate his base more effectively than the other candidates so far. But that is what being a politician is, isn’t it. Thus he should be graded on that criteria, but judged on a different set of criteria.
Just for fun:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dnc-2012-bill-clintons-speech-at-the-democratic-national-convention-excerpt/2012/09/05/f208865e-f7a4-11e1-8253-3f495ae70650_print.html
Why did you think it was a good speech? It was painful to listen to Eastwood’s execution. The stuttering senility wasn’t perfect comedic timing, it was embarrassing. He was barely able to get off his lines and sounded like a high school drama student. Clint was no Dirty Harry that night. 🙁
Your criticism might impress if he did not have the audience in stitches, and eating out of his hand.
I laughed where he set me up to laugh, I laughed at the things he set me up to laugh at, and so did everyone else.
I wasn’t looking to impress. I was wondering why you liked the speech when I was wincing at everything you supposedly liked.
I would guess that I loved the speech for pretty much the same reasons as the entire audience loved the speech.
As I said, when you can get a big crowd laughing when you want them to laugh, and laughing at the things you want them to laugh at, then you can tell me that Eastwood is no good.
What does my own skill at public speaking have to do with Clint Eastwood? That doesn’t make any sense. You’re also forgetting about the audience at home; all the people listening in, some surely laughing, but a lot more groaning at watching the bumbling of an old man.
You confabulate that the invisible audience agrees with you, but the entire visible audience were blown away by Clint Eastwood’s brilliant performance. Why should those that cannot be seen have reacted any differently to me and those that can be seen?
Now you’re exaggerating that the entire audience was blown away. I’m not making up the fact that a lot of people were disappointed by the speech. Heck, you don’t believe it’s fake either since you have an entire blog post about the immense negative response towards the speech.
The entire live audience was blown away.
You say the invisible people who were watching at home were disappointed. How do you know?
The negative reaction is entirely, 100%, from people who bitterly and passionately wish the speech was not as great as it was.
“You say the invisible people who were watching at home were disappointed. How do you know?”
Google “Clint Eastwood RNC response”, or anything similar to that. Look at the new headlines, look at the comments. Look at the youtube comments on the video for his speech. I’d say that’s a good start.
And how do you know that the response was “entirely, 100%, from people who bitterly and passionately wish the speech was not as great as it was.”? Even if you’re somehow right, why does that discount their opinion? Should your opinion against Obama not being counted since you don’t like him?
But it is pretty obvious that all of those comments, all of them, come from people who would rather cut off their genitals with a rusty pruning saw than actually themselves watch a speech ridiculing the Obamessiah.
All they know about this speech is that it had the audience roaring with laughter at Obama, and that, and only that, is why they cannot stand it. The critical comments are obviously based on third or fourth hand accounts of the speech, the still of Eastwood addressing an empty chair, and the first five or six seconds of the you tube video.
If they had actually seen the video, their criticisms would have more connection to the actual content of the video. If they had actually seen the video, they would know what Eastwood said. If they knew what he said, would attempt to rebut it.
For example, if they had actually seen the video, they would have said
Or
What they know about the Clint Eastwood video is what the Muslims know about the you tube video ridiculing Mohammed the false prophet: That it is heresy and therefore they should not see it.
How on earth can you write off every single negative piece said against Eastwood as anti-republican nonsense? How do you know that? Why are you discounting comments on Youtube videos with the whole speech, or sites with the full transcript? How can their criticisms be more connected to the content of the actual video than how the content was delivered?
If they had actually seen the speech, would have issued rebuttals against one or another points of the speech. They were not so much anti republican nonsense, as outrage at sacrilege. What got their goat was not the points that Clint Eastwood made, but that, shockingly, people were laughing at Obama. If they disliked, or even noticed, Clint’s speech, would have had something to say about his points.
Well. Thanks for continuously ignoring my points and holes in your arguments and just repeating the same things over and over again. Think I’m done here.
Jim,
You might this interesting:
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/euro-centric/putting-the-kettle-on-the-english/#disqus_thread
It’s a basic run down of how the English pretend to have free assembly where in actuality free assembly does not exist.
No freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly.
Britons need to take a look at the Cronulla riots.
The abrupt arrival of spam comments is notable, given the topic of the post, and given that the spam is not apparent on any other of your recent posts. This could be a targeted attempt to lower the search ranking for this post.
Just the internet as usual – the spam arrives abruptly, and I delete it belatedly. I think spammers have discovered Clint Eastwood for purely commercial reasons.