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"House Of Cards"' Top 3 Lessons For A Naive Voting Public
Unlike so many television shows, House of Cards shows how politicians use their power to help themselves and their friends - not the people who elected them. The fictional character at the center of the series, Frank Underwood, shows us the pitfalls of bureaucratic democracy. As professor Steve Horwitz explains in this brief clip, the series exposes the truth of public choice theory, rent seeking behavior, psychopathic tendencies, Machiavellian inclinations, corruption, and scandal. House of Cards is not that far from reality theses days and the following 3 lessons should be heeded by every voter.
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"I'm from the government and I'm here to HELP you"...
Your telling us its not true?
Isn't there like 6-10 BITCOIN is burning storys today that ZH could be reporting, but instead were being told that Politicians can be assholes.
My fucking GAWD ZH has gone full retard.
I've seen people post some pretty worthless crap over the years, but I have to say you post some of the worst.
+100
Three lessons...Only?
F rank U nderwood;
"We can be xxx dangerous too";
"Let the slaughters begin".
another GREATone from holliwand.
In season 2 at the end of episode 3 or 4, they display the rings with his initials "F U" full in the screen. To me, it was a subtle yet clear message of what the writers believe politics to be, a giant FUCK YOU to the viewing audience.
Holy shit, I am glad someone else said it. I was begining to think I was alone in reading this total crap all the time.
Maybe you shold pay attention to Ukraine a little closer. What started out as peaceful EU/Russia protest has turned into a full-retard war against mafia government.
There is no EU/Russia side any more. The protesters are priests, punks and everyone in between. From Ultra-right Ukrainian Nationalists to Russian Ukrainians. They're taking bullets side-by-side in the Maidan. Hard to convince the various groups that they're enemies when the DHS... er, interior ministry cops are shooting ALL of them.
Everyone there is against the corrupt, mafia government. They don't give a crap about Russia or the EU.
The psychopathic crazy train just went off the tracks in Kiev.
Which brings up a rather interesting dilemna for Putin, Merkel AND Obama. They are terrified of what's happening in Kiev and have been desperately trying to spin the whole affair as a EU/Russain fight or a internal Ukrainian ethnic fight and it's not working. They tried to negotiate a deal to give the opposition leaders political positions and the opposition said, "Fuck off". When you can't bribe opponents with money or power, then they're not ever going to be on the TPTB team.
It's a mass revolt against corrupt, bullying-ass government. The Russian people are watching. The EU is watching. Even a few fat-ass Hot-Pocket-eating Americans are watching.
Who does a government nuke when they can't convince the people that someone ELSE is their imaginary evil enemy? What does a government do when the people keep insisting that their real enemy is the goddamn corrupt governments and their crony corporate pals?
Interesting take, thanks. In a way I hope you are on the money. In this respect it's much like American politics, I hate both side ( EU/US an Russia). Certainly I do hate to see civilians killed for any reason. After all, all 90% of us want is to be left alone to live our lives.
I'm enjoying how quickly the wealthy psychopaths are abandoning each other. Mass exodus of oligarchs/cronies and families from Ukraine in their private jets filled with sacks of looted money are being turned away by - of all places - Austria!
+1 for Austria - you let one in, they invite their pals, and the next thing you know your burning tires in 'Freedom Square'
http://storage1.censor.net.ua/images/9/5/b/9/95b9bb82d9ad140534467645b06...
do hate to see civilians killed for any reason.
not to dismiss your point in any way beard, just would like to offer a caution against any use of the word civilians , which seems to be the human collateral damage term du jour by TPTB and those who manage their language interface with the rest of us. that interface seems to be increasingly peppered with military terms lately, like the term "civilians".
never forget that everyone in the Ukraine are living, breathing human beings like you and me. i know you realize this, but it's all too easy for any of us to allow words that subtly serve to dehumanize us all through their constant repitition to creep into our common usage without us even realizing it.
i/m/h/o we must all be diligently careful right now, as the times are becoming as delicate as a powderkeg. and memes are more powerful than we may think. hearts & minds.
excellent - words are powerfull and most of all "they cant be taken back".
so refrain, you may just not say anything and have said the most.
silence-your friend...
"The Russian people are watching. The EU is watching. Even a few fat-ass Hot-Pocket-eating Americans are watching."
Double-plus-good.
And damn funny.
Let's just hope you, right!
Hey speaking of charts!
Your posts by hour: http://i.imgur.com/54Muzq3.png
Your posts by date: http://i.imgur.com/qMAZtST.png
Hey, he gets a full eight hours of sleep. :)
6 AM must be lunch time. That's a long 15 hour day at the shop though.
Do you have a new one lined up already or will you have to think of a new moniker? Maybe a combo next time around. Something like Squeeky4SatoshisFoyle?
Fuck you Cleisthenes
M.T.V. will tell you how to vote.
Dire Straits - Money For Nothing [subtitulado español] + lyrics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNxGr2CKLfw (5:14)
So the lesson is don't vote; it's like creating shallow pools of brackish water for mosquitoes to breed in.
Bingo. Voting = your consent. Withold it.
Fuck that. I'm going to vote in every election and cast it for anyone who is not Red or Blue. I don't care if they run on the dildo-face ticket. Actually, especially if they run on that ticket.
flying spaghetti monster for the mother fuckking win
I do understand why people don't bother anymore. I did vote for the LP, after giving it much thought on if I can bother. I won't argue that your vote counts for shit in a general election, because aside for third parties, the choices wind up being nearly identical on the issues that matter to me. However, I always tel people to vote even if its only in local elections. On every single ballot where I live there are always some initiatives about raising the sales tax or some shit 'for the children' or some other bullshit reason the govt feels entitled to more of my money. And it's important to say no to that shit every time you are able.
Yeah, I know, "participation" and all that.
I'm just completely jaded. After 38 years of voting I feel impotent.
When the FED runs the economy - and the FED is run by TBTF banks who own the FED and CONgress and the Judiciary and Executive branches and by extension the Military and the Police - voting seems like banging my head against the wall.
The only thing I see as useful is nuking New York.
DC first. NY 30 seconds later.
Close but this will never work. Until they reform voting and adopt a Condorcet method of voting there is no hope. The majority will always consider a vote for a third party candidate as a wasted vote.
Only in your (recently) benighted country. Here in the Great White North, we have 3 credible parties (as in, capable of winning elections; all of their policies are ridiculous), and four if you count the Greens.
Pardon me while I clear my throat yet again:
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." — Emma Goldman
But of course the one vote upon which all others derive their power — self-determination, i.e, secession — is illegal and has been ever since union was forced upon a henceforth "indivisible" nation by the outcome of the disastrous War for Southern Independence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDqbczws1jg
P.S. I am not an unreconstructed Southerner but a transplant from "The Land of Lincoln," who has lived in the South for a couple decades.
So the lesson is don't vote; it's like creating shallow pools of brackish water for mosquitoes to breed in.
Voter apathy works in the elites favour, what needs to happen instead is the people need to reclaim the political system in the US.
Getting the money out of it would make a big difference to my mind. It's like the prohibition, when the easy money was removed (by legalization) a lot of the crime went away but people still got to enjoy the product.
It's not apathy; it's a principled abstention.
whatever it's called, it has the opposite effect as intended. Haiti, with its 25% voter participation rate, is a perfect example.
how about instead: go to the polling place, patiently stand in the cattle lines, respectfully refuse to use their fucking machines, make the volunteers explain to you how you can write-in your chosen candidates (even if it's Frank Zappa), remind the volunteers of your sovereign right to write-in any candidate you wish, insist on your wish to exercise that right, do not leave until you are assured that your vote was filled out properly and will be counted. as long as this is accomplished with no hint of aggression, this is all "legal" by any stretch of the word.
if 1 in 10 people did this, i can assure you that although the (s)election may not go as you wish, it will most definitely not go as smoothly as planned. and it may just knock a gear out of whack enough to be noticable to everyone as to how broken the machine really is.
Please recount your experience with doing so, or are your bruises still healing.
The sheeple would, at the very least, shout you down.
let me ask you something dick, do you go through the cancer chambers in the airport or do you decline? do you ever see anyone shouted down for choosing to exercise their right for a patdown when done so in a non-aggressive manner?
sheep don't shout, they baa. not do they gang together to beat someone up. they do listen though.
Jesus. Who puts up with any of this other than because they're too brainwashed to protest (the vast majority) or understandably don't want to lose their lives to one extent or another.
Again, give me an example of when you have stood up to the powers that be — just one — and then let's talk.
Anything short is just bravado.
fail to see how a top-down tall tale of my dick swinging at the Man has anything to do with the bottoms-up approach outlined above except obsfucate the issue, dick.
if you're asking me if i've ever declined the cancer scanners, all the time except when i'm running late. funny enough, met mostly friendly TSA folks in the process, a couple of assholes, but an equal amount of pretty cool ones as well.
the question whether a little bit of bravado delivered with grace distributed across a broad swath of the citizenry is more effective than a few pissed BSD's spraying their bravado like apes across the intertubes and/or public squares remains open it seems.
ciao for now.
Correct. The only hope of overcoming is to make USSA government irrelevant. Voting cannot possibly help. Pissing in the wind.
Excellent plagiarism of the British original.
The British plagiarised anything of use they could find floating around on the high seas.
Just like the Chinease rip of every bit of new technology the world currently creates.
I love my pussy. It is the complete summation of my life. ... my pussy is the temple of learning.
Madonna
From the wonderfully named book, What would Machiavelli Do?
I happen to agree with Madonna, there is much one can learn from meditating on her woo woo.
I wouldn't meditate on that diseased twat with YOUR brain.
meditate on that diseased twat or eat a diseased hot pocket. what would you choose?
I choose eating a hot twat.
But..., Rodney was chewing on that before you.
Who can forget Dennis...?
Who said I was talking about that specific twat? I said "a twat" not her twat. Try to keep up.
Twat's the difference? Oh...
"Who said I was talking about that specific twat?"
My most sincere apologies...
You are sentenced to eat your asparagus, Pea.
You can have mine too. Gives me enough gas to float the Hindenburg.
No need to apologize. We're just having a little fun here. After 16 years of marriage, I'm just fantasizing anyway.
16 years..., you're newlyweds.
I filed a FOIA request to find out if my marriage vows included a vow of chastity.
It did. They all do.
This thread is a whipped Pussy Riot.
well to be fair I said meditate on that specific twat, so knowing that...which do you go with? This is a tough one.
42. The answer is 42.
always
Sometimes 69 is the right answer.
Season 2 HOC had a 69x3 scene cut to black....
77! It's really 69, but you get ate more...
FORWARD ASS NAPKINS!
What is the difference between Moochelle, and a bowling ball?
You could eat a bowling ball if you had to.
who junks doc for giving an honest answer? Bless you Doc, you just throw it all on the line. I respect that.
(remark pulled)
Lost in translation...
meditate on that diseased twat or eat a diseased hot pocket. what would you choose?
NONE OF THE ABOVE. Why give another worn out false dilemma choice?
It was just make pretend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb7FgSzeGqg
choice? what a joke! How many times did little Wayne and Jay-z mention Obama running up to his elections?
Popular culture has been a deciding factor in every presidential election since Kennedy.
If we see Chris Christy in a Justin Timberlake Video we'll know who the next presedent will be.
Awesome key indicator. +1. Fat, it's the new black.
The medium is the message.
Marshall McLuhan (but how much can you expect from a Canuck?;)
Politics give yesterday's answers to today's questions
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing
it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” –Groucho Marx
If you don't realize it's Hillary in 2016 then you haven't been paying attention. That deal has already been made long ago.
Don't understand the thumbs down, since you are only writing the truth.
We have to have a black man and white woman in that figurehead office to convince the world that white men have been in control for too long, that black men and white women are our saviours, with high morals, ethics, and no self-interest at all.
They are holy men and women.
I liked Spacey better as John Williamson in Glengarry glen ross.. Will you go to lunch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2PtsSKE4mY
Shit, I'm old enough to remember watching the the original in the UK...
By the way, fuck the balhead with the beard...
Please, let's give Mr. Yellen a chance. He/she and BO will make quite a pair, but of what?
LMAO, class call sir!
The irony is that many of us find ourselves cheering for Frank Underwood nonetheless.
Cause Spacey is just so damn likeable, in spite of his flaws and ruthlessness. That seems to be the pinnacle of a 'successful' US politician, it seems.
I don't know where the cheering for Underwood began, but count me out on that one, as I would just as soon throw him off the subway station into the speeding path of an oncoming train, along with several others who epitomize the rank disease at the roots of government.
Including his wife, played by Robin Wright, who looks more and more like a man with every passing year.
The only solution to .gov corruption is no government.
The only solution to .gov corruption is no government.
The only solution to .gov corruption is self governance. FIFY
buy more ammo
Who let DHS on this thread? /sarc
House of Cards is rad.
Obama going to speak to the Dalai Lama over concerns of human rights abuses in China. Meanwhile here at home....well it doesn't appear the government will hand out lube while ass raping the citizen as it pertains to rights. Is it just me or does it seem over the last 2 decades or so that our politicians are far more concerned about the conditions of other countries than what's going on in their own backyard. All the foreign aid given could've actually been used to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure that they keep harping on or any other number of "problems" they tell us we have and the need to raise taxes to conquer them. Perhaps we could actually afford healthcare for all if we kept our tax revenues at home instead of spreading it all over the world which has no affect on the daily lives of the people here. Wouldn't Detroit or Appalachian Region be more worthy candidates? I mean if we are hell bent on giving handouts shouldn't those handouts be to the exclusivity of our own citizens? Gee strengthen the home, shape it up and then do good abroad if the taxpayer decides that's how they want their money spent. Nah that would be too simple.
Will president Skroob make the Dalai Lama sneak out the back door again and do the walk of shame?
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2010/02/20/nbc-notes-obama-ma...
Which brings up a rather interesting dilemna for Putin, Merkel AND Obama. They are terrified of what's happening in Kiev...
Obama is not afraid nor should he be, because lazy, dumb americans won't bother to stand up for their rights. Dumbass american voters don't know about Kiev, and wont object to govt in the newsroom, as long as the ballgame is on, nobody gives a damn.
Are the dimwits that watch this drivel actually going to learn anything from this except to accept it as 'normal' behaviour?
"the following 3 lessons should be heeded by every voter."
Lesson 1. the ballot box is rigged
Lesson 2. the ballot box is rigged
Lesson 3. the ballot box is rigged.
I only vote on ZH.
I wonder if the votes, here at ZH, are rrigged. Ever notice how the first posts get the most votes. ;0
"house majority whip in bed with lobbyist." there's not even a hint of innuendo there. House of Cards is to politics what Gallagher was to having a slice of watermellon.
Shockingly, a pretent politics show mirrors the actual sick corrupt pyscotic real politics.
The sickest thing on that whole show is the clip of Frank being interviewed by Morley Safer.
The guy looks like he died 10 years ago and they dug him up for the clip.
What's with these egomaniac MSM talking heads that they refuse to retire? Is it a Tribal thing?
All those old assholes look dehydrated and like they should be rocking on the porch and telling kids to get the fuck off the lawn.
Old Rock 'stars', cultural icons, BababWaWa, the entire panoply of those way past their best days----more significantly the poor taste of the people who want them to continue, their fans----is an indictment of the gross sentimentality of human beans reliving their past and their hopelessness about their future.
As you state, the pathetic egomania of these entertainers, sports figures, and other celebrities (does anyone have any clue as to why Beckham has tatooed the entire surface of his arms??) is a chronic disease, as is Harrison Ford wearing an ear ring.
The wailing cries for attention these people seek, is nauseating.
Friedrich Hayek and the "Road to Serfdom" indeed (mentioned in the video by "Professor" Steve Horwitz) are part of crackpot Libertarian goofballism.
It seems that "Professor" Hayek was enamored by Social Security and needed to be persuaded by none other than Charles Koch in order to come to the U.S. and join the crackpot Institute of Humane Studies (really an offshoot of the John Birch Society – Eisenhower was a Commie!- of which Charles Koch was a founder… morphed into The Cato Institute eventually)-
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cb1_1330213178
Billionaires (wealth mostly inherited or made via some form of financial industry theft/fraud/manipulation or through tax-payer cost externalization such as pollution) are behind the movement. Ayn Rand (and various academics) provided the philosophical cover . The irony is that Libertarianism is the actual “Road to Serfdom.” Libertarian ideals are a fantasy fed to the gullible to serve the interests of a particularly nasty collection of wealthy elitists.
Ask yourself this simple question- Who paid for Sarah Palin’s Americans for Prosperity T-shirt? And, why?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Americans_for_Prosperity
By the way, Ayn Rand ultimately collected SS and Medicare (without making it public of course). It seems that her chain smoking habit caught up with her... the government is lying about cigarettes causing cancer and has no right to regulate them!
Talking point after talking point. Any original thoughts?
Also: LOL Sarah Palin. Forgot about that chump.
Some "taoist" quotes about government and society. Taken from here : http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/salt/salt08.htm
Small note : " ... and fills their bellies, ... " .... not with food. Those who have heard about relaxation / qi gong will understand.
" NOT exalting worth keeps the people from rivalry. Not prizing what is hard to procure keeps the people from theft. Not to show them what they may covet is the way to keep their minds from disorder.
Therefore the Sage, when he governs, empties their minds and fills their bellies, weakens their inclinations and strengthens their bones. His constant object is to keep the people without knowledge and without desire, or to prevent those who have knowledge from daring to act. He practises inaction, and nothing remains ungoverned.
He who respects the State as his own person is fit to govern it. He who loves the State as his own body is fit to be entrusted with it.
In the highest antiquity, the people did not know that they had rulers. In the next age they loved and praised them. In the next, they feared them. In the next, they despised them.
How cautious is the Sage, how sparing of his words! When his task is accomplished and affairs are prosperous, the people all say: "We have come to be as we are, naturally and of ourselves."
If any one desires to take the Empire in hand and govern it, I see that he will not succeed. The Empire is a divine utensil which may not be. "
In the UK its:
Francis
Urquart
"I couldn't possibly comment"