C
Canuck 36
Guest
LOOK! HE MENTIONED TORONTO!
At last we have a knowledge base among the all segments of society. We're now truly world class.
|
|
|
At last we have a knowledge base among the all segments of society. We're now truly world class.
G
GeekyBoyTO
Guest
What's the guy doing here on the board anyways? Shouldn't he/she be lined up at the nearest recruitment office and offering service to his/her country? I *love* armchair patriotism.
GB
GB
C
Canuck 36
Guest
I don't think 12 year olds can sign up GB.
G
GeekyBoyTO
Guest
Canuck:
Too bad. At least Hitler has Hitler Youths :rollin
GB
Too bad. At least Hitler has Hitler Youths :rollin
GB
B
billy corgan19982
Guest
Creators of the PABAHH forum:
Cletus and Junior
Cletus and Junior
G
ganjavih
Guest
Mr. President, your 30 seconds are up
Web contest for anti-Bush ads
Winning ad to air on TV this month
One after another, a series of bright, confident, fresh-faced schoolchildren stand behind a podium and make their campaign pledges:
"If elected, I'll lie about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invading other countries."
"I'll call myself an environmentalist, then gut clean air standards."
"Our allies will go from respecting us to hating us — and I don't care!"
"I'll leave no child behind, unless they can't afford it."
"I promise to keep you in a state of fear and anxiety, so you never question what we're doing."
"And if you do, we'll call you unpatriotic."
The scene fades out and the words "What are we teaching our children?" fill the screen.
It's a powerful — if just a little biased — message. It's one of 14 anti-Bush ads that are the finalists in the "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest (bushin30seconds.org), sponsored by MoveOn.org, a Web-based advocacy group. Unlike most online campaigns, this one's got real-world representation. The winner will be declared Monday during a public screening in New York featuring a cast of mostly left-leaning celebrity judges, including Jack Black, Margaret Cho, Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Gus Van Sant, Tony Shalhoub and, of course, filmmaker Michael Moore.
The winning ad will then air in the U.S. on national television, in advance of Bush's State of the Union address planned for Jan.20.
The 14 ads were whittled down from some 1,500 submissions sent from across the country. The best are those that, like the schoolchildren spot above, aim for humour while getting their points across. One simple ad, for example, purports to be the president's computer screen, and shows the mouse pointer dragging folders labelled "Environment," "Education," "Social Security," etc., across the desktop to the computer's trash can.
Whatever side you're on, it's worth the 30 seconds to take a look.
A screen shot from one of 14 finalists in the Bush in 30 Seconds contest. The winner will be decided Monday by a panel of celebrity judges at a public screening in New York.
Web contest for anti-Bush ads
Winning ad to air on TV this month
One after another, a series of bright, confident, fresh-faced schoolchildren stand behind a podium and make their campaign pledges:
"If elected, I'll lie about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invading other countries."
"I'll call myself an environmentalist, then gut clean air standards."
"Our allies will go from respecting us to hating us — and I don't care!"
"I'll leave no child behind, unless they can't afford it."
"I promise to keep you in a state of fear and anxiety, so you never question what we're doing."
"And if you do, we'll call you unpatriotic."
The scene fades out and the words "What are we teaching our children?" fill the screen.
It's a powerful — if just a little biased — message. It's one of 14 anti-Bush ads that are the finalists in the "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest (bushin30seconds.org), sponsored by MoveOn.org, a Web-based advocacy group. Unlike most online campaigns, this one's got real-world representation. The winner will be declared Monday during a public screening in New York featuring a cast of mostly left-leaning celebrity judges, including Jack Black, Margaret Cho, Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Gus Van Sant, Tony Shalhoub and, of course, filmmaker Michael Moore.
The winning ad will then air in the U.S. on national television, in advance of Bush's State of the Union address planned for Jan.20.
The 14 ads were whittled down from some 1,500 submissions sent from across the country. The best are those that, like the schoolchildren spot above, aim for humour while getting their points across. One simple ad, for example, purports to be the president's computer screen, and shows the mouse pointer dragging folders labelled "Environment," "Education," "Social Security," etc., across the desktop to the computer's trash can.
Whatever side you're on, it's worth the 30 seconds to take a look.
A screen shot from one of 14 finalists in the Bush in 30 Seconds contest. The winner will be decided Monday by a panel of celebrity judges at a public screening in New York.
B
BuildTO
Guest
The BushIn30Seconds ads rock. I saved most of them to my hard drive. Go watch them if you haven't already.
I especially loved the "Desktop" one.
:tup:
I especially loved the "Desktop" one.
:tup:
C
cdl42
Guest
Like I said, be sure to check out the 12 'extra' ads. Besy Youth, Best Animated, Best Comedic.
A
Are Be
Guest
       
Retire the Hitler comparisons
Cathy Young
National Post
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
The flap over two political ads comparing U.S. President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, which were submitted to a "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest sponsored by the liberal MoveOn.org Voter Fund, and were briefly hosted on the group's Web site, has gotten a lot of press (courtesy of outraged Republicans). Unfortunately, this is only one in a rich crop of Hitler and Nazi analogies littering the landscape of so-called public discourse these days. And this particularly vile rhetorical device is, alas, an equal-opportunity offence. There is a lot of back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats on whether MoveOn bears any responsibility for the ads (one of which cuts back and forth between images of Bush and Hitler, using alleged quotes from Bush and a soundtrack from a Hitler speech). Conservatives portray this as a scandal exemplifying the degree to which the Democratic opposition has been hijacked by hate-filled loony radicals. American Liberals counter that the real scandal is the right's brazen distortion of the facts.
It is true that MoveOn did not create or sponsor the Bush-as-Hitler spots. Neither ad was among the 15 finalists selected by MoveOn supporters by voting on the Web site. MoveOn has pulled the two offensive ads from its site and expressed regret over their appearance. But is the organization completely blameless? Not quite. Not all of the 1,500-plus submissions to the contest were posted on the site; they were first vetted by MoveOn, whose spokesman told the New York Sun the Nazi ads somehow "slipped through."
Maybe it was an oversight. But it's also possible that MoveOn staffers did not realize just how offensive these spots were because Bush-Hitler comparisons are not viewed as beyond the pale on the left side of the political spectrum. One of the finalists in the contest, Michael Stinson, is also the creator of a Web animation that depicts President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in Nazi uniforms and highlights alleged Bush family connections to the Nazi regime. (Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, controlled companies which had extensive business dealings with Germany in the years before the Second World War.)
Appearing on the Fox News show Hannity & Colmes to discuss the Hitler ads, Wayne Madsen, co-author of the book America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II, said that he saw "some similarities" between Bush and Hitler: "If you look at the early days of Hitler's rise in Germany, if people could have stopped him before he trashed the entire German constitution and seized dictatorial powers, he could have been stopped." Madsen also compared the war against Iraq to Hitler's "pre-emptive warfare" against Poland and France.
That's the anti-Bush left. Meanwhile, on the pro-Bush right, there's a gem of a column published on Jan. 5 by the New York Post. The author, retired Army officer and writer Ralph Peters, manages to compare Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean to Hitler, Goebbels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Brezhnev. (It's a wonder that Mao and Saddam Hussein didn't make the cut.) And how does Dean warrant this comparison? He and his followers try to "restrict the free speech of others" by attacking their critics on the Internet. (That's right up there with being sent to a concentration camp.)
Peters charges that "Dean wants to muzzle his Democratic competitors, too." (Dean recently criticized Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe for not urging other Democratic candidates to refrain from negative campaigning.) Besides, he says, some of Dean's followers have turned up at rallies for other candidates and chanted to drown out their speeches: "These are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts. Had Goebbels enjoyed access to the Internet, he would have used the same swarm tactics as Dean's Flannelshirts."
How is this pernicious tripe different from the Bush-equals-Hitler variety? The only difference so far is that MoveOn has repudiated this rhetoric, while the New York Post has not.
It's not just in political campaigning that Nazi analogies are used in vain. A Brazilian judge said last week that the U.S. requirement that visitors from some foreign countries be fingerprinted and photographed is worthy of "the worst horrors committed by the Nazis." U.S. talk-show host Laura Schlessinger said that the neglect of children in day care centres is "like something out of Nazi Germany."
How about a belated New Year's resolution for 2004? No more Nazi or Hitler analogies to describe policies or politicians you dislike. Unless, of course, those policies include actual mass murder and torture, or those politicians who engage in such acts.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine and a columnist at The Boston Globe.
© National Post 2004
Copyright © 2003 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp. All rights reserved.
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.
Retire the Hitler comparisons
Cathy Young
National Post
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
The flap over two political ads comparing U.S. President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, which were submitted to a "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest sponsored by the liberal MoveOn.org Voter Fund, and were briefly hosted on the group's Web site, has gotten a lot of press (courtesy of outraged Republicans). Unfortunately, this is only one in a rich crop of Hitler and Nazi analogies littering the landscape of so-called public discourse these days. And this particularly vile rhetorical device is, alas, an equal-opportunity offence. There is a lot of back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats on whether MoveOn bears any responsibility for the ads (one of which cuts back and forth between images of Bush and Hitler, using alleged quotes from Bush and a soundtrack from a Hitler speech). Conservatives portray this as a scandal exemplifying the degree to which the Democratic opposition has been hijacked by hate-filled loony radicals. American Liberals counter that the real scandal is the right's brazen distortion of the facts.
It is true that MoveOn did not create or sponsor the Bush-as-Hitler spots. Neither ad was among the 15 finalists selected by MoveOn supporters by voting on the Web site. MoveOn has pulled the two offensive ads from its site and expressed regret over their appearance. But is the organization completely blameless? Not quite. Not all of the 1,500-plus submissions to the contest were posted on the site; they were first vetted by MoveOn, whose spokesman told the New York Sun the Nazi ads somehow "slipped through."
Maybe it was an oversight. But it's also possible that MoveOn staffers did not realize just how offensive these spots were because Bush-Hitler comparisons are not viewed as beyond the pale on the left side of the political spectrum. One of the finalists in the contest, Michael Stinson, is also the creator of a Web animation that depicts President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in Nazi uniforms and highlights alleged Bush family connections to the Nazi regime. (Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, controlled companies which had extensive business dealings with Germany in the years before the Second World War.)
Appearing on the Fox News show Hannity & Colmes to discuss the Hitler ads, Wayne Madsen, co-author of the book America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II, said that he saw "some similarities" between Bush and Hitler: "If you look at the early days of Hitler's rise in Germany, if people could have stopped him before he trashed the entire German constitution and seized dictatorial powers, he could have been stopped." Madsen also compared the war against Iraq to Hitler's "pre-emptive warfare" against Poland and France.
That's the anti-Bush left. Meanwhile, on the pro-Bush right, there's a gem of a column published on Jan. 5 by the New York Post. The author, retired Army officer and writer Ralph Peters, manages to compare Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean to Hitler, Goebbels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Brezhnev. (It's a wonder that Mao and Saddam Hussein didn't make the cut.) And how does Dean warrant this comparison? He and his followers try to "restrict the free speech of others" by attacking their critics on the Internet. (That's right up there with being sent to a concentration camp.)
Peters charges that "Dean wants to muzzle his Democratic competitors, too." (Dean recently criticized Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe for not urging other Democratic candidates to refrain from negative campaigning.) Besides, he says, some of Dean's followers have turned up at rallies for other candidates and chanted to drown out their speeches: "These are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts. Had Goebbels enjoyed access to the Internet, he would have used the same swarm tactics as Dean's Flannelshirts."
How is this pernicious tripe different from the Bush-equals-Hitler variety? The only difference so far is that MoveOn has repudiated this rhetoric, while the New York Post has not.
It's not just in political campaigning that Nazi analogies are used in vain. A Brazilian judge said last week that the U.S. requirement that visitors from some foreign countries be fingerprinted and photographed is worthy of "the worst horrors committed by the Nazis." U.S. talk-show host Laura Schlessinger said that the neglect of children in day care centres is "like something out of Nazi Germany."
How about a belated New Year's resolution for 2004? No more Nazi or Hitler analogies to describe policies or politicians you dislike. Unless, of course, those policies include actual mass murder and torture, or those politicians who engage in such acts.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine and a columnist at The Boston Globe.
© National Post 2004
Copyright © 2003 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp. All rights reserved.
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.
H
heckles2
Guest
Re: I Also Have To Add The Fact That This Video Is Slander
First off, Mr. Patriot, the CBC is public television - not government dictated television. Something we don't have here in America, if you noticed.. The PBS here is about as poor and pathetic as it gets.
Secondly, why do you care what a Canadian broadcaster says. Shouldn't you conservatives be worried about the free speech we have right here in America. I mean, it isn't like its going to last long at this rate...
First off, Mr. Patriot, the CBC is public television - not government dictated television. Something we don't have here in America, if you noticed.. The PBS here is about as poor and pathetic as it gets.
Secondly, why do you care what a Canadian broadcaster says. Shouldn't you conservatives be worried about the free speech we have right here in America. I mean, it isn't like its going to last long at this rate...
J
jamerinbow
Guest
Re: I Also Have To Add The Fact That This Video Is Slander
I have to stand up to the good folks at PBS and NPR. Excellent broadcasting, in my opinion. Not as high-quality as the CBC, but then, they get no federal government support whatsoever.
...James
I have to stand up to the good folks at PBS and NPR. Excellent broadcasting, in my opinion. Not as high-quality as the CBC, but then, they get no federal government support whatsoever.
...James
D
Darkstar416
Guest
I could be wrong, but I think PBS / NPR still gets a small congressional appropriation every year.
J
jamerinbow
Guest
I'm pretty sure that it's all gone. The Republican "revolution" under Newt Gingrich made a big thing about cutting all subsidy to PBS.
As if that's something to be proud of.
As if that's something to be proud of.
C
Canuck 36
Guest
Re: I Also Have To Add The Fact That This Video Is Slander
Indeed the PBS news show is the best I've seen on US TV.
Indeed the PBS news show is the best I've seen on US TV.
V
vincebjs
Guest
Re: The CNN Is Extremely Biased!!
What PABAAH thinks about the movie "Elf" and its threat to American society:
rtsp://a1703.v9950f.c9950.g.vr.akamaistream.net/ondemand/7/1703/9950/v001/comedystor.download.akamai.com/9951/dailyshow/corddry/corddry_8074_300.rm (RealPlayer link)
(Edit: Copy and Paste into address bar or into RealPlayer)
What PABAAH thinks about the movie "Elf" and its threat to American society:
rtsp://a1703.v9950f.c9950.g.vr.akamaistream.net/ondemand/7/1703/9950/v001/comedystor.download.akamai.com/9951/dailyshow/corddry/corddry_8074_300.rm (RealPlayer link)
(Edit: Copy and Paste into address bar or into RealPlayer)