Luigi discussion thread

Hot take: the drones are just a government and media distraction to get people's attention away from the nascent CEO-deposing movement. "Fuck fuck—they're all sympathizing with Luigi!! Quick, scramble the drones over New Jersey!!" I shall now supply some random quotes from Chomsky on the media:

The bewildered herd is a problem. We’ve got to prevent their roar and trampling. We’ve got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like "Support our troops." You’ve got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they’re properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they’re not competent to think. Therefore it’s important to distract them and marginalize them.

If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past ten years—I include here the Democratic opposition—there’s really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, deterioration in the inner cities—the whole raft of problems… In such circumstances you’ve got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they’re the ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the Superbowl and the sitcoms may not be enough. You have to whip them up into fear of enemies. In the 1930s Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and gypsies.

So we have one kind of educational system directed to the responsible men, the specialized class. They have to be deeply indoctrinated in the values and interests of private power and the state-corporate nexus that represents it. If they can achieve that, then they can be part of the specialized class. The rest of the bewildered herd basically just have to be distracted. Turn their attention to something else. Keep them out of trouble. Make sure that they remain at most spectators of action, occasionally lending their weight to one or another of the real leaders, who they may select among.

The only problem with my hot take (besides having no evidence to back it up and me not being very serious) is that the drone sightings preceded the Luigi assassination... In any case, it is still quite unfortunate how the frenzy around drones/aerial phenomena has taken attention away from questions of the healthcare industry and corporate profits, which had the potential to, and in fact did, lead to broader questioning of capitalism itself (e.g. interest in Engels' use of the term "social murder").