Tag: Bots

The Stepford Candidate

If you’ve never seen The Stepford Wives you’ll have to head for wiki and/or YouTube to get a basic rundown. If the 2004 Nicole Kidman version is what you recall then find and watch the original 1975 copy. That movie had a tremendous cultural impact at the time. If you’re a boomer, you remember seeing it that first time.

In a Wiki nutshell:

The premise involves the married men of the fictional town of Stepford, Connecticut, and their fawning, submissive, impossibly beautiful wives. The protagonist is Joanna Eberhart, a talented photographer newly arrived from New York City with her husband and children, eager to start a new life. As time goes on, she becomes increasingly disturbed by the zombie-like, submissive Stepford wives, especially when she sees her once independent-minded friends – fellow new arrivals to Stepford – turn into mindless, docile housewives overnight. Her husband, who seems to be spending more and more time at meetings of the local men’s association, mocks her fears.

As the story progresses, Joanna becomes convinced that the wives of Stepford are being poisoned or brainwashed into submission by the men’s club. She visits the library and reads up on the pasts of Stepford’s wives, finding out that some of the women were once feminist activists and very successful professionals, while the leader of the men’s club is a former Disney engineer and others are artists and scientists, capable of creating life-like robots. Her friend Bobbie helps her investigate, going so far as to write to the EPA to inquire about possible environmental toxins in Stepford. However, eventually, Bobbie is also transformed into a docile housewife and has no interest in her previous activities.

At the end of the novel, Joanna decides to flee Stepford, but when she gets home she finds that her children have been taken. She asks her husband to let her leave, but he takes her car keys. She manages to escape from the house on foot, and several of the men’s club members track her down. They corner her in the woods and she accuses them of creating robots out of the town’s women. The men deny the accusation, and ask Joanna if she would believe them if she saw one of the other women bleed. Joanna agrees to this, and they take her to Bobbie’s house. Bobbie’s husband and son are upstairs, with loud rock music playing – as if to cover screams. The scene ends as Bobbie brandishes a knife at her former friend. In the story’s epilogue, Joanna has become another Stepford wife gliding through the local supermarket, and has given up her career as a photographer, while Ruthanne (a new resident in Stepford) appears poised to become the conspiracy’s next victim.

The clue that gave Bobbie away was she couldn’t remember a word she’d used in conversation the day before – something like “donut”. Software problem. It’s always the software.

(I can’t get the iframe embed to work so head to youtube for the shopping market final scene. It gives a good sense of the bot-like life style.)

Why fighting Obama-bots on DK is a waste of time

These are people that cannot handle truth–it’s simply too depressing for them.

People there are dying for any excuse to support the American system as it is.  

Eventually, they’ll find one.

Then they’ll get disillusioned again, as reality surfaces.

Rinse Repeat

They’ve been doing this for years and years–since the start of blogging, in fact.

When the Dems voted for the Afghan war.

And the Iraq war.

And all the supplementals.

When they won the house, and nothing changed, they found an excuse.

When they won the Senate–and still nothing changed, they found an excuse.

And now with all three branches–excuse after excuse. And for the currently disillusioned–that’s only temporary.

Because they want to believe–in fact they need to or their whole America first world view goes poof.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.

The reason for this isn’t about Obama or Obama-Bots, although let’s face it-he was a brilliant choice to star in this play.  It’s because most of these people still believe in the myths of Americana they were taught in school, that are re-enforced daily on tv, in the echo chamber that is modern blogging (where any diversity of opinion can be wiped off of their lcd screeens by 10 like minded ‘bots’ giving a neg rating) .  You can’t fight all that. Not on their turf-with all the rules set against you.  

The real battle for American hearts and minds starts long before bots become bots in the first place. It starts in the schools, the churches, the TVs that their sat in front of at age 2.  It starts with the made in Texas, government approved Houghton-Mifflin textbooks they’re forced to regurgitate from age 5 onwards to age 18, age 22, or more.

It starts with an educational system that rewards puking up a canned answer, over careful thought.  And one that has largely entrenched the military into the schools.

The Republican and neo liberalist idealists know this–this is why they’ve attacked all these primary systems for years–schools, churches, non-profits, local government, military, and so on.  This is where the battle lines are drawn-the real world.   And the attitudes one faces are indoctrinated in, from an early age.