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TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TRUTH!

PostPosted: Sat Jul 14, 2018 3:43 am
by Jerky
Tired of the LIE-brary? Why not try the TRUTH-brary instead? At TRUTHBRARY.ORG!

Find out about everything from Hillary Clinton's Illuminati Satanism to the reasons why liberals hate the West!

https://www.truthbrary.org/

Enjoy!
YOPJerky

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Sat Jul 14, 2018 4:40 am
by Elvis
:lol: "Verified by the International Institute of Truth and Knowledge"

It's a laff riot; moving to the Lounge.

"Dr. Billy Wayne Ruddick, PhD" is the latest character invented by Sacha Baron Cohen ("Borat," "Ali G" et al.).

Cohen may not realize that reality has moved way past this as parody.

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2018 4:02 pm
by American Dream
Here’s The Thing About Gun Extremist Larry Pratt: He’s Always Been Like This

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Larry Pratt is not just the executive director emeritus of Gun Owners of America, he’s also an established bridge between fringe radical gun groups and some of the country’s most powerful politicians. Last night, Showtime debuted the first episode of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show called “Who is America?” in which Pratt’s extremism was featured front and center.

The first episode featured Pratt and several GOP congressmen agreeing to appear in an advertisement supporting a fake program called “KinderGuardians” that advocates arming children as young as four years old with guns in the classroom. Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Rep. Joe Wilson and former Congressman Joe Walsh were shown advocating for the fake program alongside Pratt in a clip released by Showtime.

In the clip, Pratt told Cohen, “Toddlers are pure, uncorrupted by fake news or homosexuality. They don’t worry if it’s politically correct to shoot a mentally deranged gunman. They’ll just do it. The science behind this program is proven. At age 4, a child processes images 80 percent faster than an adult meaning that essentially, like owls, they can see in slow motion.”

Cohen’s trickery also led to Pratt reciting a bit featuring the names of prominent musical artists.

“Children under five also have elevated levels of the pheromone Blink-182 produced by the part of the liver known as the Rita Ora. This allows nerve reflexes to travel along the Cardi B neural pathway to the Wiz Khalifa 40 percent faster, saving time and saving lives,” Pratt read into the camera.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkXeMoBPSDk

In the clip, Cohen said that he was able to gain access to members of Congress after successfully duping Pratt, which speaks volumes about Pratt’s deep influence among Republicans on Capitol Hill.

“Now that I had this Pratt on board, I was welcomed into the halls of Congress,” Cohen says.

Under Pratt’s leadership, Gun Owners of America has lobbied Congress on behalf of fringe anti-government militia groups for gun laws that make the National Rifle Association look moderate.

Despite the fact that Pratt makes frequent references to assassinating political leaders, was forced out of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign after his ties to neo-Nazis were revealed, and peddles absurd conspiracy theories about school shootings on par with Infowars’ Alex Jones, Republican politicians still listen to the demands of Gun Owners of America and tout the group’s endorsement.

In recent years, Pratt has:

Suggested that Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg may be a crisis actor.

Insisted that liberals have “plans to enslave an entire nation.”

Issued a veiled warning toward Merrick Garland, saying that “the Second Amendment is all about people like Judge Garland.”

Demanded that the judge who found Kim Davis in contempt for denying a same-sex couple a marriage license be arrested.

Said that states should arrest federal agents who enforce national gun laws.

Suggested regulating how much alcohol that bars serve so that patrons can carry guns inside them.

Claimed that a shooting in South Carolina was tied to the transgender rights movement.

Repeatedly compared Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler

Told a “sovereign citizen” that most federal laws were unconstitutional.



http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/here ... like-this/

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:30 pm
by Elvis
As much as I generally abhor Vox, I think they have this one right:

Sacha Baron Cohen’s political provocations are exhausting and dangerous

Baron Cohen’s prankster provocations are a bad match for our current cultural climate.

By Aja Romano @ajaromano Jul 13, 2018, 1:30pm EDT

Sacha Baron Cohen has always trafficked in fake reality. So you might think that his new Showtime comedy series, Who Is America?, would be perfect for skewering the interplaying phenomena of actual fake news and actual real news that gets labeled as fake. But we no longer live in the culture that spawned Baron Cohen’s 2006 prankster hit Borat. In an upended world where reality pretty much fakes itself, and where social media feeds an endlessly provocative outrage cycle, Baron Cohen’s game may be getting old fast.

So you could be forgiven for being already completely over the latest news involving the notorious pop-culture instigator and a number of right-wing politicians whom he apparently duped into being a part of his upcoming show.

Over the past week, well before his series even debuted (it premieres this Sunday night), Baron Cohen has prompted indignant responses from a number of right-wing political figures. Sarah Palin blasted him after he apparently tricked her into sitting for an interview for what she thought was a legitimate historical documentary. Then former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh reported that Baron Cohen had tricked him into attending what he thought was a legitimate pro-Israel event.

And on Thursday, incendiary Alabama Judge Roy Moore joined Walsh in blasting Baron Cohen over the faked pro-Israel event — which seems to have involved Baron Cohen somehow convincing a number of conservatives to travel to Washington for the gathering.

In a statement released to numerous baffled reporters, Moore railed against Baron Cohen for using “trickery, deception, and dishonesty” and threatened to sue Showtime if it aired anything “defamatory.”

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On the one hand, all this may seem like the beginning of a glorious sublime parade of politicians owning themselves. But on the other hand, these politicians were tricked into appearing on the record as themselves, in a way that further perpetuates and entrenches not only the cultural ideological divide, but the idea among conservatives that “liberal” media, including entertainment media like Baron Cohen’s production, is a constant and perpetual trap to be distrusted at all costs.

Not only that, but the mileage Team Reality will get out of Baron Cohen’s performance-art antics won’t be nearly as potent as the validation Team Fake News will get out of claiming that Who Is America? represents a new low for liberals. And that’s because Team Reality was losing its hold over a single dominant reality paradigm long before Baron Cohen cycled back onto the scene.


Sacha Baron Cohen is an old comedy dog with old comedy tricks

When Sacha Baron Cohen first came to prominence with the early-2000s series Da Ali G Show and the hugely successful 2006 feature film Borat, his provocative comedy was provoking an entirely different culture.

Think about it. In 2006, YouTube was barely a year old, and the massive culture of performative, provocative pranksters that it engendered had yet to arrive. Twitter barely existed. The 24-hour-news cycle was in full gear, but it was only 24 hours, and was considerably more contained than the current endless outrage cycles spawned by instantaneous virality and massive social media spreads.

Baron Cohen’s Borat was successful because he was a novelty — a mix of performance artist and prankster who successfully blended the real and the fictional in a way that felt new.

But Borat was also foundational. Today, you’ll meet 13 YouTubers attempting to prank you for a stunt before you’re halfway through a stroll down Venice Beach. At any given moment, alt-right memers on 4-chan are faking images of left-wing outrage, so that they can spread the fake left-wing outrage among right-wing social feeds in order to make right-wingers think shrill left-wing hysteria is real.

At any given moment, actual progressives on Twitter are reacting with shrill hysteria to a false right-wing meme designed to provoke them into just such a reaction. Russian bots are doing a better job impersonating American teenagers on Tumblr than actual American teenagers. And systematized alt-right performance art a la Infowars makes it easier than ever to create false reality.

Among the public figures who were apparently tricked by Baron Cohen’s stunts was former Nightline anchor Ted Koppel, who told the Hollywood Reporter that Baron Cohen’s production crew had engaged him in an elaborate and absurdist interview that resulted in him asking the crew to leave his home. Koppel made it clear he found the whole thing tiring — and, crucially, indicative of a larger milieu of exhaustion:

“I think there’s a larger issue here and that is, if there’s one thing we don’t need any more of in this particular era it’s people posing as documentarians. I think there’s enough skepticism to go around about people who actually are reporters, who actually are documentarians. And to undermine whatever tiny little bit of confidence might be left by pulling a stunt like this … maybe it will make for a good comedy show. I don’t know. But I don’t think it helps the overall atmosphere.”


In other words, 12 years on from Borat, we are so past the point at which we could believe in a single, stable version of reality that Baron Cohen’s methods don’t feel invigorating, or as though they’re advancing the conversation around politics or comedy. We’re in a moment where the most revelatory comedy standup is a performance where a comedian rejects comedy as a remedy.

With his old bag of tricks, Cohen is successfully promoting his show not by adding to the conversation, but by gleefully poking at it and watching everyone — politicians and onlookers alike — get upset.

Moore’s bizarre “I love God and so does Israel” reaction was exactly the kind of surreal, eye-grabbing free publicity Baron Cohen couldn’t have begged for. And even more tantalizing — or horrifying, depending on your point of view — was the idea that there may be more squirming politicians where Moore and Walsh came from:

Image

On the one hand, all this may seem like the beginning of a glorious sublime parade of politicians owning themselves. But on the other hand, these politicians were tricked into appearing on the record as themselves, in a way that further perpetuates and entrenches not only the cultural ideological divide, but the idea among conservatives that “liberal” media, including entertainment media like Baron Cohen’s production, is a constant and perpetual trap to be distrusted at all costs.

Not only that, but the mileage Team Reality will get out of Baron Cohen’s performance-art antics won’t be nearly as potent as the validation Team Fake News will get out of claiming that Who Is America? represents a new low for liberals. And that’s because Team Reality was losing its hold over a single dominant reality paradigm long before Baron Cohen cycled back onto the scene.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/13/1 ... -fake-news



Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show arrives with a swirl of outrage-driven hype. Don’t believe it.

The new Showtime series Who Is America? is manufactured to provoke empty anger in the name of publicity.

By Todd VanDerWerff @tvoti todd@vox.com Jul 15, 2018, 9:00am EDT

Who Is America?, the latest TV series in which comedian and provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen interviews people while in disguise and tries to get them to do or say outrageous things, arrived under a veil of secrecy. Showtime, the network airing it, announced the show a little over a week before it was scheduled to debut, and conducted exactly one screening for critics. Before seeing it, we were required to sign nondisclosure agreements saying we would not say anything about the contents of the episodes until a very specific time: less than 24 hours before the show aired.

This may sound like no way to run a publicity campaign, but Who Is America? has received one hell of a publicity campaign nonetheless. And Showtime hasn’t had to pay a single cent for it.

In the course of making Who Is America?, Baron Cohen interviewed a variety of prominent political and media figures while in disguise, and he evidently got them to say ridiculous things. They are now complaining about being duped, with former Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore threatening to sue Baron Cohen for defamation. (Sarah Palin has also taken umbrage, though she hasn’t threatened to sue, while journalist Ted Koppel seemed rather sanguine about being tricked into appearing on the show.)

And with every bristle of outrage, every threat of a lawsuit, Who Is America? gets more attention than Showtime could ever buy, a kind of instant signal of which side the show is on in the never-ending culture wars.

This is how the game is played now, evidently: A comedian gets prominent right-wingers to say things on camera that they later try to insist they were tricked into saying. The right-wingers howl in protest at being mistreated. The outrage cycle gets covered in the media (including on this very website), which only boosts the profile of Baron Cohen’s show among those who wouldn’t mind seeing Palin or Moore knocked down a peg or two. And the cycle repeats itself, in aggregations of video clips and breathless reports of how people were “tricked” into participating in Baron Cohen’s new series and so on and so forth.

But make no mistake: The biggest dupes are anyone who watches.


Who Is America? is a grim, vaguely nihilistic show that uses a patina of political divisiveness to make fun of everybody it can find


The various politicians featured in Who Is America? — who include Sen. Bernie Sanders in the premiere and Dick Cheney in a later episode (I have seen both the Sanders and Cheney segments; I haven’t seen the ones featuring Palin and Moore) — are a bit of a false advertisement for the rest of the program, which could just as easily convey its central thesis by having Baron Cohen stand in front of a billboard reading “Most People Are Ignorant” for a few hours.

Indeed, the weirdest thing about this show has been the promise that it would reveal something dangerous or provocative about Americans, instead of what it actually reveals, which is what Baron Cohen always reveals, which is that most of us are too polite to call people on their bullshit.

Who Is America? is exactly what you’d think it is. Baron Cohen dons a disguise. He plays a character. He wins the trust of some unsuspecting yokels. He does outrageous things, or tries to get them to do outrageous things. And so on. This is Baron Cohen’s shtick, and it works from time to time. When he was first peddling it on Da Ali G Show, it could be surprisingly incisive, because it took place in a reality where it didn’t feel like we were all being pranked all of the time.

His film Borat, released in 2006, managed to walk a razor-thin line between outright mockery of its subjects and something more valuable, but it ultimately worked because it kept falling back on a kind of comedy of manners, a story about how important it is to many white Americans to be civil and polite above all else, even if that means politely listening (or even singing along) as a man sings “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” Borat, then, was an early strike against civility culture, against the idea that what’s most important is being nice, instead of being honest.

I don’t know what Who Is America? wants to do beyond cynically call attention to itself. I laughed at it a handful of times, because Baron Cohen is a talented performer and a funny guy. But the blood it draws is very thin indeed. Who Is America? concludes that reality stars are vapid, that you can get most people to do stupid shit if you turn a camera on them, and that politicians are insincere phonies who will read whatever you throw on a teleprompter in front of them.

The best segment in the series premiere involves no politicians or prominent guests. Instead, it features Baron Cohen in character as a stereotypical tote-bag liberal sort who rants about “President Hillary Clinton” and tries to build a bridge with two South Carolina Republicans by having dinner with them, before immediately telling them about how his daughter menstruates on the American flag and that his wife had an affair with a dolphin.

The joke here, such as it is, is that Baron Cohen’s statements get more and more unhinged, while his two dining companions try their best to simply drink in what he’s saying and toss out occasional dry asides.

The segment works because both sides of the conversation get to be funny, but it also underlines a fundamental problem with the series, which is that it never quite figures out how to deal with what seems to be its central political thesis: Republicans are willing to believe the absolute worst of Democrats — up to and including that they might have sex with dolphins — while the reverse isn’t really true. Whether you agree with the show’s thesis or not, it creates a comedic imbalance Who Is America? isn’t prepared to parse or joke about, which means the series is always on to some other thing, like Baron Cohen trying to trick an art gallery owner into giving him some of her pubic hair.

As you can probably gather from the title of the show, Who Is America? wants to be about a lot more than the modern political divide within the US. It aims to tackle celebrity and wealth and reality TV culture. But its understanding of all of those things is facile — literally most of it can be boiled down to, “This is ridiculous” — and the specters it exhumes lurch onto screen like the ghosts of Christmas past. Sure, sock it to Roy Moore, to Sarah Palin, to Dick Cheney. But they’re fringe figures, at this present moment.

There’s a value, I suppose, to the notion that Baron Cohen is willing to talk torture with Cheney when so much of the rest of our culture has seemed intent on looking the other way as much as possible. And there are instances when Cohen exposes moments of genuine American racism or Republican gun love that feel like they’re coalescing toward a point.

But a lot of the humor is cruel and cynical, for the sake of being cruel and cynical, and even more of it points and laughs at the rubes, provoking them simply to provoke them.

What Who Is America? understands best is that all Americans have in common right now is anger

The closing credits of Who Is America? reveal that Baron Cohen has been joined by an all-star crew of behind-the-scenes personnel, including Nathan Fielder of Nathan for You fame. And just seeing Fielder’s name made me realize why Who Is America? kept missing the mark. Nathan for You is brilliant television, one of the best shows of this decade.

Like Baron Cohen (who is British), Fielder (a Canadian) is an outsider who wanted to show America an image of itself in a mirror. Unlike Baron Cohen, he did that by choosing a very specific target — the ridiculousness of American capitalism — and by firmly fixating the series’ comedic point-of-view, so the joke was always on him. In the series’ best episodes, Fielder becomes a sort of ur-American, a pure distillation of our inability to reflect.

We run away from ourselves because the only American dream we have left is the idea that we might accidentally reinvent ourselves into someone rich and successful. Fielder exploited that tendency to make great cringe comedy, but he also played a man who desperately wanted to believe he could become whole through exactly the right absurd scheme.

Baron Cohen’s new series fails to achieve this feat, perhaps because he splits himself among too many different characters (five in the two episodes I’ve seen). He too often wants the joke to both be on himself and on his interview subjects. He cracks open a whole country, finds dark and nasty shit, then invites you to laugh at the people who believe horrible things.

There’s something to be said, I suppose, for neutralizing their power by making them the butt of the joke, but that can also fuel more anger. Who Is America? doesn’t owe viewers anything but laughter, but it clearly has more on its mind. It’s the start of a prank war with the worst elements of an entire country, only Baron Cohen is going to pack up and go home before the other side retaliates. And I guess the rest of us get to hang out with whatever repercussions emerge.

This is assuming, of course, that anybody watches Who Is America?, which brings us back to the outrage cycle, to the cynical manipulation of a click-driven media that flocks to rage like flies to a bug zapper. What the series seems to best understand is that the only thing Americans seem to have in common right now is being mad all of the time about how little control we have over a country run amok, an economy funneling itself into the hands of a greedy few, and a planet cooking itself to a crisp.

We are powerless and scared, angry and bilious. We spit in each other’s faces, because at least we control the direction of our spit, and all the while we can hear somebody, somewhere laughing at us. And that only makes us all the angrier.

Maybe that laughing person is Baron Cohen, who has vivisected us and left us bleeding out on the table, secure in his cynicism and nihilism, in the idea that we are not worth saving and maybe never were. The only thing that keeps me from writing Who Is America? off entirely are the times I lay awake at night and think maybe he’s right.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/15/1 ... a-showtime

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:37 pm
by American Dream
It's hard for me to believe that Larry Pratt and other such right wingers were really that dumb and gullible but quite possibly they were...

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:44 pm
by Elvis
Remember, these people love to be on teevee. :tongout

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:45 pm
by American Dream
Maybe it says more about me than them that I'm really not sure if they really "get it".

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 2:37 am
by 82_28
Remember The Yes Men have been doing this far longer and it never became a "tired" trope where people have had to say so. In my day you had to have Real Player or Windows Media Player to watch that shit. I'm fully "behind" this Cohen pranking. Cohen just happened to get rich(er) doing it within closer proximity to the advent and adoption of Youtube. Also Negativland pranked the fuck out of Seattle and all corporate media in 2003.

http://www.negativland.com/archives/003kjr/


Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 2:53 am
by Elvis
Moved back to General Discussion; the title could be more specific, and the first post is rather opaque if one didn't already know about Cohen's new show.

I have a hunch the creators of the website scoured the Web for "conspiracy" sites, collected the writings and ran them through one of those article rewriting programs, adding their unique touch with a goofy aliens consiracy. The site is really just a mirror of a thousand existing "New World Order" conspiracy sites, barely distinguishable, so for me it doesn't really work as parody.

I've never been a big fan of Cohen's MO, but some of the old Ali G shows were side-splittingly funny!

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 3:32 am
by 82_28
Yes, absolutely did Cohen and his team trawl the right wing hinterlands for that site. Complete with stupid fonts and everything. It's completely obvious to anyone with a brain that functions on a human compassion level that the mind controlled masses will never see what whooshes over their heads. But I think this kind of shit is done to wake people up in the long run. Nobody would pull these sort of pranks if they actually didn't care about the social trajectory of things. I know, I have pulled many a prank in order to get people to realize that their suppositions etc are basically all selfish in nature. I hate prank shit that scares people for any reason. Ellen's fucking scaring people from behind really pisses me off. (Yes, I was in the hospital for a month and couldn't walk for another six more -- I watched TV). But there is nothing better than a fake fight, argument really, at a fancy restaurant. Just start it with someone you know and let it grow. It has to be a fancy restaurant though. I don't think it would work at a fast food joint. But it's all to prank their insulated sensibilities and see if someone pipes up. (They don't). If they ever did, I would tell them the fight was a joke and don't worry.

See, that's the problem. Insularity. It breaks through when what you're doing is trying to provoke a certain emotion in someone. In some ways the prank is lame because it makes people think maybe shit is falling apart everywhere. But in another it also says our shit maybe ain't that bad after all -- look at these idiots. But, as I think about it. I certainly do not want this to become widespread. I hate secrets. Not kept from me. I don't, for the most part, give a fuck. But I give so much of a fuck that I think pranks are powerful placeholders in the lives of people. Everyone loves a good prank.

Unless you're a right wing fascist fuck. After that. They and we are on our own.

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 9:17 am
by American Dream

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 12:05 pm
by liminalOyster
82_28 » Wed Jul 18, 2018 3:32 am wrote:Yes, absolutely did Cohen and his team trawl the right wing hinterlands for that site. Complete with stupid fonts and everything. It's completely obvious to anyone with a brain that functions on a human compassion level that the mind controlled masses will never see what whooshes over their heads. But I think this kind of shit is done to wake people up in the long run. Nobody would pull these sort of pranks if they actually didn't care about the social trajectory of things. I know, I have pulled many a prank in order to get people to realize that their suppositions etc are basically all selfish in nature. I hate prank shit that scares people for any reason. Ellen's fucking scaring people from behind really pisses me off. (Yes, I was in the hospital for a month and couldn't walk for another six more -- I watched TV). But there is nothing better than a fake fight, argument really, at a fancy restaurant. Just start it with someone you know and let it grow. It has to be a fancy restaurant though. I don't think it would work at a fast food joint. But it's all to prank their insulated sensibilities and see if someone pipes up. (They don't). If they ever did, I would tell them the fight was a joke and don't worry.

See, that's the problem. Insularity. It breaks through when what you're doing is trying to provoke a certain emotion in someone. In some ways the prank is lame because it makes people think maybe shit is falling apart everywhere. But in another it also says our shit maybe ain't that bad after all -- look at these idiots. But, as I think about it. I certainly do not want this to become widespread. I hate secrets. Not kept from me. I don't, for the most part, give a fuck. But I give so much of a fuck that I think pranks are powerful placeholders in the lives of people. Everyone loves a good prank.

Unless you're a right wing fascist fuck. After that. They and we are on our own.


I dunno man. It can be a pretty aggressive move to assume one knows the Other (rather than a judgmental projection of them) well enough to decide what they need and how to provoke it in them. I happened to see the SBC show by chance at a friend's last night. It's not revealing of anything except pre-existing biasses and stereotypes (albeit some which are horrifyingly ugly ie repub support for a "kindergun" training program for toddlers) and can't do much beyond provoke further smugness. It's mostly a snoozefest though SBC is really good in the episode where he plays an over the top white liberal multiculturalist visiting some trump supporters. <spoiler>There's a bit in that segment where he really runs with it and starts riffing on a menstruating teenage daughter who is allowed to "free-bleed" while sitting on an American flag which he then says is a teaching moment about the blood on the hands of the American empire. It's ridiculous and the logic the character represents is kind of spot on.</spoiler> But what I found most fascinating in the sketch is how the Trumpies (a late middled aged Southern woman and her seemingly closeted Southern husband) were polite and listened all the way throughout. At one point she even says to her husband "listen, don't judge." This is by far the most interesting moment in the show to me for revealing what Buddhists call Bodhicitta, a kind of basic human decency that exists in all situations and can be expanded and sustained. But SBC's goal is an increasingly simpler sort of laughing at the idiot gag that feels perfectly well in line with the general tenor of the political climate everywhere these days. It's not critical and doesn't reveal anything new, just contributes to it.

ps. forgot all about the old Yes Men Dow clip - fuck that was amazing.

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 5:22 pm
by American Dream
Sacha Baron Cohen Is Still the Greatest Troll Alive

Even in the era of hoaxes, fake news, and extremism, 'Who Is America?' comes across as brutal and hilarious.

Image

"Namaste, I'm Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, and I'm a cis-gender white heterosexual male, for which I apologize," Cohen says in a voiceover introducing his next character, who dons an NPR T-shirt and a hot pink pussy hat. Cain-N’Degeocello, balding and ponytailed, has dinner with two members of the South Carolina Republican Party, "a couple who suffers from white privilege," as he describes them. Throughout the interview, Cohen informs the couple that to combat sexism, he forces his son to pee sitting down and his daughter to pee standing up, and explains how he's made peace with his wife having an affair with a dolphin. We then meet Cohen's third character, Ricky Sherman, an ex-con who is an aspiring artist who uses bodily fluids as paint. He meets with a fine art consultant named Christy, who is unbelievably down with Sherman's fecal-based artwork. At the end of the segment, she gifts Cohen with some strands of her pubic hair for his collection.

But Who Is America? goes beyond that run-of-mill trolling when we meet the fourth character, an Israeli ex-Mossad agent named Erran Morad, who manages to persuade a slew of prominent Republicans and pro-gun activists into voicing their support for a program that gives toddlers “gunimals”—firearms dressed up as plush toys. In an interview with Larry Pratt, the executive director emeritus of firearm lobbying group Gun Owners of America, Cohen asks in a heavy Israeli accent, "Do you think these liberals are using these school shooting to further their anti-tragedy agenda?" (They're trying, Pratt replies.)

Later, Cohen has Pratt look into the camera and say, "Toddlers are pure. Uncorrupted by fake news or homosexuality. They don't worry if it's politically correct to shoot a mentally-deranged gunman, they'll just do it. The science behind [the "gunimals"] program is proven... children under five... have elevated levels of the pheromone Blink 182, produced by the part of the liver known as the Rita Ora. This allows nerve reflexes to travel along the Cardi B neural pathway to the Wiz Khalifa 40 percent faster."

Cohen gets more respectable figures on board with his scarily absurd initiative. Congressmen Dana Rohrabacher of California and Joe Wilson of South Carolina, along with former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, are all eager to support Cohen's fake guns-for-kids program. The most surprising part about actual Republican congressmen supporting giving guns to babies is that Cohen had to dupe them into doing so.

Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, who on the show says, “In less than a month, less than a month, a first grader can become a first grenader,” claimed he was tricked into saying that after the comedian "flew [him] out to DC for some made up friend of Israel award."

"I gotta live with it," he wrote on Twitter.


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/594b ... roll-alive

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 6:39 pm
by Jerky
For the record, I think the real genius of Brit Com Satire's 90's-plus wave is Chris Morris, and this new SBC show borrows more than a bit from the former's epochal BRASS EYE news magazine parody (which are all on Youtube... check out the pedogeddon episode for some REAL outrage bait... the most complained about show in British TV history).

Jerky

Re: TRUTHBRARY is here with a heaping helping of AMERICAN TR

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 6:41 pm
by Jerky
Trigger warning... sensitive topic. Just know that what's being parodied here is NOT pedophilia itself, but a particularly British form of real-world media-fueled moral panic about same, the smell of which can sometimes still be detected in these very virtual halls.