Just watched the second Hunger Games movie. I haven't read the book (Catching Fire), but all I could think of was how stupid this political regime was and that it'd never work IRL.

Anybody had similar thoughts?

I think that every day when I'm reading the news

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have read the three books.

I don't know of any particularly good way to distinguish workable fictional political regimes from non-workable ones. As long as North Korea keeps maintaining control over its territory, I'm not sure anything is unrealistic.

When you think a fictional political figure or organization is particularly ludicrous, it's always important to remember that people like Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and (for the lulz) Rob Ford are actual real life elected officials.

EDIT: And to avert the part where some pedantic dick comes in here, I know Palin was an elected official. Piss off.

Maybe a more intelligent thing to be concerned about is the public response to a film that can be trivially understood as a criticism of the use of media to distract a population from pandemic corruption.

HA! like THAT could ever really happen.

There's that as well, sure. But the way this "regime" was showed seemed too cartoonish for my taste. Both movies I'd felt I was watching a version of Battle Royale, watered down for teenagers.

It's not a new concept. Hell, even The Running Man could be understood as a criticism of the use of media to distract a population from pandemic corruption.

I think the point Jon `C is making is that everyone is okay with talking about how well a movie represents their corrupt government but doesn't try to do a damn thing about it, instead electing to spend massive amounts of brain power in interpreting easily understood fiction.

know 0 about "public response"

Somewhere out there is a group of friends who unironically dressed up as capitol citizens to see the Hunger Games 2

i have never read a hungry games

Well before I saw the movie there was a Cover Girl ad for "Capitol Edition" makeup. So I would say more than the audiences "Gatsby'd" the message.

I honestly didn't see it as being that outlandish.
Sure, in our society I can't see something like that coming about, but I could see that happening in an alternate society that developed from our bloodthirstier history.

It's different if corporations do that, because corporations already live in that world.

It's also about the failure of that very media to do its job. And it's not necessarily about a distraction about corruption but a much broader systematic oppression.

It's funny how business practices follow profit huh?

Media has not failed. Exactly the opposite, media is extremely effective in doing it's job.

You, like everyone else, assumes the government and media are there to serve YOU. They are not. They serve the people who fund them. This is why funding for campaigns needs to be so desperately limited.

Anyhow, media are all part of large conglomerates, that are huge corporations and represent corporate interest. They are a source of disinformation (there was a study once that found many Americans doubt global warming and this belief can be traced directly to news channels, primarily Fox News).

And they set the limits of debate, right, so you always hear (at least where I live) about the horrible liberal bias in the media, but really the entire media is extremely right wing on most issues. If people think that this far-right-but-left-of-the-furthest-right fake debate is the actual, real debate, they will think their more socialist views (like taxing the rich more) are absolutely insane.

There's so much propaganda and it's very gripping, almost every person alive buys into at least a few of the propaganda talking points, and it's very hard to detach yourself from it without spending a decent amount of time studying it.

Its because of all the sheeple maaaann.

Grazing on the mans green grass of greed and corruption.

Polluting the system. They don't know, I'm enlightened man.

Btw, didn't care for the books. Movie was alright.

Lead actress is definately tappable.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse.

^superior novel

+1 for psychoactive drugs. Heh.

I was talking about in the film and what the film is critiquing. If you've seen my posts before you certainly know that I have no such assumptions about the media or the government.

(spoilers maybe) in the film: the media and govt tried to placate the masses of people and obviously failed because people resisted. That is the point of the story

I mean... that IS kind of how media and government operate in real life:
government masturbates itself furiously and spews horribly sticky and useless semen angrily all over its citizenry.
citizens finally realize they are being bukakke'd on and object.
media stops fondling governments balls just long enough to feign righteous indignation.
government switches from furious to slow strokes and the media alerts the citizens that all is right with the world.
citizens stop paying attention and suddenly FURIOUS masturbation commences again!

only real difference is in real life we dont really resist. not REALLY.

^ STILL a better love story than twilight.

thank you for explaining that in terms i can understand

How has the media not failed? The concept of televised news originated as a way to inform citizens of issues relevant to elections in a widespread and accessible manner. This has somehow transformed into a platform for all viewpoints to be lended equal credence regardless of merit. Fear of being labeled biased has caused news organizations to lose oobjectivity. Sometimes a crazy thing is a crazy thing, and people need to know that, instead of being told that their crazy views are acceptable.

The second failure of televised news is a product of ad revenue. They play the stories that will get ratings. This leads to sensationalism like we saw with Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman. In no way were those trials important to the general public, but they got heavy coverage. Human interests stories fall under this category as well. The newest cell phones do not help you make informed decisions on election day. Why is it on the news? A failure of the media in terms of greed can largely be blamed for the state of affairs currently in the western world. Its not about informing people. Its about keeping them on your channel or website.

I dont know if you can really say media has failed. I mean if you do actually believe that the media is obligated and interested in doing anything other than exactly whatever the hell the feel like, then maybe you can argue they failed. But what they have done, and quite successfully might i add, is evolve (or devolve) from information distribution to profit driven quasi-entertainment. I guess you CAN say it is their fault, but i kind of put that in the category of "it's McDonald's fault that I'm fat!"

I mean really... "My lawyer has failed me!!!!"
"well... why the hell did you hire a lawyer who was dressed as a clown?"
"but he INSISTED he was a lawyer!!!"
O.o

So how do you fix the Media? I think it's always been the hope of the United States that freedom of speech gives everyone a voice and that the sheer volume of various sources reporting on issues results in fair well rounded coverage. If the costs of running a Newspaper/Radio/TV/Webblog impact the quality of stories being produced what's the solution? Would a government funded station similar to the BBC be trusted? Is that a better solution than non-profit news organizations like NPR or PBS?

mmmm... If it was government funded I might trust them to report in an unbiased manner on things not involving government.

The part that I have trouble actually grasping (and I may have just missed the explanation earlier in the books), is how a manufacturing base where each district is responsible for certain things (eg lumber, mining, ...) can continue to function after the president deciding to simply kill everyone in one of those districts.

The only explanation I can imagine is that nobody in the capitol actually uses any of those raw materials for anything, ie that they harvest and produce all the needful within the capitol itself (in which case the daily labor of the district dwellers is akin to digging holes then filling them back in again).

That's one thing. The other thing is if they'd been using fear, executions, and other unpleasant tactics to subjugate everyone into docility for 70+ years, they would've have had a revolution on their hands much, much sooner. OK, they had one and the government "burnt down" the entire district, but, people, wouldn't have that incited even more protests? They can't burn everything down, can they? And are we to assume that nobody in the police / military have any relatives in the districts at all, that they're all from the capitol? That can't be right, because otherwise they'd be heavily outnumbered. I mean, "communism" in U.S.S.R. lasted 70+ years and the reason it lasted so long (even though people were dragged to prison for thinking the wrong thoughts) was because the majority of the population thought that we lived in a wonderful country. I didn't get the same vibe from Panem...

It's at least conceivable that Panem has some outside trade, right?

Actually many Russians enjoyed a better life under the Soviets than they did under the Tsar, but that's another conversation.

Their job is to make people feel informed without actually informing them, the company that's best at deluding people and keeping viewers while doing it will get the most advertising revenue.


It's more than just the media. The media is a symptom and valuable tool of a much bigger problem, one which questions the fundamentals of western society, so don't expect much else.

It's possible to learn alot about what really goes on but you have to dig for it. I mean, a rag like The Economist is filled with loads of garbage about what should be in America or whatever, but it has to have some truths about what goes on the world, or they would lose their reader base, right, so it at least reports well in areas involving actual investment. You just have to take anything involving free trade agreements, domestic policy, etc with the giant grain of salt that you should.

A huge problem with making your own news source wouldn't even be funding, it's sources. Often times newspapers rely on government reporting. The government tends to give news late to people who report with anything but a pro-US slant, which of course if you're reporting 3 days behind the NY Times you will not get many readers.


Sensationalism is an interesting way to put it, and that is more of a recent phenomenon with the increasing blend of entertainment and news television. There are people out there who, you know, watch the news to gain information about the world. Of course most of them probably aren't watching TV news anymore and have switched to internet news sources.

I still want to understand to what goal television news has failed. Failed to do what? To educate and inform? That has clearly not been it's purpose.

But that was the original purpose of it.

things change.

although you could make an argument that they have failed at their thin veneer of "we're here to inform you in an unbiased manner!!!" if you really want to pretend that THAT is what they are doing.

I think it's safe to say that when news outlets began being bought up by giant corporations in the 1980s and 1990s that the news paradigm shifted. However, it's always been propaganda at it's core. Public relations goes back as far as the 1920s.

http://www.amazon.com/Selling-Free-Enterprise-Liberalism-Communication/dp/0252064399/ref=la_B001IXSCR6_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385973961&sr=1-1

The battle to control the way Americans think is vast and desperate. That book is very good; I'd suggest you read it.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/muzzling-federal-scientists-widespread-survey-suggests-142739172.html

The thing is each part of the propaganda system, each little part by itself doesn't mean much, but they add up to something rather large.

I mean, if the news was really set on informing the public about what goes on and reporting objectively, then events like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_de_Aviaci%C3%B3n_Flight_455 would be remembered by everyone with anger. In fact, most people in the west couldn't even name a single terrorist act that America or the west has committed. A free press would report **** like that widely and would continue to report updates on the case as they came out, but that never happens. Propaganda is implied. And this is true of American reporting for decades, it's nothing new, it's just more dramatic now. But on the other hand, people are actually more aware and angry about this stuff. The Iraq war had huge protests before we invaded, which is a huge difference from the Vietnam war.