"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

- excerpt from The Common Good, by Noam Chomsky

I was talking to Zeeshan the other day about my experience watching The O'Reilly Factor while on hallucinagenic drugs, and I remarked at how ridiculous the whole show seemed to me. I was dumbfounded that people actually took it seriously. But then i started to realize that the ideas being espoused were really not all that different from those of the liberal media. The difference between liberal propaganda and conservative propaganda is almost enitrely rhetorical. Obviously there are some relatively important actual differences between the Democrans and Republicrats, but ultimately they both support the same social structures, ideologies, and institutions. They just do a very good job of covering up the obvious similiarities by advocating slightly different approaches to politics and by constantly expressing distain for the other party. After watching The O'Reilly Factor again while completely sober, I realized just how important that particular strategy is. It wasn't that I was so much more put off by Bill O'Reilly's viewpoints than, say, those of my parents, it was that I was completely put off by his semantics and unflinching hatred for "the other side". And this phenomenon is not exclusive to Bill O'Reilly or even conservatives. Almost all of mainstream political thought is governed by these two main principles. And my good friend Noam has artfully illustrated this point in the above quote.

In this country, we have freedom of speech. But just because we're allowed to think and say anything doesn't mean we can.