From Think Tanked a few days ago:
The deadline for the Koch Associate Program is rapidly approaching on March 15th. The program, a project of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, partners with numerous think tanks and assists young professionals who are “passionate about free-market ideas, and want to become more effective at advancing liberty throughout their careers.”
The accompanying video is pure win.
wengler
Scientology looks like a more credible cult.
CJ
They have debates? Between what? “The Free Market(tm) is super” vs. “The Free Market(tm) is amazing!”
Omnes Omnibus
Damn, they only want people with 0-10 years of work experience. I guess I will have to look elsewhere for my sweet, sweet wingnut welfare checks. If my Soros check comes through I’ll be fine though.
gnomedad
So it’s like Jesus Camp for glibertanians?
Paul
A liberating career in liberty, here at the corner of Liberty & Career.
Steeplejack
Comrad DougJ:
Once again, I threw up in the back of my mouth a little.
I counted 1½ non-lily-white people in that whole video: a black woman who had a short speaking part and a woman seen in profile for about a second who may have been Asian.
And their in-group lingo is creepy: “the liberty movement,” “market-based management,” etc. Brr!
Steeplejack
@CJ:
Free-market capitalism–great system or greatest system ever?
goblue72
Its like watching bizarro-land. They all talked about how they wanted to all work at “non-profits” – the aim of said “non-profits” being to serve as wingut welfare funded groups advancing the ideology that the only thing that matters is private-sector groups making profits.
That and they looked like a bunch of culted out zombies.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: I believe that was one of the application essay topics.
Mark S.
OK, I watched the video and I still don’t know what the fuck this thing is. I know they love liberty and Thursdays are special.
Christ, is this what the Ayn Rand Institute is like?
Comrade DougJ
@Steeplejack:
That was part of its charm, its master race feel.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mark S.: I avoided the video; I have a note from my doctor saying to avoid too much excitement. Why are Thursdays special?
benintn
I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Delia
I could only make it through the first two minutes of the vid. Obviously I don’t love the ideas of liberty enough. Also I’m too old and cranky. These young punks better stay off my lawn.
S. cerevisiae
After 30 seconds I wanted my shotgun, so I could kill myself before I ever reduced my ethics enough to be a Kochsucker.
If I ever do anything like in that video you have my permission to kill me.
El Cid
The faculty there exposed me to the values of liberty. When I went to my small rural school, I had never been around people who had been practicing liberty. I mean, we had heard that there were people around doing it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about. I thought I would be the *last* person in the world to get involved with liberty; but I met some professors who really brought me in, even though I was nervous, and showed me how to really do liberty. It was a shock, but I learned that it was who I really was.
Now I’m proud, and I’ll tell anyone and everyone that I am a person who enjoys liberty, and if they’re prudes or if they look down on me because I broadened my horizons farther than they can see in exploring my own liberty, it’s not my fault.
Omnes Omnibus
@Delia: Okay, I tried to watch the video. I made it through 1:21 of it. I am not sure what is the worst between the production values, the script, and the acting.
Villago Delenda Est
Freedom for the feudal lords, like the Kochs.
Serfdom for the other 99.9% of the populace.
trollhattan
@wengler:
I was gonna quip, “Next stop, Xenu Station” but ya beat me to it.
Koch: for life!
srv
I really tried to get one of my cousins to apply to this Koch program years ago. He was anarcho-syndicalist at the time, but loathes libertarians and republicans. Even my sound logic of “you can destroy them from the inside!” was not enough to convince him.
If you really want to destroy the movement, you need a couple of dozen smart, progressive and pretty blondes to go undercover in the movement.
gnomedad
DougJ, I hope you’ve applied.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid:
You’ll go blind.
Omnes Omnibus
@srv:
I am intrigued by this plan. Please explain it in detail.
Mark S.
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t even remember. I think they attend liberty lectures.
gnomedad
@El Cid:
This remind me of Monty Python’s Mouse Problem sketch.
Bill Section 147
@El Cid: I needed some Liberty and so I went and got Liberty. It is almost like it is some product in and of itself. Very weird. The way they use the word Liberty makes me not want it so much.
Bill Section 147
I think these are the perfect non-profits to join if you want to avoid being in a community. They all want to be managers. I am not getting that corporate model.
Liberty means that every cubicle is a kingdom.
I have issues with Baltimore
Whoa. At 1:37, is that *the* Steve Sweet of fistinglessons.com? Huh…so that’s what he’s been up to these days….
replicnt6
Interesting that we need a non-profit to teach people about running non-profits that will advocate for system that values only profits.
But my favorite was this:
Don’t tell McArgleBargle.
Bubblegum Tate
I bet that Thursday meeting they love so much starts with a half-hour chant of “one of us, one of us!”
srv
@Omnes Omnibus: I could tell you, but then I’d have to shoot you. We need $25M from Soros, a pharmacist, and a progressive guy who attracts blondes like Charles Manson. He might have to be bi, I’m not sure which way the Kochs go.
The DFH’s I’ve mentioned this plan to are enraged by it. It’s like they think Uncle Ho, Che and Lenin changed the world with slogans and Andy Warhol t-shirts… We need true ideologists, or at least a new religion to defeat Koch Industries.
freelancer
@wengler:
Also, a nexus of self-generating acronyms. Market-based management or MBM creates…well thank LRH that CK has been able to give this young people or YP’s and opportunity to shine whereas they would have otherwise taken their “free-market principles” (FMP’s) and otherwise would have gone into (gasp) the Private Sector or PS.
At about 2 minutes, I was like wait, “Where are any minorities?! This is a pretty monochrome promo vid for the 21st century, it’s like a photo negative of a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ book”, then at 3:03, I was like “Ahhhh! There’s token!”
Sweet Christ, they found a secular religion based on profit-worship, and then they’re puzzled by the dearth of people not willing to share their ideals AND work at an NPO. These people are fucking hilarious, and as an aside, no one who works at Reason magazine should consider themselves as having a modicum of intellectual integrity. This video made that much clear. The Koch NPO’s are like an Amway cult pitching greed for greed’s sake. Not just the toilet paper, the candles, the ham, or even the wine, but just greed. On your knees, worship, and if some DFH calls you a “Kochsucker”, you wear their hate with pride! Because you’re a RBA, or Red-Blooded American and not a Commie Pinko Traitor or CP…nevermind you get the idea.
Villago Delenda Est
I’ve been to Amway meetings, and they are remarkable events…very much like a tent revival meeting, except substitute Mammon for Jesus, and they’re all but identical.
mk3872
It is a perversion of what credibility remains of the term “libertarian” where the free-market conservatives like the Kochs have hijacked the movement.
Complete faith in the free market system is a conservative belief, much closer to anarchy, putting control in the hands of big corporations.
srv
@freelancer: I think that’s really catchy: A non-profit based on profit-worship.
I have found my new religion.
Just Some Fuckhead
@CJ:
Learning to tell the difference between The Invisible Hand of the Market and The Holy Spirit.
freelancer
@srv:
Yeah, it’s still cracking me the fuck up. It’s the 21st century debut of irony too thick to absorb. See the early 90s, when members of the right were so “pro-life” that they had to start murdering people.
Mark S.
@mk3872:
I realize this is quibbling over terms, but isn’t complete faith in the market a libertarian belief, though not necessarily a conservative one? Every libertarian I know believe the free market can do no wrong (well, until they get fucked by it), but not every conservative (especially the more social ones) thinks that.
Calouste
@replicnt6:
I call out two lies in that sentence. First you don’t need to understand anything and second you don’t need to be able to argue. You just need to be able to repeat talking points to give the impression that you understad something, and maybe sometimes rearrange them in a different order to give the impression that you are arguing something, but that’s it.
Citizen_X
So that’s where they hatch and nurse the larval wingnuts, eh? Watch, you’re going to see at least three of those kids appearing on Fox News to prattle about Liberty(c). The rest will be infesting state legislatures, introducing bills to hunt aborting moms from helicopters or something.
Another Bob
The next generation of Koch-heads. Is it free-market based, or just free base?
Odie Hugh Manatee
Leave it to the Koch to tell you if you suck good enough or not.
BillinChicago
Yikes, I didn’t know they had a Koch Whore Academy! Well, I suppose it must be like herding cats, getting all those mental retards to recite their free-market talking points in unison.
As for those Thursday “training sessions”, I think we’ve seen this movie before:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdFLPn30dvQ
LosGatosCA
You have to admit that being part of the Liberty movement applying market based management principles while managing non-profits sounds like a solid career move. Wingnut welfare for the masses until the downsizing wave comes later, when they hit 30 and Cato, AEI, Heritage, et al determine that the supply curve requires a market based adjustment.
The only flaw in the Koch plan appears to have two parts:
1. These people appear to reading from teleprompters, and,
2. While they don’t seem any fundamentally smarter than the Teabonics crowd, they do appear to be capable of using a spell checker.
Their credibility with the rank and file may be a problem over the long run.
opie_jeanne
@El Cid: Full of Win.
opie_jeanne
@Citizen_X: They reminded me of young Mormons.
The video made me think of a dating service, for some reason, but I didn’t see anyone whose genes I wanted in my family pool.
Socraticsilence
Ah its too late I graduate in May and this would’ve been an awesome Summer job pre-Peace Corps.
Thoughtcrime
@srv:
…the Church of Christ Without Christ. Where the blind can’t see, the lame don’t walk, and the dead stay that way.
dan
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
brantl
Every one of those people’s mouths moved at an angle. I shit you not.
Sideshow Bill
“It was much better than ‘Cats.’ I’m going to see it again and again.”
YellowDog
Dorks on parade.
El Cid
@opie_jeanne: Thank you. It’s difficult to come out publicly as a Liberty-American.
@Thoughtcrime: The Church of Christ, Capitalist.
gbear
I’m surprised that no one mentioned that the woman in the video is named Arianne. At least she doesn’t spell it with a ‘y’.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
i got hooked on phonics last time i fell for an ad like this. it took me years to recover. all though i am getting a shipment of logistics fed exed to me, i can eat those things by the pound, and not gain an inch. of course, no one eats that many logistics in one setting, they are just too good, and too filling, logistics made my poop better too. one grunt and its all in the bowl, no waiting, and three wipes(sometimes two) and i am clean again, thanks logistics!
Roy G
“They created a wasteland, and called it Liberty.”
CayPDX
@Mark S.: Me too. All I can think is WTF?