Hacker Cinema
Wag the Dog
1997 · Film · 97 min
Directed by Barry Levinson
During the final weeks of a presidential race, the President is accused of sexual misconduct. To distract the public until the election, the President's adviser hires a Hollywood producer to help him stage a fake war.
6 positive20 neutralfrom 26 commenters
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26 comments on Hacker News
> let's be clear about the real goals.
You should watch “Wag the Dog”, a 1997 movie about a president who starts a war to distract from a sex scandal. The real goals here have nothing to do with anything Iran has ever done.
> The Atlantic
I open this site and the first thing I see is,
>This Is Not How Presidents Typically Communicate. (About trump)
And it screams to me that this is a biased site.
So I think it is not possible for a layman to know the ground truth. Not even close. Have you seen the movie "Wag the dog?" It is a 1997 movie. Things have only gotten real worse since..
So given that, what is the point? Either put your life on line and go to these places and understand the truth and do something about it, or just zone out and enjoy the what ever little fragile peace that you have right now.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120885
>Why did we have to go through all this pain. Was that really necessary?
Because the United States government is so grossly dysfunctional that a blatant real world re-enactment of Wag the Dog[1] has gone off without a hitch. "Without a hitch" in the "distract from the President's rape of a child" sense of the original film, of course.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
Everyone knows that the companies have to comply, so a company trying to convince the public that they can choose to not comply, is just telling a lie. I don't understand why Anthropic tries damage control here. Why not just admit that all the data given to them, is also used for war-purposes? We currently see the build-up of a much larger warfare. These things are inter-connected. Even more so when some of it is done for politics (e. g. re-election or simple election "boosters"; reminds me of the old movie Manufacturing Consent or the follow-up "brother" Wag the dog).
"Wag The Dog" movie all over again. Sure looks like deflection from the Epstein Files and economy.
In the movie "Wag the Dog", Dustin Hoffman plays a Hollywood producer who is hired by the President to create a fake war to take attention away from another scandal. Spoiler alert Near the end, Hoffman's character is upset that the President's re-election is credited to something else instead of his handiwork. Even when told he's risking his life if he says anything, he yells "I want the credit!". I think a similar psychology may be at work in this and other crimes that become (in)famous.
Wag the Dog was also a pretty decent movie, as far as comedies about distracting the public during elections go. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=steA_PZPkc8
Ever seen the movie Wag the Dog?
Right - it could be outside your comfort zone. But not a logic failure.
If you want to see an example of how this might be done, can I recommend the entertaining movie: 'Wag the dog'?
What we are really talking about is the problem of presentation. Very few people/companies have a very broad reach. If you are an agency/organisation that is able to intercept and alter the message that is sent, perhaps even create the message completely (you can call this propaganda or spin) if no one is checking the reality on the ground, would you do it? Do you think those organisations tasked with governing minds (govern mente) would consider this as the easiest way to manage their message? And, as a consumer, how would you know the truth of whatever is portrayed?
There are plenty of reasons not to take the presentation we are provided literally.
How coincidental. Just finished rewatching Wag the Dog movie.
reminds me of 'Courage Mom' from movie Wag the dog.
reminds me of a quote in the 1997 movie "Wag the Dog" (context: Stanley Motss, a Hollywood producer played by Dustin Hoffman, helps Conrad Brean, a political spin doctor played by Robert de Niro, to stage a war in order to cover up a presidential sexual-advances-to-underage-girl type scandal two weeks before the election):
Motss: "It's all, you know, thinking ahead. That's what producing is."
Brean: "It's like being a plumber".
Motss: "Yes, like being a plumber: do your job right, nobody should nocice; but when you fuck up, everyone gets full of shit."
> What say you older HNers, is this what it was like?
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis — to borrow from Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie Wag the Dog, "This? THIS is NOTH-ing!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jR4gld-nUA
I guess a more recent film is almost impossible to make you feel the same "feeling" again when watching it. But close calls I would say would be:
- Wag the Dog (1997)
- In the Loop (2009) [the closest, in my opinion]
PS: The Death of Stalin (2017) and Don't Look Up (2021) also try, but I think they don't manage to get that close.
I would also say that Coen brother's works, also of high quality and appealing to a similar-minded crowd, though are completely different animals.
Hm I just tried `!imdb wag the dog` on bing and I didn't end up on imdb.com. Instead I got Microsoft's take on that movie and a bunch of other cruft. If by proxy you mean they use bing's index then yeah I guess they do. If you mean they have the same functionality then no, you're wrong.
> Article 5 only applies if a country is attacked. So if the US or UK are attacking, it doesn't apply.
Without wishing to get all silly, most wars tend to involve both sides fighting.
What's the actual threshold for a NATO member declaring "an attack" to be able to claim assistance under Article 5? Their first ship sunk? Their first aircraft shot down? Their first casualty on the battlefield? First civilian killed in terrorist attack? First cyber-attack?
“A serious cyberattack could trigger Article 5, where an attack against one ally is treated as an attack against all” Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General[0]
It would appear to be a completely blank cheque for military action, based on suitable political theatre. Think Wag the Dog (1997 movie).[1]
[0] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_168435.htm?selectedLocale=en [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
I believe the US will go as far as claiming an incursion has occurred without it actually having occurred. Like the movie wag the dog. They will then pressure Europe to enact sanctions which includes NS2 but will them selves not stop purchasing oil from Russia.
I wonder what the larger societal context for this airstrike? The context for the "the rocket into the compound of an Afghan family" was a retreat from Afghanistan. Other previous bombings of questionable military value had other contexts.
These justifications for the bombing were disputed by the owners of the plant, the Sudanese government, and other governments. American officials later acknowledged "that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s." The attack took place a week after the Monica Lewinsky scandal and two months after the film Wag the Dog, prompting some commentators to describe the attack as a distraction for the public from the scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory
The problem is "agitators". For at least the last 10 years a good many of the riots/protests you have seen on TV have been fomented and/or inflamed by paid parties. This is a 100% proof case of "Wag the Dog". I highly recommend it if you haven't seen the movie.
I remember their coverage of Monica Lewinsky and related issues being pretty annoying, along with the rest of the networks.
I remember when Clinton tried to attack claimed al Qaeda infrastructure after the embassy bombings and made a speech about bin Laden (the first time I heard the name) they asked if it was to distract from Monica. Compared it to the film Wag the Dog.
Makes me think of the movie, 'Wag the Dog'.
You almost made me think that "Wag the Dog" is a Russian movie [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
Is there an industry of “black hat PR” people that handle this sort of thing? Would be really interested if there were any autobiographical novels from that sort of person, though I suppose, like bank robbers, their success insists they remain unknown.
EDIT: Just remembered the movie Wag the Dog the Wikipedia article calls the black hat PR people portrayed therein “spin doctors”. But that seems more like just PR to me, not setting off fire alarms to scare away reporters (though the spin doctors in the movie construct a fake war).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
Thank you for clarifying.
As a Barcelona citizen, I was with the impression that Spain's central government furious attack against Catalonia people's right to self-determination was to simply to distract the fact that the central government party (Partido Popular) has over 900 politicians currently on trial with charges of corruption (more than any other party in the whole Europe).
In fact, I thought central government's current situation was great material for a potential sequel of a great movie. The sequel could be called "Wag the Dog 2" with Robert de Niro as adviser of central goverment's president Mariano Rajoy, who as you know will be forced to declare in one these trials for corruption.
So, in your opinion the best solution for Barcelona is that Spain's central government should take over and fix our housing issues in Barcelona?
Thanks in advance for elaborating on the reasons why you think it is a good idea after the chaos they created in Barcelona's airport with something much simpler as passport control.
>Meet 7-year-old Bana, who shared her experience of war on Twitter.
It's like the movie Wag the Dog. Sad to exploit a child like this.
Americans are too strung up on the "be ashamed for someone" comedy that really doesn't go over well with Scandinavian audiences.
It's hard to find an American comedy (since Wag the Dog, perhaps) that doesn't fall on the gag of fremdschämen.
A typical example of the bleak humour from here would be the Danish movie [Flickering Lights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE4ZBcK01HU)