Matt Orfalea didn't lie, alter clips, or remove key context. He made edits faithful to reality and just got a strike for it. Welcome to post-Trump America, where truth is a censorable offense
Meanwhile, the President is fist bumping and then white washing a Saudi prince who, according to his own US intel, ordered the assassination of a journalist and who also now has "diplomatic immunity" to ensure that the wife of the journalist will have "no standing" in her lawsuit. Ok. Guess we need more oil? Strategic reserves getting low. Can't make this stuff up.
The Saudis' literally own US pols and journalists.
Look up Bandar Bush to get some small idea of just how vast their influence in the West is.
And never forget that 'somehow', immediately following the attacks on 911, a time when 'all' flights were grounded, there was a special airlift of bin Laden family members back to KSA. As the attacks were happening, Buhs senior was having breakfast with bin Laden's brother.
"A few nights after he resigned his post as secretary of state two years ago, Colin L. Powell answered a ring at his front door. Standing outside was Prince Bandar, then Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, with a 1995 Jaguar. Mr. Powell’s wife, Alma, had once mentioned that she missed their 1995 Jaguar, which she and her husband had traded in. Prince Bandar had filed that information away, and presented the Powells that night with an identical, 10-year-old model. The Powells kept the car a gift that the State Department said was legal but recently traded it away.
The move was classic Bandar, who has been referred to as Bandar Bush, attending birthday celebrations, sending notes in times of personal crisis and entertaining the Bushes or top administration officials at sumptuous dinner parties at Prince Bandar’s opulent homes in McLean, Va., and Aspen, Colo.
He has invited top officials to pizza and movies out at a mall in suburban Virginia and then rented out the movie theater (candy served chair-side, in a wagon) and the local Pizza Hut so he and his guests could enjoy themselves in solitude. He is said to feel a strong sense of loyalty toward Mr. Bush’s father dating to the Persian Gulf war, which transferred to the son, whom he counseled about international diplomacy during Mr. Bush’s first campaign for president.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, as the United States learned that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi and focused on the strict Wahhabi school of Islam that informed them and their leader and fellow Saudi, Osama bin Laden, Prince Bandar took a public role in assuring the Americans that his nation would cooperate in investigating and combating anti-American terrorism. He also helped arrange for more than a hundred members of the bin Laden family to be flown out of the United States."
"Murdering a US journalist" (who was good buddies with bin Laden) was itself an act of propaganda, a deliberate distraction from the utterly brutal Saudi/US/UK war on Yemen. A war that has seen the death of dozens of journalist, and 100s of thousands of people.
"Yemen war deaths will reach 377,000 by end of the year: UN
But nevermind, "Hey! LOOK OVER HERE!!! NOT THERE!!" and it works every time.
Just imagine the frothing, HATE, and madness that would ensue if "PTUIN!" was chopping the heads off women in Russia, in parking lots, for being "witches"
There was never any doubt in my mind that Russia-gate was a total hoax from the beginning. Call it woman's intuition. or you can call it I don't trust, and can't stand Hilary Clinton. As soon as the DNC emails were hacked Mook said the Russians did it. And how does he know? I'm always surprised that even those who come to Trump's defense must also go on an attack which is nothing short of vitriolic, like Greenwald did in his appearance on Democracy Now in April 2019 after the Mueller investigation. However Greenwald responding to David Jay Johnston did an excellent job in disposing of the Russia-gate hoax. I always remember Johnston saying that the Russians didn't want Hilary in the White House since she was held bent on having the Russian's give back Crimea. I saw Oliver Stone's documentary Ukraine on Fire, and never approved that Obama backed that coup and stood hand and hand with the neo nazi's who were the driving force behind it. We pushed the idea that it was solely a popular uprising, but hell no! Here's a very informative link on that issue, https://www.globalresearch.ca/washington-was-behind-ukraine-coup-obama-admits-that-us-brokered-a-deal-in-support-of-regime-change/5429142 Obama was going to implement a Brzezinski approach to bring down Putin. I always thought, but never said it here that I thought they pushed Russia-gate to get that agenda in Ukraine underway, but Trump got in their way, ergo remove him from office any which way we can, Just think of all the things the democrats did to oust Trump from office, and all the lies, and that impeachment, because he was stalling on getting weapons to Ukraine unless he got dirt on Biden's son. I don't believe that for a moment.
Also, during Trump's presidency not only did they tie Trump to Russia, a country highly vilified for decades, but it also helped to create an anti-Russia mindset in the minds of the American people which would make them more accepting of a military confrontation with Russia, a nuclear power. Well, didn't Biden and his fellow neocons follow through with that plan.
As I am sure you know, Aaron Maté did some excellent reporting on Russiagate. Here he is talking to Scott Horton, (his interviews amount to a Master class on Empire foreign policy) about the origins of Russiagate.
Obama was one of the very very first people to push the "Russia interfered in the election" meme.
Ask someone how, exactly they did that, and you'll get nothing but mush in response. They will mumble something about "Facebook" and "Google" and you press them for details they just get mad and then will accuse you of working for Ptuin! (how much does he pay, and where can I sign up?)
Of course the irony is that a former First Lady, who had most of the media on her side, and a 1 billion dollar war chest - could not "influence" the election, but somehow Ptuin! was able to elect Trump with a few thousand dollars worth of FB memes! You can't make this stuff up!
Someone who used to follow me on Twitter just told me that he was paying attention to my comments on "Russiagate" - which I would regularly refer to as "war propaganda".
"You were right".
Whom The Empire would destroy, first they make their people hate them.
how about I repost it to a channel of mine and people can complain about it and see if it gets taken down. Or use a backup channel of yours or a friend of yours.
At some level of consciousness I think are all aware of the propaganda, but a large chunk of the population actually likes being propagandized and so they wilfully close their eyes. It makes life more intellectually comfortable.
It's all about whether or not it advances the preferred narrative. True information that's "problematic" will be blocked.
The YouTube censoring videos like these is just the most blatant example. I suspect that there's a vastly larger amount of self censoring and spiked stories that the public is never made aware of at all.
I don’t think everyone is aware of propaganda. A few years ago, I was visiting my parents, and they asked who I liked for President, and I said Tulsi Gabbard. (Please, I know about the WEF.) Without missing a beat, my dad said, “She’s a Russian spy.” Or the time we were discussing a Michael Moore documentary, and my mom said, “There are a lot of problems with his movie.” I know they aren’t totally objective, but I thought he made some good points. So, I asked what the issues were in her opinion. She’d never actually seen it, and was just repeating talking points. My parents aren’t stupid, but I think they are completely naive about what they are absorbing from CNN and Fox and the newspaper they read. My family is just one example, but my guess is that there are probably a lot of people who don’t understand propaganda and think they are informed. Long time Taibbi readers are probably in the minority in their cynicism about the mainstream media and their suspicions about where the messaging originates. I remember decades ago, Matt’s opinion was that the press didn’t have a liberal bias but rather a bias toward cheap, easy, and appealing stories. (Isn’t it weird, isn’t it horrible, Democrats suck, Republicans suck.) I doubt he thinks that now. I’m pretty sure it isn’t our imagination that the billionaires who own and run these institutions seem to have their fingers on the scale.
A KGB agent is sitting next to an American businessman on a trans-Atlantic flight to DC. Eventually, they start to chit-chat. "So why are you traveling to the United States?" the American asks. "To study American propaganda techniques," says the KGB agent. "*What propaganda?!?*" the businessman asks in shock. "Precisely," replies the Soviet.
A man on a bridge over a stream sees two fish in the water below. He says "hey, fellas, how's the water down there?". One fish looks at the other and says "what's 'water'?"
The jokes have some superficial similarities, but your fish version misses an important part of the point. It would work better if it were about two fish in an aquarium, separated by a glass partition... One says to the other, "How's the water over there?" The other says back, "What's water?" One is aware, the other isn't.
The Soviet and the American are both human, both "in the same aquarium." But one recognizes propaganda around him, the other not so much. That's a big part of current American dysfunction.
I think people actively want to be propagandized - as long as it's their version of propaganda. See the post just above from Balance of Power about the tribalism.
Otherwise intelligent people, when presented with hard cold facts (just one example - tons of images/videos proving the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine) respond with nonsense like "there are so many fakes, I don't know what to believe". But the exact same people gulp up the COVID lies, Russiagate lies, etc.
I agree with your comment - and I'd add that I believe that these same people are just intellectually lazy. Don't read the label - don't inquire about the contents - just absorb the KoolAid. Pitiful.
Oh surprise surprise. The King's used to forgive debts from time to time in Summer and other ancient societies and let you keep part of the plunder in their wars. It worked well for corvee labor and the military. Their priest classes used to convince you that you live after you died as long as you were good with them and the King. Anyone who habitually believes anything on the MSM or social Media is really beyond hope. You tube is handy for fix it video and jokes and, of course it's great for the ruling classes. Only the technology has changed, the actors are the same. You can watch a Hollywood Western in the ancient world or far in the future, the plot is the same. China has higher home ownership and is more democratic than the USA. Russia today used to do great show's catering to the more intelligent sophisticated than anything else in English. Much of the "excluded" from the NYT types were on it. We're a RENTIER EXTRACTION society and the rest of the world has about had it with doing our work and letting their compradors sell off their public property and resources. Cynicism short of nihilism needs to become the default western societies before we can move on. I'm not hopeful!
It sure can be lonely, though, when you find yourself in a different universe than your parents. I now almost expect the Twilight Zone music to start playing when friends tell me how awesome Obama was....vs how Trump was Satan. Biden is standing up for true democracy and what a shame it will be if he loses....Neeeneeeeneeeneee.
You make an excellent point. There is a time delay to the point where you wake up and say "wait a minute". Matt's delay was less than your parents'. But eventually everyone becomes consciously aware, as was demonstrated under Communism, where finally nobody believed Pravda. Similarly Iran, where the ranks of true believers is getting really thin.
Capture, distortion, weaponization, politicization and control of the dialogue around all issues of important moral, national, human, social and economic concern. At a profit.
Take abortion as an issue. The decision to take the life of a child is seriously difficult one and cuts across the entire spectrum of human emotional, social and moral demarcation. Western society acknowledges this and sets reasonable limits and laws concerning it. The psyop weaponization of the issue is a mass propaganda, demanding the right too slice a newborn's vocal cords and set it aside, to die alone. The impact on the human psyche is brutal, numbing and enraging. Its anti-human sterility, as intended, shuts down reasonable dialogue and creates a kind of no mans land around the issue filling it with social and emotional moral anomie. Mass confusion, anxiety and depression, as intended, is the natural outcome. Add a dozen other "rules for thee not for me" manufactured ineptitudes and, as we are witnessing daily, a culture and a society disintegrates.
Of course, there is no mass murder of new borns. It is the subtle message inside it and the hidden theft of the citizens personal agency and power: a mass "fk'you" to human reason and conscience. The emotional sterility of it defines the inhumanity of the monsters sending it. It is the same psychology demonstrated by Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz: People are things.
Reality. Control of American elected political leadership is compromised and is being dismantled by a cabal of pathological international criminal financiers. YOU, your Constitution and Bill of Rights are in the way.
You say that as if an (average generic) Republican -- in 2022, to a *thinking* left-winger -- is not preferable to a Democrat. But all one needs to see is what fools the "Progressive" Democrats made of themselves recently backing out of their Ukraine peace request. If that isn't screaming loud evidence of non-democratic control of the discourse and by extension the government, it's hard to see what is. I don't see such comparable things going on in the Republican Party at the behest of its leadership; Cheney and Kinzinger were able to participate in the Democratic Party's kangaroo court. What did the Democrats do to cuck the Squad so badly?
These "Progressives" are anything but. I think if anything, they have proven that the DC Machine will grind down anyone (I'm being generous here by giving them the benefit of a doubt that they really meant what they were saying before getting elected).
Exactly. These people aren’t interested in the news so much as they are the news as presented from a certain angle. The New York Times, for example, is basically just a notary at this point. Its imprimatur and the fact that people know the Times is going to convey the news from the right perspective, that of the Good Person™, is why the subscription-as-membership quality of paying for the news has been viable during the Trump era.
Propaganda, like cheerleaders, simply makes our fascination and engagement as spectators seem more consequential. At a football game, we willingly scream and cheer with delight for the accomplishments of our heroes and boo and hiss with equal (if not more) satisfaction at the accomplishments of our enemies. The problem with politics as a spectator sport is that 1) the game never ends, 2) the stakes keep getting higher, and 3) it adversely impacts, with ever-increasing severity, our ability to form constructive relationships with people we disagree with. The political-cultural-media complex will never willingly allow this vicious cycle to stop - even as they lament and decry its effect on society - because their livelihoods absolutely depend upon its perpetuation.
I have never been to a football game, or watched one on TV, so I feel unable to judge the degree to which "propaganda" -> "engagement". But it sure seems like a reasonable and important thesis.
What you say has connections with the thesis of Neil Postman's book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Not identical, but some overlap. If you don't know about it, you should: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
"He’s clearly making the point that no matter who does it, denying election results is irresponsible. YouTube must do the right thing here." I don't agree with this statement, but I certainly think both sides should be heard. As I said, I think that the denial of the electoral results from both sides should be shown, but it has been determined that the Russians were not guilty of interfering in our elections wanting a Trump win, but a lie cultivated by Clinton and the democratic party, and unfortunately they found a press already lacking in any journalistic integrity support their claims which allowed the democrats to even go forth with an impeachment in the house which never would have happened to another president. No one in the democratic party was held accountable for the lie of Russia-gate. By defining Trump as illegitimate the democrats found it easy to reference the January 6 riots as an insurrection, and not the ridiculous riot it was. Then follow it up with a January 6 commission which is unconstitutional. After four years of this BS can anyone blame Trump for claiming the election was stolen after four years of denying his legitimacy as president? Just think of old Nancy ripping up his State of the Union Speech and calling it a dirty speech. The idea that Trump believed the election was stolen makes perfect sense to me rather then being defined as irresponsible, I think it would do a so called democratic country good to look at it's voting procedures and apparatus, and no matter your views about Trump to take another hard look at our corrupt media as well as looking into any collusion with the deep state in trying to oust Trump from office. Hope no one denies that.
Well, for four years the democrats tried to oust him from office on the lie Russia installed him in the White House. Fake news covered that lie for several years, supported it, and I don't think they gave it up after the Mueller report. I wonder what Trump thought just prior to the election when the mainstream media and the left wouldn't cover Hunter's laptop story. Bias, you think? He wasn't even invited to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran's funeral. Oh, and that impeachment in the house because he stalled on sending weapons to Ukraine unless he got the dirt on Biden's son. Now he is highly criticized for sending them. Then there was that riot they called an insurrection where I saw hundreds of people let into the Capital through the front door by police. I didn't see AOC, since she was no where near the Capital, but she feared for her life. Crash in on the drama which she is great at doing. Then that one sided unconstitutional comm to determine his guilt in fostering that "insurrection." Before it was his victory, but in the morning everything was turned around. Get it, or do I have to go on as to why he thought the election was stolen?
He may well believe it. The idiosyncrasies of 2020, with bellwether counties coming up wrong all of a sudden, the tightness of the votes, the mail-in fiascos, the ballot "curing" and signature match failure rate dropping precipitously.
The idiots fall for the hacked machines theories, but in truth, we all know how "stuffing the ballot box" is a time-honored party-machine political practice. Voting rolls from graveyards put JFK over Nixon in 1960. Is it that hard to imagine that nursing homes which used to have 12% of residents voting by mail now had 99% of them voting by mail? And that they were all compos mentis, and all the votes were legit?
The only defense ever claimed against a "stolen" election (by both sides) is that there is "no verified proof of fraud" as if to say that if film didn't exist of Diego Maradona's hand of God goal against England in 1986, then it definitely wasn't a hand-ball.
The fact that both sides argue in favor of more opaque voting techniques whenever possible, means both are up to shenanigans.
And it makes life seem "safer", so you don't have to think about stuff that should be thought about etc. And, to be fair, there's been a lot of scary stuff recently, much of it intended to actually scare people shitless.
for the gatekeepers nowadays, it is very clear that the Ends justifies the Means. I don’t think most even realize that being hypocritical is problematic because they are the “good guys”.
it might be that simple.
Sam Harris already admitted this about the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.
A little out of date, yet still very relevant. I call special attention to the part where Varoufakis says: "[Reagan & Thatcher] were wrong, but they believed it. Whereas the people I was dealing with were telling me in private that they *didn’t believe it*, but they were locked in."
Perhaps even worse than not realizing they are hypocritical, they don't realize they've gone insane.
"Yanis, you're completely right, now you've got to submit."
IMO, your observation is vastly under-liked, or under-noticed.
I hate to repeat post content, but this Feynman quote belongs here too:
"Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were *directly inconsistent* with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true." - Richard Feynman
Much easier to go with the flow, mind blinkered, than realize you live in a plutocratic/oligarchic Empire that is forever pushing for greater domestic control while spreading war and instability abroad. Reality is stark, depressing and scary.
And I think some of our societal dysfunction comes for this widespread cognitive suppression, it cracks people's brains. The need to continually embrace illogic leads to more illogic.
Although with the realization comes a certain ease of mind, since you no longer have to rationalize bad actions by bad actors who are allegedly “the good guys”. Once you realize the whole thing is a circus show designed to distract the populace from the fact that they are being robbed blind by their overlords, things make much more sense.
I know! My wife has informed me to back off at social gatherings. I wear my ‘Journalism is not a Crime” tshirt with Julian Assange on it....but as for actually getting into conversations, nobody wants to believe the facts pointing to Democrat=Republican for the past 40-50 years. War crimes=America. Democracy is a joke?!?
In addition to our affinity for tribalism, we have what Michael Shermer and others call a "believing brain". Not only is objective reason more work, but most people actually crave the act of believing. Combine the two, and we should not be surprised that people commit 100% to a chosen doctrine, and can barely tolerate other opinions.
You are certainly right about "most people." Is it *inevitable* that the failings of "most people" will determine the fate of society though? It seems there were times when these things were not so bad. I even think I remember such times.
"Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true." - Richard Feynman
I think I totally understand your intuition and sentiment. But in reality, nature is about to say otherwise.
Tribalism is a deeply ingrained human trait that may have been useful in the very early stages of evolution. But it turned gradually into an existential threat as civilization and technology advanced. Once we got to the Industrial Age, genuinely great human advances tended to coincide with intellectual rebuttals of tribalism: e.g. The Enlightenment and maybe The New Deal. Matt and Matt are two of the few remaining torch carriers.
Douglass Rushkoff has written some of the best stuff on this. Two great samples:
So do movie and record studios and newspapers, all of which pay for content. Censorship is a slippery slope. If a digital gatekeeper can create rules independent of our constitution and laws, what’s to prevent that precedent from spreading throughout society? And Democrats need to ask themselves why their party is so committed to suppressing facts and open debate.
The thing is - they are not independent of the government. They are useful tools of the government, through which it can censor what it doesn't want known. See recent stories about government strong-arming companies into doing what it wants.
It does seem to be a routinely weird trade-off of bellyaching followed by sucking up. Are we doing free markets or not? Unless you want to force bakers to make cakes for gay weddings, no case to be made here (edit: I guess this isn't a religious issue though, so maybe some case). You want the audience, you follow the terms, even if they are incoherent. Especially now that there are functional alternatives.
I already conceded the bakery wasn't a great comparison and this isn't about Twitter., But even so it hardly changes the point. Twitter and YouTube have competitors that provide nearly exactly the same service, even if their user bases and potential ad revenue are comparably miniscule (for now). The drain for monopoly power is already connected and open, it just needs community promotion and support and a willingness for average users and advertisers to support platforms that allow offensive shit. What else would you like to see done? FCC-style regulations for private internet content platforms to attempt to reduce censorship?
The competitors to Twitter and YT do not enjoy network effects. Same reason people have developed online auctions that offer lower fees and/or better functionality relative to eBay, and these alternatives have gone nowhere.
I would treat natural monopolies as, well, monopolies. Last I checked, the electric company can't cut off my power, even if I went before the Public Service Commission to oppose the latest rate hike.
First, thank you for a reasonable reply, I promise i'm not trying to be a snarky prick.
My main point is that network effects never change if users never say 'no more'. The same would seem to apply to voting and definitely to activism (the front line for fighting network effects).
My impression of eBay (which I regularly used 20 years ago) is that, while becoming basically an Amazon Jr, it's lost a significant market share (at least of the things I traded) to sites like Etsy and Reverb and others mainly because it started to suck for normies and artists to sell on. eBay might still be one of the biggest online auction sites, but is it really a monopoly for what it offers?
You're making a tautology about monopolies so I'm not sure what monopoly treatment would be exactly. In the USA, monopolies are largely treated like gifts from God, which I'm sure is not at all what you mean. Seems safe to say you would have YouTube and Twitter regulated similar to utility services, which is a fine proposal to me. What I would like to see though is some inclusion of any solution and/or alternatives along with the crying about the victimization, whether it's framed from a regulatory or a free market point of view. Monopolies/network effects don't go away without this, so we end up stuck in the endless cycle of getting screwed, whining, then simply returning to the place we started.
YouTube is THE platform for user based streaming. No other platform has been able to compete, it's similar to Ford, they were the only auto manufacturer for a time and even after others joined in, Ford still commanded the market for decades. Similarly, YouTube is a foundational part of the internet and despite small time competors it commands the market. Unlike Ford, info or streaming are not a tangible production so competitors have a very hard time marketing their platform as being much different than YouTube. Also, not enough people care to make a meaningful exodus from YouTube to a new platform. Put on your tin foil hats, but what'll really make everyone's head explode is when the government "rescues" Twitter from Elon and nationalizes it. For a large sum of course. Probably what Elon wanted from the start.
YouTube is actually the world’s second most popular search engine. As early as 2009, search volume on YouTube outstripped Yahoo!’s by 50% and Bing’s by 150%.
There are more than 2.6 billion active users. 1 billion hours of content is watched across the world every day on the platform, and every single minute, more than 500 hours of new content is uploaded.
And Amazon must be right there with YouTube in number of searches, and therefore number of potential customers. So to leave YouTube would be like a small retailer leaving Amazon Marketplace. To go where?
That said, I would love to see a rich liberal (who still gets it) fund a lawsuit against Alphabet over something like this. Couldn't be any 1st amendment stuff, but there must be some contractual problem when one user is treated arbitrarily differently than another. Causing economic damage.
Yep. How on earth did anyone make anything popular on the internet before we had Google and Facebook to advertise it for us? Must have been impossible.
It's absurd that this story doesn't start with "and here is the video on Rumble". Or heck, self host if you really want to.
Count me under the "Bad actors" category, because Big Tech/Big Media/Big Government's behavior leads me to increasingly believe that yeah, there's something sinister afoot.
I don't see that he could actually believe that bs. I suspect it is something he is compelled to add (or at least "feels" compelled to add). Like the skeptical doctors with the requisite and often contradictory (and at minimum non-sequiturial) "safe & effective" paragraph tacked on to every honest review of post-wuhan research.
Important piece, as many on the left fail to see the parallels.
The "if we lose, they cheated; if we win, democracy is functioning perfectly" dynamic should make any citizen, regardless of party, deeply suspicious.
Remember how just 2 weeks ago the Dems/media, prepping their people for the expected shellacking, were claiming "the GOP will only win because they've gerrymandered themselves into a winning position."
Well? Tell us you were lying without telling us you were lying. And, of course, the list goes on like this.
Without serious reform, this is only going to get worse. And we all know how wel serious reform happens in America.
Your "many on the left fail to see the parallels" reminded me of a leftist protester helping to pull down one of the many statues that have been destroyed by the left in one of their endless (Democrat / media approved) riots a couple of years ago. This guy said something to the effect of "well yes, we're destroying monuments and it LOOKS like what the Taliban did, but it isn't at all like the Taliban because THOSE were monuments we liked and THESE are monuments we don't like and therefore we are entitled to destroy them." That particular useful idiot could see a hazy sort of parallel with what the Taliban had done, but in the Bizarro World inhabited by the left, his conviction of his own moral perfection justified any action he and his fellow travelers chose to take.
Of course the Democrat counterpoint (and strategy) to Republican gerrymandering is ballot harvesting. Based on midterm results I’d say the ballot harvesting strategy was more effective (at least in the close races). Even though Republican House and Senate candidates collectively easily won the total popular vote). But definitely need more election reform...
Mail-in ballots lend themselves to ballot harvesting.
If you give people a month (or more) to fill in their ballots and post them in, more people are going to do that, and it's relatively easy to get a bunch of people together, fill in their ballots, and post them all. Meanwhile if you have an "election day" only those people with sufficient motivation will turn up and vote.
If then, as in Arizona, you have voting machines that fail to operate, or insufficient ballots in a polling station, many of those people who waited until the day will not be able to cast their votes.
When it became obvious that Democrats were using mass mail-in ballots, Republicans should have protested it, yes, but they should also have started encouraging their supporters to do the same thing.
If you consider that one side had a month of voting, and the other a day, it's remarkable that there were so many close races.
"If you consider that one side had a month of voting"
Alternatively: Mail-in is a perfect scheme to "fill in" your voting base.
Take that US voter turnout has consistently been in the 50% range (until very recently, interestingly enough), so there is likely a large group of perennial non-voters. Whether or not you vote is available in the public record.
Why not fill out a ballot for a person that is almost guaranteed not to show up themselves and potentially double vote?
Or mail balloting may be a tremendous boost to encouraging citizens to take part in their elections. Maybe even more so for those who live in rural areas with distance to vote. Or those with limited mobility. Or those whose work or child/elder care commitments make it difficult. Or a whole bunch of other good reasons.
Anyone who wants to argue that it's not a good idea to encourage and make it easier for Americans to vote should think that through a bit more. Maybe they'll also disagree with the idea of a federal holiday on Election Day, as many other countries have. And if mail balloting leads to fraud, we're all listening and waiting patiently for evidence of all the fraud we've been hearing about for some years now. Or is the deep state hiding all the evidence?
And only one side got mail ballots a month early? In which state?
Marvelous that the Internet was supposed to be this thing that would break the mainstream corporate media stranglehold on content and information... open up the pathways for everyone to converse without the control of the man. Young people flocked to it... the older were slower to adopt.
Now the young people are the man and frankly are demonstrating that they want to kill half of the old people because they believe those old people are somehow in their way of happiness. But we old people have the clarity of wisdom from a life lived... a live lived of struggle and tragedy that the young people have not lived... and we can see clearly that the young people are unhappy because of the ideologies they have been brainwashed to support. They are compliant clones of everything bad for them... everything that has them sleepwalking to their own destruction. Once a rebellious force against the moneyed elite cabal, the kids are now the mob armies that protect the cabal. Their adoption of woke... toxic critical theory and climate change ideology... is the basis for what is broken in them, and why they would support ending free speech on the basis of this fake and destructive moral house of cards.
We have lost the kids, and thus we have lost the world.
Things are going to get very bad very soon... and it is coming from the war on fossil fuel. The signs are everywhere just like they were for the housing and financial meltdown that destroyed so much economic opportunity for a generation of kids. And then the authoritarian response to COVID... it is still continuing today... that too was a giant hit to the economic opportunity of the young people. And now the forced scarcity of fossil fuels. The kids are supporting the people doing all of this. And they are committed to censoring, silencing and even persecuting any that would challenge them in their beliefs... just like some extreme religious are committed to the same.
The failure of the GOP to win big this election is a terrible sign that we are screwed.
Well-said. Remember when nonconformity and thinking for yourself was something to be aspired to? When even parents discouraged their children from being a "tattle-tale"?
Now young people think it's super-cool to be a snitch who dresses, acts and talks like every other stool pigeon out there. What the absolute fuck.
My two Gen-Z sons see it, but their view is that there is a cycle that connects to the old Chinese saying: "bad times create strong men that create good times that create weak men that create bad times" They say that we are heading for a bad times cycle and that kids are broken because life is too easy for them and they don't have enough real struggle to fulfill their life meaning, so they are creating it for themselves." They are basically in favor of blowing it all up and starting over.
Sadly I think that’s just right, just enough “good times” made me and lots of my generation weak, then the bottom kept falling out every 8-10 years and some of us never found our footing.
It migrated from colleges, where it was stuck for a while, and is now dominating the "real world". The Democrats were smart. They played the long game and took control of the education system. Now they reap the rewards.
You could probably point to a lot of things that led to this point, going all the way back to post-World War II. Among things to consider:
* Suburban development means people are spending less time in their neighborhoods building connections with other people.
* Overreliance on the automobile means people are more detached from others.
* "Stranger danger" led to too many parents thinking their child was always in danger and, if you left them alone for a second, you would never see them again.
* The Internet actually became a tool to further transform society so there would be less in-person interaction.
* COVID restrictions also had the same effect of less in-person interaction.
* Communities have evolved to where people have the same background, meaning they tend to think the same way about life in general.
I've learned from COVID just how important in-person interaction is to thriving as a society. The way things have developed in the United States, though, there's been more done to rely less on in-person interaction and more on "virtual" interaction.
When you lose in-person interaction, you lose an important part of what makes you human. And that allows others to mold you as they see fit and tell you that, if you stray outside the boundaries, you are in immediate danger.
Some driver cut me off on the freeway. I wanted to beat him to a pulp as he almost cause me to wreck. I followed him to a parking lot and got out to confront him... only when seeing him emerge from his car... he was an old high school buddy that I had not seen for a while. I cooled off and we talked for a while... his wife had just died of cancer and he was shopping for his kid's school supplies. He was obviously a distracted driver. I hugged him. He cried.
This was just an example of how relationships are not kept strong when people don't have face-to-face interaction. I agree with you. We have not evolved as animals to function well in a virtual world. It is destroying our ability to connect well enough and making us hostile against others when if we had face-to-face interaction we would likely understand better and calm down.
I like your abstraction but it leaves out components. One of those is the breakdown in critical thinking demonstrated by "we old people" while our kids were maturing.
In a world where "everybody's opinion has value," a kindergarten bromide that unfortunately persists because it allows both confrontation avoidance and easy exit from the hard work of thought, "kids" are going to go with the flow of their tribe. Just like we did.
Still, kids are not going to embrace the obviousness of MAGA, and as long as the GOP is trapped there by Trump, the GOP may become less relevant. We failed to give them an appreciation of liberty, possibly be we and they had so much of it.
The duopoly of our polictics is another. The lack of a dynamic, articulate "Centrist" offering an alternative message to woke, race theory, etc. pushes the dabate to low common denominators.
Along those lines, I'm not sure the GOP "failed to win big." Here the danger is of compounded thought. The voting body may have rejected part of the GOP message, the MAGA noise or victimhood of election denial, but that does not mean it would not listen to and respond to a non-progressive message.
But there isn't a way to broaadcast that, as Taibbi shows here.
So even though I think we should look in the mirror for the cause, I share your concern that we lost the kids, and thus the world, and we are screwed.
I think the GOP sucks at voter emotional capture, and the Democrats have created a persuasion enterprise that is excellent at it. The problem is that worldview that are based on emotions are sub-optimized and hazardous if not backed by real data, facts and math. The struggle for the GOP is to make a good emotional capture alternative platform based on real data, facts and math. It is a more difficult message than the pure emotional symbolism that the Democrat generate and proliferate through the campuses and media. The GOP establishment is just terrible at competing with hearts... and this is at a time when critical thinking skills are crashing to be replaced with what is a more emotional orientation.
I think the GOP EXCELS at emotional capture. See Tucker Fox. At the same time, I agree that "Wokeism" is a force on the left that could stand a bath in cold perspective. But in either case, as Kanheman points out "Thnking, Fast & Slow," reactivity is easier than critical thinking.
Talking about politicians not media entertainers... which Tucker is a small piece of that overall industry that is Democrat dominated. Taylor Swift is much more influential than is Tucker. Donald Trump was the first GOP Presidential candidate in a long while that used emotional capture well. And the GOP establishment hate him for it.
Think about it this way. What constituent groups does the establishment GOP hold other than themselves? Trump brought them the working class that they clearly despise almost as much as do the modern Democrats. The Democrats have youth, female, celebrities, Hollywood, academics, big business, small business, unions, gay, minorities, government workers. And when they don't have emotional capture they use regulatory power to force compliance and support. ESG and DEI for example.
If the GOP had such power of influence, given what the Democrats have served us lately, it should have been a red wave. It was not a red wave because the Democrat persuasion enterprise is massively big and strong and captured the emotions of voters... primarily young voters.
"we can see clearly that the young people are unhappy because of the ideologies they have been brainwashed to support"
Yes, and v1.0 of this happened in the 60s, in my opinion. Unlike the grass-roots explanation that is common wisdom, I'm now convinced the wars (vs diplomacy) it eventually engendered it were the first major attempts at separating the West from its culture.
My understanding is that in the 1960s, there were groups of rebels in the universities that "fomented discord", usually students, but also faculty. Where they all came from is not too clear to me, but it seems connected to the New Left (promoting identity separation, ironically while fighting for desegregation; vs class wars). Meanwhile, there was also a concerted effort not to *evolve* traditional society, but really to completely *break* from it ("don't trust anyone over 30"; "reject your parents, we are your family now"; etc. etc.).
It was a less extreme but similar approach to the ones in many Communist governments, especially China (1966-76), Romania (1940s-89), Cambodia (1975-79). It was all brainwashing.
Musk bought twitter so he can collect human data for his neurolink project. Twitter users are his free resource. Check out Professor Shoshana Zuboff’s book “ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power”
"These have a patina of legitimacy because of the organizations [DHS and FBI] involved"
Or, you know, not. The FBI has been coasting on its undeserved reputation as the Boy Scout starched-white-collar agency for decades (if JEH was nothing else, he was a master of PR), but did DHS *ever* have any legitimacy? Remember the terror threat color code? Are they still doing that?
There's a great piece out on the structural idiocy of the DHS (looking for the link now...), i.e., it was a hastily patched together agglomeration of existing agencies and the new charter essentially puts them all in opposition to each other, the result being almost nothing happens to advance security and lots of stuff happening that negates other agencies attempts at security. IOW, government by The People, whoever they are.
Clusterfuck? Seems like a lot of people spent a lot of times to think of ways to tighten the screws. Patriot Act, DHS, all links in the same chain. It will only get worse. You see, I'm an optimist :)
Hi Sasha, thanks for your reply. Guess I meant "clusterfuck" in terms of DHS evolving into an entity that would be like a giant vampire squid sucking on the face of the American body politic (apologies to Matt).
The Patriot Act, DHS and TSA, and people's acceptance of them, have degraded liberty to the point that it may not be recoverable. There is too little support for the 1st and 4th Amendments.
Yes, I think their intent was not to destroy the US--they hardly had the power to do that--but to provoke the US into destroying itself. Sigh. They well-knew their enemy.
When I say, "it must be comforting to trust the government," they always get mad and say they don't. And I ask them why they so vehemently shout down the government's detractors if they don't trust them, then they give me the deer-in-headlights look. Or they start repeating the canards about it being all the other party's fault.
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, *IS FASCISM* — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
"We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."
Yeah, it's funny how the FBI has had such a great reputation in recent decades, given J Edgar Hoover's role in corrupting it for 50 years...and Hoover's name is still on the FBI building.
Hoover was an honest and fair-minded person compared to the people who took over the FBI during Obama's presidency, and really made it a political organization.
The Trump-Russia business, which went on for 3 years, is far, far worse than anything Hoover ever did. It was a total lie, based on fake evidence.
Russia most certainly wanted Clinton to be President, as she was very generous to them while Secretary of State. They just had to feed her money to get decisions good for them (remember her husband Bill got $500,000 for a speech at a bank run by a friend of Putin in 2010).
Well, I'm glad you consider me "a reliable source". But he never intervened in elections like the Obama administration, or attacked a Presidential candidate and then an elected President.
I take your point, re: the shenanigans of today's FBI. But on the other hand: J Edgar did blackmail a couple of generations of powerful politicians and a succession of presidents. And there are those who think he was implicated in JFK's demise. So there is a pretty rotten tradition going in America's "premier" law enforcement agency.
Something has to be done, this is something, let's do!! We've all read it and I believe it still applies as in what not to do. And all of these years later, Joint Operation Empire Shield still has pairs of the NY Natl Guard in body armor with M4's walking around Grand Central Station, perhaps being able to do what the plethora of NY police there are unable to do. Did I feel any safer seeing them? Not at all but was reminded of that thing Bruce Schneier calls "security theater".
If everything is so great and secure, why is questioning it a threat to democracy. Just like we weren't allowed to question "the science" during COVID that turned out to be predominately wrong.
Exactly. If youtube bans questioning election results or election integrity, which is essentially what they're doing, how would we be able to uncover it if it occurs? Their policy implies that either shenanigans will never happen or never be discussed on the platform.
It actually is. Unfortunately there is this whole other world of non-controversial content producers who are barely cognizant of these issues and see no reason to move. And that’s most of the content on YouTube.
I'd be far more sympathetic to the complaints if the YouTube victims could articulate why they are still using YouTube, which may be tied up in all of these issues. But I have yet to see it.
" There is no explicit or implicit message in Orfalea’s videos that either the 2020 or 2016 vote was compromised. His videos are the opposite of election denial. He’s clearly making the point that no matter who does it, denying election results is irresponsible. If YouTube punishes him for that message, it just sends a message that all of these bad actors are right, and the system really is rigged. We’ve asked politely for a reversal of their decision. YouTube must do the right thing here."
It's appalling that factual reporting is getting removed, and with utterly bogus justifications. It's ridiculous that an anti-'X' video, whatever X might be, is taken down for promoting 'X' simply for doing the absolutely normal, expected quoting or shwing clips of what 'X; is. This has been happening for a long time with a huge number of examples and youtube doesn't appear to care to fix it.
Why not do a video with the, say 20 craziest things said by both sides of deniers with prominent status like actual elected officials, party employees, or biggest donors? I'm betting that would be illuminating.
Shane, didn't allege "voter fraud." I said "election fraud." The fact that Katie Hobbs did not recuse herself, despite repeated requests, from overseeing the election is prime facie evidence of election fraud. We are not obligated to accept the legitimacy of an election on your say so. The mere appearance of corruption negates the outcome.
Oh and that and the endless counting, the endless ballot "drops." That too, invalidates the outcome, whether you like it or not.
Now you have heard something "legitimate" about this topic. Your welcome!
Good evening! Though you did say "election" and not "voter"--my error--I am not obliged to accept the word "fraud" on your say-so, either.
Endless counting? That it is taking forever is evidence of nothing---AZ's count system, which routinely elects Republicans, is clanky and growing moss from age. But it is not fraudulent. It only means it takes a lot of extra time to count ballots. In this election, so many were drop-boxed on Election Day---by Lake AND Hobbs voters, BTW---they said it might take weeks to count everything. They were correct.
I agree Hobbs should have recused herself from overseeing the governor's race. But how she would separate that race from the general election, for which she was responsible, you tell me. Want to pass a law saying that election supervisors need to step aside from the election count system if they are a candidate? Fine by me, done. We can include it in the package that says Supreme Court justices have to recuse themselves from rulings in which they have a conflict of interest. Clean it all up at the same time.
"Mere appearance of corruption" is not a standard, because every election from dogcatcher to president can have a "mere appearance" if one looks hard enough. The Republicans in my state would be screaming bloody murder if there was any molecule of actual fraud, whether election or voter, and they aren't. Just the usual complaints from the side that lost.
Kari Lake lost, Katie Hobbs won, we move on. You're welcome back!
Shane, anytime it takes more than a day or so to count the ballots, the fraud door is wide open. Maintaining faith in the electoral process is not a legal proceeding. The mere appearance of corruption is enough to taint the process. Don't care which side it may or may not benefit, a drop box laden, multi-week counting process is bogus. As is any election in which the person in charge of counting the ballot is on the ballot. Again, does not matter which party.
But it is encouraging that you do acknowledge that the Arizona voting process is a serious shit-show in need of reform. In so doing you implicitly admit that this past election (and others before it) were not wholly "legitimate." A step in the right direction.
No, I didn't admit, implicitly or otherwise, that this and past elections were not "wholly legitimate." That's your view, not mine. I believe they were perfectly legitimate, and even the Ballot Ninja goofs paid to ferret out Arizona "corruption" in 2020 found none.
Slow-count of ballots is not fraudulent, but should be fixed for other reasons. Drop-box and mail-in ballots are not fraudulent, either, if the voter is required to request one, not have it arrive as part of a mass mailing. I had to request one here in AZ.
I see no evidence that Katie Hobbs did anything to corrupt the AZ election or the count, but we do agree she had no business supervising her own results. That should have been handed off to an independent party--perhaps a retired judge--before Election Week.
When actual evidence of election fraud pops up they start changing their phrasing to things like no "widespread" evidence of election fraud. They all know that fraud is happening, and surely both sides are involved in some way, but they will downplay one side, or downplay the scale, as it fits their needs.
I see only one way out. Boycott and regroup. These people are no more likely to concede this fight than a Bear will give back a sandwich at a picnic. Youtube is owned by Google and they always show the wrong instincts. If you think they’re bad now imagine what they’re planning for our future.
We have to create an alternative and abandon that platform forever. I’ve heard of Rumble, and others who are trying. The subscription model works so well for me. I’m completely ready to join in crowdsourcing. I want to pay for what I read and watch.
Thanks once again Matt Taibbi for doing what so few have the courage and talent to accomplish.
"YouTube really should be taking down the first video as well:"
Fuck, please don't temp them! They already hate me! LOL
Meanwhile, the President is fist bumping and then white washing a Saudi prince who, according to his own US intel, ordered the assassination of a journalist and who also now has "diplomatic immunity" to ensure that the wife of the journalist will have "no standing" in her lawsuit. Ok. Guess we need more oil? Strategic reserves getting low. Can't make this stuff up.
The Saudis' literally own US pols and journalists.
Look up Bandar Bush to get some small idea of just how vast their influence in the West is.
And never forget that 'somehow', immediately following the attacks on 911, a time when 'all' flights were grounded, there was a special airlift of bin Laden family members back to KSA. As the attacks were happening, Buhs senior was having breakfast with bin Laden's brother.
"A few nights after he resigned his post as secretary of state two years ago, Colin L. Powell answered a ring at his front door. Standing outside was Prince Bandar, then Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, with a 1995 Jaguar. Mr. Powell’s wife, Alma, had once mentioned that she missed their 1995 Jaguar, which she and her husband had traded in. Prince Bandar had filed that information away, and presented the Powells that night with an identical, 10-year-old model. The Powells kept the car a gift that the State Department said was legal but recently traded it away.
The move was classic Bandar, who has been referred to as Bandar Bush, attending birthday celebrations, sending notes in times of personal crisis and entertaining the Bushes or top administration officials at sumptuous dinner parties at Prince Bandar’s opulent homes in McLean, Va., and Aspen, Colo.
He has invited top officials to pizza and movies out at a mall in suburban Virginia and then rented out the movie theater (candy served chair-side, in a wagon) and the local Pizza Hut so he and his guests could enjoy themselves in solitude. He is said to feel a strong sense of loyalty toward Mr. Bush’s father dating to the Persian Gulf war, which transferred to the son, whom he counseled about international diplomacy during Mr. Bush’s first campaign for president.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, as the United States learned that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi and focused on the strict Wahhabi school of Islam that informed them and their leader and fellow Saudi, Osama bin Laden, Prince Bandar took a public role in assuring the Americans that his nation would cooperate in investigating and combating anti-American terrorism. He also helped arrange for more than a hundred members of the bin Laden family to be flown out of the United States."
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/washington/29saudi.html
"Murdering a US journalist" (who was good buddies with bin Laden) was itself an act of propaganda, a deliberate distraction from the utterly brutal Saudi/US/UK war on Yemen. A war that has seen the death of dozens of journalist, and 100s of thousands of people.
"Yemen war deaths will reach 377,000 by end of the year: UN
New UNDP report projects that the number of those killed as a result of Yemen’s war could reach 1.3 million by 2030." - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/23/un-yemen-recovery-possible-in-one-generation-if-war-stops-now
But nevermind, "Hey! LOOK OVER HERE!!! NOT THERE!!" and it works every time.
Just imagine the frothing, HATE, and madness that would ensue if "PTUIN!" was chopping the heads off women in Russia, in parking lots, for being "witches"
♬bad boys, bad boys, what cha gonna do... ?♬
There was never any doubt in my mind that Russia-gate was a total hoax from the beginning. Call it woman's intuition. or you can call it I don't trust, and can't stand Hilary Clinton. As soon as the DNC emails were hacked Mook said the Russians did it. And how does he know? I'm always surprised that even those who come to Trump's defense must also go on an attack which is nothing short of vitriolic, like Greenwald did in his appearance on Democracy Now in April 2019 after the Mueller investigation. However Greenwald responding to David Jay Johnston did an excellent job in disposing of the Russia-gate hoax. I always remember Johnston saying that the Russians didn't want Hilary in the White House since she was held bent on having the Russian's give back Crimea. I saw Oliver Stone's documentary Ukraine on Fire, and never approved that Obama backed that coup and stood hand and hand with the neo nazi's who were the driving force behind it. We pushed the idea that it was solely a popular uprising, but hell no! Here's a very informative link on that issue, https://www.globalresearch.ca/washington-was-behind-ukraine-coup-obama-admits-that-us-brokered-a-deal-in-support-of-regime-change/5429142 Obama was going to implement a Brzezinski approach to bring down Putin. I always thought, but never said it here that I thought they pushed Russia-gate to get that agenda in Ukraine underway, but Trump got in their way, ergo remove him from office any which way we can, Just think of all the things the democrats did to oust Trump from office, and all the lies, and that impeachment, because he was stalling on getting weapons to Ukraine unless he got dirt on Biden's son. I don't believe that for a moment.
Also, during Trump's presidency not only did they tie Trump to Russia, a country highly vilified for decades, but it also helped to create an anti-Russia mindset in the minds of the American people which would make them more accepting of a military confrontation with Russia, a nuclear power. Well, didn't Biden and his fellow neocons follow through with that plan.
As I am sure you know, Aaron Maté did some excellent reporting on Russiagate. Here he is talking to Scott Horton, (his interviews amount to a Master class on Empire foreign policy) about the origins of Russiagate.
https://youtu.be/yOtPvhhqNNc
Obama was one of the very very first people to push the "Russia interfered in the election" meme.
Ask someone how, exactly they did that, and you'll get nothing but mush in response. They will mumble something about "Facebook" and "Google" and you press them for details they just get mad and then will accuse you of working for Ptuin! (how much does he pay, and where can I sign up?)
Of course the irony is that a former First Lady, who had most of the media on her side, and a 1 billion dollar war chest - could not "influence" the election, but somehow Ptuin! was able to elect Trump with a few thousand dollars worth of FB memes! You can't make this stuff up!
Someone who used to follow me on Twitter just told me that he was paying attention to my comments on "Russiagate" - which I would regularly refer to as "war propaganda".
"You were right".
Whom The Empire would destroy, first they make their people hate them.
Could you repeat that please? I need it for the record when I prepare the search warrant.
Recorded for quality control…
Please post the 2020 video on Rumble -- love to see what YouTube/Google hates so much!
It's all there already! https://rumble.com/orf
Does it have three days of mostly peaceful protests? No...sorry, I was momentarily delusional.
how about I repost it to a channel of mine and people can complain about it and see if it gets taken down. Or use a backup channel of yours or a friend of yours.
YT would find it and kill it anywhere in their domain. That's just how censors roll. It's not enough to burn a book, you have to burn them all.
At some level of consciousness I think are all aware of the propaganda, but a large chunk of the population actually likes being propagandized and so they wilfully close their eyes. It makes life more intellectually comfortable.
It's all about whether or not it advances the preferred narrative. True information that's "problematic" will be blocked.
The YouTube censoring videos like these is just the most blatant example. I suspect that there's a vastly larger amount of self censoring and spiked stories that the public is never made aware of at all.
I don’t think everyone is aware of propaganda. A few years ago, I was visiting my parents, and they asked who I liked for President, and I said Tulsi Gabbard. (Please, I know about the WEF.) Without missing a beat, my dad said, “She’s a Russian spy.” Or the time we were discussing a Michael Moore documentary, and my mom said, “There are a lot of problems with his movie.” I know they aren’t totally objective, but I thought he made some good points. So, I asked what the issues were in her opinion. She’d never actually seen it, and was just repeating talking points. My parents aren’t stupid, but I think they are completely naive about what they are absorbing from CNN and Fox and the newspaper they read. My family is just one example, but my guess is that there are probably a lot of people who don’t understand propaganda and think they are informed. Long time Taibbi readers are probably in the minority in their cynicism about the mainstream media and their suspicions about where the messaging originates. I remember decades ago, Matt’s opinion was that the press didn’t have a liberal bias but rather a bias toward cheap, easy, and appealing stories. (Isn’t it weird, isn’t it horrible, Democrats suck, Republicans suck.) I doubt he thinks that now. I’m pretty sure it isn’t our imagination that the billionaires who own and run these institutions seem to have their fingers on the scale.
An old Soviet joke:
A KGB agent is sitting next to an American businessman on a trans-Atlantic flight to DC. Eventually, they start to chit-chat. "So why are you traveling to the United States?" the American asks. "To study American propaganda techniques," says the KGB agent. "*What propaganda?!?*" the businessman asks in shock. "Precisely," replies the Soviet.
A man on a bridge over a stream sees two fish in the water below. He says "hey, fellas, how's the water down there?". One fish looks at the other and says "what's 'water'?"
The jokes have some superficial similarities, but your fish version misses an important part of the point. It would work better if it were about two fish in an aquarium, separated by a glass partition... One says to the other, "How's the water over there?" The other says back, "What's water?" One is aware, the other isn't.
The Soviet and the American are both human, both "in the same aquarium." But one recognizes propaganda around him, the other not so much. That's a big part of current American dysfunction.
Classic :)
> I don’t think everyone is aware of propaganda.
I think people actively want to be propagandized - as long as it's their version of propaganda. See the post just above from Balance of Power about the tribalism.
Otherwise intelligent people, when presented with hard cold facts (just one example - tons of images/videos proving the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine) respond with nonsense like "there are so many fakes, I don't know what to believe". But the exact same people gulp up the COVID lies, Russiagate lies, etc.
I agree with your comment - and I'd add that I believe that these same people are just intellectually lazy. Don't read the label - don't inquire about the contents - just absorb the KoolAid. Pitiful.
Yes, a great addendum.
"I think people actively want to be propagandized - as long as it's their version of propaganda."
Agreed. I believe it is because they don't understand yet the seriousness of the consequences.
Oh surprise surprise. The King's used to forgive debts from time to time in Summer and other ancient societies and let you keep part of the plunder in their wars. It worked well for corvee labor and the military. Their priest classes used to convince you that you live after you died as long as you were good with them and the King. Anyone who habitually believes anything on the MSM or social Media is really beyond hope. You tube is handy for fix it video and jokes and, of course it's great for the ruling classes. Only the technology has changed, the actors are the same. You can watch a Hollywood Western in the ancient world or far in the future, the plot is the same. China has higher home ownership and is more democratic than the USA. Russia today used to do great show's catering to the more intelligent sophisticated than anything else in English. Much of the "excluded" from the NYT types were on it. We're a RENTIER EXTRACTION society and the rest of the world has about had it with doing our work and letting their compradors sell off their public property and resources. Cynicism short of nihilism needs to become the default western societies before we can move on. I'm not hopeful!
One rule I'd support on YT - the MSM companies are not allowed to have their channels on it.
If you own a TV channel or a newspaper - no YT for you.
Only independent content.
You had me till China is more Democratic than the us...nice try
It sure can be lonely, though, when you find yourself in a different universe than your parents. I now almost expect the Twilight Zone music to start playing when friends tell me how awesome Obama was....vs how Trump was Satan. Biden is standing up for true democracy and what a shame it will be if he loses....Neeeneeeeneeeneee.
Have you tried asking them for the concrete facts proving their position?
Are they even aware of that horrible NDAA Obomber signed?
You make an excellent point. There is a time delay to the point where you wake up and say "wait a minute". Matt's delay was less than your parents'. But eventually everyone becomes consciously aware, as was demonstrated under Communism, where finally nobody believed Pravda. Similarly Iran, where the ranks of true believers is getting really thin.
What do people in Iran are not believing? That the US is the Great Evil?
I would argue the recent world events are actually showing the greater numbers of people who do believe that.
Capture, distortion, weaponization, politicization and control of the dialogue around all issues of important moral, national, human, social and economic concern. At a profit.
Take abortion as an issue. The decision to take the life of a child is seriously difficult one and cuts across the entire spectrum of human emotional, social and moral demarcation. Western society acknowledges this and sets reasonable limits and laws concerning it. The psyop weaponization of the issue is a mass propaganda, demanding the right too slice a newborn's vocal cords and set it aside, to die alone. The impact on the human psyche is brutal, numbing and enraging. Its anti-human sterility, as intended, shuts down reasonable dialogue and creates a kind of no mans land around the issue filling it with social and emotional moral anomie. Mass confusion, anxiety and depression, as intended, is the natural outcome. Add a dozen other "rules for thee not for me" manufactured ineptitudes and, as we are witnessing daily, a culture and a society disintegrates.
Of course, there is no mass murder of new borns. It is the subtle message inside it and the hidden theft of the citizens personal agency and power: a mass "fk'you" to human reason and conscience. The emotional sterility of it defines the inhumanity of the monsters sending it. It is the same psychology demonstrated by Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz: People are things.
Reality. Control of American elected political leadership is compromised and is being dismantled by a cabal of pathological international criminal financiers. YOU, your Constitution and Bill of Rights are in the way.
Whoever she is, she is at least not a Democrat.
God, we need more Russian spies here! Is Putin available? Pretty please!
You say that as if an (average generic) Republican -- in 2022, to a *thinking* left-winger -- is not preferable to a Democrat. But all one needs to see is what fools the "Progressive" Democrats made of themselves recently backing out of their Ukraine peace request. If that isn't screaming loud evidence of non-democratic control of the discourse and by extension the government, it's hard to see what is. I don't see such comparable things going on in the Republican Party at the behest of its leadership; Cheney and Kinzinger were able to participate in the Democratic Party's kangaroo court. What did the Democrats do to cuck the Squad so badly?
These "Progressives" are anything but. I think if anything, they have proven that the DC Machine will grind down anyone (I'm being generous here by giving them the benefit of a doubt that they really meant what they were saying before getting elected).
Exactly. These people aren’t interested in the news so much as they are the news as presented from a certain angle. The New York Times, for example, is basically just a notary at this point. Its imprimatur and the fact that people know the Times is going to convey the news from the right perspective, that of the Good Person™, is why the subscription-as-membership quality of paying for the news has been viable during the Trump era.
The term is "psyop".
Propaganda, like cheerleaders, simply makes our fascination and engagement as spectators seem more consequential. At a football game, we willingly scream and cheer with delight for the accomplishments of our heroes and boo and hiss with equal (if not more) satisfaction at the accomplishments of our enemies. The problem with politics as a spectator sport is that 1) the game never ends, 2) the stakes keep getting higher, and 3) it adversely impacts, with ever-increasing severity, our ability to form constructive relationships with people we disagree with. The political-cultural-media complex will never willingly allow this vicious cycle to stop - even as they lament and decry its effect on society - because their livelihoods absolutely depend upon its perpetuation.
My only regret is that I have but one like to give for this comment
I have never been to a football game, or watched one on TV, so I feel unable to judge the degree to which "propaganda" -> "engagement". But it sure seems like a reasonable and important thesis.
What you say has connections with the thesis of Neil Postman's book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Not identical, but some overlap. If you don't know about it, you should: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
"He’s clearly making the point that no matter who does it, denying election results is irresponsible. YouTube must do the right thing here." I don't agree with this statement, but I certainly think both sides should be heard. As I said, I think that the denial of the electoral results from both sides should be shown, but it has been determined that the Russians were not guilty of interfering in our elections wanting a Trump win, but a lie cultivated by Clinton and the democratic party, and unfortunately they found a press already lacking in any journalistic integrity support their claims which allowed the democrats to even go forth with an impeachment in the house which never would have happened to another president. No one in the democratic party was held accountable for the lie of Russia-gate. By defining Trump as illegitimate the democrats found it easy to reference the January 6 riots as an insurrection, and not the ridiculous riot it was. Then follow it up with a January 6 commission which is unconstitutional. After four years of this BS can anyone blame Trump for claiming the election was stolen after four years of denying his legitimacy as president? Just think of old Nancy ripping up his State of the Union Speech and calling it a dirty speech. The idea that Trump believed the election was stolen makes perfect sense to me rather then being defined as irresponsible, I think it would do a so called democratic country good to look at it's voting procedures and apparatus, and no matter your views about Trump to take another hard look at our corrupt media as well as looking into any collusion with the deep state in trying to oust Trump from office. Hope no one denies that.
It's almost as if Tammany Hall never happened, eh?
As narcissistic as Trump is, do you really think he believes the election was stolen? He may "believe" it, but he doesn't believe it.
Well, for four years the democrats tried to oust him from office on the lie Russia installed him in the White House. Fake news covered that lie for several years, supported it, and I don't think they gave it up after the Mueller report. I wonder what Trump thought just prior to the election when the mainstream media and the left wouldn't cover Hunter's laptop story. Bias, you think? He wasn't even invited to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran's funeral. Oh, and that impeachment in the house because he stalled on sending weapons to Ukraine unless he got the dirt on Biden's son. Now he is highly criticized for sending them. Then there was that riot they called an insurrection where I saw hundreds of people let into the Capital through the front door by police. I didn't see AOC, since she was no where near the Capital, but she feared for her life. Crash in on the drama which she is great at doing. Then that one sided unconstitutional comm to determine his guilt in fostering that "insurrection." Before it was his victory, but in the morning everything was turned around. Get it, or do I have to go on as to why he thought the election was stolen?
He may well believe it. The idiosyncrasies of 2020, with bellwether counties coming up wrong all of a sudden, the tightness of the votes, the mail-in fiascos, the ballot "curing" and signature match failure rate dropping precipitously.
The idiots fall for the hacked machines theories, but in truth, we all know how "stuffing the ballot box" is a time-honored party-machine political practice. Voting rolls from graveyards put JFK over Nixon in 1960. Is it that hard to imagine that nursing homes which used to have 12% of residents voting by mail now had 99% of them voting by mail? And that they were all compos mentis, and all the votes were legit?
The only defense ever claimed against a "stolen" election (by both sides) is that there is "no verified proof of fraud" as if to say that if film didn't exist of Diego Maradona's hand of God goal against England in 1986, then it definitely wasn't a hand-ball.
The fact that both sides argue in favor of more opaque voting techniques whenever possible, means both are up to shenanigans.
And it makes life seem "safer", so you don't have to think about stuff that should be thought about etc. And, to be fair, there's been a lot of scary stuff recently, much of it intended to actually scare people shitless.
for the gatekeepers nowadays, it is very clear that the Ends justifies the Means. I don’t think most even realize that being hypocritical is problematic because they are the “good guys”.
it might be that simple.
Sam Harris already admitted this about the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.
As backing evidence for your observation, I'll recommend this interview: https://inthesetimes.com/article/confessions-of-a-troika-dropout-yanis-varoufakis-europe-marxist-austerity
A little out of date, yet still very relevant. I call special attention to the part where Varoufakis says: "[Reagan & Thatcher] were wrong, but they believed it. Whereas the people I was dealing with were telling me in private that they *didn’t believe it*, but they were locked in."
Perhaps even worse than not realizing they are hypocritical, they don't realize they've gone insane.
"Yanis, you're completely right, now you've got to submit."
thanks, I’ll check it out Andy.
the Feynman quote is perfect btw...
IMO, your observation is vastly under-liked, or under-noticed.
I hate to repeat post content, but this Feynman quote belongs here too:
"Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were *directly inconsistent* with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true." - Richard Feynman
Much easier to go with the flow, mind blinkered, than realize you live in a plutocratic/oligarchic Empire that is forever pushing for greater domestic control while spreading war and instability abroad. Reality is stark, depressing and scary.
And I think some of our societal dysfunction comes for this widespread cognitive suppression, it cracks people's brains. The need to continually embrace illogic leads to more illogic.
Although with the realization comes a certain ease of mind, since you no longer have to rationalize bad actions by bad actors who are allegedly “the good guys”. Once you realize the whole thing is a circus show designed to distract the populace from the fact that they are being robbed blind by their overlords, things make much more sense.
We know they are lying,
they know we know they are lying,
we know they know we know they are lying...
Well, yeah. Otherwise organized religion would be in trouble.
I know! My wife has informed me to back off at social gatherings. I wear my ‘Journalism is not a Crime” tshirt with Julian Assange on it....but as for actually getting into conversations, nobody wants to believe the facts pointing to Democrat=Republican for the past 40-50 years. War crimes=America. Democracy is a joke?!?
Try voting against war crimes some time. They're bipartisan consensus policy.
In addition to our affinity for tribalism, we have what Michael Shermer and others call a "believing brain". Not only is objective reason more work, but most people actually crave the act of believing. Combine the two, and we should not be surprised that people commit 100% to a chosen doctrine, and can barely tolerate other opinions.
You are certainly right about "most people." Is it *inevitable* that the failings of "most people" will determine the fate of society though? It seems there were times when these things were not so bad. I even think I remember such times.
"Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true." - Richard Feynman
I think I totally understand your intuition and sentiment. But in reality, nature is about to say otherwise.
Tribalism is a deeply ingrained human trait that may have been useful in the very early stages of evolution. But it turned gradually into an existential threat as civilization and technology advanced. Once we got to the Industrial Age, genuinely great human advances tended to coincide with intellectual rebuttals of tribalism: e.g. The Enlightenment and maybe The New Deal. Matt and Matt are two of the few remaining torch carriers.
Douglass Rushkoff has written some of the best stuff on this. Two great samples:
https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/douglas-rushkoff-83-explains-post-apocalyptic-plans-rich
At the end, he sums up humanity's current situation: "Either we all make it, or none of us makes it."
The Enlightenment and the New Deal? Uh, one of these things is not like the other
How many times is this supposed to happen before you guys wake up and take your business elsewhere (off YouTube)?
The thing that sets YT apart is that it makes you money.
So do movie and record studios and newspapers, all of which pay for content. Censorship is a slippery slope. If a digital gatekeeper can create rules independent of our constitution and laws, what’s to prevent that precedent from spreading throughout society? And Democrats need to ask themselves why their party is so committed to suppressing facts and open debate.
The thing is - they are not independent of the government. They are useful tools of the government, through which it can censor what it doesn't want known. See recent stories about government strong-arming companies into doing what it wants.
And historical stories about the same thing — Comics Code Authority, Hays Code, etc.
Corporations are not required to provide free speech rights, even though they themselves, as "persons," have those rights.
They are also not required to accommodate governmental demands. But they do.
Corps, teh feds?
There's a difference?
In your opium dreams.
That’s their position. This will end up in the courts, no doubt.
It does seem to be a routinely weird trade-off of bellyaching followed by sucking up. Are we doing free markets or not? Unless you want to force bakers to make cakes for gay weddings, no case to be made here (edit: I guess this isn't a religious issue though, so maybe some case). You want the audience, you follow the terms, even if they are incoherent. Especially now that there are functional alternatives.
Monopoly power and network effects are the difference between Twitter and some bakery.
I already conceded the bakery wasn't a great comparison and this isn't about Twitter., But even so it hardly changes the point. Twitter and YouTube have competitors that provide nearly exactly the same service, even if their user bases and potential ad revenue are comparably miniscule (for now). The drain for monopoly power is already connected and open, it just needs community promotion and support and a willingness for average users and advertisers to support platforms that allow offensive shit. What else would you like to see done? FCC-style regulations for private internet content platforms to attempt to reduce censorship?
The competitors to Twitter and YT do not enjoy network effects. Same reason people have developed online auctions that offer lower fees and/or better functionality relative to eBay, and these alternatives have gone nowhere.
I would treat natural monopolies as, well, monopolies. Last I checked, the electric company can't cut off my power, even if I went before the Public Service Commission to oppose the latest rate hike.
First, thank you for a reasonable reply, I promise i'm not trying to be a snarky prick.
My main point is that network effects never change if users never say 'no more'. The same would seem to apply to voting and definitely to activism (the front line for fighting network effects).
My impression of eBay (which I regularly used 20 years ago) is that, while becoming basically an Amazon Jr, it's lost a significant market share (at least of the things I traded) to sites like Etsy and Reverb and others mainly because it started to suck for normies and artists to sell on. eBay might still be one of the biggest online auction sites, but is it really a monopoly for what it offers?
You're making a tautology about monopolies so I'm not sure what monopoly treatment would be exactly. In the USA, monopolies are largely treated like gifts from God, which I'm sure is not at all what you mean. Seems safe to say you would have YouTube and Twitter regulated similar to utility services, which is a fine proposal to me. What I would like to see though is some inclusion of any solution and/or alternatives along with the crying about the victimization, whether it's framed from a regulatory or a free market point of view. Monopolies/network effects don't go away without this, so we end up stuck in the endless cycle of getting screwed, whining, then simply returning to the place we started.
100% agree.
YouTube is THE platform for user based streaming. No other platform has been able to compete, it's similar to Ford, they were the only auto manufacturer for a time and even after others joined in, Ford still commanded the market for decades. Similarly, YouTube is a foundational part of the internet and despite small time competors it commands the market. Unlike Ford, info or streaming are not a tangible production so competitors have a very hard time marketing their platform as being much different than YouTube. Also, not enough people care to make a meaningful exodus from YouTube to a new platform. Put on your tin foil hats, but what'll really make everyone's head explode is when the government "rescues" Twitter from Elon and nationalizes it. For a large sum of course. Probably what Elon wanted from the start.
YouTube is actually the world’s second most popular search engine. As early as 2009, search volume on YouTube outstripped Yahoo!’s by 50% and Bing’s by 150%.
There are more than 2.6 billion active users. 1 billion hours of content is watched across the world every day on the platform, and every single minute, more than 500 hours of new content is uploaded.
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/googlegov-part-1
And Amazon must be right there with YouTube in number of searches, and therefore number of potential customers. So to leave YouTube would be like a small retailer leaving Amazon Marketplace. To go where?
That said, I would love to see a rich liberal (who still gets it) fund a lawsuit against Alphabet over something like this. Couldn't be any 1st amendment stuff, but there must be some contractual problem when one user is treated arbitrarily differently than another. Causing economic damage.
this will remain the same that much longer if the people protesting YouTube cant be bothered to even mention alternatives
Yep. How on earth did anyone make anything popular on the internet before we had Google and Facebook to advertise it for us? Must have been impossible.
It's absurd that this story doesn't start with "and here is the video on Rumble". Or heck, self host if you really want to.
Matt closes:
“If YouTube punishes him for that message, it just sends a message that all of these bad actors are right, and the system really is rigged.”
Seriously..... Is there any longer any doubt that the system is completely rigged?
I wish it wasn’t true but Trump stripped bare that shabby facade... we are all being played - everyone of us.
Count me under the "Bad actors" category, because Big Tech/Big Media/Big Government's behavior leads me to increasingly believe that yeah, there's something sinister afoot.
Thank you! This was my exact comment as well.
I don't see that he could actually believe that bs. I suspect it is something he is compelled to add (or at least "feels" compelled to add). Like the skeptical doctors with the requisite and often contradictory (and at minimum non-sequiturial) "safe & effective" paragraph tacked on to every honest review of post-wuhan research.
Don’t disagree….
Important piece, as many on the left fail to see the parallels.
The "if we lose, they cheated; if we win, democracy is functioning perfectly" dynamic should make any citizen, regardless of party, deeply suspicious.
Remember how just 2 weeks ago the Dems/media, prepping their people for the expected shellacking, were claiming "the GOP will only win because they've gerrymandered themselves into a winning position."
Well? Tell us you were lying without telling us you were lying. And, of course, the list goes on like this.
Without serious reform, this is only going to get worse. And we all know how wel serious reform happens in America.
Buckle up.
Your "many on the left fail to see the parallels" reminded me of a leftist protester helping to pull down one of the many statues that have been destroyed by the left in one of their endless (Democrat / media approved) riots a couple of years ago. This guy said something to the effect of "well yes, we're destroying monuments and it LOOKS like what the Taliban did, but it isn't at all like the Taliban because THOSE were monuments we liked and THESE are monuments we don't like and therefore we are entitled to destroy them." That particular useful idiot could see a hazy sort of parallel with what the Taliban had done, but in the Bizarro World inhabited by the left, his conviction of his own moral perfection justified any action he and his fellow travelers chose to take.
"Important piece, as many on the left fail to see the parallels."
CW, many of "the left" don't want to see the parallels--including many on this site. They will be chirping up, soon.
I am on the left and I see the parallels because I’m not a liberal which is not the left.
Of course the Democrat counterpoint (and strategy) to Republican gerrymandering is ballot harvesting. Based on midterm results I’d say the ballot harvesting strategy was more effective (at least in the close races). Even though Republican House and Senate candidates collectively easily won the total popular vote). But definitely need more election reform...
Mail-in ballots lend themselves to ballot harvesting.
If you give people a month (or more) to fill in their ballots and post them in, more people are going to do that, and it's relatively easy to get a bunch of people together, fill in their ballots, and post them all. Meanwhile if you have an "election day" only those people with sufficient motivation will turn up and vote.
If then, as in Arizona, you have voting machines that fail to operate, or insufficient ballots in a polling station, many of those people who waited until the day will not be able to cast their votes.
When it became obvious that Democrats were using mass mail-in ballots, Republicans should have protested it, yes, but they should also have started encouraging their supporters to do the same thing.
If you consider that one side had a month of voting, and the other a day, it's remarkable that there were so many close races.
"If you consider that one side had a month of voting"
Alternatively: Mail-in is a perfect scheme to "fill in" your voting base.
Take that US voter turnout has consistently been in the 50% range (until very recently, interestingly enough), so there is likely a large group of perennial non-voters. Whether or not you vote is available in the public record.
Why not fill out a ballot for a person that is almost guaranteed not to show up themselves and potentially double vote?
Or mail balloting may be a tremendous boost to encouraging citizens to take part in their elections. Maybe even more so for those who live in rural areas with distance to vote. Or those with limited mobility. Or those whose work or child/elder care commitments make it difficult. Or a whole bunch of other good reasons.
Anyone who wants to argue that it's not a good idea to encourage and make it easier for Americans to vote should think that through a bit more. Maybe they'll also disagree with the idea of a federal holiday on Election Day, as many other countries have. And if mail balloting leads to fraud, we're all listening and waiting patiently for evidence of all the fraud we've been hearing about for some years now. Or is the deep state hiding all the evidence?
And only one side got mail ballots a month early? In which state?
Marvelous that the Internet was supposed to be this thing that would break the mainstream corporate media stranglehold on content and information... open up the pathways for everyone to converse without the control of the man. Young people flocked to it... the older were slower to adopt.
Now the young people are the man and frankly are demonstrating that they want to kill half of the old people because they believe those old people are somehow in their way of happiness. But we old people have the clarity of wisdom from a life lived... a live lived of struggle and tragedy that the young people have not lived... and we can see clearly that the young people are unhappy because of the ideologies they have been brainwashed to support. They are compliant clones of everything bad for them... everything that has them sleepwalking to their own destruction. Once a rebellious force against the moneyed elite cabal, the kids are now the mob armies that protect the cabal. Their adoption of woke... toxic critical theory and climate change ideology... is the basis for what is broken in them, and why they would support ending free speech on the basis of this fake and destructive moral house of cards.
We have lost the kids, and thus we have lost the world.
Things are going to get very bad very soon... and it is coming from the war on fossil fuel. The signs are everywhere just like they were for the housing and financial meltdown that destroyed so much economic opportunity for a generation of kids. And then the authoritarian response to COVID... it is still continuing today... that too was a giant hit to the economic opportunity of the young people. And now the forced scarcity of fossil fuels. The kids are supporting the people doing all of this. And they are committed to censoring, silencing and even persecuting any that would challenge them in their beliefs... just like some extreme religious are committed to the same.
The failure of the GOP to win big this election is a terrible sign that we are screwed.
Well-said. Remember when nonconformity and thinking for yourself was something to be aspired to? When even parents discouraged their children from being a "tattle-tale"?
Now young people think it's super-cool to be a snitch who dresses, acts and talks like every other stool pigeon out there. What the absolute fuck.
My two Gen-Z sons see it, but their view is that there is a cycle that connects to the old Chinese saying: "bad times create strong men that create good times that create weak men that create bad times" They say that we are heading for a bad times cycle and that kids are broken because life is too easy for them and they don't have enough real struggle to fulfill their life meaning, so they are creating it for themselves." They are basically in favor of blowing it all up and starting over.
My dad had a theory that every third generation went broke and advised me not to be that generation. So far, so good.
"They are basically in favor of blowing it all up and starting over."
Ahhh the old tried & true "If we destroy everything we have, whatever we have next is bound to be better."
Worked so well for the Soviets and all their imitators!
Sadly I think that’s just right, just enough “good times” made me and lots of my generation weak, then the bottom kept falling out every 8-10 years and some of us never found our footing.
It migrated from colleges, where it was stuck for a while, and is now dominating the "real world". The Democrats were smart. They played the long game and took control of the education system. Now they reap the rewards.
I “liked” this because it’s true. I’m not happy it’s true, but it is.
You could probably point to a lot of things that led to this point, going all the way back to post-World War II. Among things to consider:
* Suburban development means people are spending less time in their neighborhoods building connections with other people.
* Overreliance on the automobile means people are more detached from others.
* "Stranger danger" led to too many parents thinking their child was always in danger and, if you left them alone for a second, you would never see them again.
* The Internet actually became a tool to further transform society so there would be less in-person interaction.
* COVID restrictions also had the same effect of less in-person interaction.
* Communities have evolved to where people have the same background, meaning they tend to think the same way about life in general.
I've learned from COVID just how important in-person interaction is to thriving as a society. The way things have developed in the United States, though, there's been more done to rely less on in-person interaction and more on "virtual" interaction.
When you lose in-person interaction, you lose an important part of what makes you human. And that allows others to mold you as they see fit and tell you that, if you stray outside the boundaries, you are in immediate danger.
Some driver cut me off on the freeway. I wanted to beat him to a pulp as he almost cause me to wreck. I followed him to a parking lot and got out to confront him... only when seeing him emerge from his car... he was an old high school buddy that I had not seen for a while. I cooled off and we talked for a while... his wife had just died of cancer and he was shopping for his kid's school supplies. He was obviously a distracted driver. I hugged him. He cried.
This was just an example of how relationships are not kept strong when people don't have face-to-face interaction. I agree with you. We have not evolved as animals to function well in a virtual world. It is destroying our ability to connect well enough and making us hostile against others when if we had face-to-face interaction we would likely understand better and calm down.
The rugged individualism of a capitalist ideology has lead to this state.
Well. No. The corruption of true capitalism to corporatism has lead to this state.
ding ding ding, Johnny, tell him what he has won!!
I like your abstraction but it leaves out components. One of those is the breakdown in critical thinking demonstrated by "we old people" while our kids were maturing.
In a world where "everybody's opinion has value," a kindergarten bromide that unfortunately persists because it allows both confrontation avoidance and easy exit from the hard work of thought, "kids" are going to go with the flow of their tribe. Just like we did.
Still, kids are not going to embrace the obviousness of MAGA, and as long as the GOP is trapped there by Trump, the GOP may become less relevant. We failed to give them an appreciation of liberty, possibly be we and they had so much of it.
The duopoly of our polictics is another. The lack of a dynamic, articulate "Centrist" offering an alternative message to woke, race theory, etc. pushes the dabate to low common denominators.
Along those lines, I'm not sure the GOP "failed to win big." Here the danger is of compounded thought. The voting body may have rejected part of the GOP message, the MAGA noise or victimhood of election denial, but that does not mean it would not listen to and respond to a non-progressive message.
But there isn't a way to broaadcast that, as Taibbi shows here.
So even though I think we should look in the mirror for the cause, I share your concern that we lost the kids, and thus the world, and we are screwed.
I think the GOP sucks at voter emotional capture, and the Democrats have created a persuasion enterprise that is excellent at it. The problem is that worldview that are based on emotions are sub-optimized and hazardous if not backed by real data, facts and math. The struggle for the GOP is to make a good emotional capture alternative platform based on real data, facts and math. It is a more difficult message than the pure emotional symbolism that the Democrat generate and proliferate through the campuses and media. The GOP establishment is just terrible at competing with hearts... and this is at a time when critical thinking skills are crashing to be replaced with what is a more emotional orientation.
I think the GOP EXCELS at emotional capture. See Tucker Fox. At the same time, I agree that "Wokeism" is a force on the left that could stand a bath in cold perspective. But in either case, as Kanheman points out "Thnking, Fast & Slow," reactivity is easier than critical thinking.
Talking about politicians not media entertainers... which Tucker is a small piece of that overall industry that is Democrat dominated. Taylor Swift is much more influential than is Tucker. Donald Trump was the first GOP Presidential candidate in a long while that used emotional capture well. And the GOP establishment hate him for it.
Think about it this way. What constituent groups does the establishment GOP hold other than themselves? Trump brought them the working class that they clearly despise almost as much as do the modern Democrats. The Democrats have youth, female, celebrities, Hollywood, academics, big business, small business, unions, gay, minorities, government workers. And when they don't have emotional capture they use regulatory power to force compliance and support. ESG and DEI for example.
If the GOP had such power of influence, given what the Democrats have served us lately, it should have been a red wave. It was not a red wave because the Democrat persuasion enterprise is massively big and strong and captured the emotions of voters... primarily young voters.
"we can see clearly that the young people are unhappy because of the ideologies they have been brainwashed to support"
Yes, and v1.0 of this happened in the 60s, in my opinion. Unlike the grass-roots explanation that is common wisdom, I'm now convinced the wars (vs diplomacy) it eventually engendered it were the first major attempts at separating the West from its culture.
This sounds interesting, but I don't know what you mean. Would you mind explaining a bit more?
My understanding is that in the 1960s, there were groups of rebels in the universities that "fomented discord", usually students, but also faculty. Where they all came from is not too clear to me, but it seems connected to the New Left (promoting identity separation, ironically while fighting for desegregation; vs class wars). Meanwhile, there was also a concerted effort not to *evolve* traditional society, but really to completely *break* from it ("don't trust anyone over 30"; "reject your parents, we are your family now"; etc. etc.).
It was a less extreme but similar approach to the ones in many Communist governments, especially China (1966-76), Romania (1940s-89), Cambodia (1975-79). It was all brainwashing.
That settles it - Musk has to buy Google
Don't worship upon false idols.
Musk is knee-deep in the well, deep state.
And that's why it could happen.
You think DOD will front Musk $2T? :)
Well, that might require too many pallets to deliver. I think they'll need, say, oh ... a crypto exchange.
Lol! That is so funny to me. For months now I'm trying to get rid of almost 20 empty palettes of brick and other items delivered to my house :)
Musk bought twitter so he can collect human data for his neurolink project. Twitter users are his free resource. Check out Professor Shoshana Zuboff’s book “ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power”
"These have a patina of legitimacy because of the organizations [DHS and FBI] involved"
Or, you know, not. The FBI has been coasting on its undeserved reputation as the Boy Scout starched-white-collar agency for decades (if JEH was nothing else, he was a master of PR), but did DHS *ever* have any legitimacy? Remember the terror threat color code? Are they still doing that?
There's a great piece out on the structural idiocy of the DHS (looking for the link now...), i.e., it was a hastily patched together agglomeration of existing agencies and the new charter essentially puts them all in opposition to each other, the result being almost nothing happens to advance security and lots of stuff happening that negates other agencies attempts at security. IOW, government by The People, whoever they are.
Wasn't it clear from the start that the DHS was going to be the biggest bureaucratic clusterfuck in US history? It was to me!
More like Big Brother.
Clusterfuck? Seems like a lot of people spent a lot of times to think of ways to tighten the screws. Patriot Act, DHS, all links in the same chain. It will only get worse. You see, I'm an optimist :)
Hi Sasha, thanks for your reply. Guess I meant "clusterfuck" in terms of DHS evolving into an entity that would be like a giant vampire squid sucking on the face of the American body politic (apologies to Matt).
No, thank you! :)
I guess my point is that this is all by design... A conspiracist I used to know said "there are no mistakes at that level" :)
The Patriot Act, DHS and TSA, and people's acceptance of them, have degraded liberty to the point that it may not be recoverable. There is too little support for the 1st and 4th Amendments.
I was in a government agency at the time, and we were proposed to move to DHS. Fortunately, it did not happen.
to me, it’s becoming depressingly clear that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda successfully threw the stone that broke Americas feet of clay..:(
Yes, I think their intent was not to destroy the US--they hardly had the power to do that--but to provoke the US into destroying itself. Sigh. They well-knew their enemy.
I'm skeptical of that. The result was more than they could have hoped for.
Every time I ask my Democrat/Liberal friends since when they learnt to love FBI, all I get back are the crickets.
When I say, "it must be comforting to trust the government," they always get mad and say they don't. And I ask them why they so vehemently shout down the government's detractors if they don't trust them, then they give me the deer-in-headlights look. Or they start repeating the canards about it being all the other party's fault.
The sad part is that people not trusting the government are oh! so trusting corporations :)
We were warned:
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, *IS FASCISM* — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
"We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."
- FDR
But we grew fat, lazy, content and compliant.
There's too much overlap for the distinction to be meaningful.
Fascism it is :)
"Government is about who does what to whom." ;)
Yeah, it's funny how the FBI has had such a great reputation in recent decades, given J Edgar Hoover's role in corrupting it for 50 years...and Hoover's name is still on the FBI building.
Hoover was an honest and fair-minded person compared to the people who took over the FBI during Obama's presidency, and really made it a political organization.
The Trump-Russia business, which went on for 3 years, is far, far worse than anything Hoover ever did. It was a total lie, based on fake evidence.
Russia most certainly wanted Clinton to be President, as she was very generous to them while Secretary of State. They just had to feed her money to get decisions good for them (remember her husband Bill got $500,000 for a speech at a bank run by a friend of Putin in 2010).
Wow, RFHirsch, so you think J Edgar was a Good Guy compared to what we now have...coming from a reliable source like you, that's something to ponder.
Well, I'm glad you consider me "a reliable source". But he never intervened in elections like the Obama administration, or attacked a Presidential candidate and then an elected President.
I take your point, re: the shenanigans of today's FBI. But on the other hand: J Edgar did blackmail a couple of generations of powerful politicians and a succession of presidents. And there are those who think he was implicated in JFK's demise. So there is a pretty rotten tradition going in America's "premier" law enforcement agency.
Something has to be done, this is something, let's do!! We've all read it and I believe it still applies as in what not to do. And all of these years later, Joint Operation Empire Shield still has pairs of the NY Natl Guard in body armor with M4's walking around Grand Central Station, perhaps being able to do what the plethora of NY police there are unable to do. Did I feel any safer seeing them? Not at all but was reminded of that thing Bruce Schneier calls "security theater".
Duct tape. Stock up on duct tape.
The terror threat color code was hilarious. I remember someone did a parody with Sesame Street characters. Red was Elmo.
"Muh Freest and Most Fairestest Election" = election that my team won.
"Muh illest and most illegitimist election evah and threat to Muh Democracy" = the other team won.
If everything is so great and secure, why is questioning it a threat to democracy. Just like we weren't allowed to question "the science" during COVID that turned out to be predominately wrong.
Exactly. If youtube bans questioning election results or election integrity, which is essentially what they're doing, how would we be able to uncover it if it occurs? Their policy implies that either shenanigans will never happen or never be discussed on the platform.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Shakespeare did have a way with words, didn't he?
Wait, you're saying YT is being partisan?
btw Matt, I'm waiting for you to give us the definitive FTX breakdown, including the ties to the Ukraine and DNC fundraising.
Yaaaaaas!
Same!
Can we say, “RUMBLE”. It’s a great platform.
It actually is. Unfortunately there is this whole other world of non-controversial content producers who are barely cognizant of these issues and see no reason to move. And that’s most of the content on YouTube.
True..but for consideration ..which potential revenue generating platform would be
easier to manage, less risk to revenue drop and a good fit for an individuals platform
(Rumble/Substack or YT?). A switch comes with some serious revenue loss risk.
Keep an eye on Glen G's latest news desk offering to see how that shakes out perhaps.
I'd be far more sympathetic to the complaints if the YouTube victims could articulate why they are still using YouTube, which may be tied up in all of these issues. But I have yet to see it.
YT simply provides more income at this point.
If this is truly the sticking point, it would be nice if the people getting dinged would say they have to put up with it for the money.
I am for full disclosure.
Jimmy Dore admits that YT is where it is (was?) for him. He is on Rumble as well now.
One Rumble feature during his live shows that YT doesn't have is the ability to rewind :)
so much butthurt commentary about YouTube that fails even a single mention of Rumble
That's where I watch my favorite commentators on.
But does Rumble provide the same monetization level YT does?
Will it remain such a great platform once the advertisers move in en-mass?
" There is no explicit or implicit message in Orfalea’s videos that either the 2020 or 2016 vote was compromised. His videos are the opposite of election denial. He’s clearly making the point that no matter who does it, denying election results is irresponsible. If YouTube punishes him for that message, it just sends a message that all of these bad actors are right, and the system really is rigged. We’ve asked politely for a reversal of their decision. YouTube must do the right thing here."
It's appalling that factual reporting is getting removed, and with utterly bogus justifications. It's ridiculous that an anti-'X' video, whatever X might be, is taken down for promoting 'X' simply for doing the absolutely normal, expected quoting or shwing clips of what 'X; is. This has been happening for a long time with a huge number of examples and youtube doesn't appear to care to fix it.
Why not do a video with the, say 20 craziest things said by both sides of deniers with prominent status like actual elected officials, party employees, or biggest donors? I'm betting that would be illuminating.
Spoiler alert: YouTube will not do the right thing here. Because the right thing hurts their side.
And heaven forbid that actual election fraud takes place. The press would not be allowed to report the truth.
"Actual election fraud" did just take place, in Arizona.
Oh? How's that? Specifics, please. I live and vote here and have heard nothing legitimate about "voter fraud."
Shane, didn't allege "voter fraud." I said "election fraud." The fact that Katie Hobbs did not recuse herself, despite repeated requests, from overseeing the election is prime facie evidence of election fraud. We are not obligated to accept the legitimacy of an election on your say so. The mere appearance of corruption negates the outcome.
Oh and that and the endless counting, the endless ballot "drops." That too, invalidates the outcome, whether you like it or not.
Now you have heard something "legitimate" about this topic. Your welcome!
Good evening! Though you did say "election" and not "voter"--my error--I am not obliged to accept the word "fraud" on your say-so, either.
Endless counting? That it is taking forever is evidence of nothing---AZ's count system, which routinely elects Republicans, is clanky and growing moss from age. But it is not fraudulent. It only means it takes a lot of extra time to count ballots. In this election, so many were drop-boxed on Election Day---by Lake AND Hobbs voters, BTW---they said it might take weeks to count everything. They were correct.
I agree Hobbs should have recused herself from overseeing the governor's race. But how she would separate that race from the general election, for which she was responsible, you tell me. Want to pass a law saying that election supervisors need to step aside from the election count system if they are a candidate? Fine by me, done. We can include it in the package that says Supreme Court justices have to recuse themselves from rulings in which they have a conflict of interest. Clean it all up at the same time.
"Mere appearance of corruption" is not a standard, because every election from dogcatcher to president can have a "mere appearance" if one looks hard enough. The Republicans in my state would be screaming bloody murder if there was any molecule of actual fraud, whether election or voter, and they aren't. Just the usual complaints from the side that lost.
Kari Lake lost, Katie Hobbs won, we move on. You're welcome back!
Shane, anytime it takes more than a day or so to count the ballots, the fraud door is wide open. Maintaining faith in the electoral process is not a legal proceeding. The mere appearance of corruption is enough to taint the process. Don't care which side it may or may not benefit, a drop box laden, multi-week counting process is bogus. As is any election in which the person in charge of counting the ballot is on the ballot. Again, does not matter which party.
But it is encouraging that you do acknowledge that the Arizona voting process is a serious shit-show in need of reform. In so doing you implicitly admit that this past election (and others before it) were not wholly "legitimate." A step in the right direction.
No, I didn't admit, implicitly or otherwise, that this and past elections were not "wholly legitimate." That's your view, not mine. I believe they were perfectly legitimate, and even the Ballot Ninja goofs paid to ferret out Arizona "corruption" in 2020 found none.
Slow-count of ballots is not fraudulent, but should be fixed for other reasons. Drop-box and mail-in ballots are not fraudulent, either, if the voter is required to request one, not have it arrive as part of a mass mailing. I had to request one here in AZ.
I see no evidence that Katie Hobbs did anything to corrupt the AZ election or the count, but we do agree she had no business supervising her own results. That should have been handed off to an independent party--perhaps a retired judge--before Election Week.
Do we know? You mean they're already done counting!
When actual evidence of election fraud pops up they start changing their phrasing to things like no "widespread" evidence of election fraud. They all know that fraud is happening, and surely both sides are involved in some way, but they will downplay one side, or downplay the scale, as it fits their needs.
I see only one way out. Boycott and regroup. These people are no more likely to concede this fight than a Bear will give back a sandwich at a picnic. Youtube is owned by Google and they always show the wrong instincts. If you think they’re bad now imagine what they’re planning for our future.
We have to create an alternative and abandon that platform forever. I’ve heard of Rumble, and others who are trying. The subscription model works so well for me. I’m completely ready to join in crowdsourcing. I want to pay for what I read and watch.
Thanks once again Matt Taibbi for doing what so few have the courage and talent to accomplish.