I read the WSWS several times a week. They have excellent writers. There is a huge blind spot though in many of their readers though. A lot of their readers who comment regularly, are really intelligent Marxist thinkers, but they denigrate with arrogance, ideas not sanctioned by say, the FDA, etc and put down people for not adhering to a supposedly “pure” Marxist analysis of anything and everything they do. I wrote in the comments section to watch Dr. Mobeen Syed’s interview last night on youtube, of the heroic Dr. Paul Marik, who is Chief of Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical and who developed the MATH+ and I-MASK+ protocols for treating Covid-19. Two of these socialists know-it-alls, denigrated my comments without even having any medical information to back up their criticisms. I’ve practiced medicine for 34 years as an NP. I think I know what I’m talking about. But that wasn’t good enough for them. Sometimes, their commenters stink to high heaven with the very elitism they purport to abhor. And that ends up turning off people who might otherwise agree with them on much.
“Sometimes, their commenters stink to high heaven with the very elitism they purport to abhor. And that ends up turning off people who might otherwise agree with them on much.”
That is a real problem, but it can work both ways.
Your post and your responses to the replies are still up:
“Don’t be insulting. Or ignorant. Do your own research. I have for the last eight months intensively and I know what I am speaking of.”
“Then you haven’t been reading the right things.”
and
“I am an experienced practitioner. What I say holds weight and counts, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.”
could have been a turn-off for people with whom you might otherwise find common ground.
Please don’t take this to mean I find no fault in how they replied to you. I am not denigrating your position, reasoning, knowledge, or experience. You are entitled to respond exactly as you did. But maybe your antagonists might have been more receptive to a different approach. Peace.
People don’t generally respond with good cheer when they are denigrated, doc. I notice you did not post their denigrating comments to me. This pattern of aggression and rudeness is something I have noted on the WSWS again and again and again. I don’t like it. It’s unfortunate and unnecessary and it turns people against them. Such bloviating blowhards are never fun in discourse. If you’ll notice, my original post was full of good spirit and cheer and a desire to help people. Both of these guys blasted me and for what? For wanting to save people’s lives during a pandemic! Grow up.
Thank you for proving my point about some WSWS readers! Stay well and watch and learn from Dr. Marik at the original suggestion I made. Then spread what you know to others so that you too, can do fruitful things to help save people’s lives and reduce morbidity during this terrible time of sickness and death in our world.
«my experience for decades (starting with a student trip to the USSR in 1974) is that leftists have become entrenched in their delusions and are incapable of, or unwilling to, self-examine, much less self-correct.»
Here again you are largely describing the "dialectic idealism" of the hegelians, that is the right-wing "whig" tendency, nowadays called "neoliberalism", because they claim that neoliberalism (including identity politics) is the "end of history", the best of all possible worlds, and therefore any deviance from it is regressive and must be suppressed for the good of everybody.
Being assailed and/or denigrated by socialist "know-it-alls", those that do hypocritically indeed "stink to high heaven with the very elitism they purport to abhor", is becoming a common-place experience; one explained very thoughtfully by the Jesse Singal treatise referenced in the reply to you by <b>e pierce</b>.
Thank you both for your cogent and succinct comments....you made my day.
True, but I do like the comments sections on certain websites. I learn a lot sometimes from different people, too. But I do agree with your sentiments about the general public. And like George Carlin once said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that!”
«I do like the comments sections on certain websites»
Indeed I often read more the comments than the main article on "mainstream media" sites because the content of the main article is often all too predictable, while a certain percentage of commenters try to provide alternative views and information. Some mainstream media instead of have "twitter" line comments of pure declamation, which are worthless.
https://osf.io/wx3zn/ For those of you who wish to read all the studies from around the world on this topic, here is the preprint from Marik, Kory, et al, regarding the overwhelming efficacy of ivermectin in early, mid, and late stage Covid-19 disease. References at the end are extensively documented.
I have read your comments regarding Dr. Marik on the WSWS. They were nonsense. There are a lot of people with medical degrees who are not the experts they claim to be. The WSWS is a Marxist web site, so you should not be surprised that our perspective is a Marxist one. Your accusations are common responses that we see everyday from people who expect us to cease to be Marxists.
I don’t believe that was what I was asking anyone to do, Carolyn, “cease being Marxists.” What a preposterous comment. You are another of those with a surly attitude towards a lot of people, even your fellow Marxists at times. I think some of you must have a personality disorder to be so needlessly cantankerously ugly. As far as Covid advice and the criticality of treating this awful disease EARLY, I think ALL the evidence presented in the preprint from Marik, Kory, et al, shows overwhelming efficacy of the I-MASK+ protocol. If you become ill with it, which I hope you never do, I suppose you’ll choose to “sicken in place” rather than take advice from people who know a lot more about this than you do. Suit yourself, dear.
I wear a mask always. I have not ridden on public transit in 8 months. I do not leave my neighborhood. I am 72 years old and have to be very careful because of certain health conditions. The WSWS and SEP have never approved of people not taking appropriate precautions during this pandemic and never will. You seem to dislike us simply because we are Marxists. Your opinion that we are "needlessly cantankerous and ugly" reveals a certain hatred for people with Marxist principles and this does not become you at all. I do not like people with an attitude like yours, but I don't try to hide that fact. Too bad.
You have her down pat - aggravatingly and needlessly rude and terribly dispositioned, 24/7/365, pushing away would-be socialists with all ten of her gnarly knuckles, much like the old curmudgeons on WSWS as well.
This line from your article demonstrates the reason socialism will always fail, because it fails at the outset to understand that wanting things is a core human trait: "To me, the message is obvious: socialism is desirable in part because it’s only socialism that guarantees true freedom, the freedom to live and behave free of want." It is completely delusional.
«Cancel culture - contradictory to basic leftist principles»
It is contrary to basic *neoliberal* principles, basic whig principles, the practitioners of identity politics, which is not "the left", it is the neoliberal right.
Their logic seems clear to me: the whig/hegelian/... conception of history is that it is a continuous movement towards a more perfect world, progress towards the best of all possible worlds, and we have reached that best, which is the "Washington consensurs", that is neoliberalism itself, ans therefore the claim that we are at the "end of history"; therefore any other opinion is not just pointless and illegitimate, but also monstrously evil because it risks making the world regress from the best of all possible worlds.
There is a fairly humorous cartoon website on philosophy that often speaks as to the contrasts between the "history is whatever" and "history is progress" views (it omits the common "oriental" view that "history is cyclical" as it is mostly about non-"oriental" views).
By living in the left, I meant the status quo view of left - Kamala Harris is considered left. So are cancel culture constituents.
The most poignant display of what you're saying is COVID. If I say I won't get vaccinated I'm invariably met with derision, treated like an uncaring ignoramus, by people who haven't considered any opinion outside of socially accepted - even demanded - behavior. Or have they researched any information outside the box of MSM.
totally disagree with this guys politics and his idea that censorship is all about targeting the left, but it's still great to hear about things like this which i have not seen written about elsewhere. thx matt
I was curious why Google and Twitter would sensor socialist organizations. This right here is why: "The slogan of Marxists, going back to the Communist Manifesto, is 'workers of the world, unite!' not, 'races of the world, divide.'” They're not wokeity-woke enough. The new narrative only wants to fan the flames of the clash between identities, not socioeconomic classes.
He makes some good points, but also contort reality to fit into his narrative that censorship is all about silencing the left. That's false, and has been for decades.
Also, Matt, the content moderation is not directed at the "far right." It's directed at any woke-negating content from any source, and the regular right just happens to produce most of it. But even those from the left who negate the woke narrative get labeled "far right," if they're lucky enough to be acknowledged at all.
Google has been impossible to use. They are now in the business of 1. making sure you don't find what you're looking for, if they don't approve of your search, and 2. disapproving of your search with wild abandon.
I think the first paragraph of your comment is a very nice starting off point.
I read the attack on WSWS and other left leaning sites to be a consolidation effort by the democrats. Take out Bernie and his bros first. After all they cost Hillary the election and deprived America of its first female president. Once the left has been consolidated, beat on Trump and the "right" for four years. Next you build off the identity politics you have been playing up for years and let the country be beset by riots and looters. Once in office, eliminate what you can to consolidate to fit the narrow world view of the globalist elite.
Oh, I don't know, Deco... Seems the "new Left" isn't really the actual "Left".
It's some version of it that the Machine wants everyone to believe is the real thing... but it's not. Same goes for the role of "Trumper". Based on extremes, these parts twist the guts of the viewers with revulsion and hatred -a real dopamine trigger that's hard-wired into us.
The content moderation is for sure for the hard right, but we can see plainly that many on the left are as well. It's probably not published as much due to the MSM being mostly for Bloo-tagged tax cattle. Maybe that's what you're picking up on.
I thought the same thing until I read this piece. The Machine doesn't want anything it can't control on the internet for MOST people -this is clear.
Excellent point about “woke negating comments” being the real sweet spot for censorship. Nobody cares about aliens and pizza pedos-it’s the normal folks who are sick of the woke agenda that are the target of the tech elite. Questioning woke POVs deprives them of a major HE management tool.
For technical content they are still good. But for political content the rule has always been to listen to the opposition: listen to "Voice of America" for interesting news about Russia, listen to "Radio Moscow" for interesting news about America.
I occasionally use Yandex.com and SO.com for searches, and I read content from RT.com, AlJazeera.com and there are blogs and english language newspapers in various countries that are not "inspired" or "sponsored" by the propaganda machines of the usual sort.
I also skim the opinion and political news from "inspired" or "sponsored" sources (e.g. NBC, "The Guardian") because they are reliable indicators of the party line, and knowing it usually is also interesting.
My default search engine is DuckDuckGo rather than Google, and I'm always happy to find another Google alternative for searches. That's probably the most practical solution to the politicized algorithm bullshit- to build end runs around them, and use them.
«the content moderation is not directed at the "far right." It's directed at any woke-negating content from any source, and the regular right just happens to produce most of it.»
My usual comment: there are two "right wings", the non-woke tory/conservative one and the woke whig/libertarian one. The whig/libertarian right (thatcherites, reaganistas) have been attempting to enforce the "end of history" narrative by suppressing the diffusion of content outside a narrow band of "legitimate" opinions (in that they are not so libertarians, indeed they are called "neoliberals").
But this has been directed especially at the left-wing, because the tory right-wing shares with the whig right-wing their economic elitism, while the left-wing is opposed to it, and that's what both right-wings really detest.
Jones wasn't actually a card carrying right winger. You used to be able to find copious amounts of videos where he attacks both sides fairly evenly. I think they went after Jones for that reason. He was always a needling thorn in the side of the powerful.
Jones actually had the balls to crash Bohemian Grove, showing the rich, powerful & connected as they burn an effigy of a child to a giant Owl statue called Moloch.
That should have been a good indicator that our owners have, let's say, some incredibly outre beliefs.
I think he backed Trump for the same reason many folk did. He wasn't a politician & they were sick to death of politicians.
I think Jones was a test case.
To see if anyone actually cared about the 1st Amendment in any substantial way.
They found out that they didn't.
Game on.
I just watched Jones on Rogen's show.
Everything Jones said, Rogen had his producer immediately fact check.
A good 95% of it was backed up by data.
Did he veer off the rails with Sandy Hook?
No doubt.
Was his veering substantially more egregious than what established news organizations shovel on a daily basis?
Alex Jones was the “canary in the coal mine.” When Bug Tech got away with, were cheered on in fact, deplatforming Jones, that was their signal that it was ok to move forward in censoring anything they dislike. All the so-called defenders of free speech celebrated his silencing. It was outrageous. Alex Jones is a free speech martyr. Free Alex Jones!!!
So what? I don’t give a crap. He’s an American citizen with rights including free speech. If you don’t like him, don’t listen. Or better yet, prove him wrong or whatever. How does his “billion dollar empire” compare to Google?!?!?!
Thanks for looking out for the rest of us. My wife tells me to be a man and stand on my own two feet. But it's hard.... and I'm very glad to have you on my side.
"a dangerous social parasite that exploits vulnerable and low IQ people"
where have we heard this type of rhetoric before, hmmm when and where
can't get over "dangerous social parasite." the author is surely but a humble janitor, sweeping the low-IQ sand out of Society's oyster so the deserving Pearl may glow more brightly. god forbid one sand granule should listen to what another might say; it must be prevented; it's dangerous. this bivalve needs guardrails!
Howabout we replace the Soviet overtones of :social parasite" with the less fraught designation of "swindler"?
I used to like Alex, back in the 1990s. He was up on the edge of talking about phenomena like the War on Drugs, militarization of police, and other over-reaches by the State. Alex used to have some guest of actual merit to converse with, like Peter Dale Scott, who could eat anybody's lunch on a whole host of current affairs and history topics, on a show like Face The Nation. Credit for Jones inviting him on his show, which is more than any big-league national TV news network has ever done (with the exception of Pacifica's Democracy Now TV show, and that peerless primary source TV medium known as C-Span.)
I also remember Alex's Bohemian Grove prank- a daring move that got some interesting footage (although not particularly unsettling in and of itself, without the narrative frame imposed over it by ones wilder flights of imagination and/or Jones narration.) For a while, I actually felt a bit sorry for Alex, after Glenn Beck began incorporating parts of Jones act into his Fox TV show, reaping a $60 million contract for it (cut quite a bit short, but Beck got over anyway.)
All that "alternative history" shit, by late-blooming autodidacts like Jones, Beck, et. al...speaking as one autodidact to another, it has to be understood that there are some basics of erudition and scholarly discipline that are not to be dispensed with in favor of simply drawing straight lines between data points of persons, ideas, and events. Reality-based autodidacticism requires more discipline than college undergrad work, not less. Neither Jones or Beck is at that level. Sorry about that.
But what really got me to break with Jones was his descent into non-falsifiable conspiracy narratives and cartoon trap-door logic. He completely disgraced himself over Sandy Hook; a journalist with aspirations toward integrity would have done a speedy mea culpa and then shut it all down for a few years, as penance. (A real journalist of integrity would not have taken it where Jones took it in the first place.) Instead, Jones spiraled into right-wing paranoid demagoguery- and as a result, his audience exploded and his fortunes went through the roof. This in turn has resulted in Alex indulging in some documented episodes of elite deviance of his own, if I may say so. He's a rich guy now. Rich enough to know that he's sitting on top of a scam empire, as pitchman for the products that every alternative medicine fancier and survivalist needs, fueled by his rants that the sky is falling. Shrewd enough to know better than to express open contempt for the gullible audience of loyal followers with a seemingly bottomless appetite for his schlock, his twisted history seminars, and his guided meditations into paranoia.
Interesting and well written. The story of how money (and power) corrupts.
How do things like this happen in the US? I believe we are pretty unique with this sort of thing- it happens with a unusual regularity, and happens across all classes. It's a form of insanity- not just as presented by an Alex Jones or Rachel Maddow but for all their followers who can easily number in the millions. Then we wonder why civilized discussion has simply disappeared. Sure other countries through history have gone off the deep end but what excuse do we have? None that I can see- plenty of dollars floating around, plenty of opportunities, mobility- you name it and we are the envy of the world in that regard. Why the disintegration?
I think I know the source (hint, see my second sentence) and perhaps Matt will give it some attention in the future
Karl Marx- who was not all wrong- would say that this is what capitalism does: make it all about money. Grow or die, based on that cash flow.
I don't hold with Marx's Unified Field Theory of Social Organization. My view is more moderate- it isn't the existence of private enterprise and markets, it's their enshrining as an Ism.
CapitalISM is as hostile to challenges to its precepts as Leninism. (Marx himself once said "I am not a Marxist!" Indicating that he had at least some glimmer of the problems of his readers getting too dogmatic with his social prescriptions. Not a problem in my case.)
The problem is that when people refer to as "free market" principles, what they really mean is unregulated, unchecked markets. ("Free markets"- a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. As if nobody pays for anything.)
Unchecked markets are the Achilles heel of capitalism. They're inherently inertial. Diverse markets get turned into oligopolies, and even monopolies. Wealth funnels to the top. Entrepreneurialism becomes subordinate to quasi-feudal control. Facebook sees someone else's good idea, buys them out, incorporates their company into the empire, and the intentions of its creators can simply be dismissed or even suppressed. The venture capitalists and financiers who direct the investors in Big Pharma and a handful of private owners with the preferred class of stock fund the invention of a new medicine, but the inventors don't reap the profits, the funders do. Etc.
This is something that Marx intuited, even though he didn't refer to the process as "inertial." But that's how it works, if "the laws of the market" are simply allowed to dictate everything else. The most money beats everything else. Every other value. And beyond a certain level of private wealth, the person possessing it obtains autocratic power. Like a feudal lord, except that their estate is their business enterprises and purchased political influence, rather than agricultural real estate.
That's the real origin of my antipathy to the highest strata of wealth accumulation- it upsets the rule of law. Ultra-wealthy private individuals are provided with the powers of governments, minus the accountability and the restraints of democratic advice and consent. The super-rich are not necessarily nice people. But even benevolent despots are still despots. And even the well-intentioned wealthy have a tendency to lose a perspective shared in common with those who are significantly less wealthy. They're too distant to listen.
Watch the video ya sanctimonious self righteous twat. I didn't name the fucking owl. Jones didn't name the owl. The wealthy rhubarbs standing around it in robes named the owl.
You're talking about a later incarnation of Jones. His earlier stuff involved a lot of confrontational stuff against powerful people. His big idol at the beginning was Bill Hicks.
The whole "we must protect the credulous idiots from this info" is always used as justification for censorship.
C'mon, the real sad reality is that huge swathes of capitalism exploit & damage a lot of people.
If exploitation & damage were the criteria used to ban Jones then there are oodles of shit we should be banning alongside old Alex.
Let's take banking for instance.
When my mother was 79 she received a loan from Countrywide for $81,000 on an inner city row house that was, at best, $20,00. And by "at best" I mean if you'd have blinded a potential buyer in one eye before you showed it to him.
She needed this loan for a new roof.
They somehow tied the loan into having her use their suggested roofer.
He charged my mom the bulk of that loan.
To put a fucking roof on a row house.
My mom, at that point, wasn't very astute when it came to business.
She was the type of person who, if you told her something true, but were impolite in the telling, she wouldn't believe you. But if you were polite & respectful while you fed her a load of shit she'd believe you.
I'm sure the loan they sold her was a variable interest rate loan. I'm sure the payments were initially very low. Then the grace period passed.
I found out about the loan sitting with my mom in a hospital room after she'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
When she told me there was still $79,000 owed on her home I almost swallowed my tongue.
3 months later she died & I was able to look at her finances.
She had a fixed income of about $1500 a month.
Her mortgage payment was, at that point, $900 a month.
I started to wonder if she had enough money for food while she was alive or did she just not tell me.
The neighborhood where she lived was, at the time of her loan, just starting to be gentrified.
I'm sure that they gave her that exorbitant loan because they knew she'd default and they could get her house for later resale.
The neighborhood is now completely gentrified.
The house was eventually resold for a quarter of a million dollars.
There were 2 other neighborhoods that were gentrified at the same time.
They followed the same plan.
Force out the poor black & white folk and install a hell of a lot of hipster, upscale white folk.
The impetus for one of those gentrifications involved Google opening a division there.
So publicly Google supports BLM & censorship of those nasty racists & all of that other neat liberal social justice pablum, but privately they move into areas & the subsequent real estate price increases force the po' folk out of their homes. And they install the kind of residents who would have no problem dancing to the tune of the woke movement.
Yet...they've just been the cause of displacing folk who had lived there for generations.
But Jones & his snake oil had to be stomped on?
BTW, banning Jones actually increased his InfoWars audience because the interesting thing about banning things, when you ban them you suddenly make people want to look.
I could go on. Big Pharma as opiate pushers comes to mind.
I don't think you're feeling me pal. America was a conspiracy theory until it became a country. Conspiracy theories were with us when our "national unity myth" was written. The Freemasons also come to mind.
They've always been with us.
I'm not defending what Jones says just his MOTHERFUCKING RIGHT TO SAY IT.
Alex Jones' problems started when he became ALEX JONES conspiracy cottage industry.
When he was just a lone boob with a camera, a microphone and a megaphone he could be pretty fucking ballsy. He went after right & left alike.
Once he became a nonstop stream of daily videos, those videos required content. That's when he started pitching everything against the wall hoping something would stick.
That's when he started on the road to becoming a complete parody of himself.
That's when he became funny, although unintentionally so.
And he was approached by the media as a joke through Bush, who he criticized, through Obama, who he criticized, right up until he aligned himself with Trump. Then the media's attitude made a cute 180.
Now I haven't looked at Jones in years, but I do know that BANNING HIM MADE HIS AUDIENCE INCREASE.
Maybe you missed that bit as you frothed in self righteous ecstasy.
So your plan to protect the "Conspiratards" from themselves & protect society from the "Conspiratards" seems to be a dismal failure.
The same thing will happen with QAnon.
Until Trumpadoodle, the media approached "Conspiratards" as a huge fucking joke. Only recently have they raised "Conspiratards" to boogeymen needing censoring.
It's quite a curious phenomena.
Y'see I'd postulate that the media has been freebasing fear & then selling its self righteous junkie liberal clientele this toxic stew knowing full well it would huff it like glue. There's nothing like fear to bunch a liberal's panties while simultaneously making his libido quiver.
The interesting thing about fear is it requires an object. As Paul Valery said, "We hope vaguely; we fear precisely."
Trump was that object. And like those nifty one hop rules that come with those neato FISA warrant, everyone around Trump became suspect and possible fear bait.
Because if you think Jones was banned to protect "Conspiratards" from buying his snake oil, you're daft.
I could direct to a number of websites that sell the exact same shit.
Personally I like it when some boob overdoes the colloidal silver & turns into a big blue Smurf. It's funny.
In conclusion I'll leave you some H.L. Mencken quotes.
Luckily what he says about free speech will be remembered.
Sadly your opinions will fade.
Like farts.
“The danger in free speech does not lie in the menace of ideas, but in the menace of emotions. If words were merely logical devices no one would fear them. But when they impinge upon a moron they set off his hormones, and so they are justifiably feared. Complete free speech, under democracy, is possible only in a foreign language. Perhaps that is what we shall come to in the end. Anyone will be free to say what he pleases in Latin, but everything in English will be censored by prudent job holders.”
– H. L. Mencken; Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 18, 1929
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
So you have a social circle comprised of credulous dipshits and it makes you MAAAAAAAAD as hell that they're credulous dipshits and you're just not gonna take it anymore goddamn it.
I bet your sphincter puckers every time you see Alex Jones sputtering and spewing in apoplectic rage from outside of the jail cell you wish he was in.
I bet his bank account really bloodies your bologna.
Sounds like a rough life.
I'd offer you a crying towel but...ummm...this is the internet.
You could always fly down to Texas and park yourself outside of Jones' compound and stick your tongue out at him every time you see him.
Might work.
I was wrong about you. You're not just another whiny liberal with your panties bunched up to the backside of your uvula, you're also a fierce internet warrior for truth, justice & the American Way.
So it must really bug you that no one seems gives a shit.
Maybe you should try this line on your credulous rube pals:
"Conspiratard narratives are part of the atomization of culture, the rise of resentment and the dis-integration of the national unity myth."
You seem to like this one. You've used it here a few times.
Hell, it convinced me.
I swear, on a stack of The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion, that I will never ever ever look at another Conspiratard narrative again.
There are some extremely vile, toxic offshoots of the leftist conspiracy machine (known to be $100sbillions/yr) that MSM viewers don't usually know about such as Russiagate, Ukrainegate kookery mixed with crappy impeachment product marketing and rewarmed new age TDS gobbledygook.
So there is a real danger to vulnerable people ( including clueless white kids) being psychologically manipulated by toxic conspiratard narratives. .......
Wow, huge assumptions there. So tell me, who many times have I listened to Alex Jones? Huh? Don't have a clue, do you- just wild ass guesses.
Try none- never once have listened to him.
This is the United States- full of loonies. Watch MSNBC or CNN- you'll get a front row seat to a whole studio of them. Listen what comes out of any Senator's or Representative's mouth. Listen to the explanations for world-wide wars or surveillance, justifications for wholesale destruction of the natural world. I could go on and on. Go to another country and people don't act this way.
I've been railing against censorship of, by, and in the media since my days at the SF Chronicle, if not before.
The evolution of U.S. media outlets as little more than mouthpieces of the state, dissembling disinformation that suits a power structure inclusive of neoliberals, neoconservatives, and the 1% served by both, is a sickening betrayal. It's not a partisan endeavor per se, it's one that sometimes seems to exist just because it CAN exist - the ultimate tell of corrupted power.
When the NYTimes/WaPo et al, sold us the pack of lies that took us to war in Iraq, that was neither left nor right, after all, democrats and republicans lined up to fund the war and feather their respective states (recall Hillary's little nest egg she brought home for funding the war).
Some years later objective seekers of truth and information sat horrified at a mute media that never uttered a negative word as President Obama drone warred the death of hundreds of thousands around the world.
In 2019, Tulsi Gabbard had to sue Google for unfair searches and search blocks.
And the entirety of 2020 has been nothing but one lie after another bolstered by repetition and protected by omitting corrections, truths, and contrary realities. From never letting a good panic go to waste to revising the history that was less than 6 months old, narratives arose to further the media establishment's credibility that had been so profoundly eroded over the last several decades (traced back to the original Gulf War, imo). New media climbed into bed with old media and the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue to create a Potemkin America that existed to deliver a Phoenix of social engineering and virtue signaling.
Fair became foul, foul became fair, and logic and proportion fell sloppy dead.
But hey - at least the Orange King's on his head...right?
«as President Obama drone warred the death of hundreds of thousands around the world.»
That's rather an understatement: GW Bush, BH Obama and D Trump have all boasted about the number of DoD/CIA death squads that abduct, torture, eliminate "enemies of America", whether USA citizens or foreigners, around the world, working from "kill lists" approved by the president. Obviously that is not just drone hits in the third world, it is much more extensive than that.
And it is not just complete silence or deferential reporting of such achievements, there is an earlier article on this site listing other topics that Matt Taibbi thinks are kept under silence in the main media.
«democrats and republicans lined up to fund the war and feather their respective states»
Here is my usual quote on the politics of that from the notorious trotskyst mouthpiece :-), "The Financial Times", march 10th 2006:
«But is clear leaders of both parties lack the confidence to challenge the mood of xenophobia that exists outside Washington. Instead they are fuelling it. In some respects the Democrats are now as guilty of stoking fears on national security as the Republicans. Their logic is impeccable. A majority of Americans believe there will be another large terrorist attack on American soil.
Such is the depth of anxiety that one-fifth or more of Americans believe they will personally be victims of a future terrorist attack. This number has not budged in the last four and a half years. [...] Mr Bush has consistently received a much higher public trust rating on the war on terror than the Democrats.
Without this -- and without the constant manipulation of yellow and orange terror alert warnings at key moments in the political narrative -- Mr Bush would almost certainly have lost the presidential race to John Kerry in 2004. [...]
In other words, the Democrats have found an effective way of neutralising their most persistent electoral liability: they are out-Bushing Mr Bush. It is easy to see why key Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, have adopted this strategy.
It is easy also to see why their Republican counterparts are following suit. As Peter King, the Republican representative for New York, said last week: "We are not going to allow the Democrats get to the right of us on this issue."
This left Mr Bush holding the candle for the left, as it were.»
It's such a consistent and predictable pattern: The censors set a precedent using some fringe far-left or far-right figure that "everyone can agree has got to go" and then they keep expanding their definition of what else is "fringe" outward until eventually it encompasses any alternative and independent media sources. I'm not a Trotskyist (although I've enjoyed the WSWS' critique of The 1619 Project), but when it comes to free speech everybody's got to present a united front regardless of political differences or else it's not really a "right." (The only exception to free speech should be that which literally is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action," as outlined in Brandenburg v. Ohio.)
There were no search platforms in the years before the Internet. In some places there was Samizdat, in others reading rooms, people subscribed, went to the library (although not everything there), organized special collections, put up posters. For the most part one can still bookmark sites. Dependence on search engines or platforms like twitter, FB will eventually destroy broad understanding of everything. Meanwhile, look at this well done special collection--Kate Sharpely: https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/
Politically, I agree with almost nothing from the Trotskyites.
But so what?
They have every right to say it - and I have enough confidence in my views to argue it out with them in the world of ideas and let the best ideas prevail.
What I find unfortunate is Damon's inability to see the possibility of cooperating with conservatives to build a pro-free speech coalition. Even while Big Tech and the Democrats are working to silence his voice, he seems more interested in smearing anyone to the right of Castro as a "fascist" than he does in truly defending free speech on principle.
Exactly right. I disagree with Roger Waters on almost everything politically, but free speech is something much greater than specific policies. Human rights die when free speech goes down the drain.
Not a huge fan of, "You should support this because it might help you." It's like, "You don't like racism? But let me explain how it could help you personally." A pretty shallow argument.
If a person can't see that free speech is a good thing, and that controlling "free speech" destroys free speech, well, are they even worth persuading?
I saw this happen with my Google query of "Sweden COVID cases" It use to take me to the WorldoMeter page, as I wanted to compare Sweden's highly criticized approach versus other countries. But as Sweden's numbers went down, and started looking "better" - Google stopped showing WorldoMeter and instad showing Critical Media articles . NOTE: I am all for taking all precautions - as long as the populous is informed. The lack of info and even censorship is what leads to conspiracy.
Moved to DuckDuckGo - much different results - more accurate. Simple example - search on Google and DuckDuckGo "Denmark COVID protests".
These companies are sinking themselves - moving away from them is trivial. Ask IBM, MySpace, Yahoo, SnapChat.
"The real target of censorship is always the left." This is an unserious position, which supports the majority idea that this is an unserious movement. The problem with socialists - not the "Democratic Socialists who uncomfortably brush off Bernie's "We need a revolution" grandstanding as meaning something other than an actual revolution, but rather, the people who know enough to take him literally - is that they seem to have zero interest in finding friends anywhere else but in their enlightened cliques. I have conversed with a handful of true believers with whom I share a fundamental concern that the mainstream U.S. media is brazenly misinforming the public. Yet they refuse to see how conservatives, who have suffered from media bias for a lot longer than 2017(!), may be an ally in the fight against bias and censorship, because we're all "fascists." If that's how you feel, fuck off.
Herd immunity is not based on pseudoscience. It’s what naturally stops a pandemic or epidemic. Why can’t the left, with a few exceptions, admit the that the response to covid has been totally disproportionate & is being used to destroy small businesses & make people slaves to corporations & big government? Contact tracing is unlawful & turns healthy people into some kind of bio threat. So disappointed in how so-called progressives are advocating for Big Pharma,censorship & mass surveillance.
"So disappointed in how so-called progressives are ... "?
Have you lost your mind? Progs are no different from Conservatives, Liberals, etc. It is all a pursuit of power. Progs destroy small biz and make people slaves to the Elect so they can be controlled and the few rule. They do the same with "climate change" (f/k/a Global Warming, etc.). No different from other pursuits of power. The few control, the sheep suck up based on whatever those sheep think they see as truth. It ain't truth, it is just a path to power. For the few. That is Wall Street in a nut shell, Stalinism in a nutshell, etc.
Herd immunity is a real thing, but costs are exacted in getting there, sometimes heavy costs. You may not think that a quarter million dead is a heavy costs, but we aren't over this yet. (If you think that coroners around the country are being ordered by Federal tyranny- or even slipshod and biased protocols- to stamp "covid" as the cause of death for every deceased person with a diagnosis of infection, you're just plain wrong. That's a baseless claim. The coroners and physicians aren't doing anything different than what they've traditionally done with influenza deaths- determine the primary critical factor, and document it as the cause.)
SARS-Cov-2 is the first major communicable virus pandemic since the 1918 influenza epidemic. There was no sure way at the outset to determine how severe the illnesses would be. Everything was a guess, and if there were a few wrong guesses made, that's inevitable. The medical science is evolving. I pay attention to the people who know what they're talking about in that regard, the same way I listen to my auto mechanic. There are more unknowns in the first example, but they're the people who know how to figure out the answers. I'm not about to gainsay them based on some late-night cram sessions of Internet surfing.
"Healthy people" infected with covid without active symptoms are in fact "some kind of bio threat", similar to Typhoid Mary. (Look up the Wiki entry. Among other things, you'll find that the "individual rights trump everything else" entitlement attitude held by all too many Americans didn't just begin in February 2020.) And yes, contending otherwise is pseudoscience.
«Herd immunity is not based on pseudoscience. It’s what naturally stops a pandemic or epidemic.»
That's right, but two big things matter a lot as to how herd immunity is achieved:
* Whether it is achieved entirely "naturally" or by vaccination.
* How many deaths are incurred before it is achieved.
«Contact tracing is unlawful»
Infecting other people is a also unlawful and a crime if done deliberately, it is like body assault, just like hitting them with a car. The state accordingly put preventive restrictions on the ability to drive, like being certified to know how to drive safely.
The question is whether restrictions should be preventive, like testing for the virus or testing for knowledge of driving, or not. In the case of very widespread risks where redress is difficult preventive restrictions are very common as part of the rules of social living.
Julia N, “herd immunity” is not going to stop this pandemic with any surety at all. Instead, this virus will likely become endemic and circulate throughout the world and pop up in small epidemics for several years to come. Herd immunity in this case, with this virus, is folly at best, and murderous at worst. Tens of millions of Americans are in vulnerable groups and sub-groups. We can’t possibly protect them. They need to work, so many of them.
Anyone around when the Internet was created knows that that Google and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technology killed the ability of mortals to find useful information on the Internet. We don't have to know about all the subterfuge going on in the SEO algorithms to know that they suck, big time. The basic problem is that the algorithms are designed to make money, not help people find useful information. There, said it.
Unquestionably. A claim easily proven simply by using a keyword combination like [ dmv + registration ]- which will yield a list of every click-through site to offers of auto insurance in the English-speaking world, before you access your state's Department of Motor Vehicles.
ya, remember that when the whiz kids at Google one day started saying "Google has become the evil we once resisted." It was like the company got turned out to the dark side. It was horrible to watch. They died from the inside out.
It's worth noting that there's so much confusion over terms of ideology in the US that most conservatives and Republicans draw no distinctions between Democratic Party governor Andrew Cuomo, Google chief Eric Schmidt, and Naomi Klein, the author of the article warning about the surveillance state paradigm that Cuomo and Schmidt appear to be endorsing and collaborating in developing.
Andrew Cuomo is pretty much a mainstream establishment Democrat, head of a state with a large population that includes a city with a high population density, and disposed toward big-government solutions.
Eric Schmidt is a Silicon Valley billionaire who probably thinks of himself as a Promethean social progressive with benevolent liberal values, who'd just happen to benefit from the implementation of a surveillance state in order to, you know, nudge society in the direction of his preferred ideas.
Naomi Klein is the author of Shock Doctrine, a scathing indictment of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism as historically promoted by both Democrats and the Republican promoters of globalist free-market economic values. She's definitely on what I'd call "the undifferentiated Left"- I'm not sure of her precise ideological views, but she's no knee-jerk statist. As the article link demonstrates, Klein values liberty and privacy over attempts by the State to use technological power to impose order and conformity. She certainly is a courageous, articulate, and intelligent social critic. We need more of those, no matter their political leanings. It's the information values found in the content that's important, not the labels that are so easily stuck on people and their views.
As I read (for the umpteenth time today) about the 1619 project’s claim that the Revolution was an insurrection to defend slavery, it just occurred to me — and fine, call me slow if I’m the last one to think of it:
Could this race-is-everything aspect of the worsening culture war— which is most certainly encouraged by the ruling elite — be an effort to discredit our governmental system to the extent that we dispense with things like, oh I dunno, our Constitution? If it’s all based on evil racism, let’s throw the whole thing out.
Granted the Constitution is seeming more and more toothless these days (even the ACLU is firmly in the censorship camp) but the First Amendment is one of the only tools we have left.
«the 1619 project’s claim that the Revolution was an insurrection to defend slavery»
That was certainly a motivation by *some* of the constituencies, another motivation by probably a larger number was that the english were limiting expansion into the indian lands to the west, where many americans wanted to ethnically cleanse them and take them. Supporting the American Revolution there were all sort of constituencies, several of them not entirely respectable from the point of view of our times.
«to the extent that we dispense with things like, oh I dunno, our Constitution?»
As that guy say, it is "just a piece of paper". Sometimes it gets enforced. This has been a problem for *centuries* in the USA. Here are two examples from Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America", 1834, which illustrate a saying that I found reliable, that your actual rights depend on your popularity:
«I said to someone who lived in Pennsylvania: "Kindly explain to me how, in a state founded by Quakers and celebrated for its tolerance, free Negroes are not allowed to exercise their civil rights. They pay their taxes; is it not fair that they should have the vote?"
"You insult us," he replied, "if you imagine that our legislators committed such a gross act of injustice and intolerance."
"Thus the blacks possess the right to vote in this country?"
"Without any doubt."
"So, how does it come about that at the polling-booth this morning I did not notice a single Negro in the crowd?"
"That is not the fault of the law," said the American to me. "It is true that the Negroes have the right to participate in the elections but they voluntarily abstain from making an appearance."
"That is indeed very modest of them."
"It is not that they are refusing to attend, but they are afraid of being mistreated. In this country it sometimes happens that the law lacks any force when the majority does not support it. Now, the majority is imbued with the strongest of prejudices against the blacks and the magistrates feel they do not have enough strength to guarantee the rights which the legislator has conferred upon them."
"So you mean that the majority, which has the privilege of enacting the laws, also wishes to enjoy the privilege of disobeying them?"»
«A striking example of the excesses which the despotism of the majority may occasion was seen in Baltimore during the war of 1812. At that time the war was very popular in Baltimore. A newspaper opposed to it aroused the indignation of the inhabitants by taking that line.
The people came together, destroyed the printing presses and attacked the journalists' premises. The call went out to summon the militia which, however, did not respond to the call. In order to save those wretched fellows threatened with by the public frenzy the decision was taken to put them in prison like criminals.
The precaution was useless. During the night the people gathered once again; when the magistrates failed to summon the militia, the prison was forced one of the journalists was killed on the spot and the others were left for dead. The guilty parties, when standing before a jury, were acquitted.»
I’m not denying what you say. In fact, you and I seem to agree that the Revolution was much more complex than as portrayed by the 1619 project. We also agree that “bad stuff happens “ and no government perfectly addresses that.
In fact, though, part of the motivation for the Revolution was to enact an Enlightenment experiment. The goal was to have a really radical, improved form of government which would serve “everyone” (back when a radical’s view of everyone meant white property-owning men).
There are many things I dislike about our nation’s history, especially when viewed through my 21st century lens, just as I suppose 24th-century people will look back on us and consider us completely ignorant and backward and wrong in many important respects, which we are currently blind to.
Nevertheless, credit where credit is due, those who created this new experimental government built in mechanisms for progress and change so that more people can participate than white property-owning men. Unfortunately they were not able to anticipate such notions as Corporate Personhood, nor that Money is Speech, so our system of government has completely left our control and placed it increasingly in the hands of an obscenely wealthy few, who unfortunately don’t have the degree of enlightened self-interest necessary to see where we are headed. If they want to end up in a society with gated guarded compounds for them, and favelas for the rest of us, they’re doing everything right.
The Founders Enlightenment experiment was cool and noble and with a few important tweaks could be made more functional again. Right now it’s a mess and it’s not working. I say, it’s better to try to fix it than to let lazy thinking dictate that we throw it out (and replace it with what exactly?)
Both of these linked articles -- this one, and the one above about the bridge -- are absolutely amazing! Thanks so much for sharing them. I'd love to hear about anything else you find interesting -- how's that for a vague request?
As a late comment, the "bridge" thing is a theme in relatively recent philosophy, in particular Chaim Perelman in the 1950s-1960s argued extensively that while cartesian rationality does not apply to many topics, leaving those topics to mere irrationality is not necessary, because in between one can use "rhetoric", intended as the discipline to develop well built, persuasive arguments.
«the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s effectively killed off most of the "original" Constitution by creating a vast bureaucracy»
I have now read the article out of curiosity and it is well written with a content that is quite silly, and in some points utterly ridiculous in particular the claim that "It made white people a political reality in the United States in a way they had never been". HAHAHAHAHAHA!
The rest of the article boils down to the claim that the laws that created that "totalitarian informant bureaucracy" are undemocratic because a majority of voters are against them even if they never vote to replace them with other laws. Or the claim that even if a majority is for them applying them to the minority is wrong and states and individuals that are against those laws should be able to opt out.
Consider this example:
«But say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your seven-year-old son is being taught about “gender fluidity” in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this. [...] “Sorry,” you ask, “when did I vote for this?”»
The answer to what question is either: "No democratic majority voted for that", or "The democratic majority voted for that and you lost the vote". The first claim is unbelievable: there have been both Democratic and Republican majorities since 1964, and none of them have repealed those laws, because both Democratic and Republican politicians want to be re-elected by the majority.
As to "you lost the vote", calling "totalitarianism" the principle of majority-rule is rather weird. Even more so the suspicion that "taking your voice away from you taking your vote away from you is the main goal of these rights movements".
Being in the minority in a democratic vote does not mean taking your voice and vote away, it means accepting defeat or fighting to change the opinion of others until your voice and vote become a majority.
Now there is a honest argument to be made about the "dictatorship of the majority" and it was discussed in A de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" already in 1834, but that is quite a different line of reasoning from Caldwell's article.
We only use DuckDuckGo for searches. It is non-partisan, does not censor, and does not store your past searches to put ads on your new searches.
I just searched for "WSWS" and the first 7 results were for the World Socialist Web Site (one of them is for their Facebook site, one for their YouTube site and one for their Wikipedia page) The 8th is for their rating by the Media Bias Fact Check site. Also, right under the top result are three links to recent articles on their site.
Just after them comes the Western Society for Weed Science
DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its search back end. Not surprisingly, the same search on Bing provides similar results. My opinion on Google is quite simple. Use anything other than their products whenever and wherever you can.
Just to clarify, the issue is when you search for something that the site has written hundreds or thousand of articles on like “Leon Trotsky” or “US Imperialism” the wsws is buried several pages down in the search results. If you include “wsws” when you search it’s a different story. In other words unless you are actively looking for their articles it’s unlikely you will find them.
I read the WSWS several times a week. They have excellent writers. There is a huge blind spot though in many of their readers though. A lot of their readers who comment regularly, are really intelligent Marxist thinkers, but they denigrate with arrogance, ideas not sanctioned by say, the FDA, etc and put down people for not adhering to a supposedly “pure” Marxist analysis of anything and everything they do. I wrote in the comments section to watch Dr. Mobeen Syed’s interview last night on youtube, of the heroic Dr. Paul Marik, who is Chief of Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical and who developed the MATH+ and I-MASK+ protocols for treating Covid-19. Two of these socialists know-it-alls, denigrated my comments without even having any medical information to back up their criticisms. I’ve practiced medicine for 34 years as an NP. I think I know what I’m talking about. But that wasn’t good enough for them. Sometimes, their commenters stink to high heaven with the very elitism they purport to abhor. And that ends up turning off people who might otherwise agree with them on much.
“Sometimes, their commenters stink to high heaven with the very elitism they purport to abhor. And that ends up turning off people who might otherwise agree with them on much.”
That is a real problem, but it can work both ways.
Your post and your responses to the replies are still up:
“Don’t be insulting. Or ignorant. Do your own research. I have for the last eight months intensively and I know what I am speaking of.”
“Then you haven’t been reading the right things.”
and
“I am an experienced practitioner. What I say holds weight and counts, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.”
could have been a turn-off for people with whom you might otherwise find common ground.
http://disq.us/p/2denhyj
Please don’t take this to mean I find no fault in how they replied to you. I am not denigrating your position, reasoning, knowledge, or experience. You are entitled to respond exactly as you did. But maybe your antagonists might have been more receptive to a different approach. Peace.
People don’t generally respond with good cheer when they are denigrated, doc. I notice you did not post their denigrating comments to me. This pattern of aggression and rudeness is something I have noted on the WSWS again and again and again. I don’t like it. It’s unfortunate and unnecessary and it turns people against them. Such bloviating blowhards are never fun in discourse. If you’ll notice, my original post was full of good spirit and cheer and a desire to help people. Both of these guys blasted me and for what? For wanting to save people’s lives during a pandemic! Grow up.
“If you’ll notice, my original post was full of good spirit and cheer and a desire to help people.”
I did notice that in your original post. My observations were on your subsequent responses which may have detracted from it.
“I notice you did not post their denigrating comments to me.”
I didn’t see a point in replying to their comments.
“Grow up.”
I now see there was no point in replying to yours.
Be well.
Thank you for proving my point about some WSWS readers! Stay well and watch and learn from Dr. Marik at the original suggestion I made. Then spread what you know to others so that you too, can do fruitful things to help save people’s lives and reduce morbidity during this terrible time of sickness and death in our world.
«my experience for decades (starting with a student trip to the USSR in 1974) is that leftists have become entrenched in their delusions and are incapable of, or unwilling to, self-examine, much less self-correct.»
Here again you are largely describing the "dialectic idealism" of the hegelians, that is the right-wing "whig" tendency, nowadays called "neoliberalism", because they claim that neoliberalism (including identity politics) is the "end of history", the best of all possible worlds, and therefore any deviance from it is regressive and must be suppressed for the good of everybody.
Being assailed and/or denigrated by socialist "know-it-alls", those that do hypocritically indeed "stink to high heaven with the very elitism they purport to abhor", is becoming a common-place experience; one explained very thoughtfully by the Jesse Singal treatise referenced in the reply to you by <b>e pierce</b>.
Thank you both for your cogent and succinct comments....you made my day.
As usual,
Thom
Thank you, Thom. You made my own day just now. I appreciate it and hope you have a safe and delicious Thanksgiving.
Did you read the Jesse Singal piece referenced?
Meh, comments sections are not why anyone reads what these people write.
This is true of every site we browse, because the general public is kind of fucked up. It's why good writers really stand out.
True, but I do like the comments sections on certain websites. I learn a lot sometimes from different people, too. But I do agree with your sentiments about the general public. And like George Carlin once said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that!”
«I do like the comments sections on certain websites»
Indeed I often read more the comments than the main article on "mainstream media" sites because the content of the main article is often all too predictable, while a certain percentage of commenters try to provide alternative views and information. Some mainstream media instead of have "twitter" line comments of pure declamation, which are worthless.
https://osf.io/wx3zn/ For those of you who wish to read all the studies from around the world on this topic, here is the preprint from Marik, Kory, et al, regarding the overwhelming efficacy of ivermectin in early, mid, and late stage Covid-19 disease. References at the end are extensively documented.
I have read your comments regarding Dr. Marik on the WSWS. They were nonsense. There are a lot of people with medical degrees who are not the experts they claim to be. The WSWS is a Marxist web site, so you should not be surprised that our perspective is a Marxist one. Your accusations are common responses that we see everyday from people who expect us to cease to be Marxists.
I don’t believe that was what I was asking anyone to do, Carolyn, “cease being Marxists.” What a preposterous comment. You are another of those with a surly attitude towards a lot of people, even your fellow Marxists at times. I think some of you must have a personality disorder to be so needlessly cantankerously ugly. As far as Covid advice and the criticality of treating this awful disease EARLY, I think ALL the evidence presented in the preprint from Marik, Kory, et al, shows overwhelming efficacy of the I-MASK+ protocol. If you become ill with it, which I hope you never do, I suppose you’ll choose to “sicken in place” rather than take advice from people who know a lot more about this than you do. Suit yourself, dear.
I wear a mask always. I have not ridden on public transit in 8 months. I do not leave my neighborhood. I am 72 years old and have to be very careful because of certain health conditions. The WSWS and SEP have never approved of people not taking appropriate precautions during this pandemic and never will. You seem to dislike us simply because we are Marxists. Your opinion that we are "needlessly cantankerous and ugly" reveals a certain hatred for people with Marxist principles and this does not become you at all. I do not like people with an attitude like yours, but I don't try to hide that fact. Too bad.
You have her down pat - aggravatingly and needlessly rude and terribly dispositioned, 24/7/365, pushing away would-be socialists with all ten of her gnarly knuckles, much like the old curmudgeons on WSWS as well.
Good piece, e. Thanks.
This line from your article demonstrates the reason socialism will always fail, because it fails at the outset to understand that wanting things is a core human trait: "To me, the message is obvious: socialism is desirable in part because it’s only socialism that guarantees true freedom, the freedom to live and behave free of want." It is completely delusional.
Really interesting article, thanks. Cancel culture - contradictory to basic leftist principles, yet lives there.
«Cancel culture - contradictory to basic leftist principles»
It is contrary to basic *neoliberal* principles, basic whig principles, the practitioners of identity politics, which is not "the left", it is the neoliberal right.
Their logic seems clear to me: the whig/hegelian/... conception of history is that it is a continuous movement towards a more perfect world, progress towards the best of all possible worlds, and we have reached that best, which is the "Washington consensurs", that is neoliberalism itself, ans therefore the claim that we are at the "end of history"; therefore any other opinion is not just pointless and illegitimate, but also monstrously evil because it risks making the world regress from the best of all possible worlds.
There is a fairly humorous cartoon website on philosophy that often speaks as to the contrasts between the "history is whatever" and "history is progress" views (it omits the common "oriental" view that "history is cyclical" as it is mostly about non-"oriental" views).
https://existentialcomics.com/
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/307
By living in the left, I meant the status quo view of left - Kamala Harris is considered left. So are cancel culture constituents.
The most poignant display of what you're saying is COVID. If I say I won't get vaccinated I'm invariably met with derision, treated like an uncaring ignoramus, by people who haven't considered any opinion outside of socially accepted - even demanded - behavior. Or have they researched any information outside the box of MSM.
Thanks for the comic!
How do you see this playing out in the next 20-30 years?
totally disagree with this guys politics and his idea that censorship is all about targeting the left, but it's still great to hear about things like this which i have not seen written about elsewhere. thx matt
I was curious why Google and Twitter would sensor socialist organizations. This right here is why: "The slogan of Marxists, going back to the Communist Manifesto, is 'workers of the world, unite!' not, 'races of the world, divide.'” They're not wokeity-woke enough. The new narrative only wants to fan the flames of the clash between identities, not socioeconomic classes.
He makes some good points, but also contort reality to fit into his narrative that censorship is all about silencing the left. That's false, and has been for decades.
Also, Matt, the content moderation is not directed at the "far right." It's directed at any woke-negating content from any source, and the regular right just happens to produce most of it. But even those from the left who negate the woke narrative get labeled "far right," if they're lucky enough to be acknowledged at all.
Google has been impossible to use. They are now in the business of 1. making sure you don't find what you're looking for, if they don't approve of your search, and 2. disapproving of your search with wild abandon.
These are bizarre times.
I think the first paragraph of your comment is a very nice starting off point.
I read the attack on WSWS and other left leaning sites to be a consolidation effort by the democrats. Take out Bernie and his bros first. After all they cost Hillary the election and deprived America of its first female president. Once the left has been consolidated, beat on Trump and the "right" for four years. Next you build off the identity politics you have been playing up for years and let the country be beset by riots and looters. Once in office, eliminate what you can to consolidate to fit the narrow world view of the globalist elite.
Step 3: Profit
Oh, I don't know, Deco... Seems the "new Left" isn't really the actual "Left".
It's some version of it that the Machine wants everyone to believe is the real thing... but it's not. Same goes for the role of "Trumper". Based on extremes, these parts twist the guts of the viewers with revulsion and hatred -a real dopamine trigger that's hard-wired into us.
The content moderation is for sure for the hard right, but we can see plainly that many on the left are as well. It's probably not published as much due to the MSM being mostly for Bloo-tagged tax cattle. Maybe that's what you're picking up on.
I thought the same thing until I read this piece. The Machine doesn't want anything it can't control on the internet for MOST people -this is clear.
It must be brought down.
Excellent point about “woke negating comments” being the real sweet spot for censorship. Nobody cares about aliens and pizza pedos-it’s the normal folks who are sick of the woke agenda that are the target of the tech elite. Questioning woke POVs deprives them of a major HE management tool.
"Google has been impossible to use"
For technical content they are still good. But for political content the rule has always been to listen to the opposition: listen to "Voice of America" for interesting news about Russia, listen to "Radio Moscow" for interesting news about America.
I occasionally use Yandex.com and SO.com for searches, and I read content from RT.com, AlJazeera.com and there are blogs and english language newspapers in various countries that are not "inspired" or "sponsored" by the propaganda machines of the usual sort.
I also skim the opinion and political news from "inspired" or "sponsored" sources (e.g. NBC, "The Guardian") because they are reliable indicators of the party line, and knowing it usually is also interesting.
My default search engine is DuckDuckGo rather than Google, and I'm always happy to find another Google alternative for searches. That's probably the most practical solution to the politicized algorithm bullshit- to build end runs around them, and use them.
«the content moderation is not directed at the "far right." It's directed at any woke-negating content from any source, and the regular right just happens to produce most of it.»
My usual comment: there are two "right wings", the non-woke tory/conservative one and the woke whig/libertarian one. The whig/libertarian right (thatcherites, reaganistas) have been attempting to enforce the "end of history" narrative by suppressing the diffusion of content outside a narrow band of "legitimate" opinions (in that they are not so libertarians, indeed they are called "neoliberals").
But this has been directed especially at the left-wing, because the tory right-wing shares with the whig right-wing their economic elitism, while the left-wing is opposed to it, and that's what both right-wings really detest.
Jones wasn't actually a card carrying right winger. You used to be able to find copious amounts of videos where he attacks both sides fairly evenly. I think they went after Jones for that reason. He was always a needling thorn in the side of the powerful.
Jones actually had the balls to crash Bohemian Grove, showing the rich, powerful & connected as they burn an effigy of a child to a giant Owl statue called Moloch.
That should have been a good indicator that our owners have, let's say, some incredibly outre beliefs.
I think he backed Trump for the same reason many folk did. He wasn't a politician & they were sick to death of politicians.
I think Jones was a test case.
To see if anyone actually cared about the 1st Amendment in any substantial way.
They found out that they didn't.
Game on.
I just watched Jones on Rogen's show.
Everything Jones said, Rogen had his producer immediately fact check.
A good 95% of it was backed up by data.
Did he veer off the rails with Sandy Hook?
No doubt.
Was his veering substantially more egregious than what established news organizations shovel on a daily basis?
Not in the fucking least.
Alex Jones was the “canary in the coal mine.” When Bug Tech got away with, were cheered on in fact, deplatforming Jones, that was their signal that it was ok to move forward in censoring anything they dislike. All the so-called defenders of free speech celebrated his silencing. It was outrageous. Alex Jones is a free speech martyr. Free Alex Jones!!!
So what? I don’t give a crap. He’s an American citizen with rights including free speech. If you don’t like him, don’t listen. Or better yet, prove him wrong or whatever. How does his “billion dollar empire” compare to Google?!?!?!
Thanks for looking out for the rest of us. My wife tells me to be a man and stand on my own two feet. But it's hard.... and I'm very glad to have you on my side.
"a dangerous social parasite that exploits vulnerable and low IQ people"
where have we heard this type of rhetoric before, hmmm when and where
can't get over "dangerous social parasite." the author is surely but a humble janitor, sweeping the low-IQ sand out of Society's oyster so the deserving Pearl may glow more brightly. god forbid one sand granule should listen to what another might say; it must be prevented; it's dangerous. this bivalve needs guardrails!
Howabout we replace the Soviet overtones of :social parasite" with the less fraught designation of "swindler"?
I used to like Alex, back in the 1990s. He was up on the edge of talking about phenomena like the War on Drugs, militarization of police, and other over-reaches by the State. Alex used to have some guest of actual merit to converse with, like Peter Dale Scott, who could eat anybody's lunch on a whole host of current affairs and history topics, on a show like Face The Nation. Credit for Jones inviting him on his show, which is more than any big-league national TV news network has ever done (with the exception of Pacifica's Democracy Now TV show, and that peerless primary source TV medium known as C-Span.)
I also remember Alex's Bohemian Grove prank- a daring move that got some interesting footage (although not particularly unsettling in and of itself, without the narrative frame imposed over it by ones wilder flights of imagination and/or Jones narration.) For a while, I actually felt a bit sorry for Alex, after Glenn Beck began incorporating parts of Jones act into his Fox TV show, reaping a $60 million contract for it (cut quite a bit short, but Beck got over anyway.)
All that "alternative history" shit, by late-blooming autodidacts like Jones, Beck, et. al...speaking as one autodidact to another, it has to be understood that there are some basics of erudition and scholarly discipline that are not to be dispensed with in favor of simply drawing straight lines between data points of persons, ideas, and events. Reality-based autodidacticism requires more discipline than college undergrad work, not less. Neither Jones or Beck is at that level. Sorry about that.
But what really got me to break with Jones was his descent into non-falsifiable conspiracy narratives and cartoon trap-door logic. He completely disgraced himself over Sandy Hook; a journalist with aspirations toward integrity would have done a speedy mea culpa and then shut it all down for a few years, as penance. (A real journalist of integrity would not have taken it where Jones took it in the first place.) Instead, Jones spiraled into right-wing paranoid demagoguery- and as a result, his audience exploded and his fortunes went through the roof. This in turn has resulted in Alex indulging in some documented episodes of elite deviance of his own, if I may say so. He's a rich guy now. Rich enough to know that he's sitting on top of a scam empire, as pitchman for the products that every alternative medicine fancier and survivalist needs, fueled by his rants that the sky is falling. Shrewd enough to know better than to express open contempt for the gullible audience of loyal followers with a seemingly bottomless appetite for his schlock, his twisted history seminars, and his guided meditations into paranoia.
Interesting and well written. The story of how money (and power) corrupts.
How do things like this happen in the US? I believe we are pretty unique with this sort of thing- it happens with a unusual regularity, and happens across all classes. It's a form of insanity- not just as presented by an Alex Jones or Rachel Maddow but for all their followers who can easily number in the millions. Then we wonder why civilized discussion has simply disappeared. Sure other countries through history have gone off the deep end but what excuse do we have? None that I can see- plenty of dollars floating around, plenty of opportunities, mobility- you name it and we are the envy of the world in that regard. Why the disintegration?
I think I know the source (hint, see my second sentence) and perhaps Matt will give it some attention in the future
Karl Marx- who was not all wrong- would say that this is what capitalism does: make it all about money. Grow or die, based on that cash flow.
I don't hold with Marx's Unified Field Theory of Social Organization. My view is more moderate- it isn't the existence of private enterprise and markets, it's their enshrining as an Ism.
CapitalISM is as hostile to challenges to its precepts as Leninism. (Marx himself once said "I am not a Marxist!" Indicating that he had at least some glimmer of the problems of his readers getting too dogmatic with his social prescriptions. Not a problem in my case.)
The problem is that when people refer to as "free market" principles, what they really mean is unregulated, unchecked markets. ("Free markets"- a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. As if nobody pays for anything.)
Unchecked markets are the Achilles heel of capitalism. They're inherently inertial. Diverse markets get turned into oligopolies, and even monopolies. Wealth funnels to the top. Entrepreneurialism becomes subordinate to quasi-feudal control. Facebook sees someone else's good idea, buys them out, incorporates their company into the empire, and the intentions of its creators can simply be dismissed or even suppressed. The venture capitalists and financiers who direct the investors in Big Pharma and a handful of private owners with the preferred class of stock fund the invention of a new medicine, but the inventors don't reap the profits, the funders do. Etc.
This is something that Marx intuited, even though he didn't refer to the process as "inertial." But that's how it works, if "the laws of the market" are simply allowed to dictate everything else. The most money beats everything else. Every other value. And beyond a certain level of private wealth, the person possessing it obtains autocratic power. Like a feudal lord, except that their estate is their business enterprises and purchased political influence, rather than agricultural real estate.
That's the real origin of my antipathy to the highest strata of wealth accumulation- it upsets the rule of law. Ultra-wealthy private individuals are provided with the powers of governments, minus the accountability and the restraints of democratic advice and consent. The super-rich are not necessarily nice people. But even benevolent despots are still despots. And even the well-intentioned wealthy have a tendency to lose a perspective shared in common with those who are significantly less wealthy. They're too distant to listen.
Indeed, analogy overload. Though I do appreciate the effort made.
So you say stuff like "95% backed up by data", then say "Owl statue called moloch", when Moloch is a bull. You're a fucking crank, pal.
Watch the video ya sanctimonious self righteous twat. I didn't name the fucking owl. Jones didn't name the owl. The wealthy rhubarbs standing around it in robes named the owl.
I would, but I'm having Baphomet over to play Parcheesi, and wouldn't you know it, I'm all out of alien urine. D'aww.
Jordan says, "Ook Ook, Cheep Cheep." Makes believe he has thoughts. Makes believe someone would be desperate enough to play Parcheesi with him.
Stick to jerkin off into your own feces Jodie, I suspect that alone would strain your brain beyond its limits.
If you need a more reputable source pea brain Jon Ronson was with Jones. He put it in his book. Same story.
I understand that I'm making a leap here in assuming that you know what a "book" is, and that you know how to use one.
You're talking about a later incarnation of Jones. His earlier stuff involved a lot of confrontational stuff against powerful people. His big idol at the beginning was Bill Hicks.
The whole "we must protect the credulous idiots from this info" is always used as justification for censorship.
Always.
C'mon, the real sad reality is that huge swathes of capitalism exploit & damage a lot of people.
If exploitation & damage were the criteria used to ban Jones then there are oodles of shit we should be banning alongside old Alex.
Let's take banking for instance.
When my mother was 79 she received a loan from Countrywide for $81,000 on an inner city row house that was, at best, $20,00. And by "at best" I mean if you'd have blinded a potential buyer in one eye before you showed it to him.
She needed this loan for a new roof.
They somehow tied the loan into having her use their suggested roofer.
He charged my mom the bulk of that loan.
To put a fucking roof on a row house.
My mom, at that point, wasn't very astute when it came to business.
She was the type of person who, if you told her something true, but were impolite in the telling, she wouldn't believe you. But if you were polite & respectful while you fed her a load of shit she'd believe you.
I'm sure the loan they sold her was a variable interest rate loan. I'm sure the payments were initially very low. Then the grace period passed.
I found out about the loan sitting with my mom in a hospital room after she'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
When she told me there was still $79,000 owed on her home I almost swallowed my tongue.
3 months later she died & I was able to look at her finances.
She had a fixed income of about $1500 a month.
Her mortgage payment was, at that point, $900 a month.
I started to wonder if she had enough money for food while she was alive or did she just not tell me.
The neighborhood where she lived was, at the time of her loan, just starting to be gentrified.
I'm sure that they gave her that exorbitant loan because they knew she'd default and they could get her house for later resale.
The neighborhood is now completely gentrified.
The house was eventually resold for a quarter of a million dollars.
There were 2 other neighborhoods that were gentrified at the same time.
They followed the same plan.
Force out the poor black & white folk and install a hell of a lot of hipster, upscale white folk.
The impetus for one of those gentrifications involved Google opening a division there.
So publicly Google supports BLM & censorship of those nasty racists & all of that other neat liberal social justice pablum, but privately they move into areas & the subsequent real estate price increases force the po' folk out of their homes. And they install the kind of residents who would have no problem dancing to the tune of the woke movement.
Yet...they've just been the cause of displacing folk who had lived there for generations.
But Jones & his snake oil had to be stomped on?
BTW, banning Jones actually increased his InfoWars audience because the interesting thing about banning things, when you ban them you suddenly make people want to look.
I could go on. Big Pharma as opiate pushers comes to mind.
I'll spare you.
I don't think you're feeling me pal. America was a conspiracy theory until it became a country. Conspiracy theories were with us when our "national unity myth" was written. The Freemasons also come to mind.
They've always been with us.
I'm not defending what Jones says just his MOTHERFUCKING RIGHT TO SAY IT.
Alex Jones' problems started when he became ALEX JONES conspiracy cottage industry.
When he was just a lone boob with a camera, a microphone and a megaphone he could be pretty fucking ballsy. He went after right & left alike.
Once he became a nonstop stream of daily videos, those videos required content. That's when he started pitching everything against the wall hoping something would stick.
That's when he started on the road to becoming a complete parody of himself.
That's when he became funny, although unintentionally so.
And he was approached by the media as a joke through Bush, who he criticized, through Obama, who he criticized, right up until he aligned himself with Trump. Then the media's attitude made a cute 180.
Now I haven't looked at Jones in years, but I do know that BANNING HIM MADE HIS AUDIENCE INCREASE.
Maybe you missed that bit as you frothed in self righteous ecstasy.
So your plan to protect the "Conspiratards" from themselves & protect society from the "Conspiratards" seems to be a dismal failure.
The same thing will happen with QAnon.
Until Trumpadoodle, the media approached "Conspiratards" as a huge fucking joke. Only recently have they raised "Conspiratards" to boogeymen needing censoring.
It's quite a curious phenomena.
Y'see I'd postulate that the media has been freebasing fear & then selling its self righteous junkie liberal clientele this toxic stew knowing full well it would huff it like glue. There's nothing like fear to bunch a liberal's panties while simultaneously making his libido quiver.
The interesting thing about fear is it requires an object. As Paul Valery said, "We hope vaguely; we fear precisely."
Trump was that object. And like those nifty one hop rules that come with those neato FISA warrant, everyone around Trump became suspect and possible fear bait.
Because if you think Jones was banned to protect "Conspiratards" from buying his snake oil, you're daft.
I could direct to a number of websites that sell the exact same shit.
Personally I like it when some boob overdoes the colloidal silver & turns into a big blue Smurf. It's funny.
In conclusion I'll leave you some H.L. Mencken quotes.
Luckily what he says about free speech will be remembered.
Sadly your opinions will fade.
Like farts.
“The danger in free speech does not lie in the menace of ideas, but in the menace of emotions. If words were merely logical devices no one would fear them. But when they impinge upon a moron they set off his hormones, and so they are justifiably feared. Complete free speech, under democracy, is possible only in a foreign language. Perhaps that is what we shall come to in the end. Anyone will be free to say what he pleases in Latin, but everything in English will be censored by prudent job holders.”
– H. L. Mencken; Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 18, 1929
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
― H.L. Mencken
Your house is on fire and you're thoroughly pissed off at the kid who dropped his ice cream cone on your lawn. Are you even paying attention?
So you have a social circle comprised of credulous dipshits and it makes you MAAAAAAAAD as hell that they're credulous dipshits and you're just not gonna take it anymore goddamn it.
I bet your sphincter puckers every time you see Alex Jones sputtering and spewing in apoplectic rage from outside of the jail cell you wish he was in.
I bet his bank account really bloodies your bologna.
Sounds like a rough life.
I'd offer you a crying towel but...ummm...this is the internet.
You could always fly down to Texas and park yourself outside of Jones' compound and stick your tongue out at him every time you see him.
Might work.
I was wrong about you. You're not just another whiny liberal with your panties bunched up to the backside of your uvula, you're also a fierce internet warrior for truth, justice & the American Way.
So it must really bug you that no one seems gives a shit.
Maybe you should try this line on your credulous rube pals:
"Conspiratard narratives are part of the atomization of culture, the rise of resentment and the dis-integration of the national unity myth."
You seem to like this one. You've used it here a few times.
Hell, it convinced me.
I swear, on a stack of The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion, that I will never ever ever look at another Conspiratard narrative again.
So help me Jim Marrs.
Happy?
There are some extremely vile, toxic offshoots of the leftist conspiracy machine (known to be $100sbillions/yr) that MSM viewers don't usually know about such as Russiagate, Ukrainegate kookery mixed with crappy impeachment product marketing and rewarmed new age TDS gobbledygook.
So there is a real danger to vulnerable people ( including clueless white kids) being psychologically manipulated by toxic conspiratard narratives. .......
Wow, huge assumptions there. So tell me, who many times have I listened to Alex Jones? Huh? Don't have a clue, do you- just wild ass guesses.
Try none- never once have listened to him.
This is the United States- full of loonies. Watch MSNBC or CNN- you'll get a front row seat to a whole studio of them. Listen what comes out of any Senator's or Representative's mouth. Listen to the explanations for world-wide wars or surveillance, justifications for wholesale destruction of the natural world. I could go on and on. Go to another country and people don't act this way.
Opposed to double standards? You live by them.
You know, you might have something there now that I think about it. The insane part, I mean. Thanks for the diagnosis- whadda I owe yah, Doc?
I've been railing against censorship of, by, and in the media since my days at the SF Chronicle, if not before.
The evolution of U.S. media outlets as little more than mouthpieces of the state, dissembling disinformation that suits a power structure inclusive of neoliberals, neoconservatives, and the 1% served by both, is a sickening betrayal. It's not a partisan endeavor per se, it's one that sometimes seems to exist just because it CAN exist - the ultimate tell of corrupted power.
When the NYTimes/WaPo et al, sold us the pack of lies that took us to war in Iraq, that was neither left nor right, after all, democrats and republicans lined up to fund the war and feather their respective states (recall Hillary's little nest egg she brought home for funding the war).
Some years later objective seekers of truth and information sat horrified at a mute media that never uttered a negative word as President Obama drone warred the death of hundreds of thousands around the world.
In 2019, Tulsi Gabbard had to sue Google for unfair searches and search blocks.
And the entirety of 2020 has been nothing but one lie after another bolstered by repetition and protected by omitting corrections, truths, and contrary realities. From never letting a good panic go to waste to revising the history that was less than 6 months old, narratives arose to further the media establishment's credibility that had been so profoundly eroded over the last several decades (traced back to the original Gulf War, imo). New media climbed into bed with old media and the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue to create a Potemkin America that existed to deliver a Phoenix of social engineering and virtue signaling.
Fair became foul, foul became fair, and logic and proportion fell sloppy dead.
But hey - at least the Orange King's on his head...right?
«as President Obama drone warred the death of hundreds of thousands around the world.»
That's rather an understatement: GW Bush, BH Obama and D Trump have all boasted about the number of DoD/CIA death squads that abduct, torture, eliminate "enemies of America", whether USA citizens or foreigners, around the world, working from "kill lists" approved by the president. Obviously that is not just drone hits in the third world, it is much more extensive than that.
And it is not just complete silence or deferential reporting of such achievements, there is an earlier article on this site listing other topics that Matt Taibbi thinks are kept under silence in the main media.
That is an incredibly well written and articulate statement. Thank you.
«democrats and republicans lined up to fund the war and feather their respective states»
Here is my usual quote on the politics of that from the notorious trotskyst mouthpiece :-), "The Financial Times", march 10th 2006:
«But is clear leaders of both parties lack the confidence to challenge the mood of xenophobia that exists outside Washington. Instead they are fuelling it. In some respects the Democrats are now as guilty of stoking fears on national security as the Republicans. Their logic is impeccable. A majority of Americans believe there will be another large terrorist attack on American soil.
Such is the depth of anxiety that one-fifth or more of Americans believe they will personally be victims of a future terrorist attack. This number has not budged in the last four and a half years. [...] Mr Bush has consistently received a much higher public trust rating on the war on terror than the Democrats.
Without this -- and without the constant manipulation of yellow and orange terror alert warnings at key moments in the political narrative -- Mr Bush would almost certainly have lost the presidential race to John Kerry in 2004. [...]
In other words, the Democrats have found an effective way of neutralising their most persistent electoral liability: they are out-Bushing Mr Bush. It is easy to see why key Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, have adopted this strategy.
It is easy also to see why their Republican counterparts are following suit. As Peter King, the Republican representative for New York, said last week: "We are not going to allow the Democrats get to the right of us on this issue."
This left Mr Bush holding the candle for the left, as it were.»
It's such a consistent and predictable pattern: The censors set a precedent using some fringe far-left or far-right figure that "everyone can agree has got to go" and then they keep expanding their definition of what else is "fringe" outward until eventually it encompasses any alternative and independent media sources. I'm not a Trotskyist (although I've enjoyed the WSWS' critique of The 1619 Project), but when it comes to free speech everybody's got to present a united front regardless of political differences or else it's not really a "right." (The only exception to free speech should be that which literally is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action," as outlined in Brandenburg v. Ohio.)
it's almost as if adding voices enables a more multi-dimensional understanding of the issue.
There were no search platforms in the years before the Internet. In some places there was Samizdat, in others reading rooms, people subscribed, went to the library (although not everything there), organized special collections, put up posters. For the most part one can still bookmark sites. Dependence on search engines or platforms like twitter, FB will eventually destroy broad understanding of everything. Meanwhile, look at this well done special collection--Kate Sharpely: https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/
Politically, I agree with almost nothing from the Trotskyites.
But so what?
They have every right to say it - and I have enough confidence in my views to argue it out with them in the world of ideas and let the best ideas prevail.
What I find unfortunate is Damon's inability to see the possibility of cooperating with conservatives to build a pro-free speech coalition. Even while Big Tech and the Democrats are working to silence his voice, he seems more interested in smearing anyone to the right of Castro as a "fascist" than he does in truly defending free speech on principle.
Right; this is what free speech is all about, and what the Machine LOATHES and is actively trying to suppress and control.
Fuck the Machine.
Exactly right. I disagree with Roger Waters on almost everything politically, but free speech is something much greater than specific policies. Human rights die when free speech goes down the drain.
Not a huge fan of, "You should support this because it might help you." It's like, "You don't like racism? But let me explain how it could help you personally." A pretty shallow argument.
If a person can't see that free speech is a good thing, and that controlling "free speech" destroys free speech, well, are they even worth persuading?
that's the most ridiculous example ever.
Actually nobody, there are simply no statistically relevant portions of the United States population that supports racism. none.
that's the problem. The ACLU and SPLC have no natural racists to target, so they working as hard as they can to create em.
meanwhile the rest of us have to live in the swamp those creeps keep manipulating to get money, power and votes.
It's disgusting.
Just for the record: "nobody" does not equate to "no statistically relevant portions."
I don't disagree with your point, but let's keep it precise.
Ok. no statistically relevant portions
I saw this happen with my Google query of "Sweden COVID cases" It use to take me to the WorldoMeter page, as I wanted to compare Sweden's highly criticized approach versus other countries. But as Sweden's numbers went down, and started looking "better" - Google stopped showing WorldoMeter and instad showing Critical Media articles . NOTE: I am all for taking all precautions - as long as the populous is informed. The lack of info and even censorship is what leads to conspiracy.
Moved to DuckDuckGo - much different results - more accurate. Simple example - search on Google and DuckDuckGo "Denmark COVID protests".
These companies are sinking themselves - moving away from them is trivial. Ask IBM, MySpace, Yahoo, SnapChat.
Ditto Duckduckgo!
"The real target of censorship is always the left." This is an unserious position, which supports the majority idea that this is an unserious movement. The problem with socialists - not the "Democratic Socialists who uncomfortably brush off Bernie's "We need a revolution" grandstanding as meaning something other than an actual revolution, but rather, the people who know enough to take him literally - is that they seem to have zero interest in finding friends anywhere else but in their enlightened cliques. I have conversed with a handful of true believers with whom I share a fundamental concern that the mainstream U.S. media is brazenly misinforming the public. Yet they refuse to see how conservatives, who have suffered from media bias for a lot longer than 2017(!), may be an ally in the fight against bias and censorship, because we're all "fascists." If that's how you feel, fuck off.
Herd immunity is not based on pseudoscience. It’s what naturally stops a pandemic or epidemic. Why can’t the left, with a few exceptions, admit the that the response to covid has been totally disproportionate & is being used to destroy small businesses & make people slaves to corporations & big government? Contact tracing is unlawful & turns healthy people into some kind of bio threat. So disappointed in how so-called progressives are advocating for Big Pharma,censorship & mass surveillance.
"So disappointed in how so-called progressives are ... "?
Have you lost your mind? Progs are no different from Conservatives, Liberals, etc. It is all a pursuit of power. Progs destroy small biz and make people slaves to the Elect so they can be controlled and the few rule. They do the same with "climate change" (f/k/a Global Warming, etc.). No different from other pursuits of power. The few control, the sheep suck up based on whatever those sheep think they see as truth. It ain't truth, it is just a path to power. For the few. That is Wall Street in a nut shell, Stalinism in a nutshell, etc.
Herd immunity is a real thing, but costs are exacted in getting there, sometimes heavy costs. You may not think that a quarter million dead is a heavy costs, but we aren't over this yet. (If you think that coroners around the country are being ordered by Federal tyranny- or even slipshod and biased protocols- to stamp "covid" as the cause of death for every deceased person with a diagnosis of infection, you're just plain wrong. That's a baseless claim. The coroners and physicians aren't doing anything different than what they've traditionally done with influenza deaths- determine the primary critical factor, and document it as the cause.)
SARS-Cov-2 is the first major communicable virus pandemic since the 1918 influenza epidemic. There was no sure way at the outset to determine how severe the illnesses would be. Everything was a guess, and if there were a few wrong guesses made, that's inevitable. The medical science is evolving. I pay attention to the people who know what they're talking about in that regard, the same way I listen to my auto mechanic. There are more unknowns in the first example, but they're the people who know how to figure out the answers. I'm not about to gainsay them based on some late-night cram sessions of Internet surfing.
"Healthy people" infected with covid without active symptoms are in fact "some kind of bio threat", similar to Typhoid Mary. (Look up the Wiki entry. Among other things, you'll find that the "individual rights trump everything else" entitlement attitude held by all too many Americans didn't just begin in February 2020.) And yes, contending otherwise is pseudoscience.
«Herd immunity is not based on pseudoscience. It’s what naturally stops a pandemic or epidemic.»
That's right, but two big things matter a lot as to how herd immunity is achieved:
* Whether it is achieved entirely "naturally" or by vaccination.
* How many deaths are incurred before it is achieved.
«Contact tracing is unlawful»
Infecting other people is a also unlawful and a crime if done deliberately, it is like body assault, just like hitting them with a car. The state accordingly put preventive restrictions on the ability to drive, like being certified to know how to drive safely.
The question is whether restrictions should be preventive, like testing for the virus or testing for knowledge of driving, or not. In the case of very widespread risks where redress is difficult preventive restrictions are very common as part of the rules of social living.
Julia N, “herd immunity” is not going to stop this pandemic with any surety at all. Instead, this virus will likely become endemic and circulate throughout the world and pop up in small epidemics for several years to come. Herd immunity in this case, with this virus, is folly at best, and murderous at worst. Tens of millions of Americans are in vulnerable groups and sub-groups. We can’t possibly protect them. They need to work, so many of them.
Anyone around when the Internet was created knows that that Google and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technology killed the ability of mortals to find useful information on the Internet. We don't have to know about all the subterfuge going on in the SEO algorithms to know that they suck, big time. The basic problem is that the algorithms are designed to make money, not help people find useful information. There, said it.
Unquestionably. A claim easily proven simply by using a keyword combination like [ dmv + registration ]- which will yield a list of every click-through site to offers of auto insurance in the English-speaking world, before you access your state's Department of Motor Vehicles.
ya, remember that when the whiz kids at Google one day started saying "Google has become the evil we once resisted." It was like the company got turned out to the dark side. It was horrible to watch. They died from the inside out.
The most ominous turn is the ascendancy of Eric Schmidt and his minions- see https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
It's worth noting that there's so much confusion over terms of ideology in the US that most conservatives and Republicans draw no distinctions between Democratic Party governor Andrew Cuomo, Google chief Eric Schmidt, and Naomi Klein, the author of the article warning about the surveillance state paradigm that Cuomo and Schmidt appear to be endorsing and collaborating in developing.
Andrew Cuomo is pretty much a mainstream establishment Democrat, head of a state with a large population that includes a city with a high population density, and disposed toward big-government solutions.
Eric Schmidt is a Silicon Valley billionaire who probably thinks of himself as a Promethean social progressive with benevolent liberal values, who'd just happen to benefit from the implementation of a surveillance state in order to, you know, nudge society in the direction of his preferred ideas.
Naomi Klein is the author of Shock Doctrine, a scathing indictment of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism as historically promoted by both Democrats and the Republican promoters of globalist free-market economic values. She's definitely on what I'd call "the undifferentiated Left"- I'm not sure of her precise ideological views, but she's no knee-jerk statist. As the article link demonstrates, Klein values liberty and privacy over attempts by the State to use technological power to impose order and conformity. She certainly is a courageous, articulate, and intelligent social critic. We need more of those, no matter their political leanings. It's the information values found in the content that's important, not the labels that are so easily stuck on people and their views.
As I read (for the umpteenth time today) about the 1619 project’s claim that the Revolution was an insurrection to defend slavery, it just occurred to me — and fine, call me slow if I’m the last one to think of it:
Could this race-is-everything aspect of the worsening culture war— which is most certainly encouraged by the ruling elite — be an effort to discredit our governmental system to the extent that we dispense with things like, oh I dunno, our Constitution? If it’s all based on evil racism, let’s throw the whole thing out.
Granted the Constitution is seeming more and more toothless these days (even the ACLU is firmly in the censorship camp) but the First Amendment is one of the only tools we have left.
«the 1619 project’s claim that the Revolution was an insurrection to defend slavery»
That was certainly a motivation by *some* of the constituencies, another motivation by probably a larger number was that the english were limiting expansion into the indian lands to the west, where many americans wanted to ethnically cleanse them and take them. Supporting the American Revolution there were all sort of constituencies, several of them not entirely respectable from the point of view of our times.
«to the extent that we dispense with things like, oh I dunno, our Constitution?»
As that guy say, it is "just a piece of paper". Sometimes it gets enforced. This has been a problem for *centuries* in the USA. Here are two examples from Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America", 1834, which illustrate a saying that I found reliable, that your actual rights depend on your popularity:
«I said to someone who lived in Pennsylvania: "Kindly explain to me how, in a state founded by Quakers and celebrated for its tolerance, free Negroes are not allowed to exercise their civil rights. They pay their taxes; is it not fair that they should have the vote?"
"You insult us," he replied, "if you imagine that our legislators committed such a gross act of injustice and intolerance."
"Thus the blacks possess the right to vote in this country?"
"Without any doubt."
"So, how does it come about that at the polling-booth this morning I did not notice a single Negro in the crowd?"
"That is not the fault of the law," said the American to me. "It is true that the Negroes have the right to participate in the elections but they voluntarily abstain from making an appearance."
"That is indeed very modest of them."
"It is not that they are refusing to attend, but they are afraid of being mistreated. In this country it sometimes happens that the law lacks any force when the majority does not support it. Now, the majority is imbued with the strongest of prejudices against the blacks and the magistrates feel they do not have enough strength to guarantee the rights which the legislator has conferred upon them."
"So you mean that the majority, which has the privilege of enacting the laws, also wishes to enjoy the privilege of disobeying them?"»
«A striking example of the excesses which the despotism of the majority may occasion was seen in Baltimore during the war of 1812. At that time the war was very popular in Baltimore. A newspaper opposed to it aroused the indignation of the inhabitants by taking that line.
The people came together, destroyed the printing presses and attacked the journalists' premises. The call went out to summon the militia which, however, did not respond to the call. In order to save those wretched fellows threatened with by the public frenzy the decision was taken to put them in prison like criminals.
The precaution was useless. During the night the people gathered once again; when the magistrates failed to summon the militia, the prison was forced one of the journalists was killed on the spot and the others were left for dead. The guilty parties, when standing before a jury, were acquitted.»
I’m not denying what you say. In fact, you and I seem to agree that the Revolution was much more complex than as portrayed by the 1619 project. We also agree that “bad stuff happens “ and no government perfectly addresses that.
In fact, though, part of the motivation for the Revolution was to enact an Enlightenment experiment. The goal was to have a really radical, improved form of government which would serve “everyone” (back when a radical’s view of everyone meant white property-owning men).
There are many things I dislike about our nation’s history, especially when viewed through my 21st century lens, just as I suppose 24th-century people will look back on us and consider us completely ignorant and backward and wrong in many important respects, which we are currently blind to.
Nevertheless, credit where credit is due, those who created this new experimental government built in mechanisms for progress and change so that more people can participate than white property-owning men. Unfortunately they were not able to anticipate such notions as Corporate Personhood, nor that Money is Speech, so our system of government has completely left our control and placed it increasingly in the hands of an obscenely wealthy few, who unfortunately don’t have the degree of enlightened self-interest necessary to see where we are headed. If they want to end up in a society with gated guarded compounds for them, and favelas for the rest of us, they’re doing everything right.
The Founders Enlightenment experiment was cool and noble and with a few important tweaks could be made more functional again. Right now it’s a mess and it’s not working. I say, it’s better to try to fix it than to let lazy thinking dictate that we throw it out (and replace it with what exactly?)
Both of these linked articles -- this one, and the one above about the bridge -- are absolutely amazing! Thanks so much for sharing them. I'd love to hear about anything else you find interesting -- how's that for a vague request?
As a late comment, the "bridge" thing is a theme in relatively recent philosophy, in particular Chaim Perelman in the 1950s-1960s argued extensively that while cartesian rationality does not apply to many topics, leaving those topics to mere irrationality is not necessary, because in between one can use "rhetoric", intended as the discipline to develop well built, persuasive arguments.
«the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s effectively killed off most of the "original" Constitution by creating a vast bureaucracy»
I have now read the article out of curiosity and it is well written with a content that is quite silly, and in some points utterly ridiculous in particular the claim that "It made white people a political reality in the United States in a way they had never been". HAHAHAHAHAHA!
The rest of the article boils down to the claim that the laws that created that "totalitarian informant bureaucracy" are undemocratic because a majority of voters are against them even if they never vote to replace them with other laws. Or the claim that even if a majority is for them applying them to the minority is wrong and states and individuals that are against those laws should be able to opt out.
Consider this example:
«But say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your seven-year-old son is being taught about “gender fluidity” in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this. [...] “Sorry,” you ask, “when did I vote for this?”»
The answer to what question is either: "No democratic majority voted for that", or "The democratic majority voted for that and you lost the vote". The first claim is unbelievable: there have been both Democratic and Republican majorities since 1964, and none of them have repealed those laws, because both Democratic and Republican politicians want to be re-elected by the majority.
As to "you lost the vote", calling "totalitarianism" the principle of majority-rule is rather weird. Even more so the suspicion that "taking your voice away from you taking your vote away from you is the main goal of these rights movements".
Being in the minority in a democratic vote does not mean taking your voice and vote away, it means accepting defeat or fighting to change the opinion of others until your voice and vote become a majority.
Now there is a honest argument to be made about the "dictatorship of the majority" and it was discussed in A de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" already in 1834, but that is quite a different line of reasoning from Caldwell's article.
We only use DuckDuckGo for searches. It is non-partisan, does not censor, and does not store your past searches to put ads on your new searches.
I just searched for "WSWS" and the first 7 results were for the World Socialist Web Site (one of them is for their Facebook site, one for their YouTube site and one for their Wikipedia page) The 8th is for their rating by the Media Bias Fact Check site. Also, right under the top result are three links to recent articles on their site.
Just after them comes the Western Society for Weed Science
DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its search back end. Not surprisingly, the same search on Bing provides similar results. My opinion on Google is quite simple. Use anything other than their products whenever and wherever you can.
Thank you for this information.
I used to use DuckDuckGo, but https://metager.org/ is my go-to these days.
Just to clarify, the issue is when you search for something that the site has written hundreds or thousand of articles on like “Leon Trotsky” or “US Imperialism” the wsws is buried several pages down in the search results. If you include “wsws” when you search it’s a different story. In other words unless you are actively looking for their articles it’s unlikely you will find them.
Hopefully everyone reading this stopped using Google in favor of DuckDuckGo long ago. Any other suggestions for search engines would be most welcome.
Google returns better porn
I mean, don't get me wrong, I feel guilty about it .. but better is better
It points you to things that are not on the major porn sites?