Yes, the government is helping crack down on text messages and Facebook posts, but not to worry. At least your private thoughts are safe, right? Not so fast, found filmmaker Matt Orfalea
The fascism accusation never fit Trump. You could call him a number of things that weren’t good but he wasn’t a fascist. What you describe here is classic fascism. How can educated liberals not see it.
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
I agree. I believe what may be happening is that many people are not discussing their actual views at this point, out of fear of cancellation. People are rightly afraid that questioning of anything associated with "Left" automatically means "Right", and since this is a "prepare to cancel" indicator, they are silencing themselves.
At a recent small party of my neighbors, a woman from China brought up the issue of how we are no longer to speak freely about many topics, for fear of being misunderstood, losing friends, or even potentially fired, and how reminiscent this was of her experiences during the Cultural Revolution. I was somewhat shocked that she raised the issue, but was completely amazed that all of my neighbors opened up about feeling exactly the same way. It was an amazing and healing experience for everyone, and some of my neighbors later expressed a lot of gratitude that she actually took a chance to open this topic. I think this is a good way to fight this burgeoning fascism, by trying to talk about it openly with others in real life.
Family get together of a bunch of old hippies and younger Democratic voters. Again, this subject came up and everyone agreed that the current "liberal" climate was becoming very totalitarian. If they are going to correct our text messages over the virus, how long before they are correcting all of our non-DNC platform opinions? Will I be able to text my friends Guillotine gifs without winding up in jail?
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
💯 It is frustrating when words with very specific meaning become empty slurs. This is how fascist structures and tendancies can be fostered based on the fact that they don't "feel" fascist.
It is frustrating. The incorrect application of a word such as fascist does a lot of harm. It keeps us from connecting with each other and identifying the real issues. As I said there are a lot of things one could call Trump and just because one or two of them have some overlap with fascism does not make him a fascist. Maybe it has nothing to do with being educated but rather being intellectually lazy. Not sure. I know a lot of people wanted to say he was like Hitler and since he was like Hitler this must mean he was fascist. What a intellectual lazy logic. Good grief. A charismatic leader who is doing things that you think are bad does not make him or her a fascist
Fascism is a melding of government/corporate control of We the People. Jen Psaki made that crystal clear when she said a team from The White House! was working with Facebook to stop “misinformation”. Then Biden had to say “they’re killers!” Then Zuck sent a letter to Biden demanding a retraction of that crack etc.
This is squarely in our faces.
I left Facebook about four years ago after I witnessed what happened to Trump with the FBI spying and lying and watching MSM’s heads exploding. No time for that B.S. arguing.
Now I wonder what would happen if I went back and posted the FLCCC (Dr. Kory and Dr. Marick etc.) website that has a preventative protocol against Covid-19 AND the treatment protocol should one get Covid-19 (includes Ivermectin and Fluvoxamine)?
I am too old to play censorship games with fascists.
Well, except for now regularly “texting” friends disparaging messages about the jabs and Biden’s door knockers.
I just want to see if the DNC is paying attention.
Read Dave McGowan’s book “Understanding the F Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion” 2001.
Exactly. More to the point, such meaningless slurs are an essential requirement for any budding totalitarian ideology: a few simple words and catchphrases for the rabble to chant. You remember the sheep in 1984 surely! This time round we can thank our work brethren for the degradation of language. The irony is, education has been dumbed down so much in the US that the people (mis)using words like fascist actually think they're quite intellectual.
I agree. I find Trump vulgar, abrasive and insensitive. But I think calling him a fascist and using tactics against him that fascists have used in the past (surveillance of his campaign, censorship) is problematic.
Noam Chomsky, at one time, gave a good indicator of fascism when he said that there were 2 stances to take on free speech, you're either for it or you're against it. If you're against it you are a fascist.
Then Trump happened, Chomsky had a massive brain fart & jettisoned all of that nice "defend speech you don't agree with" nobility from his brain.
I think his last interview ended with "String 'em up. String 'em all up."
Well I wouldn't put too much store by Chomsky. An illustration of his intellect is that he was a big fan of Hugo Chávez, who once decreed that all TV stations broadcast his interminable speeches.
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
As I wrote earlier, pointing out how the mind control and ''depatterning'' happens through the media and socially engineered politically correct environments should probably be emphasized, especially with those who have forgotten their liberal values... Most of the brainwashing techniques (which are obvious once one recognizes them) all depend on the target or audience not realizing that a given set of suggestions is being made. From the media amplification of certain simplified no-nuance messages i.e. ''Stay Home. Save Lives'' (the only alternative being leave your house and murder people) to the pseudo-scientific ''most experts agree'' and ''the science says'' narratives, these are all various appeals to group think disguised as scientific and legitimate arguments. The statements are designed to herd people and induce a herd mentality, rather than appeal to reason. Just pointing out that such things exist might be enough to break the spell for a good number of people...
It's believed that people are such stupid malleable blank slates that they can just write whatever they want into people's minds, or just add more lipstick. However, people may not be as stupid as these misanthropes, oligarchs, and cynical social engineers believe they are...
I agree. We are clearly in an era of unbridled propaganda, and there is ample evidence that truth and free speech are no longer a priority (to understate the severity) in the education system, the media, politics, corporate governance, or any other significant institution I'm aware of. But I'm hopeful that more people are aware of this than they are letting on, because otherwise, we are truly heading straight for the cliff.
Disagree somewhat. I think the US has been a propaganda spewing machine my entire life. I think most ads have always been used to simultaneously sell & social engineer. Most of what is thought of as "success" in this country can be directly attributable to marketers & advertisers. I think people on the right are only noticing this because they're the ones that social engineers are now trying to social engineer out of existence.
For example, take any make up ad. It usually ends with some model or celebrity telling their target audience that "You deserve this," which sounds like some empowering statement about a woman's worth when what it's really saying is, "You deserve to give us your hard earned cash for this product because if you really deserved it we'd give the damn thing to you for free."
As far as "breaking the spell" I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Advertising is a billion dollar industry that no company or government would use if it didn't work and work well.
I understand what you're saying, but I guess my point is that in truth, it takes A LOT, an unimaginable amount of effort and resources, to maintain the kind of artificial environment that captures most people's psyche. And there come those times in history, where the veil is suddenly lifted. As you pointed out, we are talking about billions and billions, mass media outlet after mass media outlet, all blaring the same nonsense day and night in order to uphold a very carefully controlled narrative.
I think these substack pages alone are a major thorn in the establishment's game because they are independent. Taibi, Greenwald and company really do say what they think. It's a major threat.
When someone comes along and starts making a more nuanced argument, all of a sudden, the very carefully controlled narrative and body of curated information comes into question, or suddenly becomes undermined. I'm not saying it's easy, but suffice it to say that it really takes a lot of effort and unimaginable resources to maintain the kind of highly artificial vapid cultural and psychological environment that people live in.
We should always be poking fun at it, demonstrating how the system perverts innate human tendencies and natures, but also having a discussion about what these higher tendencies and natures are, and the myriad ways in which they can be perverted.
As Brigadier John Rawlings Rees (a high level Tavistock pschiatrist and social engineer) once stated, "winning wars is not about killing, it's about destroying the enemy's morale while maintaining one's own.''
Think about that. Those who really obsess and care about controlling the general population understand that real warfare, sophisticated warfare is not anything that happens on a battlefield, it's actually the realm of culture, media, and it's about keeping people demoralized and pessimistic. That's literally the key component, keeping people demoralized, creating the perception that everything is too far gone, that nothing can be done. That's seen as one of the most effective and powerful weapons to enforce conformity and passivity in a population.
Imagine the flip side: imagine if people recognize that it's not true, that the fight isn't over, and that in fact most of the Wall Street, WEF, City of London institutions are actually bluffing, and that their zombie banking system is really at an end. Most of the assets they hold really are just worthless toxic paper. And it could easily be cancelled.
Well I did say that I only somewhat disagreed with what you said.
In my opinion the US propaganda machine never stops running. the only thing that changes is the political party it favors as propagandists. During the run up to the 2nd Iraq War Fox, specifically Hannity & O'Reilly, were constantly labeling anyone against the war as being un-American, terrorist lovers, terrorist enablers, in bed with terrorists or just outright terrorists.
Take out the terrorist & insert Russia & you have the Democrat MSNBC CNN response to Trump. Same shit different day.
If you asked most diehard Trump hating liberal Democrats if they knew they were essentially following the same script that Republicans used against them a few short years ago, they would deny it. I think they would be entirely incapable of seeing it because they, much like the right in 2003, think they're morally justified. "The right spews hate while we spew facts" would probably be a good description of their mindset.
I think that the people that run this machine are quite smart. They understand what motivates each group & that understanding lets them manipulate so successfully.
With the right they wrap everything in the flag. That flag, whether the right admits it or not, puts most of them in a trance.
With the left they couch everything in social justice terms or PC terms because they know that your average liberal is so completely terrified of being labeled racist or homophobic or transphobic that the easiest way to get them to shut the fuck up is by labeling the guy you want them to hate as a racist or homophobe or transphobe.
What I would be curious to be able to see is an alternate reality where the populist who won in 2016 was Sanders. Would the attacks be rightward led by people blathering on about the America hating Socialist? Would Hillary be the Dem version of Liz Cheney turning on her own party's president?
As Matt has pointed out Hillary & crew were already accusing the Bernie Bros. of racist, sexist behavior & he hadn't even won the election or even the nomination.
In the end, this is globalists feverishly defending their own, very lucrative for them, agenda against any and all critics & opponents.
You’re not wrong, but there is arguably more nuance there. This becomes clear if we zoom out a bit more. Forget the Western unipolar outlook, forget the US is the Center of the world assumption.
The unipolar world is dead.
This propaganda machine and oligarchical financial establishment has largely destroyed itself by destroying its own population. They are presiding over a hoard of zombie banks, staring into a hundred trillion dollar financial black hole, and running a painfully bloated and corrupt military. The more the Western oligarchical establishment tries to encircle Russia and China and try to subvert these nations, the more they will expend the very little free energy they have left. The military is completely bloated and overextended. Their domestic industrial and manufacturing base is gone.
Meanwhile, China has lifted 600,000 people out of poverty. That’s not a minor detail in the world stare gif situation. But again, for the average Western-centric viewpoint, these strategic sea-changes are completely lost on them. They believe US and European unipolar dominance is like a law of nature or something. They couldn’t be more wrong.
So the emergence of a new Eurasian economic paradigm, overtaking the last 3000+ years of Trans-Atlantic cantered civilization is a new reality. Most people in the West don’t even know how to think about this, especially the ruling and “expert” class.
Have you looked at the leaders of the Western military powers. General Milley? These guys are total incompetent jarheads. They are dangerous, but most of that dangerous comes from their incompetence, the belief among some that the Us can win a first strike or limited nuclear war against China or Russia.
The Eurasian powers have largely rejected this decrepit speculative Trans-Atlantic system. Despite whatever individual problems countries like Russia and China have, they are not suicidal and they are committed to the survival of their nations and populations.
Those running the current American system are if anything intent on dismantling the US, and European nations. They are committed to a new technocratic feudal age where in the words of Klaus Schwab, “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”
These powers have spent their lives trying to dismantle the US industrial and scientific base, but the Eurasian nations have largely done the opposite. So don’t kid yourself, the Western establishment is in big trouble, and nothing short of outright fascism will allow them to control the situation for much longer. And a million things could go wrong there.
I don't think you're wrong either and I don't think the US is the center of anything other than its own warped fantasies about being the center of everything. But these fantasies are the fantasies of a ruling class who have been the ruling class for a very long while. Old money, in my opinion, creates generation after generation of people who get farther & farther away from the reality that I know & farther into their own warped fantasies of their own "greatness." When Hillary called the flyover states "deplorables" I think that was a case of the servant identifying with her masters. And I do believe very rich people look at the rest of us as beneath them & very much in need of their guidance.
I remember a Hunter S. article I read years back where he went to some uber wealthy enclave in Florida(?) with the idea of discovering why the children of incredibly rich people aren't doing incredible things. What he found was a group of young wealthy males who were only concerned with getting wasted while using their wealth to con local girls into bed. They knew that, no matter what they did, they'd one day inherit daddy's kingdom.
I think that's called hubris.
I think it's that hubris, that born to rule idea that has transformed America from a nation state into an empire. Nation states can have long lives. Empires, not so much.
I also think that a place like Europe has a fairly recent memory of how hubris almost destroyed them. Germany in particular understands how quickly hubris can turn into hell. The US, on the other hand, has been relatively unscathed by war in these last 2 centuries so it can bluster and blather on & on as if it knows shit when it really doesn't. That may change sooner than anyone wants.
Why wouldn’t you just as easily call him a communist? They would also say you are either with us or against us. Heck that is what the entire anti-racist movement says. Will you call them fascist? That is what the problem is. When you use a word like this in a way that just about any leader or group can be called that by a segment that disagrees with them. I am not arguing in support of Trump (there is a lot a disagreed with and was outraged about he did). My argument is in the application of the word fascist or for that matter racist, sexist, and you could go on amd on
"You either toe our prescribed lines or we ban you."
Trump never subscribed to such ceneorious stuff as that.
_That_'s the " dangerous, fascistic mindset" people of your ilk have done so much to make seem "normal." Your views are a direct and immediate menace to _ANY_ free society.
Trump was out of his league when the “pandemic” hit.
The vast majority of humans genuflect to doctors. “What ever you think doc!”
Even when he got The Rona and was taken to Walter Reed for treatment, he was at the mercy of probably ten different physicians and many nurses and various therapists.
So I can forgive him for caving to Fauci. And I give him credit for bringing in Dr. Scott Atlas (who I believe butted horns with Fauci and as a result was let go).
I still want Trump to tell the world if he was given Ivermectin at Walter Reed. I’m waiting for some intrepid reporter to dig that up.
Ibram X. Kendi: “there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of 'racist' isn't 'not racist.' It is 'antiracist.' ... One either endorses the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist or racial equality as an antiracist." I take it you also believe Kendi has a dangerous, fascistic mindset? Although in his case the charge would be warranted.
Kendi is wrong, so are you, and so is the entire CRT movement. “Racism” is a construct of Western elites. What we are talking about is “Subjugation” and “ethnic and tribal identity.” Black people were not enslaved because of their color. They were enslaved because of their weakness and the corruption of their own continent. Pre-colonial Africa comprised almost exclusively conquest states, with slavery and genocide the norm rather than the exception. These people were not “racists.” The strong exercised their preogatives over the weak in the natural expression of human nature.
One can be “not racist” in that they believe the strong should not oppress the weak, and do not do so themselves. Whether or nor they seek to impose their own view on others who DO believe the strong make their own rules (a useful definition of “anti racism”) does not change their own identity.
This is a woke fallacy. Most ofthe Union who died in the Civil War were not “anti racists”. They were opposed to the rule of the strong subjugating the weak, and were willing to fight to end that oppression in the US. The slaves could have been white, black or purple or even aliens. It was making humans chattel that they were fighting about.
Educated Liberals do see it and speak up about it, e.g. Matt, Glenn Greenwald etc. It’s pseudo-(mis)educated Maoist and Bolsheviks, aka self-proclaimed liberals, who don’t see/understand it.
Because the media spun Trump up into the American Satan, source of all evil, and a critical mass of prominent Americans are willing to sacrifice all of our civil rights to defeat the already defeated. A totalitarian cultural attitude that ironically is driving millions of Americans to the GOP.
I've been strongly left my whole life, but the government "fact checking" my private communications is a red line. I might vote GOP in the next election if the Democrats continue to support this policy.
you could NOT be more wrong. trump was all about privatization, of everything, which sees gov reduced to a tiny enabler of the monopolists. just as biden, obama before him, bush, clinton, ronnie rayguns. neoliberalism, or libertarianism, ssdd, and it is plainly about creating feudal lords to own it all. the US has been fascist for decades, there are no rogues, no outsiders, none get through the gate, if they aren't sufficient pliable. trump was a con, always , always will be, yet the ignorant masses still drink the koolaid of outsider. lol. sure thing buddy. gov authoritarians bad, feudal lord authoritarians good? dafuq?
Lol a “con” is not at all the same as a fascist. Trump was certainly the former. The fact that he was targeted by the intelligence apparatus and their media propaganda arm continually for 5 years, tells you he’s not at all a fascist, but a real threat to their government ministries of power.
China is far more capitalist than the US, Russia has not been capitalist for 30+ years, while the US is a corporate socialism (more polite term for fascism)
China is a mercantile state in that you can make money but you can not own land or other properties like a home. You can live your whole life in a house, even call it your home, but the state - or the CCP - owns it.
I was correcting your analysis of China's economic system. Capitalism offers a means of acquiring real property, facilities, equipment, and of course legal tender.
Mercantilism allows you to profit from trading labor, materials, and finished goods. People mistakenly believed that after China adopted this system they would progress to Capitalism, but the CCP would lose control of the population if they allowed that. Only the 1.4 billion Chinese can free themselves.
The US was formed as a Republic to protect the minority. Democracy devolves into mob rule. We have "democratic" elections but hopeful we will never live in a democracy.
Freedom begins with Speech. Some of us are trying to preserve that freedom. We need people who are educated, and that's why I'm explaining all of this for you.
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.
Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.
Fascists don't let the citizens keep their guns Boris. Your TDS is seeping through. One can call Trump rude, brash, pompous, showboater etc. But calling him fascist just makes you sound like an MSNBC clown.
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
Well, let's see - I read somewhere that Trump offered Assange a deal - a pardon if Assange would reveal the source of the leak of the DNC e-mails. Assange refused - being true to his vow to not reveal sources. Considering that the person, a DNC insider, whose name was briefly mentioned elsewhere as that speculative source, shortly after was killed in a "mugging", a "botched theft" in which nothing was apparently stolen - and the crime has never been "solved" ....
And Julian Assange went on camera and offered a $25K reward for anyone with info about Seth Rich's murder. So in a round-about way, he pretty much let us know that Rich was the leaker.
So, IMHO, this is why no D Pres will ever pardon Assange, why (s)he will drag out the extradition appeal, hoping he will die in a Brit prison - this isn't about outrage over revelation of "State secrets", and they don't give a damn about "press freedom", as Matt's posts make quite clear, nor about "human rights", (ruinous sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela in the middle of a pandemic, e.g.) - this is about revenge ... The only political figure that has been, and still is, a champion for Assange, is the 3rd party '12 and '16 Pres candidate, Jill Stein, who, "as we all know" is a "Putin puppet"
Our current and ongoing "partisan divide" is simply a battle for power between 2 political mafia parties, neither of which give a fig about anything else ...
But, hey what do i know, just another kook with another "conspiracy theory" ...
Hey, anyone who has their own opinion and disagrees with the unbelievable crap propaganda we're supposed to lap up is now a 'conspiracy theorist'. I no longer care if anyone calls me tinfoil hat. I am a proud member of the "Aluminati" - lol.
To tell the truth, I am wondering why no one else who has a substack account has considered this enough to write on it - I think I laid out a pretty good case, it seems rather "obvious" to me - but apparently it is not considered worthy of analysis or comment by any of our "progressive" posters - too silly? or too hot to handle?
There are fascist elements now, and there were fascist elements then. One thing we don't have to worry about, for the moment, is a charismatic strongman in charge. The man encouraged violence from his followers, who were pretty close to half the populace. (From looking at the other responses, many of you probably think it was more than half.) And then you all ask, "How could you not see that...?" How could all of YOU not see that...?
Once the Democrats are finished destroying by politicizing our institutions the population is much more susceptible to a charismatic strongman. Smearing Donald Trump as "literally Hitler" and siccing the FBI, NSA, CIA and DOJ against the leader of the country for partisan political advantage is the original sin that must not go unanswered.
Also, remember, the Dems are fully down with letting the administrative state run the country, which is a true sign of an authoritarian collapse and will open up tremendous vacuums of power. A GREAT example of this is the CDC's illegal "eviction moratorium," which is basically a ruling by fiat by a (rather corrupt I must say) small wing of an obscure branch of government, Health and Human Services, which is partially funded by no other than Bill Gates. This is all public record. This ruling, which was done by fiat, and continued by the CDC's worthless Rachel W. , has destroyed countless Mom and Pop landlords. It's a scandal basically hidden from view--but many lawsuits are percolating up through the lower courts about it. Once the administrative state completely takes over, which has happened all over the country in the guise of "health management" regarding Covid--look out.
I literally couldn't fucking stand Trump. But the Hitler trope became like a comedy routine with the left. Donny was a showman and a conman and I think literally believed nothing that he said, unlike Hitler, who embodied his every word.
I suppose that is one thing you can give Hitler. He was 100% honest about what he intended and never deviated either in word or deed. He was capable of omission, which is a form of lying, I suppose.
And yet, it was not Trump's followers who burned, looted and murdered all last summer, was it? No, those were LEFTIES. BLM/Antifa and assorted other violent idiots. But they are not called 'terrorists'.
As long as you perceive this as a morality contest between politically different segments of a powerless population, they’ve got you by the balls. BLM was symbolic and gained almost nothing. That’s what happens when your movement is immediately commodified. Same story for the 1/6 protestors. Everyone is frothing over gestures and symbols and stochastic bursts of rage, meanwhile nothing improves for anyone because we’re punching laterally instead of upwards.
I actually agree with this. The only problem with this concept is the stupids. You can't get them focused anywhere without the media complex pointing them at some shiny. Or bread and circuses, take your pick.
That’s not punching up, that’s just a personal medical choice that will probably result in many hassles for you. If anything you’re punching yourself. Lol I got the vaccine, despite my skepticism about its rapid deployment, based on odds. Are they going to poison every person on earth? After reading MIT’s in-depth reporting on the vaccines I felt good about getting one, but there are no guarantees in public health. I wear a mask when asked because it requires very little effort and made people feel safe. Masks aren’t worn here lately because our vaccinated population is a strong majority. Proudly refusing to wear a mask doesn’t make you a maverick, just a garden variety pain in the ass.
Oh boy you made the wrong choice. Nope, I'm healthy and haven't had a flu in 35 years, without vaccines. My coworkers who get the vaccines are sick every year. I'm guessing this fall is gonna be a doozy. Yes it is punching up when you resist their experimental poisons, their forced masking and their stupid social distancing. Where as you behave like a branded farm animal.
Speak for yourself. I have always seen the big pic, and realize the PTB set up a Color Revolution here in the US just as they have abroad over and over, to weaken societies. But I will also point out the utter absurdity of equating that laughable January 6th incident with the months-long BURNING LOOTING AND MURDERING BLM and Antifa were allowed to do. There are REAL victims there. LOTS of people harmed, or killed, tons of businesses destroyed. I guess I should just ignore it like Portland's mayor, huh?
You’re still doing it. I know the media lied about both events: BLM and 1/6. I’m not interested in which was “worse” because both were natural outgrowths of a nation in steep decline. The BLM protests were not the murderous riots you seem to think they were, and 1/6 was not a coup like MSNBC wants viewers to believe. You seem to fancy yourself a seeker of the unvarnished truth, yet you’re just parroting the same false bullshit I can hear on Fox News. You are picking a side, which is credulous and pointless. There’s only one thing worth getting angry about, and this ain’t it.
So you missed the murders that happened in CHAZ? Not surprised. There was one death on Jan 6 and that was a victim of over-zealous capitol police. How do you compare the two? Businesses ruined, federal buildings torched, people murdered - antifa and BLM. You probably missed the videos of the cops waving in the 'unruly mob' on January 6th as well. LOL. Have fun stewing in your ignorance. I'm not picking a side (I don't have one) I'm just following real events and calling them as I see them, not through the lens of CNN.
When J. Edgar was wire-tapping for his own giggles, was that fascism? When the Obama DOJ was throwing rhetorical molotov cocktails into Ferguson, Missouri, was that facism?
Spiro ---- Nattering nabobs of negatism. Or something like that. I am old.
I will frame these thoughts on my wall and will try smuggle them to the publisher of our century and a leading free speech advocate -- the noble and selfless Julian Assange whom "e.pierce" hates sooo much.
Nearly incredible and horrible recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated crime horror for six (read slowly - six) full years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
Something I'd also like to point out, basically the 100 ton white elephant in the room, is the incredible fact that one 80 year old blowhard, has-been epidemiologist has basically run the show in this country for the last 18 months, with tremendous help from Big Tech. The same man who I, and a great many very smart people, believe is involved in a massive cover-up of the lab leak theory for the origins of Covid. This cover-up (or at the very least, censorship of the scientific questioning of the lab leak theory) as well as massive and illegal rulings under the guise of having the "utmost of caution," i.e. lockdowns, eviction moratoriums, et al. were all sold through strong-arm tactics by Big Tech and have involved a large swath of censorship, especially of those scientists who proposed the Great Barrington Declaration.
That Harvard's own Martin Kulldorf, a man of the left and one of the most esteemed epidemiologists of the 21st century, would be banned from Twitter for his utterly rational "focused protection" ideas to battle Covid, sends shudders down my spine. Big Tech was leveraged very early on by the Fauci brigade to silence almost all dissent. It's one of this century's biggest, if not THE biggest scandal and has far reaching implications what will be felt for decades. But hardly anyone but libertarians and conservatives are talking about it.
Add to that the near complete and total suppression of information on therapeutic/prophylactic drugs like ivermectin. We've moved well beyond incompetence and into malice. These people know better and are either remaining silent because they're cowards or because they're corrupt.
The Ivermectin thing is another huge scandal. They are corrupt cowards and so, so much more. But it still just amazes me that an incompetent backwater bureaucrat like Fauci (who ever even heard of this guy before March of 2020) can basically rule a country by fiat. This dude LOVES the power; who knew that our "leading" epidemiologists were authoritarian monsters? I couldn't be happier if there were eventual tribunals for these people.
I mean, what was a "mere inconvenience" in his mind (lockdowns) spelt millions of ruined lives, lost jobs and businesses, lost health insurance, lost kids because of the school shut-downs, the list is almost endless. Dr. Fauci is, among a whole host of other pejoratives in my mind, the worst case of what Christopher Lasch once presciently named "The Revolt of the Elites." Lasch could see someone like Fauci coming from a million miles away.
For a moment I thought Fauci was done when the lab-leak hypothesis gained legs, but I was sorely mistaken. The media has gone from refuting the accusation to just ignoring it altogether. Lies of omission and context are the media's go-to way of handling dissent from the narrative.
"Everyone knows why, or at least the obvious reason why: a cheap, safe and effective treatment would torpedo Big Pharma's plans to make $$$illions from their rushed-to-market experimental mRNA treatments. The problem, not buried in the fine print, but nonetheless not widely trumpeted at the time: An Emergency Use Authorization for a medical product, such as the EUA sought by Big Pharma for mRNA gene therapy, cannot be granted if there exists a viable and safe treatment for the disease that the experimental product has targeted:
"FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products...when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives."
There it is: Ivermectin accepted as a treatment, no EUA for mRNA, no Big Bucks for Big Pharma."
If you are talking "classical liberal" than me too. If you are talking the contemporary auth-woke American variety (for which "liberal" is a complete misnomer), count me out.
I believe this should be an object lesson for anyone who believes that our free speech protections are anything but a comforting myth. Next time someone suggests this isn't a totalitarian state, think about that.
"Making this more nefarious is the fact that the government itself has an interest in silencing debate and criticism, as it funded gain-of-function research – and thus might bear responsibility for – the creation of COVID-19. They would make themselves as gods: they gave us a plague and strike us down for blasphemy."
The Biden Administration has only been in place for 6 months, and look how boldly they're already talking and acting.
For you folks on the left, what would you have thought if a spokesman for the Trump Admin just casually mentioned, "Hey, we're going to be monitoring and censoring your private text messages? We're in touch with the social media companies to make sure you don't see or hear things we deem to be harmful? We're doing it all to protect you."
At this pace, what will America be in 3 1/2 years?
But, as they like to say on conservative sites--at least there will be no more mean tweets.
The irony is that you have to show fealty with your Pfizer™ punchcard in order to go anywhere, now, regardless of your personal choice or beliefs. Can't get away from the rapidly expanding social credit system without complying by it.
I'm learning how to build a homestead and looking into Maine to buy land. I figure it'll be too cold up there for anyone to find it worth bothering me. For once I'm not joking.
I was looking at Maine, too. But the cold is daunting... I got 'soft' living in California for 25 years. I'm in Idaho now (along with half of California - lol) but even these mild winters are tough for me.
I am sick of California politics and am really sick of the weather. Every damn day it is sunny. I miss the thunder and lightning storms in Ohio. And the seasons and the quarries and swimming ponds. And normal people.
Storms are really underrated, as are gloomy nights. Southern Cali is nice to visit but I don't understand wanting the weather to stay the same all year round. I'd go crazy.
It's my one edge: I do better in the cold than the heat. Heck, by the time I'm ready, maybe Maine will have the climate that California had when I was a kid.
I am going back to Ohio. DeWine finally did something intelligent. He signed legislation stating that all state colleges must allow students full access whether vaccinated or not.
I already researched it. There is no way a human being can reach Mars, and live. Same with the moon landing, which was a hoax as well. People like to believe it though. Even though 30% of people at the time it happened didn't buy it.
"Same with the moon landing, which was a hoax as well."
That merely identifies you as a person who can't reason effectively. My respect for your opinions in general has just been destroyed by your revelatory comment. You can be a clown if you so choose. No one can stop you.
Just curious: What else about reality do you reject out of hand?
"Impossible" is almost certainly wrong. You'd be much closer with "extremely difficult and expensive barring major scientific advances". But I have zero interest in moving there regardless.
I like how Heinlen's perspective is that no matter how far into the future you go, the Libertarian Elite and Organized Labor are still locked in eternal war... and he's probably correct.
I caveat that I have not read *all* of RAH's stuff, really just the best-known stuff. He's commonly thought of as a libertarian, but I always got the vibe that he sympathizes with the working proletariat -- if not organized labor -- against the elite. He bought Philip K. Dick a typewriter and loaned him money to pay off the IRS. (PKD was broke a lot of the time, as one might expect.)
Money shot in this article: "Isaac Asimov, who knew Heinlein from the mid-'30s on, was convinced that his personal political views were largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time."
I have read everything he ever wrote plus all of the biographies, etc. I would say that he expressed a libertarian streak in many of his books but he started out as a socialist and Democrat in the 1930s (Upton Sinclair).
I think more than anything else, he wanted the state to stay out of the way of people exercising individual agency. He felt that people should act like adults and conduct their own affairs and work things out individually. He frowned on morality police and despised the false sanctimony of organized religion.
He was well aware of the creeping totalitarianism inherent in giving the state too much power and in "Friday", one of my favorite books from his late writing period, he is not kind to California in terms of describing the political situation. IIRC, he mentions excessive taxation as a serious problem (quite prescient as it turns out). He hated bureaucrats and pompous politicians and many of his protagonists lived in armored or secured compounds due to the degradation and corruption of civil order.
A common theme in several books is that when a society gets to the point of requiring ids, liberty becomes a casualty. I think he chafed under the restrictive mores of his era and dreamed of a freer society.
On the other hand, in "For Us, the Living" (written in '38 but published posthumously in '03) I just listened to a scene where the protagonist, who time travels forward 150 years from the 1930s, is sent to be re-educated because he punches someone out of jealousy. Violence is not allowed and psychiatrists are called in to correct his atavistic behavior. No one questions the right of the state to brainwash the protagonist. Conformity to custom is enforced by law.
So, I would say he flirted with quite a few ideologies over the course of his writing. Regardless, I credit him with expanding my universe on a multitude of vectors. He is the first writer who challenged me to think about systems - in terms of governments, infrastructure, and the ways that societies organize themselves. He also made me think about what it actually means to be and live as a free person.
I agree, I've also questioned whether the label fit him, but it speaks to the time when the intellectuals thought about ideology a different way.
I think back then you could still have an ideological stance but still question it and you'd be more respected for that. This ideological/intellectual/informational purity standard we find ourselves locked in has been a long time brewin'.
The irony is that if you care about promoting your own ideology it actually makes you stronger to question it, probe it, find out the weaknesses before opponents can exploit it. It's a form of empathy that makes you have stronger arguments. I've failed to explain this to many wannabe activists in today's world. It's Sun Tzu "know your enemy" shit that they deliberately stay ignorant of that would actually open the door for gaining of ground.
That being said, I think he has really smart ideas that were influential but I never enjoyed reading any of his books aside from the introduction of scientific concepts to storytelling (like in Troopers how a planet without sufficient radiation exposure would become "retarded").
I think we both know that the only reason PKD needed a typewriter was because They snuck into his house and sabotaged his old one 😉
That's very funny Asimov politely suggesting H. was pussywhipped. I guess it makes sense since he was in the Free Love scene which probably had a more Matriarchically structure given the difference of power balance (His Moon society was Matriarchically, IIRC).
This reminds of a Chuck Klosterman passage that I think of time to time, “Whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living.” The Inverse of this is that relationships take dynamic, thinking men and destroy those qualities. I could make a list...
good info. I'm curious if - in the context of this kind of framing - if this means the next (severe) economic rebellion will be delayed or hastened compared to times past.
Whenever I look at what's going on in the US, being that there's a ridiculous concentration of wealth and resources adjacent to working people who are starving, I would think that it should have already happened by now. Obviously the establishment has taken great advantage with idpol in keeping an organized class rebellion at bay, this is a huge factor. But I can see the "individual achievement" mentality as working either way.
On one hand, if you tell people that hard work will make them prosperous but the hardest working can't even afford to live, then you'd think they'd get wise at some point and just smash everything that the Kings and Barons own. What seems to be taking place instead is that over the millenia "They" have just locked down the game to a point where the poor will just tear each other apart for a slightly better seat in Steerage.
I'm not sure i can say i'm a fan, i came to them late and gave them a couple of listens (and liked them a lot.) But these two tunes are probably the only 2 i could name off the top of my head.
Dr. Kory and team are doing more to “protect” everyone over at their FLCCC website than anyone connected to the US government, Big Tech or the MSM are doing!
Personally, I never fell for Maddow. The time that she grilled Michael Moore with a condescending "what were you thinking?!?" tone for being among the many (genuine) progressives who bailed out Assange back around 2010, I wanted put my foot through the screen right where her face was. She's educated enough to know why questioning the bail is massive bullshit, particularly in an obvious international legal railoading. She's a hypocritical shitstain.
I don't necessarily believe that she's indoctrinated because that implies some sort of ideological doctrine she adheres to. Normal people couldn't stand the pressure of being forced to mislead the public day after day. My best guess is she's a sociopath driven only by self interest.
Bottom line is that companies like YouTube, Facebook, and their ilk have become quasi-governmental, basically acting as appendages of .Gov. Disagree with the narrative, no matter how benignly, and “disappeared” essentially. Kids being told to inform on their parents. The list goes on.
BLM, with their flag still flying at various American embassies (!) praises and supports the Cuban dictatorship over the tens of thousands of black Cubans demonstrating, some with American flags(oh the horror!), for their rights. Black Lives Matter only goes so far I guess.
Taken together it looks like to these old eyes the beginning (well, we’re past that) of good old-fashioned Stalinist Soviet Union, and The People’s Republic, to name just the biggest. Mao would be proud.
Censoring science discussion is downright stupid, and only done by those who cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas. I've been spanked on multiple fora for posting that it's a coronavirus that produces respiratory infection and all others have been human-to-human transmissible, but WHO was backing China's lie that it wasn't. Until it did a 180.
Other spank-worthy offenses included posting that six-feet separation was B.S., it was based on 19th century measurements of bacteria-laden droplets indoors and missed the aerosol carrying much tinier viruses 26 feet away; posting that case fatality rate was overblown in the initial models, this was serious but not panic-worthy; posting that two steps could prevent the catastrophe, moving people outdoors and focusing all safeguards on known vulnerable populations. There are many many more, and they've all been proven out. I'm not an idiot, I'm a scientist.
This has already spread to lesser-known fora. I've been kicked out of the politics section of what is now a dying forum run by left-wingers for sharing empirical information about the dangers of hydroxychloroquine (essentially zero); driven out of a discussion forum based on a serialized novel for using the hate-speech phrase "the transgender phenomenon;" been punished on other fora for sharing government data and results of large controlled double-blind randomized trials; this list is nearly endless.
The only thing preventing a Ministry of Truth in the permanent one-party authoritarian state is the filibuster in the Senate. We're fucked.
I’m not a scientist so I don’t know if I am crazy in believing that Relative Risk Reduction has no correlation with reality and that what does, Absolute Risk Reduction, means the vaccine companies have admitted their drugs are no more than 2% effective.
It's true. Just look at the numbers of all the vax trials and one thing really jumps out at you -- how few people actually got sick enough to be counted as a case in the first place.
Go to the article. There are two glaring red flags. If you click on footnote 9 you'll see that he's referencing himself. That is enough to stop reading. If you're continuing to read, see "ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs." This is either false, or a personal opinion absent psychic ability. Ascribing a bad motive to the individual you're criticizing as a substitute for critiquing methodology, selection criteria or analysis is bogus.
Normally, I'd have stopped reading after finding the self-reference, but there's an infinitesimal chance it's a typo. Not so for ascribing a bad motive to the individual you're critiquing. If the motive was self-enrichment or self-aggrandizement or revenge or anything else, only one person knows the motive, and it sure as shit isn't the author of the lancet article. This isn't the first time this year that the Lancet has proven lax in its standards.
Whether he's right or wrong, he's still wrong. I don't trust the analysis of a scientist who references himself, nor of a scientist who bypasses empirical data to go to the ad hominem. My Rating: R. For Rubbish.
"I don't trust the analysis of a scientist who references himself, "...
Really? So you reject Albert Einstein's papers* in which he references and cites his own prior papers? or J. C. Maxwell's, Bohr's, Planck's or Schrödinger's, H. Minkowski's, Bolztmann's, Infeld's, etc.?
E.g. (Volume 2: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909)
When Daniel Everett published his "Aspectos da Fonologia do Pirahã" (1979 Universidade Estadual de Campinas master's thesis) or his "A Língua Pirahã e a Teoria da Sintaxe" (1983 Sc.D. dissertation at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)) whose work except that of a few others on general side issues should he have cited other than his own? He was nearly alone and first in studying and publishing scholarly work on this Amazon tribe's language.
Others (mainly or only other religious missionaries) before Everett had tried to study their language but, before Everett, no body of linguistic studies had been published on them. He was a pioneer in his field. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett#Work)
How about this one? You never answered my question about RRR vs ARR.
“ The same publicly available data, without absolute risk reduction measures, were reviewed and approved by the roster of members serving on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) for emergency use authorization (EUA) of the mRNA vaccines [10]. Ironically, the omission of absolute risk reduction measures in data reviewed by the VRBPAC overlooks FDA guidelines for communicating evidence-based risks and benefits to the public [11]. The FDA’s advice for information providers includes:
“Provide absolute risks, not just relative risks. Patients are unduly influenced when risk information is presented using a relative risk approach; this can result in suboptimal decisions. Thus, an absolute risk format should be used.”
As you've demonstrated, there was no need for self-reference as there is other material in the field. That the author would first go to self-reference remains a red flag to me.
I encountered this years ago on the Dunning Kruger Effect. For two decades almost everything in the field was written, or collaborated on by one or the other or both. As you know, the gold standard is replication of results. For decades no one was ever able to replicate the results, until a team loaded random data into the model. THAT duplicated the results.
If you don't want to address the issue and answer my question just say so. At least that way I can try and find a different scientist to get an opinion on this potentially huge issue that no one is talking about. After your first comment talking about all the times you were right and censored in regards to covid I was hoping you would at a minimum, have an opinion.
OK. Thanks for looking at it. Let’s assume what’s in the paper is true. If they are really using RRR, which the best I have heard it explained is the percentage improvement assuming everyone was infected, would that be better than using ARR which would take into account all the people that are unlikely to be infected?
Number of infections is irrelevant because most have few symptoms or pass on the infection. Number of deaths is worth following, but less important than hospitalizations. Those are the gateway to real problems. As long as few are being hospitalized it's all good on a high level.
The other thing is that criteria for hospitalization are vastly different from country to country. If you see that the US has ten thousand people on ventilators, but Mali only has five, which healthcare system is in worse shape? It would help to know that Mali only has five ventilators in the country. If our hospitals are all 80% full, it would be helpful to know that this is the normal level of occupancy.
AND this is why they wanted so badly to pass the terrorist act they used the Jan 6 event to push. As you will note they called some of Matt O's content 'criminal' - so they are calling us violent criminals for posting things that go against the establishment narrative. The next step is to actually arrest us.
It is unconstitutional. There is clear precedent that defines government assistance in identifying what should be banned, even if carried out by private actor, as a violation of the First Amendment.
You'd have to prove that the government either pressured the private entity to suppress speech, or that it engaged in "joint action" with the private entity to suppress speech. I'd say this most easily looks like "joint action."
But the devil of proof is always in the details. The social media entities may be keeping track of times when they didn't act on a government request, and then argue that they were really making their own judgments.
A hope/belief I have is that there is a case out there right now (not Trump's) being prepared to go into court very soon challenging this BS. I believe that this is so important, so dangerous, a court would be willing to grant injunctive relief, and that it would be on the fast track to the Supremes.
I was taught in law school a century ago that The Court uses a lot of reasons/excuses to not hear a case, but this gets to the most important freedom in our country. This is so cancerous. I think good attorneys could quickly frame a case for the Supremes to take on.
I don't think it is sneaky as much "quiet.". They don't respect us at all, but it's easier if they don't wake us up. During the last election, of course there was a lot of Organizing for America that was going on. Bet you never read a story about it.
It is long-established that police cannot use an agent of the police to do on their behalf what they themselves are constitutionally or legally prohibited from doing. In this case the term "police" is drawn from "police powers," which include the power to pass laws and levy taxes. It's more than technically unconstitutional. It's unconstitutional.
An answer from a practicing attorney (I am not one) would help here. Then again, the people who wrote the constitution weren't all lawyers, were they?
Thank you for this, Matt. People are not seeing the creeping tyranny in our country. The censorship, the illegal changes in voting laws, General Milley ordering troops to attack over the head of a US President, the extended lockdowns, the suppression of information about Covid, and who knows what will be next. Where is the outrage? Are US citizens asleep, distracted, too busy to notice, or simply willing to live with tyranny?
Absolutely, where IS the outrage! This is so odious, so vile. That saying, "We've seen this movie before . . ." Re. the Milley story, we literally HAVE seen it before, it's called "Seven Days in May."
Burt Lancaster is at his best playing the heel. Kirk Douglas is at his best playing the face. It's funny how the vast majority of their careers dictated otherwise, but that's Hollywood.
"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
Can somebody please explain again what was so bad about Trump? He was against Tech amassing too much power. Please explain it as if you’re speaking to a five yr old. I want to know again - in clear language- What was So bad about Trump?
Trump was precisely what everyone SAYS they want to see in a politician: a man no one owns, who owed nothing to Wall Street, unions, the ABA, the AMA or any other special interest.
Yeah, but they said that about Bloomberg too. The kool aid drinkers on the NYT said he didn't have to answer to anybody because he had so much money, it was just between Mike and his conscience.
Right, i would bet the wellbeing of the country on the conscience of the guy who ended up stiffing all of the koolaid drinkers he paid off to post for him. I did listen to Hillary in '16 though, who told me to vote my conscience. So i wrote in Bernie.
beyond the On Paper factor I think it was that Bloomberg lacks any perceivable charisma to me and Trump has a certain amount that evidently appeals to a lot of people. It's weird to say this, but Trump almost has a "best of both worlds" thing going on by having an almost underdog charisma combined with a silver spoon upbringing.
Yea but Bloomberg had the Hillary like "elitism" built in him. Remember how he was talking about the farmers who don't do any special work and anyone can do their work? Trump, despite his flaws, didn't come off as "elite". There's couple videos of him making unplanned stops of his limo, coming out to take pictures with the fire fighters. Similar thing he did when he took his car out to visit the crowd outside the hospital when he got covid. He didn't have to do those things. But he did.
Him as well as his grandfather were hated in NY because despite the money, he didn't talk like the NY elites. He was rude, brash, blunt, politically incorrect. On one hand he was a showboater and exaggerated. On another hand, he would speak bluntly on things like "Putin isn't the only one who's a killer, you think US is innocent?"
Before the elections, reddit (and people) used to praise Trump. Look at this post with 23k upvotes and over 11k comments (Post has since been deleted by reddit).
You do have a point. He had grifters like Gina Raimondo and Stacy Abrams endorsing him. Remember how the DNC bent the debate rules so that he didn't need any small donors, while that rule had already knocked out the likes of Cory Booker? And nevermind the sexual harassment stuff, bad for Trump, ok for Bloomberg. But he was really just in there because the DNC wanted the money, and they wanted anybody but Bernie when Joe was tanking. Glad Warren basically knocked him out of it.
I didn't know about 'Berg's line about farmers, but that's asinine as fuck. I know I could find thousands of farmers brighter than him. You can take Bloomberg out of NYC, but you can't take the NYC snobbery out of Bloomberg. Jackass.
He appears brilliantly designed to create the opportunity that is being exploited now. Were it not for him, and his boorish behavior, the powers that be could not have swung the nation so willingly into a trap.
He was the establishment’s sheep dog, scaring the public into the arms of the butcher. Without him, none of this obviously pre-planned fascism would have been marketable.
That just shows that the "DNC leftists" and everyone who fell for it didn't have any principles in the first place. If your principles get eroded by 1 person you don't like, then they don't exist.
Yeah, but everyone got taken. Trump supporters thought he was some outsider, ignoring the fact that he ran in the same circles and depended on their money too. He was a black flag op of the establishment.
Trump was a total shit show. I have no idea what you are on about.
Consider how he served the establishment you seem to think he was opposing. Their entire fascist move at this point depended wholly on his existence, without which none of this would’ve been possible.
Why don’t you take responsibility?
I don’t support trump, or Clinton, or Biden. The fact that you’re trying to find a hero among that pile of trash puts the burden on you to defend your position.
You make it sound like Media and the citizens don't have any responsibility - or power - in this matter.
I think something you might also want to consider is that Establishment has definitively the most experience attaining and maintaining power. Part of that is being ready for random contingencies and adapting to them on the fly, or figuring out how to. I disagree that they expected Trump to win, and I think it shows in how it took them awhile (nearly four years) just to squeak out a win to depose him. EVEN THEN it required a pandemic to come along they could juice into a universal overreaction in order to tank the economy just in the nick of time for the election.
If it wasn't for COVID, do you seriously think Trump loses? After he INCREASED his minority demo?
Establishment aren't omniscient, it only seems that way because they're good at trying to adapt. It's their greed that gets them into trouble.
Quite simple: Trump was an outsider; couldn't be relied upon to do the "right" thing on key issues. Worse, in spite of his crude manner of expressing himself, he might even tell the truth occasionally; and worse still he seemed to be able to get through to large numbers of people who didn't give a toss about all the run of the mill politicians. But his greatest fault was that he used the tools of Big Tech to do all this.
IMO, for progressives the worst thing about Trump was that he prevented them, both legally and rhetorically, from acting out their totalitarian impulses. And for that, they called him totalitarian.
Trump, despite his flaws, didn't come off as "elite". There's couple videos of him making unplanned stops of his limo, coming out to take pictures with the fire fighters. Similar thing he did when he took his car out to visit the crowd outside the hospital when he got covid. He didn't have to do those things. But he did.
Him as well as his grandfather were hated in NY because despite the money, he didn't talk like the NY elites. He was rude, brash, blunt, politically incorrect. On one hand he was a showboater and exaggerated. On another hand, he would speak bluntly on things like "Putin isn't the only one who's a killer, you think US is innocent?"
Before the elections, reddit (and people) used to praise Trump. Look at this post with 23k upvotes and over 11k comments (Post has since been deleted by reddit).
Trump was totally incompetent, without any convictions, narcist, surrounded with sycophants -- him not pardoning Julian Assange, his strong witness about the immense Russia-gate hoax concocted by Obama-Biden-Hillary -- is a PERFECT illustration of that.
Trump had congress, big business(wall street), the media apparatus, and his own generals against him, all while having to deal with constant impeachment attempts. His failing was getting rid of Steve Bannon who had an actual vision and sticking with the snake Kushner.
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
my first introduction to Mr. Assange's revelatory skills was in Barcelona, Spain 1970. He made records available from several African governments that implicated European-sourced bribery...No surprise..but he (his organization) was adept at infiltrating even the most fascist dictatorial governments (Francisco Franco) We were young, and pre-electronic media...but just as thirsty for the truth. Assange may now have some clinical signs...but his contributions were indisputable, and vital to governmental transparency
Thank you. What is amazing and what fully illustrates that we are dealing with paid security state trolls is the following:
- Even id Julian is high functioning autist There millions of them fully contributing in our societies worldwide), even in that case --- one of their main and universally recognized characteristics is -- they are UNABLE to lie. That makes them "socially awkward"
- Note how CIA trolls intensely try to divert from the immense Assange (or Snowden, or other) immense contribution to our society, they, like with the horrendous recent history with Aristide and Haiti, how they try to deflect to another topic, in this case "mental illness"
Mr. Assange was rumored to be impossible to work with, but genius and incapable of duplicity -- almost naive...these past years must have been grueling...and Central America, Haiti in particular, is rife with bipartisan "crimes" or "policy"... will watch the interview.
Spain in 1970 was restricted, with Cataluna (Catalan) and Vizcaya, Alava and Guipuzcoa (Basque) under severe repression. This was not "pseudo" -- it was real....Mr. Assange used his stealth to reveal the dark sides of many political systems and victims -- a skill that was as dangerous as it was necessary...Thank you
Nearly incredible and horrible recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated crime horror for six (read slowly - six) full years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
Thank you. What is amazing and what fully illustrates that we are dealing with paid security state trolls is the following:
- Even if Julian is high functioning autist (there millions of them fully contributing in our societies worldwide), even in that case --- one of their main and universally recognized characteristics is -- they are UNABLE to lie. That makes them "socially awkward" but invaluable.
- Note how CIA trolls intensely try to divert from the immense Assange (or Snowden, or other) immense contribution to our society, they, like with the horrendous recent history with Aristide and Haiti, note how they try to deflect to another topic, in this case "mental illness"
Sam Harris has some pretty good takes on why Trump is so bad but a lot of it comes down to just personally hating the guy. Harris :
“ There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. If I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. ”
I used to think Sam Harris was so sophisticated, and yet that quote is so incredibly crude and unsophisticated. Childlike, really.
Yeah, Trump is gross. And narcissistic. And orange. And says really weird shit. He makes me wince.
But this left woke totalitarian movement has been obvious for a while. It kept getting stronger even under Trump. And unless you're a complete fool, it was obvious it would go on steroids if Biden were elected. Which it has.
Poor aesthetics vs. woke dystopia. That was the choice. We chose... poorly.
Trump is buffoonish , but he really did know what was ailing the country, he was just terrible at communicating it, and he had literally nobody to work with in congress.
#Resist started the day after his election. He was never more powerful than the wokeys. The absolute personal hatred toward him from 360 degrees was breathtaking. A guy who had never held office couldn't be helped along for the good of the nation. But then, they weren't very nice to Jimmy Carter either.
Well, I respect the difference of opinion. You must have noticed, though, that the media went into conniptions and predicted cataclysmic disaster after just about everything he did. Didn't that get a little silly?
This sounds like someone possessed by their shadow in the Jungian sense. Meaning he's taken everything he doesn't like about himself and projected it on to someone else. I good sign you're being run by your shadow is if you can't think of a single good thing about the object of your hatred. There was a lot of this in the TDS era.
I think like most replies you misunderstand the question, because it is not just "personally hating the guy", but having an extreme disgust at them.
The question is about *over*-reaction, not just reaction, to Trump. The question to me is about this:
* 4 years of pretty much "normal" right-wing presidency, with some changes in intended policy, and small changes in actual policy, and the over-reaction is "like Hitler" and "democracy itself";
* why the gigantic gap between (overrated) "reality" and disproportionately extreme reactions, both personal and political, to Trump?
But both your reactions are just reactions, and similar reactions could be applied to most politicians, e.g. Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz, both of which are despised even by many members of their own parties.
I think that the original "so bad" question seems to be about Trump Derangement Syndrome, those “disproportionately extreme reactions, both personal and political”.
Where are the mass graves with the bodies hacked to pieces? Where are the reports of MAGA-hatter death squads "disappearing" Democratic Party activists? Where are the vast torture camps for leftist academics? Where are the photos of the NYT and CNN buildings taken over by the secret police with the journalists brought out in chains?
I believe there were armed, ununiformed goons in unmarked vans scooping people off the street. But I'm not dumb enough to think that couldn't happen under any other president with the right conditions. Still, there's that.
“Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said he had pardoned Colonel Joseph L. Romano, who was the only person not a member of the CIA among 23 Americans sentenced for the kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Milan in 2003. The Egyptian cleric, also known as Abu Omar, was secretly flown to Egypt for interrogation, where he says he was tortured for seven months. He was a resident in Italy at the time of the abduction.”
“Lady and Medero were among 26 Americans convicted for snatching Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from a street in Milan in 2003 and whisking him away to be questioned in Egypt.”
Even the english army special forces, not exactly made of "concerned intellectuals", felt that the USA death squads in Iraq were too much:
“Some senior British officers were unhappy at what was going on and the involvement of the UK’s SAS and the SBS. “Why are we helping to run Latin American-style death squads?” One British commander, himself ex-SAS, demanded to know. The SAS were, on at least two occasions, barred from carrying out such missions in the British-run south of the country.
Questions were asked about how information was being obtained from suspects in Balad. There was an unofficial inquiry into the treatment of prisoners at the base, although no evidence was found to implicate Maj Gen McChrystal. ...
But the reverberations from special forces operations in Iraq continued. Six years later Maj Gen McChrystal, by now a four star general and commander of international forces in Afghanistan, had received a complaint from the UK’s director of special forces (DSF) for speaking about operations carried out with the SAS and SBS in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile an SAS lieutenant colonel, who had served with distinction under Maj Gen McChrystal in Iraq, was told to stay away from the Regiment’s headquarters in Hereford.”
It keeps coming down to this style over substance stuff. I’m tired of it now bc we’re approaching a dangerous situation. I need to hear, from someone intelligent, something Substantive about Trump’s major faults. I’ll go first- he does have an Andrew Jackson complex. He wanted to go down in history.. he wanted ppl to fight for him. This is a very off putting quality for many ppl and it triggered them and scared them. It didn’t come out (IMO) as a truly and Substantively damaging quality until January 6th.
I was disturbed by a couple of things. One was his advocating or condoning violence against political opponents and people he construed to be class enemies, This out of the old-time fascist playbook, although it's possible he didn't understand its connections He also encouraged private-army types. That is one thing I don't want to see catch on in the US. It's not something to fools around with even in humor, as you can find out by reading the history of Germany in the 20th century.
First, he was a true narcissist. And couldn’t control it. He didn’t deliver on his promises because he couldn’t pay attention to them if someone on Hannity was talking about him. He couldn’t listen even to good advice unless someone was sucking him off hard enough.
Second, he had no idea how to address any of the criticisms he had made to find a solution. He governed largely as a standard Republican, even when it hurt him. His lowest ratings came the day his McConnell wet dream tax cut passed.
Third, he sucked as a manager. He picked the worst people for his team. Made working for him completely unappealing to the best people for the job. And dear god did he not always pick the worst legal minds in the business?
Nothing worse than incompetence really. Nowhere near as much of a racist as Joe Biden. Nor as much of a fascist.
but it absolutely doesn't dead-end at style, that's just the low-hanging stinkfruit that most people reach for to throw the most, with good reason. the exact same thing happens with Biden
Well they are really discrediting themselves by going for low hanging fruit. No ones doing the same w Biden - we’re pointing out some very significant and dangerous flaws with him. Where was the Real danger in Trump? So far the only real answer I got is “he turned lefties into fascists and also some ppl don’t like him”. It’s an interesting theory but I’m not buying it that he was a gift created by or given to the Establishment if that lets ppl off the hook for still hating Trump. We’re not going to move forward as a society until we sort out some truth about Trump
The reality that he’s a megalomaniac is not just a matter of style. When anyone who disagrees with you becomes an enemy of the state (because, increasingly, you ARE the state), that’s really a dangerous state of affairs. We may reach fascism by committee with the Dems, but I believe a charismatic megalomaniac can bring that to pass as well.
We are already staring full-on fascism in the face under Democrats (did you READ Matt’s post?), and you’re still pursing your lips and tugging worriedly at your turtleneck over Trump.
To be clear, I have no professional idea of what it means, but I think of Trump as the mega guy, but mostly because, every time he talked, things were "the biggest," "the most," "the greatest," etc.
So, interested to know the forensic analysis of Pres. Obama. This could be a series. But we could be labeled, "misinformation."
Discrediting themselves, no. Not really answering your question, yes. Some have already addressed your question without leaning on style. Indeed, Biden faces (and deserves) similar style attacks, especially from Berniebros, I guess you've only seen the desperate dog jokes.
At one time I was smitten with Harris’ apparent hyper-rationality and ever-so-calm delivery. I don’t know just how it happened, but something destroyed that feeling. One thing that started to bother me was a sense that he wanted to talk about one thing, how bad Islam is, too exclusively. Kinda how I feel about Greenwald sometimes with his anti-mainstream-lib vendetta (not that he’s wrong). Also, both guys get hyper-riled up sometimes when criticized. But whatever.
Harris is nuanced, like the rest of us. I still listen to and respect his opinions on a great many things. Many. Things. His somewhat hyperbolic takes on Covid and Trump I take as interesting counterpoints to other opinions I glean and respect. Long live nuance!
I want a browser extension that allows me to hide all posts regarding Trump. Am I the only one who doesn't need every discussion to be 50% allocated to one topic?
It would seem that there should be some quality of use offerings provided by sites that require paid subscriptions, both in service to their patrons, as well as to those who publish their work on the venue. If it can be assumed that the patrons are attracted to the work being published, the paid provider should consider providing its patrons with a means of avoiding off-topic content and repetitive trolling by other patrons; the simple addition of an "IGNORE" button in the individuals comment section is a proven solution to this very common problem. It easily gives the subscriber individual control without censoring anyone else.
It would also be very helpful to have an "EDIT", "BOLD", "ITALICS", AND "UNDERLINE" button in the comment segment. So COME ON Substack, not asking for censorship or moderation, just a little technical upgrade? At this point, it is my belief that many of us would be happy to pay "a little" extra to end the hassles.
Here is something that is NOT about Trump. On a different subject -- worth distributing. An extraordinary interview detailing horrendous recent crimes in Haiti during Obama and Bush administrations !!
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
He is a morally bankrupt person. Whether he has good policy or not, Some people dont want a BS artist, Someone who doesnt know geography and draws on maps and lies that hr received info from weather angencies to prop up is ego.
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
Thats the sad part, Biden could of chose anyone, but he narrowed it down, to her and she has no moxie or whatever that thing is. That was a hate vote for biden, People would have voted for anyone but Trump. If trump had handled the vrus better, he would of won
«If trump had handled the vrus better, he would of won»
Relatively to most "Atlantic Alliance" countries the USA story was average, and the Trump administration also setup a vaccination program that has been working well since January. These are the death rates for COVID-19 in several countries:
211.70 Italy
197.74 Poland
192.25 United Kingdom
184.48 United States
166.01 France
142.25 Sweden
127.05 Switzerland
109.95 Germany
All those of course are 10-100 times (1,000%-10,000%) worse than those not-reaganista countries whose governments adopted test-trace-isolate:
Hilarious! Just learned my daughter's high school friend (aged 20) was approached/solicited on Capitol Hill where she is interning this summer by a sitting married, Democrat US senator (aged 60s-70s) and thus the affair began. He's gotten chlamydia from another lover and gave it to her. Meanwhile he puts chlamydia meds in his wife's breakfast. If you think there has been a moral president since the dawn of the US, think again!
You are perfectly entitled to say Trump is a BS artist. Just as you would be entitled to say that Hillary Clinton is a foolish, unspeakably arrogant, corrupt individual. Or that Joe Biden is a senile professional politician whose family is coated with the slime of decades of systemic corruption. The latter are prime examples of 2 political families (there are others) who have dragged American politics to a new low over the past 2 decades. My point is this: anyone even marginally on the right (or left, like Sauders) who pointed out obvious facts about the real issues facing the US these last years has been crucified by the mass media which has become part of the political machines of the aforementioned political families. Consequently, by 2016, no decent person with any integrity would step into the political arena. That left the field open to anyone, however crude and with whatever ulterior motives, to say what had to be said. And whatever else you may say about Trump, he articulated many of the real issues of the day: such as immigration, jobs for American workers, China, rampant political correctness at every level of American society etc. etc.
Working across the US these last years, I have met many good people, often as far-removed as you can imagine from the stereotyped "deplorable Trump supporter" portrayed by the mass media, who quietly told me they would vote for Trump "in spite of ..". All of them - you could call them swing voters - voiced in some measure disgust with the brazen corruption of Washingon and the endless posturing of the Democratic party. The proof of this is that, BS artist or not, 13 million more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. We now know that Biden is just a cipher for the DNC machine: business as usual concealed by lots of hot air! So final point: unless a meaningful alternative, with practical policies, appears in the near term, get ready for the next Trump.
«BS artist or not, 13 million more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016.»
I simply cannot believe that in an epidemic year The Usurper Trump's votes rose 18%, with much higher peaks in Republican areas; while of course I must believe that Saintly President Biden got 22% more votes than Real President Rodham-Clinton herself, with peaks in crucial Democratic areas like in Georgia of 60% more democratic votes than in 2016, a truly "fantastic" increase. :-)
D. Trump himself pointed out that he was hoping to win with 3 million more votes than in 2016:
«"They said get 66 million votes, sir, and the election is over. I got 75 million votes, and you saw what happened," he said. Mr Biden got more than 80 million votes.»
«morally bankrupt [...] BS artist, Someone who doesnt know geography [...] lies that hr received info from weather angencies [...] prop up is ego»
But all those are reasons one can give for "bad", and many people detested for similar reasons B Clinton or GW Bush and now J Biden.
The question was why "so bad", that is why the extreme over-reaction, largely based on hallucinations, given that he actually governed as a mostly standard right-wing president.
He has such a bad reputation in NY as a sheister that people hate the guy, He says he can shoot someone on 5th ave. and not lose voters, he puts false claims on twitter by qanon and gives them his endorsement. I wonder how his voters dont see this.. The simple fact that he gives Qanon people his approval should give you your answer of why so bad. These points arent hallucinations, He was asked about posting a tweet with our military saying Bin Laden wasnt killed, He just shrugs it off and claims he doesnt know, Sheister, with a capital S. Thats disrespectful to our soldiers. A so;dier actually corrected his post. Why his faithful ever react to it. TDS, I am an indepedent and did not vote for Biden,
In terms of character, Trump ultimately wants to be liked by people too much.
In terms of what the Establishment hated and feared about him, Trump ultimately wants to be liked by The People too much.
It's ironic that a character flaw in him made Trump a perfect monkey wrench tossed into the gears of The Establishment's increasing control and manipulation over government. For awhile, at least. Then They adapted, because They have Think Tanks.
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
It’s pretty significant for a president to be against, Genuinely against- mind you, Big Tech. And to have predicted the danger of tech’s new mutant government-tech-totalitarian-monster-creature. And to have pointed it out and to have recommended doing something about it. He wanted to repeal section 230- maybe not the right solution- but he understood the problem. The vast majority of politicians don’t have the balls- and we’ll never be able to elect another one who does now.. Bc tech has too much power . Now it’s too late. Knowing that Tech makes or breaks their careers and their election campaigns- they will never stand up to them. Some of them pretended to during those congressional show trials - but no, I don’t believe that the tech ceos were scared of any of them.
You're talking about the man who wanted athletes fired for taking a knee. The idea that Ding Dong Donny genuinely had any opposition to anything that made him look macho and rich.....
Yeah, fuck that guy. He was just as authoritarian as some of these transnational, hydra-headed tech CEOs and really such a dumbass. The answer lies not in either Trumpism or this crazy, crazy Maoist leftism.
How about his "Muslim registry?" Nothing could have been more authoritarian and ridiculously police-statey than that. Trump was an unhinged maniac who was right about as many fingers are on my left hand (4).
«please explain again what was so bad about Trump?»
There are two different aspects to that:
* The politics: a right-wing "nationalist one-nation tory" in the tradition of Ross Perot and Part Buchanan, therefore entirely incompatible with the right-wing "globalist individualist whig" politics of the dominant business elites.
* The person: a "low-brow", television-infused, salesman profile, therefore entirely incompatible with "high brow" (and "middle brow"), printed-word, intellectual profile of the dominant academic and political elites (so perfectly embodied by Barack Obama).
“What did we learn from the failed TRUMP experiment? (cont) Someone in office, like a High Priest of Baal, a Patriarch, a doge, a judge, or a mafia don, must observe a certain decorum & a certain ornamental deportment. This holds even more true in a secular democracy. #Lindy”
I think much of his political persona was an act. Watch his older interviews or read any of the hundreds of testimonies from his employees going back decades and it is not the same persona. Not even close.
How is that not covered by "televisual salesman"? How is that different from most other politicians and entertainers?
«going back decades and it is not the same persona»
I would question that, as he has always been a crass cable-tv style of celebrity, and always an "America Firster" like Perot and Buchanan.
But over the decades both his politics and his personality did not cause extreme reactions of disgust and rejection, at most amused dismissal: that changed quite a lot when it became clear that his personality and politics were politically influential to the point of being about to win, and then winning, the presidency.
Trump's brand of 'low-brow' was definitely incompatible for a non-zero amount of people with perfectly 'low-brow' tastes, not just elite types. Maybe not enough to make it worth mentioning in your analysis, but I know plenty.
«Trump's brand of 'low-brow' was definitely incompatible for a non-zero amount of people with perfectly 'low-brow' tastes»
Probably you are thinking of "middle brow" tastes.
But anyhow I can imagine many "low brow" disagreeing with him or not liking his specific way of being "low brow", but the question was "what was so bad", that is why the reactions of extreme disgust as to the person and extreme rejection as to the politics.
For the extreme rejection as to the person I think it was a feeling of personal humiliation by "high brow" and "middle brow" people as to having a "low brow" "orange baboon" as their superior, because he did not get that extreme reaction when he was just a "celebrity".
No, not thinking of middle brow. He certainly got that reaction from people when he was a 'celebrity'. I know poors that swear, cuss, cheat, show up in jeans or shorts, drink slaughterhouse runoff, etc with very little respect for middle or high brow society (including the law sometimes) that were repulsed by him since his gawdy appearance in the '80s, full of himself in his gold penthouse talking to Robin Leech thinking he's some kind of genius - the irony thick enough to cut with a knife. A fair amount of people have always found him to be another big grifting dumbass trying to bloviate by on his inheritance and fake sounding last name. To be clear, none of these people had any use for Clinton either. My only point is the disgust was certainly present among lower 'brow' society, but I'm leaning on personal experience here, not polling or 'science', so I accept it may seem impossible.
«A fair amount of people have always found him to be another big grifting dumbass trying to bloviate by on his inheritance and fake sounding last name.»
Ah sure, but that is simply trying to explain why he was "bad", not "so bad". Those people despised him, but did not and still do not suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, they don't say "literally Hitler", "threat to democracy itself", and streams of character assassination and distortions of whatever he does and says, including describing him as both a childish idiot and a monstrous conspirator. Your low-brows merely “were repulsed by him since his gawdy appearance in the '80s”.
Consider this deranged example instead, of thousands and thousands:
«The one thing missing from the typical NPR talk show is truth, naked, raw, unqualified, unapologized for truth. In the discussion today, the guests were being asked to speculate on the reasons for certain of Trump’s recent statements and actions: the congratulatory call to Erdogan, the invitation to Duterte, the rather unanticipated statement that he would be “honored” to meet with Kim Jong-un. Why would Trump speak in this way about rulers who murdered their own countrymen, even their own relatives, rigged elections, oppressed opponents, threw reporters in jail?
One after another, guests speculated that Trump was trying to upend long-standing American foreign policy, or was speaking thoughtlessly, or had some hidden negotiating strategy in mind. To each of these guests, Johnson responded courteously, respectfully, clearly signaling that these were just the sorts of sober, serious, thoughtful comments he wished to encourage. Then it happened. One of the guests, I do not know whom it was, said quietly, “I think it is envy.” Johnson erupted almost before the words had been uttered. In a loud, flustered voice, he burst out, “But you cannot mean that you think he would like to do those things! But, but, but, surely you do not mean that.” Johnson went on in this way, speaking over his guest, who was trying, so far as I could hear, to say “Yes, I think that is just what he wants to do.”
It was so manifestly, obviously, undeniably true, and at the same time so nakedly partisan, that it made Johnson’s head explode. It was, in its simplicity, the truest thing I had ever heard on NPR.»
<they don't say "literally Hitler"> actually, I know very few people of any brow in real life who felt this way, unless they were hiding it from me (and there's no reason I can think of one might conceal that from me). I know a few, but largely from academics down to landscapers and weed growers, people I knew who didn't care for Trump simply thought he was a gaudy, self-centered hypocrite too dumb to pull off a Hitler. What's funny is I know as many high-brow university educated country club engineers that are outspoken Trump supporters (they will move heaven and earth to explain away Trump's abrasions, like my conservative Christian friends) as I do sunburned construction workers that love him - the whole brow distinction just isn't a strong trend in my reality, I would never make an assumption about what someone thought about Trump based on 'brow', I've found it's way more complex than that. But I accept there might be some national trend that runs strongly along these lines and my experience is an outlier.
That's interesting, but I have to ask: who do the 'Celts' want revenge against? The Romans? Saxons? Franks? Norse/Normans? Or is the term 'Celt' an ahistorical representation of some non-genetic block/class/caste?
Ha, I wonder if the Democrats will get on a plane and fly to Cuba so they can't be present for the vote in protest of this discrimination.... "The worst thing since Jim Crow started the Civil War and killed Captain America with that rock... the... well, you know, the thing."
Yep. Some sort of Covid pass, along with regular status updates, is surely on the way .. to keep us all "safe" of course. And it goes without saying that it'll be tightly bound to voting rights .. to "save democracy". Thank God the government is looking out for our safety on so many fronts. Otherwise who knows? People might start thinking and acting independently.
I've always hated Facebook, and the oversharing, fake-presenting nature of social media. It's not a surprise at all that platforms owned by Google, Facebook and Amazon are blocking more and more even mildly controversial material. It's been past time to stop using products by these monoliths, which is wildly difficult, but doable.
The bigger problem now is the question of whether upstart competitors will be allowed to even exist to give us the alternatives. The shutdown of Parler was just the tip of the iceberg. If Amazon, Google and Facebook show they're willing to play ball with the party in power, and move information in their favor, they're awarded additional protections (adding clear first amendment violations - and who knows what else - to their already illegal monopolistic practices).
I don't think its unreasonable to think that the internet will be a closed system in a few years, where only companies with a great deal of start-up capital being able to even enter. Think of it like the FCC: created to give space and voice to the community on the airwaves, but over time kept everyone except for the big players off radio and TV. Think of how controlled speech is on broadcast radio and TV to this day. Now apply that to the internet.
(The censoring of text messages is way, way, way over the line. At this point we can only hope that neither of our political parties gather enough power to make any significant changes to anything. This situation is beyond dire.)
"(The censoring of text messages is way, way, way over the line. At this point we can only hope that neither of our political parties gather enough power to make any significant changes to anything. This situation is beyond dire.)"
Past time for supporting a 3rd party - they are out there, have been for decades, on ballots, and we don't support them - if we have these goons in power, we have only ourselves to blame ...
And a 4th party even! I’ve thought for years that we need at least 4 electable parties, or no parties at all.
Having two independent presidential candidates that aren’t married to culture war and talking points would be the ideal. We had something somewhat similar to this with Trump and Bernie 2016, and look how the powers that be acted. Can you imagine the media rage if a third party candidate won?
"Electable" - we are the ones who decide who is "electable" - anybody on a ballot can win if enough folks vote for 'em ..
Personally, i don't think we had "something similar" with Trump and Sanders - Trump. it seems to me, was all about Trump, saying and doing whatever he thought he needed to to be, as he himself said, "the most powerful man in the world". And Sanders - hmm, made the mistake of wedding himself to the DP, and backed it, at the cost of his own stated principles, even after it shafted him over and over ...
I don’t disagree with this at all. Trump was a spoiled, angry ego, and Sanders had to sell his souls to the Dems.
My larger point is with how the media and the parties treated these two ostensible outsiders, which was screaming contempt, smears and targeted conspiracy theories. Now imagine how they’d treat actual outsiders, or anyone who didn’t kowtow to party power, media power and corporate power?
Huh. I'm one of those guys that says, "It's a private company they can do whatever they want", but I never considered them working in concert with the government - THAT is quite disturbing.
The discovery in Trump's lawsuit against the Tech companies and other pending lawsuits as well will be very instructive. I suspect there's far more coordination going on than most people think.
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
Not to mention Laura Silsby of the Clinton Foundation getting caught trying to kidnap 30 children... for what purpose, one wonders? She was bailed out by HRC and now sits on the Amber Alert Board. Not kidding.
Consider, if you will, the Utne Reader revealed in their top censored stories for 1988 that the gov't was already able to record all telephone convo's in the US. They were working hand in hand with AT&T.
"Private companies" like Lockheed and Northrup run the various black projects so they are no longer subject to FOIA requests ('cos they aren't the gov't). The 'concert' has been playing for quite some time, but 'they' are not nearly as concerned to maintain a facade of being law abiding.
I find this an extraordinary summation of the immense hoax (although Trump was equally dangerous):
Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking
Tucker Carlson devoted seven minutes of airtime to reading it. Donald Trump heaped praise on it. Why did this Twitter analysis resonate so widely on the right?
Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking - by Darryl Cooper - Outside Voices (substack.com)
Outside Voices -- Darryl Cooper (with Glenn Greenwald intro) – July 12
Wow! How long will it be before our personal emails and substack comments are censored and any strikes against us are factored into our credit scores? The 21st century is quickly turning into a dystopian nightmare.
None of this is surprising. None of it. It’s been going this way for years. I actually said to a friend of mine about ten years ago,”A government couldn’t have devised a better way to surveil their citizens than Facebook. And y’all are just willingly ‘checking in’ and posting publicly where you are and who you’re with, all the time.” There’s nothing you can do about this, I don’t think. I mean, seriously, what can you do? I’m really asking. If anybody has a solution to this, I’m all ears. My solution, just for my own peace-of-mind, has been to just get the fuck off of FB and any form of social media. I just don’t log on there anymore. Ours is a capitalist society; money talks. If nobody goes on Facebook or YouTube anymore, their business models cease to exist. They go under.
I immediately saw the direction everything was going right after 9/11. I used to consider myself a technophile but I tell people now the greatest weapon of mass destruction used again the common man now is the computer. Prior to the computer if the government wanted to spy on you they had to pretty much send someone out to your house, not so much now. Ever since the mid 80s I've built my own computers but I am under no delusion that there aren't back doors in everything now.
Getting the F off of Facebook is a necessary but possibly not sufficient condition for preventing them from being able to track you. They have some fairly sophisticated tracking cookies and you may need to go into the browser settings and disable them explicitly. It has been a while since I looked at this, so cannot give you a lot more detail but it is worth a bit of investigation.
I like your point about the expanding Capitol Police. Apparently, it is not reasonable for us to fund a local police department with our local taxes to promote safety where we live. But Congress needs some kind of force under its control throughout the country.
Politicians do do this in the open and that’s a problem. The bigger issue, I think, is that it doesn’t even occur to the general public, like,”Wait, this is weird.” Again, it goes back to Facebook etc and people just willingly posting their entire lives online, for anybody to see. They’re so used to that that when governments institute more and more mass surveillance techniques, they just accept it. They don’t even think about it, really. If they do think about it at all, it’s a sort of,”Oh, well I’ve been doing that myself for years, so no big deal..” train-of-thought.
I admit that I post every single one of my grows online, on one specific weed-growing website, for two reasons. One: there isn’t enough info about a lot of the cannabis strains that people are growing these days. That information needs to be out there for people who grow their own weed. And two: I’m kind of like,”Yeah, what’re you gonna do about this, government?” haha! I just assume that everything I post or text to someone, every single phone call I make and whatever else is being observed. I’m not okay with it at all, but what’s the solution, really? My solution is to throw shit in their faces, just to see what might happen. I don’t think anything’ll happen, really. I’m not breaking (too many) laws, but I like to let them know that, yes, fuck you, I see you. And I don’t give a shit.
As a person who has lived in 3 different countries, I always used snail mail to keep in touch.. I loved receiving letters photos, Then people moved to emails, then social media and I found myself in the face book trap. but I feel it is time to end this, I dont have casual acquaintances on FB but people who mean alot to me but I hate the medium it's so trivial .
I started with ditching FakeBook back in 2015. Swore off of ALL social networks including YouTube. I only comment here, and then only what I'd like to share -that is to say, nothing that might be construed as anti-Regime.
I even got rid of my cell phone last month. Looks like it was a rare moment of clairvoyance!
It's nice not having that account. Plus, I KEEP the $100/mo I'd been handing over since 1999.
To think: I actually PAID for the privilege of being monitored.
Good work indeed. The key is to not use any of the Big Tech services. And there are alternatives if you make the effort; unfortunately the young generation for the most part don't. The real bugger, though, is the mobile phone: it's Google or Apple period (Purism never took off!). I'm not young anymore but I still have to work. And these days I simply cannot function without my smartphone; they've introduced authentication checks which push a message to my phone(response required!) for every system I interact with. That's minimum 8 to 12 times a workday. Just think how this process could be abused in the beautiful future!?
If sharing something in your life is important, you will actually treat it as such and put at least a modicum of effort towards making sure that the worthy recipient receives it and appreciates the thought. Social media shares? Yeah, not so much. Seriously, how fcking important can anything be if it’s shared automatically to whoever happened to click a button on their screen in some (less than) half hearted, automatic Pavlovian response reflex one anonymous day in the forgotten past? Then to be briefly semi-acknowledged by disinterested distraction addicts, in the hope that one or more of them may (hopefully!!!) LIKE it? Yeah…forget that.
You want to share something important? Actually make a freaking effort.
I actually hate it, too. It's glitchy and annoying. I am going back to blogging. Gonna set up a blog that many people can login to and have their own profile, and we can stay in touch that way.
I think 2003, right before Facebook and the iPhone, was about the optimum level of connectivity — SMS, email and blogging platforms were plenty for me.
I will gladly write the forward of your treatise on this. Zero acquiescence to social media is the most obvious start to somehow regaining our sanity. Let this nightmarish experiment in self-perpetuating egoism die the ignominious death it deserves.
“Self-perpetuating egoism” is exactly the right way to put it. It is all about ego. It’s all about “likes” and shit. The thing that always weirds me out, that I’ll never get, is when I see, like, cel phone footage on the local news and I always wonder,”How did it even occur to that person to pull out their phone and immediately start filming that?” If I see a fight or a car crash or whatever, I’ll be like,”Holy shit! Did you see that?” but it never, ever occurs to me to pull out my phone. The fact that people’s first instinct when they see something crazy is to pull out their phones and film so they can post it on social media is, to me, very weird. I mean, there’s been many instances where people filming shit on their phones has been very important, but it just doesn’t ever occur to me. I don’t ever want to think about my phone. When I come home, I set my phone on the dining room table and that’s it. When I get a text, I’ll check it. The next time I get up off of the couch to grab a beer haha. No apps on my phone at all. None of that shit. If you wanna get a hold of me, give me a call. If you text me, I’ll respond. In a couple hours. Maybe haha!
Yeah, but that’s another issue. What you just said, about “giving away your data, at least for free.” Everybody thinks they’re gonna be an “influencer” and monetize their social media profiles. It’s bullshit. “How can I make money off of my life?” One, you probably can’t. Because you’re boring and unoriginal. And two, that’s really fucked-up haha. People have just succumbed to this whole,”Make money off of your life! The more you post, the more people see your posts! And maybe you might make some money off of it…” idea. It’s all garbage. It’s fucking tacky, really. It’s low-rent bullshit, appealing to increasingly desperate people, just so they can see how many “likes” they got on a particular post. I am not interested in the best way to fold sheets or the newest and best conditioner or any of that shit. Instagram is literally just a way for people to promote themselves. And I’m not interested in self-promotion.
I've always been super careful with what I post or message there, figuring they could use it against me if they wanted to. I agree it's gotten to where it makes no sense to use them any more, given what we've learned.
Agreed. The only social platform I use is LinkedIn, and then ONLY for job related business. I never post; just keep my updated resume, link to my online design portfolio, and references there.
You are correct of course: adoption (and the network effect) is the strength of Big Tech (BT). But it is also their Achilles heel. Without users these platforms are toast! And users sign on voluntarily & can leave at the drop of a hat.
A second weakness is the possibility that as government tries to co-opt BT more and more the 2 camps will fall out. We are already seeing signs of this in the current "misinformation" campaign, where Facebook executives, fed up with ever more stringent demands from the government to cancel "misinformation" have countered that government is using them as a scapegoat for its own shortcomings. I am in the (ICT) business and I can tell you that managing Human Resources or Customer Service is definitely not the strong point of the little nerdheads who run these BT platforms; and ploughing through individual posts to identify whatever currently passes for "hate" or "xyz" is definitely a big No No. That would mean real work for no return! These guys like to automate things with algorithms. But algorithms don't always work as designed. And the more they are employed the greater the chance of ordinary users being impacted negatively. As a PR gesture a BT company will throw a few million into a unit employing cheap (slave) labour in places like the Philippines to do some manual monitoring. But their heart is not in it. After all, cancelling too many users destroys their entire business model! Everyone knows, for example, that Facebook & Twitter made a mint out of the Trump campaign back in 2016.
Another breakpoint is that changing government demands are extremely irksome. Our nerdy friends in BT need to be told exactly, precisely, specifically-to-a-T, what an "extremist" or a "conspiracy theory" is; or what type of user they should impede with things like unsaved data and suchlike (if people only knew what went on behind the scenes they would be attacking BT offices with pitchforks!). Most of these people not only have the moral compass of a rabid dog, but they also don't like change which translates to work! A U-turn like the lab-leak theory, for example, when last year's rabid conspiracy theory became this year's to-be-promoted "in-item", is not only work but can shatter the confidence of the fragile little souls programming the algorithms. All bad for business. Not everyone out there is stupid.
Finally exposure of BT practices by well-known public figures can be very effective in moving public opinion. Elon Musk's badmouthing of WhatsApp new "terms of service" back in January resulted in a large-scale haemorrhaging of users to Telegram & Signal. So there is hope.
P.S. I shall address your question "anybody has a solution to this" in another post if time.
"We’re not China." C'mon man, we're so far ahead of them, they're not competitive. We can eat their lunch. And, they have lots of money that isn't in my family's pocket yet, so let me work on that for, say, two more years, then you'll have Kamala to deal with. Meanwhile, before my retirement I'll pardon every member of my family except myself, and Kamala will do the same for me as soon as she's sworn in. I have her word for it, and Hunter has the photos.
Please, please, please quit posting your video's to YouTube. Do you see the irony? Some of us are trying to break-up with big tech. There are alternatives.
Matt, the LBRY/Odysee project seems to be trying to do things in the right way with video stuff. Mark Hurst, from WFMU's Techtonic has some good written material on tech alternatives (the show is great too, but I think you guested on it with Ken, so you probably know that).
I almost never watch online videos on any site, so I'm short on knowledge here. My question is whether the alternative sites offer the income potential of YouTube, or are likely to any time soon.
The fascism accusation never fit Trump. You could call him a number of things that weren’t good but he wasn’t a fascist. What you describe here is classic fascism. How can educated liberals not see it.
Rightists kill you because they don't like you. Leftists kill you for your own good.
It is even worse than I thought. On a related subject -- worth distributing.
An extraordinary interview !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
A very astute observation indeed
I agree. I believe what may be happening is that many people are not discussing their actual views at this point, out of fear of cancellation. People are rightly afraid that questioning of anything associated with "Left" automatically means "Right", and since this is a "prepare to cancel" indicator, they are silencing themselves.
At a recent small party of my neighbors, a woman from China brought up the issue of how we are no longer to speak freely about many topics, for fear of being misunderstood, losing friends, or even potentially fired, and how reminiscent this was of her experiences during the Cultural Revolution. I was somewhat shocked that she raised the issue, but was completely amazed that all of my neighbors opened up about feeling exactly the same way. It was an amazing and healing experience for everyone, and some of my neighbors later expressed a lot of gratitude that she actually took a chance to open this topic. I think this is a good way to fight this burgeoning fascism, by trying to talk about it openly with others in real life.
Family get together of a bunch of old hippies and younger Democratic voters. Again, this subject came up and everyone agreed that the current "liberal" climate was becoming very totalitarian. If they are going to correct our text messages over the virus, how long before they are correcting all of our non-DNC platform opinions? Will I be able to text my friends Guillotine gifs without winding up in jail?
On a different subject -- worth distributing.
An extraordinary interview !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
It’s about time we stop using/promoting YouTube. No??
It's about time he stopped spamming.
Don't waste your time with this. it's youTube!
💯 It is frustrating when words with very specific meaning become empty slurs. This is how fascist structures and tendancies can be fostered based on the fact that they don't "feel" fascist.
It is frustrating. The incorrect application of a word such as fascist does a lot of harm. It keeps us from connecting with each other and identifying the real issues. As I said there are a lot of things one could call Trump and just because one or two of them have some overlap with fascism does not make him a fascist. Maybe it has nothing to do with being educated but rather being intellectually lazy. Not sure. I know a lot of people wanted to say he was like Hitler and since he was like Hitler this must mean he was fascist. What a intellectual lazy logic. Good grief. A charismatic leader who is doing things that you think are bad does not make him or her a fascist
Fascism is a melding of government/corporate control of We the People. Jen Psaki made that crystal clear when she said a team from The White House! was working with Facebook to stop “misinformation”. Then Biden had to say “they’re killers!” Then Zuck sent a letter to Biden demanding a retraction of that crack etc.
This is squarely in our faces.
I left Facebook about four years ago after I witnessed what happened to Trump with the FBI spying and lying and watching MSM’s heads exploding. No time for that B.S. arguing.
Now I wonder what would happen if I went back and posted the FLCCC (Dr. Kory and Dr. Marick etc.) website that has a preventative protocol against Covid-19 AND the treatment protocol should one get Covid-19 (includes Ivermectin and Fluvoxamine)?
I am too old to play censorship games with fascists.
Well, except for now regularly “texting” friends disparaging messages about the jabs and Biden’s door knockers.
I just want to see if the DNC is paying attention.
Read Dave McGowan’s book “Understanding the F Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion” 2001.
There is a book for you to review Matt!
Usually asking for a one example either ends the conversation or reveals a fool.
Exactly. More to the point, such meaningless slurs are an essential requirement for any budding totalitarian ideology: a few simple words and catchphrases for the rabble to chant. You remember the sheep in 1984 surely! This time round we can thank our work brethren for the degradation of language. The irony is, education has been dumbed down so much in the US that the people (mis)using words like fascist actually think they're quite intellectual.
I agree. I find Trump vulgar, abrasive and insensitive. But I think calling him a fascist and using tactics against him that fascists have used in the past (surveillance of his campaign, censorship) is problematic.
Noam Chomsky, at one time, gave a good indicator of fascism when he said that there were 2 stances to take on free speech, you're either for it or you're against it. If you're against it you are a fascist.
Then Trump happened, Chomsky had a massive brain fart & jettisoned all of that nice "defend speech you don't agree with" nobility from his brain.
I think his last interview ended with "String 'em up. String 'em all up."
Well I wouldn't put too much store by Chomsky. An illustration of his intellect is that he was a big fan of Hugo Chávez, who once decreed that all TV stations broadcast his interminable speeches.
Chomsky went full-on anti-free speech along with the rest of the wokies.
On a different subject -- worth distributing.
An extraordinary interview !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Agreed.
As I wrote earlier, pointing out how the mind control and ''depatterning'' happens through the media and socially engineered politically correct environments should probably be emphasized, especially with those who have forgotten their liberal values... Most of the brainwashing techniques (which are obvious once one recognizes them) all depend on the target or audience not realizing that a given set of suggestions is being made. From the media amplification of certain simplified no-nuance messages i.e. ''Stay Home. Save Lives'' (the only alternative being leave your house and murder people) to the pseudo-scientific ''most experts agree'' and ''the science says'' narratives, these are all various appeals to group think disguised as scientific and legitimate arguments. The statements are designed to herd people and induce a herd mentality, rather than appeal to reason. Just pointing out that such things exist might be enough to break the spell for a good number of people...
It's believed that people are such stupid malleable blank slates that they can just write whatever they want into people's minds, or just add more lipstick. However, people may not be as stupid as these misanthropes, oligarchs, and cynical social engineers believe they are...
https://risingtidefoundation.net/2021/04/19/escaping-the-brave-new-world-podcast-creativity-and-brainwashing/
I agree. We are clearly in an era of unbridled propaganda, and there is ample evidence that truth and free speech are no longer a priority (to understate the severity) in the education system, the media, politics, corporate governance, or any other significant institution I'm aware of. But I'm hopeful that more people are aware of this than they are letting on, because otherwise, we are truly heading straight for the cliff.
Disagree somewhat. I think the US has been a propaganda spewing machine my entire life. I think most ads have always been used to simultaneously sell & social engineer. Most of what is thought of as "success" in this country can be directly attributable to marketers & advertisers. I think people on the right are only noticing this because they're the ones that social engineers are now trying to social engineer out of existence.
For example, take any make up ad. It usually ends with some model or celebrity telling their target audience that "You deserve this," which sounds like some empowering statement about a woman's worth when what it's really saying is, "You deserve to give us your hard earned cash for this product because if you really deserved it we'd give the damn thing to you for free."
As far as "breaking the spell" I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Advertising is a billion dollar industry that no company or government would use if it didn't work and work well.
I understand what you're saying, but I guess my point is that in truth, it takes A LOT, an unimaginable amount of effort and resources, to maintain the kind of artificial environment that captures most people's psyche. And there come those times in history, where the veil is suddenly lifted. As you pointed out, we are talking about billions and billions, mass media outlet after mass media outlet, all blaring the same nonsense day and night in order to uphold a very carefully controlled narrative.
I think these substack pages alone are a major thorn in the establishment's game because they are independent. Taibi, Greenwald and company really do say what they think. It's a major threat.
When someone comes along and starts making a more nuanced argument, all of a sudden, the very carefully controlled narrative and body of curated information comes into question, or suddenly becomes undermined. I'm not saying it's easy, but suffice it to say that it really takes a lot of effort and unimaginable resources to maintain the kind of highly artificial vapid cultural and psychological environment that people live in.
We should always be poking fun at it, demonstrating how the system perverts innate human tendencies and natures, but also having a discussion about what these higher tendencies and natures are, and the myriad ways in which they can be perverted.
As Brigadier John Rawlings Rees (a high level Tavistock pschiatrist and social engineer) once stated, "winning wars is not about killing, it's about destroying the enemy's morale while maintaining one's own.''
Think about that. Those who really obsess and care about controlling the general population understand that real warfare, sophisticated warfare is not anything that happens on a battlefield, it's actually the realm of culture, media, and it's about keeping people demoralized and pessimistic. That's literally the key component, keeping people demoralized, creating the perception that everything is too far gone, that nothing can be done. That's seen as one of the most effective and powerful weapons to enforce conformity and passivity in a population.
Imagine the flip side: imagine if people recognize that it's not true, that the fight isn't over, and that in fact most of the Wall Street, WEF, City of London institutions are actually bluffing, and that their zombie banking system is really at an end. Most of the assets they hold really are just worthless toxic paper. And it could easily be cancelled.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/01/federal-reserve-admits-it-pumped-more-than-6-trillion-to-wall-street-in-recent-six-week-period/
Well I did say that I only somewhat disagreed with what you said.
In my opinion the US propaganda machine never stops running. the only thing that changes is the political party it favors as propagandists. During the run up to the 2nd Iraq War Fox, specifically Hannity & O'Reilly, were constantly labeling anyone against the war as being un-American, terrorist lovers, terrorist enablers, in bed with terrorists or just outright terrorists.
Take out the terrorist & insert Russia & you have the Democrat MSNBC CNN response to Trump. Same shit different day.
If you asked most diehard Trump hating liberal Democrats if they knew they were essentially following the same script that Republicans used against them a few short years ago, they would deny it. I think they would be entirely incapable of seeing it because they, much like the right in 2003, think they're morally justified. "The right spews hate while we spew facts" would probably be a good description of their mindset.
I think that the people that run this machine are quite smart. They understand what motivates each group & that understanding lets them manipulate so successfully.
With the right they wrap everything in the flag. That flag, whether the right admits it or not, puts most of them in a trance.
With the left they couch everything in social justice terms or PC terms because they know that your average liberal is so completely terrified of being labeled racist or homophobic or transphobic that the easiest way to get them to shut the fuck up is by labeling the guy you want them to hate as a racist or homophobe or transphobe.
What I would be curious to be able to see is an alternate reality where the populist who won in 2016 was Sanders. Would the attacks be rightward led by people blathering on about the America hating Socialist? Would Hillary be the Dem version of Liz Cheney turning on her own party's president?
As Matt has pointed out Hillary & crew were already accusing the Bernie Bros. of racist, sexist behavior & he hadn't even won the election or even the nomination.
In the end, this is globalists feverishly defending their own, very lucrative for them, agenda against any and all critics & opponents.
You’re not wrong, but there is arguably more nuance there. This becomes clear if we zoom out a bit more. Forget the Western unipolar outlook, forget the US is the Center of the world assumption.
The unipolar world is dead.
This propaganda machine and oligarchical financial establishment has largely destroyed itself by destroying its own population. They are presiding over a hoard of zombie banks, staring into a hundred trillion dollar financial black hole, and running a painfully bloated and corrupt military. The more the Western oligarchical establishment tries to encircle Russia and China and try to subvert these nations, the more they will expend the very little free energy they have left. The military is completely bloated and overextended. Their domestic industrial and manufacturing base is gone.
Meanwhile, China has lifted 600,000 people out of poverty. That’s not a minor detail in the world stare gif situation. But again, for the average Western-centric viewpoint, these strategic sea-changes are completely lost on them. They believe US and European unipolar dominance is like a law of nature or something. They couldn’t be more wrong.
So the emergence of a new Eurasian economic paradigm, overtaking the last 3000+ years of Trans-Atlantic cantered civilization is a new reality. Most people in the West don’t even know how to think about this, especially the ruling and “expert” class.
Have you looked at the leaders of the Western military powers. General Milley? These guys are total incompetent jarheads. They are dangerous, but most of that dangerous comes from their incompetence, the belief among some that the Us can win a first strike or limited nuclear war against China or Russia.
The Eurasian powers have largely rejected this decrepit speculative Trans-Atlantic system. Despite whatever individual problems countries like Russia and China have, they are not suicidal and they are committed to the survival of their nations and populations.
Those running the current American system are if anything intent on dismantling the US, and European nations. They are committed to a new technocratic feudal age where in the words of Klaus Schwab, “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”
These powers have spent their lives trying to dismantle the US industrial and scientific base, but the Eurasian nations have largely done the opposite. So don’t kid yourself, the Western establishment is in big trouble, and nothing short of outright fascism will allow them to control the situation for much longer. And a million things could go wrong there.
I don't think you're wrong either and I don't think the US is the center of anything other than its own warped fantasies about being the center of everything. But these fantasies are the fantasies of a ruling class who have been the ruling class for a very long while. Old money, in my opinion, creates generation after generation of people who get farther & farther away from the reality that I know & farther into their own warped fantasies of their own "greatness." When Hillary called the flyover states "deplorables" I think that was a case of the servant identifying with her masters. And I do believe very rich people look at the rest of us as beneath them & very much in need of their guidance.
I remember a Hunter S. article I read years back where he went to some uber wealthy enclave in Florida(?) with the idea of discovering why the children of incredibly rich people aren't doing incredible things. What he found was a group of young wealthy males who were only concerned with getting wasted while using their wealth to con local girls into bed. They knew that, no matter what they did, they'd one day inherit daddy's kingdom.
I think that's called hubris.
I think it's that hubris, that born to rule idea that has transformed America from a nation state into an empire. Nation states can have long lives. Empires, not so much.
I also think that a place like Europe has a fairly recent memory of how hubris almost destroyed them. Germany in particular understands how quickly hubris can turn into hell. The US, on the other hand, has been relatively unscathed by war in these last 2 centuries so it can bluster and blather on & on as if it knows shit when it really doesn't. That may change sooner than anyone wants.
Excellent observations!
Remember Bush's nuanced message, "You're either with us or you're against us...?" That's Trump in a nutshell. And it's a dangerous, fascistic mindset.
Why wouldn’t you just as easily call him a communist? They would also say you are either with us or against us. Heck that is what the entire anti-racist movement says. Will you call them fascist? That is what the problem is. When you use a word like this in a way that just about any leader or group can be called that by a segment that disagrees with them. I am not arguing in support of Trump (there is a lot a disagreed with and was outraged about he did). My argument is in the application of the word fascist or for that matter racist, sexist, and you could go on amd on
Here's your lot's "nuanced" message:
"You either toe our prescribed lines or we ban you."
Trump never subscribed to such ceneorious stuff as that.
_That_'s the " dangerous, fascistic mindset" people of your ilk have done so much to make seem "normal." Your views are a direct and immediate menace to _ANY_ free society.
So dangerous. Tell me what fascistic policies Trump put in place. I can list plenty that Biden already has.
You either agree w Fauci and hate trump or yer anti science
Trump was out of his league when the “pandemic” hit.
The vast majority of humans genuflect to doctors. “What ever you think doc!”
Even when he got The Rona and was taken to Walter Reed for treatment, he was at the mercy of probably ten different physicians and many nurses and various therapists.
So I can forgive him for caving to Fauci. And I give him credit for bringing in Dr. Scott Atlas (who I believe butted horns with Fauci and as a result was let go).
I still want Trump to tell the world if he was given Ivermectin at Walter Reed. I’m waiting for some intrepid reporter to dig that up.
Is that a little like "If you have a problem with me you have a problem with science."?- Anthony Fauci, circa June 2021
I thought he said, “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”? Maybe Ari Fleischer said that?
Ibram X. Kendi: “there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of 'racist' isn't 'not racist.' It is 'antiracist.' ... One either endorses the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist or racial equality as an antiracist." I take it you also believe Kendi has a dangerous, fascistic mindset? Although in his case the charge would be warranted.
Kendi is wrong, so are you, and so is the entire CRT movement. “Racism” is a construct of Western elites. What we are talking about is “Subjugation” and “ethnic and tribal identity.” Black people were not enslaved because of their color. They were enslaved because of their weakness and the corruption of their own continent. Pre-colonial Africa comprised almost exclusively conquest states, with slavery and genocide the norm rather than the exception. These people were not “racists.” The strong exercised their preogatives over the weak in the natural expression of human nature.
One can be “not racist” in that they believe the strong should not oppress the weak, and do not do so themselves. Whether or nor they seek to impose their own view on others who DO believe the strong make their own rules (a useful definition of “anti racism”) does not change their own identity.
This is a woke fallacy. Most ofthe Union who died in the Civil War were not “anti racists”. They were opposed to the rule of the strong subjugating the weak, and were willing to fight to end that oppression in the US. The slaves could have been white, black or purple or even aliens. It was making humans chattel that they were fighting about.
I do not really know enough about Kendi to know if he is fascist.
Educated Liberals do see it and speak up about it, e.g. Matt, Glenn Greenwald etc. It’s pseudo-(mis)educated Maoist and Bolsheviks, aka self-proclaimed liberals, who don’t see/understand it.
Because the media spun Trump up into the American Satan, source of all evil, and a critical mass of prominent Americans are willing to sacrifice all of our civil rights to defeat the already defeated. A totalitarian cultural attitude that ironically is driving millions of Americans to the GOP.
I've been strongly left my whole life, but the government "fact checking" my private communications is a red line. I might vote GOP in the next election if the Democrats continue to support this policy.
I like your phrase “defeat the already defeated”.
Democrats are something else altogether these days. A reality that many of them have not yet tumbled to.
you could NOT be more wrong. trump was all about privatization, of everything, which sees gov reduced to a tiny enabler of the monopolists. just as biden, obama before him, bush, clinton, ronnie rayguns. neoliberalism, or libertarianism, ssdd, and it is plainly about creating feudal lords to own it all. the US has been fascist for decades, there are no rogues, no outsiders, none get through the gate, if they aren't sufficient pliable. trump was a con, always , always will be, yet the ignorant masses still drink the koolaid of outsider. lol. sure thing buddy. gov authoritarians bad, feudal lord authoritarians good? dafuq?
Lol a “con” is not at all the same as a fascist. Trump was certainly the former. The fact that he was targeted by the intelligence apparatus and their media propaganda arm continually for 5 years, tells you he’s not at all a fascist, but a real threat to their government ministries of power.
You're so full of bull you must have horns coming out your ass.
Is this your idea of adding to the discussion? Too bad there´s not a "block" button!
You need a button? Why not exercise your right to ignore the comment...or skip over it. You certainly didn't need to reply.
Too bad you don't have a sense of humor.
Puerile references to horn-filled asses is not humor. It´s adolescent prattle.
I will have to steal this line!
China is far more capitalist than the US, Russia has not been capitalist for 30+ years, while the US is a corporate socialism (more polite term for fascism)
China is a mercantile state in that you can make money but you can not own land or other properties like a home. You can live your whole life in a house, even call it your home, but the state - or the CCP - owns it.
And ??
Should we therefore "free" China?
Or should we attempt to bring democracy and freedom to our beloved country?
I was correcting your analysis of China's economic system. Capitalism offers a means of acquiring real property, facilities, equipment, and of course legal tender.
Mercantilism allows you to profit from trading labor, materials, and finished goods. People mistakenly believed that after China adopted this system they would progress to Capitalism, but the CCP would lose control of the population if they allowed that. Only the 1.4 billion Chinese can free themselves.
The US was formed as a Republic to protect the minority. Democracy devolves into mob rule. We have "democratic" elections but hopeful we will never live in a democracy.
Freedom begins with Speech. Some of us are trying to preserve that freedom. We need people who are educated, and that's why I'm explaining all of this for you.
Thank you - your description is a pedantic academic description.
May I ask you a question:
In what system Chinese private enterprises are always on average 100 times faster in building any product?
IT’S TIME TO BUILD by Marc Andreessen IT'S TIME TO BUILD - Andreessen Horowitz (a16z.com)
https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.
Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.
Trump was definitely a fascist dangerous clown and an insane lunatic.
His failing to pardon Julian Assange, his strongest witness about the immense Russia-gate hoax of the century certifies that.
Now we have Blinken (skinny Pompeo) -- nothing changes for the US War party...
Fascists don't let the citizens keep their guns Boris. Your TDS is seeping through. One can call Trump rude, brash, pompous, showboater etc. But calling him fascist just makes you sound like an MSNBC clown.
Not pardoning Julian Assange is fascism? What a bizarre world you live in.
On a different subject -- worth distributing.
An extraordinary interview !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Please stop spamming though.
Well, let's see - I read somewhere that Trump offered Assange a deal - a pardon if Assange would reveal the source of the leak of the DNC e-mails. Assange refused - being true to his vow to not reveal sources. Considering that the person, a DNC insider, whose name was briefly mentioned elsewhere as that speculative source, shortly after was killed in a "mugging", a "botched theft" in which nothing was apparently stolen - and the crime has never been "solved" ....
And Julian Assange went on camera and offered a $25K reward for anyone with info about Seth Rich's murder. So in a round-about way, he pretty much let us know that Rich was the leaker.
So, IMHO, this is why no D Pres will ever pardon Assange, why (s)he will drag out the extradition appeal, hoping he will die in a Brit prison - this isn't about outrage over revelation of "State secrets", and they don't give a damn about "press freedom", as Matt's posts make quite clear, nor about "human rights", (ruinous sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela in the middle of a pandemic, e.g.) - this is about revenge ... The only political figure that has been, and still is, a champion for Assange, is the 3rd party '12 and '16 Pres candidate, Jill Stein, who, "as we all know" is a "Putin puppet"
Our current and ongoing "partisan divide" is simply a battle for power between 2 political mafia parties, neither of which give a fig about anything else ...
But, hey what do i know, just another kook with another "conspiracy theory" ...
Hey, anyone who has their own opinion and disagrees with the unbelievable crap propaganda we're supposed to lap up is now a 'conspiracy theorist'. I no longer care if anyone calls me tinfoil hat. I am a proud member of the "Aluminati" - lol.
To tell the truth, I am wondering why no one else who has a substack account has considered this enough to write on it - I think I laid out a pretty good case, it seems rather "obvious" to me - but apparently it is not considered worthy of analysis or comment by any of our "progressive" posters - too silly? or too hot to handle?
There are fascist elements now, and there were fascist elements then. One thing we don't have to worry about, for the moment, is a charismatic strongman in charge. The man encouraged violence from his followers, who were pretty close to half the populace. (From looking at the other responses, many of you probably think it was more than half.) And then you all ask, "How could you not see that...?" How could all of YOU not see that...?
Once the Democrats are finished destroying by politicizing our institutions the population is much more susceptible to a charismatic strongman. Smearing Donald Trump as "literally Hitler" and siccing the FBI, NSA, CIA and DOJ against the leader of the country for partisan political advantage is the original sin that must not go unanswered.
Also, remember, the Dems are fully down with letting the administrative state run the country, which is a true sign of an authoritarian collapse and will open up tremendous vacuums of power. A GREAT example of this is the CDC's illegal "eviction moratorium," which is basically a ruling by fiat by a (rather corrupt I must say) small wing of an obscure branch of government, Health and Human Services, which is partially funded by no other than Bill Gates. This is all public record. This ruling, which was done by fiat, and continued by the CDC's worthless Rachel W. , has destroyed countless Mom and Pop landlords. It's a scandal basically hidden from view--but many lawsuits are percolating up through the lower courts about it. Once the administrative state completely takes over, which has happened all over the country in the guise of "health management" regarding Covid--look out.
Because we aren't idiots. Comparing Trump to Hitler or even Mussolini is retarded.
I literally couldn't fucking stand Trump. But the Hitler trope became like a comedy routine with the left. Donny was a showman and a conman and I think literally believed nothing that he said, unlike Hitler, who embodied his every word.
I suppose that is one thing you can give Hitler. He was 100% honest about what he intended and never deviated either in word or deed. He was capable of omission, which is a form of lying, I suppose.
I agree. Ironically, Biden is the one ushering us into totalitarianism.
And yet, it was not Trump's followers who burned, looted and murdered all last summer, was it? No, those were LEFTIES. BLM/Antifa and assorted other violent idiots. But they are not called 'terrorists'.
As long as you perceive this as a morality contest between politically different segments of a powerless population, they’ve got you by the balls. BLM was symbolic and gained almost nothing. That’s what happens when your movement is immediately commodified. Same story for the 1/6 protestors. Everyone is frothing over gestures and symbols and stochastic bursts of rage, meanwhile nothing improves for anyone because we’re punching laterally instead of upwards.
I actually agree with this. The only problem with this concept is the stupids. You can't get them focused anywhere without the media complex pointing them at some shiny. Or bread and circuses, take your pick.
I punch upwards. Did you refuse the vaxx and forced masking? I did.
That’s not punching up, that’s just a personal medical choice that will probably result in many hassles for you. If anything you’re punching yourself. Lol I got the vaccine, despite my skepticism about its rapid deployment, based on odds. Are they going to poison every person on earth? After reading MIT’s in-depth reporting on the vaccines I felt good about getting one, but there are no guarantees in public health. I wear a mask when asked because it requires very little effort and made people feel safe. Masks aren’t worn here lately because our vaccinated population is a strong majority. Proudly refusing to wear a mask doesn’t make you a maverick, just a garden variety pain in the ass.
Oh boy you made the wrong choice. Nope, I'm healthy and haven't had a flu in 35 years, without vaccines. My coworkers who get the vaccines are sick every year. I'm guessing this fall is gonna be a doozy. Yes it is punching up when you resist their experimental poisons, their forced masking and their stupid social distancing. Where as you behave like a branded farm animal.
You don't have a clue what I perceive.
I'm starting to, and it's outstanding.
Speak for yourself. I have always seen the big pic, and realize the PTB set up a Color Revolution here in the US just as they have abroad over and over, to weaken societies. But I will also point out the utter absurdity of equating that laughable January 6th incident with the months-long BURNING LOOTING AND MURDERING BLM and Antifa were allowed to do. There are REAL victims there. LOTS of people harmed, or killed, tons of businesses destroyed. I guess I should just ignore it like Portland's mayor, huh?
You’re still doing it. I know the media lied about both events: BLM and 1/6. I’m not interested in which was “worse” because both were natural outgrowths of a nation in steep decline. The BLM protests were not the murderous riots you seem to think they were, and 1/6 was not a coup like MSNBC wants viewers to believe. You seem to fancy yourself a seeker of the unvarnished truth, yet you’re just parroting the same false bullshit I can hear on Fox News. You are picking a side, which is credulous and pointless. There’s only one thing worth getting angry about, and this ain’t it.
So you missed the murders that happened in CHAZ? Not surprised. There was one death on Jan 6 and that was a victim of over-zealous capitol police. How do you compare the two? Businesses ruined, federal buildings torched, people murdered - antifa and BLM. You probably missed the videos of the cops waving in the 'unruly mob' on January 6th as well. LOL. Have fun stewing in your ignorance. I'm not picking a side (I don't have one) I'm just following real events and calling them as I see them, not through the lens of CNN.
Who encouraged violence from his followers?
When J. Edgar was wire-tapping for his own giggles, was that fascism? When the Obama DOJ was throwing rhetorical molotov cocktails into Ferguson, Missouri, was that facism?
Spiro ---- Nattering nabobs of negatism. Or something like that. I am old.
Because few are well-educated about politics or history.
I will frame these thoughts on my wall and will try smuggle them to the publisher of our century and a leading free speech advocate -- the noble and selfless Julian Assange whom "e.pierce" hates sooo much.
Guess he touched a nerve, eh?
"e.pirce" is a lunatic but likely a paid troll.
CIA and its servants did the SAME accusations to Aristide !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI -- a MUST read/hear.
Nearly incredible and horrible recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated crime horror for six (read slowly - six) full years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Something I'd also like to point out, basically the 100 ton white elephant in the room, is the incredible fact that one 80 year old blowhard, has-been epidemiologist has basically run the show in this country for the last 18 months, with tremendous help from Big Tech. The same man who I, and a great many very smart people, believe is involved in a massive cover-up of the lab leak theory for the origins of Covid. This cover-up (or at the very least, censorship of the scientific questioning of the lab leak theory) as well as massive and illegal rulings under the guise of having the "utmost of caution," i.e. lockdowns, eviction moratoriums, et al. were all sold through strong-arm tactics by Big Tech and have involved a large swath of censorship, especially of those scientists who proposed the Great Barrington Declaration.
That Harvard's own Martin Kulldorf, a man of the left and one of the most esteemed epidemiologists of the 21st century, would be banned from Twitter for his utterly rational "focused protection" ideas to battle Covid, sends shudders down my spine. Big Tech was leveraged very early on by the Fauci brigade to silence almost all dissent. It's one of this century's biggest, if not THE biggest scandal and has far reaching implications what will be felt for decades. But hardly anyone but libertarians and conservatives are talking about it.
Add to that the near complete and total suppression of information on therapeutic/prophylactic drugs like ivermectin. We've moved well beyond incompetence and into malice. These people know better and are either remaining silent because they're cowards or because they're corrupt.
The Ivermectin thing is another huge scandal. They are corrupt cowards and so, so much more. But it still just amazes me that an incompetent backwater bureaucrat like Fauci (who ever even heard of this guy before March of 2020) can basically rule a country by fiat. This dude LOVES the power; who knew that our "leading" epidemiologists were authoritarian monsters? I couldn't be happier if there were eventual tribunals for these people.
I mean, what was a "mere inconvenience" in his mind (lockdowns) spelt millions of ruined lives, lost jobs and businesses, lost health insurance, lost kids because of the school shut-downs, the list is almost endless. Dr. Fauci is, among a whole host of other pejoratives in my mind, the worst case of what Christopher Lasch once presciently named "The Revolt of the Elites." Lasch could see someone like Fauci coming from a million miles away.
For a moment I thought Fauci was done when the lab-leak hypothesis gained legs, but I was sorely mistaken. The media has gone from refuting the accusation to just ignoring it altogether. Lies of omission and context are the media's go-to way of handling dissent from the narrative.
Me too, man. :(
Oh, many have heard of Fauxi way before now. https://youtu.be/w69dUC6o89I
Take a look at RFK Jr's book - "The Real Anthony Fauci", surprised it hasn't been kicked off Barnes and Noble yet.
From Peter Webster:
"Everyone knows why, or at least the obvious reason why: a cheap, safe and effective treatment would torpedo Big Pharma's plans to make $$$illions from their rushed-to-market experimental mRNA treatments. The problem, not buried in the fine print, but nonetheless not widely trumpeted at the time: An Emergency Use Authorization for a medical product, such as the EUA sought by Big Pharma for mRNA gene therapy, cannot be granted if there exists a viable and safe treatment for the disease that the experimental product has targeted:
"FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products...when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives."
There it is: Ivermectin accepted as a treatment, no EUA for mRNA, no Big Bucks for Big Pharma."
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/pandemic-the-next-big-thing
Liberals with the capital L, like Matt Taibbi, do.
If you are talking "classical liberal" than me too. If you are talking the contemporary auth-woke American variety (for which "liberal" is a complete misnomer), count me out.
I believe this should be an object lesson for anyone who believes that our free speech protections are anything but a comforting myth. Next time someone suggests this isn't a totalitarian state, think about that.
"Making this more nefarious is the fact that the government itself has an interest in silencing debate and criticism, as it funded gain-of-function research – and thus might bear responsibility for – the creation of COVID-19. They would make themselves as gods: they gave us a plague and strike us down for blasphemy."
https://technofog.substack.com/p/the-new-orthodoxy-jurisdiction-over
Yep.
This guy is on it. I highly suggest you tune into the Corona Investigative Committee: https://www.bitchute.com/video/1338kLyYzeAp/
The Biden Administration has only been in place for 6 months, and look how boldly they're already talking and acting.
For you folks on the left, what would you have thought if a spokesman for the Trump Admin just casually mentioned, "Hey, we're going to be monitoring and censoring your private text messages? We're in touch with the social media companies to make sure you don't see or hear things we deem to be harmful? We're doing it all to protect you."
At this pace, what will America be in 3 1/2 years?
But, as they like to say on conservative sites--at least there will be no more mean tweets.
Biden is a puppet, others are pulling the strings. The election was a complete fraud directed by the string pullers.
Where can we move??
The irony is that you have to show fealty with your Pfizer™ punchcard in order to go anywhere, now, regardless of your personal choice or beliefs. Can't get away from the rapidly expanding social credit system without complying by it.
I'm learning how to build a homestead and looking into Maine to buy land. I figure it'll be too cold up there for anyone to find it worth bothering me. For once I'm not joking.
I hear they have mosquitos there the size of hummingbirds!
Hopefully this will be solved if scientists figure out a way to reduce the size of hummingbirds.
Minnesota does, too.
I was looking at Maine, too. But the cold is daunting... I got 'soft' living in California for 25 years. I'm in Idaho now (along with half of California - lol) but even these mild winters are tough for me.
I am sick of California politics and am really sick of the weather. Every damn day it is sunny. I miss the thunder and lightning storms in Ohio. And the seasons and the quarries and swimming ponds. And normal people.
Storms are really underrated, as are gloomy nights. Southern Cali is nice to visit but I don't understand wanting the weather to stay the same all year round. I'd go crazy.
That's why I left. It nearly drove me insane, sun sun sun sun all the time. And heat.
Aren't you guys locked down again? Agree, CA is cuckoo.
It's my one edge: I do better in the cold than the heat. Heck, by the time I'm ready, maybe Maine will have the climate that California had when I was a kid.
Ha! Great point.
I am going back to Ohio. DeWine finally did something intelligent. He signed legislation stating that all state colleges must allow students full access whether vaccinated or not.
I'd say Mars, but it's the tech billionaires who control the transpo. Probably the real estate too.
It's impossible to live on Mars. I can't believe people think it's possible - lol.
You may be misinformed. Look for better news sources.
https://www.englishforum.ch/attachments/international-affairs-politics/62671d1368636202-art-waiting-line-004.jpg
I already researched it. There is no way a human being can reach Mars, and live. Same with the moon landing, which was a hoax as well. People like to believe it though. Even though 30% of people at the time it happened didn't buy it.
Ha!!! Read Dave McGowan’s “Wagging the Moondoggie” online PDF. So damn laugh out loud funny!
"Same with the moon landing, which was a hoax as well."
That merely identifies you as a person who can't reason effectively. My respect for your opinions in general has just been destroyed by your revelatory comment. You can be a clown if you so choose. No one can stop you.
Just curious: What else about reality do you reject out of hand?
"Impossible" is almost certainly wrong. You'd be much closer with "extremely difficult and expensive barring major scientific advances". But I have zero interest in moving there regardless.
Libertarian space colonization fantasies run into this problem hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
I like how Heinlen's perspective is that no matter how far into the future you go, the Libertarian Elite and Organized Labor are still locked in eternal war... and he's probably correct.
I caveat that I have not read *all* of RAH's stuff, really just the best-known stuff. He's commonly thought of as a libertarian, but I always got the vibe that he sympathizes with the working proletariat -- if not organized labor -- against the elite. He bought Philip K. Dick a typewriter and loaned him money to pay off the IRS. (PKD was broke a lot of the time, as one might expect.)
Money shot in this article: "Isaac Asimov, who knew Heinlein from the mid-'30s on, was convinced that his personal political views were largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time."
I have read everything he ever wrote plus all of the biographies, etc. I would say that he expressed a libertarian streak in many of his books but he started out as a socialist and Democrat in the 1930s (Upton Sinclair).
I think more than anything else, he wanted the state to stay out of the way of people exercising individual agency. He felt that people should act like adults and conduct their own affairs and work things out individually. He frowned on morality police and despised the false sanctimony of organized religion.
He was well aware of the creeping totalitarianism inherent in giving the state too much power and in "Friday", one of my favorite books from his late writing period, he is not kind to California in terms of describing the political situation. IIRC, he mentions excessive taxation as a serious problem (quite prescient as it turns out). He hated bureaucrats and pompous politicians and many of his protagonists lived in armored or secured compounds due to the degradation and corruption of civil order.
A common theme in several books is that when a society gets to the point of requiring ids, liberty becomes a casualty. I think he chafed under the restrictive mores of his era and dreamed of a freer society.
On the other hand, in "For Us, the Living" (written in '38 but published posthumously in '03) I just listened to a scene where the protagonist, who time travels forward 150 years from the 1930s, is sent to be re-educated because he punches someone out of jealousy. Violence is not allowed and psychiatrists are called in to correct his atavistic behavior. No one questions the right of the state to brainwash the protagonist. Conformity to custom is enforced by law.
So, I would say he flirted with quite a few ideologies over the course of his writing. Regardless, I credit him with expanding my universe on a multitude of vectors. He is the first writer who challenged me to think about systems - in terms of governments, infrastructure, and the ways that societies organize themselves. He also made me think about what it actually means to be and live as a free person.
I agree, I've also questioned whether the label fit him, but it speaks to the time when the intellectuals thought about ideology a different way.
I think back then you could still have an ideological stance but still question it and you'd be more respected for that. This ideological/intellectual/informational purity standard we find ourselves locked in has been a long time brewin'.
The irony is that if you care about promoting your own ideology it actually makes you stronger to question it, probe it, find out the weaknesses before opponents can exploit it. It's a form of empathy that makes you have stronger arguments. I've failed to explain this to many wannabe activists in today's world. It's Sun Tzu "know your enemy" shit that they deliberately stay ignorant of that would actually open the door for gaining of ground.
That being said, I think he has really smart ideas that were influential but I never enjoyed reading any of his books aside from the introduction of scientific concepts to storytelling (like in Troopers how a planet without sufficient radiation exposure would become "retarded").
I think we both know that the only reason PKD needed a typewriter was because They snuck into his house and sabotaged his old one 😉
That's very funny Asimov politely suggesting H. was pussywhipped. I guess it makes sense since he was in the Free Love scene which probably had a more Matriarchically structure given the difference of power balance (His Moon society was Matriarchically, IIRC).
This reminds of a Chuck Klosterman passage that I think of time to time, “Whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living.” The Inverse of this is that relationships take dynamic, thinking men and destroy those qualities. I could make a list...
good info. I'm curious if - in the context of this kind of framing - if this means the next (severe) economic rebellion will be delayed or hastened compared to times past.
Whenever I look at what's going on in the US, being that there's a ridiculous concentration of wealth and resources adjacent to working people who are starving, I would think that it should have already happened by now. Obviously the establishment has taken great advantage with idpol in keeping an organized class rebellion at bay, this is a huge factor. But I can see the "individual achievement" mentality as working either way.
On one hand, if you tell people that hard work will make them prosperous but the hardest working can't even afford to live, then you'd think they'd get wise at some point and just smash everything that the Kings and Barons own. What seems to be taking place instead is that over the millenia "They" have just locked down the game to a point where the poor will just tear each other apart for a slightly better seat in Steerage.
Extra points for linking to Heinlein. He is my fave SF author bar none. Love TMIAHM. Great story.
I'm not really a Sci-fi fan, but i can do a rock video. Not 80's though, my Prayers For Rain got answered and it hasn't stopped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rB3LdLuFVw
I thought I was the only Grandaddy fan left alive.
https://youtu.be/23_xrih86Dg?t=53
The Crystal Lake is on my current driving playlist!
I'm not sure i can say i'm a fan, i came to them late and gave them a couple of listens (and liked them a lot.) But these two tunes are probably the only 2 i could name off the top of my head.
Flyover country. Medium town, small town. AKA Mars.
Apparently we can all move into Vida Galore's cranium--where there is infinite unoccupied and unused "space". It's a vast "vacant lot."
You sound jelly.
Or now, calls the millions of unvaccinated people "killers".
Dr. Kory and team are doing more to “protect” everyone over at their FLCCC website than anyone connected to the US government, Big Tech or the MSM are doing!
Personally, I never fell for Maddow. The time that she grilled Michael Moore with a condescending "what were you thinking?!?" tone for being among the many (genuine) progressives who bailed out Assange back around 2010, I wanted put my foot through the screen right where her face was. She's educated enough to know why questioning the bail is massive bullshit, particularly in an obvious international legal railoading. She's a hypocritical shitstain.
More and more “educated” does not imply wisdom…in fact often times the opposite.
It means more and more indoctrinated. They live in an alternate reality.
I don't necessarily believe that she's indoctrinated because that implies some sort of ideological doctrine she adheres to. Normal people couldn't stand the pressure of being forced to mislead the public day after day. My best guess is she's a sociopath driven only by self interest.
Agree 100% about Maddow. My comment was more to do with the uber-educated in general.
Madcow has reduced herself to a twitching, maniacal joke.
Bottom line is that companies like YouTube, Facebook, and their ilk have become quasi-governmental, basically acting as appendages of .Gov. Disagree with the narrative, no matter how benignly, and “disappeared” essentially. Kids being told to inform on their parents. The list goes on.
BLM, with their flag still flying at various American embassies (!) praises and supports the Cuban dictatorship over the tens of thousands of black Cubans demonstrating, some with American flags(oh the horror!), for their rights. Black Lives Matter only goes so far I guess.
Taken together it looks like to these old eyes the beginning (well, we’re past that) of good old-fashioned Stalinist Soviet Union, and The People’s Republic, to name just the biggest. Mao would be proud.
Censoring science discussion is downright stupid, and only done by those who cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas. I've been spanked on multiple fora for posting that it's a coronavirus that produces respiratory infection and all others have been human-to-human transmissible, but WHO was backing China's lie that it wasn't. Until it did a 180.
Other spank-worthy offenses included posting that six-feet separation was B.S., it was based on 19th century measurements of bacteria-laden droplets indoors and missed the aerosol carrying much tinier viruses 26 feet away; posting that case fatality rate was overblown in the initial models, this was serious but not panic-worthy; posting that two steps could prevent the catastrophe, moving people outdoors and focusing all safeguards on known vulnerable populations. There are many many more, and they've all been proven out. I'm not an idiot, I'm a scientist.
This has already spread to lesser-known fora. I've been kicked out of the politics section of what is now a dying forum run by left-wingers for sharing empirical information about the dangers of hydroxychloroquine (essentially zero); driven out of a discussion forum based on a serialized novel for using the hate-speech phrase "the transgender phenomenon;" been punished on other fora for sharing government data and results of large controlled double-blind randomized trials; this list is nearly endless.
The only thing preventing a Ministry of Truth in the permanent one-party authoritarian state is the filibuster in the Senate. We're fucked.
It's the biggest hoax in history. And for those of us who understand that, it's quite torturesome.
As a scientist do you have an opinion on this?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(21)00069-0/abstract
I’m not a scientist so I don’t know if I am crazy in believing that Relative Risk Reduction has no correlation with reality and that what does, Absolute Risk Reduction, means the vaccine companies have admitted their drugs are no more than 2% effective.
It's true. Just look at the numbers of all the vax trials and one thing really jumps out at you -- how few people actually got sick enough to be counted as a case in the first place.
Go to the article. There are two glaring red flags. If you click on footnote 9 you'll see that he's referencing himself. That is enough to stop reading. If you're continuing to read, see "ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs." This is either false, or a personal opinion absent psychic ability. Ascribing a bad motive to the individual you're criticizing as a substitute for critiquing methodology, selection criteria or analysis is bogus.
Normally, I'd have stopped reading after finding the self-reference, but there's an infinitesimal chance it's a typo. Not so for ascribing a bad motive to the individual you're critiquing. If the motive was self-enrichment or self-aggrandizement or revenge or anything else, only one person knows the motive, and it sure as shit isn't the author of the lancet article. This isn't the first time this year that the Lancet has proven lax in its standards.
Whether he's right or wrong, he's still wrong. I don't trust the analysis of a scientist who references himself, nor of a scientist who bypasses empirical data to go to the ad hominem. My Rating: R. For Rubbish.
RE:
"I don't trust the analysis of a scientist who references himself, "...
Really? So you reject Albert Einstein's papers* in which he references and cites his own prior papers? or J. C. Maxwell's, Bohr's, Planck's or Schrödinger's, H. Minkowski's, Bolztmann's, Infeld's, etc.?
E.g. (Volume 2: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909)
pp. 596 to 601 are just the citations of Einstein's work alone or, more often, with others. (https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol2-doc/632)
It's a very old and established practice.
When Daniel Everett published his "Aspectos da Fonologia do Pirahã" (1979 Universidade Estadual de Campinas master's thesis) or his "A Língua Pirahã e a Teoria da Sintaxe" (1983 Sc.D. dissertation at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)) whose work except that of a few others on general side issues should he have cited other than his own? He was nearly alone and first in studying and publishing scholarly work on this Amazon tribe's language.
Others (mainly or only other religious missionaries) before Everett had tried to study their language but, before Everett, no body of linguistic studies had been published on them. He was a pioneer in his field. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett#Work)
How about this one? You never answered my question about RRR vs ARR.
“ The same publicly available data, without absolute risk reduction measures, were reviewed and approved by the roster of members serving on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) for emergency use authorization (EUA) of the mRNA vaccines [10]. Ironically, the omission of absolute risk reduction measures in data reviewed by the VRBPAC overlooks FDA guidelines for communicating evidence-based risks and benefits to the public [11]. The FDA’s advice for information providers includes:
“Provide absolute risks, not just relative risks. Patients are unduly influenced when risk information is presented using a relative risk approach; this can result in suboptimal decisions. Thus, an absolute risk format should be used.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996517/
As you've demonstrated, there was no need for self-reference as there is other material in the field. That the author would first go to self-reference remains a red flag to me.
I encountered this years ago on the Dunning Kruger Effect. For two decades almost everything in the field was written, or collaborated on by one or the other or both. As you know, the gold standard is replication of results. For decades no one was ever able to replicate the results, until a team loaded random data into the model. THAT duplicated the results.
If you don't want to address the issue and answer my question just say so. At least that way I can try and find a different scientist to get an opinion on this potentially huge issue that no one is talking about. After your first comment talking about all the times you were right and censored in regards to covid I was hoping you would at a minimum, have an opinion.
OK. Thanks for looking at it. Let’s assume what’s in the paper is true. If they are really using RRR, which the best I have heard it explained is the percentage improvement assuming everyone was infected, would that be better than using ARR which would take into account all the people that are unlikely to be infected?
Number of infections is irrelevant because most have few symptoms or pass on the infection. Number of deaths is worth following, but less important than hospitalizations. Those are the gateway to real problems. As long as few are being hospitalized it's all good on a high level.
The other thing is that criteria for hospitalization are vastly different from country to country. If you see that the US has ten thousand people on ventilators, but Mali only has five, which healthcare system is in worse shape? It would help to know that Mali only has five ventilators in the country. If our hospitals are all 80% full, it would be helpful to know that this is the normal level of occupancy.
And it's unconstitutional. This shows me that we no longer have any rule of law. If we ever did.
Is it technically unconstitutional though? The government is using Big Tech as a proxy to skirt that pesky old document. I'm just guessing here.
AND this is why they wanted so badly to pass the terrorist act they used the Jan 6 event to push. As you will note they called some of Matt O's content 'criminal' - so they are calling us violent criminals for posting things that go against the establishment narrative. The next step is to actually arrest us.
It is unconstitutional. There is clear precedent that defines government assistance in identifying what should be banned, even if carried out by private actor, as a violation of the First Amendment.
You'd have to prove that the government either pressured the private entity to suppress speech, or that it engaged in "joint action" with the private entity to suppress speech. I'd say this most easily looks like "joint action."
But the devil of proof is always in the details. The social media entities may be keeping track of times when they didn't act on a government request, and then argue that they were really making their own judgments.
Someone uncovered it already - maybe Whitney Webb, and proved that Twitter was being given directives by the government.
Ha! What do you know, just saw a tweet of Jen Psaki admitting it. So there you go.
The government funded google in its infancy. Google owns YouTube.
The government also funded and developed Google Earth during Project Keyhole.
Google was handed the whole lot and they created Google Maps, etc.
Thanks for that. (I'm a foreigner.) So what's next?
Someone sues, and we find out if we still have a functioning judiciary left.
A hope/belief I have is that there is a case out there right now (not Trump's) being prepared to go into court very soon challenging this BS. I believe that this is so important, so dangerous, a court would be willing to grant injunctive relief, and that it would be on the fast track to the Supremes.
I was taught in law school a century ago that The Court uses a lot of reasons/excuses to not hear a case, but this gets to the most important freedom in our country. This is so cancerous. I think good attorneys could quickly frame a case for the Supremes to take on.
And they need to. This is already of hand.
I have no doubt that rule of law is gone.
Yes it is. It's the government directing censorship through a private company. Sneaky, and illegal.
I don't think it is sneaky as much "quiet.". They don't respect us at all, but it's easier if they don't wake us up. During the last election, of course there was a lot of Organizing for America that was going on. Bet you never read a story about it.
It is long-established that police cannot use an agent of the police to do on their behalf what they themselves are constitutionally or legally prohibited from doing. In this case the term "police" is drawn from "police powers," which include the power to pass laws and levy taxes. It's more than technically unconstitutional. It's unconstitutional.
An answer from a practicing attorney (I am not one) would help here. Then again, the people who wrote the constitution weren't all lawyers, were they?
Well, well -- the elections are coming; how else to stay in power?
I don't think it's wise to assume anything about the sociopolitical atmosphere in Cuba based on American reporting.
Thank you for this, Matt. People are not seeing the creeping tyranny in our country. The censorship, the illegal changes in voting laws, General Milley ordering troops to attack over the head of a US President, the extended lockdowns, the suppression of information about Covid, and who knows what will be next. Where is the outrage? Are US citizens asleep, distracted, too busy to notice, or simply willing to live with tyranny?
It's not creeping any more. It's full bore.
It makes me sad and furious.
Absolutely, where IS the outrage! This is so odious, so vile. That saying, "We've seen this movie before . . ." Re. the Milley story, we literally HAVE seen it before, it's called "Seven Days in May."
Burt Lancaster is at his best playing the heel. Kirk Douglas is at his best playing the face. It's funny how the vast majority of their careers dictated otherwise, but that's Hollywood.
So scary and so disappointing.
Man, is this fascist takeover happening quickly.
How ironic that it would’ve been impossible were not set up under the guise of “confronting fascism.“
Donald Trump appears to be the greatest gift the establishment ever received.
Accident?
I don't think so. I think he was installed to get us to where we are now. Talk about theater...
I'd almost fall for that, if Hillary Clinton didn't want to be potus just so badly. And the Clintons could have grifted so much better.
I respectfully disagree. They did it the sneaky way. They created Trump Derangement Syndrome and the rest was a piece of cake.
"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
Well, we had disaster capitalism and controlled hysteria and tails wagging dogs and all the rest long before Trump.
We didn't have half the populace completely culted and brainwashed though. Now we do, thanks to TDS.
Im not sure how much daylight there is between TDS and CDS
You sound like democrats talking about TDS, both sides use this term on each other
Reagan predicted exactly this and he probably ripped it off from a Founding Father.
...and he kicked the Trilateral Commission's can down the road more as he was instructed.
I don't know... is it an accident that his former producer at NBC moved up to head CNN as he began his run for the Big Show?
I think not.
This is a coordinated attack on "what's left" and it's going on without even so much as a whimper from most people. So sad.
Can somebody please explain again what was so bad about Trump? He was against Tech amassing too much power. Please explain it as if you’re speaking to a five yr old. I want to know again - in clear language- What was So bad about Trump?
Trump was precisely what everyone SAYS they want to see in a politician: a man no one owns, who owed nothing to Wall Street, unions, the ABA, the AMA or any other special interest.
And that, of course, was completely unacceptable.
Yeah, but they said that about Bloomberg too. The kool aid drinkers on the NYT said he didn't have to answer to anybody because he had so much money, it was just between Mike and his conscience.
Right, i would bet the wellbeing of the country on the conscience of the guy who ended up stiffing all of the koolaid drinkers he paid off to post for him. I did listen to Hillary in '16 though, who told me to vote my conscience. So i wrote in Bernie.
beyond the On Paper factor I think it was that Bloomberg lacks any perceivable charisma to me and Trump has a certain amount that evidently appeals to a lot of people. It's weird to say this, but Trump almost has a "best of both worlds" thing going on by having an almost underdog charisma combined with a silver spoon upbringing.
Yea but Bloomberg had the Hillary like "elitism" built in him. Remember how he was talking about the farmers who don't do any special work and anyone can do their work? Trump, despite his flaws, didn't come off as "elite". There's couple videos of him making unplanned stops of his limo, coming out to take pictures with the fire fighters. Similar thing he did when he took his car out to visit the crowd outside the hospital when he got covid. He didn't have to do those things. But he did.
Him as well as his grandfather were hated in NY because despite the money, he didn't talk like the NY elites. He was rude, brash, blunt, politically incorrect. On one hand he was a showboater and exaggerated. On another hand, he would speak bluntly on things like "Putin isn't the only one who's a killer, you think US is innocent?"
https://youtu.be/y7ErFCqCXcg
They don't like their evil to be talked out loud.
Before the elections, reddit (and people) used to praise Trump. Look at this post with 23k upvotes and over 11k comments (Post has since been deleted by reddit).
http://archive.is/8TvxG
He also criticized HRC in 2002 for still not supporting gay marriage. People like to forget that stuff though and think of him as Orange Hitler.
You do have a point. He had grifters like Gina Raimondo and Stacy Abrams endorsing him. Remember how the DNC bent the debate rules so that he didn't need any small donors, while that rule had already knocked out the likes of Cory Booker? And nevermind the sexual harassment stuff, bad for Trump, ok for Bloomberg. But he was really just in there because the DNC wanted the money, and they wanted anybody but Bernie when Joe was tanking. Glad Warren basically knocked him out of it.
I didn't know about 'Berg's line about farmers, but that's asinine as fuck. I know I could find thousands of farmers brighter than him. You can take Bloomberg out of NYC, but you can't take the NYC snobbery out of Bloomberg. Jackass.
He appears brilliantly designed to create the opportunity that is being exploited now. Were it not for him, and his boorish behavior, the powers that be could not have swung the nation so willingly into a trap.
He was the establishment’s sheep dog, scaring the public into the arms of the butcher. Without him, none of this obviously pre-planned fascism would have been marketable.
That just shows that the "DNC leftists" and everyone who fell for it didn't have any principles in the first place. If your principles get eroded by 1 person you don't like, then they don't exist.
Well put.
Yeah, but everyone got taken. Trump supporters thought he was some outsider, ignoring the fact that he ran in the same circles and depended on their money too. He was a black flag op of the establishment.
This is just quite the elaborate fantasy to evade taking responsibility for your vote by not admitting that Trump would have been a better choice
????
Trump was a total shit show. I have no idea what you are on about.
Consider how he served the establishment you seem to think he was opposing. Their entire fascist move at this point depended wholly on his existence, without which none of this would’ve been possible.
Why don’t you take responsibility?
I don’t support trump, or Clinton, or Biden. The fact that you’re trying to find a hero among that pile of trash puts the burden on you to defend your position.
He was hired to play the part of "The Heel".
I think that is called a trojan horse, not that I believe Trump was aware of it.
You make it sound like Media and the citizens don't have any responsibility - or power - in this matter.
I think something you might also want to consider is that Establishment has definitively the most experience attaining and maintaining power. Part of that is being ready for random contingencies and adapting to them on the fly, or figuring out how to. I disagree that they expected Trump to win, and I think it shows in how it took them awhile (nearly four years) just to squeak out a win to depose him. EVEN THEN it required a pandemic to come along they could juice into a universal overreaction in order to tank the economy just in the nick of time for the election.
If it wasn't for COVID, do you seriously think Trump loses? After he INCREASED his minority demo?
Establishment aren't omniscient, it only seems that way because they're good at trying to adapt. It's their greed that gets them into trouble.
Except- at least half- the country didn’t fall for it. People need to take responsibility for their actions. If someone fell for it, its on them.
I think you give him too much credit. It was going this direction regardless. Give up your guns and you won’t be long for life.
controlled opposition
Quite simple: Trump was an outsider; couldn't be relied upon to do the "right" thing on key issues. Worse, in spite of his crude manner of expressing himself, he might even tell the truth occasionally; and worse still he seemed to be able to get through to large numbers of people who didn't give a toss about all the run of the mill politicians. But his greatest fault was that he used the tools of Big Tech to do all this.
IMO, for progressives the worst thing about Trump was that he prevented them, both legally and rhetorically, from acting out their totalitarian impulses. And for that, they called him totalitarian.
Trump, despite his flaws, didn't come off as "elite". There's couple videos of him making unplanned stops of his limo, coming out to take pictures with the fire fighters. Similar thing he did when he took his car out to visit the crowd outside the hospital when he got covid. He didn't have to do those things. But he did.
Him as well as his grandfather were hated in NY because despite the money, he didn't talk like the NY elites. He was rude, brash, blunt, politically incorrect. On one hand he was a showboater and exaggerated. On another hand, he would speak bluntly on things like "Putin isn't the only one who's a killer, you think US is innocent?"
https://youtu.be/y7ErFCqCXcg
They don't like their evil to be talked out loud.
Before the elections, reddit (and people) used to praise Trump. Look at this post with 23k upvotes and over 11k comments (Post has since been deleted by reddit).
http://archive.is/8TvxG
Trump was totally incompetent, without any convictions, narcist, surrounded with sycophants -- him not pardoning Julian Assange, his strong witness about the immense Russia-gate hoax concocted by Obama-Biden-Hillary -- is a PERFECT illustration of that.
Trump had congress, big business(wall street), the media apparatus, and his own generals against him, all while having to deal with constant impeachment attempts. His failing was getting rid of Steve Bannon who had an actual vision and sticking with the snake Kushner.
I suspect all the best ideas Trump ever claimed came from directly from Bannon.
...perhaps his strongest failing...and one of his weakest moments...was not pardoning
Julian Assange. totally agree
Thank you -- on a different subject -- recent US colonial crimes:
IMPORTANT -- An extraordinary interview !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
my first introduction to Mr. Assange's revelatory skills was in Barcelona, Spain 1970. He made records available from several African governments that implicated European-sourced bribery...No surprise..but he (his organization) was adept at infiltrating even the most fascist dictatorial governments (Francisco Franco) We were young, and pre-electronic media...but just as thirsty for the truth. Assange may now have some clinical signs...but his contributions were indisputable, and vital to governmental transparency
Thank you. What is amazing and what fully illustrates that we are dealing with paid security state trolls is the following:
- Even id Julian is high functioning autist There millions of them fully contributing in our societies worldwide), even in that case --- one of their main and universally recognized characteristics is -- they are UNABLE to lie. That makes them "socially awkward"
- Note how CIA trolls intensely try to divert from the immense Assange (or Snowden, or other) immense contribution to our society, they, like with the horrendous recent history with Aristide and Haiti, how they try to deflect to another topic, in this case "mental illness"
( please see/listen to the truly eye-opening US recent bipartisan crimes in this "Haiti interview" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI )
Mr. Assange was rumored to be impossible to work with, but genius and incapable of duplicity -- almost naive...these past years must have been grueling...and Central America, Haiti in particular, is rife with bipartisan "crimes" or "policy"... will watch the interview.
Spain in 1970 was restricted, with Cataluna (Catalan) and Vizcaya, Alava and Guipuzcoa (Basque) under severe repression. This was not "pseudo" -- it was real....Mr. Assange used his stealth to reveal the dark sides of many political systems and victims -- a skill that was as dangerous as it was necessary...Thank you
"e.pirce" is a lunatic but likely a paid troll.
CIA and its servants did the same blasphemous accusations to Aristide !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI -- a MUST read/hear.
Nearly incredible and horrible recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated crime horror for six (read slowly - six) full years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Thank you. What is amazing and what fully illustrates that we are dealing with paid security state trolls is the following:
- Even if Julian is high functioning autist (there millions of them fully contributing in our societies worldwide), even in that case --- one of their main and universally recognized characteristics is -- they are UNABLE to lie. That makes them "socially awkward" but invaluable.
- Note how CIA trolls intensely try to divert from the immense Assange (or Snowden, or other) immense contribution to our society, they, like with the horrendous recent history with Aristide and Haiti, note how they try to deflect to another topic, in this case "mental illness"
( please see/listen to the truly eye-opening US recent bipartisan crimes in this "Haiti interview" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI )
Sam Harris has some pretty good takes on why Trump is so bad but a lot of it comes down to just personally hating the guy. Harris :
“ There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. If I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. ”
I used to think Sam Harris was so sophisticated, and yet that quote is so incredibly crude and unsophisticated. Childlike, really.
Yeah, Trump is gross. And narcissistic. And orange. And says really weird shit. He makes me wince.
But this left woke totalitarian movement has been obvious for a while. It kept getting stronger even under Trump. And unless you're a complete fool, it was obvious it would go on steroids if Biden were elected. Which it has.
Poor aesthetics vs. woke dystopia. That was the choice. We chose... poorly.
Trump is buffoonish , but he really did know what was ailing the country, he was just terrible at communicating it, and he had literally nobody to work with in congress.
I dunno. I think Trump’s a dangerous man. And at least for awhile there, he was much more powerful than the wokeys.
#Resist started the day after his election. He was never more powerful than the wokeys. The absolute personal hatred toward him from 360 degrees was breathtaking. A guy who had never held office couldn't be helped along for the good of the nation. But then, they weren't very nice to Jimmy Carter either.
They literally said they were going to get him out of office THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION!
Well, I respect the difference of opinion. You must have noticed, though, that the media went into conniptions and predicted cataclysmic disaster after just about everything he did. Didn't that get a little silly?
This sounds like someone possessed by their shadow in the Jungian sense. Meaning he's taken everything he doesn't like about himself and projected it on to someone else. I good sign you're being run by your shadow is if you can't think of a single good thing about the object of your hatred. There was a lot of this in the TDS era.
Big time
«good takes on why Trump is so bad»
I think like most replies you misunderstand the question, because it is not just "personally hating the guy", but having an extreme disgust at them.
The question is about *over*-reaction, not just reaction, to Trump. The question to me is about this:
* 4 years of pretty much "normal" right-wing presidency, with some changes in intended policy, and small changes in actual policy, and the over-reaction is "like Hitler" and "democracy itself";
* why the gigantic gap between (overrated) "reality" and disproportionately extreme reactions, both personal and political, to Trump?
I’m just torn between “trump is an evil narcissist who has no moral compass and that makes him dangerous” and
“Trump did do some good things he’s just a orange tv star who likes his ego stroked all day. Overall he wasn’t so bad”
But both your reactions are just reactions, and similar reactions could be applied to most politicians, e.g. Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz, both of which are despised even by many members of their own parties.
I think that the original "so bad" question seems to be about Trump Derangement Syndrome, those “disproportionately extreme reactions, both personal and political”.
Where are the mass graves with the bodies hacked to pieces? Where are the reports of MAGA-hatter death squads "disappearing" Democratic Party activists? Where are the vast torture camps for leftist academics? Where are the photos of the NYT and CNN buildings taken over by the secret police with the journalists brought out in chains?
I believe there were armed, ununiformed goons in unmarked vans scooping people off the street. But I'm not dumb enough to think that couldn't happen under any other president with the right conditions. Still, there's that.
They surely were operating in Italy under GW Bush:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/italy-pardons-us-colonel-cia-rendition-case-flna1B9241457
“Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said he had pardoned Colonel Joseph L. Romano, who was the only person not a member of the CIA among 23 Americans sentenced for the kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Milan in 2003. The Egyptian cleric, also known as Abu Omar, was secretly flown to Egypt for interrogation, where he says he was tortured for seven months. He was a resident in Italy at the time of the abduction.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-cia-pardon-idUSKBN0U623J20151223
“Lady and Medero were among 26 Americans convicted for snatching Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from a street in Milan in 2003 and whisking him away to be questioned in Egypt.”
Even the english army special forces, not exactly made of "concerned intellectuals", felt that the USA death squads in Iraq were too much:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/chilcot-inquiry-black-ops-in-iraq-caused-split-between-us-and-uk-7130996.html
“Some senior British officers were unhappy at what was going on and the involvement of the UK’s SAS and the SBS. “Why are we helping to run Latin American-style death squads?” One British commander, himself ex-SAS, demanded to know. The SAS were, on at least two occasions, barred from carrying out such missions in the British-run south of the country.
Questions were asked about how information was being obtained from suspects in Balad. There was an unofficial inquiry into the treatment of prisoners at the base, although no evidence was found to implicate Maj Gen McChrystal. ...
But the reverberations from special forces operations in Iraq continued. Six years later Maj Gen McChrystal, by now a four star general and commander of international forces in Afghanistan, had received a complaint from the UK’s director of special forces (DSF) for speaking about operations carried out with the SAS and SBS in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile an SAS lieutenant colonel, who had served with distinction under Maj Gen McChrystal in Iraq, was told to stay away from the Regiment’s headquarters in Hereford.”
Sam Harris went from being a decent intellectual to completely terminal TDS.
It keeps coming down to this style over substance stuff. I’m tired of it now bc we’re approaching a dangerous situation. I need to hear, from someone intelligent, something Substantive about Trump’s major faults. I’ll go first- he does have an Andrew Jackson complex. He wanted to go down in history.. he wanted ppl to fight for him. This is a very off putting quality for many ppl and it triggered them and scared them. It didn’t come out (IMO) as a truly and Substantively damaging quality until January 6th.
Andrew Jackson if I remember by history was the first and last to successfully disband the central banks, see link.
http://www.campaignforliberty.org/andrew-jackson-and-the-central-bank
I was disturbed by a couple of things. One was his advocating or condoning violence against political opponents and people he construed to be class enemies, This out of the old-time fascist playbook, although it's possible he didn't understand its connections He also encouraged private-army types. That is one thing I don't want to see catch on in the US. It's not something to fools around with even in humor, as you can find out by reading the history of Germany in the 20th century.
First, he was a true narcissist. And couldn’t control it. He didn’t deliver on his promises because he couldn’t pay attention to them if someone on Hannity was talking about him. He couldn’t listen even to good advice unless someone was sucking him off hard enough.
Second, he had no idea how to address any of the criticisms he had made to find a solution. He governed largely as a standard Republican, even when it hurt him. His lowest ratings came the day his McConnell wet dream tax cut passed.
Third, he sucked as a manager. He picked the worst people for his team. Made working for him completely unappealing to the best people for the job. And dear god did he not always pick the worst legal minds in the business?
Nothing worse than incompetence really. Nowhere near as much of a racist as Joe Biden. Nor as much of a fascist.
but it absolutely doesn't dead-end at style, that's just the low-hanging stinkfruit that most people reach for to throw the most, with good reason. the exact same thing happens with Biden
Well they are really discrediting themselves by going for low hanging fruit. No ones doing the same w Biden - we’re pointing out some very significant and dangerous flaws with him. Where was the Real danger in Trump? So far the only real answer I got is “he turned lefties into fascists and also some ppl don’t like him”. It’s an interesting theory but I’m not buying it that he was a gift created by or given to the Establishment if that lets ppl off the hook for still hating Trump. We’re not going to move forward as a society until we sort out some truth about Trump
The reality that he’s a megalomaniac is not just a matter of style. When anyone who disagrees with you becomes an enemy of the state (because, increasingly, you ARE the state), that’s really a dangerous state of affairs. We may reach fascism by committee with the Dems, but I believe a charismatic megalomaniac can bring that to pass as well.
You really shit beige, don’t you?
We are already staring full-on fascism in the face under Democrats (did you READ Matt’s post?), and you’re still pursing your lips and tugging worriedly at your turtleneck over Trump.
To be clear, I have no professional idea of what it means, but I think of Trump as the mega guy, but mostly because, every time he talked, things were "the biggest," "the most," "the greatest," etc.
So, interested to know the forensic analysis of Pres. Obama. This could be a series. But we could be labeled, "misinformation."
Discrediting themselves, no. Not really answering your question, yes. Some have already addressed your question without leaning on style. Indeed, Biden faces (and deserves) similar style attacks, especially from Berniebros, I guess you've only seen the desperate dog jokes.
I've seen the ice cream updates. Bernie bro-ette here, but i suspect we'll let Joe slide and save it for when it's Kamala's Turn.
I used to like Sam Harris but you've totally destroyed that feeling.
At one time I was smitten with Harris’ apparent hyper-rationality and ever-so-calm delivery. I don’t know just how it happened, but something destroyed that feeling. One thing that started to bother me was a sense that he wanted to talk about one thing, how bad Islam is, too exclusively. Kinda how I feel about Greenwald sometimes with his anti-mainstream-lib vendetta (not that he’s wrong). Also, both guys get hyper-riled up sometimes when criticized. But whatever.
Well Islam is a terrible violent religion so I don’t mind that.
Harris is nuanced, like the rest of us. I still listen to and respect his opinions on a great many things. Many. Things. His somewhat hyperbolic takes on Covid and Trump I take as interesting counterpoints to other opinions I glean and respect. Long live nuance!
I've always not been able to stand him.
I’ve always never not hated him
Not a credible source when it comes to Trump. Harris has stage four TDS.
There is a book called "Insane Clown President" which answers that question. I can't quite remember the author's name... but you should check it out.
I want a browser extension that allows me to hide all posts regarding Trump. Am I the only one who doesn't need every discussion to be 50% allocated to one topic?
Re: Greg Maland
It would seem that there should be some quality of use offerings provided by sites that require paid subscriptions, both in service to their patrons, as well as to those who publish their work on the venue. If it can be assumed that the patrons are attracted to the work being published, the paid provider should consider providing its patrons with a means of avoiding off-topic content and repetitive trolling by other patrons; the simple addition of an "IGNORE" button in the individuals comment section is a proven solution to this very common problem. It easily gives the subscriber individual control without censoring anyone else.
It would also be very helpful to have an "EDIT", "BOLD", "ITALICS", AND "UNDERLINE" button in the comment segment. So COME ON Substack, not asking for censorship or moderation, just a little technical upgrade? At this point, it is my belief that many of us would be happy to pay "a little" extra to end the hassles.
As Usual,
EA
Here is something that is NOT about Trump. On a different subject -- worth distributing. An extraordinary interview detailing horrendous recent crimes in Haiti during Obama and Bush administrations !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
He is a morally bankrupt person. Whether he has good policy or not, Some people dont want a BS artist, Someone who doesnt know geography and draws on maps and lies that hr received info from weather angencies to prop up is ego.
"He is a morally bankrupt person."
Look, I'm the last guy on earth to defend the buffoon Trump, but have you noticed who our current President and Vice President are?
And - it is much worse than even I thought. On a different subject -- worth distributing. An extraordinary interview !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Thats the sad part, Biden could of chose anyone, but he narrowed it down, to her and she has no moxie or whatever that thing is. That was a hate vote for biden, People would have voted for anyone but Trump. If trump had handled the vrus better, he would of won
«If trump had handled the vrus better, he would of won»
Relatively to most "Atlantic Alliance" countries the USA story was average, and the Trump administration also setup a vaccination program that has been working well since January. These are the death rates for COVID-19 in several countries:
211.70 Italy
197.74 Poland
192.25 United Kingdom
184.48 United States
166.01 France
142.25 Sweden
127.05 Switzerland
109.95 Germany
All those of course are 10-100 times (1,000%-10,000%) worse than those not-reaganista countries whose governments adopted test-trace-isolate:
17.63 Finland
14.85 Norway
11.92 Cuba
11.72 Japan
8.03 Iceland
3.20 Thailand
2.89 China-Taiwan
0.63 Singapore
0.53 New Zealand
0.35 China
0.09 Vietnam
Hilarious! Just learned my daughter's high school friend (aged 20) was approached/solicited on Capitol Hill where she is interning this summer by a sitting married, Democrat US senator (aged 60s-70s) and thus the affair began. He's gotten chlamydia from another lover and gave it to her. Meanwhile he puts chlamydia meds in his wife's breakfast. If you think there has been a moral president since the dawn of the US, think again!
My post was response to why is he so bad to some people who dont like him. Im not defending DC.
Well you just can't make this shit up.....there is moral corruption EVERYWHERE!
You are perfectly entitled to say Trump is a BS artist. Just as you would be entitled to say that Hillary Clinton is a foolish, unspeakably arrogant, corrupt individual. Or that Joe Biden is a senile professional politician whose family is coated with the slime of decades of systemic corruption. The latter are prime examples of 2 political families (there are others) who have dragged American politics to a new low over the past 2 decades. My point is this: anyone even marginally on the right (or left, like Sauders) who pointed out obvious facts about the real issues facing the US these last years has been crucified by the mass media which has become part of the political machines of the aforementioned political families. Consequently, by 2016, no decent person with any integrity would step into the political arena. That left the field open to anyone, however crude and with whatever ulterior motives, to say what had to be said. And whatever else you may say about Trump, he articulated many of the real issues of the day: such as immigration, jobs for American workers, China, rampant political correctness at every level of American society etc. etc.
Working across the US these last years, I have met many good people, often as far-removed as you can imagine from the stereotyped "deplorable Trump supporter" portrayed by the mass media, who quietly told me they would vote for Trump "in spite of ..". All of them - you could call them swing voters - voiced in some measure disgust with the brazen corruption of Washingon and the endless posturing of the Democratic party. The proof of this is that, BS artist or not, 13 million more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. We now know that Biden is just a cipher for the DNC machine: business as usual concealed by lots of hot air! So final point: unless a meaningful alternative, with practical policies, appears in the near term, get ready for the next Trump.
«BS artist or not, 13 million more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016.»
I simply cannot believe that in an epidemic year The Usurper Trump's votes rose 18%, with much higher peaks in Republican areas; while of course I must believe that Saintly President Biden got 22% more votes than Real President Rodham-Clinton herself, with peaks in crucial Democratic areas like in Georgia of 60% more democratic votes than in 2016, a truly "fantastic" increase. :-)
D. Trump himself pointed out that he was hoping to win with 3 million more votes than in 2016:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56563469
«"They said get 66 million votes, sir, and the election is over. I got 75 million votes, and you saw what happened," he said. Mr Biden got more than 80 million votes.»
«morally bankrupt [...] BS artist, Someone who doesnt know geography [...] lies that hr received info from weather angencies [...] prop up is ego»
But all those are reasons one can give for "bad", and many people detested for similar reasons B Clinton or GW Bush and now J Biden.
The question was why "so bad", that is why the extreme over-reaction, largely based on hallucinations, given that he actually governed as a mostly standard right-wing president.
He has such a bad reputation in NY as a sheister that people hate the guy, He says he can shoot someone on 5th ave. and not lose voters, he puts false claims on twitter by qanon and gives them his endorsement. I wonder how his voters dont see this.. The simple fact that he gives Qanon people his approval should give you your answer of why so bad. These points arent hallucinations, He was asked about posting a tweet with our military saying Bin Laden wasnt killed, He just shrugs it off and claims he doesnt know, Sheister, with a capital S. Thats disrespectful to our soldiers. A so;dier actually corrected his post. Why his faithful ever react to it. TDS, I am an indepedent and did not vote for Biden,
In terms of character, Trump ultimately wants to be liked by people too much.
In terms of what the Establishment hated and feared about him, Trump ultimately wants to be liked by The People too much.
It's ironic that a character flaw in him made Trump a perfect monkey wrench tossed into the gears of The Establishment's increasing control and manipulation over government. For awhile, at least. Then They adapted, because They have Think Tanks.
This is different -- but true recent and disgusting colonial crimes of Hillary, Obama, Condoleezza Rice:
IMPORTANT -- An extraordinary interview !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
looking forward to the replies on this one. And I hope you got a lot more to work with than 'he was against Tech amassing too much power'
It’s pretty significant for a president to be against, Genuinely against- mind you, Big Tech. And to have predicted the danger of tech’s new mutant government-tech-totalitarian-monster-creature. And to have pointed it out and to have recommended doing something about it. He wanted to repeal section 230- maybe not the right solution- but he understood the problem. The vast majority of politicians don’t have the balls- and we’ll never be able to elect another one who does now.. Bc tech has too much power . Now it’s too late. Knowing that Tech makes or breaks their careers and their election campaigns- they will never stand up to them. Some of them pretended to during those congressional show trials - but no, I don’t believe that the tech ceos were scared of any of them.
You're talking about the man who wanted athletes fired for taking a knee. The idea that Ding Dong Donny genuinely had any opposition to anything that made him look macho and rich.....
Yeah, fuck that guy. He was just as authoritarian as some of these transnational, hydra-headed tech CEOs and really such a dumbass. The answer lies not in either Trumpism or this crazy, crazy Maoist leftism.
Oh you’re one of the dumb ones. Never mind
How about his "Muslim registry?" Nothing could have been more authoritarian and ridiculously police-statey than that. Trump was an unhinged maniac who was right about as many fingers are on my left hand (4).
You think the government doesn't already have that registry before Trump?
Macron had to do the same thing and no one even noticed
you got me
«please explain again what was so bad about Trump?»
There are two different aspects to that:
* The politics: a right-wing "nationalist one-nation tory" in the tradition of Ross Perot and Part Buchanan, therefore entirely incompatible with the right-wing "globalist individualist whig" politics of the dominant business elites.
* The person: a "low-brow", television-infused, salesman profile, therefore entirely incompatible with "high brow" (and "middle brow"), printed-word, intellectual profile of the dominant academic and political elites (so perfectly embodied by Barack Obama).
As to the latter point:
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1351145008506798084
“What did we learn from the failed TRUMP experiment? (cont) Someone in office, like a High Priest of Baal, a Patriarch, a doge, a judge, or a mafia don, must observe a certain decorum & a certain ornamental deportment. This holds even more true in a secular democracy. #Lindy”
http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/sites/default/files/articles/WQ_VOL1_A_1976_Article_04.pdf
“Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow by Russell Lynes”
I think much of his political persona was an act. Watch his older interviews or read any of the hundreds of testimonies from his employees going back decades and it is not the same persona. Not even close.
«much of his political persona was an act»
How is that not covered by "televisual salesman"? How is that different from most other politicians and entertainers?
«going back decades and it is not the same persona»
I would question that, as he has always been a crass cable-tv style of celebrity, and always an "America Firster" like Perot and Buchanan.
But over the decades both his politics and his personality did not cause extreme reactions of disgust and rejection, at most amused dismissal: that changed quite a lot when it became clear that his personality and politics were politically influential to the point of being about to win, and then winning, the presidency.
Trump's brand of 'low-brow' was definitely incompatible for a non-zero amount of people with perfectly 'low-brow' tastes, not just elite types. Maybe not enough to make it worth mentioning in your analysis, but I know plenty.
«Trump's brand of 'low-brow' was definitely incompatible for a non-zero amount of people with perfectly 'low-brow' tastes»
Probably you are thinking of "middle brow" tastes.
But anyhow I can imagine many "low brow" disagreeing with him or not liking his specific way of being "low brow", but the question was "what was so bad", that is why the reactions of extreme disgust as to the person and extreme rejection as to the politics.
For the extreme rejection as to the person I think it was a feeling of personal humiliation by "high brow" and "middle brow" people as to having a "low brow" "orange baboon" as their superior, because he did not get that extreme reaction when he was just a "celebrity".
No, not thinking of middle brow. He certainly got that reaction from people when he was a 'celebrity'. I know poors that swear, cuss, cheat, show up in jeans or shorts, drink slaughterhouse runoff, etc with very little respect for middle or high brow society (including the law sometimes) that were repulsed by him since his gawdy appearance in the '80s, full of himself in his gold penthouse talking to Robin Leech thinking he's some kind of genius - the irony thick enough to cut with a knife. A fair amount of people have always found him to be another big grifting dumbass trying to bloviate by on his inheritance and fake sounding last name. To be clear, none of these people had any use for Clinton either. My only point is the disgust was certainly present among lower 'brow' society, but I'm leaning on personal experience here, not polling or 'science', so I accept it may seem impossible.
«A fair amount of people have always found him to be another big grifting dumbass trying to bloviate by on his inheritance and fake sounding last name.»
Ah sure, but that is simply trying to explain why he was "bad", not "so bad". Those people despised him, but did not and still do not suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, they don't say "literally Hitler", "threat to democracy itself", and streams of character assassination and distortions of whatever he does and says, including describing him as both a childish idiot and a monstrous conspirator. Your low-brows merely “were repulsed by him since his gawdy appearance in the '80s”.
Consider this deranged example instead, of thousands and thousands:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/05/speak-truth-to-power.html
«The one thing missing from the typical NPR talk show is truth, naked, raw, unqualified, unapologized for truth. In the discussion today, the guests were being asked to speculate on the reasons for certain of Trump’s recent statements and actions: the congratulatory call to Erdogan, the invitation to Duterte, the rather unanticipated statement that he would be “honored” to meet with Kim Jong-un. Why would Trump speak in this way about rulers who murdered their own countrymen, even their own relatives, rigged elections, oppressed opponents, threw reporters in jail?
One after another, guests speculated that Trump was trying to upend long-standing American foreign policy, or was speaking thoughtlessly, or had some hidden negotiating strategy in mind. To each of these guests, Johnson responded courteously, respectfully, clearly signaling that these were just the sorts of sober, serious, thoughtful comments he wished to encourage. Then it happened. One of the guests, I do not know whom it was, said quietly, “I think it is envy.” Johnson erupted almost before the words had been uttered. In a loud, flustered voice, he burst out, “But you cannot mean that you think he would like to do those things! But, but, but, surely you do not mean that.” Johnson went on in this way, speaking over his guest, who was trying, so far as I could hear, to say “Yes, I think that is just what he wants to do.”
It was so manifestly, obviously, undeniably true, and at the same time so nakedly partisan, that it made Johnson’s head explode. It was, in its simplicity, the truest thing I had ever heard on NPR.»
<they don't say "literally Hitler"> actually, I know very few people of any brow in real life who felt this way, unless they were hiding it from me (and there's no reason I can think of one might conceal that from me). I know a few, but largely from academics down to landscapers and weed growers, people I knew who didn't care for Trump simply thought he was a gaudy, self-centered hypocrite too dumb to pull off a Hitler. What's funny is I know as many high-brow university educated country club engineers that are outspoken Trump supporters (they will move heaven and earth to explain away Trump's abrasions, like my conservative Christian friends) as I do sunburned construction workers that love him - the whole brow distinction just isn't a strong trend in my reality, I would never make an assumption about what someone thought about Trump based on 'brow', I've found it's way more complex than that. But I accept there might be some national trend that runs strongly along these lines and my experience is an outlier.
That's interesting, but I have to ask: who do the 'Celts' want revenge against? The Romans? Saxons? Franks? Norse/Normans? Or is the term 'Celt' an ahistorical representation of some non-genetic block/class/caste?
Also interesting, but I guess I should have also asked what they want revenge for.
Do you believe that the next election won't be rigged utterly?
Be sure you have your COVID card filled out with the Delta DLC signatures so you can legally vote in 2024.
Don't lose your card or expect testicular electrocution.
Ha, I wonder if the Democrats will get on a plane and fly to Cuba so they can't be present for the vote in protest of this discrimination.... "The worst thing since Jim Crow started the Civil War and killed Captain America with that rock... the... well, you know, the thing."
Yep. Some sort of Covid pass, along with regular status updates, is surely on the way .. to keep us all "safe" of course. And it goes without saying that it'll be tightly bound to voting rights .. to "save democracy". Thank God the government is looking out for our safety on so many fronts. Otherwise who knows? People might start thinking and acting independently.
They all have been for decades.
Well said
I've always hated Facebook, and the oversharing, fake-presenting nature of social media. It's not a surprise at all that platforms owned by Google, Facebook and Amazon are blocking more and more even mildly controversial material. It's been past time to stop using products by these monoliths, which is wildly difficult, but doable.
The bigger problem now is the question of whether upstart competitors will be allowed to even exist to give us the alternatives. The shutdown of Parler was just the tip of the iceberg. If Amazon, Google and Facebook show they're willing to play ball with the party in power, and move information in their favor, they're awarded additional protections (adding clear first amendment violations - and who knows what else - to their already illegal monopolistic practices).
I don't think its unreasonable to think that the internet will be a closed system in a few years, where only companies with a great deal of start-up capital being able to even enter. Think of it like the FCC: created to give space and voice to the community on the airwaves, but over time kept everyone except for the big players off radio and TV. Think of how controlled speech is on broadcast radio and TV to this day. Now apply that to the internet.
(The censoring of text messages is way, way, way over the line. At this point we can only hope that neither of our political parties gather enough power to make any significant changes to anything. This situation is beyond dire.)
Bears emphasizing:
"(The censoring of text messages is way, way, way over the line. At this point we can only hope that neither of our political parties gather enough power to make any significant changes to anything. This situation is beyond dire.)"
Past time for supporting a 3rd party - they are out there, have been for decades, on ballots, and we don't support them - if we have these goons in power, we have only ourselves to blame ...
And a 4th party even! I’ve thought for years that we need at least 4 electable parties, or no parties at all.
Having two independent presidential candidates that aren’t married to culture war and talking points would be the ideal. We had something somewhat similar to this with Trump and Bernie 2016, and look how the powers that be acted. Can you imagine the media rage if a third party candidate won?
"Electable" - we are the ones who decide who is "electable" - anybody on a ballot can win if enough folks vote for 'em ..
Personally, i don't think we had "something similar" with Trump and Sanders - Trump. it seems to me, was all about Trump, saying and doing whatever he thought he needed to to be, as he himself said, "the most powerful man in the world". And Sanders - hmm, made the mistake of wedding himself to the DP, and backed it, at the cost of his own stated principles, even after it shafted him over and over ...
I don’t disagree with this at all. Trump was a spoiled, angry ego, and Sanders had to sell his souls to the Dems.
My larger point is with how the media and the parties treated these two ostensible outsiders, which was screaming contempt, smears and targeted conspiracy theories. Now imagine how they’d treat actual outsiders, or anyone who didn’t kowtow to party power, media power and corporate power?
I suspect pretty much the same way - they have limited imaginations :D
Huh. I'm one of those guys that says, "It's a private company they can do whatever they want", but I never considered them working in concert with the government - THAT is quite disturbing.
The discovery in Trump's lawsuit against the Tech companies and other pending lawsuits as well will be very instructive. I suspect there's far more coordination going on than most people think.
$50 say SCOTUS says he has no standing or that it is moot.
This.
While I would love for it to succeed, I can almost guarantee it that not a single court will have the spine to let it go through.
Someone made an entire compilation of Joe Biden sniffing kids. FB censors this site:
https://joebiden.info
A FAR more important topic -- an extraordinary interview !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Recent US crimes against Haiti people -- by Hillary , Condoleezza Rice/Bush, Obama -- coups, military, exploitations of one of the poorest country, UN that brought in cholera (30,000+ dead, million sick) but negated the horror for six (read slowly - six) years.
A detailed, most horrible recent history of US colonialism -- kudos to Aaron Mate (always remember how vulgarly he was attacked by TYT's despicables - Ana & Cenk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iT3y7MktI
Not to mention Laura Silsby of the Clinton Foundation getting caught trying to kidnap 30 children... for what purpose, one wonders? She was bailed out by HRC and now sits on the Amber Alert Board. Not kidding.
I've shared that so many times, I think Fascistbook blocks it. LOL.
Consider, if you will, the Utne Reader revealed in their top censored stories for 1988 that the gov't was already able to record all telephone convo's in the US. They were working hand in hand with AT&T.
"Private companies" like Lockheed and Northrup run the various black projects so they are no longer subject to FOIA requests ('cos they aren't the gov't). The 'concert' has been playing for quite some time, but 'they' are not nearly as concerned to maintain a facade of being law abiding.
Well there are other laws they should be beholden too as well, but aren't. Such as descrimination.
I find this an extraordinary summation of the immense hoax (although Trump was equally dangerous):
Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking
Tucker Carlson devoted seven minutes of airtime to reading it. Donald Trump heaped praise on it. Why did this Twitter analysis resonate so widely on the right?
Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking - by Darryl Cooper - Outside Voices (substack.com)
Outside Voices -- Darryl Cooper (with Glenn Greenwald intro) – July 12
Wow! How long will it be before our personal emails and substack comments are censored and any strikes against us are factored into our credit scores? The 21st century is quickly turning into a dystopian nightmare.
We are there
None of this is surprising. None of it. It’s been going this way for years. I actually said to a friend of mine about ten years ago,”A government couldn’t have devised a better way to surveil their citizens than Facebook. And y’all are just willingly ‘checking in’ and posting publicly where you are and who you’re with, all the time.” There’s nothing you can do about this, I don’t think. I mean, seriously, what can you do? I’m really asking. If anybody has a solution to this, I’m all ears. My solution, just for my own peace-of-mind, has been to just get the fuck off of FB and any form of social media. I just don’t log on there anymore. Ours is a capitalist society; money talks. If nobody goes on Facebook or YouTube anymore, their business models cease to exist. They go under.
I immediately saw the direction everything was going right after 9/11. I used to consider myself a technophile but I tell people now the greatest weapon of mass destruction used again the common man now is the computer. Prior to the computer if the government wanted to spy on you they had to pretty much send someone out to your house, not so much now. Ever since the mid 80s I've built my own computers but I am under no delusion that there aren't back doors in everything now.
I'm with the Luddites. I'm all for technology, just not the misuse of it to do harm.
Getting the F off of Facebook is a necessary but possibly not sufficient condition for preventing them from being able to track you. They have some fairly sophisticated tracking cookies and you may need to go into the browser settings and disable them explicitly. It has been a while since I looked at this, so cannot give you a lot more detail but it is worth a bit of investigation.
Facebook is tough to shake.
I like your point about the expanding Capitol Police. Apparently, it is not reasonable for us to fund a local police department with our local taxes to promote safety where we live. But Congress needs some kind of force under its control throughout the country.
Politicians do do this in the open and that’s a problem. The bigger issue, I think, is that it doesn’t even occur to the general public, like,”Wait, this is weird.” Again, it goes back to Facebook etc and people just willingly posting their entire lives online, for anybody to see. They’re so used to that that when governments institute more and more mass surveillance techniques, they just accept it. They don’t even think about it, really. If they do think about it at all, it’s a sort of,”Oh, well I’ve been doing that myself for years, so no big deal..” train-of-thought.
I admit that I post every single one of my grows online, on one specific weed-growing website, for two reasons. One: there isn’t enough info about a lot of the cannabis strains that people are growing these days. That information needs to be out there for people who grow their own weed. And two: I’m kind of like,”Yeah, what’re you gonna do about this, government?” haha! I just assume that everything I post or text to someone, every single phone call I make and whatever else is being observed. I’m not okay with it at all, but what’s the solution, really? My solution is to throw shit in their faces, just to see what might happen. I don’t think anything’ll happen, really. I’m not breaking (too many) laws, but I like to let them know that, yes, fuck you, I see you. And I don’t give a shit.
As a person who has lived in 3 different countries, I always used snail mail to keep in touch.. I loved receiving letters photos, Then people moved to emails, then social media and I found myself in the face book trap. but I feel it is time to end this, I dont have casual acquaintances on FB but people who mean alot to me but I hate the medium it's so trivial .
I started with ditching FakeBook back in 2015. Swore off of ALL social networks including YouTube. I only comment here, and then only what I'd like to share -that is to say, nothing that might be construed as anti-Regime.
I even got rid of my cell phone last month. Looks like it was a rare moment of clairvoyance!
It's nice not having that account. Plus, I KEEP the $100/mo I'd been handing over since 1999.
To think: I actually PAID for the privilege of being monitored.
Pff.
Good work indeed. The key is to not use any of the Big Tech services. And there are alternatives if you make the effort; unfortunately the young generation for the most part don't. The real bugger, though, is the mobile phone: it's Google or Apple period (Purism never took off!). I'm not young anymore but I still have to work. And these days I simply cannot function without my smartphone; they've introduced authentication checks which push a message to my phone(response required!) for every system I interact with. That's minimum 8 to 12 times a workday. Just think how this process could be abused in the beautiful future!?
Good work. I'm at heart a neo-luddite but am far too addicted to Spotify's Discover Weekly. I feel like it is a deep moral failing of mine.
If sharing something in your life is important, you will actually treat it as such and put at least a modicum of effort towards making sure that the worthy recipient receives it and appreciates the thought. Social media shares? Yeah, not so much. Seriously, how fcking important can anything be if it’s shared automatically to whoever happened to click a button on their screen in some (less than) half hearted, automatic Pavlovian response reflex one anonymous day in the forgotten past? Then to be briefly semi-acknowledged by disinterested distraction addicts, in the hope that one or more of them may (hopefully!!!) LIKE it? Yeah…forget that.
You want to share something important? Actually make a freaking effort.
I actually hate it, too. It's glitchy and annoying. I am going back to blogging. Gonna set up a blog that many people can login to and have their own profile, and we can stay in touch that way.
Maybe we should go back to dial up BBSs.
That is a great idea, I shall look into it, thanks for the tip.
I was a blogger before FB arrived, and it was great. Everyone had a blog and we all connected. That's what I'll be returning to.
I'll be returning to telepathy.
https://boingboing.net/images/_images_Test-Your-Precognition-Abilities.jpg
Web 1.0!
I think 2003, right before Facebook and the iPhone, was about the optimum level of connectivity — SMS, email and blogging platforms were plenty for me.
Don't use WordPress though unless you have your own hosting and install it yourself. If you use their platform, they will censor.
Thanks, I have a techie friend who can help with that, I date back to the invention of the type writer.
I will gladly write the forward of your treatise on this. Zero acquiescence to social media is the most obvious start to somehow regaining our sanity. Let this nightmarish experiment in self-perpetuating egoism die the ignominious death it deserves.
“Self-perpetuating egoism” is exactly the right way to put it. It is all about ego. It’s all about “likes” and shit. The thing that always weirds me out, that I’ll never get, is when I see, like, cel phone footage on the local news and I always wonder,”How did it even occur to that person to pull out their phone and immediately start filming that?” If I see a fight or a car crash or whatever, I’ll be like,”Holy shit! Did you see that?” but it never, ever occurs to me to pull out my phone. The fact that people’s first instinct when they see something crazy is to pull out their phones and film so they can post it on social media is, to me, very weird. I mean, there’s been many instances where people filming shit on their phones has been very important, but it just doesn’t ever occur to me. I don’t ever want to think about my phone. When I come home, I set my phone on the dining room table and that’s it. When I get a text, I’ll check it. The next time I get up off of the couch to grab a beer haha. No apps on my phone at all. None of that shit. If you wanna get a hold of me, give me a call. If you text me, I’ll respond. In a couple hours. Maybe haha!
Jaron Lanier's written quite a bit about not giving away your data (at least for free).
Yeah, but that’s another issue. What you just said, about “giving away your data, at least for free.” Everybody thinks they’re gonna be an “influencer” and monetize their social media profiles. It’s bullshit. “How can I make money off of my life?” One, you probably can’t. Because you’re boring and unoriginal. And two, that’s really fucked-up haha. People have just succumbed to this whole,”Make money off of your life! The more you post, the more people see your posts! And maybe you might make some money off of it…” idea. It’s all garbage. It’s fucking tacky, really. It’s low-rent bullshit, appealing to increasingly desperate people, just so they can see how many “likes” they got on a particular post. I am not interested in the best way to fold sheets or the newest and best conditioner or any of that shit. Instagram is literally just a way for people to promote themselves. And I’m not interested in self-promotion.
I've always been super careful with what I post or message there, figuring they could use it against me if they wanted to. I agree it's gotten to where it makes no sense to use them any more, given what we've learned.
Agreed. The only social platform I use is LinkedIn, and then ONLY for job related business. I never post; just keep my updated resume, link to my online design portfolio, and references there.
You are correct of course: adoption (and the network effect) is the strength of Big Tech (BT). But it is also their Achilles heel. Without users these platforms are toast! And users sign on voluntarily & can leave at the drop of a hat.
A second weakness is the possibility that as government tries to co-opt BT more and more the 2 camps will fall out. We are already seeing signs of this in the current "misinformation" campaign, where Facebook executives, fed up with ever more stringent demands from the government to cancel "misinformation" have countered that government is using them as a scapegoat for its own shortcomings. I am in the (ICT) business and I can tell you that managing Human Resources or Customer Service is definitely not the strong point of the little nerdheads who run these BT platforms; and ploughing through individual posts to identify whatever currently passes for "hate" or "xyz" is definitely a big No No. That would mean real work for no return! These guys like to automate things with algorithms. But algorithms don't always work as designed. And the more they are employed the greater the chance of ordinary users being impacted negatively. As a PR gesture a BT company will throw a few million into a unit employing cheap (slave) labour in places like the Philippines to do some manual monitoring. But their heart is not in it. After all, cancelling too many users destroys their entire business model! Everyone knows, for example, that Facebook & Twitter made a mint out of the Trump campaign back in 2016.
Another breakpoint is that changing government demands are extremely irksome. Our nerdy friends in BT need to be told exactly, precisely, specifically-to-a-T, what an "extremist" or a "conspiracy theory" is; or what type of user they should impede with things like unsaved data and suchlike (if people only knew what went on behind the scenes they would be attacking BT offices with pitchforks!). Most of these people not only have the moral compass of a rabid dog, but they also don't like change which translates to work! A U-turn like the lab-leak theory, for example, when last year's rabid conspiracy theory became this year's to-be-promoted "in-item", is not only work but can shatter the confidence of the fragile little souls programming the algorithms. All bad for business. Not everyone out there is stupid.
Finally exposure of BT practices by well-known public figures can be very effective in moving public opinion. Elon Musk's badmouthing of WhatsApp new "terms of service" back in January resulted in a large-scale haemorrhaging of users to Telegram & Signal. So there is hope.
P.S. I shall address your question "anybody has a solution to this" in another post if time.
"We’re not China." C'mon man, we're so far ahead of them, they're not competitive. We can eat their lunch. And, they have lots of money that isn't in my family's pocket yet, so let me work on that for, say, two more years, then you'll have Kamala to deal with. Meanwhile, before my retirement I'll pardon every member of my family except myself, and Kamala will do the same for me as soon as she's sworn in. I have her word for it, and Hunter has the photos.
#Pardonkornpop2. Or is it, Cornpop?
😂
Please, please, please quit posting your video's to YouTube. Do you see the irony? Some of us are trying to break-up with big tech. There are alternatives.
At the very least, anything worth posting to youtube should be posted to alternative platforms as well. Not sure if Matt does this with his videos.
Stay tuned
I came here to say the same and delighted we got an answer.
Matt, the LBRY/Odysee project seems to be trying to do things in the right way with video stuff. Mark Hurst, from WFMU's Techtonic has some good written material on tech alternatives (the show is great too, but I think you guested on it with Ken, so you probably know that).
I almost never watch online videos on any site, so I'm short on knowledge here. My question is whether the alternative sites offer the income potential of YouTube, or are likely to any time soon.
Up next: banning misinformation about inflation.
It's for the children.
So you're saying the good news is that we don't have to worry about a war with China
because the bad news is that we're becoming an idealogical suburb of China?
China owns our asses.
This is a common misperception.
Right. We don't owe them trillions. LOL.
What does accounting have to do with it?
They can call in our tab any time.
So? There’s the bank owns you and there’s you own the bank. In the latter, the bank is in trouble if they call the note. Let ‘em call it.
oh I like this alliterative description
How terrifying. It's like we are watching the world pre Germany nd wondering if and when we should act. We are the frogs slowly boiling.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the US invaded Poland at this point.