When you look at the number of viewers/ listeners to Brand, Rogan, Dore, Glennwald, Mate et al, could it be that independent journalism is winning? The "thought police" have lost, it appears. Let's savor the moment.
The elite (Ivy League and similar) educated class uncritically digest the excretions of the MSM. Ordinary people, including those with no college education, are on average more critical thinkers and consumers of information. This makes sense when you realize whose interests the MSM serves.
Critical thinking is the normal human condition. The primary purpose of education is to indoctrinate you in the world view of the ruling classes and more education equals more indoctrination. It's a rare person who can survive the indoctrination industrial complex of schools and church and media and the group think and still be able to think critically and even more rare to speak truth against the narrative du jour.
the elite class and the media work in concert, and I don't feel like the independent/other side is winning simply for existing in reasonable numbers. I feel like the mainstream media, combined with the herd effect of social media and its outrage buttons, are depressingly effective at fooling a lot of the people a lot of the time.
A massive number of people believe that the Georgia elections bill was massively one sided and restrictive to voting rights - a bill that literally requires there to be no more than one hour lines (which will reduce from 3+) and mandated minimum numbers of voting machines to make sure people had access.
A massive number of people have no sense that Russiagate and election lies are two sides of same coin, they believe the MSM on both.
Either way you vote you're piling in with people who believe a lot of falsehoods. It's all very depressing.
Yes. We have had the panopticon where the few watch the many, the surveillance state. Now we also have a reverse panopticon where the many watch the few, the celebrities of the MSM who, in obedience to the masters, give us our opinions (i.e., brainwash us.}
Only GG has had brought any really serious consequences to political or government power. The rest are just winning audience from MSM. And even GG's consequences are debatable. Snowden's data had an impact but our governments snoop and violate no less than before. They reorganized, consolidated and normalized their practices. We used to think that snooping was a bad idea, but now we seem to think that it protects democracy ITSELF. What else keeps us safe from trump/putin/1-6/nazis?
I mean, they utterly debunked it for anyone who pays attention. But not enough to make much difference in its serviceability for the purposes of social control. It is still used as justification for various injustices, including, to some extent, our new proxy war with RF in which we expect every Ukrainian who can fight to do so.
I think this is a bit too pessimistic. In the same vein as lab leak. Anyone who paid attention knew lab leak was very likely to be correct, and certainly wasn't "debunked". Eventually the MSM narrative couldn't hold up to the torrent from the heterodoxy and relented. It didn't "solve" any problems, but it showed that there was sufficient power to correct the narrative. A wonderful side effect of Russiagate/lab leak was introducing a whole new cadre of people into heterodox thinking especially related to the MSM.
It could be. But keep in mind this highly enlightening content can ONLY exist in a vast ocean of online garbage fiercely tuned via algorithm to gin up the most horrid reactions. Both Brand and Taibbi allude briefly to this situation.
Personally, I believe both the old model of media and the new digital environment need to go away. On balance, the internet itself has proved to be societal poison. And I say that even though I'd deeply miss these two guys, as well as a few others.
I'm not sure the comparison is fair but I agree with the first sentence. Rogan is more an entertainer than an investigative journalist. And I think he has learned his lesson and is making an effort to stay safe.
Probably not fair. But they’re both pro hucksters turning a buck by having “opinions” indistinguishable from lies. One is far, far more dangerous (hence “lite”).
Rogan does plenty besides having opinions. (He's a good interviewer, for one.) Are you saying that Rogan's opinions are mostly lies, i.e. deliberate deceptions? Or are you saying that his opinions contain falsehoods?
Rogan thinks aloud, but in the end, his decisions seem informed. He challenged the conventional wisdom on Covid, supported Bernie and seems to really value free speech.He did cut Alex Jones a break early on. I think they are drinking buddies. But if he watched any of the testimony as to what Jones did to the families who lost children at Sandy Hook, I'd bet he would not be so understanding. He and Russell Brand have huge audiences for a reason. And Jimmy Dore, although lacking the polish of Glenn Greenwald, is always equipped with the facts to back his opinions. That Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal are regular guests, show that they are all peers. Long may they thrive!
Watching him slowly chip away at Sanjay Gupta was like watching a prize fighter. He has quite a strategic method, except when perhaps he has had just a touch too much mood enhancer
I honestly can't see how anyone who has actually watched at least a few complete Rogan podcasts (especially ones where he is having a conversation with someone who is an expert in whatever field they are in) can come to this conclusion about him. It's very clearly not true.
After all these years I'm still unsure what being a bot means to you, e.pierce. Is it mainly an insult along the lines of: Your comment is so ___ it could have come from a bot? If so, what is in the blank? e.g. "ordinary", "predictable;e", "random"? Iow, what are the qualities of being a bot?
I find it hard to understand that idiots like you persist coming on sites that are evidently populated by critical thinkers. You don't have a chance in hell of convincing anyone here with your baseless statements
We listened to a podcast on a long road trip earlier in the year - only listen in the car - about that one doctor who was running around the country performing lobotomies on mostly women and kids. Fuck man, that was some evil shit.
I wouldn't lump Mate and Greenwald into the same category as Rogan and Brand. The former are actually investigative journalists exposing lies and worse. Rogan and Brand are entertainers who happen to like allowing people like GG and AM to gain access to their large audiences, so they're more like independent platforms. Taibbi is also an investigative journalist. Minor quibble though.
The Wokeists in Corporate America, Langley, the Pentagon and Wall Street are just riding the wave and hoping to forego any more workers' awakenings, but they'd be happy to continue funding and abetting far-right governments abroad if it's good for business and they can successfully mask it with a good PR effort.
The numbers even if growing significantly are still insignificant and always will be. It’s good that these guys exist and can spread reliable information but it will always be a niche market.
I think he confuses "liberalism" for "neoliberalism" there, where the former had luminaries like Adam Smith (whose writings would truly shock some of today's economists in training) and the latter covers everyone from Ronny Raygun to Sleepy Uncle Joe. Off-topic, I know, but I honestly don't think there's much of a difference between neoconservatives and neoliberals, at least not from an economic or foreign policy perspective.
Russell seems to pretty consistently land on the correct side of issues, imho at least. My only gripe would be that he tends to suck all of the oxygen out of the room at times, when I'd really like the guest to be the main topic.
Kind of like what I thought Lis Smith did on Real Time last week. She was nothing more than a paid ad for the DNC, and turned every topic into a mid term campaign ad. and I wanted to hear Matt bring some sanity to the discussion.
Yes, I watched Lis Smith on Real Time and laughed hard. She is a puppet. At least she had the courage to agree with Matt on a few points that will likely cost her some friends on the left.
When even Bill Maher is calling bullshit on a guest's DNC spin, you know they're in trouble. Last time Matt was on, Maher couldn't accept his statements about Russian collusion being a hoax, so he's clearly deep in the Democrat bubble on some things. It's nice to see him occasionally notice that maybe, just maybe, they are at least as full of shit as Republicans.
She is a low intelligence Dem political hack. I find it amazing that low intelligence people like her or say VP Harris or Marco Rubio can rise so high being toads of power. If I had to say something good about the trumpster it would be how easily he cut down the best the republican party had. You could see, live on stage in the republican party debates what fools they were running for POTUS.
I saw the same thing. I'm guessing Maher let her drone on with the Approved Talking Points, as Maher lets the guest talk and dig her own grave. Smith was a caricature that night.
Actually, he's back to the Clinton era Bill Maher. He's always going to bring the Lib, but he's a huge proponent of Free Speech and anti-woke. Worth watching again if you have HBO. He did a segment during pride month which had a lesbian and gay man as the panelists, and it was amazing. They were far more mainstream than the people who are the public advocates for LGBTQ.
Yes, I love Russel Brand, I've seen his hilarious 33 show and clearly he's a consummate performer of the monologue, where his bread and vegan butter is made. And it's good to see some action on this side of the pond.
I totally agree the skill, quality and how much we enjoy and get out of an interview is always inversely proportional to the number of words that the interviewer says.
The sanity would NOT have been coming from the side of Matt, who is for some reason unable to stop toeing the liberal world order (pronounced: ray geem) line in all things.
Brand is one of the few voices waking people up to the slippery slope of the fascist, Marxist Liberal World Order that America has found itself sliding down. While Matt is too busy keeping all of his premises in line with his NYT worshiping friends. He does his readers harm by keeping their world view intact, when it needs is to be split down the middle and exposed as the complete inverted-truth, elitism-credentialism-loving, totalitarianism promoting propaganda that it is.
"Marxist liberal world order"? Marxists aren't liberals and liberals aren't Marxists. Corporatism is the new world order that has supplanted nation states, more or less. Corporations have all the rights and none of the obligations that people used to enjoy. They are blithely destroying the oceans, the land, and the air in their endless lust for profit with the aid of their bought-and-paid-for politicians. You are right about one thing which is that America is "sliding down" the hill towards outright fascism, but it is about the unbridled power of capitalism and not the rise of a worker-controlled state, i.e., a Marxist socialist state.
The left tries to blame their antics on capitalism because their Marxist cause is aided by people rejecting capitalism. Scratch the surface of any anti-capitalist and you will find a brainwashed (likely by an esteemed institute of higher education) aspiring communist. And they’re happy to start telling you why Marxism isn’t bad, it’s just never been implemented properly.
It’s astonishing the anti-historical-fact propaganda people will absorb, when presented by a college professor and regurgitated for an A.
First 'm sure you've never read anything by Karl Marx in your life. In order to be critical of something you have to at least know what it is. You speak of propaganda, but you're a prime example of it's effectiveness with your gross overgeneralizations and inability to give specific examples.
"First 'm sure" it's not my job to do your research-History is full of examples. Since you have NO earthly IDEA what I have or haven't read, you afford me a prime opportunity to quote your FAVORITE expert, you- "In order to be critical of something you have to at least know what it is".
Your mean spiritedness does not predispose me to waste much more time caring about your opinion. Better luck elsewhere, recruiting the unwitting to give up all their rights in a world controlled by sociopaths, for the "guarantee" <wink><wink> of a workers paradise.
I provided several specific examples throughout, but my posts tend to be long enough as they are, so my bad for not leaving quite enough to satisfy you.
As for claiming I've never read Karl Marx, this is clearly an assumption by someone who has never done so themselves but only read or watched videos (like the one Janine shared in this thread) featuring pro-capitalist propaganda from pro-capitalism sources besmirching and mis-representing what Marx wrote and then assuming that those sources got it right because you favor their ideology.
As for gross overgeneralizations, I think pointing to the adaptability and mutability of human behavior is hardly a generalization.
As for saying that I'm a victim of incorrect propaganda for following the actual system proposed by Marx & Engels, that is an odd accusation to make against someone who grew up immersed in pro-capitalist propaganda from numerous sources, as I described in some detail and give *specific* examples regarding.
Yes, Janine, we reject capitalism, because we are tired of having so many of us being impoverished despite our long hours of hard work and subject to inability to acquire necessities, let alone psychologically necessary recreation, while a few inherit an obscene amount of access to the social wealth that we the workers collectively create. Technology has advanced to the point that class divisions and extreme material inequality is no longer necessary, and has now become destructive to the planet itself.
Considering all of the pro-capitalist rhetoric and misrepresentation of Marxism spewed by the privately/corporate owned media, it's frankly strange to accuse anti-capitalists of being the brainwashed ones. And I don't mean that as an insult, but simply an observation.
Marxism has not been implemented improperly, it has not been implemented at all. Certainly nothing remotely resembling the classless, moneyless, stateless system formulated by Marx and Engels, since they were quite clear that such a system required an advanced industrial base, something 1917 Russia and the many small developing nations purporting to establish "socialism" et al did not have.
As for anti-historical propaganda absorption, I think defenders of capitalism deliberately put blinders on to ignore the mass of homeless people, the numerous workers struggling paycheck to paycheck while sometimes working three different jobs, going into massive debt or bankruptcy due to medical problems, and the festering slums that our inner cities have been reduced to when we have reached the technological capacity to produce an abundance for all and try to say that capitalism remains a good or remotely progressive system.
And college professors who promote "wokeism" do not promote "Marxism" as described by Marx & Engels, but "Marxism" in name only. They claim to dislike capitalism, yet the corporations *love* the SJWs and do everything they can to promote their agenda of Extreme Left identity politics because it keeps workers fighting amongst themselves, fosters competition that the system thrives on, and diverts workers from class unity by besmirching and misrepresenting the system actually described by Marx & Engels.
The mass of homeless people on full display in California COULD EASILY BE RESOLVED if our money wasn't being routed through international aid NGOs and back into politicians' foundations (The Biden foundations, Clinton Foundation....how many can you count?) . (How much are we up to in Ukraine now?) THINK ABOUT IT. The point of the homeless people is to turn you against capitalism. The UN New World Order is getting impatient- it needs you to reject your Constitution and to start insisting on Marxism to solve 'the ills of America! 'Why would someone who was really serving their constituents leave the scar of tent cities on the face of our great cities? Because it serves their narrative- a global world government wherein the constitution has been cancelled and the deplorables have no rights but what the elites hand them. 'Come on man! It'll be much more fair!'
Mail ballots started in California in 1978. Since then California's Democrats Pelosi, Waters, Feinstein etc etc - no matter HOW HORRIBLE the state of the poor in California, never cease to win their elections... HMMM...... Everything is just the way the want it to be, and voters can't do a thing about it, cause they've got the bloated voter rolls and drop boxes, to fill any ballot deficits. Pelosi's father was investigated for ties to the Communist party. Those documents were released within the last few years. Surprise surprise. (https://time.com/5892357/voting-by-mail-history/).
That you are ready to turn your back on the once-in-the-history-of-humankind blessing of living in a free society as a sovereign, and are advocating an oppressive rights-free existence (which would be neo-feudalism) is no accident.
It's time to rethink your media and your liberal arts professors. What you are advocating for is VERY much against the best interest of every American. How did you get there?
We should be working together to eliminate the grip of the Build-Back-Better globalists who have captured our media and our Congress, and get back to the freedom and prosperity we've had in decreasing quantities since the first time Bush Sr. uttered the words "New World Order."
These are scary times, we need to work together to save our liberties for future generations.
OMG the communists have invaded Taibbis substack! That’s two in one thread!
All of the ills you ascribe to capitalism are the result of the cabals overtaking of our Congress and enacting laws that only ensure the rape of American citizens- the dual goals of which were to get rich and to hoodwink people like you into thinking the problem was ‘capitalism’. I can assure you that the cabal does not believe in free market capitalism. But they do hope that you will never realize that socialism is merely the gateway drug that is used to get people to surrender their rights and freedoms. What happens then is what has happened in every communist country- death of millions, privation, misery, and NO HOPE EVER of recourse because YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS because you idiotically gave up your rights and any means by which to assert your God given right to freedom.
I am under no illusion that I will persuade a propagandist to disavow his false- message, so I’ll end it there, satisfied that I have a t least outed you.
Capitalism, which puts a price tag on everything rather than rewarding all workers with full access to the collective wealth in exchange for their hard work; and allowing a tiny handful of the population to become obscenely wealthy and powerful with a large chunk of the population becoming impoverished, results in extreme power imbalances that leads to... corporatism/fascism. If you want a system based on ruthless competition, can't pay/can't have, with a few controlling everything, you're going to end up with a fascist system.
No, I want to empower the people themselves to do it. We're already close to a fascist state as it is thanks the corporations working hand-in-hand with the state, and without a state regulating capitalism to protect the system from itself, we're running the risk of the capitalists becoming the government themselves and acting as post-Industrial feudal lords. It's the capitalists who empower the state, not the other way around. Workers need to run the system as a whole, not via a handful of privileged bureaucrats doing it in their stead. Power has to be evenly distributed among everyone in an environment of cooperation and material equality, otherwise class divisions and hence varying degrees of fascism will exist.
No living thing does anything without motivation. Pretending that people will work, when they’ve been promised everything they need, whether they do or don’t work, is MAGICAL THINKING. But you can get a PhD in philosophy if you write nice essays about magical thinking. Colleges are pumping out anti-capitalist communists like it’s their mission.
I mostly agree with this, Hugh, and I thank you for saying it. Since I speak as a Classical Marxist myself, i.e., a follower of the Economic Democracy that Marx and Engels actually endorsed as opposed to all the other tendencies that bastardized it during the 20th century to the present, the SJWs being the latest nitwits to do this. Marx was most certainly not the equivalent of a modern liberal for his time period, but firmly on the side of the working class. As for worker controlled states, Marx and Engels envisioned a stateless economy where workers controlled the system via social ownership of all the industries, which as you noted are now the actual power firmly in control of all nations, the state apparatus being their pawn and enforcer. But I do understand what you meant by a "worker-controlled state," as too many people on the Left who support the Chinese government claim that they established this (which is ridiculous and very blatantly not the truth) as an ingenious excuse to allege that if you oppose the Chinese government then you effectively attack all the Chinese people. Sort of similar to the way Israel promotes Zionism as somehow representing the interests of all Jewish people so that opposition to this ethno-centric, apartheid form of identity politics can be painted as antisemitism. Pundits have made an art form out of cloaking their autocratic and regressive tendencies behind "progressive" sounding monikers to gain support and fend off criticisms. If the former Soviets, SJWs, and Zionists haven't taught us this important lesson yet, then we all need to take classes in Politics 101.
Who! is on the side of the corporations? You can't be serious.
Which side was most vehement about forcing us with mandates to take the useless untested BigPharma shots- the Dem/Left.
Who mandated the closure of mom and pop shops and churches, while letting the big box stores stay open- the Dem/Left.
Who's in bed with the "private" corporations that run the all major social media, and silencing all political opposition? - the Dem/Left.
Who's policy positions exclusively are on the mouths of corporate mainstream media globally? - the Dem/Left ( the very reason we are here on Substack)
Who's leaders where are caught repeating the Globalist war cry, "BUILD BACK BETTER" straight from the One World Government headquarters, the World Economic Forum - the Dem/Left
Who's legislating HUGE expenditures to globalist corporations that make "green" energy equipment, while shutting down our cheap national energy production? - the Dem/left.
Who keeps funnelling billions to Ratheon to send Nazi-infested, and NATO-ineligible (due to corruption), Ukraine, while ignoring our own border and national integrity? - the Dem/left.
It sounds to me Hugh, like you don't have an understanding of what Marxism is. Marxism is communism with a layer of elite on top- living the American dream, while the rest of us 'own nothing'. Haven't you heard the WEF agenda catchphrase "you will own nothing and be happy"? That's Marxism. That's where the Dem/left are intent on taking us, just after they are done bankrupting our country(- is that goal not obvious to you yet? -look what they are doing to the money supply), hungry (look at all the food processing plant destruction, the supply chain snafus and the fertilizer rationing) and demoralized (we all know our elections are being rigged).
Once we are broke and desperate, we will be ripe for rolling onto the Liberal World Order - their words not mine- minus, of course, our Constitution and our second amendment rights.
Have you not noticed they are after those?
Honestly, turn off the mainstream media completely Hugh. There is so much that is as plain as the nose on your face, that you are completely missing. Taking in too many media lies will do that to a person.
The Dems aren't Left. They're corporatist servants. They serve the war machine and the big oil machine and the big banks just as the GOP does, except that they're less obvious about it. The system distracts you from what's actually happening which is the ultra-rich screwing you and everyone else they can with the aid of their bought-and-paid-for politicians. The charade that is US democracy is a game to occupy and mollify the populace. It's the "circus". Don't be distracted by the shadow puppets. Look at who is prospering and who is falling into or has fallen into poverty. Look at what is being destroyed in the natural world by the endless lust for more and more money. The rest is just noise.
That explanation for what Marxism is, Janine, bears no resemblance to what Marx and Engels actually promoted in their books. What you call "Marxism" is true or false depending upon what definition you choose to utilize, as we live in an era where words tend to mean anything the person using them wants them to mean. Personally, I am using the classical meaning of the term. I'll allow others to define it as they choose, but it's not what Marx and Engels formulated.
To be honest, Janine, "Marxistish" would also be inaccurate, since what they promote is Marxist in name only, because it is utterly unlike and in fact anathema to the system that Marx and Engels actually formulated.
I am also indeed aware that BLM espouses "Marxism" on their website, but again, that is hi-jacking the name to look good to progressives, as what they promote as "Marxism" bears no resemblance to the system discussed in Marx and Engels' various works. In fact, we Classical Leftists have a word for people on the Left who support any type of system that happens to have the words "socialism" or "Marxism" etc attached to it, no matter how much it deviates from the economic democracy described in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO et al: we call them "tankies."
Conservatives also jump on that misapplication of the name, of course -- not to attract progressives to it but in their case to denigrate the work of Marx and Engels in the eyes of everyone by making people think of a system of autocratic despotism whenever they hear or read "Marx" or "Marxism". One thing Marx and Engels never did was race-bait or gender-bait, and they stuck firmly with class unity while simply saying that such a system would benefit people of color and women, who during that era were truly oppressed.
To be clear, I never denied that BLM and many other purported liberals and Leftists, not to mention other tendencies, use the words "Marxist" and "Marxism." However, saying that makes it Marxism in the classical sense as described by Marx and Engels is like arguing that referring to an ostrich as a duck makes it a duck, since that is the word people were using for it. The people in charge of BLM are very well aware that they will attract lots of tankies to their cause simply by using the words "Marxist" or "Marxism."
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. I would encourage you to expand your politics beyond the binary simplicity of FOX News and OAN. Hate INC. by Matt Taibbi would be a good place to start.
Russell is a big proponent of decentralization and transparency. I wish he would start talking about a more organized fashion of it and how to use it to regain control and stop the corruption from happening. Like this:
Interesting idea. I worry that you'd need a government to government those who govern, meaning you'd run the risk of shifting the corruption to a new entity. Also, most of the aspects of government that are corrupt have happened in the open. We just didn't notice them.
I agree that there's no point to advocating for programs until government officials demonstrate accountability to the people. I think we can do it by demanding that laws like the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act be repealed. Politicians nor their spouses, parents and children, should be allowed to trade stock from the time they assume office until 10 years after they leave office. A lifetime cap should be put on speakers fees. That's an incomplete list, but that's the general direction I'm inclined to move in.
The Framers thought through the problem of centralized power and accountability much better than any of us could. We should go back to the solution they tried to embed in the Constitution: strict limits on the powers and scope of the federal government, with most functions left to states and localities, where the people can better monitor and control them.
Skeptic, the system is too corrupted. We need to make our own system and plug it into the current one to force politicians to play by our rules again. We can’t change the system. We need to make a new version of it.
Corruption has a hard time existing in transparency. In transparency we all can police it - and should. It should be our duty to protect our own system.
We have recognized some major overlap between the non-authoritarian elements of the left and right for some time now, especially in these threads. That's good, but to paraphrase Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction, let's not go patting each other on the backs just yet. It's time to start developing an actionable common agenda.
Here's what I think many of us can agree on: The federal government has become too big and overweening. It needs to be trimmed. Federal law enforcement needs to be massively cut. The states can create some kind of structure for information sharing, coordination, and cooperation; the FBI sucks at this anyway. The centralized intelligence services should be broken up; they have very few demonstrable achievements and they're dangerous to freedom. Intelligence functions can be distributed among military intelligence agencies.
Agencies with the power to threaten freedom should be kept as localized, close to the people, and accountable as possible.
Don't look now, but Senate Dems stayed up late Saturday night so they can hire thousands of new IRS agents, because there aren't enough people answering the phone at headquarters. Yeah, right.
It used to annoy me when Hillary Clinton couldn’t answer a question with less than a thousand words. I like Russel, but sometimes he can’t ask a question with less than a thousand words.
Russell Brand having a clear idea about what troubles the world...(?) When celebrities are those we turn to for informed intelligent analysis of the world order, we're fucked. Wait...WHAT? Uh oh....
Occasionally, I've actually found him mildly humorous on specific topics, but wtf...Russell Brand on the world...?!? Pick a name out of a phone book, take a chance...it'd have about the same probability of hearing intelligent analysis.
The educated class really generally suck. I am ashamed that I am one of them. However, I live on the other side of the tracks where I have some calluses on my hands, and my mind still works on objectivity, pragmatism and critical thinking.
RB may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but he sees the world through his own eyes rather than in service of an agenda, and that makes him appealing.
I stopped watching cable news completely about 10 years ago and mostly about 15 years ago. What I remembered about the old days was that pundits and commentators used to have their own identities and ideas. Sometime around that 15 year ago period I noticed that everyone who came on pretty much was a shill regurgitating the party line (and the party line is usually a lot less interesting and more predictable than a person’s independent opinion), though it seems to be what keeps viewers/readers coming back. For me, why on earth would I bother to watch (or read) someone like that? I can get all the push emails full of spin I want for free direct from the pols (or for a token contribution to their activist groups). I started noticing that newspaper editors were getting the same emails I was and then pushing those memes in stories. How can you charge for something a reader or viewer can get for free almost anywhere? I suppose there is a patina of authenticity for some rubes if they read it a few days later in the NYT or FT?
Anyway, what is appealing about RB is that he is himself, not part of the machine and not flogging the same old tropes. Also he is funny! Thanks
love it. brand is sometimes challenging to listen to, not generally in conversation with people, but his rants before and after an excerpt.. YET... his mantra.. is drop the childish labels, find commonality, built unity. it's our only option. thanks Matt!
The discussions here, and in all media, ignores that all that is happening has been happening in one form or another since humanity first clubbed the other guy on the head to take his food. The issue is deeper than ANY current manifestation. Deep in our psyche there is a fallacious approach to life. Religions attempt and pretend to address this, but , like every thing societal, the religions become a tool of the madness. Still that personal, stepping away from the 'group', questioning and search can be the only rational approach to look at the insanity that engulfs every human being.
I heard someone on some podcast talking about this idea that there are non-human intelligences behind the will of men and women that transmit themselves by deed across time. For example, theft induces more theft and murder leads to more murder. A counter-example to this might be the old mustard seed adage that a small act of kindness can grow into something huge and powerful. The nobility of the human spirit is that which can stand against these malign instincts and memetics or promote the good ones.
Except that we’re not just apes. Trying to reduce humanity to a species it separated from millions of years ago is a convenient (and wrong) argument against taking responsibility for the animal we have become. The idea that we only eat, shit and fuck, is so clearly and superficially wrong I’m not even sure what point you’re trying to make.
The key question here is can humans work against the negative elements of (the non-human intelligence of) evolution and shape their future. If we’re only apes then it’s unlikely, but then we have to figure out how to explain away all the times throughout history where we did exactly that and how were at a point where we can ‘choose’ whether or not to annihilate ourselves and the planet.
Two, we didn't "separate" from the planet "millions of years ago" or something.
We've been part of this whole thing since we've been around in some form or another.
To claim otherwise is just stupid.
What, we dropped to earth and "separated" ourselves?
You're a relatively hairless ape who needs food, sex and shelter.
Too bad your large forebrain can't get around the entre basis for "love", art, technology and survival.
We can't really "work against" what we are, but we can do what we've always done: vie for power. Some rise up, they sit on top of the heap for a while and then they get taken out.
That's it. The problem is, we'll do this until we go extinct -unless you see some way out of a population of around 7 billion WITHOUT a collapse.
It's really much more simple than you think if you seek the roots of your art, your music, your technology.
no it is much more simple than that. Our whole personal and societal activity is based on self deceit. Thinking process allows us to pretend that there is thinker when in fact the thinker is not separate, is not a self, but part of the thinking process.
I agree with your analysis but I understood the (totally lost to time) podcaster as saying something slightly different.
Again, I’m rehashing something I vaguely remember, so take it as you will, but we can imagine some base level, instinctual things that humans do that might be bad or anti-social but also primal: you hit me, I’ll hit you back. But there’s a point at which that switches into something that requires more intelligence, like, “he broke up with me so I’m going boil his cat and crap in his furnace.” This sort of hopped-up malice is a thing beyond simple retribution or power dynamics and the speaker talked about it as if it were a malign spirit.
Maybe another example might be “mass shooters” who seem to communicate to each other through time and from beyond the grave. I’m not going to say this isn’t wishy-washy mambo-jumbo, but I do believe that people operate on levels of reality that transcend the mundane, for example symbolic or archetypal. We don’t have to attribute consciousness or intent to something like an archetypal intelligence and it seems perfectly reasonable that things like this could evolve naturally from an ape with social qualities you describe. Anyway, this isn’t meant to convince anyone but rather open the window a bit on thinking about very different intelligences and how they might appear and be understood.
The "them" in We Can't Let Them Do this are possessed by demons.
Demons? Really? Levitating and vomiting black puke? No. Not that kind of demon. It's even worse .
I posted this last year as an effort to make sense of the world I see, and reposting here, as everything goes steadily downhill. It's not wonderfully written, but whatever. I don't have time to make it pretty. And the 2 people who read it won't care. ahhahahaha
A Brief History of Demons
We are seeing in the U.S. an apparent descent into borderline social psychosis -- where monsters are made from shadows and empirical facts cease to exist. The phenomenon -- like a virus or plague -- seems to transmit invisibly and presents through symptoms that vary within a broad pattern. Heart-rending stories -- even seen here in comments -- of family members estranged and angry in siloed realities are examples. Wikipedia defines psychosis as "an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real." Our current predicament is due in part to news industry methods, but those can be seen two ways: 1) as a cause and 2) as a consequence of a larger phenomenon.
"Reality" is a slippery concept. The scientific revolution brought epistemological clarity to the physical world, which peaked with the grandeur of Newtonian mechanics. Quantum theory demolished certainty and put probability in its place. But probability remains measurable and physical reality remains objective through empirical experiment.
Human psychology has no such objectivity. Going back to Greek thought and proceeding to now we see a sequence of speculations. The ancient world saw man as playthings of gods -- which the Greeks called "daimons" -- who would interfere in human affairs, steer actions and results. Daimons were disembodied but quite real beings who could act for good or bad. Christianity, in its monotheistic enthusiasm, repositioned these beings as "angels" and "demons" and moved them off center stage. I recall one Roman historian (whose name I've forgotten) observed there were over 1 million gods in ancient Rome. It's far easier to keep track of one god and one devil than sort out millions! Maybe monotheism is the first triumph of managerial efficiency in human history. LOL.
Human thought in "the West" focused for centuries on systems of ethics and political theory, giving man free will to act on a fixed point between two poles -- Jesus and Satan. It was the Christian writer Doestoevsky in his 1860s novel "The Possessed" who rehabilitated the daimons of ancient Greece for our age, largely in the form of demons. My intellectual hero Albert Camus observed that "The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx." Camus' own novel "The Plague" and the playwright Eugene Ionnescu's "Rhinoceros" were two artistic attempts to catalog the same phenomenon.
20th century psychology pursued demons only tentatively and through three systematic methods. One -- by noting that groups seem to become possessed by an animating power independent of any single constituent -- was group psychology through French sociologist Gustav Lebon's 1895 book "The Crowd" and later in 1921 by Freud in "Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego". I'm not aware of much beyond that, as pyschology "advanced" through behavioral theories and neurologial explorations -- although it may exist and I'm uninformed.
The second was objective mental illness, focusing on biochemical etiology; this was a clarifying and ethical achievement that has done enormous good. But the underlying mechanisms remain hidden in mystery and these conditions apply only to a small subset of humanity; they do not explain broad social phenomenon.
The third path was an atavistic return to daimonic theory, perhaps most evident in Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's archetypes, but also in the cartography of universal mythic structures seen in James Frazer's "The Golden Bough" and in the popularized treatment through Joseph Campbell best-selling books. Jung's idea of a universal mind composed of psychic forces called "archetypes" that drive human perception and action closely parallels the "forms" of Plato and is perhaps the Greek daimons renamed.
The path from Doestoevsky, through LeBon and Freud, energized by Jung's archetypes seems to me the most analytically fruitful in interpreting our current situation, explaining motivations and perceptions, and bringing the unconscious -- "demons" or "daimons" or "archetypes" or what you will -- into a clarifying consciousness. All provide a vocabulary and analytical structure that elevates and illuminates thinking far above the fruitless slogans and spitting sputtering bewildered stammering that passes for critical commentary.
The ancient Greeks placed the command "Gnothi seauton" (Know Thyself) on their temple of Apollo at Delphi. But, even so, the Athenians killed Socrates -- for talking. It's hard to take your own advice. But it's good advice. "Civilization" has made some progress since then, but progress is easy to lose.
Our media class has largely devolved into propagandists for the Democrats, completely sacrificing their integrity and, correspondingly, their credibility. I always assume all “news” outlets are lying, and hopefully most Americans remain healthfully skeptical about any/all “information” emanating from these classless, self-serving drones.
Great interaction and thoughtful perspective, and I will now go watch the whole thing on Russell’s channel!
Enough already with Bill Marr. You can set a timer for 5 minutes until he gets into his schtick -- boilerplate criticism of "the left" for pronouns, bathrooms, so-called "censorship" of jokes, and other misdeeds. Instead of live guests, he should just fashion some puppets to nod their heads in agreement with his tedious rants. Any actual human who dares disagree with him is summarily interrupted.
Bill is a pathetic shell of his former self, reminding us how hip he is with gratuitous references to spleef and by touting his atheist credentials at every turn. But he's no Chris Hitchens. He's a burnt-out "Get off my lawn libs" bore.
He's consistently wrong because he is a classic limousine liberal.
He lives a very sheltered and fragile little bubble and he gets off on wiggling the skin of said bubble but never popping it.
He's always been a mediocre comedian, and his smarmy shtick got old in the mid 90s.
Now he's playing at deep-thinking political discussion but he has a very limited view of things, as one would expect someone with millions in the bank and assistants to fetch coffee, dry cleaning and food for him.
Hitchens and Maher ended up in roughly the same sad state. Hitchens was once a brave and expert fighter for the true cause. His schtick, however, was a ferocious debating style that was very effective but ultimately in bad faith. It was about defeating opponents, not improving our understanding. When he went all in on the War on Terr he ended up believing his own disingenuous debate zingers.
Agree that Hitchens and Maher both went off the rails. Their hatred of Abrahamic religions (which I share and which is a good thing) caused Chris to break with his contempt for American foreign policy and embrace the Neo-Cons. Maher got cancelled after 9-11, an experience that has morphed into a hobby course he cannot get off.
When you look at the number of viewers/ listeners to Brand, Rogan, Dore, Glennwald, Mate et al, could it be that independent journalism is winning? The "thought police" have lost, it appears. Let's savor the moment.
The elite (Ivy League and similar) educated class uncritically digest the excretions of the MSM. Ordinary people, including those with no college education, are on average more critical thinkers and consumers of information. This makes sense when you realize whose interests the MSM serves.
Critical thinking is the normal human condition. The primary purpose of education is to indoctrinate you in the world view of the ruling classes and more education equals more indoctrination. It's a rare person who can survive the indoctrination industrial complex of schools and church and media and the group think and still be able to think critically and even more rare to speak truth against the narrative du jour.
RH
Good insights form Chomsky himself... Well done..
I have to think about your observation.
Unfortunately many of the elite class and decision makers take their cues from those media outlets.
the elite class and the media work in concert, and I don't feel like the independent/other side is winning simply for existing in reasonable numbers. I feel like the mainstream media, combined with the herd effect of social media and its outrage buttons, are depressingly effective at fooling a lot of the people a lot of the time.
A massive number of people believe that the Georgia elections bill was massively one sided and restrictive to voting rights - a bill that literally requires there to be no more than one hour lines (which will reduce from 3+) and mandated minimum numbers of voting machines to make sure people had access.
A massive number of people have no sense that Russiagate and election lies are two sides of same coin, they believe the MSM on both.
Either way you vote you're piling in with people who believe a lot of falsehoods. It's all very depressing.
News Bulletin: The media outlets take their cues from the elite class and the decision makers.
Yes. We have had the panopticon where the few watch the many, the surveillance state. Now we also have a reverse panopticon where the many watch the few, the celebrities of the MSM who, in obedience to the masters, give us our opinions (i.e., brainwash us.}
Only GG has had brought any really serious consequences to political or government power. The rest are just winning audience from MSM. And even GG's consequences are debatable. Snowden's data had an impact but our governments snoop and violate no less than before. They reorganized, consolidated and normalized their practices. We used to think that snooping was a bad idea, but now we seem to think that it protects democracy ITSELF. What else keeps us safe from trump/putin/1-6/nazis?
And since when was it a journalist's responsibility to undo all the wrongs?
Snowden has sacrificed his liberty, his home and his career and yet snooping persists.
In theory at least, we ,the people ,are responsible to undo the mess.
At least the journalists give us information with which to decide.
And I would argue that Aaron Mate and Jimmy Dore both worked diligently to destroy the scam that was Russiagate.
💯
I mean, they utterly debunked it for anyone who pays attention. But not enough to make much difference in its serviceability for the purposes of social control. It is still used as justification for various injustices, including, to some extent, our new proxy war with RF in which we expect every Ukrainian who can fight to do so.
I think this is a bit too pessimistic. In the same vein as lab leak. Anyone who paid attention knew lab leak was very likely to be correct, and certainly wasn't "debunked". Eventually the MSM narrative couldn't hold up to the torrent from the heterodoxy and relented. It didn't "solve" any problems, but it showed that there was sufficient power to correct the narrative. A wonderful side effect of Russiagate/lab leak was introducing a whole new cadre of people into heterodox thinking especially related to the MSM.
1. When did I say what the responsibilities of a journalist are?
2. Snowden is a hero. His persecution is an injustice.
3. In practice, I see no alternative. Do you?
4. Yes, but they can become a pastime, part of the circus, as in bread and... . That's a status quo-safe outcome too.
Don't forget Kim Iversen. She is amazing.
perhaps all the same people watch these programs and the number is a small somewhat aware group.
It could be. But keep in mind this highly enlightening content can ONLY exist in a vast ocean of online garbage fiercely tuned via algorithm to gin up the most horrid reactions. Both Brand and Taibbi allude briefly to this situation.
Personally, I believe both the old model of media and the new digital environment need to go away. On balance, the internet itself has proved to be societal poison. And I say that even though I'd deeply miss these two guys, as well as a few others.
I’m not sure Rogan represents the triumph of reason. Alex Jones Lite, with “jokes.”
...a triumph of reasonableness perhaps.
I'm not sure the comparison is fair but I agree with the first sentence. Rogan is more an entertainer than an investigative journalist. And I think he has learned his lesson and is making an effort to stay safe.
Probably not fair. But they’re both pro hucksters turning a buck by having “opinions” indistinguishable from lies. One is far, far more dangerous (hence “lite”).
Rogan does plenty besides having opinions. (He's a good interviewer, for one.) Are you saying that Rogan's opinions are mostly lies, i.e. deliberate deceptions? Or are you saying that his opinions contain falsehoods?
Best interviewer on the planet, imo. Let’s his guest speak and is a natural conversationalist.
Rogan thinks aloud, but in the end, his decisions seem informed. He challenged the conventional wisdom on Covid, supported Bernie and seems to really value free speech.He did cut Alex Jones a break early on. I think they are drinking buddies. But if he watched any of the testimony as to what Jones did to the families who lost children at Sandy Hook, I'd bet he would not be so understanding. He and Russell Brand have huge audiences for a reason. And Jimmy Dore, although lacking the polish of Glenn Greenwald, is always equipped with the facts to back his opinions. That Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal are regular guests, show that they are all peers. Long may they thrive!
Watching him slowly chip away at Sanjay Gupta was like watching a prize fighter. He has quite a strategic method, except when perhaps he has had just a touch too much mood enhancer
I honestly can't see how anyone who has actually watched at least a few complete Rogan podcasts (especially ones where he is having a conversation with someone who is an expert in whatever field they are in) can come to this conclusion about him. It's very clearly not true.
I think comparing him to Alex Jones is a clue. Probably hasn't really watched either.
After all these years I'm still unsure what being a bot means to you, e.pierce. Is it mainly an insult along the lines of: Your comment is so ___ it could have come from a bot? If so, what is in the blank? e.g. "ordinary", "predictable;e", "random"? Iow, what are the qualities of being a bot?
Right. Like those idiots comprise "independent journalism."
I find it hard to understand that idiots like you persist coming on sites that are evidently populated by critical thinkers. You don't have a chance in hell of convincing anyone here with your baseless statements
Clearly not everyone has facts to use to persuade others.
l. is a well-known troll. better to ignore.
GG IMO is the best traditional journalist of those mentioned. Does not take away from the others value in any way, their just different
Add Bari Weiss and the kids at Triggernometry et al and yes, I do think they can win.
The kids are on to corporatists, and eventually they’ll be alright.
We will know they’re winning when child drug treatment for gender goes down in history next to the lobotomy and no one believes anything NYT writes.
We listened to a podcast on a long road trip earlier in the year - only listen in the car - about that one doctor who was running around the country performing lobotomies on mostly women and kids. Fuck man, that was some evil shit.
I wouldn't lump Mate and Greenwald into the same category as Rogan and Brand. The former are actually investigative journalists exposing lies and worse. Rogan and Brand are entertainers who happen to like allowing people like GG and AM to gain access to their large audiences, so they're more like independent platforms. Taibbi is also an investigative journalist. Minor quibble though.
The Wokeists in Corporate America, Langley, the Pentagon and Wall Street are just riding the wave and hoping to forego any more workers' awakenings, but they'd be happy to continue funding and abetting far-right governments abroad if it's good for business and they can successfully mask it with a good PR effort.
The numbers even if growing significantly are still insignificant and always will be. It’s good that these guys exist and can spread reliable information but it will always be a niche market.
I think he confuses "liberalism" for "neoliberalism" there, where the former had luminaries like Adam Smith (whose writings would truly shock some of today's economists in training) and the latter covers everyone from Ronny Raygun to Sleepy Uncle Joe. Off-topic, I know, but I honestly don't think there's much of a difference between neoconservatives and neoliberals, at least not from an economic or foreign policy perspective.
All dictatorships are run by small minorities. Taleb sometimes sounds like Gladwell.
Russell seems to pretty consistently land on the correct side of issues, imho at least. My only gripe would be that he tends to suck all of the oxygen out of the room at times, when I'd really like the guest to be the main topic.
Kind of like what I thought Lis Smith did on Real Time last week. She was nothing more than a paid ad for the DNC, and turned every topic into a mid term campaign ad. and I wanted to hear Matt bring some sanity to the discussion.
Yes, I watched Lis Smith on Real Time and laughed hard. She is a puppet. At least she had the courage to agree with Matt on a few points that will likely cost her some friends on the left.
I've only watched the Overtime clip. She seemed to be a bit drunk. Though I'm not familiar with her, maybe she is just always like that.
She didn’t present any substance at all.
When even Bill Maher is calling bullshit on a guest's DNC spin, you know they're in trouble. Last time Matt was on, Maher couldn't accept his statements about Russian collusion being a hoax, so he's clearly deep in the Democrat bubble on some things. It's nice to see him occasionally notice that maybe, just maybe, they are at least as full of shit as Republicans.
Yea, I remember seeing Maher disagreeing with Matt on the Russia hoax.
They love to hate on Trump.
She is a low intelligence Dem political hack. I find it amazing that low intelligence people like her or say VP Harris or Marco Rubio can rise so high being toads of power. If I had to say something good about the trumpster it would be how easily he cut down the best the republican party had. You could see, live on stage in the republican party debates what fools they were running for POTUS.
Well, yeah. Nobody is yearning for the 2000-2016 GOP.
That’s because they shunned Dr. Ron Paul. Fuck the GOP, but just a little less than the DNC.
Exactly my stance.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/democrats-have-gone-crazy-but-freedom
LOL she's going to be gone in 2022, so like I said.........
I saw the same thing. I'm guessing Maher let her drone on with the Approved Talking Points, as Maher lets the guest talk and dig her own grave. Smith was a caricature that night.
Matt did bring sanity when he spoke& he spoke well. I stopped watching bill Maher years ago. He sucks.
Actually, he's back to the Clinton era Bill Maher. He's always going to bring the Lib, but he's a huge proponent of Free Speech and anti-woke. Worth watching again if you have HBO. He did a segment during pride month which had a lesbian and gay man as the panelists, and it was amazing. They were far more mainstream than the people who are the public advocates for LGBTQ.
Nope.
her performance did feel like an ad.
weren't you convinced when she said she is an old school liberal (/s)?
Yes, I love Russel Brand, I've seen his hilarious 33 show and clearly he's a consummate performer of the monologue, where his bread and vegan butter is made. And it's good to see some action on this side of the pond.
He's on the right side of everything I think and uses his self confessed narcissism to wake people up and spread conspiracy facts. He's not quite there on evidence for existence of a virus https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/seeing-is-believing or a pandemic https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/is-this-the-greatest-con-of-all-time but that may be cos he has to tread the youtube censorship line very carefully.
I totally agree the skill, quality and how much we enjoy and get out of an interview is always inversely proportional to the number of words that the interviewer says.
Jo
The sanity would NOT have been coming from the side of Matt, who is for some reason unable to stop toeing the liberal world order (pronounced: ray geem) line in all things.
Brand is one of the few voices waking people up to the slippery slope of the fascist, Marxist Liberal World Order that America has found itself sliding down. While Matt is too busy keeping all of his premises in line with his NYT worshiping friends. He does his readers harm by keeping their world view intact, when it needs is to be split down the middle and exposed as the complete inverted-truth, elitism-credentialism-loving, totalitarianism promoting propaganda that it is.
Wake up Matt- you are helping evil people.
"Marxist liberal world order"? Marxists aren't liberals and liberals aren't Marxists. Corporatism is the new world order that has supplanted nation states, more or less. Corporations have all the rights and none of the obligations that people used to enjoy. They are blithely destroying the oceans, the land, and the air in their endless lust for profit with the aid of their bought-and-paid-for politicians. You are right about one thing which is that America is "sliding down" the hill towards outright fascism, but it is about the unbridled power of capitalism and not the rise of a worker-controlled state, i.e., a Marxist socialist state.
It’s not capitalism though. It’s the unbridled power of corporatism/ fascism.
The left tries to blame their antics on capitalism because their Marxist cause is aided by people rejecting capitalism. Scratch the surface of any anti-capitalist and you will find a brainwashed (likely by an esteemed institute of higher education) aspiring communist. And they’re happy to start telling you why Marxism isn’t bad, it’s just never been implemented properly.
It’s astonishing the anti-historical-fact propaganda people will absorb, when presented by a college professor and regurgitated for an A.
First 'm sure you've never read anything by Karl Marx in your life. In order to be critical of something you have to at least know what it is. You speak of propaganda, but you're a prime example of it's effectiveness with your gross overgeneralizations and inability to give specific examples.
"First 'm sure" it's not my job to do your research-History is full of examples. Since you have NO earthly IDEA what I have or haven't read, you afford me a prime opportunity to quote your FAVORITE expert, you- "In order to be critical of something you have to at least know what it is".
Your mean spiritedness does not predispose me to waste much more time caring about your opinion. Better luck elsewhere, recruiting the unwitting to give up all their rights in a world controlled by sociopaths, for the "guarantee" <wink><wink> of a workers paradise.
I provided several specific examples throughout, but my posts tend to be long enough as they are, so my bad for not leaving quite enough to satisfy you.
As for claiming I've never read Karl Marx, this is clearly an assumption by someone who has never done so themselves but only read or watched videos (like the one Janine shared in this thread) featuring pro-capitalist propaganda from pro-capitalism sources besmirching and mis-representing what Marx wrote and then assuming that those sources got it right because you favor their ideology.
As for gross overgeneralizations, I think pointing to the adaptability and mutability of human behavior is hardly a generalization.
As for saying that I'm a victim of incorrect propaganda for following the actual system proposed by Marx & Engels, that is an odd accusation to make against someone who grew up immersed in pro-capitalist propaganda from numerous sources, as I described in some detail and give *specific* examples regarding.
Yes, Janine, we reject capitalism, because we are tired of having so many of us being impoverished despite our long hours of hard work and subject to inability to acquire necessities, let alone psychologically necessary recreation, while a few inherit an obscene amount of access to the social wealth that we the workers collectively create. Technology has advanced to the point that class divisions and extreme material inequality is no longer necessary, and has now become destructive to the planet itself.
Considering all of the pro-capitalist rhetoric and misrepresentation of Marxism spewed by the privately/corporate owned media, it's frankly strange to accuse anti-capitalists of being the brainwashed ones. And I don't mean that as an insult, but simply an observation.
Marxism has not been implemented improperly, it has not been implemented at all. Certainly nothing remotely resembling the classless, moneyless, stateless system formulated by Marx and Engels, since they were quite clear that such a system required an advanced industrial base, something 1917 Russia and the many small developing nations purporting to establish "socialism" et al did not have.
As for anti-historical propaganda absorption, I think defenders of capitalism deliberately put blinders on to ignore the mass of homeless people, the numerous workers struggling paycheck to paycheck while sometimes working three different jobs, going into massive debt or bankruptcy due to medical problems, and the festering slums that our inner cities have been reduced to when we have reached the technological capacity to produce an abundance for all and try to say that capitalism remains a good or remotely progressive system.
And college professors who promote "wokeism" do not promote "Marxism" as described by Marx & Engels, but "Marxism" in name only. They claim to dislike capitalism, yet the corporations *love* the SJWs and do everything they can to promote their agenda of Extreme Left identity politics because it keeps workers fighting amongst themselves, fosters competition that the system thrives on, and diverts workers from class unity by besmirching and misrepresenting the system actually described by Marx & Engels.
Answer in one word: Is our (USA) current economic system capitalism?
The extreme left identity politics is an adaptation of Marxism. Again! watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JX4bsrj178
The mass of homeless people on full display in California COULD EASILY BE RESOLVED if our money wasn't being routed through international aid NGOs and back into politicians' foundations (The Biden foundations, Clinton Foundation....how many can you count?) . (How much are we up to in Ukraine now?) THINK ABOUT IT. The point of the homeless people is to turn you against capitalism. The UN New World Order is getting impatient- it needs you to reject your Constitution and to start insisting on Marxism to solve 'the ills of America! 'Why would someone who was really serving their constituents leave the scar of tent cities on the face of our great cities? Because it serves their narrative- a global world government wherein the constitution has been cancelled and the deplorables have no rights but what the elites hand them. 'Come on man! It'll be much more fair!'
Mail ballots started in California in 1978. Since then California's Democrats Pelosi, Waters, Feinstein etc etc - no matter HOW HORRIBLE the state of the poor in California, never cease to win their elections... HMMM...... Everything is just the way the want it to be, and voters can't do a thing about it, cause they've got the bloated voter rolls and drop boxes, to fill any ballot deficits. Pelosi's father was investigated for ties to the Communist party. Those documents were released within the last few years. Surprise surprise. (https://time.com/5892357/voting-by-mail-history/).
That you are ready to turn your back on the once-in-the-history-of-humankind blessing of living in a free society as a sovereign, and are advocating an oppressive rights-free existence (which would be neo-feudalism) is no accident.
It's time to rethink your media and your liberal arts professors. What you are advocating for is VERY much against the best interest of every American. How did you get there?
We should be working together to eliminate the grip of the Build-Back-Better globalists who have captured our media and our Congress, and get back to the freedom and prosperity we've had in decreasing quantities since the first time Bush Sr. uttered the words "New World Order."
These are scary times, we need to work together to save our liberties for future generations.
OMG the communists have invaded Taibbis substack! That’s two in one thread!
All of the ills you ascribe to capitalism are the result of the cabals overtaking of our Congress and enacting laws that only ensure the rape of American citizens- the dual goals of which were to get rich and to hoodwink people like you into thinking the problem was ‘capitalism’. I can assure you that the cabal does not believe in free market capitalism. But they do hope that you will never realize that socialism is merely the gateway drug that is used to get people to surrender their rights and freedoms. What happens then is what has happened in every communist country- death of millions, privation, misery, and NO HOPE EVER of recourse because YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS because you idiotically gave up your rights and any means by which to assert your God given right to freedom.
I am under no illusion that I will persuade a propagandist to disavow his false- message, so I’ll end it there, satisfied that I have a t least outed you.
Capitalism, which puts a price tag on everything rather than rewarding all workers with full access to the collective wealth in exchange for their hard work; and allowing a tiny handful of the population to become obscenely wealthy and powerful with a large chunk of the population becoming impoverished, results in extreme power imbalances that leads to... corporatism/fascism. If you want a system based on ruthless competition, can't pay/can't have, with a few controlling everything, you're going to end up with a fascist system.
If you want to empower the state to rectify these perceived wrongs you’ll end up with a fascist state.
No, I want to empower the people themselves to do it. We're already close to a fascist state as it is thanks the corporations working hand-in-hand with the state, and without a state regulating capitalism to protect the system from itself, we're running the risk of the capitalists becoming the government themselves and acting as post-Industrial feudal lords. It's the capitalists who empower the state, not the other way around. Workers need to run the system as a whole, not via a handful of privileged bureaucrats doing it in their stead. Power has to be evenly distributed among everyone in an environment of cooperation and material equality, otherwise class divisions and hence varying degrees of fascism will exist.
No living thing does anything without motivation. Pretending that people will work, when they’ve been promised everything they need, whether they do or don’t work, is MAGICAL THINKING. But you can get a PhD in philosophy if you write nice essays about magical thinking. Colleges are pumping out anti-capitalist communists like it’s their mission.
Sorry you’ve been fooled, but you’ve been fooled.
I mostly agree with this, Hugh, and I thank you for saying it. Since I speak as a Classical Marxist myself, i.e., a follower of the Economic Democracy that Marx and Engels actually endorsed as opposed to all the other tendencies that bastardized it during the 20th century to the present, the SJWs being the latest nitwits to do this. Marx was most certainly not the equivalent of a modern liberal for his time period, but firmly on the side of the working class. As for worker controlled states, Marx and Engels envisioned a stateless economy where workers controlled the system via social ownership of all the industries, which as you noted are now the actual power firmly in control of all nations, the state apparatus being their pawn and enforcer. But I do understand what you meant by a "worker-controlled state," as too many people on the Left who support the Chinese government claim that they established this (which is ridiculous and very blatantly not the truth) as an ingenious excuse to allege that if you oppose the Chinese government then you effectively attack all the Chinese people. Sort of similar to the way Israel promotes Zionism as somehow representing the interests of all Jewish people so that opposition to this ethno-centric, apartheid form of identity politics can be painted as antisemitism. Pundits have made an art form out of cloaking their autocratic and regressive tendencies behind "progressive" sounding monikers to gain support and fend off criticisms. If the former Soviets, SJWs, and Zionists haven't taught us this important lesson yet, then we all need to take classes in Politics 101.
e.pierce has 3 standard responses that he applies to anyone who calls him out as the professional regime-narrative policing troll that he is.
Run along "e", you have no power here.
Who! is on the side of the corporations? You can't be serious.
Which side was most vehement about forcing us with mandates to take the useless untested BigPharma shots- the Dem/Left.
Who mandated the closure of mom and pop shops and churches, while letting the big box stores stay open- the Dem/Left.
Who's in bed with the "private" corporations that run the all major social media, and silencing all political opposition? - the Dem/Left.
Who's policy positions exclusively are on the mouths of corporate mainstream media globally? - the Dem/Left ( the very reason we are here on Substack)
Who's leaders where are caught repeating the Globalist war cry, "BUILD BACK BETTER" straight from the One World Government headquarters, the World Economic Forum - the Dem/Left
Who's legislating HUGE expenditures to globalist corporations that make "green" energy equipment, while shutting down our cheap national energy production? - the Dem/left.
Who keeps funnelling billions to Ratheon to send Nazi-infested, and NATO-ineligible (due to corruption), Ukraine, while ignoring our own border and national integrity? - the Dem/left.
It sounds to me Hugh, like you don't have an understanding of what Marxism is. Marxism is communism with a layer of elite on top- living the American dream, while the rest of us 'own nothing'. Haven't you heard the WEF agenda catchphrase "you will own nothing and be happy"? That's Marxism. That's where the Dem/left are intent on taking us, just after they are done bankrupting our country(- is that goal not obvious to you yet? -look what they are doing to the money supply), hungry (look at all the food processing plant destruction, the supply chain snafus and the fertilizer rationing) and demoralized (we all know our elections are being rigged).
Once we are broke and desperate, we will be ripe for rolling onto the Liberal World Order - their words not mine- minus, of course, our Constitution and our second amendment rights.
Have you not noticed they are after those?
Honestly, turn off the mainstream media completely Hugh. There is so much that is as plain as the nose on your face, that you are completely missing. Taking in too many media lies will do that to a person.
Highly recommended brief explanation of Marxism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFEeHPYp7sg&t=25s
The Dems aren't Left. They're corporatist servants. They serve the war machine and the big oil machine and the big banks just as the GOP does, except that they're less obvious about it. The system distracts you from what's actually happening which is the ultra-rich screwing you and everyone else they can with the aid of their bought-and-paid-for politicians. The charade that is US democracy is a game to occupy and mollify the populace. It's the "circus". Don't be distracted by the shadow puppets. Look at who is prospering and who is falling into or has fallen into poverty. Look at what is being destroyed in the natural world by the endless lust for more and more money. The rest is just noise.
That explanation for what Marxism is, Janine, bears no resemblance to what Marx and Engels actually promoted in their books. What you call "Marxism" is true or false depending upon what definition you choose to utilize, as we live in an era where words tend to mean anything the person using them wants them to mean. Personally, I am using the classical meaning of the term. I'll allow others to define it as they choose, but it's not what Marx and Engels formulated.
So I should have called them Marxistish? It‘s varied with each implementation.
In any event, they are scarcely trying to hide it. BLM has espoused Marxism on their own website.
To be honest, Janine, "Marxistish" would also be inaccurate, since what they promote is Marxist in name only, because it is utterly unlike and in fact anathema to the system that Marx and Engels actually formulated.
I am also indeed aware that BLM espouses "Marxism" on their website, but again, that is hi-jacking the name to look good to progressives, as what they promote as "Marxism" bears no resemblance to the system discussed in Marx and Engels' various works. In fact, we Classical Leftists have a word for people on the Left who support any type of system that happens to have the words "socialism" or "Marxism" etc attached to it, no matter how much it deviates from the economic democracy described in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO et al: we call them "tankies."
Conservatives also jump on that misapplication of the name, of course -- not to attract progressives to it but in their case to denigrate the work of Marx and Engels in the eyes of everyone by making people think of a system of autocratic despotism whenever they hear or read "Marx" or "Marxism". One thing Marx and Engels never did was race-bait or gender-bait, and they stuck firmly with class unity while simply saying that such a system would benefit people of color and women, who during that era were truly oppressed.
To be clear, I never denied that BLM and many other purported liberals and Leftists, not to mention other tendencies, use the words "Marxist" and "Marxism." However, saying that makes it Marxism in the classical sense as described by Marx and Engels is like arguing that referring to an ostrich as a duck makes it a duck, since that is the word people were using for it. The people in charge of BLM are very well aware that they will attract lots of tankies to their cause simply by using the words "Marxist" or "Marxism."
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. I would encourage you to expand your politics beyond the binary simplicity of FOX News and OAN. Hate INC. by Matt Taibbi would be a good place to start.
Winston: 'Rachel and Joy said I should hate your hating self cause hating you is the only response to your hatred, you hater'
Thanks for the intellectual discourse, Winston. Tell your buddy e.pierce you're gaining on him for most contentless malignant posts in this stream.
Sorry you were unsuccessful at getting under my skin and merely managed to embarrass yourself. Better luck next time.
All of Taibbi's readers know you by now Troll-"e". Time to change your account name - or something- if you hope to have any impact at all.
You've been exposed; Run along and change your costume.
So true! When Bill asked her anything that required her to expand on her prefab talking points it kind of broke her brain 😵💫
IKR? Every time she opened her mouth all I could do was wonder how Bill's lame-ass guests get booked.
Otherwise, lay off Russell!
I don't think those 2 events are alike at all
Russell is a big proponent of decentralization and transparency. I wish he would start talking about a more organized fashion of it and how to use it to regain control and stop the corruption from happening. Like this:
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/what-we-need-is-a-transparency-movement
Interesting idea. I worry that you'd need a government to government those who govern, meaning you'd run the risk of shifting the corruption to a new entity. Also, most of the aspects of government that are corrupt have happened in the open. We just didn't notice them.
I agree that there's no point to advocating for programs until government officials demonstrate accountability to the people. I think we can do it by demanding that laws like the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act be repealed. Politicians nor their spouses, parents and children, should be allowed to trade stock from the time they assume office until 10 years after they leave office. A lifetime cap should be put on speakers fees. That's an incomplete list, but that's the general direction I'm inclined to move in.
The Framers thought through the problem of centralized power and accountability much better than any of us could. We should go back to the solution they tried to embed in the Constitution: strict limits on the powers and scope of the federal government, with most functions left to states and localities, where the people can better monitor and control them.
Consider this
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/the-case-for-building-a-new-open
Skeptic, the system is too corrupted. We need to make our own system and plug it into the current one to force politicians to play by our rules again. We can’t change the system. We need to make a new version of it.
Corruption has a hard time existing in transparency. In transparency we all can police it - and should. It should be our duty to protect our own system.
We have recognized some major overlap between the non-authoritarian elements of the left and right for some time now, especially in these threads. That's good, but to paraphrase Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction, let's not go patting each other on the backs just yet. It's time to start developing an actionable common agenda.
Here's what I think many of us can agree on: The federal government has become too big and overweening. It needs to be trimmed. Federal law enforcement needs to be massively cut. The states can create some kind of structure for information sharing, coordination, and cooperation; the FBI sucks at this anyway. The centralized intelligence services should be broken up; they have very few demonstrable achievements and they're dangerous to freedom. Intelligence functions can be distributed among military intelligence agencies.
Agencies with the power to threaten freedom should be kept as localized, close to the people, and accountable as possible.
Don't look now, but Senate Dems stayed up late Saturday night so they can hire thousands of new IRS agents, because there aren't enough people answering the phone at headquarters. Yeah, right.
It used to annoy me when Hillary Clinton couldn’t answer a question with less than a thousand words. I like Russel, but sometimes he can’t ask a question with less than a thousand words.
I mentioned that in my comment. He can overpower his guests, but otherwise, he's a great interviewer.
I love Russell Brand. He's a force of good in this world. Comics are so damn smart.
Russell Brand having a clear idea about what troubles the world...(?) When celebrities are those we turn to for informed intelligent analysis of the world order, we're fucked. Wait...WHAT? Uh oh....
Occasionally, I've actually found him mildly humorous on specific topics, but wtf...Russell Brand on the world...?!? Pick a name out of a phone book, take a chance...it'd have about the same probability of hearing intelligent analysis.
@263053-matt-taibbi You can host video on Substack now. Don't need to send audience to YouTube.
If that feature isn't enabled in your account, ask Substack to enable it. That's what I did but maybe it's on for everyone now. Idk.
The educated class really generally suck. I am ashamed that I am one of them. However, I live on the other side of the tracks where I have some calluses on my hands, and my mind still works on objectivity, pragmatism and critical thinking.
RB may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but he sees the world through his own eyes rather than in service of an agenda, and that makes him appealing.
I stopped watching cable news completely about 10 years ago and mostly about 15 years ago. What I remembered about the old days was that pundits and commentators used to have their own identities and ideas. Sometime around that 15 year ago period I noticed that everyone who came on pretty much was a shill regurgitating the party line (and the party line is usually a lot less interesting and more predictable than a person’s independent opinion), though it seems to be what keeps viewers/readers coming back. For me, why on earth would I bother to watch (or read) someone like that? I can get all the push emails full of spin I want for free direct from the pols (or for a token contribution to their activist groups). I started noticing that newspaper editors were getting the same emails I was and then pushing those memes in stories. How can you charge for something a reader or viewer can get for free almost anywhere? I suppose there is a patina of authenticity for some rubes if they read it a few days later in the NYT or FT?
Anyway, what is appealing about RB is that he is himself, not part of the machine and not flogging the same old tropes. Also he is funny! Thanks
love it. brand is sometimes challenging to listen to, not generally in conversation with people, but his rants before and after an excerpt.. YET... his mantra.. is drop the childish labels, find commonality, built unity. it's our only option. thanks Matt!
The discussions here, and in all media, ignores that all that is happening has been happening in one form or another since humanity first clubbed the other guy on the head to take his food. The issue is deeper than ANY current manifestation. Deep in our psyche there is a fallacious approach to life. Religions attempt and pretend to address this, but , like every thing societal, the religions become a tool of the madness. Still that personal, stepping away from the 'group', questioning and search can be the only rational approach to look at the insanity that engulfs every human being.
Sounds like Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I heard someone on some podcast talking about this idea that there are non-human intelligences behind the will of men and women that transmit themselves by deed across time. For example, theft induces more theft and murder leads to more murder. A counter-example to this might be the old mustard seed adage that a small act of kindness can grow into something huge and powerful. The nobility of the human spirit is that which can stand against these malign instincts and memetics or promote the good ones.
Or, we're just naked apes and this is all part of our nature -evolved over time to better suit our needs for breeding, eating and having shelter.
So, there's that./
Except that we’re not just apes. Trying to reduce humanity to a species it separated from millions of years ago is a convenient (and wrong) argument against taking responsibility for the animal we have become. The idea that we only eat, shit and fuck, is so clearly and superficially wrong I’m not even sure what point you’re trying to make.
The key question here is can humans work against the negative elements of (the non-human intelligence of) evolution and shape their future. If we’re only apes then it’s unlikely, but then we have to figure out how to explain away all the times throughout history where we did exactly that and how were at a point where we can ‘choose’ whether or not to annihilate ourselves and the planet.
A few things wrong with your assumptions.
One, we ARE apes.
Two, we didn't "separate" from the planet "millions of years ago" or something.
We've been part of this whole thing since we've been around in some form or another.
To claim otherwise is just stupid.
What, we dropped to earth and "separated" ourselves?
You're a relatively hairless ape who needs food, sex and shelter.
Too bad your large forebrain can't get around the entre basis for "love", art, technology and survival.
We can't really "work against" what we are, but we can do what we've always done: vie for power. Some rise up, they sit on top of the heap for a while and then they get taken out.
That's it. The problem is, we'll do this until we go extinct -unless you see some way out of a population of around 7 billion WITHOUT a collapse.
It's really much more simple than you think if you seek the roots of your art, your music, your technology.
no it is much more simple than that. Our whole personal and societal activity is based on self deceit. Thinking process allows us to pretend that there is thinker when in fact the thinker is not separate, is not a self, but part of the thinking process.
I agree with your analysis but I understood the (totally lost to time) podcaster as saying something slightly different.
Again, I’m rehashing something I vaguely remember, so take it as you will, but we can imagine some base level, instinctual things that humans do that might be bad or anti-social but also primal: you hit me, I’ll hit you back. But there’s a point at which that switches into something that requires more intelligence, like, “he broke up with me so I’m going boil his cat and crap in his furnace.” This sort of hopped-up malice is a thing beyond simple retribution or power dynamics and the speaker talked about it as if it were a malign spirit.
Maybe another example might be “mass shooters” who seem to communicate to each other through time and from beyond the grave. I’m not going to say this isn’t wishy-washy mambo-jumbo, but I do believe that people operate on levels of reality that transcend the mundane, for example symbolic or archetypal. We don’t have to attribute consciousness or intent to something like an archetypal intelligence and it seems perfectly reasonable that things like this could evolve naturally from an ape with social qualities you describe. Anyway, this isn’t meant to convince anyone but rather open the window a bit on thinking about very different intelligences and how they might appear and be understood.
Brand has been exceptional during covid.
I agree. Never saw him on the street or in the grocery store.
Troll
The "them" in We Can't Let Them Do this are possessed by demons.
Demons? Really? Levitating and vomiting black puke? No. Not that kind of demon. It's even worse .
I posted this last year as an effort to make sense of the world I see, and reposting here, as everything goes steadily downhill. It's not wonderfully written, but whatever. I don't have time to make it pretty. And the 2 people who read it won't care. ahhahahaha
A Brief History of Demons
We are seeing in the U.S. an apparent descent into borderline social psychosis -- where monsters are made from shadows and empirical facts cease to exist. The phenomenon -- like a virus or plague -- seems to transmit invisibly and presents through symptoms that vary within a broad pattern. Heart-rending stories -- even seen here in comments -- of family members estranged and angry in siloed realities are examples. Wikipedia defines psychosis as "an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real." Our current predicament is due in part to news industry methods, but those can be seen two ways: 1) as a cause and 2) as a consequence of a larger phenomenon.
"Reality" is a slippery concept. The scientific revolution brought epistemological clarity to the physical world, which peaked with the grandeur of Newtonian mechanics. Quantum theory demolished certainty and put probability in its place. But probability remains measurable and physical reality remains objective through empirical experiment.
Human psychology has no such objectivity. Going back to Greek thought and proceeding to now we see a sequence of speculations. The ancient world saw man as playthings of gods -- which the Greeks called "daimons" -- who would interfere in human affairs, steer actions and results. Daimons were disembodied but quite real beings who could act for good or bad. Christianity, in its monotheistic enthusiasm, repositioned these beings as "angels" and "demons" and moved them off center stage. I recall one Roman historian (whose name I've forgotten) observed there were over 1 million gods in ancient Rome. It's far easier to keep track of one god and one devil than sort out millions! Maybe monotheism is the first triumph of managerial efficiency in human history. LOL.
Human thought in "the West" focused for centuries on systems of ethics and political theory, giving man free will to act on a fixed point between two poles -- Jesus and Satan. It was the Christian writer Doestoevsky in his 1860s novel "The Possessed" who rehabilitated the daimons of ancient Greece for our age, largely in the form of demons. My intellectual hero Albert Camus observed that "The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx." Camus' own novel "The Plague" and the playwright Eugene Ionnescu's "Rhinoceros" were two artistic attempts to catalog the same phenomenon.
20th century psychology pursued demons only tentatively and through three systematic methods. One -- by noting that groups seem to become possessed by an animating power independent of any single constituent -- was group psychology through French sociologist Gustav Lebon's 1895 book "The Crowd" and later in 1921 by Freud in "Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego". I'm not aware of much beyond that, as pyschology "advanced" through behavioral theories and neurologial explorations -- although it may exist and I'm uninformed.
The second was objective mental illness, focusing on biochemical etiology; this was a clarifying and ethical achievement that has done enormous good. But the underlying mechanisms remain hidden in mystery and these conditions apply only to a small subset of humanity; they do not explain broad social phenomenon.
The third path was an atavistic return to daimonic theory, perhaps most evident in Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's archetypes, but also in the cartography of universal mythic structures seen in James Frazer's "The Golden Bough" and in the popularized treatment through Joseph Campbell best-selling books. Jung's idea of a universal mind composed of psychic forces called "archetypes" that drive human perception and action closely parallels the "forms" of Plato and is perhaps the Greek daimons renamed.
The path from Doestoevsky, through LeBon and Freud, energized by Jung's archetypes seems to me the most analytically fruitful in interpreting our current situation, explaining motivations and perceptions, and bringing the unconscious -- "demons" or "daimons" or "archetypes" or what you will -- into a clarifying consciousness. All provide a vocabulary and analytical structure that elevates and illuminates thinking far above the fruitless slogans and spitting sputtering bewildered stammering that passes for critical commentary.
The ancient Greeks placed the command "Gnothi seauton" (Know Thyself) on their temple of Apollo at Delphi. But, even so, the Athenians killed Socrates -- for talking. It's hard to take your own advice. But it's good advice. "Civilization" has made some progress since then, but progress is easy to lose.
Our media class has largely devolved into propagandists for the Democrats, completely sacrificing their integrity and, correspondingly, their credibility. I always assume all “news” outlets are lying, and hopefully most Americans remain healthfully skeptical about any/all “information” emanating from these classless, self-serving drones.
Great interaction and thoughtful perspective, and I will now go watch the whole thing on Russell’s channel!
Enough already with Bill Marr. You can set a timer for 5 minutes until he gets into his schtick -- boilerplate criticism of "the left" for pronouns, bathrooms, so-called "censorship" of jokes, and other misdeeds. Instead of live guests, he should just fashion some puppets to nod their heads in agreement with his tedious rants. Any actual human who dares disagree with him is summarily interrupted.
Bill is a pathetic shell of his former self, reminding us how hip he is with gratuitous references to spleef and by touting his atheist credentials at every turn. But he's no Chris Hitchens. He's a burnt-out "Get off my lawn libs" bore.
Yeah... Maher is a cunt.
He's consistently wrong because he is a classic limousine liberal.
He lives a very sheltered and fragile little bubble and he gets off on wiggling the skin of said bubble but never popping it.
He's always been a mediocre comedian, and his smarmy shtick got old in the mid 90s.
Now he's playing at deep-thinking political discussion but he has a very limited view of things, as one would expect someone with millions in the bank and assistants to fetch coffee, dry cleaning and food for him.
"Real Time" -more like VEAL time amiright?
That's a very, very good summary. I didn't think you'd beat your opening but, damn, you did!
Come on... Veal Time with Bill Maher.
hahaha
Hitchens and Maher ended up in roughly the same sad state. Hitchens was once a brave and expert fighter for the true cause. His schtick, however, was a ferocious debating style that was very effective but ultimately in bad faith. It was about defeating opponents, not improving our understanding. When he went all in on the War on Terr he ended up believing his own disingenuous debate zingers.
Agree that Hitchens and Maher both went off the rails. Their hatred of Abrahamic religions (which I share and which is a good thing) caused Chris to break with his contempt for American foreign policy and embrace the Neo-Cons. Maher got cancelled after 9-11, an experience that has morphed into a hobby course he cannot get off.