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Caitlin Johnson - Mainstream Journalism Doesn't Exist, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

She nails it a lot of the time. I edited links and graphics out of this which can be seen in the original, link at the end.

Mainstream Journalism Doesn’t Exist, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative

Journalists should be exposing inconvenient truths about powerful people in their own nation and its allies. Instead the people we call “journalists” criticize enemy nations, smear political dissidents, demand increasing amounts of censorship, and advance narratives that are convenient for the powerful.

The “war on terror” is a false pretext for interventionism in the Middle East and the “war on drugs” is a false pretext for interventionism in Latin America.

Lula being free and eligible to run again in Brazil is a very big deal with huge implications for US imperialism. This isn’t like some fake leftist getting into the Democratic Party or whatever, this is a real thing that will have real consequences in a nation with huge geostrategic significance to the US empire. The empire invested many years staging a coup in one of the largest nations on earth, and it’s not just going to let it be reversed without a fuss. I’m bit nervous about what will happen.

The Monroe Doctrine is literally just the US saying “Latin America is our Africa. You guys get those brown people over there, these are our brown people over here.”

I love how pundits talk about the Monroe Doctrine like it’s a real thing that has actual legitimacy. “Well we can’t have Russia and China interfering in Venezuela, that’s just the Monroe Doctrine.” No, how about you fuck all the way off from any country not named the United States of America.

We could be collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem to create a beautiful, awesome, healthy world. Instead we’re all competing with each other working meaningless jobs creating pieces of landfill which serve no purpose besides turning millionaires into billionaires.

The overwhelming majority of human effort goes into competing against other humans. We do have the ability to take all that lost energy and re-route it toward collaborating with each other toward health and thriving. There is no real reason we can’t do this. There are no hard obstacles preventing us from moving away from our failed competition-based model to a collaboration-based model. All that’s stopping us is plutocratic propaganda and our collective belief in it. We do have the ability to drop that belief and move toward sanity.

Leftist thinkers who predicted that the inevitable decline in material conditions caused by capitalism would necessarily lead to its downfall failed to foresee just how powerfully effective capitalist propaganda would get at preventing revolution, and the US conclusively proves this. It’s like predicting that an abuser’s abuse will necessarily lead to the victim leaving; that’s simply not the case if the abuser is adept at manipulation, as many abusers are. The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. It is very potent.

Across nearly all sectors of thought, people consistently underestimate how easy human beings are to psychologically manipulate. The only sectors which are exempt from this rule are those which make manipulation their business: advertising, politics, and propaganda.

The left simply doesn’t have the numbers to advance socialist and anti-imperialist agendas in the western world. We don’t have the numbers because mass-scale plutocratic propaganda actively works to keep us from having the numbers. Until we address this head-on, meaningful changes are impossible.

It’s amazing how often leftists ignore this massive, glaring problem of not having enough numbers to accomplish anything real. You have to address it. You must find those numbers somewhere. Deteriorating material conditions aren’t doing the job for us; we need to do it ourselves.

I mean the Green Party presidential candidate got 0.2 percent of the vote in the US last year. The Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate got 317 votes, total. Three hundred and seventeen, in the entire United States. That’s not even an average-sized Italian wedding. I don’t care what your reasons are, you can’t just keep trucking along like those numbers aren’t a huge problem. Something needs to be done, and that something begins with directly tackling the problem of plutocratic propaganda.

Taking back the wealth that the plutocrats have stolen isn’t just valuable because it can be used to help the needful: it’s a defensive measure as well. Take their money and they can’t use it to buy politicians, buy up news outlets, fund think tanks, and propagandize the masses. The collective is entitled to confiscate any weapon that someone is using to harm the collective. If you’re using a rifle to fire upon a crowd, they’re entitled to disarm you for their collective safety. If you’re using your billions of dollars to exploit and manipulate, they’re entitled to disarm you for their collective safety.

Very upsetting how whoever’s the next high profile western anti-imperialist turned out to be a sinister Kremlin agent and/or evil anti-semite.

We are told that capitalism is responsible for accelerating progress, but capitalism’s version of “progress” is destroying the ecosystem, and is clearly progressing far too fast: the development of artificial intelligence without a thorough examination of the risks, medicines being released that haven’t been fully tested, etc.

A socialist who only criticizes the GOP is called a liberal.

In a world that is rapidly dying and at increasing risk of nuclear war there is no functional difference between a liberal incrementalist and a progressive who favors advancing change by slowly taking over the Democratic Party over the course of the next century.

How many of people’s mental health diagnoses are really just them not coping well with capitalism?

If you’re a father to boys and you’re not having regular conversations with them about what consent is, what rape is and how important it is to not rape people, you are a big part of the problem. If you currently don’t know how to have these conversations in ways that are age-appropriate and informative then look it up, ask for directions, listen and learn. You are your kid’s only hope that he doesn’t cause irreparable damage to others. You need to take this seriously.

Oh, your dad never did this for you? Well color me shocked. It shows. Your son will not have the same excuse of ignorance. The world is getting brighter with far less places for rapey behavior to hide. He needs your help to navigate this.


*Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to [best read at the link]

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So many well made points there - thanks for posting @JackieL. CJ is just so clear in her outline of the various problems.

I agree with her - the left is losing people and support. Fascism - actual, real, brutal fascism - seems to be on the rise and getting more popular. Politicians, the armed forces and the police seem to be completely free of even basic notions of accountability for their murderous behaviours. But anyone who supports Palestinian rights, or who has concerns about what transgenderism means for women’s and girls rights is mercilessly hounded and held up as a bigoted enemy of society.

Politicians who are directly responsible for thousands and thousands of unnecessary deaths in the country from Covid can just hold up their hands and say “nothing to do with me!” and no-one seems able to hold them to account.

More Americans died because of trump’s lies, ignorance and fascist tendencies than the total that died in WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11.

Was he held accountable? Nope. He lost the election by a whisker (or did he!?). This should have been the easiest election to win in the history of the US.

Why? Why do people support Boris after all the documented lies, the catastrophic mishandling of covid, the unnecessary deaths, the economic catastrophe of Brexit, the increasingly authoritarian swerve to fascism, the privatising of the NHS?

Why?

This quote from CJ seems really important to me:

It’s like predicting that an abuser’s abuse will necessarily lead to the victim leaving; that’s simply not the case if the abuser is adept at manipulation, as many abusers are.

Derrick Jensen, the environmental activist, had said something similar years back. We are being abused. Physically, psychologically, emotionally and even sexually by this system and its leaders. And like victims of abuse everywhere, we are being gaslighted and manipulated into giving away our power, so we stay in the relationship and even feel scared about it ending.

I can’t think of any other reason why so many of us not only refuse to fight against this toxic system and hold its leaders accountable, but rather fight to keep it and work to destroy anyone who wants to effectively change it.

I don’t see how this is going to change any time soon. There is no life on the left - it’s a rotting corpse, a spent force. It’s leaders are neutered as soon as they raise their heads above the parapet.

As dark as these times are, I can only see it getting worse. And as we have spoken about many times before, that means the brunt of the violence will be borne by the vulnerable - women and ethnic minorities/immigrants. The warning signs are already flashing loud and clear in the rise in domestic abuse of women, the rise in xenophobia and racism and the totally disproportionate effect of covid on minorities and the disabled.

The near future is looking very scary to me.

Stay safe out there J. Sending love

PP

Oops, sorry about that mess of a response [referring to deleted post]! I still obviously have lots to learn about this platform.

This is the abridged, and readable hopefully, version of my response:

I also am fearful and not hopeful. So many things are wrong, most critically perhaps the climate crisis, and I don’t have faith in humanity’s ability to deal with those things in any productive way.

Such is evolution I guess. I just regret what we’ve left for the young people. It’s not fair but…

I’m interested in this part of your comment

“Everyone…who has concerns about what transgenderism means for women’s and girls rights is mercilessly hounded and held up as a bigoted enemy of society.”

I see that your viewpoint on that topic is shared by many people - just Sunday a lifelong friend of mine said the same thing and I was surprised. It seems like a right wing position to me.

I certainly agree that piling onto and bullying anyone who expresses the ‘wrong’ opinion is widespread and that is a big problem for public discourse.

But when I think of trans people, I think of people who were born one sex but feel like the other sex. And I do not mind those people dressing and acting however they wish to, as long as they are not hurting anyone else. My friend said that women’s safe places are no longer safe if trans men can be there, and that elite women’s sports will cease to exist because trans men will overrun them. I don’t feel fear about meeting a trans man in a public washroom because I don’t fear trans men. Re the sports, maybe there needs to be a third category for trans people. Perhaps I’m naive and unaware of what’s going on.

I know there are militant trans people like the one who sued the esthetics shop because the esthetician refused to give them a bikini wax. Very upsetting and disruptive for the person they targeted I’m sure. But I don’t think we want to set public policy based on outliers.

I think this kind of dovetails into a discussion about an increase in the number of personality disorders - people who do not respect the autonomy or personal space of others, who feel they can force others to do as they wish.

I have no answers, which brings me back to how I started this comment, and perhaps makes you wonder why I am commenting at all.

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P.S. I took the time to share these thoughts on the trans issues because I respect your opinion. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.

Excellent and thoughtful comments, as usual @JackieL. And this is certainly a complex subject. I appreciate and support your position by and large. Let me start by saying that I am 100% in favour of breaking down our existing gender stereotypes, allowing for greater personal expression and freedom. I doubt that you and I disagree very much on the substantive issue of human rights for trans folk.

The problem that I am referring to is that there is a great tendency for discussion on trans issues to quickly descend into abuse hurling and virtue-signalling, to the general frustration and pain of all involved. It’s become more and more rare to see a civilised discussion where all points of view can be discussed, without name calling. And there is a definite misogynistic whiff around that to my mind. Take a common term used to describe women who are seen as generally not supportive of the trans community - TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). This word has been used a lot in every discussion on trans issues that I’ve seen, and is becoming something of an insult online. A question that I was pondering recently was what is the male equivalent of a TERF? I, personally, have never seen it applied to a gay man, for example, even though surveys have shown that lesbian women are more accepting of trans-women, than gay men are of trans-men.

Something about all that feels off to me. But if I were to say that on many of the other boards I read, I would be immediately denounced as a transphobic bigot. It’s not just my experience; Glenn Greenwald has had a few pieces recently discussing some thoughts about a recent LGBT survey, and has been trounced all over twitter and Reddit as a transphobe, which if you follow GGs work, is a nonsense. GG said in a podcast a few months ago that he was having dinner with some friends who worked at the NYT. Over dinner some of the people at the table were discussing stories of their children who had friends that were undergoing hormonal treatments to transition (the children were mid-teens) and wondering aloud at the wisdom of allowing or even supporting such a young person in making changes to their body that could ultimately lead to permanent results such as infertility later in life. Who is that sure of anything when they are 14/15? Anyway, when GG asked the speakers if they might publish some of their thoughts in the NYT they immediately replied “No way!” The resulting flak from even having a discussion would be enough for them to lose their jobs.

Again, nothing of this is to say that I do not support trans rights generally, but I do think there are important questions to be discussed here, and I don’t see any place where that conversation can be had in a free and reasonably way… I wonder why.

Perhaps I’m wrong about that. It’s only my observation so far after all. Perhaps there are places where reasonable discussion of these issues happens. I’m curious as to the forces that end up shaping what can be said and what can’t be said.

We know from Chomsky and co. that the 5-filters are an effective way of guiding public discourse and filtering out undesirable facts. The way pro-Palestinian views are immediately and roundly labelled as antisemitism feels like a concerted campaign. The way that anyone questioning any of the big questions involved in trans-rights and childrens or women’s rights gets immediately and roundly labelled as transphobic feels like a similar sort of dynamic…

Well. That went on for much longer than I was expecting. Hope that you can make sense of my ramblings!

Cheers
PP

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Yes, I get what you’re saying. It’s very curious that something that directly affects such a small percentage of the population is getting so much ‘air time’ and impassioned discussion. I feel that it is partly driven by right wing conservatives who want rigid gender roles but that’s just a hunch. And I know there’s more to it than that.

Thanks for sharing your ideas.

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Very interesting thread. In the chain of dependent origination, paticcasammuppada, it is taught that really there are only three basic feeling tones: like/dislike/neutral. The challenge is to try and break the chain by resisting the response → reaction papanca (proliferation).

Twitter, in particular, engenders the knee-jerk first response… not much later a dogpile may form.

The results are the dread of being *cancelled" as the Glenn Greenwald anecdote illustrates. Nuance is crowded out by the binary logic of good/bad, believer/denier, ally/TERF. Ultimately this is how algorithms work, of course… so the prevalence of this straitjacketed discourse in an age of technocracy is nigh on inevitable.

As we know, divide and rule tactics very much suits elites, as do right-wing versus left-wing “only two choices on the menu” politics.

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Hi @JackieL and @Kieran_Telo. Just for balance I thought I’d post this article I just read from a trans-man pointing out that as far as he can see, the flak goes the other way. Supporters of trans-rights are afraid to speak up in the UK as they are afraid of being seen as anti women’s-rights.

This is obviously a complex and painful subject for many. Even more important then that we are able to have meaningful, compassionate and respectful discussions about the issues raised.

Cheers both

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It’s… an imaginative approach, I’ll say that.

Here’s a little more on this subject by Glenn. I’ve not watched the video, but the essay intro is interesting

Any set of rules for political discourse that subordinate the merit of an argument to the identity of the person advocating it is one that is inherently unhealthy and distorted. And that framework, undoubtedly growing in strength in elite U.S. precincts, is also producing a wide range of incentives, distortions and pathologies for how marginalization and its various identities are understood.

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Likewise: a 90 minute video is quite a big ask.

The article is good although GG is more forgiving than I would be towards those who recently and prominently redefine their identity. But then I’m Jane Average*, powerless, and merely seeking to pick apart arguments because that’s how my non-neurotypical brain gets some exercise. (No one is neurotypical, really, by the way.)

And for me power is the key variable. Powerful people get a relatively smooth ride if they use identity politics in divisive ways (GG refers to weaponisation). Everyone else jockeys for position, bickering with great bitterness, ‘erasing’ each other, and all the other modish tactics.

In a way it’s the corollary to the engineering consent tactic discussed in Romanoff’s series of essays posted elsewhere. Except it’s manufacturing dissent to obscure the real power play.

The fear of losing ones livelihood, good reputation, etc, if some careless words are taken out of context adds to the mix. The powerful get to enjoy the use of nuance, aided by legions of media commentariat.

Rather an old piece by the late Mark Fisher but worth ten minutes of your time maybe:

* for the purposes of this discussion, "I" and "Jane" and "Karen" and so on being convenient fictions to help simplify this maddening, beautiful, complexity.

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Thanks to both of you for your input. It will take me a while to get through it. But reading the Greenwald piece reminds me of a saying of my father’s - ‘There’s none so pure as the purified.’ He used it in relation to non-smokers but apparently it fits other situations too.

A well known young Canadian actor has recently come out as trans. I am interested in what Elliot Page has to say because, like Chelsea Manning, I have always found him to be a thoughtful and intelligent voice. He is from and lives in a city near me so I’ve been more aware of his struggle for truth.

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It’s been a storm day here and I was actually able to listen to the Hertzog/Greenwald video. Fascinating and touches on some of my concerns. Children getting elective sex change operations? Bullying people out of their jobs for thought crimes? No, no, no!

Although I am quite distressed by some of the opinions that people hold these days - Q Anon and violent prejudice against particular groups for example.

What a crazy world we live in.

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Glad you found the podcast interesting @JackieL. I’ll have a listen too, when I have a moment. Personally, I find the subject of gender to be a minefield, full of ill-defined concepts and social conditioning and philosophies. Some of which can blow up in your face. Perhaps we’ll be able to discuss some of these issues here in the forum in constructive ways.

@Kieran_Telo that was a fantastic article. Loads of things to sink your teeth into (so to speak). I must admit to my own shame that I don’t have to look too far into my own history to see elements of vampire castle thinking in my own self.

Oh well. Live and learn I hope.

Thanks both for your thoughts

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Great post, @Kieran_Telo. Lots to think about

Well put. The use of ID and intersectionality to divide is pretty well established. And I speak as someone who is sympathetic to the idea of intersectionality. Personally it has always made sense to me that those who are marginalised, discriminated against and underprivileged might band together and make a common cause. In many ways that’s the opposite of the dynamic you mention, where it becomes a brutal competition to see who is the most marginalised “discrimination points”. A kind of hunger games pitting race against gender against class.

No wonder the left is so fractured.

Amen

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Very interesting article, Heather. Thanks for sharing it. It’s long and I haven’t finished reading it yet.

He discusses some of the things that disturb me - divisiveness, bullying and piling on, super rude discourse and inability to have a calm discussion, the need to rigidly define identities rather than just being.

New communication technologies have created new or amplified existing problems. In a best case scenario, growing pains as we move toward a more just world. But I’m discouraged and not holding my breath for that outcome.

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