Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ All of our world's worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don't use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people's understanding of what's going on.
To your excellent analysis of these techniques, I'd add an overarching attitude that drives these narrative distortions of reality. That attitude is a fundamental disdain by the elites of the capabilities and value of us proles. Nonstop manipulative lying seems to me to require that disdainful posture. Also, based on my experience with a security clearance, I'd supplement Assange's observations on government secrecy by noting that most of the classified docs I reviewed and edited were terribly boring and mundane having little to do with "national security". Yet every time, I interacted with the crap, I felt the threat-pressure of the Espionage Act hanging over my head like a boulder ready to drop. A product of that aforementioned disdain is the desire to generate fear as a primary goal.
Yup. The tsunami of redactions in the Mueller report represents another facet of censorship. The self-censorship under your rubric of hiding inconvenient info. They had nothing worth talking about in my opinion and the redactions were a clumsy attempt to make it look like there was something there. A country which classifies a petabyte of dross a month. You only had to look at the hangdog expression on Mueller’s face, to imagine some kind of forced coprophagia, rather like Colin Powell after he realized he had delivered lies to the UN about WMDs.
That speculation aside, the sorry spectacle of a country caught spying on all its own citizens, all world leaders, all allies and their leaders, having the nerve to crap on the Russians for hacking a membership roll redefines absurdity.
Ask any American what they were told to protect themselves from the evil cybersecurity Russian menace, so dangerous one had to whisper about it? They were told nothing! Because there was nothing. In retrospect, it was a false flagette variant, a pretext and justification for adventures in Ukraine.
> Babbling thought stories dominate our experience of reality
I am in a Heidegger+Arendt reading group and we just learned the difference between "Gerede" (idle talk) and "Rede" (discourse). Caitlin Johnstone's projects continues to liberate humanity's minds, I think Hannah Arendt would be a huge fan of Caitlin. Arendt died writing "Life of the Mind" and I think a lot about Julian Assange and Barrett Brown and how America's imperial core has destroyed so many revolutionary minds and continues to send chills down the spine of any community that could become revolutionary.
Also I love how you elegantly reduced the Imperial Narrative into 5 bullet points, aka a Pentagon, very clever 🤣.
Anyways I am probably babbling at this point, I just wanted to comment for The Algorithm and try to engage more with your content on substack and twitter, since we are in a battle for the mind. Keep up the fantastic work! 💚💙💛
As far as fighting algorithm manipulation goes, I recommend the following. Some of it might be obvious, but just in case it isn't:
1. Turn off autoplay on YouTube. In the past, that's spared me getting exposed to stuff like Colbert's most recent "apple-polishing" (as Matt Taibbi's put it) for the powerful. Or, if you feel like putting it less politely, substitute "balls" for "apple", and substitute "licking" for "polishing". Either way, I'm glad I didn't have to hear even a second of it.
2. If the algorithm suppresses people worth listening to, use word of mouth or retweets. Even before YouTube changed its algorithm, even before the "adpocalypse" years ago, I actually never had any shows I watch or once watched recommended to me by the algorithm. Even with Rising on The Hill, I actually first found out about it because Niko House tweeted about it positively, back in the days when Krystal & Saagar were more well-regarded on the left.
3. Don't just search for a particular topic if you don't want to hear whatever mainstream bullshit is being churned out. Instead of searching for "Ukraine" search for, say, "Ukraine" and "Max Blumenthal". Or whoever you trust to give you the straight dope. For the same reason, if you do happen to look at whatever the top stories are on Google or YouTube or whatever, make sure to remember why you're not getting your news from whichever outlets they're recommending in the first place and to search for the opinion of someone trustworthy on it. For example, one of the first things I saw when I looked at the top stories right now was about Justin Trudeau virtue signaling over Roe v. Wade, wringing his hands about how awful the Supreme Court decision was. Not that Trudeau is wrong *this* time IMHO, but if you read enough stories like that--ones which make him out to be a heroic defender of women's rights--then you might start to forget that he froze peaceful protestors' bank accounts, imprisoned others, that "In 2020, the Canadian government, citing COVID, proposed legislation 'to make it an offence to knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people.'" (via Greenwald), etc.
I don't know whether any of that is helpful to anyone who reads this, but hopefully it will be.
You'd wish they'd teach these five concepts in journalism school. They could inoculate the new journos from becoming mindless government-operated mainstream media drones. Until we learn to recognize the manipulation ourselves, we'll need all the honest journalists we can get.
Caitlin has accurately described the "cultural hegemony" of the "power elite," including the oppressor, controlling "wealthy media-owning class." The oppressor class is not all whites, nor all cis-gendered heterosexuals, nor all males, though those are the narratives the "wealthy media-owning class" wants us to believe via CRT, radical feminism and queer ideology. Oh, and it's really perfectly fine with cis-gendered, heterosexual whites blaming POC, queers and women for all their problems. The "power elite" says it opposes such divisiveness, but actually does all it can to "stir the pot." It keeps the vast oppressed class divided and fighting each other, whites vs POC, males vs females, straight vs queer, Republican vs Democrat, "conservative" vs "liberal" etc.
"Authoritative sources" don't just lie to us about war. They lie to us about everything of importance to the "wealthy media-owning class" and anything that might unite us, like the so-called "red-brown alliance."
A critical analysis of Putin and Russia must be put forth and examined outside of the mainstream narrative. Parts of the mainstream narrative are true, but like all propaganda, truth is mixed with lies and presented in a such a manner as to persuade those at whom it is directed to draw false conclusions.
Probably one area of this that is often overlooked are the special operations that take place in comments sections. Lots of games being played. The goal it seems is to sow confusion.
Another great article but maybe it's an octagon not a pentagon.
#6 EDUCATING AGAINST THINKING
- controlling schooling so it's homogenized pro-empire, psychologically parochial, training citizens to be good selfish anodyne consumers, crushing real curiosity replacing it with obsessive compulsive ephemera, stigmatize wrongthink (like socialism, dissent, disloyalyy) early and often so the individual's reaction when triggered is felt, never reasoned out
#7 EMBEDDING THE WE
- groupthink is best when it's unconscious. unconscious means path of least resistance. path of least resistance means feeling natural, objectively correct, in the right, included. self and national identity blended into "we" by mythologizing the past while obfuscating real history, conditioning pride in empire and personal 'felt' association with its outcomes
#8 INSTILL LOVE/NEED FOR A CARCERAL LIFE
- empire wants the citizen productive, exploited, responsive to direction, committed to internalized small scale ambition, terrified of unknowns and uncertainties, naive and rooted by faith in the goodness of the homeland. turn fear of authority into love of authority, faith in authority, unconscious ties to place and prescription. All that kind of lasagne...
The powerful, with all their think tanks and perpetually increasing surveillance technology have known for a long time that a point would arrive when the deprived, oppressed populaces would rebel, one way or another, and have provided for that event. They use and have used all forms of
media to brain wash in the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the panglossian view
that has been extremely successful - to the point of inducing guilt in the large numbers of people who "fail" in the system, are not clever or callous enough to use others to advance themselves.
Many of these people see themselves as losers, once the reality sets in, and they know their lives and that of their families will not improve. This attitude is not normal but studiously imposed on society by elites. We have to think our way out of it and demand socialism, or to be treated as human beings with natural rights, not a novel idea in itself, but manipulated and distorted to the point where deprivation \is forwarded as a form of "freedom" and therefore, a "right". From that insane starting point they can foist anything they choose onto us, with no fear of reprisal.
To your excellent analysis of these techniques, I'd add an overarching attitude that drives these narrative distortions of reality. That attitude is a fundamental disdain by the elites of the capabilities and value of us proles. Nonstop manipulative lying seems to me to require that disdainful posture. Also, based on my experience with a security clearance, I'd supplement Assange's observations on government secrecy by noting that most of the classified docs I reviewed and edited were terribly boring and mundane having little to do with "national security". Yet every time, I interacted with the crap, I felt the threat-pressure of the Espionage Act hanging over my head like a boulder ready to drop. A product of that aforementioned disdain is the desire to generate fear as a primary goal.
I am not sure how there is anything in this piece that is remotely controversial to anyone other than a muppet.
Yup. The tsunami of redactions in the Mueller report represents another facet of censorship. The self-censorship under your rubric of hiding inconvenient info. They had nothing worth talking about in my opinion and the redactions were a clumsy attempt to make it look like there was something there. A country which classifies a petabyte of dross a month. You only had to look at the hangdog expression on Mueller’s face, to imagine some kind of forced coprophagia, rather like Colin Powell after he realized he had delivered lies to the UN about WMDs.
That speculation aside, the sorry spectacle of a country caught spying on all its own citizens, all world leaders, all allies and their leaders, having the nerve to crap on the Russians for hacking a membership roll redefines absurdity.
Ask any American what they were told to protect themselves from the evil cybersecurity Russian menace, so dangerous one had to whisper about it? They were told nothing! Because there was nothing. In retrospect, it was a false flagette variant, a pretext and justification for adventures in Ukraine.
> Babbling thought stories dominate our experience of reality
I am in a Heidegger+Arendt reading group and we just learned the difference between "Gerede" (idle talk) and "Rede" (discourse). Caitlin Johnstone's projects continues to liberate humanity's minds, I think Hannah Arendt would be a huge fan of Caitlin. Arendt died writing "Life of the Mind" and I think a lot about Julian Assange and Barrett Brown and how America's imperial core has destroyed so many revolutionary minds and continues to send chills down the spine of any community that could become revolutionary.
Also I love how you elegantly reduced the Imperial Narrative into 5 bullet points, aka a Pentagon, very clever 🤣.
Anyways I am probably babbling at this point, I just wanted to comment for The Algorithm and try to engage more with your content on substack and twitter, since we are in a battle for the mind. Keep up the fantastic work! 💚💙💛
Dear Librarians,
Time to move George Orwell's "1984" into the Non-Fiction section.
they are also censoring the truth about COVID and the clot shots
As far as fighting algorithm manipulation goes, I recommend the following. Some of it might be obvious, but just in case it isn't:
1. Turn off autoplay on YouTube. In the past, that's spared me getting exposed to stuff like Colbert's most recent "apple-polishing" (as Matt Taibbi's put it) for the powerful. Or, if you feel like putting it less politely, substitute "balls" for "apple", and substitute "licking" for "polishing". Either way, I'm glad I didn't have to hear even a second of it.
2. If the algorithm suppresses people worth listening to, use word of mouth or retweets. Even before YouTube changed its algorithm, even before the "adpocalypse" years ago, I actually never had any shows I watch or once watched recommended to me by the algorithm. Even with Rising on The Hill, I actually first found out about it because Niko House tweeted about it positively, back in the days when Krystal & Saagar were more well-regarded on the left.
3. Don't just search for a particular topic if you don't want to hear whatever mainstream bullshit is being churned out. Instead of searching for "Ukraine" search for, say, "Ukraine" and "Max Blumenthal". Or whoever you trust to give you the straight dope. For the same reason, if you do happen to look at whatever the top stories are on Google or YouTube or whatever, make sure to remember why you're not getting your news from whichever outlets they're recommending in the first place and to search for the opinion of someone trustworthy on it. For example, one of the first things I saw when I looked at the top stories right now was about Justin Trudeau virtue signaling over Roe v. Wade, wringing his hands about how awful the Supreme Court decision was. Not that Trudeau is wrong *this* time IMHO, but if you read enough stories like that--ones which make him out to be a heroic defender of women's rights--then you might start to forget that he froze peaceful protestors' bank accounts, imprisoned others, that "In 2020, the Canadian government, citing COVID, proposed legislation 'to make it an offence to knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people.'" (via Greenwald), etc.
I don't know whether any of that is helpful to anyone who reads this, but hopefully it will be.
You'd wish they'd teach these five concepts in journalism school. They could inoculate the new journos from becoming mindless government-operated mainstream media drones. Until we learn to recognize the manipulation ourselves, we'll need all the honest journalists we can get.
Caitlin has accurately described the "cultural hegemony" of the "power elite," including the oppressor, controlling "wealthy media-owning class." The oppressor class is not all whites, nor all cis-gendered heterosexuals, nor all males, though those are the narratives the "wealthy media-owning class" wants us to believe via CRT, radical feminism and queer ideology. Oh, and it's really perfectly fine with cis-gendered, heterosexual whites blaming POC, queers and women for all their problems. The "power elite" says it opposes such divisiveness, but actually does all it can to "stir the pot." It keeps the vast oppressed class divided and fighting each other, whites vs POC, males vs females, straight vs queer, Republican vs Democrat, "conservative" vs "liberal" etc.
"Authoritative sources" don't just lie to us about war. They lie to us about everything of importance to the "wealthy media-owning class" and anything that might unite us, like the so-called "red-brown alliance."
..old proverbio, he who digs a pit under another, falls into it himself!
A critical analysis of Putin and Russia must be put forth and examined outside of the mainstream narrative. Parts of the mainstream narrative are true, but like all propaganda, truth is mixed with lies and presented in a such a manner as to persuade those at whom it is directed to draw false conclusions.
Probably one area of this that is often overlooked are the special operations that take place in comments sections. Lots of games being played. The goal it seems is to sow confusion.
5 . political security for Russia: we help ourselves.
US of Arrogance Hato liar:. Politcical security is your learning helplessness.
We elites help ourselves to your Learned Helplessness.
Elites teach folks to learn to be helpless.
Now go to jail. Close door behind you
Excellent article.
Another great article but maybe it's an octagon not a pentagon.
#6 EDUCATING AGAINST THINKING
- controlling schooling so it's homogenized pro-empire, psychologically parochial, training citizens to be good selfish anodyne consumers, crushing real curiosity replacing it with obsessive compulsive ephemera, stigmatize wrongthink (like socialism, dissent, disloyalyy) early and often so the individual's reaction when triggered is felt, never reasoned out
#7 EMBEDDING THE WE
- groupthink is best when it's unconscious. unconscious means path of least resistance. path of least resistance means feeling natural, objectively correct, in the right, included. self and national identity blended into "we" by mythologizing the past while obfuscating real history, conditioning pride in empire and personal 'felt' association with its outcomes
#8 INSTILL LOVE/NEED FOR A CARCERAL LIFE
- empire wants the citizen productive, exploited, responsive to direction, committed to internalized small scale ambition, terrified of unknowns and uncertainties, naive and rooted by faith in the goodness of the homeland. turn fear of authority into love of authority, faith in authority, unconscious ties to place and prescription. All that kind of lasagne...
The powerful, with all their think tanks and perpetually increasing surveillance technology have known for a long time that a point would arrive when the deprived, oppressed populaces would rebel, one way or another, and have provided for that event. They use and have used all forms of
media to brain wash in the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the panglossian view
that has been extremely successful - to the point of inducing guilt in the large numbers of people who "fail" in the system, are not clever or callous enough to use others to advance themselves.
Many of these people see themselves as losers, once the reality sets in, and they know their lives and that of their families will not improve. This attitude is not normal but studiously imposed on society by elites. We have to think our way out of it and demand socialism, or to be treated as human beings with natural rights, not a novel idea in itself, but manipulated and distorted to the point where deprivation \is forwarded as a form of "freedom" and therefore, a "right". From that insane starting point they can foist anything they choose onto us, with no fear of reprisal.