What you are writing about is a combination of mass hysteria and a psycho-pandemic which forms a smokescreen around socio-political realities.
What unites these manifestations is a refusal to look at the 'man behind the curtain' the capitalist system in all its panoramic glory.
The world is dominated by capitalism which spends enormous amounts of energy in encouraging people to 'be original', 'think for themselves' and move beyond the 'tired old scapegoating' of capitalism which puts all in mind of the 'failures' of socialism-in all of its forms- which is the keystone of modern ideology (which is not an ideology or an ism, god forbid, but a recognition of the way things are, must be and always have been).
Unhappily the Universe does not seem ready to tolerate this endless game among mediocre minds.
While idiot "a" is explaining (not for the first time) that Co2 is used in greenhouses to ripen fruit or that the wine froze on Louis XIV's Versailles dinner table in May or some other such sub-factoid from the back of a chewing gum wrapper, the temperature is rising, ice is melting and the possible end of the lives of billions (greatly to be desired no doubt in some quarters) or even human life itself looms ever closer.
And climate change is just one of the morbid symptoms of a capitalist system, embracing the entire world, that the media of which you write, together with the actual (dying) remnants of the mainstream's, avoids noticing.
Another, of course, is disease-epidemics and pandemics in particular- which emanate not from one of Dr Evil's labs, from demand stoking elements of Big Pharma or from Lizard HQ but from the way that unplanned, un-thought through, unregulated, profit fuelled essays into nature's last refuges leads to unwanted results.
And there are a myriad other alibis for avoiding the very simple truth that in order to thrive human communities must be self governing: democratic and egalitarian, bringing all our brains, experiences and ideas to bear on the problems that affect us all.
It is sometimes said that two competing propagandas cancel each other out...(but) far from cancelling each other out because they are contradictory, (they) have a cumulative effect. A boxer, groggy from a left hook, does not return to normal when he is hit with a right hook; he becomes groggier.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda - The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 181.
An excellent metaphor for the effects of the combined MSM and MSAM, shown by the misguided comments and opinion pieces on some of the sites that I peruse. It is sad when commentators who are excellent in a given area, such as the Ukraine War or Climate Change, prove themselves to be utterly confused/delusional on wider issues. Rare to find those that have been able to maintain immunity from both MSM and MSAM manipulations.
the US capitalists have been the best friends that money and mutual interests can provide to China for the last 3decades.
in fact, they all met with Xi when he showed up in SF. mutual enemies of the US working class, and willing to keep Chinese enslaved in Foxconn factories to produce products while selling the same story they used to sell us here: increasing living standards.
you don't have to be idiot controlled Alex Jones to notice this.
in fact, the bastion of capitalism today is in fact China. of course, it's the earlier industrial capitalism.
oh, a recent article in, i think it was, Bloomberg put an estimate that 8% of the population in China owns 50 percent of the valuable assets. seems not too dissimilar to here. i wonder what the lowest 50% of the population actually owns.
who are the top communist members, and are they indeed the industrial princes of the realm or merely their highly educated children in that "true" capitalist meritocracy?
Well it seems that the MSAM has been successful in your case. The Chinese Party-state played along with the delusional and profit-hungry US elite for quite a while, it was a policy called "keep a low profile and bide our time, while also getting something accomplished" and put into place by Deng Xiaoping. Repeatedly China made sure that it did not open itself up to US dominance while using the US to drive its own economic development, for example maintaining the financial and energy sectors within Party-state control. The US elites were also far too involved in their ridiculous GWOT to pay proper notice to the fact that China was growing so quickly while the US de-industrialized itself. The Chinese elites understood that they had to develop national power before challenging the US.
After the colossal growth of the Chinese economy, to the point where it was nearly equal to that of the US in size (by PPP) and had developed its manufacturing prowess while destroying that of the US, Xi Jinping changed to a more assertive foreign policy. The US elites realized that they had been well played, hence the increasingly aggressive reactions while they struggle with losing the profit streams that China holds captive.
The Chinese working class has had its welfare massively improved by the Party-state, with real incomes still increasing by 5% per year and state services improving every year. Foxconn is a symptom of the old days of desperate rapid development to overcome China's weakness and in no way represents much of the present or the future of China. The Party-state is essentially a meritocratic bureaucracy that represents the interests of the people (especially now that Xi has eradicated so much of the corruption and traitorous capitalists scheming with the US) that will not allow a capitalist ruling class to take over. That's why the US ruling capitalist class has become so anti-Chinese.
You sound like the Trotskyists over at the WSWS as well as Alex Jones, have you actually been to China and properly studied the people and institutions?
everything that i have read about the place indicates that it is developing rapidly, but on the backs of their internal extremely low classes who are absolute, by anyone's measure, exploited and not "sharing in the glory" of the value being created around them, while they are the ones directly creating it. sounds very like what Marx criticized, if i'm not mistaken.
not allowing US "dominance" is wise, but if the vaunted "multipolarity" is simply going to be a reorganization worldwide around another capitalist dominant country, i don't see much hope for change in the vaunted BRICS for the workers. instead of the US pointing guns, it will simply be a matter of the undeveloped nations exploiting their own people to send raw goods, food and such to China so their own capitalists can become rich.
not following this alternative view that China is some socialist utopia is not being brainwashed by MSM, nor Alex Jones (i actually look at neither of them except extremely rarely).
That's the best you could come up with? Global Research is an extremely hit and miss site, some good some lousy. Godfree Roberts has a very good blog on China, you could start there for some real education. I didn't call you an idiot, but you are certainly very ignorant and biased about China.
China's Human Development Index (a balanced measure of the development of a country) has increased dramatically in the past few decades to a high level and will probably hit very high within a decade - which is incredible for a nation as poor as sub-Saharan Africa in 1980.
China is ruled by a meritocratic bureaucracy, the Party-state and the commanding heights of the economy plus the land are owned by the state. You don't seem to understand what "capitalist" actually means. Corporations are answerable to the state, each having its own Party apparatus internally. Capitalism is dominance by a capitalist class, that does not exist in China. Xi has just spent the last decade disciplining the rich and corporate leaders, as well driving out Party corruption.
it's very easy to come from zero on most measures of advancement and make big strides when you have over 300 million internal slaves. meanwhile, they industrialized so rapidly they are essentially the main "destroyers" of the environment now.
i am trying to not be biased in the way that everyone who is touting China as the answer to human civilization is. it is still a capitalism. their own unique form, but they still have an oligarchy and just telling that oligarchy not to become grossly visible in their privilege is not eliminating a group of people whose interest is to keep hundreds of millions of slaves making products that the rest of us are using.
i personally have a problem with enshrining capitalism worldwide and then saying it's something different simply because the country doing it won't be pointing guns everywhere to get the necessary resources, and keeps bragging about their development while it does so on the backs of its own citizenry all while claiming it is "socialist". if that is the best the human race can come up with, it doesn't inspire much confidence for civilization and it doesn't really produce an alternative vision for the problems we in the west have created.
if capitalism is the operating system that the world will use, you don't have to point any guns at anyone. they will simply adopt the imperatives that keeping slaves (that everyone carefully doesn't call slaves) and forcing the workers to keep their heads down is the only mode we've got, especially if you want anything to work properly. those are my concerns.
"disciplining" doesn't mean kicking them out of their money, control or power. it is their children who will rule and govern just like it is the upper middle to top class children who rule and govern us. no matter how circumspect they are in their consumptionary habits.
oh, and i was reading a paper recently about their "meritocracy" and how the sociologists there have determined that the basic gripe of the new generations, who all ran out and got educations, is that it isn't doing them any good to work 12 hour/6 week days because they will never own anything or have a decent life, due to the fact that the earlier generation who benefitted from installing capitalism own everything already. this paper even stated something to the effect that "position is determined by previously accumulated property". it went into the problem because of a worry that this new class of semi-disenfranchised will not be motivated properly to keep their noses to the grindstone, hence "lying flat" and being bleak nihilists (or what seems to be worse to them--hedonists) which endangers China's plans. so there's that, then.
i am willing to hear that "such was always the way of the world" but i am not going to listen to anymore shilling about how China has the answer to every [post]modern question.
A somewhat brilliant piece. I say 'somewhat' only because I find it too complex to follow simply because there are just too many layers and levels of deceptive BS to keep track of. I got lost in there! But 'good on ya' for doing so.
As to your last list, I believe I pass the test except for the climate change issue which have researched personally and came away unconvinced. Simply put, I don't believe that modern science has nearly the ability to discriminate normal climate fluctuations from any recent contributions by Man. Not to mention too many Big Lies far too often that just get conveniently ignored. Moreover, I don't accept the criticism that anyone who disputes the notion is a shill for the energy industry or has been brainwashed by them; that's a shallow, essentially ad-hominem argument.
That said, I believe (though cannot prove) that industrial pollution of all sorts is a very real and present danger, but unfortunately the global climate change narrative all but guarantees that such pollution will never be addressed, because there the solutions are local and specific whereas with global climate change, well heck we need a new global government to tackle that, or at the very least global taxation, and any solutions from that vector will prove far worse than the seeming problems they are falsely claiming to be able to remediate, just as the UNO, set up to prevent wars, has done no such thing and in fact is an obstacle to our doing a collectively better job at stopping them. Exhibits 1 & 2: Ukraine and Palestine.
But apart from the climate issue, I passed the test even though I couldn't understand all the complexities of the two-false-sides paradigm. I occasionally watch Grayzone but find Duran and Atlas far too 'Gatekeeperish' for my taste. You do a good job identifying the importance of 'Zionism' but I suspect there is much more to Zionism than the Zionism publicly described. Just as I also suspect that what is called capitalism, though decidedly a major problem like you and bevin below say, is not really capitalism as generally defined and described, nor is what it actually is clearly seen or understood; thus the capitalist definition and language, like that of anthropogenic climate change, covers up the real issues and problems and thus again serves to ensure that no substantive reform movements ever develop. But that's just a guess.
What you are writing about is a combination of mass hysteria and a psycho-pandemic which forms a smokescreen around socio-political realities.
What unites these manifestations is a refusal to look at the 'man behind the curtain' the capitalist system in all its panoramic glory.
The world is dominated by capitalism which spends enormous amounts of energy in encouraging people to 'be original', 'think for themselves' and move beyond the 'tired old scapegoating' of capitalism which puts all in mind of the 'failures' of socialism-in all of its forms- which is the keystone of modern ideology (which is not an ideology or an ism, god forbid, but a recognition of the way things are, must be and always have been).
Unhappily the Universe does not seem ready to tolerate this endless game among mediocre minds.
While idiot "a" is explaining (not for the first time) that Co2 is used in greenhouses to ripen fruit or that the wine froze on Louis XIV's Versailles dinner table in May or some other such sub-factoid from the back of a chewing gum wrapper, the temperature is rising, ice is melting and the possible end of the lives of billions (greatly to be desired no doubt in some quarters) or even human life itself looms ever closer.
And climate change is just one of the morbid symptoms of a capitalist system, embracing the entire world, that the media of which you write, together with the actual (dying) remnants of the mainstream's, avoids noticing.
Another, of course, is disease-epidemics and pandemics in particular- which emanate not from one of Dr Evil's labs, from demand stoking elements of Big Pharma or from Lizard HQ but from the way that unplanned, un-thought through, unregulated, profit fuelled essays into nature's last refuges leads to unwanted results.
And there are a myriad other alibis for avoiding the very simple truth that in order to thrive human communities must be self governing: democratic and egalitarian, bringing all our brains, experiences and ideas to bear on the problems that affect us all.
Apropos of your "two propaganda boxers":
It is sometimes said that two competing propagandas cancel each other out...(but) far from cancelling each other out because they are contradictory, (they) have a cumulative effect. A boxer, groggy from a left hook, does not return to normal when he is hit with a right hook; he becomes groggier.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda - The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 181.
An excellent metaphor for the effects of the combined MSM and MSAM, shown by the misguided comments and opinion pieces on some of the sites that I peruse. It is sad when commentators who are excellent in a given area, such as the Ukraine War or Climate Change, prove themselves to be utterly confused/delusional on wider issues. Rare to find those that have been able to maintain immunity from both MSM and MSAM manipulations.
the US capitalists have been the best friends that money and mutual interests can provide to China for the last 3decades.
in fact, they all met with Xi when he showed up in SF. mutual enemies of the US working class, and willing to keep Chinese enslaved in Foxconn factories to produce products while selling the same story they used to sell us here: increasing living standards.
you don't have to be idiot controlled Alex Jones to notice this.
in fact, the bastion of capitalism today is in fact China. of course, it's the earlier industrial capitalism.
oh, a recent article in, i think it was, Bloomberg put an estimate that 8% of the population in China owns 50 percent of the valuable assets. seems not too dissimilar to here. i wonder what the lowest 50% of the population actually owns.
who are the top communist members, and are they indeed the industrial princes of the realm or merely their highly educated children in that "true" capitalist meritocracy?
Well it seems that the MSAM has been successful in your case. The Chinese Party-state played along with the delusional and profit-hungry US elite for quite a while, it was a policy called "keep a low profile and bide our time, while also getting something accomplished" and put into place by Deng Xiaoping. Repeatedly China made sure that it did not open itself up to US dominance while using the US to drive its own economic development, for example maintaining the financial and energy sectors within Party-state control. The US elites were also far too involved in their ridiculous GWOT to pay proper notice to the fact that China was growing so quickly while the US de-industrialized itself. The Chinese elites understood that they had to develop national power before challenging the US.
After the colossal growth of the Chinese economy, to the point where it was nearly equal to that of the US in size (by PPP) and had developed its manufacturing prowess while destroying that of the US, Xi Jinping changed to a more assertive foreign policy. The US elites realized that they had been well played, hence the increasingly aggressive reactions while they struggle with losing the profit streams that China holds captive.
The Chinese working class has had its welfare massively improved by the Party-state, with real incomes still increasing by 5% per year and state services improving every year. Foxconn is a symptom of the old days of desperate rapid development to overcome China's weakness and in no way represents much of the present or the future of China. The Party-state is essentially a meritocratic bureaucracy that represents the interests of the people (especially now that Xi has eradicated so much of the corruption and traitorous capitalists scheming with the US) that will not allow a capitalist ruling class to take over. That's why the US ruling capitalist class has become so anti-Chinese.
You sound like the Trotskyists over at the WSWS as well as Alex Jones, have you actually been to China and properly studied the people and institutions?
the typical response "you are a brainwashed idiot and you've never been anywhere".
here's someone who has done both (academic study within the actual country).
https://michelchossudovsky.substack.com/p/its-not-socialism-china-is-a-capitalist
everything that i have read about the place indicates that it is developing rapidly, but on the backs of their internal extremely low classes who are absolute, by anyone's measure, exploited and not "sharing in the glory" of the value being created around them, while they are the ones directly creating it. sounds very like what Marx criticized, if i'm not mistaken.
not allowing US "dominance" is wise, but if the vaunted "multipolarity" is simply going to be a reorganization worldwide around another capitalist dominant country, i don't see much hope for change in the vaunted BRICS for the workers. instead of the US pointing guns, it will simply be a matter of the undeveloped nations exploiting their own people to send raw goods, food and such to China so their own capitalists can become rich.
not following this alternative view that China is some socialist utopia is not being brainwashed by MSM, nor Alex Jones (i actually look at neither of them except extremely rarely).
That's the best you could come up with? Global Research is an extremely hit and miss site, some good some lousy. Godfree Roberts has a very good blog on China, you could start there for some real education. I didn't call you an idiot, but you are certainly very ignorant and biased about China.
China's Human Development Index (a balanced measure of the development of a country) has increased dramatically in the past few decades to a high level and will probably hit very high within a decade - which is incredible for a nation as poor as sub-Saharan Africa in 1980.
China is ruled by a meritocratic bureaucracy, the Party-state and the commanding heights of the economy plus the land are owned by the state. You don't seem to understand what "capitalist" actually means. Corporations are answerable to the state, each having its own Party apparatus internally. Capitalism is dominance by a capitalist class, that does not exist in China. Xi has just spent the last decade disciplining the rich and corporate leaders, as well driving out Party corruption.
it's very easy to come from zero on most measures of advancement and make big strides when you have over 300 million internal slaves. meanwhile, they industrialized so rapidly they are essentially the main "destroyers" of the environment now.
i am trying to not be biased in the way that everyone who is touting China as the answer to human civilization is. it is still a capitalism. their own unique form, but they still have an oligarchy and just telling that oligarchy not to become grossly visible in their privilege is not eliminating a group of people whose interest is to keep hundreds of millions of slaves making products that the rest of us are using.
i personally have a problem with enshrining capitalism worldwide and then saying it's something different simply because the country doing it won't be pointing guns everywhere to get the necessary resources, and keeps bragging about their development while it does so on the backs of its own citizenry all while claiming it is "socialist". if that is the best the human race can come up with, it doesn't inspire much confidence for civilization and it doesn't really produce an alternative vision for the problems we in the west have created.
if capitalism is the operating system that the world will use, you don't have to point any guns at anyone. they will simply adopt the imperatives that keeping slaves (that everyone carefully doesn't call slaves) and forcing the workers to keep their heads down is the only mode we've got, especially if you want anything to work properly. those are my concerns.
"disciplining" doesn't mean kicking them out of their money, control or power. it is their children who will rule and govern just like it is the upper middle to top class children who rule and govern us. no matter how circumspect they are in their consumptionary habits.
oh, and i was reading a paper recently about their "meritocracy" and how the sociologists there have determined that the basic gripe of the new generations, who all ran out and got educations, is that it isn't doing them any good to work 12 hour/6 week days because they will never own anything or have a decent life, due to the fact that the earlier generation who benefitted from installing capitalism own everything already. this paper even stated something to the effect that "position is determined by previously accumulated property". it went into the problem because of a worry that this new class of semi-disenfranchised will not be motivated properly to keep their noses to the grindstone, hence "lying flat" and being bleak nihilists (or what seems to be worse to them--hedonists) which endangers China's plans. so there's that, then.
i am willing to hear that "such was always the way of the world" but i am not going to listen to anymore shilling about how China has the answer to every [post]modern question.
You are welcome to your opinion, but not to my further time.
A somewhat brilliant piece. I say 'somewhat' only because I find it too complex to follow simply because there are just too many layers and levels of deceptive BS to keep track of. I got lost in there! But 'good on ya' for doing so.
As to your last list, I believe I pass the test except for the climate change issue which have researched personally and came away unconvinced. Simply put, I don't believe that modern science has nearly the ability to discriminate normal climate fluctuations from any recent contributions by Man. Not to mention too many Big Lies far too often that just get conveniently ignored. Moreover, I don't accept the criticism that anyone who disputes the notion is a shill for the energy industry or has been brainwashed by them; that's a shallow, essentially ad-hominem argument.
That said, I believe (though cannot prove) that industrial pollution of all sorts is a very real and present danger, but unfortunately the global climate change narrative all but guarantees that such pollution will never be addressed, because there the solutions are local and specific whereas with global climate change, well heck we need a new global government to tackle that, or at the very least global taxation, and any solutions from that vector will prove far worse than the seeming problems they are falsely claiming to be able to remediate, just as the UNO, set up to prevent wars, has done no such thing and in fact is an obstacle to our doing a collectively better job at stopping them. Exhibits 1 & 2: Ukraine and Palestine.
But apart from the climate issue, I passed the test even though I couldn't understand all the complexities of the two-false-sides paradigm. I occasionally watch Grayzone but find Duran and Atlas far too 'Gatekeeperish' for my taste. You do a good job identifying the importance of 'Zionism' but I suspect there is much more to Zionism than the Zionism publicly described. Just as I also suspect that what is called capitalism, though decidedly a major problem like you and bevin below say, is not really capitalism as generally defined and described, nor is what it actually is clearly seen or understood; thus the capitalist definition and language, like that of anthropogenic climate change, covers up the real issues and problems and thus again serves to ensure that no substantive reform movements ever develop. But that's just a guess.
Anyway, thanks for another good article.