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.
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?
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.
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?
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.