+ Reply to Thread
Page 7 of 8 FirstFirst 1 7 8 LastLast
Results 121 to 140 of 146

Thread: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

  1. Link to Post #121
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    The Most Revealing Footage On Police Brutality Is These Cops Applauding Its Perpetrators
    See: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1359885


    IMPORTANT UPDATE: A very different story when you take a closer look. A friend just sent me the following:
    "The old guy the cops shoved (after he pushed into their line and made physical contact) is a 'professional protestor' .
    Here is his YouTube channel:
    https://www.youtube.com/user/MartinGugino
    His blogger profile = https://www.blogger.com/profile/12535061710557436016

    He was trying to jam the officer's phone location data. That's why he's flailing his phone around the officer's belt.

    Here's his website where he brags about being arrested for protesting and never convicted:

    https://archive.is/4IlFv

    He is a paid provocateur.

    The crowd was told to disperse (clear on the video). On command the police move forward, attempting to clear the street and sidewalks of people violating curfew. Gugino, against police orders, advanced upon the officers, steps right in front of one, and places his hands on the second one. He could have been arrested and charged with assault.

    Watch his fall. He sticks his butt out to take the fall and he hits the ground sitting straight up. There's no way he hit his head hard from that angle. I've taken the same fall myself many times, and always gotten up afterward with no problems.

    And if you download the high res video and zoom in while paused, you can see that he's got some kind of blood pack in his ear (looks like a dark brown blob). Note that these pix clearly show that his ears are not naturally that dark!

    And when he goes down, there's an instant pool of blood almost as soon as he hits the ground (about 1.5 seconds after he falls on his butt). After 4 seconds there's a way larger pool of blood than your get in that amount of time from a normal concussion (which he wouldn't have gotten anyway from that fall).: The old guy the cops shoved (after he pushed into their line and made physical contact) is a 'professional protestor' . Here is his YouTube channel:
    https://www.youtube.com/user/MartinGugino
    His blogger profile = https://www.blogger.com/profile/12535061710557436016

    He was trying to jam the officer's phone location data. That's why he's flailing his phone around the officer's belt.

    Here's his website where he brags about being arrested for protesting and never convicted:

    https://archive.is/4IlFv

    He is a paid provocateur.

    The crowd was told to disperse (clear on the video). On command the police move forward, attempting to clear the street and sidewalks of people violating curfew. Gugino, against police orders, advanced upon the officers, steps right in front of one, and places his hands on the second one. He could have been arrested and charged with assault.

    Watch his fall. He sticks his butt out to take the fall and he hits the ground sitting straight up. There's no way he hit his head hard from that angle. I've taken the same fall myself many times, and always gotten up afterward with no problems.

    And if you download the high res video and zoom in while paused, you can see that he's got some kind of blood pack in his ear (looks like a dark brown blob). Note that these pix clearly show that his ears are not naturally that dark!

    And when he goes down, there's an instant pool of blood almost as soon as he hits the ground (about 1.5 seconds after he falls on his butt). After 4 seconds there's a way larger pool of blood than your get in that amount of time from a normal concussion (which he wouldn't have gotten anyway from that fall)."
    Last edited by onawah; 7th June 2020 at 18:54.
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  2. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Gekko (16th June 2021), Icare (24th September 2020), Mercedes (29th July 2020), PurpleLama (16th June 2021)

  3. Link to Post #122
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    So It Turns Out ‘Overpopulation’ Was Always A Stupid Patriarchal Myth
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    JULY 19, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07...riarchal-myth/

    "A new study published in the Lancet confirms what people like myself have been saying over and over again for years: that the human population is unlikely to get much bigger than it is right now, and will in fact begin declining in the latter half of this century as more and more women obtain money, education, and reproductive sovereignty.

    “It has nothing to do with sperm counts or the usual things that come to mind when discussing fertility,” BBC News explains. “Instead it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children.”

    The mass media have been discussing these findings with shock and alarm, because such information is likely to be new and surprising to anyone who has never gone through the all-consuming herculean effort of motherhood. To anyone who has, the idea that most women would choose to have two or fewer children if given the resources, information and freedom to do so is just self-evident common sense.
    Quote BBC Science News
    @BBCScienceNews
    Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being bornB=V=Nearly every country will see their populations fall as people have fewer babies. bbc.com
    For decades, the absurd belief that the world population will keep exploding until we either choke the planet to death with tens of billions of humans or figure out how to send people off to live in space has been promoted everywhere from the mass media to Hollywood to oligarchs just saying it themselves. Preventing overpopulation was the driving motivator behind Thanos, the ultimate supervillain of the Marvel Cinematic Universe who featured in Avengers: Endgame, the highest-grossing film of all time. It has also been the foremost stated concern of plutocrats like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the latter of whom revealed last year that his grand vision for humanity is to send most of the world population off planet and have a trillion human beings living in giant rotating space cylinders.

    And, like so much else in our crazy world, this delusion is ultimately due to the male supremacism which has been interwoven throughout the fabric of our society’s development since the dawn of civilization. Because women have been excluded from the design of our society until only the most recent few generations, there is a built-in assumption underlying much of our thought that men are just going to keep shooting sperm into women and women are going to keep shooting out babies for as long as there are humans.

    It would never occur to someone who has thrived in such a pervasively patriarchal society like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos that women will not always exist as breeding livestock, and would instead at some point begin putting themselves and their interests first. Someone like Bezos just naturally assumes “Well obviously we’re going to keep blowing our loads in these bitches and they’re going to keep getting knocked up, so the only possible solution is to have all those trillions of babies living offworld in giant rotating Amazon Space Phalluses.”

    zerohedge
    @zerohedge
    Bezos Reveals His Ugly Vision For The World He's Trying To Rule
    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...es-trying-rule





    Look at those things. He honestly expects people to reproduce on those. If given the choice I don’t even really feel safe enough to have a baby if I’m living in an apartment, let alone floating through the vacuum of space in a giant dildo surrounded by an infinite yawning abyss of instant death.

    Billionaires, as we discussed recently, are not smart. They certainly should not be in charge of the future of our species.

    Now that another major plot hole has been punched in the establishment myth that brown-skinned babies in impoverished nations are going to ruin the world, establishment voices are taking this opportunity to yell and scream in the other direction, claiming population decline is a dangerous emergency.

    “Declining rates of working-age populations could lead to a dramatic shift in the size of economies, the research says, with China set to replace the U.S. with the world’s largest gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035,” warns CNBC.

    Oh no! But unipolar US world domination has been working out so great for all of us!

    “Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?” asks BBC News.

    You mean humanity’s future is going to require a system where we’re not all competing with each other to win a stupid made-up game of who can get the most imaginary numbers in their bank account by selling the most useless junk for us to throw in the ocean? That we’re going to have to create a system where more of us stay home from our gear-turning cubicles and we actually collaborate and take care of needful people instead? Sounds… obvious.

    “Population collapse is second biggest danger to civilization after AI,” tweeted billionaire Elon Musk, adding, “Mars needs people!”

    What the hell is it with these idiotic tech plutocrats always babbling about flinging everyone into space? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that any arguments against continuing the unsustainable rapacious ecocide and consumerism which makes the billionaire class possible can be spun as irrelevant if we pretend we can just move to space after we destroy our home world.

    Quote http://Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    The main thing billionaires get out of having a space program is a narrative management op which helps market their insane economic doctrine of infinite growth on a finite planet. It doesn't matter what the billionaire class does to our home because we can all just move to space.
    5:54 PM · Jul 6, 2020
    Of course we are still going to need to find a way of collaborating with our ecosystem in a much healthier way than we are now, even if the global population doesn’t get a whole lot bigger. The new study predicts that our population will peak at 9.7 billion around 2064 and then begin falling back down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century, which we simply cannot sustain under our current way of operating.

    One way we can get the population to fall a whole lot faster is by removing all societal expectations from women that they be career girls and mothers at the same time. If we as a society collectively stop subscribing to the ridiculous power-serving notion that it’s possible to be a good mother and obtain all of one’s life ambitions and career goals in the same lifetime, far fewer women will opt for motherhood and will pursue their own interests instead.

    This would mean treating motherhood as its own career, with an ample wage and benefits provided by the collective. We’ve already established that we’re going to need a lot more caregivers staying at home for the aging population, so we way as well prepare to compensate the caregivers of the young as well. Producing physically and psychologically healthy members of society is the most important job there is, and women shouldn’t have to depend on the charity of a man to be compensated for it.

    In any case, we’re going to have to find a much better way of collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem than we are now. As long as we’re being propagandized into consenting to the perpetuation of the status quo it won’t matter if the population peaks at a few billion, we’ll still likely meet our end via climate collapse or nuclear war. It is clear that big changes are going to be needed in the new world that’s to come, so we’d better find a way to force those changes to happen."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  4. The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Constance (20th July 2020), Gekko (16th June 2021), Icare (24th September 2020), Jayke (20th July 2020), Mercedes (29th July 2020), mountain_jim (21st July 2020), Reinhard (20th July 2020)

  5. Link to Post #123
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Narrative Is Crumbling
    JULY 26, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07...-is-crumbling/


    "It’s difficult to understand what’s going on in the world.

    It’s difficult to understand what’s going on in the world because powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what’s going on in the world.

    Powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what’s going on in the world because if the public understood what’s going on in the world, they would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful.

    The public would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful if they understood what’s going on in their world because then they would understand that the powerful have been exploiting, oppressing, robbing, cheating and deceiving them while destroying the ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of armageddon and waging endless wars, for no other reason than so that they can maintain and expand their power.

    The public do not rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful because they have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to.

    Narrative is crumbling.
    The public have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful due to the way the powerful have been able to shore up mainstream narrative control in the form of purchasing mass media outlets, funding think tanks, buying politicians, implementing government opacity, pushing internet censorship, and other forms of perception management.

    The powerful use their control over mainstream narratives to ensure that enough members of the public believe they live in a free democracy where things aren’t perfect but it’s the best you could ask for, instead of in a corporatist oligarchy wherein the powerful exploit, oppress, rob, cheat and deceive them while destroying the ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of armageddon and waging endless wars.

    As long as the powerful are able to exert control over mainstream narratives, there will never be enough members of the public willing to use their strength of numbers to shake off the powerful and create a healthy society.

    The powerful will remain capable of exerting control over mainstream narratives for as long as the public maintains its current unhealthy relationship with mental narrative.

    Narrative is crumbling.
    A collective shift into a healthy relationship with mental narrative would mean thought becomes the useful tool we evolved it to be rather than this noisy, compulsive head-chatter which dominates our lives where we are driven by fear and attachment to imbue an endless string of mental stories with the power of belief.

    If we had a healthy relationship with mental narrative we would naturally view stories about what’s going on in the world far more objectively, because rather than glomming onto them out of fear and attachment we would have psychological space enough to look at them and critically examine whether or not they are useful tools for us to use in the present moment.

    If humanity collectively made such a transition on a mass scale–a transition which sages across the millennia assure us humans are fully capable of–then humanity would become impossible to propagandize effectively.

    If humanity becomes impossible to propagandize effectively, the lies will be impossible to conceal via mainstream narrative control, and humanity using the strength of its numbers to create a healthy society will become an inevitability.

    And the funny thing is, in a weird way from way out of left field that nobody could possibly have anticipated, humanity’s current relationship with mental narrative appears to be drawing to a close.

    Narrative is crumbling.
    The narratives are breaking down.

    People’s old ways of understanding what’s going on in the world just aren’t holding together anymore.

    Trust in the mass media is at an all-time low, and it’s only getting lower.

    People are more aware than ever that anything they see can be propaganda or disinformation.

    Deepfake technology will soon be so advanced and so accessible that nobody will even trust video anymore.

    The leader of the most powerful country on earth speaks in a way that has no real relationship with facts or reality in any way, and people have just learned to roll with it.

    Ordinary people are hurting financially but Wall Street is booming, a glaring plot hole in the story of the economy that’s only getting more pronounced.

    The entire media class will now spend years leading the public on a wild goose chase for Russian collusion and then act like it’s no big deal when the whole thing turned out to be completely baseless.

    There’s a virus causing a massive disturbance in the entirety of human civilization with two wildly different narratives about it running simultaneously, and both sides are 100 percent convinced that all the facts have fully vindicated their position.

    There are protests where people are becoming more and more aware that they are being fed empty narratives of approval and understanding while their core demands are going completely unaddressed.

    There’s a presidential election between two obvious dementia patients and the mass media are all pretending that’s fine and normal despite what people can see with their own eyes.

    New cold war escalations between the US-centralized empire and the unabsorbed governments of China and Russia are going to cause the media airwaves around the planet to become saturated in ever-intensifying propaganda narratives which favor one side or the other and have no interest in honestly telling people the truth about what’s going on.

    Now they’re even babbling about UFOs.

    Narrative is crumbling.
    It’s all accelerating toward a white noise saturation point.

    How long do you think we can go on like this?

    How far do you think humanity’s relationship with narrative can be stretched before it snaps completely and forces a completely new way of being?

    How long before it becomes more and more common for people to begin looking to themselves as individuals to determine which narratives are useful to them instead of looking to establishment narrative managers like they used to?

    How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “Is this true?”

    How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “What is truth?”

    How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “What else have I been deceived about?”

    How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “How else have I been deceiving myself?”

    The current strain that is being placed on our collective relationship with narrative is completely unsustainable.

    This would be a bad thing if we’d had a healthy relationship with mental narrative, but we don’t; we have a profoundly unhealthy relationship with mental narrative which has left us susceptible to terrible abuses on a mass scale.

    We are now, as a species, collectively squeezing ourselves out of our old unhealthy relationship with narrative.

    Narrative is crumbling.
    It’s all crumbling to the ground.

    This cannot be a bad thing.

    It could end up being very, very good."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  6. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Alekahn2 (30th July 2020), avid (26th July 2020), Bluegreen (26th July 2020), Gekko (16th June 2021), Icare (24th September 2020), Mercedes (29th July 2020)

  7. Link to Post #124
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    As US Eviction Crisis Looms, Remember That Poverty Is Weaponized By The Elite
    by Caitlin Johnstone
    7/28/20
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07...-by-the-elite/

    "CNBC News reports that Americans are looking at the possibility of up to 40 million evictions in the coming months as unemployment payments expire and a federal moratorium on evictions runs out.

    "On Friday, the federal moratorium on evictions in properties with federally backed mortgages and for tenants who receive government-assisted housing expired." CNBC reports. "The Urban Institute estimated that provision covered nearly 30% of the country’s rental units."

    “It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen,” National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel coordinator John Pollock told CNBC, adding that there were 2.3 million evictions in the entirety of 2016 and that “There could be that many evictions in August.”

    Here's how the eviction crisis will impact each state.
    Quote CNBC
    @CNBC
    Here's how the eviction crisis will impact each state. https://cnb.cx/3hGzLLj
    While ordinary Americans are worried about being evicted from their homes by the tens of thousands, the nation's billionaires are warning the nation of the dangers of communism. After recently drawing fire for repeatedly cheerleading last year's vicious fascist coup of Bolivia's leftist government, billionaire Elon Musk is now tweeting anti-Marx memes and warning that leftists are "losing the middle".

    I suppose we could take it as an encouraging sign that plutocrats are with increasing frequency feeling the need to go out and personally yell at the unwashed masses who are being slowly crushed to death by end-stage metastatic neoliberalism for their insufficient submissiveness to the capitalism god. They used to just have their PR people do it, so they must be at least a little nervous.

    This is America. This is what America is designed to be. The head of a vast, globe-spanning empire needs its rank-and-file citizens to be poor, powerless, busy and brainwashed at all times, because a lot of power and money rides on keeping the riff raff away from the gears of the imperial machine.

    I have traveled through the US, the parts that everyone ignores and Hollywood doesn't show you, and I have traveled through many countries which are widely considered impoverished. It often surprises Americans when I say this, but the USA is largely a third-world country blanketed in first-world narrative. The way so many of them live compared to the bare minimum standard of living in other wealthy countries is absolutely breathtaking.

    And this is entirely by design.
    Quote Elon Musk
    @elonmusk
    Das Kapital in a nutshell

    1:57 PM · Jul 27, 2020
    165.7K
    41.4K people are Tweeting about this
    I talk about establishment narrative control a lot here, and it's important to remember that poverty in and of itself can also be a form of narrative control. If you keep a populace impoverished, toiling and constantly terrified of the possibility of losing everything due to a single turn of bad luck or ill health, you ensure that they won't have the time and psychological spaciousness needed to sit down and examine, for example, why their elections never change anything, or what their nation is doing to other nations.

    You also ensure that a critical mass of them will never be able to afford political influence. In a nation where you're literally incapable of influencing government policy and behavior unless you have a certain amount of wealth at your disposal, depriving the populace of their ability to pool their money toward electing a government which combats income and wealth inequality. The donor class are the only ones who get a say.

    In a nation where money equals power and power is relative, you necessarily get a ruling plutocratic class which needs to keep everyone else poor in order to maintain their rule. If everyone is king then nobody is king, so if money makes you king in your society then you necessarily have to actively deprive the majority of money.

    This is why I'm always dismissive of theories which insist that you can let the wealthy keep all their wealth and also provide enough for everybody. No you can't, because the wealthy have a vested interest in keeping everyone from having enough, and they use their wealth as a weapon to enact that agenda in the form of political influence, monopolistic tyranny, and mass media narrative control.

    They use their wealth as a weapon. They use poverty as a weapon.
    Quote Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    "What is the worst problem in America?"

    Homeless people: Economic injustice.
    Unemployed/underemployed people: Economic injustice.
    The working poor: Economic injustice.
    Uninsured people: Economic injustice.
    Those soon facing eviction: Economic injustice.
    Billionaires: Communism.
    7:33 PM · Jul 27, 2020
    407
    195 people are Tweeting about this
    "What is the worst problem in America?"

    Homeless people: Economic injustice.
    Unemployed/underemployed people: Economic injustice.
    The working poor: Economic injustice.
    Uninsured people: Economic injustice.
    Those soon facing eviction: Economic injustice.
    Billionaires: Communism.

    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 28, 2020

    As long as human behavior remains driven by the pursuit of profit, we will continue to see steadily rising amounts of war, ecocide, oppression, exploitation and mass-scale manipulation, because those things are profitable and/or protect the interests of those reaping the profits. We will never, ever profit our way out of any of those problems. The pursuit of profit will only ever make more of them.

    The wealthy are only wealthy because they found some clever way to insert themselves as unnecessary middlemen between consumers and the labor, skill, and/or talent which creates the actual thing the consumers are paying for, and skimmed most of the money off for themselves. That's all "profit" ever is in large-scale corporate operations: it's the money that parasitic middlemen were able to steal from the real talent and move into their own bank accounts.

    This will never create a healthy and harmonious world. It will only ever create more suffering and dysfunction. Something better is needed."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  8. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Alekahn2 (30th July 2020), Gekko (16th June 2021), Icare (24th September 2020), Mercedes (29th July 2020)

  9. Link to Post #125
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    The Undoing Of Illusions: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
    CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    AUGUST 10, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/08...rative-matrix/


    "Governments have obscenely well-funded intelligence agencies that are literally dedicated to orchestrating secret conspiracies around the world, but if you say they might be conspiring in some part of the world people call you a mentally ill conspiracy theorist.

    The fact that the Phoenix Program existed is by itself an unassailable argument for permanently dismantling the entire CIA.

    A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent is a political establishment that should not exist.

    A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent can never and will never lead to a sane world.

    A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent has no business calling its members “moderate” or “centrist”.

    A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent is a crazy and extremist political establishment.

    A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a $740 billion military budget by 10 percent is too crazy and extremist to be permitted to exist.

    Democrats and Republicans are like male and female starfish; it’s hard to tell them apart unless you’re one of them.

    The modern US imperial war machine kills more like a python than a tiger, placing less emphasis on the full-scale ground invasions of the Bush era and more on slowly suffocating the life out of targeted nations using sanctions, blockades, coups, psyops and CIA-backed uprisings.

    This is one reason to be dismissive of Trump supporters who say he “hasn’t started any new wars”. What they mean is he hasn’t done any old school ground invasions. He’s still attacking and killing with sanctions and blockades and imperiling the world with cold war escalations.

    From 2021 until nuclear armageddon Biden will be sitting off to the side mumbling to himself as his brain turns to chowder while holdovers from the Obama administration orchestrate cold war escalations against China in retaliation for its 2020 “election meddling”.

    You will never, ever hate China enough to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Playing along with bull**** narrative spin hoping it will bring your jobs back will never work. You’re just helping opaque government agencies advance their new cold war.

    The dumbest thing about believing foreign countries attacked American democracy is believing America has any democracy to attack.

    Thought experiment: If you looked out the window right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, how would you feel about the way you’ve been spending your mental energy lately? Be honest with yourself.

    If we win this thing it won’t be because conspiracy analysts showed everyone a bunch of complex financial connections or because Marxists put a bunch of theory in everyone’s heads, it will be because clear, simple pointing helped everyone notice the fact that they’ve been duped.

    This fight isn’t a game of addition, it’s a game of subtraction. You’re not trying to get the mainstream rank-and-file public to understand a bunch of complicated new information, you’re trying to remove the blindfold so they can see something for themselves that they kind of already suspected was the case.

    Cripple public trust in the establishment narrative control apparatus and you remove the only obstacle that’s been stopping the people from using the power of their numbers to force real change. They don’t need anything new, they need to exorcise the lies that have blinded them and stop trusting in the words of liars.

    All I’m ever writing about here is the undoing of illusions. The undoing of illusions about what’s happening in the world, the undoing of illusions about the media, the undoing of illusions about society, the undoing of illusions about ourselves. If you’re a lover of truth, it’s all the same to you.

    The world isn’t happening the way most people think it is happening. Maturity is learning and understanding the multifaceted, multi-leveled ways in which this is the case."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  10. The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Gekko (16th June 2021), Icare (24th September 2020)

  11. Link to Post #126
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Why The ‘Lesser Evil’ Is An Illusion
    CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    AUGUST 23, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/08...s-an-illusion/

    "There was a simultaneously hilarious and nightmare-inducing meme format that was popular not long ago called Creepy Garfield, in which the familiar Jim Davis comic is re-imagined as a Lovecraftian horror genre in which the titular cat often features as an eldritch demigod who is tormenting his owner Jon in some existentially terrifying way.

    A common theme is a comic which starts out like a normal Garfield cartoon in which Jon is talking to his obese pet in the usual way we all grew up reading, then it turns out we were completely misperceiving the situation and the cat’s head is for example actually part of a tentacled hellbeast, perhaps dwelling within Jon himself.

    Anyway, that’s basically what the “two”-party political system is like.

    When the comic starts out, you’re looking at two separate and distinct political parties with completely different goals and platforms. One of them seems nice, the other is a bit of a jerk who’s always eating all the lasagna. But subsequent panels reveal something far less comfortable to look at.

    As you read on, it turns out that both the character on the left side of the panel and the one on the right side of the panel are actually just two tentacles on the same abyssal monster, who’d been putting on a two-headed performance within the small puppet show frame of the comic strip. In reality, they are both extensions of the same murderous oligarchic forces.

    Those oligarchic forces use the illusion of the puppet show to manipulate the public into consenting to their continued rule. For example, in the US there’s a pretend presidential race on right now in which voters are being presented with a nasty, fascistic idiot incumbent who is running against a character who is far from perfect, but at least he’s not the tyrant who has been abusing and terrifying them for four years.

    In reality, they’re both part of the same oligarchic Cthulhu monster, whose continued rule is ensured by manipulating people into begging for the tentacle on the left.

    Joe Biden is a half-dead piece of beltway flotsam who is held together by nothing but Aricept and crazy glue, and it’s been his job to push for for wars, austerity and authoritarianism on behalf of his oligarchic donors since before most Bernie supporters were even born. Yet American progressives are being told to believe that they can push him to the left during his administration to help them stomach the idea of voting for him.

    If he wins the imaginary US election, Biden’s most progressive achievement will be having the most diverse, inclusive and intersectional cabinet of mass murderers ever assembled. He will function in the same way a skin suit full of government agencies, war profiteers and rapacious corporations would function if it became president, because that’s essentially all he is as a person.

    There are slightly different factions and agendas in the US oligarchy, and those can manifest as some of them backing one tentacle over the other in various puppet shows. But what all oligarchs have in common is the need to maintain the same basic status quo upon which their respective kingdoms have been built, which means that while there might be some sectarian power struggles at the top, none of them are going to improve upon the oppressive, exploitative, Orwellian, imperialist status quo that is crushing ordinary human beings to death every single day.

    So as far as ordinary human beings are concerned, all you’re ever looking at is a giant bully telling you to beg him to punch you with his left fist or he’ll punch you a bit harder with his right.What do you do in such a situation? What is the correct response when a powerful oligarchy is telling you that if you don’t consent to being ruled by one of its puppets, it will brutalize disadvantaged communities and take away people’s civil rights?

    Is it to do as it says, hold your nose, and do everything you can to get the puppet on the left elected so that the oligarchic tentacle beast won’t devour disempowered members of the population? Is it to refuse to appease the beast and elect the right tentacle in a deluded act of defiance? Is it to pour all your energy into building a third party?

    Or is it to actually fight?

    What if everyone just completely ignored the frame of the comic strip panels? What if they completely ignored the puppet show stage, and just stared directly at their infernal tormenter who is holding the puppets? What if instead of talking about elections all the time, they started pointing at the real reason elections never change anything?

    If you are an American who is dissatisfied with the presidential choices you are being offered in election after election, consider focusing your energy on the status quo itself. Consider taking the energy you might have put into talking about Donald Trump and Joe Biden and putting it into waking up your countrymen to the fact that the political class is there to rob them and the media class is there to deceive them on behalf of their oligarchic owners.

    What prevents real change from coming to the most powerful nation in the world is not the fact that the “lesser evil” loses elections, it’s the fact that everyone’s being manipulated into buying into a fake performance that is wholly owned and operated a single oligarchic force which benefits directly from oppression, exploitation and mass murder. It’s that there is no “lesser evil”.

    The conversation about the political system should be dragged kicking and screaming into these waters at every opportunity. Refuse to clap along with any aspect of the puppet show, and keep pointing to the oligarchy behind the stage. The naked emperor only has invisible clothes until someone points out that his balls are showing.

    Our job is to wake people up from this illusion. Our job is to wake them up from the dream."

    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  12. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Bluegreen (23rd August 2020), Gekko (16th June 2021), Hym (24th September 2021), Icare (24th September 2020), pueblo (23rd August 2020)

  13. Link to Post #127
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    (Best thing I've read in awhile)
    To Oppose Power Is To Meet With Hopelessness, But Hopelessness Is An Invitation To Real PowerCAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    AUGUST 24, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/08...to-real-power/



    "To oppose power is to set yourself on a collision course with despair.

    You set out, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, charging full speed at the man all set to overthrow the status quo, and then what happens?

    You splat headfirst into a solid steel wall.

    Your plans fail.

    Your heroes capitulate.

    Your comrades begin succumbing to propaganda.

    You realize that the roots of establishment power stretch far deeper than you’d initially guessed, and that it has strategies in place to ensure its survival that are far more ingenious and effective than you’d ever previously imagined.

    And then there she is. Lady Despair, in all her ego-crushing glory.

    And then what do you do?

    Perhaps you avoid the despair by pretending things aren’t as bad as they seem; pretending that the corrupt establishment lackeys that are being presented to you as power-threatening rebels really are power-threatening rebels, pretending the fake decoy revolution they’re stagnating your movement with is a real one.

    Perhaps you do as so many lifelong revolutionaries have done and refuse to give in to despair, keeping your feet planted and refusing to fall as its weight saps the fire from your eyes and makes you hard, jaded and bitter.

    Perhaps you avoid the weight of despair by giving yourself a new narrative about how the fight is useless and resistance is futile, so you drop your revolutionary spirit altogether and become whatever we call hippies who become yuppies these days.

    Or perhaps you really give in to hopelessness. Really, truly surrender to it. Honestly, directly, and unreservedly.

    And perhaps you discover something you hadn’t noticed before. A part of the equation it had never occurred to you to account for.

    And perhaps you learn that just as your naive hopefulness was the result of a misperception of reality, so too was your hopelessness.

    And perhaps it turns out that just as the impulse to fight the power was an invitation to hopelessness, hopelessness is in turn an invitation to real power.

    Because it might perhaps turn out that when you let go of all hope–really, truly let go of it–you expect to fall. You’ve been holding onto hope like someone clinging to a cliff’s edge, so when you let go you expect there to be a disastrous plummet into the abyss.

    And perhaps you will find that the fall never comes. You let go, fully prepared to plummet, and it turns out the whole situation was an illusion. There was never anywhere to fall to.

    And perhaps you notice that your lungs are still taking in air. That the life of the world–including your own–keeps marching on completely unimpeded. That your body is still standing, all on its own.

    And perhaps you discover on an experiential level that the force which powers you has never had anything to do with your hopes and your desires and your personal willpower. Perhaps you discover that it has never had anything to do with what you think of as “you” at all.

    Perhaps, by relinquishing all hope and struggle and control, you find that what you’re really made of has never had any use for those things anyway. That, in fact, they’ve only ever been getting in the way.

    And perhaps you find out that what you really are is far more powerful than what you thought you were. That it is far more powerful than the power you were trying to fight.

    By letting go completely, perhaps you find that the life force which grows your hair and replicates your cells has far greater organizing power and spontaneous creativity than the repetitive thought patterns you’d previously been employing to fight the power.

    Perhaps openings in the armor of the machine are noticed in what had previously looked like a solid steel carapace. Perhaps solutions emerge to what had looked like unsolvable dilemmas. Perhaps you begin moving in ways which surprise even you, because they arise from an unpatterned place of unprecedented aliveness.

    And perhaps others do the same.

    And perhaps that’s how we win.

    Hope and hopelessness might just be an opening to a discovery of something that is far beyond them both.

    Something boundless.

    Something crackling with potentiality.

    And something the bastards never saw coming.

    Perhaps. Perhaps not. What the hell do I know? Try it out for yourself.

    And let go."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  14. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Delight (28th August 2020), Dennis Leahy (24th September 2021), Gekko (16th June 2021), Icare (24th September 2020), mountain_jim (24th August 2020)

  15. Link to Post #128
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Normal Has Failed. Be As Weird As You Like
    CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    AUGUST 28, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/08...d-as-you-like/



    "Consumerism is unsustainable. Competition is unsustainable. Imperialism is unsustainable.

    Our species is standing on the brink of an extinction-level event due to ecosystemic collapse or nuclear war, and it is because of the way that we have lived on this planet up until this point. If we keep moving in this direction we will go the way of the dinosaur in the not-too distant future and take most terrestrial life with us. Maybe even all of it.

    The imperfect and immature nature of our newly evolved capacity for language and abstract thought, combined with our social nature as primates, has caused our species to consistently organize according to the will of the very worst of us–the most sociopathic, the most foolish, the most irresponsible of humans. The one who is the most willing and capable of doing and saying whatever it takes in order to exert control over other humans has throughout our history been the one who ascended to leadership.

    So now we find ourselves in a society that has been built from the ground up almost entirely at the direction of sociopaths, for the benefit of sociopaths. Nations point armageddon weapons at one another as a vast globe-spanning empire works toward total planetary domination. Mass-scale human behavior is driven predominantly by the pursuit of profit, and all the most profitable behaviors involve inflicting trauma of some sort: war, militarism, monopolism, usury, strip mining, fossil fuels, factory farming, ads convincing us we’re deficient, etc.

    And we’re on track to traumatize ourselves right out of existence very soon.

    What this means is that, while on paper we are a successful organism in terms of population and domination of the food chain, we are actually as spectacular a failure as any life form can possibly be. The only species which could arguably rival our failure might be the prehistoric cyanobacteria, which, like homo sapiens, became too populous too quickly for the ecosystem to sustain and caused a mass extinction.

    We are not going to consume our way out of this mess. We are not going to compete our way out of this mess. And we are most certainly not going to imperialism our way out of this mess. Those who think we will are delusional. Our old way of doing things has failed.

    The path out of this mess can only lie in the exact opposite direction of the path which led us into it. This doesn’t mean ripping apart the earth searching for magical forms of renewable energy and sending rocket ships into space to warehouse all the excess humans so we can keep doing what we’ve been doing. It means turning around and moving into a collaborative relationship with each other and with our ecosystem. That is the only way.

    What this means for you, personally, is that you have no responsibility toward any of the old mechanisms which have led us to the brink of extinction, because those mechanisms have failed. Utterly and indisputably.

    As a human being, you may safely flush your loyalties to any system which has been a part of humanity’s march to extinction right down the toilet. The political systems, the mindsets, the religions, the culture. It has all failed, so you owe none of it any loyalty.

    In fact, you may feel free to reject anything that your society regards as “normal”, because your society is as sick and insane as a society can possibly be. “Normal” has led to a world that is dying and a society that is insane. So be happy with your weirdness.

    A wild divergence from our current trajectory is the only hope our species has for survival, so as a member of our species it is your duty to participate in that divergence in any way that looks healthy to you. Our civilization as it exists today is a dead man walking. Do not dance with dead men.

    Reject the norms. Let the zombies think you are weird. The values they are criticizing you for diverging from are the values that are choking us all to death.

    Leave your crappy marriage. Leave your crappy religion. Change your career. Change your entire lifestyle. Change your name. Change your gender. Change whatever you want. Change things just for the hell of it. If drastic change is what we need, then baby, be the change.

    Wherever you see light, move there. Don’t let any inhibitions hold you back, because those inhibitions are imposed by a culture that is an omnicidal maniac. Dismiss all its arguments, because it is insane.

    Be you, and don’t let any part of the dead man walking tell you it’s wrong. Your own best guess is better than the “normal” of a society that has signed off on its own obliteration.

    Step off from the old patterns.

    Diverge."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  16. The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Dennis Leahy (24th September 2021), Gekko (16th June 2021), Icare (24th September 2020)

  17. Link to Post #129
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    MSM Promotes Yet Another CIA Press Release As News
    CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    SEPTEMBER 23, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09...lease-as-news/

    "The Washington Post, whose sole owner is a CIA contractor, has published yet another anonymously sourced CIA press release disguised as a news report which just so happens to facilitate longstanding CIA foreign policy.

    In an article titled “Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden“, WaPo’s virulent neoconservative war pig Josh Rogin describes what was told to him by unnamed sources about the contents of a “secret” CIA document which alleges that Vladimir Putin is “probably” overseeing an interference operation in America’s presidential election.

    True to form, at no point does WaPo follow standard journalistic protocol and disclose its blatant financial conflict of interest with the CIA when promoting an unproven CIA narrative which happens to serve the consent-manufacturing agendas of the CIA for its new cold war with Russia.

    And somehow in our crazy, propaganda-addled society, this is accepted as “news”.

    Quote Jake Tapper
    @jaketapper
    .⁦@joshrogin⁩: “Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden” - The Washington Post
    Opinion | Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden
    Another revelation of Russian interference in the 2020 election.
    washingtonpost.com

    6:23 AM · Sep 22, 2020
    4.3K
    3.5K people are Tweeting about this
    The CIA has had a hard-on for the collapse of the Russian Federation for many years, and preventing the rise of another multipolar world at all cost has been an open agenda of US imperialism since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed it is clear that the escalations we’ve been watching unfold against Russia were in fact planned well in advance of 2016, and it is only by propaganda narratives like this one that consent has been manufactured for a new cold war which imperils the life of every organism on this planet.

    There is no excuse for a prominent news outlet publishing a CIA press release disguised as news in facilitation of these CIA agendas. It is still more inexcusable to merely publish anonymous assertions about the contents of that CIA press release. It is especially inexcusable to publish anonymous assertions about a CIA press release which merely says that something is “probably” happening, meaning those making the claim don’t even know.

    None of this stopped The Washington Post from publishing this propaganda piece on behalf of the CIA. None of it stopped this story from being widely shared by prominent voices on social media and repeated by major news outlets like CNN, The New York Times, and NBC. And none of it stopped all the usual liberal influencers from taking the claims and exaggerating the certainty:

    Quote BrooklynDad_Defiant!
    @mmpadellan
    America is so screwed up right now that the CIA has determined that Putin is directing efforts to interfere in the 2020 election against Biden, and a collective shoulder-shrug is all we can muster. Ż\_(ツ)_/Ż
    12:27 PM · Sep 22, 2020
    6.5K
    2.5K people are Tweeting about this
    The CIA-to-pundit pipeline, wherein intelligence agencies “leak” information that is picked up by news agencies and then wildly exaggerated by popular influencers, has always been an important part of manufacturing establishment Russia hysteria. We saw it recently when the now completely debunked claim that Russia paid bounties on US troops to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan first surfaced; unverified anonymous intelligence claims were published by mass media news outlets, then by the time it got to spinmeisters like Rachel Maddow it was being treated not as an unconfirmed analysis but as an established fact:

    Quote Aaron Maté
    @aaronjmate


    NBC News
    @NBCNews
    2 months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian gov't bribed Taliban to kill US service members, the commander in the region says a review of the intel has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program

    1:13 PM · Sep 14, 2020
    1.1K
    420 people are Tweeting about this
    If you’ve ever wondered how rank-and-file members of the public can be so certain of completely unproven intelligence claims, the CIA-to-pundit pipeline is a big part of it. The most influential voices who political partisans actually hear things from are often a few clicks removed from the news report they’re talking about, and by the time it gets to them it’s being waved around like a rock-solid truth when at the beginning it was just presented as a tenuous speculation (the original aforementioned WaPo report appeared on the opinion page).

    The CIA has a well-documented history of infiltrating and manipulating the mass media for propaganda purposes, and to this day the largest supplier of leaked information from the Central Intelligence Agency to the news media is the CIA itself. They have a whole process for leaking information to reporters they like (with an internal form that asks whether the information leaked is Accurate, Partially Accurate, or Inaccurate), as was highlighted in a recent court case which found that the CIA can even leak documents to select journalists while refusing to release them to others via Freedom of Information Act requests.

    Quote MuckRock
    @MuckRock
    While we're not saying that the #CIA deliberately leaks inaccurate information to the press, we will that there's a specific form they have to fill out when they do so. https://buff.ly/2GqlyPQ #FOIA


    12:15 PM · Feb 19, 2018
    85
    58 people are Tweeting about this
    A lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, assassinating, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic spook agency with an extensive history of deceit and depravity that selectively gives information to news reporters with whom it has a good relationship is never doing so for noble reasons. It is doing so for the same rapacious power-grabbing reasons it does all the other evil things it does.

    The way mainstream media has become split along increasingly hostile ideological lines means that all the manipulators need to do to advance a given narrative is set it up to make one side look bad and then share it with a news outlet from the other side. The way media is set up to masturbate people’s confirmation bias instead of report objective facts will then cause the narrative to go viral throughout that partisan faction, regardless of how true or false it might be.

    Quote Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    US Intelligence: If Trump Wins Russia Did It, If Biden Wins It Was China And Iran

    "Lastly, the dumbest thing about believing foreign nations are interfering in American democracy is believing America has any democracy to interfere with."
    US Intelligence: If Trump Wins Russia Did It, If Biden Wins It Was China And Iran
    Back in April I said “China’s gonna be so surprised when it finds out it interfered in the November election.”
    medium.com
    10:15 PM · Aug 7, 2020
    1.1K
    542 people are Tweeting about this
    The coming US election and its aftermath is looking like it will be even more insane and hysterical than the last one, and the enmity and outrage it creates will give manipulators every opportunity to slide favorable narratives into the slipstream of people’s hot-headed abandonment of their own critical faculties.

    And indeed they are clearly prepared to do exactly that. An ODNI press release last month which was uncritically passed along by the most prominent US media outlets reported that China and Iran are trying to help Biden win the November election while Russia is trying to help Trump. So no matter which way these things go the US intelligence cartel will be able to surf its own consent-manufacturing foreign policy agendas upon the tide of outrage which ensues.

    The propaganda machine is only getting louder and more aggressive. We’re being prepped for something."

    _________________________
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  18. The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Gekko (16th June 2021), Icare (24th September 2020)

  19. Link to Post #130
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Americans Who Support Status Quo Politics Are American Supremacists
    SEPTEMBER 25, 2020
    CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09...-supremacists/


    "Trump is a bad president. He’s coddled oligarchs both in America and around the world, he made a mess of the pandemic response and lied about it, he’s incited violence and inflamed hate, he’s done nothing for ordinary Americans, he’s facilitated ecocide, any good decisions he’s made on foreign policy have been far outweighed by the bad, and his recent refusal to guarantee a peaceful transition of power if defeated in November is concerning.

    That said, Trump is not a uniquely bad president. The only way to see him that way is to believe that American lives are far, far more important than those of the millions of mostly brown-skinned human beings who have been murdered by the US war machine under the leadership of both Trump and his predecessors.

    Just since 9/11 several million people have been killed and tens of millions displaced by American military violence to shore up control of key geostrategic regions with the goal of total global domination. Trump has not been any worse in the facilitation of this butchery than his predecessors. Where he differs significantly is in the amount of stress that his presidency has been causing Americans.

    I don’t mean to make light of the stress, disruption and anxiety that Americans have experienced during the Trump administration, but to suggest that it comes anywhere remotely close to the unbroken streak of blood staining presidencies long preceding this one is absurd. Millions of people brutally murdered for imperialist resource control agendas and war plutocrat profit margins is vastly more significant than the emotional discomfort of Americans. It just is. If you disagree with what I just said, you are wrong.

    Quote Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    America has slaughtered millions of human beings since 9/11 to facilitate global domination and the people who live there are saying this election is unique because this president is actually bad.
    7:53 PM · Sep 24, 2020
    2.4K
    884 people are Tweeting about this
    I am not saying who Americans should or should not vote for. What I am saying is that the belief that this election is uniquely important because this president is uniquely bad is the product of a worldview which sees American lives as much more important than non-American lives. It is the worldview of American supremacism.

    American supremacism is like any other supremacist ideology which holds an empowered group as innately superior to disempowered groups, except since its consequences are exported overseas its adherents don’t have to look at those consequences. For this reason, most American supremacists are not aware that that’s what they are. Their politics don’t hold all people as equal, but they are able to compartmentalize away from that fact since its consequences are out of sight and out of mind.

    If they were executing immigrants in American streets by the millions, there’d be a very conscious divide between those who support this and those who do not, because everyone would be constantly confronted with the fact that it’s happening and forced to come down on one side or the other on the issue. But since it’s an atrocity Americans don’t have to look at, and since their oligarchic news media are all too happy to passively conceal it from them, they wind up unconsciously selecting American supremacism as their default position by supporting the status quo which promotes it.

    Americans who support status quo politics, whether by the oligarchic warmongering Democratic Party or the oligarchic warmongering Republican Party, are American supremacists. They might not know it, but they are. They support a political paradigm in which people in other parts of the world are violently butchered to protect a US-centralized power structure which exists solely for the benefit of the powerful. Their American supremacist worldview allows them to see their own emotional discomfort as more significant than human bodies getting ripped apart by explosives every day around the world in support of the status quo their mainstream political faction promotes.
    Quote The Hill
    @thehill
    Nearly 500 former national security officials formally back Biden http://hill.cm/uUaUIJ3
    7:07 AM · Sep 24, 2020
    579
    325 people are Tweeting about this
    And it’s just taken as a given that it has to be this way. It’s taken as a given by both of America’s mainstream political factions that endless military expansionism, bombings, starvation sanctions and cold war escalations are going to continue, and the only things up for debate are the specific details of exactly how it’s going to continue and whether or not saying “black lives matter” makes you a communist.

    And of course it doesn’t have to be this way. America could just function as a normal country, minding its own affairs inside its own borders without murdering anyone for happening to live near fossil fuels. There’s no legitimate reason why it could not. The endless slaughter benefits no ordinary people in any way.

    It would be one thing if Americans actually benefited from all the bloodshed; that would just be garden variety human predation. But it’s not even that; the American supremacist worldview serves nobody but a few elite sociopaths who’ve enmeshed themselves with the world’s most powerful government. Ordinary Americans consent to the interminable churning of the US war machine at their own expense and to their own detriment because they are kept ignorant, poor and propagandized so they don’t get any grand ideas about intervening in the empire-building of the manipulators.

    Regardless of what happens in November, this is madness and it must not continue. Don’t let the sideshow of electoral politics distract from this vastly more important fact. Vote for whoever you want, but have no illusions about that vote addressing what is by far the most crucial issue with the US government."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  20. The Following User Says Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Gekko (16th June 2021)

  21. Link to Post #131
    Avalon Member East Sun's Avatar
    Join Date
    13th May 2010
    Location
    USA
    Language
    English
    Posts
    2,108
    Thanks
    6,998
    Thanked 8,486 times in 1,711 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    All of bidons words mean nothing at all. Yes, nothing at all.
    Question Everything, always speak truth... Make the best of today, for there may not be a tomorrow!!! But, that's OK because tomorrow never comes, so we have nothing to worry about!!!

  22. The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to East Sun For This Post:

    Gekko (16th June 2021), onawah (26th September 2020)

  23. Link to Post #132
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Response To Trump Covid Diagnosis Shows His ‘Opposition’ Always Saw Him As Part Of The Club
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    OCTOBER 3, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/10...t-of-the-club/

    "The Joe Biden campaign is reportedly taking down all negative ads against the US president due to his recent positive test for Covid-19.

    The Hill reports that according to two sources within the former vice president’s camp, the campaign has “decided to scrap the negative ads before the White House announced that Trump is being taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.”

    “The VP can’t say ‘God Bless this family’ and then trash him in ads,” one Biden ally told The Hill.

    “Jill and I send our thoughts to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery. We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family,” Biden tweeted upon the news of Trump’s positive test.

    “Trump’s campaign hit back at Biden and did not indicate it intends to take down its negative ads,” The Hill reports.

    Quote The Hill

    @thehill
    #BREAKING: Biden camp taking down all negative ads after Trump tests positive for COVID-19 http://hill.cm/uvBZIoP

    1,152
    5:32 PM - Oct 2, 2020
    Twitter Ads info and privacy
    690 people are talking about this
    This would be the same Donald Trump that Democratic politicians and pundits have been confidently assuring us is both a Russian agent who is trying to destroy America on orders of Vladimir Putin, and a white nationalist who is trying to eliminate minorities from the United States to create a white ethnostate. This same man who they’ve been saying poses a unique existential threat to human lives will receive no attacks from his only viable political opponent.

    “Doug and I join Joe Biden and Dr. Biden in wishing President Trump and the First Lady a full and speedy recovery,” tweeted Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris. “We’re keeping them and the entire Trump family in our thoughts.”

    Former president Barack Obama reportedly sent Trump his best wishes, saying “We’re all Americans and we’re all human beings, and we want to make sure everybody is healthy.”

    “God bless the president and the first lady,” tweeted the world’s most virulent Russiagater Rachel Maddow. “If you pray, please pray for their speedy and complete recovery — and for everyone infected, everywhere. This virus is horrific and merciless — no one would wish its wrath on anyone.”

    Again, this is after years of Maddow staring at the camera and weaving ridiculous narratives about Russia having taken over the highest levels of the US government. Night after night after night after night.

    “I join in the chorus of those who wish a speedy and full recovery to President Trump, the First Lady, Hope Hicks, and all who were exposed to them in recent days,” tweeted another virulent Russiagater Laurence Tribe. “This is no time for cruelty, schadenfreude, or any other form of small-mindedness.”

    Quote Rachel Maddow MSNBC

    @maddow
    God bless the president and the first lady. If you pray, please pray for their speedy and complete recovery — and for everyone infected, everywhere.

    This virus is horrific and merciless — no one would wish its wrath on anyone.

    We must get its spread under control. Enough.

    146K
    12:19 AM - Oct 2, 2020
    Twitter Ads info and privacy
    45.8K people are talking about this
    These are just a few examples. These sentiments are everywhere throughout the Democratic establishment and its allied media.

    Do these seem like the sentiments of a media class who believes Donald Trump poses an urgent existential threat and must be defeated at all cost? Or do they sound like a media class who promoted Russiagate and Trump hysteria for ratings?

    Do these seem like the sentiments of a political class who believes there’s an urgent existential need to defeat Donald Trump at all cost? Or do they sound like a political class who promoted Russiagate and Trump hysteria because impeachment and advancing longstanding CIA agendas against Russia are more politically convenient than advancing progressive policies and addressing the massive corruption problems which were exposed in their party in 2016?

    Would you stop fighting someone who was trying to kill you with every weapon at your disposal just because they got sick? If you actually believed they truly pose an existential threat to you, would a positive Covid test cause you to let up at all?

    Of course not.

    Quote Existential Comics
    @existentialcoms
    So to clarify, the liberal position is that Biden owes us nothing but we absolutely must vote for him anyway because Trump is the second coming of Hitler, and he will dissolve democracy if he wins, and we hope he is doing well and lives a long and happy life?

    6,111
    12:38 PM - Oct 2, 2020
    Twitter Ads info and privacy
    1,500 people are talking about this
    It turns out all that unprecedented hysterical shrieking about a Russian Nazi in the White House was just political hyperbole. It was an act. They’ve never seen Trump as a uniquely menacing threat, they see him as what he is: a garden variety corrupt American president who is evil in more or less the same ways the other corrupt American presidents are evil. They see him as a part of the establishment they serve, advancing more or less the same agendas. They see him as a part of the club, just covered by a thin layer of narrative to the contrary.

    If you ever had any doubt that Democrats will one day regard Trump the way they now regard George W Bush, you can set that doubt aside.

    As George Carlin famously said, it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.

    Quote Laurence Tribe

    @tribelaw
    I join in the chorus of those who wish a speedy and full recovery to President Trump, the First Lady, Hope Hicks, and all who were exposed to them in recent days. This is no time for cruelty, schadenfreude, or any other form of small-mindedness
    16.5K
    6:43 AM - Oct 2, 2020
    Twitter Ads info and privacy
    6,230 people are talking about this
    The responses to Trump’s diagnosis from the liberal political/media class show that they’ve never actually been afraid of Trump. In fact, what they have been afraid of is you.

    All these admonishments toward civility we’re hearing today, from the subtle like Maddow’s heartfelt prayers to the overt like Tribe’s “This is no time for cruelty, schadenfreude, or any other form of small-mindedness,” are the result of an establishment that is secretly terrified of the rank-and-file public. The ruling class and its lackeys are secretly terrified that one day the ordinary people they despise will awaken from their propaganda trance and realize the power of their numbers, and any incivility and impoliteness directed at the ruling class reminds them of just how ugly that could get for them.

    These admonishments toward civility are always anti-populist in nature, and are always the result of nervousness about the public turning toward their rulers with hostility. They are nervous for the same reason you’d get nervous if your dog suddenly remembered its wolf heritage and started killing trespassing deer. They know they are outnumbered. They know our teeth are sharp.

    This sudden pivot from portraying the US president as a unique and unprecedented threat to finger-wagging about politeness exposes what’s really going on here. Contrary to what his Democratic detractors and Republican supporters believe, Trump has never been anything other than a servant of the ruling power establishment, serving its agendas in the ways to which his political base is best-suited to support and his opposition is best-suited to allow.

    Quote Joe Biden

    @JoeBiden
    Jill and I send our thoughts to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery. We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family.

    853K
    7:45 AM - Oct 2, 2020
    Twitter Ads info and privacy
    98.7K people are talking about this
    The establishment narrative managers know this, which is why their alarmism about Trump has only ever been an act. There are plenty of ordinary Americans who view Trump as a uniquely dangerous threat, but it is so, so vital to understand that his ostensible opposition does not see him this way, and never has.

    Their job isn’t to resist Trump, their job is to resist you. He’s in the club, you’re not. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. "

    Also posted here: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1381327
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  24. The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Bluegreen (17th June 2021), East Sun (3rd October 2020), Gekko (16th June 2021)

  25. Link to Post #133
    United States Avalon Member Dennis Leahy's Avatar
    Join Date
    14th January 2011
    Location
    North Carolina
    Language
    English
    Age
    69
    Posts
    6,741
    Thanks
    47,010
    Thanked 48,583 times in 5,817 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Hmmmmm..... it's been a while since this thread was current.

    For those who don't know of Caitlin Johnstone's work, she is an Australian woman writing primarily about the psychopathic, imperialist, corporatist, warlords and technocrats that are the operational face of the American/Ameri-centric Global Empire. Please don't read her stuff if you are a partisan to one of the US political party/corporations - she will hurt your feelings. Do read her if you want a better understanding of Empire. If you don't glean anything else, at least comprehend the notion that she identifies "narrative control" as the key element of control over... well, us and everything.

    ---------------------------
    Listen to a reading of this article:

    Studying the unfolding of the new mainstream UFO narrative has been very interesting, because it highlights the dynamics I always talk about in a fresh light which makes them easier to point to.


    One theme that keeps resurfacing is people marvelling at how low-key the public response to the whole thing has been. One might expect the US government officially stating that the military has been frequently encountering strange unknown aircraft of unthinkable technological advancement would rank a little higher in public interest, but so far that really hasn't been the case.


    A YouTuber recently summed up this sentiment with a 13-minute rant about how weird it is that everyone isn't screaming about this all day long:


    I've seen numerous attempts to explain the unexpectedly apathetic response to the fact that UFOs are in the news every day now, the most common being that people have so much on their plate these days that even the possibility of extraterrestrials buzzing US navy ships just doesn't rank high on their priorities. Others suggest that it's such an obvious military psyop that the public is dismissive of the story.
    Neither of these offerings are particularly convincing in my opinion. We see vapid nonsense attracting mountains of public interest every day, so the idea that people have no mental bandwidth for this story doesn't hold water. While the belief that the UFO narrative looks like some kind of military psyop is widely accepted among the sort of people who'd be likely to read this article (I've been saying it for a while now myself), skepticism toward suspicious US government claims is not a very widespread posture for people to hold in the mainstream public.

    It seems pretty clear to me that the reason there's not as much public interest in this story as you'd expect is because it doesn't fit neatly into any of the little boxes that people have been trained to file news into in this society. There's no partisan angle to it, so it doesn't appeal to any of the egoic constructs to which the general public tends to hook incendiary news stories.


    The likelihood of a news story going viral in our society has little to do with its newsworthiness, its unusualness, or even whether or not it is factually accurate. The single most likely factor in whether or not a news story will have mass appeal is whether it appears to validate the worldview of one of the two mainstream political factions. This is why the mainstream media have been deliberately sowing partisan divisiveness and marketing toward increasingly distant partisan echo chambers instead of just reporting the news; they have an obvious profit motive to do so, because tickling people's egos with hate porn and illusory validation is the best way to get clicks and generate ad revenue.



    This is why those who promoted the theory that Trump was a secret Russian agent saw their ratings soar for years before it was conclusively discredited by the very Special Counsel they'd been literally singing Christmas carols and lighting prayer candles to until then. There is more evidence that space aliens are cruising around in Earth's atmosphere than there ever was that Vladimir Putin had covertly infiltrated the highest levels of the US government, but because it inflamed liberal passions and made them feel like their partisan worldview was about to be vindicated any minute, it sold like crack.


    You can immediately tell if something is going to go viral by how politically tinged it is and how mainstream the appeal of those politics are. A story about how schools want to make your kids transgender. A popular conservative acting like an idiot. A black Trump supporter saying Trump isn't racist. Marjorie Taylor Greene doing literally anything. Take it too far outside the mainstream, like the US government getting caught tampering with an OPCW investigation in Syria for example, and you won't see a ton of clicks, but if it appeals to tens of millions of mainstream partisans you will.


    In a society that's enslaved to egoic consciousness as ours is, the things that generate the most public interest will be those which flatter or infuriate common egoic constructs. This is not unique to politics; advertisers have raked in vast fortunes by associating products with common cultural mind viruses like body image issues and personal inadequacy, and TV show hosts like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich figured out decades ago that you can attract massive ratings by letting people feel smug and superior at the sight of poor and uneducated guests acting out emotionally.

    To make something go viral, it needs to appeal to the ego. Advertisers understand this. Media executives understand this. Propagandists understand this.
    The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public's Trust
    "There's no point admonishing the mainstream press for the public's plummeting trust in it, because a thing that has only ever existed to administer propaganda can't suddenly become journalism."https://t.co/1LN9q8dtRQ
    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 26, 2021
    Creating big psychological identity structures out of our politics makes the job of the propagandists so very much easier; it's like a lubricant which lets mass-scale psyops glide smoothly into public consciousness. From there it's a very easy task to get people hating Russia or China for this or that partisan reason, or to get people believing Trump or Biden are helping the American people despite their both continuing and expanding the same murderous and oppressive status quo of their predecessors.
    This is why the partisan divide is the most heated and contentious it's ever been, while the actual behavior of each mainstream party when it's in power brings in only the most superficial of changes. The oligarchs who own the political/media class desire the continuation of the status quo upon which they have built their empire, but they also want to keep the public as plugged in as possible to the partisan perspectives which facilitate the propaganda that cages our minds.

    The solution to this, on an individual level, is to dismantle any egoic attachment you might have to either of the mainstream political factions which preserve the status quo. This includes any attachment to the phony populism of progressive Democrats, and it includes any attachment to the phony populism of Trumpian Republicans. These factions within the mainstream factions are themselves propaganda constructs which will never be permitted to advance any agenda that isn't desired by the oligarchic empire; they serve only to keep people who would be inclined to reject mainstream politics plugged in to mainstream politics.


    And of course the ultimate solution to this problem is for humanity to awaken from the ego. All propaganda relies on egoic hooks in public consciousness to circulate itself, so if humanity begins dropping its habit of creating psychological identity structures altogether (which it looks like it might), we will become harder and harder to propagandize. Since humanity's collective problems ultimately boil down to the fact that sociopaths manipulate our minds at mass scale, such a transformation would make a healthy new world not just possible but inevitable.

    _____________________
    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
    [IMG]https://miro.medium.com/max/514/0*paUsi0SrKB2QX9ci[/IMG]


    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
    Political Partisanship Is A Propaganda Lubricant

    by Caitlin Johnstone


  26. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Dennis Leahy For This Post:

    Bluegreen (17th June 2021), Forest Denizen (17th June 2021), Gekko (16th June 2021), haroldsails (17th June 2021), mountain_jim (16th June 2021), Pam (17th June 2021)

  27. Link to Post #134
    United States Avalon Member Dennis Leahy's Avatar
    Join Date
    14th January 2011
    Location
    North Carolina
    Language
    English
    Age
    69
    Posts
    6,741
    Thanks
    47,010
    Thanked 48,583 times in 5,817 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    America’s Soup-Brained President Says The US Never Interferes In Other Countries’ Elections






    Listen to a reading of this article:

    During an astonishingly sycophantic press conference after the Geneva summit with Vladimir Putin, President Biden posited an entirely hypothetical scenario about what the world would think of the United States if it were interfering in foreign elections and everybody knew it.

    When AP’s Jonathan Lemire asked the president of the most powerful government in the world what “consequences” he’d threatened the Russian leader with should the Kremlin interfere in US elections going forward, Biden meandered his way through one of his signature not-quite-lucid word salads, and then said the following:
    “Let’s get this straight: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.”

    The fact that the entire press corps did not erupt in side-splitting laughter at this ridiculous utterance is in itself proof that western news media is pure propaganda. The United States has directly interfered in scores of foreign elections since it began its ascent to global domination at the end of the second World War, to say nothing of all the coups, color revolutions, proxy conflicts and regime change military invasions it has also participated in during that time. The US openly interfered in Russia’s elections in the nineties, and literally just tried to stage a coup in Bolivia by interfering in its democratic process. The US is far and away the single most egregious offender in the world on this front, which is largely why it is perceived around the world as a greater threat to democracy than any other government.

    This is not a secret, internationally or in the United States. Anyone who has done any learning about the US government’s actual behavior on the world stage knows this. Hell, a former CIA director openly joked about it on Fox News a few years ago.
    Fox’s Laura Ingraham unsurprisingly introduced former CIA Director James Woolsey as “an old friend” in a 2018 interview about Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 alleged members of a Russian troll farm, in which Woolsey unsurprisingly talked about how dangerous Russian “disinformation” is and Ingraham unsurprisingly said that everyone should actually be afraid of China. What was a bit surprising, though, was what happened at the end of the interview.

    “Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Ingraham asked in response to Woolsey’s Russia remarks.

    “Oh, probably,” Woolsey said with a grin. “But it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over. For example, in Europe, in ’47, ’48, ’49, the Greeks and the Italians we CIA-”

    “We don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”

    Woolsey smiled and said said “Well…”,
    followed by a joking incoherent mumble, adding, “Only for a very good cause.”

    And then they both laughed.

    The fact that not one person in the press pool questioned or criticized Biden’s outrageous remarks tells you everything you need to know about the western media and what its real function is. This is further illustrated by the rest of the behavior of these odious propagandists during the summit, which was illustrated quite well by the glowing praise of Democratic Party insider Andrea Chalupa on Twitter:

    “The winners of #GenevaSummit2021 are the White House press corp,” Chalupa said. “Excellent questions confronting Putin and challenging Biden on holding a summit with a ruthless dictator. And they literally held their ground when shoved by Putin’s security and propagandists.”

    That actually says it all. Western reporters are forbidden by their oligarchic owners from ever confronting power in any meaningful way; the closest they’re ever allowed to get to punching up is challenging the leaders of CIA-targeted governments, and demanding to know why their own leaders aren’t being more hawkish and aggressive toward those leaders.

    As RT’s Murad Gazdiev pointed out, “ABC, NBC, BBC, CNN, and many other Western outlets were invited for Putin’s press conference. No Russian media was invited to Biden’s press conference.” The whole thing was a navel-gazing, masturbatory cold war propaganda orgy where western “journalists” made up fantasies about their soup-brained leader staring down Putin, where they yelled nonsense about Alexei Navalny at the Russian president and then fangirled at Biden’s response.
    Can anyone imagine a US corporate journalist screaming at Biden: "Why do you fear Assange so much?"
    Always easy to condemn the acts of the governments your country tells you to see as Enemy. Much harder – and way more meaningful – to challenge your own government's repression. https://t.co/CtzeU37pn3
    — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 16, 2021
    Real journalists go to Belmarsh Prison for exposing US war crimes. Western propagandists ask Putin why he’s such a doodoo dumb dumb poopy head and then dream about Pulitzers all night.

    Western news media exists to funnel propaganda into the minds of the public. It is controlled by plutocrats who work in alliance with opaque government agencies to weave narratives about why the US government needs to do the things it had already planned on doing anyway. This gets more obvious by the day.
    ____________________
    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

    [IMG]https://miro.medium.com/max/514/0*paUsi0SrKB2QX9ci[/IMG]


    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
    Liked it? Take a second to support Caitlin Johnstone on Patreon!


  28. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Dennis Leahy For This Post:

    Forest Denizen (17th June 2021), Gekko (17th June 2021), haroldsails (17th June 2021), mountain_jim (17th June 2021), onawah (17th June 2021), Pam (17th June 2021)

  29. Link to Post #135
    United States Unsubscribed
    Join Date
    3rd March 2012
    Location
    the terrarium
    Posts
    649
    Thanks
    3,077
    Thanked 2,853 times in 448 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words


  30. Link to Post #136
    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
    Join Date
    28th March 2010
    Language
    English
    Posts
    22,208
    Thanks
    47,681
    Thanked 116,092 times in 20,639 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    I was going to post this article from Caitlin, but couldn't decide whether to put it on the You-must-laugh-at-least-once-a-day thread
    ...or this one:
    Biden-voters-and-supporters.-How-is-it-going

    Nice to see you back on the forum!

    Quote Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
    America’s Soup-Brained President Says The US Never Interferes In Other Countries’ Elections
    Last edited by onawah; 17th June 2021 at 16:04.
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  31. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Dennis Leahy (17th June 2021), Gekko (17th June 2021), mountain_jim (17th June 2021), Pam (17th June 2021)

  32. Link to Post #137
    United States Avalon Member Dennis Leahy's Avatar
    Join Date
    14th January 2011
    Location
    North Carolina
    Language
    English
    Age
    69
    Posts
    6,741
    Thanks
    47,010
    Thanked 48,583 times in 5,817 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    The Weird, Creepy Media Blackout On Recent Assange Revelations

    by Caitlin Johnstone Listen to a reading of this article:

    As of this writing, it has been three days since the Icelandic newspaper Stundin broke the story that a key witness in the US government's case against Julian Assange had fabricated allegations against the WikiLeaks founder. And yet, somehow, Assange is still in prison.


    Weirder still, not one major western media outlet outside of Iceland has reported on this massive and entirely legitimate news story. A search brings up coverage by Icelandic media, by Russian media, and by smaller western outlets like Democracy Now, World Socialist Website, Consortium News, Zero Hedge and some others, but as of this writing this story has been completely ignored by all major outlets who are ostensibly responsible for informing the public in the western world.


    It's not that those outlets have been ignoring Assange altogether these last few days either. Reuters recently published an interview with Assange's fiance Stella Moris. Evening Standard has a recent article out on Assange's plans to marry Moris in Belmarsh, as does Deutsche Welle. It's just this one story in particular that they've been blacking out completely.
    I don’t think one US or UK newspaper has reported this. The free press is incredible. https://t.co/NpkCpa2kdN
    — Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) June 28, 2021
    And it's not that the mainstream press are unaware of this story. Mainstream western reporters spend a lot of time on Twitter, and Assange's name was trending in the United States after the Stundin story broke. Tweets about the article by high-profile accounts like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have many thousands of shares each. They've all seen the article. They all know it's newsworthy. They're just choosing not to report on it.

    It reminds me of the blanket media blackout that occurred while the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was hemorrhaging leaks revealing a US government-tied coverup in the alleged chlorine gas incident in Douma, Syria. Immensely newsworthy stories were breaking every few days on a major international scandal, yet not a peep was made about it by the mainstream press.


    We got some insight into what happens in mainstream newsrooms during such bizarre circumstances when journalist Tareq Haddad leaked the emails from his editors at Newsweek refusing him permission to write about the unfolding OPCW scandal. Haddad's pitch was rejected by editor Dimi Reider on the basis that other bigger outlets hadn't written about it.


    “Leak has been out since weekend," Reider wrote. "It's certainly no scoop. Yet despite the days that passed, not a single respected media outlet – many of whom boast far greater regional expertise, resources on the ground and in newsroom than Newsweek does – have taken the leak remotely seriously. Which already yesterday made my wonder how we could or why we should.”


    Reider was supported by Newsweek's digital director Laura Davis, who told Haddad his pitch was being rejected because "the leak found zero to no traction among publications which are highly resourced and experienced on Syria."


    And that's just pretty darn convenient for the powerful, is it not? Assuming other mainstream news outlets feel the same, this means they're all generally following the lead of just a handful of top-tier publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. If just those few outlets decide to ignore a major news story that's inconvenient for the powerful (either by persuasion, infiltration or by their own initiative), then no one else will either. As far as the media-consuming public is concerned, it's like the major news story never happened at all.

    And that's really, really creepy.
    As far as we can tell from searches, not a single 'mainstream' UK newspaper has covered this major development in the #Assange case. Nor has BBC News.
    The discipline, or blindness, to ignore awkward facts is a reliable feature of corporate 'journalism'.https://t.co/DMOUD568j5
    — Media Lens (@medialens) June 29, 2021
    Western mass media outlets are propaganda. They are owned and controlled by wealthy people in coordination with the secretive government agencies tasked with preserving the world order upon which the media-owning plutocrats have built their kingdoms, and their purpose is to manipulate the way the mainstream public thinks, acts and votes into alignment with the agendas of the ruling class.

    You see this propaganda in the way things are reported, but you also see it in the way things are not reported. Entire news stories can be completely redacted from mainstream attention if they are sufficiently inconvenient for the mechanisms of empire, or only allowed in via platforms like Tucker Carlson Tonight and thereby tainted and spun as ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories.


    If newsworthiness and significance were what governed mainstream news media reporting, instead of the agendas of profit and power, we'd constantly be hearing about the people dying in Yemen and the brutal income inequality in the United States. And the fact that the most powerful government in the world is persecuting a journalist for telling the truth would be at the forefront of everyone's awareness, instead of the mountain of smears they have heaped upon Julian Assange.
    I worry sometimes, who will explain this stuff with this level of detail, if they put me in jail?
    Worth noting that the Thordarson saga has never been reported by mainstream media outside Iceland.https://t.co/sq5hu8PDiV

    — Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) June 29, 2021
    I sometimes get people telling me that some news stories are meant to "distract" us from other, bigger news stories, like this is something the imperial narrative managers do especially on some occasions but not all the time. In reality, distraction is never not happening, because every single day the plutocratic media pull people's attention away from the pressing issues of the moment like ecocide, poverty, oppression and mass military slaughter to get them talking about Cardi B's baby bump and Marjorie Taylor Greene's latest doofy publicity stunt.

    We are being lied to. Constantly, and in more ways than we realize. By omission, by distortion, by half-truths and by outright deception. Our minds are being actively messed with by powerful people with limitless resources to ensure their continued domination of the planet at any cost. Our very perception of reality is being assaulted on myriad fronts. Until humanity finds a way to wake itself up from its propaganda-induced coma, the abuses of the powerful will continue.


  33. The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Dennis Leahy For This Post:

    mountain_jim (29th June 2021), Reinhard (29th June 2021)

  34. Link to Post #138
    Avalon Member Frankie Pancakes's Avatar
    Join Date
    11th March 2012
    Location
    Absurdistan
    Posts
    486
    Thanks
    853
    Thanked 4,661 times in 480 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    It begins in typical somewhat Orwellian fashion:

    No longer content with absurd claims that the January 6 Capitol riot was as bad as the 9/11 attacks, Democratic Party-aligned pundits are now insisting that it was in fact worse.

    On a recent appearance with MSNBC’s ReidOut with Joy Reid, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd said he felt the Capitol riot was “much worse” than 9/11 and that this is the “most perilous point in time” since the beginning of the American Civil War.

    “To me, though there was less loss of life on January 6, January 6 was worse than 9/11, because it’s continued to rip our country apart and get permission for people to pursue autocratic means, and so I think we’re in a much worse place than we’ve been,” Dowd said. “I think we’re in the most perilous point in time since 1861 in the advent of the Civil War.”

    “I do too,” Reid said.

    Not to be outdone, Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Smith cited Dowd’s hysterical claim but adding that not only was January 6 worse than 9/11, but it was actually going to kill more Americans somehow, even counting all those killed in the US wars which ensued from the 9/11 attacks.

    “He couldn’t be more right,” Schmidt said at a town hall for the Lincoln Project. “The 1/6 attack for the future of the country was a profoundly more dangerous event than the 9/11 attacks. And in the end, the 1/6 attacks are likely to kill a lot more Americans than were killed in the 9/11 attacks, which will include the casualties of the wars that lasted 20 years following.”

    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07...ore-january-6/

  35. The Following User Says Thank You to Frankie Pancakes For This Post:

    Dennis Leahy (24th September 2021)

  36. Link to Post #139
    United States Avalon Member Dennis Leahy's Avatar
    Join Date
    14th January 2011
    Location
    North Carolina
    Language
    English
    Age
    69
    Posts
    6,741
    Thanks
    47,010
    Thanked 48,583 times in 5,817 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Electoral Politics Does Not Work: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    by Caitlin Johnstone Listen to a reading of this article:

    It says a lot that AOC wasn't even able to vote against an Israeli apartheid measure that everyone already knew would pass regardless of her vote.
    I mean, how far gone is your progressive revolution if you're not even allowed to have a perfectly safe performative "no" vote? If even the illusion of opposition is banned?
    People say, "Why pick on AOC when other lawmakers are way worse?"
    They're not worse, they just perform different functions. The Manchins and Sinemas kill leftward movement openly, the AOCs encourage the left to feed their political energy into a party that's built to kill leftward movement.
    It happens that one of these manipulations is much easier for leftwardy-inclined people to see than the other; it's easier to recognize Manchin and Sinema-type bull**** than AOC-type bull****. So you'll see some factions on the left putting special emphasis on pointing out the one that the general public needs a lot more help recognizing.
    I don't know who needs to hear this but there is no functional difference between a politician who votes a certain way because they want to and a politician who votes a certain way because systemic pressures push them to.
    It's like Trump supporters saying he wanted to fight the Deep State but the Deep State wouldn't let him. It's like, okay, so? Who gives a ****? Either he's an asshole or an impotent puppet, either way **** him. Same with AOC and her constant establishment capitulations. Whether they're serving the empire because they want to or because they have to, it's clear and undeniable that electoral politics isn't the way to advance the interests of normal human beings. The system simply does not allow for that.
    The absolute least important thing in the universe is how some politician's feelings are feeling inside. It does not matter what secret intentions they have in their heart. All that matters is what they do. If they can't do what you need them to, it means they're useless. Period.
    The single greatest threat to freedom and democracy is not foreign governments, nor the authoritarian measures being implemented by our own governments, but the fact that giant media and tech companies are used to continuously manipulate the way people think about all of those governments.
    You are not free if your mind is not free. It doesn't matter if you were free to say and do whatever you want if the powerful are still actively manipulating the thoughts you think, because all your words and actions will arise from those thoughts. Mental sovereignty comes first.

    In an alternate universe the governments of a parallel Earth responded to the pandemic by pouring money into healthcare systems, transferring wealth from their nations' richest to their poorest, and saying "Here's a new vaccine but it's up to you whether you use it or not."
    It's true that knowledge is power. That's why the powerful work to control people's access to knowledge through the internet and news media. It's also why there's privacy for the powerful and radical transparency for the public, instead of the other way around as it ought to be.
    Biden proclaiming that the US is no longer at war because he moved a few thousand troops out of Afghanistan is the most Trump-like thing that has happened so far in this very Trumpian administration.
    The US is like "We do not seek a new cold war, we simply seek to remain the unipolar dominator of the entire planet and maintain the ability to unilaterally destroy smaller nations which disobey us. And we'll do anything to accomplish this, including waging a new cold war."
    George W Bush should never be able to give any speech anywhere without people in the audience cutting him off to yell about his war crimes.
    Invented a highly effective new antidepressant that I hope to get to the market ASAP. It's not a pill it's just a big wad of cash taken by force from giant corporations.
    Mothers and nurses work harder than any billionaire on earth.
    People complain about how I do my thing here and say I should do it some other way, and I totally get it. One time I went to an AC/DC concert and they played not one note of smooth jazz. I was so angry.
    We are ruled by a nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure which is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways and that power structure has somehow seamlessly paced us from fearing terrorists to fearing Russian hackers to fearing anti-vaxxers instead of fearing it.
    Someone who calls you an "anti-vaxxer" for expressing moderate and reasonable human rights concerns about brand new government policies that affect everyone deserves as much respect as someone who calls you an "anti-semite" for voicing legitimate criticisms of Israeli apartheid.
    Having principles means having them even when they don't further your personal agenda. You may enjoy the sight of having your politics enforced by gunpoint today, but it completely demolishes your voice and integrity when police brutality comes for you tomorrow. Those little self-serving lies that we tell ourselves about how our principles don't apply here because of blah-blah reason are the levers by which the powerful manipulate us into further and further submission.
    Propaganda works because it plugs into our most fundamental egoic mechanisms: identity and fear. Identify tightly with a group or political faction and you'll accept propaganda which comes from there. Be driven by fear and that will be used to herd you into power-serving agendas.
    If you want to free your mind from the chains of power it's not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts. The most important step to freeing your mind from its shackles is to remove from yourself the psychological hooks to which those shackles are attached.
    Last edited by Dennis Leahy; 24th September 2021 at 16:34.


  37. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Dennis Leahy For This Post:

    earthdreamer (25th September 2021), Hym (24th September 2021), mountain_jim (24th September 2021), Orph (24th September 2021)

  38. Link to Post #140
    Avalon Member mountain_jim's Avatar
    Join Date
    8th December 2010
    Posts
    8,757
    Thanks
    59,330
    Thanked 77,653 times in 8,595 posts

    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Quote The single greatest threat to freedom and democracy is not foreign governments, nor the authoritarian measures being implemented by our own governments, but the fact that giant media and tech companies are used to continuously manipulate the way people think about all of those governments.
    You are not free if your mind is not free. It doesn't matter if you were free to say and do whatever you want if the powerful are still actively manipulating the thoughts you think, because all your words and actions will arise from those thoughts. Mental sovereignty comes first.
    David Icke's interview by Chris Martin posted here at Avalon today really covers the first highlighted section here in the context of the what has long-been planned and what is happening now, and why.



    https://odysee.com/@Chris_Martenson:2/DavidIcke:0

    transcript

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1453833
    I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions. - Robert Anton Wilson

    The present as you think of it, and in practical working terms, is that point at which you select your physical experience from all those events that could be materialized. - Seth (The Nature of Personal Reality - Session 656, Page 293)

    (avatar image: Brocken spectre, a wonderful phenomenon of nature I have experienced and a symbol for my aspirations.)

  39. The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to mountain_jim For This Post:

    Dennis Leahy (25th September 2021), earthdreamer (25th September 2021), Elainie (24th September 2021)

+ Reply to Thread
Page 7 of 8 FirstFirst 1 7 8 LastLast

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts