"Americans are the most propagandized population on earth" - they are also the most hypocritical population on earth except maybe the English. They fully embrace the ends justify the means concept, but they'll never ever admit to it.
Among the fundamentalist like Mike Pompeo, they revel in the use of any means to get the desired end, see it as a proof of their commitment, that they well and truly deserve to be seated at the right hand of their god.
Forget Pompeo. What about those neocons in the Biden White House, in the State Department that are calling the shots when it comes to our foreign policy? Now we've put Ukraine in a protracted war with Russia with the expectation of bleeding Russia dry, as we did in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Way back Pelosi in 2003 was on the intel committee during the build up to war in Iraq and claims she knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, and therefore her reason to vote no on the war, but she didn't tell Joe who used his position in the Senate to push the war in Iraq on his fellow democrats. Lot of blame to go around when we push an agenda for war, and confrontation. Sometimes we take sides. Ms Johnstone in an article referencing the war in Ukraine let Obama off the hook, since he didn't send any weapons, recognizing it was too dangerous, but Trump did. However she did fail to mention that it was the Obama administration that instigated the coup in Ukraine, with the help of nazis, overturning a pro-Russian government, not to mention our many democrats that pushed Russia-gate along with the left. Boy that didn't help. Too often we put the onus on the right, but too often, especially during Trump's presidency, the left helped our government along in it's self righteous exploitation of the world using Trump-hate and Russia-gate to do it, and few on the left, like Mate, and Greenwald challenged the lie.
Hardly. I can give you a running history of how the democrats veered right after or during the Carter administration and Billy Clinton really took the party to the right. They really lost me after that. I don't understand how you came to your assessment after what I said.
This assessment is the one I have too. No longer a Democrat, and never a Republican, I can say that the Dem Party is nowhere near it was in the 60's or 70's, and even that was when I was still oblivious to many of its shortcomings, such as its support for empire, war, and US exceptionalism. It's indefensible now since it stands for nothing in regard to the common good, using the accomplishments of FDR as if it still believes in those things. It doesn't and is in fact assisting Republicans in destroying those limited gains.
I was always a registered democrat until the Trump years when the dems came across as a bunch of saintly autocrats which they continue to push to this day.
I hear about how Obama helped precipitate the Maidan revolution in 2014 but, other than a phone conversation with Victoria Nuland, I've never heard what the U.S. did specifically. Give me this and I'll believe the premise
Check out Aaron Mate'of the Grayzones full set of reporting on Ukraine coup. Of course I can't give it to you, no one can. You have to take knowledge from where you can find it, and learn out to sieve a truth from it, but the first step is taking it.
But that's the problem. Aaron makes conclusionary statements that states our operational intent. But he doesn't say HOW it was done. Without this evidence, I can't support the conclusion.
What's that thing in front of his conclusionary statements? Oh, it's evidence. Willful ignorance cannot be cured by any 2nd or 3rd party, I'm sorry to tell you.
What that phone conversation conveyed between Nuland, who is a neocon and was in Obama's State Dept, and now in Biden's, and Jeffery Pyatt, who was the ambassador to Ukraine, was a discussion on who was to take over the reins of power in Ukraine. Basically they ousted a pro-Russian government with one that was not. Ukraine is a very corrupt country, the most corrupt in Europe and the 9th most corrupt in the world. You have to also realize we supported neo-nazi's that were mainly instrumental in driving this coup. Our objective was clear, and that was to install a pro-western government in Ukraine right up against Russia's borders. Our agenda has always been, even before supporting this coup to diminish Russia's power like we did during the Clinton years in supporting Yeltsin who was an American pawn used by Russian and American Oligarchs that bled that country dry causing the life expectancy for each age group in Russia to go down by some 10 years. Now we plan to use Ukraine as a means of accomplishing the goal of severely weakening Russia and ousting Putin. We will no doubt have a long protracted war in Ukraine, using that country and it's people to obtain our goal. We did this in Afghanistan in the 1980's by supplying the Mujahideen with weapons to fight Russia, and we bled her dry.
No, the conversation said who they supported. It doesn't say how they would make that happen. Again, I'm not saying Aaron is wrong. What I'm saying there needs to be evidence of the means. Money? Paramilitary teams? Disinformation campaigns? What was it? Without this info, the conclusion is like HRC saying the Russians manipulated the 2016 election, omitting that the "manipulation" was $100k in Facebook ads that were nonsensical. Let's hold our fav journalists to the same standards they hold the MSM.
Yes, we supported the coup and helped out a bunch of neo-nazi's with their agenda. We supported it. Watch Oliver Stone's documentary on our role in overturning a pro-Russian president, Yanukovych. Nuland, who was in Obama's State Department, and now in Biden's, and married to Robert Kagan. If you don't know who he is, well, he's one of the biggest neocons of them all, like Cheney. Both signed on to the Project for a New American Century. Read their manifesto and understand why our many wars in the Middle East in the the 21st century. Here's their philosophy, " ...liberal international organizations can intervene in other states in order to pursue liberal objectives. The latter can include humanitarian aid and military intervention." Not to mention US dominion over the world. Dick Cheney is a neocon, and their agenda led us into our Middle Eastern wars. We even armed the the Azov battalion in Ukraine in 2018. They're nazi's. They killed a lot of people in the Donbass region which gave us this war with Russia. Do you know how we armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan which eventually bled Russia dry and our intention in the Ukraine is the same and to hell with the people and their country. Zelensky is nothing but a comedian turned crook.
There's zero doubt with the likes of Pompeo. I was referring more to the "regular" folks. When the push comes to shove you better hold on to your balls as "below the belt" rule is for fools only.
I'm not sure I've met a regular American in all my years there, but I can say that Mike Pompeo is a perfect example of the more radical among the Southern Baptist, Agnus Dei, Mormon. Some of them give the Sunni Wahab a real run for the money, particularly the Southern Baptist. The rest mostly feign ignorance, but if offered to switch to smushed brown children to fill their diesel pickup truck tanks, many probably will even pay a premium for the thrill of doing it themselves. Most of rest will fall in line if you just give them enough of a discount. Those that don't, morally can't, will be isolated, and eventually take out to where they hide the other bodies.
I have lived among the Southern Baptists almost my whole life. "Some of them give the Sunni Wahab a real run for the money". I don't know how extreme or crazy the Sunni Wahab are, but the Baptists are top notch crazy. They love nothing more than to shove their 'morality' down as many people's throats as they possibly can.
Lol. Yeah, except it's even worse when they become judges and legislators. For me, there is nothing that the woke folks can do that would be worse than what has been done by these people.
If I could I'd downvote you for that bit of bigotry rb!
I am a born and bred Englishman and I am writing this post from England.
I have cousins in the US, mostly in New York City. And among other things I am a casual student of the Russian language. (Not easy - you should try it).
Despite my strong dislike for the US Empire I nevertheless do not attempt to tar all Americans with the same brush. There are very many decent Americans. (I know Caitlin will agree with me on that). So I wouldn't be inclined to say all Americans are (....) choose your insult. They're not all the same.
Similarly with Russians. I know only the teachers whose blogs I follow. But they are all very nice people as far as I can tell. Nothing like their stereotypes and none of them interested in war. In fact one teacher left Russia in disgust in March 2022.
I accept your downvote and will mentally subtract it from the total number of upvotes.
If you read carefully I never said "all" anywhere. I continued the line used by Caitlin, namely "Americans...". That there are all kinds of people everywhere on a personal level is a given. We, however, talk about the general tendencies of a population enabling certain behavior for their governments.
As for Russian language - I'm a native speaker so not burdened with its difficulties :)
As to your Russian teacher having left "in disgust" - ask her whether she was disgusted with the 8 years bombing of Donbass by the Ukraine.
Feel free to ask me about Russian language. Despite your downvote I appreciate your efforts. It's not easy indeed.
Apologists for US aggression everywhere are either vested interests or imbeciles - and perhaps they completely overlap. The evidence is overwhelming, there are libraries full of it, not to mention still living victims. But history is not on their side, and neither is the economy, which is about to disclose its secrets very candidly. If some believe barking at the moon is the solution, so be it.
One of the things I don't understand is the liberal-synthetic left-regular citizen's disinterest in living true to the ideals they seem to profess. I get that many people are hypocrites or venal or greedy or power-hungry. Many but not most. Most people aren't evil. Most people don't want to live a lie, or have to lie to live, or have to believe lies to live as they believe...
So wtf is going on with overnight adoption of Ukraine flags or relentless neocon anti-China populism or obsession with the day's news gossip to the exclusion of anything that matters? Why don't people get bored of the bullshit?
Why don't people who want a better world - or a safer world - prioritize this decency when it comes to who they vote for, what they listen to, where they get their information? I don't get it.
The only answers are unsatisfactory. It's always generalizations, abstractions, dismissing individual agency to fit this or that group into some sweeping stereotype. I've never heard anyone nail why reality matters so little and fantasies matter so much. It's unnatural, even in the face of our vast propaganda machinery.
Oh well. If anyone can explain why - to give an example relevant today - nobody gives a f**k about nuclear omnicide; and yet spend hours every day consuming news, forming convictions, believing in good over evil; I'm all ears...
In a nutshell, because every attempt to organise/mobilise mass opposition to big business has been crushed. From the defeat of William Jennings Bryan and the arrest and imprisonment of Eugene Debbs the bosses have had it their own way. Good intentions are not worth a thing in the absence of widespread, organised, expressions of soldarity between ordinary people. The 'Left' today is a controlled opposition designed to misdirect the energies of people who seek change, the ideas/rhetoric of the 'Left' is essentially sentimental, rather than pragmatic.
Bots are the arbitrors of what is popular sentiment, the rest follows. Fact checkers and censorship remove popular opinion that may persuade. Logic therefore is banished to the more biological need to fit in the middle of the group, sheltered from danger. Witness the changing of the tide, the sheep will jump like hot tamales. So simple. Control, with great and gross efforts the speaking, and the biology of the accursed will damn them. Free speech is a right that speaks to our very human traits. Address this fully and the cabal will fall.
If you are not already familiar with the term “mass formation” (sometimes called “mass formation psychosis”), you may want to search for it. The Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet is the current best explainer of what it is. He’s all over YouTube (and Rumble) and well worth a little time.
Maybe none of it amounts to a hill of beans. They say it's all random anyway right? I mean - you and I are just random atoms that will soon disappear forever. That's what all the experts say ...
'I've never heard anyone nail why reality matters so little and fantasies matter so much.'
Because the whole of society and culture is based on the false premise that the spiritual and the physical are fundamentally different. Start with a fantasy and this is what we get.
I respectfully disagree. The real reason is much simpler: the overwhelming centrality of entertainment in our culture and in the daily lives of most people has reset the norms for thinking and experience itself. If they spend enough time every day in front of a tv screen people will come to prefer the soothing immersion in fantasy over reality of any kind. Intoxification and psycho-affective disablement by way of entertainment. Digital entertainment, supplemented by poor diet, lack of exercise, limited exposure to the natural world, disrupted sleep and drugs like cannabis produce a population that is zombified.
What most people brought up in the Judeo-Christian traditions of the West do not seem to appreciate is that "good" and "evil" are subjective judgments.
When we as Americans divorce ourselves from the MSM, corporate-governments-institutional BS snd pay attention to what similarly independent and now divorced from the mainstream are thinking everything changes. It doesn’t take long for the circus being marketed by the mainstream begins to look fully ridiculous if not insane. The US however is not the only empire-mimicking fraud here.
Exactly. This is why my first piece of life changing advice is to avoid the MSM. It is The Matrix and you will not see reality until you are divorced from it.
KMT and Taiwan are the rocks upon which the school of CIA/MIC-IMATT corruption were founded. The USA is always complaining about how China steals USA technology, but the USA here stole 5000 years of refining how to run a graft machine. Madam Chang, her brother-in-law and their families stole enough money from the funding sent into China to secure major shares in Texaco (Chevron), Chase Manhattan, etc. Madam Chang, Henry Luce, and the Dulles brothers created the model of the media circus, money laundry, weapons sales theft, human trafficking, drug smuggling, etc. that we see in it's refined form with USA in Afghanistan and Ukraine. Those Congress-beasts are just the latest in a long line of trough feeders sticking their snouts in to the slop.
Yes the empire is corrupt, lacks any hint of conscience, but has spread itself so thin in its quest for global domination it has grown weaker. You seem to suggest China is without aspirations of global dominance just like the US. All governments should be feared but without any knowledge of history when the fear finally arrives it may arrive too late.
Odd how you go from Caitlin's sentence one can read above:
"Normal person: China's misdeeds have been greatly exaggerated by western propaganda and the US is quantifiably far more murderous and destructive." -Caitlin
to ...
"You seem to suggest China is without aspirations of global dominance..." -T Paine
And then you conclude a false equivalency between China and the US. I mean, for starters Mr. Paine: just compare the military budgets of China versus the US. I mean FOR FUCKS SAKE.
For fucks sake? China was handed the critical tools, technology and knowledge of our bureaucracy through our Universities, corporations and government stupidity putting them in a position to dominate the US much quicker than any of these same entities expected. Your thinking of military budgets in 20th century terms and demonstrating your failure to consider how irrelevant boots on the ground or ships at sea has become. Nobody knows how many millions of its own citizens the Chinese have killed so making comparisons is comparing apples and oranges. I’m not defending our corrupt corporations, military or gov just recognizing the dependence our society relies on China for its continued existence. I’ve been in the military , held government positions know the stupidity, lies and corruption first hand and incompetence is the rule as clearly demonstrated for half a century and beyond. Yes our government is guilty of killing untold foreign lives and is quilts of spreading death across the globe and I condemn it. That does not mean I need to ignore the potential China has to seek revenge for past transgressions f it on the West. You also assume our bloated military budget is efficient and competently allocated and free from corruption which would be naive to assume based on results and MIC profits.
That you without pause or question drink CIA cool aid cooked up by Nazi employees is very American. There is no external cure for that addiction, you'll have to fix your compass yourself there. While that's damn unlikely, but not impossible.
I also guess you're okay with killing other countries citizens, for which no one can top the USA. Now, let's look at all that fiction you take as fact. Me, I figure that it is less abhorrent for a nation to kill it's own citizens since in some way they are responsible for the government. It's far more abhorrent to kill people who are innocent and have absolutely no agency at all just to steal and begger them. However, I can understand why you think that way, son of a country built on genocide and and empire maintained by it. It helps you sleep.
You’re right I’m wrong. Your latest response is adversarial just like your original post. If you had read anything I wrote you would know I feel much more sympathy for the thousands killed by the US than the fools who claimed they were spreading democracy. To suggest I’ve drank the CIA cool-aid is absurd.
Have you followed Chinas global investment strategy? The logical consequences of a country powerful enough to challenge the US would be foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity. There is no guaranty China will be successful in dominating the planet but empires follow a consistent cycle, Ray Dario’s “The Changing World Order” is one voice recognizing Chinas opportunity to dominate the planet.
Families may be based on a hierarchy but it’s a stretch to consider it a government with the power of incarceration and death. Yes all groups of humans are social creations the alternative is anti social and solitude. I don’t see your point.
The last sentence reminds me of Bastiat's essay, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. Peace pays plenty, if only because resources and thought aren't being spent on destruction. All military expenditure falls under the Broken Window Fallacy.
We can't without impoverishing ourselves. The Russian sanctions proved that. Europe is plunging into an energy nightmare and it's only going to get worse.
the only thing the empire has left is its military...which is of no use against the combined forces of Russia and China...the ruse is up...the end of the empire is nigh...the only remaining question is will Dr. Strangelove turn from fiction to reality...https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/creativity-entrepreneurship-and-other-american-myths/
Pfizer thinks they can make money out of "health," but what they did was create a poisonous shot that some people like RFK, Jr., and others estimate injure or kill 1 to 4% of every person who gets it. Pfizer doesn't care about human life.
The shot, and the lockdowns, and all of the restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly were the greatest infringement on freedom, worldwide, since WWII or Communism.
Governments in general in the last 100 years have killed over 262,000,000 people according to Professor RJ Rummel.
Caitlin is right about many things. It would be nice to get her take on the poison death shot, the unnecessary lockdowns that impoverished hundreds of millions of people--and which will lead to millions of deaths due to starvation. And to the oppressors who would like to reduce the world population to half a billion people, which they justify with their heavy propaganda of "climate change."
I am so sick of people promoting war against Russia, against China, and war against the people of the world. The propaganda always says its for our own good, too, as they take away our livelihood, and our ability to not live under the shadow of death.
It is surprising how selective the outrage is concerning the vaccines. For anyone that does even a modest amount of investigation, it becomes clear that these shots are killing an incredible number of people and harming innumerable others, most outrageously children.
This is pitchforks and torches in the street level stuff, yet there is notable silence, or at best equivocation, amongst our most reliable ‘truth to power’ observers. Caitlin comes to mind, as does Taibbi, Greenwald, and Rogan.
I am at a loss to account for it but I think at least part of the reason is that they are aware of the unscrupulous nature of the forces lined up against them. Big Pharma does kill people and not just with needles. As does our government.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand against it.
Not really, it's chicken shit to rage about shots. It's dangerous to organize against Washington, and even more dangerous to organize against Wall Street. On the other hand, the world is full of living, even thriving anti-vacs.
war is always between the rich / exploitative 1% and the poor / exploited 99% across borders and times, not between religions, races, states, nations, continents, civilizations, sexes, or anything else.
There are those who know, your comments and your commentators and the majority who stare at screens in their spare time. I'm not elitist. I'm too lazy to waste time pretending anything but somehow being so isolated feels great. Except when they tell you what they believe and it isn't the bottle talking cause they haven't got the bottle to back up the digital bilge they froth their skulls with. It's interesting the Amerikans [that is the correct European spelling] are rather normal. I wonder who the media as gabbing to.
"Americans are the most propagandized population on earth" - they are also the most hypocritical population on earth except maybe the English. They fully embrace the ends justify the means concept, but they'll never ever admit to it.
Among the fundamentalist like Mike Pompeo, they revel in the use of any means to get the desired end, see it as a proof of their commitment, that they well and truly deserve to be seated at the right hand of their god.
Forget Pompeo. What about those neocons in the Biden White House, in the State Department that are calling the shots when it comes to our foreign policy? Now we've put Ukraine in a protracted war with Russia with the expectation of bleeding Russia dry, as we did in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Way back Pelosi in 2003 was on the intel committee during the build up to war in Iraq and claims she knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, and therefore her reason to vote no on the war, but she didn't tell Joe who used his position in the Senate to push the war in Iraq on his fellow democrats. Lot of blame to go around when we push an agenda for war, and confrontation. Sometimes we take sides. Ms Johnstone in an article referencing the war in Ukraine let Obama off the hook, since he didn't send any weapons, recognizing it was too dangerous, but Trump did. However she did fail to mention that it was the Obama administration that instigated the coup in Ukraine, with the help of nazis, overturning a pro-Russian government, not to mention our many democrats that pushed Russia-gate along with the left. Boy that didn't help. Too often we put the onus on the right, but too often, especially during Trump's presidency, the left helped our government along in it's self righteous exploitation of the world using Trump-hate and Russia-gate to do it, and few on the left, like Mate, and Greenwald challenged the lie.
You mistake fundamentalist for Republican, then you mistake the Democrat for being left. That's a big discount already.
Hardly. I can give you a running history of how the democrats veered right after or during the Carter administration and Billy Clinton really took the party to the right. They really lost me after that. I don't understand how you came to your assessment after what I said.
This assessment is the one I have too. No longer a Democrat, and never a Republican, I can say that the Dem Party is nowhere near it was in the 60's or 70's, and even that was when I was still oblivious to many of its shortcomings, such as its support for empire, war, and US exceptionalism. It's indefensible now since it stands for nothing in regard to the common good, using the accomplishments of FDR as if it still believes in those things. It doesn't and is in fact assisting Republicans in destroying those limited gains.
I was always a registered democrat until the Trump years when the dems came across as a bunch of saintly autocrats which they continue to push to this day.
I hear about how Obama helped precipitate the Maidan revolution in 2014 but, other than a phone conversation with Victoria Nuland, I've never heard what the U.S. did specifically. Give me this and I'll believe the premise
Check out Aaron Mate'of the Grayzones full set of reporting on Ukraine coup. Of course I can't give it to you, no one can. You have to take knowledge from where you can find it, and learn out to sieve a truth from it, but the first step is taking it.
But that's the problem. Aaron makes conclusionary statements that states our operational intent. But he doesn't say HOW it was done. Without this evidence, I can't support the conclusion.
What's that thing in front of his conclusionary statements? Oh, it's evidence. Willful ignorance cannot be cured by any 2nd or 3rd party, I'm sorry to tell you.
What that phone conversation conveyed between Nuland, who is a neocon and was in Obama's State Dept, and now in Biden's, and Jeffery Pyatt, who was the ambassador to Ukraine, was a discussion on who was to take over the reins of power in Ukraine. Basically they ousted a pro-Russian government with one that was not. Ukraine is a very corrupt country, the most corrupt in Europe and the 9th most corrupt in the world. You have to also realize we supported neo-nazi's that were mainly instrumental in driving this coup. Our objective was clear, and that was to install a pro-western government in Ukraine right up against Russia's borders. Our agenda has always been, even before supporting this coup to diminish Russia's power like we did during the Clinton years in supporting Yeltsin who was an American pawn used by Russian and American Oligarchs that bled that country dry causing the life expectancy for each age group in Russia to go down by some 10 years. Now we plan to use Ukraine as a means of accomplishing the goal of severely weakening Russia and ousting Putin. We will no doubt have a long protracted war in Ukraine, using that country and it's people to obtain our goal. We did this in Afghanistan in the 1980's by supplying the Mujahideen with weapons to fight Russia, and we bled her dry.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/07/eu-us-diplomat-victoria-nuland-phonecall-leaked-video
No, the conversation said who they supported. It doesn't say how they would make that happen. Again, I'm not saying Aaron is wrong. What I'm saying there needs to be evidence of the means. Money? Paramilitary teams? Disinformation campaigns? What was it? Without this info, the conclusion is like HRC saying the Russians manipulated the 2016 election, omitting that the "manipulation" was $100k in Facebook ads that were nonsensical. Let's hold our fav journalists to the same standards they hold the MSM.
Yes, we supported the coup and helped out a bunch of neo-nazi's with their agenda. We supported it. Watch Oliver Stone's documentary on our role in overturning a pro-Russian president, Yanukovych. Nuland, who was in Obama's State Department, and now in Biden's, and married to Robert Kagan. If you don't know who he is, well, he's one of the biggest neocons of them all, like Cheney. Both signed on to the Project for a New American Century. Read their manifesto and understand why our many wars in the Middle East in the the 21st century. Here's their philosophy, " ...liberal international organizations can intervene in other states in order to pursue liberal objectives. The latter can include humanitarian aid and military intervention." Not to mention US dominion over the world. Dick Cheney is a neocon, and their agenda led us into our Middle Eastern wars. We even armed the the Azov battalion in Ukraine in 2018. They're nazi's. They killed a lot of people in the Donbass region which gave us this war with Russia. Do you know how we armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan which eventually bled Russia dry and our intention in the Ukraine is the same and to hell with the people and their country. Zelensky is nothing but a comedian turned crook.
There's zero doubt with the likes of Pompeo. I was referring more to the "regular" folks. When the push comes to shove you better hold on to your balls as "below the belt" rule is for fools only.
I'm not sure I've met a regular American in all my years there, but I can say that Mike Pompeo is a perfect example of the more radical among the Southern Baptist, Agnus Dei, Mormon. Some of them give the Sunni Wahab a real run for the money, particularly the Southern Baptist. The rest mostly feign ignorance, but if offered to switch to smushed brown children to fill their diesel pickup truck tanks, many probably will even pay a premium for the thrill of doing it themselves. Most of rest will fall in line if you just give them enough of a discount. Those that don't, morally can't, will be isolated, and eventually take out to where they hide the other bodies.
https://youtu.be/JA8I5ADd4Mk
I have lived among the Southern Baptists almost my whole life. "Some of them give the Sunni Wahab a real run for the money". I don't know how extreme or crazy the Sunni Wahab are, but the Baptists are top notch crazy. They love nothing more than to shove their 'morality' down as many people's throats as they possibly can.
Would this guy be an example of that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSIrQBGfUtw
I must admit all these sects and their orgies scare the bejeezus out of me. Luckily there are humorous takes on it out there now. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPRvxTjfOk
Lol. Yeah, except it's even worse when they become judges and legislators. For me, there is nothing that the woke folks can do that would be worse than what has been done by these people.
If I could I'd downvote you for that bit of bigotry rb!
I am a born and bred Englishman and I am writing this post from England.
I have cousins in the US, mostly in New York City. And among other things I am a casual student of the Russian language. (Not easy - you should try it).
Despite my strong dislike for the US Empire I nevertheless do not attempt to tar all Americans with the same brush. There are very many decent Americans. (I know Caitlin will agree with me on that). So I wouldn't be inclined to say all Americans are (....) choose your insult. They're not all the same.
Similarly with Russians. I know only the teachers whose blogs I follow. But they are all very nice people as far as I can tell. Nothing like their stereotypes and none of them interested in war. In fact one teacher left Russia in disgust in March 2022.
I accept your downvote and will mentally subtract it from the total number of upvotes.
If you read carefully I never said "all" anywhere. I continued the line used by Caitlin, namely "Americans...". That there are all kinds of people everywhere on a personal level is a given. We, however, talk about the general tendencies of a population enabling certain behavior for their governments.
As for Russian language - I'm a native speaker so not burdened with its difficulties :)
As to your Russian teacher having left "in disgust" - ask her whether she was disgusted with the 8 years bombing of Donbass by the Ukraine.
Feel free to ask me about Russian language. Despite your downvote I appreciate your efforts. It's not easy indeed.
Apologists for US aggression everywhere are either vested interests or imbeciles - and perhaps they completely overlap. The evidence is overwhelming, there are libraries full of it, not to mention still living victims. But history is not on their side, and neither is the economy, which is about to disclose its secrets very candidly. If some believe barking at the moon is the solution, so be it.
One of the things I don't understand is the liberal-synthetic left-regular citizen's disinterest in living true to the ideals they seem to profess. I get that many people are hypocrites or venal or greedy or power-hungry. Many but not most. Most people aren't evil. Most people don't want to live a lie, or have to lie to live, or have to believe lies to live as they believe...
So wtf is going on with overnight adoption of Ukraine flags or relentless neocon anti-China populism or obsession with the day's news gossip to the exclusion of anything that matters? Why don't people get bored of the bullshit?
Why don't people who want a better world - or a safer world - prioritize this decency when it comes to who they vote for, what they listen to, where they get their information? I don't get it.
The only answers are unsatisfactory. It's always generalizations, abstractions, dismissing individual agency to fit this or that group into some sweeping stereotype. I've never heard anyone nail why reality matters so little and fantasies matter so much. It's unnatural, even in the face of our vast propaganda machinery.
Oh well. If anyone can explain why - to give an example relevant today - nobody gives a f**k about nuclear omnicide; and yet spend hours every day consuming news, forming convictions, believing in good over evil; I'm all ears...
In a nutshell, because every attempt to organise/mobilise mass opposition to big business has been crushed. From the defeat of William Jennings Bryan and the arrest and imprisonment of Eugene Debbs the bosses have had it their own way. Good intentions are not worth a thing in the absence of widespread, organised, expressions of soldarity between ordinary people. The 'Left' today is a controlled opposition designed to misdirect the energies of people who seek change, the ideas/rhetoric of the 'Left' is essentially sentimental, rather than pragmatic.
Bots are the arbitrors of what is popular sentiment, the rest follows. Fact checkers and censorship remove popular opinion that may persuade. Logic therefore is banished to the more biological need to fit in the middle of the group, sheltered from danger. Witness the changing of the tide, the sheep will jump like hot tamales. So simple. Control, with great and gross efforts the speaking, and the biology of the accursed will damn them. Free speech is a right that speaks to our very human traits. Address this fully and the cabal will fall.
Well, just negate your first paragraph and all will make sense. Most people, not many, are those bad things you describe. Hence the results.
If you are not already familiar with the term “mass formation” (sometimes called “mass formation psychosis”), you may want to search for it. The Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet is the current best explainer of what it is. He’s all over YouTube (and Rumble) and well worth a little time.
Hi Jack 💯 check out my call to action
https://youtu.be/KXzkg1iHmcU
Maybe none of it amounts to a hill of beans. They say it's all random anyway right? I mean - you and I are just random atoms that will soon disappear forever. That's what all the experts say ...
'I've never heard anyone nail why reality matters so little and fantasies matter so much.'
Because the whole of society and culture is based on the false premise that the spiritual and the physical are fundamentally different. Start with a fantasy and this is what we get.
I respectfully disagree. The real reason is much simpler: the overwhelming centrality of entertainment in our culture and in the daily lives of most people has reset the norms for thinking and experience itself. If they spend enough time every day in front of a tv screen people will come to prefer the soothing immersion in fantasy over reality of any kind. Intoxification and psycho-affective disablement by way of entertainment. Digital entertainment, supplemented by poor diet, lack of exercise, limited exposure to the natural world, disrupted sleep and drugs like cannabis produce a population that is zombified.
What most people brought up in the Judeo-Christian traditions of the West do not seem to appreciate is that "good" and "evil" are subjective judgments.
Maybe you will find a satisfactory explanation of human behaviour in the works of Slavoj Zizek and his followers.
When we as Americans divorce ourselves from the MSM, corporate-governments-institutional BS snd pay attention to what similarly independent and now divorced from the mainstream are thinking everything changes. It doesn’t take long for the circus being marketed by the mainstream begins to look fully ridiculous if not insane. The US however is not the only empire-mimicking fraud here.
Exactly. This is why my first piece of life changing advice is to avoid the MSM. It is The Matrix and you will not see reality until you are divorced from it.
KMT and Taiwan are the rocks upon which the school of CIA/MIC-IMATT corruption were founded. The USA is always complaining about how China steals USA technology, but the USA here stole 5000 years of refining how to run a graft machine. Madam Chang, her brother-in-law and their families stole enough money from the funding sent into China to secure major shares in Texaco (Chevron), Chase Manhattan, etc. Madam Chang, Henry Luce, and the Dulles brothers created the model of the media circus, money laundry, weapons sales theft, human trafficking, drug smuggling, etc. that we see in it's refined form with USA in Afghanistan and Ukraine. Those Congress-beasts are just the latest in a long line of trough feeders sticking their snouts in to the slop.
Yes the empire is corrupt, lacks any hint of conscience, but has spread itself so thin in its quest for global domination it has grown weaker. You seem to suggest China is without aspirations of global dominance just like the US. All governments should be feared but without any knowledge of history when the fear finally arrives it may arrive too late.
Odd how you go from Caitlin's sentence one can read above:
"Normal person: China's misdeeds have been greatly exaggerated by western propaganda and the US is quantifiably far more murderous and destructive." -Caitlin
to ...
"You seem to suggest China is without aspirations of global dominance..." -T Paine
And then you conclude a false equivalency between China and the US. I mean, for starters Mr. Paine: just compare the military budgets of China versus the US. I mean FOR FUCKS SAKE.
For fucks sake? China was handed the critical tools, technology and knowledge of our bureaucracy through our Universities, corporations and government stupidity putting them in a position to dominate the US much quicker than any of these same entities expected. Your thinking of military budgets in 20th century terms and demonstrating your failure to consider how irrelevant boots on the ground or ships at sea has become. Nobody knows how many millions of its own citizens the Chinese have killed so making comparisons is comparing apples and oranges. I’m not defending our corrupt corporations, military or gov just recognizing the dependence our society relies on China for its continued existence. I’ve been in the military , held government positions know the stupidity, lies and corruption first hand and incompetence is the rule as clearly demonstrated for half a century and beyond. Yes our government is guilty of killing untold foreign lives and is quilts of spreading death across the globe and I condemn it. That does not mean I need to ignore the potential China has to seek revenge for past transgressions f it on the West. You also assume our bloated military budget is efficient and competently allocated and free from corruption which would be naive to assume based on results and MIC profits.
That you without pause or question drink CIA cool aid cooked up by Nazi employees is very American. There is no external cure for that addiction, you'll have to fix your compass yourself there. While that's damn unlikely, but not impossible.
I also guess you're okay with killing other countries citizens, for which no one can top the USA. Now, let's look at all that fiction you take as fact. Me, I figure that it is less abhorrent for a nation to kill it's own citizens since in some way they are responsible for the government. It's far more abhorrent to kill people who are innocent and have absolutely no agency at all just to steal and begger them. However, I can understand why you think that way, son of a country built on genocide and and empire maintained by it. It helps you sleep.
You’re right I’m wrong. Your latest response is adversarial just like your original post. If you had read anything I wrote you would know I feel much more sympathy for the thousands killed by the US than the fools who claimed they were spreading democracy. To suggest I’ve drank the CIA cool-aid is absurd.
But who is telling you that China seeks global domination?
Have you followed Chinas global investment strategy? The logical consequences of a country powerful enough to challenge the US would be foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity. There is no guaranty China will be successful in dominating the planet but empires follow a consistent cycle, Ray Dario’s “The Changing World Order” is one voice recognizing Chinas opportunity to dominate the planet.
Do you fear the government of your family, and do others in the family fear? family, tribe, nation, all are social creations.
Families may be based on a hierarchy but it’s a stretch to consider it a government with the power of incarceration and death. Yes all groups of humans are social creations the alternative is anti social and solitude. I don’t see your point.
Why should China desire global dominance?
The last sentence reminds me of Bastiat's essay, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. Peace pays plenty, if only because resources and thought aren't being spent on destruction. All military expenditure falls under the Broken Window Fallacy.
Since virtually everything we buy in the USA is made in China, how can we ever de-couple?
We can't without impoverishing ourselves. The Russian sanctions proved that. Europe is plunging into an energy nightmare and it's only going to get worse.
the only thing the empire has left is its military...which is of no use against the combined forces of Russia and China...the ruse is up...the end of the empire is nigh...the only remaining question is will Dr. Strangelove turn from fiction to reality...https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/creativity-entrepreneurship-and-other-american-myths/
Pfizer thinks they can make money out of "health," but what they did was create a poisonous shot that some people like RFK, Jr., and others estimate injure or kill 1 to 4% of every person who gets it. Pfizer doesn't care about human life.
The shot, and the lockdowns, and all of the restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly were the greatest infringement on freedom, worldwide, since WWII or Communism.
Governments in general in the last 100 years have killed over 262,000,000 people according to Professor RJ Rummel.
Caitlin is right about many things. It would be nice to get her take on the poison death shot, the unnecessary lockdowns that impoverished hundreds of millions of people--and which will lead to millions of deaths due to starvation. And to the oppressors who would like to reduce the world population to half a billion people, which they justify with their heavy propaganda of "climate change."
I am so sick of people promoting war against Russia, against China, and war against the people of the world. The propaganda always says its for our own good, too, as they take away our livelihood, and our ability to not live under the shadow of death.
It is surprising how selective the outrage is concerning the vaccines. For anyone that does even a modest amount of investigation, it becomes clear that these shots are killing an incredible number of people and harming innumerable others, most outrageously children.
This is pitchforks and torches in the street level stuff, yet there is notable silence, or at best equivocation, amongst our most reliable ‘truth to power’ observers. Caitlin comes to mind, as does Taibbi, Greenwald, and Rogan.
I am at a loss to account for it but I think at least part of the reason is that they are aware of the unscrupulous nature of the forces lined up against them. Big Pharma does kill people and not just with needles. As does our government.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand against it.
Not really, it's chicken shit to rage about shots. It's dangerous to organize against Washington, and even more dangerous to organize against Wall Street. On the other hand, the world is full of living, even thriving anti-vacs.
Caitlin explained why she has not written about the covid vaccines in detail in a comment a couple of days ago.
Interesting. Did not know that. Will try to find it.
Things you CAN make money from:
Peace (which MUST give us a free global marketplace).
The Biosphere and environment
Health (again through the free market, innovation and competition).
And………… Energy
-Exploitative slave wages
-Political speeches for Wallstreet Executives
-Drone manufacturing
-Private Information culling: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
-Big Pharma Drugs
-Goldman Sachs Pyramid Schemes
-USAAF Fighter jets that never fly
-$7 dollar a gallon oil monopolies/collusion
-Rent extortion in LA
-Billions to Ukraine that disappear ...
-Being the son of Joe Biden
-Becoming POTUS like Trump
That’s not a response, it’s a tsunami. I can’t address all this. I would like to. But you’re obviously just hunting for combat. I’m not the one.
Oh I forgot about the excellence of "privatization"! And all the good it brings to ordinary people.
-Privatizing public schools
-Privatizing the post office
-Privatizing the roads
-Privatizing the police
-Privatize former public land
-Privatize parks
Hey privatize whatever we mofos can get our hands on and make a tidy profit from.
Anyone who consumes MSM is engaging in self harm.
Ain't nobody gonna make no money from world war four
Chaka Khan should incorporate this line in her hit from now on.
I m Russian too
Welcome to the club: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAPwIEWzqJE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=zNtSsBJUCZM
this one from pre IsoLa, sans bass, oh well...
the Rule of Freedom is meant to be...
another fine piece of Russian music, (in Englishkie...)
war is always between the rich / exploitative 1% and the poor / exploited 99% across borders and times, not between religions, races, states, nations, continents, civilizations, sexes, or anything else.
There are those who know, your comments and your commentators and the majority who stare at screens in their spare time. I'm not elitist. I'm too lazy to waste time pretending anything but somehow being so isolated feels great. Except when they tell you what they believe and it isn't the bottle talking cause they haven't got the bottle to back up the digital bilge they froth their skulls with. It's interesting the Amerikans [that is the correct European spelling] are rather normal. I wonder who the media as gabbing to.
I have looked and cannot find this post. Can you provide a link or a title? Thanks.