Perhaps tech platforms need to feed the contents of Human Pathophysiology texts to their algorithms. Scott Ritter's analysis of the deterioration of exposed corpses over time is spot on. The science and the available data hence do not support the conclusion of Russian atrocities in Bucha. But no worries, clearly algorithms written by corporate profit scroungers are more trustworthy than the condition of bodies assessed by someone with direct experience of war. In like manner, those algorithms clearly comprehend more immunology than respected immunologists or teachers who cite principles rigorously established over the past 50 years. It's all just evidence that any assessments of complex systems made in the context of a Capitalist culture that reduces everything to profit can never be trusted. I find it more difficult every morning to awaken to life in a brilliantly logical biosphere whose top predator species functions within the illogical scientific framework of consume-and-discard, poisoning essential ecological resources, and unlimited growth.
This also can be construed as a move towards socialist totalitarianism with "big brother" running the show. All isms run to dogma and control and profits for elitists whether scientific technocrats or "benevolent leaders" Yours and mine only safety is a strong Bill of Rights and no subhuming the Constitution further to a supranational power like the WHO. A federation of nations that can openly discuss their issues is OK but I draw the line too at the last sentence of yours that everything we do is illogical and motivated by unlimited growth.
Neo-feudal totalitarianism. Corporations are feudal fiefs, and those who control them must give fealty to the political powers that grant their charters. Otherwise, they will be accused of monopolism and brought before feudal courts in various capitol buildings. Presidents and Prime Ministers govern by Divine Right granted by the papacy of the power elite who meet at Davos, the CRF, Roundtable etc.
Adding to anti-republocrat below, when you have unsettled science promoting technocrats in government setting societal policy and overriding human rights you have what I said. In the extreme they would settle the social security and pension issues by denying you all social credit by say, age 60 to 65. Go take a final shot.
That said, cull the corporate bureaucracy control structure with Www.movetoamend.org
I agree that all isms eventually lead to hell (though small-a anarchism may be as close as we get to an anti-ism or at least a self-limiting ism).
With regard to your statement that our “only safety is a strong Bill of Rights,” I agree this would help, but only so long as those rights are respected and defended by corporations, since corporations now provide much (if not most) of our governance but have absolutely no obligation to respect or defend the Bill of Rights. Corporations are extra-Constitutional entities, and Government is now little more than a facilitator and cheerleader of corporate control over our lives. The “public-private partnership,” which is so much in vogue in western "democracies" today, was once the definition of fascism. Since the day when Mussolini defined the word, the imperial lexicographers may have changed the definition, but the reality remains the same.
Correct. Until recently, the ruling class was able to manage public discourse by owning the media; expression was nominally free but considerations of power and wealth constrained television, newspapers, and radio to follow the official line. The internet radically reduced the cost of communication, and there was panic for awhile among the gatekeepers. We're seeing the latest, and maybe the last phase, of this loss of control. It's not actually due to the technology; it's mainly due to the decline of the quality of the ruling class, which goes back some decades. We may observe a significant break soon. One is tempted to wish for this, but our regime change, like so many others, may turn out to be for the worse. Nevertheless, any opening should probably be exploited; otherwise, "nothing fundamental will change."
Back in The Good Old Days, publishing news was hard. For one thing, you needed a printing press, which was expensive and required specialized staff to operate it. Not only that, but a printing press cost money for every sheet of paper printed, and you had to spend more money on distribution.
They say that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" but there's more! Unless you planned to publish as an expensive and time-consuming hobby, you needed an income stream. You would get some money from subscriptions, but subscriptions are really a means to sell advertising. Dependence on advertising meant that there were some people the publisher had to keep happy, and others he could not afford to annoy.
Anyone who knows anything about local news knows this. At best, it's a tightrope walk between giving subscribers the news they want to know, and not infuriating your advertisers. The result was a sort of natural censorship. Publishers had to think long and hard before they published anything that would tork the bigwigs off. The fact that a publisher was tied to a physical location and physical assets also made libel suits much easier.
The internet changed all that. Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop and WiFi can go into the news publishing business by nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and advertising revenue, to boot. Marginal cost of readership is zero. Needless to say, this development has The People That Matter very concerned, and they are working hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
The difficulty for the Tech-Elite-Big Government is that humanity and the societies it forms has survived thousands of years communicating without the Social Media.
Censorship is “a tell” and it the last resort of those who cannot rationally communicate and persuade.
If you do not worship the Cathedrals narrative, you are a dangerous heretic. They wish they had the CCP social credit score system where you can be unpersoned for disobedience with one click.
Believe me, we'll be meeting them, soon enough? US liberals throwing midterms, then handing executive branch to Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Trump... starting to see a pattern? Our lurkers will be kicking in our doors in 5... 4... 3...
I'm guessing, algorithms tracking IP DNS of our petulant rants were all being stored & cross-referenced way before Snowden joined Booz-Allen? Betya, a lota-whole-buncha these blog-aggregators are simply pfishing by antiterrorism spook firms, trying to mau-mau affluent boomer yuppies?
Isn't victim blaming the entire defense whenever Israel inflicts civilian deaths on the Palestinians? Can't wait to see all pro-Israel media curtailed. Oh, wait. You mean these rules are being applied conditionally? There's not only no fire; there isn't even a movie theater.
Scott Ritter’s famous tweet below (April 6, 2022). He was immediately banned from Tweeter – than reinstated and soon again permanently banned without explanation.
Remember, Scott courageously fought US bipartisan War party’s WMD fraud in Iraq from the very start.
“The Ukrainian National Police committed numerous crimes against humanity in Bucha. Biden, in seeking to shift blame for the Bucha murders to Russia, is guilty of aiding and abetting these crimes. Congratulations America…. We’ve created yet another Presidential war criminal !!”
-----------------------------------------------
@DefenceUkraine -- regarding the Tochka-U fired at the train station:
Get the serial number of the missile off the debris. Provide a list of all Tochka-U’s in your inventory by serial number. Prove that missile was never in your inventory.
But you can’t, because it was.. GUILTY !! --- Scott Ritter tweet – April 8, 2022
----------------------------------
Scott Ritter and The Battle of the Donbas – April 11, 2022
In 2013 The US passed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act. An act that originally came about in 1948 following WWII and the acknowledgement that propaganda directed at a domestic audience is perilous to democracy. The evidence of Joseph Goebbels' deployment of propaganda on the citizens of Germany as Exhibit A.
The "modernization" of it was effectively a repeal of the ban on propaganda through domestic media. Republicans and Democrats alike supported the repeal. Media and "fact check" reports following the "modernization" claimed there was no effective repeal of the ban. Of course, following the repeal of the ban the media and "fact checkers" were by the very passage of the act, propagandists. So when known propagandists say they aren't disseminating propaganda it stands to reason that their denial is propaganda.
The rest, as they say, is history. And the present. And the future? Is up to us.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
We'd turned off "network news Jan 20, 1981. Actually misplaced our 19" B&W Sony for a while, until we needed it to watch I Claudius, PeeWee's Playhouse and MST3K. In the US, I can certainly attest to ABSOLUTE falsehood in NYC coverage of COVID, Ukraine, Russia-Russia-Russia, Iraq, bin Laden's family relationship with Bush, Israeli, al Saud & Atlantic Council involvement in U S wars of imperialism. ANYTHING to do with AGW, "our" party's fracking Ponsi scheme, ANYTHING to do with WTO, trade agreements, ISDS panels; ANY mention of DNC simply disappearing primary ballots, cops murdering us, etc?
Caitlin, your conclusions, "It's not about saving Ukrainians, ending Covid misinformation, preventing violence, or any of the other excuses they've been rolling out since 2016. It's about censoring the internet," are spot on.
Elite power structures welcomed the internet because it increases the reach of their propaganda. Its use by alternative voices, and their appeal to a growing number of skeptics, blind-sided that power elite. They're using a two pronged approach to shut down those dissident voices and solidify their own power. One prong was Ajit Pai's attack on net neutrality. Net neutrality prevented ISPs from discriminating against independent platforms that compete with popular social media (like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook) by classifying ISPs as common carriers like telephone. Voices for freedom have not yet won that battle, though some progress has been made, particularly at the state and local levels. The other prong is to use corporate social media giants for censorship by proxy, threatening them with anti-trust actions if they don't comply with censorship demanded by government. The courts have yet to deal with that.
As Caitlin correctly sums it up, "The idea is to keep the vast propagandizing power of the internet open while forcing its democratizing power closed, thereby keeping the balance of power tilted far toward the empire managers while manipulating us into believing this is all happening for our own good. But that's all it is: manipulation. Psychological manipulation at mass scale, for the benefit of the powerful. That's all this has ever been."
I do have a minor criticism of Caitlin when she writes, "...at least the arguments about the need to prevent violence technically made sense," and later, "...at least the argument that people were dying as a result of being misinformed about a deadly virus technically made sense." There's a wealth of case law defining incitement to violence, and neither Alex Jones nor QAnon were ever indicted for it. Similarly, we've never before shut down the speech of even the most egregious "snake oil" salesmen on that basis. The most dangerous of "patent medicines" like laudenum were discredited by allowing the salesmen's speech and refuting it. The rampant censorship and propaganda has actually discredited the CDC, FDA, NIH and even CMS and DOD. Censorship continues to the actual destruction of lives, as it always does.
Never give an inch, Caitlin. That small sliver of territory will defeat you.
Maybe it's worth considering taking our bad selves back to the garden eschewing the wonders of modern technology in order to send a message that we no longer will participate in any of the censorship or propagandizing. Shut down and de-power the web. What do we really need it for anyway? Isn't it possible we, the "revolutionaries" sitting at our screens, are actually, in some way perpetuating the ouroboros of materialistic, imperialist madness? Maybe it's simply time to walk away. I mean how many windmills can we fight at once?
Perhaps tech platforms need to feed the contents of Human Pathophysiology texts to their algorithms. Scott Ritter's analysis of the deterioration of exposed corpses over time is spot on. The science and the available data hence do not support the conclusion of Russian atrocities in Bucha. But no worries, clearly algorithms written by corporate profit scroungers are more trustworthy than the condition of bodies assessed by someone with direct experience of war. In like manner, those algorithms clearly comprehend more immunology than respected immunologists or teachers who cite principles rigorously established over the past 50 years. It's all just evidence that any assessments of complex systems made in the context of a Capitalist culture that reduces everything to profit can never be trusted. I find it more difficult every morning to awaken to life in a brilliantly logical biosphere whose top predator species functions within the illogical scientific framework of consume-and-discard, poisoning essential ecological resources, and unlimited growth.
This also can be construed as a move towards socialist totalitarianism with "big brother" running the show. All isms run to dogma and control and profits for elitists whether scientific technocrats or "benevolent leaders" Yours and mine only safety is a strong Bill of Rights and no subhuming the Constitution further to a supranational power like the WHO. A federation of nations that can openly discuss their issues is OK but I draw the line too at the last sentence of yours that everything we do is illogical and motivated by unlimited growth.
Not socialist totalitarianism at all. This is Fascist capitalist authoritarianism FOR SURE.
Neo-feudal totalitarianism. Corporations are feudal fiefs, and those who control them must give fealty to the political powers that grant their charters. Otherwise, they will be accused of monopolism and brought before feudal courts in various capitol buildings. Presidents and Prime Ministers govern by Divine Right granted by the papacy of the power elite who meet at Davos, the CRF, Roundtable etc.
Adding to anti-republocrat below, when you have unsettled science promoting technocrats in government setting societal policy and overriding human rights you have what I said. In the extreme they would settle the social security and pension issues by denying you all social credit by say, age 60 to 65. Go take a final shot.
That said, cull the corporate bureaucracy control structure with Www.movetoamend.org
And you're expecting the independent and objective Congress of the United States to pass this amendment?
Yes to an amendment. However, be aware of secondary agendas of some orgs to sheepdog you into "liberal" or Democratic agendas.
I agree that all isms eventually lead to hell (though small-a anarchism may be as close as we get to an anti-ism or at least a self-limiting ism).
With regard to your statement that our “only safety is a strong Bill of Rights,” I agree this would help, but only so long as those rights are respected and defended by corporations, since corporations now provide much (if not most) of our governance but have absolutely no obligation to respect or defend the Bill of Rights. Corporations are extra-Constitutional entities, and Government is now little more than a facilitator and cheerleader of corporate control over our lives. The “public-private partnership,” which is so much in vogue in western "democracies" today, was once the definition of fascism. Since the day when Mussolini defined the word, the imperial lexicographers may have changed the definition, but the reality remains the same.
Power attracts sociopaths like catnip attracts cats.
Sociopaths are unmotivated by ideology, except as it can be used as a tool for power. Similarly, sociopaths care nothing for consistency.
The increasing reliance upon overt and heavy-handed censorship is a sure sign of weakness and not strength.
Correct. Until recently, the ruling class was able to manage public discourse by owning the media; expression was nominally free but considerations of power and wealth constrained television, newspapers, and radio to follow the official line. The internet radically reduced the cost of communication, and there was panic for awhile among the gatekeepers. We're seeing the latest, and maybe the last phase, of this loss of control. It's not actually due to the technology; it's mainly due to the decline of the quality of the ruling class, which goes back some decades. We may observe a significant break soon. One is tempted to wish for this, but our regime change, like so many others, may turn out to be for the worse. Nevertheless, any opening should probably be exploited; otherwise, "nothing fundamental will change."
To get an idea of how radically disconnected from reality the r.c. and those it has deluded have become, compare "The military situation in the Ukraine" by Jacques Baud, a former Swiss military intelligence officer, with anything you can read in the official media (see https://mronline.org/2022/04/10/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine/ or https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine/ )
Back in The Good Old Days, publishing news was hard. For one thing, you needed a printing press, which was expensive and required specialized staff to operate it. Not only that, but a printing press cost money for every sheet of paper printed, and you had to spend more money on distribution.
They say that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" but there's more! Unless you planned to publish as an expensive and time-consuming hobby, you needed an income stream. You would get some money from subscriptions, but subscriptions are really a means to sell advertising. Dependence on advertising meant that there were some people the publisher had to keep happy, and others he could not afford to annoy.
Anyone who knows anything about local news knows this. At best, it's a tightrope walk between giving subscribers the news they want to know, and not infuriating your advertisers. The result was a sort of natural censorship. Publishers had to think long and hard before they published anything that would tork the bigwigs off. The fact that a publisher was tied to a physical location and physical assets also made libel suits much easier.
The internet changed all that. Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop and WiFi can go into the news publishing business by nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and advertising revenue, to boot. Marginal cost of readership is zero. Needless to say, this development has The People That Matter very concerned, and they are working hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
Read Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class for an analysis of the ruling class even today.
And how we'll have regime change? When we do the hard work to bring it about.
Watch How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary and read From Dictatorship to Democracy the book by Dr Gene Sharp.
"From dictatorship to democracy" seems rather optimistic as a proposition.
The difficulty for the Tech-Elite-Big Government is that humanity and the societies it forms has survived thousands of years communicating without the Social Media.
Censorship is “a tell” and it the last resort of those who cannot rationally communicate and persuade.
If you do not worship the Cathedrals narrative, you are a dangerous heretic. They wish they had the CCP social credit score system where you can be unpersoned for disobedience with one click.
Give them time and they'll give us something that makes the CCP social credit system look like it was designed by pikers.
Too late! ConocoPhillips is already greenwashing it and Biden's calling it a solution to Climate Catastrophe
https://www.desmog.com/2022/03/31/exxon-conocophillips-bitcoin-mining-flare-gas-cryptocurrency-climate-change/
Has anyone else picked up "followers" who have never made comments on anything?
Believe me, we'll be meeting them, soon enough? US liberals throwing midterms, then handing executive branch to Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Trump... starting to see a pattern? Our lurkers will be kicking in our doors in 5... 4... 3...
I'm guessing, algorithms tracking IP DNS of our petulant rants were all being stored & cross-referenced way before Snowden joined Booz-Allen? Betya, a lota-whole-buncha these blog-aggregators are simply pfishing by antiterrorism spook firms, trying to mau-mau affluent boomer yuppies?
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/04/13/ned-finances-key-ukrainian-propaganda-organ-the-kyiv-independent/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4FR1WzmDc9E&feature=emb_title
https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-the-national-endowment-for-democracy
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QNOIo0areC8
Isn't victim blaming the entire defense whenever Israel inflicts civilian deaths on the Palestinians? Can't wait to see all pro-Israel media curtailed. Oh, wait. You mean these rules are being applied conditionally? There's not only no fire; there isn't even a movie theater.
Really insidious to use the "victim blaming" argument to promote US government censorship via corporate proxy.
Interview w/Scott Ritter, April 6, 2022, By Don DeBar -- Bucha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfHohl6gCJY
------------------------------------------------
Scott Ritter’s famous tweet below (April 6, 2022). He was immediately banned from Tweeter – than reinstated and soon again permanently banned without explanation.
Remember, Scott courageously fought US bipartisan War party’s WMD fraud in Iraq from the very start.
“The Ukrainian National Police committed numerous crimes against humanity in Bucha. Biden, in seeking to shift blame for the Bucha murders to Russia, is guilty of aiding and abetting these crimes. Congratulations America…. We’ve created yet another Presidential war criminal !!”
-----------------------------------------------
@DefenceUkraine -- regarding the Tochka-U fired at the train station:
Get the serial number of the missile off the debris. Provide a list of all Tochka-U’s in your inventory by serial number. Prove that missile was never in your inventory.
But you can’t, because it was.. GUILTY !! --- Scott Ritter tweet – April 8, 2022
----------------------------------
Scott Ritter and The Battle of the Donbas – April 11, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5RKNoIhE40
In 2013 The US passed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act. An act that originally came about in 1948 following WWII and the acknowledgement that propaganda directed at a domestic audience is perilous to democracy. The evidence of Joseph Goebbels' deployment of propaganda on the citizens of Germany as Exhibit A.
The "modernization" of it was effectively a repeal of the ban on propaganda through domestic media. Republicans and Democrats alike supported the repeal. Media and "fact check" reports following the "modernization" claimed there was no effective repeal of the ban. Of course, following the repeal of the ban the media and "fact checkers" were by the very passage of the act, propagandists. So when known propagandists say they aren't disseminating propaganda it stands to reason that their denial is propaganda.
The rest, as they say, is history. And the present. And the future? Is up to us.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
We'd turned off "network news Jan 20, 1981. Actually misplaced our 19" B&W Sony for a while, until we needed it to watch I Claudius, PeeWee's Playhouse and MST3K. In the US, I can certainly attest to ABSOLUTE falsehood in NYC coverage of COVID, Ukraine, Russia-Russia-Russia, Iraq, bin Laden's family relationship with Bush, Israeli, al Saud & Atlantic Council involvement in U S wars of imperialism. ANYTHING to do with AGW, "our" party's fracking Ponsi scheme, ANYTHING to do with WTO, trade agreements, ISDS panels; ANY mention of DNC simply disappearing primary ballots, cops murdering us, etc?
At the end of this Chomsky Scahill chat, they begin to discuss important points about this issue. Surprising coming from The Intercept... Also, Noam makes some sense about the proxy war. Back to form. https://theintercept.com/2022/04/14/russia-ukraine-noam-chomsky-jeremy-scahill/
Caitlin, your conclusions, "It's not about saving Ukrainians, ending Covid misinformation, preventing violence, or any of the other excuses they've been rolling out since 2016. It's about censoring the internet," are spot on.
Elite power structures welcomed the internet because it increases the reach of their propaganda. Its use by alternative voices, and their appeal to a growing number of skeptics, blind-sided that power elite. They're using a two pronged approach to shut down those dissident voices and solidify their own power. One prong was Ajit Pai's attack on net neutrality. Net neutrality prevented ISPs from discriminating against independent platforms that compete with popular social media (like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook) by classifying ISPs as common carriers like telephone. Voices for freedom have not yet won that battle, though some progress has been made, particularly at the state and local levels. The other prong is to use corporate social media giants for censorship by proxy, threatening them with anti-trust actions if they don't comply with censorship demanded by government. The courts have yet to deal with that.
As Caitlin correctly sums it up, "The idea is to keep the vast propagandizing power of the internet open while forcing its democratizing power closed, thereby keeping the balance of power tilted far toward the empire managers while manipulating us into believing this is all happening for our own good. But that's all it is: manipulation. Psychological manipulation at mass scale, for the benefit of the powerful. That's all this has ever been."
I do have a minor criticism of Caitlin when she writes, "...at least the arguments about the need to prevent violence technically made sense," and later, "...at least the argument that people were dying as a result of being misinformed about a deadly virus technically made sense." There's a wealth of case law defining incitement to violence, and neither Alex Jones nor QAnon were ever indicted for it. Similarly, we've never before shut down the speech of even the most egregious "snake oil" salesmen on that basis. The most dangerous of "patent medicines" like laudenum were discredited by allowing the salesmen's speech and refuting it. The rampant censorship and propaganda has actually discredited the CDC, FDA, NIH and even CMS and DOD. Censorship continues to the actual destruction of lives, as it always does.
Never give an inch, Caitlin. That small sliver of territory will defeat you.
Maybe it's worth considering taking our bad selves back to the garden eschewing the wonders of modern technology in order to send a message that we no longer will participate in any of the censorship or propagandizing. Shut down and de-power the web. What do we really need it for anyway? Isn't it possible we, the "revolutionaries" sitting at our screens, are actually, in some way perpetuating the ouroboros of materialistic, imperialist madness? Maybe it's simply time to walk away. I mean how many windmills can we fight at once?
bowie was quite prescient in 2000 on the internet
https://www.factmag.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-internet-jeremy-paxman-interview/
Palestine Action in the UK started using Donorbox when all previous platforms - including PayPal - dropped them https://donorbox.org/
"For democracy to survive": we need more censorship - Max Boot
Jefferson is turning in his grave.