This Is Your Brain On Echo Chambers: Right Calls Biden A Xi Puppet As He Packs His Cabinet With China Hawks
This Is Your Brain On Echo Chambers: Right Calls Biden A Xi Puppet As He Packs His Cabinet With China Hawks
This is your brain:
This is your brain on media echo chambers:
Prior to the US election I wrote a couple of articles saying that if Biden wins he will be attacked by the right as a Xi Jinping puppet even as he escalates dangerous cold war aggressions with China, in exactly the same way Trump was attacked by Democrats as a Putin puppet even as he escalated dangerous cold war aggressions with Russia. This extremely obvious prediction is of course already coming true.
I'm still getting dopey wingnuts in my social media notifications telling me that Biden is a Xi Jinping puppet who is going to be soft on China, even as Biden packs his cabinet with virulent anti-China hawks:
Biden's expected Defense Secretary Michele Flournoy opined this past June that the US military needs a new arms race to obtain "the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China's military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours".
Biden's choice for Secretary of State Tony Blinken plans on undermining Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, reportedly wants to "tame" and "try to coalesce skeptical international partners into a new competition with" China, and said that the Biden administration will "fully enforce" the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, "including sanctions on officials, financial institutions, companies and individuals." Earlier this month The Economist reported that Republican China hawks would be happy with a Secretary of State nomination for Blinken.
Biden's choice for National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was described by Forbes this past June as a "Peter Navarro-like China hawk" who believes that Beijing is “gearing up to contest America’s global leadership” and that those signs are “unmistakable, and they are ubiquitous.”
It's not hard to see where people of a certain ideological bent are getting the impression that Biden is going to be a sycophantic Beijing lackey, though, with influential rightist voices pounding that message into their skulls all day every day despite all evidence to the contrary. Just today within hours of this writing you've got Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw tweeting that "Biden‘s plan is to let radicals destroy our economy, with little if any benefit for the environment, and huge benefits for China," right-wing pundit Paul Joseph Watson labeling the murderous war whore Blinken a "compromised SIMP for China", and bloodthirsty psychopath Tom Cotton proclaiming on no basis whatsoever that Biden is "surrounding himself with panda huggers who will only reinforce his instincts to go soft on China."
"Panda huggers." This is a sitting member of the US Senate.
This complete schizm from reality, where you've got an incoming administration stacked with Beltway insiders who want to attack Chinese interests running alongside an alternate imaginary universe in which Biden is a subservient CCP lackey, is only made possible with the existence of media echo chambers. It's the same exact dynamic that made it possible for liberals to spend four years shrieking conspiracy theories about the executive branch of the US government being run by a literal Russian agent even as Trump advanced mountains of world-threatening cold war escalations against Moscow in the real world.
You see this dynamic at work in conventional media, where plutocrat-controlled outlets like Breitbart are still frantically pushing the Russiagate sequel narrative that Hunter Biden's activities in China mean that his father is a CCP asset. You also see it in social media, where, as explained by journalist Jonathan Cook in an article about the documentary The Social Dilemma, "as we get herded into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information, we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other."
"We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants," writes Cook.
Because people are a lot more likely to click, read and share information which validates their pre-existing opinions and follow people who do the same, social media is notorious for the way it creates tightly insulated echo chambers which masturbate our confirmation bias and hide any information which might cause us cognitive dissonance by contradicting it. Whole media careers were built on this phenomenon during the years of Russiagate hysteria, and we see it play out in spheres from imperialism to Covid-19 commentary to economic policy.
Someone benefits from this dynamic, and it isn't you. As we've discussed previously, we know from WikiLeaks documents that powerful people actively seek to build ideological echo chambers for the purpose of propaganda and indoctrination, and there is surely a lot more study going into the subject than we've seen been shown. Splitting the public up into two oppositional factions who barely interact and can't even communicate with each other because they don't share a common reality keeps the populace impotent, ignorant, and powerless to stop the unfolding of the agendas of the powerful.
You should not be afraid of your government being too nice to China. What you should worry about is the US-centralized power alliance advancing a multifront new cold war conducted simultaneously against two nuclear-armed nations for the first time ever in human history. There are far, far too many small moving parts in such a cold war for things to happen in a safely predictable manner, which means there are far, far too many chances for something to go very, very wrong.
Whenever someone tells you that a US president is going to be "soft" on a nation the US government has marked as an enemy, you are being played. Aways, always, always, always. It's just people manipulating you away from your natural, healthy inclination toward peace. Get out of your echo chamber, look at the raw information instead of the narratives, and stop letting the sociopaths manipulate you.
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Yeah, you sure are getting a lot of Tweets, but are these accusations getting a play on corporate media? Do you have any links to corporate media making such accusations (other than possibly quoting Tom Cotton and labeling him a "conservative")? I didn't think so. I told you before, it's going to get nowhere near the traction that Russiagate got.
The game of portraying other nations with two completely contradictory accusations is getting really, really tiresome. They will do anything to portray Russia an an inept place with a failed economy, then tell you that President Putin has omnipotent powers over the entire world. China is a more complex reality than Russia. China is a dictatorship unlike Russia which is not (a good case comparison is the internet which in China is heavily controlled with severe censorship while the internet in Russia is free and open and in fact less controlled than in the UK). China does have some serious human rights issues. Though the USA with over 2 million prisoners is hardly in a position to preach from a pulpit of moral superiority. China, however also offers tremendous benefits to the world economy. By Western design we are now totally mainline junky addicted to their manufacturing base. That was a choice the West made, China did not force us down that path. It has of course had great benefit to hundreds of millions of Chinese who do live better lives today than before. I do not buy the idea that USA controls China or that China controls the USA. They are competitive partners with some regional disputes that are inflated by US politicians who prefer to spend their time accusing foreigners of American society's ills instead of doing their job and addressing the USA's own issues and shortcomings. One recalls Susan Rice recently going from acknowledging that the racial tensions, protests and riots have a 350 year history behind and underneath their social and historical context, to insisting that there was still no doubt that Russia was engineering the current racial conflicts in the USA. As a friend of mine said "the best and the brightest" as she is held up to be and that is how the B&B think or at least what they say on CNN. One should recall the phrase "the best and the brightest" originates in teams of university educated smart staff of the Kennedy admin. By the time their foreign policy, that they in part extended, in part created came to fruition in the years to come, there was a trail of 10 million corpses across the world, 5 million of whom were Indochinese. China is not however Vietnam or Indonesia nor Iraq nor even Brazil, China is a very big player with the world's most relevant economy. The US empire's imperial ruling class still refuse to accept what President Vladimir Putin told them at the Munich conference 13 years ago that resulted in US leaders like McCain putting the Russian president on the shitlist. The Biden people want a world that is monopolar and under exclusive US power and control but they have no choice but to realise that world no longer exists and 800 plus military bases only weakens the US economy and drains public resources budgets. The irony is that China's communists are trying to teach American leaders that it is markets not military that conquer the world in our time. Does anyone in the Biden sphere even get the Elephant in the Room on China ? That Elephant is TESLA. Elon Musk is a better Secretary of State and Sec of Industry when it comes to China than any public official. During the last two election cycles the only American politician to visit TESLA was Andrew Yang, who owns and drives a MODEL X. The single most important American company with the world's single most advanced science and engineering innovation across multiple fields of expertise was literally ignored by both parties. Except for when AOC insulted TESLA with an ignorant remark that confirmed that she is nothing but an actress who speaks from out of her backside. The TESLA gigafactory in Shanghai that went from muddy field to producing MODEL 3s in a record time period is the first ever foreign branded factory that the Chinese government has permitted to be self-owned. The usual procedure in China is that foreign brands have to partner with a Chinese company that is in part or whole owned by the Chinese state. China's leaders comprehend how important TESLA is to the world more than any American politician that they waved their own rule to allow Musk and TESLA to own fully the TESLA Shanghai gigafactory without a Chinese partner corporation. TESLA cars Made in the USA have over the years had some quality control issues which the post-sale service dept tends to have to fix. Issues which should not come out of the factory. The immediate recognition once the cars rolled out of the Shanghai factory was that the China workforce is in fact making better quality TESLAs. The workforce at TESLA is not like at APPLE who makes everything at the lowest price to sell at the highest price. TESLA's mission in China is help China clean up their polluted air by selling EVs and to get the vehicle price down for both Asia and now even for Continental Europe until the German gigafactory is built. What the well chosen highly motivated Chinese workforce is revealing is that China's education system may not teach about freedom and democracy but apparently it does teach math, science and engineering at the highest level of integrity. Meanwhile TESLA's factory floor US workforce are a product of a two-tier education system based on property taxes that is not only a disaster for them but for the US economy.