Girlfriend of 2 years (27f), it came out during lockdown that she believes that you can usher in worldwide socialism without dispersing ameriKKKans throughout the third world. She admitted that she believes that socialism has to originate in the imperialist core. Our relationship is basically over in my mind now, but I need some consensus.
sovnarkoman posted:posters itt watch out
Aren’t all these theories more or less instinctually believed in by like 90% of Americans now. There’s no institutional legitimacy left. These are actually tame, everyone’s fucking psycho now
It’s notable as propaganda though for two reasons. First, because the coalition it celebrates couldn’t reveal itself until after the election, because it would have put cracks in the narrative of competition between bourgeois parties as the motive force in U.S. politics. Now, it’s celebrated openly as a then-secret, elites-only “conspiracy” of patriots, seemingly almost desperate to maintain popular approval after the fact for their consensus against the Trump sector as rival bourgeoisie. The group includes a lot of campaign-dollar-hungry righty-liberal politicians for the time being, but it’s at its heart the base of the Democrat-CIA state coalition we’ve talked about on here, where it’s always existed to some degree but has a little more directly invested nowadays on one side of the aisle, with a new batch of open & proud “intelligence community” assets among newly elected Democrats at the national level.
Second, and maybe more important, is the nature of the infantile language in the story, and I’m curious if it will remain the norm for the U.S. media under the current Democrat-managed police state. Key to it is how the alignment of most of the media with the Democrats, with many Republican politicians and with the “intelligence community” (the extralegal U.S. security state composed of both entrenched officials and policy-shaping retirees) is not “the conspiracy” per se. Rather, all of the above are symptomatic of much of U.S. capital uniting solidly behind a global-enterprise-friendly, medium-term-stability-oriented political grouping, one this sector of capital always supported in a general sense but which became more lockstep and self-policing in the previous four years, less able to brook points of departure. I think the capitalists in question were ultimately unsettled not by Trump’s victory, but by their subsequent inability to bring the new guy to complete heel in the public eye or calm the occasionally spasmodic activity of the administration on the world stage. Replacing key incompetent newcomer-officials with establishment figures didn’t do the job it was meant to do, or not well enough. There didn’t seem to be anything to tame, let alone a way to tame it, even as the policy of the Trump administration almost never departed substantively from the status quo. Lack of control by itself was unsettling enough, threatening a possible loss of profit at the margin. Further, it was personally insulting.
So the TIME article, reflecting that new grouping’s favored terms, showcases what seems to have become the new normal a little while back for U.S. news press descriptions of U.S. electoral politics, language no less infantile than the previous norm of “partisan” cliche, but infantile in a substantially different way.
It’s the language the U.S. media has previously reserved for propaganda about politics outside the United States, and usually, for elections outside the white West.
Celebrations of Biden’s victory last year are described by the TIME writers, insistently, as celebrations of “the democratic process” that elected him. Usually, that sort of claim is only deployed regarding foreigners, people who can be supposed by the readership, U.S. readers or foreigners of the appropriate class, to be starved for “American values”. It requires distance because it’s absurd. No one throws a party for a “process”; they celebrate a victory for their side, right or wrong. The article’s almost teeth-grinding insistence that an election’s outcome is synonymous with elections themselves is, presumably, aimed at an audience now believed to be receptive to that story, told in those terms, about themselves.
Similarly, the grouping that struck a pact to displace Trump—putting the National Manufacturers Association hand in hand with the top officials of trade unions, and those union leaders in back-room coalitions with the Republican legislators who’d sought for many years to diminish their influence in the game of campaign funding—that’s described as the “democracy” faction in the article. It’s again taken for granted that the reader will agree with the writers, will agree that the apparent breadth of the grouping (in partisan-cliche terms) reflects the triumph of a unifying “American”-ism over a threatening lame-duck tyrant and his handful of legislative bad apples, whose FBI-enabled clowns, off-duty cops and “small business owners” armed with nothing more than bison hats and homemade riot shields, are supposed to represent the dark forces of fascism arrayed against the 100% fascist-free, spanking-clean bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress. The bad guys were soundly defeated by the good guys. And to make it look like the bad guys weren’t always already defeated, to justify constant police-state pressure everywhere else to prevent their return, the coalition against them must be turned into the “democracy” side. It looks kind of stupid in practice, but it’s not without a certain craftiness, and, again, it’s presumed effective by the many, many writers TIME’s article only echoes.
I guess I’d call it the banana factor, if I need to talk about it later. Even though there is nothing nearly as formidable as a Roosevelt-era, New-Deal-Democrat-style coalition in place here—and I suspect nothing ironclad about where the security agencies will lend their future support as they play what has become a much more public game of manipulating U.S. elections—TIME pretends the current situation is even more stable and easily defended to its audience, at the same time it insists on its precariousness. The propaganda used to support a domestic political story becomes the sort of absolute language meant to exploit the nigh-invincible ignorance about foreign politics presumed by the news press of its domestic reader. It’s moderate rebels, “pro-democracy” heroes, vs. villainous tyrants and zealous radicals that are truly alien in psychology, creatures that, reassuringly, could never truly be “American”. That isn’t new, but it’s the persistence of it into 2021 that’s of interest here, when it could very easily have been abandoned within hours of the new guy taking office, or even before then. Because, again, it doesn’t make a ton of sense on its face anymore.
I don’t think that target reader, the college-educated U.S. “news junkie” of bourgeois values if not class, is all that ignorant of the reality in this case. The reality, too, is deployed for the same purpose by the same bourgeois-media voices, the truth of how the apparent cross-“American” coalition is not at all popular consensus: how e.g. state Republican parties are rushing to exercise what limited power they can to censure legislators from their states for anything but full-throated support for Trump, because the state parties must more closely reflect Republican campaign money and voters alike. As with propaganda regarding U.S.-dependent satrapies and proxy forces abroad, the threat has to continue to appear in the story to justify constant and deadly action by the “pro-democracy” gang. But in this case, the propaganda’s “anti-democracy” types are by default “American”, “middle class”, white and well-off like the readers themselves. And their remaining politicians can and will cut the same deals they always have with their fellows “across the aisle”, their fellow bourgeois.
I wonder how stable this sort of domestic propaganda structure will be when competing with the familiarity of the supposed threat, if it can really last against the return of the previous bourgeois-partisan play-by-play that has sustained what remains of U.S. mass news media through most of the recent post-print economy. The new pose might end up irritating the pride of that same sector of the bourgeoisie all over again. Maybe they’ll get sick of being exciting captains of the domestic “democracy” squad as they continue to murder foreigners abroad and cage children at home, because they’d rather see themselves as “leader” material for the rest of the world: smart and secure, and spiritually, blessedly, boringly white.
cars posted:Now, it’s celebrated openly as a then-secret, elites-only “conspiracy” of patriots, seemingly almost desperate to maintain popular approval after the fact for their consensus against the Trump sector as rival bourgeoisie. The group includes a lot of campaign-dollar-hungry righty-liberal politicians for the time being, but it’s at its heart the base of the Democrat-CIA state coalition we’ve talked about on here, where it’s always existed to some degree but has a little more directly invested nowadays on one side of the aisle, with a new batch of open & proud “intelligence community” assets among newly elected Democrats at the national level.
The irony is this stance retroactively confirms (at least for the benefit of those sympathetic to him) that Trump's narrative was correct insofar as he was an outsider, a barbarian confronting the elites on their own turf, and that the 'deep state' was determined to take him down. That's exactly why so many people voted for him over Clinton, as a rejection of what they rightly perceived to be an aloof cabal of wealthy powerful people who presume to know what's best for the peasants and don't even pretend they don't think they're superior. So the doubling down on that strategy, those attitudes by the centrist-intelligence complex will only make the problem much worse. It'll fester away until the next populist 'outsider' senses an opportunity to strike using a similar strategy as Trump, only the next guy won't be a fucking deep-fried-brain geriatric loser, and (spoiler alert!) the centrists won't have any kind of answer.
dizastar posted:been thinking about the possible link between dairy and meat lobbying and recent uprising - over the past couple of years prolly - of keto/carnivore/highfatlowcarb diet particularly in right wing milieu. the narrative for the adoption of said diet relies a lot on traditionalist mythology (steppe nomadic warrior etc, naturalistic fallacies, primitivism) and machismo. tons of so-called studies promoting the carnivore diet are fabricated and there a clear money stream from the meat industry being poured into them. maybe this is all a big reach from me but itd be funny if carnivore and right wing adjacent internet figures were on Big Meat's payroll
its just more "scientists show blueberries make you smarter", paid for by the blueberry growers association of wherever, you know what else makes you smarter - fucking reading and studying and shit, but since you can't eat books people hate being told this and would rather drink their own magical piss at the recommendation of a salesperson in a labcoat
sovnarkoman posted:i tried keto with intermittent fasting and had really bad brain fog and my veins twitched quite often to the point that i could see a vein under my eye popping in the mirror but i lost 20 kg quite fast so hell yeah long live keto gonna die like a martyr
this shit genuinely upsets me and i seriously hate it. my best friend is a keto convert and i yell at him all the time because he has voluntarily signed himself up to live like he has an eating disorder, For The Trend.
tears posted:big nut
Acdtrux posted:
the congolese have the right idea
The mention by Reuters of the Belarusian TV Station Belsat, and its particular relevance “to the UK Government Strategy’s capacity to detect and counter the spread of Russian information” was notable. While describing itself as “the first independent television channel in Belarus,” Belsat is, as the Reuters tender makes clear, a vehicle of NATO influence.
Based in Poland and funded by the Polish Foreign Ministry and other EU governments, Belsat played an influential role in promoting the color revolution-style protests that erupted in May 2020 to demand the ouster of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
The programs exposed through the latest leak of documents operate under the auspices of a shadowy division of the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office called Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD). Led by an intelligence operative named Andy Pryce, the program has shrouded in secrecy.
Indeed, the British government has denied freedom of information requests about the division’s budget and stonewalled members of parliament like Chris Williamson who sought data about its budget and agenda, citing national security to block their demands for information.
“When I tried to probe further,” former MP Williamson told The Grayzone, “ministers refused to let me have access to any documents or correspondence relating to this organization’s activities. I was told that releasing this information could ‘disrupt and undermine the program’s effectiveness.’”
During a meeting convened in London on June 26, 2018, Pryce outlined a new FCO program “to weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbors.” He solicited a consortium of firms to assist the British state in establishing new and seemingly independent media outlets to counter Russian government-backed media in Moscow’s immediate sphere of influence, and to amplify the messaging of NATO-aligned governments.
Justified on the basis of Russia’s supposed intention to “sow disunity and course disruption to democratic processes,” the campaign Pryce laid out was more aggressive and far-reaching than anything Russia has been caught doing in the West.
https://monthlyreview.org/2021/03/01/the-ideology-of-late-imperialism/ posted:One of the early critiques of the Marxist anti-imperialist tradition came from Warren, a former British Communist Party member who later joined the British and Irish Communist Organization. In 1973, Warren published a long article, “Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialization,” in the New Left Review.4 In the article, Warren sought to challenge the then common anti-imperialist view that imperialism, and more generally the expansion of capitalist relations globally, created dependency and underdevelopment in the third world. Warren was eager to show that the expansion of capitalism and imperialism brought progress (industrial and otherwise) to the third world. In Warren’s words, “empirical observations suggest that the prospects for successful capitalist economic development of a significant number of major underdeveloped countries are quite good.”
*jerry seinfeld voice* who are these people
jiroemon1897 posted:In Warren’s words, “empirical observations suggest that the prospects for successful capitalist economic development of a significant number of major underdeveloped countries are Fairly Fucking Good, and Epic.”
imo... If there's one part of the pig-enabled Capitol riot that was an operation performed directly by a U.S. federal agent or directly-employed "intelligence community" asset, the pipe bombs were it.
1) This is the most important reason: the pipe bombs allegedly placed at the DNC and RNC headquarters, and "discovered" before they had any other effect whatsoever, are the excuse given by law enforcement/security agencies in Washington for their impossible claims about the Capitol riot, that is, for the patently absurd claim that all the cops and security agents in Washington, D.C. were too busy somewhere else(!) to keep the Capitol rioters from breaching the United States' national legislature(!!)
Make no mistake, that is the official line: the police and security agencies do NOT claim that they were overwhelmed by Capitol rioters on January 6th, but rather that they were diverted beforehand by the pipe bombs allegedly found at the DNC and RNC.
This is in direct contradiction to their response to anti-cop protests in the exact same areas of the city a few months beforehand. The claim offered by the pigs is that the discovery of what were believed to be two small explosive devices kept almost the entire security apparatus of the most security-blanketed city in the United States busy for an entire day—an event that would not lead to that result in any major or mid-sized city in the country, or even at one of its regional airports. The "pipe bomb" excuse was the one parroted by what was purported to be a Congressional investigation, and, amazingly, it's accepted by Washington-approved voices in the news media as the official explanation to this day.
2) That a pro-Trump rioter would place bombs at both the DNC and RNC is extremely unlikely, even given the anger of the rioters at specific Republican politicians. The rioters believed that they represented the will and majority of the Republican Party, and more likely targets would have been offices tied to specific Republican legislators and groups that had taken public stances against Trump before or after the election, not general-purpose Republican Party offices. The rioters were, in fact, supported rhetorically by high-profile Republican legislators, individuals with whom they directly identified. The RNC itself was not a bastion of anti-Trump sentiment, as you might expect from a fund-raising organization for the Republican Party in January 2021.
3) The placement of bombs at both DNC and RNC offices, however, would prove effective for the Washington intelligence/security apparatus, were the "pipe bomb" event intended to provide the excuses they have in fact used for their own activities on January 6th.
It's proven effective on a number of levels that are pretty convenient if they only follow incidentally:
- silencing in-depth critique or investigation into any wrongdoing by police or Washington's security and intelligence agencies, through that proven post-9/11 trick, "But there was a terrorist threat!";
- reducing ground-level Democrat partisan interest in any direct investigation of the "bombing", as a discovery at the RNC as well as the DNC puts the "pipe bomb" event outside of easy use for the accusations Democrat politicians have made about Republican Party complicity in the other events from the same day;
- removing the "pipe bomb" event from the media's high-profile ritualistic purging of Trump post-election, and relegating the "bombing" to the level of a B-level side story in the press—otherwise a thwarted terrorist bombing in the nation's capital city would be at the forefront of news stories, but a major focus on tying Trump to an attempted bombing at the RNC (rather than a rabble of rude clowns) would risk appearing more clown-like than the rioters themselves;
- providing a claim for security "shortfalls" on January 6th that, while impossible on the facts, seems plausible to many people inside and outside the country, by claiming security forces were "distracted" by two separate targets that obviously do not share office space—as most people in the U.S. (and certainly most outside of it) are not personally familiar with Washington, D.C., and are unaware of the way the city was redesigned after 9/11 for express deployment of security forces, or how thoroughfares and other routes around Washington are regularly blocked off for the use of security forces and to guard high-profile buildings;
- ensuring the momentary purity of ego-driven anger at Trump from among the more willing, gullible, susceptible and senile of Republican Party Congress-oids and hangers-on, intimately concerned with challenges to their own supremacy within Barter-Town but disconnected from the deeper security apparatus—which in turn serves to carry forward the security agencies' gangland message to better-connected friends and rivals, with Trump as example, that no one who badmouths them in Washington is untouchable;
...and so on.
4) The FBI—which, alongside Washington's other security/intelligence agencies, has spent years engaged in public turf-war propaganda operations against Trump and his supporters—eagerly "crowd-sourced" the identification of the Capitol rioters. They did so at the peak of media coverage of the events of January 6th and Trump's second trial in Congress. This was all the better to sweep the major news outlets with the agencies' preferred stories. It deflected attention away from the security forces activities around the riot and onto an assemblage of scare-story-friendly, kooky randos.
But, for the "pipe bomb" event alone, the FBI are only now, months later, pursuing in earnest (or appearing to pursue) a "crowd-sourced" investigation, even though their "evidence", per the FBI themselves, was captured on digital video back on January 6th, just as with the riots whose images they publicized immediately. This is happening at a point when stories about Trump and the Capitol riot have faded into the realm of the politics-junkie retrospective. A "search" now makes the FBI appear to be busy bees to curious parties, and prior to any action they have planned, but it has already prevented a Trump-impeachment-level storm of press coverage of the pigs' "search for the real bomber", until (and if) the FBI themselves publicize an arrest—or killing-during-arrest, or identification of an untouchable, already-dead or out-of-country enemy—as a result of what they purport to be their investigation into the pipe bombs. If the U.S. security agencies already have a "suspect" in mind for the alleged DNC & RNC pipe bombs on January 6th, 2021, they just chambered the bullet.
..........so yeah here's your Crazy Carson Pick of the Year, the pipe bombs were placed by an agent/asset for the purpose of "discovery" on the pigs' timetable, and the FBI's just now "crowd-sourcing" the pipe-bomb investigation with images and purported details because it's all stuff they can pin on anyone they choose to send up the river, if they even bother to "solve" the "case" this time around instead of allowing it to melt away into a TV-special-friendly unsolved mystery.
ALERT: FBI releases new security cam video of person who placed pipe bombs outside Republican Natl Committee headquarters ahead of Jan 6 insurrection pic.twitter.com/fAZjBHTU7e
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) March 9, 2021
https://medium.com/@MMabeuf/reconsidering-some-things-i-wrote-about-theranos-last-year-cb9f32b833df
So, if nothing got destroyed, and the investors felt that they were not ripped off, how did the money get spent? Was 900 million dollars really wasted on a 12-year farce to hack an already-available commercial blood test machine? Did hundreds of qualified scientists really participate in such a farce for over a decade?
...
Theranos Board included: Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, George Shultz (Secretary of State when the USSR was destroyed) Bill Perry, former spy satellite manufacturer (founder of Electronic Systems Labs) and Secretary of Defense under Clinton, when the USSR was plundered.
The “whistleblowing” source was Shultz’s grandson, who was on the team for the faked Edison machine.
Elizabeth Holmes great grandfather, the “entrepreneur” who inspired her was Julius “Junkie” Fleishchmann, (Fleischmann’s Yeast) a major funder of the CIA’s Congress of Cultural Freedom program. Her father was a VP at Enron who reported to Jeff Skilling. Gibney fails to mention this despite having directed the canonical Enron documentary, “The Smartest Guys In the Room.”
Elizabeth Holmes neighbor / childhood psychiatrist Richard Fuisz, was a CIA agent who helped privatize the Soviet Union. His son invented suboxone, which like think about Dark Alliance or the Opium Wars for a minute.
Like
Honest question: what’s harder — landing on the Moon, or faking the Moon landing and getting everyone involved to keep the secret for 50 years?
The author asks this rhetorical as if we'll obviously agree that there must be a coverup but get this: landing on the moon is actually the easier option, which is why the US went to the fucking moon (and also to develop their military rocketry technology at the same time, the kind of win-win efficiency everyone loves.) If you think constructing an entire fake space program and covering up a fake moon landing leaving behind absolutely no evidence is the easier option you completely misunderstand how power works. And so again:
What’s the easier scam? Tricking a dozen senior military / intelligence commanders into paying you a billion dollars for bullshit, or getting a dozen senior military / intelligence commanders together to realize a billion dollar plan while pretending to be bullshitting?
The author's conclusions are completely ass backwards. Yes, a bunch of powerful people with military connections really did get roped in and told their friends and their friends got roped in. The ruling class of ghoul aristocrats aren't superintelligent demigods, they're fallible people who can stumble into stupid blunders, blinded by the ease of power offered to them by the empire.
The thing about being materialists who investigate the world with the Immortal Science is that we know the machinations of power really can be and are unveiled by digging and it's often not very hard once you get off your ass and scratch the surface. Meanwhile this author is on some absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence shit where not seeing a conspiracy to create an imaginary bioweapon product means there must be one. That's stupid.
I think some aspiring conspiracy digger types read stuff like Yasha Levine's excellent Surveillance Valley and make a critical mistake: they see the associative collections of people get strung together into a narrative, and they miss the part where the conclusions are also backed by testimony and evidence. The first part is what makes Yasha a compelling writer, but uhhh the second is what makes him a researcher that uncovers facts and it's the important part.
shriekingviolet posted:Like
Honest question: what’s harder — landing on the Moon, or faking the Moon landing and getting everyone involved to keep the secret for 50 years?
The author asks this rhetorical as if we'll obviously agree that there must be a coverup but get this: landing on the moon is actually the easier option, which is why the US went to the fucking moon (and also to develop their military rocketry technology at the same time, the kind of win-win efficiency everyone loves.) If you think constructing an entire fake space program and covering up a fake moon landing leaving behind absolutely no evidence is the easier option you completely misunderstand how power works. And so again:
oh i thought the writer wrote that as "yes we landed on the moon" but now i realize i was being too charitable. but yeah, it's wild conjecture and they were probably scammed, but it's fun to think about here, in the conspiracy thread.