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It Takes A Lot Of Education To Keep Us This Stupid

It Takes A Lot Of Education To Keep Us This Stupid

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The oligarchic empire is working harder and harder to bolt down our minds in service of its agendas.

Silicon Valley is working more and more openly in conjunction with the US government, and its algorithms elevate empire-authorized narratives while hiding unapproved ones with increasing brazenness.

The mass media have become so blatantly propagandistic that US intelligence operatives are now openly employed by news outlets they used to have to infiltrate covertly.

NATO and military institutions are studying and testing new forms of mass-scale psychological manipulation to advance the still developing science of propaganda.

transparently fake “whistleblower” is being promoted by the US political/media class to manufacture support for more internet censorship and shore up monopolistic control for institutions like Facebook who are willing to enforce it.

Wikipedia is an imperial narrative control operation.

They’ve imprisoned a journalist for exposing US war crimes after the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him.

 

The powerful work so hard at such endeavors because they understand something that most ordinary people do not: whoever controls the dominant narratives about the world controls the world itself.

Power is controlling what happens; absolute power is controlling what people think about what happens.

If you can control how people think about what’s going on in their world, if you can control their shared how-it-is stories about what’s happening and what’s true, then you can advance any agenda you want to. You’ll be able to prevent them from rising up against you as you steal their wealth, exploit their labor, destroy their ecosystem and send their children off to war. You can keep them voting for political institutions you own and control. You can keep them from interfering in your ability to wage wars around the world and sanction entire populations into starvation to advance your geostrategic goals.

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The Science Of Propaganda Is Still Being Developed And Advanced

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We live in a far less free society than most of us think.

It looks like we’re free. We don’t get thrown in prison for criticizing our government officials. We can vote for whoever we want. We can log onto the internet and look up information on any subject we’re interested in. If we want to buy a product we have many brands we are free to choose from.

But we’re not free. Our political systems are set up to herd people into a two-party system that is controlled on both sides by plutocrats. The news media that people rely on to form ideas about what’s going on and how they should vote are controlled by the plutocratic class and heavily influenced by secretive government agencies. Internet algorithms are aggressively manipulated to show people information which favors the status quo. Even our entertainment is rife with Pentagon and CIA influence.

How free is that? How free is your speech if there are myriad institutional safeguards in place to prevent speech from ever effecting political change?

It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to call the oligarchic puppet put in office by the last fake election a dickhead. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to Google any information you want only to find whatever information Google wants you to find.

What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has a system in place which prevents dissent from having any meaningful impact?

There is none.

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Netflix To Launch WikiLeaks Smear Job Three Days Before Assange Court Date

Netflix To Launch WikiLeaks Smear Job Three Days Before Assange Court Date

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Netflix will begin streaming a brazen hatchet job on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for its American subscribers on October 24th, just three days prior to a significant court date in Assange’s fight against extradition from the UK to the United States on October 27th.

“You can stream We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks on Netflix starting Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 12 AM PT / 3 AM ET,” Netflix Schedule reports.

We Steal Secrets was a “documentary” that is now so outdated beyond its 2013 release that one of its central characters, Chelsea Manning, is referred to by a dead name throughout its entirety. Why choose this specific moment to release it?

Well it doesn’t make much sense at all, if the timing wasn’t deliberately geared toward damaging Assange’s reputation in the nation whose government is trying to extradite him for exposing its war crimes. Assange’s October court date was set way back in August and Netflix didn’t announce it had scheduled to begin streaming this film until two weeks ago.

After all, We Steal Secrets was so egregious in its spin that not only did WikiLeaks supporters like World Socialist Website and journalist Jonathan Cook pan it as a smear at the time, but WikiLeaks itself went to the trouble of publishing a line-by-line refutation of the mountains of propaganda distortion heaped on the narrative by filmmaker Alex Gibney.

“The title (‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’) is false,” WikiLeaks writes at the beginning of its response. “It directly implies that WikiLeaks steals secrets. In fact, the statement is made by former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden in relation to the activities of US government spies, not in relation to WikiLeaks. This an irresponsible libel. Not even critics in the film say that WikiLeaks steals secrets.”

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Anyone Who’d Support Going To War Over Taiwan Is A Crazy Idiot

Anyone Who’d Support Going To War Over Taiwan Is A Crazy Idiot

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Taiwan has been in the news a lot lately, and it’s really bringing out the crazy in people.

The mass media have been falsely reporting that China has been encroaching on Taiwan’s “air defense zone”, which gets stretched into the even more ludicrous claim that China “sent warplanes flying over Taiwan”. In reality Chinese planes simply entered an arbitrarily designated area hundreds of miles from Taiwan’s coast it calls its “Air Defence Identification Zone”, which has no legally recognized existence and contains a significant portion of China’s mainland. This is likely a response to the way the US and its allies have been constantly sailing war ships into disputed waters to threaten Beijing.

As Moon of Alabama reports, US warmongers inflamed this non-controversy even further by feeding a story to the press about the already public information that there are American troops in Taiwan training the military there, citing “concern” about the danger posed by China.

 

Now headlines are blaring about President Tsai Ing-wen responding to this non-event with the announcement that Taiwan will “do whatever it takes to defend its freedom and democratic way of life.” Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott just visited Taipei to advocate that “democracies stand shoulder to shoulder” with Taiwan against China. The CIA has announced the creation of a new spy center that will focus solely on China, which CIA Director William Burns says will “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century: an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”.

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All Our Problems Are Built On Us-Vs-Them Propaganda

All Our Problems Are Built On Us-Vs-Them Propaganda

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Liberal pundit Keith Olbermann shared a video the other day where he ranted about people who don’t want to take the Covid vaccine with such emotional vitriol that spittle flew from his mouth and drool poured down his chin. I found it hard to watch, partly because it’s always uncomfortable to see someone come apart like that and partly because it made me realize that I’ve probably spent the last few years making fun of a media personality who has some actual diagnosable psychological disorders.

Rather than lay out what he thinks are the best arguments for taking the vaccine as most of his peers have been doing, Olbermann instead spouts vituperations about what “cowards” and “snowflakes” unvaccinated people are.

“They’re afraid!” Olbermann screams over and over again, as though being afraid of something makes you some sort of monster. As though we’re not all afraid of something, whether it be the vaccine or the virus or being alone or the fact that thawing arctic permafrost is pouring methane into the atmosphere. This commonality should draw us closer together, but here it’s being used for partisan us-vs-them theatrics which drive us further apart.

Us-vs-them frameworks are used constantly to manipulate people into espousing various narratives, and narrative manipulation is the underlying source of all of humanity’s problems.

Today’s world is dominated by a unipolar power structure loosely centralized around the United States government. It is comprised of many nations which are ostensibly independent, but, since they move in near-complete alignment with each other on all international issues of major importance, this power structure can effectively be called an empire. This empire sets the economic, environmental and military policies which are causing all the ecocidewar and nuclear brinkmanship we see driving humanity toward its destruction today.

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The Corporations Are The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The Corporations Are The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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You’d think the revelation that the CIA planned to assassinate an award-winning journalist for journalistic activity would have been a bigger deal.

Capitalism hinders progress because it ensures that all mass-scale human behavior will be driven by the pursuit of profit. For example, a huge global issue we have right now is cleaning up the pollution in our oceans. That is an easily solved issue if you take out the profit motive; you don’t wait for market forces to find some way to make it profitable, you just get in there and clean it up. But with the profit motive it’s almost impossible to conceive of it ever being solved.

How often have you been excited by a great idea only to feel that familiar disappointment wash over you as you realize that it will never happen because it won’t make anyone any money? That’s how the profit motive stunts innovation.

The profit motive will never find a way to leave a forest alone or minerals in the ground. There’s no business plan that makes money out of moms being paid to bring up healthy, happy, secure children. You can’t find a way to make money out of people driving less or buying less. There is no money in curing an illness, only treating it. There is no money in solving poverty, only in setting up a multi-million dollar “charity” that never actually intends to solve poverty because it’s a business and a business requires endless expansion.

People who proffer the market as a solution to our massive problems have either never really thought about the restrictions of the profit motive, or they are heavily invested in pretending those restrictions don’t exist. I don’t respect either of those positions.

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People Don’t Understand How Unfree We Already Are

People Don’t Understand How Unfree We Already Are

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The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved.

We’ve been so busy watching out for the next overtly totalitarian dictatorship that wants to put the jackboot on our necks we never noticed the covert totalitarians sliding the shackles around our minds.

Everyone thinks about the abusers who beat their spouses, but not the abusers who dominate their spouses’ minds with psychological manipulation.

Everyone thinks about psychopathic killers prowling the streets, but not the psychopathic killers who rule our world via mass-scale manipulation.

Conspiracy analysts warn that the government is trying to give everyone a social credit score to force us all to comply with the agendas of the powerful, in nations where mass-scale narrative management through the media and online algorithms already manipulates everyone into complying with the agendas of the powerful.

People assume that they aren’t already behaving exactly how the powerful want them to behave within a civilization whose political, monetary and economic systems are already completely under the control of the powerful.

People think they are free just because they can go and buy whatever they want in an economy rigged for the powerful using money rigged for the powerful, because they can say whatever they want on internet platforms whose algorithms are manipulated by the powerful, because they can vote for a politician who only got on the ballot by being owned by the powerful.

People think they are free because the system let them elect a “populist” like Donald Trump, even after that “populist” spent four years doing nothing but advancing the interests of the powerful.

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Australians Need To Decide If This Is The Kind Of Country We Want To Live In From Now On

Australians Need To Decide If This Is The Kind Of Country We Want To Live In From Now On

A lot has changed for Victorians since the lockdowns started. Our lifestyles. Our waist sizes. The kinds of things we see as normal.

And a lot has changed in Victoria itself since we’ve been in lockdown as well. For example, have you seen our police lately?

If memory serves, they used to look something like this:

Image

But now we’re seeing police that look like this:

And this:

They’re also riding around on armored military vehicles called Bearcats, like this:

And they’re acting differently too. They’re firing on protesters with rubber bullets and other projectile weapons with alarming frequency in order to end demonstrations against government shutdowns, lockdowns and vaccine mandates, frequently for no other reason than because the demonstrators are disobeying them.

Use of force by Victorian police is officially required to be “reasonable, necessary and proportionate to the threat posed by an incident.” When you see a video clip of Melbourne protesters just standing around the Remembrance Shrine begin fleeing to escape harm and being fired upon with less-lethal weapons as they retreat, for example, does that seem “reasonable, necessary and proportionate to the threat posed by an incident” to you?

“But Caitlin!” you may object. “Those people they’re firing on are Bad People! They’re right-wingers and anti-vaxxers! And they’re protesting without permission!”

Okay, if you don’t want to oppose police brutality on principle without making it about the supposed ideological positions of its victims then that’s your right. But surely you don’t think the normalization of this kind of violence is something that’s only going to affect people you disagree with politically going forward, do you?…

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Talkin’ About Armageddon: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Talkin’ About Armageddon: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The fact that our world is hurtling toward man-made obliteration on multiple fronts should probably occupy more of our conversational bandwidth than it does.

My basic overall position is that humanity is about to end itself via climate chaos or nuclear war due to global capitalism and oligarchic imperialism, that propaganda prevents people from rising up to stop this, and our only path out is a mass-scale psychological transformation.

If you’ve ever been curious why I don’t write more about this or that subject, it’s usually because the above is my area of focus. Everything I write points to this in some way. That’s what I do here.

There are a lot of narratives circulating about what’s really happening between the US and China and whether the aggressions are actually as dangerous as they seem, and all of these narratives are rendered moot by the undeniable buildup of US military weaponry around China.

If you’re more concerned about China’s domestic affairs than your own country’s aggressive foreign policy toward China it’s because you’ve been propagandized. Change your media consumption habits accordingly.

Not even the craziest imperialists want a hot war with China. They’d much rather China to bow and be absorbed into the US-centralized empire as so many other nations before, or to collapse and fragment after a decades-long subversion campaign à la the USSR. In that order.

The empire will happily make life miserable for Chinese people in coming decades to pressure Beijing into accepting that it’s in the people’s interests that the PRC kiss the ring. The problem of course is that China will be resisting these maneuvers in ways that can easily blow up in catastrophic ways…

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Propaganda Scrambles Our Minds: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Propaganda Scrambles Our Minds: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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America is a unipolar superpower governed by octogenarians who work for corporations and banks where military weapons are made by prison slaves to be launched at impoverished foreigners while celebrities attend lavish galas and police guard food in dumpsters from the homeless.

Propaganda warps people’s perspectives so drastically their own opinions don’t even adhere to the values they’ll tell you they hold. A liberal will get angrier about a random member of the public circulating a conspiracy theory than about government agencies killing children with bombs. Political Twitter got angrier about Joe Rogan taking ivermectin than the Pentagon murdering an entire Afghan family and lying about it. All sense of proportion and perspective has been scrambled.

Facebook has had a two-tiered system where famous people won’t be censored or suspended for posts normal people would be. Politicians and celebrities freely ignore mask rules while their servants are forbidden to. They all think they’re better than us, and our systems agree with them.

 

If you rise to a position of influence in the western world you will immediately find yourself surrounded by people who are very interested in making sure you support status quo power structures, whether you’re a celebrity, a politician, or a social media executive.

It’s weird how nobody’s even saying the vaccine isn’t working as well as they’d hoped it would. You’re not even allowed to say that. Everyone’s really disappointed but they’re pretending they’re not because anything but 100 percent big-smile cheerleading gets you branded an anti-vaxxer. Everyone’s gotta do this weird, super tense, phoney happy smiley dance about how perfect and not-at-all-disappointing the vaccine is, because being truthful about how disappointed you feel hurts the vaccination campaign and therefore means you’re worse than Hitler.

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Manufacturing Dystopia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Manufacturing Dystopia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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We live in a world of manufactured lack, manufactured enemies, manufactured crises and manufactured consent. We’ve had sufficient resources to care for everyone for generations. All our wars are based on lies. All our problems are cooked up by a few psychos with too much power.

Ever since he came to Australia my American husband still finds it strange to see a parrot out in the open instead of sitting in a cage. I feel much the same whenever I see George W Bush.

The capitalist class has never voluntarily returned anything it has stolen from the working class; every time it manages to give people less it never reverses it, no matter how much greater profits become. Capitalism is never going to get less abusive. It will only grow more so.

If there were good billionaires they wouldn’t still be billionaires.

It’s impossible to be a good billionaire, not just because it’s immoral to remain that wealthy in a world full of need and because all billionaires are parasitic middlemen siphoning the profits off other people’s labor, but also because in order to obtain that much wealth you generally have to manipulate the actual movement of human civilization to your benefit in some way.

“You’re anti-American!”

No I’m anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-empire, anti-ecocide, anti-oligarchy, anti-capitalism and anti nuclear brinkmanship. It just happens that the US is at the center of a globe-spanning power structure that is the worst offender on all these fronts by an extremely wide margin.

The most evil and destructive things Trump did as president weren’t the Trumpian things but the American things. The things his predecessors and his successor are also guilty of doing.

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The World’s Deadliest Terrorist Group: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The World’s Deadliest Terrorist Group: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The CIA just casually discussed sinking a boat full of Cuban refugees and planting bombs in Miami and blaming Castro, but you’re bat shit crazy if you suspect such agencies may have had similar discussions about other geostrategic situations and decided to go through with it.

There’s more public criticism of ordinary people taking ivermectin than there is of planet-dominating power structures driving humanity to armageddon.

Nobody who supports internet censorship does so because they’re worried they themselves might consume dangerous words and believe them, it’s always to protect other people from dangerous words. It’s about the most megalomaniacal, emotionally stunted desire anyone could possibly have.

They see themselves as responsible adults who can be trusted to independently sort out truth from falsehood, but see other people as infants who cannot be trusted to do this. This is nothing other than garden variety narcissism.

Internet censorship via monopolistic government-tied tech corporations isn’t just a problem because of free speech issues, it’s a problem because the way it’s applied is completely uneven and power-serving: politicians and the mass media circulate disinformation constantly without ever being censored. It’s not just silencing people, it’s actually shifting power upwards.

There is no path forward for humanity on this planet without complete female reproductive sovereignty.

Imagine if the world’s deadliest terrorist group got their hands on drones and cruise missiles and nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers and circled the planet with hundreds of military bases and began waging wars and destroying any country which disobeyed their dictates.

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Propaganda Is The Source Of All Our Problems: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Propaganda Is The Source Of All Our Problems: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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We don’t talk nearly enough about the fact that wealthy and powerful people are constantly pouring vast fortunes into manipulating the way we perceive our world and that this is the ultimate source of all our major problems.

Democracy is a meaningless concept when the primary factor in determining how votes will be cast is the wealth that plutocrats have poured into mass-scale media psyops to manipulate public perception of reality.

People babble about “freedom” in a society where almost everyone’s mind is in a cage built by the powerful. Caged birds singing that they can do whatever they want inside their cage.

Covid could just as easily have been used to transfer wealth downward as upward. The only reason wealth has shifted to the wealthiest among us instead of the most needful is because we have systems in place which allow money to translate to political influence and policy making.

Without such vast wealth inequality the public would have the money to crowdfund their own political campaigns, legislative initiatives and media outlets. That’s why the rich actively work to keep others poor. It’s not so they can buy one more private jet, it’s to maintain power.

Because money is power and power is relative, the plutocrats have a natural incentive to use their financial clout to shape things so the majority remains poor. We have a system which makes you king if you’re richer than the masses; if everyone’s king then no one is king.

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OMG Afghanistan Is Invading Afghanistan: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

OMG Afghanistan Is Invading Afghanistan: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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During the Trump years the media wept for the poor kids in cages and ignored all the bombs he was dropping. Now the media ignore the kids in cages and weep for the poor neglected bombs.

The US empire will literally invade a country so it can spend decades using the people who live there as target practice for its expensive new military technologies and then tell you to worry about motherfucking Cuba.

Sure is a crazy coincidence how government foreign policy decisions that would advance humanitarian interests always happen to align perfectly with government foreign policy decisions that would be extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers.

Love how everyone suddenly started babbling about China taking America’s place in Afghanistan. Like Beijing’s been watching all the world powers smashing their heads against military interventionism in Afghanistan and thinking “Yeah that looks awesome, we should definitely try that.”

Bush era war criminals are louder than ever right now because they’ve lost the argument. The Afghan “government” proved to be an illusion, proving they spent 20 years lying to us about what they’d been doing there, so now they’re trying to salvage their reputations and legacies.

I can’t believe there are still highly influential people saying we need to keep raining military explosives on the Islamic world to make Muslims less extremist.

Everyone’s freaking out that Afghanistan is invading Afghanistan.

The Biden administration is perpetuating and advancing all of Trump’s policies better and more efficiently than Trump himself and it’s hilarious that MAGA people still oppose him just because Candace Owens told them he’s a communist.

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You Need To Understand That The US Is The Most Tyrannical Regime On Earth

You Need To Understand That The US Is The Most Tyrannical Regime On Earth

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You get a lot of moral clarity when you realize that the US government is the most despotic and corrupt regime on the entire planet by a very wide margin. This clarity informs your perspective in a way that helps you see through a lot of the propaganda narratives that are laid over the public’s vision about what’s going on in our world.

Whenever I say the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth I get a lot of objections from people, and these are always people who simply haven’t thought very hard about the horrific realities of US foreign policy. Sure you can name some governments who are more brutal and oppressive toward their own citizenry than Washington, but you can’t name any who are more brutal and oppressive overall when you zoom out and look at the big picture.

The United States is currently circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and waging wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. Its sanctions and blockades are starving people to death en masse every single day. It works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates by toppling their governments via CIA coups, proxy armies, partial and full-scale invasions, and the most egregious number of election interferences in the entire world.

The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews

Biden picked up where Trump left off and has been aggressively bombing Somalia.

Successive US administrations have cycled through a myriad of excuses to bomb the country, not acknowledging that they are bombing the very “terrorists” they created.https://thegrayzone.com/2021/08/13/in-somalia-the-us-is-bombing-the-very-terrorists-it-created/ 

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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