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Nobody Who Says “You Can Criticize Washington AND Beijing” Actually Does

November 19, 2021

Nobody Who Says “You Can Criticize Washington AND Beijing” Actually Does

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Whenever I criticize the US empire’s manipulations and aggressions on a nation which disobeys its dictates I always get comments from people saying “You know, Caitlin, two things can be bad at once. You can criticize both.”

They say it like it’s some kind of profound esoteric insight being passed down from on high instead of a generic response I hear from westerners every single day. Like, oh, you mean I can criticize two things instead of just one thing? You just blew my mind. Thanks for baptizing me with your magic wisdom sauce, Gandalf.

Of course it’s possible to criticize both the US and its targets. That’s obvious to anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears. The issue is that westerners, especially westerners who hasten to urge you to be more critical of governments targeted by western imperialism, do not do this.

Lately this happens most often with China, since that’s where the propaganda brainwashing has been most concentrated lately. I’ll say something about how the US empire is the clear and obvious aggressor in the escalating tensions between the two nations or how Australians are being brainwashed into supporting a war over Taiwan with astonishing forcefulness, and some internet genius will wheelbarrow his gigantic brain into my notifications with the comment “Caitlin it’s possible to criticize both the US and China.”

And if there were enough time in the day for me to respond to all of these galaxy-brained intellectual giants I would tell them something like, “Okay. But you don’t. Or if you do it’s not in proportion to how deserving of criticism they both are.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Self-Victimize to Bar Criticisms of Themselves

March 30, 2021

Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Self-Victimize to Bar Criticisms of Themselves

Powerful media figures now invoke sexist and racist tropes to cast themselves as so fragile and marginalized that critiques of their work constitute bullying and assault.

An unidentified man walks through the lobby of the Gannett-USA Today headquarters building August 20, 2013 on a 30-acre site in McLean, Virginia. (AFP/PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images)

The daily newspaper USA Today is the second-most circulated print newspaper in the United States — more than The New York Times and more than double The Washington Post. Only The Wall Street Journal has higher circulation numbers.

On Sunday, the paper published and heavily promoted a repellent article complaining that “defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan. 6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown by tech companies.” It provided a road map for snitching on how these private citizens — who are charged with serious felonies by the U.S. Justice Department but as of yet convicted of nothing — are engaged in “a game of cat-and-mouse as they spring from one fundraising tool to another” in order to avoid bans on their ability to raise desperately needed funds to pay their criminal lawyers to mount a vigorous defense.

In other words, the only purpose of the article — headlined: “Insurrection fundraiser: Capitol riot extremists, Trump supporters raise money for lawyer bills online” — was to pressure and shame tech companies to do more to block these criminal defendants from being able to raise funds for their legal fees, and to tattle to tech companies by showing them what techniques these indigent defendants are using to raise money online.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

glenn greenwald, journalism, journalists, critique, criticism, media, mainstream media,

Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists

March 11, 2021

Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists

This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.

Supporters of Mark Meechan aka Count Dankula gather in central London to protest against his conviction under the Communications Act in March 2018 (Photo credit should read Wiktor Szymanowicz / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, I wrote about how corporate journalists, realizing that the public’s increasing contempt for what they do is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences. That is why journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.

That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with “harassment,” “abuse” and “violence” — so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism on the ground that any criticism of them places them “in danger.” Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people’s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them.

Any independent platform or venue that empowers other journalists or just ordinary citizens to do reporting or provide commentary outside of their repressive constraints is viewed by them as threats to be censored and destroyed. Every platform that enables any questioning of their pieties or any irreverent critiques of mainstream journalism — social media sites, YouTube, Patreon, Joe Rogan’s Spotify program — has already been systematically targeted by corporate journalists with censorship demands, often successfully.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse

March 10, 2021

Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse

As social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society’s most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.

A view of The New York Times Building Headquarters. (Photo by John Nacion/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the west, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Some Common Criticisms Of My Work Addressed, By Caitlin Johnstone

March 31, 2019

Some Common Criticisms Of My Work Addressed, By Caitlin Johnstone

It’s a relatively slow news day so I thought it might be good to just tap out a few responses to common criticisms of the writing I’ve been doing since I started this gig two and a half years ago. I try to put all my cards on the table in full transparency so that people can decide if they trust me or like what I’m doing.

Obviously when you do what I do for a living you get truckloads of criticisms every day ranging from the reasonable and thoughtful to the downright bizarre, so I’ll only be able to focus on the most common ones:

“Caitlin touts the Kremlin line. Everything she writes is in accordance with Kremlin talking points.”

It is true that my foreign policy views often align with the foreign policy positions promoted by the Russian government, but this is only because I oppose US interventionism. Russia, like many other sovereign nations, also opposes US interventionism, because it is in their interests to do so. This is unrelated to my own reasons for opposing US interventionism, namely that it is consistently disastrous and unhelpful, and that US military violence serves as the glue which holds together a powerful empire which is oppressive, ecocidal, omnicidal, and increasingly Orwellian. More on this here.

For the record, I have nothing to do with the Russian government, and to my knowledge I have never received any money that came from the Kremlin. I’ve been offered to appear on various RT programs, but I’ve always declined because I don’t want my arguments tainted with any perception of loyalty to that network. I’m an entirely reader-funded writer, and I have my Patreon information on the most transparent settings available.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Egyptian Economist Arrested for Criticizing Government

October 24, 2018

Egyptian Economist Arrested for Criticizing Government

The Egyptian Economist, Abdel Khalik Farouk, is the author of more than 20 books on corruption in the Egyptian economy. His latest book, Is Egypt really poor? was confiscated by Egyptian authorities last week on the day of publication. The owner of the printing house, Ibrahim El Khatib, was also arrested. Farouk has set out that the corruption inside the Egyptian government is what keeps the nation poor. He is correct on that score for corruption in governments, in general, are always the greatest redistribution of wealth ever created.

Then there is the Greek Chief statistician Andreas Georgiou who is now under the charge of having harmed the national interest! He was the one who corrected the faked Greek deficit number of -3,9 to the real number of -15.4%. On August 2nd, 2010, he was appointed as President of the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT). Then on August 2nd, 2015, he surprisingly resigned from office with immediate effect. This in July 2016, the Greek Supreme Court upheld charges against Georgiou for having harmed the “national interest” for effectively telling the truth.

Of course, our media is part of the corruption in general. They preach the government line and spit out propaganda and they could care less what they are doing to the United States or the world. Hillary, for example, was perhaps the peak of corruption. Here we had a politician with the audacity to pretend she stands against the “rich” and then all the super rich stand in line to buy favors. Goldman Sachswent as far as to ban its staff from even donating to the Trump campaign.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unprecedented Mainstream Media Criticism of Central Banking Bodes Ill for the Larger Economy

June 20, 2016

econ-crisis

Unprecedented Mainstream Media Criticism of Central Banking Bodes Ill for the Larger Economy

DoubleLine’s Gundlach says ‘central banks are losing control’ … Jeffrey Gundlach, the chief executive of DoubleLine Capital, said on Tuesday investors are dropping risky assets and turning to safer securities including Treasuries and gold because they are losing faith in central banks. –Reuters

There is definitely considerable negativity about central banking in the mainstream media these days.

This is surprising, on the one hand, because central banking provides the foundation of the current economic system, worldwide.

On the other hand, such negativity may be signaling far worse.

Our theory, for years has been that the central banking system is presented as something that is economically positive when, in fact, it is quite negative and responsible for the gradual collapse of Western prosperity.

The mainstream media makes no real reference to the state of the West – or the world – when it comes to the larger economy.

China is collapsing. The European Union is half-bankrupt. The US is in a kind of depression.

But until recently the system that has created this mayhem has been treated as a kind of eternal or natural constant, like the sky or the moon or the sun.

Now however, with half the West running on negative interest rates, the cracks cannot be papered over.

The recent Bilderberg meetings apparently focused in large part on the economy.

Disaster was predicted and preparations were made.

In fact, this is how economies and economic systems “evolve.”

Out of “chaos,” order.

And to ensure that the responsibility for the chaos is not blamed on the bankers who run the central banking system behind the scenes, the central banking system itself is beginning to be blamed.

This is quite unusual. In past times, investment banking was blamed. Wall Street was blamed. Commercial banks were blamed. Now central banks are blamed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Attacks On the Press Escalate Ahead of Turkish Elections

October 30, 2015

Attacks On the Press Escalate Ahead of Turkish Elections

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, Turkish riot police stormed the offices of Koza Ipek Holding, a media group in Istanbul housing the Bugun TV channel and the Bugun and Millet newspapers.

“Dear viewers,” a Bugun TV anchor casually announced during the early morning broadcast, “do not be surprised if you see police in our studio in the upcoming minutes.” Outside, police were leading journalists away in handcuffs, while citizens — many of them journalists who worked in the building — protested the dawn raid as police attempted to disperse the growing crowd with tear gas and water cannons.

Scenes of riot police suddenly and forcefully storming media outlets perceived to be critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have become increasingly common in Turkey. In June the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) won 13 percent of the vote in the Parliamentary election, thereby surpassing the 10 percent electoral threshold needed for Parliamentary representation and taking away seats from President Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Crackdown Ahead of Elections

As the November 1 elections approach — a “snap” election called by the AKP in hopes of regaining a Parliamentary majority — press freedom advocates are concerned that the increasing raids on media outlets and attacks on journalists represent a dire threat to Turkish democracy.

“This pressure and attacks have significantly impacted journalists’ ability to report on matters of public interest freely and independently,” said Muzaffar Suleymanov, a researcher for the Committee to Protect Journalists Europe and Central Asia Program, at a recent press conference hosted by an emergency press freedom mission to Turkey. “In a practical sense, attacks on journalists compromise their work and affect the public’s ability to make an informed decision to vote.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Top 10 Activist Errors

May 16, 2015

Top 10 Activist Errors

The number one error, engaged in by the majority of people, is failing to be an activist. The world’s going to hell, countless situations can be easily improved, lives can be saved, and most people just sit there and do nothing. Others actively work to make matters worse. So, if you’re working for peace and justice, you’re among the tiny minority that’s pretty much got the big stuff right. If constructive criticism drives you into despair, please stop reading this article right now and just continue what you’re doing with your life. You have my gratitude.

If you’re open to hearing some suggestions, for whatever they may be worth (and yes, of course, this list of errors will exclude those that I am myself guilty and unaware of), read on:

1. ELECTIONISM. We need elections but do not now have them in the United States, not at the federal level. Working for election reforms is one of the most important things anyone can do. But taking time off from activism to focus on elections is the biggest waste of resources we engage in. Election reform will come through creative nonviolent activism, education, organizing, media, disruption, resistance, and protest. It won’t come through elections. Registering voters is not activism. Creating automatic registration, as just done in Oregon, is activism. Please stifle your compulsion to ask me who I’m voting for. You don’t ask me if I want to win the lottery. (I do, but I will not buy a ticket or devote my life to staring at one.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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