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Ashton Kutcher, a stupid person who got famous playing the role of a stupid person, tweeted the following the other day:
“Where has the middle gone? Middle class? Politicians who don’t need to be far left or far right? Media the just tells the facts w/o spin? The middle is most! The middle can innovate. The middle can negotiate. Hardworkers with inclusive values = the middle.”
A year ago Kutcher also tweeted a photo of himself sipping from a coffee mug bearing the insignia of the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency, with the caption, “Just sending out a morning shout to the men and woman of the intelligence community that keep us safe and protect our country.”
Just sending out a morning shout to the men and woman of the intelligence community that keep us safe and protect our country. #gratitude #ty
If Kutcher had tweeted a “far left” or “far right” perspective, like that America should be an all-white ethnostate or that racist demonstrators should be physically assaulted in the streets, it would have made international headlines. But tweeting in favor of the CIA, who kill many orders of magnitude more people than America’s fringe white supremacist groups, went almost completely unnoticed.
This will sound normal and obvious to you. But it shouldn’t.
If people could wake up one morning and suddenly see what the ruling power establishment is doing to them every single day, there’d suddenly be vastly more outrage directed at the so-called “centrists”, and a lot less focus on politically impotent fringe organization like white nationalists and Antifa. This is not to say that all fringe ideologies are harmless, just that none of them pose anywhere near the immediate existential threat that is posed by the current order.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A duck floats past two fish, looks down and says “Morning boys! How’s the water?” The fish swim on for a bit, then one of them turns to the other and says, “What the fuck is water?”
Corporatist propaganda is to western civilization what water is to fish. Our culture is saturated in it; it informs so many levels of our worldview and most of us never even examine any of them. It informs all aspects of culture, from our beliefs about what’s going on in the world to our understanding of history to what issues we think we’re supposed to care about on a given day to what opinions we think we’re allowed to choose from. People think they know what’s going on in their society, why their country fought this or that war, how their nation’s government and economy operate, when really they don’t know any of those things. All their most basic assumptions about their world, their culture, and even who they are as individuals is fully pervaded by mass media propaganda narratives.
In early tribal cultures, humans depended on campfire stories passed on from one generation to the next to tell them what the world is and how to interpret their experiences in it. Now that role has fallen exclusively to a few highly consolidated corporate media conglomerates whose billionaire owners have a vested interest in maintaining the warmongering plutocratic power establishment that is loosely centralized in the United States, because in that power establishment they get to live as kings.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
US oligarchs: Russia hacked our election.
Public: Uh oh! What should we do about it?
US oligarchs: Greatly inflate the military budget, sanction US rivals, and censor dissenting opinions.
Public: Umm… aren’t those things you’ve always wanted to do anyway?
US oligarchs: Hush.
I know objecting to internet censorship makes me a right-wing Nazi-kissing literal Hitler in the eyes of many in this bizarre funhouse mirror world of online political discourse, but I insist that censorship by powerful corporations is one of the greatest obstacles we face in our fight to survive and thrive as a species in a world that is increasingly imperiled and dominated.
It has become painfully obvious that political solutions to the problems we face are locked shut to us. Democracy does not exist in America in any meaningful way, and those of us who live outside of America are all subject to the whims of the power establishment which has loosely centralized itself there. Here in Australia we have paper ballots, exit polls and ranked-choice voting, which is a wet dream for many American election reform advocates, but it’s completely meaningless for us in a lot of ways because we’re functionally a US military/intelligence asset. All matters of interest to the US-centralized power establishment are completely uninfluenced by Australian voters; we only get to pretend to be a real country insofar as that doesn’t interfere with the interests of the empire.
I love my birth country Australia but as a state it doesn’t exist. Here is why it had its prime-minister denounce me, moved to cancel my passport, secretly passed data on me to US intelligence and has never made representations on my behalf. It is owned by US+UK corporations.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
