TWO “DEEP GREEN” VIDEOS

Youtube took all my original videos down when my old email address became invalid, so I’m gradually reposting them. Here’s the two that are up so far–one song about the basic structure of matter, and another about the importance of liquid hydrogen monoxide. Definitely “deep green music.” Enjoy!

GANDHI, KING, UKRAINE? a repeat post

I’m taking this month off for some spiritual renewal, and reposting this January offering because it remains so relevant, even as the USNATOkraine narrative about what’s going on falls apart in reality while those trying to maintain it resort to increasing levels of censorship in an effort to keep people from understanding the truth.  I’ll likely be writing about that in November, but here’s a teaser of sorts. This is a screenshot of a leaked British intelligence report detailing plans to expand the reach of Ukrainian legal standards, under which Mr. Sharly is subject to arrest and execution for treason, to the rest of the west, including the good ol’ USA. Ain’t freedom of speech wunnerful?:

from Wikipedia

One of the questions people ask me,, and that I sometimes ask myself, is why a long-time peace activist and vocal pacifist who was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war is now rooting for Russia to prevail in Ukraine, especially since, in the perception of most Americans, the Russians started the conflict. I’ve addressed the issue of the false perception that “the Russians started it” plenty of times. I’ll need to talk about that some tonight/in this essay, but I’m going to focus on what Gandhi had to say about  the limits of non-violence, the factors that allowed both him and Rev. Martin Luther King to conduct such powerful, non-violent campaigns, and to what extent, or whether, those factors are operating in the Ukrainian situation.

First of all, here’s some quotes from  Gandhi on the limits of non-violence. I will refer to some of them later.

I WOULD risk violence a thousand times rather than risk the emasculation of a whole race…..

….I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence… I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor…….

….The world is not entirely governed by logic. Life itself involves some kind of violence and we have to choose the path of least violence…..

….I want both the Hindus and Mussalmans to cultivate the cool courage to die without killing. But if one has not that courage, I want him to cultivate the art of killing and being killed rather than, in a cowardly manner, flee from danger. For the latter, in spite of his flight, does commit mental himsa (harm).  He flees because he has not the courage to be killed in the act of killing…..

…. if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women, and our places of worship by the force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting…..

….My nonviolence does admit of people, who cannot or will not be nonviolent, holding and making effective use of arms. Let me repeat for the thousandth time that nonviolence is of the strongest, not of the weak…..

….I have been repeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honour by non-violently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live for ever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully…..

….Whilst I may not actually help anyone to retaliate, I must not let a coward seek shelter behind nonviolence so-called. Not knowing the stuff of which nonviolence is made, many have honestly believed that running away from danger every time was a virtue compared to offering resistance, especially when it was fraught with danger to one’s life. As a teacher of nonviolence I must, so far as it is possible for me, guard against such an unmanly belief. Self-defense….is the only honorable course where there is unreadiness for self-immolation.

Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission. The latter befits neither man nor woman. Under violence, there are many stages and varieties of bravery. Every man must judge this for himself. No other person can or has the right.

From these quotes we see that Gandhi was a realist, and understood that nonviolent resistance is not always possible. In the same way, I consider myself a “realistic pacifist.” I would like the world to be nonviolent, and it’s what I practice in my personal life, but there are no pacifist governments on Earth, except maybe Bhutan–nope, I checked, they’ve got an army, too–and so it is likely that armed struggle will continue to be a factor in human society for a while. When fighting breaks out, we can use Gandhi’s guidelines to decide if it is one, or both, sides that should be condemned for their violence.

AN ANNIVERSARY, AND AN INVITATION

Tomorrow is the 22nd anniversary of whatever it was that happened to the World Trade Center in New York, and I think these paragraphs from a couple of posts I wrote in honor of the 20th anniversary of the event are worth reposting here.

Yesterday was the 20^th anniversary of an engineering miracle of sorts—the day when two airplanes were flown into the upper floors of The World Trade Center, setting off a low-temperature jet fuel/kerosene fire (not hot enough to melt steel) that somehow caused the buildings to collapse as if they had been professionally demo’d, and that, even more miraculously, caused the building next door, where all the surveillance records were stored, to collapse as well.

I think … the greatest miracle of 9/11: (was) that a group of powerful, influential (mostly) men, “The Project For A New American Century,” asked The God Who Loves America More Than Anywhere Else for a “new Pearl Harbor” to convince Americans that we needed to invade the Middle East.

amazing what a little kerosene can do…..

Although these men were powerful and influential, and capable of working behind the scenes to make things turn out in accordance with their wishes, their faith in their God was so great that they forbore from using their power and influence, and God gave them the “new Pearl Harbor” they asked for, without them having to lift a finger to make it happen. Hallelujah!

And you’d better believe that, or the DNCIA’s Brockbots will talk trash you, troll you with long, tendentious comments,, and otherwise harass you unmercifully. God works in mysterious ways.

Yes, indeed, God works in mysterious ways. After I posted a comment contesting the allegations in a Ukrainian propaganda video the other day, somebody got far enough into my Facebook account to try and change the password. When I found that out, I changed the password.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001 were, in my opinion, a con job on the American people and the world that was perpetrated by our so-called intelligence agencies and others in the upper echelons of our government, in collusion with corporate media. Since then, they have collaborated to convince the American people that, since a bunch of Saudis hijacked some airplanes and flew them into buildings, we should invade Afghanistan, that Saddam Hussein,helped them and therefore we should invade Iraq, that George Bush was fairly re-elected in 2004, that Obama was going to save the middle class, that a plan to give government funding to for-profit insurance companies was health care reform, that Trump was a Russian agent who only got elected because the Russians interfered in the election–the list goes on. One item on it is “If only the Democrats had a clear majority in Congress, they would fix climate change.” While they have made some carefully calculated gestures in that direction, they are not taking the issue nearly as seriously as they should, and so, in the hopes that there will be a massive outpouring of citizens demanding real change, and that the powers that be will take heed, there will be a demonstration in Nashville on Sunday, September 17th,

Here’s what the organizers have to say about it:

Join us for an empowering and action-filled rally in Public Square Park in Nashville! This event is Nashville’s answer to the Global Fight to End Fossil Fuels movement taking place all over the world this weekend. Together, we will take in-the-moment actions to stand against TVA’s creation of new gas buildouts in Middle Tennessee, urging TVA to transition to clean energy instead. This rally is presented in solidarity by a coalition of local organizations: The Climate Reality Project: Nashville Chapter, Climate Nashville, Sunrise Movement Nashville, Tennessee Interfaith Power & Light, and more.

Don’t miss out on the chance to participate in a global day of action, right here in Nashville! Let’s come together to show that this issue matters to us, take important action steps during the event (bring a charged phone), and be inspired by amazing local speakers and grassroots activity. Lineup to be announced soon.

Attendees will leave with current, local action items that can be shared with others; this rally is a spark for continued local climate action to come!

You can find the event’s Facebook web page here, and its non-Facebook page here.

And here’s the short version of what I would say if I were a featured speaker: In order to make a successful transition out of our fossil fuel addiction, we are going to need a radical turning-about in our economy and our expectations. Both personally and societally, we are going to have to switch from material growth to material degrowth–doing more with less. We need to strive for sustainability–maintaining the ecosystem we are part of rather than degrading it for our short-term needs. We are going to have to switch from linear consumption modes to circular ones–every “waste product” must be useful for something else. We need to switch from being competitive to being co-operative. We need to only produce things that we actually need, and make those things durable enough to last as long as possible. We need to learn to share things, and make sure that everybody is covered for their  basic needs. We need to build local economies, so that what we use is produced nearby rather than overseas.  We need to have time in our lives to do what we enjoy, rather than having to be on a work treadmill all the time. We need to measure our wealth by our relationships, rather than by our possessions. He who dies with the most toys loses. And, finally, we need to enjoy our lives, not by accepting our current roles as wage slaves, but by creating a system that nourishes and empowers us. I often feel very pessimistic about our future, but I know that I don’t know everything, and I am in favor of trying every tactic that might possibly work. Let a thousand flowers bloom! 8 min

The song dates from Bush times, but could easily be called Bidenomics. Consider the pic in the video teaser–Biden has always been about bailing out the banks, and he only reluctantly promised to raise the minimum wage, and then failed to do it.

4 min

I STAND ACCUSED…..AND RESPOND.

After my recent article in Communities Magazine, entitled “Agreements and Individuality, The Farm’s ‘Multistery’, and My Shotgun Wedding,” the editor received this letter:

In his article in the summer issue, Martin Holsinger writes: “I didn’t realize that I had bought into a belief system that increasingly resulted in my committing what we now call sexual assault and date rape.” After making that statement, he never goes on to apologize to the women that he assaulted or raped. I found it offensive for him to blame his behavior on “the culture around me” when, in fact, he still remembered that his mother had told him “make sure your partner is having a good time,” which is a pretty good definition of consent, for that era. Just because what he was doing might not have been called sexual assault or rape at that time doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong and harmful to the women involved. The President of the Royal Spanish Football Federation is losing his job over a forced kiss. It sounds like Martin Holsinger has gotten away with much more. I call on Martin Holsinger to publish an apology in these pages to the women he assaulted or raped. I’m sure they have never forgotten.

I wrote a short response for publication, and promised a longer response on my blog, and here it is. If you want the short version, you can find it in the comments at my recent post, “My Shotgun Wedding.”

Dear Ms. C

Thank you for your concern. I’d like to begin by clarifying what I meant when I wrote “what we now call sexual assault and date rape.” It has to do with the change in what is meant by “consent” over the last fifty-five years. In the sixties, “consent” meant “not saying no,” while these days it means “explicitly saying yes.” I think this is a great improvement in many ways, and helps lessen the likelihood of unpleasant surprises when two people are in an extremely open and vulnerable mode.

I should also make it clear that whenever I got a verbal or behavioral “no,” I respected it, but, as we both are aware, sometimes people will not say “no,” when they would like to, and the truth only emerges after the fact. That was what I was referring to in my article. I certainly never forced anybody to kiss me, much less anything more intimate. After the intervention I described, I reached out to as many of the women I felt I had been pushy with as I could find, and apologized. They numbered about a half-dozen, including the ones I couldn’t find It was the sixties. People didn’t have email addresses or phones–it was “Mary Doe, General Delivery, Smalltown, California,” and you had no idea if they were still there or ever stopped by the post office. I thought I made it clear from the rest of what I wrote that I repented, but I can’t control what those who read my writings read into, or fail to understand, in them. I will say that, fifty-five years after these events, my memories of them are still wince-worthy. Perhaps I should have included all that in the article, but it was already long by Communities Magazine standards.

In spite of the hit-or-miss nature of communication back then, I did hear back from some of the women to whom I was apologizing,, mostly along the lines of “NOW you’re saying you’re sorry!!??,” but also one who said she didn’t know what I was talking about, as she remembered our encounter quite warmly.

I mentioned what my mother told me about sex. I didn’t mention what my father told me about sex, because my father never told me anything about sex, how to treat women, or what it means to be a man. I should also mention that my parents’ marriage, and thus my very existence, are the result of their failure to communicate before becoming sexually involved. My mother grew up in radical Jewish circles in New York City, and my father was a Protestant from a small, deeply conservative town in Ohio. To my mother, sex was something friends could enjoy together. To my father, a woman opening herself to a man meant she wanted to marry him, and thus my father felt honor-bound to ask my mother to marry him once they had Done The Deed. Their marriage only lasted ten years, and was clearly in big trouble after only five. In his privately circulated autobiography, my father called marrying my mother   “the biggest mistake I made in my life.” Thanks, Dad, for your honesty, if not your blessing.

My father’s failure to communicate with me about values and behavior is not just about one conservative Midwesterner who didn’t want to talk about such things, and maybe didn’t know what to say. Behind that lies the oft-remarked fact that our culture has no serious rites of passage into adulthood, as all “primitive” cultures do, and that we are spiritually impoverished by that lack. Australian aborigines ritually and ceremonially mutilated their pubescent boys and sent them off into the desert to make it on their own until they were fully healed from the mutilation. In pre-Christian Europe, young men were sent into the forest to “live like wolves,” sleeping outside and eating only raw meat, for a year. Young teenagers in some New Guinea tribes have, or perhaps at this point had, to give blow jobs to older boys–and swallow, so as to absorb their manliness. Tribal people all over the world have, or in most cases these days, had, some kind of ordeal that young men had to survive in order to be considered men.

OF COURSE NATIONAL PROPAGANDA RADIO SLIMES BOBBY KENNEDY

(technical note: for some reason, WordPress will not let me put a “read more” tag in this story.)

Cornel West is asking to be The Green Party’s Presidential nominee. Bobby Kennedy is not. So why am I going to talk about his campaign? I’m going to talk about the sliming of RFK’s campaign for President because it is a much bigger version of what the mainstream press has always done to candidates who question the status quo, as Dr. Jill Stein did. It’s a great chance to examine the way mainstream media do it. And National Propaganda Radio made it easy for me by putting it all in one convenient place. In mid-July, they published/broadcast a story called “RFK jr.’s Campaign Is Driven By Conspiracy Theories”  gathered together all the major attacks on Kennedy. Here’s an edited, linked, and expanded version of what I had to say about it when I posted it on a certain well-known social media site that is not formerly known as “Twitter.”

courtesy Getty Images

I’m not sharing this because I agree with it. I’m posting it because a friend of mine shared it in a discussion of Kennedy’s candidacy, and I found it laughably easy to rebut–a prime example of slime from National Propaganda Radio. So, here’s the article, and here’s my rebuttal. My friend, unfortunately, chose to stick with “Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist.” Maybe the fact that this is an NPR article will cause the fboook algorithm to share it more widely than it does my usual posts. Here’s my rebuttal, which I’m planning to turn into a blog post that will include links to support what I say:

First”conspiracy theory”: Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain,””….Jill Stein got tarred for pointing out that the Europeans are way more conservative than we are about such things, leaning towards the precautionary principle rather than letting ‘er rip until a problem shows up. European kids are much less likely to have cell phones than American kids. Is this “conspiracy theory”? Here’s a quote from a petition to the FCC about 5G that was published in Scientific American:

“Numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most international and national guidelines. Effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being in humans. Damage goes well beyond the human race, as there is growing evidence of harmful effects to both plant and animal life.”

The FCC commissioners, not wishing to risk their future job prospects and financial security, were not impressed. That was in 2019.

A similar movement was afoot in Europe, where 180 scientists petitioned the EU Commissioners. Here’s an excerpt from their petition, plus commentary by the anonymous poster:

“We, the undersigned scientists, recommend a moratorium on the roll-out of the fifth generation, 5G, for telecommunication until potential hazards for human health and the environment have been fully investigated by scientists independent from industry. 5G will substantially increase exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) on top of the 2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi etc. for telecommunications already in place. RF-EMF has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment.”

The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals…..

,,,,….It has been shown that studies on the health impact of electromagnetic radiation in the past have often been influenced by industry. The scientists insist that independent studies on the effects of 5G radiation “to ensure the safety of the population” should now be carried out. They therefore ask the European Commission to postpone the expansion of the 5G network “until the potential risks to human health and the environment have been thoroughly investigated by scientists independent of industry”.

So….is the conspiracy theory “there seem to be serious drawbacks to our mass exposure to EMF radiation that are not being studied because the results might threaten the profits of the wealthy,” or “Don’t worry about the silly ‘evidence’! EMF won’t hurt you!”

NPR also faulted Kennedy for saying “5G networks are used for mass surveillance.” By denying this, NPR asks us to commit doublethink about the very nature of the modern internet. In order to use it for everything from grocery shopping to sex, people essentially are agreeing to be surveilled. Your phone continually gives your location to a central network as it records your purchases, conversations, and contacts. Such data has repeatedly been used to find and convict people of criminal behavior. It’s why police take peoples’ phones. They don’t have to compile a dossier on you: you have compiled your own dossier, and all they need is a compliant judge to say it’s relevant for them to read it. The recent outrageous case of a Nebraska teenager and her mother being jailed for arranging the daughter’s abortion, with the state subpoenaing their Facebook Messenger conversations, is a case in point, but there have been, and will be, plenty of others.

 

Here, with some commentary by Rolling Stone Magazine, is what Kennedy said that prompted the charge that “anti-depressants are linked to school shootings”:

“And prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country,”….“The one thing that we have, it’s different than anybody in the world, is the amount of psychiatric drugs our children are taking.” He then alleged that the National Institutes of Health won’t research the supposed link between these drugs and shootings “because they’re working with the pharmaceutical industry.”

Mainstream media treats Kennedy as if he were some kind of nut, when the fact is that he has spent decades as a successful environmental lawyer, who has now turned his legal and scientific skills on the conduct of the US government, which is responding by characterizing everything he says as “nutty.”  Consider the further context in this claim:  Antidepressants are a huge cash cow for big pharma, in spite of independent studies that show they are marginally effective to ineffective at doing what they are touted for, and loaded with side effects, such as people who take them having suicidal thoughts that they might not have had otherwise. Do those suicidal urges turn into homicidal urges? A great many mass shooters finish by shooting themselves.  You will find a vast chorus of corporate media voices denying the possibility of a connection between psychiatric drugs and mass shootings. After all, it would be bad for business to ban or seriously limit use of these drugs, so we’re certainly not going to fund research that might demonstrate a connection.

Hey, even if there isn’t a direct connection, maybe we should be looking at how, and why, our culture is so crazy that we have to drug one out of every five Americans because they can’t otherwise accommodate themselves to society’s demands. Maybe we should have a national dialogue about changing our culture so that people don’t need to be drugged in order to fit in. Such changes would certainly be inimical to the financial well-being, indeed, the existence, of the corporations whose political party and media are sliming Kennedy. They definitely do not want people asking why so many Americans are so stressed out that a big chunk of them need to have their feelings and emotions chemically damped down so they can cope, and, even so, some of the chemically repressed end up shooting lots of people. And the shooters who weren’t on psychiatric meds? Just another undiagnosed case of mental illness, right? They’d a been on drugs if the authorities knew about ’em!

Next claim: “Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender,” I found evidence to support Kennedy’s claim only in wildly radical, dubious publications like The Guardian and the US National Institute of Health. It’s well documented that chemicals in our water are blurring sexual differentiation in other species, so it only stands to reason that they would do the same to us. Millions of women are taking birth control pills. Much of the estrogen is excreted in their urine, and water treatment plants are not equipped to remove it. In addition, microplastics and other petroleum-derived chemicals such as agricultural sprays are estrogen mimics, and they are everywhere–but how could we possibly run our culture without them? Again, Corporate America gets its money in large part from activities that flood our environment, and our bodies, with estrogen mimics,  which act as endocrine disruptors that chemically scramble peoples’ thoughts and physiology. In order for the profits involved to continue, we must believe that the huge eruption in gender confusion that has developed over the last several decades is “just something that’s happening,” that it means that human society and consciousness must evolve to accept a wide variety of sexual preferences and genders.” Not to be fully supportive of this is to be sexist, transphobic, homophobic, and so on.

I have no problem with accepting people as they are in those respects. However, my acceptance does not preclude my curiosity about what made them that way. Gee, do you think it could have something to do with the way we are flooding our environment with petrochemicals and their derivatives? Is suggesting that our gender diversity might diminish if we quit being fossil fuel junkies “anti-diversity”? Yet another one of the ways in which being “woke” and “politically correct” just happens to support the neoliberal agenda.

Next claim: “AIDS is not connected with HIV.” When I checked into this, I discovered that the top endorsement of Kennedy’s notorious book about Anthony Fauci (which I haven’t read) spends about half its pages addressing Kennedy’s evidence on AIDS, is from

“Prof. Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus in 1984,(who) writes “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Moreover, we are told that as far back as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference of June 1990, Montagnier had publicly declared “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.”

Once again, there is a huge medical establishment, with billions invested in it and thousands of people profiting from the investment, that Kennedy is calling into question here.

When it comes to vaccines and autism, people keep saying things that they claim Kennedy has said. Here’s something he actually said:

“Every medicine is required to do placebo-controlled trials … you give a group of people the medicine, and then you give a similarly situated [group] of people a placebo, and then you look at health outcomes over a four- or five-year period. Many of the outcomes are going to have long diagnostic horizons and long incubation periods, so you won’t see them immediately. You need to do it — Anthony Fauci said said eight years for a vaccine. You need to watch them for a while. … The only medicine that never gets tested are vaccines. And that is what I object to. … All I’m saying is, let’s test them the way we test other medicines. That does not seem unreasonable.”

Interestingly, this is the same stance for which Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party Presidential candidate in 2016, was labelled “anti-vax” for taking. We should note that Dr. Stein has spent most of her working life as a pediatrician, who regularly recommended childhood immunizations to the families whose children she cared for. Note that this did not stop the Democrats from making a huge amount of noise about her being “anti-vax.”

And yes, vaccines are the kind of cash cow that the pharmaceutical industry’s stockholders just love. Everybody gets them and they’re inexpensive to manufacture. What’s not to like? It’s another one of the straws through which money is sucked from the common treasury into the pockets of those whose pockets are already bulging.

Whether or not a connection between vaccines and autism exists, autism, like blurred sexuality, is on the rise. Might this, too, be linked to the ways we are fouling our nest? Sorry, we can’t look into that, we have to pump up the war machine, and besides, it’s mean of you to talk like that about the differently-abled.

OK, I’ve got another subject I want to cover, so I’m going to keep the rest of these comments short.

“fact-checking or criticizing them amounts to censorship.” I personally have seen multiple instances where the “neutral fact checking bodies” such as politifact, endorsed lies as the truth, mostly around Russiagate and the Ukraine war. And the fact is that people are being censored for speaking opinions that the government doesn’t want heard. That’s what Matt Taibbi’s investigation into the Twitter Files revealed–but the Democratic/corporate press dismissed that because Elon Musk.

The thing about the First Amendment is, there’s nothing in it that says you must have your facts straight in order to freely express your opinion. We have a right to make fools of ourselves, and anybody, any government or industry body that tries to pass judgement on what we do and don’t have the freedom to say is turning this country into a tyranny.

” his insistence that Republicans stole the 2004 election to his claims that 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance to his belief that the CIA assassinated his uncle.”

It’s pretty well documented that the GOP did steal the 2004 election, as judged by the results of a Green Party lawsuit in Ohio, where the deed was done, but Kerry, like Gore before him (speaking of stolen elections) declined to raise a fuss about it.

I have a lot of questions about 5G–it’s being forced on us, so we’ll see what happens, to the extent that those who benefit from it will let negative news about it get any traction–and we’ve definitely entered the era of mass surveillance, 5G or not.

The CIA certainly wants us to believe that the notion that they assassinated Kennedy is “conspiracy theory.” It’s pretty clear that Oswald didn’t act alone. He was considered a poor marksman in the army, the shot out the window that he allegedly made would have been difficult for a good marksman, and both the Zapruder film and the original description of Kennedy’s fatal wound point to him having been shot from a different angle. And then there’s his vow to “tear up the CIA and scatter it to the four winds.” They didn’t like that one bit.

“(Kennedy) says he would “seal the [U.S.-Mexico] border permanently” and blames the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying Moscow acted in “good faith.””
Good luck with the first one, right on on the second.

And then there’s all the horror NPR expresses about him pointing out that the US government tells a lot of lies. Of course NPR would be horrified–they’re part of the system that spreads and perpetuates the lies.(insert graphic into script)

Not my perfect candidate, but the slanted criticism of him is quite telling. He’s scaring the bejesus out of all the right people.

Re another article labeling RFKj as “Aniti-Semitic” : Yep, “anti-Semitic” is another one of the Empire’s weapons for squashing dissent. Usually done in relation to people who point out that the Israelis are being very nasty to the Palestinians, which is ironic, because one of the dumber quotes I have heard from RFK was his claim that the Israelis aren’t killing Palestinian children on purpose.

I read the Politico article and I gotta say I think it’s quite a stretch to call saying that Ashkenazi Jews are among the people least susceptible to Covid “anti-Semitic.” Ashkenazi Jews are also more susceptible to colorectal and endometrial cancers. You win some, you lose some. Genetics has no “anti-Semitic” bias.

It just so happens that Patrick Lawrence wrote an eloquent article in response to the “anti-Semitism” charge. It’s called “Anything–Anything–To Avoid Debating Robert F. KenJrnedy .” Here’s a quote from it:

the last and biggest reason R.F.K. Jr. so profoundly provokes the Democratic elite’s ire. He stands explicitly against the American empire—a term he has no hesitation using. On his website and in his interviews and campaign speeches, Kennedy attacks the corporatization of the American political economy, the censorship regime it sponsors, the wars of adventure, the institutional corruption in Washington. He praises whistleblowers such as John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake, who have paid big for their principles. On Day 1, he promises, he will drop all charges against Julian Assange.

This is a man who understands the Deep State for what it is and is intent on challenging it. And he does so in the name of inspiring Americans to insist on rebuilding our crumbling republic according to the ideals his uncle and his father were the last authentically to articulate. The Atlantic headlined its take-down of Kennedy, in unstated contempt, “The First MAGA Democrat.” What kind of people are they who find repellent the thought of dismantling the imperium and reviving this broken nation? Answer: People who think being liberal Democrats is more important than being Americans–or being, indeed, human.

Suppressing the polling percentages, keeping Kennedy off the debating stage: Questions of campaign strategy and tactics are one thing. It is what R.F.K. Jr. stands for that makes him the greatest source of the angst so obviously abroad among liberals. Given all that is at issue in the 2024 presidential election, the need for an open debate between two candidates diametrically opposed on issues of war and peace and the fundamental direction of this nation could hardly be greater. What kind of people would deprive voters of this pressing occasion? Answer: See the conclusion of the previous paragraph.

Unfortunately, Kennedy’s response to the charge that he is anti-Semitic has been to double down on his support for Israel and his disdain for the Palestinians. I found this very disappointing. It curbed my guarded enthusiasm for Kennedy quite a bit. The fact remains, however, that corporate media are telling lies about him, just as they did about Trump, whom I view as an unbridled disaster–but that did not stop me from repeatedly pointing out the lies that were told about him, and pointing out that lying about somebody is not only a morally repellent way to attack somebody, but a way that is likely to rebound and benefit the person you are lying about. For that, plenty of Democrats called me a Trump supporter. At least this time, I’m defending somebody who has a lot of positions with which I agree.

By casting Kennedy, who has for decades, been a successful environmental lawyer–whose success was based on his excellent grasp of both subjects, as a stupid nut job, those who impugn him are impugning all of us who are more alarmed about the many unintended consequences of our chemical civilization than its perpetrators want us to be. Casting Kennedy aside is a first step to casting aside all objections, and objectors, to the government’s view of what is right and proper. I’ve often said that those who think all the fascism is coming from the right are dangerously mistaken, and this national propaganda radio story, which just one of many similar echoes in the corporate echo chamber, is a prime example. Of course, this is the tactic that corporate media used in their anti-Trump campaign in 2016. I can only hope it does the same for Kennedy as it did for Trump. Perhaps those who like to keep things under their control will do unto him as they did to his father and his uncle. Or perhaps his “unconditional support for Israel” will alienate enough of the people who would otherwise support him so that he will crash and burn on his own. We’ll see.

music: Camper Van Beethoven, “Jack Ruby”

 

 

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN

I have a longtime friend who has been accused of being a pedophile. I’m not going to talk about that particular case, except to mention that it sparked my interest in the topic. As I explored it, I found myself with a number of insights that nobody else seems to be expressing, so I guess it’s up to me to say these things, some of which are very politically incorrect–but no, I’m not going to assert that being sexual with young children is OK.

According to those who put up websites to raise the alarm about pedophilia, one in four children gets sexually molested–one in three girls, one in five boys. Since we’ve all been children, and it’s clear that sexual abuse has been widespread in our culture for a very long time, I think we can take this statistic to mean that one quarter of us were molested as children. That’s about 80 million people.

These same sites also claim that the “average” molester messes with eight children over the course of their life, which means there are about ten million child abusers in this country, most of whom have never been charged for their crimes. That’s about one adult out of every thirty-three.

These statistics, however, turn out to be based on conjecture, because they also say that a high percentage of child sexual abuse is not reported. So how do they know for sure? I’m not trying to dismiss the problem. It’s clearly widespread, I’m introducing this to look at the question of why the people who are committing these acts don’t turn themselves in for treatment, which ties in with the question of why others who know about what they are doing don’t intervene.

ANNOUNCING A “TEACH-IN” ON THE WAR IN UKRAINE

Last Fall, I covered the Nashville Peace and Justice Center’s highly slanted “Ukraine Round Table,” which was basically a Ukraine support rally. I am happy to announce that the NPJC will be having a gathering to talk about “the other side of the story.” We–and I say “we” because I am one of those who helped organize it–are calling it, “Ukraine Reconsidered.” This will be a panel discussion featuring Bruce Gagnon, director and founder of The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power In Space, Gloria LaRiva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Ray McGovern of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Here’s more info about the panelists:

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years (April 1963 to August 1990), serving seven U.S. presidents. During the Ronald Reagan administration he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President’s Daily Brief. At his retirement in 1990, McGovern received the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medal. He returned the medal in protest in 2006 over CIA use of torture. In 2003 he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Gloria La Riva is a labor, community and anti-war activist based in San Francisco, California. In 2016, she was the presidential candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Peace and Freedom Party.

Bruce Gagnon grew up in a military family and served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. for the past 40 years he has been working for peace and social justice. He is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation is the main sponsor of this meeting, and will be providing a catered meal for those who show up in person at The Nashville Friends’ Meeting on Thursday, July 19th. (Donations will be welcome, of course!) The gathering is scheduled to start at 6:30. McGovern and Gagnon will be Zooming in, while Ms. LaRiva will be present in person. There will be plenty of time for questions and answers, and the panelists have explicitly said that they welcome tough questions, so I’m urging all those who have debated the Ukraine issue to attend, one way or another.

Here’s the link for RSVP’ing. That will get you on the list for the zoom link or the meal.

FREDDIE O’CONNELL FOR MAYOR

I’m endorsing Freddie O’Connell for mayor of Nashville. You can go to his website and read about what he’s done and what he intends to do, if Metro Council, and maybe the state legislature, agree with him. Local government is where the rubber meets the road for radical politics. Class-based analysis is all well and good, but what are you going to do about the school system and other community infrastructure? What are you going to do about taxes? Law enforcement?

I can rant on and on about the US’s dismal foreign policy strategies and the way corporate priorities are steering our country’s agenda and neglecting, if not actively exploiting, working people, and I can know that it is highly unlikely that, at the national level, enough people who see things anything like my way are going to come into office and change that. That’s not true at the local level. While the decisions local government gets to make are not broad policy strokes, they are a place for finding practical ways to implement the socialist ideals that “we are all in it together” and “the purpose of government is to make sure everybody’s material needs, at least, are being met–adequate housing, healthy food, and a way to spend one’s time that contributes to the community–which helps meet our non-material needs for community and a sense of purpose.

There’s a certain kind of language that is what you might call “boilerplate” for local election campaigns, the things any candidate with a pretense of being “liberal” or “progressive” has to say. There are also different boilerplate statements that conservative candidates make, but that’s not the subject here. Past the boilerplate rhetoric, what it comes down to is how much you trust the candidate to deliver, which involves knowing their background and their record. Let’s read a quote from Freddie’s campaign website:

As Mayor, Freddie will make Nashville more mobile by using technology to make traffic flow better, ending our standing as the worst in the nation for potholes, and developing an easy-to-use transit system that unclogs our roads.

He will ensure that the complex array of construction-based closures are better coordinated so we can get where we need to go, whether by bus, bike, car, or sidewalk. He will use his experience in tech to fix our traffic management systems so we can get where we need to go faster and stop sitting at red lights when no one is coming the other way.

Freddie will also take on our transit system. Having served on the leadership board of the system, and because he and his family often ride the bus, he knows what’s needed. Without raising taxes, he can implement a three-year plan that creates more crosstown routes and reduces downtown transfers (and traffic).

Here’s some background on this issue: first of all, Freddie originally arrived on the public scene as an advocate for making Nashville more bicycle-friendly. He doesn’t talk about that much on his campaign website, nor does he raise the radical roots of pushing for better public transportation: that an automobile-based society, among its many other drawbacks, makes life difficult for low-income citizens. Cars cost thousands of dollars. Their insurance and upkeep runs to hundreds of dollars a year, maybe thousands if a major repair is needed. The minimum wage has not risen in 14 years, during which its buying power has dropped by about 50%. Yep. Seven and a quarter today is the equivalent of $3.60 in 2009 dollars.  The “fight for fifteen” movement, which started in 2012, should now, in order to keep up with inflation, be a “fight for twenty.”

Purchasing and maintaining an automobile, like having a cell phone, is, in effect, a tax that citizens must pay to private industry in order to fully participate in society, and, as I just pointed out, a far more onerous one than the not inconsiderable $50-$100+ per month cost of a cell phone.

This gets back to the basic difference between capitalism and socialism. The capitalist looks at this situation and says, “if people can’t come up with the scratch for a phone or a car, that’s their problem,” while the socialist perspective is, “how can we make sure everybody has adequate access to communication and transportation?”Obviously, that doesn’t have to mean buying everybody a car, or even making sure everybody earns enough money to buy a car. It can also mean creating a functional public transportation system and fostering walkable neighborhoods so that people do not have to get in a car to buy groceries, go to work, or take their children to school. If public transportation can cover some of those needs, great, but the more locally people can live their lives, the better off they will be.

I think it’s wise of Freddie to not talk about this broader context. Maybe it’s even unwise of me to mention it. If you label your proposals “socialist,” some people will get up in arms about it–these days, maybe literally. But if you propose the kind of common sense solutions that stem from a socialist perspective, without putting a label on them, I think they have the capacity to gain a lot more support. As an illustration, we can look to the dawn of modern democratic socialism in the US: Bernie Sanders’ tenure as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont. One of his most important moves was to turn city-owned low-income housing into a co-op that was owned not by the city, but by the residents of the “project.” Sanders pitched this to Burlington’s not inconsiderable number of Republican voters as promoting an “ownership society” by making the inhabitants of the projects the owners, thus making them responsible for maintenance and repairs. The Republicans liked that, and helped make it happen. Of course, the residents weren’t just told, “Now you’re buying instead of renting. Good luck!” and set adrift. They got plenty of advice and other kinds of help from the city. Thirty years later, the plan is still a success. Perhaps, under Freddie’s stewardship, we will see similar moves in Nashville. “Could Freddie be the next Bernie?” Well, first he’s got to get himself elected.

Here’s another thing that Freddie doesn’t really come out and say on his campaign website, and that maybe I shouldn’t say either, but he is not a candidate like all the other candidates. Everybody else who is running for Mayor is a member of the business and legal community, and that’s the basis for their interest in participating in local government. Freddie got into Nashville government for a very different reason. He entered the halls of power as a community activist. At that level, I feel like he is “one of us.” I have had the opportunity to speak with him personally, and I felt like I was with a brother, not a politician. It is heartening to see his rise, and I hope his candidacy is just the beginning of a big change for the better for Nashville, and towards more influence for Freddie and others who share his sensibilities.

There is indeed a crop of like-minded office holders and candidates joining him. At-large Metro Council members Burkley Allen and Zulafat Suara, both of whom I endorsed when they first stood for office, are running for re-election, and Delisha Porterfield and Jeff Syracuse are a couple of progressive populist district representatives who are making a bid to join them. Here in District One, where we have a history of dysfunctional council reps, we have a good field of candidates running. I like both community activist Ruby Baker and social justice lawyer Joy Kimbrough, who has pledged to pay attention to keeping the open space in District One, well, open. As someone who lives at the end of a dead-end road in the woods, woods whose continued existence depends on the decisions of our neighbors, that is an important quality of life issue for me.

To me, Freddie’s emergence as a serious candidate is a milestone of sorts in the evolution of local politics here in Nashville. His victory would mark a departure from the usual ruling class of people who are beholden to the business-as-usual community and who are seemingly incapable of grasping that the world they have always lived in is coming to an end, much less guiding the city through the changes that are surely coming our way. So I hope Nashville turns out to be, in the words of his campaign slogan, “Ready for Freddie.”

music: Muddy Waters, “I’m Ready“

CORNEL WEST MAKES THE GREEN PARTY AN OFFER WE CAN’T AFFORD TO REFUSE

photo courtesy Getty Images

While I’m on the subject of endorsements, Dr. Cornel West has made The Green Party an offer I don’t think we can afford to refuse: he would like to be our Presidential candidate. I’m going to talk a little about why I think that would be a great idea, and why I wish we could nominate him to run for a position where he had a good chance of actually winning, but first let’s look at the history of Green Party Presidential candidates and who is running for the 2024 nomination.

Ralph Nader was our candidate for our first two elections, in 1996 and 2000. He brought his prestige to the party and helped amplify our message. Nader and the GP went our separate ways after 2000, with Nader outpolling the GP’s candidate, David Cobb, by nearly 4 to 1 in 2004. Cynthia McKinney was our 2008 candidate. She had some national prominence from being at first the most radical Democrat in Congress and then becoming too radical for the Democrats. The Green Party’s experience of her, overall, seems to have been that she was too erratic and not really interested in building the party, and she is no longer associated with the GP. Jill Stein then took a couple of turns. Dr. Stein was not a national figure when she started, but she had, and has, the chops to become a national figure–she can think quickly and speak clearly on her feet. Her pockets are only so deep, however, and she has had to return to being a physician in order to support herself. Howie Hawkins was our candidate in 2020, mostly because there wasn’t anybody else any better qualified than he. I met a number of the other candidates for the GP Presidential nomination when they came through Nashville right before Covid hit. Frankly, it was a clown show. It reminded me of a story from Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles,” in which an astronaut from Earth lands on Mars, tells them he’s from Earth, and promptly gets confined in a mental hospital ward with all the other nut jobs that claim they’re from Earth. “Ah, so you say you’re running for President?”

Apart from Cornel West, the field of announced GP Presidential candidates I found in Ballotpedia mostly contained the names of people I couldn’t find anything on when I searched for their name and “Green Party.” There were a couple of exceptions to that. One of them has tried several times to get elected to their local school board, and failed. Another ran for their state’s House of Representatives, in a district in which the GOP was not a serious contender, and only received 420 votes compared to the winning Democrat’s 32,000. If you can’t win, or at least do well, in a local race where fear of a Republican victory is not a factor and the district is small enough so  it is at least theoretically possible to meet every voter face to face, what are you thinking when you propose to run for President of the United States?

This illustrates the way the US political system is designed to exclude new parties with radical ideas. There’s no proportional representation, no ranked choice voting, and, in some cases not even runoff elections, meaning that whoever receives a plurality of the votes cast, whether it’s a majority of them or not, is declared the winner. Our country’s major media outlets only recognize “well-funded” candidates, i.e., ones who take donations from big business and other moneyed interests, as “viable candidates. This makes it hard for The Green Party and other parties with a radical vision for America’s future, to get people elected to “entry-level” positions so we can start building a credible field of candidates for higher offices. Meanwhile, Cornel West is the most sensible choice for the Presidential campaign we have to run. It’s too bad we don’t have a parliamentary system, under which he, as head of the party, could run for Congress, and possibly win a seat, giving him, and us, a place at the table. Instead, we have to run him as a Presidential candidate, a sure-to-lose gambit that will at least elevate his influence on our national conversation, and ours.

So, in the unlikely event that Dr. West becomes our next President, he will have to deal with an entrenched establishment that will be dead set against pretty much everything he might want to do.I doubt if he will win, but I think his presence will bring a much-needed note of reality to what is shaping up as a zombie Presidential race: the doddering, wildly unpopular Joe Biden vs. the not quite doddering, but somewhat deranged, WUP Donald Trump. It’s a fear-based election: will it be a repeat of 2020, when enough people were afraid of another four years of Trump to elect Biden? Or have enough people gotten frustrated enough with Biden’s failure to follow through on many of his campaign promises that the third of the population that admires Trump and sees him as a bulwark against Biden’s so-called “socialism” will prevail?

I think it’s safe to say that Biden has largely lost credibility with working-class voters because he has failed to deliver on even the tepid promises he made. Fifteen dollar minimum wage? Nope–never mind that, given our rate of inflation, 2012’s demand for $15/hr. today translates into twenty dollars an hour. College loan forgiveness? Nope. Protecting women’s rights? Nope. Any kind of improvement in our health care system? Nope.  Biden can blame the GOP all he wants, but the fact is that he has failed to deliver. On many issues, he’s just continued Trump’s policies and people–aggression against Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia, crushing the Palestinians, supporting the Saudis, you name it. The situation cries out for change, and Dr. Cornel West is the man who can embody those changes.

Cornell West is a gifted orator and a deeply compassionate visionary who uses his power to give a voice to the voiceless. West doesn’t just talk. He sings, not in the way we usually think of as singing, but the way a jazz musician can combine rhythm, melody, and intensity to take their listeners to a whole new level. He is humorous and inclusive. I view him as every bit as much an heir to Martin Luther King’s mantle as The Reverend William Barber.

I took a break from writing this to try and find a way to include an example of Dr. West’s word jazz in this broadcast. I haven’t figured it out, but, for my readers, here are a couple of links. The first is to Dr. West’s Presidential announcement video, and the second is the audio of a speech he gave twelve years ago.

Putting Cornel West in the arena as a Green will help raise public awareness of sane alternatives to the Demopublican monopoly lock on US politics, and on the unfairness of the media-reinforced legal system that perpetrates that monopoly. Dr. West’s voice is a clarion call for Americans who want something better than a choice about which corporation will own them to find each other and organize. In the face of the widespread legal suppression of the Green Party’s efforts to get on the ballot, creating networks that make corporate monopoly irrelevant, and that will be able to emerge and help organize civic life after the duopoly falls should, I think, be our primary task. We need to help organize neighborhood co-ops of various kinds–worker, consumer, child care, cooking, housing–and neighborhood organizations in which people meet face to face and work together to create gardens, do neighborhood cleanups and repair projects. There’s organic garden growing, and then there’s organic community growing, in which the projects emerge from the needs of those who organize themselves.

What about “the spoiler effect”? The Democrats are already peddling the fearful meme that any dissatisfaction with Biden, whether a primary challenge within the party or a strong bid by an alternative party, will “siphon off votes and elect Trump,” or whoever replaces him if the Democrats do succeed in disqualifying him from running for President.

Turnout was at a near-record high for US Presidential elections in 2020. Two-thirds of potentially eligible voters turned out–that’s a hundred and fifty-eight million people. About eighty-one million of them voted for Biden. About seventy-three million of them voted for Trump. And about seventy-nine million didn’t vote at all. In other words, Trump didn’t just lose to Biden. He came in third, behind “neither of the above.”

So, there are seventy-nine million reasons why, even in a relatively tight, highly contested election like 2020, a third strong candidate would not be a “spoiler.” If the Democrats can’t inspire any of those seventy-nine million citizens to vote for them, that’s their problem, not The Green Party’s.  Indeed, Cornel West’s input would not spoil our election process, but perhaps be more like a kind of yogurt starter for it, that would improve its nutritional quality and overall benefits. At worst, helping Dr. Cornel West run for President will be a great education for all those who participate. I’m in.

THE ELITE WAR ON FREE THOUGHT

This is  an article by Matt Taibbi, shared from his Substack page to Scheerpost, with a few comments at the end from me.

A funny thing happened last night, at a remarkable event in London in celebration of free speech with Russell Brand and Michael Shellenberger. Before the proceedings Michael suggested we give prepared remarks. I wrote a speech, tinkering with it at night on the plane over, then all day after landing. At the event Michael stood before the large crowd and extemporaneously delivered a rousing address. I slid what I wrote under a chair.

Though I did end up mumbling a few things from memory, this is the whole speech, as written:

It’s heartening to see so many faces here in London, to talk about the crisis of free speech around the globe, or to protest censorship, or whatever it is we’re doing exactly. Before we begin, I think it’s important to make a distinction. Unlike Russell and the rest of our hosts, Michael and I, and a few of us in the crowd, are Americans. For us, belief in unfettered free speech is a core part of our character. It’s a big reason that we Americans enjoy the wonderful reputation we do all around the world, especially here in Europe, where (I’m sorry to tell you) we hear you whispering to the restaurant hostess that you’d like to be seated at the table as far away from us as possible.

That was meant to be a laugh line, but in some ways, that’s what the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution comes down to: the right to be an asshole. We have a prettier way of saying it — a right to petition for a redress of grievances — but it’s the same basic idea.

Isn’t that a beautiful phrase, a redress of grievances? Great, memorable language. Like a lot of Americans, I know the First Amendment by heart. I’ve recited it to myself enough to know it doesn’t say the government gives me the right to speech, assembly, a free press. It says I have those things, already. As a person, as a citizen.

This is a very American thing, the idea that rights aren’t conferred, but a part of us, like our livers, and you can’t take them away without destroying who we are. That’s why in other contexts you’ll hear some of us say things like, “I’ll give you this gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands!”

Some people roll their eyes and think that sounds crazy, but we know that guy actually means it, and to a lot of us it makes sense. We’re touchy about rights, especially about the first ones: speech, assembly, religion, the free press.

But we’re not here tonight to debate the virtues of American speech law versus the European tradition. Instead, Michael and I are here to tell a horror story that concerns people from all countries. Last year, he and I were offered a unique opportunity to look at the internal documentation of Twitter.

I entered that story lugging old-fashioned, legalistic, American views about rights, hoping to answer maybe one or two questions. Had the FBI, for instance, ever told the company what to do in a key speech episode? If so, that would be a First Amendment violation. Big stuff!

But after looking at thousands of emails and Slack chats, I first started to get a headache, then became confused. I realized the old-school Enlightenment-era protections I grew up revering were designed to counter authoritarianism as people understood the concept hundreds of years ago, back in the days of tri-cornered hats and streets lined with horse manure.

What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.

In fact, after enough time online, users will lose both the knowledge and the vocabulary they would need to even have politically dangerous thoughts. What Michael calls the Censorship-Industrial Complex is really just the institutionalization of orthodoxy, a vast, organized effort to narrow our intellectual horizons.

It’s appropriate that we’re here in London speaking about this, because this is the territory of George Orwell, who predicted a lot of what we saw in the Twitter Files with depressing accuracy.

One example stands out.

One of the big themes of 1984 was the reduction of everything to simple binaries. He described a world where “all ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged,” where it wasn’t really necessary to have words for both “warm” and “cold,” since as he put it, “every word in the language – could be negatived by adding the affix un-.”

Let’s not bother with cold, let’s just have unwarm.

A political movement has long been afoot in America and other places to reduce every political question to simple binaries. As Russell knows, current political thought doesn’t like the idea that there can be left-neoliberalism over here, and right-Trumpism over here, and then also all sorts of people who are neither – in between, on the peripheries, wherever.

They prefer to look at it as, “Over here are people who are conscientious and believe in science and fairness and democracy and puppies, and then everyone else is a right-winger.” This is how you get people with straight faces calling Russell Brand a right-winger.

But it goes deeper. Michael and I found correspondence in Twitter about something called the Virality Project, which was a cross-platform, information-sharing program led by Stanford University through which companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook shared information about Covid-19.

They compared notes on how to censor or deamplify certain content. The ostensible mission made sense, at least on the surface: it was to combat “misinformation” about the pandemic, and to encourage people to get vaccinated. When we read the communications to and from Stanford, we found shocking passages.

One suggested to Twitter that it should consider as “standard misinformation on your platform… stories of true vaccine side effects… true posts which could fuel hesitancy” as well as “worrisome jokes” or posts about things like “natural immunity” or “vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway.”

This is straight out of Orwell. Instead of having “ambiguities” and “shades of meaning” on Covid-19, they reduced everything to a binary: vax and anti-vax.

They eliminated ambiguities by looking into the minds of users. In the Virality Project if a person told a true story about someone developing myocarditis after getting vaccinated, even if that person was just telling a story – even if they weren’t saying, “The shot caused the myocarditis” – the Virality Project just saw a post that may “promote hesitancy.”

So, this content was true, but politically categorized as anti-vax, and therefore misinformation – untrue.

A person who talks about being against vaccine passports may express support for the vaccine elsewhere, but the Virality Project believed “concerns” about vaccine passports were driving “a larger anti-vaccination narrative,” so in this way, a pro-vaccine person may be anti-vax. They also wrote that such “concerns” inspired broader discussions “about the loss of rights and freedoms,” also problematic.

Other agencies talked about posts that shared results of Freedom of Information searches on “authoritative health sources” like Dr. Anthony Fauci, or used puns like “Fauxi.” The VP frowned on this.

“This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices,” wrote Graphika, in a report sent to Twitter, “leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.”

It was the same with someone who shared true research about the efficacy of natural immunity or suggested that the virus came from a lab. It all might be factual, but it was politically inconvenient, something they called “malinformation.” In the end, out of all of these possible beliefs, they derived a 1984 binary: good and ungood.

They also applied the binary to people.

This was new. Old-school speech law punished speech, not the speaker. As a reporter I was trained that if I commit libel, if I wrote something defamatory that caused provable injury to someone, I would have to retract the error, admit it, apologize, and pay remuneration. All fair!  But the court case wouldn’t target me as a person. It wouldn’t assume that because I was wrong about X, I would also be wrong about Y, and Z.

We saw NGOs and agencies like the FBI or the State Department increasingly targeting speakers, not speech. The Virality Project brought up the cases of people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The posts of such “repeat offenders,” they said, are “almost always reportable.” They encouraged content moderators to make assumptions about people, and not to look on a case-by-case basis. In other words, they saw good and ungood people, and the ungood were “almost always reportable.”

Over and over we saw algorithms trying to electronically score a person’s good-or-ungoodness. We found a Twitter report that put both Wikileaks and Green Party candidate Jill Stein in a Twitter “denylist,” a blacklist that makes it harder for people to see or search for your posts. Stein was put on a denylist called is_Russian because an algorithm determined she had too many beliefs that coincided with banned people, especially Russian banned people.

We saw the same thing in reports from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. They would identify certain accounts they claimed were Russian operatives, and then identify others as “highly connective” or “Russia-linked,” part of Russia’s “information ecosystem.” This is just a fancy way of saying “guilt by association.” The technique roped in everyone from a Canadian website called Global Research to former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and former Italian Democratic Party Secretary Nicola Zingaretti.

If you apply these techniques fifty million, a hundred million, a billion times, or a billion billion times, people will soon learn to feel how certain accounts are deamplified, and others are not. They will self-sort and self-homogenize.

Even when Twitter doesn’t remove an account if the FBI recommends it, or passes along a request from Ukrainian intelligence to remove someone like Grayzone journalist Aaron Mate, users start to be able to guess where that line between good and ungood is.

One last note. As Michael and I found out recently with regard to the viral origin story, things deemed politically good often turn out to be untrue, and things deemed ungood turn out to be true.

I can recite a list if need be, but many news stories authorities were absolutely sure about yesterday later proved totally incorrect. This is another characteristic Orwell predicted: doublethink.

He defined doublethink as “the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely.”

Not long ago we were told in no uncertain terms the Russians blew up their own Nord Stream pipeline, that they were the only suspect. Today the U.S. government is telling us it has known since last June that Ukrainian forces planned it, with the approval of the highest military officials. But we’re not expected to say anything. We’re expected to forget.

What happens to a society that doesn’t square its mental books when it comes to facts, truth, errors, propaganda and so on? There are only a few options. Some people will do what some of us in this room have done: grow frustrated and angry, mostly in private. Others have tried to protest by frantically cataloging the past.

Most however do what’s easiest for mental survival. They learn to forget. This means living in the present only. Whatever we’re freaking out about today, let’s all do it together. Then when things change tomorrow, let’s not pause to think about the change, let’s just freak out about that new thing. The facts are dead! Long live the new facts!

We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory. It’s why people can’t read books anymore and why, when they see people like Russell who don’t fit into obvious categories, they don’t know what to do except point and shriek, like extras in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

We have been complaining about censorship, and it’s important to do that. But they are taking aim at people in a way that will make censorship unnecessary, by building communities of human beings with no memory and monochrome perception. This is more than a speech crisis. It’s a humanity crisis. I hope we’re not too late to fix it.

My comment is simply that I have experienced all of this. I have had plenty of binary-minded people tell me I was a Trump supporter if I wasn’t a Clinton/Biden supporter, and it’s easy to note that, by and large, the comments on current events that I post on Facebook get no likes or comments, apart from occasional, increasingly rare protesting comments from individuals who sharply disagree with me. I am grateful to Matt Taibbi for speaking so eloquently on a subject that affects me so deeply.

Eurtythmics–“Doubleplus Good“