Tag: politics

SOCIETY OF SPECTACLE

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, whose first of six televised hearings began last Thursday, is spectacle replacing politics. There is nothing substantially new in the accusations. The committee lacks prosecutorial power. No charges have been filed by Attorney General Merrick Garland against former President Donald Trump and none are expected. The choreographed hearings, like the two impeachment trials of Trump, will have no effect on Trump voters, other than to make them feel persecuted, especially with more than 860 people already charged (including 306 guilty pleas) for their role in storming the Capitol. The committee echoes back to Trump opponents what they already believe. It is designed to present inaction as action and substitute role-playing for politics. It perpetuates, as Guy Debord writes, our “empire of modern passivity.”

The committee, which most Republicans boycotted, hired James Goldston, a documentary producer and former president of ABC News, to turn the hearings into engaging television with slick packaging and an array of pithy sound bites. The result is, and was meant to be, politics as reality television, a media diversion that will change nothing in the dismal American landscape. What should have been a serious bipartisan inquiry into an array of constitutional violations by the Trump administration has been turned into a prime-time campaign commercial for a Democratic Party running on fumes. The epistemology of television is complete. So is its artifice.

The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lock step for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties. They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy democratic institutions on behalf of the rich and corporations. They desperately work together now to stave off the revolt by enraged and betrayed white working men and women who support Donald Trump and the far right.

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The Demented – and Selective – Game of Instantly Blaming Political Opponents For Mass Shootings

It is virtually impossible to find any ideology on any part of the political spectrum that has not spawned senseless violence and mass murder by adherents. “The suspected killer of Dutch maverick politician Pim Fortuyn had environmentalist propaganda and ammunition at his home,” reported CBS News about the assassin, Volkert van der Graaf. Van der Graaf was a passionate animal rights and environmental activist who admitted “he killed the controversial right-wing leader because he considered him a danger to society.” Van der Graaf was particularly angry about what he believed was Fortuyn’s anti-Muslim rhetoric. As a result, “some supporters of Fortuyn had blamed Green party leader Paul Rosenmoeller for “demonizing Fortuyn before he was gunned down in May just before general elections.” In other words, simply because the Green Party leader was highly critical of Fortuyn’s ideology, some opportunistic Dutch politicians sought absurdly to blame him for Fortuyn’s murder by Van der Graaf. Sound familiar?

During the BLM and Antifa protests and riots of 2020, an Antifa supporter, Michael Reinoehl, was the leading suspect in the murder of a Trump supporter, Aaron J. Danielson, as he rode in a truck (Reinoehl himself was then killed by federal agents before being arrested in what appeared to be a deliberate extra-judicial execution, though an investigation cleared them of wrongdoing, as typically happens when federal agents are involved). In 2016, The New York Times reported that “the heavily armed sniper who gunned down police officers in downtown Dallas, leaving five of them dead, specifically set out to kill as many white officers as he could, officials said Friday.” The Paper of Record noted that many believed that anti-police protests would eventually lead to violent attacks on police officers: it “was the kind of retaliatory violence that people have feared through two years of protests around the country against deaths in police custody.”

Then there are the murders carried out in the name of various religions. For the last three decades at least, debates have been raging about what level of responsibility, if any, should be assigned to radical Muslim preachers or Muslim politicians when individuals carry out atrocities and murders in the name of Islam. Liberals insist — correctly, in my view — that it is irresponsible and unfair to blame non-violent Muslims who preach radical versions of religious or political Islam for those who carry out violence in the name of those doctrines. Similar debates are heard with regard to Jewish extremists, such as the Israeli-American doctor Baruch Goldstein who “opened fire in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 Muslim worshippers.” Many insist that the radical anti-Muslim speech of Israeli extremists is to blame, while others deny that there is any such thing as “Jewish terrorism” and that all blames lies solely with the individual who decided to resort to violence.

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Celebrities Are Such Scumbags Because They’re Invested In The Status Quo

Have you ever wondered why a famous person whose work you’ve enjoyed has such a myopic perspective on world events? How someone can stir you at your most intimate depths with their words or their music and yet have a blinkered mainstream political worldview that is manufactured by think tanks and spinmeisters?

Celebrities have been particularly odious empire sycophants these last few days, and it’s probably worth taking a moment to reflect on what’s going on when that happens.

Bette Midler has been drawing headlines for her recent let-them-eat-cake remark about baby formula shortages, taking to Twitter to tell Americans, “TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.”

There are of course many reasons why parents might be unable to consistently provide breast milk to their baby, including but not limited to the very health problems and long working hours that the US status quo often creates. More than this, telling individuals what to do in response to a systemic problem created by the wealthy and the powerful serves to divert attention away from criticisms of those people and those systems.

Midler often uses her Twitter account to broadcast her indifference to the struggles of the less fortunate, like in March when she tweeted “I’d happily pay more for gas for her” with a picture of a child holding a Ukrainian flag. Midler has an estimated net worth of a quarter billion dollars.

While we’re on the subject of Ukraine, U2’s Bono and the Edge recently played a concert in Kyiv in support of the world-threatening US proxy war against Russia, because of course they fucking did. Bono, who says he has “grown very fond” of war criminal George W Bush and praised capitalism at the World Economic Forum and teamed up with warmonger Lindsey Graham to promote US empire narratives about Syria in 2016, would of course be seen singing “Stand by Ukraine” in support of US empire narratives in a Kyiv subway in 2022.

The immensely popular Indian spiritual leader known as Sadhguru Jagadish Vasudev recently tweeted “May Israel inspire the world” in praise of the apartheid ethnostate’s farming practices even as its tyranny and bloodshed draws international headlines. Few of the enlightenment merchants on the spiritual marketplace have anything worthwhile to say about individual awakening, and virtually all of them are fast asleep when it comes to consciousness about the external world.

Horror author Stephen King made the bizarre decision to tweet “I stand with Nina Jankowicz” the other day in support of the freaky shitlib who will be leading the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth. Nothing really to say about that beyond what it is.

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The Fight Over Truth

The modern world of American politics brought us this wonderful propaganda ecosystem which even the most gifted sophist would admire, bringing in such glorious words as disinformation, misinformation, and even malinformation to the forefront of our political discourse here in America. Let’s flesh out these words and their meanings a little more, disinformation is defined as, “false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.”[1]

    The next term in this political game of getting around the truth or labeling the truth as fake truth like some spurious religious prophet, is misinformation which can be defined as, “false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.” And finally we have the newest term in our game of political charades, malinformation which has several different definitions from the highly deceptive, “is fake information to make a scheme sound more believable.”[2] To the following more malicious meaning, “is genuine information that is shared to cause harm.”[3]

This can all be rather simplified to politicians lie for a living, and politicians compete against other lying politicians for the political spoils that elected office brings in this purported representative democracy, and any available tools to help obfuscate the truth will be used when and if needed. And as it turns out, in today’s world of unbalanced budgets, forever wars, runaway inflation, and poor legislative policies, lying is the holy grail of American politics.

Ironically, with the news media being largely bombastic banal mouthpieces for the two political parties these days, CNN representing the Democratic Party, and Fox News representing the Republican Party, the news media as an industry have become the biggest purveyors of disinformation in this country. If you watch liberal news outlets, they will make you feel all warm and fuzzy with liberal biased political spin, and if you devote your time to conservative news media platforms, they will sing your favorite political song with all the conservative propaganda that your sanctimonious heart desires.

However, if you just want the important news of the day, free of political spin, you are fresh out of luck in our modern world of partisan journalism. You see journalism today doesn’t have a very high regard for the facts, or even the truth for that matter, but instead, how information itself can be shaped towards their activist goals and overall political world view.

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