QAnon is one of the most annoying things on Twitter and its followers are morons. And, also, it is dangerous and unacceptable that monopolistic Silicon Valley tech plutocrats are exerting more and more control over human communication.
I criticize QAnon constantly and find its acolytes intensely irritating. And, also, I don’t want monopolistic tech billionaires paternalistically protecting my fragile little mind from them.
Twitter shouldn’t be censoring this.
In a corporatist system of government, where few meaningful distinctions exist between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Permitting such a thing, to any extent, is extremely hazardous for the future of human development.
~
The dawn of political insight is when you realize propaganda isn’t just something that is done by other countries and other political parties.
~
Step 1: Foment violent extremism in a key geostrategic region you want to control.
Step 2: Wait for the government of that region to respond to extremism.
Step 3: Spin their response as unprovoked tyranny, tell the world interventionism is required to prevent another Holocaust.
~
Q: What does “tankie” mean?
A: “Tankie” is a noise you make when you want to avoid contemplating the uncomfortable possibility that someone else might be less MSM-brainwashed on foreign policy than you are.
~
Q: What is China?
A: China is a large Asiatic nation which westerners use as an emotional punching bag for their capitalism-induced rage, propaganda-induced confusion, and fears about the death of the US empire.
~
Believing China wants to take over your country, censor your internet and give you a social credit score is exactly the same sort of foam-brained othering which told previous generations that black men want to take over your neighborhood so they can have sex with your wives.
~
“I guess you don’t realize this Caitlin, but it’s actually possible to be critical of the US government and mindlessly regurgitate CIA narratives about China,” said the Smart Internet Person. “It’s called being fair and balanced.”
~
US conservatives whose precious religion admonishes them to “remove the plank from thine own eye” are obsessed with China, a nation on the other side of the planet whose alleged misdeeds are far less egregious than those of their own country.
~
If a foreign government is authoritarian toward its own people and your government is authoritarian toward the entire world, then yours is the more authoritarian government.
If your attempts to fight tyranny help advance the planet-dominating agendas of the most powerful government on earth, then you’re not fighting tyranny. You’re facilitating it.
~
Troops that are stationed outside a nation’s borders are just glorified mall cops. They’re not defending people, they’re guarding resources and commercial interests. They’re an army of Paul Blarts.
~
In studying the secretive behaviors of global power structures it’s important to be honest with yourself about what you know and what you don’t know. My experience in such discussions is that people generally know a lot less than they pretend to know. It’s okay to just not know.
~
Complaining about the existence of conspiracy theories is power-serving behavior. Instead, complain about the existence of government, corporate and financial secrecy which causes people to form speculative theories about what the powerful are up to behind that veil of opacity.
They concentrate all the power in these tiny little elitist circles, then say “You don’t get to know what we’re doing with all our power over here. Not only that, but you don’t even get to talk to each other about what we might be doing, even though it could directly affect you.”
How crazy is that? At the very least don’t play along with them and police each other about it on top of that.
It’s fine to discuss and debate the validity of individual theories (I do it all the time), but to complain about the fact that people form theories about possible conspiracies when we know for a fact that powerful people conspire is just infantile.
~
Talk about revolutionary changes you want and there’s always people going “I agree, but that’s taking it a bit too far.” It’s like mate, people aren’t even moving in that direction yet, let alone at risk of taking things too far. You’re creating inertia for literally no reason.
Just push for exactly what you want and not one iota less. Don’t reel it in because you’re worried you’re being excessive or not being “realistic” or whatever. Don’t come to the negotiation table with your compromise. Come with a clear idea of exactly what you want, and then add fifty percent more for good measure. There are people whose entire job is to push you backward, don’t do their job for them. Make them push you back, and make them fight for every inch.
~
The reason you can find revolutionary writings from generations ago indistinguishable from those of today is because their insights are simple and complete. Nothing more was required. All that needed to change, and still needs to change, is the inertia against actualizing them.
Like so much else, this is mirrored in the inner journey: you can have a major epiphany, think it’s going to change your life, then stay stuck in the same patterns for years. The insight will keep resurfacing, but the inertia against actualizing it will prevent really changing.
But then, one day, you’ll recall that insight you’ve had many times before, and it will land in a different way. And then something will shift, and actual changes will be made. We can expect to see this in our society as well. We’ll make the changes we’ve long known are needed.
~
May empathy become the new currency. May humanity become so compassionate and empathy-driven that severe mental illness is no big deal since you’ll get all the help you need, but being psychopathic or sociopathic is a severe handicap in which the inability to empathize sticks out to everyone like a sore thumb.
~
Spirituality, the real kind, is just a matter of getting curious about what’s actually going on with your own inner processes and your own consciousness, and hopefully finding some answers in your own direct experience. It’s nothing more out there or extraordinary than that.
____________________
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22 responses to “China, QAnon Censorship, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
Absolutely amazing post Caitlin. Resonates very deeply. Thank you for being here to express these things. Thank you!
2020 has revealed the existence of a greater appetite in the United States for authoritarianism than I had imagined.
really well said, Caitlyn….as usual. thank you…..NEXT!
“Without-real-leadership-war-within-six-months”
“Who could have imagined six months ago how our lives would have been affected by a virus? Well, try for a moment to imagine what our lives might look like if a world war between global thermonuclear powers was sparked. If the stock of advisors from governments and think tanks currently guiding US, UK and Australian foreign policy are left to their devices, this could become reality within the next six months!”
https://citizensparty.org.au/without-real-leadership-war-within-six-months
Caitlin, you are cosmic commonsense incarnate! Thanks!
it all boils down to god and man, man and god.
same thing.
you get a femme god in there: a goddess. you might see some changes.
we got choices: like in Bolivia: Pachamama, i.e., Gaia, who is Greek. or Isis, Astarte.
uhmmm…Hera, Mary, Kali, the Other Mary (the foot washer one), Mother Earth, Mother Nature, (A nice lesbian couple i’m in support of) with their daughter Gais who is also Greek and represents that thin film of Life we really need to protect NOW! no matter what Biden or Tramp think.
Anyway, Gaia counts, as we know more than politics. Hero was une femme in Greece. a goddess. See how men are? super heroes are all men now. buildin’ dem pipelines and drilling and squirting their stuff right into Mama Earth just like the MF’s they are.
we”re gonna be in deep shit in stead of deep state. Who’s gonna burn the last gallon of oil? Eat the last salmon? Burning methane in NOW our only hope Obewan. Because burning it keeps it from escapin’ into the atmosphere where it is 80 X more powerful at capturing the Sun’s heat than CO2. so burn baby burn: if it leaks out of the oceans or the tundra AS IS we’re lost. and this planet will only be able to support about 10 million people instead of 10 billion.
that means Bill Gates who has been planning for this all along will WIN AGAIN. i heard he stole Windows from those gullible kids, Jobs and Woz. Next he steals the whole planet. Him and Bezos. unless we quit using money. And internet. Bezos seems ready to to ride this out. since he’ll be the 1st trillionaire soon.
Great ‘Twitter size’ quotes! I like the last paragraph (and not only that) about spirituality. Spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle say great things but when they start mentioning God and universal consciousness then I turn off. We don’t need another religion.
yeah we do! there are an infinite number of paths to the infinite!
my man. make one up!
it can’t get any worse and it’ll be free!
I was alot happier when I thought China was the plates mom put out at special events.
“In a corporatist system of government, where few meaningful distinctions exist between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Permitting such a thing, to any extent, is extremely hazardous for the future of human development.”
.
Corporations run governments and governments run people. This is the “modern” social hierarchy. We were better off years ago with simple tribes living off the land and keeping mostly to themselves.
.
“Troops that are stationed outside a nation’s borders are just glorified mall cops. They’re not defending people, they’re guarding resources and commercial interests.”
.
Since malls are going out of business, there are many mall cops now in desperate need of work. Where can we send them? Which commercial interests need further protection? And will the hot pretzel shop and cheap pizza parlor be nearby?
.
“May empathy become the new currency. May humanity become so compassionate and empathy-driven that severe mental illness is no big deal since you’ll get all the help you need, but being psychopathic or sociopathic is a severe handicap in which the inability to empathize sticks out to everyone like a sore thumb.”
.
No more psychopathic or sociopathic personalities? Where will corporations and governments get their talent pool from?
.
“Spirituality, the real kind, is just a matter of getting curious about what’s actually going on with your own inner processes and your own consciousness, and hopefully finding some answers in your own direct experience. It’s nothing more out there or extraordinary than that.”
.
Spirituality is knowing that you have been gifted conscious awareness from The Source Of All in order to have experiences and learn gratefulness and appreciation for that very gift of being alive and all that implies. Once this Step One has been achieved and driven deeply into one’s spiritual DNA, everything else yet to do gets easy after that.
maybe if one would give twitter immunity from prosecution when offline harm happens, they would not censor.
Ms Johnstone please peruse this article;
A dictatorship functions by news-suppression and other forms of censorship, even more than it does by its own lying. It functions by deceit, but the main way it deceives is by prohibiting the truth to be published on any of the billionaires’ (or other ruling group’s) media — including all of the media that have large audiences.
This article can be read here:
Who the Democratic and Republican Party Censors Are, for the “News” You See & Hear by Eric Zuesse!
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/07/21/who-democratic-republican-party-censors-for-news-you-see-hear/
We will continue to spin toward our end until we can change the money system from private credit to public asset. Money is the “leverage point” within the system, that one small thing that can be changed within a system that changes the entire system. We have a private for-profit money system, it generates a for-profit obsessed society with severe psychological consequences that are subconscious, the “hidden hand.” Changing the money to a public asset for the general welfare would reverse those psychological consequences generating an Economics of Care. People who imagine money to just be money, that how it is created and for what doesn’t matter, are doomed to never see a solution.
This is precisely Scott Ferguson’s message in his “Declarations of Dependence,” to which I assume you’re alluding. When the axioms of MMT join with the insights of critical theory, there’s an explosion of imagination and hope. I wish Ferguson’s important book wasn’t written in academic postmodernese, but it’s well worth wading through nevertheless.
An ‘economics of care’ is precisely what McMurtry is talking about.
Redefining the paradigm of what is meant by “the general welfare”, by adjusting what economics entails, in fact, will positively reshape psychological consequences. overall.
Without applying any of the societally taboo words!
After watching this slow-motion shit-show accelerate in it’s collapse for the last ~15 years, and having some interest in current events since I was late for a third grade class because I lost track of time watching Reagan catch one from a JodieFoster admirer (it seems), anything short of violence and theft (in any form) that illuminates the common foe(s) is an asset.
And any person who advocates humility, empathy, awareness, knowledge, courage and collaboration is worth a listen…or a read.
Definition “Of sound mind” in 2020: Caitlin Johnstone
http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/07/waiting-for-it.html
There has been a lot of fearful name calling in political circles in recent years.
“FASCIST!”
“”COMMUNIST!”
There are others, but those hit the buttons pretty well.
What are the components that make up a political movement? Let’s call them “Axes” for this exercise, please.
There’s Left and Right, which are mostly feelings and patterns of social engagement.
Lefties tend to be more spontaneous, take superficial risks more, engage socially in a “lefty” kind of way.
Morality may be perceived as more situational than absolute.
Rightists tend to be more concerned with consequences, and more formal.
Morality is not a casual thing to rightists, but a serious concern for society, and when it is abandoned, some very bad things happen, especially to children. That’s certainly true.
I adjust my presentations to people based on whether I’m with lefties or rightists. It’s all valid and useful.
I seek to avoid offense. It’s possible. It’s more productive. We all have to work together.
There is Liberal, or Free, vs Illiberal, or Totalitarian.
I’m kind of bent-outta’-shape about how many ways the term “liberal” is used and misused recently, so I’d prefer “free” and “totalitarian” as an axis. Fascism and Soviet Communism, as Americans know them were both totalitarian, illiberal.
I might make the argument that Teddy Roosevelt was a right liberal populaist and Franklin Roosevelt was a left liberal populist. Some might well disagree, but I just want to show that such things have existed.
The next axis, and Americans have a hard time seeing it as independent, is Private vs Social dominant values.
It’s never one or the other, and we are at the extreme of a swing to private-ownership, including means of production, money creation, and credit-taking. If you own the media, you get the credit for whatever good happens, but not the blame for bad stuff. We admire groups of pioneers, settlers, who raised barns together, and cleared fields to grow crops together. We encourage children to cooperate. Most of what we have accomplished as a species has come from our stellar ability to cooperate.
Right now the wealth disparity is as high in the US as it has ever been in our history, maybe a tad higher, and it’s absolutely high by the standards of world history.
Let me argue at this point, that the only way for society to go is to more socialism/populism. The elite owner class absolutely hates this fact, but they also see it. they just want as little safety net action as possible, and they want assurances that they will still get the first drink of all the fresh money that is created, before they pass it through their systems to the rest of us. I don’t think it’s possible for wealth to remain this concentrated without breaking the social order, and I think it is actually broken, and denial won’t be sustainable, even for the elites. I don’t know what will burst that bubble for them, but it will be most unpleasant for you and me, too.
What about Left and Right? America seems stuck at an impasse between left and right dominant values. It was Left in the “Roaring 20s”, and swung to Right during the “Great Depression”.
It swung to the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and it seems sort of that way now, but it doesn’t feel real. I think “Limousine Left” is not “left”. I seem to know more and more people who were moral-left in 1960s and 1970s, anti-war, and are now moral-conservative, anti-war.
The pro-war-left is now a thing that bombs babies to protect them. Weird.
Clinton did that in Bosnia. It worked for team Clinton-Bush.
It could/should be that moral-right is the next swing. I’m ready for some real morality in politics. It has been such a looong time…
We could also get totalitarian-right, which is what a lot of people are afraid of. We call that Fascism, and lack of freedom of speech is a big part of totalitarian-subjugation. Hard totalitarianism is not open to debate. Obey or be branded for prison, torture and death. This is what the American military and covert mercenary armies have been doing throughout the world since 9/11.
The public was against this immorality in Vietnam, but has been neutered since 9/11.
No draft. No TV news showing horrors of war, not lately.
I look around and see a subtle slide into immoral-left already underway. There is no longer full support for freedom of speech. Standing up for freedom of speech is “hate speech”, now, and gets professors fired without recourse. This seems like the early days of the Cultural-Revolution we are seeing.
People were really hungry, starving and desperate in China’s Cultural Revolution. We are not… Yet.
We should best pick a healthy path before things get really bad.
Left and Right are matters of style, and will decide themselves.
I suspect a swing to the Right will happen as history tightens up, and social leftist identity-politics has played some pretty impractical cards recently.
Individual is at an extreme swing, and absolutely must give way to Social. We have tremendous changes to make, to recreate a living, working economy, as energy supplies delete, the globe heats up, and the consequences and failures of a system based on infinite growth crash all around us and on our heads.
Let’s just help each other and be seen doing it. Grow vegetables together. That’s our basic successful social function.
It’s nice. It feels good, once you get in the groove.
I dont agree with alot you said. Stalin was communist, hard left and a monster. You act like extreme crnsorship and freedom lost comes only on the right. The cancel culture today is pure totalitarianism. It is dangerous and radical. That is coming from the left. The hard right and hard left are equally dangerous at destroying freedom. Both are real dangers and both are rising to dangerous levels. Acting like the left is for freedom is wrong. Only the center is relatively safe. I find whats happening today to be just as dangerous as the early 1920s.
yeah well, you got some of that backwards: your synopsis, ending, was left of normal left. it’s called progressive. lect of that is what you described with the communal gardens, and that is socialist.
where i am. just like the family base of all human activity. from each to each. you got that one?
so we end up together in the garden. then we go swimming in the pure water–getting harder to find.that is left. the right goes swimming while the workers work over-time to grow and prepare their dinners after their strenuous swims.
and we got a week to clear this up. because here comes the methane.
and the new blame. it will look to the oilers that we did not let them pump enough oil. and to the big bankers we did not let them be free enough and to Greenspan that “there was a flaw in my (his) world-view.”
http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/07/waiting-for-it.html
The threat to us all, including our selfish, parasitic, sociopathic elite owners (no offense intended) is totalitarian SUBJUGATION
The efforts to extend the current private-ownership-of-the-world paradigm can only be totalitarian-subjugation efforts, because the system has gotten too inefficient and bureaucratic for anything but threats of pin and violence to extend it. Threats of pain and violence are comparatively cheap. They force the systemic costs onto the people complying with the threats. That arrangement is inherently unstable. Working people are already cracking from the stress.
The last cards of make-believe are being played right now, with the Fed and high-frequency trading manipulating equity markets and bond markets to higher and higher nominal valuations. All investors are getting rich as the real economy simultaneously evaporates. This is the final, manic, fear-of-missing-out phase of financial bubbleism.
It’s all police state when the happy-lies go POOF!
Unless we chose FREEDOM.
The last Moral Candidate for POTUS, that I saw was US Army Reserve Major and Congresswoman , Tulsi Gabbard.
I would categorize Congresswoman Gabbard as Freedom-loving, Right, Populist/Socialist. You might disagree.
Bernie Sanders has always been left, “mostly-Socialist” and Freedom-propounding, though he plays-well-with-capitalists, Bernie did accidentally become a “millionaire” through the wonders of inflation and old-age.
Bernie Sanders would do, but it’s a bit late in the life-cycle for him. Times like this call out for youthful vigor.
I see the need for a national leader with an independent moral compass as the highest priority.
The current political system has not let any candidate advance without being controllable by the current elite oligarchs, except for this orange haired Tasmanian Devil accident that happened 4 years ago.
Weird fluke. It was supposed to be Clinton or Bush again…
The “You’re-Fired” guy is trying to look moral, but he accidentally held the Bible upside down in that photo-op the Army cleared the crowd for last month. “Grab-em-by-the-…..” He sued the porn-queen-for-snitching-after-he-paid-her-off.
Donald Trump is none of the categories above. He’s Left-right, Billionaire-populist, too-erratic-to-be-a-hypocrite.
Trump And Biden Should Debate While Attached To A Lie Detector
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rabo-trump-and-biden-should-debate-while-attached-lie-detector
“Complaining about the existence of conspiracy theories is power-serving behavior. Instead, complain about the existence of government, corporate and financial secrecy which causes people to form speculative theories about what the powerful are up to behind that veil of opacity.”
– Very good!