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Every Billionaire Is A Predator: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2020-07-16 at 00:39:27 )
Every Billionaire Is A Predator: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
Step 1: Be the billionaire class.
Step 2: Buy up all news media.
Step 3: Structure outlets to elevate voices who defend the status quo.
Step 4: Smear non-plutocratic media who do not protect the status quo as crazy conspiracy theorists and Russian propaganda.
Step 5: Dominate the narrative about what is going on in the world.
Mainstream news is just advertising. You watch advertisements for maintaining the plutocratic status quo, then you watch advertisements between those advertisements for useless crap to make plutocrats even richer. It is all just different layers of marketing. When I was getting my journalism degree they used to talk about journos selling their souls and going into marketing, going into PR. It is like bitch, you are already doing that.
It is amazing how after all the lies we know we have been told about countries our rulers do not like people are still all derp duhh Chinas harvesting organs and Russias attacking our democracy and Iran wants to nuke us and Maduros a dictator and Assad gasses babies for fun.
It is true that social media platforms are run by oligarchs and depraved government agencies. It is also true that ideas and information are moving vastly faster than they used to, in a way establishment power structures can not really keep up with. Denying either of these is dumb.
People who say "Twitter is not real life" really mean "Twitter is not mainstream life". It is the innovators, early adopters, influencers, cool hunters. Obviously this bleeds into the mainstream. It is what university culture used to be, only far more populist and democratic, and much faster.
MSM has always prevented enlightened ideas from ever moving at the speed of print or broadcast media, which means until social media they mostly moved at the speed of university papers and books. They took literally years to circulate. The speed jumped from that to instantaneous. To think this is not having an impact on our collective consciousness is demented.
Our species has literally never looked anything like this. We are now like a giant planetary brain in which each of the billions of internet-connected humans is a neuron. This can not not change us.
Obviously establishment power structures are working to bring this unprecedented movement of ideas and information under tight control, but there is only so much control you can exert over a force this big. Past a certain point it is like trying to wrestle a tornado. We are moving.
The relationship between Wall Street numbers and peoples wallets is more divorced than ever. People are more aware than ever that anything they read can be propaganda or disinfo. Deep fakes make it impossible to even trust video. Narrative itself is crumbling on all levels.
It has always been almost impossible to know what is really going on, since the narrative about the present has always been controlled by the powerful and the narrative about the past written by whoever won the most recent war. What has changed is that now people are realizing this.
Remember United States of Americans, if you have a problem with the fact that your system literally makes it impossible to elect a president who is not pure dog shit, you are crazy and murderous and the worst person in the world.
Now is not the time to take a stand against the United States of Americas corrupt electoral process. You should wait until after Joe Biden is elected, then wait until after he is re-elected, and keep waiting, and just keep on waiting until planet Earth is one more cold dead rock in the solar system.
Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Terence McKennas ghost, literal Buddha and Actual Biblical Yahweh could all show up on my doorstep telling me to support Joe Biden for president and I would still tell them to go sniff farts.
We have been given zero reasons to believe that a Joe Biden administration would be any less likely than the Donald Trump administration to make murderous foreign policy decisions, and we have been given numerous reasons to suspect the opposite might be the case.
Julian Assanges Twitter account was one of the most interesting, heterodox and insightful voices in the world before he was silenced and it is absolute bullshit that we have had to navigate this bizarre and confusing political landscape without the resource of his perspective.
Donald Trump supporters who circulate the false and destructive narrative that Donald Trump is secretly helping Julian Assange by imprisoning and extraditing him are just as guilty of smearing Mr. Assange as liberals who circulate the false narrative that he is a rapist and a Russian agent.
People who still believe Donald Trump is fighting the establishment remind me of senior citizens gratefully entering their credit card numbers to every message that pops up telling them their computer urgently needs virus protection.
People calling for climate action without calling to defund the Pentagon do not actually care about climate action.
Not every predator is a billionaire, but every billionaire is a predator.
Capitalism will let you starve to death while sitting meters away from food.
I get that people are scared and stressed out, but the way masks have been turned into yet another stupid f-cking culture war partisan wedge issue is probably the dumbest and most annoying widespread debate that I have ever seen.
Everyone who writes about propaganda and government lies is expected to have a really strong opinion about Covid-19 and masks and lockdowns, but I just do not and I can not help it. I find the whole thing ultimately irrelevant and boring and have nothing to add to the debate.
I find that people get ridiculously irrational and emotional about it, and I find that both sides of the debate have a lot less evidence for many of their beliefs than they think they do.
I pay attention to actual concrete policies which threaten to facilitate pre-existing authoritarian agendas like increased tech surveillance, and I have written multiple articles about such things. But getting involved in the hysterical shrieking about masks, the economy and just how deadly the virus actually is blah blah blah is just completely uninteresting to me. It does not in and of itself affect the large-scale power dynamics I write about.
I think a lot of the intensity in this debate has a lot more to do with the fact that people are scared and stressed out than actual facts and data. I see a lot of sloppy thinking and conflation of issues that should be kept distinct, and not a lot of emotional wisdom. I think discourse about the virus would greatly benefit from people just taking responsibility for their emotions, feeling their feelings all the way through, completely divorcing themselves from partisan thought, thinking carefully, then seeing what remains.
And that is really the extent of my opinions on the matter. There are a lot of people who are a lot more knowledgeable than myself on the actual science of these matters, and I have nothing to add to that conversation. People tell me it is because I am trying to appear nonpartisan or because I am afraid of being called a conspiracy theorist, but really I just do not have any opinions on the matter that are strong enough to write about.
Sorry if that does not conform to your expectations, but I am not going to start writing about something just because that is what everyone else is doing.
I still always get libertarian types expressing shock and confusion at the fact that they like some stuff I say, yet I also say lefty things which they do not like. If you expect people to either always say things you agree with or always say things you disagree with, you are in a really bad echo chamber.
Me, a naive idiot: The world can be saved by a mass-scale shift in human consciousness into a healthy relationship with mental narrative.
Smart, realistic person: No that is stupid and impractical. The world will be saved by monopolistic profit-chasing tech oligarchs.
The most important work you need to do to be a good parent is not reading the right books or getting the right parenting philosophy, it is healing your own bullshit so you do not inevitably pass it down to them. If you do not work on yourself, you can not help giving them your issues.
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