New and Improved Propaganda Machines

We carry propaganda machines in our pockets. Propaganda isn't just to misinform, but to distract us and exhaust the capacity for critical thinking. When you're struggling to decide between 25 types of cereal or what colour to paint the kitchen, you can miss the bigger picture. Chomsky's been saying that for years. Propaganda destroys the quest for truth, and it's worse than ever.

Pat Loller has a quick explainer about how we're ignoring the huge shift in how propaganda operates now:

"Go make a new account or reset your algorithm on any app and see how many swipes it takes to get right-wing propaganda. . . . There are all these studies coming out saying Americans are functionally illiterate . . . you don't read, you don't get critical thinking skills, and then the propaganda that you're consuming, you don't think about. You just go, 'Oh, okay, I guess that's true,' especially if you've been consuming it since you were 15 years old. . . . These kids congregate around these figures and they play video games together. Go and look at any popular video game, and Control F search for 'woke' or 'DEI', and you'll see that the gaming sphere has been a cesspool for decades. . . .  There's all these angry young men with no critical thinking skills who are being fed a constant diet of propaganda that is literally dished up to them on their phones the moment they open an account. Is it any wonder that they're going to fall Pied Piper behind this guy who's just like, 'Hey, all of those complex challenges in your life? It's this guy's fault. Stop centering you as the protagonist in every single video game and every single movie and TV show ever made?? Girls say they'd rather meet a bear in the woods than you?? Get mad and vote for the guy who is going to hurt those people.' 

On a Radical Vision of Future Earth

I grabbed this book, by meteorologist Eric Holthaus, as soon as it went on sale, excited to check out the new vision of how we can all better live together. There's lots of information for the uninitiated, and then it becomes sort of a fictional narrative. There are no characters or plot to speak of, instead it's a description of what needs to happen but written entirely in the past tense, as if it already happened. He seems to think this is how we'll better imagine what it all looks like when we solve this crisis. And it all really doesn't work (as a book and as a concept to save us), which I find a bit heartbreaking to tell you the truth. But good job trying something original, I guess.

It's being billed by the publisher as "the first hopeful book about climate change," which ignores so many many hopeful books out there: most recently Michael Mann's Madhouse Effect and George Monbiot's Out of the Wreckage, and, going way back, Chris Turner's The Geography of Hope, which was a fantastic read about people actually getting shit done. I checked the publisher's page because the book has a self-published feel to it from the get go: cliché phrases and incorrect comma use, and a weird organization - part 1 is about a third of the book without any chapters, and part 2 has just three chapters, all followed by a very lengthy epilogue. But, nope. It's Harper-Collins. Curious.

Reich's The System

Robert Reich, an economist and professor of economics at Princeton who served under Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations, had a great discussion with Michael Sandel, political philosophy professor at Harvard, about Reich's new book: The System: Who Rigged It and How to Fix It. I can only find the 60 minute video on facebook, but here's my summary of the ideas below. It also all fits together perfectly with Robert Fisk's new film, This is Not a Movie, which documents the history of journalists backing away from the truth in order to make a much easier living selling government-supported falsehoods.

This was all outlined and clarified by Klein's Shock Doctrine, ten years ago, but it's important it's revisited again and again. Here's what they said:

The important distinction in politics now is NOT between right and left, but between democracy and oligarchy (power held by a few - specifically those with money). Three developments have contributed to the shift to an oligarchy: the move from stakeholders to shareholders, the decline of labour unions, and the deregulation and expansion of finance.

Age of Oblivion: Another End of Decade Rant

Of course  calendars are a construct and don't mean anything, but the end of the year and, even more so, the end of the decade are useful times to take stock.

In pop culture, we have the Ecco Homo moment as a cultural foreboding - the chutzpah to insist on a fix that pretends to be completely oblivious to the destruction of former beauty. We've done that with our whole planet. But more than that is the fame it brought to the amateur restoration worker, driving up tourism dramatically. We are positioned to celebrate destruction of beauty more than creation. This could be bookended with the acknowledgment and then immediate justification of "billionaires in wine caves" having more power than the rest of the populous; that a politician will be attacked for refusing to be bribed is a sign of our times.

The New York Times got a random smattering of people to answer: What Will the World Look Like in 2030?, twelve years after we were told we have twelve years to fix everything. It's a terrifying read. I've smushed some pertinent bits together here:

Requiem for the American Dream

This is Chomsky's last long-form documentary. It came out in January, but I hadn't heard about it until recently. I paraphrased/transcribed the 72 minute video liberally with links to further readings below.

It's about the American Dream: the idea that you can be born poor but work hard enough for a home and car and good schools - that's all collapsed. We profess to like the values of democracy, so public opinion should have an influence on policy and the government should carry out actions determined by the population, but the privileged sector doesn't like democracy. We have extreme inequality with a super wealthy group in the top 1/10th of the top one percent. It's unjust in itself, but it's got a corrosive effect on democracy.

The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power, especially as costs of elections skyrocket forcing politicians into the pockets of corporations. This translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth through fiscal policy (taxes, deregulation, rules of corporate governance) designed to increase the concentration of wealth and power in a vicious cycle of progress.

On Retaliation

Both Hedges and Reich are writing about Trump's frightening behaviour. It's not just the weird tweets, but the follow-up from him and from supporters.  Reich discusses Chuck Jones' experience: "I’m getting threats and everything else from some of his supporters.” And he talks about Trump's tweet proposing cancelling a fictitious Boeing order, which resulted in a nosedive for Boeing shares. And then he got to 18-year-old Lauren Batchelder who was brave enough to share some concerns about Trump:

"Almost immediately, Batchelder’s phone began receiving threatening messages. “I didn’t really know what anyone was going to do,” Batchelder told the Washington Post. “He was only going to tweet about it and that was it, but I didn’t really know what his supporters were going to do, and that to me was the scariest part.”

Hedges' recent column focuses on the media:

He will seek to domesticate the press and critics first through the awarding of special privileges, flattery, gifts and access. Those who cannot be bought off will be destroyed. His petulant, childish taunts, given authority by the machinery of the security and surveillance state, will be dangerous.

If You're Not Turned on to Politics...

.... politics will turn on you.  - Nader

Hedges is at his most impassioned in this debate with Robert Reich. It's just the last 35 minutes of the show. But his point was made years ago by Rage Against the Machine, in this video directed by none other than Michael Moore. At less than four minutes, it's the more efficient option (and it will actually embed!):