caitlin always seems to present you with an opportunity to consider things you probably haven't before;

Propaganda is so advanced that rank-and-file members of the public will openly cheerlead their government’s imprisonment of Assange so that their government can continue to lie to them.

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The focus shouldn’t just be on bad things done by individual plutocrats – Gates did X, Bezos did Y etc. The primary focus should be on how we shouldn’t have a system which allows any individual to have that much power over our world. No individual should have that much power to do that much harm.

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You couldn’t create a more perfect profit-generating scheme than war. Entire civilizations can be streamlined into the task of cranking out top-of-the-line, name-brand killing machines at the drop of a false flag. War will continue as long as human behavior is driven by profit.

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If you want more of something, apply capitalism; if you want less of something, apply socialism. Capitalism is great for making a ton of stuff, but for making less stuff it’s shit, whether that be making less illness, less pollution, less ecocide, less war, less prisoners, etc. Right now we live in a world that needs a great reduction of a great many things, and there’s just no way to get there as long as human behavior is driven by profit.............read more...........

trust is a frangible item;

you're being played;

link below takes you to transcript of the george floyd game;

As we suspected and asked from Day 1 of the George Floyd incident, where’s the police body-cam footage? Meanwhile, as major racial strife swept the land, the corrupto star chamber Attorney General of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, sat on the evidence, controlled the narrative and failed to provide proper transparency to the public.

Even two months later, the body-cam footage was still being withheld by this corrupto. However, attorneys for one of the defendants — officer Thomas Lane, 37, who is charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder — secured written transcripts of the videos from three of the officers. The videos are still being memory holed by Ellison.

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ain't like what we were taught in civics class;

this presentation will show you how you are now a feudal serf with about as much power, or not;

You better bow low and pay up, peasant, or your voice in the digital world will disappear just as quickly as your democracy's control over Big Tech.

Who's the junior partner in global hegemony, Big Tech or the U.S. government? The question would have been laughable just a few years ago, but now it's a viable debate when we ask questions like: which one plays a larger role in your daily life, Big Tech platforms or the government? If controlling the flow of data is now the primary means of production, then who owns control of data flows? As we all know, the answer is Big Tech platforms: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix et al.

As Mark, Jesse and I discuss in our latest salon, The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Feudal Network State, these platforms have become defacto sovereign states with global hegemony over surveillance, censorship, data collection and behavioral influence--what Jesse calls network states.

Since the leadership of these private-sector sovereign entities is effectively monarchical, it is also effectively neofeudal: these platforms are private, closed source systems, managed by black-box algorithms hidden from users and regulators. This is the acme of neofeudalism: there is no democratic control at all by users or citizens.

Source: 'Too big to fail': why even a historic ad boycott won't change Facebook.

Whether Facebook will ever hit upon a more coherent approach to protecting the free expression of the powerless as well as the powerful depends on whether it ever comes to grip with its own role as the largest censor in the history of the world. (emphasis added by CHS)............read more........

pcr speaks in this essay about the vanishing american past and where we are going, almost unavoidably;

The Woke Revolution

Paul Craig Roberts

150 prominent intellectuals and Ivy League academics of leftish persuasion have signed a letter in Harper’s protesting the breakdown in civilized debate and imposition of ideological conformity.  The signatories made the obligatory bow to denouncing Trump as “a real threat to democracy” and called for “greater equality and inclusion across our society.”  But this wasn’t enough to save them from denunciation for stating these truthful facts:

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.”.......read more.........