The Humor Divide

I agree with Batya Ungar-Sargon's observation that the main divide in the United States is not race, but economic class. I also agree with Jonathan Haidt's observation that those who have lost touch can be identified by their lack of humor:

Intellectual life used to be fun," Mr. Haidt said. "There's an emergent community, from center left to center right, of people who feel politically homeless and are recognizing that the big division is no longer between left and right, but between people who are on the extremes, who are humorless and aggressive and deluded by their passion and tribalism, versus the middle 70 percent of the country.

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How Corporate Media is Trying to Turn Free Speech into a “Right Wing” Position

Notice this recent headline from the New York Times:

Six years ago, no one would have claimed that free speech was a "right wing" value. What happened? Glenn Greenwald discusses this issue with Matt Taibbi (Start at min 14):

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About Corporatism

Robert Malone is concern about that new thing that is not not capitalism and not socialism:

This used to go by the name “crony capitalism” which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.

The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system –have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream. We hardly know anymore for whom to cheer or boo in the great struggles of our time.

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Mike Benz Recommends How to Be Arrested

I don't know who this is, but this gentleman exhibits incredible composure while being arrested:

The above tweet was posted by Mike Benz, who has become a hero to me based upon his encyclopedic coverage of the military-censorship-industrial complex.  Mike, a former State Department official, is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.  He is incredibly brave based on the monied and powerful people he is angering.  If you want to know how bad things are getting for those of use who still believe in the First Amendment, watch and learn:

Probably the best place to start is this one-hour synopsis by Mike Benz that is equally brilliant and horrifying:

Here's an excerpt from the above one-hour interview (Tucker Carlson and Mike Benz):

Tucker Carlson: You're not describing democracy. You're describing a country in which democracy is impossible.

Mike Benz: What I'm essentially describing is military rule. I mean, what's happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. You know, democracy sort of draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is ruled by consent of the people being ruled that is, it's not really being ruled by an overlord, because the government is actually just our will expressed by our consent with who we vote for. The whole push after the 2016 election and after Brexit, and after a couple of other, you know, social media-run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted, like the 2016 Philippines Election, was to completely invert everything that we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is, we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions. And who are the the democratic institutions? Oh, it's us. You know, it's the military. It's NATO. It's the IMF and the World Bank. It's the mainstream media. It is the NGOs and oh of course, these NGOs are largely state department funded, or IC funded. It's essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you're left with is essentially, democracy is just the consensus building architecture within the within the democratic institutions themselves.

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