Julian Assange: To Know Where We Should Be Headed, We Need to Figure Out Where We Are

Julian Assange:

We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it's all bankrupt," Assange said. "And the reason it's all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don't know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don't even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up a sort of intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are, then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction. Until then, I think all political theories — to greater and lesser extents of course — are bankrupt.

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Carl Sagan Explains the Critical Need to be Skeptical

As Carl Sagan explains, meaningful conversation involves constant skepticism and testing of viewpoints and claims. Anything else is kayfabe conversation. Any attempts to outlaw or discourage skepticism or testing of any viewpoint or claim is an attempt to dehumanize the other person, to force them to become your puppet = Nietzschean ressentiment.

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The Democrat Ruling Class

Ruy Teixeira explains "How the Democrats Became the Party of the Ruling Class." Excerpt:

The Democratic Party, he argues, has abandoned its traditional working-class base and become a party of college-educated elites. For decades, the party has been hemorrhaging white working-class voters. But in recent election cycles, it has suffered big losses among Latinos without a college education, and has started to slide with non-college-educated Asian and even black Americans as well. The Republicans have capitalized on that loss by embracing these exiled voters, creating an inverted political dynamic that has left those of us old enough to remember the traditional pro-worker, anti-war left with our heads spinning . . .

The city-dwelling, college-educated, professional-class demographic that serves as both the political base of the Democratic Party and the ideological core of the left constitutes America’s new ruling class. As such, its interests, values, and worldview are as one with the institutions that form our country’s political, cultural, and corporate establishments — including government agencies, NGOs, universities, and the industries of cultural production. Unsurprisingly, these power centers benefit from mass censorship of those who dissent from their orthodoxies, from the contrivance of new disciplinary tools to wield against the working class, and from the endless invocation of emergencies to justify radical exercises of state power, such as Covid-19 and the ostensible menace of Vladimir Putin.

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