Time to Sign Up for X (Special Invitations for Those Who Have Resisted Until Now)
Joe Rogan:
So there's this giant resistance right now to the idea that X is the new source of the world. They're the mainstream. It's the new source of the world. These people that want to cling to authority and say, "No, you're not. God damn it. You're not a journalist." You guys fucked us too many times, and we don't believe you anymore. And so the only way for us to find out what's real and what's not real is if someone posts it online, and then everybody looks at it, and then you get the Community Notes, and that's way better than the New York Times telling me that the Fruit Loops in Canada are exactly the same as the Fruit Loops in America, except for a bunch of shit that's banned. And that's the whole point of the whole fucking thing. Yeah, meanwhile, they're fact checking, RFK, Jr, so now I don't trust you anymore either.
Tonight I posted the following on FB:
If you want to know what's really going on in the world, it's time for you to grow up and participate at X (Twitter). Don't be scared away by your "friends" who will call you names if you dare to listen to facts and opinions they don't approve of. At my website, Dangerousintersection.org, I've been following/analyzing the corporate news for years and I can guarantee you that corporate media "journalists" repeatedly fail to ask obvious questions. They are totally captured by their corporate masters and their main mission is to manipulate you to be gaslit and coerced to believe the BS power-hungry entities such as the U.S. government, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex and the Censorship Industrial Complex.
Will you find nuts and kooks at X? Absolutely. But at least big topics are not being filtered and vanished systematically at X as they are elsewhere (such as here at FB). At X, you will eventually find many credible voices that you will learn to question, learn from and treasure. You will not agree with them on everything, which is a good thing! Give it a try. Within a month or so you will start to see an upside down version of the fantasy-world you now inhabit, the one you are now afraid to question if you are not yet on X.
The Shrieks of a Dying “News” Industry that Knows That it is Dying
The CEO of Axios is not ranting out of concern for us. He is ranting because it wants the unearned power of being a permanent gatekeeper. He wants legacy media to have power to control our thoughts and actions, whether or not the legacy media is doing excellent work. The ultimate power of the news should reside with all of us at the grassroots level. The responsibility and power for all things that affect us should be with each of us. That is the core idea of a democracy and the great gift offered to us by the Enlightenment.
Why the Elites Are Panicking Over Free Speech
Why are the Elites freaking out over free speech? In a mass-email to subscribers, Catherine Herridge explains:
The new super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices, and embrace transparency which can strengthen democracy. This is nothing short of an industrial revolution driven both by technology and by loss of trust in corporate media. In 2023, Human Rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama wrote about the upheaval and resulting, 'elite panic.
Elite panic is this recurring phenomenon throughout the history of free speech, where whenever the public sphere is expanded, either through new communications technology, or to segments of the population that were previously marginalized, the traditional gatekeepers, the elites who control access to information, tend to fret about the dangers of allowing the unwashed mob — who are too fickle, too unsophisticated, too unlearned — unmediated access to information. They need information to be filtered through the responsible gatekeepers and it may be even more dangerous to allow them to speak without adult supervision. That's a phenomenon that we see again and again. And we're seeing it play out now on social media. … [Elite panic is] one contributing factor to the free speech recession.
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn Discuss Ukraine, Censorship and Insanity
Fascinating discussion about Ukraine, censorship and the insanity of the neocons (of the U.S. and western Europe). Here's an excerpt from a much longer conversation titled "Gambling with Nukes" by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi 0:16
There's a gamble implicit in it. You are firing missiles at a nuclear power and you are gambling that they are not going to fire them back, right? And there was, there were actually quotes from American officials talking about how, you know the real irresponsible people were the Russians. They were the ones you know, who were being irresponsible. Let's see what was the quote? The EU foreign policy chief Joseph Burrell said it's not the first time that Putin plays the nuclear gamble, okay? And this was before the launch of the British missiles, and after the launch of the of the ATACMS missiles. And then, and then this guy, [British Prime Minister, [Keir] Starmer, who comes out, and he looks like a cross of Max Headroom and Noel Coward. I mean, like, I can't even that the whole presentation is so disturbing. This like kind of blinking creature who speaks in that bizarre accent, just repeating catch phrases over and over again while he talks about firing missiles at Russia. It just seems crazy, right? And then that is succeeded by new news that came out that, apparently, the French are going to be next, and they're going to, they're going to be sending something called SCALP missiles into Russia. And, you know, then we get the ICBM fired back.
Walter Kirn 1:59
Well, they're, they're all they're all making themselves targets, aren't they? I mean, they're lining up. Should there be any doubt about the legitimacy? Who cares about legitimacy? Who cares about all the rules anymore these? Who cares about the norms? Dude, they just broke the biggest norm in history, which was to send our missiles into a nuclear state to land and explode. That's the biggest norm in American or world history, since those kind of things were invented, frankly, so the rules based international order--that's out the window. Norms are out the window, not shooting missiles into the home territory of the greatest nuclear power next to the United States is out the window. All of this being led by a lame duck American president who is all week in South America, while his vice president, who just ran for president, is vacationing in Hawaii. Well, Aloha. The whole mask is off.
The thing that scares me is how these people ever expect that they and their party will be taken seriously for five seconds should they ever try to float a peace message or a humanitarian message. Again, the party of social justice, and in England, the left wing party, the Labor Party, to which Starmer belongs, are at a moment when we have actually, in the United States, the center, the crown, of this power structure, voted out our executive It is beyond insane, and it will not end well. Matt, just as I was upset on Monday, I can tell you that next week we will be even more upset. Things are going to happen, and things are already happening every day, when this missile went off this morning. Every power in the world that has modern warning systems had an alarm go off right for the first moments after its launch. The United States had to assume that it was under nuclear attack.
[MORE . . .]