Youtube Disappears Six Years of Work by Chris Hedges

Youtube's Mission Statement:

Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.

Bullshit.

Six years of work by Chris Hedges. Youtube doesn't like it, so now it is gone.

Excerpt from the website of Chris Hedges:

The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of the money-drenched electoral system, neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, predatory capitalism, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in the U.S. Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.

What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a ten-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the contents on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation.” I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.

"The deplatforming of voices like mine, already blocked by commercial media and marginalized with algorithms, is coupled with the pernicious campaign to funnel people back into the arms of the establishment media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In the US, as Dorothy Parker once said about Katharine Hepburn’s emotional range as an actress, any policy discussion ranges from A to B. Step outside those lines and you are an outcast. This is the reason Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and I are on Substack.

It is perhaps telling that our greatest investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, who exposed the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at My Lai and the torture at Abu Ghraib, has trouble publishing in the United States. I would direct you to the interview I did with Sy about the decayed state of the American media, but it no longer exists on YouTube.

Continue ReadingYoutube Disappears Six Years of Work by Chris Hedges

Definition of Cancel Culture

Greg Lukianoff defines "cancel culture," documents its existence and urges that we not give in to its perpetrators who claims that it does not exist:

A culture of censorship—of shaming, shunning, and attempting to destroy people’s lives for ideological reasons—exists in America, and Americans have a name for it: cancel culture.

Let’s not abandon that name in a vain attempt to please the people most responsible for perpetuating the problem.

Continue ReadingDefinition of Cancel Culture

Tara Henley Describes the Identitarian Left

Who are these people? Here's one tell: You will not find them on the streets actually helping to improve the people they claim they care about. You will not find them in the kinds of colleges that most people attend. You won't find them inviting open-ended discussions with the people they disagree with.

Tara Henley tells us more about the Identitarian Left, whether you call them this or whether you call them Woke Moralists or Social Justice Warriors or whatever:

One term I’ve heard lately that’s helpful in unpacking the new left is “identitarian moralism.” This phrase captures the new left’s puritanical thrust and quasi-religious fervour, along with its festishization of identity, while also signaling its ability to shape-shift to take up the Twitter cause du jour, whether that happens to be pandemic public health policies or, this week, recasting Madeleine Albright as some sort of feminist icon. What remains consistent, across all fronts, is a strident illiberalism.

Let’s be clear: If you do not agree with the new left’s list of approved narratives, it one hundred percent expects you to keep your mouth shut (or, alternatively, to “do the work” of “listening and learning,” ideally on Instagram, so that you can be shunned and shamed in as public a manner as possible).

The goal of the new left is, in fact, explicitly to shut down debate of any ideas deemed “harmful,” so as not to perpetuate the harm. This unfortunately leads to an endless parade of bad faith arguments, since the goal is never to make sense or persuade people, but rather to bring discussions to an abrupt halt.

It also leaves a great number of people politically homeless.

Who is Tara Henley? Someone who lives by her principles. A former decorated reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Here is why she resigned at the end of December 2021:
It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.

It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the “woke” worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.

To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.

To work at the CBC is to submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.

Continue ReadingTara Henley Describes the Identitarian Left

The Washington Post has Reckless and Incoherent Joe Biden’s Back

Joe Biden's reckless/incoherent rhetoric could get us all killed. I'm talking about his recent rhetoric. That's on top of the fact that American news media has been pummeling us with non-stop unreflective pro-war messages leading up to the current sorry state of the world. We are where we are not because of a sober cost-benefit foreign policy analysis. This war has turned into theater or, perhaps, the existential version of the Superbowl, where U.S. officials refuse to open up a dialogue with Russia. That would be the thing that grown-ups would do when their conduct is nudging up the nuclear clock which, in 2018, was already at two minutes to midnight.

Here's a "solution." In case Joe Biden says something incoherent or reckless, the Washington Post headline writers are there to save the day. You see, Biden didn't mean what he said, that thing that could result in a civilization-ending nuclear holocaust.

Glenn Greenwald:

President Obama's own arguments about a conflict between Russia and Ukraine — namely, that “Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one” and therefore the U.S. should not risk confrontation with Moscow over it — were widely maligned as Kremlin assets if not agents. Others who urged the U.S. to try to avert war through diplomacy — by, for instance, formally vowing that NATO membership would not be offered to Ukraine and that Kyiv would remain neutral in the new Cold War pursued by the West with Moscow — faced the same set of accusations about their loyalty and patriotism.

Most taboo of all was any discussion of the heavy involvement of the U.S. in Ukraine beginning in 2014 up to the invasion: from micro-managing Ukrainian politics, to arming its military, to placing military advisers and intelligence officers on the ground to train its soldiers how to fight (something Biden announced he was considering last November) — all of which amounted to a form of de facto NATO expansion without the formal membership. And that leaves to the side the still-unanswered yet supremely repressed question of what Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland referred to as the Ukrainians’ "biological research facilities” so dangerous and beyond current Russian bio-research capabilities that she gravely feared they would "fall into Russian hands.” . . .

As a result of the media's embracing of moral righteousness in lieu of debating these crucial geopolitical questions, the U.S. government has consistently and aggressively escalated its participation in this war with barely any questioning let alone opposition.

The central question for Americans from the start of the war in Ukraine was what role, if any, should the U.S. government play in that war? A necessarily related question: if the U.S. is going to involve itself in this war, what objectives should drive that involvement?

Prior to the U.S.'s jumping directly into this war, those questions were never meaningfully considered. Instead, the emotions deliberately stoked by the relentless media attention to the horrors of this war — horrors which, contrary to the West's media propaganda, are common to all wars, including its own — left little to no space for public discussion of those questions. The only acceptable modes of expression in U.S. discourse were to pronounce that the Russian invasion was unjustified, and, using parlance which the 2011 version of Chris Hayes correctly dismissed as adolescent, that Putin is a “bad guy.” Those denunciation rituals, no matter how cathartic and applause-inducing, supplied no useful information about what actions the U.S. should or should not take when it came to this increasingly dangerous conflict.

That was the purpose of so severely restricting discourse to those simple moral claims: to allow policymakers in Washington free rein to do whatever they wanted in the name of stopping Putin without being questioned. Indeed, as so often happens when war breaks out, anyone questioning U.S. political leaders instantly had their patriotism and loyalty impugned (unless one was complaining that the U.S. should become more involved in the conflict than it already was, a form of pro-war "dissent” that is always permissible in American discourse).

Matt Taibbi knows how to connect the dots:

Continue ReadingThe Washington Post has Reckless and Incoherent Joe Biden’s Back