What People are Missing if They Aren’t reading X (Twitter)

It's wild out there in the lands of Politics and Culture. I've been doing some collecting and I'd like to offer some of the things that especially caught my attention recently.

Glenn Greenwald is on fire. Here he is once again pointing out DNC/Corporate Media Hypocrisy:

I've lost count of the people who have told me that they don't know what Robert F. Kennedy actually says and they don't want to find out. And then They claim that he is "anti-vax" and a "conspiracy theorist," as though saying that is a substitute for knowledge. Michael Shellenberger comments:

This really happened. How could EVERYONE in the corporate media forget?

The Ukraine war (which has killed 600,000 Ukrainians so far) must must must go on because . . . trust us . . . says Anthony Blinken, neocon in Joe Biden's cabinet and one of the architects of the Iraq War.

Tulsi Gabbard was really put on this list this year after she expressed a political position in support of Trump. Everything else here is absolutely true. Does this sound like America?

It's guaranteed won't hear these things about Matt Gaetz at your favorite corporate media outlets. Independent journalist Lee Fang will tell you:

If really you'd like to learn RFK, Jr's positions on important topics (and you should want to know them), here are some of his main points, succinctly set out and annotated:

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Who is the Real Anthony Fauci?

I had been reading RFK, Jr's long book, The Real Anthony Fauci, when I noticed that a three-hour documentary has been released based on this same book. The documentary is both riveting and demoralizing, filling in dozens of holes avoided by corporate media. They want to keep you ignorant.

I highly recommend watching this so that you can knock the scales from your eyes. It's not merely about Anthony Fauci. It's about our out-of-control corrupt medical system. Rather than getting frustrated by the system, this documentary names names and offers specifics about the cash-infused misguided ideology that now substitutes for what should be free-ranging endlessly-curious and self-critical science. You will learn why your doctors' hands are often tied.

You will learn many reasons for why the existence of the COVID vax is massive scandal and that there were many better alternatives. What makes me sad is that the people who need to watch this the most will refuse to watch it because they insist that Fauci should forever remain on a pedestal no matter how many people he has killed over the decades (including the AIDS scandal) through his corruption and ignorance.

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The Overwhelming Power of Negation

Greg Lukianoff discusses Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public. He focuses in on negation. As Greg discusses, It's easy to tear things down and it can be contagious as it becomes a badge of tribal membership to tear more and more things down. A big problem, however, is the concomitant violation of Chestson's Fence: Do tear something down until and unless you first know why it was there in the first place. What happens next is described by the law of unintended consequences. To me, these three principles seem to define the present age. Here's an excerpt from Lukinanoff's article, the byline of which is "Our media revolution has only been able to tear things down. We need to learn how to build."

Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down: institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. Cancel Culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.” Here’s Gurri explaining further:

“Negation” comes from Hegel’s dialectical logic ...  In my terms, it’s the complete repudiation of the system by the public, usually expressed through some aborted form of protest.
. . . Gurri shows how this phenomenon manifested itself in the 2011 Arab Spring, and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. ... According to Gurri, this hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism in which nothing is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down:

If you push the negation of the system far enough without any interest in providing an alternative, you arrive at the proposition that destruction by itself is a form of progress. ... You can see this nihilism in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to Cancel Culture on both the right and the left — and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by QAnon and other conspiracy theories.

One thing must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation: Very often, what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss the fact that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts — and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous.

Negation is indeed tearing things down that really needed to be torn down. The problem is that it seems to be taking everything else with it.

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