Wokeism: A mechanism for marketing closed-mindedness, self-censorship, and censorship of others to people who adamantly proclaim they support open-mindedness and free inquiry.
How do you sell censorship to people who have convinced themselves that they stand for free thinking and open discourse? You make it all about “protecting the little people”. Never mind that western societies have a 100% failure rate in the “responsibility to protect” that they have assigned to themselves; that is, in all cases they burn the village to “save” the village, and they “free” people by killing them. The intentions always seem like good ones, but in all cases those “intentions” are just empty marketing blurbs created by capitalist mass media, and the actions western societies take to realize those intentions invariably bring terrible harm to those they profess to trying to help.
Martin Luther King Jr’s dream was for people to not notice the skin melanin content when interacting with others, but what are the “woke” upper middle class white people who profess to oppose racism doing? They are focusing all attention on that single characteristic. Race is said to be a social construct, but it is the “woke” upper middle class white people who are socially constructing it, reinforcing it, and guaranteeing that everyone resents it, including the “poor little brown people” that the delusional “woke” upper middle class whites tell themselves that they are “helping”.
Unfortunately, “wokeism” is a closed logic loop. Those afflicted with it cannot break out. The only response they can see to failure of their “wokeness” is yet more “wokeness”. What’s more is that “wokeism” can only fail because it cannot address the real causes of unequal distribution of opportunity in capitalist society because “wokeness” is to its core a capitalist ideology. As a consequence we will be treated to more and yet even more “wokeism” from the institutions in society controlled by the “woke” upper middle class whites: Mass media, entertainment of all sorts, universities, and workplaces. Americans in particular should expect in the near future to be forced to attend “sensitivity seminars” based upon various “critical grievance group theories” as a condition of employment. For sure that will make people sympathetic to those grievance groups, right? The marketing of “wokeness” will move on to the hard-sell level and be mandated by law… a “deal you cannot refuse!”
More importantly for capitalist elites, anyone who opposes, or is perceived to oppose “wokeism” will be “cancelled”, ostracized, “deplatformed”, marginalized, and even imprisoned. You must first create witches if you intend to use witch hunts to silence opposition.

Posted by: William Gruff | Mar 15 2021 12:22 utc | 104

Pachinko,
I think you ask a very important question.At fist sight it puzzles me as well why so many leftists put their energy and readiness-for-change in this kind of societal subjects.Do antifa and BLM oppose exploitation of the people in africa?No they do not.Do they oppose bombing of innocent elderly,children and women in Yemen or Syria or Donbass?No they do not neither.
My take :it is all about essentialation of sexual preferences,of accidental properties of the human,like skin-colour.At a moment of time in which all kinds of people are mixed together in most countries,and we could overwhelmingly understand each other delivered from such racial and sexual markers,the criminals in power have worked out the idea to utilize frustration giving birth to anger,to use and direct this anger to make us into one-dimensional thinkers and feelers.They want us to live by impressions,rather than by facts.
In France they pushed homosexual mariage,under the presidency of François Hollande.Not withstanding the fact that many homosexuals are perfectly happy the way they lived before this law.But hey,who is such a bore to oppose it?Only conservatives and catholics etc.There were large demonstrations against this law (Le manif pour tous.) assembling over a million in the streetsof Paris,very undercounted as 40000 in the news.Mothers and little children were teargassed,people wearing some slogan teashirt got four months prisontime.Now french people must say :parent 1,and parent2,instead of father and mother.
Minister of Education at the time was “philosopher” Vincent Peillon,who in a book has written about the intentional tearing apart of family because family as a concept is outdated.The children must be taken violently from their parents and be re-educated by the government.Of course he did not mean his own children,and he got a nice job for his daughter after her studies,to become attaché-culturel at the french embassy in Tel-Aviv.
This all goes hand in hand with deculturization,deletion of history and historic conscience,and of course we never know the persons behind the politics who push this.A lot of them are from McKinsey,and communication coaches really run the country,while the guy you voted for is just an actor.
Macron and Merkel have McKinsey advisors to guide them.
There’s a lot more to say about it and in trying to answer your very good question,but I do not have the time for it at the moment.Happy to read other posters’s insights though…

Posted by: willie | Mar 15 2021 12:58 utc | 106

Someone in this thread just used the phrase “closed logic loop”, I did a refresher of it’s definition.
The phrase brings to mind an experience I had decades ago. The experience really stuck with me.
I was seated on a plane next to someone that asked if they could “witness to me”.
“Witness to me”, as you probably already know, means: can they tell you their story of how
they found Jesus. I don’t remember whether I said yes of no, but I do remember saying that
I don’t believe *every single word* in the Bible is true. The witness-er gave me such a look, not
hostile, more like when a bird-watcher catches sight of an extremely rare and unique to them
bird. His response was what I will always remember and is a fitting example of “closed logic loop”.
He showed me where in the Bible it says, “every word in the Bible is true”.

Posted by: librul | Mar 15 2021 13:46 utc | 108

Librul,@ 109
That’s a good story.

Posted by: arby | Mar 15 2021 14:17 utc | 110

Now we can say it’s official: the F-35 is dead:
NYT EDITORIAL BOARD -The Fighter Jet That’s Too Pricey to Fail: The F-35 is a boondoggle. Yet we’re stuck with it.

Posted by: vk | Mar 15 2021 14:29 utc | 112

@Posted by: librul | Mar 15 2021 13:46 utc | 109
Addendum
I think I responded to the witness-er
that he was using circular logic. Or maybe I am
remembering what I *should* have said.
I think circular logic is a subset of closed loop logic,
but not all closed loop logic is circular logic.
I am open to be corrected.

Posted by: librul | Mar 15 2021 14:53 utc | 114

BEN 100
‘Now the military has declared open-season on the protestors and the body count is trending toward 150’
UNVERIFIED
aFTER TAM, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, Iraq,
Yugo, Syria, Libya ….
Lesson learned,
ASSUME INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY.
This is classic fukus MO,
Manufacture crisis,
Manufacture consent,
R2p[lunder]
we are into stage two now.
The last thing we want is to uncritically swallow the official story
, thus unwittingly abetting fukus in
manufacturing consent.

Posted by: denk | Mar 15 2021 15:37 utc | 116

willie@103
Yes, even his wife as I noted @50.

Posted by: spudski | Mar 15 2021 15:52 utc | 118

@c1ue 114,
of course it’s more complex; the blog-comment genre calls for simplicity.
“Having Walmart greeters and Amazon packers be less dependent on food stamps is not a real benefit for anyone.”
They’ll do the cost/benefit analysis for the $15/hr requirement, and it might compel to get rid of the greeters altogether. As for Amazon packers, they’ll probably make them work faster, raise productivity norms.

Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Mar 15 2021 16:08 utc | 120

Mr. Crooke brings up Dostoevsky and “Demons” again, and continues in a rather apocalyptic vein:
Leviathan Mobilises for Decisive Battle

Posted by: Bemildred | Mar 15 2021 16:30 utc | 122

@ librul | Mar 15 2021 13:46 utc | 109 and William Gruff | Mar 15 2021 13:47 utc | 110:
I did haphazardly turn “closed logic loop” into “circular logic” in my reply; maybe I missed the point of your posts because of that, but I’d expect both terms to have the same meaning.
Your comparison with Nazi Germany caught me by surprise through. So is – in your opinion – the substance behind wokeness just that? Just another group of people hypnotizing themselves with delusions of grandeur? Believing to be, if I may take your words, outside the rules of history everyone else is trapped in; and at the same time displaying how they are trapped themselves by re-enacting self-delusions that have been noted countless times in history already? Just another fad that’ll fade away on its own after finally consuming itself (inevitably due to its inherent circular logic preventing it from solving its existential problems)?

Posted by: pachinko | Mar 15 2021 16:33 utc | 124

@azzron | Mar 15 2021 12:17 utc | 104

Because 4,500 years – almost the entirety of written human history – is rather adequate time for people to have looted those tombs. The 3 Giza pyramids were likely looted in the first intermediate period – about 300 years after Khufu & Khafre. And the robbers who did so almost certainly found the pharaoh’s bodies.
BTW, when tomb robbers were caught, the punishment was impalement.

There is no evidence for these claims, it is imagination.
There is also no evidence that the dynastic Egyptians built the pyramids, or that they were capable of doing so. Remember high up in the core of the Great Pyramid of Giza are found multiple 70-ton granite blocks from Aswan 500Km away. They are perfectly fitted. Then add ~2.5 millon limestone blocks of 1-2 ton each. No remains of burials in the pyramids are seriously claimed, and there are no hieroglyphs in there. Then add the places like the Serapeum with more than 20 high precision granite boxes built from single slabs weighing ~100ton each and placed underground in narrow bedrock niches. Then add the water erosion on the Sphinx enclosure, it shows it has been subject to running water erosion over a very long time even though the sphinx has been buried under sand most of the time the last 5000 years, and it hasn’t even rained much during that time.
A much more likely scenario is that the dynastic egyptians found the pyramids. They were built much further back in time by a civilization with high technological skills, witnessed by the circular granite bore holes, saw marks and many other things you can find there (and in places like Peru, Bolivia, Cambodia and many other places).
As has been mentioned before, a very likely theory is that the earth was hit by a comet 12900 years ago. More specifically it hit the Laurentide ice sheet over north America, killed the megafauna there. The whole of north america was bombarded with secondary impacts of giant ice boulders, in some places like the Carolinas the remnants are still found in the form of Carolina Bays, ref. Antonio Zamora
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM8bvhhFAB-Wmr-PeEVkGTA
The impact caused the Younger Dryas cold period that lasted 1200 years and well documented in the climate history.
On the other side of the Atlantic, this probably caused “The Great Flood” we know from the Bible, and I would guess it gave even the Giza pyramids a thorough rinse, notice that one of the pyramids have casing stones intact on the top, but not further below. Perhaps they were washed away. There are many signs of such a cataclysm in Egypt and also in places like Lebanon and even Bolivia.
So in my book, human history is much older than 4500 years. Human civilization was interrupted by the comet 12900 years ago to the degree that it took about 7000 years for civilization to recover and return to Egypt. We are closer in time to the pharaos today than the pharaos were relative to the pyramid builders.

Posted by: Norwegian | Mar 15 2021 17:01 utc | 126

Watch the price of the critical mineral palladium and other platinum group elements plus nickel skyrocket following the closure of two mines in Russia:
https://www.mining.com/web/nornickel-shares-drop-after-partial-suspension-of-operations-at-two-mines/
These minerals are necessary for green energy and are very hard to find. Australia has recently discovered significant new deposits. Chalice Mining, Impact Minerals and a few others lead the charge. Some miners extract PGE’s as a byproduct of other mining, like Australian Vanadium. Usually this PGE group are found together, often with copper and zinc.
Playing hardball with Russia is a loose – loose game. Is dividing Syria into a mosaic of mini states so important for “American” security?
Palladium is necessary for catalytic converters in auto manufacturing. It is far more valuable than gold.

Posted by: Paul | Mar 15 2021 17:16 utc | 128

@librul | Mar 15 2021 17:23 utc | 130

Got that? Everyone has the same thing written on their forehead:
“I want to be treated with respect.”

You mean just peeking over the mask that screams: “They took away my self respect”
I agree it is a fundamental right to be treated with respect. That is why the psychopaths in power are busy demolishing all forms of respect towards common people. They know what they are doing.

Posted by: Norwegian | Mar 15 2021 17:33 utc | 130

@Posted by: Norwegian | Mar 15 2021 17:33 utc | 131
good point

Posted by: librul | Mar 15 2021 17:45 utc | 132

pachinko @125
Had the Soviet Union not defeated Germany in WWII the Nazis would still be here. The modern expressions of fascism will likewise not go away on their own. So long as the ideology of capitalism remains unchallenged the internal logic of “wokeism” will remain compelling for those who see injustice in the world while at the same time depending for their comfort and security upon capitalist property relations. The bunny’s post above helps illustrate what it looks like from the inside. “Wokeism” seems self-evident to those afflicted with the delusion.
Of course, that is just one contemporary expression of fascism, and it isn’t very compatible with some of the other ones out there right now (Bolivian or Brazilian fascism, for instance). It would be nice if some of them would crash into and annihilate each other without any collateral damage, but that is unlikely.

Posted by: William Gruff | Mar 15 2021 18:37 utc | 134

The Global Times editor is becoming more sophisticated in his taunts:
“All of the US’ problems should be attributed to the decline in its competitiveness in the era of globalization. It is too addicted to military and financial hegemony. Its ability and speed of innovation is declining, and its labor force as a whole is becoming lazy. To maintain its advantage, the US wants to keep the existing stock of advantages instead of creating more advantages. The country will inevitably face problems in the long run if it goes on like this.”
Truth mixed with sarcasm is an excellent formula as numerous comedians have known. An interesting question is posed by the prose: Do Japan and South Korea really require the Outlaw US Empire to provide their “security”? IMO, there are no hostile nations in the region aside from the Outlaw US Empire–open up commerce and cultural interaction and North Korea will become quite friendly if cautious, particularly with South Korea. China and Russia pose zero threat to either, so the same formula applies. Indeed, it’s the Empire’s forces that are the genuine regional threat that once removed will remove that threat. I wonder how many Japanese and Koreans have figured that out?

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 15 2021 18:57 utc | 136

c1ue, Bemildred
My sense is that ‘woke’ developed as an independent off-shoot of Bernie and BLM. Both of these Movements are channels for hyper-partisan ‘divide and conquer’ psyops but ‘woke’ (a certain level of awareness) has not been compromised. And that really really annoys the establishment because the see it as a challenge similar to the counter-culture of the 1960’s (I think that’s true).
The ‘woke’ are likely to be anti-war once the shooting starts.
<> <> <> <> <>
Note: ‘Woke’ is not Antifa. Anyone with children of a certain age (like me) know this.
IMO those who try to make a connection to Antifa are just trying to undermine the ‘woke’ community.
!!

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Mar 15 2021 19:29 utc | 138

vk | Mar 14 2021 15:03 utc | 4

I will repeat what I told the British when Labour sabotaged Corbyn to put Starmer in power: you could have an Aurelian, but instead chose a Priscus Attalus.

Yers! Pretty neat analogy! No doubt the majority of the Blairite Labour MPs and the the other ‘Public’ Schoolboys that are a large part of the Tory Party understood you, but I doubt that most of Corbyn’s supporters had a clue as to what you meant.

Posted by: foolisholdman | Mar 15 2021 20:27 utc | 140

vk | Mar 14 2021 15:51 utc | 6

The reason manufacturing jobs are seen as naturally more highly paid in the post-war era is because the manufacturing workers were in the vanguard of class struggle during the 19th-20th Centuries, therefore they fought more – and got more – rights, wages and benefits.

E.g. the railwaymen in the UK are still well unionized and, almost alone amongst the blue-collar workers in Britain, are still well paid.

Posted by: foolisholdman | Mar 15 2021 20:41 utc | 142

vk | Mar 14 2021 17:07 utc | 11

1) reshoring could theoretically lower unemployment if we exclude the factor of automation. However, even if that happened, it would lower the profit rates even more, thus lowering the ceiling of the wages; and
2) it would happen at the cost of the deindustrialization of the rest of the world – specially China.

I don’t think it would lead to the “deindustrialization of the rest of the world – specially China” as exports to the Us are not that big a part of China’s exports. (About 3% I think it was, last time I looked.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Mao Cheng Ji | Mar 14 2021 16:07 utc | 8

Which is exactly what happened during the Trump administration: the lowest unemployment and highest wages in 50 years.
And of course limiting inflow of desperate undocumented foreigners, suppressing wages by playing (roughly speaking) the role of scabs, cheap replacement workers – that’s another factor.

How real were those figures? The unemployment figures left out the people who had stopped looking for work.

Posted by: foolisholdman | Mar 15 2021 21:02 utc | 144

vk | Mar 14 2021 18:02 utc | 20

Long story short, the American people cannot have the best of the two worlds: either it accepts a lower life standard while it accepts to not be the hegemon or it goes all-in with protecting its hegemon status and deepens its aggressiveness toward the rest of the world so as to maintain its exuberant life standard.

I don’t agree. The USA has nearly everything, in the way of resources, it needs to give all its inhabitants a decent standard of living. The few other things it needs it could get by trade. The problem, what stops it doing that, is its Socio-economic system. The people running it are a small collection (class) of greedy bastards. They don’t want the mass of the people to have a comfortable, secure life. They like having poor people around.

Posted by: foolisholdman | Mar 15 2021 21:55 utc | 146

vk | Mar 14 2021 18:02 utc | 20

Long story short, the American people cannot have the best of the two worlds: either it accepts a lower life standard while it accepts to not be the hegemon or it goes all-in with protecting its hegemon status and deepens its aggressiveness toward the rest of the world so as to maintain its exuberant life standard.

What “exuberant life standard” is that then? Looking at videos of the tent dwellers in SF, I don’t see many that look all that exuberant! Half a million of the others are dead. This must be some new form of exuberance of which I was formerly unaware!

Posted by: foolisholdman | Mar 15 2021 22:03 utc | 148

snake | Mar 14 2021 18:09 utc | 21
The ruling class has in the past ruled by brute force, police and armed forces were always primarily set up to protect the ruling class from the under class(es). Since WW2, the present western ruling class has hit on a superior scheme: control of information and education + “Democracy”. The MSM are the eyes and ears of the populace and the education system has convinced the under classes that they can control how the country is run by voting occasionally for politicians.
When the country is managed to the disadvantage of the majority the MSM tell them (and most believe) that they made the wrong choice, next time they should vote for the other politicians, who promise to do better. Curiously, it has worked every time! So far. It may be changing, failing.

Posted by: foolisholdman | Mar 15 2021 22:20 utc | 150

This is an interesting article about “originalism” and the conservatives’ ongoing attempt to get the Supreme Court (and the US legal system) to actually attempt to understand and enforce the law as opposed to enables laws that change society.
It is particularly interesting given a different article I read which attempted to paint originalism as Christian fundamentalism transplanted into big bad conservative ideology.
Of course, both could be right…
Liberty’s Journal on Conservative law
Long article also talks about the coming showdown between libertarian and “anti-SCOTUS society framing” conservatives.

Posted by: c1ue | Mar 15 2021 22:27 utc | 152

At its start, the hippie movement is one of the best things that ever happened to the USA. Before that wars were never questioned. Due to the counter-culture, conscription is nearly impossible. I also appreciate the changes the counter-culture brought after the fascist 50’s. A lot of positive ground was made in the way of race, gender and environment.
The CIA didn’t create the counter-culture, it conquered the counter-culture and changed it into what we see today. Hippies became yuppies, drug use went from pot and psychedelics to alcohol, cocaine and pills. Fighting the good fight…the hard fight for social justice was manipulated into virtue signaling and identity politics, with no real substance.
Without the counter-culture, I doubt we make it out of the 60’s without nuclear war. The 50’s were an ugly time, a time when America took up the mantle of the Nazis, genociding North Korea and Vietnam. Brutal death squads across the world. Good riddance to that, it is just to bad most of the hippies sold out or were coopted or became so addicted to raw hedonism that they lost sight of what really mattered.
That is the nature of the Borg…resistance is futile, no matter what you will be assimilated, and by the early 70’s the counter-culture was largely assimilated.

Posted by: ArtherDent | Mar 15 2021 23:02 utc | 154

Norwegian #127
Thank you for your precise response regarding the myth of pyramids as burial chambers. There are mortuary temples scattered about on the surrounding plains but there is no absolute coincident dating. The extraordinary ‘boxes’ at the Serapeum defy logic as to the place they are in and simultaneously challenge construction technology available in the day.
Thank you too for linking to Antonio Zamora. His analysis is precise and succinct.
In addition to the overwhelming evidence for a meteor strike some 12,900 years and its catastrophic aftermath:
The Burkle meteor impact 5,000 years ago did create a tsunami that impacted Madagascar AND the south west coast of Australia. That tsunami likely headed north as well and severely impacted the Red Sea, Persian Gulf etc. Parts of that meteor fell on Australia and Argentina from recall.
The Tempest Stele records a later event 3550 years ago that was a severe weather disaster in Egypt and almost destroyed that society. Origin is speculatively linked to the Santorini volcanic explosion.
The Santorini volcano disintegrated in its entirety in one explosion some 3550 years ago and likely created massive Mediterranean tsunamis. This event ended the Minoan civilisation immediately.
Large catastrophic events interrupt earths development periodically it seems. They also enrich flood myths and reinvigorate expiring myths.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Mar 15 2021 23:55 utc | 156

Seems Banksters are hip to capitalize on the Woke/Cancel inanities, “Oligarch bankers are using woke PR campaigns to whitewash the greatest wealth inequality and economic plunder in history”. I offer the following outtake:
“None of these banks care about equality—racial, economic or otherwise—unless it directly impacts their paycheques. And that remains evident from yet more hollow pledges. More to the point, after the heinous actions banks took bankrupting America over the past several decades, should we really believe that these same bankers are going to make a serious effort to end wealth inequality? Or should we see this latest verbal diarrhoea for what it really is: a bulls**t PR campaign by people who really don’t care about equality? After all, this program is coming from a company with 45,000 employees, where less than three percent of the senior management are ‘black or African American.’”
Add that and the other content the author provides to Crooke’s essay, and we might be able to measure the 1%’s growing desperation.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 0:19 utc | 158

@152 Bemildred
I’d like to quote you please:

I find it interesting that all of these guys, Dugin, Crooke, Unherd come to center on identity as an object of attack, to be pushed on people. And that seems one of the greatest forms of oppression, to have an identity forced on you to suit someone else, or to have your identity attacked and undermined.
Yet we all need an identity, a center, something to belong to, something to be and do, a meaning. At one time you would belong to a tribe, that would be your identity. Now they get invented in the movies and people adopt them like a new pair of shoes.

It’s so useful that you drop these major themes into the discussion on wokeness and wokeism. I hadn’t quite put them together, but of course, they are all part of the same thing. Wokeism is part of the attack on identity, and is one of the few tools remaining to the powers that be, albeit a very powerful tool.
~~
I must interrupt myself here to notice Jackrabbit’s idea that woke also falls organically to today’s young, and can perhaps evolve into a full-on force of anti-establishment. In the same way that the 60’s were very interwoven with CIA mind-control experiments, and yet, even so, lost out on the more sublime levels to the natural wisdom of the Universe itself when the LSD actually kicked in for millions – in just such a way, the woke theme may well have been created in a psy-op lab, but may also turn into its own thing. We shall see.
~~
Back to identity. It’s almost as if the new battleground is that of identity. And if, as Crooke implies, and as his ex-CIA analyst author claims, the powers that be have largely lost control of the very workings of their agenda, then the battle raging could be won by anyone.
And if so, perhaps it can be won decisively by choosing the identity of victor. Human trumps non-human – a slogan, perhaps, for the rallying cry that will emerge as the Awakening gathers force.
And I say this because Dugin’s theme, which has become for Crooke now an obvious pillar of his own analysis, also liberated me in some way to choose a bedrock belonging, one that cannot be challenged or overturned.
When the enemy became so clearly revealed as trans-human, anti-human – humancidal, in fact – then it became effortlessly simple to identify myself as human, and rooting for the humans, and fighting for the humans.
So this is the future. And battle is already joined, here in the present. But now, finally, we know the sides.

Posted by: Grieved | Mar 16 2021 3:40 utc | 160

Grieved @160–
When the enemy became so clearly revealed as trans-human, anti-human – humancidal
Yes. I’ve been calling the enemy Parasites for quite awhile. Vampires are another analogy; but IMO, Parasites is best as it’s more apt. Humans versus the Anti-humans is another theme I put forth. Collectivist versus Atomistic. Humans versus the Mind Snatchers. Dignity and the Sanctity of Life versus Profit about all else. Again, the Dualistic Good versus Evil. You’re Either With Humans or Against Humans.
Big Picture-wise it’s Humans versus Western Human History and the dominance of Parasitic Creditors on Human Development and Peaceful Evolution. That Historical Narrative has yet to be properly espoused.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 5:18 utc | 162

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit from the early 1950s plus Death of a Salesman spoke to those themes. But not nearly enough people saw or read either to make a difference.
Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 5:22 utc | 163
That would apply to most, but not all, of the people I knew in High School.
There was still back then a robust indy political print media, lots of little magazines popping up like mushrooms. Commies everywhere, Mao’s litle red book. The anti-war movement started there, old school hard-nosed political (and infiltrated). “The Lost Generation”, “The Beat Generation” they called them.
But always a minority, though the crowds grew as the war went on. And when the inductees came home it became impossible to hide what was going on there.
And then came the Summer of Love etc., and that sold much better, and everything changed after that. That was the beginning of the media circus, “The Summer of Love”, and they were all pumping it out then too. And here we are now, still living in that media bubble.

Posted by: Bemildred | Mar 16 2021 5:50 utc | 164

@162 karlof1 – That Historical Narrative has yet to be properly espoused.
I think perhaps this is now happening – with Dugin, and Crooke, and us, and others.
And the warrior side of me feels potent energy arising from correctly identifying that narrative, seeing the war for what it truly is, and long has been, and seeing the battle lines beginning to draw up clearly. Watching the enemy come into the light, to be destroyed.

Posted by: Grieved | Mar 16 2021 6:30 utc | 166

“Verkada Breach Demonstrates Danger of Overprivileged Users” headline
Astonishing story. Reminds me a wave of attacks by creepy clowns that spread over all English speaking country. In both cases, no one linked the crisis to Russian or Chinese.
There is also a note of resentment against the “overprivileged”, i.e. the most productive citizen that keep our house in order economically. Is a revolution coming?

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Mar 16 2021 11:05 utc | 168

karlof1 @ 164, ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit’ was one of the last movies I saw as a teenager in New Zealand. There were three together that I remember as actual movie theatre movies then. The other two were “The High and the Mighty” and “The Purple Plain”. All three figured quite vividly in my resettlement in the US as memories. I recently found ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit’ through youtube. It holds up well. I found “The Purple Plain” as a novel in a thrift store. The movie is very close to the novel. And soon after arriving in the US, I, mother and sister relived the ‘High and the Mighty’ disaster as we flew from San Francisco to New York,(first time on an airplane) only not the extreme drama of that. I was sitting over one of the engines and noticed oil leaking out. Fortunately the crew had also noticed, we weren’t far from takeoff, so turned around, landed, and the matter was quickly resolved.

Posted by: juliania | Mar 16 2021 15:39 utc | 170

An interesting article on NFTs primarily because the authors (and Yves) apparently have never read Veblen and his concept of the Veblen good.
And yes, the ongoing trend is at least partly due to ZIRP, stimulus checks and ongoing oligarchic rampaging through the economy…
Why would anyone buy NFT art

Posted by: c1ue | Mar 16 2021 16:42 utc | 172

Hudson has penned another short memo on the need to deal with debt so economic growth can be promoted, “Removing The Debt Barrier To Economic Growth”–the implication being without its removal growth will not occur and economic shrinkage for the masses will continue unabated.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 17:14 utc | 174

New study faults Neoliberalism for EU’s botched COVID response:
“‘We are calling on government leaders and international organizations to fix the fractures in our societies and stop turning a blind eye to the conditions that allowed the novel coronavirus to inflict such grave damage on the world,’ Monti said. ‘We have a choice: to ignore the evidence and risk being even harder hit in future pandemics, or to heed the warnings and implement the lessons we have learned.'” [My Emphasis]
The bolded passage is the great obfuscation for the ideology responsible for the immorality inflicted on Neoliberal nations particularly as they lead the world in deaths from COVID–The Outlaw US Empire, EU, then Brazil are the top three. But I doubt this report or any other will oust the Parasites or debilitate their ideology. After all, they have NATO to defend against such threats, although NATO was a complete failure in this instance.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 17:51 utc | 176

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 17:41 utc | 176
Twitter has been warned, they have a month to come to terms or they will be blocked. But not only Twitter, Apple thought it over and their phones will offer the alternative to be launched with local software, like VK and Odnoklasniki for social media, Yandex browser and search tools. Apple must have checked the numbers and figured that it cannot afford to lose that market. Interesting that what is asked of them is to offer the alternative, let the user choose. It does not look that bright with Google, the smart boys at the do no evil empire figured that the age limit will turn off a lot of users and they applied that “no evil” mechanism to a patriotic film related to the recent inauguration of the monument in Rzhev, quite a beautiful monument that hopefully I’ll get to see sometime, the movie about the Rzhev Battle was tagged as having violent content and requires age check, they have been warned, lift that restriction or else. Defending your digital turf, so sad that here in Europe we are the absolute digital colony of those felons.

Posted by: Paco | Mar 16 2021 18:55 utc | 178

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 17:41 utc | 176
Here you have the inauguration and some scenes from the film partly blocked. The song is the poem by Tvardovsky “I fell near Rzhev”, a beautiful poem, a quick search for a translation gave me no results and I now, machine translation of poetry is something out of reach for now, but in any case here is the link for the song and images plus the poem in Russian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peK_KYGQjhs
https://lev-shlosberg.livejournal.com/1097017.html

Posted by: Paco | Mar 16 2021 19:08 utc | 180

Karlof 177
Here is the report (not linked in the RT article)
https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-policy/european-programme-of-work/pan-european-commission-on-health-and-sustainable-development/news-and-multimedia/rethinking-policy-priorities-in-the-light-of-pandemics-a-call-to-action

Posted by: Mina | Mar 16 2021 19:35 utc | 182

Well Goll-ly!! as Gomer Pyle intoned. A week ago, we read about the very sorry state of Afghanistan thanks to the obtuseness of Outlaw US Empire officials and the corruption they brought along with their invasion. Today we read that:
“[O]n March 10, they [All Afghans’s woes] were all stated – clearly and unequivocally – by the most senior U.S. government official charged with monitoring the war effort in that unhappy Central Asian nation, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko himself.”
He said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies:
“[That] the biggest factor destroying the credibility of the Afghanistan government among its own people is not the attacks and military opposition of the insurgent Taliban: It is the U.S.-dominated and directed international aid which has totally undermined and discredited the very government it is supposed to support.” [My Emphasis]
Nor is this new information. Instead, it’s very well known:
“Back in 2014, former ISAF (NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan) Commanding General John Allen was not hyperbolic when he told Congress that corruption, not the Taliban, was the existential threat to the Afghan government.”
The author declares:
“Therefore not only have the Americans generated their own corruption and wrecked their own strategy in Afghanistan: But a very senior U.S. official charged with monitoring these issues has admitted it.”
But is that really the case? Catch-22 presented a very strong if fictional hypothesis for the very behavior we’ve seen in Afghanistan and elsewhere as murky, unseemly interests profit hugely from the installed corruption. Furthermore, this admission will be used to invalidate Trump’s deal to withdraw forces and keep them there until at least 2024, which means yet more money for those murky interests and many more billions for the CIA’s narco-based Black Budget. It appears the Outlaw US Empire invented the first ever Geopolitical Hole Deepener and patented it in Vietnam and has now upgraded and modernized it with its latest Afghani model.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 22:37 utc | 184

sorry. go to ” point of order” at 19:25

Posted by: John Cleary | Mar 16 2021 22:46 utc | 186

Joaquin Flores writes a rather different hypothesis for the recent developments within the Outlaw US Empire that IMO merits consideration. Strategic-Culture editors provide the following synopsis:
“America’s deep state and oligarchy have landed upon a type of civilizational about-face, where the legitimating social ideology is increasingly being made into the legitimating ideology of the military.”
Flores sees it this way:
“The real problem is that the lack of public support for military imperialism mirrors the public’s aversion to the new cultural revolution underway in the U.S.
“We are forced to return our focus to the Syria theatre, for it is here that we are seeing the ugliest and most contemptible return to Obama-era policies, where ISIS terrorism and YPG separatist terrorism were both supported.
“But rather than reverse a truly Anti-American and misanthropic policy, the American oligarchy has cynically decided to simply change the ideology of the military so as to redefine the rationale for America’s disastrous adventurism without reversing the policy of adventurism itself. This also happens to be a reflection of a deeply problematic problem inside the U.S. as well: rather than confront the role of the financial institutions and the billionaire oligarchs running the U.S., there has been a decision to ‘punch downward’ and lay the blame for America’s problems at the feet of the American people themselves. ‘Racism’, we are told, is not an institutional phenomenon shaping public and corporate policy. which historically benefited the oligarchy’s divide-and-conquer motifs, but rather an ‘attitude problem’ at the level of the average private individual.” [My Emphasis]
IMO, Flores is very close to the Truth as we’ve discussed what he says above in different ways that say the same things. Along with others, Flores makes these two critical observations:
“The military is a microcosm of society itself. A society that believes in itself, has a military that believes in society’s mission. A people with high morale, has a military with high morale. A society that is openly corrupt and lacks legitimacy, has a military that is openly corrupt and lacks legitimacy. That military begins to operate more and more like a large mercenary outfit, and a dysfunctional class-system within it between reluctant potato peelers and misanthropic paid killer specialists. That type of military can work to an extent so long as the conflicts do not require a full mobilization of society, and do not strain the military itself. Those may be low to medium intensity conflicts with only several hundred actually involved in live-fire operations.
“Every society has a legitimating ideology. There has to be some degree of tangible reality that connects the legitimating ideology to the actual facts on the ground. One of the reasons the USSR collapsed is that the ideology of socialism became increasingly and publicly at odds with the very real and actual role that Communist Party chiefs had as privately interested oligarchs who were in it for themselves and themselves alone. When that reality sank in, the society collapsed. It only required a few extra bribes and nudges from its great geopolitical rival, the U.S., to pull the final thread out for the whole sweater to come undone.” [My Emphasis]
One of the more important aspects that’s occurring Flores has discerned and describes thusly:
“A new form of indoctrination is afoot, where the founding fathers must be ritualistically introduced first as being ‘flawed people’, before the actual reference to those leaders’ relevant ideas can then be discussed.”
IMO, that’s extremely important as it directly impacts the two preceding paragraphs. Unfortunately, it appears Flores was cramped by the infamous restrictions on essay length which renders his conclusion rushed and non-cohesive. Nevertheless, IMO he’s ferreted out some important strands describing what’s happening that aren’t readily seen, but when added to other observations start to form a coherent whole. Discerning what’s actually happening within the Outlaw US Empire often invokes the Elephant Dilemma where many of its parts are well described but not its entire being.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 16 2021 23:20 utc | 188

@189 katlof1
Thanks for the Flores post – when I saw it, I thought, of course, Flores would understand and dive deep into the waters of woke. He has the mind to follow those twisted strands.
I really like what he says in your quote, calling the identity massacre a “cultural revolution” – that’s the right scale for the thing we’re in. And I totally admired his articulation of the underclasses being blamed for their supposedly racist attitudes, rather than the system that creates racism.
And, seeing as he does, and as you quote, the turmoil used as a weapon to destroy all undesired messages by killing their messengers – and reaching now to the Founding Fathers, no less – the psy-op becomes ever more clear.
Flores is an uncertain quality, but sometimes he can knock one out of the park. I will now read his article.
Many thanks!

Posted by: Grieved | Mar 17 2021 1:18 utc | 190

Finally a voice of reason in the NYT:
Manufacturing Isn’t Coming Back. Let’s Improve These Jobs Instead.
Mr. Winaut must be a closeted Marxist. It is class struggle that determines the exact level of wages, not the nature of the job (i.e. if it’s manufacturing, services etc.). There is no difference between manufacturing and services in Marxist theory: the services sector is merely the end of the entire manufacturing process, therefore it is also manufacturing.

Posted by: vk | Mar 17 2021 15:25 utc | 192

Grieved | Mar 17 2021 1:41 utc 192|
My pleasure. It’s fascinating to watch, isn’t it?
TO ALL KEEN GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
I’d like to use my own version of the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Royal+Coat+Of+Arms+Of+United+Kingdom+&atb=v92-1_g&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
Can anybody take the basic design and make two changes:
1 Remove “Honi soit qui mal y pense” and in its place substitute “go fuck yourself if you don’t like it”
2 Remove “Dieu et mon droit” and in its place substitute “The God I deceive”
If anybody can do that please send to me (b has my email) or place it where I can retrieve a copy.
Many thanks (:

Posted by: John Cleary | Mar 17 2021 17:45 utc | 194

Just saw this on Global Times and burst out laughing, they draw Huawei as a liberal bulb-head:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1218707.shtml
Global Times is unintentionally hilarious sometimes.

Posted by: Smith | Mar 18 2021 3:24 utc | 196

Russia has recalled its US Ambassador for consultation and the meeting between China and the US in Alaska on Thursday looks to be a barn burner.
It will be interesting to see what comes after this phase of rhetoric.
The shit show continues until it doesn’t. What is going to stop the music? We may be about to find out.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Mar 18 2021 5:15 utc | 198

…
On government radio France Culture they are doubling down on Assad.This is the stance of the Quai d’Orsay ,the name by which goes the french ministère d’affaires étrangères,that is infested with atlantist cockroaches.France Culture equals french policy abroad,without any critical evaluation.It is colonial,it is treacherous and 90% of its editors and “journalists” have been there for decades and hail from jewish background.
I still remember how in their daily news program in 2011 in a live sequence an actress impersonated the syrian ambassador to France and said she was with the opposition now.Of course this evil act was without follow up,but then again,it was never talked about again,in any media,not even the alternative ones.They can dothis without the public even noticing it.
…
Whenever there will be attacking of Russia via Ukraine and Syria,I think the RF should seriously consider bombing…
…
Posted by: willie | Mar 15 2021 12:00 utc | 103
Yep. Both types of Russia-bashing, directly via Putin The Killer, and indirectly via Syria and Ukraine, have escalated in the Oz Fake News Media. A couple of days ago Jewed-up ABC.net.au news roundup program The World, broadcast some tosh about the victims of Assad’s Torture Complex – including an interview with 1 victim. Then there was an interview with a rep from the White Helmets, showing clips of WH heroes saving people from Evil Assad by conducting amateurishly fake rescues.
I was stunned. The host of the program, the once-delightful Beverly O’Connor, used to be one of the sharpest interrogators and logicians in the ABC’s arsenal, back in the ’90s. Talk about going to Hell in a Handbasket doesn’t begin to sum it up…!
Anyhow…
Oz definitely lost it non-existent innocence yesterday, March 18.
The big news is that ASIO (a bunch of obedient & secretive lobotomised CIA/MI6 Tools) had to expel more than 10 ‘foreign diplomats’ for ‘spying’ in 2020. ASIO doesn’t name the country of origin of these spies but ‘luckily’ ASIO fanboys are pretty confident it’s Russia.
And that was just the fuzzy logic, silly non-news.
The hair-raising news is that ASIO, in it’s Infinite Wisdom (cough,cough) has decided to reject and abandon the terms “Right-Wing” and “Islamic Extremism”.
Why?
They are no longer relevant to the Emerging Threat landscape.
Wow! Watch out Vladimir and Xi! The mendacious little Christian Colonial Pussies are coming after you!
Grab the fly-swatter! Keep it next to the bed!

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Mar 18 2021 15:30 utc | 200