An unusual and significant court ruling entitles YouTube's main competitor, Rumble, to obtain long-hidden internal documents on Google's search engine manipulations.
It is already obvious. The problem is that so long as the legacy press is still in the DNC/Technocrat/Swamp Rat bag, 40% of the population wouldn't care or in many cases, even know.
That is the frightening and insidious thing. The Swamp Rats--the unelected bureaucrats of the federal government--DNC, establishment portion of the RNC, legacy press and tech titans were all in collusion with oneanother.
Worse than not care; they'll actively cheer it on in the name of "saving democracy" and "combating disinformation". I already see it on some liberal forums I lurk. While they sling the term "fascist" around like candy at a Christmas parade, they adored the disinformation governance board.
I've seen that too. So-called progressives have no self awareness. I had one co-worker raging that Trump was "literally Adolf Hitler." I had to gently remind my other co-workers that, bad as he is, Trump is no Hitler. With that kind of reasoning, these faux progressives will cheer on most any repressive policies.
It was Glenn who said when you've allowed yourself to be convinced you're dealing with the most singular evil in three generations you can justify using whatever tactics to stop it. When the DGB came out most of the comments were standard authoritarian fare like "the only people who should be concerned about this are the people spreading disinformation". One that stuck out to me was "conservatives are having a meltdown over this and I love it!" I used to laugh at conservatives doing silly things like smashing their already-paid-for keurigs to "own the libs". Now that coin has flipped over and liberals are cheering on giving government unprecedented sweeping powers to "own the cons".
Of all the stupid things for big tech to collude with government about, I still can't get over the stupidity of colluding over health information. A ridiculous number of human health opinions have been proven wrong or abandoned in the last 100 years. Consensus opinions about health are less reliable than ones about the one, true god.
It wasn't stupid, it was part of an intentional "plandemic" meant to result in the controlled demolition of the American middle class, e.g., the destruction of the mom-and-pop shops that couldn't financially withstand the lockdowns while allowing the big box stores to stay open.
And this phenomena is part and parcel of the over-arching problem of State *capture* of what should be wholly a-political, solely (honest, non-coerced) supply-and-demand wealth -creating entities in the private-sector, who can only survive by competing fairly *without* the imprimatur of Big Brother.
We need a Constitutionally enshrined (strengthened with explicit amendment) separation of State and economy. It is just as, if not more, important as the separation of State and "church."
Edit: And we especially need it to protect against the resetters:
Let's start with ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. They may have needed help at the beginning of the twentieth century, but I'm pretty sure they're profitable now.
Yes, but it's not about the truth. It's about who controls the "truth" (the State narrative). Big tech corps are onl;y doing what all persons do: Survive and grow. That they become State captured is only a measure of too much State power. Without State backing and protection (for example, Parler), these corporations would not be able to accumulate so much market power. There would be unfettered competition, and we consumers would have the power.
Massively reduce the size and power of the Federal leviathan, and all good will follow, including the tech "monopolies."
My feeling is you have that exactly backwards. It isn't the elected officials who are dictating to the companies it is the opposite. Corporate lobbyists often write the drafts of the laws they want the politicians to vote on.
What is the easier sell for big media?
A) Simply deciding to de-platform Parler out of the blue for 'reasons'.
B) Talking with a couple of your politician buddies and saying "Hey, if you give us a good reason to, we can shut down this Parler thing that Trump is using to upset your political applecart."
So corporate CEOs and their "oligarchy" have captured the State, not the other way around? (The answer to which is the growing shareholder revolt and reassertion of appropriate control.)
But in either case (whichever way one wishes to see it) the problem is the Federal government has too much power, too much scope. It is the Staists/Fascists/WEFer/DEIer/ESGer/control-freaks dream come true.
There are Statists-at-heart, some powerful, some merely "fellow travellers," in BOTH the private sector and public, so why would you think one group would not work hand-in-hand with the other, regardless of position, private or public.
Statists cooperate. The only antidote is popular uprising, whether at the ballot box, board meeting, or, ultimately, an insurgency.
I pray that when the Republicans retake the House, we can have a REAL investigation into J6, including the participation and incitement by Ray Epps and the FBI…and that the facts can actually be presented and searchable on the internet.
Many years from now names like Glenn Greenwald, Dr Robert Malone, Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi and Tucker Carlson will be considered true heroes of the resistance. Viva America, Viva Liberty and Viva Glenn Greenwald. Thanks for fighting the good fight to help save us from ourselves, the happless voters who have allowed this to happen through their apathy, ignorance and focus on being FAT, Dumb and Happy..
That is what terrifies me most, and that the only real thing holding such a catastrophize back is Putin himself.
Neither the EU nor the US or their 'shared organ' of NATO have shown signs of anything but pushing an unending war. This is wholly on their hands...and they even have a nuclear attack add running in NYC on what people should do. When I hear of that, my first reaction was 'find out who allowed for nuclear war to become possible and put them six feet under.
Even during the so called Cold War there were always voices in the power structure and the media who wanted rapprochement, peace, those people were respected and seen as legitimate interlocuters.
Not today. Speak out against war with Russia, and you know what they will call you.
And, Gov. Hochul tried to push thru Bill A416 which reads, in part, (Section 12): "...the governor or his or her delegee may...issue and seek enforcement of any other order that he or she determines...to require testing or medical examination of persons who may have been exposed to or contaminated with dangerous amounts of radioactive materials or toxic chemicals .." With Mayor Adams recently having been discovered by the media conducting NYC business from a bunker in a windowless building instead of from City Hall ( a few blocks away), I wonder if Hochul and Adams know something the rest of us don't. Or, if this is just part of the perpetual fear campaign that is being waged to keep Americans constantly scared of something (covid, omicron, crime, BA4-5, monkeypox). Frightened people stop thinking, and are more easily controlled, confined, and manipulated.
Bill, thanks for those excellent links. Yes, Prof Cohen was prescient on so many issues, and often fiercely reviled for it. You probably know his book "War With Russia." It is a collection of his articles and commentary decrying those who would needlessly start a war with Russia.
Agreed, expanding NATO is undoubtedly the greatest US foreign policy error of the post-CW era...and that's saying something.
Maybe we need to calm things down. In the long term, we can give Russia assurance that its valid (but only its valid) security interests will be protected by allowing (and encouraging) Russia to join NATO. Sounds silly, but it is one way to prevent wars based on perceived security threats.
Yes, Prof. Cohen got it. Cohen was actual friends with Gorbachev, and if anyone "got it" it was Stephen Cohen. Him and X, George Kennan, who predicted all this.
I have been 'following' the cold war since the 70s.
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The architect of the cold war policy of containment did not mince words in arguing that “expanding Nato would be the most fateful error in American policy in the entire post-cold war era”.
He predicted that “it would inflame nationalistic, anti-western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion”, “have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy”, “restore the atmosphere of cold war to east-west relations”, and “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking”."
I agree that world war is likely in the next 10 years or so. Whether it reaches the level of destructiveness you fear -- that is, ending civilization in some countries -- is a separate issue. You're right to worry about that level of destructiveness, which can now be achieved without nuclear weapons. Modern Internet/hacking technology allows that civilization-ending level of destruction without breaking the nuclear taboo. As long as each major power can maintain an effective deterrent threat of mutually assured destruction, and leaders aren't reckless in certain ways, we'll avoid that level of catastrophe. But what matters is whether a country's deterrent ever breaks down, and that depends on developments in hacking which are very difficult to find out about.
We're in WWIII. Advancement's in electronic communication (much like the printing press) has caused a jump in Consciousness world wide. "ism's" are dead or dying and the graft of avaricious finance is transparent to reality. They're dangerous. The fact that we're discussing nuclear war is proof that the mask is off. Totalitarian finance is holding a gun to our heads. The choice is "you will own nothing and be happy" perpetual debt driven feudalism or salvation in the firestorm. Welcome to the new age.
You clearly don't understand the destructiveness of nuclear weapons. It's not just the explosive power of them, it's also the massive and massively toxic radioactivity they release into the atmosphere. And your Dr. Strangelove attitude that a nuclear war may not reach a high level of destructiveness is insane and immoral beyond words.
Where world-war-level hacking is concerned, you are the one who is taking the Dr. Strangelove "it's not that bad" approach. I acknowledge how catastrophic nuclear war would be; it would have terrible global effects. But because you share the common view that understates the dangers from hacking, you wrongly believe that world-war-level hacking wouldn't reach a level of severity comparable to nuclear war. You misunderstood me, and I hope I wasn't being unclear.
I've done anti-nuclear protests and I'm familiar with the harms that nuclear weapons do. Most of this is understood by the general public. The harm of nuclear weapons is largely concentrated on the cities they target, although as you say they can have very serious effects elsewhere. The harm from a world-war-level hacking campaign is less understood by the general public. If you hack into utilities, shutting off the power grid and making the sewage systems flow in reverse with maybe some chemical-plant sabotage tossed in, you kill the population pretty quickly and it affects not just cities but rural areas too. At present the only effective defense that's been implemented against that is mutually assured destruction, just like with nukes.
I wouldn't want either a large world-war-level hacking campaign or a small nuclear war, but the harm from a large world-war-level hacking campaign can clearly become more serious than a small nuclear war, and it's not bound by any well-publicized taboos that are as strong as the nuclear taboo. So, it's clearly shortsighted to talk about only nuclear war as a danger and not talk about hacking.
World-war-level hacking should be discussed as a similar danger to nuclear war, so that taboos against it can develop. The long tradition of talking about nuclear war as if it was a unique danger has now become an outdated habit -- it's not that nuclear war has become any less severe than it's feared to be, but that modern means of warfare such as hacking have become as severe or more severe than a small nuclear war. Since there have been some successes in establishing a taboo against nuclear weapons, I want to replicate that success by publicizing the truth that world-war-level hacking can be comparably severe.
Hacking only affects humans, unless it causes a nuclear meltdown or nuclear weapons to be launched. Nuclear weapons irradiate the atmosphere, negatively affecting the Earth and all life on it. I'm a radical environmentalist and I totally oppose industrial society, though we're obviously stuck with it for a while even if we began moving away from it immediately. My primary concerns are the Earth and all life on it, of which humans are just one of tens of millions of species.
Your comment to which I responded was questioning of the great harms that a nuclear war would cause. I understand that because of this ridiculously tech-dependent society that we've created, hacking can cause severe harms. But aside from nuclear weapons or nuclear power plants, I'll take hacking any day over a nuclear war, which could end all or virtually all life on Earth, not merely some civilizations. I agree with you that humans can destroy the Earth, and in fact have been doing so, without nuclear weapons. But the great harm that nuclear weapons would cause should never me minimized.
I see you've been busily swallowing propaganda. The US National Intelligence Community assessed that Iran's nuclear goal was to achieve a "breakout capability" -- that is, Iran's end goal is to have the technology and components that enables assembling nuclear weapons on short notice but without actually possessing any assembled nukes. That Iranian strategy is the same approach that Japan took to nukes for many decades during the cold war. Countries that take that "breakout" approach end up having a similar deterrent power to those who actually have a few nuclear weapons, but without running the risks of actually possessing nukes, and can tell their own people and their neighbors that it's only the evil foreigners who possess nukes. Saudi Arabia follows a very similar strategy, having made a quiet international agreement with Pakistan where the Saudis can have a few Pakistani nukes delivered to Saudi Arabia on short notice in case of emergency. Like Iran, Saudi Arabia is able to have a kind of nuclear deterrent without possessing the actual bombs.
Western mainstream media distorted all this into "OH NO IRAN IS RUSHING TO BUILD NUCLEAR WEAPONS, DOOM DOOM DOOM", while of course not saying the same about the Saudis or Japan. I would say the Saudis are even more evil than the evil Iranian regime; the Saudis are engaging in more aggressive wars, not to mention their other abuses. But no one in the media tells you to panic over how close the Saudis are to having nukes, so you act as if Iran is the problem.
Even apart from that, the idea that "When Iran gets a working nuke they'll start threatening Israel and then we're screwed" is completely illogical. India and Pakistan have nukes and they threaten each other, but the nukes have had little effect apart from maybe slightly diminishing India's and Pakistan's covert operations against each other. Iran hasn't ever fought an outright war with Israel, while India and Pakistan have fought at least three wars with each other since the mid-twentieth century.
Just stop repeating the indoctrinated panic stuff, it's pointless.
Yep. The megalomania of totalitarian finance and its poseur Marxist front is capable of anything. The Jordan Peterson/Michael Yon conversation is chilling. The ascension of world wide WEF/CCP feudalism is in our faces.
In case of nuclear attack, it seems to me, you should kiss your ass goodbye, and hope that you are killed instantly. Those who remain alive will be the ones who suffer horribly.
I confess. I have not bought a luxury bunker yet. I'm waiting for them to come down in price. Some people are "early adopters", I'm the "last adopter". Any day now, I'm going to buy one of them newfangled AM/FM radios. Just gotta get my nerve up.
Remember when Elon Musk was threatening to buy Twitter and goodthinkers were losing their minds at the thought that Twitter might censor less aggressively?
Funny how "Muh private company can do whatever it wants!" was no longer a QED argument when it came to *less* censorship.
Besides Twitter's misrepresentation of how many accounts were actually bots; the State threatened "Space X" with all kinds of nonsensical regulations and requirements. I wonder if Musk didn't see that coming, or whether he thought "Space X" was so important to the future of the nation that it wouldn't be used to rein him in.
Please stop disparaging the private sector, M. F. Yes, private actors are free to censor. That is no problem , of course, because actors in the private sector have "competitors," and consumers are free to go elsewhere. (Google, of course, has broken laws by illegaly structuring its architecture to deny competition, and it has been allowed to do so because it is State-captured, and therefore has unfair State assistance.)
As always, it's the PUBLIC sector, the State, that is the danger and cause of all censorship problems. The State has no competition.
"That is no problem , of course, because actors in the private sector have "competitors,""
Until they don't
"and consumers are free to go elsewhere."
Until they aren't
So long as money trumps humanity, you are going to have this kind of thing (using said money to bend/break rules for your own benefit at the expense to the detriment of others) happening on various scales throughout society.
That's the bottom line here. Dress it up however you like, but it always, in the end, comes back to that.
There seems to be some psychological willingness to believe that wealth makes someone worthy of leadership. It's not just an Anglo-Saxon trait. And, $$$$$$$ by its nature seems to rig whatever system it gains control of at the cost of human moral decency. I'm for commerce. I'm not for rigged game finance. The entire problem is apparent in the fact that Wall Street gutted American industry, crashed the greatest economy in history, stuffed their pockets and walked. How much of the chaos in the world today is direct "blowback" from the Cheney/Bush/ Clinton/Obama travesty and its capitulation with Wall Street rigged game grifters.
The WEF/CCP new world perpetual debt driven feudalism, is just the new face of the venal Capitalist anti-union, cheap subsistence debt driven labor, I'm exploiting the worlds resources for my own benefit without consequences scam. Avaricious finance has abandoned America. And, Capitalism.
I'm not Communist nor am I a Capitalist . I'm an American. Our Constitution and the fact that we're armed to the teeth is the only thing holding the WEF/CCP totalitarian financed bureaucratic big tech surveillance state at bay. (I'm not, by the way, for armed conflict.) I do think one thing we don't consider and discuss enough is pulling the monsters teeth through extreme taxation. That and adamant protection of our Republic and its Constitution might begin to bring daylight.
Right because certainly no one else has, you know, nodded and winked at your famed article of treating everyone equally under the law over the years for personal gain. That's never happened. The Constitution is sacrosanct. It's never been perverted for private gain (cough,...NRA...cough).
Sign me up as the first person in favour of taxing the hell out of the rich. The problem is, so long as they control the politicians that is never going to happen. Control must be wrested from them in other ways.
A huge part of the lie is convincing "...we the people..." that we have no power. I think we do or, though bad things are happening to good people, especially at the Marxist D.E.I. end of the gun, it would be a lot worse. We probably both see and experience today's lives in the balance reality and would like it to change. Realistic taxation of income isn't anti-Constitutional. We pay it proportionately. So should the rich. And the transfer of debt downward and tax dollars upward is criminal. American political representation standing by while the lords of monopoly tax shelter and duck legitimate tax's is also criminal. The pretense WEF/CCP monsters like K.Schwab and B.Gates have anything but a self-interested vision of the future is pure pathology. The MSM duck and cover Epstein "the king has no clothes scandal" revealed the moral high ground they inhabit. Its pure dog and pony we want slave labor and unfettered exploitation. They gutted American industry and destroyed the greatest economy in the world. If a couple of thousand of us chip in a hundred bucks each I'm sure we can find an economics expert capable of insight and solution.
There's economists out there already who are squarely pointing the finger where you are, the financial sector and the oligarchs who use it to prey on people.
Interesting tidbit here, a recent memo from a Bank of America exec basically stated that he hoped the conditions for American workers would get worse to force them back into taking the three low paying burger flipping jobs they've been forced to take pre-COVID but are now saying no too because it would help the bank's bottom line if that happened.
Think about that. They are willing to see you homeless, without clothes, food, medical care unless you 'company town' your existence so they can increase their profit margins.
They are currently lobbying the government to fiddle with your interest rates to ensure that happens.
This is what unfettered Capitalism brings you. Pure markets look great on paper, but they do not account for the human factor. The reality is far more messy.
And usually the fault of the public sector, either by capturing the corp/sector (think healthcare) and denying competition, or by not enforcing existing law.
The free market takes time to re-assert itself. Trust the free individual and the free market.
Money does not trump humanity. That is, and always has been, a canard and a red herring. Are you a Socialist?
Does me being a Socialist (whether I am or not) automatically mean that what I write has less credibility than you?
We've given your free market a good long time to do the right thing, like since Reagonomics. We are talking half a century here. It has consistently done the wrong thing in terms of humanity. It has helped an increasingly smaller and smaller amount of people garner more and more of society's wealth while sentencing the remainder to what amounts to indentured servitude.
Yes, people are free *not* to work in which case *not* eating, *not* having a place to sleep, and *not* getting medical care that is worth the name, *not* having these things is also *free*.
Or are you going to blame the public sector for private gains.
Who do you think writes the laws the politicians vote on? You think they get those off the back of cereal boxes? Corporate lobbyists do that work (and that is well documented).
Who do you think funds the focus groups and PACs that kill any reform that might in any way dilute the power structure that keeps these one way taps flowing? I would say do the research and look it up but I suspect you know that special interests by and large pay for those things to push their agendas without them getting their hands dirty.
In which case you'd be talking out of your ass to push an agenda yourself most likely of small government/less regulation and couching it in 'Yippee Small Business' rhetoric and give it a folksy feel because why exactly?
Let me guess. In your view powerful people have throughout history shown that when given the opportunity to grab more power they turn it down, right?
I never claimed that "what [you] write has less credibility than [me]." And I believe that your opinion is just as valid as mine.
But we have *not* had "my" free market for a good long time. Reagan did NOT reduce the size of the public sector and free the markets. He was right in focusing on the supply side, not the demand side, in economics. That is the road to true Capitalism.
The body of your response here indicates that you think individuals have a right to all that they *need* to survive, and they cannot ever obtain those things without the State providing it for them. That Socialism has always failed, and led to such destruction of wealth that humanity has suffered immensely. This is obvious, so I refuse to respomd here.
Your last sentence is so ridiculous that I will only respond by requesting that you stop putting words in my mouth.
We disagree profoundly on the nature of human economic reality, and what social system will lead to the best solution. That is all. It's okay for us to disagree, isn't it?
Just like you say we have never had *true* Capitalism, I can safely say we have never had *true* Socialism. For the same reasons I might add. People able to take advantage of a system to garner personal gain for themselves at ther expense of others and to the detriment of those same people have done so. There are oligarchs everywhere in the world.
Remember, I never painted myself with the Socialist brush, *you* did. *You* also labelled yourself a died in the wool Capitalist. For me, political left or right never enters into this equation. For you, this discussion can't be had without it.
"As soon as Parler rose to the top spot, Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and censorship activists groups such as Sleeping Giants demanded that Google and Apple immediately remove Parler from their app stores, preventing any further downloading."
Speech, like ideas, should rise and fall on its own merits. And the only arbiter of what I should read and hear, is me. When four corporations, with the aid of the federal government, get to use state-sponsored bully tactics to silence competition -no matter under what cock-and-bulls**t guise- we need to call it what it is...FASCISM.
Oh, and AOC coming down on the wrong side of history...AGAIN?!
Ocasio-Cortez and her Squad are phony progressives. Their job is to sheep herd progressives into the Democratic Party, thereby neutering them. Members of the Squad almost always say the right things, while hypocritically supporting the Democratic Party establishment with their votes and what they actually do.
We as individuals need to start discussing and finding ways to expanding this platform and reach others. Of course I share good pieces. I wonder if we each printed a hundred copies of really good articles and inserted them in waiting room magazines or in the free paper magazine racks we see everywhere. Or, just handed them directly to friends. A good number of our American revolutionary's were pamphleteers.
I admit I was a Bernie Bro' during one of his campaigns. Like you, I thought he was the best of a bad bunch of options. Bernie talks the heartfelt talk, but he doesn't walk his talk.
He's bad on foreign policy, though not quite as much as establishment Democrats or Republicans. I would have held my nose and voted for him if he'd won the presidential nomination in 2016, but not in 2020.
"...she couldn't refuse."? Or, she wouldn't refuse? Yes, in this nation, anyone who stands up for honesty, integrity, and decency, will pay a price (probably poverty). But the choice is yours to make.
I'd wager 1,000 pieces of silver is what it took. Now she is the swamp rat's mascot. It's sad, that she was willing to abandon everything she claimed to believe in for popularity, money and power.
Thanks. I was wondering if you were ok. I actually searched you last night, wondering if you’d gone missing or been arrested, and I was relieved to see some recent activity on your Twatter account.
I genuinely appreciate the concern. The slow pace over the last couple months wasn't planned. I've been producing articles at an extremely rapid and intense rate since I moved to Substack in October, 2020 -- almost two years ago now. And, as I indicated in the introductory paragraphs to the last freelance article we posted, I have been working intensively on a new project that we're about to unveil that is very exciting and, I hope and believe, will make a huge impact. So my lack of output here was more just about needing a little bit of a rest and having less time than I planned, as well as a spontaneous need to slow down for a bit to keep my batteries charged and ready, along with the planning needed for launching this new project coming very shortly. We do have our freelance program but it's not really an adequate substitute since my writing and journalistic approach are pretty idiosyncratic and it's noticeable when the articles aren't mine. In any event, I should be back up to the normal pace very soon.
I'm glad you are alright, I had thought you had decided to take a vacation as well, even if you are doing something you love, it will still burn you out if you continue to do the work of five journalists day and night, and that isn't good for anyone.
Oh, I understand. It wasn’t an accusation or something. I personally don’t use T and somehow (wrongly) figured you were banned from it anyhow. It takes very little time/energy to post a tweet vs what you do here. Not comparable. It was a funny coincidence though that you popped up right after I looked for signs of life. I understand Zelensky named you as a “Russian disinformer”, which is both funny/not funny. Not sure if that’s a signal to Azov or just to the propaganda machine. System Pigs, as Lira would say. Hence my concern. Looking forward to what you are working on, when it may be ready. Be well!
Zelensky had Greenwald, Gabbard and Rand Paul put on a disinformation 'blacklist'. If anyone involved in this conflict has to go, it's him. He's the one who demanded joining NATO and who continues to push for war, something the Swamp Rats are all too happy to reply to by sending a gravy train of money and weapons. It makes me wonder if he has some kind of financial connection to the Bidens...
Oh, I totally agree. I am certain he is in bed with the govt/cartel, of which Brandon is “The Big Guy”. (The Big Guy doesn’t mean “The Godfather”, that’s too far a leap for Brandon though. More like Scranton Joe is a bag man who carried big bags, but using his som and brother’s hands, to keep his off radar). Wasn’t Z groomed to be Ukrainian President while VP Brandon was point person to Ukraine? I am fuzzy on specific dates concerning Z’s rise in the Ukraine, but the CIA intervention that was the Maidan coup originated then, for sure. When Zelensky got picked to play President on tv, then a political party was created just for him, then selected him to play candidate for that party, then won, was playing out during Brandon’s time. I saw the Oliver Stone doc and read more but all the threads in the tangled web of corruption are just too many to keep track of now. Peter Schweizer’s books help in grasping the extent of corruption and Dan Bongino’s “Follow the money” is also good in respect to understanding the Ukraine-Obama era DC connection.
I am not denying any of what you say there took place, in fact I'm with you in the opinion that the 'coup' was engineered,
But I think the Zelensky, that may have been gung ho to be America's puppet at the beginning might not be the same guy we are dealing with now.
Watching your countrymen die all around you changes a person who is not used to their actions having those consequences.
I could be completely wrong here, I'm not in the guy's head, but I also know that Noam Chomsky is pretty thorough in his sourcing. If he says that Zelensky has been trying to get a peace process started fror months and the U.S. has shut him down at every turn, I have a hard time dismissing it outright.
In my lifetime, I can't remember a time when a country in an active war can have their first lady pop over to the US Congress to give a speech and then fly back (or maybe it was before) to do a photoshoot for Vogue magazine along with the country's president. How is she gettin out and in along with people like Ben Stiller? What kind of war is this? So bizarre!
Something's up for sure, Stephen. As kinda a 'home experiment' I went on Fox News' Comments Section and said words to the effect of "hooray for Zelensky: all the countries sitting on the fence will be joining NATO this year" ---got over a thousand 'likes' in 12 hours. I came back and said words to the effect of "Zelensky is a tinhorn who reminds me of a general in a Charlie Chaplin movie" ---- the remark DISAPPEARED for 12 hours before reappearing at the very bottom of their comments section.
The company is in on this war. In a big way. And I use the word 'company' broadly.
The problem with everything involving Ukraine joining NATO is that it pushes Russia into China's hands. With their respective resources, sanctions are next to useless against the two combined. What good are sanctions on Russian Oil when China will buy it all? What good are sanctions on Chinese products when Russia will buy them? By pushing the two together, they become stronger as a unit, or rather Xi's China does. Think of Hitler and Stalin, the British blockade on Hitler prior to his betrayal of Stalin had no effect, as Stalin sent Hitler food, coal, oil and iron.
Xi is laughing watching Russia bleed itself dry and push it's neighbors away from it, all as he laughs at the US for burning money, all but destroying it's reserve AMS systems and being complacent in the conflict. He is using Putin as a stooge to help drain the US. Putin undoubtedly knows this, but has no other alternative available to him as the 'no NATO' for Ukraine is not on the table.
It doesn't have to be that way, as Russia's modern identity was formed as a result of resistance to the Mongols (not something exactly rare). I imagine that plenty of Russians see Xi's China as another 'massive empire on the door that wishes to reduce Russia to a dependency,' yet the foreign policy of the US gives them little option but to follow in that track, as the only thing worse than having a despot for an ally is having no allies at all.
Yes, if there was any remaining doubt about Zelensky's legitimacy, or lack thereof, it is now removed with his creation of a "blacklist" of those who dare to challenge his narrative, like Glenn.
Chomsky has been saying for months now that the U.S./NATO flatly rejected Zelensky's proposals for peace negotiations with Putin.
In light of that, putting three foreign influencers on a media blacklist in a country that probably right now doesn't have a power grid in numerous places seems more like a sop to appease the masters than a principled political stance.
The Euromaiden coup...and it's aftermath. Why Russia acted then I do not know, though in light of evidence of an emergency, I think it was beyond idiotic on multiple counts as Ukraine is known to have undergone severe repression genocide at Russia's hands and all it did was generate needless death for all parties involved and international bad press for Russia.
If Russia wanted to flex it's muscles, all it needed to do was wait until 2015, the hundredth anniversary of the start of the Armenian Massacre, and proceed to agitate against Turkey until it spat out Western Armenia. Nobody would have risen a finger to help Turkey as doing so would be political suicide (France and Britain were Turkish allies during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, but neither did anything due to public opinion). Conversely, Russia would have been seen as a liberator, especially if it's actions also freed Turkish Kurdistan. Instead though, unless I'm missing something, Russia played it's cards as badly as below average Joe has.
Zelensky's hands are tied. He will not (and should not) surrender to Russian Fascism. He is the leader of the Ukrainians who do NOT want to be Russians. He rises to that occasion.
The Pulitzer lost all meaning when it was awarded to the 'useful idiot' who said in the 1930s that there 'was no famine'. It has not to this day been revoked.
Taking this opportunity to say -- I hope your husband recovers well from his hospitalization and that you two will celebrate many more Dias dos Namorados together (while, in between, he may drag you into going to the occasional Pride festival). Hope you're both back at full strength soon.
Ahh yeah, I remember loosing a pet cat who I had since my childhood shortly after he turned 21...the loss of any pet after a long period of time, 5+ years and one you form a bond with is a major loss.
Yes, for sure. We keep cats, usually four of them. We just lost Isis, our big fat black cat at 13 last December. She was named after Gary Seven's cat in Star Trek, not the assholes. But tell that to NSA.
It's nice to hear the case has been allowed to penetrate the legal system one baby step further. Please no one get too excited, though. "Discovery" isn't a victory ---it's the place things really go wrong in today's pretend-judicial system [while giving the appearance that things are otherwise]. Google's compliance will be slow or purposefully screwed up. Extension after extension will be granted as Google complains every request is too burdensome, unclear or voluminous. And, worst of all, I promise you, with 100% confidence, that Google will not be sanctioned for dragging their feet.
But you are right. Google will not be sanctioned. But eventually we will force the Feds to stop protecting it, and then the free marketplace will rightfully decide.
Marketplaces never 'rightly' decide unless you define 'might as right' as 'rightly'.
Let's assume for the sake of argument everything goes right that we want to go right in the Google case.
Files get opened, light is shone on the darkness, evil machinations on behalf of the corporate behemoth is exposed. Headlines are made. Companies are fined and broken up. People are chastised, apologies are made, people even go to jail. Someone writes a book, someone makes a movie about the book, it wins awards. All the things you want to happen, happen.
Want to know what would have preceded all of that?
The people behind the curtains would have quietly pulled their support from Google, parked their money offshore for a few months until they found the next big thing they could use to perpetuate the oligarchy and then ploughed their cash and influence into that.
Because marketplaces rightly decide what is best for us.
"Marketplaces never 'rightly' decide unless you define 'might as right' as 'rightly'."
Gobblygook.
Marketplaces are EXACTLY the opposite of "might as right." In the free market, the free individual reigns, and force is not allowed.
M. Stephen, imo you don't understand what true Capitalism is. It is the opposite of ANY human being being able to use force.
Edit: And must I add that we have very little Capitalism today. The State (including the State-captured part of the "private" sector) has grown too large, and is naturally destroying freedom.
Oh I'll give you that point, what we have today is not true capitalism. Given all of the bailouts for thye financial sector I would say for them it is far closer to socialism. But for the rest of us poor sods, capitalist austerity it is.
You keep throwing this on the state but the state was bought and paid for long ago by the 'social oligarchs'. If a politician doesn't stick with the program, he is not a politician for long.
Yes, the "social oligarchs" (and that is a perfectly accurate term) are, in fact, part of the State, since both are acting in collusion, as one entity in essence. It remains the underlying, most important truth to recognize that these "social oligarchs" could not be oligarchs at all if, IF, we drastically reduce the size and scope of the Federal leviathan, which provides the *force* behing any individual's ability to become so powerful.
The Democrats act to *increase* the size and power of the public sector. Most Republican politicians, and NO lay Republican voter, would do so.
Who are you going to vote for, in order to avoid the coming bloodshed?
Yes, the "social oligarchs" (and that is a perfectly accurate term) are, in fact, part of the State, since both are acting in collusion, as one entity in essence."
There is only one steering wheel in any one vehicle and ther state is not the one with their hands on it, however much you want to blame the Democrats and big government for all of our evils.
It is your oligarchs who are busily beavering away and reducing the state of all of it's regulatory powers ('EPA on line 1 Mr. Koch') so they can exploit the enviroment and the masses even more than they already are.
First off, again, left and right do not enter into this for me. If forced to choose I would either vote third party or not vote at all, because the entire political machine across the board is in the hands of a powerful few whose only loyalty is to their spread sheets.
Secondly, unless you people colonized Canada when I was asleep, I do not believe I get to vote, though given the extent to which a person's vote actually matters in terms of how your country (and mine) is run by *any* politician of *any* party what good would it do anyway?
Love GG .. What an amazing human! I found him through Tucker Carlson and will follow him as long as he writes .. Thank you Mr. Greenwald for being a voice in the dark ❤️
If you can, check out the film 'Snowden'. Glenn's not in it; he's portrayed in it by Zach Quintero (Mr. Spock of the Star Trek reboot). I've been a fan since '15 or so.
He's truly a remarkable person. His writing is savage when it needs to be, but he's also funny as hell when he kicks back. For examples, see The Jimmy Dore Show YouTube page and look for Jimmy & Glenn's pieces. His quick wit destroys you w/ LOL's.
(Personal note: I've encountered about 3 families w/ adopted daughters from China. One of them was a personal friend at the time. The grueling work (and $$$) Bev put in to find her daughter still awes me 30 years later. She loved her baby so much, a year later went back for another girl.
In other cases I ran into families such as yours while travelling.
In every case, EVERY situation, the love that bound these families was almost physical. I'm not kidding; it emanated like a force field or something. The abiding connections I witnessed blew my hair back.
To have seen this once would have been way cool. To experience it a second time really gets one's attention.
But three in a row?
There's something deep and meaningful about people such as yourself who created your family. I can't say anything analytical about the dynamics of your family, it goes beyond words. But I can say from experience that there's something remarkably good about your family that's deeply powerful.
JHC Glenn, it completely slipped my mind that you're in the same boat w/your hubby-doo. That's awesome.
Oh...gotta question: were you able to see the Whitestone Bridge from your house growing up? I could see it at night from the Bronx. It looked sooo magical to me after I went to the World's Fair in '64.
One point Greenwald admits here undermines Rumble's free speech credibility a bit. Greenwald mentions Rumble's imminent merger with a SPAC that "will effectively make Rumble a public company". Greenwald thinks this is great because Rumble would get more capital, but getting floated on the market could, perhaps, enable increased pressure on Rumble to censor at some point in the future.
The stories I've seen from December say that Rumble's CEO and founder Chris Pavlovski would retain voting control even after the merger. If that's still true, it's a good sign. But even in a company where the founder retains voting control, there can be pressure by Wall Street on the company: investment firm analysts can tell management they have to change policies or see their share price go down. I don't expect that to happen right away, but it's true that going public comes with an increased vulnerability to pressure from Wall Street on corporate policies.
Also, Pavlovski himself may not always remain pro-free speech. For instance, he feels patriotic about Macedonia (that's the appropriate term for him, since I gather he thinks the country should cover more than just North Macedonia). What would happen if Macedonian patriotism starts to clash with free speech? I can't be totally sure.
None of this means there's an immediate risk to free speech, but history shows the financial markets don't always favor free speech, and it's good to at least have backups instead of relying on the likes of Rumble and Substack.
Even if Pavlovski retains a majority of voting shares, he is still opening himself up to a fiduciary duty suit if he doesn't censor like a proper oligarch.
But recognizing how censorship aligns with shareholder interests is itself too unspeakable for a lawsuit to be built on that premise.
It's much more convenient to believe, as Greenwald more or less does, that shareholder capitalism will somehow save the day for free speech (and they happily grant him a speaking-out niche on their neoliberal platforms to say so).
By the way, it's nice to see NoSuchCommentator/Benito-style posts coming out of your cat avatar; wonder if that could be a pet video on Rumble.
(note: I edited my original comment after posting to delete a sentence that didn't make sense)
Going public is ALWAYS bad if you're trying to maintain your politics and ideals. Regardless of whether Pavlovski retains voting control for now, going public would subject Rumble to a hostile takeover, among other things. I can't think of one company that's gone public and maintained its politics and ideals completely, or even usually at all.
Randall, what you're talking about is exactly what happened to a huge, old, family owned news source, the NYT and it's once-fabulous subsidiary, the International Herald Tribune, in 2014/2015. Big as it was, powerful, respectable and influential like few others, it succumbed to financial pressures.
This is good news, thanks for covering it. Also, it seems like everyone on Substack is talking about your interview with Alex Jones except for you. No links or comment?
I read the Singal article. I found it a bit annoying, tbh. The take of "Everyone knows Alex Jones is a pathological liar," doesn't bring much to the table, either. I haven't spent enough time watching Alex Jones to know, but from what I've seen it's more ranting and sensationalism rather than outright lies. Sometimes he makes unsubstantiated claims or draws strange conclusions from available evidence, but I don't think that's the same as blatantly lying.
The Taibbi article was less critical, which I suppose isn't surprising.
He is a danger to the *establishment's version* of democracy. It really depends on how they are defining democracy now doesn't it? :)
I happen to think Trump is a bit of a buffoon politically and that he comes from the same moneyed elite he purports to be an enemy of.
But the thing he did and does that endears him to the masses is he lifts the curtain. He doesn't treat the vote like they are children in terms of what they need to know and what they don't.
And that does not sit well with the folks who would rather the little people be kept in the dark while they count their money.
If you pay even a passing attention to politics, you’ve noted Democratic politicians proclaiming that everything from Facebook to Republicans themselves are trying to undermine democracy. Joe Biden called January 6th “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Indeed, because Democrats loudly proclaim to be “defending democracy”, anything that threatens them anywhere is declared an “attack on democracy.” (Just add “insurrectionist” to the long list of ‘deplorable’ adjectives.)
It’s sort of a sick irony that the very people who call everything a ‘threat to democracy’ are the people who most ignore the rules of our Republic. As I previously discussed, the new idea of America was that nobody was above the law, and that government officials who passed laws were held to account by voters. Over and over during his short administration, Joe Biden has ignored the proper rule-making process of our Republic while proclaiming to be saving it.
With executive orders, he shut down the Keystone pipeline and suspended other energy projects. He sanctioned Russia (long before the war) and shut down travel that Trump had opened. Vaccine mandates were executive orders. Now, certainly Biden isn’t the first president to use the executive order, but he may be the most hypocritical by sidestepping the proper lawmaking procedures of the country for the biggest issues of the day.
A great listen is Joe Rogan's podcast with Alex Jones. I know of him but didn't follow him at all. This interview was really interesting. I still need to watch Glen's interview with Jones.
Thank you for the update. It's a little late for this to impact this year's elections. Will be interesting to see if well-heeled lawyers for Big Tech drag this past the 2024 vote.
As a Canadian that keeps a watchful eye on the censorship issues that occur in the USA, this will be followed with extreme interest. The ripple effect is felt by all.
I will say that I just did a Noam Chomsky search on Rumble and on YouTube. I turned up far more material on the latter than I did on the former. Given Chomsky's decades long activism and anti-establishment views, I would have thought the opposite.
I'm not denying that Google plays dirty pool with their search algorhythms, that we kinda already know. But Rumble needs to make an effort to get more content from the very folks who are pulling people who think critically like myself to You Tube (Noam Chomsky, Janis Varoufakis, Mark Bythe and the like *in their entirety*) and not rely less on people who cherry pick a comment from one of them, then scream obscenities at the top of their lungs while pushing a political agenda.
I don't watch CNN/MSNBC for that reason. Why would I put my time here? Neither gives me what I am looking for atm.
your right not to put much faith in something cultivated in Canada, with the exception of Rumble. The monopoly held by the major telecommunication giants here says it all. Check out our rates!
I live in Ottawa. I can tell the difference. Most of them were not truck drivers. One thing is for sure Americans know almost NOTHING about Canada. The situation is complicated and has a lot to do with hatred of Trudeau and Western alienation and very little to do with "FREEDOM". Whatever that means. Find me a "trucker" who knows anything about C-11 or who doesn't want Canada fighting American wars.
Canadians are just like you. Nothing special.
I oppose Trudeau, but for good and real reasons. Not because of the child sex slaves in his basement. LOL
if you want to know the outcome, rewind to the late 90s, when Microsoft used anti competitive tactics to defeat Netscape, and then famously lost to Andreesen and Join Clark in federal court - the fine, as I recall was around $750 million. But by then, the damage was done. Netscape, once the leader, won in court, but lost the marketshare battle with Microsoft after it was acquired by AOL in a $10 billion deal.
Fully agree. While this lawsuit and the denial of the motion to dismiss are good things, they're not the solution here. See my other comments in this thread.
I despise the liberal weasels running Google. They have turned a brilliant tech company into an instrument of oppression and disinformation; this will not end well for them, I predict.
That said, I would prefer to see Rumble succeed on its own merits rather than through litigation. Technology is a fast moving industry, and the courts are sluggish and backward thinking.
Tiktok is an example of an innovative product that is challenging Youtube for dominance right now. Their viewership now exceeds Youtube's, their user interface is completely mobile centric and their user base is predominantly under 20. Youtube is experimenting with short form videos, as is Facebook, but their efforts are lame and irrelevant.
Meanwhile, Rumble's user experience sucks; they still don't support sorting and filtering of viewer comments, on a platform that caters to very politically opinionated and highly engaged users. When I visit the Rumble website, it always shows me puppy videos instead of the channels I've subscribed to. I don't give a shit about puppy videos. Its suggestions of related channels are lame and poorly implemented. For a corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars of capitalization, they don't seem to spend much on improving the product itself.
Rumble is starting to provide hosting services similar to Amazon Web Services (AWS -- the company that shut down Parler overnight). That's a brilliant move; I hope they don't screw it up through laziness and lack of innovation.
I would love to see Rumble, along with Dan Bongino's Parallel Economy payment service, Trump's Truth Social, and a bunch of these other companies grow and become credible alternatives to the liberal-dominated crap we're currently stuck with. But they have to put in the hard work to develop innovations that are appealing and compelling. Lawsuits and me-too also-rans aren't going to get them there.
Careful who you praise -- you write "TikTok is an example of an innovative product", but of course TikTok's parent company is Chinese and part-owned by the CCP government.
And you should know better than to state the obviously false claim that Tiktok's "viewership now exceeds Youtube's". Tiktok has been ahead of Youtube in viewing time per user, not in vierwership.
Google/Alphabet is proverbially evil, but an app like Tiktok's that's dominated by the CCP is more evil still.
"Listen to this, this is from TikTok's privacy policy. It said, 'We collect certain information about the device you use to access the platform, such as your IP address, user region.' This is really crazy.
User agent, a mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purpose, model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types.'
So all your apps and all your file names, all the things you have filed away on your phone, they have access to that. 'File names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms'
So they're monitoring your keystrokes, which means they know every fucking thing you type."---Joe Rogan
I'm not trying to defend TikTok, which obviously is controlled by the world's most evil regime (I mean ChiCom, not Biden, in case that wasn't clear). But nonetheless, they're incredibly successful and have almost stolen away an entire generation from Youtube, just as SnapChat has practically robbed Facebook of the kids. We can learn from their innovation.
You need to seriously stack up the 'evil' things the U.S. has accused China of and then go back and look at some of the things the U.S. has rationalized in the name of freedom and democracy.
China's 'evil' stems from the fact that when America says 'Jump' they say 'Ummm, no.'
Terry's right that China's government, at present, is worse than the US government, at present, though both governments have been far more evil in the past than they are now.
As far what is currently the world's most evil regime, Stephen says the US (Terry is a bit tempted to agree when the party he dislikes is in power) and Terry says China. Since evil doesn't depend on size, I would think North Korea is the strongest candidate.
I'm not saying this one is worse than that one per se as much as I am saying the way each is perceived for doing the same things is vastly different.
China is villanized by the media, America gets the jingoistic cheers. Now said media for the most part is American and quite possibly it is the complete reverse in China right?
The point I am making here is American policy since WWII has been we lead, you all follow. And when a country passes on that plan, out comes the villan propaganda and the whole 'threat to American/Western Democracy' schtick (as if these yo-yos aren't enough of a threat to that themselves).
And if that still doesn't work you get regime change by any means necessary.
America's problem with China, is not only are they not buying into 'the program', they are too big too topple militarily *and* they are on far better economic footing *and* they are catching up to, if not surpassing, the west in the sciences.
CNN and MSNBC won't tell you that, but they have already developed a state run digital currency that Russia is now using to do it's international banking, but more importantly they also use it to make sure their citizens have food on the table and a bed to sleep in at night.
Could you ever imagine any of the western digital currencies or the central banks (be it the Fed or the ECB) that are trying to set up theirs doing that?
A somewhat good reply, but I still disagree on a few things.
You're too hasty in giving credit to China's ruling party for living standards. It's true that there is less poverty in China now than before 1949. The credit for that improvement in living standards goes, primarily, to the Chinese people (not their government) whose values, creativity, ideas, and hard work were the main force making it possible. Secondarily, some credit should be given to how the Chinese people learned to use innovations borrowed from overseas. Those two are the main factors deserving credit; I would give less credit to the Beijing government.
China's ruling party claims to have worked to eliminate extreme poverty (at least in rural areas), and their efforts have had some positive results, but of course China's government has also done a lot to create severe poverty by putting people into involuntary detention (including what used to be called "laogai").
The CCP's contribution has been mixed: sometimes helping to alleviate poverty, and often impeding the fight against poverty due to the CCP's desire to maintain privilege, economic status and power (particularly the privileges, economic status and power of higher-ranking CCP members). Suppose that instead of the CCP, China had hypothetically had a government that was neutral about issues of poverty and wealth, in the following sense: unlike the CCP, these government officials wouldn't do anything to promote their own wealth (apart from taking a salary that's middle-class by the standards of their fellow citizens) or to promote the wealth of their relatives and cronies, and these government officials would never do anything aimed at alleviating poverty or increasing poverty among the general public. Instead, these hypothetical government officials would focus on trying to restrain and punish wrongdoing, in a moderately successful way, and in particular they would try to prevent the kind of economic wrongdoing that is prevalent in American capitalism. I think if China had been ruled by these hypothetical officials who are neutral on poverty, there would be less poverty in China now than there actually is under the CCP. If so, perhaps that shows that the CCP's net effect on poverty has been worse than neutral, worse than a government that doesn't try to do anything about poverty per se. I think every government on earth, including China's government and the kind of government that American libertarians prefer, has a long way to go before it can be as good as this hypothetical kind of neutral government. So I have my doubts whether the CCP's overall effect on the fight against poverty has been mostly helpful or mostly harmful. Laozi would say "mostly harmful", and Laozi is wiser than those who view the CCP leaders' role more or less along the lines that Lei Feng was said to do.
One strand in the Cultural Revolution was a deliberate effort to produce poverty among those who questioned the top leader. I don't think the CCP has lost its tendency to deliberately produce poverty among those Chinese who are brave enough to say that the CCP has no right to rule because it isn't that serious about its "serve the people" motto.
You talk about a "state run digital currency" as if it was a good thing. To me, that sort of currency just gives the government more tools to produce poverty among those citizens who take a critical approach to it.
And again, I am sure that the Chinese elite's strenuous effort to maintain its own members' power, privileges and wealth have an effect in helping to keep ordinary Chinese in poverty. That would be true of the elite in any country. Although you seem to suggest you can't imagine western government matching Beijing's work to reduce poverty, in fact western governments have done anti-poverty programs of their own, some of which have been partially successful just like China's was. But that doesn't prove that either the Beijing government or western governments have had a better-than-neutral effect on poverty overall.
I would also dispute your talk of what the Chinese ruling party does for its "citizens". I don't think they exactly have the concept of "citizens" in the way that this term is used in countries like the United States. Citizenship entails that the government is accountable to the citizens. What Beijing does believe is that they have an obligation to increase the prosperity of the Chinese people, but they are happy to make exceptions to that and to reduce the prosperity of parts of the Chinese population when those people try to exercise the rights of citizens.
A future where the CCP government is the hegemonic global power is quite possible. It has the potential to be as bad or worse than American hegemony ever was in the past. And comparing it to the present-day version of American hegemony, I would assess that it would inevitably be worse than what we now have. The Chinese government considers its main opponent in the ideological realm to be the idea of human rights, which it identifies with Western power. So, if the Chinese ruling party became the most influential power worldwide, it would be a disaster for human rights.
The large majority of people in China support their government, unlike here. You have a very warped Ugly American view of the world. The U.S. is the evil empire on this planet, not China. To be clear, I oppose all large countries, they're all evil. But no one can compete with the U.S. for being evil at this time.
Both China and the USA are oligarchies and thus neither is good; the PEOPLE are another matter entirely. It's the power of money controlling the world - instead of good governance of by and for The People - that's the problem.
It's not just that they're oligarchies, though that's bad per se. It's that they're large. In order to be a large country, you have to subjugate and conquer many smaller societies and communities. Homogenization is bad per se, both in nature and in human societies. People should live in small groups, and their individual cultures should be allowed to be maintained. That doesn't mean that we all have to fight each other; instead, we can celebrate our diversity and differences.
Your first two sentences I find weird; all oligarchies are bad, and that they're large is almost immaterial; large size just illustrates our collective failure at dealing with a substantial issue before it became possibly impossible to fix, and amplifies our need to have a prompt and robust - and EFFECTIVE - response (and war isn't it).
I also have issue with your third sentence; India, especially BEFORE the British split the country of Muslim and Hindu, is a perfect counter example.
However, the rest of your comment is gold, thanks.
I'm wondering if you could do some sort of internet crowd sourced development board for governing proposals/infrastructure projects and the like. For example if two of your small entities happen to have the same idea they want to put in play, say they both want to make a nature trail, they can corroborate on it so that the end of one joins up with the next and the rest areas are regularly spaced.
I'm thinking some misguided advertising wonk somewhere has got the perfect marketing campaign for 'The Most Evil Empire in the World' all cued up and ready to go, complete with the MGM musical number and is waiting for the phone call to roll it out that is never going to come while their colleagues are facepalming in nearby cubicles.
(Sorry a momentary lapse of silliness overtook me there - blame Monty Python)
Your assumption that products which prevail in current markets are automatically valuable and worth learning from is self-refuting. As you admit, what prevails in the market (practically stealing an entire generation, as you put it) is something like TikTok. But TikTok is an instrument of domination for those who ultimately want to get rid of markets. So, market success can't be the be-all end-all, since what succeeds in the market isn't even helpful to the market in the long run, and is also evil in other ways.
The fact that you praise Truth Social (which is so evil that it calls reposting someone else's post "retruthing") is one more thing making it hard to take your points seriously. I'm done with this conversation.
Saying that Rumble should "succeed on its own merits" is nothing but establishment propaganda. The point here is that Google and other huge tech companies have stacked the deck against everyone else. A much better comment would be that Google should have to succeed on its own merits instead of doing illegitimate monopolistic things as charged in this lawsuit.
Every dominant player stacks the deck. 25 years ago, Microsoft was stacking the deck, by incorporating every innovation that came along into its Windows operating system, by making its Internet Explorer browser the default, and so on. 20 years before that, it was IBM. But today, M$ is an also-ran, IBM is practically out of business, and even some of the heavyweights of the past 5-6 years are stumbling (Facebook, Twitter, Netflix). I suspect some of these companies won't exist in 10 years, at least not in their present form. And eventually, something will come along to blow Tiktok out of the water.
In this atmosphere of destructive creativity, it's hard to predict, but based on past experience, the only constant is change, and innovation is key to survival. My gut feeling is that Rumble, being politically rather than technically motivated, will disappear eventually. Too bad for us conservatives, who are increasingly suppressed and silenced. But something will eventually come along that works for us. Or, I should say, that supports basic human rights such as freedom of speech.
The reason that every dominant entity stacks the deck is because we live in a society that places money above all else. In a decent society, no one would be allowed to stack the deck, and things like big tech would be owned by the government, i.e., us.
And BTW, it's not just conservatives who are silenced, it's anyone who goes against the establishment, the military/intelligence/industrial complex, or Corporate America. If your conservative views fit those of those entities, you are the opposite of silenced. True conservatives are silenced, because true conservatism means leaving things as they are unless there's a real need for change (leaving the natural world alone, for example).
"The reason that every dominant entity stacks the deck is because we live in a society that places money above all else."
Instead what's happening is that TODAY people are under such HUGE financial stress and financial uncertainty, employment and otherwise, that we're, by and large, forced into extreme penny penching - and OF COURSE I'm talking about the bulk of the USA's population, even all the way up to the 99.8% or so. And yes, I know people in that upper level who express to me their anxiety: their employment is now precarious whereas they thought it wasn't when they made their own silly expenditures and now they're committed, and in the own minds, even though it's mostly silly, they're "broke." ...It's perception that drives penny-penching... NOT necessarily avarice. THAT you can ascribe to everyone in the top 0.01% for sure, and likely MOST in in the top 0.1%, but that's less certain.
The "bottom line" is that when people feel financially insecure they'll do almost anything to save money, even if it's long-term stupid and they know it.
Oh, the poor Americans; they can only have one SUV instead of three. Gimme a break! Have you ever seen how the rest of the world lives? No one obsesses on money and material things as much as Americans. You can make all the excuses you want, but they're all BS.
The coordination has always been obvious, but 'big tech' changing their lab leak policy the EXACT DAY that Biden says it is possible was always proof that they were acting in a political matter. Great article as always!!
One easy -- at least on an iPhone or desktop -- little thing to do to tell it to the man is to change your default search engine.
Change it anything that's not Google. Bing is actually not that bad, albeit there are privacy concerns. I'm still recommending DuckDuckGo despite that fact that has rightfully got on many people's shit-list.
I started using DuckDuckGo years ago when I learned that Google spied on you and DuckDuckGo was a good alternative. Don't use Google for a search engine, and use Firefox for your browser.
I never saw the appeal of Google and never used it save for Gmail. I too switched to DuckDuckGo and Brave, as well as using Protonmail. Sadly, I fear most people are used to how gmail and Google products overall work and as a result, would not bother to change them if it would cause them a nuisance.
monopoly might be capitalistic, but its not free and fair market.
there are virtually no free markets anywhere except small niche areas. health care is also a rigged market with no competition between insurance and actual services. I'd like to see the show drop on that next. obamacare didnt create competition. It solidified the monopoly rigged cartel system. food is rigged. education is rigged. basically everything thats difficult to afford for average people is rigged by global corporate cartel systems.
even the two party political system is essentially a monopoly. you can choose shit stew or a crap sammich, but you're screwed either way. obamacare had the illusion of competition . you could choose from like two providers that both had the same crappy plans or the governments equally crappy plan. classic trust cartel system. same as the political parties. same for your electric provider or internet and phone.
Awesome.
I am not holding my breath, but dream of a day when all the Democrat big-tech collusion evidence is finally made public.
It is already obvious. The problem is that so long as the legacy press is still in the DNC/Technocrat/Swamp Rat bag, 40% of the population wouldn't care or in many cases, even know.
That is the frightening and insidious thing. The Swamp Rats--the unelected bureaucrats of the federal government--DNC, establishment portion of the RNC, legacy press and tech titans were all in collusion with oneanother.
Worse than not care; they'll actively cheer it on in the name of "saving democracy" and "combating disinformation". I already see it on some liberal forums I lurk. While they sling the term "fascist" around like candy at a Christmas parade, they adored the disinformation governance board.
I've seen that too. So-called progressives have no self awareness. I had one co-worker raging that Trump was "literally Adolf Hitler." I had to gently remind my other co-workers that, bad as he is, Trump is no Hitler. With that kind of reasoning, these faux progressives will cheer on most any repressive policies.
It was Glenn who said when you've allowed yourself to be convinced you're dealing with the most singular evil in three generations you can justify using whatever tactics to stop it. When the DGB came out most of the comments were standard authoritarian fare like "the only people who should be concerned about this are the people spreading disinformation". One that stuck out to me was "conservatives are having a meltdown over this and I love it!" I used to laugh at conservatives doing silly things like smashing their already-paid-for keurigs to "own the libs". Now that coin has flipped over and liberals are cheering on giving government unprecedented sweeping powers to "own the cons".
So, good: We have a majority.
It's been leaking out for a while, but a new round of released emails shows MAJOR coordination between Big Tech and the CDC
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/emails-reveal-extensive-coordination
Of all the stupid things for big tech to collude with government about, I still can't get over the stupidity of colluding over health information. A ridiculous number of human health opinions have been proven wrong or abandoned in the last 100 years. Consensus opinions about health are less reliable than ones about the one, true god.
Case in point: The Food Pyramid.
It wasn't stupid, it was part of an intentional "plandemic" meant to result in the controlled demolition of the American middle class, e.g., the destruction of the mom-and-pop shops that couldn't financially withstand the lockdowns while allowing the big box stores to stay open.
Exactly.
And this phenomena is part and parcel of the over-arching problem of State *capture* of what should be wholly a-political, solely (honest, non-coerced) supply-and-demand wealth -creating entities in the private-sector, who can only survive by competing fairly *without* the imprimatur of Big Brother.
We need a Constitutionally enshrined (strengthened with explicit amendment) separation of State and economy. It is just as, if not more, important as the separation of State and "church."
Edit: And we especially need it to protect against the resetters:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/triumph-of-davos-man/
Let's start with ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. They may have needed help at the beginning of the twentieth century, but I'm pretty sure they're profitable now.
Subsidies aren't today's carbon energy problem; shutdowns, artificial supply restrictions, and especially qualifying carbon as a pollutant are.
If only plants and crops could talk...
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/30/americans-are-collateral-damage-in-dems-insane-war-on-energy/
Yes, but it's not about the truth. It's about who controls the "truth" (the State narrative). Big tech corps are onl;y doing what all persons do: Survive and grow. That they become State captured is only a measure of too much State power. Without State backing and protection (for example, Parler), these corporations would not be able to accumulate so much market power. There would be unfettered competition, and we consumers would have the power.
Massively reduce the size and power of the Federal leviathan, and all good will follow, including the tech "monopolies."
My feeling is you have that exactly backwards. It isn't the elected officials who are dictating to the companies it is the opposite. Corporate lobbyists often write the drafts of the laws they want the politicians to vote on.
What is the easier sell for big media?
A) Simply deciding to de-platform Parler out of the blue for 'reasons'.
B) Talking with a couple of your politician buddies and saying "Hey, if you give us a good reason to, we can shut down this Parler thing that Trump is using to upset your political applecart."
So corporate CEOs and their "oligarchy" have captured the State, not the other way around? (The answer to which is the growing shareholder revolt and reassertion of appropriate control.)
But in either case (whichever way one wishes to see it) the problem is the Federal government has too much power, too much scope. It is the Staists/Fascists/WEFer/DEIer/ESGer/control-freaks dream come true.
There are Statists-at-heart, some powerful, some merely "fellow travellers," in BOTH the private sector and public, so why would you think one group would not work hand-in-hand with the other, regardless of position, private or public.
Statists cooperate. The only antidote is popular uprising, whether at the ballot box, board meeting, or, ultimately, an insurgency.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/29/pay-attention-to-the-dutch-farmer-protests-because-america-is-next/
I wouldn't say no to the French Revolution Solution. It's not like we haven't given these folks enough chances to get it right.
I pray that when the Republicans retake the House, we can have a REAL investigation into J6, including the participation and incitement by Ray Epps and the FBI…and that the facts can actually be presented and searchable on the internet.
Sadly, no one will care.
That's not true. In fact, I share GG's optimism.
Many years from now names like Glenn Greenwald, Dr Robert Malone, Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi and Tucker Carlson will be considered true heroes of the resistance. Viva America, Viva Liberty and Viva Glenn Greenwald. Thanks for fighting the good fight to help save us from ourselves, the happless voters who have allowed this to happen through their apathy, ignorance and focus on being FAT, Dumb and Happy..
Don't start celebrating now, we won't live through the coming nuclear holocaust to enjoy any of this "freedom".
We have never been closer to global nuclear war.
That is what terrifies me most, and that the only real thing holding such a catastrophize back is Putin himself.
Neither the EU nor the US or their 'shared organ' of NATO have shown signs of anything but pushing an unending war. This is wholly on their hands...and they even have a nuclear attack add running in NYC on what people should do. When I hear of that, my first reaction was 'find out who allowed for nuclear war to become possible and put them six feet under.
Even during the so called Cold War there were always voices in the power structure and the media who wanted rapprochement, peace, those people were respected and seen as legitimate interlocuters.
Not today. Speak out against war with Russia, and you know what they will call you.
Neville Chamberlain?
And, Gov. Hochul tried to push thru Bill A416 which reads, in part, (Section 12): "...the governor or his or her delegee may...issue and seek enforcement of any other order that he or she determines...to require testing or medical examination of persons who may have been exposed to or contaminated with dangerous amounts of radioactive materials or toxic chemicals .." With Mayor Adams recently having been discovered by the media conducting NYC business from a bunker in a windowless building instead of from City Hall ( a few blocks away), I wonder if Hochul and Adams know something the rest of us don't. Or, if this is just part of the perpetual fear campaign that is being waged to keep Americans constantly scared of something (covid, omicron, crime, BA4-5, monkeypox). Frightened people stop thinking, and are more easily controlled, confined, and manipulated.
I truly fear that you are correct.
Stephen Cohen, the great Stephen Cohen, would agree with us.
Bill, thanks for those excellent links. Yes, Prof Cohen was prescient on so many issues, and often fiercely reviled for it. You probably know his book "War With Russia." It is a collection of his articles and commentary decrying those who would needlessly start a war with Russia.
Agreed, expanding NATO is undoubtedly the greatest US foreign policy error of the post-CW era...and that's saying something.
Maybe we need to calm things down. In the long term, we can give Russia assurance that its valid (but only its valid) security interests will be protected by allowing (and encouraging) Russia to join NATO. Sounds silly, but it is one way to prevent wars based on perceived security threats.
Now you are talking my talk. I consider myself to have been one of his greatest fans. You too, I take it.
Yes, Prof. Cohen got it. Cohen was actual friends with Gorbachev, and if anyone "got it" it was Stephen Cohen. Him and X, George Kennan, who predicted all this.
I have been 'following' the cold war since the 70s.
"Real men go to Mockba"
https://williamowen.substack.com/p/the-war-on-russia
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https://www.ft.com/content/fbfc34eb-d722-43af-b160-63d5cd9604f5
The architect of the cold war policy of containment did not mince words in arguing that “expanding Nato would be the most fateful error in American policy in the entire post-cold war era”.
He predicted that “it would inflame nationalistic, anti-western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion”, “have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy”, “restore the atmosphere of cold war to east-west relations”, and “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking”."
I agree and I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, totally terrified for 2 weeks.
I was very young. My main memory was the fear that I saw and felt all around me.
I agree that world war is likely in the next 10 years or so. Whether it reaches the level of destructiveness you fear -- that is, ending civilization in some countries -- is a separate issue. You're right to worry about that level of destructiveness, which can now be achieved without nuclear weapons. Modern Internet/hacking technology allows that civilization-ending level of destruction without breaking the nuclear taboo. As long as each major power can maintain an effective deterrent threat of mutually assured destruction, and leaders aren't reckless in certain ways, we'll avoid that level of catastrophe. But what matters is whether a country's deterrent ever breaks down, and that depends on developments in hacking which are very difficult to find out about.
We're in WWIII. Advancement's in electronic communication (much like the printing press) has caused a jump in Consciousness world wide. "ism's" are dead or dying and the graft of avaricious finance is transparent to reality. They're dangerous. The fact that we're discussing nuclear war is proof that the mask is off. Totalitarian finance is holding a gun to our heads. The choice is "you will own nothing and be happy" perpetual debt driven feudalism or salvation in the firestorm. Welcome to the new age.
You clearly don't understand the destructiveness of nuclear weapons. It's not just the explosive power of them, it's also the massive and massively toxic radioactivity they release into the atmosphere. And your Dr. Strangelove attitude that a nuclear war may not reach a high level of destructiveness is insane and immoral beyond words.
Where world-war-level hacking is concerned, you are the one who is taking the Dr. Strangelove "it's not that bad" approach. I acknowledge how catastrophic nuclear war would be; it would have terrible global effects. But because you share the common view that understates the dangers from hacking, you wrongly believe that world-war-level hacking wouldn't reach a level of severity comparable to nuclear war. You misunderstood me, and I hope I wasn't being unclear.
I've done anti-nuclear protests and I'm familiar with the harms that nuclear weapons do. Most of this is understood by the general public. The harm of nuclear weapons is largely concentrated on the cities they target, although as you say they can have very serious effects elsewhere. The harm from a world-war-level hacking campaign is less understood by the general public. If you hack into utilities, shutting off the power grid and making the sewage systems flow in reverse with maybe some chemical-plant sabotage tossed in, you kill the population pretty quickly and it affects not just cities but rural areas too. At present the only effective defense that's been implemented against that is mutually assured destruction, just like with nukes.
I wouldn't want either a large world-war-level hacking campaign or a small nuclear war, but the harm from a large world-war-level hacking campaign can clearly become more serious than a small nuclear war, and it's not bound by any well-publicized taboos that are as strong as the nuclear taboo. So, it's clearly shortsighted to talk about only nuclear war as a danger and not talk about hacking.
World-war-level hacking should be discussed as a similar danger to nuclear war, so that taboos against it can develop. The long tradition of talking about nuclear war as if it was a unique danger has now become an outdated habit -- it's not that nuclear war has become any less severe than it's feared to be, but that modern means of warfare such as hacking have become as severe or more severe than a small nuclear war. Since there have been some successes in establishing a taboo against nuclear weapons, I want to replicate that success by publicizing the truth that world-war-level hacking can be comparably severe.
Hacking only affects humans, unless it causes a nuclear meltdown or nuclear weapons to be launched. Nuclear weapons irradiate the atmosphere, negatively affecting the Earth and all life on it. I'm a radical environmentalist and I totally oppose industrial society, though we're obviously stuck with it for a while even if we began moving away from it immediately. My primary concerns are the Earth and all life on it, of which humans are just one of tens of millions of species.
Your comment to which I responded was questioning of the great harms that a nuclear war would cause. I understand that because of this ridiculously tech-dependent society that we've created, hacking can cause severe harms. But aside from nuclear weapons or nuclear power plants, I'll take hacking any day over a nuclear war, which could end all or virtually all life on Earth, not merely some civilizations. I agree with you that humans can destroy the Earth, and in fact have been doing so, without nuclear weapons. But the great harm that nuclear weapons would cause should never me minimized.
When Iran gets a working nuke they’ll start threatening Israel and then we’re “screwed, blued and tattooed”.
I see you've been busily swallowing propaganda. The US National Intelligence Community assessed that Iran's nuclear goal was to achieve a "breakout capability" -- that is, Iran's end goal is to have the technology and components that enables assembling nuclear weapons on short notice but without actually possessing any assembled nukes. That Iranian strategy is the same approach that Japan took to nukes for many decades during the cold war. Countries that take that "breakout" approach end up having a similar deterrent power to those who actually have a few nuclear weapons, but without running the risks of actually possessing nukes, and can tell their own people and their neighbors that it's only the evil foreigners who possess nukes. Saudi Arabia follows a very similar strategy, having made a quiet international agreement with Pakistan where the Saudis can have a few Pakistani nukes delivered to Saudi Arabia on short notice in case of emergency. Like Iran, Saudi Arabia is able to have a kind of nuclear deterrent without possessing the actual bombs.
Western mainstream media distorted all this into "OH NO IRAN IS RUSHING TO BUILD NUCLEAR WEAPONS, DOOM DOOM DOOM", while of course not saying the same about the Saudis or Japan. I would say the Saudis are even more evil than the evil Iranian regime; the Saudis are engaging in more aggressive wars, not to mention their other abuses. But no one in the media tells you to panic over how close the Saudis are to having nukes, so you act as if Iran is the problem.
Even apart from that, the idea that "When Iran gets a working nuke they'll start threatening Israel and then we're screwed" is completely illogical. India and Pakistan have nukes and they threaten each other, but the nukes have had little effect apart from maybe slightly diminishing India's and Pakistan's covert operations against each other. Iran hasn't ever fought an outright war with Israel, while India and Pakistan have fought at least three wars with each other since the mid-twentieth century.
Just stop repeating the indoctrinated panic stuff, it's pointless.
I see you trust Iran. Good luck to you.
Lies about the "Iranian bomb" started way back in the 80s and have never ceased.
Iran is a state in rebellion against The Empire and is a minor threat to Israel, and so, "they must be destroyed".
TRVTH
Yep. The megalomania of totalitarian finance and its poseur Marxist front is capable of anything. The Jordan Peterson/Michael Yon conversation is chilling. The ascension of world wide WEF/CCP feudalism is in our faces.
In case of nuclear attack, it seems to me, you should kiss your ass goodbye, and hope that you are killed instantly. Those who remain alive will be the ones who suffer horribly.
I confess. I have not bought a luxury bunker yet. I'm waiting for them to come down in price. Some people are "early adopters", I'm the "last adopter". Any day now, I'm going to buy one of them newfangled AM/FM radios. Just gotta get my nerve up.
thanks for that link :).
"With enough shovels..."
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/931997.With_Enough_Shovels
Who's celebrating?
The NeoCons and NeoLibs.
Indeed Señor Paine.
Remember when Elon Musk was threatening to buy Twitter and goodthinkers were losing their minds at the thought that Twitter might censor less aggressively?
Funny how "Muh private company can do whatever it wants!" was no longer a QED argument when it came to *less* censorship.
All private companies are equal but some are more equal than others.
Besides Twitter's misrepresentation of how many accounts were actually bots; the State threatened "Space X" with all kinds of nonsensical regulations and requirements. I wonder if Musk didn't see that coming, or whether he thought "Space X" was so important to the future of the nation that it wouldn't be used to rein him in.
Apples and oranges.
Please stop disparaging the private sector, M. F. Yes, private actors are free to censor. That is no problem , of course, because actors in the private sector have "competitors," and consumers are free to go elsewhere. (Google, of course, has broken laws by illegaly structuring its architecture to deny competition, and it has been allowed to do so because it is State-captured, and therefore has unfair State assistance.)
As always, it's the PUBLIC sector, the State, that is the danger and cause of all censorship problems. The State has no competition.
"Yes, private actors are free to censor. "
Yes they are.
"That is no problem , of course, because actors in the private sector have "competitors,""
Until they don't
"and consumers are free to go elsewhere."
Until they aren't
So long as money trumps humanity, you are going to have this kind of thing (using said money to bend/break rules for your own benefit at the expense to the detriment of others) happening on various scales throughout society.
That's the bottom line here. Dress it up however you like, but it always, in the end, comes back to that.
There seems to be some psychological willingness to believe that wealth makes someone worthy of leadership. It's not just an Anglo-Saxon trait. And, $$$$$$$ by its nature seems to rig whatever system it gains control of at the cost of human moral decency. I'm for commerce. I'm not for rigged game finance. The entire problem is apparent in the fact that Wall Street gutted American industry, crashed the greatest economy in history, stuffed their pockets and walked. How much of the chaos in the world today is direct "blowback" from the Cheney/Bush/ Clinton/Obama travesty and its capitulation with Wall Street rigged game grifters.
The WEF/CCP new world perpetual debt driven feudalism, is just the new face of the venal Capitalist anti-union, cheap subsistence debt driven labor, I'm exploiting the worlds resources for my own benefit without consequences scam. Avaricious finance has abandoned America. And, Capitalism.
I'm not Communist nor am I a Capitalist . I'm an American. Our Constitution and the fact that we're armed to the teeth is the only thing holding the WEF/CCP totalitarian financed bureaucratic big tech surveillance state at bay. (I'm not, by the way, for armed conflict.) I do think one thing we don't consider and discuss enough is pulling the monsters teeth through extreme taxation. That and adamant protection of our Republic and its Constitution might begin to bring daylight.
"Extreme taxation" *only* fuels Statism, and is certainly un-Constitutional.
Right because certainly no one else has, you know, nodded and winked at your famed article of treating everyone equally under the law over the years for personal gain. That's never happened. The Constitution is sacrosanct. It's never been perverted for private gain (cough,...NRA...cough).
You are mistaken, perhaps because, as a Canadian, you are not as familiar with our Constitution, and specifically what it is *not*.
Sign me up as the first person in favour of taxing the hell out of the rich. The problem is, so long as they control the politicians that is never going to happen. Control must be wrested from them in other ways.
A huge part of the lie is convincing "...we the people..." that we have no power. I think we do or, though bad things are happening to good people, especially at the Marxist D.E.I. end of the gun, it would be a lot worse. We probably both see and experience today's lives in the balance reality and would like it to change. Realistic taxation of income isn't anti-Constitutional. We pay it proportionately. So should the rich. And the transfer of debt downward and tax dollars upward is criminal. American political representation standing by while the lords of monopoly tax shelter and duck legitimate tax's is also criminal. The pretense WEF/CCP monsters like K.Schwab and B.Gates have anything but a self-interested vision of the future is pure pathology. The MSM duck and cover Epstein "the king has no clothes scandal" revealed the moral high ground they inhabit. Its pure dog and pony we want slave labor and unfettered exploitation. They gutted American industry and destroyed the greatest economy in the world. If a couple of thousand of us chip in a hundred bucks each I'm sure we can find an economics expert capable of insight and solution.
We should at least have the discussion.
There's economists out there already who are squarely pointing the finger where you are, the financial sector and the oligarchs who use it to prey on people.
Interesting tidbit here, a recent memo from a Bank of America exec basically stated that he hoped the conditions for American workers would get worse to force them back into taking the three low paying burger flipping jobs they've been forced to take pre-COVID but are now saying no too because it would help the bank's bottom line if that happened.
Think about that. They are willing to see you homeless, without clothes, food, medical care unless you 'company town' your existence so they can increase their profit margins.
They are currently lobbying the government to fiddle with your interest rates to ensure that happens.
This is what unfettered Capitalism brings you. Pure markets look great on paper, but they do not account for the human factor. The reality is far more messy.
"Until they don't" (twice)
And usually the fault of the public sector, either by capturing the corp/sector (think healthcare) and denying competition, or by not enforcing existing law.
The free market takes time to re-assert itself. Trust the free individual and the free market.
Money does not trump humanity. That is, and always has been, a canard and a red herring. Are you a Socialist?
Are you a Capitalist?
Does me being a Socialist (whether I am or not) automatically mean that what I write has less credibility than you?
We've given your free market a good long time to do the right thing, like since Reagonomics. We are talking half a century here. It has consistently done the wrong thing in terms of humanity. It has helped an increasingly smaller and smaller amount of people garner more and more of society's wealth while sentencing the remainder to what amounts to indentured servitude.
Yes, people are free *not* to work in which case *not* eating, *not* having a place to sleep, and *not* getting medical care that is worth the name, *not* having these things is also *free*.
Or are you going to blame the public sector for private gains.
Who do you think writes the laws the politicians vote on? You think they get those off the back of cereal boxes? Corporate lobbyists do that work (and that is well documented).
Who do you think funds the focus groups and PACs that kill any reform that might in any way dilute the power structure that keeps these one way taps flowing? I would say do the research and look it up but I suspect you know that special interests by and large pay for those things to push their agendas without them getting their hands dirty.
In which case you'd be talking out of your ass to push an agenda yourself most likely of small government/less regulation and couching it in 'Yippee Small Business' rhetoric and give it a folksy feel because why exactly?
Let me guess. In your view powerful people have throughout history shown that when given the opportunity to grab more power they turn it down, right?
Yes, I am.
I never claimed that "what [you] write has less credibility than [me]." And I believe that your opinion is just as valid as mine.
But we have *not* had "my" free market for a good long time. Reagan did NOT reduce the size of the public sector and free the markets. He was right in focusing on the supply side, not the demand side, in economics. That is the road to true Capitalism.
The body of your response here indicates that you think individuals have a right to all that they *need* to survive, and they cannot ever obtain those things without the State providing it for them. That Socialism has always failed, and led to such destruction of wealth that humanity has suffered immensely. This is obvious, so I refuse to respomd here.
Your last sentence is so ridiculous that I will only respond by requesting that you stop putting words in my mouth.
We disagree profoundly on the nature of human economic reality, and what social system will lead to the best solution. That is all. It's okay for us to disagree, isn't it?
Just like you say we have never had *true* Capitalism, I can safely say we have never had *true* Socialism. For the same reasons I might add. People able to take advantage of a system to garner personal gain for themselves at ther expense of others and to the detriment of those same people have done so. There are oligarchs everywhere in the world.
Remember, I never painted myself with the Socialist brush, *you* did. *You* also labelled yourself a died in the wool Capitalist. For me, political left or right never enters into this equation. For you, this discussion can't be had without it.
There, my friend, is our difference.
"As soon as Parler rose to the top spot, Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and censorship activists groups such as Sleeping Giants demanded that Google and Apple immediately remove Parler from their app stores, preventing any further downloading."
Speech, like ideas, should rise and fall on its own merits. And the only arbiter of what I should read and hear, is me. When four corporations, with the aid of the federal government, get to use state-sponsored bully tactics to silence competition -no matter under what cock-and-bulls**t guise- we need to call it what it is...FASCISM.
Oh, and AOC coming down on the wrong side of history...AGAIN?!
THE HELL YOU SAY!
Ocasio-Cortez and her Squad are phony progressives. Their job is to sheep herd progressives into the Democratic Party, thereby neutering them. Members of the Squad almost always say the right things, while hypocritically supporting the Democratic Party establishment with their votes and what they actually do.
We as individuals need to start discussing and finding ways to expanding this platform and reach others. Of course I share good pieces. I wonder if we each printed a hundred copies of really good articles and inserted them in waiting room magazines or in the free paper magazine racks we see everywhere. Or, just handed them directly to friends. A good number of our American revolutionary's were pamphleteers.
The same can be said of Bernie Sanders, tough talk, and then he votes with Democrats. If Sanders' brain could be combined with Manchin's balls---WOW!
I've never liked Sanders that much, though he clearly used to be substantially better than the average Democrat. Now he's just like them.
I admit I was a Bernie Bro' during one of his campaigns. Like you, I thought he was the best of a bad bunch of options. Bernie talks the heartfelt talk, but he doesn't walk his talk.
Sanders=all matzoh, no balls.
He's bad on foreign policy, though not quite as much as establishment Democrats or Republicans. I would have held my nose and voted for him if he'd won the presidential nomination in 2016, but not in 2020.
"He's bad on foreign policy." Divided loyalties?
I wonder how much AOC sold her behind for? The Best Congress that money can buy.
I suspect she was made an offer she couldn't refuse...
"...she couldn't refuse."? Or, she wouldn't refuse? Yes, in this nation, anyone who stands up for honesty, integrity, and decency, will pay a price (probably poverty). But the choice is yours to make.
Nice behind. I'm sure she got a nice, fat sum.
I'd wager 1,000 pieces of silver is what it took. Now she is the swamp rat's mascot. It's sad, that she was willing to abandon everything she claimed to believe in for popularity, money and power.
I'm sure that in her own mind, she is a hero suffering for the masses. Never underestimate what people are willing to believe about themselves.
Thanks. I was wondering if you were ok. I actually searched you last night, wondering if you’d gone missing or been arrested, and I was relieved to see some recent activity on your Twatter account.
I genuinely appreciate the concern. The slow pace over the last couple months wasn't planned. I've been producing articles at an extremely rapid and intense rate since I moved to Substack in October, 2020 -- almost two years ago now. And, as I indicated in the introductory paragraphs to the last freelance article we posted, I have been working intensively on a new project that we're about to unveil that is very exciting and, I hope and believe, will make a huge impact. So my lack of output here was more just about needing a little bit of a rest and having less time than I planned, as well as a spontaneous need to slow down for a bit to keep my batteries charged and ready, along with the planning needed for launching this new project coming very shortly. We do have our freelance program but it's not really an adequate substitute since my writing and journalistic approach are pretty idiosyncratic and it's noticeable when the articles aren't mine. In any event, I should be back up to the normal pace very soon.
Always good to hear you Glenn. Peace.
Yes, Glenn, take care... we love you and we need you.
I'm glad you are alright, I had thought you had decided to take a vacation as well, even if you are doing something you love, it will still burn you out if you continue to do the work of five journalists day and night, and that isn't good for anyone.
I too had been worried and missing your voice if sanity.
Just put up a "GON' FISHING. BE BACK SOON."
Oh, I understand. It wasn’t an accusation or something. I personally don’t use T and somehow (wrongly) figured you were banned from it anyhow. It takes very little time/energy to post a tweet vs what you do here. Not comparable. It was a funny coincidence though that you popped up right after I looked for signs of life. I understand Zelensky named you as a “Russian disinformer”, which is both funny/not funny. Not sure if that’s a signal to Azov or just to the propaganda machine. System Pigs, as Lira would say. Hence my concern. Looking forward to what you are working on, when it may be ready. Be well!
Zelensky had Greenwald, Gabbard and Rand Paul put on a disinformation 'blacklist'. If anyone involved in this conflict has to go, it's him. He's the one who demanded joining NATO and who continues to push for war, something the Swamp Rats are all too happy to reply to by sending a gravy train of money and weapons. It makes me wonder if he has some kind of financial connection to the Bidens...
Oh, I totally agree. I am certain he is in bed with the govt/cartel, of which Brandon is “The Big Guy”. (The Big Guy doesn’t mean “The Godfather”, that’s too far a leap for Brandon though. More like Scranton Joe is a bag man who carried big bags, but using his som and brother’s hands, to keep his off radar). Wasn’t Z groomed to be Ukrainian President while VP Brandon was point person to Ukraine? I am fuzzy on specific dates concerning Z’s rise in the Ukraine, but the CIA intervention that was the Maidan coup originated then, for sure. When Zelensky got picked to play President on tv, then a political party was created just for him, then selected him to play candidate for that party, then won, was playing out during Brandon’s time. I saw the Oliver Stone doc and read more but all the threads in the tangled web of corruption are just too many to keep track of now. Peter Schweizer’s books help in grasping the extent of corruption and Dan Bongino’s “Follow the money” is also good in respect to understanding the Ukraine-Obama era DC connection.
I am not denying any of what you say there took place, in fact I'm with you in the opinion that the 'coup' was engineered,
But I think the Zelensky, that may have been gung ho to be America's puppet at the beginning might not be the same guy we are dealing with now.
Watching your countrymen die all around you changes a person who is not used to their actions having those consequences.
I could be completely wrong here, I'm not in the guy's head, but I also know that Noam Chomsky is pretty thorough in his sourcing. If he says that Zelensky has been trying to get a peace process started fror months and the U.S. has shut him down at every turn, I have a hard time dismissing it outright.
In my lifetime, I can't remember a time when a country in an active war can have their first lady pop over to the US Congress to give a speech and then fly back (or maybe it was before) to do a photoshoot for Vogue magazine along with the country's president. How is she gettin out and in along with people like Ben Stiller? What kind of war is this? So bizarre!
Something's up for sure, Stephen. As kinda a 'home experiment' I went on Fox News' Comments Section and said words to the effect of "hooray for Zelensky: all the countries sitting on the fence will be joining NATO this year" ---got over a thousand 'likes' in 12 hours. I came back and said words to the effect of "Zelensky is a tinhorn who reminds me of a general in a Charlie Chaplin movie" ---- the remark DISAPPEARED for 12 hours before reappearing at the very bottom of their comments section.
The company is in on this war. In a big way. And I use the word 'company' broadly.
Yes, it's SO strange that countries want to join NATO now.
(Hint: Russia doesn't invade NATO members.)
The problem with everything involving Ukraine joining NATO is that it pushes Russia into China's hands. With their respective resources, sanctions are next to useless against the two combined. What good are sanctions on Russian Oil when China will buy it all? What good are sanctions on Chinese products when Russia will buy them? By pushing the two together, they become stronger as a unit, or rather Xi's China does. Think of Hitler and Stalin, the British blockade on Hitler prior to his betrayal of Stalin had no effect, as Stalin sent Hitler food, coal, oil and iron.
Xi is laughing watching Russia bleed itself dry and push it's neighbors away from it, all as he laughs at the US for burning money, all but destroying it's reserve AMS systems and being complacent in the conflict. He is using Putin as a stooge to help drain the US. Putin undoubtedly knows this, but has no other alternative available to him as the 'no NATO' for Ukraine is not on the table.
It doesn't have to be that way, as Russia's modern identity was formed as a result of resistance to the Mongols (not something exactly rare). I imagine that plenty of Russians see Xi's China as another 'massive empire on the door that wishes to reduce Russia to a dependency,' yet the foreign policy of the US gives them little option but to follow in that track, as the only thing worse than having a despot for an ally is having no allies at all.
Yes, if there was any remaining doubt about Zelensky's legitimacy, or lack thereof, it is now removed with his creation of a "blacklist" of those who dare to challenge his narrative, like Glenn.
Chomsky has been saying for months now that the U.S./NATO flatly rejected Zelensky's proposals for peace negotiations with Putin.
In light of that, putting three foreign influencers on a media blacklist in a country that probably right now doesn't have a power grid in numerous places seems more like a sop to appease the masters than a principled political stance.
Russia invaded his country 8 (eight) years ago.
I guess you wouldn't have risen to the occasion.
The Euromaiden coup...and it's aftermath. Why Russia acted then I do not know, though in light of evidence of an emergency, I think it was beyond idiotic on multiple counts as Ukraine is known to have undergone severe repression genocide at Russia's hands and all it did was generate needless death for all parties involved and international bad press for Russia.
If Russia wanted to flex it's muscles, all it needed to do was wait until 2015, the hundredth anniversary of the start of the Armenian Massacre, and proceed to agitate against Turkey until it spat out Western Armenia. Nobody would have risen a finger to help Turkey as doing so would be political suicide (France and Britain were Turkish allies during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, but neither did anything due to public opinion). Conversely, Russia would have been seen as a liberator, especially if it's actions also freed Turkish Kurdistan. Instead though, unless I'm missing something, Russia played it's cards as badly as below average Joe has.
We are in general agreement, I think, on the course of history, M. Sanford, but not conjecture:
"Nobody would have risen a finger to help Turkey..."
That is absurd. NATO existed, and Turkey was a member, in 2015 (As opposed to 1877!!).
I'm not quite sure of the point you are making here. Please expand.
Zelensky's hands are tied. He will not (and should not) surrender to Russian Fascism. He is the leader of the Ukrainians who do NOT want to be Russians. He rises to that occasion.
The Pulitzer lost all meaning when it was awarded to the 'useful idiot' who said in the 1930s that there 'was no famine'. It has not to this day been revoked.
That's good news. I suspect that more than a few of us were concerned about your absence.
Taking this opportunity to say -- I hope your husband recovers well from his hospitalization and that you two will celebrate many more Dias dos Namorados together (while, in between, he may drag you into going to the occasional Pride festival). Hope you're both back at full strength soon.
Just keep rockin' forward. Making good whiskey takes a while. (Kick their asses Glenn.)
He just lost Sheeva, one of his favourite dogs.
That's hard.
I missed that news. I am sorry for your loss, Glenn. Losing mine = great sorrow and I know its same for many.
Ahh yeah, I remember loosing a pet cat who I had since my childhood shortly after he turned 21...the loss of any pet after a long period of time, 5+ years and one you form a bond with is a major loss.
Yes, for sure. We keep cats, usually four of them. We just lost Isis, our big fat black cat at 13 last December. She was named after Gary Seven's cat in Star Trek, not the assholes. But tell that to NSA.
It's nice to hear the case has been allowed to penetrate the legal system one baby step further. Please no one get too excited, though. "Discovery" isn't a victory ---it's the place things really go wrong in today's pretend-judicial system [while giving the appearance that things are otherwise]. Google's compliance will be slow or purposefully screwed up. Extension after extension will be granted as Google complains every request is too burdensome, unclear or voluminous. And, worst of all, I promise you, with 100% confidence, that Google will not be sanctioned for dragging their feet.
"...one baby step further"
One. Then another. Then...
Do you know what a rock-hammer is, M. Guarino?
But you are right. Google will not be sanctioned. But eventually we will force the Feds to stop protecting it, and then the free marketplace will rightfully decide.
Marketplaces never 'rightly' decide unless you define 'might as right' as 'rightly'.
Let's assume for the sake of argument everything goes right that we want to go right in the Google case.
Files get opened, light is shone on the darkness, evil machinations on behalf of the corporate behemoth is exposed. Headlines are made. Companies are fined and broken up. People are chastised, apologies are made, people even go to jail. Someone writes a book, someone makes a movie about the book, it wins awards. All the things you want to happen, happen.
Want to know what would have preceded all of that?
The people behind the curtains would have quietly pulled their support from Google, parked their money offshore for a few months until they found the next big thing they could use to perpetuate the oligarchy and then ploughed their cash and influence into that.
Because marketplaces rightly decide what is best for us.
"Marketplaces never 'rightly' decide unless you define 'might as right' as 'rightly'."
Gobblygook.
Marketplaces are EXACTLY the opposite of "might as right." In the free market, the free individual reigns, and force is not allowed.
M. Stephen, imo you don't understand what true Capitalism is. It is the opposite of ANY human being being able to use force.
Edit: And must I add that we have very little Capitalism today. The State (including the State-captured part of the "private" sector) has grown too large, and is naturally destroying freedom.
Oh I'll give you that point, what we have today is not true capitalism. Given all of the bailouts for thye financial sector I would say for them it is far closer to socialism. But for the rest of us poor sods, capitalist austerity it is.
You keep throwing this on the state but the state was bought and paid for long ago by the 'social oligarchs'. If a politician doesn't stick with the program, he is not a politician for long.
Yes, the "social oligarchs" (and that is a perfectly accurate term) are, in fact, part of the State, since both are acting in collusion, as one entity in essence. It remains the underlying, most important truth to recognize that these "social oligarchs" could not be oligarchs at all if, IF, we drastically reduce the size and scope of the Federal leviathan, which provides the *force* behing any individual's ability to become so powerful.
The Democrats act to *increase* the size and power of the public sector. Most Republican politicians, and NO lay Republican voter, would do so.
Who are you going to vote for, in order to avoid the coming bloodshed?
Yes, the "social oligarchs" (and that is a perfectly accurate term) are, in fact, part of the State, since both are acting in collusion, as one entity in essence."
There is only one steering wheel in any one vehicle and ther state is not the one with their hands on it, however much you want to blame the Democrats and big government for all of our evils.
It is your oligarchs who are busily beavering away and reducing the state of all of it's regulatory powers ('EPA on line 1 Mr. Koch') so they can exploit the enviroment and the masses even more than they already are.
First off, again, left and right do not enter into this for me. If forced to choose I would either vote third party or not vote at all, because the entire political machine across the board is in the hands of a powerful few whose only loyalty is to their spread sheets.
Secondly, unless you people colonized Canada when I was asleep, I do not believe I get to vote, though given the extent to which a person's vote actually matters in terms of how your country (and mine) is run by *any* politician of *any* party what good would it do anyway?
Love GG .. What an amazing human! I found him through Tucker Carlson and will follow him as long as he writes .. Thank you Mr. Greenwald for being a voice in the dark ❤️
Mom to 2 girls born in China
and 2 Fur Babies
If you can, check out the film 'Snowden'. Glenn's not in it; he's portrayed in it by Zach Quintero (Mr. Spock of the Star Trek reboot). I've been a fan since '15 or so.
He's truly a remarkable person. His writing is savage when it needs to be, but he's also funny as hell when he kicks back. For examples, see The Jimmy Dore Show YouTube page and look for Jimmy & Glenn's pieces. His quick wit destroys you w/ LOL's.
(Personal note: I've encountered about 3 families w/ adopted daughters from China. One of them was a personal friend at the time. The grueling work (and $$$) Bev put in to find her daughter still awes me 30 years later. She loved her baby so much, a year later went back for another girl.
In other cases I ran into families such as yours while travelling.
In every case, EVERY situation, the love that bound these families was almost physical. I'm not kidding; it emanated like a force field or something. The abiding connections I witnessed blew my hair back.
To have seen this once would have been way cool. To experience it a second time really gets one's attention.
But three in a row?
There's something deep and meaningful about people such as yourself who created your family. I can't say anything analytical about the dynamics of your family, it goes beyond words. But I can say from experience that there's something remarkably good about your family that's deeply powerful.
I felt it. )
Adoption is one of the most profound and beautiful things on the planet and you eloquently captured why. Really appreciate the nice words.
JHC Glenn, it completely slipped my mind that you're in the same boat w/your hubby-doo. That's awesome.
Oh...gotta question: were you able to see the Whitestone Bridge from your house growing up? I could see it at night from the Bronx. It looked sooo magical to me after I went to the World's Fair in '64.
Much love and respect Glenn Greenwald, have watched, listened and read much of your work. Thank you, God Bless. Cheers from Canada.
One point Greenwald admits here undermines Rumble's free speech credibility a bit. Greenwald mentions Rumble's imminent merger with a SPAC that "will effectively make Rumble a public company". Greenwald thinks this is great because Rumble would get more capital, but getting floated on the market could, perhaps, enable increased pressure on Rumble to censor at some point in the future.
The stories I've seen from December say that Rumble's CEO and founder Chris Pavlovski would retain voting control even after the merger. If that's still true, it's a good sign. But even in a company where the founder retains voting control, there can be pressure by Wall Street on the company: investment firm analysts can tell management they have to change policies or see their share price go down. I don't expect that to happen right away, but it's true that going public comes with an increased vulnerability to pressure from Wall Street on corporate policies.
Also, Pavlovski himself may not always remain pro-free speech. For instance, he feels patriotic about Macedonia (that's the appropriate term for him, since I gather he thinks the country should cover more than just North Macedonia). What would happen if Macedonian patriotism starts to clash with free speech? I can't be totally sure.
None of this means there's an immediate risk to free speech, but history shows the financial markets don't always favor free speech, and it's good to at least have backups instead of relying on the likes of Rumble and Substack.
Even if Pavlovski retains a majority of voting shares, he is still opening himself up to a fiduciary duty suit if he doesn't censor like a proper oligarch.
But recognizing how censorship aligns with shareholder interests is itself too unspeakable for a lawsuit to be built on that premise.
It's much more convenient to believe, as Greenwald more or less does, that shareholder capitalism will somehow save the day for free speech (and they happily grant him a speaking-out niche on their neoliberal platforms to say so).
By the way, it's nice to see NoSuchCommentator/Benito-style posts coming out of your cat avatar; wonder if that could be a pet video on Rumble.
(note: I edited my original comment after posting to delete a sentence that didn't make sense)
Censorship need only align with perceived or stated shareholder interests.
There are stockholders who oppose censorship. Having a tech company which is not censoring would allow them to put their money into it.
One shareholder is all thst is needed to bring suit.
Going public is ALWAYS bad if you're trying to maintain your politics and ideals. Regardless of whether Pavlovski retains voting control for now, going public would subject Rumble to a hostile takeover, among other things. I can't think of one company that's gone public and maintained its politics and ideals completely, or even usually at all.
Investors need to take back control of their property from Wall Street, just like voters need to take back control of the Federal government.
Randall, what you're talking about is exactly what happened to a huge, old, family owned news source, the NYT and it's once-fabulous subsidiary, the International Herald Tribune, in 2014/2015. Big as it was, powerful, respectable and influential like few others, it succumbed to financial pressures.
This is good news, thanks for covering it. Also, it seems like everyone on Substack is talking about your interview with Alex Jones except for you. No links or comment?
Good question. Since links are helpful, I'll mention that Jesse Singal had one of those articles (unfortunately paywalled): https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/is-there-a-right-way-to-interview
I don't buy the "grifting" theory about Greenwald at all, but his strategy deserves scrutiny, including the parts of it that he never mentions.
I read the Singal article. I found it a bit annoying, tbh. The take of "Everyone knows Alex Jones is a pathological liar," doesn't bring much to the table, either. I haven't spent enough time watching Alex Jones to know, but from what I've seen it's more ranting and sensationalism rather than outright lies. Sometimes he makes unsubstantiated claims or draws strange conclusions from available evidence, but I don't think that's the same as blatantly lying.
The Taibbi article was less critical, which I suppose isn't surprising.
As always, they try to steal bases. Like with 'everybody knows' Trump is a danger to democracy.
He is a danger to the *establishment's version* of democracy. It really depends on how they are defining democracy now doesn't it? :)
I happen to think Trump is a bit of a buffoon politically and that he comes from the same moneyed elite he purports to be an enemy of.
But the thing he did and does that endears him to the masses is he lifts the curtain. He doesn't treat the vote like they are children in terms of what they need to know and what they don't.
And that does not sit well with the folks who would rather the little people be kept in the dark while they count their money.
Exactly the case! I wrote about this a while ago:
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/everything-is-an-attack-on-democracy?s=w
If you pay even a passing attention to politics, you’ve noted Democratic politicians proclaiming that everything from Facebook to Republicans themselves are trying to undermine democracy. Joe Biden called January 6th “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Indeed, because Democrats loudly proclaim to be “defending democracy”, anything that threatens them anywhere is declared an “attack on democracy.” (Just add “insurrectionist” to the long list of ‘deplorable’ adjectives.)
It’s sort of a sick irony that the very people who call everything a ‘threat to democracy’ are the people who most ignore the rules of our Republic. As I previously discussed, the new idea of America was that nobody was above the law, and that government officials who passed laws were held to account by voters. Over and over during his short administration, Joe Biden has ignored the proper rule-making process of our Republic while proclaiming to be saving it.
With executive orders, he shut down the Keystone pipeline and suspended other energy projects. He sanctioned Russia (long before the war) and shut down travel that Trump had opened. Vaccine mandates were executive orders. Now, certainly Biden isn’t the first president to use the executive order, but he may be the most hypocritical by sidestepping the proper lawmaking procedures of the country for the biggest issues of the day.
A great listen is Joe Rogan's podcast with Alex Jones. I know of him but didn't follow him at all. This interview was really interesting. I still need to watch Glen's interview with Jones.
Thank you for the update. It's a little late for this to impact this year's elections. Will be interesting to see if well-heeled lawyers for Big Tech drag this past the 2024 vote.
As a Canadian that keeps a watchful eye on the censorship issues that occur in the USA, this will be followed with extreme interest. The ripple effect is felt by all.
Bill C-11 is a nightmare in the making. It will happen too. Somnolent Canadians haven't even noticed, and if they did? Few would care.
I asked Trudeau once about Harper's Bill C-51 and he told me he was against it. But here we go again.
https://youtu.be/xGKunT1S32o
I will say that I just did a Noam Chomsky search on Rumble and on YouTube. I turned up far more material on the latter than I did on the former. Given Chomsky's decades long activism and anti-establishment views, I would have thought the opposite.
I'm not denying that Google plays dirty pool with their search algorhythms, that we kinda already know. But Rumble needs to make an effort to get more content from the very folks who are pulling people who think critically like myself to You Tube (Noam Chomsky, Janis Varoufakis, Mark Bythe and the like *in their entirety*) and not rely less on people who cherry pick a comment from one of them, then scream obscenities at the top of their lungs while pushing a political agenda.
I don't watch CNN/MSNBC for that reason. Why would I put my time here? Neither gives me what I am looking for atm.
Mike Geist, a prof here in town, is pretty good on C-11. A bill that will allow big Justin to kontrol internet kontent.
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/tag/c-11/
your right not to put much faith in something cultivated in Canada, with the exception of Rumble. The monopoly held by the major telecommunication giants here says it all. Check out our rates!
We have the highest cellphone rates in the world.
So an entire country is somehow tainted and no good can come from it?
Good to know.
I live in Ottawa. I can tell the difference. Most of them were not truck drivers. One thing is for sure Americans know almost NOTHING about Canada. The situation is complicated and has a lot to do with hatred of Trudeau and Western alienation and very little to do with "FREEDOM". Whatever that means. Find me a "trucker" who knows anything about C-11 or who doesn't want Canada fighting American wars.
Canadians are just like you. Nothing special.
I oppose Trudeau, but for good and real reasons. Not because of the child sex slaves in his basement. LOL
if you want to know the outcome, rewind to the late 90s, when Microsoft used anti competitive tactics to defeat Netscape, and then famously lost to Andreesen and Join Clark in federal court - the fine, as I recall was around $750 million. But by then, the damage was done. Netscape, once the leader, won in court, but lost the marketshare battle with Microsoft after it was acquired by AOL in a $10 billion deal.
Fully agree. While this lawsuit and the denial of the motion to dismiss are good things, they're not the solution here. See my other comments in this thread.
I despise the liberal weasels running Google. They have turned a brilliant tech company into an instrument of oppression and disinformation; this will not end well for them, I predict.
That said, I would prefer to see Rumble succeed on its own merits rather than through litigation. Technology is a fast moving industry, and the courts are sluggish and backward thinking.
Tiktok is an example of an innovative product that is challenging Youtube for dominance right now. Their viewership now exceeds Youtube's, their user interface is completely mobile centric and their user base is predominantly under 20. Youtube is experimenting with short form videos, as is Facebook, but their efforts are lame and irrelevant.
Meanwhile, Rumble's user experience sucks; they still don't support sorting and filtering of viewer comments, on a platform that caters to very politically opinionated and highly engaged users. When I visit the Rumble website, it always shows me puppy videos instead of the channels I've subscribed to. I don't give a shit about puppy videos. Its suggestions of related channels are lame and poorly implemented. For a corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars of capitalization, they don't seem to spend much on improving the product itself.
Rumble is starting to provide hosting services similar to Amazon Web Services (AWS -- the company that shut down Parler overnight). That's a brilliant move; I hope they don't screw it up through laziness and lack of innovation.
I would love to see Rumble, along with Dan Bongino's Parallel Economy payment service, Trump's Truth Social, and a bunch of these other companies grow and become credible alternatives to the liberal-dominated crap we're currently stuck with. But they have to put in the hard work to develop innovations that are appealing and compelling. Lawsuits and me-too also-rans aren't going to get them there.
Careful who you praise -- you write "TikTok is an example of an innovative product", but of course TikTok's parent company is Chinese and part-owned by the CCP government.
And you should know better than to state the obviously false claim that Tiktok's "viewership now exceeds Youtube's". Tiktok has been ahead of Youtube in viewing time per user, not in vierwership.
Google/Alphabet is proverbially evil, but an app like Tiktok's that's dominated by the CCP is more evil still.
Speaking of TikTok...
"Listen to this, this is from TikTok's privacy policy. It said, 'We collect certain information about the device you use to access the platform, such as your IP address, user region.' This is really crazy.
User agent, a mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purpose, model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types.'
So all your apps and all your file names, all the things you have filed away on your phone, they have access to that. 'File names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms'
So they're monitoring your keystrokes, which means they know every fucking thing you type."---Joe Rogan
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/07/28/joe_rogan_reads_tiktoks_privacy_policy_they_know_everything_you_type.html
I'm not trying to defend TikTok, which obviously is controlled by the world's most evil regime (I mean ChiCom, not Biden, in case that wasn't clear). But nonetheless, they're incredibly successful and have almost stolen away an entire generation from Youtube, just as SnapChat has practically robbed Facebook of the kids. We can learn from their innovation.
"world's most evil regime"
You need to seriously stack up the 'evil' things the U.S. has accused China of and then go back and look at some of the things the U.S. has rationalized in the name of freedom and democracy.
China's 'evil' stems from the fact that when America says 'Jump' they say 'Ummm, no.'
Terry's right that China's government, at present, is worse than the US government, at present, though both governments have been far more evil in the past than they are now.
As far what is currently the world's most evil regime, Stephen says the US (Terry is a bit tempted to agree when the party he dislikes is in power) and Terry says China. Since evil doesn't depend on size, I would think North Korea is the strongest candidate.
I'm not saying this one is worse than that one per se as much as I am saying the way each is perceived for doing the same things is vastly different.
China is villanized by the media, America gets the jingoistic cheers. Now said media for the most part is American and quite possibly it is the complete reverse in China right?
The point I am making here is American policy since WWII has been we lead, you all follow. And when a country passes on that plan, out comes the villan propaganda and the whole 'threat to American/Western Democracy' schtick (as if these yo-yos aren't enough of a threat to that themselves).
And if that still doesn't work you get regime change by any means necessary.
America's problem with China, is not only are they not buying into 'the program', they are too big too topple militarily *and* they are on far better economic footing *and* they are catching up to, if not surpassing, the west in the sciences.
CNN and MSNBC won't tell you that, but they have already developed a state run digital currency that Russia is now using to do it's international banking, but more importantly they also use it to make sure their citizens have food on the table and a bed to sleep in at night.
Could you ever imagine any of the western digital currencies or the central banks (be it the Fed or the ECB) that are trying to set up theirs doing that?
A somewhat good reply, but I still disagree on a few things.
You're too hasty in giving credit to China's ruling party for living standards. It's true that there is less poverty in China now than before 1949. The credit for that improvement in living standards goes, primarily, to the Chinese people (not their government) whose values, creativity, ideas, and hard work were the main force making it possible. Secondarily, some credit should be given to how the Chinese people learned to use innovations borrowed from overseas. Those two are the main factors deserving credit; I would give less credit to the Beijing government.
China's ruling party claims to have worked to eliminate extreme poverty (at least in rural areas), and their efforts have had some positive results, but of course China's government has also done a lot to create severe poverty by putting people into involuntary detention (including what used to be called "laogai").
The CCP's contribution has been mixed: sometimes helping to alleviate poverty, and often impeding the fight against poverty due to the CCP's desire to maintain privilege, economic status and power (particularly the privileges, economic status and power of higher-ranking CCP members). Suppose that instead of the CCP, China had hypothetically had a government that was neutral about issues of poverty and wealth, in the following sense: unlike the CCP, these government officials wouldn't do anything to promote their own wealth (apart from taking a salary that's middle-class by the standards of their fellow citizens) or to promote the wealth of their relatives and cronies, and these government officials would never do anything aimed at alleviating poverty or increasing poverty among the general public. Instead, these hypothetical government officials would focus on trying to restrain and punish wrongdoing, in a moderately successful way, and in particular they would try to prevent the kind of economic wrongdoing that is prevalent in American capitalism. I think if China had been ruled by these hypothetical officials who are neutral on poverty, there would be less poverty in China now than there actually is under the CCP. If so, perhaps that shows that the CCP's net effect on poverty has been worse than neutral, worse than a government that doesn't try to do anything about poverty per se. I think every government on earth, including China's government and the kind of government that American libertarians prefer, has a long way to go before it can be as good as this hypothetical kind of neutral government. So I have my doubts whether the CCP's overall effect on the fight against poverty has been mostly helpful or mostly harmful. Laozi would say "mostly harmful", and Laozi is wiser than those who view the CCP leaders' role more or less along the lines that Lei Feng was said to do.
One strand in the Cultural Revolution was a deliberate effort to produce poverty among those who questioned the top leader. I don't think the CCP has lost its tendency to deliberately produce poverty among those Chinese who are brave enough to say that the CCP has no right to rule because it isn't that serious about its "serve the people" motto.
You talk about a "state run digital currency" as if it was a good thing. To me, that sort of currency just gives the government more tools to produce poverty among those citizens who take a critical approach to it.
And again, I am sure that the Chinese elite's strenuous effort to maintain its own members' power, privileges and wealth have an effect in helping to keep ordinary Chinese in poverty. That would be true of the elite in any country. Although you seem to suggest you can't imagine western government matching Beijing's work to reduce poverty, in fact western governments have done anti-poverty programs of their own, some of which have been partially successful just like China's was. But that doesn't prove that either the Beijing government or western governments have had a better-than-neutral effect on poverty overall.
I would also dispute your talk of what the Chinese ruling party does for its "citizens". I don't think they exactly have the concept of "citizens" in the way that this term is used in countries like the United States. Citizenship entails that the government is accountable to the citizens. What Beijing does believe is that they have an obligation to increase the prosperity of the Chinese people, but they are happy to make exceptions to that and to reduce the prosperity of parts of the Chinese population when those people try to exercise the rights of citizens.
A future where the CCP government is the hegemonic global power is quite possible. It has the potential to be as bad or worse than American hegemony ever was in the past. And comparing it to the present-day version of American hegemony, I would assess that it would inevitably be worse than what we now have. The Chinese government considers its main opponent in the ideological realm to be the idea of human rights, which it identifies with Western power. So, if the Chinese ruling party became the most influential power worldwide, it would be a disaster for human rights.
The large majority of people in China support their government, unlike here. You have a very warped Ugly American view of the world. The U.S. is the evil empire on this planet, not China. To be clear, I oppose all large countries, they're all evil. But no one can compete with the U.S. for being evil at this time.
Both China and the USA are oligarchies and thus neither is good; the PEOPLE are another matter entirely. It's the power of money controlling the world - instead of good governance of by and for The People - that's the problem.
It's not just that they're oligarchies, though that's bad per se. It's that they're large. In order to be a large country, you have to subjugate and conquer many smaller societies and communities. Homogenization is bad per se, both in nature and in human societies. People should live in small groups, and their individual cultures should be allowed to be maintained. That doesn't mean that we all have to fight each other; instead, we can celebrate our diversity and differences.
Your first two sentences I find weird; all oligarchies are bad, and that they're large is almost immaterial; large size just illustrates our collective failure at dealing with a substantial issue before it became possibly impossible to fix, and amplifies our need to have a prompt and robust - and EFFECTIVE - response (and war isn't it).
I also have issue with your third sentence; India, especially BEFORE the British split the country of Muslim and Hindu, is a perfect counter example.
However, the rest of your comment is gold, thanks.
The U.S. is rather unique in that it expanded mostly because people wanted to come here, not because large numbers of people were subjugated.
I'm wondering if you could do some sort of internet crowd sourced development board for governing proposals/infrastructure projects and the like. For example if two of your small entities happen to have the same idea they want to put in play, say they both want to make a nature trail, they can corroborate on it so that the end of one joins up with the next and the rest areas are regularly spaced.
I'm thinking some misguided advertising wonk somewhere has got the perfect marketing campaign for 'The Most Evil Empire in the World' all cued up and ready to go, complete with the MGM musical number and is waiting for the phone call to roll it out that is never going to come while their colleagues are facepalming in nearby cubicles.
(Sorry a momentary lapse of silliness overtook me there - blame Monty Python)
Your assumption that products which prevail in current markets are automatically valuable and worth learning from is self-refuting. As you admit, what prevails in the market (practically stealing an entire generation, as you put it) is something like TikTok. But TikTok is an instrument of domination for those who ultimately want to get rid of markets. So, market success can't be the be-all end-all, since what succeeds in the market isn't even helpful to the market in the long run, and is also evil in other ways.
The fact that you praise Truth Social (which is so evil that it calls reposting someone else's post "retruthing") is one more thing making it hard to take your points seriously. I'm done with this conversation.
Yet, you have no problem with "tweeting"?
TikTok is basically cerebral crack.
Saying that Rumble should "succeed on its own merits" is nothing but establishment propaganda. The point here is that Google and other huge tech companies have stacked the deck against everyone else. A much better comment would be that Google should have to succeed on its own merits instead of doing illegitimate monopolistic things as charged in this lawsuit.
Every dominant player stacks the deck. 25 years ago, Microsoft was stacking the deck, by incorporating every innovation that came along into its Windows operating system, by making its Internet Explorer browser the default, and so on. 20 years before that, it was IBM. But today, M$ is an also-ran, IBM is practically out of business, and even some of the heavyweights of the past 5-6 years are stumbling (Facebook, Twitter, Netflix). I suspect some of these companies won't exist in 10 years, at least not in their present form. And eventually, something will come along to blow Tiktok out of the water.
In this atmosphere of destructive creativity, it's hard to predict, but based on past experience, the only constant is change, and innovation is key to survival. My gut feeling is that Rumble, being politically rather than technically motivated, will disappear eventually. Too bad for us conservatives, who are increasingly suppressed and silenced. But something will eventually come along that works for us. Or, I should say, that supports basic human rights such as freedom of speech.
The reason that every dominant entity stacks the deck is because we live in a society that places money above all else. In a decent society, no one would be allowed to stack the deck, and things like big tech would be owned by the government, i.e., us.
And BTW, it's not just conservatives who are silenced, it's anyone who goes against the establishment, the military/intelligence/industrial complex, or Corporate America. If your conservative views fit those of those entities, you are the opposite of silenced. True conservatives are silenced, because true conservatism means leaving things as they are unless there's a real need for change (leaving the natural world alone, for example).
This is a HUGE misread:
"The reason that every dominant entity stacks the deck is because we live in a society that places money above all else."
Instead what's happening is that TODAY people are under such HUGE financial stress and financial uncertainty, employment and otherwise, that we're, by and large, forced into extreme penny penching - and OF COURSE I'm talking about the bulk of the USA's population, even all the way up to the 99.8% or so. And yes, I know people in that upper level who express to me their anxiety: their employment is now precarious whereas they thought it wasn't when they made their own silly expenditures and now they're committed, and in the own minds, even though it's mostly silly, they're "broke." ...It's perception that drives penny-penching... NOT necessarily avarice. THAT you can ascribe to everyone in the top 0.01% for sure, and likely MOST in in the top 0.1%, but that's less certain.
The "bottom line" is that when people feel financially insecure they'll do almost anything to save money, even if it's long-term stupid and they know it.
Oh, the poor Americans; they can only have one SUV instead of three. Gimme a break! Have you ever seen how the rest of the world lives? No one obsesses on money and material things as much as Americans. You can make all the excuses you want, but they're all BS.
That is why there are terms such as relative poverty.
You probably don't hate Google enough, frankly.
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/googlegov-part-2
The coordination has always been obvious, but 'big tech' changing their lab leak policy the EXACT DAY that Biden says it is possible was always proof that they were acting in a political matter. Great article as always!!
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/googlegov-part-2
One easy -- at least on an iPhone or desktop -- little thing to do to tell it to the man is to change your default search engine.
Change it anything that's not Google. Bing is actually not that bad, albeit there are privacy concerns. I'm still recommending DuckDuckGo despite that fact that has rightfully got on many people's shit-list.
DuckDuckGo, which last I heard, is 1/50th the size of Google, finds my little site almost 20 times as often. See here: https://billlawrenceonline.com/why-we-cant-hate-duckduckgo/
If Google played fair -- and it doesn't with me for the usual reasons -- my site might actually be making money.
Hey Rumble, if you need/want my testimony let me know.
I started using DuckDuckGo years ago when I learned that Google spied on you and DuckDuckGo was a good alternative. Don't use Google for a search engine, and use Firefox for your browser.
I never saw the appeal of Google and never used it save for Gmail. I too switched to DuckDuckGo and Brave, as well as using Protonmail. Sadly, I fear most people are used to how gmail and Google products overall work and as a result, would not bother to change them if it would cause them a nuisance.
monopoly might be capitalistic, but its not free and fair market.
there are virtually no free markets anywhere except small niche areas. health care is also a rigged market with no competition between insurance and actual services. I'd like to see the show drop on that next. obamacare didnt create competition. It solidified the monopoly rigged cartel system. food is rigged. education is rigged. basically everything thats difficult to afford for average people is rigged by global corporate cartel systems.
even the two party political system is essentially a monopoly. you can choose shit stew or a crap sammich, but you're screwed either way. obamacare had the illusion of competition . you could choose from like two providers that both had the same crappy plans or the governments equally crappy plan. classic trust cartel system. same as the political parties. same for your electric provider or internet and phone.