I’m sorry. I failed to understand how deeply the Western propaganda machine is embedded within all that we consider “news” and uncritically believed the AP article because it “seemed true” i.e. confirmed my biases.
Then I got pressed and malded in the comments, when called out.
Thank you for education me. I have some serious learning to do.
Special thanks (and apology) to @Awoo @kristina @American_Communist22 and everyone else who engaged with me over multiple comments. Sorry for being so thick-headed. I’ll do better in the future.
Reading it is the first thing I'll do. It's been recommended a lot in this thread.
I would very much recommend reading Parenti's Inventing Reality. It's dated but chock full of example after example of how our news gives the appearance of being uncritical while advancing the machinations of the ownership class. If you've paid any sort of attention to coverage of Bolivia or Venezuela the past few years you'll be blown away by how they keep getting away with the same techniques over and over again.
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media - this is an unofficial reprint someone is selling on amazon. I bought a copy and it's pretty decent. Just a few OCR related typos. The official used copies go for over a hundred sometimes so this is definitely worth it.
Or, if the seven seas is more your cup of tea
Also, the Blowback Podcast is pretty awesome.
I don't mean to derail the thread here, but I just finished Against Empire. Before that was BS&R as my first Parenti book. Would you recommend Inventing Reality next, or another one of his?
I didn't complete either book, but I think I liked Inventing Reality more. BS&R reads more like a polemic. It's good and brings a lot of common assumptions into question. Inventing Reality on the other hand really dives into how the sausage is made, who sits on the boards of which media companies, etc. Very fascinating and mindblowing shit.
I've listened to a lot of his lectures but only read BS&R and Inventing Reality so far. Inventing Reality is a must read though. I would definitely recommend it to libs over BS&R as well, simply because he's less more abashedly pro-USSR before already laying the groundwork for the bias of the media. BS&R first for baby leftists tho, as he addresses leftist anti-communism.
Btw, did you ever check out that Thomas Frank book? (I think it was you?😅)
Thanks for the lecture link! I've seen most of what is on YT, but some of these names are new to me!
And uhhh which Thomas Frank book? I just looked at his wikipedia page and don't remember talking about him at all, but my memory is also dogshit.
The book was Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?. it was about how the Democratic transformed into the neolib organization it is today?
It totally could have been someone else though as my memory is also a hot dumpster fire and I can't search the comments anymore.😅
Thomas Frank is a lib, but he is a fairly prescient lib getting this book published while everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to receive a coronation.
Fuck I was going to recommend Inventing Reality when talking to @LiberalSocialist but for the life of me I could not remember the name of it or the author for whatever reason, I was blanking out. Please do take this recommendation.
Thanks for the links. Reading it is the first thing I'll do. It's been recommended a lot in this thread.
You're welcome, it's really a great read overall. And really it just scratches the surface of what we have to watch out for nowadays. Pretty much all US news media regarding foreign conflicts is just copy pasted from State Department memos and most non-US western news media source a ton of CIA funded organizations. And then if we're not being gaslit by the CIA, it's the fucking billionaires. Fucking madness. :this-is-fine:
Have you tried having the correct opinions to begin with? (Like me)
But where do those correct opinions (or ideas) come from? Hmm maybe they fall out of the sky? I know, I think they are innate in the mind...
unlike you libs, as the One True Leftist :tm: i was born with all correct opinions
I’ve done it before. I was being an asshole and persistent about something stupid for no reason. And I was in the wrong.
This honestly is probably a more impressive act of public self crit than I would be capable of, gotta give you credit. Not that I'm just giving you credit because I gotta, you deserve it.
Just a heads up it won't ping @Awoo @kristina and @American_Communist22 in the post body it has to be in a comment but I'm sure they will appreciate the sincere apology. Good job on doin some self crit though.
:rosa-salute: thank you for the ping, I would indeed have missed this otherwise.
Some of our most powerful posters in the trenches to snuff out :brainworms:
:sankara-salute: Never stop explaining
you went from a Liberal to a Socialist
:07:
I have no idea about the context behind this post :blob-no-thoughts:
your translating work was instrumental, thank you 1000 times.
o7 we can’t expect to never get things wrong and especially in regards to an ongoing military conflict, but much respect for owning up to your mistaken understanding of the situation and deferring to your comrades with a better capacity to interpret primary sources.
This is nice to see.
I have some serious learning to do.
Do you want to talk about the HK riots, Uighurs, Syria, Libya, Iraq or Taiwan next?
Serious question. Given how that thread went I'm almost certain that there's going to be brainworms :brainworms: to figure out about these topics, and if you're genuinely interested in learning then these topics have been extremely well covered by the left in a way that liberal media will not have exposed you to at all. With the Ukraine situation it is still developing, and so what you're seeing with something like this child issue is a realtime scepticism response followed by research and investigation to find out what might be true vs what might be false.
We went through this with all the above topics. Most recently the Chinese ones of course. There is a wealth of learning to do about all of them that conflicts with the official narratives produced. I'm quite willing (and so are others) to get into anything when I know a person is actually receptive.
Uh so I’ll state my opinions on those topics and you can see where I’m at?
China - So I genuinely support the CPC and China and don’t think they would be perpetuating genocide or whatever. But, I’ll be honest, that belief is because they are a socialist country run by a communist party, not based on any reading I’ve done on the precise nature of the allegations in HK, Taiwan, Tibet, or Xinjiang. If you can provide some sources for that, I’ll happily read them. For China news I usually just go to CGTN, Xinhua, Sixth Tone etc. but I’m not more iffy on Global Times or SCMP.
Middle East - I’m 100% against US/Western invasion or intervention, even if I find people like Saddam, Gaddafi, and Assad to be disgusting and horrific. But, I guess that means I do fall for Western atrocity propaganda when I read news about these places?
Thinking about it, I guess my blind spot kicks in depending on whether the place/leader is socialist/communist or not. If they are, then I ignore or don’t believe Western media about them. But if they aren’t (as is the case with all Middle Eastern leaders today) I’ll believe what I read even if I don’t advocate for the policies the West uses to deal with them (sanctions, invasion etc). I’ve realised this is the wrong way to go about it because this just means I shy away from actually analysing the source. I…rarely try to do that.
Like, you didn’t mention it, but with the recent protests in Iran. I’m inclined to support the protestors. I see the videos constantly on Tiktok and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. I consider those videos different from reading about the news in the BBC etc. where they advocate for more sanctions. The videos are more raw and real and show the genuine anger and emotion of the people, not the cynical opportunism of western pundits in their war against Iran. That leaves me in an awkward spot sometimes when I’m talking to people because it’s not like I support the Iranian regime which I get accused off but I do support it against Western intervention, but I also support the protesters in demanding an end to their ultra-conservative/religious ideology, but I don’t support the protesters when they demand for a more western-aligned and neoliberal regime. It’s confusing.
If you are anti-war, everyone you know, even western "leftists" will accuse you of loving dictators.
You kinda get used to it.
Huh you're a new type of person to me, less liberal than I thought.
Like, you didn’t mention it, but with the recent protests in Iran. I’m inclined to support the protestors. I see the videos constantly on Tiktok and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. I consider those videos different from reading about the news in the BBC etc.
Ok so, Iran let's start there. This one's a currently developing situation so I won't say that I'm completely settled on it yet but I think there's many red flags to be aware of. I am pretty concerned that this looks like a western colour revolution.
Middle East - I’m 100% against US/Western invasion or intervention, even if I find people like Saddam, Gaddafi, and Assad to be disgusting and horrific. But, I guess that means I do fall for Western atrocity propaganda when I read news about these places?
I think if you're a supporter of socialism then there may be some things to learn in this area. How much do you know about Ba'athism and Arab Socialism ? And on the topic of Gaddafi, how much do you know about his interpretations of socialism and his Third International Theory ?
I'm reading through these right now and realizing that my whole life is a fucking lie.
One thing that pops up frequently is "class collaboration" rather than "class struggle". It seems they are anti-West, but they're also pro-nationalism and Islam, which isn't a bad thing, obviously, at least until it leads to them denouncing Marxism as atheistic and turns their criticism of capitalism from one rooted in its contradictions, to a more "moralistic" critique and advocacy for a return to a more "simpler" system.
But, I don't really care if we disagree on how to bring about socialism, if what you end up doing is stuff like this:
Gaddafi's domestic popularity stemmed from his overthrow of the monarchy, his removal of the Italian settlers and both American and British air bases from Libyan territory, and his redistribution of the country's land on a more equitable basis.[474] Supporters praised Gaddafi's administration for the creation of an almost classless society through domestic reform.[475] They stressed the regime's achievements in combating homelessness, ensuring access to food and safe drinking water, and to dramatic improvements in education; under Gaddafi, literacy rates rose significantly, and all education to university level was free.[475] Gaddafi's Great Man-Made River is the world's largest irrigation project.[476] Supporters have also applauded achievements in medical care, praising the universal free healthcare provided under the Gaddafist administration, with diseases like cholera and typhoid being contained and life expectancy raised.
It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.
Right you're starting to see just why the west hated these people so much now. They weren't perfect socialists, not from our perspective, but they had a sort of leftism that is actually worth understanding under the material conditions that they were under. With this perspective it then brings about a completely new lens through which to view actions that were depicted as "barbaric" and actions that you may have previously just been led to believe were because these were bad evil people hell bent on power for no reason whatsoever other than being bad evil people.
Now, are some of the things they've done criticisable? Almost certainly. But a different lens is required with a much fairer, more educated and analytical perspective. The western media has deliberately miseducated as to who these people were and what they sought to do.
I will never forget for example this post Parenti made when Libya fell. What did nato bring to Libya with the US backed regime change? Literal slave markets re-opened and the country has been a disaster ever since.
- Libya had no external debt and its reserves amounted to $150 billion - which are now frozen globally
Hmm. Seeing a pattern in which countries the US/NATO decides to fuck with ...
Thanks! I made a post just now asking about China’s economy, actually. Would you have some sources for that?
The Nayirah testimony stuff is very frightening to me. It’s just such a cynical manipulation of our common human urge to empathise and it puts every victim statement into question. Just heartbreaking.
everyone on this website (and everyone in the world) likes the things that confirm their biases.
