Pro tip: DemocracyNow! transcribes their episodes, so you can find it like this in Google:
site:democracynow.org "the most important geopolitical threat facing the United States"
whatever that thing is. I have brightness low, night mode to avoid attracting bugs outside lmao
don't hold out on me I know you fuckers remember every show
No it didn't surprise me, just interested what they referred to. Obviously the "pineal podcaster" isn't super interesting. I am well acquainted with Mate I have argued with him about basic JFK facts 😂
That being said you need to read The CIA As Organized crime and take the compatible left argument seriously. Wasn't invented by infrahaz or taibbi, you have no excuse
oh god forbid i correct mate with something from a book i've read about jfk, i must be T E R M I N A L L Y O N L I N E, i respond to a large majority of the things i look at online when i look, i just don't sit around trying to be a semipro milquetoast anti-imperialist media consumer all day
maybe you should try actually reading "the CIA as organized crime" instead of going with your manichean good and evil view of reporters
Like let me put it this way before work - I'm always tired and high and shit, trying to piece together what's been happening on the left in america since 9/11.
There's so many complete losers still lurking around being like "OH I GUESS NOTHING IS EVER GOOD ENOUGH FOR ZOOMERS HUH???? HAVEN'T YOU BEEN OBSESSIVELY WATCHING DEMOCRACY NOW AND THE INTERCEPT AND ALL THE LASTEST PSYOPS FOR YEARS AND YEARS??!!!" - no I haven't that's why I'm not depressed and anxious. Ask yourself what the antiwar movement has to show for itself other than depression and anxiety. Protip: you can't.
yeah that's what I meant by the foreign policy realist take, exactly this kind of thing
okay "Venustum" it wasn't supposed to be affectionate, i don't have any problem with anyone either, i just try to adjust my tone to communicate efficiently in whatever online space im in
i need to condense these thoughts I have into a substack about Doug Valentine's books because it touches on a lot of stuff people on this website have experienced, so I don't have to make these comments over and over
I read lots of non-marxists and non-communists, like Adam Tooze
it's interesting to go back and look at how Valentine was able to actually get sources for his book and how different things are now - he calls out Hersh and others for stonewalling him HARDER THAN THE CIA because they had a relationship of patronage with them in exchange for information
one interesting point I've seen is the idea it's not even this strict kind of amplify/censor game (my adolescent privacy nerd conception of it) but fracturing reality on the left and making it impossible for anything other than socdemism to assert itself
propagandizing the people who do have a fair bit of education and other resources and free time (lol even include the twitch ipad kids/adult-children lol) and making sure they don't become little marxist theorists or collaborate too effectively on the internet only takes a tiny push with modern technology & everyone forced online & using recommendation systems. starbucks was almost able to illegally pull organizer text messages in a court case recently iirc and hired pinkertons and the cia.
Confusing basic ideas like neoliberalism being anti labor both at home and abroad is valuable to stymie organizing
most propaganda is bent towards people who are bought off in some way and reassures them they are doing everythinf fine and that's why it seem overtly repulsive and agitating to everyone else going to their service job or warehouse
I need to look more into where exactly the wealth trickles down in the core and isn't snatched up by the importers etc themselves, where the rents and debt cut into it (everywhere lol), i understand some jobs which are definitely not bourgeois labor and some which definitely are but my overall class analysis of american society is not well informed
more of a world systems/dependency theory (basically third worldism 😂) international financial plunder and war crimes fan + domestic surveillance & cointelpro & cop horror appreciator. and a basic organizing strategies guy. Actually once we fill in a little bit of glue we might have a cohesive guy, we'll see. anyways mental note to continue this with more class analysis and more prepared anecdotes from a possible rereading of Valentine's books - it's been like three years and i mostly just search quotes i remember
after 9/11 journalism has imploded even more and the idea of seeing the battlefield or interviewing cia officers and cross referencing what they say with south vietnamese cops who knew about phoenix is unthinkable
we only have whistleblowers now and we've seen what's happened to assange & manning etcetera - we are completely in the dark and can only go off inferences
sure also there's the whole digital side of it we've discussed to death and all experienced firsthand being banned from most sites at least once, digital blackmail probably makes obtaining informants and the like trivial
also you have platforms that are just engineered for brain disintegration lol like the way google pushes drama vlogging and facebook fucks with people
idk if CIA is that organized and present of mind in everything they do
wouldn't it be kind of fucked up if they managed to squash the left here by accident?? there's great and horrible friction in the events caused by US covertly like we have secretly backed rebels that provide reason for CENTCOM to come in, but it's not unintentional
the phoenix program is interesting too because of how mad the author is that his writing about the organizational structure got turned into sensationalism about the death squads - not to diminish how horrible that is at all, in fact because My Lai got treated with undue emphasis it softly concealed how phoenix involved doing my lais 24/7 as a way of dealing with people out of range of finer wetwork & espionage & mccarthyism (to be very rough here sorry im powerwalking)
