More Dangerous Than The Authority To Outlaw Hate Speech Is The Authority To Define Hate Speech

Racket  |  It’s become axiomatic that the United States “lags far behind” Europe when it comes to hate speech law. Everyone from Joe Biden to would-be disinformation Czarina Nina Jankowicz to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger have suggested the United States needs to move more in Europe’s direction, toward stricter rules and “illegal hate speech,” which “you will have soon also in the U.S.,” as European Commission Vice President for Values Vera Jourova put it at the Davos conference this year.

It makes sense. After all, who’s for hate speech? What possible downside can there be to disallowing expressions of racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, transphobia?

C.J. Hopkins can answer that. Following a similar case involving Roger Waters, the American playwright, Substack contributor, and editor of Consent Factory has been placed under investigation by a Berlin prosecutor for tweeting an image of his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. 

I first read C.J. at the outset of the Russiagate scandal, when from the amusing Statler-and-Waldorf remove of expat life he wrote witty columns about how far off the rocker America had fallen. A terrific comic prose stylist, he ripped our culture for obsessing over “Putin-Nazis,” noting the new Russophobia was just “a minor variation on the original War on Terror narrative we’ve been indoctrinated with since 2001.” These columns are worth a re-read. C.J. was ahead of me, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, and others in seeing how Trump-era propaganda campaigns deranged the population.

We had uncomfortable correspondence after Covid-19 hit, when I wasn’t so sure we were dealing with the same kinds of official lies this time, and worried about the wisdom, say, of writing “pandemic” in quotation marks. I rolled my eyes when I saw him cite an old quote from Hermann Goering, saying, “All you have to do is tell [people] they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” But he placed it astride this real quote from California State Senator Richard Pan, about “anti-vaxxers”:

These extremists have not yet been held accountable, so they continue to escalate violence against the body public… We must now summon the political will to demand that domestic terrorists face consequences for their words and actions.

In hindsight it’s incredible how many of us swallowed the notion that people who didn’t take the shot were “terrorists,” and needed the incentive of ever-harsher “consequences” to repent of their “violence.” That this was more religious movement than science was hard for some to see at the time. The tell eventually was that none of the messaging relented when details about the inefficacies of the vaccines came to light. Only a few were willing to say anything about this. C.J. was one, and even if you don’t agree with all he says — style-wise he often conducts literary operations miles behind hyperbolic lines — he said a great many things that were true and needed hearing. Now, he’s looking at charges for doing so.

One thing The New Normal Reich is not is a celebration of Nazi imagery. Hopkins is taking current governments around the world that used the pandemic to assert sweeping power and comparing them to Nazi rule. Here’s an example, from a column called “The Germans are Back!” in November 2020:

On November 18, the German parliament passed a new law, revising the so-called “Infection Protection Act” (“Das Infektionsschutzgesetz” in German), that formally granted the government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wants under the guise of protecting the public health…

Now, this revised “Infection Protection Act…” is not in any way comparable to the “Enabling Act of 1933,” which formally granted the Nazi government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wanted under the guise of remedying the distress of the people. Yes, I realize that sounds quite similar, but, according to the government and the German media, there is absolutely no equivalence whatsoever, and anyone who even suggests there is… “a neo-Nazi conspiracy theorist” ... or whatever.

In no way does this kind of passage “further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” It compares the current German government to Nazi Germany. The current German government in turn is openly validating that comparison by criminally investigating C.J. for the critique.

What’s more dangerous than outlawing hate speech? Giving someone the authority to define hate speech. Germany has already jailed one lockdown critic (Michael Ballweg, arrested in a dubious fraud case), while microbiologist Sucharit Bhakdi was taken to trial — acquitted, but still — for describing Israel as worse than Nazi Germany. The Roger Waters case investigates clearly satirical imagery. Set all those cases aside, however. C.J.’s situation is, openly, a case of a government seeking to criminalize criticism of itself, the dumbest and least defensible version of censorship possible. At the very least, other writers should be taking his side, and journalists should bring this case up anytime anyone even thinks about claming the United States is “lagging” behind Europe on the speech-law front. I spoke with Hopkins about his situation:

 

The Curious Phenomenon Of Mexican And South Asian Neo-Nazis...,

richardhanania  |  Ron: That’s very interesting, Marius. But I’d like to go back to the strangeness of this group and their complaints. When you’re talking about crime and the destruction of our great cities, aren’t you really talking about, well, since you like the euphemism of “Foundational American,” I’ll call them “1619 Americans”…

Brahmin: In a way, yes, but preserving the Foundational American stock is important. Whenever there is diversity, you see division, chaos, bloodshed. That’s the rule here, that’s the rule everywhere. Have you ever read Precambrian Pederast? He taught us about all that is wrong with this disgusting era. Ethnic homogeneity must be preserved, above all else.

Ron: That certainly doesn’t seem to be the rule here. Today, I live in the Bay Area. California is a majority-minority state. And yet we see very little of the violence you fear. In 1970, California was 76% white. It’s now 35% white. You know what’s happened to the murder rate in that time? It’s been cut by two-thirds! As far as racial strife, you may have seen recent news stories about the California reparations commission and San Francisco wanting to offer blacks ungodly amounts of money to compensate them for past and present racism. The Bay Area is like 8% black, they’re the smallest population of the major American “races.” Yet if you follow racial issues in the state, if you went into a coma in the late 1960s and woke up in 2020, you would be amazed at how little had changed. Well, pronouns and that stuff would be new. But on race, you have income and test score disparities, crime that we can’t be honest about, so-called “police brutality.” Only if anything, California is a lot more peaceful due to the demographic change you all decry so much…

Allison: But they vote, Ron! Who gave us these crazy policies?

Ron: I won’t dispute that Hispanic and Asian immigrants tend to vote Democrat. But look at it another way. Republicans in 2016 nominated the guy whose main message was “Mexicans are rapists.” In 2020, he still won 40% of them. Can you imagine if Republicans could actually pretend to like these people? Italians ended up pretty evenly divided between the two parties, and even Jews are headed in the conservative direction thanks to differential birth rates. I see no reason why there’s some impossible barrier to overcome between Mestizos and white Americans. I mean look at this room…

[In addition to the clearly swarthy Romero and Brahmin, at least a third of the room looks to be of either Hispanic or South Asian descent.]

Ron: You doubt that you can have a multiracial country? You all have built a multiracial movement based on the idea of maintaining racial purity. Don’t check your phones, you might see another alert of a Neo-Nazi Mexican mass shooter, there have been a few of those lately, and a right-wing Indian just tried to kill Biden I believe. Remember not that long ago when there was a mass shooting, and everyone would either hope it was a right-wing white male or a Muslim, depending on their politics? Well, now we have the brown white supremacist, which right-wingers on Twitter tell me can’t possibly exist, even though it’s like half their movement now.

When was the last time you even heard of Muslim terrorism? Is a brown mass shooter these days more likely to be a Muslim extremist or someone whose brain has been melted by the online right? This question would’ve been laughable a few years ago, and I guess it’s still laughable now, but for a different reason.

And the funniest part is that I suspect that all of this results from a fear of talking about what is arguably the main issue at the heart of the American experiment. That’s right, it’s the weird, sadomasochistic relationship between whites and blacks that was so well dramatized by Tom Wolfe when he was alive. Oh sure, you guys talk about race and crime. But it seems like you need your “racism” to be more inclusive. You need to pretend to exclude everyone, because it seems more consistent with universalist principles. “We just want to preserve the demographic majority, the same right that anyone else has. Oh, it’s not any particular group that’s the problem, it’s the principle of diversity. Can’t we just have a world where every nation is homogenous to the greatest extent possible and then we can all get along?”

[At this point I burst out laughing]

Me: Ron, so wait, what you’re saying is that when we see a Klansman walking around in a hood and screaming about defending the white race, we should pity him for how much his mind has been captured by political correctness? That’s quite a funny image, in fact, it alone has made my night here worthwhile.

Ron: Indeed, Richard, that is what I’m saying. And these poor kids worried about the future of the American right, are digging their own grave, because, guess what? The die has been cast, and we’re headed to a non-white majority. And so conservatism is shaping up to be a movement that represents a coalition of overweight rural whites from left behind areas of the country and short Mestizos, all crying about the passing of whiteness and also about how much the country sucks because everyone is so fat. This probably isn’t a winning message. Of course, there’s overwhelming public support for clamping down on crime and making institutions color-blind, or, as you would put it, going after civil rights law. This is what turned whites towards the Republican Party in the first place, or the disgusting ways in which white elites have let our cities be destroyed and gone to war with every American principle — merit, freedom of speech, rule of law, you name it — in the name of anti-racism.

But instead of focusing on those things and fixing the country, the American right has decided to get distracted by doubling down on becoming a movement of brown white nationalists, in a country where the majority of children born are already non-white.

[At this point, I can feel the energy go out of the room. A few of the attendees pick at one or another of Ron’s points, but they’re clearly deflated and realize that he has given them a lot to think about. An hour and a half later, he is driving me home.]

Me: Wow, Ron, that was something else. I really wish you would’ve elaborated on the vaccine thing a little bit more. Their desire to “own the libs” has really swallowed every other part of their brain, even though they like to think they’re more sophisticated than regular conservatives, and I appreciated you recently taking apart some of the most ridiculous claims of the anti-vaxxers.

Ron: Thank you, Richard. We’ll have to do this again some time.

Me: Oh yeah, I had a lot of fun. What do you think you should try to convince people of next time?

Ron: I believe that covid-19 has a non-zoonotic origin.

Me: So lab leak? That’s it? That’s very mainstream at this point, it’s impossible to find a right-winger who doesn’t believe that this was all the fault of the Chinese.

Ron: Who said anything about the Chinese?

Me: Wait, is this another one of your anti-American conspiracy theories? You’re now going to tell me that the US government accidentally inflicted covid on the world?

Ron: Who said anything about it being an accident?

Me: Please stop Ron, there are only so many mind-blowing ideas I can digest in one night. Let’s talk about the pleasant California weather for the rest of our trip, and how nice it is to live in a state with such natural beauty and low levels of violent crime.

Dressing the Reich: The Fear and Elegance in Nazi Uniforms

iu.edu  |  The omission of clothing from historians’ discussion of the effect of Nazi propaganda is not by accident. It was Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ Reich Minister of Propaganda, who famously said, “Propaganda becomes ineffective the moment we become aware of it.” The power in the uniform therein lies in its silence. The uniform is not a poster, a film, or a speech, but a silent, omnipresent actor that, like these media, is a piece of the Nazi propaganda machine. Goebbels’ quote perfectly encapsulates the propagandistic impact of the uniforms worn during the time of the Third Reich. Consequently, Nazi dress and regalia are not the most talked about aspects of the Nazis’ propaganda machine, but more than likely, the least touched upon.

Regardless of silence and scarcity in conversation however, Nazi uniforms may have been the most effective for the very reason that Goebbels outlined: German citizens, enemies of the Nazi regime and foreigners alike were unaware that the Nazis they viewed were walking advertisements for the Reich. These uniforms may have been mute, but they constantly operated in service of the regime through their utilisation of both style and menace.

Uniforms, which have come to be known as one of the most visually-striking elements of Nazi aesthetics, served as one of the principal vectors of propaganda in the Third Reich. In biology, a vector is an organism, typically of the biting sort, that transfers a disease from one being to another– Nazi uniforms did just that. However, instead of fleas transferring the plague, the Nazis used clothing to present propaganda that conveyed their message of racial dominance and militarism without uttering a word. Uniforms operated as an arm of the Nazi ideals of Volksgemeinschaft, in English, a people’s community and Gleichschaltung, the idea of bringing everything in line with the values of national socialism. The Nazi uniform aided in the destruction of personal identity and smoothed out the differences between German citizens thereby constructing both an egalitarian and passive society.

The main question of this paper is: how did the Nazi Party use its uniforms to exude elegance whilst eliciting fear in order to further its ideology into the minds of wearers, viewers and enemies? In other words, how was the uniform a piece of propaganda? I will argue that the  Nazis used uniforms to produce a fashionable aesthetic to serve as another arm of the Third Reich’s propaganda machine– specifically, through the stark uniform that so occupies our memory of the image of the Nazis. I will look at the structure and implementation of the Nazi uniform and how it pertained to the promotion of the ideals of the Reich. By then using primary sources from vantage points, the perception and effect of these uniforms can be analysed and their propagandistic effect better understood.

This paper arises out of my own interests in the ability fashion to speak. A natural reaction of impressedness from seeing images of Nazi men clad in strong and svelte clothing forced me to recognise this regalia as different from ordinary uniforms. In other words these were the propagandistic impacts of Nazi fashion, generated from viewing images of Nazi elites and soldiers, felt decades after their design to have just that effect. I was interested in separating the crimes of the Third Reich and understanding how the regime’s look could be evil, investigating whether the fear we associate with the Nazi uniform was an intention in design, or a function of the crimes committed by the Nazis. Did the Nazi uniform have a unique look for its time? Would an allied uniform look ‘evil’ if it was placed into the context of crimes such as the Holocaust? This question can be answered through the juxtaposition of the uniform against those of concurrent, non-German armies and peoples. Isolating an intention to create a uniform that functioned in such a multifaceted way spurred an interest within me to explore the possible depth of the Nazi uniform.

What I believe makes this paper special is that it explores an important and relevant topic: the usage of inanimate and non-vocal (through sound, text or image) techniques to disseminate information. My hope is that this paper will enlighten the reader to look more critically at the ability of potential actors at play in the political sphere. When it comes to gaining and maintaining power, anything can be in service of a regime– including fashion.

20th Century Fascism As Type Formations

johnganz  |  A little while ago, I came up with the idea that that the difference between Italian Fascism and German Nazism was that Fascism essentially had “Jock-Douche” vibes while Nazism had “Creep-Loser” vibes. Now, I’m going to try to develop this fancy into a full-blown (or rather, half-baked) theory.

“But, John, this is absurd,” you might immediately object, “How can you reduce an entire political ideology to categories drawn from American high school movies.” Well, try to think of them as ideal-types like the sociologist Max Weber developed. Here’s what Weber wrote of his ideal-type methodology: “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those onesidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct...” That is to say, they are sort of made up. Still, I believe that this theory, while it does not pretend to be a definitive explanation, may help to illuminate aspects of the far right today.

The Categories Considered in their Ideal-Typical Formation

First, some preliminary definitions. The Jock-Douche ideal-type proceeds in the world with confidence and the presumption of immediate physical domination, while the Creep-Loser ideal-type has been thwarted some way and is therefore reflective, and is resentful, a plotter, a schemer, and a fantasist dreaming up grand historical vistas of triumph or doom. Again, keep in mind these are purely ideal-types. Rarely does an individual totally embody either one or the other idea. One could speculate that in many cases the superficial confidence of the Jock-Douche type is merely psychological compensation for the feelings of inadequacy of the Creep-Loser. On the converse, the intellectual limitations of the Jock-Douche type leads to an imaginative perspective that cannot escape the relatively crude thought-world of Nerd-dom. Considered from either an existential or psychoanalytic lens, it seems likely that these two are actual facets of single complex or form of being-in-the-world, manifested in different ways under different circumstances. Fascism as its own ideal-type can be understood as a synthesis between the Jock-Douche and the Creep-Loser: a cult of sheer physical of strength and action wedded to a wounded and brooding consciousness of impotence and humiliation.

I should address the specifically national character of the division proposed here, that Italian Fascism and German Nazism represent two different affective dimensions of the fascist consciousness or self. Again, this is purely ideal-typical: both movements and nationalities naturally contain examples of the opposite tendency, but for the sake of illustration it is convenient to divide them in this manner. I also believe one finds that these two different spirits do actually predominate more or less in these respective national movements. Now, one might object here that making a division according to national origin recapitulates the very sort of national or even racial essentialism of fascist ideology itself, and that I am stereotyping Italians as impulsive, hot-blooded, and unintellectual while painting Germans, from “the land of poets and thinkers,” as either speculative dreamers or ratiocinators. I would just say to that to a large degree that these different modes of behavior and thinking are representations and projections of fascists’ own fantasies about their national qualities.

The Categories Expressed in Historical Examples

The most obvious representation of the Jock-Douche and Creep-Loser duality is in the leadership of the respective movements: Benito Mussolini vs. Adolf Hitler. Mussolini was socially successful, a popular and esteemed figure in the Italian socialist party. In fact, his turn to nationalism and war-mongering can be considered as a result of the desire for continued popularity, or even identification with popular enthusiasm as such, when his initial pacifist line as editor of the socialist newspaper failed to capture the national imagination.

The turn to war-making and nationalism also appealed to Mussolini’s belief in a mystique of violence and action, leavened by his interest in Georges Sorel’s irrationalism and political vitalism. Here’s how a fellow socialist described him in 1914: “Nothing matters to him now except to win. What matters is to triumph over timidity, fear and prudence which impede and arrest the revolutionary advance of the proletariat.” And Mussolini adulated the proletariat, not so much for its Marxist-assigned historical role of overthrowing the capitalist mode of production, but for its heroism, masculinity and toughness. Mussolini’s he-man histrionics as fascist leader, the jaw-jutting and arm crossing etc. project this pure masculinity. And although he was an intellectual, his statements reflect a proud and defiant anti-intellectualism. Speaking of an anti-fascist newspaper, Mussolini famously remarked, “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our programme? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” In other words, bullying brought to the level of political theory.

On the other hand, Hitler was a loser. A marginal type in post-war Munich, he was a failure at his chosen vocation as artist. In an unintentionally revealing passage in Mein Kampf, Hitler describes how he was bullied and chased away from a construction job by union organizers. The fact this probably never happened in reality is all the more revealing: it reveals an essential fantasy at play. Mein Kampf itself is the ranting and grandiose fantasies of an embittered man, which provided a good deal of its rhetorical appeal to other members of his pseudo-intellectual milieu, the “intellectual precariat of bohemians and academic dropouts, throwing together various elements that they have found in the neurotic overproduction of private mythologies” as Albert Koschorke describes them in his essay on Mein Kampf.

Even the most casual observer of Nazism has no doubt noted the absurd difference in Hitler’s actual meager appearance and silly histrionics with his professed Aryan ideal. This feature extends across the Nazi leadership, and is especially notable in the figure of Heinrich Himmler. Himmler’s unassuming appearance betrays his essential difference from the mob figures of the early Nazi party, men like the predatory bully Ernst Röhm. He was a petit bourgeois philistine preoccupied with eugenic fantasies drawn from his time as a chicken farmer. He also believed himself to be the reincarnation of an ancient Aryan king.

 

No Nazis, No Hypersonics, Move Along Nothing To See Over Here...,

thelastamericanvagabond  |  For those who have not closed their eyes to the integration of leading unreconstructed Nazis, Italian Fascist, and Japanese fascists into the Anglo-American intelligence complex after World War Two this celebration is bitter sweet to say the least.

In West Germany, the head of Nazi intelligence, Reinhardt Gehlen, was given a new job by Allan Dulles as the head of West German intelligence under CIA control.

As Cynthia Chung demonstrated in her book The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set, between 1958-1973, every single head of NATO’s central European command were former Nazi SS officers. And as Swiss historian Daniele Ganser demonstrated in his NATO’s Secret Armies, the Cold War served as the excuse to build a vast paramilitary complex using fascists from Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, and Germany in order to carry out a multi-faceted war on the people of Europe through the organization of terrorist organizations like The Red Brigade and the targeting assassinations of nationalist leaders unwilling to adapt to a new depopulation-oriented world order.

Sadly, this devil’s pact was not something that simply occurred in the wild days of the Cold War, but continues virulently to this day on a number of levels.

Modern Nazi Revivalist Movements

For example, modern expressions of fascism can be seen in the renewal of swastika-tattooed, black sun of the occult loving, wolfsangel-wearing Azov, C14, Svoboda and Aidar neo-Nazis in Ukraine today, on top of a whole re-writing of WWII history which has taken an accelerated dive into unreality during the 30 years since the Soviet Union collapsed.

Across the spectrum of post Warsaw Pact members absorbed into NATO, such as Lithuania, Estonia, Albania, Slovakia, and Latvia, Nazi collaborators of WWII have been glorified with statues, public plaques, monuments, and even schools, parks, and streets named after Nazis. Celebrating Nazi collaborators while tearing down pro-Soviet monuments has nearly become a pre-condition for any nation wishing to join NATO.

In Estonia, which joined NATO in 2004, the defense ministry-funded Erna Society has celebrated the Nazi Erna Saboteur group that worked with the Waffen SS in WWII with the Erna advance Guard being raised to official national heroes. In Albania, Prime Minister Edi Rama rehabilitated Nazi collaborator Midhat Frasheri, who deported thousands of Kosovo Jews to death camps.

In Lithuania, the pro-Nazi Lithuanian Activist Front leader Juozas Lukša who carried out atrocities in Kaunas was honored as a national hero by an act of Parliament which passed a resolution dubbing “the year 2021 as the year of Juozas Luksa-Daumantas”. In Slovakia, the ‘Our Slovakia Peoples Party’ led by neo-Nazi Marián Kotleba moved from the fringe to mainstream wining 10% of parliamentary seats in 2019.

Finland has become a new member of NATO which will possibly be joined by Sweden, both of whom share deep unresolved pro-Nazi traditions which are slowly coming to the surface once more as I outlined in Nazi Skeletons in Finland and Sweden’s Closets.

Across the ‘free and democratic’ Trans-Atlantic community, euthanasia programs are coming online at a startlingly fast pace with ever increasing access to ‘mature minors’, disabled citizens struggling with depression and other non-fatal illnesses. In the USA, Biden’s healthcare reforms have revived Hitler’s Tiergarten-4 ‘useless eater elimination’ program imposing cost-benefit accounting onto lives not worthy of being lived.

Eugenics has become once more a governing pseudo science of a fascist elite class of social engineers seeking to breed out undesired traits in the population while reducing the overall population levels to manageable numbers — using the same formulas adopted by Hitler and his collaborators in the 1930s -1940s.

The fact is that a certain something wasn’t resolved on the 9th of May, 1945 which has a lot to do with the slow re-emergence of a new form of fascism during the second half of the 20th century and the renewed danger of a global dictatorship which the world faces again today.

 

Before There Can Be A Revoution There Must First Be A Revolution Between The Ears

Consciousness reflects–and goes towards further influencing–the material underpinnings of the system in which it is situated. U$A is rapidly trending in a sharply authoritarian direction because the structural contradictions of capitalism can only be effectively addressed by the 1% via domestic austerity, increased repression (suppression of information, outright dismantling of supposed rule-of-law mechanisms, etc.), and accelerating militarism and war. 

We are not approaching a crisis–we are in one. It was remarked to me years ago, there is a death wish at the core of capitalism. It’s 50/50 whether it’s more insane or evil, but both characterizations fit increasingly generalized events like the expulsion of legislators in Tennessee, the outright bribery of Supreme Court “justices,” and as always, the ability of the biggest banks to wallow outright in their corruption. 

We live in interesting times. To the extent it is a spectator sport, we can only expect this plunge to continue and intensify. There is no “technical fix” to a system that is irrational and self-destructive–as someone remarked long ago, we will be its undertakers or ourselves be interred by its collapse.

From ChatGPT: Propaganda methods are techniques used to manipulate information, ideas, and opinions to influence and control people’s behavior. Here are some common propaganda methods:

• Name-calling: This is a technique used to create negative associations by using negative labels or name-calling to discredit a person, group, or idea. 

• Testimonials: This is a technique used to build credibility by using endorsements or testimonials from respected people or authorities.

• Bandwagon: This is a technique used to create a sense of social pressure or conformity by suggesting that “everyone else is doing it,” or that it is the popular or accepted choice.

• Emotional appeals: This is a technique used to appeal to people’s emotions rather than reason, often by using vivid imagery, personal anecdotes, or appealing to people’s fears or desires.

• Glittering generalities: This is a technique used to create positive associations by using vague or undefined terms that sound good but have no real meaning.

• Simplification: This is a technique used to oversimplify complex issues, often by reducing them to simple slogans or catchphrases.

• False or misleading information: This is a technique used to manipulate information or present false or misleading information as fact to support a particular point of view.

• Scapegoating: This is a technique used to blame a particular person or group for a problem or issue, often unfairly, to distract attention from the real causes. 
  

I foresee a future in which it is simultaneously claimed that AI is sentient for marketing purposes but lacks sentience for legal purposes.  This is the way that Corporations have been given legal rights amounting to Corporate personhood but without the possibility of sending the Corporate person to prison no matter how many people the Corporation kills.

If You Don't Like The Status Quo You Have No One To Vote For - Just People To Vote Against

neuburger  |  To answer that question seriously, consider the following premises. I think the first four accurately describe the thinking of mainstream Democratic leaders since the humiliating presidential loss of 2016:

1. Modern Republicans (leaders, media, and crucially, their voters as well) represent the worst threat to the American Republic since the Civil War.

   1. Or possibly since the Founding. Southern Confederates didn’t wish to institute Hitlerian reforms that would eliminate democracy from the governance of the state.

2. Any act by any individual or organization that advances the overall Republican Project, inadvertently or not, is as dangerous as the Project itself.

3. Because the Republican Project is evil, its supporters are evil — or in the most generous cases, deeply stupid.

4. Stopping the Republican Project means stopping all supporters and adherents, be they willing or not.

5. (Taibbi addendum 1) Matt Taibbi is a supporter, willingly or not, and therefore must be stopped.

6. (Taibbi addendum 2) Because his support is probably not inadvertent — Seder’s hosts and the Democratic committee members are certain his motive is money, a sell-out to advance Elon Musk — destruction of his entire career is a reasonable response. After all, the whole of American democracy is at risk; literally all.

I don’t think any of those statements, stark as they are, misrepresent the Democratic Party position. Everything I’ve observed since November 2016 confirms them all.

The Problem in a Nutshell

Statement 1 could well be true. I believe it myself, though about the leadership only. (I have other thoughts about Republican voters.)

But does the rest follow from that? Does it justify the destruction of free speech, to take one example, in order to preserve it? (If you doubt that’s what’s on offer, click the link.)

And even if it does, even if the means are justified by the end, the problem is that this Democratic Party response — this hate-Republicans-at-all-costs messaging (while party leaders themselves cut deals with them) — is not going to work. It won't blast them past their electoral opponents at near the speed it ought to, given their opponent's obvious and fatal flaws.

Mainstream Democrats run roughly even with Republicans except in protected districts. They certainly ran roughly even with Donald Trump in the only venue that counts, the Electoral College. And Democratic leaders are the reason that this is so. Will all this vitriol make them more attractive, or less?

If you don’t like the status quo, you have no one to vote for, just people to vote against.

What do you think would happen if Democrats ran a candidate of Real Rebellion, a Bernie Sanders, say, à la 2016, against the candidate of Pretending to Care what happens to suffering voters? Would real rebellion against predatory rule by the rich “trump” fake rebellion financed by the rich?

Of course it would. Sanders would have beaten Trump soundly, had he had the chance, in the 2016 race. All the momentum was his, and he won almost every head-to-head primary contest in states with open, same-day primary voting.

But Democrats, the other party of the rich, won’t take that course. Which leaves them only one pitch. In Taibbi’s language from the start of this piece:

It’s always “Vote for us or you’re a right-wing insurrectionist Putin-lover,” which is the opposite of persuasive.

This is the Democrats’ constant closing argument, and the worst they could advance. It makes them, not just wrong, but ugly as well, the “opposite of persuasive.” Yet this is all they have, if they can’t themselves attack the people’s real enemy, and this time actually mean it. Sad for us. Sad for them as well.

 

The U.S. And Canada Will Sue And Sanction Mexico For Taking Care Of Mexicans

NC  |  But all of that changed when AMLO came to power in late 2018. For the first time in 30 years Mexico had a government that was not only determined to halt the privatisation and liberalisation of Mexico’s energy market but to begin dialling it back. Allegations of corrupt practices and price gouging by Iberdrola and other energy companies became a popular talking point at AMLO’s morning press conferences. The juicy contracts began drying up. Instead, a range of obstacles began forming, from disconnections to nonrenewal of permits and fines for price gouging.

The times of plenty had come to an end. And not a moment too soon.

At the rate things were going, the CFE would be generating just 15% of Mexico’s electricity by the end of this decade, says Ángel Barreras Puga, a professor of engineering at the University of Queretero; the rest would be generated exclusively by private, foreign companies.

“Who was going to control prices in the market? Foreign companies, with all that entails. Behind the foreign companies are their national governments. And we have seen how the US government, the US Ambassador and US legislators came to Mexico to try to pressure AMLO to change his policies. Ultimately, they are all lobbyists of private companies.”

There are few better examples of this than US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar, as Ken Hackbarth reported for Jacobin at the time of Sakazar’s appointment in 2021:

Upon leaving (the US Interior Department] in 2013, Salazar went through the revolving door to work for WilmerHale, a law and lobbying firm with close ties to the Trump family, whose roster drilling- and mining-related clients included none other than — you guessed it — BP. From his lucrative new perch in the private sector, Salazar used his clout to support the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Protocol (TPP), whose “investor-state” provisions would let corporations challenge environmental regulations in private tribunals; fought against ballot initiatives that would limit fracking and distance oil wells from buildings and bodies of water; opposed climate lawsuits against the fossil fuel sector; and, in a highly questionable skirting of ethics rules, provided legal counsel to the same company, Anadarko Petroleum, that benefitted on multiple occasions from his stint in government…

The fact of sending an oil and gas lobbyist to lecture Mexico on renewable energy — one, moreover, representing an administration that just opened 80 million acres for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and is approving drilling permits on public lands at a faster rate than Trump — would be comical if it were not so revealing of the ugly underbelly of US-Mexico relations.

More to Come?

The AMLO-Iberdrola deal has raised concerns in business circles that other foreign energy companies could face a similar fate as the Spanish utility, as AMLO government pushes to expand the state’s role in the energy sector. Bloomberg describes it as a warning shot for international energy companies.

“The choice of words and messages is deliberate,” said John Padilla, managing director of energy consultancy IPD Latin America, adding that such moves could be intentionally sending a warning to foreign companies amid protracted trade disputes with the USA on energy policy. “The main message for private sector investors, at least on the electricity side, is certainly not a good one.”

Mexico’s nationalist energy policies have already stoked the ire of its North American trade partners, Canada and the US, which argue that they violate the USMCA regional trade agreement by discriminating against Canadian and US companies. As Reuters reported a week ago, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is considering making a “final offer” to Mexico negotiators to open its markets and agree to some increased oversight.

Failing that, USTR will initiate a dispute settlement against its southern neighbour. If the panel rules against Mexico and the Mexican government refuses to rectify its behaviour, Washington and Ottawa could impose billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs on Mexican goods.

Tablet Calls The American "Disinformation Regime" The Hoax Of The Century

tablet  |  It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”

Even trenchant critics of the phenomenon—including Taibbi and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jeff Gerth, who recently published a dissection of the press’s role in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion claims—have focused on the media’s failures, a framing largely shared by conservative publications, which treat disinformation as an issue of partisan censorship bias. But while there’s no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it’s also a convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

The first phase of the information war was marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation. But the next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.

Less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times published an important article titled “The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.” The essay’s author, Times staff writer and Yale Law School graduate Emily Bazelon, argued that the United States was “in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation” that she compares to the “catastrophic” health effects of the novel coronavirus. She quotes from a book by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley and linguist David Beaver: “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.”

So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself—specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. This view may be jarring to people who are still attached to the American heritage of liberty and self-government, but it has become the official policy of the country’s ruling party and much of the American intelligentsia.

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy’s demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists—a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.

A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the “infodemic,” we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.

 

The American Political World Revolves Around Banksters And Their Money

realclearwire  |  One thing is clear. At $319 billion and counting, the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank alone in the last two weeks are already on par with the entire 2008 financial crisis, which saw 25 banks failing, with $373 billion in combined assets. And with $620 billion of unrealized losses that triggered this crisis still pending, we may be just getting started.

What path policymakers will choose this time around is unclear. The country has never been more evenly split politically. Meanwhile, the regulatory system has attempted to stem the tide without the involvement of Congress or the White House. A political reconciliation, in other words, has been deferred.

Political issues come and go, but financial panics create political movements because they hit Americans directly, in their bank accounts. Voters pay attention.

The movement that results from this panic will depend ultimately on whom voters blame for it. That scapegoat, whether real or imagined, will determine where on the political spectrum the movement leans.

Many Americans continue to identify government itself as the top non-economic issue they face. Inflation, a problem created by government, is their top economic problem. Most Americans believe the federal government is too big and doing too much. In places like real-life Indiana, Pennsylvania or fictional Beaver Falls, it is abundantly clear that Americans have lost faith in their leading institutions.

“You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money,” George Bailey tells his antagonist in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Bailey was referring to the machinations of a powerful banker, but his words are fitting in an unintended sense, too: in American politics, realignments begin because the world revolves around voters and their money.

Journalists Lock Horns With State Sponsored Thought Police In Congress

zerohedge  |  As one might expect, the Judiciary hearing on the "weaponization" of federal agencies, featuring Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as witnesses was full of fireworks, facts, and ad hominem friction.

Out of the gate, Ranking Member Democratic Del. Stacey E. Plaskett labeled the two "so-called journalists" as dangerous and a "threat" to former Twitter employees.

She claimed that Republicans brought "two of Elon Musk's ‘public scribes'" in "to release cherry-picked out-of-context emails and screenshots designed to promote his chosen narrative - Elon Musk’s chosen narrative - that is now being parroted by the Republicans" for political gain.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say you have called two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Plaskett said after the video.

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, had a simple response to her accusations:

“It’s crazy what you were just saying.”

“You don’t want people to see what happened,” Jordan continued.

“The full video, transparency. You don’t want that, and you don’t want two journalists who have been named personally by the Biden administration, the FTC in a letter. They say they’re here to help and tell their story, and frankly, I think they’re brave individuals for being willing to come after being named in a letter from the Biden FTC.”

Taibbi snapped back...

As Glenn Greenwald chimed in from Twitter: "To Democrats, "journalist" means: one who mindlessly and loyally endorses DNC talking points. "

Unshaken, Matt Taibbi continued, when he was allowed to respond, laid out what he and Shellenberger had found in their research of The Twitter Files:

“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said.

“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”

Taibbi pointedly added that “effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system."

“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”

Democrats only response to Taibbi and Shellenberger's facts was to get personal...

The full hearing can be viewed below:

As we detailed earlier, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government today. Both journalists were involved in the 'Twitter Files' disclosures, in which we learned that the government was directly involved in censoring disfavorable speech.

"Our findings are shocking," writes Shellenberger at his blog. "A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it."

Ahead of the appearance, Taibbi released his prepared remarks. He also dropped a new and related Twitter Files mega-thread on 'THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX' which will be submitted to the Congressional record which, according to Taibbi, 'contains some surprises.'

Mainstream Interpretation Of The Whitehouse National Cybersecurity Strategy

Wired  |  In the endless fight to improve cybersecurity and encourage investment in digital defenses, some experts have a controversial suggestion. They say the only way to make companies take it seriously is to create real economic incentives—by making them legally liable if they have not taken adequate steps to secure their products and infrastructure. The last thing anyone wants is more liability, so the idea has never exploded in popularity, but a national cybersecurity strategy from the White House this week is giving the concept a prominent boost.

The long-awaited document proposes stronger cybersecurity protections and regulations for critical infrastructure, an expanded program to disrupt cybercriminal activity, and a focus on global cooperation. Many of these priorities are widely accepted and build on national strategies put out by past US administrations. But the Biden strategy expands significantly on the question of liability.

“We must begin to shift liability onto those entities that fail to take reasonable precautions to secure their software while recognizing that even the most advanced software security programs cannot prevent all vulnerabilities,” it says. “Companies that make software must have the freedom to innovate, but they must also be held liable when they fail to live up to the duty of care they owe consumers, businesses, or critical infrastructure providers.”

Publicizing the strategy is a way of making the White House's priorities clear, but it does not in itself mean that Congress will pass legislation to enact specific policies. With the release of the document, the Biden administration seems focused on promoting discussion about how to better handle liability as well as raising awareness about the stakes for individual Americans.

“Today, across the public and private sectors, we tend to devolve responsibility for cyber risk downwards. We ask individuals, small businesses, and local governments to shoulder a significant burden for defending us all. This isn’t just unfair, it’s ineffective,” acting national cyber director Kemba Walden told reporters on Thursday. “The biggest, most capable, and best-positioned actors in our digital ecosystem can and should shoulder a greater share of the burden for managing cyber risk and keeping us all safe. This strategy asks more of industry, but also commits more from the federal government.”

Jen Easterly, director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, had a similar sentiment for an audience at Carnegie Mellon University earlier this week. “We often blame a company today that has a security breach because they didn’t patch a known vulnerability,” she said. “What about the manufacturer that produced the technology that required too many patches in the first place?”

The goal of shifting liability to large companies has certainly started a conversation, but all eyes are on the question of whether it will actually result in change. Chris Wysopal, founder and CTO of the application security firm Veracode, provided input to the Office of the National Cyber Director for the White House strategy.

“Regulation in this area is going to be complicated and tricky, but it can be powerful if done appropriately,” he says. Wysopal likens the concept of security liability laws to environmental regulations. “You can’t simply pollute and walk away; businesses will need to be prepared to clean up their mess.”