JOHNSTONE

So this is just a quick, friendly reminder while all this Ukraine stuff is happening that the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim, and that any claim that has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. This applies to individuals, and it most certainly applies to untrustworthy governments as well.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Joe Rogan/Spotify controversy is still going on and has only gotten more vitriolic and intense. Claims that Spotify must walk away from its $200 million contract with the world's most popular podcaster for promoting vaccine misinformation have sparked a lot of debates about freedom of speech, online censorship, what exactly those terms mean, and whether they can be correctly applied to the practice of Silicon Valley deplatforming.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I'm highlighting this deranged behavior not to defend the odious Carlson, but to point out that it works very much in the US empire's favor to have a bunch of influential narrative managers aggressively manufacturing the consensus that anyone who criticizes America's posture toward Russia is suspicious and untrustworthy.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It takes a touch of madness to take seriously the possibility that your entire society is insane.

That's why devoted critics of the oligarchic empire are often a bit odd; something in them was driven to wade into waters that most people aren't psychologically prepared to enter.

It's not that questioning the status quo is madness; just the opposite: it's that "Maybe everything I've been taught is a lie and everyone I know is wrong and all the information I'm getting is designed to serve the powerful?" isn't the sort of question you tend to ask when everything's going your way. If you had a happy idyllic childhood where mummy and daddy loved you very much and have lived a life where things generally go okay for you, you'll likely be psychologically stable, but you're a lot less likely to go "Hey wait a minute—maybe all of this is bullshit!" That type of insight tends to fall to those who are just a hair off-kilter.

So here's to all you heroic lunatics, waking the world up one pair of eyelids at a time. The smileyface gear-turners might scoff at you right now, but the world needs you, not them.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Biden says "everything south of the Mexican border is America's front yard." Jen Psaki says Eastern Europe is "our eastern flank". The US government firmly believes its territorial borders extend to the outer planets in our solar system.

Reading by Tim Foley.

People don't generally leave abusive relationships in egoically satisfying, Hollywood-friendly ways. 

I point this out because those of us who are watching the people's abusive relationship with predatory power structures and hoping for revolutionary change often tend to envision the status quo ending in an epic way that will make for a good story and let us feel good about ourselves and how right we were. And that just isn't how these things tend to go.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Free speech matters because dissent from the status quo is how the status quo gets changed. If voices which oppose the status quo are consistently denied access to mainstream platforms and are algorithmically suppressed online, they're unable to change the status quo. They don't have free speech in any meaningful sense, because they're actively obstructed from using free speech to do what free speech is supposed to do: challenge existing consensus, norms, systems, and power structures.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Far more consequential than overt censorship of individuals is censorship by algorithm. No individual being silenced does as much real-world damage to free expression and free thought as the way ideas and information which aren't authorized by the powerful are being actively hidden from public view, while material which serves the interests of the powerful is the first thing they see in their search results. It ensures that public consciousness remains chained to the establishment narrative matrix. 

It doesn't matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you speak. Even in the most overtly totalitarian regimes on earth you can say whatever you want alone in a soundproof room.

That's the biggest loophole the so-called free democracies of the western world have found in their quest to regulate online speech. By allowing these monopolistic megacorporations to become the sources everyone goes to for information (and even actively helping them along that path as in for example Google's research grants from the CIA and NSA), it's possible to tweak algorithms in such a way that dissident information exists online, but nobody ever sees it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Major western news publications are running a story about a sinister plot by the Russian government, and — you may want to sit down for this — the sources of the report are anonymous, and the evidence for it is secret.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Ukrainian-born MSNBC favorite Alexander Vindman, best known for his role in the Trump impeachment, has informed the network's viewership that we are almost certainly on the cusp of a war with Russia comparable to World War II.

Reading by Tim Foley.