Lordre: journalism

Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts

Five reasons Imran Khan will return to lead Pakistan

There are good reasons to believe the unfairly removed Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, will achieve political victory and be able to lead the country again.

#1 All opponents gather together

Because they conspired to create the current government, any blame for shortcomings in government policy will fall on all of Imran Khan's opponents in a single blow to them all, creating the distinct impression that Imran Khan is the only alternative to their rule. This may turn Imran Khan into a far more powerful figure than he already was, as the people will see him as a force equal to all his enemies. The anti-PTI parties may be perceived as one entity and be ineffective at competing with each other as if they have independent visions, because they may all be perceived to share blame for the country's problems equally following Imran Khan's removal. The 'imported' government are simply the same group responsible for decades of mishandling the economy and are likely to only worsen life across the nation, discrediting any claim that they needed to remove Imran Khan to save the economy.

#2 Imran Khan's popularity

Despite efforts to tarnish his character on an international level, Imran Khan has remained popular within Pakistan. Pakistan's people don't seem susceptible to the influence of the international media, which labours to discredit Imran Khan. People get their information from each other, which causes smear campaigns to be less effective against an honest leader. This seriously complicates the efforts of the new authorities, because they desperately needed to perform a character assassination on Imran Khan and seem to be clueless about how to achieve this. Instead, we could see Imran Khan become even more popular.

#3 Reversed US coups are a thing

US coups have been reversed quite effectively in other parts of the world. Foreign propaganda campaigns and repressive rule have proved ineffective against mass movements in countries such as Brazil and Bolivia. In Brazil, former president Lula da Silva was impeached and jailed and his successor Dilma Rousseff faced impeachment as well. However, Lula is now free once again and is making a successful political comeback, being expected to return to power and replace Jair Bolsonaro in the October election. In Bolivia, despite a US-encouraged coup against him that created a floundering puppet regime for a single year, Evo Morales' popular Movement for Socialism returned to power. As such, even if Imran Khan is jailed on some false charge, this will only be a temporary setback for his movement. In such an event, people will contrast his behaviour with his opponents fleeing abroad when under investigation. If he were to stay in Pakistan against all pressure, this could only make him appear to be a more patriotic and righteous person. Despite whatever hardships he and his movement may be put under, his return to power and his reversal of the US-led regime change is an eminently realistic and likely outcome based on precedents in other countries.

#4 US impatience

The US helped Imran Khan's opponents into power with a goal to get specific policies enacted in Islamabad that are against the nation's interests. These policies are actually foolish and unlikely to be implemented even by the usurper government. The hope to separate Pakistan from China in the economic and military spheres is likely to be at the top of the wish list of US diplomats, but will never be implemented as the cooperation of Islamabad and Beijing is likely too advanced at this point. As a result, the US will only increase pressure once again on the current authorities in a vain attempt to get the results they want. This will ultimately empower Imran Khan, who will be in a position to simultaneously show the current authorities as ineffective at maintaining relations with the US, while at the same time being the US's corrupt puppets. The usurping authorities will appear to be corrupt and incompetent even at their one purpose of serving the US's will.

#5 Instability

A lack of acceptance of the perceived usurpers is widespread. The resulting weak mandate to rule will result in an inability to effectively handle or be perceived to handle internal and external security threats. If any kind of violence or terrorism grows, perhaps encouraged by the ongoing political crisis, the dubious legitimacy of the regime itself will be first thing to be blamed for any ineffectiveness on the part of authorities. This will intensify any such crisis, perhaps also causing the Army to lose confidence in this regime and creating the possibility that they will prefer the return of Imran Khan.

With patience, it is likely that Imran Khan and his party will return to power. Bumbling conspirators and corrupt leaders may destroy themselves. They will to fail to satisfy anyone, abroad and at home, and it is possible that conniving elements of the establishment will realise that going against the people's will was impractical and destabilising even for their own interests.

Social media is central to many people's lives. It is increasingly a focal place for political expression, too, with many having no means of doing so other than social media. However, there are reasons to think humanity is better off without it.

Stop (most) fake news

It is likely true that lies spread faster than truth on social media. Social media users are able to lean on one another as sources of information rather than going to official sources that at least have some (albeit not always) reputation to maintain for accuracy. Random people you meet on the internet are under no pressure to be accurate or reliable. In addition, mainstream news sources are able to get away with more fakes with the help of social media, since it allows to creation of media that can be quickly deleted and swept under the rug when it is not convenient, or followed up with haphazard apologies.

Improve mental health

There is adequate reason to think getting rid of social media would decrease mental illness and especially suicide among young people. Such a move would be a problem for some though, and result in them being more isolated. However, those isolated people would just be fringe minority communities who naturally are isolated anyway. If the majority at risk, their welfare has to always be addressed before that of any minority.

Reduce political interference

Dismantling social networks would remove a threat to governments by unpredictable and profit-driven actors. It would remove the ability for foreign governments where the social media companies are located, mainly the United States, to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Likewise, it would allay Western fears of election interference by Russia and China, which are continuously voiced by politicians and journalists.

Improve political discourse

Social media may be ruining political discourse simply due to the way it works. Whether you are a conspiracy theorist or someone who just relies on mainstream media, you are similarly being duped by an industry that focuses on the endless, mindless consumption of news under a model intended for entertainment, rather than stopping to analyse or understand the world.

Of course, it is highly unlikely that social media will be eliminated for the reasons above, because it is too lucrative to the companies involved and the politicians they influence. Nevertheless, governments should certainly create options to get rid of it in the least disruptive way, in the interests of preparation against foreign interference. How to effectively do this will eventually be the subject of another post.

In a way, accusing the other side of weaponising all sorts of things is itself an attempt to weaponise those things. By saying others are weaponising information, for example, as the Guardian does, you are basically turning information sources into targets for military action.

Or, you are telling people to close their ears to other sources and listen instead to you. You are taking the war to the information sphere and telling your audience to fight for you by only listening to you, thereby unnecessarily militarising and weaponising this sphere. You were the one who adopted the idea that making people hold specific beliefs is a military objective you want met, and declared this view publicly. Others may just have welcomed a healthy debate, with every point, from the most banal to the most diabolic, open for consideration. So, who really weaponised something?

Pandemic of censorship

In a 2020 exchange of ideas, the Mont Order information-sharing society agreed that “The way content related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been controlled is a potential gateway to increasingly aggressive censorship by Western governments”. This referred to the handling of medical disinformation, which can indeed be fatal, but later, disputed political information was increasingly being dealt with in the same way.

The Mont Order prediction seemed to come true later, when all dissenting sources on the Ukraine conflict were being treated as enemy operators rather than legitimate participants in a debate. Virtually every statement critical of the West and NATO was also suddenly treated as the statement of none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself. The accepted idea became that everyone must promote a single narrative on any controversial issue, and all dissent must be dealt with like enemy shellfire, and silenced immediately.

Attention given to the idea of Russia spreading propaganda, and a lack of grasp of what propaganda is (other than that it is enemy information and therefore bad), has likely made many people in the West incapable of spotting a lot of very obvious and shoddy propaganda from the West itself. The cliché that the other side only produces propaganda and its claims can all be dismissed (even if true) is a huge accomplishment in propaganda. Inconvenient information is to be dismissed without consideration and even any source dismissed as an enemy agent, regardless of where it is located or its prior reputation. Everything becomes ad hominem attacks and shooting the messenger (in Ukraine itself, that probably is happening literally).

Being right doesn't mean being correct

Control of all publicly-consumed information works well for winning information wars where the goal is to convince the people of something, but it does not create informed experts. It is not hard to guess that Western journalists and politicians are themselves consuming dubious information, confusing a sense of righteousness for accuracy (the word "right" being the same word used to describe things that are morally encouraged or factually correct is a source of confusion, maybe). A rational person, meanwhile, concedes that our own regimes and the small, narrow blob of familiar corporate sponsors in the West could be motivated to spread their own fakes and propaganda.

In some ways, the discouragement of anything contrary to the single supreme narrative on a given controversy makes the West every bit as vulnerable to mindless propaganda as the most totalitarian societies in history. At worst, it means the very foundations of our supposed Western civilisation are just fakes and falsehoods, devoid of substance. We do not enjoy liberty, and lack access to the truth.

Weaponisation of TikTokers and YouTubers

The Biden administration actually intervened to convince TikTok creators to help it convince users of its position on the fighting in Ukraine. To the US government, everything is a weapon, and its foreign policy goals need to be achieved using every ethical and unethical method it can find.

It can seem as if genuine grassroots voices are rising up to support Ukraine's apparently morally just cause on YouTube, unanimously siding with the West and the supposed universal decency it represents when it comes to conflicts. The reality, though, is that even this behaviour is explained more by these people's reliance on a single platform aligned with the West and the sanctions it uses to control content creators. Creators want to stay in good standing with the platform, and this has more to do with what they say than any genuine moral stance on anything.

The sanctioned point of view

If we focus on YouTube's weaponisation, it is not hard to notice that content (even from entertainers) praising Ukraine or NATO in the ongoing conflict in Europe retains its monetisation (ads still play), in addition to which pro-Ukraine ads are allowed all over the site itself, despite this cause being ethically dirty and politically aligned in a violent conflict (revenue is blocked for video content on other conflicts). This tells us two things. First, that YouTube's management are guided by agents of the US government when it comes to foreign policy (certainly, Google is). Second, that the users creating the content had some kind of advance knowledge of the measures in place to reward or punish people depending on what conclusions their videos endorsed regarding the Ukraine conflict. With such factors in force, how likely is a content creator to arrive at balanced conclusions on the war in Ukraine? Basically, they have been given financial incentives to promote a specific view in their videos.

Clearly, the same narrow group of people who have sway over Western regimes and are able to treat politicians to all kinds of carrots and sticks are doing the same with even small content creators online. Consequently, what appears to be mass support popping up for a cause is always more likely to just be financially motivated and originating from a very narrow source.

To display a Ukrainian flag at one's church, or on one's car or social media profile, is not an autonomous action by people. Nobody was really moved by what they saw in Ukraine or in any other foreign conflict, but by sanctions, i.e. a cycle of reward and punishment by the powerful, which is the basis of all Western policy and morality. The resulting activity supporting the state's policies is subtly state-controlled. One way or another, incentives are created by the state and influence operations take place, in an effort to weaponise everything and everyone to sanitise and prop up an otherwise dubious and dirty policy of inflaming a foreign conflict.

Bill Gates seems to have developed an obsession with the conspiracy theories about him, while doing nothing to address them. His own obsession now goes far enough that everyone can be forgiven for taking an interest in those theories, too.

Back at the start of this month, Gates objected to Elon Musk’s desire to ease the moderation policies on Twitter. He seemed to be specifically pleading for his own protection from conspiracy theorists who propagate claims regarding his bizarre continuous attempts to involve himself in health policy, with which this billionaire software designer has no expertise.

Bill Gates' conspiracy theory obsession

Bill Gates asked of Musk, “How does he feel about something that says ‘vaccines kill people’ or that ‘Bill Gates is tracking people?’”, which is telling. This reveals that Gates’ main concern about medical disinformation and malpractice is all about himself. For him, it is not about whether members of the public have access to the accurate and diverse sources of information they deserve or their understanding of science is boosted. He has shown no interest in that issue.

On Saturday, a very unfavourable hashtag was trending on Twitter about Bill Gates.

As an entrepreneur, Bill Gates should take note. Now, as always, he is at the mercy of consumers. Demanding harsh control over what opinions those consumers can express among themselves, when the entire capitalist model depends on them making choices, is folly for one whose career success was based on the consumer's whims.

Bill Gates' scientism

To be on the wrong side of millions of people is dangerous. To cultishly repeat that being on the side of science is best, in the face of millions of worried people, is a disservice to science. It creates the impression that the natural sciences have carved in stone unchanging answers fundamental questions, and have now developed some social role to compel society into obedience, which is hardly a service to scientific inquiry or the public perception of science. Scientists are not parental figures and nannies, and no credible scientist ever assigned himself such a role. They do not compel the public to do anything, as society only ever consented to give them the role of investigators and sources of counsel. Right now, scientists are aware of many things that compromise people's health, and they do nothing about them, because that is not their purpose, which is only to inform.

Bill Gates’ condescending attitude puts him at risk of the millions of unscientific people he feels it is safe to mock, and who may eventually take worse action than yelling at him. Conspiracy theorists may seem like a laughing matter to those who know better than them, but the ones doing the mocking should take a look at what conspiracy theorists have actually done throughout history. It is not a pretty thing, to be in their sights.

Conspiracy theories are no laughing matter

Conspiracy theories are not new, or an internet phenomenon. Before the internet, they were conveyed in pamphlets. Historically, they are linked to eventual justifications for massacres and the rise of extreme ideologies, as most genocides and civil wars feature them as a key part in the formation of the prerequisite extreme views. They are possibly the single most radicalising phenomenon, not just in modern extremism but in history's most extreme revolutionary violence and massacres. As such, the current approach of denigrating conspiracy theorists and dismissing them as incompetent, even as they come to encompass half the population in places like the United States, presents a grave danger.

Most people would be very worried for their safety if they were accused of the diabolical things that Bill Gates is being accused of. However, this man seems to expect so little initiative from the people who accuse him of murder, that he is completely unconcerned.

Gates' persistent mockery of the fears of a growing number of people across the world, and continued involvement in health policy despite unnerving so many people, actually suggests he has a personality that is bizarre and maybe sociopathic (unable to empathise with or understand the fear he creates). This is a factor that likely only increases many people’s discomfort with him. Many people likely sense stench about him, and it is why they buy into paranoid claims about him.

If conspiracy theorists are mistaken, Bill Gates' best way of correcting the problem is still to withdraw from all his involvement or interest in health policy, as a way to reassure people, and apologise for the fears he created. This would actually do more to encourage vaccines than all his previous involvement in promoting them to date.

How Bill Gates can help

Bill Gates’ story is one of success with consumers. He should take note of his benefactors, and be aware that upsetting them and provoking them can have consequences just as as significant for his life as creating products for them.

Eventually, the crowds must be placated rather than dismissed, even if it means diminishing the authority of capable meritocrats and their role in society. Otherwise, uncontrollable and murderous crowds are inevitable.

Part of the role of leaders is to actually have the trust of society. If half the population really begins to believe Bill Gates is a murderer and a monster, this means that his most stabilising role in society is actually to keep his mouth shut and fade from public view, as would suit public safety and his own safety.

Popular billionaire tycoon Elon Musk has been the target of sexual harassment allegations reminiscent of those against Donald Trump, including the familiar claim of paying for an individual’s silence.

Such claims against Musk are carried by journalists, and occurred at a time when he was clashing with the very same journalistic community about freedom of speech. This indicates that what is happening is a smear campaign, likely by elements associated with the Democratic Party in the United States

Journalists lie

Journalists and mainstream media outlets cannot be trusted. They are able to lie, and then later retract their claims and apologise when the damage is done, thereby continuing to maintain their supposed reputation for journalistic integrity. This 'oops' model of disinformation means that none of the current headlines can be taken seriously, since every point they make may simply be retracted quietly later.

It is entirely possible that some months after all the damage is done, it will quietly emerge that Elon Musk didn't do anything. One could point to Musk's ability to sue for defamation, but this can neither undo the damage to him, nor necessarily cause damage to the business of the offending publication or network.

It could alternatively be the case that Elon Musk’s transgressions are true, but that they are true of virtually all celebrities of similar status in the US. It may be that journalists just use this as a way of attacking the person if they become a political enemy. There seems to be virtually no high-profile individual, especially a political target, in the United States. who doesn't eventually get accused of something grave.

Non sequitur in the free speech debate

Finally, people should bear in mind that Elon Musk’s personal character has little to do with his disputes with journalists and management at Twitter after securing a deal to buy the company. It does nothing to discredit his views of journalistic and online freedoms, any more than spurious and eventually withdrawn rape allegations discredited Julian Assange's journalistic work.

If you are seeing a lot of stories saying something bad about China in your news feed, don’t bother clicking on any of them. They are all paid for by the US government.

Last year, the US government allocated a quarter of a trillion dollars from its budget to simply stifling China, all out of resentment at that country’s competition with the United States.

Since that time, the US government allocated half a billion dollars specifically to negative news coverage of China, with or without any relationship to the truth.

Whether it relates to the pandemic, to the situation in Xinjiang, to the Solomon Islands, to Taiwan, or whatever else, every negative story about China may as well have been spotted being printed at a US government office. It all ought to be rejected as rubbish, without us even looking at it.

Racist state propaganda

The stories about China are despicable and racist in character, and have likely contributed to soaring anti-Asian hate crime in the United States. This rivals how the establishment press cultivated Islamophobia during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is as if, even as it condemns racism, the warmongering armada we call the "West" bumps into civilisations and races it deems inferior, declaring war on them one after the other. However, each and every case it attempts to build against these victims consists of lies and recycled canards of past centuries, including vile rumours that the supposedly inferior races are the source of plagues.

Sponsoring conflicts on rivals' borders

The US is actively pursuing a policy to aggravate all conflict with China, under the same model as it did against Russia in Ukraine, where it fanned the flames of war on the Russian periphery for no purpose other than creating endless security threats to a "rival". That model is applied, in almost exactly the same way, with regard to Taiwan. There is clearly a strategy to drag China down into misery and conflict, out of resentment at its development.

Fortunately for the Russians and Chinese, the US and Britain seem to be acting on a very tight schedule, attempting a Herculean task of trying to defeat all the rival states across the world in the course of only a few years, beginning with the strongest - Russia and China. Whether this will be more successful than the failed attempts to bring down Iran, North Korea, Cuba and even the Taliban, is yet to be seen.

With the creation of the so-called Disinformation Governance Board in the United States, let us recall how social networks betrayed their purpose.

They tried to pry open your eyes and set them back to looking at the old faces that formerly monopolised your television screen, rather than letting you select your own information sources. Those other information sources are to be buried, suppressed, cancelled.

The very appeal of social media from day one was that it contained user-generated content, not approved by the establishment. That very feature, the central appeal of social media, is now berated as some sort of bug. It is "disinformation", now sidelined by the platforms, in deference to the content produced for television networks, as if all of Twitter is meant to be a substitute for the television screen.

The spread of “disinformation”, first and foremost conspiracy theories, was presented as an extraordinary evil that descended upon us like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky, in 2016 and then during the pandemic when it arguably had the potential to do harm.

In reality, nonsense conspiracy theories were abundant on the internet ever since it began, and possibly even worse prior to 2016, when it only began to upset the wrong people, because it might have slightly affected the results of a US presidential election. They had no care for people believing false realities until it affected their power in some way.

Journalists and politicians have spectacularly managed to fool many users into believing that the very things they were looking for on the internet - those alternative views and products that grew after people became hostile to the mainstream - are actually some new inconvenience to the users. According to them, we must now suppose, the internet was actually just meant to be television 2.0, with the same ugly talking heads of authority speaking via it, telling us what opinions are acceptable. Why ever did we need to listen to normal or random people on the internet, when we could focus solely on the special people with crumpled foreheads and lucrative sponsors to tell us what to think?

Of course, in reality, people fled those rich journalists and talking heads to the internet because they were sick of them, and wanted rid of the mainstream media. They wandered the desert, searching for an oasis where people spoke their mind rather than a paid agenda.

Unfortunately, the journalists followed the audiences that had fled them, until they finally appeared on social networks and began to receive blue tick marks and favourable treatment. They pursued their desire to recapture their captive audience, to firmly strap the television sets back onto the audience’s heads and prevent them from escaping again like runaway beasts.

In short, once upon a time, realising what a parasite and a villain the modern “journalist” was, people fled to the internet. The mocking forms of “alternative media” and lackadaisical memes were born. People created their own news and conspiracy theories, and derided the establishment. However, like monsters, the mainstream media followed, transforming social media into but another television screen, and now they have you back in their clutches again.

Julian Assange is expected to be extradited soon, once the order is approved.

At the same time, the loyalist war hysteria related to the fighting in Ukraine dominates what is left of a supposedly free press. It should be noted that while Assange faces punishment, the journalists presented as legitimate by governments and the media are increasingly deranged and embrace violence, wishing all manner of censorship, adversity and even death on people who disagree with them.

Dominant discourse

Most of the labelled “independent media” appears to be falsely labelled thus, and a majority of “journalists” seem not to be journalists but in fact vile combatants, who would deserve no protection internationally and in fact their death or absence would have no effect on people’s access to truth, and may even be met with cheer. The same cannot be said of the victim of the state, Assange, whose very punishment is the result of him increasing people’s access to truth (that much is not denied even by governments themselves, which hold it against him, preferring instead scribblers who parrot their justifications for increased murder and misery).

One can only hope things are not so bad.

Hysterical responses to the Solomon Islands signing a security agreement with China reveal hypocrisy over the Ukraine crisis of 2014 and subsequent conflict of 2022.

NATO’s Secretary General stated that the defining struggle in the world has become one of big powers forcing smaller powers to serve their interests, or letting them choose their own path, arguing that the Western alliance group is firmly in favour of free choice.

The argument was clear: Russia was behaving very irregularly and violating national sovereignty, by expecting to have any say on hostile troop deployments into countries adjacent to it.

Nothing At All Treaty Organisation

Unfortunately for NATO, such firm principles for which the world's most powerful military alliance stood were inadvertently denounced and shown to be utter nonsense by NATO countries. As soon as the Solomon Islands chose to align with China on its own free will, the US issued warnings of unspecified consequences. Therefore, it became suddenly unacceptable for nations to align in any way against others.

The hypocrisy on display now proves that the attempt of NATO governments to stand and fight for any set of principles at all could not last much more than a couple of months. This powerful alliance is proved to not stand for anything, much as the US’s own ideology is confused and America immediately steps on its own commitments like rakes, as soon as it tries to lay them down.

Menaces to democracy

The Solomon Islands may have chosen to side with China entirely of its own free will. Ukraine, in contrast, only sought alignment with NATO and the EU after extensive interference in its internal affairs and a violent takeover supervised by Western officials in 2014.

The Solomon Islands is now to be portrayed as some sort of threat to democracy, merely by the fact it is inconvenient to the West (i.e. "democracy"). In reality, the country is a democracy threatened by coercive Western powers that clearly have no interest in the wishes of the people.

One would be wise to expect fake mass protests sponsored and led from US diplomatic buildings in the Solomon Islands, covered by all the cable news channels and praised by them. In addition, expect any scale of bribery and attempts to subvert the wishes of the people of that land, perhaps in the months or even weeks to come.

Elon Musk seeks to own Twitter and make it a platform for free speech around the world. This certainly is not its reputation at the moment, although it seemed like it in the past.

Many of us (especially if we are at least 30 or older) remember a time when the internet was an experiment in anarchy, rather than a prison of control. It easily seems natural to us that the current extent of control and filtering of content on social networks is just an unwelcome anomaly in what should be the course of human progress to greater liberty and exposure.

Contrary to my wishes, as well as Elon Musk's, Noughties-style online freedom probably isn't really our destiny but just a historical blip. History indicates that any technologically-endowed freedom is likely to only ever be a fleeting thing before some authorities reassert the primacy of the law, but that pattern is a topic for another day.

Restoring Trump?

The political right has rallied around Musk's attempts to take over Twitter. They seem to see a way to get their beloved Donald Trump’s account restored, after so-called "Big Tech" exercised its power in favour of the Democratic Party by suspending his Twitter account towards the end of the 2020 US presidential election.

Whatever happens to Twitter is likely to serve interest groups in the United States, first and foremost the government itself. Although it likely remains the world's most politically influential website or application, Twitter has become little more than a channel for amplifying and rewarding views approved by or entirely constructed by United States government bodies. With time, it has increasingly aligned with the US government on every issue and teamed up against regimes the US is targeting.

It has reached a point now that, if any other country is as vigilant as the United States about guarding against foreign political interference, such a country will ban Twitter without hesitation.

A dead end

Although Musk's ownership of Twitter may be beneficial to independent media and dissident voices, Twitter is dead. Despite retaining its influence as nothing more than inertia from a prior model under which it succeeded, almost all media stories that succeed there now are artificially boosted by the platform, and are from nauseatingly familiar sources.

Twitter is now little more than an aggregator for common American cable news channels, showcasing the content of such channels as its main attraction, as a way of recapturing the audiences that fled them and suppressing or banning other content wherever possible. Twitter may have, actually, been infiltrated by and bent to the will of journalists hellbent on restoring Iraq War-era levels of manipulation of the public.

The best Elon Musk ought to do is sabotage what Twitter has become, if he can, but the tech companies will never tolerate the return to the wilderness the internet once was. Immediately after Musk unblocks and unbans any content, there will be pressure on the app stores to remove Twitter. Following this, the platform will be effectively destroyed and fade into obscurity.

To set in motion the destruction of Twitter would wipe a stain from the internet, and be a huge favour from Elon Musk if it is achieved. Twitter, like most social networks, is no longer of any benefit to society or human relationships, being a false afterimage of former creativity.

Keir Starmer recently pointed out that Boris Johnson is a liar and has broken the law, pitching himself once again as a more moral character, an alternative to Johnson.

This seems to be Starmer’s main platform now. He is not Boris Johnson, in the same way Biden’s platform was to not be Donald Trump. It represents, in some ways, our descent as a country into American levels of immaturity.

Protesting too much

Starmer does not commit himself to anything and has broken his pledges. He is in some ways worse than Boris Johnson, because he refuses to apologise or acknowledge any fault, which makes him more like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than Johnson is. This is a type of person who sells his own moral character as his only redeeming quality, but that product is ultimately a dud.

Boris Johnson broke the law, but is paying penalties accordingly. As such, it is hard to agree with Starmer's calls that he should step down, much less that Starmer himself is the ideal replacement product. The reality is that we let people with power get away with some things, and it will be the same for Starmer if he becomes PM, and he would expect nothing less.

There is no reason to think that the loss of his job, even if it is the top job, is somehow also necessary. Johnson breaking lockdown rules did nothing to mismanage the country. If he did not mismanage the country, as appears to be the case from Starmer’s inability to locate the fault or give any argument other than saying the PM is a knave, then Starmer’s kind of political opposition really has nothing to offer.

Whose fault is this?

We are left with some questions.

Has politics and systemic political opposition in the UK become Americanised, to a point that it now focuses entirely on the character of the Prime Minister and the supposed alternative to him? Are we all going to vote for "not Boris" at the next general election, only to elect a plank of wood?

Whose fault is this deterioration, if it is so? The American political culture affects us, to a large part, thanks to a shared English-speaking media. People cannot be blamed, if their ability to think maturely about politics has been ruined by their consumption of American media and stupid debates that amount to nothing more than name-calling sessions.

The behaviour of those who propose undemocratic measures against elected leaders, while portraying them as somehow undermining democracy, is remarkable.

When the EU and Europhile journalists speak of democracy, they seem to really only be talking of the dictatorship of their important selves and their opinions as they interfere around the world. They hate the rule of the people's will, which is meant to be the meaning of democracy. The same bewildering lack of appreciation for popular rule exists among Americans who continue to chant the word "democracy" as the alleged basis of their foreign policy.

Love of fake democracy

From the point of view of democratically dubious or outright unelected elites the world over, "democracy" seems to be the favoured word when engaging in empty rhetoric. They insinuate that this word refers to their esoteric authority or superiority, rather than submission to the wisdom of the people.

The rule of the people, in fact, is equated by these corrupt beings with demagoguery and described by them as "populism". That is a favoured word among the narrow few who are frustrated when they find, to their dismay, that the people have resisted them and attempted to survive.

Hatred of "populists"

Establishment scribblers, unthink tanks and other self-appointed guardians of democratic civilisation command the international news media, as well as the constructed currents of social media. They are infuriated by the popularity of Vucic, Orban and Le Pen, although in each case the candidates are popular because they genuinely represent the views of the people. The European Parliament could not even refrain from punishing Poland, despite the adjacent Ukraine war.

The same people were also distressed at Pakistan's (now ex-) Prime Minister Imran Khan's independent foreign policy, encouraging every measure except an election to safeguard "democracy". There, we find that "democracy" used as the secret word for the deeds of unelected, bought people and schemers, rather than a genuine demonstration of popularity such as an election.

Without Mr Khan, the leadership of Pakistan is expected to be handed over to a man who said "beggars can't be choosers", in English, in response to a question about his country's foreign policy. Military chiefs in the country also broke with the elected government to say they were believers in strong ties to the United States. In contrast to that beggar, Mr Khan apparently earned hatred from the US and its allies for saying his country will not be slaves.

Undemocratic worms sighted

Skyrocketing prices and what might be approaching food shortages on the European continent are tolerated by those who are evidently motivated by something other than the wellbeing of their constituents. They believe that their challenge is not to derive their legitimacy from the population, but to chastise the population and tell them to bear the costs of their policies.

If democracy is real, the right of the people to throw out worms from society and the political system is paramount. It is essential that when undemocratic worms utter the word "democracy", it is considered a blasphemy against the people and their interests.

The Ukraine war perfectly illustrates how outrage regarding foreign conflict zones is generated selectively and handed to passive consumers, who drink stories like cans of Coke. Countless conflicts and even the names of countries are unheard of until someone decides to sell them.

With Ukraine, we are presented (through the international media and through social media) with a supposed reality in which a country (Russia) launched an unprovoked attack on its neighbour. This caused citizens all across the world to spontaneously denounce this apparent act of evil.

Ukraine seemed to come into existence in February 2022. People were given primers explaining what Ukraine is and where it is, so they can know better than everybody in Russia and in Ukraine itself.

Likewise, many conflicts and supposedly valiant struggles, such as in Syria, ceased to exist when the stories stopped, because the enemy (in that case the "Assad regime") was not being defeated as planned. As the manipulators lost interest, so too did the manipulated.

Bought outrage

Ukraine came to nobody's attention by their own will.

In reality, no citizen of any country denounced anything or rose up against anything that happened in Ukraine. The government and the international media simply decided to coax and convince the population of countries like Great Britain into thinking it was "the done thing" to condemn Russia. We used just the same approaches we use when marketing soft drinks to people, to get them to buy a ticket on the outrage bandwagon that the government thinks they should buy.

Setting aside the question of whether or not it is morally righteous for us all to fly Ukrainian flags from our windows, we should also be interested in knowing if we have strings, and if somebody is pulling them.

Consider whether the decision to care so much about Ukraine, as opposed to conflict-ridden Yemen or Ethiopia, was really your idea. Was it not in fact caused by your awareness of Ukraine, and complete unawareness of Yemen and Ethiopia? If so, is the one pulling the strings of your outrage in fact the one responsible for providing your daily news digest or delivering your evening news broadcast?

Where are all your other flags?

Which side are you on, between Morocco and the Sahrawis in Western Sahara, or between rebel Tigray and the forces of Addis Ababa? Between the Ansar Allah-led administration in Sanaa and the exiled government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi? Between Kashmir and the Indian occupation? Oh, of course, these places and combatants don't exist, because the media has not given you a primer on them and told you who the bad guy is.

Whose side were you on between Kiev and Donbass, during the eight-year-long phase of the Ukraine conflict before the Russian invasion? But of course, that never happened, because the media ignored that.

One could argue that some of those conflicts aren't worth choosing a side in, because they aren't severe enough and the casualties are too low, but why should that influence anything? Is the "bad" side really just the side that was reported to have caused casualties or escalated the situation at a particular moment of news coverage, and no history or context is needed? What kind of moral system would that be?

For many, only the things appearing on television screens or socially encouraged social media feeds exist or deserve any comment. Occasionally, someone might make a social media post trying to showcase horrors in their country, but if it wasn't on the news, most of us will just ignore it and move on, dismissing the poster as some liar or lunatic. The news media may later assert something with no evidence at all, and people will accept it.

Build your own news service

People have committed themselves to the silliest causes due to some minute of tear-jerking manipulation, while being blissfully unaware of other causes in the world, because someone else they can't even name is manipulating their news feed. People even ultimately end up giving their lives for that reason, too, misled like cattle by personages they know nothing of.

It is also really easy to break someone's control of your information. You can simply build your own news digest, using tools like paper.li or any number of news aggregator services, according to which you can select the sources you feel provide balanced coverage of world events. There is no reason to only be aware of a conflict or controversy that some talking heads think it is important to talk about, for their own reasons.

The person deciding if a country needs your support can easily be you, rather than someone else. It is in fact possible to know about every country in our world, to be aware of the strife or injustice taking place in all of them at all times. Is this not better than receiving the painfully abridged account that someone else wants to give you, covering a particular locale and a particular time favourable to them?

People have many buttons that can be pressed by others, wanting to control them like robots. It makes sense to at least try to guard some of them, especially the button of emotional appeal, so you are more independent of manipulation and able to come to independent opinions.

Noam Chomsky asserted in his book, Media Control, that the corporate media had an ability to trigger totalitarian behaviour in people, stating "the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they’re supposed to repeat".

America's history of making excuses for fascist types in Latin America and Eastern Europe, coupled with the veneration of police state figures at home and panic among elites at their collapsing economic and military power, could lay a path for our nations into actual fascism.

Sanitising fascism

As evidence accumulates that we in the West are supporting Nazis in Ukraine, such that even NATO itself is unable to avoid sharing evidence of these Nazis and then hurriedly deleting it, we may see excuses made for radical nationalism and fascism. It is accompanied by our own anti-Russian propaganda, sometimes rivalling the work of the Nazis, as we become enamoured with the monsters we support.

Nazism in Ukraine, however explicit, is uniquely weaponised and directed against the local ethnic Russians, such that Jews in Ukraine are seemingly able to avoid being hurt by it. But, as anyone who was properly educated at school knows, the selected scapegoat makes no difference to whether fascism is fascism. Portraying the West's declared enemies such as Russians, Muslims or the Chinese as subhuman is as wrong as anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, as Chomsky points out, educated people in the West seem able to forget their entire moral code and education when the media simply claims that things are different this time, and that fascistic sentiment is now necessary. They are then okay with calling for the death or silencing of those who oppose us. Making special exceptions where it is okay to censor or even murder people when we are told is a masterclass in turning a peaceful person into a monster.

The subconscious drift to fascism

Part of the reason for fascism is the feeling that one's country was meant to be the most successful, the best of them all, but that traitors and fifth columnists are hampering it. In the past, that was the essence of anti-communism. Today, the communists are simply "Russians", the word used for essentially anyone on the internet who contradicts the narrative, despite no evidence of any link to Moscow.

There has been a tragic history of the United States relying on fascists to secure its goals in South and Central America, and the US is typically aligned with the most reactionary forces around the world. This is no different in Ukraine, where, from the beginning, the US took as its allies the most violent nationalists and fascists it could find, and portrayed them as liberals to gullible audiences at first. Now, though, the audience is actually becoming illiberal, drawn more and more into pure hatred and flag-waving.

As the West declines in the face of a rising China, and is confronted by the unprecedented failure of its sanctions policy, statements from Western journalists and politicians can only be expected to become more deranged. As economic and financial punishments fail against rival countries for the first time, a new ideology that justifies the magnification of military force, terroristic violence, and the creation of vast armies may be demanded. As refugees flee Ukraine, many still with sympathies to fascism, and are lionised, it is possible that the Western media will engage in revisionism and justifications for a for at least a few variants of fascism.

Ukraine to be the model for the declining West?

Russia has been afraid for some time that World War Two could be rewritten by the West, in a way that puts all the blame on the Soviet Union. It could get worse. As Russia is increasingly vilified, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators are redeemed in Western eyes, and the usefulness of fascist thugs becomes increasingly attractive to Western elites, not just abroad but potentially at home.

Because the US is okay with bans on media in Ukraine, it is okay with bans on media at home. Because the US is okay with a war on terror abroad, it is okay with a war on terror at home. Does the US's support for fascist thugs on the streets in Ukraine mean that fascist thugs will be accepted on the streets at home?

Now, some will want to stop me here and attempt to make the case that groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM) or Antifa are the local variants of fascism. They are similarly lionised to the Ukrainian nationalists, and excuses are made for their violence in the US. Others will say this is different, because these are the anti-fascists. But are they? Anti-fascists may be expected to use reason, and explain exactly why fascism is wrong. The BLM and Antifa movements are not rationalist movements. Their followers are just addicted to the dopamine rush they get from being supported in the media and in the currents of social media. The ideology matters not.

Swastikas of freedom

It is not unrealistic to estimate that if the media began to fly the swastika, at first pitching it as a maligned anti-Russian "freedom" symbol, a fair majority of the self-styled advocates of BLM, Antifa and other social justice causes would steadily convert not just to fascism but to Nazism. Moreover, the amount of effort needed to convert a majority of Western society to Nazi ideology would require one week to one month of television broadcasts, social media hashtags, and some entertainment and education-related boycotts and products being cancelled by certain key companies. In total, it would only require the staff at the top of several organisations such as CNN, Facebook and Twitter to collaborate on achieving it.

What if Western policy elites responsible for backing extremists abroad should now decide that establishing full fascism at home is the way to mobilise the United States and the West to defend their hegemony? They are disturbingly well-equipped to do it. They have so far been able to pressure the previously mentioned types of organisation into adhering to their strategy. The informal hierarchy placing the US foreign policy elites and spooks over the media lackeys is obvious in the shocking speed at which propaganda is disseminated everywhere, and, as Chomsky said, we can be made to goose-step on command.

Through practices like corrections, retractions and social media follow-up posts, it may be that mainstream news organisations are able to preserve the appearance of journalistic integrity even while they get away with spreading disinformation to a majority of their audiences.

When retracting false claims, apparently to preserve their journalistic integrity (or, rather, just the false image of it), publishers may be only reaching a tiny number of people with their corrections. There is also the issue of false coverage or false "fact-checking" at a decisive moment, such as an election, followed by retraction or correction after the decisive moment has subsided, as can be seen with the story of Hunter Biden's laptop.

Always deception at a critical moment

Many media sources will assert certitude at times when decisions are being made by people on an issue, to purposefully press them into taking a position when it matters, like with the allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq nearly twenty years ago, or chemical attacks in Syria more than five years ago. They don't mind later casting doubt on allegations, as long as the moment when decisions are being made has passed and they got their result.

Another example is the triumphant US strike against ISIS-K in Afghanistan, which followed a lethal suicide bombing against US Marines at Kabul Airport. The revenge strike was presented in the press as some sort of victory, only for it to later be quietly revealed that the US strike hit no terrorists but managed to kill an entire family, seven children included. What the American journalists did during that series of retaliatory drone strikes was about as good as drinking the blood of those Afghan children when they died, lapping up the US government's triumphant statement, and they had no shame later. Apologies and corrections are worthless, as their act of vile propaganda at the cost of real lives and the deceiving of their audience about an American revenge operation had already been done. To this date, there is no indication that US revenge strikes in response to the deaths of their Marines killed anyone other than innocent people.

When it comes to outrage-generating headlines relating to decisive elections or world conflicts, what we see is every dirty tactic being used by the press to convince people to support a narrow agenda or side. A lot of it is later passed of as mistakes, like showing pro-regime rallies in a country and miscaptioning it as opposition rallies, although they will only do the same again and again in similar conflicts. But, in every case, they make sure the damage is done and the public is thoroughly misled at a decisive moment before making any correction.

Red-handed journalists

When the media engages in false or misleading coverage, and later discretely apologises or tidies up its mistakes once it knows nobody is looking, it does the equivalent of what many nations keep doing on the foreign policy front when they enter conflicts. That is, despite repeatedly making everything worse and getting everything wrong, they keep giving themselves another chance to get it right, like a doctor who kills a hundred percent of patients he operates on. Although every attempt at intervention in other nations by Western military forces has been an unmitigated disaster for the last thirty years or so, and much of the Western media coverage of such conflicts has consisted of endless lies, still they try. And, they will try to convince us, it is all just innocent mistakes. They will go back later, offer a half-apology here and there, delete this or that offensive lie that killed so many people, and then move on after washing their bloodied hands in blood.

Yes, bloodthirsty interference and attempts to change the regime abroad are innocent mistakes by the well-meaning and sweet people of the United States, just as misleading the people about the change of regime at home is also an innocent mistake by sweet journalists. That is what you believe, if you are the kind of dupe they are looking for.

It would be good if some laws governing journalism forced news sources to thoroughly publicise their own errors in subsequent articles or segments. They should be forced to provide self-denigrating coverage that must reach as many people as their false information did, in order to compensate.

Russia's military campaign in Ukraine, launched last month, could be the beginning of a long and bloody war. Being already seen as such, it has likely alienated many individuals in the West who formerly sided with Russia against a morally dubious Western foreign policy establishment.

One of the places where those opponents of the West's moral skeleton liked to gather, following the 2003 Iraq War which largely discredited the West as a positive moral agent in the world, was the now heavily censored and cyber-attacked RT (formerly Russia Today). There, such individuals appeared as viewers, journalists, and guests for many years to express their anti-war views.

The doves fly

For anyone watching RT during the opening of Russia's offensive into Ukraine in February 2022, it would be impossible not to notice the great unease of the English-speaking anchors during this Russian government-funded news network's live broadcasts. It is likely that such individuals were recruited in the first place because of their unease with Western foreign policy, which made them more likely to sympathise with and be willing to present Russia's position to English-speakers for many years. Russia's sudden decision to employ force will have changed everything, leaving many of them shaken and confused. Why did Russia apparently choose to rain its own bombs on a country, rather than foiling America's dubious schemes and rejecting its excuses, as had been the case in Syria? That will be burdening their consciences.

Many disbelieved that Russia was planning a major military escalation in Ukraine, holding the Kremlin's promises to the world as true. Those who had supported the Russian media against Western military actions, out of a principled rejection of military intervention everywhere, will find it difficult to maintain that support (see Max Keiser, formerly of the Keiser Report, as an example).

Did Russia make the right choice?

It may be that the Kremlin made a strategic mistake by trying to dominate Ukraine militarily (I concurred with the British government about this in January). We live in an era of failed foreign interventions by even the most technologically sophisticated countries, which is why many will anticipate a slow Russian defeat and withdrawal from Ukraine. Ukrainians are not incompetent or cowardly, having made up a significant portion of the most competent and brave soldiers of the former USSR, so it would be wrong for Russia to think they are easily cast aside.

On the other hand, the Kremlin may have not made a mistake in Ukraine at all. The twin objectives of "demilitarisation" and "denazification" may be impossible to achieve if pursued to total completion all across Ukraine (a scenario vulnerable to "mission creep"), but they can easily be accomplished to a point that Moscow no longer needs to worry. A battered Ukrainian military, pushed back to the west of Ukraine, left with no threatening hardware, can be guaranteed by Russia's brutal and overwhelming firepower. A number of Ukrainian radicals can be assassinated or captured to showcase "denazification". Following such steps, Russia could withdraw. They could also almost certainly defend a number of seized Ukrainian cities indefinitely and annex them formally or informally, managing over time to convince their largely Russian-friendly populations to welcome the change.

Whatever the case, Russia's leadership must have known they would lose much support in the West. The only conclusion can be that, faced with NATO expansion into Ukraine, Russian leaders felt that the problem was so severe and so strategically dangerous that it was worth huge sacrifices to overcome it. It was worth losing any remaining soft power Russia had in the West, in favour of applying hard power in Russia's near abroad. NATO was being intransigent, refusing to rule out nuclear missiles being placed in Ukraine to target Moscow, declaring Russia as its enemy and Ukraine as its frontline partner against Russia.

Anti-war? You are outgunned

Considering the obstruction faced by anyone sympathetic to Russian worries or just simply critical of Western policy in Western societies, it is not surprising that Russia would decide to throw them under the bus. They were never likely to accomplish any significant influence or power anyway. Russia's might still ultimately lies in its unrivalled missile power and vast force of armoured vehicles on its territory, so they decided to exert this power rather than something more subtle.

Those who based their interpretation of world events solely on morality, and were led to side with Russia or China for that reason and reject the interventionist US and NATO, were doomed to be disappointed. International relations is not a moral affair, unfortunately. There are no values, only interests. Sooner or later, any national government will assert its interests in the most brutal way, reminding us all of what a state really is.

Russia is neither good nor bad, and that's what is so shocking to those who used morality to guide their interpretation of international events. Likewise, the United States is neither good nor bad, although the case can certainly be made that it is incompetent and confused, and that has always been the chief complaint that seems to have the most merit.

People who are anti-war ultimately get pushed aside by those favouring force, if we are in a situation where force can work. This is because being anti-war is solely a personal philosophy, not an expression of anything necessarily aligned with the national interest. As long as there are national interests and diplomatic quarrels, force will be part of the spectrum, the continuation of politics by the steel gauntlet of those who have might, if mere talk failed.

Should we believe extraordinary claims from government sources, such as the "Tic Tac" UFO encounter footage from the US government?

While extra-terrestrials may be a favoured explanation for some, for UFO sightings, a secret military technology is more plausible, because we are at least aware that military secrets are real. However, even that is far-fetched. A technology that is truly beyond anything known to science, for example, having the ability to fully neutralise g-forces, is also countered by a more likely possibility.

Extraordinary claims

The most reasonable explanation for any compelling video evidence of extra-terrestrial or truly unexplained UFO encounters, if they originate from a government source, will be that they are nevertheless fake. An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence, so video and official endorsement of video is not enough. People also saying they saw it doesn't help, as testimony is unreliable.

In 2003, the American people believed their government's mere word about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. After waging the war, they learned it was not true. Many lost faith in the mainstream media, and now obstinately disbelieve even the more mundane claims of governments.

In 2022, prior to it happening, we had headlines and pictures in tabloids about a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many believed it, because it came from government sources, namely the US government. Others disbelieved it for that very same reason. Unfortunately, the American warnings turned out to be true in the case of a Russian incursion into Ukraine, and the Russians seemed to begin the very operation they were insisting would not happen.

For many Americans, Russia's deceptions will vindicate the US government and they will be more likely to trust the US government's authority again, even when it is lying.

Distrust them

Despite the above change, governments still lie. The most effective lies are those that are mixed with confirmed reality by those telling the story. Many believe that if they can confirm some part of a story, the rest must be true.

In the case of formal, government-stamped evidence of the seemingly impossible, what we are looking at could be an experiment in the authority of the state. It could be a test of how credulous a citizen can be, if their government verifies something as true, or a sort of experiment in how far the militarisation of false information can go when pushed from government to journalists. How far do loyal citizens actually go in believing the state? Might they even believe in alien invaders if they are reported on the news?

Government authority lends credibility to a report, but it by no means confirms it to be accurate.

Pages