This is a cross-post from Daily Agitator, my other blog, I post it here for those IST followers that have not yet found the Daily Agitator with the hope that they will find it in their hearts to follow.
The word ‘Communist” has hit the headlines again…..is this 1950?
For those that follow both blogs thank you and hopefully it will be a learning experience.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
I have never thought Glenn Beck was particularly intellectual as a matter of fat when on CNN I found his show mostly crap….and a little too religious for my liking….and then he moved on and started his own specialty website and the crap just kept flowing.
I will say that recently I found his stuff extremely humorous, at least for me, because he takes issues to the extreme and they makes it even more laughable…..
This is his most recent humor…..
Seriously, they will destroy America? I think his buddies the christian nationalists and those slime merchants in MAGA have been doing a fine job of that exact thing….I guess they do not want any competition.
Anyone dispute my conclusion?
I Read, I Write, You Know
Lego ergo scribo”
This is my continuing series on the success that the DSA has recently had at the polls and the meltdown that the Right is having dealing with this success…..passing out propaganda like candy to a 6 year old and it is working…..
Gramsci? If you are not familiar with the workings of socialism then the name means little to Americans and yet the Washington Times invoked his name.
Before I go any further a quick lesson on Gramsci….
Key points:
Very basic but if you want more…..https://theconversation.com/antonio-gramsci-his-philosophy-explained-286341
That out of the way this is the bullshit article that made me go to this rant….
Just another MAGA rag that spread manure like it was real…..
Personally I think Gramsci was an excellent thinker and some of his ideas deserve a second look….but think about this MAGA and the GOP have been using his concepts for many decades….so is he all that wrong?
Questions?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
With the popularity of the DSA so far in the midterms the rage by the Right has once again exploded into the usual stupidity about socialist or communists or Marxists and as usual none of it is accurate….
I have been fighting the false narrative for many many years and here we go again….soon the MAGA people will be counting all the communists in the country for exposure….
This is something I wrote about 14 years ago during an earlier attack on the Left….I use to have a feature in IST called the VOMITORIUM……
That movie exposed just how stupid the whole thing becomes when you let idiots define the political landscape….
Enjoy.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
From time to time I will bring the utter crap that the Right wing noise machine has to offer….the best lies and the best bullshit.
This is one of those outlets, Washington Examiner, the best of MAGA manure spread as if it was news.
With the rise and success of the DSA in recent elections the Right wants you to believe that it is the party of rich white guys…..
Socialist Democrats represent the rich, white voters in their party
This accusation is really humorous unless you one of those humorless by-standers….but this could very well be talking about the GOP….but no one wants to admit it.
The article is bullshit and unfit to grace the bottom of a bird cage……
Any opinions?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo’
+++Today is chemo so this may be the only post you see from me today sorry but I usually feel like crap afterwards++++
With the progress that the DSA is making in elections we are hearing the title almost daily….The Right is a fevered pitch trying to ward off any advancement of the progressives by resurrecting the old lame ass “Red Scare”
What bullshit!
As the mid term vote nears and the looming general in 2028 the propaganda machine that hides under the guise of media outlets is staring the lies and misinformation about the danger of those damn Marxists….
Keep in mind that the source of this article is a Far Right propaganda that feeds an unsuspecting public with the lies and misinformation.
America faces a Marxist pincer movement the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Soviet Union sent tanks rolling across Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the ‘50s and ‘60s. This time, it’s not from a military intent on crushing liberty, but an insidious threat to our way of life nonetheless.
On one side, we have American communists plotting street mayhem in Havana, calling for a mass U.S. uprising from the capital of militant world communism, while Cuban communists provide them backup by meeting with Americans on U.S. soil to instruct them on how to lobby Congress.
The Marxist threat to America has two fronts. Both are advancing
This group and its media propagandists will do and say whatever they can to discourage Americans from learning anything about this group (DSA)….but I can help….
There isn’t one universal definition of democratic socialism. According to the website of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), democratic socialists view capitalism as “a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit” and want to “replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.”
“What we want to do is extend democracy to our workplace and our housing and society at large, sort of deciding the ways our cities run, our jobs run, our housing runs, as opposed to right now, we think we’re in sort of a dictatorship of capital—the big corporations kind of make the decisions about everything, really,” says Megan Romer, the co-chair of the DSA.
Democratic socialism in the U.S., Farinella says, is not the socialism seen in the former Soviet Union, which was an autocratic system that eliminated capitalism by putting all major industries under centralized government control. Democratic socialists don’t want large corporations to be controlled by the government, and don’t want an autocracy; rather, they want to place the power of decision-making in the hands of the people through a democratic process.
Farinella says that democratic socialism also isn’t the kind of social democracy seen in Scandinavian countries, which reject authoritarianism and, in his words, “combine free market capitalism with high taxes” to fund social programs such as health care and education. Democratic socialists, meanwhile, don’t support capitalism (though some self-described democratic socialists have suggested that it is possible for democratic socialism and capitalism to exist together).
Democratic socialism “resides perhaps in the middle of the spectrum,” Farinella says.
“The democratic socialists in the United States want to shift political and economic power away from corporations and ultimately move beyond a capitalistic system, which they view as inherently unfair and exploitive,” he says. “They want to replace capitalism with an economy driven by social need rather than by profit motive, and they want to do this with workers and ordinary citizens making decisions about how to deploy resources—not having government make the decisions about how to deploy resources.”
“They want to do it all through democratic processes and institutions,” he adds.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/democratic-socialist-191131545.html
These people are NOT communists! The key to their electoral strategy is the last line of the quote…..”They want to do it all through democratic processes and institutions”….that means they want the people to have the voice in the elections.
This is what democracy looks like not the warped BS that Donny presents as such.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
There is so much propaganda out there, not just the Donny years but for the last several decades, ‘facts’ that we all buy into that are not ‘facts’ at all…..
1. The idea that tax cuts or bailouts for the wealthy will stimulate the economy (aka “trickle-down economics”) is, at best, a failed experiment and, at worst, an all-out deception. The term “trickle-down economics” was first used in relation to Herbert Hoover and his economic policy during the Great Depression. However, Hoover’s oft-attributed commitment to laissez-faire free market economic policy is debatable, and he actually raised taxes on the rich.
2. The major modern player in trickle-down economics was Ronald Reagan, though the term he actually used was supply-side economics, which purports to boost economic growth through lowered individual and corporate taxes and regulations. His first major move toward such an economy was the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which, according to Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, was really just “a Trojan horse to bring down the top [tax] rate” and essentially trickle-down in a trench coat.
The Act slashed the highest income tax from 70% down to 50%. Lower incomes also received tax cuts, but they were much smaller. It also reduced estate, capital gains, and corporate taxes. This massively increased the deficit to such a disastrous level that some of it was actually reversed before it went into effect just a year later in TEFRA, including a few of the tax breaks and slashes that had not gone into effect yet; it also closed tax loopholes and increased other taxes like the cigarette tax. However, Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 later provided further massive tax cuts, slashing the top income tax from 50% to 28%, and decreasing the corporate tax rate by 12 points to 34%.
All of this was purportedly done to boost the economy, which was in a recession when Reagan came into office. So, did it work? Kind of, temporarily. Unemployment dropped, finance (particularly stocks, bonds, and real estate) and technology expanded, and low-level positions (in addition to high-level ones) saw pay raises. However, Reaganomics also led to the income gap widening considerably, with the richest now able to lobby the government for further policy to support them. Oh, and Reagan massively increased the deficit…again.
There is so much more bullshit that was fed to the less intelligent among us
https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahmarder/american-propaganda
All this was propaganda which equates to damn lies and yet voters flocked to the promise of a better America…..and how has that worked out for you?
Reagan among others have been pulling our chains and manipulating us to the point of us actually being the problems we face today.
For christ sake learn something…..for we have the power to change this assassination of our system by politicians….all we have to do is learn and vote for the change we need to right this country from the destructive course these politicians have set us on.
Do you want to continue on this journey of destruction or do you want the country we use to have?
It is your choice.
Choose wisely.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
And it is replaced with sycophants that will happily pass on bullshit, lies and propaganda in the guise of news….
Have you been following the reports of the ‘new’ criteria that the SecWar has put into place?
Several outlets supportive of the political right said Wednesday they had agreed to a new press policy rejected by virtually all legacy news media organizations and will take their place in the Pentagon, the AP reports. The new Pentagon press corps will include the Gateway Pundit, the National Pulse, Human Events, podcaster Tim Pool, the Just the News website founded by journalist John Solomon, Frontlines by Turning Point USA, and LindellTV, run by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Many of those outlets were not staffed for the job; Just the News, for example, posted an online ad seeking a Pentagon reporter.
The Pentagon’s announcement came less than a week after dozens of reporters from outlets including the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, and the Washington Post turned in their access badges rather than agree to a policy the journalists say will restrict them to covering news approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Sean Parnell, Hegseth’s spokesman, announced the “next generation” of the Pentagon press corps with more than 60 journalists who had agreed to the new policy. He said 26 journalists who had previously been part of the press corps were among the signees. The department wouldn’t say who any of them were, but several outlets reposted his message on X, saying they had signed on.
There isn’t unanimity among organizations that appeal to Republican consumers. Fox News Channel, by far the most popular news source for fans of President Trump, was among the walkouts, as was Newsmax. Some of the outlets moving in pronounce themselves conservative in their mission statements, and the “about” page on the National Pulse features a picture of Trump. The journalists who left the Pentagon haven’t stopped covering the military. With them out of the Pentagon, “reporters will have to work harder,” said Barbara Starr, a longtime Pentagon reporter retired from CNN. “But the real price is paid by the American people and the American military families,” Starr said. “Military families who have their sons and daughters serving, they want to know everything and they want to know it fast.”
LindellTV (seriously), Dead Charlie’s Turning Point, et al…..none of which is any real news gathering experience….but they are butt lickers….that is all you need to be part of the press corps.
This change will guarantee that there will be NO actual factual news coming from the Pentagon.
I will be watching to see which of the MSM will bite and carry the bullshit from Donny’s idiot, Hogsbreath.
+++I return to the infusion chair today so I may not be in any shape for further posting……I will try to catch as quickly as I can+++
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Last weekend I watched one of my favorite movies, The Manchurian Candidate (the original, not the sloppy re-make) and it got me thinking about a subject that we do not hear much about these days, brainwashing.
The story is some captured Americans in Korea were whisked off and were brainwashed to carry out a mission that they would under normal conditions would have never considered.
The Soviets and Red Chinese were the culprits in the movie but the technique was not unknown in the US.
Journalist Edward Hunter was the first to sound the alarm. “Brain-washing Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party,” blared his headline in the Miami Daily News in September 1950. In the article, and later in a book, Hunter described how Mao Zedong’s Red Army used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into mindless, Communist automatons. He called this hypnotic process “brainwashing,” a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash (xi) and brain (nao), and warned about the dangerous applications it could have. The process was meant to “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”
It wasn’t the first time fears of Communism and mind control had seeped into the American public. In 1946 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was so worried about the spread of Communism that it proposed removing liberals, socialists and communists from places like schools, libraries, newspapers and entertainment. Hunter’s inflammatory rhetoric didn’t immediately have a huge impact—until three years into the Korean War, when American prisoners of war began confessing to outlandish crimes.
When he was shot down over Korea and captured in 1952, Colonel Frank Schwable was the highest ranking military officer to meet that fate, and by February 1953, he and other prisoners of war had falsely confessed to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. The American public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs either petitioned the U.S. government to end the war, or signed confessions of their alleged crimes. The final blow came when 21 American soldiers refused repatriation.
Suddenly the threat of brainwashing was very real, and it was everywhere. The U.S. military denied the charges made in the soldiers’ “confessions,” but couldn’t explain how they’d been coerced to make them. What could explain the behavior of the soldiers besides brainwashing? The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III. Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-brainwashing-and-how-it-shaped-america-180963400/
This is important to know because right now much of the ugly side of government is being deleted or altered….so some of this ugliness may disappear forever (if Trump has anything to do with it)
We need to know the lengths the government would have gone to to try and off-set any possible interference by foreign nations.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
That seems to be the way of things these days…..we have truth and we have lies and it is up to the individual to ascertain which is which…..and there in lies the problem…..thanx to social media and the media itself have blurred the lines…..
This first story was written in 2020…..but it still helps the understanding….
Many of us are familiar with the quotation, “Repeat a lie often enough and people will eventually come to believe it.”
Not ironically, the adage — often attributed to the infamous Nazi Joseph Goebbels — is true and has been validated by decades of research on what psychology calls the “illusory truth effect.” First described in a 1977 study by Temple University psychologist Dr. Lynn Hasher and her colleagues, the illusory truth effect occurs when repeating a statement increases the belief that it’s true even when the statement is actually false.[1]
Subsequent research has expanded what we know about the illusory truth effect. For example, the effect doesn’t only occur through repetition but can happen through any process that increases familiarity with a statement or the ease by which it’s processed by the brain (what psychologists in this context refer to as a statement’s “fluency”). For example, the perceived truth of written statements can be increased by presenting them in bold, high-contrast fonts[2] or when aphorisms are expressed as a rhyme.[3]
According to a 2010 meta-analytic review of the truth effect (which applies to both true and false statements),[4] while the perceived credibility of a statement’s source increases perceptions of truth as we might expect, the truth effect persists even when sources are thought to be unreliable and especially when the source of the statement is unclear. In other words, while we typically evaluate a statement’s truth based on the trustworthiness of the source, repeated exposure to both information and misinformation increases the sense that it’s true, regardless of the source’s credibility.
The illusory truth effect tends to be strongest when statements are related to a subject about which we believe ourselves to be knowledgeable,[5] and when statements are ambiguous such that they aren’t obviously true or false at first glance.[4] It can also occur with statements (and newspaper headlines) that are framed as questions (e.g. “Is President Obama a Muslim?”), something called the “innuendo effect.”[6]
Now this report on the mass media and its part at spreading the manure….
A recent case rightly illustrates the confounding way truth and lies spread in mass media. On June 15, 2017, The New York Post published this headline: “Breatharian Couple Survives on the Universe’s Energy Instead of Food.” Now, The New York Post is a big paper—the sixth largest, by circulation, in the United States—and it’s an old paper, established in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. But headlines like this show that even the mainstream media can sometimes stretch the truth, or just ignore it completely.
In skimming the New York Post article, it’s not just the headline, but the whole article is silly. And this was not an April Fool’s joke. The article says “Husband and wife Akahi Ricardo and Camila Castello believe that food and water aren’t necessary and humans can be sustained solely by the energy of the universe.” They’ve eaten, we’re told, just three times a week since 2008, and even then only a piece of fruit or vegetable broth. Furthermore, the couple didn’t eat a single thing for three years. Ms. Castello didn’t eat during her first pregnancy, either, because as she declared, “I knew my son would be nourished enough by my love.”
For the record, people can’t survive without nourishment, and we are required to get our nourishment from food. These facts should not be controversial. But the New York Post article presented the story of this so-called Breatharian couple as fact. There wasn’t a word of skepticism, or an iota of fact-checking, or even a hint that this story wasn’t literally true.
Truth and Lies in Mass Media
On a side note….did the AP strike a deal with Nazi Germany for propaganda purposes…..you knew that eventually I was going to interject some history….
Even the Associated Press has its secrets.
A recent report, declassified by the AP itself, discloses information about the news outlet’s coverage of WWII, and the role that Nazi soldiers may have had in it. According to the internal report released Wednesday, the AP made a deal to exchange photos with Nazi soldiers. The photos were run in American newspapers, without crediting their origins. In turn, AP photos were used by Nazi soldiers for Nazi propaganda.
An investigation was open into the long-secret arrangement after German historian Harriet Scharnberg published an article in March of 2016 accusing the AP of Nazi cooperation. Scharnberg’s research pointed out that pictures supplied by the AP were being published in propaganda publications, such as “Der Untermensch” (The Subhuman). Scharnberg also stated that by submitting to “Schriftleitergesetz“ or editors law, the AP relinquished control of the content that they released to German publications. Therefore, the AP’s content fell under instruction not to print any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.”
https://www.salon.com/2017/05/11/the-associated-press-reveals-secret-propaganda-deal-with-nazis/
Media spreading manure goes back a ways…..
Who do you trust?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”