Michael Parenti on the ruling class' concern with our thinking/perceptions

"But they don’t care about what we think. They turn a deaf ear to us," some people complain. That is not true. They care very much about what you think. In fact, that is the only thing about you that holds their attention and concern. They don’t care if you go hungry, unemployed, sick, or homeless. But they do care when you are beginning to entertain resistant democratic #thoughts. They get nervous when you discard your #liberal complaints and adopt a #radical analysis. They do care that you are catching on as to what the motives and functions of the national security state and the US global empire are all about at home and in so many corners of the world. They get furiously concerned when you and millions like you are rejecting the pap that is served up by corporate #media and establishment leaders.

By controlling our #perceptions, they control our society; they control public #opinion and public #discourse. And they limit the range and impact of our political #consciousness. The plutocrats know that their power comes from their ability to control our empowering responses. They know they can live at the apex of the social pyramid only as long as they can keep us in line at the pyramid’s base. Who pays for all their wars? We do. Who fights these #wars? We do or our low-income loved ones do. If we refuse to be led around on a super-patriotic, fear-ridden leash and if we come to our own decisions and act upon them more and more as our ranks grow, then the ruling profiteers’ power shrinks and can even unwind and crash—as has happened with dynasties and monarchies of previous #epochs.

We need to strive in every way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a #revolution of organized #consciousness striking at the #empire’s heart with full force when #democracy is in the streets and mobilized for the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come from nowhere yet is sometimes able to carry everything before it.

There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political #institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the #people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic.

--- Michael Parenti, in his book Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies (highlights added by me)

#MichaelParenti #capitialism #oligarchy #RulingClass

Small minority of people who know the truth makes no difference whatsoever in public opinion, and they will continue to know anyway because this is what normal people do.
Slightly altered from another challenging statement below:

Russia must repatriate remains of Red Army soldiers buried anywhere in Europe, especially Germany, and remove the monument in Treptower Park and bring it back to Russia. The generation of Western Allies who fought heroically in WW II is pretty much gone now and there is no need in trying to convince the West about who and how defeated Nazism.

Small minority of Europeans who know the truth makes no difference whatsoever in public opinion and they will continue to know anyway because this is what normal people do. The rest, who cares–it is over for the West anyway and the trajectory to oblivion is well defined.
source

#facts, vs the #believe in the #truth of my #opinion
Anyway, how can we say it is a fact?
Carl L. Becker, 1931: Everyman His Own Historian.

-- Une copine a moi s'est faite agresser par 3 gars, c'est pour ça que je suis devenu #raciste.
-- Ah bon ? Et ces 3 gars étaient #rebeus ?
-- non, un seul l'était, les deux autres non.

Un grand classique du #racisme, non ?
J'avais déjà conscience que devenir raciste est de l'ordre de la #facilité : c'est très facile de trouver des justifications à rejeter l'autre sur des critères fallacieux.

Mais je découvre sur #Diaspora, de plus en plus depuis des mois, qu'un autre paramètre de cette facilité intellectuelle, ou devrais-je dire #paresse intellectuelle aussi, est à l’œuvre : je regarde ailleurs.
Oui, plein de gens sont prompts à se dire non racistes. Mais vont liker un propos ouvertement #discriminatoire, soit-disant pour valider une "opinion", comme si le rejet d'une pratique ou d'une catégorie de la population pouvait être une #opinion au lieu d'un racisme latent...
Oui, #jaccuse des gens ici, ceux qui veulent ne pas s'en mêler, ceux qui veulent simplement qu'on leur foute la paix, de laisser faire... surtout quand ça en arrive à liker les propos d'un raciste patenté et reconnu comme tel par tous ici, juste pour rester à distance, ne pas se sentir concerné : Le #confort... le confort de mes #pantoufles.

J'avais conscience très vite dans la vie, que de ne pas se laisser aller au racisme, supposait un petit effort intellectuel à la base, comme l'exemple cité plus haut : à quoi bon devenir raciste, si tu le dis toi-même, en plus seul un sur 3 des gars était rebeu...
Mais je constate que ça va plus loin... L' #extrême-droite progresse, car la #société de #loisirs veut juste s'amuser, ne veut pas se mêler de #politique (faut dire que tout est fait dans ce sens aussi, vu le process de l'élection (je dénonce l'élection, pas le vote, nuance))... Et à laisser faire, la fenêtre d' #Overton se décale de plus en plus à l'extrême-droite.

Et si tu viens corriger le #mensonge qui blâme injustement un organisme comme Framasoft, que se passe-t-il ?
Tu es considéré comme "dangereux", mis dans le même sac que ces #puants qui crachent leur mensonge....

Dans une telle société, l'extrême-droite ne peut que progresser.

Et donc, pendant ce temps :
Le bruit des bottes, le silence des pantoufles
https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/271123/le-bruit-des-bottes-le-silence-des-pantoufles

Des bandes d’extrême droite multiplient les actions punitives visant migrants, Arabes et musulmans. Une #violence raciste et islamophobe qui ne suscite pas de réaction politique et médiatique à la hauteur du danger qu’elle incarne.

Le bruit des bottes, le silence des pantoufles

Des bandes d’extrême droite multiplient les actions punitives visant migrants, Arabes et musulmans. Une violence raciste et islamophobe qui ne suscite pas de réaction politique et médiatique à la hau…

Opinion | How China can best counter the US-Japan-South Korea alliance | South China Morning Post https://archive.ph/4Zrbw
Sounds good, but is it actually possible or pointless?

Reunification with Taiwan will require a conducive political and economic environment. Beijing must seek economic integration, followed by peaceful political integration, thus winning the hearts of the Taiwanese people.
If Beijing attempts reintegration by using military force, North Korea is likely to follow suit, which would not only lead to acute instability but also contradict the core principles of Chinese foreign policy enunciated in the Global Civilisation Initiative.

Tags: #dandelíon #China #news #opinion

via dandelion* client (Source)

Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel’s Worst Prime Minister Ever

#Atlantic #Opinion #Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel’s Worst Prime Minister Ever

One man’s ambition has undermined Israel’s security and consumed its politics.

Si vous n’êtes pas vigilants, les journaux arriveront à vous faire détester les gens opprimés et aimer ceux qui les oppriment.

#MalcolmX , militant politique (1925-1965), Discours prononcé le 13 décembre 1964 à l’Audubon Ballroom de Harlem

#manipulation #oppression #violence #opinion #medias #journalisme #journaliste #media #israel #palestien #palestine

Where Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism Collide

#palestinians #genocide #jews #antisemitism #anti-zionism #opinion

March 11, 2024

By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist

Every time I write, as I did last week, that I don’t think anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic, I get emails from Jewish readers that are angry, disappointed or sometimes simply baffled. “Israel is the political entity through which the Jewish people exercises its natural right of self-determination and control over its own fate,” said one typical recent message. “How is singling out the Jewish people to deprive it of those rights not antisemitic?”

To answer this question fully would take more than a single column, but I want to make a brief attempt, because lately, in reaction to the grotesque suffering in Gaza, two ugly, intertwined trends are gaining steam. Well-intentioned opponents of Jewish nationalism, some Jewish themselves, are being falsely smeared as antisemites. At the same time, antisemitism is cloaking itself in anti-Zionism, with people spitting out the word “Zionist” when they really seem to mean “Jew.”

My own views on Zionism are ambivalent and conflicted. I’m a secular Jew with no particular attachment to Israel, spiritual or otherwise, though I also recognize that my ability to hold myself aloof from the country is enabled by the great privilege of an American passport. I think the idea of Israel as a colonial entity that will eventually be dismantled is a malign fantasy — most Jewish Israelis don’t have anywhere else to go — but I also recognize that the country’s creation can’t be disentangled from the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Yes, as Zionists often point out, Palestinians were far from the only people made refugees as maps were redrawn in the wake of World War II. After Israel’s creation, more Jews were uprooted from Arab and Muslim countries than Arabs expelled from their homes in historic Palestine. It is not Israel’s fault that some of its neighbors kept displaced Palestinians as stateless refugees rather than integrating them as full citizens. But I could never blame a Palestinian for thinking it obscenely unfair that I have a right to “return” to a country to which I have no family connection, while Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 do not.

I also understand why many Jews, the survivors of millenniums of attempts to destroy them as a people, put their need for national self-determination above other, competing values. But one needn’t hate Jews to make a different moral calculus.

Right now, the relentless growth of settlements in the West Bank has created a one-state reality on the ground, although one in which people have very different rights and freedoms depending on their ethnic and religious background. There are people of good will who think the way out of this insupportable situation lies in the fight for equal democratic rights in a single state for everyone living in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality,” Peter Beinart wrote in Jewish Currents in 2020.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/opinion/antisemitism-vs-anti-zionism.html

Why Russia Killed Navalny

#Atlantic #Opinion #Navalny #Putin #Kleptocracy #Corruption #Murder

Why Russia Killed Navalny

Even behind bars, the dissident leader was a threat to the corrupt Russian dictator.

AI-Powered Bumper Sticker Provides Context-Sensitive Urban Camouflage

#transportationhacks #bumpahstickah #bumpersticker #geolocation #geopy #gps #hdmi #opinion #politics #raspberrypizero #hackaday
posted by pod_feeder_v2

AI-Powered Bumper Sticker Provides Context-Sensitive Urban Camouflage

While we absolutely support the right of everyone to express their opinions, it seems to us that it’s rarely wise to turn your vehicle into a mobile billboard for your positions. Aside from p…

The world is waging war on its children, in an obscene mockery of international law

#Guardian #Observer #Opinion #War #HumanRights #Children

How liberal feminism turns into fascism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a7LrWo47I0
21:04 min #video
#videocast #liberalfeminism #fascism #opinion by #AliceCappelle

A quotation from Gide, Andre

Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.

André Gide (1869-1951) French author, Nobel laureate
“An Unprejudiced Mind,” sec. 1, Pretexts (1959) [ed. O’Brien (1964)]

#quote #quotes #quotation #belief #biasconfirmation #challenge #education #inference #opinion #prejudice
Sourcing / notes: https://wist.info/gide-andre/66959/

"An Unprejudiced Mind," sec. 1, Pretexts (1959) [ed. O'Brien (1964)] - Gide, André | WIST Quotations

Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.

#news #crise #agricole #manif #paysans #tracteur #écologie #dialogue #social #justice #opinion

LES INSTITUTEURS, LES INFIRMIERS, LES RETRAITÉS…. DEVRAIENT APPRENDRE À CONDUIRE DES TRACTEURS, DES POIDS-LOURDS ET AUTRES ENGINS AGRICOLES…..

https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/opinions/crise-agricole-le-gouvernement-fort-avec-les-faibles-faible-avec-les-forts-20240128_72TBITTYNJG43GH5RCWS7LBSCA/

Crise agricole : le gouvernement fort avec les faibles, faible avec les forts

Les agriculteurs font peur aux gouvernants plus qu’ils ne les convainquent. La façon dont le Premier ministre cède à leurs revendications, sans imposer de contrepartie environnementale, résulte de ce rapport de force.

Can we send Trump into exile?

#Salon #Opinion #Trump #Napoleon #Tolstoy #Kutusov #Biden

Can we send Trump into exile? It worked (sort of) with Napoleon

Tolstoy describes sending a defeated leader with no "human dignity" far, far away — and it sounds like a great idea

When the #NewYorkTimes lost its way

America’s media should do more to equip readers to #think for themselves

source: https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way

Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief

...

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact

...

A #journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling #awareness that it knows nothing

...

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy

...

Illiberal journalists are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power

...

#press #freedom #America #USA #politics #election #opinion #future #reality #clickbait #internet #scandal #online #media #criticism #society

When the New York Times lost its way

America’s media should do more to equip readers to think for themselves

Call me all the names you want – I won’t stop telling the truth about livestock farming

#Guardian #Opinion #Farming #Industry #Misinformation #Greenwashing #Livestock #Meat #Dairy

[Complément d’enquête] Cyril Hanouna : le nouveau parrain du PAF

Diffusé le 30/11/2023 à 22h58 - Disponible jusqu’au 30/12/2024
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C’est un record dont Cyril Hanouna se passerait bien.
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7,5 millions d’euros d’amendes
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Insultes, canular homophobe, publicité clandestine : en 13 ans d’existence, son émission Touche Pas à mon Poste a reçu 29 sanctions et rappels à l’ordre de l’ARCOM (ex-CSA), du jamais vu.
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Des amendes toutes réglées sans broncher par C8.
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Il faut dire que le diffuseur n’a pas vraiment le choix… Jamais une chaîne de télévision n’a été aussi dépendante d’un seul homme.
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Avec le soutien du propriétaire, le milliardaire Vincent Bolloré, Cyril Hanouna a fait de C8 sa maison : jusqu’à 5h de direct par jour où il se permet tout, avec sa bande de chroniqueurs, et son armée de « fanzouzes », le surnom de ses admirateurs.
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Sur son plateau défilent chaque soir anonymes, artistes et hommes politiques, dans l’espoir d’atteindre cette fameuse « France d’en bas » que l’animateur est censé fédérer.
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Mais qui est vraiment ce nouveau souverain cathodique ? Une fois les caméras éteintes, comment se comporte-t-il en coulisses ? Quel patron est-il ?
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Dans le petit monde de la télévision, beaucoup hésitent à se confier sur le nouveau « parrain » du PAF, capable de faire et défaire des carrières, ou de distribuer les coups de pression et les menaces.
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Mais à l’aide de témoignages inédits et de documents exclusifs, Complément d’enquête vous dit tout sur Cyril Hanouna.
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Son parcours, ses réussites, ses ratés, ses réseaux, sa fortune estimée à 85 millions d’euros, vous saurez tout sur ce petit gars du 9-3 qui a pris son temps pour conquérir le petit écran.
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_ Une enquête de Virginie Vilar, Guillaume Beaufils, Guillaume Couderc, Brice le Borgne et Karim Annette_

#CyrilHanouna #Hanouna #TPMP #TouchePasAMonPoste #C8
#ComplementDEnquete #FranceTV #France2 #VincentBollore #Bollore #Oligarchie #Divertissements #Television #Opinion

Complément d'enquête Cyril Hanouna : le nouveau parrain du PAF

C’est un record dont Cyril Hanouna se passerait bien. 7,5 millions d’euros d’amendes Insultes, canular homophobe, publicité clandestine : en 13 ans d’existence, son émission Touche Pas à mon Poste a reçu 29 sanctions et rappels à l’ordre de...

I can understand #GretaThunberg...

It is usually a good left-liberal reflex to stand up for the supposedly weaker party. Helping the weak and kicking upwards against the powerful. The exact opposite of the right-wing radicals.

Unfortunately, our #society, and the left in particular, is so divided that it seems you can only protest together if you pursue 100% the same goals.

Fridays for future has never spoken out directly against #capitalism so as not to divide the #movement. Instead, they have used #newspeack and introduced the term climate justice, which includes a critique of capitalism.

#Greta is used to shitstorms. She is probably the most hated young person in the world by the right. Unfortunately, she does not yet have enough life experience to know that she should have kept quiet about the #MiddleEast conflict.

#opinion #war #conflict #Palestine #Israel #climate #environment #protest #FridaysForFuture #earth #pollution #politics #activism #shitstorm

Cancel the Donald Trump reality show: War in the Middle East makes Don's courtroom antics irrelevant

[A] president who has worked a bipartisan mini-miracle to pass an infrastructure bill and help keep the government open and is dealing with border issues no president has dealt with in 40 years, all while bringing down prescription drug prices and managing two proxy wars in Asia and the Middle East, still trails a former president who has been impeached twice, found liable for fraud and rape in civil court and is currently facing 91 felony charges in four different jurisdictions. If you presented it as a Hollywood script it would only be bought if it were labeled satire.

The world teeters on the brink of war. Trump is whining about his problems.

#Salon #Opinion #Trump

Cancel the Donald Trump reality show: War in the Middle East makes Don's courtroom antics irrelevant

The threat of growing war leaves Trump looking so very small

No Wonder Donald Trump Loves Mike Johnson

There is also the fact that Johnson is a zealous homophobe and anti-abortion crusader who has said that physicians who offer abortion care should be “imprisoned at hard labor” and who has co-sponsored federal legislation that would ban abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat. In 2015 Johnson told Irin Carmon of New York magazine, “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control.” He has, in speeches, suggested that school shootings are the natural consequence of teaching evolution. He co-sponsored legislation introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that would make it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to people under 18 years of age. The list goes on and on.

#Slate #Opinion #MAGA #Theocracy #Democracy #MikeJohnson

No Wonder Donald Trump Loves Mike Johnson

Johnson is the terrifying embodiment of two anodyne faces that give cover to the worst forms of MAGA extremism.