peisistratos

Almost all access to the media, access to the Internet and so forth in the US has been consolidated into the control of six corporations: AT&T/Warner, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp, Sony, and ViacomCBS. As control of almost all communication is centralized under the control of entities ultimately controlled by billionaire heirs, the natural reaction of people will be to struggle over what communications comes out of these channels.

The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is below what it was in the early 1970s in the US. All the wealth has gone to the heirs and a handful of people mostly born into the white upper middle class. Channels of communication are shut down. The monopolies I mentioned shut down Usenet and communication became centralized by them and companies like Facebook.

Everyone I have heard whining about the end of the Enlightenment recently is part of this to the manor born type, as well as their bought off stalking horses in relevant communities.

What is happening is a very natural result of what has been happening for decades. As anti-trust laws are not enforced, as the Fairness Doctrine goes away and our media channels consistently advocate oppression of nationalities alongside a newly militarized police, we don't hear of the monopolization of communication or proletarianization and impoverishment of the population or militarization of the police, the end of the Fairness doctrine - we hear the newly centralized lines of communication can't spew out their propaganda without complaint.

> Fiat currencies (that is, currency that has no intrinsic value) has existed for at least 1300 years, if not longer. They are not based on air

If paper currency got bootstrapping 1300 years ago, then why were American and European currencies gold backed half a century ago? Apparently the bootstrapped currency needed to be bootstraped again.

Gold is an ordinary commodity with practical uses (electronics, tooth fillings etc.) Its special qualities that make it a good currency candidate are its durability, portability, uniformity and divisibility. Gold is valuable due to its practical value, but is often exchanged due to its commodity qualities.

> an institution and its ability to maintain its value through whatever means it has available

The means a half century ago was to trade the paper for gold. Now that is implicit. The US stores tons of gold in Fort Knox and elsewhere - why? Obviously it implicitly backs the currency, even if the M1 supply is very large.

As currencies have existed for thousands of years, then I guess it took all that time to bootstrap to a half century ago, where the currency started running on air.

Or -

A few years or decades from now, our post Bretton Woods, post Gold Shock currency system will become untenable and be replaced by something else, as has happened numerous times throughout history, especially when the currency has no inherent value.

The a priori to all of this current hubbub is a large number of people who are not of an upper class or upper middle class white American background, who are not even heard at all.

One example would be Tulsi Gabbard. We do not hear what she says. We hear from a New York Times columnist who went to exclusive prep schools and then to an Ivy League college (where she tried to "cancel" Arab professors by testifying against them that they were antisemitic) before landing her plum role, that Gabbard is an "Assad toadie". After years of throwing mud from her aerie, she herself finally feels some criticism come in, and quits her job in a huff, with ramblings about the end of freedom.

Hillary Clinton not so indirectly implied Gabbard was some sort of stalking horse of Putin's as well. Saturday Night Live joins in. This is all not considering canceling though. It's not, in a sense, the notion that the US should not have military bases all over the world was never out there on the corporate controlled media channels . There's nothing to cancel - that show was never allowed on to start with.

Pushback against this mudslinging is considered canceling though. This is the threat to freedom we hear Sturm and Drang about.

The channels of media out there all blast forth establishment views, benefiting a minority of privileged people. They are born upper and upper middle class, white, and are American if not by birth then by coming to the US. Other voices are excluded. All that is left and that can finally be faintly heard is some criticism of these establishment narratives. That this pushback is causing demonstrations around the country and criticism of the establishment narrative is very distressing for these people.

(A tangential example - in the days after 9/11, the New York Times published excerpts of an Osama bin Laden statement. As the whole world seemed to be pivoting on this dialectic, I tried to find the full statement somewhere. I was unable to. I could not even find it on the net. Perhaps it has surfaced in the past 20 years. It reminds me of the old Irish republican cartoon of an Irishman with a British gag over his mouth representing BBC voice bans etc. When the gag is removed a dove of peace comes out. NATO bombing Serbian press is not considered censorship. Satellite installers jailed for installing al-Manar is not censorship. Privileged people who tried to cancel Arab professors getting criticism is considered censorship.)

In the current dialectic, we have to-the-manor born, white, more or less American establishment types suddenly having to contend with voices who are not necessarily white or American, who went to public schools and grew up middle class or working class or poor, who are finally having their voices heard and who are challenging the establishment hegemony. I know which side I am on.

So your counterpoint is that the call to genocide was one he relayed directly from the president of the USA?

The "I was only following orders" defense did not fly at the Nuremberg trials.

Kissinger's documented order was "anything that flies on anything that moves".

While the Nuremberg trials had a lot of evidence, they never had such direct documentary evidence of a call for genocide like that.

(or is that overblown? Perhaps only for the Cambodians fighting against the CIA backed coup of Lon Nol should shirts be torn in accusations of genocide).

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Then Nigeria and Bangladesh have a significant advantage over Japan, Germany, France and the UK.

There used to be local record shops and big ones downtown - music distribution has since become pretty automated. There used to be many bookstores around - book distribution has become fairly automated. Gamestop has been closing stores and has been hit by automated distribution in recent years.

I used to buy Hagstrom map books filled with detailed current maps - they were sold in gas stations and bookstores and they even had some of their own stores. Their stores all shut down and their business shrank enormously as map navigation became automated.

There used to be a lot of tour and travel agencies around. They still exist, but are much less prevalent and are scaled down.

In fact, automation of commodity distribution has had a major effect on retail, and consequently commercial real estate.

Insofar as office work - people who work in law tell me the large number of secretaries who shuffled through cabinets full of folders containing records have largely disappeared as record retrieval has been automated. I had data entry jobs many years ago, itself a type of automation - but the jobs I did have disappeared as data distribution has become automated.

I don't know what they are measuring but I have seen the effects of a automation all around. Maybe with the closing of bookstores and record stores and video game stores, they mean the role of a retail clerk has not been much automated, which may be true. But I have seen automation have a large effect on many industries, and then rippling effects onto industries like real estate.

> The Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a wide range of lurid conspiracy theories in countries whose governments are hostile to the United States, notably Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela... authoritarian regimes have exploited widespread public fear and confusion to generate suspicions about U.S. motives, to stoke hostility toward the United States, and to discredit the U.S. government’s sincerity in combatting the global pandemic.

With Trump tweeting "LIBERATE MICHIGAN" in support of the armed anti-lockdown group who shut down the Michigan statehouse and its lockdown efforts, I think the so-called "authoritarian regimes" have more to "exploit" regarding "the U.S. government's sincerity in combatting this global pandemic" than just "widespread public fear and confusion".

Hong Kong was broken off of China so that the British could push heroin opium on Chinamen. It's a laugh that westerners think they still have some colonial claim at what goes on in Hong Kong, based on their old drug pushing operation.

Hong Kong is a colonial relic, it makes all the sense in the world for China to reintegrate this former imperial outpost now.

The web site this comes from is named for someone who said about Israeld killing of hundreds of children in Gaza bombings "Israel cannot have a proportional response" against the Palestinians.