Netflix As Propaganda

Netflix, a company that went from a mail-order lending library of CDs to a major propaganda broadcasting network in a few years (and HOW did that happen) put out a new anti- social media documentary the other day, called The Social Dilemma. (Actually, the child porn movie they put out also had an anti-social media aspect). My friend's cousin was influenced by the propaganda and posted that she was going to close her Facebook account, so as not to be corrupted by communicating with other humans without the intervention of top down corporate media. (I paraphrase, of course). My friend wrote an eloquent response.

There is definitely an issue that too much of our time is spent on the internet. We need to get on with life. I too have seen this Netflix film and while I went along at first, at the end I felt I was being manipulated. Consider this if you will.

Social media has done some wonderful things in these last decades for millions of people. It has brought together old friends and family lost for years. I wouldn't know you at all, my beautiful cousin, or your brothers if not for Facebook. Neither would I have been able to reach out to the rest of the scattered family with social media. I have reunited childhood friends, old lovers, and made many, many new contacts around the world whom I never would have encountered any other way.

I have been exposed to ideas and opinions I never knew existed and learned more about almost every subject that interests me...which is a lot. I have met many people on FB who later became good friends in real life and have been to my home and I to theirs. We have been able to organize and mobilize politically in ways that were never possible before, and especially now during this time of curfew and lockdown.

Millions of people isolated and alone, depend on social media to keep in touch and give meaning to their lonely lives. Social media has changed my life for the better and millions of others too. It has made us smarter and wiser and more effective citizens of the world. In fact, last month I was a judge on a virtual international panel of artists for the Curfew Group International Group Art Exhibition in Saudi Arabia attended by the Royal Family.

And there is the fact that social media is a challenge to the mainstream media narrative that often intends to mislead, misinform and just plain lie to us for commercial and political reasons. Gore Vidal, the great intellectual and historian said, The US invented only one art form. Advertising. We use it to sell soap and presidents. The corporate grip on opinion in the US is a wonder of the Western world, he said. No first world country has managed to eliminate so entirely from media all objectivity, much less decent.

Social media is a challenge to that control of the narrative. Eyes have been opened, truths have been revealed, and opinions changed. People have become much more aware of what is truth and skeptical of the propaganda. Because the fact is that the US is the most propagandized nation on earth. In 2013, Obama signed an order that lifted the prohibition against propaganda directly aimed at the American people. Now, anything goes. Nothing we read or hear now on commercial media should be taken at face value anymore, but rather considered critically and verified if possible by other sources. That is what social media is helping us do.

New independent sources of information are rising up all the time and their only outlet is Facebook and Twitter and other social media. That is a good thing. Because we cannot have a democratic representative government without the informed consent of the people. The republic depends on that.

People around the world would be less informed and more vulnerable to tyranny without the discoveries and truths we find on social media.....and that scares the hell out of those who would rule us with fear and propaganda. ...and they are responding accordingly. Corporate gatekeepers with ties to nefarious federal agencies regularly censor views that challenge the official narrative. But that is not working. The truth has ways of revealing itself. So now, there is a campaign to get us to leave social media with all its inconvenient truths revealed and available. This film on Netflix is part of that effort, and a very clever one at that. The best PR money can buy, but it is not in the public interest.

Sarah, my dear. You are young and in love and have a whole life before you. You have wonderful things ahead of you, as do your beautiful brothers. You don't need social media now. You have important work to do in life. But you benefit from it in many ways whether you participate regularly or not.

Social media is a valuable communication tool in a world that gets smaller but more complicated by the day. Language, for the first time in history, is not a barrier to communication around the world between regular people like us. That has changed everything and authoritarian regimes in this world hate it but cannot stop it entirely no matter what they try to censor.

To sum up, I would caution you about being too impressed with this film about Social media. It has an agenda. Not a good one either. Don't close your accounts. Keep them open even if you don't go there often. For no other reason, than to keep in touch with friends and family, but also to keep a line of communication that is not filtered so totally by commercial media and for corporate interests.

But the old folks at home, like me, need this lifeline and it enriches our lives in many many ways. And we have things to teach you too. Lessons learned old and new. Do it for us too. We need your support.

I have never had a formal education, but I am, none the less, an intellectual. My friends here are professors, doctors lawyers, and other intellectuals. I learn from them, but they also learn from me. We have enriched each other's lives and we have important things to teach and share.

How else could that happen except on Facebook?

There are sinister forces at work here that need us to stay ignorant and misinformed. It is why our school system ranks so poorly compared to the rest of the world. Americans are considered by much of the rest of the world and poorly educated and poorly informed and they are, for the greater part, absolutely correct.

As George Carlin said, The rulers of this country don't want us informed and educated, they want us to know just enough to do the work but not enough to know we are getting screwed. Well, as an old-time Labor leader, I can tell you that the working class is indeed getting screwed and has been from the beginning. No nation on earth has a more violent anti-worker Labor history than the US. Our labor laws are way behind those of all other industrialized countries and we have fewer benefits and entitlements, although we pay almost as much in taxes, we get nothing at all for it but more foreign wars.

I bet you were not aware of that until reading it here for here on facebook for the first time. Most people don't. Labor history is never taught in school. I have been fighting for that for years, and Facebook has put me in touch with other educators to advance that cause. We are making progress.

The truth about the failure of our profit-driven health care system (the most expensive and least effective in the world by every measure) has been driven home by this coronavirus crisis. The media would have us blame an unpopular president instead of the very fundamental problems with a system that does not have the health and safety of the American people as its priority, but rather the source of its profits. Social media has made a difference there too. Now, almost 70% of the American people want a universal single-payer nonprofit health care system like every other developed, and even some undeveloped nations already enjoy. We can thank social media for raising that awareness when commercial media would dismiss it as godless commie socialism...lol.

I'm sorry this is so long, I have been writing here for over two hours now. But I think this is important and that you may not hear this point of view from other sources, and you should hear it. I hope you will share my thoughts on this...which is another thing that social media allows us to do.

Crimes Not Prosecuted

Criminals flourish when law enforcement breaks down. The US deregulated the S&Ls in the 80s, and the bankers responded with a billion dollar crime wave. 1200 bankers went to prison. But when Clinton was elected in 1992, the regulators were told by Al Gore that their role was no longer to prosecute crime, but to be partners. (Per William Black, hobbled bank prosecuter.)

And now we watch as criminals who used the national security establishment to go after their political rival go free. Outrageous crimes are being committed, while Americans bicker about trivialities.

From Kunstler 9-11-20 "Ongoing sedition is the answer, with fetid slime trails across the political landscape everywhere you look. We’re informed hours ago, for instance, that the top lawyers in Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel operation wiped all the records from their cell phones before the DOJ Inspector General could collect evidence of their communications from the SC team’s three-year exercise in overthrowing a president. How is that not an obstruction of justice, and who will answer for it?

That’s on top of many other bits of essential evidence in the RussiaGate coup and other perfidious acts mysteriously gone missing — Special Agent Joe Pientka’s original “302” document from the Flynn interrogation, thousands of Strzok-and-Page’s text messages, official verifications of the Steele Dossier submitted to the FISA court, communications between the FBI “small group” (Comey, McCabe, Priestap, Carlin, McCord, Baker, et al.) plus CIA Chief John Brennan and DNI James Clapper with Senators Burr and Warner on the Senate Intel Committee, communications between “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, Col. Alexander Vindman and House Intel Committee chair Adam Schiff, records of CIA prop Stephan Halper’s doings with the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, all communication records between State Department official Jonathan Winer and British ex-spy Christopher Steele….

And now, like a fever building to climax, comes the news right out-front that the Democratic Party intends to foment insurrection if the election goes against them."

For Women, All Towns Are Sundown Towns

To women, all towns are Sundown Towns. From girlhood, we are warned about the risks to our lives and safety of being alone, especially after dark, in towns, on streets, in parks, in stairwells, on paths or in our own homes.

This knowledge is part of the culture and is turned into entertainment for the masses. Murder mysteries go into grisly details, and movies and TV show it in color. Every episode of Law and Order, Special Victims Unit starts with a brutal murder, usually with rape and/or mutilation.

We don't have to be alone to be targeted. 8 nurses in Chicago, 14 female engineering students in Montreal, women in war zones everywhere are targeted for being women.

In a bizarre 21st perversion, though, the media and Social Justice Warriors now tell us that the most vulnerable of all women are not women at all, they are men in womenface. Yes, if a man puts on makeup and/or a dress, he instantly turns into a delicate Special Victim, whom actual women must protect by allowing into our hitherto safe spaces, where we are more vulnerable. This includes the spaces that 20th century women built for female victims of violence, like domestic violence and rape centers, now being forced open to allow men inside.

Women who object to these intrusions are insulted, harassed and threatened. The Special Victims specialize in issuing sexually specific threats, such as rape and forced fellatio. Odd, that. Women don't usually threaten other women with rape, but men in womenface sure do.

The Establishment also stomps down on dissenting women, with arrests, banning, censorship and firing.

Why is any of this acceptable?