I've already given up on Homo sapiens but you almost certainly have not.
If you still give a shit, if only to protect yourself and your family, you need to understand that if you want to keep what's left of our democracy and your constitutionally guaranteed rights, you will need to push back on what's going on in Washington in 2019. The elites who run this country are totally corrupt. They will sacrifice anything and anyone to get what they want. The worst of their political representatives is Democrat Adam Schiff of California's 28th district. He's been running the impeachment farce.
Trust me on this one — Adam Schiff is the most ruthless, unprincipled politician I've ever seen. I was a toddler when Senator Joseph McCarthy was witch-hunting communists in the early fifties (1950-1954, 2nd video below). McCarthy was an evil man. The bad news is that he's the only apt comparison to Schiff I've got. Not even Nixon reached this level of corruption, although Nixon was clearly a scumbag.
Regarding Schiff, see the 1st video below.
Like McCarthy, Schiff is an power-obsessed lunatic, a classic demagogue. He's a very, very dangerous man. Trump's crazy in that peculiar way of his, but he's nowhere near as dangerous as Schiff. And of course the mainstream media (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) are complicit in Schiff's over-the-top attempt to destroy our political system. If these evil cocksuckers get away with this, the end is nigh.
Were I to leave the house this morning, I would have a choice to make. I could go left or I could go right. As it turns out, this is no choice at all according to House speaker Nancy Pelosi because
"I also pointed out to the President that I had concerns that all roads seem to lead to Putin..."
In her role as speaker the house, Nancy Pelosi is third in line for the presidency of the United States. This makes her one of the most powerful people on Earth.
In contemplating the meaning of life, the universe and everything, your role on this planet and especially the viability of our species going forward, I humbly ask you to meditate at some length on Pelosi's simple summation of our current political situation—all roads lead to Putin.
Today I have a question for you humans out there. First, watch Matt Christiansen's video below.
OK, here's the question—
Are we really going to let these very low awareness, unaccountable, unscrupulous Google assholes run a huge part of the internet?
Right? I mean, they're dishonest, slippery, deceitful and unprincipled—the means apparently always justify the ends, but what exactly are the "ends" here? No doubt these unconsciously arrived at ends include more for them and less for everybody else, but I wonder how they rationalize/justify their disgraceful and immoral behavior. They're not saying and don't have to because Might Makes Right (watch the video).
I would think the obvious answer to today's question is "No" but I don't see anyone doing anything about it. Another clearly pertinent question relates to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Who made him God?
In my last post, I asked humans to try to suck a little less to combat this fascism/free speech problem that's come up in the last few years (basically, ever since the elites have engaged in a coup attempt to get rid of Trump and subvert what's left of our democracy.)
But clearly, from a human nature point of view, such a request is far, far beyond the capacity of the vast majority of you. So I'm sorry for asking the impossible. Mea culpa.
Go back to my last post and click on the link underlying the text "sham impeachment bullshit." What will you see?
That was a Tim Poll video. You can no longer watch it on YouTube. What was Tim's crime? He talked about the partisan political ties of the so-called "whistleblower" and named him. That Democrat political operative's name is Eric Ciaramella. Everything Tim discussed was already public knowledge. It was on the record. For example, Real Clear Politics had already written a story outing this "deep state" asshole.
And now, according to our corporate and political overlords, any story on Facebook or YouTube mentioning this dickhead's name is officially a conspiracy theory. That's the elite establishment party line. That's what the American Politburo wants you to believe. CNN (or ABC, etc.) equals Pravda.
That's fascism. It's here now. There is still a chance to defeat this evil but that chance is fading fast.
Two courses of action are still available to you: you can submit to our corrupt overlords or you can fight back.
Submitting indicates that you are completely domesticated. The overlords love that. To me, submitting means you're no better than a garden-variety house pet. Woof, woof!
Did you think I was going to watch Western Civilization collapse without saying anything?
I have often voiced my firm view that humans suck. How about for once you try to suck a little less?
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Update — Facebook suspends Tim Pool for naming the "whistleblower." They told Tim that his reporting on what is now public knowledge was criminal activity.
Well, we're back to George Carlin again. His prescient observations have withstood the test of time (video at the end).
That "big club" you ain't in consists of the elites who own and run this country. Ever since right-wing populist Donald Trump got elected through the electoral college, those elites have waged constant war on Trump and the Truth. These evil elites have waged war on ordinary working Americans through their "woke" minions on social media (especially Twitter). They are waging war on what's left of the Republic and Democracy right now with this sham impeachment bullshit.
Make no mistake, it is constant warfare now and has been ever since Trump was elected. And it is class warfare. Pay no attention to all that political correctness nonsense. There's a not-very-well hidden agenda behind all that nonsense (see below). It's the corporate/political elites against the middle and working classes. That's the war we're in.
Unfortunately, most Americans are too dumb or domesticated to realize that our elites are coming for them. But George Carlin explained that as well because K-12 "education" in the United States is a joke and getting a "college education" is the same as volunteering to become a mark in a money-making scheme run by college presidents and administrators. You too can pay $40,000 a year to get indoctrinated in fascistic post-modernist bullshit (watch these two amazing lectures, part I and part II).
Now, if you understand what I just said, you will also understand why The Washington Post just ran an editorial called Why America Needs a Hate Speech Law. You will understand that the owners of this country don't want you to be able to speak freely. As George would say, that's against their interests. Free speech can lead to wrongthink, which can be defined as any speech or beliefs the elites don't like.
You want some hate speech? OK, here's some. The evil cocksucker who wrote this Washington Post editorial is Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time Magazine. He wants you to believe some Big Lies. As Joseph Goebbels said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." The Russiagate conspiracy theory is one of those Big Lies. This Stengel asshole is counting on you being weak-minded enough to cede your 1st Amendment rights to our corporate and political overlords. They don't just want obedient, cheap workers as George Carlin said. No, they want your soul too.
Disinformation techniques are always associated with Russia and other non-democratic states. The sad fact is that every disinformation technique listed by CEPA (for example) is being used by the American corporate-owned mainstream media every day in 2019, and this deception will only get worse next year prior to the election. The even sadder fact is that only a few Americans are capable of recognizing what is going on.
I've made a few comments to help you through this steaming pile of self-serving dishonest horseshit. Emphasis added.
When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Wow. I have a problem with the first sentence—this evil elite cocksucker thinks he was a journalist at Time magazine. No bona fide journalist would attack the 1st amendment. Free speech is the lifeblood of actual journalism. This asshole was and still is a propagandist.
But as a government official traveling around the world ...
For Obama, Mr. Hopey-Changey. Can you say revolving door? It's a big club and you ain't in it.
... championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran.
Right. The 1st Amendment is an outlier here on Earth. No corrupt elite anywhere in the world can operate with impunity if people can say or think anything they want, let alone vote or engage in any behavior which indicates they have a spine.
Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that? It’s a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the “thought that we hate,” but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw. It is important to remember that our First Amendment doesn’t just protect the good guys; our foremost liberty also protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society.
In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election ...
Bad actors? Hmmm.... Do you think this evil cocksucker is referring to himself? No, of course not. He's referring to...
... Russia’s Internet Research Agency planted false stories hoping they would go viral. They did. Russian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook, all protected by the First Amendment. The Russians understood that our free press and its reflex toward balance and fairness would enable Moscow to slip its destructive ideas into our media ecosystem. When Putin said back in 2014 that there were no Russian troops in Crimea — an outright lie — he knew our media would report it, and we did.
Any reference to "Russia" with regard to the 2016 election is what poker players call a tell. Could it be that our corrupt elites and that HopeyChangey dickhead were responsible for the election of Donald Trump? Could it be that these same assholes fucked over so many Americans for so many years that these same Americans had no problem voting for the OrangeMan? Is Trump merely a symptom of a much greater rot in that Nest of Vipers called our nation's capital? Of course not! The elites want you to believe that it was the Russians who elected the Donald, and anything else you might say or believe is wrongthink.
That’s partly because the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era.
Yes, it was a simpler era when the convoluted evil this cocksucker represents was not as pervasive as it is right now.
The [1st] amendment rests on the notion that the truth will win out in what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called “the marketplace of ideas.” This “marketplace” model has a long history going back to 17th-century English intellectual John Milton, but in all that time, no one ever quite explained how good ideas drive out bad ones, how truth triumphs over falsehood. Milton, an early opponent of censorship, said truth would prevail in a “free and open encounter.” A century later, the framers believed that this marketplace was necessary for people to make informed choices in a democracy. Somehow, magically, truth would emerge. The presumption has always been that the marketplace would offer a level playing field. But in the age of social media, that landscape is neither level nor fair.
Right, it's the evil internet that makes our political and corporate overlords nervous. And despite the fact that Google, Twitter and Facebook are censoring the fuck out of any speech they don't like and promoting the elite-controlled mainstream media whenever they can, so-called "hate speech" keeps popping up like weeds in the elaborately designed, well-tended garden these same elites created to keep us all fat, dumb and medicated. Gotta contain this internet threat. You know, like the Chinese do.
On the Internet, truth is not optimized. On the Web, it’s not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth doesn’t always win. In the age of social media, the marketplace model doesn’t work. A 2016 Stanford study showed that 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and an actual news story. Only a quarter of high school students could tell the difference between an actual verified news site and one from a deceptive account designed to look like a real one.
I wonder, Mr. Cocksucker, whether you yourself can tell the difference between Truth and Propaganda? Apparently not, because you're the one promoting this authoritarian Big Lie and undoubtedly you believe your own bullshit.
Since World War II, many nations have passed laws to curb the incitement of racial and religious hatred. These laws started out as protections against the kinds of anti-Semitic bigotry that gave rise to the Holocaust. We call them hate speech laws, but there’s no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is. In general, hate speech is speech that attacks and insults people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation.
That's another tell. The elites hide behind this "race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation" nonsense. It's all a smokescreen, even though their "woke" minions believe this bullshit. They use this stuff for their own evil purposes. Political correctness, intersectionality, invoking white privilege and the rest are merely means to an end—political and thought control by elites. If you don't align with what our overlords want you to believe, well, you're basically a Nazi according to the blue checkmarks on Twitter. Believing that free speech itself is a good thing means you're alt-right. I'm not kidding. "Free Speech" is merely a Republican "talking point" according to those deranged by #OrangeManBad.
I hope you the reader understand at least that much. Here's the rest of the bullshit. You get the idea. I'm done. The stench is getting pretty thick up in here.
I think it’s time to consider these statutes. The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” or is likely to do so can be restricted. Domestic terrorists such as Dylan Roof and Omar Mateen and the El Paso shooter were consumers of hate speech. Speech doesn’t pull the trigger, but does anyone seriously doubt that such hateful speech creates a climate where such acts are more likely?
Let the debate begin. Hate speech has a less violent, but nearly as damaging, impact in another way: It diminishes tolerance. It enables discrimination. Isn’t that, by definition, speech that undermines the values that the First Amendment was designed to protect: fairness, due process, equality before the law? Why shouldn’t the states experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation?
All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting “thought that we hate,” but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect.
And here's George. He's like fine wine. He gets better and better as time goes on.
Perhaps you are concerned that the United States in turning into some 1984-like authoritarian/fascist/totalitarian state where (1) history is routinely rewritten and (2) current events are manipulated by the Powers That Be.
Well, I'm here to ease your concerns. America is not turning into an Orwellian state; it already is one!
But you probably don't care or you're completely unaware that this Orwellian thing is happening. OK, then. As the old song goes, Don't Worry, Be Happy. When they eventually come for you through the media or at your front door, if I'm still around, I'll just pretend it didn't happen just like almost all of you are doing right now.
Rewriting history, which is called often gaslighting nowadays, is the subject of the first video below (Tim Pool). I've suitably modified the Encyclopedia Britannica definition to fit the usual case in 2019. Emphasis added.
Gaslighting — an elaborate and insidious technique of deception and psychological manipulation practiced by the mainstream corporate media (our corporate overlords) over an extended period.
Its effect is to gradually undermine the people's confidence in their own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from appearance, thereby rendering them pathologically dependent on the gaslighters in their thinking or feelings.
And thus wrongthink is effectively quashed among the masses...
As part of the process, people's sense of reality is severely damaged, and they become additionally dependent on the gaslighters for emotional support and validation. In some cases the intended (and achieved) result is to rob the people of their sanity...
This next sentence is precious because according to my model of human nature, when there is something important at stake, when there are existential threats, as in this case, then it turns out that virtually everyone on Earth is "psychologically disordered" in the sense meant below.
Because the gaslighters are themselves typically psychologically disordered, they are often not fully aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it.
When existential threats are present, and if virtually everyone on Earth is not fully (or even partially) aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it in such cases—they are psychologically disordered in this sense—then in effect nobody is psychologically disordered. Being "psychologically disordered" in such cases is simply normal human behavior.
My name for that fucked up "psychologically disordered" human world is Flatland (follow the human nature link above). Are the people on The View or CNN or MSNBC psychologically disordered? Or are they normal human beings? (See below).
In the second case, where current events are routinely manipulated by the Powers That Be, we find out that in the crucial days after Tulsi Gabbard called out evil conspiracy theorist and warmonger Hillary Clinton, YouTube manipulated it's search results to suppress access to Tulsi's channel and videos. Instead they boosted videos from MSM corporate media, which those in the know understand to be their unofficial and secret official policy. The videos YouTube boosted were more likely than not gaslighting videos.
For instance, look at this video (Jimmy Dore quoting MSNBC). I mean, after all, Tulsi didn't explicitly deny that she's a Russian asset, right? Am I right? Case closed!
Anyway, we know YouTube suppressed Tulsi's content because using a VPN (virtual private network) allows us to see YouTube search results in various countries. It turns out that the suppression occurred only in the United States. A few days later, after the furor died down, the suppression was removed. Voila! It's like fucking magic.
This is the subject of the second video below (Jeremy at The Quartering).
The bottom line is that Alphabet (Google/YouTube) routinely manipulates elections in the United States. Gee, I thought only Russians and Russian puppets like Tulsi did that kind of thing
In 2016 I missed my opportunity to vote for Donald Trump. I didn't vote. That was a mistake. But I didn't know then what I know now. Lots of water under the bridge since then. The Big Reveal. Mea Culpa. And if Trump were to do some really bad thing, something that would bring this evil world to a screeching halt, then good for him. Good job!
But that's very unlikely. As the great comic Dave Chappelle said recently, the only way Trump has affected him was to give Chappelle a tax break.
The good news is that I will get another chance to vote for Trump next year. In so doing I will give our astonishingly corrupt Political/Media/Corporate/Deep State overlords the finger.
("Deep State" refers very specifically to the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, and all the operatives currently working inside or outside those agencies who seek to overthrow an elected president, and most pertinently the ones like serial liar James Clapper who now work for or appear on CNN.)
Well, I will vote for Trump unless a miracle occurs and Tulsi Gabbard becomes the nominee. Miracles can't happen because most humans have their oblivious heads up their asses and totally corrupt (self-interested, power-obsessed, status-seeking) humans at the top of social hierarchies demand that all us low-status racists, Nazis, homophobic, misogynist, islamophobes submit to them.
(That last sentence contains some sarcasm and I only point that out because most humans are incapable of understanding irony.)
Regular people trying to live their pathetic, suffering-filled lives are scum, according to our morally superior overlords, and we know that because our high-status overlords keep telling us so. Let me be entirely clear about what I mean when I say I will vote for Trump. I have a message for our integrity-challenged overlords.
I'm assuming the Democratic nominee will be Elizabeth Warren. Fuck all the others except for Tulsi. I will never vote for Pocahontas Elizabeth Warren. She's Pure Evil 2.0. (Watch any Jimmy Dore video about Warren. Here's another one. He's got her pegged.)
But let's hear from Pure Evil 1.0., the 2016 version. That's what prompted this post. I'm still waiting for her head to spin around Exorcist-style. My source is The Washington Post, an exemplary news organization owned by Jeff Bezos. (That was sarcasm again.)
Gabbard won’t be happy to hear Hillary Clinton’s latest interview. Nor will President Trump or another of Clinton’s 2016 opponents, whom Clinton has now lodged similar accusations about.
In a conversation on former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s podcast, “Campaign HQ,” Clinton suggested the Russians are leveraging a number of top U.S. politicians. She suggested Russia had kompromat, or compromising information, on Trump. She accused 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein of being a “Russian asset.”
That's all bad enough, but...
And she suggested Russia might back Gabbard as a third-party candidate.
“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton did not provide any evidence for her claim, though a spokesman later insisted to CNN, “This is not some outlandish claim; this is reality.” Gabbard, though, has previously ruled out an independent campaign.
The “again” in Clinton’s quote referred to Stein, whom some Clinton supporters have accused (rather baselessly) of serving as a spoiler for Clinton in 2016. Stein got around 1 percent of the vote in the three decisive states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but exit polls showed most of her voters wouldn’t have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein weren’t running.
Clinton then flat-out labeled Stein a “Russian asset.”
“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
At another point in the interview, Clinton wagered that Russia does in fact have some compromising material on Trump, suggesting that’s why so many of Trump’s decisions have erred in a pro-Russian direction.
“I don’t know what Putin has on him, whether it’s both personal and financial,” Clinton said. “I assume it is.”She then switched gears: “But more than that, there is this bizarre adulation Trump has for dictators and authoritarians. He dreams of being able to order people to do things and make them do it. He has no democratic instincts, really.”
Tulsi's Response
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton.
You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.
From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
In a since-deleted tweet on Oct. 4, Morey shared an image with this slogan: "Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong."
(standwithhk.org)
Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong
'We too love money more than freedom and democracy': Creators of 'South Park brutally mock NBA's China apology
BEIJING – The creators of “South Park” have issued a mock apology to China after censors scrubbed their popular animation from the Chinese web.
The tongue-in-cheek statement, skewering Beijing’s demands that Western brands conform to its world view, came with officials apparently annoyed about an episode that crossed several of the Communist Party’s red lines.
The episode — called “Band in China” — depicted forced labor at a Chinese prison and parodied companies that cave in to censorship for commercial gain.
“I can’t sell my soul like this,” says one character, who was under pressure from Chinese censors to rewrite his music.
“It’s not worth living in a world where China controls my country’s art,” he added.
The incident comes as the NBA and its Houston Rockets franchise are facing fierce criticism and financial punishment in China over a tweet supporting Hong Kong’s democracy protesters.
Both the league and the team have scrambled to apologize over the tweet by Rockets’ General Manager Daryl Morey, as calls for a boycott gather steam in one of the NBA’s most lucrative markets.
But the apologies have sparked derision in the United States, where critics said the league is sacrificing morals for money.
Writing on Twitter, “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone offered spoof contrition over any offense they had caused in China with their satirical show.
“Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts,” they wrote.
“We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look just like Winnie the Pooh at all,” the statement added, a reference to banned memes comparing Chinese President Xi Jinping with the portly bear.
“Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?” the statement read.
On Tuesday, searches for “South Park” on China’s Twitter-like social media platform Weibo and popular film review site Douban did not return any results.
And while information on “South Park” was still available on a few video streaming sites, episodes could not be played.
Parker and Stone’s response to China stands in stark contrast to that of major Western brands who have quickly beaten a retreat when faced with potential losses in China’s huge — and fiercely nationalistic — consumer market.
Companies ranging from airlines to fashion houses have issued fulsome apologies, often after being charged with “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.”
As well as any indication of support for protests in Hong Kong, common crimes include labeling Taiwan as a separate country — China believes it is a renegade province — or discussing Xinjiang, where rights groups say a million mostly-Muslim minorities are being held in prison camps.
China Is Treating Islam Like a Mental Illness
August 28, 2018 — One million Muslims are being held right now in Chinese internment camps, according to estimates cited by the UN and U.S. officials. Former inmates—most of whom are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority—have told reporters that over the course of an indoctrination process lasting several months, they were forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day. There are media reports of inmates being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, which are forbidden to Muslims, as well asreports oftorture and death.
The sheer scale of the internment camp system, which according to The Wall Street Journal has doubled in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region just within the last year, is mindboggling. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China describes it as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.” Beijing began by targeting Uighur extremists, but now even benign manifestations of Muslim identity—like growing a long beard—can get a Uighur sent to a camp, the Journal noted. Earlier this month, when a UN panel confronted a senior Chinese official about the camps, he said there are “no such things as reeducation centers,” even though government documents refer to the facilities that way. Instead, he claimed they’re just vocational schools for criminals.
China has been selling a very different narrative to its own population. Although the authorities frequently describe the internment camps as schools, they also liken them to another type of institution: hospitals. Here’s an excerpt from an official Communist Party audio recording, which was transmitted last year to Uighurs via WeChat, a social-media platform, and which was transcribed and translated by Radio Free Asia:
Members of the public who have been chosen for reeducation have been infected by an ideological illness. They have been infected with religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology, and therefore they must seek treatment from a hospital as an inpatient. … The religious extremist ideology is a type of poisonous medicine, which confuses the mind of the people. … If we do not eradicate religious extremism at its roots, the violent terrorist incidents will grow and spread all over like an incurable malignant tumor.
“Religious belief is seen as a pathology” in China, explained James Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University, adding that Beijing often claims religion fuels extremism and separatism. “So now they’re calling reeducation camps ‘hospitals’ meant to cure thinking. It’s like an inoculation, a search-and-destroy medical procedure that they want to apply to the whole Uighur population, to kill the germs of extremism. But it’s not just giving someone a shot—it’s locking them up for months in bad conditions.”
LeBron James says NBA exec was 'misinformed' in his tweet supporting Hong Kong protests
But on Monday night, the vocal NBA star sided with silence as he criticized Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey as "misinformed" over Morey's tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters. "I just think that when you're misinformed or you're not educated about something -- and I'm just talking about the tweet itself -- you never know the ramifications that can happen. We all see what that did -- not only for our league but for all of us in America, for people in China as well," he told reporters on Monday.
James' comments threatened to undermine his reputation as perhaps the foremost social justice advocate in popular culture. Amid that criticism from sports columnists and politicians, James tried to clarify his position on Twitter. He said he was "not discussing the substance" of the tweet and added that Morey "could have waited a week" to tweet what he did.
James' criticism came while the NBA is embroiled in a standoff with China after Morey tweeted his support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Morey quickly apologized and deleted his original tweet, but the league's Chinese partners suspended ties, state broadcaster CCTV halted all broadcasts of preseason matches, and the Chinesegovernment said the NBA needed to show "mutual respect."
The rift, and the NBA's rapid attempts to salvage its massive Chinese market, have sparked broader questions about the influence of China on free speech in corporate America. Speaking to reporters before a game in Los Angeles Monday, James called it "a very delicate situation, a very sensitive situation."
When asked whether Morey should be reprimanded for his tweet, James responded, "I think when we all sit back and learn from the situation that happened, understand that what you could tweet or could say, and we all talk about this freedom of speech -- yes, we do all have freedom of speech, but at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you're not thinking about others and you're only thinking about yourself."
"I don't want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand and he spoke. So many people could have been harmed, not just financially but physically, emotionally, spiritually. So just be careful what we tweet and what we say and what we do, even though yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too."
James, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers,added that he and his teammates had stayed silent about the situation because they were "not informed enough" about it, and that "I'm not here to judge how the League handles the situation."
George Monbiot opens the video below by talking about his occasional feelings of despair. After all, there is lots to be despairing about. The climate is rapidly transitioning to a hostile state, though it is happening far too slowly for humans to grasp what's going on. The world's top soil is disappearing, again rapidly on any time-scale longer than the human one. On the global scale, a relative handful of humans own most of the wealth and are accumulating even more wealth as I write this. George even talks about humans as storytelling animals.
Ironically, the title of the video is How to Really Take Back Control. Take back control? I say "ironically" because nothing can be done about anything George talks about. Nothing. Not the climate, not the topsoil, not the global wealth inequality. These problems can not be fixed and therefore will not be fixed. Human nature itself created these problems. Human nature did not allow for solutions to them.
Stop reading for a moment. Let that sink in for a while.
But Monbiot believes these problems can be fixed. We Shall Overcome and all that. He thinks that if we just replace one narrative with another, a miracle will occur. So Monbiot's "despair" is really hope in disguise. That's always true in Flatland. Evolution guaranteed humans would feel that way to keep the game going (to get your gene spellings into the next generation).
That's why Monbiot has bothered to get up in front of an attentive crowd and tell them a story. Because he thinks there's some point to doing so. And for George himself, of course there is a point because it must be very satisfying for him to get up in front of an audience of spellbound people and tell them a hopeful story, however delusional it is.
So Monbiot has no idea what despair is. I'll tell you what despair is. A person feels despair when he able see the ineluctable working out of humankind's tragic fate. When he can see some (if not all) of the flawed qualities which make that self-destructive outcome unavoidable. When he can see that every effort he might conceivably make to reverse that outcome is utterly futile.
That's the despair I feel every day. I would never get up in front of roomful of people to talk about humanity's problems. What would be the fucking point? I wouldn't get anything out of it and neither would they.
Outside of evolution's wicked game, all this serves to underscore the utter pointlessness of human existence, even as humans everywhere desperately try ever harder to create meaning & purpose by clinging to one type of delusion or some other one.
I never feel such despair all the day long. Those feelings are fleeting. Most days I compose or arrange music because it makes me happy, even as the inevitable aches and pains of aging rob me of precious vitality over time (I am now 66).
So George Monbiot has no clue what real despair is. Fuck off, George.
