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Thread: Brave New World

  1. #501
    Thailand Expat misskit's Avatar
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    An anti-mobilization activist was hospitalized in Moscow after he was apparently raped and abused by police, independent media outlet Novaya Gaztea Europe reported Monday.


    Police raided the home of Artyom Kamardin and other anti-war activists filmed reading poems critical of the Russian military on Mayakovsky Square on Sunday.


    Russia has made public criticism of what it calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine punishable by fines or prison time.


    Officers “beat up Kamardin very badly and stuck a dumbbell in his anus,” according to Novaya Gazeta Europe.


    His lawyer Leonid Solovyov corroborated that account to the Kommersant newspaper Tuesday, but said Kamardin was not in need of hospitalization.

    MORE Japan Slams ‘Unbelievable’ Treatment of Diplomat Detained in Russia - The Moscow Times

  2. #502
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Stop it misskit, you'll get sabang all excited.

  3. #503
    Thailand Expat misskit's Avatar
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    For singing a song, for Pete’s sake. What a wonderful Brave New World they have in Russia.


    'Miss Crimea 2022' fined for singing Ukrainian song

    A Russian court has fined 2022 Miss Crimea pageant winner Olga Valeyeva 40,000 rubles ($681) for singing the patriotic Ukrainian song Chervona Kalyna (“Red Guelder Rose”) in a video posted to Instagram, RIA Novosti reported on Monday. A friend of Valeyeva who also appeared in the video was sentenced to 10 days in prison.


    Both women were charged with “discrediting” the Russian army and spreading propaganda for an extremist organization. According to the Russian news outlet Life, Valeyeva was given a lighter sentence because she has young children.


    A video posted on the Crimean Interior Ministry’s Telegram channel Monday shows the women apologizing for singing the song.

    The song Chervona Kalyna has long been a symbol of Ukrainian independence. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a number of Ukrainian artists, as well as Pink Floyd, have released recordings of the song. Russian state media has written that the song is “considered an anthem of Ukrainian nationalist formations, including groups banned in Russia.”

    https://meduza.io/en/news/2022/10/04...ukrainian-song

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    Quote Originally Posted by misskit View Post
    For singing a song, for Pete’s sake. What a wonderful Brave New World they have in Russia.
    Our three stooges remind me of the Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore who extol the virtues of the land of their heritage, lambast the 'west' . . . but would never move to China.

  5. #505
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by misskit View Post
    For singing a song, for Pete’s sake. What a wonderful Brave New World they have in Russia.


    'Miss Crimea 2022' fined for singing Ukrainian song
    Putin is a terrified man. "Brave" is not a word you associate with such cowards.

  6. #506
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    Lets enter the great Censorship debate!

    Is it the right thing to do? Are dissenting opinions dangerous?
    Is it only right if you don't like what is being said?
    If so, who gets to decide that- Big Tech? Government/ Oligarchy? You?
    Or is it a sinister development that does not bode well for the future....
    The UK Labour Party.

    Labour conference delegate suspended(?) after speaking out against Nato


    "A delegate to the Labour Party conference who criticised NATO yesterday (September 27) has been suspended today, it is being reported. Angelo Sanchez, Leicester CLP delegate, was speaking on a motion on Ukraine. Here’s what he said:



    It seems free speech and debate is unwanted in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. What does that presage for the UK as a whole, if he ever becomes prime minister?"

    Labour conference delegate suspended(?) after speaking out against Nato | Vox Political


    To be fair, the speaker was supported by the moderator, calling for the delegates to listen to all views.

    Surprised, if he was suspended, nope.
    Last edited by OhOh; 05-10-2022 at 06:33 PM.
    A tray full of GOLD is not worth a moment in time.

  7. #507
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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda View Post
    Putin is a terrified man. "Brave" is not a word you associate with such cowards.
    His end is coming.

  8. #508
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    Quote Originally Posted by misskit View Post
    For singing a song, for Pete’s sake. What a wonderful Brave New World they have in Russia.


    'Miss Crimea 2022' fined for singing Ukrainian song

    A Russian court has fined 2022 Miss Crimea pageant winner Olga Valeyeva 40,000 rubles ($681) for singing the patriotic Ukrainian song Chervona Kalyna (“Red Guelder Rose”) in a video posted to Instagram, RIA Novosti reported on Monday. A friend of Valeyeva who also appeared in the video was sentenced to 10 days in prison.


    Both women were charged with “discrediting” the Russian army and spreading propaganda for an extremist organization. According to the Russian news outlet Life, Valeyeva was given a lighter sentence because she has young children.


    A video posted on the Crimean Interior Ministry’s Telegram channel Monday shows the women apologizing for singing the song.

    The song Chervona Kalyna has long been a symbol of Ukrainian independence. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a number of Ukrainian artists, as well as Pink Floyd, have released recordings of the song. Russian state media has written that the song is “considered an anthem of Ukrainian nationalist formations, including groups banned in Russia.”
    Just to piss you off :


    “I don’t want this virtual war” — Alina Pash withdraws from Eurovision following Crimea travel controversy



    Pictures: Suspilne



    Alina Pash will not sing at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022. In a post shared on Wednesday afternoon, she made it clear that the ongoing saga of her 2015 visit to Crimea has become too much for her.
    “I don’t want to be part of this dirty story anymore,” she said, just hours after it was revealed that one of her team members had forged travel documents to make it look like she’d traveled to the region legally.
    In her statement she said:
    “I am a citizen of Ukraine. I follow the laws of Ukraine. I try to carry the traditions and values of Ukraine into the world. What’s been poured into this story is not at all what I put into my song.”
    “I am an artist, not a politician. I do not have an army of PR people, managers, lawyers to resist all these attacks and pressure, the break-in of my social networks, the threats. And also the absolutely unacceptable words that people allow themselves without understanding the situation and forgetting about the dignity of every citizen of Ukraine. I don’t want this virtual war and hatred. The main war now is an external one, which came to my country in 2014.”
    “I don’t want to be in this dirty story anymore. With a heavy heart I unfortunately withdraw my candidacy as the representative of Ukraine in the Eurovision Song Contest. I’m really sorry.”
    “We will contact the public broadcaster [Suspilne] and sign all the necessary documents.”
    “Separately, I want to thank everyone who supports and helps me, who hears my song and important message, rather than gossiping about me. Thanks! We have a story going on with you, and we have to decide what it will be.”
    She finished her statement with a heart em


  9. #509
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    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    lambast the 'west' . . . but would never move to China.
    I agree with this part

  10. #510
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    Quote Originally Posted by helge View Post
    I agree with this part
    Only that???

  11. #511
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    I would happily move to China, but I would need a Chinese spouse. I certainly would not move to the USA, with it's health care costs, awful public transport, crime and drug problems, and general overall expensiveness (+ tip) for a bucket of shit. OK, anywhere is fine if you are a multi- millionaire, but I prefer places where average people enjoy some dignity of life.

  12. #512
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    Quote Originally Posted by bsnub View Post
    His end is coming.
    We shall see if he survives the upcoming midterms successfully.

  13. #513
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    I would happily move to China
    Of course you would . . . said no-one ever.


    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    but I would need a Chinese spouse.
    Ah, there's the out . . . you never would.


    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    I prefer places where average people enjoy some dignity of life.
    Like the Tibetans, Falung Gong, Christians, Uighurs, basically anyone who wants to voice their opinion of dissent, can't travel unless the government approves of your life



    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    OK, anywhere is fine if you are a multi- millionaire
    You want to live a wester-style life you have to be a millionaire or you can live in a hovel without running water, crappy workmanship, drive a Great Wall piece of crap and pray for electricity.

    Sure you would

  14. #514
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    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    Our three stooges remind me of the Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore who extol the virtues of the land of their heritage, lambast the 'west' . . . but would never move to China.
    Quote Originally Posted by helge View Post
    I agree with this part
    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    Only that???
    I don't know any chinese in Malaysia or Singapore, and I don't know if any posters on TD would like to move to China...or not.

    As I posted; an attempt at a joke and on top of that..the truth, I'll never move there.


    I was in my youth at times told to move to Moscow because of my political beliefs.



    You know, criticise policies of our gowernment and being told to fuck off.

    Then you know, that you won that little debate.


    I live in the west; it's my right and duty to lambast it.

  15. #515
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    Quote Originally Posted by helge View Post
    I was in my youth at times told to move to Moscow because of my political beliefs.
    I wish you had. Then maybe would have gotten mobilized and been eating a shit sandwich right now.

    Quote Originally Posted by helge View Post
    I live in the west; it's my right and duty to lambast it.
    That is all well and good, but to grovel and snivel at the feet of a mass murdering dictator is another.

  16. #516
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    Quote Originally Posted by bsnub View Post
    I wish you had. Then maybe would have gotten mobilized and been eating a shit sandwich right now.
    That's not very nice
    Quote Originally Posted by bsnub View Post
    That is all well and good, but to grovel and snivel at the feet of a mass murdering dictator is another.
    Link for the grovel and snivel posts, ...please

    Nah you can't


    Am I supposed to forgive and forget your lies because you are drunk ?

    Again ?

  17. #517
    Thailand Expat misskit's Avatar
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    Russia Labels Star Rapper Oxxximyron a “Foreign Agent”

    Russia on Friday labeled superstar rapper Oxxxymiron, popular among young Russians, a "foreign agent," according to the interior ministry's website.


    Oxxxymiron, the stage name of 37-year-old Miron Fyodorov, has called the Kremlin's Ukraine offensive a "catastrophe and a crime."


    His name was added to a register of "foreign agents" — a term used to crack down on Kremlin critics — on the ministry's website.


    The rapper is one of thousands of Russians who left Russia since the Kremlin sent troops to Ukraine and has organized concerts in support of Ukrainian refugees from abroad.


    Popular Russian science fiction writer Dmitry Glukhovsky — who also denounced the offensive and was put on a wanted list for "discrediting" the Russian army — was also labeled a "foreign agent."


    The author of a 2002 post-apocalyptic fiction novel, "Metro 2033," was put on the list after a Russian court ordered his arrest in absentia for his criticism of the offensive.


    Feminist politician Alena Popova — who has long campaigned for domestic violence legislation in Russia — and a journalist for Radio Free Europe/Liberty, Irina Storozheva, were also added to the foreign agent list.


    The label, which is reminiscent of the "enemy of the people" of the Soviet era, has been used extensively against opponents, journalists and human rights activists accused of conducting foreign-funded political activities.

    Russia Labels Star Rapper Oxxxymiron a 'Foreign Agent' - The Moscow Times

  18. #518
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    60-Year-Old Jailed for Telling Vladimir Putin’s Parents What a Shithead He Is

    A 60-year-old Russian woman has been tossed in jail for visiting the gravesite of Vladimir Putin’s parents and leaving a note expressing her desire for him to join them in the earth.


    Amazingly, Irina Tsybanyeva is not the first Russian citizen to take her grievances straight to the Russian leader’s eternally resting parents, but she appears to be the first to be snatched up by police as a result.

    “What is in the note is not known for certain. But she said that it had a wish [for him] to die,” Maksim Tsybanyev, Irina’s son, told Mediazona.


    Tsybanyeva reportedly visited the St. Petersburg cemetery last Thursday to leave the note, and police showed up at her door on Monday.


    “She didn’t open the door for a long time, but in the end he [a policeman] promised to pry it open and she opened it. She was taken away yesterday at 3 p.m. to the [police department.] They pissed around for a long time. As a result, by nighttime she called and said there would be a raid,” her son was quoted saying, adding that he went to her house right after but saw neither his mother nor any traces of a police search.


    Tsybanyeva was brought to court Tuesday to face charges of desecration of the bodies of the dead and their burial places, committed on the grounds of political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred or enmity. The charge carries a maximum punishment of five years behind bars.


    Less than two weeks before Tsybanyeva’s graveyard visit, several anti-war activists left a similar note for Putin’s parents, Maria and Vladimir.


    “Dear parents, Your son is misbehaving! He is skipping history lessons, fighting with classmates, and threatening to blow up the whole school! Do something!”

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/60-yea...grave?ref=home

  19. #519
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    That must have hurt his widdle feewings.

  20. #520
    Thailand Expat misskit's Avatar
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    No kidding. So put some old woman in jail for a note on a grave.

    Big Brother is Watching YOU!


    But, poor Julian!

  21. #521
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    Quote Originally Posted by misskit View Post
    No kidding. So put some old woman in jail for a note on a grave.

    Big Brother is Watching YOU!


    But, poor Julian!
    You can see, though, that sympathies must lie with Putin on the war . . . enough even to move there.

    What a joke

  22. #522
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    Russian journalist says he was signed up as a volunteer for the war without his knowledge


    Vasily Krestyaninov, a journalist with Russian publication The Insider, says that his online state services account was hacked and he was signed up as a volunteer for the war in Ukraine.


    On October 11, he received an email from state services saying that his application to volunteer had been accepted, and that he had been assigned a date to appear at the enlistment office. However, Krestyaninov himself never put in any application to state services.


    The journalist reviewed his login sessions and found that his account had been entered from IP addresses in Moscow, Lyuberets just outside of Moscow, and Yerevan.


    Krestyaninov left Moscow in November 2021 because of FSB persecution and until recently lived in Georgia. Since September he has been located in Yerevan, after Georgian border control refused him reentry into the country.


    The logins from Russian IP addresses were made from Windows systems and through the Yandex web browser, which Krestyaninov says he doesn’t use. The logins from Armenia don’t correspond to times that he was online.


    He said that he views the hacking as a political persecution for his journalism and activism.

    https://meduza.io/en/news/2022/10/13...-his-knowledge

  23. #523
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    The Consortium Imposing the Growing Censorship Regime

    Yikes, now this is a long read, a la Glen Greenwald.


    The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments.

    The Consortium of State and Corporate Power






    There has been some reporting — by me and others — on the new and utterly fraudulent “disinformation” industry. This newly minted, self-proclaimed expertise, grounded in little more than crude political ideology, claims the right to officially decree what is “true” and "false” for purposes of, among other things, justifying state and corporate censorship of what its “experts” decree to be "disinformation.” The industry is funded by a consortium of a small handful of neoliberal billionaires (George Soros and Pierre Omidyar) along with U.S., British and EU intelligence agencies. These government-and-billionaire-funded “anti-disinformation” groups often masquerade under benign-sounding names: The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, Bellingcat, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They are designed to cast the appearance of apolitical scholarship, but their only real purpose is to provide a justifying framework to stigmatize, repress and censor any thoughts, views and ideas that dissent from neoliberal establishment orthodoxy. It exists, in other words, to make censorship and other forms of repression appear scientific rather than ideological.

    That these groups are funded by the West's security state, Big Tech, and other assorted politically active billionaires is not speculation or some fevered conspiracy theory. For various legal reasons, they are required to disclose their funders, and these facts about who finances them are therefore based on their own public admissions. So often the financing is funneled through well-established front groups for CIA, the State Department and the U.S. National Security State, such as “National Endowment for Democracy.”






    As has always happened with censor-happy tyrants throughout history, the more centers of power inject themselves with the intoxicating rush of silencing their adversaries, the more intense the next hit has to be. Every movement that has wielded censorship as a political weapon tells itself the same story to justify it. In ordinary times, they will casually recite, free speech is a vital value. But these are no ordinary times in which we are living. Our enemies and their ideas are different. They are uniquely hateful, false, inflammatory, and dangerous. The ideas they espouse will destabilize society, cause direct harm to others, deceive people, and incite violence against institutions of authority and their followers. Thus, they reason, we are actually not censoring at all. We are simply preventing evil people from doing harm to society, the government, and to citizens.

    Look to any government or society in which censorship prevailed — either today or throughout history. This narrative about why censorship is not just justified but morally necessary is always present. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a censorship supporter. They need to be supplied with a story about why they are something different, or at least why the censorship they are led to support is uniquely justified.

    And it works because, in the most warped sense possible, it appeals to reason. If one really believes, as millions of American liberals do, that the U.S. faces two and only two choices — either (1) elect Democrats and ensure they rule or (2) live under a white nationalist fascist dictatorship — then of course such people will believe that media disinformation campaigns, censorship, and other forms of authoritarianism are necessary to ensure Democrats win and their opponents are vanquished. Once that self-glorifying rationale is embraced — our adversaries do not merely disagree with us but cause harm with the expression of their views — then the more suppression, the better. And that is exactly what is happening now.



    Banishment From the Financial System






    One of the latest, and perhaps most disturbing, new frontiers of censorship is the escalating means of excluding citizens from the financial system as extra-judicial punishment for expressing views or engaging in political activism disapproved of by establishment power. In one sense, this is not new.

    In 2012, I co-founded the group Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) — along with the Oscar-winning CitizenFour director Laura Poitras, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others. The creation of that group was in response to the 2010 demands made by then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), in his capacity as Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, along with other war hawks in both parties, that financial services companies such as the online payment processor PayPal, credit card companies MasterCard and Visa, and the Bank of America all terminated the accounts of WikiLeaks as punishment for the group's publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs: a trove of documents which proved systemic war crimes and lying by the U.S. Security State and its allies. Watching U.S. national security state officials pressure and coerce private companies over which they exert regulatory control to destroy their journalistic critics is exactly what is done in the tyrannies we are all conditioned to despise.

    All of those corporations obeyed, thus preventing WikiLeaks from collecting donations from the public even though the group had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes. Amazon then booted WikiLeaks off of its hosting platform, removing the group from the internet for weeks. This was nothing less than extra-legal banishment of WikiLeaks from the financial system. We created FPF in order to circumvent that ban by collecting donations for WikiLeaks and then passing those funds to the group. When I announced the group's creation in a 2012 Guardian article, and while reporting on these pressure campaigns against WikiLeaks in a separate Guardian article, I explained how dangerous it would be if the U.S. Government could simply prohibit any journalistic groups it dislikes from participating in the financial system without even charging them with a crime:


    So this was a case where the US government - through affirmative steps and/or approving acquiescence to criminal, sophisticated cyber-attacks - all but destroyed the ability of an adversarial group, convicted of no crime, to function on the internet. Who would possibly consider that power anything other than extremely disturbing? What possible political value can the internet serve, or journalism generally, if the US government, outside the confines of law, is empowered - as it did here - to cripple the operating abilities of any group which meaningfully challenges its policies and exposes its wrongdoing?. . . In sum, [by forming FPF], will render impotent the government's efforts to use its coercive pressure over corporations to suffocate not only WikiLeaks but any other group it may similarly target in the future.

    Last week — in response to numerous reports this year of PayPal's expanding use of expulsion from the financial system as punishment for what it deems “extremist” political views and activities — the tech investor Stephen Cole recalled this then-unprecedented 2010 silencing campaign against WikiLeaks that was led by PayPal. Cole wrote: “I was an engineer at eBay/PayPal when PayPal censored donations to Wikileaks in 2010. That’s the first time I remember wondering… are we sure we’re the good guys?”


    Back in 2010, this ominous tactic was depicted as just a one-time exception, an isolated case for a particularly threatening group (WikiLeaks). But in the last year, there is no question that exclusion from the financial system is becoming the tool of choice for Western censors in both the public and private sector, who work together — just as Big Tech and the U.S. Security State do — to identify and punish dissidents too dangerous to be permitted to speak.

    The most alarming harbinger of this tactic came in February of this year when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an emergency decree granting himself the power to freeze the bank accounts of any Canadian citizen who he determined, in his sole discretion, was participating in or otherwise supporting the truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates and passports. As a result of Trudeau's extraordinary seizure of unchecked power, “Canadian banks froze about $7.8 million (US $6.1 million) in just over 200 accounts under emergency powers meant to end protests in Ottawa and at key border crossings.” The BBC called this tactic “unprecedented,” as it empowers the Prime Minister to freeze the personal bank accounts of anyone “linked with the protests …. with no need for court orders.” If it is not considered "despotic” for a political leader to wield the power to unilaterally seize the personal funds of citizens as punishment for peaceful protests against the government's policies, then nothing is.

    But this tactic worked to end the peaceful protest which Trudeau opposed — people cannot survive if they cannot access their funds or participate in the financial system — and it is thus now being aggressively expanded. Perhaps the leading weaponizer is PayPal. Last year, PayPal announced a new partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a once-respected group that battled anti-Semitism and defended universal civil liberties, before becoming yet another standard liberal Democratic Party activist group devoted to censoring adversaries of neoliberal orthodoxy (the ADL has, just as one example, repeatedly demanded the firing of America's most-watched host on cable news, Fox News's Tucker Carlson). The stated purpose of this PayPal/ADL partnership was “to investigate how extremist and hate movements in the United States take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities,” with the ultimate goal of “uncovering and disrupting the financial flows supporting [what the ADL claims are] white supremacist and anti-government organizations.”

    But predictably — indeed, by design — this “partnership” was nothing more than an ennobling disguise to enable PayPal to begin terminating all sorts of accounts of people and businesses who expressed political views disliked by its executives. Over the past year, a wide range of individuals have had their PayPal accounts canceled due solely to disapproved political views and activism.

    The lesbian activist Jaimee Michell was notified by PayPal last month that the account of her activist group, Gays Against Groomers, was being immediately canceled due to unspecified rules violations. Moments later, the group — created by gay men and lesbians to oppose attempts by trans activists to teach trans dogma and highly controversial gender ideology to young schoolchildren — was notified that their account with PayPal's subsidiary, Venmo, was also canceled immediately, leaving them with few options to continue to collect donations. Around the same time, the British anti-woke and right-wing commentator Toby Young, who had created a group called the Free Speech Union to oppose speech-based cancellations of accounts, was notified by PayPal that the group's account, used to accept donations, was also being cancelled; though PayPal refused to notify Young of the reason for the cancellation, it told The Daily Mail "it was trying to balance ‘protecting the ideals of tolerance, diversity and respect’ with the values of free expression.”
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    At the time of his PayPal expulsion, Young had become a vocal opponent of the U.K. Government's escalating involvement in the war in Ukraine. Two of the sites on which this long-time right-wing figure relied for his opposition to NATO involvement in Ukraine were MintPress and Consortium News, two populist left-wing sites long devoted to anti-war and anti-imperialism policies. Several months earlier, those two anti-establishment left-wing sites were notified by PayPal that their accounts were being immediately closed, and that the balances in their account would be seized and may never be returned. PayPal refused to tell either news site, or Coinbase, which reported on the account closures, what its reasons were. It was just an arbitrary decree by unseen authorities who not only closed their accounts but threatened to seize their donations without bothering to provide a reason. Now that is real tyrannical power. MintPress writer Alan MacLeod said that “this is a warning shot fired at anyone even remotely antiestablishment,” adding that “alternative media operations run on shoestring budgets and rely on enormous corporations like PayPal to operate correctly. If they can do this to us, they can do it to you.”

    Earlier this month, PayPal announced that it would fine account holders $2,500 if, in PayPal's sole discretion, it was determined that those users were guilty of “promoting misinformation.” In other words, PayPal would just steal their own users’ funds from their account as extra-judicial punishment for the expression of views that PayPal — presumably working in conjunction with liberal activists groups such as ADL and billionaire-funded “disinformation experts” — decrees to be false or otherwise unacceptable. When this new policy provoked far more anger than PayPal evidently anticipated, they claimed it was all just a big mistake — as if some PayPal computer on its own accidentally manufactured a policy advising users about this seizure of funds. Regardless of whether PayPal returns to this policy — and there are, as Forbes noted, some unconfirmed reports that it is starting to do so — the intent is clear, because it is so consistent with so many other new frameworks: fortifying a multi-faceted regime of state and corporate power to silence and punish dissent.


    Union of Big Tech, U.S. Security State and Corporate Media Giants






    In May, the Department of Homeland Security's attempted appointment of a clearly deranged partisan fanatic, Nina Jankowicz, to effectively serve as “disinformation czar” sparked intense backlash. But liberal media corporations — always the first to jump to the defense of the U.S. Security State — in unison maligned the resulting anger over this audacious appointment as “itself disinformation,” without ever identifying anything false that was alleged about Jankowicz or the DHS program.

    Though anger over this classically Orwellian program was obviously merited — it was, after all, an attempt to assign to the U.S. National Security State the power to issue official decrees about truth and falsity — that anger sometimes obscured the real purpose of the creation of this government program. This was not some aberrational attempt by the Biden administration to arrogate unto itself a wholly new and unprecedented power. It instead was just the latest puzzle piece in the multi-pronged scheme — created by a union of U.S. Security State agencies, Democratic Party politicians, liberal billionaires, and liberal media corporations — to construct and implement a permanent and enduring system to control the flow of information to Western populations. As importantly, these tools will empower them to forcibly silence and otherwise punish anyone who expresses dissent to their orthodoxies or meaningful opposition to their institutional interests.

    That these state and corporate entities collaborate to control the internet is now so well-established that it barely requires proof. One of the first and most consequential revelations from the Snowden reporting was that the leading Big Tech companies — including Google, Apple and Facebook — were turning over massive amounts of data about their users to the National Security Agency (NSA) without so much as a warrant under the state/corporate program called PRISM. A newly obtained document by Revolver News’ Darren Beattie reveals that Jankowicz has worked since 2015 on programs to control “disinformation” on the internet in conjunction with a horde of national security state officials, billionaire-funded NGOs, and the nation's largest media corporations. Ample reporting, including here, has revealed that many of Big Tech's most controversial censorship policies were implemented at the behest of the U.S. Government and the Democratic-controlled Congress that openly threatens regulatory and legal reprisals for failure to comply.





    Wall Street Journal Editorial, Sept. 9, 2022

    Every newly declared crisis — genuine or contrived — is immediately seized upon to justify all new levels and types of online censorship, and increasingly more and more offline punishment. One of the core precepts of the Russiagate hysteria was that Trump won with the help of Russia because there were insufficient controls in place over what kind of information could be heard by the public, leading to new groups devoted to "monitoring” what they deem disinformation and new policies from media outlets to censor reporting of the type that WikiLeaks provided about the DNC and Clinton campaign in 2016. This censorship frenzy culminated in the still-shocking decision by Twitter and Facebook to censor The New York Post's reporting on Joe Biden's activities in China and Ukraine based on documents from Hunter Biden's laptop that most media outlets now acknowledge were entirely authentic — all justified by a CIA lie, ratified by media outlets, that these documents were “Russian disinformation.”

    The riot at the Capitol on January 6 was used in similar ways, though this time not merely to un-person dissidents from the internet but also to use Big Tech's monopoly power to destroy the then-most-popular app in the country (Parler) followed by the banning of the sitting elected President himself, an act so ominous that even governments hostile to Trump — in France, Germany, Mexico and beyond — warned of how threatening it was to democracy to allow private monopolies to ban even elected leaders from the internet. Liberal outlets such as The New Yorker began openly advocating for internet censorship under headlines such as “The National-Security Case for Fixing Social Media.”

    The COVID pandemic ushered in still greater amounts of censorship. Anyone who urged people to use masks at the start of the pandemic was accused of spreading dangerous disinformation because Dr. Anthony Fauci and the WHO insisted at the time that masks were useless or worse. When Fauci and WHO decided masks were an imperative, anyone questioning that decree by insisting that cloth masks were ineffective — the exact view of Fauci and WHO just weeks earlier — was banned from Big Tech platforms for spreading disinformation; such bans by Google included sitting U.S. Senators who themselves are medical doctors. From the start of the pandemic, it was prohibited to question whether the COVID virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan — until the Biden administration itself asked that question and ordered an investigation to find out, at which point Facebook and other platforms reversed themselves and announced that it was now permissible to ask this question since the U.S. Government itself was doing so.

    In sum, government agencies and Big Tech monopolies exploited the two-year COVID pandemic to train Western populations to accept as normal the rule that the only views permitted to be heard were those which fully aligned with the views expressed by institutions of state authority. Conversely, anyone dissenting from or even questioning such institutional decrees stood accused of spreading "disinformation” and was deemed unfit to be heard on the internet. As a result, blatant errors and clear lies stood unchallenged for months because people were conditioned that any challenging of official views would result in punishment.

    We are now at the point where every crisis is seized upon to usher in all-new forms of censorship. The war in Ukraine has resulted in escalations of censorship tactics that would have been unimaginable even a year or two ago. The EU enacted legislation legally prohibiting any European company or individual from broadcasting Russian state-owned broadcasters (including RT and Sputnik). While such legal coercion would (for now) almost certainly be banned in the U.S. as a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and free press rights, non-EU companies that decided in the name of open debate to allow RT to be heard — such as Rumble — have faced a torrent of threats, pressure campaigns, media attacks and various forms of retribution.

    One of the easiest and surest ways to be banned these days from Big Tech platforms is to reject the core pieties of the CIA/NATO/EU view of the war in Ukraine, even if that dissent entails simply affirming the very views which Western media outlets spent a decade itself endorsing, until completely changing course at the start of the war — such as the fact that the Ukrainian military is dominated by neo-Nazi battalions such as Azov, especially in the Eastern part of the country. Regardless of one's views on the Biden administration's involvement in this war, surely it requires little effort to see how dangerous it is to try to impose a full-scale blackout on challenges to U.S. war policy, especially given the warning by Biden himself that this war has brought the world closer to nuclear armageddon than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

    It cannot be overstated how closely aligned Big Tech censorship is with the agenda of the U.S. Security State. And it is not hard to understand why. Google and Amazon receive billions in contracts from the CIA, NSA and Pentagon, and, as we reported here in April, the most vocal lobbyists working to preserve Big Tech monopoly power are former Security State operatives. Illustrating this alignment, Facebook — at the start of the war in Ukraine — implemented an exception to its rule banning praise for Nazi groups by exempting the Azov Battalion and other neo-Nazi Ukrainian militias.

    This regime of censorship is anything but arbitrary. Its core function is to shield propaganda that emanates from ruling class centers of power from critique, challenge and opposition. It is designed to ensure that Western populations hear only the assertions and proclamations of state and corporate elites, while their adversaries and critics are at best marginalized (with warnings labels and other indicia of discredit) or banned outright.


    Pro-Censorship Corporate “Journalists”






    No discussion of this growing and limitlessly dangerous censorship regime would be complete without noting that central role played by the West's largest media corporations and their largely-millennial, censorship-obsessed liberal employees who bear the deceitful corporate Human Resources job title of “journalist.” The most beloved journalists of modern-day American liberalism are not those who divulge the secret crimes of CIA, or the chronic lies that emanate from the Pentagon and other arms of the U.S.'s endless war machine, or monopolistic abuses of Big Tech. Indeed, journalists who do that work — challenging and exposing the secrets of actual power centers — are the ones most hated by liberals in light of their adoration for those institutions. That is what explains their support for Julian Assange's ongoing imprisonment and Edward Snowden's ongoing exile as the only way to avoid the same fate as Assange is suffering.

    Today's journalistic icons of American liberalism are not those who confront establishment power but rather serve it: by relentlessly attacking ordinary citizens as punishment for expressing views declared off-limits by these journalists' establishment masters. As I have previously reported, there is a horde of corporate employees at media behemoths with the classic mindset of servants of petty tyrants, whose only function — and passion — is to troll the internet searching for upsetting dissent, and then agitate for its removal by centers of corporate powers: NBC News’ disinformation unit employees Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny; The Washington Post's “online culture” columnist Taylor Lorenz; and the New York Times’ tech reporters (Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac and countless others). At the time I first reported on what they are assigned to do, I dubbed this “tattletale journalism": the fixation with demanding the immediate cessation of “unfettered conversations” and the constant attempt to confront and expose ordinary citizens for the crime of expressing prohibited views





    Clockwise from top left: censorship advocates Brandy Zadrozny (NBC News’ "disinformation unit”); Taylor Lorenz (The Washington Post); Ben Collins (NBC News’ "disinformation unit”); and Ryan Mac (The New York Times tech unit)

    .In September, Matthew Price, CEO of Cloudflare — a major tech company that provides services constituting the backbone of the internet, including security protections — refused to capitulate to the pressure campaign to cancel the site called KiwiFarms. The cancellation demands were based in the claim that the forum was allowing "harassment” and doxing of a Twitch streamer named "Keffals,” whom Lorenz in The Washington Post — under the headline “The trans Twitch star delivering news to a legion of LGBTQ teens” — had months earlier christened the Patron Saint of Trans Victimhood. Price, the CEO, warned that because Cloudflare is a security company and a hosting service, not a social media site, it would be extremely dangerous for them to start closing accounts based on public dislike of the content that appears on those sites. This is how he explains the company's steadfast refusal to capitulate to censorship demands — such cancellations, he explained, would be akin to demanding that AT&T refuse telephone service to right-wing commentators by arguing that they use their telephones to spread harmful views:
    Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. Both in the physical world and online, that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities.

    Today, more than 20 percent of the web uses Cloudflare's security services. When considering our policies we need to be mindful of the impact we have and precedent we set for the Internet as a whole. Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.

    But Cloudflare's refusal to capitulate to censorship advocates infuriated NBC News’ Ben Collins — whose primary purpose in life is to agitate for greater and more repressive control over the internet to stifle views that deviate from establishment liberalism — and, along with his NBC colleague and fellow censorship advocate Kat Tenbarge, used the massive corporate platform of NBC News to pressure Cloudflare to obey, claiming Cloudflare's refusal to censor on command endangers trans people. Within less than 24 hours of the publication of Collins’ article — blasted to millions of people across the various platforms owned by NBC and Collins’ corporate owner, the Comcast Corp. — the CEO of this powerful company reversed himself, groveling before the media's censorship advocates and vowing that this would be a one-time exception. “This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with,” he wrote, as he announced that he would do it anyway (it will, needless to say, be the opposite of a one-time exception, since any millennial censor at The Huffington Post or Vox can now easily force Cloudflare to keep censoring by exploiting this new precedent with new articles about their censorship target using the “worse-than-Kiwifarms” formulation).

    And thus did this corporate "journalist” once again usher in a brand new escalation in the strengthening censorship regime: tinkering with the infrastructure of the internet to expel sites and people anathema to liberal pieties. As usual, not just liberals but also the left cheered this forced capitulation, as they are somehow convinced that the world will be a better place when the power to silence voices and ideas is in the collective hands of the U.S. Security State, their oligarchical partners who own Big Tech, and their servants who masquerade as "journalists” deep within the bowels of the West's largest media corporations. Polls leave no doubt that Democrats are vastly more supportive of internet censorship not only by large corporations but also by the state, and that is the mindset that asserts itself over and over to cheer these censorship schemes by the West's most powerful institutional actors.






    This is the regime of censorship whose tentacles grow each month and whose power expands inexorably. Like all censors, the consortium that controls and funds this regime recognizes that whoever controls the flow of information will wield unchallenged power, and that few powers are more potent and tyrannical than the ability to relegate one's critics to the most distant fringes or to silence them altogether.


    Our New Nightly Live Program on Rumble






    Any article that simply reports on these vital developments with free speech and systemic censorship is, by itself, journalistically worthwhile, even necessary. With so many Western corporate journalists supportive of or (at best) indifferent to the grave dangers this system imposes, the truth behind this censorship regime — who is constructing it and for what purposes — is far too rarely revealed. Any news article reporting on the component parts of this escalating regime would be inherently valuable.

    But when it comes to this sinister regime of information control, I long ago ceased believing it sufficient merely to report on it. I regard the need to fight against this regime of censorship, to destabilize and subvert it, and ultimately to defeat it as a paramount cause, the journalistic and political cause I prioritize above all others. Little is possible, including meaningful journalism, if we are prevented from being heard, if our discourse is strictly controlled and policed by the very power centers our rights allow and encourage us to challenge. Few other values can be defended, and few other injustices exposed and combated, if ruling class elites continue to acquire the defining tyrannical power of information control and silencing of dissent.

    Action, not just words, is required. That is why I have been devoting myself to supporting only those sites and companies genuinely determined to resist pressures and other forms of coercion to censor on behalf of Western establishment institutions, and instead to preserve and fortify spaces for free speech and free inquiry online, with the ability to reach large numbers of people. It does nobody any good — other than one's adversaries — if one willingly ghettoizes oneself into fringe and marginalized precincts. What is required is a cause-driven commitment to free speech along with the strategic ability to attract large audiences — and that, to me, means doing my journalism only on platforms with a demonstrated commitment to these values and an demonstrated ability to reach large numbers of people.

    For this reason, the platforms with which I have worked over the past two years are ones that have proven not just a willingness but an eagerness to express defiant contempt for these censorship pressures and an impressive commitment to ensuring free expression: Substack for written journalism, Callin for podcasts, and Rumble for video journalism. Each has been the target of pressure campaigns of the type that caused the Cloudflare CEO so pathetically to reverse his own refusal to obey censorship orders after less than a day. Each of these platforms has refused to accede to these demands in the way that Cloudflare and so many others before it have done. That is precisely what is needed to subvert the growing censorship regime: people and companies that simply refuse to obey.

    Rumble in particular has been the target of intense attacks — in part because it agreed to allow RT to broadcast on its platform in order to protest the EU's outlawing of that network and thus incurred the wrath of the Russia-obsessed corporate media, but also because it has experienced massive growth largely as the result of growing anger toward Big Tech censorship. Rumble has begun attracting not only political commentators banished in unison by Big Tech — such as the recent banning Andrew Tate, who promptly moved his large audience to Rumble — but also cultural commentators and Gen Z personalities increasingly angry at the repressive climate imposed by Google on its YouTube platform. This is driving more and more growth to the platform, which in turn is causing establishment media corporations to devote more and more energy to disparaging it.





    Crickey, Aug. 29, 2022

    Rumble's lawsuit against Google for antitrust violations — alleging that Google is using its market dominance of search engines to hide Rumble videos in order to protect Google's YouTube — created a significant win for Rumble, as we reported here in August, as the judge refused Google's request to dismiss the lawsuit. That ruling allows Rumble to obtain invasive discovery about how Google manipulates its search engine algorithms, and for whose benefit.

    As a result of what appeared to be the genuine commitment of Rumble's founders to the cause of free speech and anti-censorship efforts, I was part of a group last year — that included former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and frequent Joe Rogan guest Bridget Phetasy — which agreed to create video journalism exclusively for that platform. Our show, called System Update, was a great success, surpassing all of my expectations. Several of our video broadcasts — with little promotional budget or regularly scheduled programming — exceeded 750,000 viewers, while our shows routinely exceeded 200,000 views. Pursuant to our agreement, we uploaded each video to YouTube several hours after they debuted on Rumble, and with the exception of one or two videos, the Rumble videos performed significantly better.






    (Notably, The Washington Post article announcing our move attempted to disparage Rumble as a toxic sewer of disinformation. To do so, it cited one of those benign-sounding groups — what The Post heralded as “the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank in London” — to call Rumble “one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world.” As I documented in a detailed video report on Rumble, that “Institute” cited by the Post as its disinformation expert is one funded by and serves as a partner to the U.S. and UK Security states as well as Big Tech itself. In other words, the Post unwittingly illustrated how this sham "disinformation” industry is weaponized by institutions of establishment power to deceive the public into believing that their decrees are apolitical proclamations based in science rather than what they are: extremely politicized schemes on behalf of Western power centers designed to make crude censorship appear enlightened and scientific.


    FULL- https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the...ng-the-growing
    Last edited by sabang; 30-10-2022 at 07:22 AM.

  24. #524
    Days Work Done! Norton's Avatar
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    Damn Sab. Wtf is that. Suggestion. Rather than pasting a wall of text, how about a summary in your own words and a link to the site.

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    Really. I started reading it, then zzzzzzz.

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