Milos Uzelac

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Posts posted by Milos Uzelac


  1. 45 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

    Just by being American a self-bias is created. Nearly all American media and journalism is self-biased in that way.

    This I presume applies to all nationalities and descents in the world and for the majority of people living in all countries currently existing today, when being programmed, instructed to and stuck to act in that identity for the collective constraint. 

    For example I developed a bias to look more favorably to a Yugoslav or common South Slav identity that I feel is also a part of me then the Serbian one because I feel from my POV it fosters more tolerant and healthy relationships with people in the region where I live with whom I share an almost exact same language but I cannot exercise that identity in my environment freely because nobody here believes in it anymore and there is no shared consensus about it. It would be akin as if telling the people here I am an Atlantean from some past glorious kingdom and of course some other people that lived within the territory of that country never viewed or accepted that identity favourbly as it felt they are not the part of the same cultural and ethnic descent as other people who have claimed to form that country on that basis and was therefore seen alien and foreign imposed on them such as the Kosovar Albanians even though there existed an official policy in Yugoslavia where you could choose what nationality you identify with based on your own beliefs, preference, feelings or degrees of patriotism on what you identify with the most, for example Serbian or Yugoslavian.

    It seems to me here that there are degrees of collective identity to which one is willing to accept. 


  2. 4 hours ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

    The President of Haiti was recently assassinated, and there were massive protests in Chile to overturn its' neoliberal constitution, but no one attributes that to failures of Liberalism. Bias bias bias on the past of Americans.

    The people of Cuba are protesting over economic hardship that was caused by Coronavirus. Kind of hard to treat a disease when your nation has been EMABRGOED by the United States ever since its' Communist revolution, and then we blame the economic hardship caused by the embargo on Communism.

     

    Yes it is possible that they are not even protests against the established ruling party but just people venting off their grievances and wanting more accountability from the government and action due to economic hardships - power cuts, slow vaccination rate etc. and going out in the streets to exercise their rights for those demands and to be heard. 

     


  3. 2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

    attribute to self-bias and ignorance.

    I can understand this is in the case of Fox News and some other US media outlets but the Guardian press staff who are the supposedly left-wing    pro-Labour press in the UK to not be able to detect the 26th of July name for the the ruling party in Cuba on the picture and to present it on their cover as an anti-government protest while they are supposedly a left-wing publication calls into question the expertise and credentiality of people who work there if this was due to ignorance or more likely due to lazy self-bias of just quickly taking the picture from a well-established original corporate media complex 'credible' source AP and unquestioningly using it as a cover for the article while somehow missing that those protestors on the picture are holding slogans for more than a half a century old government ruling party in Cuba. What standard and knowledge required for professional journalism. 


  4. 58 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

     I don't know much about my ancestry other than that I'm half British, quarter Indonesian and quarter Dutch genetically speaking, although that's as far as I know. Regarding this I also wonder about while I was doing some research about this, and this possibility seems more far fetched because her communication is similar with mine, and I have yet heard her speak differently, and I encountered her in Niagra falls, not in Britain or in Indonesia. Although I know enough to say thag on my mother's side, there were a bunch of paranormal events that occurred in her family, which did deal with one event of a ghost haunting that her family hed to deal with, and another event that I don't know much about.

    Interesting, thanks for being to willing to answer to me on this seemingly a little to personal question and being open and carefree about it, I will admit, this what intrigued me the most when you wrote on the context and the nature of your encounter of maybe having a intergenerational background in your own family and in the lives and encounters of your ancestors. It is one theory, of course, that can be either to narrow or to limited to explain why this happened specifically to you or that has perhaps some merit of explaining at least a fraction of some of the origins and your own predispositions towards the specifics of situation you are living with and experiencing, but the one that I most thought about when thinking about the possible further background behind the situation of what you are experiencing. 


  5. Fearmongering, demonizing, stereotyping and scapegoating a minority ethnic, religious or social group within a country or another nationality within a neighbouring country in order to divert the publics attention from the economic or other problems that the country went through, is going through or is facing ahead. 

    For example the whole current government of Serbia and the President Aleksandar Vuchic and his ministers with the Croatians and their government and with the Albanians in Kosovo. 

    Other examples here are genocide denial, watering down or justifying war crimes in a previous war, whitewashing and reinventing war criminals as national heroes and the demonizing, repressing and fearmongering about the political opposition and it's sympathizers in the country to the public in the media, in the press and in the political system. 


  6. 39 minutes ago, Derek White said:

    there are much more serious difficulties people face in work, like unfair job treatment, delayed salaries, no benefits, no unions, working in sweatshops, lack of safety regulations, corruption, abuse, racism, etc. All this is peanuts compared to colleagues not sending condolences.

    Yes this all true. But, never mind that most academic settings, positions and jobs don't suffer through these problems and that they should supposedly foster higher consciousness and conscientiousness towards other humans and the world through the nature and aim of their work and yet the atmosphere is like Cornel described people wallowing exclusively in their own self-interest by using this veneer and institutional norms of this construct of academic professionalism to justify not reflecting more on the latter.

    Even in those hard and tough work environments, far from the privileges that come with the academic ones, people should also have the consciousness of their shared solidarity and struggle of going through the same things together exactly as people and fellow workers and to foster close friendships and alliances that would reflect their shared struggles and tribulations in the same work environment as form collective response to their same position at work and not wallow only in their own self-interest with shallow hope a miniscule possibility of even a slight advancement. Solidarity at work with colleagues should ideally resemble a friendship,not necessarily a close one, between humans in the work environments that you mentioned since they are all in the end part of the same workers community that are tied to other communities in that end. And the slight material advancements and things they might lose might be nothing in compared to the dignity and humanity they gain if they act and treat one another as a part of the same extended community together with their families and co-workers.

    This might all sound like idealistic and naive on first glance from lived experience view of working in such environments but what would the people lose and gain from fostering and creating such a work culture in such work environments, historically, powerful workers unions and their strong leadership would take upon the task to create and maintain such a work culture based on the shared interests and solidarity of all the workers. 

    The bar set for a privileged academic setting than should be even higher given the nature of work they perform in society and Cornel is right should be even more impenetrable to other interests anc selfish exclusive self-interest given their role in the wider system. 

    That's my two cents on it on reducing work environments to such an inescapable and alienating place with no place for improvement of human to human interactions and humanising work relationships. 


  7. Chapter I

    Hypocritical Humanitarianism

    "From March 24 to June 10 1999, US military forces,in coordination with a number of other NATO powers, launched round-the-dock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia, dropping twenty thousand tons of bombs and killing upwards of three thousand women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism - or so 
    we were asked to believe."

    p.9

    "Some of us cannot help noticing that US leaders have been markedly selective in their supposedly humanitarian interventions. They made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Roma (gypsies), or Britain for its longtime repression of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of half a million Tutsi in Rwanda—or the French who were complicit in that massacre. Nor did US leaders consider launching "humanitarian bombings" against the Guatemalan people for the Guatemalan military's systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers, or against the Indonesian people because their generals killed over two hundred thousand East Timorese and were engaged in such slaughter through the summer of 1999, not to mention the estimated half million to one million Indonesians these same generals exterminated in 1965 and after. Nor have humanitarian concerns caused US leaders and right-wing paramilitary forces to move against the scores of other 
    countries around the world engaging in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, death squads, mass murder, and wars of attrition—actions that have been far worse than anything Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has been charged with. In most cases, the US national security state has not only tolerated such atrocities but has been actively complicit with the perpetrators who usually happened to be recipients of US aid and trade."

    p. 10


  8. "I will argue that Western intervention in Yugoslavia has not 
    been benign but ruthlessly selfish, not confused but well directed, given the interests that the interventionist serve. The motive behind the intervention was not NATO's newfound humanitarianism but a desire to put Yugoslavia—along with 
    every other country—under the suzerainty of free-market globalization. I am not the only one who sees the conflict this way; the decision-makers themselves do too. As I will show, they 
    have been far more concerned about privatization and neoliberal "reforms" (rollbacks) than about the well-being of the various Yugoslav peoples."

    p. 2-3

    "So corporate-dominated media rather faithfully reflect the line put out by corporate-dominated political leaders, those decision makers who build their careers in service to the economic powers that be. In regard to Yugoslavia, the Western press dropped all pretense at critical independence and—with some notable exceptions—went into overdrive to demonize the Serbs and create the sensationalist justification for NATO's destabilizing and violent interventions."

    p. 4

    "There are some people who grow 
    indignant at the suggestion that their political leaders lie to them, especially in regard to foreign policy. To suggest as much is to indulge in "conspiracy theories," they maintain. In fact, US 
    presidents never lie so much as when they talk about US foreign policy. In the public stances he took in regard to 
    Yugoslavia, Bill Clinton proved himself a professional liar. When dealing with what he and his associates have said, we can, without turning to alternative sources, point to the lack of evidence to support their claims, and to the contrary evidence suggested by their actions. And we can note their persistent manipulation of images and labels by which they have tried to short-circuit our critical thinking and make evidence itself irrelevant. As is frequently the case, liars can be the best witnesses against themselves."

    Introduction, p. 6-7

    "Much of the debate about the Yugoslav conflict revolves around questions like: Whom do we believe? What sources do we rely on? Is it the free and independent Western media or Belgrade's government-controlled press? I would answer as follows: The US media, as with most of the news media in other Western nations, are not free and independent. They are owned and controlled by largely conservative corporate cartels 
    that adhere to the self-serving neoliberal ideology of international finance capital. The goal of these politico-economic elites is to transform the world into a global economy under the tutelage of the transnational corporations, backed by the 
    unanswerable imperial might of the United States and its allies. 
    A key component of that global strategy, of course, entails 
    capitalist restoration within the former Communist countries. The corporate-owned media seldom stray too far from that dominant ideological paradigm."

    Introduction p. 5


  9. 1 hour ago, Derek White said:

    Complaining about not receiving condolences on his mother's death... that's not something colleagues are obliged to do and that's not something related to the profession.

    It a human thing to do ain't it. I mean for a human who is in a community of any sort with a shared goal and aim that goes through the same thing.

    I mean we shouldn't be so alienated and atomised in our work environments under the veneer of professionalism that we forget that we are part of the same community that goes through the same things in their environment and are also part of other communities. 

    It's the sweeping away of the humanity of a colleague and viewing him only through that lense as competitor for advancement at work or a fellow machine performing his given function pulling in the hours. 

    This exactly what he categorised under the spiritual rot that is caused by narcisstic academic professionalism moved forward by exclusively market incentives and self-serving promises and interests of career advancement and being stuck in that bubble fostered by the institution itself and repressing human co-operative and communitarian impulses with other colleagues. 


  10. 7 hours ago, lmfao said:

    How do you think the rich ended up pulling the ladder from them?

    7 hours ago, lmfao said:

    How do you think the rich ended up pulling the ladder from them?

    On 10/07/2021 at 3:00 AM, Milos Uzelac said:

     

    It's a very complex and systematic issue. But to narrow it down into my opinion and current possessing info on the topic education that is not easily affordable and good-paying jobs and careers now that require a degree now and constant professional perfecting, over shipping of industries to Third World countries, the increasing privatisation of previously free public goods such as education and healthcare in order to generate profit, debt peonage of a lot of people by taking loans with high interests from banks, little to no savings of most people that would go towards education and creditor economy and policy programs that are mainly focused on increasing efficiency, the revenue stream and profits of the already minority of upper eschalons of the economy. In short, the negation or curbing of the role the state played earlier in regulating the economy so it would not devolve with pure market mechanisms that are primarily aimed at increasing profits and funneling society into the opposing poles of winners who seized their opportunity in time in the economy and now have a monopoly on it and the losers who missed their mark or didn't make the right calls or moves and not giving them more chances via any meaningful regulatory mechanisms that previously existed and were aimed at raising the quality of the public as a whole and not cherry pick individuals exclusively on the performance. An economy functioning in the aim to increase the wealth of and fortify the social positions of the upper successful eschalons and credentialised classes as much as possible while leaving everyone else behind. There of course more nuances and intricacies to this given each countries specific situation and conditions but this can generally be put on he trend that has been happening over the last thirty years on the planetary scale. The current credentialised managerial and educated classes or the heirs of wealth using the previously existing more publicly oriented system to get ahead of everyone else and become winners of the system and then set up policies to fortify their social positions and compensation revenue for their function in order to enjoy as much benefits as possible and to increase their wealth acquired from those positions at the cost of most of the rest of the countries economy and people who didn't seize the opportunity in time or missed it. I may have butchered this last part but I aim to further inform and educate how this results systematically in the above mentioned result. 


  11. On 7/11/2021 at 3:03 AM, lmfao said:

    But do you not think Hungary's anti-gay laws are anything but regressive and evil?

    From my perspective. Yes, it feels like a regression, from the perspective of the relative psychological and cultural development of the country no, it just feels like cultural backlash of the less developed people on the spiral living in the country who were the shadow of its relative status of being a member of the Union.

     

    On 7/11/2021 at 3:03 AM, lmfao said:

    Do you think it is untruthful to tell kids that being gay is okay? Why would you think it isn't?

    Depends on the pressure of the environment you are in and yours and its level of development. Personally, I have no issue I've been friends with gay people in my own country, and even though I don't plan on having kids anytime soon I think I will hopefully have the same attitudes when I have them.

    On 7/11/2021 at 3:03 AM, lmfao said:

    Article then talks about the culture war, and the war against populism. It's a rant about how liberal globalists wish to take over the world, atomise society into a collection of disconnected and lonely individuals. It's just a bullshit rant of whatever. 

    The main point of the article, as I see it, is to highlight the consequences of fragmenting society into this pole of the relatively affluent and wealthy educated winners of the global world with their refined cultural tastes and attitudes and the losers of the global world who suffer economic depravity and lack of opportunity, are stuck in the family unit and have no financial ability to educate themselves further and to move upwards on the social ladder, the rich have basically pulled the ladder for them and in their traditional and rigid mind they have developed resentment to this perceived threat of radically changing society culturally not corresponding with their own economic progress and development. Populism, therefore, becomes a kind of a manipulation scheme of the politicians to channel and to use the anger of the disaffected and suffering crowd into culturally regressive politics while not changing and improving the underlining economic conditions that are causing their resentment and skepticism to gradually shifting and changing society. Also, a traditionally oriented work environment helps reinforce these populists' narratives into an unquestioning echo chamber and work culture of people who worked there from my experience

     

    On 7/11/2021 at 3:03 AM, lmfao said:

    The article seems to praise Hungary for their laws banning education of homosexuality as a victory for populism.
    Does this make populism incompatible with free knowledge and education of the people? 

    It makes it incompatible with enough open-mindedness and mental and emotional resilience to pursue further education as the demand of the constantly adapting and specializing individual in the contemporary global market society and not being stuck in resentment and victimhood in your current economic position and projecting your contempt and unhappiness onto something else or someone else developing and growing in society.

    I don't know currently if it just a current backlash or were these countries generally that underdeveloped than what the elite of the country tried to represent them to the world as. Though Poland and Hungary always had more of a traditional and religious base in their own country due to historical circumstances than the rest of Europe so the demarcation line of the level of the development of the Union is clearly drawn in those countries or at least prove that relative economic development doesn't always correspond of the overall cultural development of a country.


  12. 7 hours ago, Dryas said:

    If you were a little more aware of the online political sphere, you’d know this guy is the last person on the planet you want to be listening to. 

    Fine. Thanks for the advice. I will look more into it before posting some book or excerpts from a book next time. Thanks for non-accusatory and calm heads-up.


  13. 5 hours ago, Girzo said:

    1. Most of the stuff you have cited is not arguments, just smearing people.

    I can't see how there isn't a semblance of an argument on the basis of exposing someone's beliefs as actually faux in regards to what someone actually perpetrates to standing for and believing. In other words, pointing to contradictions in one's stated beliefs and principles and actual conduct in the world and wider beliefs about the world.

    6 hours ago, Girzo said:

    if one wants to mean something in the political game, the worst thing to do is to start throwing shit at others.

    Pointing out to the readers how someone, maybe out of ignorance, unconsciously or perhaps out of self-serving interests, pushes systems of power and empire serving narratives to his audience while purportedly claiming to be doing something else amounts to shit tossing?

    7 hours ago, Girzo said:

    2. The stuff that could be taken as arguments is so off, to correct it you would have to start from the basics they teach at college. He doesn't construe quality arguments. Not book-quality for sure. 

    His book, as I've seen the excerpts from it, is actually more like cataloguing of breadtubers, their biographies and their most heinous arguments and espoused positions on certain issues. So Leo is right in the sense that it kinda ammounts to gossipy shit but I would argue with a quality backdrop of giving some people who are interested about these online personalities and their social influence a background where they come from with thier positions and propagation of certain narratives. So the title of how BreadTube serves Imperialism can't be fully understood alone from these excerpts.

     

    7 hours ago, Girzo said:

    You are probably the only person on this forum reading him and you are not gonna change your mind.

    I am not reading him I just saw these excerpts posted online and it caught my attention. I will see if I consider buying his book, I am currently in financial problems in regards to paying off my faculty debt and passing some exams which I failed and have to pass in August so I don't know if it would be worth my time and money and not a distraction from reading some actual relevant work or books that are relevant to understanding the history and origins of the living conditions of the country I currenlty live in. Like Michael Parrenti's work  - How to Kill a Nation. The War on Yugoslavia.

    7 hours ago, Girzo said:

    Replying to this thread already borders on too much effort.

    Agreed. I feel the same. I will ask some of the moderators to lock this thread it has already gone off the rails on level of reactivity on my side that I reacted to unconsciously when met by intially only dismissals or accusations that I am promoting reading a hateful ideologies promoting author that goes against the guidelines of the forum and on some people who chimed in recently triggered by the title of the thread, it's ammount of views or I don't know criticisms layed out of their viewing and online consumption habits of online personalities presented in these excerpts of the book. 


  14. 6 hours ago, Girzo said:

    The book reminds me of "works" of Dinesh Souza or some other bullshit writing right-winger, but instead of being ultra-American, it's ultra-Soviet-style communism.

    Wouldnt equate them on the same position on the spiral based on some flimsy perceived similarties or biased projections. I don't personally see to equate them both as the since Caleb to be on a much higher level of rigour and intellectual seriousness then D'Souza who is tasked to invent ways for narrative validation of some disengaged from reality claims of the Republican Party. Maupin as some say may have ulterior motives or ideological biases but he puts much more serious intellectual seriousness and rigour to push his claims, that I don't feel as much being agenda driven for a larger entity, as much as being his staunch beliefs about the world and actual held positions. I am not sure D'Souza actually truly believes the stuff he puts forth. 

     

    6 hours ago, Girzo said:

    That level of discourse does not demand a serious response. I wouldn't argue with a kid over politics, and I would neither do so with this guy.

    Dismissing some arguments on the basis of being or labelling them as infantile and one being beyond them

    is not either seriously engaging with their content or putting in the effort to actually adress them point by point and disprove them on the basis of contra-arguments based on evidence. It's more of a triggered response to seeing something one does not like or isn't alligned with one's own proclivities or tastes. 

    6 hours ago, Girzo said:

    It's used towards anyone on the left who is less developed than the liberals. I mean less developed in terms of a values set one deems important, exactly the thing that Spiral Dynamics describes. People don't know that model but they can intuitively smell someone less developed than them on that axis.

    Yeah I would agree with everything you said here about the psychological traps one might fall into deluding oneself he is more developed or more advanced then some simply on the basis of holding dogmatically an ideological position one feels is more correct and truthful simply through seeing the world through the lense of his own survival biases, lived conditions, group belonging, history and perceived past. 

    6 hours ago, Girzo said:

    And if you want to oppose that opinion, then is really writing such a slanderous book in an attacking tone a sign of high development? That's not how you do quality reporting.

    He does not oppose that opinion since he is not critiquing the model of Spiral Dynamics, since I don't know if he even knows about it. He is critiquing BreadTube as phenomenona which he sees as presenting to him a misconstrued version of socialism divorced from the international context, apart from the conditions in the Western hemisphere, and the history of others peoples and countries trials and tribulations of implementing a functioning and prosperous model of it which corresponds to the actual stated goal and aim of that worldview which is a world where humans are truly free and not slaves to their own conditions they find themselves in, or at least that's my interpretation of it, and the various ways of achieving this. 


  15. 8 hours ago, DocWatts said:

    and that whatever your worldview there exists an information source to reinforce one's existing biases.

    Yes this is dangerous trap and obstacle against developing open-mindedness and the ability to view and think about the world, your position, place in it and state in it from multiple perspectives. Though this only comes from a disengaged, calmed and healthy mind not hooked on survival and crowd mentality pressure. Quite the challenge and feat to consistently develop and have consistent personal integrity with at the cost of short-term repercussions and consequences. 


  16. 8 hours ago, DocWatts said:

    Of course US corporate media monopolies are going to be pushing a self serving narrative. There's nothing unique about this; Russia and China each have thier own version of this, so the United States is not special in this regard.

    The scope is much larger I would argue due to the tech-monopolies being US based multinationals and the fact that the majority of the planet learns English for  global commercial purposes. 

    8 hours ago, DocWatts said:

    If anything, the social fragmentation that's been occuring over the last decade or so in America is indicative of exactly the opposite problem;  namely that shared national narratives are breaking down due in part to the decentralisation of news media, and that whatever your worldview there exists an information source to reinforce one's existing biases.

    Well you are right about that and therein lies the danger of being stuck in your own psychological bubble and crowd echo chamber that is also partially enforced by the biases and survival interests of one's own position on the social ladder, economic development and wealth of the region, class, race, ethnicity, religion etc. 

    Though I admit this view is also prone to simplification and generalisation for the purposes of one's own survival and prosperity bias and position in the globe and danger of being enslaved to one news sources that feeds your opinions, biases and proclivities back to you. 


  17. 9 hours ago, DocWatts said:

    The idea that anyone on the Libertarian-Left would consider him a "tankie" is laughable.

    One of my problems with the self-proclaimed liberatarian left crowd is that stuff like this gets uncovered. No matter their psychological development on spiral dynamics this background and history presents a trust problem and a potential conflict of interest of advocating for something. Its seems on the outset like one part of these people use it as a sort of a de-radicalization umbrella for various ideas presented to left-oriented people to lessen their radicalism while on the same note not questioning the actors and their backgrounds who present such ideas. 

    Like this guy who runs the channel and goes by the Twitter handle Socialism Done Left:

     


  18. 11 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

    Stop defending authoritarianism.

    Just because the US engages in Imperialism doesn't mean that other countries automatically get a free pass for authoritarian practices.

    Both should be criticized.

    Wouldn't even be compelled to do that if it was an even playing field. 

    The main problem as I see it is the Western media monopoly that projects their own unsolved issues onto other nations and cynically manufactures or construes evidence for fitting the legal definition of genocide as in the Uyghur case to drive a media narrative while deliberately downplaying the Palestinian case and situation. 

    Here is a video disputing the former:

     


  19. 13 hours ago, Joel3102 said:

    a tankie who plays cover for authoritarian regimes just because it’s anti-West.

    “Tankie” used to be a term for British communists who supported the Soviet Union, but under the facilitation of narrative managers like Smith it’s enjoying a mainstream resurrection in which it is commonly weaponized against anyone to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders who opposes U.S.  imperialist agendas.

    I wrote against imperialism for years without anyone ever applying that pejorative to me, but now it comes up on a near-daily basis. I haven’t changed the basics of my beliefs or my approach to anti-imperialism, but the widespread use of “tankie” as a pejorative against people like me most certainly has changed.

    Joining the Upper Ranks 

    It joins the ranks of famous weaponized pejoratives like “Russian bot,” “CCP propagandist,” “Assadist” and the one-size-fits-all perennial favorite “conspiracy theorist” in labels used to dismiss anyone who voices skepticism of narratives that are being promoted by known liars to facilitate the agendas of murderous psychopaths.

    Another new crowd favorite is “genocide denier,” a label applied to anyone who points out the glaring plot holes in the imperial Uyghur narrative which narrative managers are overjoyed about being able to use because it lets them equate skepticism of a geostrategically significant U.S.  narrative with Nazism.

    What these pejoratives accomplish, as Noah Smith is well aware, is the ability to inoculate the mainstream herd from the wrong think of anyone to whom that label has been applied. That way they never have to engage the argument or the evidence that gets laid out contradicting the official imperial line; as long as they can convince enough people to accept their pejorative as legitimate, they have a magical phrase they can utter to dispel any anti-imperialist argument which appears anywhere in the information ecosystem."


  20. 13 hours ago, DocWatts said:

    Basic Media Literacy 101 involves assessing the tone and style of a piece

    Alright, what ulterior motives did you assess from 4 pages of the piece. Someone reading this will abandon Kochinski and what will then become amicable to Nazbol propaganda and go watch Nazbol content on YouTube or read Nazbol work. Where exactly in the piece does his Nazbol bias show itself and is detectable. 

    We can flip the question. How trustworthy is Vaush a source on socialism and anti-imperialism if he gets coaching before debates from TYT contributors that are on the payroll of Democratic Party lobby groups and other lobby groups in the U.S.

    "I’d be remiss to overlook the influence of twenty million dollars invested in The Young Turks from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s media conglomerate that has its fingers in the private healthcare industry.

    In 2019, Katzenberg developed a smartphone app to help healthcare giants with mobile marketing.

    Like Nomiki Konst, Ana Kasparian brands herself as a progressive, and even a socialist, while participating directly in NATO propaganda operations.

    Last year, she beamed with pride as she interviewed Madeleine Albright at the Munich Security Conference, a NATO summit funded by Western governments, multi-national corporations, and the arms industry."

    Source: https://mronline.org/2020/12/30/meet-the-pseudo-left-imperialists-fighting-against-universal-healthcare/

    13 hours ago, DocWatts said:

    So whether the guy writing a takedown piece on Vaush is in part motivated by an authoritarian ideology (ie  Bolshevism and Nazism) is completely relevant.

    Again where in that piece does that authoritarian ideology manifest? What for second guessing the intent behind calling for that Trump supporters be disappeared after rushing the Capitol? Questioning U.S. State Department calls for humanitarian interventions across different countries? Where in the piece is it indicated that he supports Nazism or Bolshevism? Besides honestly that sounds like a stretched for the purposes of dismissing someone based on the label 1920's and 1930's stage blue  false equivalency to me. 

    14 hours ago, DocWatts said:

    The fact that he lists China, a country that's engaging in active genocide against ethnic minorities within its sphere of influence, as an anti-imperialist state(?!), is a good evidence for the ideological bias I indicated.

    It's anti-imperialist only in its position as a counter to U.S. imperialism across the globe. The same way that Soviet Union once was anti-imperialist against U.S. influence on the globe yet internally it was a different story. Again some would not characterize that as genocide based on the supplied evidence but a government suppression of a religious and cultural liberties of a minority group, again not surprising given the policy of official state atheism in China, not to mention the fact suppressing a separatist organizations such as the ETIM that planned to carry out terrorist attacks across China such as at Beijing Olympics in 2008, that curiously the U.S. State Department in 2020 suddenly removed from its list of designated terrorist organizations. Curious. 

     

    14 hours ago, DocWatts said:

    take this guy about as seriously as I'd take a Neo Nazi or White Supremacist's

    Only shows how deeply the narrative managers have falsely equated the two positions and manufactured the label 'tankie' in the minds of Americans and Westerners. 

    Here is an article if you are curious of how that narrative management and control works and how it repeats the talking points of U. S. State Department propaganda against a group or other countries:

    https://consortiumnews.com/2021/04/06/tankie-other-popular-terms-of-narrative-control/

     

     


  21. 14 hours ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

    Breadtube is so small, how is it serving Imperialism

    It's because, at least Ian Kochinski does, I don't know about the others I haven't watched them, they demonise and smear harsh critics of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, State Department propaganda and corporate media propaganda as monolithic and homogeneous group of 'tankies' who use it as a cover to support authoritarian regimes aligned against U.S. interests or who openly work for the advancement of the interests of those régimes. Example if you are against U.S. escalation of arms supply to Taiwan, are skeptical based on the supplied and surfaced evidence of the extent that what is happening in Xinjiang is an actual 'concentration and internment camp genocide of the Uyghur ethnic minority group carried out in open sight by the Chinese government' and that it can't be characterized as something else for example government suppression, forced secularisation and Sinofication or discrimination against a group or suppressing that group for the fear of infiltration and support of separatist and terrorist group such as the ETIM or even call it cultural genocide if you will, while ignoring the fact that China has done that to most of its religious groups under the policy of state atheism and not just Uyghurs, being against the murderous economic sanctions and warfare imposed on the Venezuelan government carried out by the U. S. government and being amicable and in support of that governments struggle against those sanctions and some of their policies towards their people and being in support also of the Iran and Cuba governments struggle against U. S. sanctions etc. and what do these authoritarian regimes have in common they are curiously all the target of U. S. economic sanctions and military might and somehow those other authoritarian regimes like in Colombia and Azerbaijan and others around the globe aren't, and that to me is why it's fair game to call them, like Maupin said, anti-imperialists state because they are only demonised and despised as authoritarian by the U. S. State Department because they go against the logic of U. S. economic imperialism and financial hegemony in their geostrategic constellation and functioning. 

    Also because they demonise the working-class, small businesses or rural Americans in your country who got coned by Trump and have been abandoned and outcast by the state as irredeemable fascists and as a potential domestic terrorist threat in alignment with the stance U. S. intelligence services and government who are the ones that need to go extinct and disappear from the country failing to see that their the ones who are the actual suffering working class of the country that is in alienated and in deep despair caused by the severe lack of economic justice and structural dysfunction within the country. They view them as the CIA views them as prone to white nationalist, ethnonationalist or supremacist radicalization by foreign powers while totally dismissing the underlying structural and economic causes that in the past 30 years caused the American working class to be in such a state. Zero compassion and liberal bigotry directed towards them. 


  22. 2 minutes ago, Willie said:

    Vaush isn’t the best person to follow, nor is he the worst. He’s pretty solidly above average, though.

    If you want to learn about what socialism and what it is about and how to approach the world when adopting such a stance I would argue he is a source that delludes people and grossly miseducates on the topic and grossly misrepresentats other creators, authors and figures stance on the topic. You have much better and more credible authors and creators on the topic that can put one on a much better direction than what Vaush does to his audience and fanbase. 


  23. 57 minutes ago, Stomatopod said:

    What do you call that other than trying to smear the person in any possible way you can think of? That book sounds like it's just one long late night rage tweet on print, sold for $18.00 on amazon. Haha, are you kidding me??

    Exposing evidence of proving someone is a legitimate fraud is not smearing and its a way for people to have a another perspective on the person they didn't have or was hidden from them to reconsider if they are truly following a guy that aligns with their stated cause and their principles or if he is a fraud deluding them and swindling them for money and donations. 

    If people truly care about what socialism stands for and what it is about then they should have all the info about if their following of a certain person aligns with that cause and are not being misguided into following something else that only has a facade of that cause and actually stands for something else. 

    The title of the book suggests they are following and agreeing to something else which has more to do with U.S. state, foreign policy, media and oligarchic interests than of actual international working-class politics, solidarity and struggle. 

    57 minutes ago, Stomatopod said:

    I would much rather young impressionable minds listen to them over someone like Tim Pool or Steven Crowder.

    Yes, I agree. They are a step up in the right direction on the spiral. However the effect of their following and content is a grossly miseducated audience who is taught incorrectly about what socialism is about and how activism of its advancement is carried out and who it suppose to primarily target. Hint its not so much towards as college youth as much towards the people they despise and demonise as an inferior rabble, the actual or future working class of the country. Sure its vitally important to sway away the youth from radicalization into hateful ideologies but it is equally important no to teach that youth to hate and despise their more unfortunate counterparts in the more underdeveloped parts of the country as Nazis, Nazbols, fascists and déplorables who have fallen prey to such ideologies as the unredeemable main foe of your cause who deserve nothing but contempt and hatred. 

    Also to dismiss and demonise as equally dangerous as the right-wing harsh critics of the U. S. in your country who are amicable to some other foreign powers policy towards the world and  working class people in their own country as agents for a foreign power and tankies since they point to the way the U.S. foreign policy has been against and undermined these countries efforts is implicitly rhetorically supporting and enabling imperialist policies of your own country by demonising and equating these critics with facists and with ulterior motives to radicalize your audience by exposing them to some unsavory truths about the mechanicsm in which the U. S. Empire sustains itself and its hegemony in the world and how the global oligarchy in the country sustain themselves, their system that perpetuates huge disparities in wealth, and their narrative power. 


  24. 7 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

    Anyone know what this guy's deal is (by that I mean Caleb Maupin)? 

    From what I've been able to gather the guy is apparently a nazbol, which is combination of National Socialism (aka Nazism) and Bolshevism; something I had no idea was even a thing that existed until I started looking in to it. 

    If that's accurate, he sounds like a real piece of shit...

     

    Again I see ad-hominems directed towards the author of the book and no actual substance dispelling and disproving any of the arguments and accusations he levied against of any of the people in the book, their history, practices and online schemes. 

    That's the first I heard of the claim that he is a Nazbol, sounds like to me it was invented by Vaush or someone from the breadtube space since he is a contributor at RT, said things and supports the idea behind the Soviet Union and contemporary China, advocated in support for white working class Americans from the Midwest or Rustbelt, making him in the minds of these breadtubers a Nazbol. 

    I would like to see someone defining what any of these buzzwords actually mean and how they are relevant to contemporary framing of the direction of advocating for working class-politics and are not just a label and easily invented phrase to demonise and write off opponents as evil and Nazis to a delluded fan base.