society

Now, as we enter the final month of the U.S. election, the expected climax to long-buried animosities is at hand. It is unlikely to be brief or decisive. The internal convulsions of the U.S. however, are one thing. But the implosion of social trust in the U.S. is radiating out, and its effects are radiating out across the globe. If the imprecarity of our times – compounded by the virus – is making us nervous and tense, it may be because we intuit that a way-of-life, a way-of-economics, too, is coming to its end.

Bill BLUNDEN
Psychopaths are a dangerous lot. They lie as easily as they breathe and when they’re not busy gaslighting people they’re hunting for bits of sensitive information to exploit later on. Clinical therapists recommend that the best way to deal with psychopaths is to avoid them.
Yet most people are loath to abandon the little monster that is the smartphone. Particularly denizens of the Beltway. These users would be well advised take a sober look at their mobile devices and acknowledge the true nature of what they’re dealing with. 

On October 5th, The Atlantic, a pretentious American popular ‘big think’ magazine (selling 552,242 copies per issue), headlined an 8,500-word essay from the New York Times columnist and PBS NewsHour commentator David Brooks, “America Is Having a Moral Convulsion: Levels of trust in this country — in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another — are in precipitous decline.” This article documented that levels of trust in America have plunged; distrust has s

Palestine under siege for 72 years. A UK-prompted UN decision in 1947 allowed David Ben-Gurion, then the head of the Jewish Agency, to proclaim on May 14, 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel.

In the latest sign that the mind of U.S. academia has been hijacked by the left, a professor from the University of California-Santa Barbara described herself “a white American” who is, therefore “by definition racist.”
In a webinar lecture entitled, “Undoing White Supremacy in the Language Disciplines,” Mary Bucholtz, Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, broke the news to America’s majority white population that white supremacy “is a system that White people have built in order to oppress everyone else.”

Anthony DIMAGGIO
Despite the rising salience of “fake news” in the U.S., propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are hardly new phenomena. In the 1950s, The historian Richard Hofstadter famously wrote in The Paranoid Style of American Politics about conspiratorial thinking in American history, including McCarthyism, ravings about water fluoridation, and wild tales about the Illuminati and Free Masons secretly dominating American politics and society.

Caitlin JOHNSTONE
“We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”
~ Terence McKenna

Once upon a time it was possible to rely on much of the mainstream media to report on developments more or less objectively, relegating opinion pieces to the editorial page. But that was a long time ago. I remember moving to Washington back in 1976 after many years of New York Times and International Herald Tribune readership, when both those papers still possessed editorial integrity.

Censorship in the West flourishes as tech giants turn social media back into traditional programmed media.
The United States, United Kingdom and the European Union are fond of passing judgement on nations around the globe regarding “free speech.”

Caitlin JOHNSTONE
When you look at US politics, it appears as though there are two mainstream political factions that very strongly disagree with one another. “Divided” is a word that comes up a lot. “Polarized” is another.
It is of course true that a whole lot of emotion flows between these two factions, and most of it is indeed negative. The hot topics of any given news cycle in America will typically involve more than one story pertaining to the vitriolic enmity between them.