The Arab explosion in the 7th century was fueled by belief in divine favor. The united Arab armies conquered the world from Spain to India, marching confidently into battle with the backing of the one true God. Their religious identity solidified in the century following the life of Muhammad. From my perspective in the 21st century, the Arab rule in Spain was undergirded by fanatical religious beliefs.
The Christians of Spain and Portugal sought to reclaim their lands from these foreign conquerors. To do so, they sharpened their own religious fanaticism. The completion of the reconquista in 1492 coincided with the peak of the Spanish Inquisition. Spain had united in spirit to defeat the Moors, but at the cost of freedom of religion for others such as the Jews. Truth and rationality were less important than unity under the Christian identity.
Something similar is happening today in the United States. The traditional Christian / white male led community has united under the banner of the Republican party and backed the more diverse Democratic faction into a corner. The Democrats are now demanding unity, and are not tolerating dissent within their ranks.
Some examples of such intolerance:
The campaign to remove Michael Moore’s new documentary from the Internet – led by Moore’s erstwhile progressive “allies” – is a significant advance in the censorship revolution...
Environmentalists denounced the film as riddled with “lies” and “misinformation,” claiming among other things that Moore used old data to discredit green technology. A campaign to remove the film from circulation immediately took shape...
The removal of a film by Moore – a heavily-credentialed figure long revered by the liberal mainstream – takes place amid a dramatic acceleration of such speech-suppression incidents, many connected to the coronavirus disaster...
One problem is the so-called “reputable” fact-checking authorities many platforms are relying upon have terrible factual histories themselves. There’s an implication that “misinformation” by foreign or independent actors is somehow more dangerous than broadly-disseminated official deceptions about U.S. misbehavior abroad, or manufactured scandals like Russiagate. We now expect libertarian or socialist pages to be zapped at any minute, but none of the outlets which amplified the bogus Steele dossier have been put in Internet timeout...
In Planet of the Humans, Moore and Gibbs make a complex argument. In essence, they charge that people have become dependent upon the high-consumption lifestyles made possible by fossil fuels, and that it’s our addiction to that way of life, as much as to fossil fuels themselves, that is driving humanity off a “cliff.” ...
The new take is that episodes like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the Charlottesville tragedy, a cascade of racially-motivated mass shootings and cases of police violence, and more recently the coronavirus disaster, have all proven that incorrect speech can no longer be tolerated. It’s now understood the consequences are simply too severe, especially for disadvantaged communities.
In the multitudinous critiques of Planet of the Humans, a creepy kind of rhetorical intersectionality is observed. Moore’s film is consistently depicted as not merely misinformation, conspiracy theory, or Trumpian hate speech, but somehow an interlocking combination of all of these things. Critics all seem to have gotten the same memo...
With Planet of the Humans, we’ve come full circle. Now liberal critics are deriding all this tree-hugging as not just misanthropy, but supportive of racism and even genocide, using language that blows away Bush-era conservative rhetoric.
“Protecting the trees has almost always come with a judgment about which kind and color of humans they need protection from,” wrote Kate Aronoff at the New Republic. She added, “Gibbs does not appear to be a white nationalist himself, but his film echoes their approach.”
In The Nation, which lists Moore on its masthead as a contributing editor, Fox wrote a piece denouncing the film as not only “racist,” but, potentially, an “incitement to eco-fascist population controls.”
Leah Stokes on Vox wrote the film’s takes on the dangers of overpopulation had “more in common with anti-immigration hate groups than the progressive movement” and expressed hope the film would be “buried.” Gizmodo argued the film has “more than a whiff of eugenics and ecofascism… Who are we going to knock off or control for?”
Given that the primary criticism of Moore’s film is that it unfairly depicts people like McKibben as sellouts, it’s more than a little odd that the apparently serious return criticism is that Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs want to massacre nonwhite people. This would be laughable were it not for the fact that the campaign succeeded...
Maybe Moore is wrong about the environmental movement, but these new suppression tactics are infinitely more dangerous than one movie ever could be, and progressives seem to have lost the ability to care.
Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.
Russiagate cases were often two-level offenses: factually bogus or exaggerated, but also indicative of authoritarian practices. Democrats and Democrat-friendly pundits in the last four years have been consistently unable to register objections on either front.
I will venture to say that FBI “entrapment” type actions in manufacturing crimes, as was practiced on Flynn, got its early start as a more normalized standard procedure after 9-11 with Robert Mueller’s FBI gravitating to using con-artist type informants to infiltrate Muslim communities in order to identify, coerce and entrap the more emotionally vulnerable members into committing acts that the FBI could take credit for as “preventing” terrorism...
In 2018, the Department of Justice initiated approximately 80,000 federal prosecutions. Two percent of these cases went to trial, with an 83 percent conviction rate. Of the remaining 98 percent of the cases, some 90 percent ended with the defendant pleading guilty; ... The plea process is so prevalent and pervasive in the U.S. Court system that in the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Missouri v. Frye, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, quoted a prominent law review article which concluded that “[Plea bargaining] is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.”
Federal prosecutors are equipped with a considerable range of legal weapons that can be used to compel confessions and discourage a jury trial, including charge-stacking (charging multiple criminal counts derived from a single act), mandatory-minimum sentences which eliminate discretion on the part of a sentencing judge, pretrial confinement, inordinately high bail, threats against friends and family, and the reality that any sentence handed down after trial will be substantially greater than one that could be reached via a plea bargain.
The upside of such a process is a streamlined criminal justice system which places a premium on convictions and incarceration without the cost of a trial. The downside, however, is an unacceptably high rate of false confessions obtained by the plea deal process—the National Registry of Exonerations estimates that as many as 20 percent of all plea deal-related confessions are false.
It is perhaps the least reported media scandal about the least reported international controversy in recent times—the resignation of Tareq Haddad, a well-regarded journalist from Newsweek, a mainstay of the mainstream media.
At issue was what he said regarding the magazine’s refusal to cover the scandal unfolding within the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Evidence has been building for some time that the OPCW cooked the books in its investigation of alleged chemical weapons use in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7, 2018. These allegations served as the justification for a subsequent joint U.S.-U.K.-France attack against suspected chemical weapons targets inside Syria, despite the fact that the OPCW had yet to inspect the Douma location, let alone issue a report on its findings...
Under normal circumstances, the leaked documents and first-hand testimony of a whistleblower like “Alex” would have garnered the attention of the mainstream media.. The OPCW whistleblower scandal has all the elements of a blockbuster—heroes, villains, scandal, lies, and cover-up. But fact-based truth is no longer the fuel of the media business that modern journalism is supposed to sustain, especially when the truth can so easily be fobbed off as “pro-Assad” or “pro-Russia.”
- All the Adam Schiff Transcripts
Newly released documents show he knew all along that there was no proof of Russia-Trump collusion.
The question we’d ask our friends in the media is when are they going to stop playing the fool by putting him on the air? Mr. Schiff is a powerful figure with access to secrets that the rest of us don’t have and can’t check. He misled the country repeatedly on an issue that consumed American politics.
President Trump often spreads falsehoods and invents facts, but at least he’s paid a price for it in media criticism and public mistrust. An industry of media fact checkers is dedicated to parsing his every word. As for Mr. Schiff, no one should ever believe another word he says.
A fuller accounting by the Times is especially necessary because the media’s pushing of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories was central to an unprecedented and possibly criminal effort to subvert or remove a president under false pretenses. Unless the Times and other sources come clean about who was feeding them misleading and partisan information, we may never understand this momentous chapter of history...
It is clear now that a prime engine of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was the opposition research commissioned from the Washington firm Fusion GPS, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The so-called Steele dossier – named for the former British spy who helped compile it, Christopher Steele – included a range of wild tales that deeply influenced federal investigations, including kinkiness with Russian prostitutes and cloak-and-dagger intrigue in Prague. While the FBI’s close and credulous relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS has been exposed in a series of news and official reports, media outlets have not been forthcoming about their interactions with the opposition research firm and how and why they followed its lead into the dead end of collusion...
Nobody knows how many people died as a result of the UK/US Coalition of Death led destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, by proxy, Syria and Yemen...
The neo-con drive to dominate the Middle East, in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel, has caused an apocalyptic level of death and destruction. It really is very difficult indeed to quantify the number of people killed as a direct result of the policy of “liberal intervention” in these countries. Bombing people into freedom has collateral damage. There are also the vast unintended consequences. The destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria launched a wave of refugee migration which led to politicial instability throughout Europe and contributed to, among many other consequences, Brexit.
For the purposes of argument, I am going to put an extremely conservative figure of 5 million on the number of people who died as a result of Western military intervention, direct or proxy, in the Middle East.
Now compare that to the worldwide death toll from coronavirus: 220,000. Let me say that again: Western aggressive wars to coronavirus: 5,000,000 : 220,000.
The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government.
No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies...
There is no doubt that Douma was a false flag. The documentary and whistleblower evidence from the OPCW is overwhelming and irrefutable...
None of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian nor CNN – all of which reported the Douma chemical attack very extensively as a real Syrian government atrocity, and used it to editorialise for western military intervention in Syria – none of them has admitted they were wrong. None has issued any substantive retraction or correction. None has reported in detail and without bias on the overwhelming evidence of foul play within the OPCW.
The official UK, US, French and Spanish government line, and the line of the billionaire and state owned media, continues to be that Douma was a Syrian government chemical weapons attack on civilians. They intend, aided and abetted by their vast online propaganda operations, to brazen out the lie.
In the next instalment I shall consider how the Establishment is brazening out similar lies on the Russophobe agenda, and sticking to factually debunked narratives on the DNC and Podesta emails, on the Steele Dossier and on the Skripals.I could go on and on (as I have in previous posts) -- truth does not matter so much as unity in defeating the Republicans. Perhaps this is an acceptable tradeoff? I'm pretty sure that's what most Democrats believe.
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