https://brownstone.org/articles/technology-weapon-of-the-people/
Technology: Weapon of the People
In an essay titled “Looking forward, looking backward,’ philosopher of technology, Andrew Feenberg writes (in Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity, The MIT Press, 2010, p. 61; my emphasis, B.O.):
The utopian and dystopian visions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were attempts to understand the fate of humanity in a radically new kind of society in which most social relations are mediated by technology. The hope that such mediation would enrich society while sparing human beings themselves was disappointed. The utopians expected society to control modern technology just as individuals control traditional tools, but we have long since reached the point beyond which technology overtakes the controllers. But the dystopians did not anticipate that once inside the machine, human beings would gain new powers they would use to change the system that dominates them. We can observe the faint beginnings of such a politics of technology today. How far it will be able to develop is less a matter for prediction than for practice.
This essay was published almost 15 years ago, and it is striking that, even then, Feenberg was keenly aware of the need for a ‘politics of technology,’ of which he perceived the glimmerings at the time. From this excerpt it is apparent that the rest of the essay addressed the diametrically opposed evaluations of the mediating role of modern technology in society in the late 19th and early 20th century, evaluations that are subsumed under the headings of ‘utopian’ and ‘dystopian.’
These divergent approaches were accompanied by optimism and pessimism, respectively, regarding the ability of human beings to keep technology in check, but the italicised sentences reflect a different, hopeful, and novel realisation, articulated by Feenberg himself. Here I would like to reflect on the implications for today of his belief, ‘that once inside the machine, human beings would gain new powers they would use to change the system that dominates them.’ There are indications that this is indeed happening, as evident in the fact that, contrary to the desire of the Davos ‘elites’ to, and their belief that they could, control the (largely internet-based) news, this is increasingly not the case. (More on this below.)
What does Feenberg mean by ‘inside the machine’? A lot hinges on how one understands this, and in order to do justice to the ambiguity of this statement, I believe that it is imperative to understand the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of the pharmakon (when applied to technology), which means both ‘poison’ and ‘cure,’ and from which the English terms, ‘pharmacy’ and ‘pharmaceutical’ are derived.
As most people know, pharmaceutical products are literally pharmaka (plural of pharmakon)– they have to be used with circumspection, otherwise they may have an adverse effect on one’s health instead of a curative one. In the practice of homeopathy this is even clearer – the preparations received from a homeopath for curing, say, anxiety, or an itchy skin, are usually based on miniscule amounts of substances, such as belladonna (deadly nightshade), which are poisonous, but nevertheless work for their assigned medicinal purpose when taken in small quantities.
As Jacques Derrida has demonstrated, in Plato’s work, the Phaedrus – which deals mainly with the concept and nature of love – the concept of the pharmakon is used against the sophists, who were paid teachers of rhetoric in ancient Greece, unlike philosophers, who did not expect payment for the knowledge they shared with people. In the dialogue, Plato’s Socrates appeals to an Egyptian myth to persuade his friend, the eponymous sophist, Phaedrus, that writing is like a dream-image, compared to the reality of things like justice, when captured in speech, because writing represents a futile attempt to capture the meaning of words spoken between people, which are animated by the truth of the directness and decipherable intention of the speaker.
Employing the notion of ‘Plato’s pharmacy’ (in his book, Dissemination), Derrida demonstrates that, in fact, Plato thought of writing as a pharmakon (poison and cure), insofar as he claims (through Socrates) that, compared to the directness of speech, it is at best a secondary, graphic ‘reminder’ of what one knows, but at the same time he valorises ‘what is truly written in the soul’ (‘for the sake of understanding’), thus paradoxically revealing his (unacknowledged) positive evaluation of ‘what is written’ as something that preserves truth. Hence, although warning against writing as a secondary, unreliable copy of speech, he simultaneously redeems it as a repository of truth in the soul or psuche. Hence the status of writing as pharmakon.
The elaboration on the meaning of pharmakon, above, will serve as backdrop to inform the discussion of contemporary media as pharmaka. Recall that at the outset I pointed out – given Feenberg’s observation, that a ‘politics of technology’ was possible once humans were ‘inside the machine’ – that his expectation appears to be borne out by what has been happening in the mediascape of late; namely, that greater numbers of people appear to be using the ‘machine’ in the shape of internet-based websites, to assert their critical position regarding the global political crisis. By ‘political’ – an adjective that ineluctably implicates power relations and power struggles – I obviously mean the global struggle between the ‘empire’ of lies and tyranny, and the growing rebellion, or ‘resistance,’ and truth-telling against the former.
If this statement is redolent of George Lucas’s Star Wars movie series, it is no accident. Particularly the first one, where the rebels face the daunting task of destroying the empire’s ‘death star’ – by homing in on the only vulnerable part on its gigantic spherical surface with a rebel starfighter and accurately launching a missile at it – has clear allegorical significance for what we, the members of the resistance, face today. I am convinced that those of us fighting the cabal have already uncovered several such vulnerabilities in the armour of the technocrats.
So where is the pharmakon in all of this? Earlier I alluded to the so-called ‘elites’ no longer controlling information and news through the media (if they ever did). Why do they no longer ‘own the news?’ Because the pharmakon has asserted itself. Remember how it manifests its paradoxical character of being poison and cure at the same time?
In Derrida’s analysis of writing (as opposed to speech) in Plato’s work it turned out that it is never simply a ‘poison’ (as Plato believed), but simultaneously a ‘cure’ insofar as it preserves precisely that which is valorised in speech (namely, meaning and truth), which can be brought to presence again out of its putative ‘absence,’ initially perceived in writing. The same goes for contemporary media as pharmaka.
On the one hand the (mainstream) media, which (as red-pilled rebels all know) routinely trots out all the officially ‘approved’ news and information – that is, propaganda in the purest sense of information deliberately formulated to persuade consumers that the world displays the character of a specific, pre-interpreted state of affairs. This is the news that the ‘elites’ have control over. Their mistake was to believe, blindly and dogmatically, that this ‘news’ was exhaustive, which, in their closed universe, it probably is.
The truth is, however, that the official news constitutes the ‘poison’ portion of information – not merely because, from the perspective of the resistance, its poisonous features can be discerned. If this were the case, the resistance could be accused of being merely biased, and an epistemological stalemate would obtain.
But crucially, a scrupulous examination of the news as presented by the official news sources – CNN, MSNBC, BBC, the New York Times, and so on – and a comparison of this ‘approved’ version of events with what is encountered in the alternative media – Redacted, The People’s Voice (on Rumble), the Kingston Report, Alex Berenson’s ‘Unreported Truths,’ Real Left, The HighWire, many, if not most Substack sites, and of course Brownstone Institute, to mention only some – soon discloses the mendacity of the mainstream narrative. Such deception is incommensurate with what the alternative media give one access to, and this state of affairs instantiates what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls a differend (a situation where the epistemic criteria underpinning the respective arguments of two or more parties in a dispute are completely irreconcilable).
But surely this comparison, by itself, merely reveals the same suspected bias mentioned earlier? This would be the case, were it not for an essential, demonstrable difference between the poison aspect of the contemporary information scene and its cure aspect. This vital difference is not that difficult to discern. It comes into view with the regular appearance on alternative news or discussion sites, of investigative reporters ‘on the ground’ as it were, as opposed to the mainstream reporting of events – which arguably show that Western media are the ‘most corrupt in the world,’ according to Redacted, with substantiating evidence; for example, that CNN must get permission from Israel to publish news about the Gaza conflict.
In other words, news is routinely censored to ensure that it is in accordance with the official version of events. In contrast with this propagandistic practice, the alternative media typically give viewers or listeners access to eyewitness accounts (see link above) of newsworthy occurrences, as well as (more frequently) presenting evidence to support a dissenting stance on certain issues. Such evidence is not presented in the legacy media, for obvious reasons.
An example of alternative media furnishing the requisite evidence pertaining to a newsworthy topic is the discussion, supported with documentary substantiation, of the (controversial) MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) programme in Canada, on Clayton and Natali Morris’s Redacted news site. Here they provide evidence of Canadian doctors’ ‘revolt’ against the programme, which has been expanded to provide procedures for ‘assisted dying’ – previously extended to terminally ill patients – to those who suffer from non-life threatening chronic physical conditions, as well as mentally ill patients. This kind of critical discussion is highly unlikely to feature on mainstream news and discussion sites, particularly since it is arguably not difficult to perceive this programme as the outcome of a depopulation agenda.
Understandably those parties hellbent on exercising censorship and control over the alternative media go out of their way to warn users against visiting those websites where one is likely to discover alternative accounts of the misleading news supplied by mainstream sources.
Such alternative websites include the ones found on the open access platform, Rumble, where censoring of content is not carried out, in stark contrast with YouTube. Sometimes the attempts to prevent users from gaining access to sources where sorely needed information, unavailable on official websites, may be found, reach ludicrous proportions.
For instance, in South Africa anyone using Google as a search engine cannot even access Rumble; one has to make use of non-censoring search engines such as Brave. Similarly, in European countries and in Britain the Russian news site, RT, is blocked so that citizens in these countries cannot gain access to what, surprisingly, turn out to be refreshingly informative, divergent accounts of events around the world. Part of the reason for this is the fact that RT makes use of correspondents living in other parts of the world.
But independent journalists, who are increasingly being threatened with legal action and even prison sentences (the most recent instance of which is Tucker Carlson, who had the ‘audacity’ to travel to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin), are fighting back against the empire. The cure, which is inseparable from the poison side of the pharmakon, is asserting itself, but one should remind oneself that this is not a state of affairs which will ever disappear. One must, of necessity, always maintain a vigilant stance against those who will not let up in their attempt to impose their tyrannical will upon the rest of us.
The good news, from the perspective of those who are engaged in lifting the obfuscating fog constantly being spread over actually unfolding events, is that – according to Natali and Clayton Morris – mainstream media are being ‘killed,’ as reflected in dwindling digital audience numbers. These statistics apply to audio-visual media such as CNN and Fox News, as well as to print media, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
In sum, while the poisonous aspect of the media pharmakon has not nearly exhausted its toxic potency, the curative side has incrementally been gaining strength and therapeutic effectiveness, as reflected in the anxiety of the ‘Davos elites,’ detectable in their worry, that they no longer ‘own the news.’ They thought they had it all under control, but were caught unawares by the unexpected power of the alternative media – those ever-expanding digital spaces of the machine inhabited by the resistance.
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https://www.aaronmate.net/p/the-biden-doctrine-in-gaza-bomb-starve
The Biden doctrine in Gaza: bomb, starve, deceive
The White House unveils a new PR stunt for Gaza aid while hiding US arms transfers to Israel.
At his State of the Union address Thursday night, President Biden announced that the US military will install a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza to deliver emergency aid to the besieged enclave, where more than 2.2 million Palestinians face a humanitarian crisis, including starvation. The pier, which will take weeks if not months to complete, will be built by US soldiers.
The US, Biden claimed, “has been leading international efforts to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza” and believes that “protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.”
In reality, the emergency project underscores Biden’s real priority: to prolong Israel’s rampage in Gaza, the US is even willing to deploy its own military for face-saving public relations stunts.
With criticism of Biden’s Gaza complicity increasing inside the Democratic Party, and threatening him at the ballot box, the pier is the latest in a series of token gestures aimed at feigning concern for Gazans while providing unfettered support to the Israeli government that is indiscriminately attacking them.
The White House has carried out air drops over Gaza that amount to a few trucks’ worth of aid – compared to the thousands of trucks that Israel is blocking with US support. “The food, water, and medical supplies so desperately needed by people in Gaza are sitting just across the border,” Doctors Without Border said Friday. “Israel needs to facilitate rather than block the flow of supplies.”
Even those trucks that can enter Gaza have been unable to make safe deliveries after Israel attacked their Hamas police escorts and crowds of desperate civilians lining up to receive aid. One air drop has even killed five Palestinian civilians and wounded others when a parachute failed to open.
The US military pier, Biden claimed, “will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.” His own aides acknowledge that this is a ruse. According to the Washington Post, administration officials quietly concede that “only by securing the opening of additional land crossings would there be enough aid to prevent famine.” And given that the pier will take at minimum 30 days to complete, that “[raises] questions about how famine in Gaza will be staved off in the critical days ahead,” the New York Times notes.
The White House has given the answer: rather than compel Israel to open those land crossings and prevent famine, it is instead adopting the Israeli position that the land crossings can be used as a tool of leverage against Hamas — and that Israel can control everything that gets in. In ceasefire talks, Israel has demanded that Hamas release hostages in exchange for, at best, a six-week pause to the massacre.
As one US official told the Post, such a deal would allow for a “significant surge” in aid delivery. The choice of words is striking: for months, US officials have been promising to “surge” aid into Gaza. The fact that such a “surge” is now explicitly conditional underscores that those prior vows were a lie, and a cynical cover for the actual policy of helping Israel block aid to the people of Gaza.
In a Selma, Alabama speech that was widely mischaracterized as a call for a ceasefire, Vice President Kamala Harris explained the White House stance. “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire,” Harris told a crowd, drawing effusive applause. But after a pause, she added the qualifier: “-- for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table.” The onus, she added, is entirely on Hamas, which “needs to agree to that deal.” If they do, then the agreement “will get the hostages out and get a significant amount of aid in.”
The very fact that the delivery of “a significant amount” of aid is conditional on Hamas accepting Israeli demands underscores that Israel, with US backing, is using that aid as a tool of coercion. This directly contradicts Biden’s claim, in his State of the Union address, that such assistance cannot be “a bargaining chip.”
While backing Israel’s blockade, the White House continues to expedite weapons transfers to Israel while hiding them from the public footing the bill.
According to the Washington Post, the US has made more than 100 sales of weaponry to Israel since Oct. 7th. Only two of those transfers were made public – and in both of those cases, the White House invoked emergency powers to bypass Congressional review.
To avoid standard disclosures, the administration sent the weapons “in smaller batches that fall below a dollar threshold that requires the administration to notify Congress,” the Wall Street Journal reports, a method that comes as part of “a broader pattern in which the Biden administration has sought to avoid scrutiny from Congress.” And there are far more sales to come: according to the Journal, the US has “600 active cases of potential military transfer or sales worth more than $23 billion between the U.S. and Israel.”
“There’s nothing that Israel can say that it has not gotten,” an Israeli military official noted. “Israel got basically what it needed.” And Biden is committed to meeting Israel’s needs. Asked about his critics on Gaza, Biden told the New Yorker: “I think they have to give this just a little bit of time.”
Biden is devoted to ensuring more “time” for Israeli mass murder even though it directly threatens his re-election chances, as illustrated by the more than 140,000 “uncommitted” votes in the Michigan and Minnesota primaries.
In a bid to save his chances in Michigan, the White House deployed top aides to meet with Arab-American voters ahead of the vote. According to a recording of one such meeting, Deputy National Security Jon Finer relayed his regrets as follows: “We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration and the country values the lives of Palestinians.” Therefore, according to the White House, the problem is not that Biden is helping Israel exterminate Palestinian lives, the problem is that voters are unaware how much he secretly “values” the people he’s helping to exterminate.
Finer went on to demonstrate the limitations on that valuation. Yes, he acknowledged, Israeli leaders have compared “residents of Gaza to animals.” But rather than condemn this genocidal rhetoric and stop arming the government spouting it, the White House had no choice but to continue arming them. “Out of a desire to sort of focus on solving the problem and not engaging in a rhetorical back-and-forth with people who, in many cases, I think we all find somewhat abhorrent,” Finer explained, “we did not sufficiently indicate that we totally rejected and disagreed with those sorts of sentiments.”
Indeed, it would be incongruent for the Biden administrating to publicly rebuke the Israeli government while privately rushing it weapons to help exterminate the Gazan “animals.”
Which explains why, five months into Israel’s genocidal campaign, the White House’s empty gestures have extended beyond mere empty words to costly, empty stunts by sea and air.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/democrats-decided-2024-time-go-full-permanent-control-government/5851432
The Final Battle: The Democrats Decided 2024 Is the Time to Go for Full and Permanent Control of the Government
With the Super Tuesday massacre now behind us, it’s clear Donald Trump will be the 2024 Republican Party nominee, and panicked Democrats are concerned that even their well-oiled cheating machine may not be enough to keep him from winning the general election. But don’t sell Democrats short, because, if nothing else, they are relentless. They will never stop lying; they will never stop cheating; they will never stop trying to rig elections.
You may think the Supreme Court’s ruling on the ridiculous Colorado ballot case is a triumph of good over evil, but I can assure you it will not deter Democrats from trying again … and again … and again. They are already talking about legislation in Congress that would cut right to the chase and keep Trump off the ballot. And if all else fails, they are threatening to refuse to certify the upcoming election. (You know, the same thing they accused Donald Trump of doing in 2020.)
It’s time to face up to the reality that the United States is no longer a nation where the rule of law reigns supreme.
This is not some big, new revelation. It’s long been an open secret that the United States is a dangerous, crime-ridden country with a wide-open border and blatant criminality at the highest levels of government. Ransacking retail establishments from Walgreens to Gucci seems perfectly normal in a country where it’s common knowledge that the man posing as president has made millions of dollars through a massive bribery and money-laundering scheme for half a century.
This was driven home recently by El Salvadore President Bukele when he spoke at CPAC. In the days of yore, Americans would have been insulted if the head of state of another country — especially a third-world country — lectured them on what they need to do to pull their country back from the brink of disaster. At CPAC, however, his remarks were met with loud applause and cheering, because those in attendance realized that everything he was saying was true.
Bukele warned Americans not to make the same mistakes El Salvadore made in the sixties and seventies, urging them to reject globalism and fight against unelected bureaucrats, corrupt prosecutors, judges, and attorneys, and activists posing as journalists. His depth of understanding of the problems that are turning the United States into a third-world country was eye opening.
Bukele reminded me of the late Andrew Breitbart, because of his emphasis on the need for Americans to take immediate action. I interviewed Breitbart less than a year before he passed away, and I believe his greatest contribution was that he emphasized the importance of being proactive rather than playing defense against Democrat treachery. He understood that passivity in politics is death, particularly in this day and age of lawless Democrats running roughshod over the Constitution.
If Democrats manage to cheat their way to victory in November — particularly if they manage a clean sweep by winning majorities in the House, Senate, and the presidency — it’s hard to see how America can survive. They have clearly decided that 2024 is the time to go for full and permanent control of the government by pulling out all stops. They are now openly working to subvert the 2024 election. If they achieve power, they will try to imprison their political opponents, pack the Supreme Court, import tens of millions of new Democrat voters, and write laws aimed at watering down the Constitution.
On the other hand, if Republicans somehow manage to overcome the Democrats’ massive election-fraud antics, Donald Trump will have a very brief window of opportunity to take serious action. Repeat, serious action as opposed to tinkering around the edges. I believe he’s sincere when he says he intends to do many things to push back against Democrat criminality, but to actually follow through on them, he must overcome his addiction to sycophantism.
If he surrounds himself with sycophant Republicans like Tim Scott (who endorsed Lisa Murkowski!), prim and proper Matt Whitaker, and Kristie Noem (who has referred to John Thune as “my good friend”), his efforts will be doomed. All of them are nice, well-meaning people, but nice and well-meaning don’t cut it during wartime. And, make no mistake about it, we are at war.
This isn’t fun and games anymore. It’s the final battle, literally. If Republicans lose this battle, the war will be over.
If he is serious about holding the line against criminal Democrats, Trump needs to pick ruthless warriors like Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ric Grenell, to name but a few. If he gets this wrong, we all may as well start booking our reservations for the gulag.
If
liberty is your goal, the one battle you cannot afford to lose is the
final battle. That being the case, we would all do well to make certain
like-minded people understand that in the lead-up to November 5.
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