It's getting late and I can't stay in too late, so I have to keep this brief.
Mainly I just wanted to repost this excellent rumination on the―and it beggars belief that I am typing these words about a real thing that exists―Disinformation Government Board.
Which is really to miss the forest for the trees, in my opinion. Would it really be any better if the “Disinformation Governance Board” was run by a chill dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with? Especially when we know the ideological leanings of this department are going to bounce back and forth between elections and will always act in service of US empire narrative control regardless of who is in office? I don’t think so.
And that gets to the heart of it, I think. It's not like deception and censorship are new to this government or any other. But when they're publicly labeled a top priority meriting their own bureau and nobody is supposed to notice anything amiss, that's dismaying independent of who is nominally in charge of it.
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I can't help but believe we're being actively trolled by the US government. (I thought things were bad enough when the dog man was put in charge of nuclear waste.) Glenn Greenwald also wrote a good article about the new Ministry of Truth that you can read if you want. Here are a couple of quotes:
Glenn Greenwald: There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation.
Then there was Politico's Jack Schafer: Who among us thinks the government should add to its work list the job of determining what is true and what is disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts….Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car.
Still, there's bits of good news here and there:
Netflix cancelled Meghan Markle's dream project, Pearl.
Elon Musk is planning to fire Twitter's censorship czar Victoria Gadde.
Disney fired their new chief of corporate practices after the woke debacle in Florida.
The WSJ reports top business leaders have been wondering how to avoid being the next Walt Disney Co.
Apparently, it's not all bad news. It's been said politics is downstream of culture so we can hope to see some better days.
Oh man, the dog guy. I think my own brain censored that out of my memory just to spare me. See, government? We can brainwash ourselves just fine.
Whether or not I agree with him on any given topic I appreciate Greenwald as a straight shooter. His honesty of course means that he gets lots of people accusing him of being a Russian dupe or worse. But yes, it's undeniable that this was a case of the fox volunteering to guard the henhouse.
Jack Schafer is right too, and I guess knows whereof he speaks, since he used to be an analyst with the FBI. Although I've almost always heard "hide the salami" used as a sexual metaphor.
The collapse of the Disinformation Governance Board reads as another bit of good news. As I've heard someone say, it lasted exactly as long as CNN+: 22 days. Realistically it doesn't mean that they'll stop censoring and manipulating the facts, just that they're not going to be as loud and proud about it.
But politics being downstream of culture is a comforting thought. I do think/hope that there's a limit to what the citizenry will put up with.
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