Caitlin Johnstone — Why The Entire Political-Media Class Just Tried To End Ilhan Omar’s Career

This is indicative of a much larger problem than AIPAC. It's the basis of attacks grounded in sophistry that uses invalid logic.

The aim is to attack an opposing party or cohort "X." The logic used runs thus.

X is against Y. Y has a property. Therefore X is against everyone/everything having that property.

This is clearly wrong if Y is not identical to everyone/everything having that property, e.g, being Jewish, which in this instance is not the case. Y is represents only some of those having that property, not all, since the relevant property is holding a policy and acting on it. In fact, those having this characteristic may not all be Jewish. Some are not.

Here the political leadership of a country, Israel, and its supporters within and outside of the country, must be distinguished from the dominant group in the country, that is, people identifying a Jews or having Jewish heritage, especially when this group is not characterized entirely by being associated with the country's political leadership and policy.

It is simply invalid logically to charge that someone that criticizes a particular political faction of Israel under the rubric, "Israel" is biased against Jewishness, i.e., is antisemitic. In logic, this is called "nonsense."

While some people that criticize "Israel" and its supporters may be antisemitic, all are clearly are not, since many Jews also criticize and oppose "Israel" in the sense of Israeli leadership and policy. This would include those outside Israel that support regardless of whether they are Jewish. Some are and some are not.

Moreover, there is no connection with having the property of being Jewish and supporting the Israeli leadership and its policy. Many Jews in Israel and also outside of Israel also don't.

This is false argument mounted by those either ignorant of basic logic, or used intentionally to smear the opposition. In other words, morons or complicit.

Intentional or not, it is an effort to silence opposition based on false cause. It is to be condemned.

The situation of a boycott is somewhat different, but related. It is also similar to imposing sanctions. Both boycotts and sanctions may be imposed on an entire country, affecting all in the country and those connected with it, regardless of whether they support the country's leadership or policy that is being targeted. This penalizes all for the actions of a few. Is that just?

This is a larger issue, too, and affects all areas in which is there is bias and discrimination. These kinds of tactics are in wide use to smear opponents in an attempt to destroy them.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Why The Entire Political-Media Class Just Tried To End Ilhan Omar’s Career
Caitlin Johnstone

also

Mint Press News
Ilhan Omar is Right: AIPAC Influences Congress To the Tune of $4 Million Annually

Whitney Webb

See also

Blaming the Venezuelan leadership and "socialism" for a crisis exacerbated by economic sanctions. Adding insult to injury, those that imposed the sanction then disingenuously offer "aid" without revoking the sanctions unless the government capitulates. And the media amplifies the subterfuge rather than exposing it.

Again the "logic" here is nonsense.

FAIR
U.S. media ignore—and applaud—economic war on Venezuela

Gregory Shupak

Also at FAIR

Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Cheap Trump/Rubio Venezuela Aid PR Stunt

Adam Johnson

Facts Don’t Interfere With Propaganda Blitz Against Venezuela’s Elected President

Joe Emersberger

also

Popular Resistance
RED CROSS OF COLOMBIA: US ACTION TO VENEZUELA IS NOT ‘HUMANITARIAN AID'

Staff, Brasil247.com

Bill Mitchell — The Left propaganda that the state is powerless – continues

When we published our latest book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World – last September, Thomas Fazi and I approached the UK Guardian to see if they would publish an Op Ed by us summarising the main arguments presented in the book. We received no response. Pluto tell us that the book is one of their better sellers since it was published. And it is not as if the topic is irrelevant in the Guardian’s assessment. That is clear from the fact that on April 5, 2018, they published one of their ‘long read’ articles by Rana Dasgupta – The demise of the nation state – which is a direct refutation of the ideas advanced in our book. This ‘long read’ also falls into the same traps and analytical errors that we point out has besotted the Left side of politics since the 1970s. The article is clearly part of the Guardian’s agenda to appear progressive but, in fact, be anything of the sort. As I have noted previously, the Guardian seems content to publish a torrent of anti-Brexit articles and criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn rather than provide any semblance of balance.

In the US, we call them "limousine liberals" and "latté liberals." They pretend to be progressives on the side of the people, but their real mission is to support the power elite in their push for transnational corporate totalitarianism in the name of "liberalism" and "Western values." The fact is that they are fascists. Fascism is aligned with capital being the chief political factor. In a representative democracy, this occurs through corruption of the political process and state capture. Is the Guardian in the category of promoting this?

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The Left propaganda that the state is powerless – continues
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

RT — ‘Enslaved to US politics’: Assange seeks encrypted Twitter alternative

Assange told his 439,000 Twitter followers on Friday that he is looking for a “decentralized/cryptographic alternative” to the social media giant.…

Twitter’s freedom of expression has been on an inexorable decline. It’s enslaved to its US jurisdiction and politics. Although it is substantially better than Facebook that is a very low standard indeed,” Assange said online.

The inevitable result of politicization is loss of credibility and creation of alternatives.

Not to mention that Twitter and FaceBook and most of social media constitute a gigantic waste of time.

RT
‘Enslaved to US politics’: Assange seeks encrypted Twitter alternative

Steve Randy Waldman — A tao of politics

Dialectical logic: seeing complements instead of opposition, paradox instead of contradiction.

Interfluidity
A tao of politics
Steve Randy Waldman

John Keane et al — “Comparative Silence” Still?: Journalism, academia, and the Five Eyes of Edward Snowden

Abstract 

This paper revisits the longstanding debate about journalism, academic scholarship, and their connections with the powerful forces of surveillance that shape the lives of contemporary democracies. Drawing critically on the practical findings of Edward Snowden and others, we offer an analysis of the “Five Eyes” intelligence collection and sharing arrangements between the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and the responses it has elicited from journalists and academic researchers. We show how and why journalists and academics have been deterred from researching and reporting on the significance of Five Eyes activities to the public. The paper provides a new account of the Five Eyes project, helped along by the findings of journalists, including the NSA data-gathering schemes exposed by Edward Snowden. Then we examine the uneven outputs of journalists and academics. Finally, we will show why Edward Snowden’s revelations must be seen as just one contribution to our understanding of a much longer historical trend; and we show why the work of other, less well-known journalists is vital for explaining and understanding a surveillance programme that arguably has profound threatening implications for the future of journalism, university scholarship, and the ideals and institutions of democratic citizenship.

John Keane
“Comparative Silence” Still?: Journalism, academia, and the Five Eyes of Edward Snowden
Digital Journalism Pages 353-367 | Published online: 17 Nov 2016
Felicity Ruby, Gerard Goggin & John Keane

Taylor Lewis — The Shift: From Liberal-Conservative to Globalist-Nationalist

Taylor Lewis explores the contrast between globalism and nationalism from a nationalist point of view.

Nationalism is usually considered to be a rightist point of view, and internationalism a leftist one. However, economic liberalism led to global capitalism so establishments of both the parties of the right and left favored globalism and international institutions that accommodated transnational corporatism.

The election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the resurgence of nationalists parties in Europe, collectively called "populism," has changed that political dynamic and pitted nationalists against globalists.

The American Thinker
The Shift: From Liberal-Conservative to Globalist-Nationalist

Taylor Lewis

HBR — What Trump Understands About Using Social Media to Drive Attention

Is Twitter disruptive technology in politics and are those that fail to embrace innovation doomed to go the way of the dodo?

Harvard Business Review
What Trump Understands About Using Social Media to Drive Attention
Barbara Bickart, associate professor of marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business; Susan Fournier, Questrom Professor of Management and Senior Associate Dean at Boston University, and Martin Nisenholtz,professor of the practice of digital communications at Boston University’s College of Communications, previously CEO of New York Times Digital

Zero Hedge — Germans Outraged After US Tennis Association Plays "Nazi Anthem"

German tennis has responded with outrage after the United States Tennis Association (USTA) made the embarrassing error of playing the Nazi-era version of Germany's national anthem during a Fed Cup tie in Hawaii.

The version played included the first stanza, beginning "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in der Welt" which was used as Nazi propaganda.

It translates as "Germany, Germany, above all, above all in the world" and was dropped after World War Two because of its association with Adolf Hitler….

Gaffe or trolling?

Reuters

Tennis-Germans outraged as U.S. plays Nazi version of anthem

Alan Fleischmann — It’s Time For CEOs To Be the New Leaders of the World

Because capitalism.

Alan Fleischmann is talking his book.

Fortune
It’s Time For CEOs To Be the New Leaders of the World

Alan H. Fleischmann is Founder, President & CEO of Laurel Strategies, a global business advisory and strategic communications firm

Scott Adams — The Thinking Filters

Logic versus rhetoric, reason versus persuasion.

Scott Adams's Blog
The Thinking Filters

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert

Glenn Greenwald — The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition

STAGE 1: Polite condescension toward what is perceived to be harmless (we think it’s really wonderful that your views are being aired).

STAGE 2: Light, casual mockery as the self-belief among supporters grows (no, dears, a left-wing extremist will not win, but it’s nice to see you excited).

STAGE 3: Self-pity and angry etiquette lectures directed at supporters upon realization that they are not performing their duty of meek surrender, flavored with heavy doses of concern trolling (nobody but nobody is as rude and gauche online to journalists as these crusaders, and it’s unfortunately hurting their candidate’s cause!).…

STAGE 4: Smear the candidate and his supporters with innuendos of sexism and racism by falsely claiming only white men support them (you like this candidate because he’s white and male like you, not because of ideology or policy or contempt for the party establishment’s corporatist, pro-war approach).

STAGE 5: Brazen invocation of right-wing attacks to marginalize and demonize, as polls prove the candidate is a credible threat (he’s weak on terrorism, will surrender to ISIS, has crazy associations, and is a clone of Mao and Stalin).

STAGE 6: Issuance of grave and hysterical warnings about the pending apocalypse if the establishment candidate is rejected, as the possibility of losing becomes imminent (you are destined for decades, perhaps even generations, of powerlessness if you disobey our decrees about who to select).

STAGE 7: Full-scale and unrestrained meltdown, panic, lashing-out, threats, recriminations, self-important foot-stomping, overt union with the Right, complete fury (I can no longer in good conscience support this party of misfits, terrorist-lovers, communists, and heathens).

The Intercept

The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition
Glenn Greenwald

Neil Wilson — The Left's Love of Higher Law

One thing I've noticed during debates over the past year or so, is that those on the Left are particularly keen on the concept of Rule According to Higher Law. When they lose elections they always want to appeal to some higher body to stop any changes being made by the winners. (This seems Kantish in origin - perhaps the philosophers can shed more light?)

I don't think that this is remarkable since liberalism is dominant politically in the West since the Enlightenment and especially with the end of political monarchies and aristocracies after WWI. The Left and Right hold competing views of liberalism.

It's a paradox of liberalism that liberalism seeks to make itself the only acceptable political paradigm once it is installed. Moreover, different views on the spectrum of liberalism take themselves to be the very definition of liberalism and therefore seek to install themselves as the optimal alternative within a liberal contexts when they accede to power.

The tension is between freedom and control. In engineering design, it is generally assumed that an optimal balance between freedom and control needs to be achieved in order to produce the highest level of capability consistent with getting the work done.

So it's likely explicable through a combination of optimizing and preferences in articulating the design problem. Preferences is where the normative aspect comes in, and it is arguable that "higher law" is Kantian, or deontological rather than consequentialist.

I don't see this as problematic in that humans tend to rationalize their preferences in terms of values. Humans also disagree over what constitutes values to some degree and quite a bit over prioritizing values, especially when they conflict in situations.

This is especially the case in political and legal affairs since positive law and institutional arrangements, which are human constructs, are inherently normative owing to the human context in which they are embedded.

The difference in liberal political theory tends to be over competence. The Right is conservative and conservatism is based on the principle that some are better than others. So this is reflected in the conservative approach to liberalism, which prefers republicanism, in which elites control the levers of power and are the final arbiters.

On the other hand, the Left generally subscribes to the wisdom of crowds and prefers democratic decision-making and determination of criteria.

But just because someone or some party adopts a label doesn't imply that they are actually going to behave like that. Presently, the Right is more or less consistent but the Left, no so much, at least with respect to the political leadership.

3spoken
The Left's Love of Higher Law
Neil Wilson

Chris Dillow — Ambiguity aversion in politics

Intersections of psychology, politics, and economic policy. "It's the uncertainty, stupid." Using unfamiliarity, difference, and uncertainty as propaganda rhetorical tools to influence debate and prejudice shape public opinion.

This is chiefly to do with UK politics. The same is operative in the US using code words, for instance to create FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

Stumbling and Mumbling
Ambiguity aversion in politics
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Why Won't More Scientists Peer-Review Reality? Citizens Too.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Scientists are hopless. Not THAT beer reviewed journal, silly. I mean ones critical for democracy.

Let's get serious.

Why do our rulers carry out winning political campaigns in trashy tabloids ... rather than peer-reviewed journals? :(

Prof. Brad Lewis notes that "I think many economists just ignore it because it's not in the peer-reviewed stream" - which brings up fundamentally interesting questions about power, politicians and scientists.

And overall, that's just not good enough. After all, if war is too important to be left to the generals, surely every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners?

So why won't more scientists peer-review reality?

In science programs, we're taught everything about science, except WHY to pursue it, and how best to leverage it for mankind. That's stunning, if you stop and think about it.

Rulers & politicians like their scientists meek, malleable, and above all else, submissive.

Pair that with how little it takes to bribe & neutralize scientists & academics, and you have our quasi-feudal NeoLiberal state.

Here's my contention:

'The most important question in every science field - in fact in every human discipline - from day 1, may well be:

"how do we coordinate current & emerging knowledge in each discipline, with current & emerging knowledge in all disciplines?" '

That, after all, is how aggregates evolve.

Move over combinatorial chemistry. Combinatorial Cultural Evolution is demanding it's due. Or else!

Let's drill down a bit deeper into this same topic.

Why don't more scientists use "Design of Experiments?" There are some fundamentally solid reasons in key instances (i.e., when experimental space or "policy space" includes discontinuities such as phase-changes, rather than smoothly extrapolated functions), but let's leave that question to later. The bigger & more immediate conclusion is that asking why more scientists don't use "Design of Experiments" is a relatively trivial question - asked most frequently by investors and accountants.

The far bigger question?

Why don't more citizens at least refer to Design of Experiments - and constantly enlarging perspective - when trying to run their [supposed] democracies?

That's a far more fundamental question, and the answer is known. Our entire education system, from top to bottom, trains citizens to seek overly simplistic solutions to a series of increasingly complex tasks. Doh!

Increasingly, our schools stunt, trap and enslave students intellectually, rather than setting them free. If that doesn't change, we can't change, fast enough. Specifically, our Adaptive Rate won't meet the demands of an accelerating Future Shockwave - unless we fundamentally & continuously improve our K-12 schools, so that all citizens act like owners of democracy, and practice contributing to where we're going, instead of leaving it to a small bevy of sociopathic "owners" practicing Central Planning.

If we don't selectively increase our rate of interactions .... we're dishonestly making a mockery of the scientific method, and of evolution.

We already know that aggregate evolution is leveraging the increasing inter-dependencies among growing numbers of components, across multiple levels of organization. That's why we have molecules, cells, cell-types, organs, physiologies, human cultures, and multi-nation alliances.

The way all aggregates handle an unpredictable stream of transient contexts is by reconnecting everything to everything, on-demand, before transiently settling into a relaxed organizational state continuously tuned (but not over-tuned) to a given context. That's exactly what we do every night when we go to sleep. Upon waking every morning, we've done the best we can to make sense of yesterday's data deluge, and interpret it per ongoing models ..... OR ... we've determined that it's time to re-assess everything (which we do mainly by replacing parent models with offspring models).

It seems reasonable to conclude that national aggregates of humans need a sample/assess wake/sleep cycle every bit as much as our personal aggregates of CNS neurons do. If citizens don't do periodic After Action Re-assessments at a quite fundamental level, then we don't have a democracy. Worse, if we don't educate and train citizens to be up to that frequent re-assessment task, then we can't have a democracy.

Daniel Little — Science and decision

Science is uncertain•; and yet we have no better basis for making important decisions about the future than the best scientific knowledge currently available. Moreover, there are powerful economic interests that exert themselves to undermine the confidence of the public and our policy makers in the findings of science that appear to harm those interests. How should we think about these two factors, one epistemic and the other political? The first lays out the reasons for thinking that some of our most confident theories may in fact be erroneous; the second makes us worry that even strongly credible science will be undermined by corporate and financial interests....

Understanding Society
Science and decision
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Science is uncertain in several respects. First, science knowledge is uncertain in the sense of being tentative. Science involves general description, which can be falsified but not definitively confirmed. Secondly, since science is empirical it can only approach probability 1 as a limit. Science is essentially skeptical. Thirdly, no theoretical explanation can be shown to be the "best" explanation possible, only the optimal one available at the time.

This relates to the raging discussion that Paul Romer began with his post on "mathiness." It's still raging.

We need New Therapies For Aggregate Clumsiness. There Is No Cure. Forget The Federalist Papers. We Need The Autocatalysis Memes. Pronto.

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How about cultural, or aggregate clumsiness? (Yes, it's called evolution. We'll return to that in a moment.)

What is aggregate clumsiness?

If this doesn't say it all, I don't know what does

'How could government agencies with a vast network of research labs and armies of science PhDs fall for a technological hoax as elementary as the “Mechanical Turk” of eighteenth-century Europe or the hundred-miles-per-gallon Fish carburetor of the 1950s? There are several factors: the long-standing American bias toward technological panaceas; the bureaucratic competitiveness of the S&T directorate, which wanted to enhance its role in the war on terrorism; and the smothering blanket of government secrecy, which prevented other agencies from learning of the hoax.'   Mike Lofgren

There's a simple rule to this. Without arduous practice, emerging aggregate stupidity always rises to exceed aggregate expressed intelligence.

Aggregates undergoing a growth spurt - like adolescents - HAVE to get clumsier before they can regain or improve aggregate agility, or aggregate intelligence.

It's simple mathematics. Our problem is that human populations are undergoing a CONTINUOUS GROWTH SPURT! Our organizational demands are outstripping all other demands.

Every growing network is only as smart as the practiced activity which it maintains throughout all of its inter-connections.

And that's a race that cannot be won, or finished, since every added node adds more options than the aggregate's previous organizational state was geared to solve. (Since we adjust by re-gearing AND THEN RELAXING to a state over-specialized to a unique context. The only way to "win" is to just stay in the unending race.

All along the way, it's 2x as hard to undo outmoded efficiency as it is to re-create resiliency.

Long term habits are a crutch we can afford less every day. That is the exact reason why all species have programmed lifetimes. To re-gear everything, continuously. We just have to find a way to do so even faster than ever before. That's been true since biology began.

Growing populations have to completely re-gear, every day. That's the lesson realized by Darwin. We call it the theory of evolution.

Our own organization is the last thing we can afford to ignore, but it's still the very thing we ignore the most, by continuing to practice politics as-is.

Operation Rent Seeking: How the war on terrorism became a business model.

This example illustrates the core, and greatest, challenge facing the USA.

Will we as a people respond?

Not unless we find ways to pose this challenge - ASAP - to enough citizens to matter, before our unaddressed frictions cause a mis-educated population to disassociate.

Forget the Federalist Papers. We need the Autocatalysis Memes. Pronto.

Any suggestions?  Examples?

Uh ... Isn't Demand Destruction Inseparable From Policy?

  (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Oil price crash is driven by Demand Destruction, not politics

?? Same thing? Or do they think the only demand that can be destroyed is demand for oil? They can't see the Aggregate Demand for THEIR demands?

How are Demand Destruction & policy separable?

Do "The police exist to maintain the divide between the upper class and everyone else. Nothing more." ?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

You can't blame some citizens for considering the overall validity of the title conjecture, given our current context.

I wonder how long it takes, on average, for the average local cop on the beat - fresh out of a police academy - to become aware of, let alone come to grips with, the default institutional lobbying that comes from perennial class competition, whether overt or "Innocent Fraud".

With current education practices, the bulk of our citizens seem to remain politically naive for most of their lives, so there's no reason to expect the bulk of police officers to catch on much faster, if ever.

Progress requires much more organizational effort to get all citizens on the same page, and realizing that we're all in this together.

There's so much to gain from social coordination (teamwork), and each year we've less to lose.

Meanwhile, it's still true that adversarial approaches are unlikely to work. In fact, they'll play into classic methods for confusing, dividing & conquering electorates by default, i.e., narrow business lobbies & politics as usual. Here's yet another example.

How FBI Illegally Stole Ross Ulbricht's Laptop & Brought Down The Silk Road

In response, a contact wrote:

"The police exist to maintain the divide between the upper class and everyone else. Nothing more."

I'm not the only one wondering why the FBI action against Ross Ulbricht & Silk Road was such a priority.

Especially given persistent unemployment levels, student loan debt, poor K-12 schools*, white collar crime, blue collar crime, etc, etc.

Not to mention money laundering & other financial terrorism by Wall St. banks

   ----

* Compare schools today with Sam Adam's early education, 200+ years ago. Read it and weep.

"Sam Adams, like five of the fifty-six signers of the Declarations of Independence, attended Boston Latin School [at ~age 7]. Required reading at the Boston Latin School for a student's first four years included Aesop's Fables, one of the first of which is a tale of a wolf who devoured a lamb despite the lamb's refutation of all the wolf's accusations against him. The moral of the story, according to Aesop, is that 'The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.' ...

In years five through seven of the school, students progressed to reading letters, essays and orations of the Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero.  ... 

[Subsequently,] Sam Adams entered Harvard in 1736 at age 14." 

Which was normal for that day, at least for motivated families in and around Boston. So why isn't a similar educational rate "normal" today? After all, a human mind is a terrible thing to waste, and so is a national group mind.

Jonathan Denn — The Politics of MMT (Strange Bedfellows)

I don’t think these two premises, MMT and ideology, are mutually exclusive. What I propose is there are issues and contexts where a majority, perhaps even a supermajority of Americans, could agree on—where, how, and when—public spending can decouple from the restraints of taxing and borrowing.

New Economic Perspectives
The Politics of MMT (Strange Bedfellows)
Jonathan Denn

The Arthurian — "No government in history has been known to evade this pattern."

"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy." — Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

The New Arthurian Economics
"No government in history has been known to evade this pattern."
The Arthurian