The firehose of falsehood still spews Missed some things while on the road over the weekend. Something about an aborted revolt in Russia, was it? Jay Rosen’s comment on Anne Applebaum’s essay at The Atlantic made me look. Russian citizens along the Wagner Group parade route to Moscow came out to gawk, shake hands, and take selfies with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenaries. “Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime,” Applebaum writes: The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose.
Reading
Prigozhin's mercenary force is not a private military company but a sub-division of the Russian Ministry of Defence. So what is really going on with the short lived mutiny?
Friends, the days of mental illness being too taboo to discuss are over. The time when mental illness existed in the shadows, stigmatized or never acknowledged, is gone. We are finally talking openly about various psychological conditions, and I’m so glad that we are, because it’s made it a whole lot easier for me to blame every societal problem on people with mental illnesses.
It used to be that if you wanted to discover the causes of homelessness, you had to use complex statistical methods drawing on housing costs, employment, social ties, and migration to gain an understanding of what was happening. Now that we’re no longer living in the dark age of hiding mental illness away, all we need to do is see somebody who “looks weird” talking to themselves in front of a Jiffy Lube to know exactly what causes homelessness: people with mental illnesses.
The current Tánaiste (deputy prime minister), foreign minister and defence minister, Mícheál Martin, is using his last eighteen months in office to coordinate a shift in Ireland’s foreign policy away from an eroded notion of neutrality to align more closely with an increasingly interventionist EU and an expanded NATO. His alma mater, University College Cork, […]
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Rick and Morty, TWD: Dead City, AEW/NJPW, The Sandman, Frasier, Secret Invasion, SDCC 2023, and more!
In a bonus episode for supporting subscribers, an interview with a New York-based organizer about the four year campaign to pass the BPRA.
A new study shows how the effects of austerity on women and children are now being compounded by the cost of living crisis in Northern Ireland
- by Aeon Video
- by Eddie Brummelman & Kelly Ziemer
- by Michael Lamb
According to the research, ministers have pushed through changes to Britain’s political system that pose 'considerable risks' for the country's democratic future
Last week – RBA wants to destroy the livelihoods of 140,000 Australian workers – a shocking indictment of a failed state (June 22, 2023) – I wrote about the sense of being in a parallel universe when one reads official statements from the Bank of Japan and juxtaposes them against the stream of statements coming…
Bill Mitchell explains how MMT sees the effect of Interest Rate changes on the economy
There's been a complex crackdown in West Asia and North Africa on banning Queer iconography.
My grandma's fine set of plates is no match for my tupperwares.
Numerous serious casualties were incurred during Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s supposed “coup.” The Grayzone offers an in-depth look at the massacre carried out by some of America’s top Russia experts against their own credibility. When Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a supposed revolt against Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 23, sending his forces on a march toward Moscow following a series of tirades against the country’s defense establishment, Washington’s expert class overflowed with an orgy of regime change […]
The post The real casualties of Russia’s ‘civil war’: the Beltway expert class first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post The real casualties of Russia’s ‘civil war’: the Beltway expert class appeared first on The Grayzone.
Via WSJ: Jeffrey Katzenberg has some Hollywood role models in mind as he urges the nation’s first octogenarian president to embrace his age. The movie mogul has joined with other advisers in counseling President Biden to “own” his age and turn it into an asset, according to people familiar with the conversations. If Harrison Ford, 80 years old, can star in a new Indiana Jones movie and the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, who turns 80 next month, can strut around a stadium stage, Katzenberg says, then Biden should lean into his longevity as a sign of wisdom and experience while offering a sense of humor about it. It’s the only way. It can’t be ignored. So lean into it. I’d say this guy is good role model too:
Whatever …. They will not listen to reason. Fuggedboudit.
One day when I was about six, I was walking with my dad in New York City. We noticed that someone had stuck little folded squares of paper under the windshield wipers of the cars parked on the street beside us. My father picked one up and read it. I saw his face grow dark with anger. “What is it, Papa?” “It’s a message from people who think that all Jews should be killed.” This would have been in the late 1950s, a time when the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews in Europe was still fresh in the American consciousness. Not, you might have thought, a good season for sowing murderous antisemitism in lower Manhattan. Already aware that, being... Read more
Source: Yes, We Have Home-Grown Fascists appeared first on TomDispatch.com.