Doug Soderstrom: Most Americans have no idea that what we are fed by the news media is nothing more than a portrayal of what powerful corporations want us to believe, that what happens to pass as education is as often as not mere propaganda, that what we learn in church may have very little or nothing to do with the truth, that what our parents teach us may be nothing more than an accumulation of their own personal biases, no doubt a rather subtle modification of what they were taught by their parents. And through such a process, governments and nations around the world wield control as to what their citizens, believe, value, and do. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7948
Network: You're never going to get any truth from us (television). We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We deal in illusions. None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! ... This tube (television) is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth. ... Television is not the truth. Television is a God-damned amusement park. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7949
Neil Postman: The early-twentieth-century journalist Lincoln Steffens proved that he could create a "crime wave" anytime he wanted by simply writing about all the crimes that normally occur in a large city during the course of a month. He could also end the "crime wave" by not writing about them. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7950
Chris Hedges: The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7951
Jon Rappoport: If the US government hires, supports, and arms terrorists. The news can claim the government is doing everything possible to fight against terrorism. The absurd contradictions are simply ignored. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7952
Ken Adachi: What most Americans believe to be 'Public Opinion' is in reality carefully crafted and scripted propaganda designed to elicit a desired behavioral response from the public. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7954
Eric Zuesse: "Mainstream" newspapers are billionaire viewspapers peddling an extreme and extremely biased view of the world. On every single issue of consequence - from party politics, to the economy, from Iraq, to Libya, to Syria, to Venezuela, to climate change, to the nature of human happiness and the prospects for human survival - corporate media reporting and commentary are systematically filtered to further the interests of the state-corporate elites who own, manage and fund them. It is not that corporate media 'spin', 'hype' or 'sex up' the news - they fundamentally distort every significant issue they touch. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7955
Thomas Jefferson: The most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of news-writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7956
John Pilger: Although journalism - the 'media' - was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. With many independent journalists ejected from the 'mainstream', a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: what some would call true journalism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7959
Fred Reed: We now have a press of two tiers, the establishment media and the net, with sharply differing narratives. The internet is now primary. The bright get their news from around the web and then read the New York Times to see how the paper of record will pevaricate. People increasingly judge the media by the web, not the web by the media. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7961
The server went down for a few hours today and resolved before I could look at it. It's also been a really bad day for my physical health so I've had very little capacity.
I am looking into why it happened but have no firm answers at this time.
Katherine Graham: We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7962
Lenin: What has anarchism, at one time dominant in the Romance countries, contributed in recent European history? - No doctrine, revolutionary teaching, or theory. - Fragmentation of the working-class movement. - Complete fiasco in the experiments of the revolutionary movement (Proudhonism, 1871; Bakuninism, 1873). - Subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics in the guise of negation of politics. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7964
Lenin: This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers. take the side of the bourgeoisie, the "Versaillese" against the "Communards". https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7966
Lenin: Anarchism, in the course of the 35 to 40 years (Bakunin and the International, 1866-) of its existence (and with Stirner included, in the course of many more years) has produced nothing but general platitudes against exploitation. These phrases have been current for more than 2,000 years. What is missing is (alpha) an understanding of the causes of exploitation; (beta) an understanding of the development of society, which leads to socialism; (gamma) an understanding of the class struggle as the creative force for the realisation of socialism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7965
Brandon Smith: The Globalist strategy, which was planned by the Club Of Rome along with top globalists, was to create the idea of an environmental threat so potentially devastating that the only option would be for the public to accept global governance as the solution. Global warming and "climate change" became that existential threat. It does not seem to matter how often or how brutal the climate change argument is debunked by real data; the globalists desperately push the ideology. It is a primary key to everything they hope to accomplish in terms of centralization, and their timeline is set for the year 2030. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7967
Fred Reed: The New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are quasi-governmental organs, predictably predictable and predictably dishonest. The truth is not in them. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7968
John Pilger: In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference. In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7969
William M. Arkin: The problem is not that a computer network (Internet) offers an alternative to the information aristocracy. The true crisis is that neither the news media nor the government has enough credibility to be accepted as either truthful or impartial on their own. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7970
David Rovics: If you are getting your news from mainstream media, whether it's from supposedly "conservative," "liberal," or "objective" outlets, whether a corporate-owned or so-called "public" network, if you're in the US, the UK, and many other countries, you are being lied to. How much they're lying depends on what they're reporting on. What you can be sure of, though, is if it's something we really need to know the truth about right now - if a light needs to be shone on an urgent issue, like a possibly imminent invasion of a sovereign country by the US military - you can be sure that that's when they'll lie more, not less. When we need them the most, that's when they'll fail us most spectacularly. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7971
William Cormier: Our Mainstream News Media is demonstrating that when it pertains to reporting important facts to the public, they are absolutely worthless. China and other state-controlled news outlets are no worse than our own news media; the only difference is that our media releases enough valid news to lull the public into believing that we have news that reflects the needs of the public. However, when it comes to important issues, our MSM is no better than any other fascist/authoritarian news outlet that exist in some of the most restrictive societies on earth. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7972
Karl Marx: Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7973
Michael Krieger: Most of the mainstream media has been transformed into little more than complete propaganda over the past several decades. When the various papers and televisions stations aren't covering up for the war crimes and corruption of politicians and intelligence agencies, they are busy protecting their corporate advertisers from any potential criticism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7974
Peter Oborne: A free press is essential to a healthy democracy. There is a purpose to journalism, and it is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big corporations and rich men. Newspapers have what amounts in the end to a constitutional duty to tell their readers the truth. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7975
Karl Marx: In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7976
Karl Marx: The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7977
Server News
in reply to Server News • •As far as I can tell, the biggest most obvious culprit is the database backup which was happening at that time.
It looks like the database is big enough that backups are no longer simple and I'll need to change my backup method.
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Server News • •Revised method of backups set up, tomorrow I'll test that it's working and then attempt a restore (on a second server so no impact here).
I've also refreshed the virtual network interface as I learned it may have been dropping packets for some unknown reason and it's working fine now.