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Tom Engelhardt: The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales ... controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008... with 70% of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would qualify as a monopoly position. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7935
Lenin: The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7936
Lenin: Materialism in general recognises objectively real being (matter) as independent of consciousness, sensation, experience, etc., of humanity. Historical materialism recognises social being as independent of the social consciousness of humanity. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7938
Frantz Fanon: Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7939
Friedrich Engels: From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment. What had been the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labor. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society, as can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally also in the democratic republic. Nowhere do "politicians" form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all they can do they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends - and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7941
Friedrich Engels: Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7942
globalresearch.ca: The Pentagon employs more than 27,000 PR specialists who, with a budget of nearly $5 billion a year, are working the media and circulating targeted manipulations. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7943
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
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.