The Post-Partisan Emporium

Infantilized R Us THOMAS HARRINGTON     I If you want to understand a culture, it is imperative that you listen carefully to the stories that it—or perhaps more accurately—its story-telling elites most assiduously disseminate among the general population.  To speak of “story-telling” in this context is to speak not only of well-worn verbal tropes such as “America as a city upon a hill” or “America as generous purveyor of democracy,” but also the broader set of repeated semiotic inputs that greet the citizen in the course of his daily adventures.  A short while back I wrote a piece on the  growing presence of speed bumps in our culture  and sought in this very vein of semiotic analysis to explain what message—beyond the obvious goal of slowing drivers down—the authorities installing them in increasing numbers in cities and towns might be sending about how they view their fellow citizens, and how, in turn, their seemingly condescending gaze might affect the w...

Waiting For The Fall John Michael Greer It’s been a busy couple of weeks, hasn’t it? A Pfizer executive admitted under oath that all those claims that the Covid vaccine would protect you from catching Covid had no data at all backing them.  Inevitably, corporate media flacks are now insisting at the top of their lungs, in the teeth of ample evidence, that nobody ever made the claims in question. Ukrainian agents used a truck bomb to damage the bridge that links Crimea to Russia; Russia, which has supposedly been running out of missiles since about a week since their forces invaded Ukraine, responded by sending a flurry of the missiles they aren’t supposed to have any more to blow up another round of Ukrainian targets, focusing on the energy and transport facilities the Ukrainians are going to need to face the massive winter offensive Russia is all too clearly preparing. The Ministry of Truth insists this never happened. In other news, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. Th...

Covid’s Lesson: When Anxious, Isolated and Hopeless, We’re Less Ready to Think Critically JONATHAN COOK   When I criticize meddling in Syria by Britain and America, or their backing of groups there that elsewhere are considered terrorists, it does not follow that I am, therefore, a cheerleader for the dictatorship of Bashar Assad or that I think that Syrians should be denied a better political system. Similarly, when I criticize Joe Biden or the Democratic party, it does not necessarily follow that I think Donald Trump would have made a better president. A major goal of critical thinking is to stand outside tribal debates, where people are heavily invested in particular outcomes, and examine the ways debates have been framed. This is important because one of the main ways power expresses itself in our societies is through the construction of official narratives – usually through the billionaire-owned media – and the control and shaping of public debate. You are being manipulated – ...