The Post-Partisan Emporium

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 – ...

Tomorrowland Has Fallen! John Michael Greer Has anyone else noticed just how odd it is that so many people on the progressive end of our cultural landscape are frantically trying to convince everyone that the Omicron variant, the latest mutation of the Covid-19 cold virus, really is the end of the world? I freely grant that a lot of people are ill just now—that’s what usually happens in the temperate zone’s winter, you know, when the latest respiratory viruses make their rounds.  I grant just as freely that hospitals are scrambling to keep up—many of them have laid off up to half their staff as a result of vaccine mandates, after all, and they’re being besieged by mobs of people who have been convinced by the media that ordinary cold symptoms mean they’re about to die. The result is a collective frenzy being eagerly fed by a great many people. Of course it’s not surprising that the corporate media would push scare stories at full volume. Whoring out the news to sell advertising spa...

the eternal anxiety of the thoughtless mind clinging to crisis as though your identity depended upon it el gato malo brains are breaking right now. you can hear the shrieks and sputtering and smell the burning wires. that’s what cognitive dissonance does because it is first and foremost a defense mechanism. if you hold a view with sufficient strength and commitment, especially if this is a view you have woven into your identify and proudly promulgated to others, hectoring and posing and portraying it as virtue, letting go is no mean feat. the dogma has become you and you have become reliant upon it for support and structure. those who mutter in their madness the same phrases over and over as they rock back and forth upon the ground are not trying to convince you. they are trying to convince themselves. they will bend fact and ignore plain reality to protect the fictions upon which they have predicated their lives and legends. they will distort and disavow anything they must to keep thi...