First of all, I agree with patio11 here... this doesn't belong on HN because it's just a bunch of political stuff. Secondly, there's a lot of misleading stuff here-- either half-truths or things taken completely out of context.
Start with "the prison system in the United States is a profit-making industry." Well, yeah-- parts of it are. Except the parts that aren't. There are both public and private prisons in the U.S. So already we start with a half-truth.
Six corporations control virtual all American media"... except the parts they don't control, like the web site you're reading right now, or local cable access programs, and so on and so forth. Yeah, it sucks that there has been so much consolidation in TV and print. But I think the News Corporation scandal shows that the media are far from invincible.
Yeah, the FBI and CIA did a lot of questionable stuff, especially in the 1950s. But guess what? There really were a lot of Soviet spies in the country at that time. Communism had a great appeal, especially since very little of the truth about what was really happening in those countries was known in the west. Even the Great Famine in China was pretty much unknown in the United States. In an age before the internet, when all the Chinese newspapers were censored, how would they know? How would they know about the bloody purges in Russia either?
He mentions MKUltra. I'm surprised he didn't mention Tuskagee syphillis experiment. Yep, these things happened. But they're hardly unknown, at least to people who went to high school. A blog post titled "if everyone knew..." discusses things that... everyone knows. Ooh, ooh. How about Watergate? That'll embrass the Americans. Shouldn't we bring that one up too? After all, nobody knows about that one.
I'll skip the anti-Israeli stuff, since it's basically just yet another fact-free polemic. What have we turned up that would be shocking "if everyone knew..."? The fact that some guy on the Internet doesn't like Israeli. Wow, man. That's like... shocking. Mind: blown.
The rest of it is the same kind of tripe. Mean-spirited anti-Americanism masquerading as scholarly discourse. I love the "footnotes." Putting your "a href=" in a giant block makes you more than just a blogger-- you're a Scholar, Imparting Deep Knowledge. Even if most of it is wikipedia links and links to newspaper editorials.
It's interesting that he takes aim at the Fed too. Usually that's the province of far-right nutters. But what we have ourselves here is an equal-opportunity kook. Joy.
Start with "the prison system in the United States is a profit-making industry." Well, yeah-- parts of it are. Except the parts that aren't. There are both public and private prisons in the U.S. So already we start with a half-truth.
Six corporations control virtual all American media"... except the parts they don't control, like the web site you're reading right now, or local cable access programs, and so on and so forth. Yeah, it sucks that there has been so much consolidation in TV and print. But I think the News Corporation scandal shows that the media are far from invincible.
Yeah, the FBI and CIA did a lot of questionable stuff, especially in the 1950s. But guess what? There really were a lot of Soviet spies in the country at that time. Communism had a great appeal, especially since very little of the truth about what was really happening in those countries was known in the west. Even the Great Famine in China was pretty much unknown in the United States. In an age before the internet, when all the Chinese newspapers were censored, how would they know? How would they know about the bloody purges in Russia either?
He mentions MKUltra. I'm surprised he didn't mention Tuskagee syphillis experiment. Yep, these things happened. But they're hardly unknown, at least to people who went to high school. A blog post titled "if everyone knew..." discusses things that... everyone knows. Ooh, ooh. How about Watergate? That'll embrass the Americans. Shouldn't we bring that one up too? After all, nobody knows about that one.
I'll skip the anti-Israeli stuff, since it's basically just yet another fact-free polemic. What have we turned up that would be shocking "if everyone knew..."? The fact that some guy on the Internet doesn't like Israeli. Wow, man. That's like... shocking. Mind: blown.
The rest of it is the same kind of tripe. Mean-spirited anti-Americanism masquerading as scholarly discourse. I love the "footnotes." Putting your "a href=" in a giant block makes you more than just a blogger-- you're a Scholar, Imparting Deep Knowledge. Even if most of it is wikipedia links and links to newspaper editorials.
It's interesting that he takes aim at the Fed too. Usually that's the province of far-right nutters. But what we have ourselves here is an equal-opportunity kook. Joy.