Showing posts with label Social. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social. Show all posts

4 December 2021

Is Twitter losing a fight with the state?

 

Social networks are fighting a lost battle against states, the new online column Lordre has argued.

A detailed post at the new blog sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin's assessment that social networking websites sought to usurp some state responsibilities and that their attempts were "fleeting".

Going into more detail than Putin, the Lordre blog identified safety and access to information as key areas of responsibility that social networks seek to replace government in managing.

States are aware of the threat of monopolization of information and culture and are pushing back. To quote the blog, "The European Union currently has the Digital Markets Act (DMA) on the cards, which apparently will prevent a tech company from trapping users in an operating system or bundle of apps that solely favours its own services (and by extension news feeds) over any other firm's."

More severe confrontation exists with states in Africa. The blog argued, "Social media companies are uniquely confrontational towards governments, lately seeing themselves as authorities on par with some governments."

The deletion of government communications deemed to be violent (even if the government is at war) represent "an ineffective and failed usurpation of the state's responsibilities, since a state can still commit or allow violence whether Twitter deletes posts about it or not."

Despite their rebellious appearance, social networks are just "weak outfits", vulnerable to being "forcibly broken up due to laws, taken offline or bankrupted by fines at any moment the state truly loses patience with them."

The new Lordre blog has taken over the website lordre.net, formerly an unofficial Mont Order website.

- ClubOfInfo

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5 February 2021

Are people finally noticing CENSORSHIP hurts citizens and helps elites?


The alignment of US tech companies with US foreign policy is drawing more attention. Online political censorship is now impacting people who identify themselves as being on the American left, including those who mistakenly endorsed censorship because they believed it was aimed at hatemongering conservatives.



Many of us did try to point out the folly of supporting arbitrary censorship (against anyone, even if we hate them) early on, but we were ignored.


Now, we're in a situation where presidents and platforms are being removed from the internet with insufficient cause. The US has a pro-censorship administration that endorsed taking all opposition TV channels off the air in a country, as noticed in a US Embassy tweet in relation to a legally dubious decree in Ukraine.


Countries will take greater liberty to block or attempt to place limits on US entities, because they can point to the US government's zeal to suppress dissent and the censorship taking place on US social networks themselves. If US companies are censorship-prone, nothing will be missed if they get blocked or censored themselves.

Seen this way, the US is losing its "cold war" with Russia and China. It has compromised its ideology and changed tone away from "freedom" and towards state security, giving the initiative to countries like China and Russia to repeat the US's pro-censorship rhetoric back to it and block US influence.


Although it is consistent with the views of the state in China and Russia, blocking foreign interference in the US and not consistent with the US state ideology (capitalist liberal democracy). Effectively, the US is destroying its own ideology and system faster than any foreign adversary could do so.

Based on the US state ideology, the US is the "melting pot" of foreign interference; the Biden administration should welcome foreign interference and set up new agencies to accelerate it rather than prevent it. For example, Chinese students should be welcomed by Biden, rather than getting accused of being enemy spies as they were under Trump's revisionist policies.

- ClubOfInfo

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2 February 2021

If Twitter is loyal to the US, other countries should block it


Has Twitter started to act like a leading propaganda agency of the US state after the Democrats assumed power this year? We can speculate that it is going to support deadly US foreign policy objectives while also shielding the regime at home from criticism.

Views critical of the regime may be hidden, while many label them as treasonous. Parrots who praise the regime mindlessly might be bizarrely boosted on the social network, even while being mocked on the street (this could be proven by identifying a list of such users and analysing the way they talk about their IRL experiences).

As of today, Twitter still maintains its permanent ban on the current top US opposition figure, Donald Trump. At the same time, the social network is alleged to support the opposition figure and NATO stooge in Russia, Alexei Navalny, who begged for US and EU sanctions against his own country in a letter (imagine if Trump had written to Moscow for a package of sanctions on America in response to his election defeat!)
One way that Twitter obviously filters information is by shadowbanning popular accounts so users cannot find them, and by recommending headlines from the North American regime's preferred newspapers and broadcasters instead.
Twitter's excuses for banning Trump were related to preventing violence like the chaos at the US Capitol. Even if these excuses are valid, they resemble the same national security reasons given by governments (such as Uganda) when they block Twitter itself during sensitive political periods. Twitter's pompous managers are trying to use the same arguments for blocking information as far away as Africa, while condemning the actual government authorities in Africa for using these arguments or taking any action.

In using such poor arguments and being so glaringly hypocritical, Twitter has essentially given carte blanche for all governments in the world to block its services completely if they want. Twitter's own statements prioritising political stability and preventing interference actually support arguments for the social network to be blocked by governments during sensitive times.


And so Twitter should be blocked more regularly around the world, if it is going to be an arm of America.
In conclusion, we should be tolerant of any government choosing to block Twitter, as the website now heavily overrrepresents the views of a single state entity and its elite rather than a society.

When newly introduced, a technology will set many people free and let them punch above their weight. Perhaps when it reaches its maturity and the limits of its power, we then see excessively powerful monopolies (as we see now with social media). Around this time, there often are abuses and atrocities before states inevitably have to step in and restrict everything once again.

- ClubOfInfo

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19 January 2021

Russia dominates US social media users as US censorship is bungled


Obsessions with Russia interfering in an innocent America (Russiagate) failed to lead to "smoking gun" evidence of anything devious. However, as American social media and tech companies bungle their attempts to censor conservative politicians and users, they may have begun really surrendering ground to Russia.

It has been reported that Parler, a platform popular with American Republicans as an alternative to Democrat-siding Twitter, may now be reliant on servers located in Russia to evade US corporate censorship. As servers are key in deciding which government controls a social network's off-button, this means the social network could be under Russian dominance to a similar extent Twitter and Facebook are under US dominance.

Going by the outcry of American commentators, this is an entire social network used by Americans that the United States has lost control of and Russia captured. Given the significance of social networks to modern politics, it is a bit like Russia taking a chunk of US territory for itself, only this chunk is online.

Alaska, formerly part of Russia, had a population under one million in 2020. At the same time, Parler had a number of users well over a million.

About 70 million Americans voted for the Republican incumbent President Donald Trump. By attempting to gag and deplatform all right wing pundits with little thought, Democrat-leaning social media companies are potentially forcing their millions-strong audiences to now enlist on a social network dependent on the territory of Russia. This could give Russia real influence and inroads into US conservative political messaging that the alleged Russian-orchestrated email hacks or leaks decried in 2016 and 2020 could not provide. You can thank the overconfidence and lack of foresight by US tech companies, overconfident in their power and eager to pull the plug on people.

Of course, we can say American conservatives are patriotic and will not use a social network if they learn of its servers being located in Russia. They do try, and would continue to do so if it is up to them, but in this scenario they have no choice. The suffocating and repressive environment being newly generated by Democrat-leaning providers is forcing them.

To sum up: hamfisted attempts to stamp out imaginary Russian influence by damaging the ability of Americans to use their own country's social networks can backfire. As these millions of voices flee, they may eventually find their way to Russia, and this can provide Russia with its first real influence in the homes of millions of Americans. This would be such a favorable result to Russia that it almost appears to be by design, with US social media bigwigs taking predictable measures of repression and serving as useful idiots to the benefit of Russia, a country that lagged behind the US in "soft power".

Of course, any company can be placed under US sanctions eventually or its website blocked by the US, but such an exchange of blows is still a net loss to America as it yields to Russia the right to launch a reciprocal crackdown on a US website. Russia has potentially won a big success as a result of the US's foolish censorship crusade, and it is something the US can't win back easily.

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26 January 2020

Do Iranians want regime-change in Iran?


The top 3 most ridiculous Iranian “opposition” groups (extra points for being funded by the US government)


With Iran’s apparently sinister regime supposedly on the verge of collapse every weekend for the last 41 years, you would think people would get bored and stop listening to compromised fake Western news sources.

Also having waited very impatiently for 41 years for the regime to fall, various “Iranians” who dislike the regime are offering their support for US President Donald Trump to bomb their beloved country on their behalf. In doing so, they know Trump would kill millions of Iranians and eradicate Persia’s priceless cultural sites in the process - but it is the price they are willing for other Iranians to pay. Staying on that topic, let’s take a look at the top three most ridiculous Iranian “opposition” groups, all of which either get money off the US government or want it desperately.

#3 “Restart”

The silliest of the three, this is a strange group led by some kind of comedian. More accurately, he is apparently a radio host who believes America will defeat Iran and install him as its new leader if he begs them and posts memes about it on Twitter. Really, he is probably just hoping the US government will believe his claims and donate a lot of taxpayer money for him to live off while he stays in America.

Opposed to the MKO and the Shah-supporters, but even more obsessed with asking America to bomb Iran and magically install him as the ruler of a new Iranian regime, the guy in charge of “Restart” is only active on Twitter. He spreads a lot of spam there and appears to have no real support, but uses a number of memes about Donald Trump and the hashtags #MIGA and #MakeIranGreatAgain to pretend he has the support of Trump. He seems to have successfully duped a number of conservative Americans at least online, who don’t know the difference between him and the other two groups. He claims to have 20 million members in his “opposition” group but you can only find a few on Twitter, and their accounts are fake.

#2 Shah supporters

Unemployed US resident Reza Pahlavi (some dunce who thinks he is the king of Iran) has supporters who think he can become the puppet dictator of Iran, restoring the failed US-backed regime overthrown in 1979. If that is his goal, he seems to believe he can do it by appearing in interviews in US military propaganda, rambling about the “democracy” he doesn’t want in Iran and praising the US government’s idiotic policies and missteps in the Middle East. Although almost non-existent among Iranian expatriates, his “opposition” group is possibly bigger than #3.

If we consider the fact the original Shah was a US puppet, it is highly likely this wannabe puppet is also paid by the US government and kept as a future dictator if the US tries to forcibly change the Iranian regime. His appearances in news sources compromised by the US government seem to strengthen that possibility.

#1 MKO

Largest of the three, this one might confuse you if you are a US anti-Iran conservative. A Marxist group who originally opposed the Shah of Iran before joining Saddam Hussein’s regime in the Iran-Iraq War, the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization is considered a terrorist group in Iran and hated by the population. They were even also blacklisted as a terrorist group by the US government until recently.

Its bizarre ideology mixing communism and Islam and its history of violence have not been noticed by anti-communist US crusaders, who somehow support this group as the rightful rulers of Iran if the regime falls. Led from Europe by Maryam Rajavi, the now pro-West sycophant group is cheered by neocon drone-enthusiasts who call for America to attack Iran to install its power-hungry members as Iran’s new regime. While this may be what they actively call for, it is likely that the group really just wants dole from the US government like the other two. Despite that, the organization has killed Iranian scientists and other civilians on US orders in recent years and helped the US’s policies to immiserate and oppress Iranians.

Trump administration figures like John Bolton considered the MKO to be ideally placed to rule Iran, and promised them that the Iranian “regime” would be overthrown and the MKO would be celebrating with US conservatives in Tehran by 2019. Despite the MKO continuing to kill Iranian civilians, after 41 years it is no closer to the bloodthirsty regime-change it talks about.

What happens next?

In conclusion, it isn’t likely any of these dodgy and untrustworthy groups of exiles will ever be in power in Iran. At best, their support for US action against Iran will only fuel further US sanctions that will harm the welfare of Iranians over the coming decades or culminate in limited US bombing raids against Iranian nuclear reactors, causing a huge loss of civilian lives. In such a case, these ineffective groups will only be blamed for their support of the US actions and find it even harder to continue operating.

Finally, if the US does attack Iran and force one of these groups to form a puppet government, they will most likely die on arrival in Iran or end up on US taxpayer-funded life support machines while wishing they stayed in America.
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31 January 2019

The "People's Vote" might have a people problem - here's why


Despite gaining support from visibly large crowds of people in the UK, the "People's Vote" campaign for a second Brexit referendum vote demonstrates serious problems engaging with the broader British public on social media.

Local chapter pages of the "People's Vote" movement based on Facebook have insignificant numbers of followers and unremarkable levels of engagement, with the only page with a significant following being a single page that makes heavy use of advertising, titled People's Vote UK. In the case of this page itself, more problems appear.

Looking to the page's posts and the responses is no useful way to assess how British people actually perceive its message, since these posts are likely to have been shared by pro-EU groups and individuals. However, the group does target ads to the general public, and here its claims of popular support begin to look dubious.

Negative comments are being left when the ads appear in people's news feeds


Most visitors to People's Vote UK social media pages are leaving positive comments, but the majority seems to shift to negative comments when the group tries to target the broader public with advertising through news feeds. The resulting barrage of negativity has an effect of drowning out the voices of exasperated EU supporters, who can't tell why they are suddenly faced with offensive comments.

This could be the work of trolls trying to demoralize the pro-EU movement in the UK. But, if so, why are such comments only flooding the page's content when the group tries to advertise to the public? One explanation is that the negative response to the People's Vote campaign actually originates with the campaign's own target audience - the British public.

What is described above hints that the poll data supposedly showing a shift in favor of the UK remaining in the European Union could be dodgy, and there are numerous ways such data could be seriously flawed.

"Leave" may simply have turned quiet and content in their victory, rather than actually losing supporters as the "Remain" camp is fond of claiming. When directly provoked by flooding their news feeds on Facebook they do appear to respond viciously as described above.

Data favoring "Remain" could be flawed because, as well as more eagerly taking part in polls, EU supporters never stopped campaigning. This creates the unrealistic sensation that they have more influence or power, or have now won the debate. Their desire to keep their cause alive through constant adverts, polls, petitions, columns, etc. is clear. The "Leave" campaign, in contrast, is undertaking no similar project to maintain public backing and isn't even watching the polls. Their sole position is that the debate is over and they already won.

So, even if polls and news stories supporting a people's vote do show an accurate cross-section of the population, these are a poor basis to predict a pro-EU victory in a second referendum. The anti-EU side has yet to counterattack or produce its own new slogans and talking points, as it is too busy in power. A decisive lead for pro-EU forces in the polls, while the other side is not campaigning, might become irrelevant as soon as the other side begins a counter-campaign if its plans are really contested.

Treat all this as speculation. Unfortunately, comments on Facebook ads are extremely difficult to capture or prove because Facebook withholds the data once ads go inactive and takes them out of the page's feed itself, allowing posts that receive negative responses to quickly be buried while the page only displays posts that received positive responses. However, you can easily view the comments for yourself if you catch the ads while they are running or see them in your news feed.

Don't take our word for it. Give it a go!


The clubof.info Blog


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22 March 2018

Will the mainstream media be deleted on Twitter tomorrow?

After March 23, Twitter could go through a kind of update to detect and suspend users with bot-like behavior. The move is designed to counter "Russian bots".


The problem is, many non-Russian users and even newspapers sharing news about the evils of Russian bots behave like Russian bots and will also get deleted if any serious action comes out of this.

 They are guilty of the same behavior they accuse Russian botnets of, and new algorithms won't be able to tell the difference between them and the Russians.

If your app or service includes features which allow users to perform simultaneous actions across multiple accounts, you should make changes to bring it into compliance with this policy by March 23, 2018. Failure to comply with these rules could result in enforcement action, up to and including the suspension of associated applications and accounts. 
 Automation and the use of multiple accounts

See below examples of suspicious Twitter bot accounts sharing a BBC article about Russian bots. Their behavior makes them Russian bots, according to the article they are spamming, where it is written that "Networks of bots can be identified if multiple profiles tweet the same content almost simultaneously".


Automated content shared by anti-Russia campaign accounts and media is often about Russian bots and how to spot them, but is being shared using automation tools and fake identities. Accounts campaigning against Russian bots have therefore been behaving exactly like the alleged Russian bots by sharing the same content repeatedly, over and over, through multiple fake handles on Twitter. In fact, bots and "duplicative or substantially similar content" seem to be a favorite tactic of all political campaign groups and media organizations.

Twitter algorithms may hunt and delete the mainstream media for spam as well as Russian media


Twitter handles too much information to check if every bot account is Russian before deleting it. Twitter engineers will write algorithms to delete suspicious accounts automatically. Many of the deleted accounts may belong to the mainstream media.

Syndication by mainstream newspapers and television violates Twitter rules


Syndication is the widespread online business practice of pushing the same content through as many as hundreds of additional local publications, and is also common of television stations. It is a common practice of the mainstream media, and results in duplicated content across social media. A clear violation of the new rules at Twitter.

While Russian publications like RT and Sputnik do share very similar content, and both they and Iran's Press TV often agree, they are only copying the behavior of Western propaganda organizations. Organizations like the BBC and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are much worse in that they repeat the same articles verbatim across a huge empire of publications and share exactly the same videos across their accounts (they all tend to have associated Twitter accounts). This is especially true when an article relates to local events and gets reprinted across a spectrum of local and national publications. The use of bots is also obvious through a brief look at the wave of sharing that always occurs without fail by numerous accounts when these publications post anything.

If algorithms are to be used to hunt this media practice down and ban accounts, many mainstream newspapers in the US and Britain will witness their Twitter accounts being suspended or suddenly deleted as possible Russian bots.

The price of hypocrisy and censorship


Twitter resents the political pressure put on it by the US and UK to thwart foreign media. It seems to be gearing up for indiscriminate censorship that will hit both sides by targeting all "suspicious" behavior, i.e. all attempts by campaigners and publications to punch above their real weight using social media.

The campaign against Russian bots is the result of pressure by myopic, frustrated journalists who don’t understand that their own media are engaged in the same behavior as the Russian media and will also be banned. It is reminiscent of how AlterNet suffered losses in revenue after Google took steps against the "fake news" AlterNet itself was calling for action against. AlterNet had called for action against fake news without realizing its own alternate views would be detected as fake news.
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27 September 2016

This tweet sums up the Mont Order

The Blog


Did you know you can follow everything being said at the Mont Order society, by subscribing now to one email alert?


Originally created for members only, the alert also helps keep track of everything being said about the Mont Order on the internet - everything ranging from new Google content to tweets about the Order.

Here's a fantastic link:

t.co/nm3OeAHMDN


In the above tweet, you see the way the Mont Order works in the current day. The Mont Order, while having an interesting origin story based on rumors of extreme age and wisdom, is primarily an internet-based group of bloggers, volunteers and part-time political campaigners.

The Order still hasn't lost track of its mission. "The Mont Order is a society of small publishers, activists and authors dedicated to sharing information and other products to help accelerate human destiny and happiness", it writes.


The clubof.info Blog

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24 September 2016

Time to Deprogram From the Cult of National Unity (commentary)

Kevin Carson at C4SS


People don’t like seeing their gods blasphemed, and the backlash against Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem has revealed the completely religious nature of American patriotism.


Tomi Lahren, whose views on racial matters are about what you’d expect from a “conservative commentator” on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, has been on a nonstop outrage jag ever since Kaepernick’s stance made the news. As the protest movement of variously sitting, kneeling and raising fists during the national anthem has spread, Kate Upton has joined Lahren’s social media campaign to make football games a safe space for hyper-sensitive patriots. The complaints, predictably, reached fever pitch on 9/11. Upton responded to the decision of several Dolphins to kneel during the anthem by chiding: “You should be proud to be an American. Especially on 9/11 when we should support each other.” The most egregious comments though, which get right to the heart of the national unity cult, came from Lahren: “We aren’t white & black, we are red, white & blue.” “[W[e are Americans and we stand together.”

Howard Zinn ably deconstructed this idea that our common identity as Americans is somehow more important than race or class differences:

“[Our present leaders] bombard us with phrases like ‘national interest,’ ‘national security,’ and ‘national defense’ as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Link: Time to Deprogram From the Cult of National Unity

“Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that — not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor — is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.”

The cult of national unity is an old one, and it exists for a reason. It dovetails with, and reinforces, a number of other patriotic American myths. Among them is the myth of “American Exceptionalism” — i.e., that America is the uniquely “indispensible nation” in promoting “peace and freedom” around the world, and is entitled to maintain military forces larger than the rest of the world combined, and unilaterally define as a “threat” or “aggressor” any country that defies American dictates, because of this beneficent role.

Another myth associated with the cult of national unity is the American Dream. We see this in the belief by the majority of Americans that they are “middle class.” The myth encourages Americans to believe that wealth is just a matter of hard work and ingenuity, and to identify with the “53%” of “taxpayers” and “makers vs. takers” against class warriors like Occupy, in the belief that someday they too may hit it big.

Link: Support this author on Patreon

It also commonly appears in conjunction with the cult of The Troops as guarantors of “our freedoms,” as illustrated by Upton’s Instagram comments on 9/11. The anthem, she said, “represents honoring the many brave men and women who sacrifice and have sacrificed their lives each and every single day to protect our freedom.”

All this despite the hard realities that America’s wars have been overwhelmingly fought to secure capitalist access to the land, natural resources and markets of the world, and the rich get the great majority of their wealth by extracting rents from the rest of us with the help of the state.

America is “exceptional” among the developed Western nations in that it is the world’s biggest settler state, created by European colonists supplanting and exterminating the indigenous population on a continental scale, and in the role that slavery played in building our economy. It is exceptional, probably not unrelated to the previous fact, in the size of its prison system and the way its culture glorifies police and soldiers. It is “exceptional” only to the extent to which its people have been successfully inculcated with myths of a “Shining City on a Hill” and a “Classless Society.” These myths obscure the criminal reality of America’s role in the world; America’s reality is hidden behind the official idealistic facade.

Thanks to this whole complex of quasi-official ideologies, America has attained the unique status of global enforcer of class rule. It is equally unique in concealing the very existence of class conflict from a significant part of its domestic population.

Fortunately, as evidenced by the rise of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and the protest movement inspired by Kaepernick himself, the spell of this patriotic cult is wearing off. Power, ultimately, depends on consent. And consent depends on deception and ignorance. Once people begin to see through its legitimizing ideologies, the system of power is doomed.


Kevin Carson

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16 August 2016

Mont society includes Kevin Carson

The Blog


The Mont Order society includes Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) writer Kevin Carson on its lists as of 14 August. Writings by Carson are henceforth a key part of the feeds promoted by several Mont services and pages.


Kevin Carson's "free market anti-capitalism", the mission of the Center for a Stateless Society, combines hopes for popular social and technological liberation as captured in books such as The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.

Among the demands advised by the anti-statist commentator is the view that artificial scarcity, intellectual property and mandatory high overhead enforced by states to benefit monopoly capitalism must all be abolished. The state colludes with capitalists, liberals and the "vulgar libertarians" of the political right to create an environment in which a leaner, more efficient economy cannot develop.

Of course, such abolition need not be imposed from above. The people in general can circumvent corporate monopolies, in much the way pirated software is shared and movies uploaded to online services such as Putlocker.

It isn't hard. Thanks to the widespread adoption of personal technologies, apps, and internet sites, everyone's lives are connected. Creators are connected without the need for owners and masters.


Even better, the costs for success in media have declined so substantially that, starting in this "immaterial" realm people can already reject and build alternatives against large brands. Networked organizations can outmaneuver hierarchic ones, and even the costs of physical production are declining so rapidly that eventually a real-world economic revolution in manufacture and delivery of goods will take place.

With the lies and pillars of modern industrial civilization being gnawed at by the "smart rats" once described as such by Julian Assange, governments in the West will descend further into crisis. As they rot away, they will be replaced by a stateless, tolerant and anti-authoritarian culture.

While not all Mont Order friends are likely to endorse such ideas, they boost the existing counter-state dissident credentials of the Mont Order in a Western context.

Visit Kevin Carson's articles at the Center for a Stateless Society


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29 July 2016

India fails to contain truth on Kashmir

The Blog


Writing on recent Indian regime crackdown actions against Kashmiris, the Kashmir Times executive editor wrote "sooner or later the narratives will emerge" to expose the suffering and yearning for freedom.


India has sought to impose a media blackout to prevent Kashmiris and the wider world from being aware of the extent of repression.

However, images of children blinded by pellet guns used by Indian forces, together with other abuses, have circulated easily despite curfews and bans on print publications. Social media understandably played a key role in making people aware.

The editor wrote of the Indian government and its regional authorities in Kashmir, "Their aim is to make the narrative disappear". This effort will fail, the editor predicts, because stories will still "emerge to haunt, often with a dash of bitterness and sometimes peppered with rumours."

In addition, "stories have been told and re-told at individual and community levels", and the editor concludes, "Now, like then, when gory stories of boys dragged out of their homes and shot at point-blank range, tales of random arrests, crackdowns and molestations, of children blinded by pellet guns who have gone missing, abound, yet another unbridgeable chasm has opened, defying resolution of the churning that is Kashmir."


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24 June 2016

Islamic faith irrelevant to Omar Mateen

The Blog


Commenting on the work of investigators looking at the attack by US citizen Omar Mateen that took the lives of a high number of LGBT people in Orlando, Florida, Beliefnet's Hesham Hassaballa argued it was nothing to do with Islam.


Investigators currently believe even the connection between the gunman and the ISIS terrorist group was nothing more than posing for publicity at best. The shooter had his own reasons for committing his crime. With extremist ideology not an important motivation for Mateen, his Islamic faith was even more irrelevant.

Nevertheless, many other commentators in the media are convinced the attack is just additional evidence to claim all Muslims are terrorists in waiting. The rhetoric of politicians such as Donald Trump is therefore likely to take a boost in popularity, as a result of the shooting.

In conclusion, Hassaballa writes, "it is becoming increasingly clear that this crime had nothing to do with terrorism and ISIS. Omar Mateen fit the typical profile of a mass shooter, and this time, he happened to be Muslim."

Many critics of western media and legal responses to mass murder sprees focus on how Middle Eastern attackers are quickly judged to be religious terrorists even if they were mentally ill, whereas white attackers are only ever judged to be mentally ill or incorrectly medicated.


The clubof.info Blog

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21 June 2016

India's Zionist settler tactics in Kashmir

The Blog


A report printed in the magazine Voice of East points out the "aggressive policies of [the] government of India to change the demography of [the] state [of Kashmir]".


Altaf Hussain Wani, a human rights activist for the Indian-annexed territory of Jammu and Kashmir, is quoted stating, "People under foreign occupation have not only been deprived of their political rights but also social, cultural and economic rights".

The report termed India's foreign policy as being based on a "colonial mindset". Indeed, much of India's behavior has included colonial military occupation and suppression of the many minorities and different nations India claims to rule over. This scandal occurs while India portrays itself as a modernized democracy and consorts with western powers.

Poverty is used by India to inflict misery on the people it attempts to rule over. As the Voice of East report stated, "Indian-occupied Kashmir is one of the regions, where Indian state has failed to respect its international obligations to frame policies to eliminate poverty". India's policy has been to "grab the land of state subjects and render them landless" as the Indian regime works to re-engineer demographic balances to suit its power goals.

Evidence of India's re-engineering of the population to assert its power lies in the way "occupation forces have already occupied 1,000,000 of acres of [agricultural] land". In addition, India is "planning to construct colonies for retired Indian army persons [and] homeless Indians in Kashmir valley".

Occupying powers including Zionist Israel have a long history of building their colonies on occupied territories to change "facts on the ground" to justify their rule on so-called democratic grounds. When such efforts succeed, the result is often deemed to be genocide because it entailed destruction of the indigenous people.


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17 June 2016

Assange "pretty much" supports Brexit

The Blog


In a televised interview, WikiLeaks founder and political prisoner Julian Assange expressed the view that he supports Britain leaving the European Union.


In the interview, Assange broke down the different camps relating to the EU referendum, ultimately favoring the minority "left Brexit" faction in the debate.

While right wing campaigners who support Brexit want the "old empire" and right wing campaigners who oppose Brexit want the "new empire", Assange characterized left wing opponents of Brexit as reactionaries who think "another world is not really possible". This, he contrasted with the more optimistic left who do believe "another world is possible".

The phrase "another world is possible" is associated with the alter-globalization movement and the World Social Forum, attended by Latin American leaders and global sociologists and left wing academics including Noam Chomsky and Immanuel Wallerstein throughout the years. This sentiment is not necessarily against globalization, but against the negative globalization imposed by the US government and corporations on the world's poor and in favor of positive social globaliztion and mixing.

When pressed on whether he supported Brexit, Assange replied "pretty much". He judged that the British regime is using the European Union as "political cover" for human rights abuses and its subservience to the US, including during his own political persecution by the state.


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7 June 2016

Game over! America can't be great again

The Blog


A return to the "golden era" promised by Donald Trump when he says he will "make America great again" is not historically possible. The world has changed, and it hasn't changed to America's advantage.


Furthermore, all Trump's opponents, including Hillary Clinton, are no different than him in longing for a return to America's past glory days. America's stature in the world, in the eyes of ally and enemy alike, has degenerated and cannot be recovered

 Such facts are recently articulatated by global top social historian Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein's commentary appeared at his website on 1 June 2016, and argued the top social scientist's judgment again that America has already long lost its crown as a hegemonic superpower. As asserted in the commentary:
Life in the United States is not as good as it once was. Trump has used as his slogan “make America great again.” The “again” refers to the golden era. And Sanders also seems to refer to a previously golden era in which jobs were not exported to the global South. Even Clinton now seems to look back at something lost.
Looking at escalating gun violence in America (mainly confined to Black ghettos and ignored by the national media, insofar as middle class whites aren't the victims), Wallerstein speaks of a cycle of social instability in the US that will only increase in coming years. Such violence may reach non-Black areas of US society soon on a large scale, causing a vicious circle of insecurity that panics everyone and feeds back on itself, leading to increasing numbers of people leaving America and fewer migrants entering. It also feeds into another pattern of force, already inflamed to levels that made the US government tremble recently.

Wallerstein writes of a "very small band of deeply anti-state militias, who call themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (CCF)".

Unsurprisingly, the regime considers such ranchers and militiamen to be a greater "threat" than foreign terrorists, although these alleged "domestic terrorists" largely seek only to reclaim the original Republic formed by George Washington. And the biggest way the regime acknowledges the magnitude and prestige of this threat is by negotiating with them, rather than simply killing them as it does with other enemies.

Although the regime has in fact used force against homegrown militias if "negotiations fail", it has set itself on a grave path by doing so. Alluding to various standoffs between militias and the government, Wallerstein believes, "This more extreme version of action may soon spread. It is not a question of moving to the right but of moving towards more violent protest, towards a civil war".

With the paranoid regime ignoring increasing gun crime expanding beyond ghettos and threatening to inflame community tensions, together with anti-Federal militias taking matters into their own hands to restore order, the country's future as a failed state seems frighteningly certain.

It is not that left-wing sociologist Wallerstein means to endorse right-leaning militia forces like the CCF by ideology, but that he sees them playing an essential historic role in the demise of the US regime and ending its global oppression starting at home. Of that demise, Wallerstein promises we can "make the world a better place for everyone... only if we stop longing to go back to a golden era, which was not so golden for most of the world."


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Muhammad Ali's sacred communication

The Blog


Following the iconic African American sportsman's recent passing on 3 June, Garrison Center director Thomas Knapp draws our attention to Muhammad Ali's days as a conscientious objector and anti-war campaigner.


Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused the draft three times in 1967, and is known to have declared his sympathy with the victims of the US state's war crimes in Vietnam, saying "I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong — no Viet Cong ever called me nigger".

Without the stand Ali took against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. would probably not have come out with the same view, inspired by the former's courage. And without that, the superpower might not have been so pressured to withdraw from its misguided wars.

Ali's legacy has already reached far beyond his own time and beyond America itself. Admired by many people across the globe, Ali's international popularity will still symbolize what Frantz Fanon meant when he mentioned an "illuminating and sacred communication" between all oppressed and colonized people. Here we see how virtue can transcend one's time and one's country. Ali's life offers a certain story of resistance and victory that will continue to inspire all people - but perhaps Muslims most of all - against imperialism, hegemony and injustice.


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24 May 2016

Tech leads to anti-statism: 2015 at TED

The Blog


A fascinating TED talk recently re-posted by the Center for a Stateless Society relates weakening governments with accelerating social change and popular liberation by technology.


Originally from 2015, the TED talk by William Gillis equates the state with control, and control with building perfect defenses and security measures. All of these become impossible because the spectrum of disobedience, disruption and vandalism by people increases through technology and popular access to it (just ask hackers).

"The more means by which people can act the easier attack becomes and the harder defense becomes" the speaker argued. Using a Star Wars (image courtesy) reference that would be enjoyed by fans of the sci-fi series, Gillis states, "It’s a simple matter of complexity. The attacker only needs to choose one line of attack, the defender needs to secure against all of them. This isn’t just true of small thermal exhaust ports, it’s true in our software ecosystems today and any other system with many dimensions of movement."

The thermal exhaust port is a weakness in the Empire's deadly Death Star battle station featured in Star Wars. In the film, rebel hero Luke Skywalker destroys the planet-killing weapon by firing a proton torpedo through the thermal exhaust port, causing a chain reaction that destroys the Death Star.

Edward Snowden could perhaps be likened to Luke Skywalker, one man able to bring the colossal machine of tyranny down by being in the right place, at the right time, with the right technologies. Advanced technology, Gillis believes, adds concrete facts to support a form of anarchism and super individualism that previously had only been possible in theory.

In his conclusion, Gillis identified the idea of a stateless society with the posthuman society predicted by transhumanism, stating "transhumanism represents yet another arm of anarchism: a focus on expanding freedom in physical terms and a critique of timid retreat to some stultifying “human nature.""

According to Gillis and others at Human Iterations, we need a "social singularity" thinking about a post-state society filled with superempowered individuals equipped with the ultimate personal technologies, who no longer need governments to take care of themselves. It is hard to deny such a conclusion, as "The arc of human history is an arc bent by our creativity and inquiry towards more options, more ways of existing and acting."


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20 May 2016

Would a world government create war?

The Blog


Any "world government" created out of the current international system would be faced with civil war instantly, an article posted to Aral Bereux's site Dystopian News noted.


Hypothesizing that humans are still slaves to their violent instincts and territorial behavior, a short post to the site puts forward a gloomy assessment of what might happen if a powerful organization tried to make humanity clean its act up and unite under a single authority.

Unstable states faced with disintegration are suggested as examples of what would immediately happen to a world government attempting to secure its authority and legitimacy in the same fashion as existing governments.




Asking the question, "Do You Want to Live in a Stateless World?", however, could be beside the point. Most political scientists agree that states are now confused, stressed by supranational influences, and failing to provide security (and jobs) for their subjects on the greatest scale seen in modern history.

Books such as Wallerstein's Utopistics show the reason for the apparent tragedy of state erosion is not a conspiracy or because a group of people "want" it to happen, but because the historical social system (international capitalism regulated and enforced by nation-states) is at the end of its lifespan and faced with economic contradictions, migration, and new technologies.


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6 May 2016

Mont Order society letting everyone join

The Blog


The Mont Order society, despite being called a "secret society" often, is letting everyone join it.


Recently announced over Facebook is a fairly large group called the "Friends of the Mont Order", the same term used by various actual members of the group. In a matter of hours, it had over 400 people signed up to it.

So if you ever wanted to be part of a mysterious and arcane order, now's your chance. Influence the world... or at least influence a group that is influencing the world:

Friends of the Mont Order (Facebook)

One Beliefnet blog commented, "It joins as part of a broader tapestry of groups, movements and contact circles who know of the Mont Order and are sharing its messages of global enlightenment and progress every day."

The main purpose of the Facebook group is to bring people together to talk about the "intersection of technology and politics", one of the areas of interest mentioned in the Order's code.


Info on the Mont Order

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12 April 2016

'Anti-Trumpism' over the top: academic

The Blog


Writing in a commentary at the start of April, left wing historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote that the rhetoric against US presidential candidate Donald Trump is highly exaggerated, and Trump would not be a "catastrophe" if elected.


Donald Trump is primarily no threat to liberals or the Democratic Party, but to entrenched GOP elites, who are highly distressed by him not committing to their agenda (in fact, Wallerstein believes Trump has no ideological agenda at all, and that's why he is loathed so much). The expected GOP candidates have been cast aside by Trump in the presidential nomination race, losing all hope in their party's support base as it rallies around this loose cannon.

Dismissing any theory about Trump as a menace to human rights, women and other issues of grave concern to liberal commentators, Wallerstein's April 1st analysis, "Anti-Trumpism", points out that Trump seems to retract many statements he makes on controversial subjects. What this means, Wallerstein says, is that Trump actually doesn't care whatsoever about conservative issues such as religion, abortion or immigration. He has no particular agenda at all, although he does appeal to the Republican support base's favorite slogans and ideas with the goal to win.

Extract from the Wallerstein commentary relating to Trump foreign policy:
Look at all the hints he has thrown out about his actual agenda. He does not intend to send troops on the ground anywhere. He does not intend to support so-called free trade treaties. He does not intend to revoke the diplomatic opening to Cuba or the agreement with Iran. He is for a bi-state solution in Israel/Palestine. He will not change Social Security. He... is open to increasing taxes on the truly wealthy.
So while many in the Republican leadership have reasons to fear Trump's wrath if he is triumphant, a Trump Presidency should be of no concern to the political left and possibly even favorable to left wing forces such as the anti-war movement.


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