Tag: Power

Invisible Ukrainians: A conversation with a professor from the Donbas

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

From the time that Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western media coverage of the war has been dominated by the perspectives of Ukrainians who support Zelensky’s government and who oppose Russia. While it is vitally important that we be informed of their perspective, we cannot truly understand the Ukraine war without hearing from Ukrainians who reject Zelensky’s rule. In the Western mainstream discourse, those Ukrainians are virtually invisible.

Invisible Ukrainians: A conversation with a professor from the Donbas

The New National American Elite

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The New National American Elite

More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.

Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.

Related:

YouTube – Twin Problems: Social Media and Power Concentration by Economist Ashley Hodgson

Philip Agee and Edward Snowden: A comparision.

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Philip Agee and Edward Snowden: A comparision.

Links to articles (Wired one is behind a paywall):

CIA Diary – Inside the Company (Excerpt)

Snowden – I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them (Full Interview)

Related:

Snowden and the Ethics of Whistleblowing

Snowden also explained to Greenwald how his leaks differed from those he had previously criticized. “When you leak the CIA’s secrets, you can harm people,” he explains, as Julian Assange’s more indiscriminate Wikileaks had, perhaps, demonstrated. Blowing the whistle about NSA surveillance supposedly would not harm anyone: “when you leak the NSA’s secrets, you only harm abusive systems.” As Snowden has repeatedly emphasized, he meticulously sorted the secret materials he released with an eye toward minimizing danger to others: “I have carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was in the public interest.” Snowden encouraged Greenwald to filter the leaked materials so that they could reach the public “without harm to any innocent people.” Rather than place classified materials online in bulk as Assange has, Snowden urged a more cautious approach. “If I wanted the documents just put on the Internet en masse, I could have done that myself,” he tells Greenwald.