JASON HIRTHLER—In many respects what all this superhero cinema reveals is the startling infantilism of the American mind. Benjamin Barber foresaw this some years ago in his excellent cultural exposition, Consumed. The infantilization of the American masses produces the ideal state for consumption: blissfully ignorant and driven by impulsive desires and fears, largely uninformed by any evaluative research let alone the consequences of spending. The critical faculties of adults are absent in the infantile consumer. Surely adults that continually appease their fears (or boredom) with fantasies of caped crusaders rescuing the sheeple from certain destruction participate in this sophomoric recidivism.
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President Moreno accused Assange of violating terms in a number of ways including harassing guards, covering CCTV cameras, hacking security files. Most lewd of all, he accused Assange of smearing his feces on our embassy’s walls. All without corroboration, the only footage to emerge from his stay is a leaked CCTV video of the Wikileaks founder skateboarding in a small room.
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DAVID CROMWELL—Covering dangerous climate change in accordance with such basic essentials means not just reporting the science of climate change responsibly – a task too far for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. But it also means investigating the systemic reasons for global warming. That must include a critical appraisal of corporate-driven capitalism and unrestrained consumerism. And, finally, it must also mean full and open public debate about alternative ways of organising society to benefit human well-being and the climate stability of the planet.
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PATRICE GREANVILLE—The truths that Sharmine Narwani and Patrick Lawrence have confirmed are not revelations to our audience. We in the counter-establishment world have known these facts for many years, since the indecencies of the Western media did not begin with the Syrian conflict, nor with the Obama regime, and we understand well the nature of the capitalist/imperialist beast. The omissions of truth, half-truths, distortions, and false flags have been there for generations, part and parcel of the huge propaganda arsenal spawned by American capitalism by the turn of the 20th century, a machine enormously expanded and finetuned since the end of World War2, all to justify the legitimacy and supposed necessity of criminal foreign (and sometimes domestic) policies before the US population.
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BRIAN CLOUGHLEY—The United States is the self-appointed guardian of the Seas, and declares it “will exercise and assert its navigation and overflight rights and freedoms on a worldwide basis in a manner that is consistent with the balance of interests reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention.” There is a problem with this, in that the US Senate refuses to ratify the Convention, which makes nonsense of the constant threats by Washington that everybody must obey it or there will be the United States to reckon with, in the shape of the US Navy which roams the seas with its eleven aircraft carriers, 9 amphibious ready groups (more accurately, strike squadrons), 22 cruisers and 66 destroyers with, down below, some seventy submarines.
