Dateline: 15 Jun 2018 Disinformation scarred campaigning in elections in the Indian state of…
AMERICAN BRAINWASH
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Trump-induced amnesia has erased much of the memory of this, but Democrats haven’t always been so goddamn terrifying. They’ve always been phony, and they’ve always been the other half of America’s oligarchic military-industrial complex problem, but before they lost their marbles in 2016 they did at least try to pretend to be vaguely progressive sometimes instead of basing their entire platform on attacking political opponents for trying to get along with Russia or North Korea. A reversion to the way things used to be, when Rachel Maddow was just a garden variety partisan hack instead of a psychotic amalgamation of all the worst aspects of Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Joseph McCarthy, would be a welcome relief.
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ERIC ZUESSE—Basically, the IG’s report said that the Obama Administration had failed to enforce the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. This bill had been passed overwhelmingly, 92-4 in the Senate, and 338-52 in the House. All of the votes against it came from Republicans. (Perhaps Obama was secretly a Republican.) The law sent $165 million to the DOJ to catch the executive fraudsters who had brought down the U.S. economy, and it set up the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and had been introduced and written by the liberal Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. President Obama signed it on 20 May 2009. At that early stage in his Presidency, he couldn’t afford to display publicly that he was far to the right of every congressional Democrat, so he signed it.
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CAILTIN JOHNSTONE—As this webcomic from The Oatmeal brilliantly explains, the brain is hardwired to protect strongly valued belief systems in the same way it’s hardwired to make sure the body protects itself from a physical attack. This serves a useful function in that it gives us a cognitive strategy for making sense of the world that isn’t blown to pieces every time you encounter a new idea, but it can also be malformed in a way which does not accurately represent reality. When that happens, it really is worthwhile to tough it out through the brain’s distress signals of cognitive dissonance and consciously restructure your sense-making apparatus in a way that accommodates a more accurate perspective.
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R S AHTHION—It is of course no surprise that the Americans’ response to a humanitarian crisis they created be the disgusting internment camps reminiscent of World war 2.
The thousands of people turning up at the borders of the United States are the refugees from capitalism and a violent foreign policy led by the leaders of the United States (Democrats or Republicans). Therefore that border is not worthy of respect.