EDITOR—Sabby presents the “debate” between “Rabbi” Shmuley —a shameless Zionist propagandist—and Norman Finkelstein, first aired on the Piers Mrgan show, with Shmuley, as usual, trying to buffalo his opponent, while Norman remains absolutely calm in the face of a torrent of ad hominem provocations. Piers Morgan doesn’t help much as a moderator; the man clearly has his orders from above, so he actually piles on Norman Finkelstein until the latter puts him in his place. Sabby, meanwhile, champing at the bit, literally boils with rage and frustration while Norman does not seem unduly unruffled by Shmuley’s insults. It’s clear she would have probably disposed of Shmuley on the first round.
CORPORATE WHORES
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EDITOR—When Stewart first “retired” from the TV spotlight about a decade ago, we were not among the mourners. In fact, as card-carrying contrarians, we celebrated Stewart’s departure in the only way we saw fit: By reposting this classic, hard-to-surpass analysis by Steve Almond of what Jon Stewart and his protegé Stephen Colbert really represent in the maelstrom of American culture. As Almond astutely notes, “far from actually serving a newsworthy role, let alone consistently educating mass audiences and criticizing the empire…Stewart and Colbert are trivializers of evil, their legacy one of defanging the truth about systemic evil by hurling toothless parody at it.”
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—There is no need to wonder what causes this departure from observable facts, diabolically purposeful as it often is, and what comes of it. This may seem an unprecedented moment in human history, but there are, indeed, many precedents. Barbara Tuchman told us all about them in The March of Folly (Knopf, 1984): These grand lapses reflect an absence of intellect, vision, and principle at leadership level and lead ineluctably to failure and one or another kind of mess. The Ukraine case, the preoccupation in Munich last week, could not possibly make this clearer.
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Is Tucker Carlson a Harbinger of a New Information Age?
20 minutes readP. GREANVILLE—Irrepressibly, largely spontaneously, and with ever greater force and speed, a new information paradigm is being born to meet the urgent survival needs of humanity. This paradigm, conceived in a still hotly contested digital matrix where the dying system still exerts heavy influence through a variety of advantages, is nonetheless largely grounded in truth. State power, corporate ownership, and huge chunks of badly brainwashed humanity can delay the process, and they do, but eventually reality will win. Moral integrity in mass journalism is an idea whose time is come.
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INDRAJIT—This was my jam on Medium. Capitalist disavowal was my niche. Complaining about capitalism and America within an American capitalist platform, while paying withholding tax to the American government. I might have been smart, but the people making money off me were genius. Palestine, however, is a one-way ticket to demonetization. What’s the difference?