Tag: Civil Rights

Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn – King of the Hate Business: Inside the Southern Poverty Law Center

Link to a reprint of an article by Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn:

“King of the Hate Business: Inside the Southern Poverty Law Center”

Bonus quote: “PC anti-racism is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment which emerges when the PC-subject triumphantly reveals the hidden racist bias on an apparently neutral statement or gesture”

Good Social Science

A major contribution of (good) social science is to uncover and articulate implied meanings, as well as to refute false denials of meaning.  This is to say that human beings are often disingenuous in their explicit statements.  While that statement is hardly shocking (or original), it nonetheless stands in marked contrast to the work of a large swath of academic studies that rely on surveys and take all survey responses at face value, for instance.  More useful is an analysis — often statistical — that largely disregards (or diminishes) stated intents and rationales and instead draws out hidden motivations and benefits.  Take for instance accusations of discrimination, like racism.  Many racists deny that they are in fact racist (often because they rationally understand that such admissions are treated with derision and, sometimes, are prosecuted/redressed), frequently relying instead on a professed mantra of individual choice (or “states rights”, etc.).  These are often subtle attempts to re-frame the discussion away from the kinds of statistical analyses that would show how those purportedly benign personal choice in fact rely upon and support discriminatory “social constructs”.  In a broader sense, this ties in to reliance on a very binary analytical system of individual subjectivity vs. scientific/observable fact that is overly simplistic.  More pernicious are things like “implicit bias” theorizing, which is really a characteristically Liberal response to this issue, and which still accepts the basic individual choice framework (largely side-stepping analysis of “social constructs”) but admits to errors of isolated individuals in order to leave the pre-existing (and unexamined) “social constructs” in place.  Well, and the outright hostility to the very idea of “social constructs,” to wit Margaret Thatcher’s infamous quip, “There is no such thing as society.”

Selected illustrative links: See “A Southern City With Northern Problems” and “Marx’s ‘Capital’ at 150: History in Capital, Capital in History”

Edward S. Herman – Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies

Link to an article by Edward S. Herman:

“Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017”

 

Bonus links: “The Fallacy of Post-Truth” and “Evidence of Google Blacklisting of Left and Progressive Sites Continues to Mount” and Inkywatch and New York Times eXaminer and Liberalism: A Counter-History and War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century and “How the ‘Fake News’ Scare Is Marginalizing the Left” and “Twitter Bans RT and Sputnik Ads, Who’s Next?” and “NYT Prints Government-Funded Propaganda About Government-Funded Propaganda” and “Who’s Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO?” and “The Rise of the New McCarthyism” and “Century of the National Security State: A New Subversives List?” and “A Left Critique of Russiagate” and “The Grammar of Russiagate” and “The Cult of Authority” and “Do U.S. Oligarchs Exist? Not in Mainstream Media” and “Folktales of Russiagate” and “Dictator: Media Code for ‘Government We Don’t Like’” and “The Third Red Scare: Neoliberal’s Effective Framing of 21st Century Populist and Progressive Movement” and “The Unanswered Questions in the Latest Russian ‘Meddling’ Allegations”

Andre Damon – Evidence of Google Blacklisting of Left and Progressive Sites Continues to Mount

Link to an article by Andre Damon:

“Evidence of Google Blacklisting of Left and Progressive Sites Continues to Mount”

 

Bonus links: “Google’s new search engine bias is no accident” and “Social Media Giants Choking Independent News Site Traffic to a Trickle” and “Google Suppressing World Socialist Web Site Content in its Search Results for the New York Times’ 1619 Project” and “Facebook Security Officer: Not All Speech Is ‘Created Equal’” and “Facebook’s power is to sort what people see and to screen information. That’s basically what Google does, too” and “Facebook Wants You to Know if You’re Getting Your News From the Wrong Government” and “Tulsi Gabbard vs Google Goliath” and “‘We Are Moving Into a New, Controlled Society Worse Than Old Totalitarianism’ – Zizek on Google Leak” and “Monopoly Media Manipulation” and “What Google and Facebook Are Hiding” and “Hawkish, Gov’t Funded Think Tank Behind Twitter Decision to Delete Thousands of Chinese Accounts” and “Twitter’s Ban on Political Advertisement: A New Move to Censor the Internet” (“The underlying assumption is that the determination of what is truth and what are ‘crazy lies’ is a purely objective process, unrelated to class or social interests.”) and “Liar, Liar” (“Capitalism is not inevitable nor is it some kind of natural law. Its a fact that Google and Facebook censor socialist sites. Why would they do that if they were not afraid? The authority structure, the proprietor class, they want you asleep. That’s the idea.”)

Bonus quote:

“Even when we don’t believe what the media say, we are still hearing or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They are still setting the agenda.”

Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the News Media (1986)