But the Times is hardly alone in these obfuscating headlines. The Washington Post’s lead story on the massacre is headlined “Gaza buries its dead as death toll from protests at fence with Israel rises to at least 60.” Again, the headline leaves us wondering who killed the people of Gaza? Are we to assume that the protests – and not the Israeli military – killed these people?
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ERIC ZUESSE—Hoppe argues not only for an aristocracy, but for a hereditary one, and he even opposes immigration; so, if he were a democrat, at all, then he’d be excluding immigrants from voting. But he’s not even that much of a democrat. And he especially approves of hereditary monarchy. His reason for that preference is traditional libertarianism, which favors the private over the public: “Hereditary monarchies represent the historical example of privately owned governments, and democratic republics that of publicly owned governments.” Libertarianism opposes public ownership, favors private.
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C. JOHNSTONE—In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it’s psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it’s narrative.
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P. GREANVILLE—Emerging from this cultural miasma is not easy. Since being dumb is a form of progressive debilitation, a sort of “negative feedback loop” as really brainy guys like to put it, each round of lies, each assault on reality, is less likely to be resisted or even remotely detected by the beaten down, pacified populace. A huge part of this is simply the organic result of living under unrestricted capitalism, with few USAers ready to disinherit themselves from their birthright, the American Dream. For in one of the greatest triumphs of mass programming, in the US capitalism has been sold to the people as indistinguishable from their own identity, their nationality.
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TOM HALL—The ex-spies all postured as defenders of freedom of speech. “Whether one agrees or disagrees with what John Brennan said is not the issue,” Leon Panetta said. “We have something called free speech in this country. And whether you’re a former CIA director or whether you’re a former President of the United States or whether you’re just a citizen on the street you have a right to free speech to say what you think about our country and our President—and that’s the right that John exercised.”
