Late August

https://twitter.com/FinalOverdrive wrote:Waco? The compound burned because the local Klan called up the FBI and had them torch the most multiracial community in the area. Koresh was a nut, Koresh was a sicko. But that's not why the Feds did what they did.

  They Just Wanted to Entertain    

      

Many on the left surmised that the hosts were puppets. But selling the Republican message was never the hosts’ top priority. In my research into the history of conservative talk radio, the executives, producers, and hosts whom I interviewed told me over and over that their main goal was to produce the best radio show each day, one that could command the largest audience possible that tuned in for the longest possible time.

Over time, this focus on the commercial imperatives of AM radio would transform politics. To keep audiences engaged and entertained, hosts grew more and more strident as the years passed, depicting politics as warfare—and started targeting moderates in the Republican Party.

In its early phases, conservative talk radio had exhibited a pragmatic streak that would sound foreign today. Hosts never loved moderates, and never hesitated to criticize them for actions out of step with hosts’ vision for the country. But they understood that such figures were crucial to securing a majority, without which their preferred agenda had no shot. But this detente started to break down as the 2000s progressed. In one 2005 harangue prompted by Republicans who voted against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Limbaugh declared, “There’s no such thing as a moderate. A moderate is just a liberal disguise, and they are doing everything they can to derail the conservative agenda.

A year later, Sean Hannity demonstrated that things were shifting further - Any Republican who sought out compromise or who rejected political warfare found him or herself a target of conservative media. And by 2009, a rubicon had been crossed: Limbaugh called for the defeat of eight House Republicans who voted for a carbon cap-and-trade system, even though more hard-line conservatives likely could not win their seats. Hosts blasted them with increasing regularity, while praising a new group of political superstars, largely backbenchers with minimal power on Capitol Hill. But they were perfect for talk radio: They spewed extreme rhetoric, saw the world in black-and-white terms, and advocated for the most extreme tactics possible.

Trump’s presidency is the ultimate testament to the power of talk-radio conservatism. In one week last month, the president not only called in to Hannity’s show, but on a separate night tweeted, “Oh well, we still have the great  @seanhannity who I hear has a really strong show tonight. 9:00 P.M.” He reportedly talks regularly with Hannity as well. And last winter, when Trump reversed course after the uprising on the right, it was Limbaugh to whom the president pledged that he would shut the government down if he didn’t get enough funds for his border wall.

The power of these hosts would’ve been unthinkable when Limbaugh took the national airwaves by storm in 1988. But over three decades, hosts have used the special bond they’ve forged with their audiences to reshape the Republican Party in their image. For millions of listeners, the change has been electrifying. For excommunicated moderates, this show hasn’t been entertaining in the least.  ”

The Joe Rogan Experience has been the No. 2 most-downloaded podcast on iTunes for two years running.

Rogan is much better at captivating audiences than most of us, because he has the patience and the generosity to let his interviews be an experience rather than an inquisition. And, go figure, his approach has the virtue of putting his subjects at ease and letting the conversation go to poignant places....

This is the era of the Angry White Man, and it’s not just the MAGA army. If all you know about Joe Rogan is his Wikipedia entry—Fear Factor, UFC, stand-up, podcasts with Elon Musk and Alex Jones—and if you make no effort to learn more, he might seem like this gang’s pied piper. And he does give them a platform with a massive audience. But that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that. I respond to that. The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization. A goal so hazy and unreachable that you never stop trying, until you realize with a kind of enviable Zen clarity that the trying is the whole point. If the world isn’t giving you much in the way of positive feedback, create your own.

It’s a tough message for a very rich guy like Joe Rogan to sell, but he pulls it off because he has never stopped coming across as stubbornly normal. He’s from a middle-class Boston suburb, he’s bald, and for God’s sake, his name is Joe. Rogan’s father was a cop....All I remember of my dad,” Joe told Rolling Stone in 2015, “are these brief, violent flashes of domestic violence.”

One of the downsides of total human optimization is that you’re always coming up short, and in the wrong stew of testosterone and serotonin, it can turn into a poison of self-loathing and trigger-cocked rage. And a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy.

Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election and that he despises Trump. During a podcast episode in March, he described himself as “fucking left wing” and “almost a socialist,” then ticked off a list of progressive issues he backs, including universal basic income and free college. He tends to assert his progressive credentials, though, only when he gets accused of being a far-right mouthpiece, and it always has a ring of “Some of my best friends voted for Hillary.” More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials.

“I say shit I don’t mean because it’s funny,” he sneers during the special. He uses the word 'lady' a lot. “Ladies,” he went on, “you make people. You make all the people. And you want to be president, too, you fucking greedy bitches? What else do you want? You want bigger dicks than us?” “Ladies, I love you … but let’s be honest, you don’t invent a lot of shit.”

Rogan is a professional stand-up comedian, but if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies, sexism. Of all the things in the world for a comedian to joke about right now, why these?

Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble. Especially when he talks about Twitter, a company that brings together Joe’s two biggest blind spots: his basic misunderstanding of the concept of censorship and his tendency to see the world through a thick cloud of Axe Body Spray. (No, Joe, Twitter banning white nationalists from its privately held publishing platform is not censorship—it might be a risky corporate policy, but it is not censorship.)

Joe likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good.  

My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table.

And yet I came away more comfortable with Joe’s vision of manhood—and more determined to do the exact opposite. We’re just different. Joe Rogan lives every day like it’s his last. I live every day like I’m going to have to do most of this crap again tomorrow...

Jordan Peterson, the much-debated Canadian professor-preacher, has repurposed ideas about anima and ego for a new generation. Back in 1996, Tool’s Ænima took a stab at doing the same, with the hypnotic swirl of “Forty six & 2” describing exactly that process Peterson now touts: integrating one’s “shadow,” a.k.a. their suppressed creep, into their waking self for a transcendent sizzle. One YouTube video I recently came across made the insightful point that that song ends in all the instruments banging on one note, surely to represent the narrator’s arrival at inner unity. That video was, naturally, drawing the connection between Peterson and Tool.

That connection is coincidental, but it isn’t meaningless. Part of Tool’s appeal was that it took metal’s fantastical pangs—previously rendered with dragons, wizards, sci-fi, satan—and seemed to dignify them by drawing on rule systems: science, philosophy, religion. Doing so allowed listeners to access gut pleasures with the pretense of mind expansion. Call it heavy edutainment or rifftastic self-care. The title track from Lateralus was written in time signatures determined by the mystic math of the Fibonacci sequence; Keenan’s lyrics mapped out Jung’s theory of individuation using references to alchemy. But it is a great song because of massive, grinding, straining sound, evoking a slow-motion upper-cut aimed at the sun. The music yearns for enlightenment so powerfully that it seems to, in bits and flashes, actually provide it. Which is also what pseudo-rational rule clubs of all sorts do.

On 1996’s “Stinkfist,” Keenan described an extreme sexual act so as to argue, per the lyrics, there’s “something kinda sad about the way that things have come to be desensitized to everything.” On Joe Rogan’s podcast last month, he lamented widespread addiction to “dopamine” and pled with listeners to, yes, go take a walk. The ascetic impulse is an ancient one—the Sabbath is a dopamine reset, no?—with obvious appeal in the era of Netflix autoplaying (ugh). But purification of the self has, of late, been hitched to larger, more unsettling purification missions: See the reactionary politics that’ve accompanied Peterson’s lifestyle counseling, or the white nationalists who’ve espoused “no wank” credos, or the anti-vax implications of Marianne Williamson’s love-heals-all gospel. All of that may seem far from Tool’s dark, boot-clad, skeleton-tattooed aesthetic, which is firmly in a cathartic metal tradition of flaunting one’s own disaffection. But after so many mass shootings accompanied by male manifestos decrying supposed cultural decline, it’s harder than ever to wave away, say, ex-Army veteran Keenan looking around a Southern California tourist trap during a 2001 Spin interview and remarking, “You want to get out a rifle, stand out on a building, and … erase the karmic debt, so to speak.”

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is one of Keenan's pursuits, and he studied under Rickson Gracie. It was announced in June 2010 that Keenan had proposed to manager Lei Li. On Rogen’s podcast, amid chitchat about Jiu-Jitsu and winemaking, Keenan talked about the need to prepare for climate change and find common ground across political differences. .

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/10/its-an-aggressive-hostile-act-joan-didions-thoughts-on-writing/263679/ wrote:In many ways writing is the act of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions —with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.  

Guy Debord, Treatise on Secrets: Commentaires sur la societe du spectacle, (London: Verso, 1990) wrote:Secrecy dominates this world, and foremost as the secret of domination.

• To the Liberals, "power" is taboo, instead we live in a 'meritocracy' where we are all equal but ruled by the best and brightest (as determined by your wealth).
  
• Conservatives like to "trigger" the Liberals by showing that raw "power" (bosses, cops, lynch mobs, guns) still exists - and they own it!
  
• Leftists study the material reality of "power" and want it used for the good of us all.
  

... wrote:When the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, the Pentagon's office of Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence offered The Rendon Group a four-month, $400,000 contract that has since been extended indefinitely. The Rendon Group has billed the government at least $7.5 million for its post-9/11 services.

Rendon's own records show he spent more than $23 million in the first year of his contract to work with an Iraqi exile group. Several of his operatives in London earned more than the director of Central Intelligence--about $19,000 per month. The Rendon Group was "paid close to a hundred million dollars by the CIA" for its work with the INC."

According to Brooke, the company signed a secret contract with the C.I.A. which guaranteed that it would receive a ten-per-cent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend millions. “We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year...It was a very nice job.”

Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the W.M.D. evidence was not the best argument for the war, but that for bureaucratic reasons “we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.” As a result, the war was largely marketed domestically as a scare campaign.  Brooke said, “I sent out an all-points bulletin to our network, saying, ‘Look, guys, get me a terrorist, or someone who works with terrorists. And, if you can get stuff on W.M.D., send it!’

Western Media Coverage of a Protest in Hong Kong

Western Media Coverage of a Protest in American

wikipedia wrote:Mao insisted that the people themselves, not the security organs, should become involved in killing landlords who had oppressed them, which was quite different from Soviet practice. Mao thought that peasants who killed landlords with their bare hands would become permanently linked to the revolutionary process in a way that passive spectators could not be.  The killing eventually gave rise to the saying "dou di zhu" (斗地主), or "fight the landlord~!"

There were policies in certain regions of China not necessarily obeyed which required the selection of "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution" The actual number of people who were killed in the land reform campaign is believed to be between 200,000 to two million.  

All formerly landless workers received land. As a result, "middling peasants," who now accounted for 90 percent of the village population, owned 90.8 percent of the land, as close to perfect equality as one could possibly hope for.

During the Chinese Civil War, the CIA-funded anti-communists established a Landlords Legion, which was composed of landlords who sought the return of their redistributed land and property from peasants and communist guerrillas until their defeat in 1949.

Nicky Hagert 'Other People's Wars' (2011) wrote:A senior New Zealand government official described what happened during the reception, when Tony Blair asked Helen Clark, Australaian PM John Howard and Canadian PM Jean Chretien to attend an unexpected private discussion.

'Blair pulled aside Helen and Howard and Chretien, and said, "The Americans are going to war. We will have to go with them. are you with us?" This is when Blair claimed he hadn't made up his mind. Straight away, little Johnny [Howard] the lap dog says, "I'll be with you Tony", but Helen and Chretien were aghast. They said, "No, you can't." Clark immediately took the position "you can't do anything that doesn't have UN backing" and Chretien agreed with that. She came away from that meeting shaking her head, and in her surprise let it slip to some of her staff. She didn't often let things like that slip"

wikipedia wrote: The local parish priest, Father Auger, hated all Liberals as "ungodly," and spread malicious rumours about the Liberal Chrétien family, saying he would never let a teenage girl go on a date unchaperoned with any of the Chrétien boys, which caused the young Jean Chrétien to have troubled relations with the Catholic church.

Chrétien disliked the Catholic priests who educated him and in turn was disliked by them with one of Chrétien's former teachers, Father François Lanoue, recalling that Chrétien was the only student he ever had to beat up in his classroom as he was too unruly. Chrétien in an interview called his education "unnatural" as he recalled an extremely strict regime where the priests beat anyone bloody who dared to question their authority while teaching via rote learning.

When asked in an interview what subject he was best at in high school, Chrétien replied: "It was street fighting that I was best at"