Friday 29th of March 2024

we've been mind-controlled for a long time...

mind control...   We have been potty-trained to believe. It has become second nature. When we don't believe, the system has ways to spin us around with various fears and things to buy at bargain prices. Religions have been the supreme users of the propaganda techniques, but since the advent of "democratic" secularism, propaganda had to be restructured into a new illusion of well-being.

 

And so say all of us: see: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/964

 

The propaganda is based on giving us "the news"....

 

---------------------

 

The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control


Edward Curtin


In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain.

In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites.

Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City. 

There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self (above), where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/12/15/the-art-of-doublespeak-bellingcat-and-mind-control/?

lazy journalism...

lazy

 

Note: "as we forgive those who tell the truth against us" — of course was meant with the caveat: "except Julian Assange" (and everyone who expose the trickery)...

st paul, the propagandist...

 

There is no more significant figure in the history of the Christian Church than the 1st-century Jewish teacher and tentmaker, Saul of Tarsus (commonly known by his Latin name of Paul). Despite not personally knowing the Galilean crucified as a political prisoner on a Roman cross nearly 2000 years ago, St Paul is considered an apostle of Jesus Christ, equal in status to the original 12 and arguably above even Peter, James and John in his influence on the early religious movement that would become Christianity.

Paul the Apostle was famously converted from a career of zealous persecution of Jewish followers of Jesus while on the road to Damascus. Out of a blinding encounter with a man put to death a few years before came the novel conviction that the resurrected Christ was the saviour not just of Jews but of everyone. The transformative impact of this revelation was such that it sustained extraordinary missionary journeys (the subject of about half of the New Testament’s “Acts” of the Apostles) in which Paul told the story of a messiah whose death was central to the meaning of his life. What “the world” saw as humiliation and defeat became glorious victory in a revisionist history of revolutionary importance. The apostle’s influence was compounded by his skills as a writer – although not all the 14 New Testament texts attributed to Paul came from his pen, the epistles he sent to the scattered fellowships he founded remain the most read letters in history.

In powerful and sometimes poetic prose, Paul sets out his conviction that with faith in the resurrection came freedom from Jewish law, divine punishment and death. The rules and distinctions that underpinned religion and culture were superseded by a new identity centred on the risen Lord, with converts taught that they were now “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. Paul depicted Jesus as a second Adam whose death had liberated human beings from all that had bound them since the infamous sin of the first. Because Paul began the long process of constructing a cosmic “Christ” (from “christos” in Greek, meaning “anointed one”) out of the human Jesus, he played a key role in turning a small sect of Judaism into a universal religion.

It is thus not surprising that Paul is often blamed for what went wrong. In what can seem like a caricature of “good cop/bad cop”, people across the belief spectrum unite in defending the goodness of Jesus while criticising his apostle. They see the problem with Christianity as not being the ethical teachings of its founder but their corruption into religious dogma by Paul and his increasingly oppressive successors.

The unfashionable counterargument is that any belief system needs some degree of agreement about what is believed before it can be propagated and sustained. Because Jesus never thought of himself as founding a religion or even a new Jewish sect, it took more than 300 years to work through a broadly agreed meaning about his life and death from the scant detail set out in the Gospels. Nevertheless, Paul’s dogmatic assertions (“reject this”, “believe that”, “ignore the dangerous views of so and so”) clearly irked many believers at the time (including the apostolic leaders of the original church in Jerusalem), and have been fraught texts for some Christians ever since. While Paul’s stunning portrayal of the freedom and equality proffered through Christ’s resurrection ensured the extraordinary liberating force of nascent Christianity, the apostle’s injunctions can seem distant from the unadulterated teachings of the wandering Nazarene. Paul’s letters to the scattered faith communities promote servility to the state and include strictures directed at homosexuals, women and slaves that now sit uncomfortably with the gloriously liberating paragraphs that accompany them. (Perhaps the main occasion when Australians still hear Paul quoted is at weddings, where reciting his sentiment on the nature and primacy of love, written to the fellowship at Corinth nearly 2000 years ago, is more popular than ever.)

One of the millions of young people turned off Christianity by exposure to the ethics of St Paul was Christos Tsiolkas. It is surely an evangelical mistake to recommend that adolescents interested in learning more about faith start by reading the Bible. If they make it through the violence and vengeance infused in the Old Testament, what sensitive young mind would not share the response of Tsiolkas on reaching parts of the New? It is hardly surprising that, as he explains in an author note to his new novel Damascus (Allen & Unwin), Tsiolkas was “unable to go past the famous strictures against homosexuality in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians”.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/december/1575205200/james-boyce...

 

 

Gus is a fierce atheist.

the free fake news...

 

From Stephen Lendman


The Myth of a Free Press in America and the West


The dominant fourth estate long ago abandoned journalism the way it's supposed to be - serving the imperial state and monied interests exclusively.

 

Real news, information, and analysis is still available from independent credible sources unbeholden to powerful interests, mainly online.


Days earlier, America's leading proliferator of managed news misinformation and disinformation on issues mattering most NYT headlined: "Who Will Tell the Truth About the Free Press?"


Clearly not the self-styled newspaper of record, operating exclusively as a mouthpiece for powerful interests, featuring the official narrative exclusively at the expense of "all the news that's fit to print" - banned in its daily editions on major domestic and geopolitical issues. More on its editorial piece below.


Wrong and never to be trusted most always, Trump is right about establishment media fake news, earlier saying: "(T)he media deserves a very, very big fat failing grade. (They're) very dishonest people."


CNN is the most untrustworthy name in television news. Establishment print and electronic media reports in the US and other Western countries are polar opposite how the American Press Institute defines journalism, saying:


It's "the gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information," adding:


Its "characteristics and practices...separate journalism from other forms of communication...mak(ing) it indispensable to democratic societies."

 

 

"(J)ournalism provide(s) citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments."


What passes for the dominant fourth estate in the US replicates how all totalitarian societies operate - controlling the message, suppressing vital information essential for everyone to know about how their government operates at home and abroad.


Trump didn't invent the term "fake news," as he falsely claimed. The Nazi equivalent was lugenpress (lying press).


Since the early 1990s, the Center for Democracy & Technology's PR Watch reported on "spin... disinformation (and) fake news."


The term disinformation may have originated from Soviet Russia's dezinformacija - first used during the early Cold War years.


In the 17th century, Samuel Johnson used the term misinformation in remarks about the king of Prussia.


In 1620, Francis Bacon noted what he called a "confirmation bias" that undermines trust and truth.

 

A modern translation of philosopher Thomas Brown's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) would be "An Epidemic of Fake News."


Today's corporate controlled conventional and social media are platforms for disinformation, Big Lies and fake news.


The lying machine NYT proliferates the above in daily editions. Since Trump triumphed over media darling Hillary, the Times waged all-out editorial war to delegitimize and demonize him - largely for the wrong reasons, ignoring the most important right ones because the vast majority of the US political establishment shares guilt.


The Times: "The health of democracy, in the United States and around the world depends on" a free press.


Fact: In Western countries and most others, democracy is nonexistent. Nor are free and open major media - notably because the dominant fourth estate is concentrated in few hands.


In the West, six major corporations own and control 90% of the media: Comcast's NBC Universal, AT&T/Time Warner, Disney, News Corp., Viacom, and Germany's Bertelsmann.


The "truth about a free press...in the United States and around the world" is it's only available from reliable independent sources - never from establishment ones like the Times and likeminded press agents for wealth, power, and privilege.


Following them assures knowing only what dark forces want people to know - nothing about major domestic and geopolitical issues affecting the public welfare.

 

 

Читайте больше на https://www.pravdareport.com/opinion/144130-free_press/

 

Read from top.

loving youse all-ish, hierarchically?

 

From Casey Chalk...

 



Yet one might ask: doesn’t the Christian religion—as well as the secular humanism that often unknowingly derives many of its ethical principles thereof—teach that we should love all our neighbors equally? Not so fast. While we can love all persons with “one same generic good, namely everlasting happiness,” it is impossible to love all people equally. Says Aquinas: “we are bound to observe this inequality [of love], because we cannot do good to all.”
….

Either way, the critical needs of those of our immediate communities go ignored, if not derided.

 

Aristotle and Aquinas have offered us a better, if harder way, one that involves sacrifices and self-gift to our first neighbors. It is the Order of Charity, not global citizenship, that will restore our souls and the welfare of our communities.


Casey Chalk covers religion and other issues for The American Conservative and is a senior writer for Crisis Magazine. He has degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia, and a masters in theology from Christendom College.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/thomas-aquinas-was-no-c...


———————————


If this is not a betrayal of the Christian doctrine, what is? 

Yep, according to Mr Chalk, now fully theo-diplomed, Aristotle and Aquinas have offered us a better pathway than Christ himself… By trying to limit our universal love into a relative love of our neighbourly neighbours, Casey thus chalks another doozy. Now, equipped with a Masters in Theology (whatever spiritual bullshit that is), Casey has climbed the molehill of the Order of Charity, which, according to Gus’s vague catho-recollections, is going against Christ preaching universal love in the desert, including the love of one’s enemy… Once you start to be choosy about your embraces, you become a humanistic discriminating atheist, like old Gus on a good day — or a hypocritical religious mobster. 

Yes, we structure our love around our family, though we might draw a red line in the sand in regard to our orstracised uncle-the-bank-thief, except we always welcome his yearly lavish Christmas presents in our red soxes. Sure, the new testament never mentioned Aristotle nor Thomas Aquinas… Trying to “improve" on the doctrine is like making an excuse for our inability to be “universal”. A humanistic discriminating atheist like old Gus does not have such need. Some people, you like. Some, you don’t. No gymnastics to explain the hierarchy of atheistic love… Should I hate my Russian friends and love the Yankee murderers, our Aussie first neighbours? 


Gus the Lesser...

Loving youse all, as long as...