What a relief. I suppose I’m not the most unbiased reader, but when I read truth and honesty, it just floats off the page. Having just listened to a vile and dishonest interview between the gasbag mediocrity Sam Harris, and someone named Timothy Snyder a Yale professor, this is truly fresh air. Everyone should listen to that interview just to understand how dishonest minds work. And thank you Chris Hedges and Medea Benjamin for your knowledge, honesty, and wisdom.
There is no such thing as 'unbiased'. We bring our biases, conscious or unconscious to all life., And we are all biased for what we believe.
Biasness is not the problem.
The problem is how we get biases, if and why they are tools, if they are, and if we are aware of our biases and able to suspend them in order to enter into other points of view.
Sound clownish?
It should.
Look around you are the carousel of hate and depravity and tell me that the carny barkers in the great Carnival of capitalism has anything to offer working people or the dispossessed
You are right, but what comes next? ... the French revolution ... Robespierre, the reign of terror and the guillotine??? As the saying was: the revolution devours their own children - I am scared of this!!!
Joe Biden, Senator John McCain, Victoria Nuland and John Kerry all met with the opposition before the 2014 coup, including the leader of the Svoboda Party, Oleh Tyahnybok, who was considered as antisemitic by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. This hatred was caused by the Holodomor, the big famine created by Stalin. in the 1930s Ukrainians saw Holodomor as being created by «Bolchevik Jews». It explains why Stepan Bandera became a nazi and was responsible for the death of thousands Jewish Polish citizens. Bandera is celebrated as a hero in Ukraine and the Ukrainian ambassador in Germany recently refused to condemn Bandera. Right Sector and Azov Battalion were involved in the 2014 coup, in the political exclusion of Russian linguistic rights and in the civil war. Neo-nazis are a minority in Ukraine but play an important role in the escalation of the war. And the Americans use them as a way to destabilize Russia, as suggested and recommended in the 2019 Rand Report "Extending Russia".
... and from what I’ve been reading, the historical sale of opiates to the Chinese by Western oligarchs (as well as the enslavement of Chinese) is at the core of Chinese animosity towards the US, Japan, Britain and other countries. It forms the basis of their plans for retribution. Yes, the Chinese have a grand plan, indeed.
What a wonderful discussion - balsam for the soul to know that people with common sense still exist. I wish Mrs Benjamin great success in her announced tour of the country! The 'government' is completely out of control and without any basis to reality, no wonder that some conspiracy theorists think that they are lizards from ... (outer space??) - I guess even children in Kindergarten have more brains!! It is devastating what is happening now - there are so many problems for this beautiful planet and nobody in power doing the right things ...
American propaganda and nonsense. History tells us from the time before Alexander the Macedonian Empires drew maps not the people living on the land.
The Charge of the Light Brigade happened in Crimea as the Russian invaders were repelled by the European and Ottoman Empires and Germany wasn't a nation.
We have the American military inside our borders and we dare not declare neutrality.
The best we can do is support the Ukrainians and their call for sovereignty.
The only possible positive outcome in human terms is an end to the Czarist Empire and Russia becoming part of Europe.
The real question is not Russia whose Empire is no more but America where Putin would be a normal politician or oligarch. What will America do without Empire. It was in 1917 when William F Buckley Senior wanted war with Mexico because He not Mexico owned the oil in Mexico.
Buckley was of course given Venezuela because of his emotional distress.
I am a Canadian and a Quebecer and I like real social democracy, a free press, an educated population and peace order and good government and a road map to a better future.
I believe the Russian people and the American people deserve a future better than the present.
Zelensky told Ukraine what was worth dying for before he went into politics.
"The difference between democracy and dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first, and take orders later; in a dictatorship, you don't have to waste your time voting."
I looked up Capitalism in My 1755 edition of the Dictionary of the English language. Capitalism is the way a society functions. I understand feudalism it is the basis of the Magna Carta where the Barons (landlords) ruled
Oligarchy seems a much more explicit definition of America and Pax Americana.
Democracy is another word that needs context.
We the people meant 5% in 1776 and less than five percent in 2022.
I am not real good at abstractions but BIG Numbers and REALLY BIG NUMBERS are my cup of tea.
That is why I don't gamble except for a weekly lottery ticket and I don't worry about being hit by lightning.
I tried to explain democracy to my American wife this week. We had a dental emergency and we needed to call my parliamentary representative's office to facilitate. In a democracy the top is where you start not where you finish. The Prime Minister serves everybody and commands little respect for their sacrifice.
This is true but we are where are. Liberal Democracy is post World War Two.
Liberal democracy started in Vilnius Lithuania with the Enlightenment and ended in 1794 when Russia with the permission of all the Empires including the USA dealt Vilnius and liberal democracy a mortal blow.
The War in Ukraine began with the Peace of Westphalia and the Empires dividing the world. It was the Holy Roman Empire that started the war in Ukraine.
The world could do without another Holy Roman Empire centered in New York, Vegas , Moscow, Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Dallas, Geneva and Miami.
Americans know less than nothing about real democracy.
In the words of Firesign Theatre "Attention seekers!"" Everything You Know is Wrong."
France and England are not the birthplace of modern Western Civilization.
This is true but we are where are. Liberal Democracy is post World War Two.
Liberal democracy arose with capitalism. It is a managerial form for the state and economy.
There was no liberal democracy under slavery or feudalism.
And as capitalism decays, so does its political managerial class.
Liberal democracy started in Vilnius Lithuania with the Enlightenment and ended in 1794 when Russia with the permission of all the Empires including the USA dealt Vilnius and liberal democracy a mortal blow.
It started with capitalism. There is no 'one date' it was the evolution and revolution from fedualism,
The War in Ukraine began with the Peace of Westphalia and the Empires dividing the world. It was the Holy Roman Empire that started the war in Ukraine.
1649 I believe was the Peace of Westphalia. And this was to assure national sovereignty over the economy and war.
The world could do without another Holy Roman Empire centered in New York, Vegas , Moscow, Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Dallas, Geneva and Miami.
Agreed. The 'Holy' Roman Empire is what is wanted in the US.
Americans know less than nothing about real democracy.
They think it is majority rule they have no idea of its origins, its cycles, why it does or doesn't work. For them, like American Exceptionalism it is deified.
In the words of Firesign Theatre "Attention seekers!"" Everything You Know is Wrong."
Or, as Socrates would say: The more you know the less you know.
For all knowledge is based on questions.
It is not so much that we must answer questions but questions answers.
France and England are not the birthplace of modern Western Civilization.
Certainly Socrates is suspected of being Plato's creation because there is no historical record just as Jesus has no historical record.
Cervantes; Don Quixote was forced to look in the mirror.
Only America could turn the ultimate human tragedy into a Broadway Musical AND SELF DECECEPTION INTO A GLORIOUS QUEST.
THAT WAS WILSON'S COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION.
Creel went from Washington to Madison Avenue.
I think Americans want peace order and good government but understand the complexity of bottom up governance. It was the main topic of discussion of the founders and their fear of the tyranny of the masses.
That is why Franklin is so reviled he was a commoner or as Samuel Johnson called him a scoundrel.
I have found, sadly, in my limited study of this question, very few examples when humans have not lived in one or another system of dominance. It comes from us, our nature and blindnesses (both willful and unwitting). Those among us prone to do so, seem able to corrupt any system. There always results an establishment of a favored group, wielding power. When the problem seems to BE us, the dilemma is how it can be addressed.
I think that there are two types of critical thinkers.
There are those who critically think for their own selfish interests (sophistic thinkers), those of which you speak.
Then there are fair-minded critical thinkers who look, through reasoning within other points of view, the best solutions or answers to problems.
I tried to express this here and you might find it of interest.
OpEdNews Op Eds 12/31/2014 at 2:03 PM EST H4'ed 12/31/14
The Social and Psychological Roots of Machiavellian Thinking and Sophistic Thought
By Danny Weil
This article was first published November 18, 2014, at Philosophers for Change.
"For as we have said, the art of the sophist is a money-making art which trades on apparent wisdom, and so sophists aim at apparent proof, for sophistry is an appearance of wisdom without reality." --- (Quoted from Aristotle's On Sophistical Refutations, 171b32-7. Tr. E. S. Forster. Loeb Classical Library Vol. 400 (Harvard, 1955. P. 63)
The human mind is a marvelous set of formations and systems. It is the epicenter of consciousness and action. The human mind can form a unique identity. It can create its own view of the world. Rich experiences can emerge from its interactions with the world; bedeviled experiences also can transpire to destroy awakening.
The mind thinks, it feels, it wants, it has the ability to apprehend truths and suppress errors. It can achieve insights and it can fabricate prejudices, sabotage its own thinking and chloroform thought. Both useful truths and harmful misconceptions are the intermixed products of the human mind. The human mind can easily believe what is false, as well as what is true.
The human mind has the propensity to see beauty in right conduct and justify what is flagrantly unethical within bad conduct. It can love and hate, engineer illusions or confront reality. It can be kind, it can be cruel. It can advance knowledge, or it can promulgate error. It can be intellectually humble and honest or intellectually arrogant and perfidious. It can be empathic or narrow minded. It can be open or it can be closed. It can achieve a permanent state of expanding knowledge or a deadening, smothering state of narrowing ignorance and throttled thought. It is said to both transcend the creatures of lesser ability, while it more than often insults their innocence and nobility by its ignoble self-deception and repeatedly unconscious or conscious cruelty.
It brings so much together, a description that seems sadly more borne out every day.
In terms of what you write, I think that human mind is innately ill-equipped to deal with the internet-mediated world in which society essentially now lives and functions.
I think that in a certain sense, critical thinking reached its high point in the 17th and 18th centuries. There is a complex comprehensiveness to thought, evidenced in the subtlety and recursive nature (evident in even a single paragraph or sentence) and the reach of ideas in the writings from that time. (In what little of them I have read.)
It's "funny" (in a paradoxical way): it would seem that the near universal spread of literacy, and the sheer magnitude and availability of nearly the whole of human thought on the internet and in books would result in corresponding parallel rise of thought, and yet the opposite has occurred, along the lines of what you describe in the essay.
Per C Wright Mills: the idea of "human nature" is problematic, (I sometimes use the term, sometimes don't), but I think that we can definitely speak of tendencies and patterns of human thought, emotion, and behavior, both individual and collective, in the recurrence of patterns and manifestations.
I am learning so much. Such corrupt capitalist greed and elite disinformation. I always knew when the US weapons complex is making $$$ there is a war to be found and exploited; and that those weapons would sooner than later be used against us. No good planning, respect for human life, manipulation of public on a grand (and successful) scale. Thank you both so much for your truth and tireless work -
It is very important that people not believe for one second that the move to 'chip' us is anything other than control over the population. The claims re monitoring our carbon footprint is a NO SALE while the Oligarchs wage heavy polluting wars and causing more dirty energy to be used. And NEVER be fooled when 'CONVENIENCE' is used to take away more of our privacy and rights!!! I can only see the Oligarchs as INSANE as the push us toward nuclear war. I understand that they have spaceships and bunkers, but it still seems insane.
What a relief. I suppose I’m not the most unbiased reader, but when I read truth and honesty, it just floats off the page. Having just listened to a vile and dishonest interview between the gasbag mediocrity Sam Harris, and someone named Timothy Snyder a Yale professor, this is truly fresh air. Everyone should listen to that interview just to understand how dishonest minds work. And thank you Chris Hedges and Medea Benjamin for your knowledge, honesty, and wisdom.
There is no such thing as 'unbiased'. We bring our biases, conscious or unconscious to all life., And we are all biased for what we believe.
Biasness is not the problem.
The problem is how we get biases, if and why they are tools, if they are, and if we are aware of our biases and able to suspend them in order to enter into other points of view.
Sound clownish?
It should.
Look around you are the carousel of hate and depravity and tell me that the carny barkers in the great Carnival of capitalism has anything to offer working people or the dispossessed
You are right, but what comes next? ... the French revolution ... Robespierre, the reign of terror and the guillotine??? As the saying was: the revolution devours their own children - I am scared of this!!!
Wow. Well said.
Joe Biden, Senator John McCain, Victoria Nuland and John Kerry all met with the opposition before the 2014 coup, including the leader of the Svoboda Party, Oleh Tyahnybok, who was considered as antisemitic by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. This hatred was caused by the Holodomor, the big famine created by Stalin. in the 1930s Ukrainians saw Holodomor as being created by «Bolchevik Jews». It explains why Stepan Bandera became a nazi and was responsible for the death of thousands Jewish Polish citizens. Bandera is celebrated as a hero in Ukraine and the Ukrainian ambassador in Germany recently refused to condemn Bandera. Right Sector and Azov Battalion were involved in the 2014 coup, in the political exclusion of Russian linguistic rights and in the civil war. Neo-nazis are a minority in Ukraine but play an important role in the escalation of the war. And the Americans use them as a way to destabilize Russia, as suggested and recommended in the 2019 Rand Report "Extending Russia".
They are all war criminals. Forbes- Kerry's family made its fortune off of selling opium to China
... and from what I’ve been reading, the historical sale of opiates to the Chinese by Western oligarchs (as well as the enslavement of Chinese) is at the core of Chinese animosity towards the US, Japan, Britain and other countries. It forms the basis of their plans for retribution. Yes, the Chinese have a grand plan, indeed.
Jamie Raskin, Nazi Supporter Extraordinaire
Maryland's pompous congressman warms up to the Azov Battalion (by Scott Ritter – Nov 3, 2022)
https://www.scottritterextra.com/p/jamie-raskin-nazi-supporter-extraordinaire
If Russia did not exist, Ukraine would be a pariah state.
“Well, if the Blacks, and the Puerto Ricans, and the Chicanos and the Indians all get what they want, then there won’t be any United States...?”
-- Oregon high school student questioning a Cherokee speaker from the American Indian Movement
It is all a psyop. Land, culture and economics in a post modern society of decay and dreracination.
What a wonderful discussion - balsam for the soul to know that people with common sense still exist. I wish Mrs Benjamin great success in her announced tour of the country! The 'government' is completely out of control and without any basis to reality, no wonder that some conspiracy theorists think that they are lizards from ... (outer space??) - I guess even children in Kindergarten have more brains!! It is devastating what is happening now - there are so many problems for this beautiful planet and nobody in power doing the right things ...
Commentary after commentary will do nothing.
Organizing for socialism is what is needed.
But it takes education and courage, both of which Americans have none
American propaganda and nonsense. History tells us from the time before Alexander the Macedonian Empires drew maps not the people living on the land.
The Charge of the Light Brigade happened in Crimea as the Russian invaders were repelled by the European and Ottoman Empires and Germany wasn't a nation.
We have the American military inside our borders and we dare not declare neutrality.
The best we can do is support the Ukrainians and their call for sovereignty.
The only possible positive outcome in human terms is an end to the Czarist Empire and Russia becoming part of Europe.
The real question is not Russia whose Empire is no more but America where Putin would be a normal politician or oligarch. What will America do without Empire. It was in 1917 when William F Buckley Senior wanted war with Mexico because He not Mexico owned the oil in Mexico.
Buckley was of course given Venezuela because of his emotional distress.
I am a Canadian and a Quebecer and I like real social democracy, a free press, an educated population and peace order and good government and a road map to a better future.
I believe the Russian people and the American people deserve a future better than the present.
Zelensky told Ukraine what was worth dying for before he went into politics.
Reagan and Bush sold Saudi Snake Venom.
real social democracy
That will happen when capitalism ends, we hope.,
"The difference between democracy and dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first, and take orders later; in a dictatorship, you don't have to waste your time voting."
Charles Bukowski
I looked up Capitalism in My 1755 edition of the Dictionary of the English language. Capitalism is the way a society functions. I understand feudalism it is the basis of the Magna Carta where the Barons (landlords) ruled
Oligarchy seems a much more explicit definition of America and Pax Americana.
Democracy is another word that needs context.
We the people meant 5% in 1776 and less than five percent in 2022.
I am not real good at abstractions but BIG Numbers and REALLY BIG NUMBERS are my cup of tea.
That is why I don't gamble except for a weekly lottery ticket and I don't worry about being hit by lightning.
I tried to explain democracy to my American wife this week. We had a dental emergency and we needed to call my parliamentary representative's office to facilitate. In a democracy the top is where you start not where you finish. The Prime Minister serves everybody and commands little respect for their sacrifice.
It is one economic/social order.
We live in the age of dominance.
Master Slave
Lord serf
Employer employee
All class based societies that failed.
This is true but we are where are. Liberal Democracy is post World War Two.
Liberal democracy started in Vilnius Lithuania with the Enlightenment and ended in 1794 when Russia with the permission of all the Empires including the USA dealt Vilnius and liberal democracy a mortal blow.
The War in Ukraine began with the Peace of Westphalia and the Empires dividing the world. It was the Holy Roman Empire that started the war in Ukraine.
The world could do without another Holy Roman Empire centered in New York, Vegas , Moscow, Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Dallas, Geneva and Miami.
Americans know less than nothing about real democracy.
In the words of Firesign Theatre "Attention seekers!"" Everything You Know is Wrong."
France and England are not the birthplace of modern Western Civilization.
This is true but we are where are. Liberal Democracy is post World War Two.
Liberal democracy arose with capitalism. It is a managerial form for the state and economy.
There was no liberal democracy under slavery or feudalism.
And as capitalism decays, so does its political managerial class.
Liberal democracy started in Vilnius Lithuania with the Enlightenment and ended in 1794 when Russia with the permission of all the Empires including the USA dealt Vilnius and liberal democracy a mortal blow.
It started with capitalism. There is no 'one date' it was the evolution and revolution from fedualism,
The War in Ukraine began with the Peace of Westphalia and the Empires dividing the world. It was the Holy Roman Empire that started the war in Ukraine.
1649 I believe was the Peace of Westphalia. And this was to assure national sovereignty over the economy and war.
The world could do without another Holy Roman Empire centered in New York, Vegas , Moscow, Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Dallas, Geneva and Miami.
Agreed. The 'Holy' Roman Empire is what is wanted in the US.
Americans know less than nothing about real democracy.
They think it is majority rule they have no idea of its origins, its cycles, why it does or doesn't work. For them, like American Exceptionalism it is deified.
In the words of Firesign Theatre "Attention seekers!"" Everything You Know is Wrong."
Or, as Socrates would say: The more you know the less you know.
For all knowledge is based on questions.
It is not so much that we must answer questions but questions answers.
France and England are not the birthplace of modern Western Civilization.
That is why Plato said:
Everybody hates truth tellers.
Certainly Socrates is suspected of being Plato's creation because there is no historical record just as Jesus has no historical record.
Cervantes; Don Quixote was forced to look in the mirror.
Only America could turn the ultimate human tragedy into a Broadway Musical AND SELF DECECEPTION INTO A GLORIOUS QUEST.
THAT WAS WILSON'S COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION.
Creel went from Washington to Madison Avenue.
I think Americans want peace order and good government but understand the complexity of bottom up governance. It was the main topic of discussion of the founders and their fear of the tyranny of the masses.
That is why Franklin is so reviled he was a commoner or as Samuel Johnson called him a scoundrel.
I have found, sadly, in my limited study of this question, very few examples when humans have not lived in one or another system of dominance. It comes from us, our nature and blindnesses (both willful and unwitting). Those among us prone to do so, seem able to corrupt any system. There always results an establishment of a favored group, wielding power. When the problem seems to BE us, the dilemma is how it can be addressed.
I think that there are two types of critical thinkers.
There are those who critically think for their own selfish interests (sophistic thinkers), those of which you speak.
Then there are fair-minded critical thinkers who look, through reasoning within other points of view, the best solutions or answers to problems.
I tried to express this here and you might find it of interest.
OpEdNews Op Eds 12/31/2014 at 2:03 PM EST H4'ed 12/31/14
The Social and Psychological Roots of Machiavellian Thinking and Sophistic Thought
By Danny Weil
This article was first published November 18, 2014, at Philosophers for Change.
"For as we have said, the art of the sophist is a money-making art which trades on apparent wisdom, and so sophists aim at apparent proof, for sophistry is an appearance of wisdom without reality." --- (Quoted from Aristotle's On Sophistical Refutations, 171b32-7. Tr. E. S. Forster. Loeb Classical Library Vol. 400 (Harvard, 1955. P. 63)
The human mind is a marvelous set of formations and systems. It is the epicenter of consciousness and action. The human mind can form a unique identity. It can create its own view of the world. Rich experiences can emerge from its interactions with the world; bedeviled experiences also can transpire to destroy awakening.
The mind thinks, it feels, it wants, it has the ability to apprehend truths and suppress errors. It can achieve insights and it can fabricate prejudices, sabotage its own thinking and chloroform thought. Both useful truths and harmful misconceptions are the intermixed products of the human mind. The human mind can easily believe what is false, as well as what is true.
The human mind has the propensity to see beauty in right conduct and justify what is flagrantly unethical within bad conduct. It can love and hate, engineer illusions or confront reality. It can be kind, it can be cruel. It can advance knowledge, or it can promulgate error. It can be intellectually humble and honest or intellectually arrogant and perfidious. It can be empathic or narrow minded. It can be open or it can be closed. It can achieve a permanent state of expanding knowledge or a deadening, smothering state of narrowing ignorance and throttled thought. It is said to both transcend the creatures of lesser ability, while it more than often insults their innocence and nobility by its ignoble self-deception and repeatedly unconscious or conscious cruelty.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Social-and-Psychologic-by-Danny-Weil-Belief_Beliefs_Deception_Delusion-141231-996.html
Thank you for the link - that is a fine article.
It brings so much together, a description that seems sadly more borne out every day.
In terms of what you write, I think that human mind is innately ill-equipped to deal with the internet-mediated world in which society essentially now lives and functions.
I think that in a certain sense, critical thinking reached its high point in the 17th and 18th centuries. There is a complex comprehensiveness to thought, evidenced in the subtlety and recursive nature (evident in even a single paragraph or sentence) and the reach of ideas in the writings from that time. (In what little of them I have read.)
It's "funny" (in a paradoxical way): it would seem that the near universal spread of literacy, and the sheer magnitude and availability of nearly the whole of human thought on the internet and in books would result in corresponding parallel rise of thought, and yet the opposite has occurred, along the lines of what you describe in the essay.
Per C Wright Mills: the idea of "human nature" is problematic, (I sometimes use the term, sometimes don't), but I think that we can definitely speak of tendencies and patterns of human thought, emotion, and behavior, both individual and collective, in the recurrence of patterns and manifestations.
Again, you describe it well.
Medea Benjamin should be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for her strong voice and many years of activism for a peaceful world.
I am learning so much. Such corrupt capitalist greed and elite disinformation. I always knew when the US weapons complex is making $$$ there is a war to be found and exploited; and that those weapons would sooner than later be used against us. No good planning, respect for human life, manipulation of public on a grand (and successful) scale. Thank you both so much for your truth and tireless work -
FBI demands 66 YEARS to release data on Seth Rich laptop – (his murder is still unresolved.)
2020 elections were indeed STOLEN – by FBI !!
It is very important that people not believe for one second that the move to 'chip' us is anything other than control over the population. The claims re monitoring our carbon footprint is a NO SALE while the Oligarchs wage heavy polluting wars and causing more dirty energy to be used. And NEVER be fooled when 'CONVENIENCE' is used to take away more of our privacy and rights!!! I can only see the Oligarchs as INSANE as the push us toward nuclear war. I understand that they have spaceships and bunkers, but it still seems insane.
Thank you. Wonderful interview.
Binary thinking. This is the grave problem. The Beavis and Butthead cultural stance and educational stance serve idiocy and confusion.
The psyop is in full spectrum operation.
America is dead, both ideologically and in terms of any form of critical thinking, critical scrutiny or understanding.
We live in an incubator of lies and deceit.
My heart goes out to Medea, but unfortunately her movement has failed.
Perhaps her thirteen million dollars in a Trust in her name will help.
Chris, you are calling on the wrong people.
Go to the youth.
Interview them.
Suggest their points of view be critically examined but please, no more controlled opposition.
If "her movement" failed, then we all have failed. She simply opened a door. We were supposed to walk through.
Good point. But Zombies do not walk, unless risen from the grave