/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I wonder if this will have any bearing on Consortium News' ongoing lawsuit against "Newsguard" and the US government.

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/23/us-government-newsguard-sued-by-consortium-news/

>>476953
These cases appear related somewhat, but the consortium news case is about defamation and a freedom of speech violation against a specific publisher. While the CTI League stuff seems to show stuff going into the direction of sedition. I'm guessing there is some aliment but i might be wrong.

I'm not very knowledgeable about legal matters so take all of this with a grain of salt. In the US it appears to be the case that who ever upholds the constitution is the legitimate government and not upholding it means not being the government. So if the US institutions still work, the censorship complex will likely get canned.

I don't know how it is in the UK, if you look at what kind of laws they recently passed they might already have fully descended into a Banana-republic.

The most telling part is this:
<“If you talk to the average Chinese citizen, they absolutely believe that the Great Firewall of China is not there for censorship. They believe that it's there because the Chinese Communist Party wants to protect the citizenry and they absolutely believe that's a good thing. If the US government tried to sell that narrative, we would absolutely lose our minds and say, ‘No, no, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights.’ So the in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different.”

They think Chinese citizens trust the Chinese government because the Chinese Communist Party is better at manipulating people than the US political system. When the reality is much more banal: Chinese people trust their government because the average living standards in China have quintupled over the last 30 years. The US citizens do not trust their government because American living standards have declined over that same period of time.

<“SJ called us the ‘Hogwarts school for misinformation and disinformation,’”
They suffer from magical thinking, about being able to put a spell on people. They want a cheat-code for getting people to trust their government without having to do actual "good governance" meaning running the institutions state in a manner that it benefits the interests of the masses.

All that said the Chinese population is eventually going to dismantle the censorship mechanisms in China as well. You have to look at the historical processes. China hasn't even fully completed the transition from peasant economy to wage-labor commodity economy, so all the struggles for civil liberties that happened in the west are still ahead of them. China "opening up" on civil liberties might coincide with the west closing down and that'll cause a massive brain-drain to china, because the intelligentsia really likes their intellectual liberties.

All the civil liberties in the west represented a significant strategical advantage because it exerted a pull on many competent people all over the world. Not having to worry about discrimination because of political, philosophical or religious expression is a strong "feature" in the game of civilization.

The political result of this little dark age likely will change the conception of liberties. At the moment we assume that liberties are being upheld and a violation has to be demonstrated. The default assumption is trust. The default assumption will likely change to no-trust and liberties we'll be assumed to be perpetually violated until it can be demonstrated that they are being upheld. We'll stop looking at liberties as a state of nature that can get disrupted by evil doers, and will go towards the principle that liberties are a condition that has to be actively produced. Maybe that's an adaptation of technological environments that we neglected to consider.

>>476953
Not really applicable. The US government has regulatory power to tag speech as "un-American" without confiscating the press. CN can still write, their articles are available (as intended because it is itself an op, a cutout that doesn't reveal much new like many pulp altnews sites).
There really isn't anything in the Constitution preventing the US from implementing something like Chinese censorship, not that the Constitution matters much. It would be problematic if political organs closely tied to the state overtly espoused a party line that prohibited any views but theirs from being expressed, to the point where speaking of disapproved thoughts was chilled to the point of being effectively illegal. The US has skirted around that line with enough plausible deniability, whereas in China, the government's law gave the Party every right to regulate speech for what they consider the public good. As far as what actually happens, the US is already censored much like China so far as the government needs it to be. What the US doesn't have is Chinese net access restrictions which tie your access to a national ID, and that has to do with the running battle over national ID which is not a thing in China. If national ID is fully implemented as is planned, there is nothing in US law that would prevent them from doing everything China does if not more. Again, it should be made clear that laws don't really impede the powers that be in the US, and soon enough the Constitution will be a dead letter - not over censorship or guns or any particular part, but because the entire document presents impediments to what the US courts and enforcement apparati want to do. They need to get rid of anything like due process or anything presenting a public record of what they're doing, or anything suggesting the coming carnage can be stopped. The worst is yet to come.

If that were hung over the head of Americans, and they were told they could be like China instead, they would be much more amenable to being China on steroids. But, the reasons for the changes in US policy aren't about stamping out freedumbs for the lulz. They can already do most of that within Constitutional precedent - the document doesn't say what these morons think it says at all, and a basic civics course would tell you this. If the SC made it illegal for someone to call a fascist a fascist in the 1940s, you don't really have freedom to speak as you please. The first amendment concerned the press, rather than a right to say whatever you like or let others appreciate it. Basically it amounts to saying the government won't just outright smash your press if you say something they don't like - and even then, that is nearly unenforceable and the US President did exactly that not too long after the document was shoved down our throats. It was illegal and the law struck down, but it was clear that the federal and state governments could censor more or less as they pleased. The real reasons for that language - and by the way the bill of rights was tacked on and disapproved by many of the people who wrote it - suggested something about legal rights generally. It's the parts about free assembly and the establishment of religion that were most relevant, rather than the press or saying words. Free assembly has already been shat on so royally that we live in a highly segregated society strictly regimented into castes or grades of civic worth, and this is not just legal but upheld repeatedly by the supreme law of the land and enforced beyond those mandates. If that has been established for a century, nothing in the Constitution about your rights means a fucking thing, and they know this.

>>476955
I should add here the purpose of all of this - the ramping up of censorship - has nothing to do with convincing the people to like the government or believe anything. If the government wanted the people to believe anything, they wouldn't bark contradictory orders and there would be by this point a clear government propaganda organ that anyone would have a reason to believe more than the privately held press. It has long been known that the press is full of prostitutes who would write anything for money and shitcan anyone who writes the truth. You saw American journalists and writers bemoaning that during the late 19th century. Nothing about public relations is about fostering trust in institutions or even pretending there can be trust. The attitude of PR is openly contemptuous of the people and lies flagrantly about basic things, openly disparaging the ruled as cattle. Read Public Opinion:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6456/pg6456-images.html

The purpose of this is to tighten the ranks of those "in the know" and segregate them from those "out of the know", who are relegated to an increasingly marginal existence. It has less to do with "hiding the truth", then it does with making it illegal for anyone "out of the know" to say the truth. This isn't about censorship by the removal of certain words or enforcing a singular party line. This is about suggesting that only certain people are allowed to speak or act at all, and others have no rights whatsoever. It is impossible to do this so long as ordinary people believe a free press or anything like it is operative, even as a principle that the state could cancel at any time. China's censorship only sort of does this, and does so within the precedent of communist rule. It amounts to basically "don't get involved in politics, remember the Party rules and gets its special privileges and clubs that you can't join", and stuff that is publicly acknowledged. You are warned about what you're not allowed to say and given ample opportunity to make amends for wrongspeak, recant your statements, and the things you're not allowed to say are things like "porn rocks" and links to porn libraries, or things clearly intended to shit up the internet to make it unusable. Look at the chilling effect on the US internet and Chinese censorship seems favorable - they don't want complete filth flooding everything and crowding out anything in the commons. You are allowed to disagree with the government within boundaries, which is no different from the US in practice, and you can speak (carefully) about things the government does. The US censorship is about making it illegal to stop anything - the faithful that the state wishes to elevate are granted absolute impunity in anything they do to those who have no such right. It extends beyond speech and grants absolute impunity for any action. What this means is that the regime in the US wants a general purge on the basis of "crimes of Being", and if you're selected as a Bad Person, anyone may attack you for anything, at any time, and the law will support this effort and consider it patriotic. All of this would be technically within bounds of the Constitution but it would become very tortured logic unless it was no longer possible to even raise the legal question at all. And so, the US can either formally scrap the Constitution, or make it effectively a dead letter through extreme lawfare, such that only AI lawyers can "represent you", in a court gamed so that the favored parties cannot possibly lose. In effect, the favored groups will have a monopoly on reality itself, and to act against it is be insane at the least. It will be illegal to even ignore it and attempt to carry on.

This, if you don't already know, is the experience of an extremely submerged minority in this country, who already have no legal rights. They were already ruled insane, and their "free" existence is just institutionalization in the open. That's what happens if you are ruled totally insane - you have no rights whatsoever. The new laws would eliminate the need for that judgement to be raised formally - you would be guilty of insanity until proven innocent, rather than "innocent until proven guilty", and so the presumption of sanity that is still regarded . Even the institutionalized are granted certain "rights" that are expected to be honored, though they are entirely at the mercy of mental health authority and only exist because the family or any advocate could in principle question that sort of absolute impunity, which has happened often enough to be a nuisance. If you are declared insane, you have no agency to act in your own defense - any agency you appear to have is entirely a superficial appearance that is entertained. Your signature, your ability to sign a contract, is only entertained so far as it is convenient to do so. Of course, in practice, any contract can be voided for this purpose, and legal fuckery can twist contract law to mean anything. But, the new idea is to simply make it the default that humans are insane, and then sanity is granted by a body of experts who specifically approve your rights. "Technically", you can still have fundamental rights, because you don't have a right to be automatically declare sane until proven otherwise. Right now, the standard is "sane until proven insane", and again, there are certain expectations regarding treatment of the insane, and in theory an advocate can vouch for rehabilitation. Under the new expectation, rehabilitation as a concept will be absolutely inadmissible. The concept would be so alien to the intent of the new law that it would be completely out of line with their declarations of what reality is. You would only be "habilitated" through a proper process of "vetting" which effectively locks in your status by the age of 16. Once insane, always insane, and they have already made it clear they will not allow any advocacy. Past slaveries allowed advocates and manumission. Not this one.

>>476968
And the way this is done wouldn't "make everyone insane", so much as it would suggest sanity is a rare condition that only the favored can possess, and this must be judged carefully. Most people would exist in a limbo - told you're "sane enough" but "not really sane" and constantly run down. In short, the expectation is to treat normal people as if they are insane, and then present the "legally insane" as living examples of what happens if the peasants get too uppity. This was trialed during the 1990s and was wildly successful, but the only way they can keep going is to intensify it and maximize it.

>>476966
>>476967
>>476968
>>476969
Whoa uygha, ever heard of paragraph breaks?

It's also what "basic income" trial programs were suggesting - trialing the social relations that would place everyone in this double bind, unless they were granted specific exemption from it. Those who are granted exemptions would constantly live with the threat of termination and would be sorted into their profession, told "this is what you are, and no more". A smaller group are granted "absolute impunity and absolute freedom". This is the cult that believes they're going to become gods.

That, of course, is what they plan, and what their actions since 2020 - planned as early as the 1980s - could only be understood as accomplishing. There is no other plan for them, except interminable war or ad hoc stalling tactics to mollify anyone until purges can eliminate those who have no choice but to live in spite of this. There is no "other system" or alternative that you would find in another country. China is taking another path to the same outcome, but has to worry about the rule of the Communist Party - at least, for now. It's not hard to see that the ruling elite would be happy to ditch the Communist label as long as they can continue ruling, and it stays mostly because of old people and because sudden disappearance of communism would be fatal to China's elites.

>>476966
>>476967
>>476968
>>476969
The problem people have with it all is that it a loophole around the 1st amendment and the legal precedent thereof. It's something that violates the spirit of the law without violating the letter of it.

>>476967
>>476968
>>476969
What you are describing is an open class system.

All the trouble we currently have with raising class consciousness, trying to explain how capitalism fucks over workers, that would not be necessary. Organizing a revolution to overthrow the system you described would not take more than a few weeks.

Most capitalists do not treat the lower classes with open contempt, for good reason. The level of humiliation you are describing would get the ruling class hacked to peaces, like what happened during slave revolts.

>>476976
My god, you really believe this is about narratives on the internet. People called me crazy!

What this means is that there will be no ambiguity. It will be open season on anyone who isn't selected to live - and that's what COVID was, a test of lockouts for this next step, and of public willingness to support such a regime. They have their faithful marching in step, at least for now. The true believers who know exactly what they fought for since the 1990s will never, ever leave. They will fight to the death and resort to unlimited terror to get what they dreamed of. If the escalation of purges stops, they're done, and they know it. It's keeping those who are just basic liberals or conservatives on-side that they worry about - they have far less to gain from this ideology and know this devours them before it will devour the instigators, and their only hope is to remain useful enough or find some way to become more favored than the enablers and functionaries. Eventually the joke will be on many of the true believers once this status quo is locked in for enough years, and the shock troops are no longer necessary. They will be disposed of, and most of the venal stopped caring. They only believe in eugenics and can't not at this point.

>>476976
Maybe you should recall in history that there is only one slave revolt in human history that was ever successful, and that was not purely a slave revolt. Look at Haiti now and ask how well that did, and how they were punished to make sure nothing of the sort ever happened again - and bear in mind that among the Haitian rebels were the owners of the slaves, who were about as fucked by French rule.

Anyway, that's the plan, and it wouldn't have moved this far unless there was widespread commitment. If there was going to be a revolt, it would have happened in 2020 at the latest, and the last time you actually could have had a revolution was the 1990s. That still would have required large parts of the political class to allow such a thing, and clearly they had no interest in that. You don't seem to understand what a revolution is.

Now, you could find a large part of the political class that would be ready for revolution of some sort, but no such event is possible. The state is armed so deeply and compromised anyone who would have any standing to start the political class's part of the rebellion. The standing bureaucracy will support anything because they're in the faction that is winning. If they wanted the policy to change, they wouldn't invoke revolution. They would invoke the institutional coup, which is the way anything would happen at this stage of human history, in this time and place. Republics do not face revolutions.

>>476986
>They will fight to the death
Sure it's somewhat likely that people trying to build such a horrendous system (as you described it), would be killed.

>>476987
>Maybe you should recall in history that there is only one slave revolt in human history that was ever successful
Slave revolts did not lack the power to crush their masters. Many slave owning casts got wholesale liquidated. The reason why slave revolts ultimately failed was because without the mechanical power production of steam-engines, slave society would always re-emerge. The productive forces simply weren't advanced enough to level up in the mode of production.

But today the material conditions are no longer like that. We have like a thousand different ways to make power, not just mechanical power, but electrical power which is even more versatile. Slave society is utterly retarded if you don't need humans for mechanical power. It would blow up spectacularly if you tried.

I get where you are coming from tho, i see the headlines about the expansion of private prisons in the US. But that's a situation that's sooner or later going to explode.

>>476989
What fucking world do you live in? My god, narratives destroyed your brain. The destruction of mechanical thinking has made this brain poison possible. Only on leftypol…

What scares the shit out of people when they think of slavery is the full knowledge that history has shown the hopelessness of slavery. Even if redeemed, you're never fully free. The precedent of crushing revolts so successfully made that clear, and every revolt crushed was followed by brutal reprisals.

I don't even know where to begin with you. The whole post is so far removed from anything that actually happens or what politics is. I think it should be self-evident by now that people don't rebel on their own, and certainly not as a reaction they didn't think about until the moment. Most slave rebellions focus entirely on escape, because fighting slavery in the open was unthinkable. If you escaped to wilderness, that was as good as it got. Usually escape from slavery just meant someone free redeemed you for their own purposes, as it happened many times in American history. You wouldn't escape without a plan because of impulsive feelings. There was an escape route, an expectation of what to do, and of course the ability to even start escaping. You weren't going to lead a slave army to victory against trained legions, and the South was so effective at crushing revolts that you only ever saw a few dozen slaves escape at most.

>>476998
he's right doe and in more ways than one. all that is needed is a vanguard party to use the existing political energy. even if you aren't in the US you've still got a chance of winning after military revolt: you just have to lose the next war with a drafted army. 3d printed weapons might also close the gap for other countries provided more reliable ignition is developed like the based shinzo shotgun. Once retarded college students, autists, and troons are pushed to the obscure and auxiliary positions in orgs we will see major movement.

>>477000
You mean the political energy that is so hooked on narratives that they're afraid of their own shadow or naming their enemies? That let itself be sheepdogged in the most hilariously sad way possible and made themselves into a joke?

There is no political force opposing what I described as an organized front, and what you're calling the left is less than a front. It's the exact opposite - something designed to lose spectacularly so that more poor people are thrown away than would happen if the people were resigned to hopelessness. There is an actual resistance and an actual left, but they are far too weak to mount a resistance, and much of the actual left wishes to reconcile and get the crumbs of political privilege if they can still get that. Politically, if I were a left politician, I would do that. I would know the people are done, and the people won't be given anything they actually wanted because what the people wanted was none of this at all. They don't exist as props to be cajoled by idiots.

Hilariously, the few people who would actually want it to change are the autists and troons, because they know they're prime hate targets and they won't just be killed but maximally tortured. Most of us were already killed during the pre-democide initiated in earnest during the 1990s. What's happening now wouldn't start if that weren't wildly successful. Virtually all of the "autists" in the 1990s school are dead now, life expectancy of ~36 is only possible with outright extermination policy. Those who survived are like fucking survivors of the Nazi purge. You can't even admit what was done, and that the bastards are going for all the blood they can.

>>477002
learn how to reply faggot. 90s uyghas aren't even dead they're still teaching the young and beginning to regroup. Nowhere near the wipeout you claim. What's happening now is a major rediscovery of what was lost in the 90s with the slow collapse of US international influence. Now's not the time to doompost, now is the time for an inter-(and internal)party fight to the death over who will lead the movement.

>>477005
The smart communists gave up in the 1990s. Those who knew what this really meant committed suicide and they would tell everyone humanity is doomed. Doomed. They were right.

If you want anything in this world, you would have to do the exact opposite of what you're doing. That has produced 150 years of failure every time, and shitted up anything people were doing to end this beast and save their lives. Ideologues and cloistered fools do not move history in that way. They facilitate the worst it has to offer.

It's like, you have an actual genocide going on right in front of you, and you're expected to smile and act like it's not happening, and certain people throw it in your face to glorify the maximization of torture. Israel is testing the maximization of torture machine right now with their latest PR - it is telling that they can mask off and show what they really were.

>>477005
>What's happening now is a major rediscovery of what was lost in the 90s with the slow collapse of US international influence.
So you think the reason why the US left was weakened so much was due to the US's triumphant geo-political period after the first cold-war.
It's an interesting theory.

Most places that had communist revolutions were countries that had been beaten in geo-political contests. The Russian empire had a really bad naval defeat against Japan, which probably played a role in the bolshevik revolution.

However I'm not convinced that lefty political influence is inversely proportional to success in geo-political struggles, but there are a few indicators pointing in that direction, none the less.

Do you have theory that explains:
<less international influence = more rediscovery of lefty politics

>>477031
Yes this was the conclusion of lenin in https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/ch01.htm The strengthening of the national bourgeoisie can only come at the expense of the proletariat. Wars also foster "turbulent sentiments" as outlined by lenin in https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jul/26.htm The momentum from this turbulence must be turned against one's own country for the defeat of one's own government in civil war.
>>477009
ok so give up then fag if you're too much of a troon to take mental blows I doubt you'd be useful anyway. Alternatively, you can start organizing irl and be ready for activation when the time comes.

>>477032
>Yes this was the conclusion of lenin
You think this still holds ?

Is the US poised to go through an internal upheaval which will be set off by suffering a big military defeat in some kind of battle abroad ?

>>477034
You people are fucking hopeless.

>>477034
it's looking more and more probable but only time will tell. We need to get more orgs on the same page to take advantage should it happen. We must distribute Lenin and take leadership roles in our orgs
>>477035
only hopeless one is you, doomer troon

>>477041
Is this satire?

>>477041
>it's looking more and more probable but only time will tell.
It kinda depends on the recklessness of the ruling class. If they don't charge into a dumb military adventure where they take a massive L. The imperial part of the US might just evaporate away. And the local governance adapts to becoming a normal country without an upheaval.

>We need to get more orgs on the same page to take advantage should it happen.
Seems like a decent precaution.