New Operating Manual for Spaceship America

[IanEye]

apologies to you brekin.

[Rory]

This thread is specifically for discussing a work of sophisticated propaganda, performed by a shill in the employ of neocon hawks and aggrieved, ultra capitalist oligarchs.

No tangential discussion plz

[Luther Blissett]

What I am trying to say about the youth is that they all know the system doesn't work for them. It was predicted long before the Sanders campaign that they would be the first American generation (since before the Industrial Revolution?) to not do as well as their parents', and they know it.

I must beg to differ on this whole idea of the Millenials being "the first American generation (since before the Industrial Revolution?) to not do as well as their parents' "

exhibit A:
Billy Joel's "Nylon Curtain" album which was released in the fall of 1982.


every child had a pretty good shot
to get at least as far as their old man got
but something happened on the way to that place
they threw an American flag in our face

I consider myself a former member of this community. One who comes bank to lurk now and then when I'm bored out of my mind, but beyond that I have finally moved on.

And it's getting very hard to staaaaaaaayyyy.....

.

I do have a special closeness with the contents of this song and so I know that it was definitely sung only in regards to the rust-belt working class stock from which I was born. As working class whites, Puerto Ricans and African Americans they were not the first cohort to not do as well as their parents, but this does not encapsulate the generational thrust as a whole that has finally caught up with society. That being the affects of Reaganomics which further consolidated wealth from accelerating productivity into the hands of an ever-more acute ownership class. Even Allentonian Xers did better than the Boomers.

ON EDIT:
This helps to demonstrates that our future is far misaligned with Russia's.

[brekin]

apologies to you brekin.

No worries. The "catholic boy" sub-thread title moniker I assume is for my orthodox adhering to the OP.

This thread is specifically for discussing a work of sophisticated propaganda, performed by a shill in the employ of neocon hawks and aggrieved, ultra capitalist oligarchs. No tangential discussion plz

Please cite from his work proving such.

In other news, no doubt all the work of sophisticated propaganda, performed by a shill in the employ of neocon hawks and aggrieved, ultra capitalist oligarchs:

Russia Moves to Ban Jehovah’s Witnesses as ‘Extremist’
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/worl ... pe=article

Chechen Authorities Arresting and Killing Gay Men, Russian Paper Says
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/worl ... -says.html

Second Moscow opposition protest leads to arrests
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39 ... ting-story

[IanEye]

perhaps more on point, do you think there was any coordination between the rollout of this Pomerantsev tome and Adam Curtis' "Bitter Lake"?

Both pieces of media seemed to have had a rollout in late 2014.

.

But this meditation on Surkov is from 2012. So, maybe it was just a zeitgeist thing.

"Catholic Boy" is a cool album by the Jim Carroll Band.

.

[Rory]

You are only permitted to critique the propaganda through sourcing from the propagandist alone.

This sisyphean conundrum sounds like the plot line from a book like this:

In other news, no doubt all the work of sophisticated propaganda, performed by a shill in the employ of neocon hawks and aggrieved, ultra capitalist oligarchs:

Russia Moves to Ban Jehovah’s Witnesses as ‘Extremist’
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/worl ... pe=article

Chechen Authorities Arresting and Killing Gay Men, Russian Paper Says
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/worl ... -says.html

Second Moscow opposition protest leads to arrests
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39 ... ting-story

[IanEye]

ok, I read some more of that 2012 Curtis essay and he mentions Pomerantsev:

A TV journalist who worked in Soviet television called Peter Pomerantsev has written a fascinating article about Surkov. You can find it here. In it he argues that Surkov has turned Russian politics into postmodern absurdist theatre. In a way, just like Limonov, Surkov is adapting avant-garde ideas to this new political world.

"The novelist Eduard Limonov describes Surkov himself as having 'turned Russia into a wonderful postmodernist theatre, where he experiments with old and new political models'.

There's something in this. In contemporary Russia the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away.

Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is indefinable."

[brekin]

You are only permitted to critique the propaganda through sourcing from the propagandist alone.

If you aren't critiquing the source Rory, what are you critiquing?
And other commentaries on the source are welcome, but if you don't use the actual source as primary, then you have no idea what you are talking about.

Rory: Hates Sushi: Has never tried it.
Rory: Hates Disney World: Has never been there.
Rory: Hates Disco Music: Has never heard it.
Rory: Hates the book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Has never read it.

[Elvis]

If you read the Mad magazine parody, you don't really need to see the movie.

[Rory]

I should offer the caveat that I helped get a local Democrat elected and might be doing the same right now if the person decides how they want to run.

What I am trying to say about the youth is that they all know the system doesn't work for them. It was predicted long before the Sanders campaign that they would be the first American generation (since before the Industrial Revolution?) to not do as well as their parents', and they know it. They know about the non-sustainability of the system and of growth, they know about inequality, they know the answers to all the questions boomers ask in their think pieces, like, "why aren't Millennials buying houses?" "Why aren't Millennials getting married?" "Why don't Millennials care about diamonds?" "Why don't Millennials have 401Ks?"

It might not happen tomorrow, but the shift will probably happen right around the same time there's a spasmodic methane pulse and a major coastal city gets hit with a superstorm and permanently inundates it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

One by one, members of the Mahoning County Democratic Party poured out their frustrations: Just months after the presidential election, they felt folks like them were being forgotten — again. The party’s comeback strategy was being steered by protesters, consultants and elitists from New York and California who have no idea what voters in middle America care about.

But worst of all, they said, the party hadn’t learned from what they saw as the biggest message from November’s election: Democrats have fallen completely out of touch with America’s blue-collar voters.

“It doesn’t matter how much we scream and holler about jobs and the economy at the local level. Our national leaders still don’t get it,” said David Betras, the county’s party chair. “While Trump is talking about trade and jobs, they’re still obsessing about which bathrooms people should be allowed to go into.”

[brekin]

I should offer the caveat that I helped get a local Democrat elected and might be doing the same right now if the person decides how they want to run.
What I am trying to say about the youth is that they all know the system doesn't work for them. It was predicted long before the Sanders campaign that they would be the first American generation (since before the Industrial Revolution?) to not do as well as their parents', and they know it. They know about the non-sustainability of the system and of growth, they know about inequality, they know the answers to all the questions boomers ask in their think pieces, like, "why aren't Millennials buying houses?" "Why aren't Millennials getting married?" "Why don't Millennials care about diamonds?" "Why don't Millennials have 401Ks?"
It might not happen tomorrow, but the shift will probably happen right around the same time there's a spasmodic methane pulse and a major coastal city gets hit with a superstorm and permanently inundates it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

One by one, members of the Mahoning County Democratic Party poured out their frustrations: Just months after the presidential election, they felt folks like them were being forgotten — again. The party’s comeback strategy was being steered by protesters, consultants and elitists from New York and California who have no idea what voters in middle America care about.
But worst of all, they said, the party hadn’t learned from what they saw as the biggest message from November’s election: Democrats have fallen completely out of touch with America’s blue-collar voters.
“It doesn’t matter how much we scream and holler about jobs and the economy at the local level. Our national leaders still don’t get it,” said David Betras, the county’s party chair. “While Trump is talking about trade and jobs, they’re still obsessing about which bathrooms people should be allowed to go into.”

Totally off topic. Keep it on topic.
Ask for help if you can't surmise the topic.

If you read the Mad magazine parody, you don't really need to see the movie.

Really?

The Mad magazine parody:

A work of sophisticated propaganda, performed by a shill in the employ of neocon hawks and aggrieved, ultra capitalist oligarchs.
― Rory, Re: New Operating Manual for Spaceship America thread.

The movie:

“I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act.
Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

[Rory]

Read the Mark Ames article. Shows what a sack of shit you're promoting

[brekin]

Read the Mark Ames article. Shows what a sack of shit you're promoting

Take your own reading advice and go long form Rory. You know not what you speak.
I've eaten at the restaurant myself, and don't need to rely on someone elses restaurant review, or their toadying pamphleteer.

“The weekly news round-up show is on. The well-dressed presenter walks across the well-made set and into shot, briskly summing up the week’s events, all seemingly quite normal. Then suddenly he’ll twirl around to camera 2, and before you know it he’s talking about how the West is sunk in the slough of homosexuality, and only Holy Russia can save the world from Gay-Europa, and how among us all are the fifth columnists, the secret Western spies who dress themselves up as anti-corruption activists but are actually all CIA (for who else would dare to criticise the President?), while the West is sponsoring anti-Russian ‘fascists’ in Ukraine and all of them are out to get Russia and take away its oil, and the American-sponsored fascists are crucifying Russian children on the squares of Ukrainian towns because the West is organising a genocide against Us Russians and there are women crying on camera saying how they were threatened by roving gangs of Russia-haters, and of course only the President can make this right, and that’s why Russia did the right thing to annex Crimea, and is right to arm and send mercenaries to Ukraine, and that this is just the beginning of the great new conflict between Russia and the Rest. And when you go to check (through friends, through Reuters, through anyone who isn’t Ostankino) whether there really are fascists taking over Ukraine or whether there are children being crucified you find it’s all untrue, and the women who said they saw it all are actually hired extras dressed up as ‘eye-witnesses’.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

[Rory]

Great find, Brekin. This book (and my not ever going to read it) prompted you to make this thread which has helped me learn more about things which maybe would have stayed occluded.

Pomerantsev's book, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,” and his thesis driven home in articles and in the halls of US-UK government power: That Putin’s brand of totalitarianism represents something absolutely new, innovative and uniquely threatening — an avant-garde totalitarianism for which we in the West are nearly helpless against; a totalitarianism constructed entirely out of virtual reality, political technologies, and distorted realities, beamed through televisions and the Internet, brainwashing the Russian public and anyone else who crosses their information-beams in ways so sophisticated and disruptive, everything we hold dear is doomed to collapse before it.

I wish I was exaggerating his thesis, but there you have it.

But his book is oddly vague on details — just one of its problems. I’d never heard of Pomerantsev while working there; he claims (and I’m sure it’s true) that he spent a few years working for the quasi-western TNT network, where one of my own best friends worked as a top producer for several years. I asked recently him if he or his TNT contacts remembered Pomerantsev there because I'd never heard of him in my years in Moscow; he hadn't either. I don’t doubt he was there; but there is a vague, foggy, masked quality to his writing and to his approach to most things, including his intimate vignettes in his book: people without last names or recognizable faces, characters whose canned descriptions seem lifted from writers’ workshop classes rather than from experience. Much of his book reads as an intimate personal “memoir” of his life in the 2000s, and yet it's peopled with Russian caricatures from the 1990s: mobsters, whores, suicidal runway models, hedonistic New Russians, even a scrappy World Bank do-gooder from western Europe. It's hard to believe anyone would paint a World Bank or IMF representative as the scrappy underdog in Russia, unless perhaps that painter has a personal stake in painting them that way. Which, it turns out, Pomerantsev does: He is listed as "Senior Fellow" at a neoliberal think-tank called the Legatum Institute, founded by a highly secretive billionaire vulture capitalist notorious for always remaining in the shadows.

This is what makes Pomerantsev a particularly complicated and interesting character-study for me. Because on the one hand, his book's thesis — Kremlin political technologists manipulating a virtual reality via television on a vast new scale — has a lot of truth to it, and is worth studying. But the other part of the thesis, that this is something completely new and invented by Putin, is so patently false it makes a mockery of his own reader. It isn't just that Kremlin reality-distortion and political technology began under Yeltsin with the full backing and advice of the West; it's that our own governments are guilty of this as well, as anyone who remembers the fake WMD scare to invade Iraq can tell you.

The real giveaway for me, which got me looking into who Pomerantsev works for, was his choice of heroes in the scary Kremlin information wars: western investors, and western global financial institutions. People like billionaire vulture capitalist Bill Browder, the bloodless grandson of former US Communist Party leader Earl Browder, who served as Putin’s most loyal attack dog while he was raking in his billions, but then transformed himself into the Andrei Sakharov of vulture capitalism as soon as Putin’s KGB tossed Browder out of their circle and decided to keep his share of the take for themselves.

Legatum turns out to be a project of the most secretive billionaire vulture capital investor you’ve (and I’d) never heard of: Christopher Chandler, a New Zealander who, along with his billionaire brother Richard Chandler, ran one of the world’s most successful vulture capital funds—Sovereign Global/Sovereign Asset Management. That family of funds, based in the offshore haven of Monaco, operated until 2004, when the Chandler brothers, Richard and Chris, divided their billions into two separate funds.

The article on the Chandlers has an illustration of two respectable, gray-haired brothers in fine tailored bankers' suits, sweating in fear before an angry Russian barbarian aiming an AK at them to keep them out of a shareholder's meeting—the perfect cover to Pomerantsev's book, if he'd been honest enough...

In 2007, Chris Chandler, the billionaire behind Dubai’s Legatum Capital, launched the Legatum Institute, and staffed it with senior Bush Administration neocons. Legatum’s first leadership team was led by two former senior members of the Bush Administration’s National Security Council: William Inboden (who specialized in “counter-radicalization”) and Michael Magan, who also served as Special Assistant to President Bush. After Obama came to power, Legatum was headed by uber-neocon Jeffrey Gedmin, former director of the old CIA front Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (né “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism”), and one of the original signatories to the neocon heavyweight “Project for the New American Century” alongside Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the Iraq war gang.

Nowadays, Legatum tries to be a bit more discreet about its White House national security/neocon connections, although Anne Applebaum’s blinding presence on the Legatum staff alongside Pomerantsev somehow slipped through.

Last year, Pomernatsev co-authored another one of these slick Legatum white papers with an up-and-coming neocon from the late George W. Bush era, Michael Weiss. Together, Pomerantsev and Weiss summed up the threat Russia's avant-garde political technologies pose to world order, warning:

"the struggle against disinformation, strategic corruption and the need to reinvigorate the global case for liberal democracy are not merely Russia-specific issues: today’s Kremlin might perhaps be best viewed as an avant-garde of malevolent globalization."

That Pomerantsev would team up with a neocon as compromised as Michael Weiss is enough to call into question the value of everything he's written. During the late Bush years, Weiss worked for the neocon organ of Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard; afterwards, Weiss headed up a neocon PR project, "Just Journalism," which policed the English-language press for any journalism critical of Israel in the wake of its brutal war on Gaza in 2008-9. Then, as Syria descended into civil war, Weiss became one of the leading neocon warmongers pushing for America to invade Syria. Perhaps most troubling of all when it comes to Pomerantsev’s credibility — Weiss played a lead role in promoting the career of one of the most notorious academic frauds of our time, Elizabeth O’Bagy, the fake Syria “expert” whom Weiss teamed up with to argue for war in Syria. Apparently after O’Bagy was exposed as a fraud with no Syria credentials, Weiss skulked away, only to reappear with a new co-author—Peter Pomeranstev—and a new beat: Putin's Russia. Despite having zero Russia background and expertise, Weiss has successfully reemerged lately as a Russia expert on various TV news programs — the Elizabeth O’Bagy of Putin critics — and Pomerantsev’s role in this partnership appears to be laundering Weiss' credentials.

And at the very end of Pomerantsev’s book, in his acknowledgements, he thanks Ben Judah for giving him the final edit read-through.

Really? Ben Judah? Can’t the neocon veal pen try a little harder? This is just insulting. Judah, for those who don’t know, got busted last year forging what had been his biggest scoop ever for Politico magazine: Judah alleged, falsely, that Putin had secretly proposed to Poland’s president in 2008 to carve up Ukraine together. The Polish president whom Putin supposedly offered half of Ukraine to is now dead, so he couldn’t deny it. The point of Judah’s article was to “prove” that Putin had all along intended to invade and carve up Ukraine, rather than Putin reacting to the 2014 US-backed overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych. (Judah also took to the New York Times calling on the US to "arm Ukraine".)

Welp, wouldnchaknow it, Judah’s source for his Big Scoop was none other than the husband of Legatum Institute’s Anne Applebaum. His name is Radislow Sikorski, and he’s the looniest of Poland’s neocons. Nothing about Judah's scoop made sense—why would Putin offer such an inane plan to a NATO enemy? But the best lies aren’t the most complicated lies, they’re the lies people want to believe. And everyone wanted to believe Judah’s story—except Polish journalists, who saw through it. They did what journalists do and questioned Sikorski for more details. Sikorski stuttered and stammered and admitted he’d made it all up, and apologized. So did most media that ran Judah’s false story. Sikorski even disowned Judah and Politico. But you won’t find a retraction on Judah’s story. It’s still there, proud as a peacock.

This is the same guy whom Pomerantsev thanks for editing his book.

[brekin]

Oh please, and I'm sure his college roommate is up to no good to. Rory you don't challenge anything he is written, nor does the butt hurt critic above really, but just makes digs of people the writer knows or has collaborated with that are suppose to reflect on him. The ridiculousness of the writers relations not being politically aligned enough, irregardless of the actual content of his writings, shows how crude (and strangely STASI like) you judge someone, and their work from an ignorant (truly as you haven't read it) viewpoint.

Most importantly, the writer himself worked in Russian reality television and he knows and shows us that the people he portrayed and stories were to be a mix of stereotype and archetype. The whole form is meant to showcase the exaggerated, heightened and distorted. What he discovers though is that the "virtual reality" of the reality television culture helped solidify and perpetuate the corrupt and inhumane political system. And nowhere does he say Putin's Russia is the first to use television propaganda to solidify and bind a country, he just makes the point, and illustrates it, that you can have a seemingly "open", anything goes, Western stylized post-modern reality television culture, that only helps and is in service to an old school authoritarian-gangster regime. Hello, most authoritarian regimes have had traditional, conservative, non-sensational propaganda fare for generations, Keeping up with the Karsapovs though is a new twist. He shows a powerful innovation, not invention. As the first 10 pages of the book show how clamorous and desiring the Russian media folks are of anyone with western television or film experience.

Your stumping for a particular bias, when you haven't even read the work itself is just plain lazy and irresponsible. Your continuing to do so, encouraging and pestering people to adopt your own point of view, though, is a little more alarming. You want people to adopt your opinion of something. Which is not even your own. And you don't even fully understand. I'd be careful of selling things you don't even own.