Original Post:

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I asked, concisely and simply, what was being hidden from us. Most of them just berated me, one user claimed the Syria conflict to which I provided a link to a recent UN Statement on which quite accurately reflected the conflict start to finish. Another user claimed that the recently declassified Nixon era documents about the Chilean revolution and coup, but I was able to find a 1973 archived Newspaper accusing the Nixon Admin of having a hand in it from Times Magazine meaning it was already a mainstream theory at the time.

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https://feddit.online/post/1341994

  • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialEnglish
    154·
    6 days ago

    Two things are happening, I think:

    1. It’s not anymore, but the cartoon when it was printed was pretty accurate. Before the internet, it used to be functionally impossible to run across anyone who had any kind of platform anywhere in the US who thought that universal health care was a good idea, or that Israel was anyone other than the good guys, or that publicly funded elections would fix 85% of our problems. Or that global warming was a problem. The magnitude of the catastrophe-on-purpose that resulted from that distorted media is still with us to this day. It’s why we still don’t have a functioning health care system, for example, because everyone in Washington’s picture of the world froze in around 1995 when their brains reached the age where they stop making new worldviews. I actually don’t think it’s fair to blame that on capitalism specifically, since powerful people seizing the methods of media and distorting them to prevent the people from figuring out what’s going on is a pretty universal problem in any economic system, but it is certainly accurate and in the US it takes the forms of capitalism (and is still going on today, just in a different form; it’s why no one published the whistleblower’s warning about the US invading Venezuela for example.)
    2. What the .ml contingent means by posting that is that the capitalist press is hiding the truth that Ukraine started the Ukraine war, that Biden was the biggest threat to world peace and it was therefore important not to vote for Kamala, and so on. They’re adopting a time-honored very effective propaganda technique of reversing the roles, and then screaming the role-reversed framing of reality with so much vigor that it’s hard for anyone within the bubble to point out that the truth they claim is being censored is readily available to literally everyone, and that they are the ones constantly banning people who don’t agree with their carefully curated worldview. Because EVERYONE KNOWS and then they get an inch away from your face and start aggressively repeating what it is that everyone knows.
    • PugJesus@piefed.socialEnglish
      12·
      5 days ago

      Before the internet, it used to be functionally impossible to run across anyone who had any kind of platform anywhere in the US who thought that universal health care was a good idea, or that Israel was anyone other than the good guys, or that publicly funded elections would fix 85% of our problems.

      what

      Those were all popular ideas before the advent of the internet. Israel’s supremacy in US foreign policy didn’t even come about until the mid-80s, universal healthcare was one of Clinton’s main running points in '92, and the private funding floodgates didn’t open until Citizens United in 2010, and was deeply controversial with the public.

      • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialEnglish
        22·
        5 days ago

        Those were all popular ideas before the advent of the internet.

        I’ll ask you the same thing I asked Diplomjodler: Show me one article in the mainstream press that simply reports the objective truth that Al Gore is right about global warming.

        They were “popular” ideas, sure. What I’m saying is that the media’s unanimous opposition to them was very effective at preventing them from getting real traction by distorting the thinking of a lot of people in the country. For example:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_1993

        The effort also included extensive advertising criticizing the plan, including the famous “Harry and Louise” ad, paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, which depicted a middle-class couple despairing over the plan’s complex, bureaucratic nature.[18][19] Time, CBS News, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor ran stories questioning whether there really was a health care crisis.[20] Op-eds were written against it, including one in The Washington Post by conservative[21] University of Virginia Professor Martha Derthick that said,

        “In many years of studying American social policy, I have never read an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naivete… with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me.[22]”

        The 1994 mid-term election became, in the opinion of one media observer, a “referendum on big government – Hillary Clinton had launched a massive health-care reform plan that wound up strangled by its own red tape”.[31] In that 1994 election, the Republican revolution, led by Newt Gingrich, gave the GOP control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time since the 83rd Congress of 1953–1954, ending prospects for a Clinton-sponsored health care overhaul. Comprehensive health care reform in the United States was not seriously considered or enacted by Congress until Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and the U.S. remains the only developed country without universal health care.

          • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialEnglish
            21·
            5 days ago

            Nothing of this indicates that it’s in any way urgent. That was my point. The closest it comes, way way down after it’s talking about some flowers maybe doing some weird things, is:

            A warming of 3.5 degrees, according to experts, would cause widespread climatic and environmental dislocations, producing more extreme weather, raising the global sea level, causing precipitation patterns to change and shifting climatic and agricultural zones.

            Doesn’t sound too bad. What Gore said, during the election while the press criticized him for it and later when he found financing for a platform of his own, was:

            There are good people, who are in politics in both parties, who hold this at arm’s length, because if they acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable. … unless you fix the biggest damn crisis in the history of this country.

            Tony Blair’s scientific advisor has said that because of what’s happening in Greenland right now, the maps of the world will have to be redrawn. If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen to San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, one of the low countries. Absolutely devastating.

            The area around Beijing that’s home to tens of millions of people. Even worse, in the area around Shanghai, there are 40 million people. Worse still, Calcutta, and to the east, Bangladesh. Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees when they’re displaced by an environmental event. And then imagine the impact of a hundred million or more.

            Here’s Manhattan. This is the World Trade Center memorial site. And after the horrible events of 9/11, we said, “Never again.” But this is what would happen to Manhattan.

            All emphasis is mine. I just picked random stuff from his movie’s script. That’s the reality. I think people still don’t really grasp it, because the “business as usual” malpractice press got replaced with getting your news from Facebook instead of being replaced with something better, but it is at least possible to broadcast that message to a mass audience now without having to finance your own movie. In 1999, it wasn’t, and the news was refusing their duty to as the only ones who could do it.

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      6 days ago

      Nonsense. There was a free press that freely discussed all the topics you mentioned. It’s true that the mainstream was pretty supportive of the status quo but even there you’d find, for instance, plenty of warnings of climate change and open discussions about it.

      • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialEnglish
        81·
        5 days ago

        Noam Chomsky wrote a bunch of books about the free press’s coverage of geopolitical issues and one of his biggest points of emphasis was how the whole spectrum of permissible debate was basically indistinguishable. That’s why I used Israel as one example.

        I think you’d be hard pressed to find even a single newspaper article in the run-up to 2000 that was willing to simply say plainly that Al Gore was objectively right about climate change and what a fucking emergency it was, for example. It was always represented as a “debate” and his absolutely voice-in-the-wilderness diagnosis was a “viewpoint.” He had to make a whole movie of his own to be able to speak plainly about what was going on, because literally no one in the news was explaining what needed to be explained about it. And that was all after counterculture news started to get a little bit of early traction on the internet and puncture the monopoly a little bit.

        It is almost impossible for people who grew up post-internet to grasp how constrained the news in the pre-internet era was. It sounds like we’re making it up, like of course it couldn’t have been like that.

        • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
          25·
          5 days ago

          You mean the guy who was all buddy buddy with Epstein? Well, in that case it must be true, of course.

          • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialEnglish
            51·
            5 days ago

            I’m going to need you to look up “ad hominem” in the dictionary, it’s not just for internet insults

            Also let me know if you find one of those climate change articles or anything

            • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
              51·
              5 days ago

              I’m actually old enough to remember reading those back in the day. And if you go to any library that has old magazines or newspapers you won’t have any trouble finding stuff. As for Chomsky, this motherfucker (note the ad hominem) has lost every bit of credibility he might ever have had for associating with the kind of people he’s been arguing against all his life.

              • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialEnglish
                4·
                5 days ago

                Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

                https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/03/us/2000-campaign-environment-favorite-issue-gore-finds-himself-2-front-defense.html

                Just a bunch of shit, from beginning to end. Not a whisper of the idea that this might actually be an emergency. In fact, it’s kind of treated as a liability for Gore that he keeps saying that it is.

                About as good as it gets is this:

                https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/121898sci-global-warming.html

                … which, even if we’re not going to take any points off for “While there are dissenters who believe the warmer climate can be explained by normal variation,” doesn’t really address even to the slightest degree why this kind of thing might actually be important let alone a globe-spanning catastrophe.

                That’s what I mean about why Gore had to make his own movie. The media was simply violently opposed to the idea of telling anyone the truth about it, limiting itself to sometimes making a grudging acknowledgement that maybe some of the most basic facts about the present might be true, with nothing at all indicated about what it meant for the future.

                Okay, your turn. Where’s the newspaper article where they made it clear that it was an emergency? You said anyone could find them without any trouble, so it should be easy.

          • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineOPEnglish
            2·
            5 days ago

            Yeah, Noam Chomsky is openly siding with Russia’s invasion, isn’t he? “A Stronger NATO is the last thing we need” he said.

            Even then, he’s been a prominent figure and part of the available media in the USA for a very long time, so clearly an example of not being censored.

            • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialEnglish
              21·
              5 days ago

              Yeah, Noam Chomsky is openly siding with Russia’s invasion, isn’t he? “A Stronger NATO is the last thing we need” he said.

              Yeah. He went off the deep end once he got elderly and his viewpoint of the world ossified. It doesn’t invalidate his earlier scholarship, though.

              (Also, his support for Russia is overblown by the disinfo machine. Mostly what he’s saying in things that I have read is that NATO and the West have done ten times worse than Russia is doing in Ukraine right now, so the freakout is a bunch of hypocrisy, which is of course completely accurate. The disinfo likes to spin it like he’s saying Russia is the good guys, which isn’t at all what he’s saying. But yes, I also think he’s missing the central point in Ukraine because it doesn’t fit with how he likes to look at things.)

              Even then, he’s been a prominent figure and part of the available media in the USA for a very long time, so clearly an example of not being censored.

              Well… the US doesn’t have state-sponsored censorship like most socialist countries. That part is true. My point, and I think the OOP cartoon’s point, is that because our media is capitalist, it was more or less impossible before non-big-business media developed out of the internet for certain messages to get out. I do think that’s a fair point. Just the fact that one academic was able to get one counterculture message out (and generally be regarded by 100% of the external political spectrum as a terrorist as a result) doesn’t invalidate that to me.

    • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineOPEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      We had those beliefs in print and more, actually. For example, people used to think our supply of oil would have been completely used up by now, it caused a lot of fear and panic back in the day. Al Gore was running a presidential campaign on a Climate Change platform starting in 1999.