• barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 hours ago

    Muh freeze-peach, I am simply participating in the marketplace of ideas. You don’t have to like it, but you have to allow me to say RIP Bozo another gender neutral bathroom unlocked.

  • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    7 hours ago

    The American liberal, faced with this reality, tends to concede that truth is in fact drowned out by a relentless tide of spin and propaganda. Their next move is always predictable, however. It’s another lesson dutifully drilled into them in their youth: “At least we can dissent, however unpopular and ineffectual!” The reality, of course, is that such dissent is tolerated to the extent that it is unpopular.

    Big-shot TV host Phil Donahue demonstrated that challenging imperial marching orders in the context of the invasion of Iraq was career suicide, when a leaked memo clearly explained he was fired in 2003 because he’d be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” [5] The fate of journalists unprotected by such wealth or celebrity is darker and sadder. Ramsey Orta, whose footage of Eric Garner pleading “I can’t breathe!” to NYPD cops choking him to death went viral, was rewarded for his impactful citizen journalism by having his family targeted by the cops, fast-tracked to prison for unrelated crimes, and fed rat poison while in there. [6] The only casualty of the spectacular “Panama Papers” leak was Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist who led the investigation, who was assassinated with a car-bomb near her home in Malta. [7] Then there’s the well-publicized cases of Assange, Snowden, Manning, etc. That said, I tend think to such lists are somewhat unnecessary since, ultimately, most honest people confess that they self-censor on social media for fear of consequences. (Do you?)

    In other words, the status quo in the West is basically as follows: you can say whatever you want, so long as it doesn’t actually have any effect.

    from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

    • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      7 hours ago

      “Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times — that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.

      The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and hiring newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.

      The capitalists have always used the term ‘freedom’ to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death.

      In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.

      In this respect, too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.

      —Lenin, Congress of the First Comintern

  • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    7 hours ago

    Both Republican and Democratic political figures — including all living former U.S. presidents — have condemned Kirk’s assassination, but a small number of social media users have mocked or celebrated the killing, drawing outrage.

    a small number

    it-is-known

  • FuckyWucky [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    6 hours ago

    can’t have anti-regime opinions in public sector and if you have anti-regime opinions in the private sector, pro-regime ppl will get you fired.

    similar to third world countries ig, the only decent work is in the public sector, but there you can’t criticize the neoliberal regime or appear ‘political’ in any way.