Arts & Culture

The YouTube vlogger PewDiePie, who paid two Indian men to hold up a sign reading “DEATH TO ALL JEWS”. Photograph: Adithya Sambamurthy/The Guardian for the Guardian

• Immersed in life online like the followers of 4chan or PewDiePie, we start to imagine that nothing matters – even racism, misogyny and resurgent fascism.
• Related: Chris Hedges | A Nation of the Walking Dead

George Monbiot, the Guardian

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Tuesday 28 February 2017 | Everything is possible. Nothing is possible. Nothing hurts any more, until the consequences crash through the screen. Immersed almost permanently in virtual worlds, we cannot check what we are told against tangible reality. Is it any wonder that we live in a post-truth era, when we are bereft of experience?

It is no longer rare to meet adults who have never swum except in a swimming pool, never slept except in a building, never run a mile or climbed a mountain, never been stung by a bee or a wasp, never broken a bone or needed stitches. Without a visceral knowledge of what it is to be hurt and healed, exhausted and resolute, freezing and ecstatic, we lose our reference points. We are separated from the world by a layer of glass. Climate change, distant wars, the erosion of democracy, resurgent fascism – in our temperature-controlled enclosures, all can be reduced to abstractions.

George Monbiot is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain.

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Related:

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

Chris Hedges | A Nation of the Walking Dead, Chris Hedges,  Truthdig  / Rise Up Times

• This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don’t just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate is a desire to really lose a sense of self.
• Related: We Are All Deplorables

Arts and humanities get at the truth of things – so naturally Trump's administration plans to defund them.

Jesse Berney, Rolling Stone

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http://media.cagle.com/226/2017/03/19/193093_600.jpg January 20, 2017 | The day before Donald Trump's inauguration as president of the United States – an actual event taking place in the universe we live in – news broke that his administration plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. And I wanted to scream.

This is Donald Trump's America: one where things like art and books and science and learning and thoughtful consideration of complicated problems are deemed worthless and tossed aside. This can't be surprising after the Trump we saw on the campaign trail, the man who never answered a question with a hint of intelligence or depth. In an interview this week, he couldn't name a single book he's reading. (Evergreene Digest Editor's Note: It has been widely reported his has a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf on his nightstand.) He's appointed a secretary of education who wants to destroy public schools. He reportedly offered a notorious anti-vaccination activist a position leading a commission investigating vaccines. He called global warming a Chinese hoax.

Jesse Berney, Contributor, Rolling Stone

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We cannot fall prey anymore to the reigning message that meaningful democratic participation consists of going into a voting booth to mark a ballot once every four years and then going home to (in Noam Chomsky’s words)  “let other [and very rich ] people run the world [into the ground].”

"Republican and Democratic 'elites' are united with the capitalist elite in top-down hatred of the multi-racial working class." --Paul Street 

Paul Street, CounterPunch

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January 20, 2017 | Listen and you can hear the sneering “elite” liberal left narrative about how the big dumb white working class is about to get screwed over by the incoming multi-millionaire- and billionaire-laden Trump administration it voted into office.  Once those poor saps in the white working class wake up to their moronic mistake, the narrative suggests, they’ll come running back to their supposed friends the Democrats.

Trump Didn’t Really Win Over Working Class America: Clinton Lost it

It’s true, of course, that Trump is going to betray white working class people who voted for him in the hope that he would be a populist champion of their interests – a hope he mendaciously cultivated. But there are three basic and related problems with the scornful liberal-left storyline. The first difficulty is that the notion of a big white proletarian “rustbelt rebellion” for Trump has been badly oversold. “The real story of the 2016 election,” the left political scientist Anthony DiMaggio notes, “is not that Trump won over working class America, so much as Clinton and the Democrats lost it…The decline of Democratic voters among the working class in 2016 (compared to 2012) was far larger than the increase in Republican voters during those two elections”  If the Democrats had run Bernie Sanders or someone else with “a meaningful history of seeking to help the working class,” DiMaggio observes, they might well have won.

Paul Street's  latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

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Hollywood activists prefer their human rights causes blessed by the U.S. government, which contributed to the dubious Oscar for “The White Helmets” propaganda flick, writes Patrick Hennigsen at 21st Century Wire.

Patrick Hennigsen, Consortium News

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In earnest,

Dave & the Crew

March 3, 2017 | In your average lifetime, everyone will get to see his or her share of war propaganda films. In America, it’s a kind of sacred tradition, where Hollywood does the job of revisionism, paving over an otherwise uncomfortable history with a new coat of stain. It’s necessary – not just to make us feel better about ourselves, but also to cover-up any inconvenient truths and high crimes of the state.

To be honest, when I first heard about “The White Helmets” film being promoted by Netflix, I wasn’t surprised at all because ever since the Syria conflict began in 2011, the establishment media has gone out of its way to falsely promote it as a “civil war” and have used the NGO known as the White Helmets, which calls itself the “Syria Civil Defense,” as its primary media protagonist in furthering that narrative.

Patrick Hennigsen is the founder and managing editor of the independent news and media analysis website 21st Century Wire.com and host of the weekly SUNDAY WIRE radio show which broadcasts live weekly on the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR).

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