cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/766438
Some of the replies and reposts have me chuckling.
Ben Norton is one of the best commentators on modern politics, it’s tough to find people who are Pro-Russia for THE RIGHT REASONS! There are a shitload of Pro-Russia people who are supporting them because Mainstream media is against them and they’re not full on Nazis (otherwise they’d support Ukraine) so they think that they must be good. These people would support ISIS just to be confrontational. Ben Norton actually talks about the Euromaidan, the Alley of Angels and US Imperialism. Uncritical support indeed🫡
Yeah, you said it.
American left is kinda nutty in that there are a lot of people siding with Blumenthal in the replies which I find insane. Some choice ones include a guy ridiculing Norton for calling Blumenthal’s turn right-wing. Some guy implying Norton is paid by Pfizer. Another one did not like how Norton covered the “freedom” convoy.
They need to readsettlers.org.
I could not care less if Norton stole money or intellectual property or whatever. It’s great if he did.
Why is it insane that people are siding with Blumenthal? I don’t know much about him/the situation, but these accusations seem pretty serious.
Being against people who don’t want to get “the jab” is damning?
I think they’re talking about Norton’s takeover (assuming Blumenthal is telling the truth) of their shared Patreon and social media accounts
This sounds to me like a personal business dispute that should not be aired out in public. Even if this is all true, and i would want to hear Ben’s side of the story too before making up my mind, it’s also not as if Blumenthal was financially crippled by Norton leaving with perhaps a somewhat bigger share than he was owed. Blumenthal still has a big and decently funded media organization at his disposal with the Grayzone whereas Norton is now presumably on his own.
agreed, and I think cornering him on a bus like that was a scummy move
MR YouTube channel is still up https://youtube.com/@ModerateRebels
But it looks like Multipolarista has a reeupload of its debut video, presumably from when the MR YouTube channel was briefly rebranded. https://youtu.be/zJy0VXn-wN0?si=uD5HgcU-GAHRNN1P
It looks like Ben is correct here, there was a settlement regarding the channel and they’ve parted ways and Max owns the MR content produced under the Greyzone label. Not really sure what a settled dispute has to do with Ben’s move to China or why publicly meltdown about it now.
Not really sure what a settled dispute has to do with Ben’s move to China or why publicly meltdown about it now.
Max can’t legally force Ben to do anything while Ben is in China, since China likely won’t enforce Western judgments about password control of a patreon or whatever. He was likely hoping to take Ben down legally and then Ben moved outside the reach of the law, so now he’s trying to publicly smear him
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Eh, Settlers is kinda a bad book, has been done better since 1979, and includes stuff you learn in history class in school anyway.
The problem with the people supporting Blumenthal in the comments is that Twitter is filled with PatSocs and LaRouchites.
So fuck 'em
includes stuff you learn in history class in school anyway.
dog what, did you go to school on the moon or something?
Uh, I was in a southern state. I learned a lof of what it talked about in several history classes before reaching college (which definitely did talk about this stuff as well).
What class did you learn about Bacon’s Rebellion in?
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PSL is doing activism against imperialism. It’s just not talked about because the media likes that anti-war stuff is only coming from the right, and RAtWM can be used as evidence for horseshoe theory.
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PSL isn’t democracy now. They are actually trying to build a left anti-war movement. Meanwhile RAtWM is just fueling horseshoe theory and opportunism.
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I agree with all that. All I’m saying Rage Against the War Machine isn’t doing any good (the thing with far right libertarians collaborating with patsocs. I think grayzone is involved).
There’s nothing really, I would say, wrong with PSL fundamentally. If they’re doing actual activism rather than Internet shenanigans, then they’re already more advanced than a lot of leftists out there.
They didn’t cover next to anything that Sakai covered in Settlers in my history classes; for damned sure.
Let’s hear about why you find it to be ‘a bad book’; because the only ‘critique’ I ever hear about it seems to be coming from aggrieved settlers who don’t like what they’re reading from an accountability standpoint; and I want to see if you’re any different to that trend.Been there, argued that, not wasting the electrons again. Go away.
Btw that account is makan
I forgot, we’ve had this conversation before. He thinks Sakai is too critical of CPUSA’s favorite people.
I’m non-white. The person misquotes several people and attacks several orgs I know in-person for being. We don’t even know the person’s credentials or whether they are a “Sakai” to begin with. Prove to me the credentials of the person and maybe I’ll take what the person says at face-value; until then, read it critically and maybe consider the other side of the story when it comes to documenting the labor movement.
Man, I told you I’d been there and done that with you already. With all due respect, please fuck off. We’ve been here before, and I’m utterly disinterested in the anti-accountability horseshit you peddle. “Buh buh buh we don’t know who he really is” like we don’t have a LONG FUCKING HISTORY of pseudonymous publishing. For someone who’s non-white, you sure as shit argue like a white man. Fuck outta here.
Uh, I’m not against accountability. We also don’t really have a long history of pseudonymous publishing or one that’s really that extensive. Why are you attacking and acting rude toward me? It’s literally just one book out of many…
I liked settlers. It’s thesis was a little extreme, but I learned a lot of new stuff from it (probably because it’s old). Which parts did you learn in history class? In a way I don’t want patsocs to be able to group us in the Sakai stans, but I’d also like to promote it to spite them. Yes, there are better books now.
We are communists, we don’t automatically refuse extreme just because. Problem with it that it was undialectical and thus unmarxist.
I don’t mean too extreme as in “extremism=bad” like libs. I mean he lays out evidence that USian crackers are part of an oppressor nation and have historically benefited from imperialism, but goes as far as to say that we cannot be working class and nothing good can ever come from us or from working with us because we are inherently opportunistic and bourgeois or something like that. I agree he failed to use dialectical and historical materialism as a mode of study.
The Filipino War, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the ethnic cleansing of the “civilized tribes,” New Deal and the inherent racism of it, etc. I’m, err, not exactly sure what I’m missing, but there you go.
But hey, if you want to spite PatSocs, you do you. As you yourself said, there are better books now since 1979.
Maybe I will in the future but I didn’t learn much of that in school.
Oh okay. I did.
Yeah, I’m with Ben on this one. The whole thing from Max Blumenthal appears to be incredibly malicious. First question is, why come out with this now. What is he trying to achieve with this smear campaign. As Ben arrives in a new country to benefit from the goodwill of his hosts, citizens must be warned that a criminal mind is lurking in their midst. Seems a tad much, is he warning all of China against him?
Watch out there’s a guy who changed a patreon password and took THOUSANDS of dollars!
The only thing I could think of would be him trying to get Ben’s visa revoked. China has pretty strict non-criminal record requirements on their visas (at least on work visa, not sure about other types).
I guess, but if he thinks China’s going to revoke Ben’s visa over a twitter smear then he’s even more of a clown than I thought.
I am also fully on Ben Norton’s side. I too would probably have had to split over fundamental disagreements with someone like Blumenthal once he started to peddle anti-vax conspiracy theories. A reminder that although the Grayzone is a very useful journalistic outlet that frequently breaks news and uncovers stories that are extremely important, and they are far more credible than the mainstream media, it is nonetheless clear that there are significant ideological differences between us MLs and them. These differences will sometimes result in ugly outbursts like this which would have been better kept private.
It’s sad how much the anti-vax cult has spread.
Even to the communist movement nowadays…
Because there is a kernel of truth. Reports about negative side effects were actively supressed in the west and people concerned about those effects were immediately equated to nazis. Perfect soil for radicalization.
Not to mention the unprecedented push to immediately use experimental mRNA vaccines when old school ones would have sufficed just fine. It’s like pharma wanted to do a massive experiment and we were not allowed to opt out. Even if they turn out just fine, I believe that was seriously unethical and damaged the credibility of health institutions. They also destroyed their own credibility by going back-and-forth on their statements so much - at first saying masks were useless, then saying SIKE! masks are useful and mandatory and we were fooling you before to prevent a rush on masks. How is anyone supposed to believe these lying cretins when they change their story every 5 minutes?
Obviously China took the optimal path here with 0 covid policy during the initial outbreaks until they could vaccinate enough of their population (their vaccines weren’t mRNA btw, neither is Cuba’s), and China is much more competent and has the credibility to make these demands of the population. Idk if that was ever possible in the US, seems like the US was just set-up and doomed to fail on COVID and a couple pharma fucks exploited that failure for massive profits.
The scaremongering about mRNA vaccines is overblown, they are nowhere near as “experimental” as some people make them out to be. Some of the vaccines having adverse side effects is not unusual, a lot of medicine does, it’s always about the balance of risk vs reward, do you save more people than you harm.
Of course i have no doubt that the pharma companies cut corners on this like on any other product. It’s what you get when you give such an essential task to private companies. The private sector is synonymous with corruption. It’s why countries should have state healthcare and research institutions which should be kept ready to be mobilized to the task in case of national emergencies.
And the masks flip flop was because they were initially worried that they would run out of masks for medical professionals if everyone rushed to buy them. They lied to cover up how unprepared they were and because people would not like being asked to refrain from buying something that could save them from getting infected, because there is zero understanding of the concept of making sacrifices for the greater good of society in the hyper-individualist west…except when the rich tell the poor that they have to be sacrificed on the altar of the economy, that somehow is always acceptable.
Yes the West’s handling was overall a complete shitshow and it is not surprising that this has driven people to conspiracy theories and undermined their faith in modern medicine. China is one of the few countries that actually had both the political will and the practical capabilities to do it right, the way it should have been done everywhere.
they are nowhere near as “experimental” as some people make them out to be.
Even so it is kind of weird that they were basically fast tracked to the masses. Hell they even called it “operation lightspeed” if I remember correctly. I’ve never seen something get approved so fast. Part of me thinks that they needed something to get people to go back to work (of course service workers were always working but they seemed to also want to put the white collar workers back in line too)
Well yes, of course one of the main reason that the West opted to focus heavily on vaccines instead of lockdowns was to get people back to work as soon as possible. All part and parcel of the logic of capitalism. China was able to take its time in not just developing their vaccine but in building up the confidence of the people in their efficacy, because their lockdowns and vigilant zero Covid policy greatly delayed the point at which the infection would start to run its course through the population. By that point most people were already vaccinated, the disease was much better understood, and better treatments and therapeutics had been developed. Every additional day that China waited before they opened up literally saved lives. Under capitalism this could never have been done because “muh economy”. China knowingly sacrificed economic growth for the sake of saving millions of lives. And despite the apocalyptic predictions of western analysts that China would never recover from the economic consequences of zero Covid, they not only did not economically collapse but are now on track to make up all the growth they missed out on and more since they did not let millions of workers die as a capitalist government would have.
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Don’t remind me, I got AstraZeneca back then too. I was down for days.
Lol ben seized the means
Well-put.
Ben Norton is definitely a marxist and he is actually very ideologically well-read and studied. Blumenthal is those fake ass closet right wing American like the Johnny Harris guy. These people may be anti-imperialist against the US but that’s the only thing they know. Deep down, they fucking hate China and other stuff that doesn’t suit them. lol
This whole situation is crap. I have respect for all parties involved and I get informed from both platforms. Yes, I would probably agree far more with Ben Norton over Max Blumenthall ideologically.
But I tend to judge people based on their work, and Max (alongside Aaron Mate) are doing excellent work in covering US imperialist and capitalist attrocities. So does Ben. And that’s the only part of their relationship to me, as their audience, that matters. Everything else is borderline sectarianism.
Couldn’t have said it better. GZ and Norton serve different purposes to me.
Hell, the Duran ppl, who iirc are paleocons, have extremely useful analysis in certain areas. I think they’re very mistaken in other areas.
At some point recently I freed myself from ideological bloc discipline as it relates to media sources and just started sampling broadly and making up my own mind according to my values. It’s liberating.
I could not agree more. This is my sentiment as well. Once you become confident enough in your own ideological convictions as a Marxist-Leninist there is no reason why you can’t draw on sources with all sorts of different ideological inclinations as long as the analysis they provide is solid and valuable. I find it is a sign of weak conviction in one’s own position when someone tries to exclude sources based on their ideological orientation rather than their credibility on a given issue (because i don’t believe in blanket credibility…everyone has their biases). I’m not going to suddenly become an anti-vax conspiracy theorist because i read Grayzone articles, and I’m not going to become a paleoconservative by listening to the Duran, because my political and ideological views were not formed on the basis of online personalities like is unfortunately the case for many among the “breadtube” left and who seem to think that simply by listening to people who are not perfectly aligned with you ideologically you will suddenly change your core beliefs about the world. If your views are informed by a solid, scientific understanding of the world, you are if not completely immune then at least highly resistent to anti-scientific nonsense and you can pick and choose what is valuable and true from the analysis of people with whom you have disagreements and discard the garbage.
I’ve had conversations with ‘leftists’ who religiously ignore right wing literature and are shocked to hear me cite it after revealing that I’m a Marxist. Concrete analysis of concrete conditions and the ruthless criticism of all that exists mfs. That means you’ve got to learn to read things you disagree with.
You can’t treat it like a team sport where you assume that your side has a monopoly on knowledge (well, MLs do, but that’s different 😉) or as if contrary views are contagious. If you’re at risk of reading a biography of Reagan and becoming a neoliberal, perhaps you’re not as principled as you’d like to think.
You need to remind those people that we wouldn’t even have had Marxism if Marx had chosen to ignore everything Adam Smith had written in the way they choose to ignore everything that can be labeled “right wing”.
Part of being politically (and scientifically) literate is being able to treat sources critically.
Got to wonder how much of this is pushed by state security services. People are far less dangerous if they don’t know what’s really happening. Iirc @[email protected] is regularly challenged e.g. for citing Rand. As if you can know what the right wing thinks by ignoring it’s bloody think tanks (which happen to be quite open about the horrors they want to unleash on the world and, lo and behold, whose policy papers often become policy a few months or years later).
It’s absolutely incredible how much of this stuff is right there in the open. The really sad part of all this is that even when this information is officially published and accessible, people will still refuse to acknowledge it. This is what we’re up against.
About ten seconds after I posted this I saw that you’d been heavily down voted for saying that China has long term economic plans. It’s misplaced but I can understand libs being mad at praise for China. But mad at basic facts? Come on now.
It’s no coincidence that you find agreement over basic facts in the kinds of sources we’re talking about. Not always. And it can be spun in different ways. But, yeah, it’s just… yeah… I’m lost for words when I come across it. Online anti-communists are deeply unserious yet entirely unaware of it, apparently. They can have strong and what they think are rigorous viewpoints without ever really having delved into the topic.
War-driving is a necessary skill to develop when one’s enemies like leaving their plans plastered on the walls.
I personally think liberal media is extremely useful to be familiar with because they tip their own hand so often if you know how to spot it.
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Once you become confident enough in your own ideological convictions as a Marxist-Leninist there is no reason why you can’t draw on sources with all sorts of different ideological inclinations as long as the analysis they provide is solid and valuable.
This is literally what Marx and Engels did. They read Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, etc and it was all important in forming their thought. They even read scientific stuff like Darwin, etc.
I think leftists need to look outside their little bubble otherwise things are going to blindside them. One example I can think of is how most lefists were completely blindsided by Andrew Tate and didn’t even know about him until after he had already blew up and was on the verge of having all his social media purged. And the standard response is “hurr durr why do I need to know about him, hE’s A nObOdY!!” I mean yeah, to you he might be but he was super influential to millions of men and boys(and still is). And if you want to reach these guys you need to know what they are immersed in. Then you can apply a mass line tactic of sorting them into advanced, intermediate, backwards and do all that analysis. But you can’t analyze what you aren’t even aware of.
At some point recently I freed myself from ideological bloc discipline as it relates to media sources and just started sampling broadly and making up my own mind according to my values. It’s liberating.
Couldn’t have said THAT better!
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Tbh I could give less of a fuck, or if any fucks are given it’s in favor of Ben 100% after seeing Max turn into a loser, cornering someone in public and throwing the video on the internet like some Fox News/Daily Mailremoved. What a child.
Yeah…
? Why the ellipses?
Ellipses?
https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/ellipses.html
Not sure what they were confused by though
Oh, that’s an ellipse.
I actually don’t know why I put that there. Could’ve been because I was making the “Yeah” sadder than I intended or because I was trying to come off as more, well, sympathetic to what you were saying, I guess. I wouldn’t look too much into it. It’s been a while since I made that reply anyway so it’s not like I know exactly what I was thinking when I made it, tbh.
I have always understood them to mean like something is being left unsaid, my b
100% behind Ben. He’s a goodamn foundation.
Agreed!
Why is anti-vax a thing, again?
Hyper-individualistic plague-spreading westerners, who don’t believe in the concept of public health.
Mainly in the West, though of course, you see it with the PatSocs a lot.
it’s rabid in Western Europe as I recently found out. Restaurants wouldn’t even serve us when we wore masks. They’d tell us they were booked up or some other nonsense and turn us away only to let the next wandering group right in. Also the amount of people that fake coughed in my face was unreal.
That’s fucking horrible.
You can make a lot of money with the grift too, that’s why you see so many people in the media pivot.
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he truly has the right takes every single time
He evolved like a Pokemon, you see.
They accosted him on a bus! They’re so pathetic.
7th grade behavior
Agreed!
What the fuck is the LaRouchite movement about anyway?
Lyndon LaRouche was in a Trotskyist org and split to make another. That org is famous for beating CPUSA people with nunchucks. That cult became full on fascist, and eventually turned into the Schiller Institute. After LaRouche’s death his cult still calls all environmentalists eco fascists, spreads conspiracy theories, and says anti-nato stuff. I think I heard they once said we could fit 100 billion people on earth.
To be fair, depending on the technological sophistication and architecture, you could fit that many on Earth. But I would highly advise against it.
Maybe if you want to factory farm humanity like the matrix.
100 billion? Far from it. Ecomenopoli can comfortably house trillions, more if the excess heat is handled well.
Sure it could fit all those people, but where are the resources coming from?
You have three options:
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You create them from pure energy via fusion of atoms.
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Offworld.
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Recycling.
For food there’s a fourth option:
High tech approach - orbital farms, horizonal farming, farming levels in the city. If you have a city wide planet, energy is no longer a problem. Otherwise you’d not have made it that far.
My problem is the city wide planet. How the hell did you get all that metal. I guess you’d need star wars level tech and space knowledge/capabilities.
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Like a city-planet ecumenopolis.
LaRouche was a weird guy. Completely unhinged. He called everyone who disagreed with him a fed, but then boasted about working for the feds (whether that was true or not has yet to be conclusively proven). We have some info here, but the article is only about half-finished: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche edit: lol didn’t see you’d already linked it
No one can beat me with the prolewiki links.
Here’s the prolewiki on him: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche
was in a Trotskyist org and split to make another
what Trotskyist org doesn’t split?
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Centers around a man named Lyndon LaRouche. Started in the 70s or thereabouts. His ideas, which are right-wing in nature, center around a sort-of “American socialism” that’s very chauvinistic and bourgeous.
haters and losers
It pops up when contradictions sharpen and people start turning to socialism and communism, we are seeing it pop up again because of the continuing 2008 fallout and especially recently the pandemic. They want to turn people down blind alleys instead of gain true class consciousness
If he did do all this stuff, I think that’s funny and cool. Hard to defend him legally tho
I don’t think he did what Max Blumenthal accused him of in that regard, but I could be wrong, and I’m not sure myself.
Facts seem to line up with Ben’s re-telling of events, a bunch of former Grayzone/Moderate Rebel accounts did start promoting multipolarista after Ben left GZ and then stopped producing content. I’ll wait to hear what Ben has to say, but it seems pretty clear cut that Max is in the right legally unless something major changes, so it’s gonna be hard to defend Ben outside of “lmao get owned Max we stole your shit”
Ben has already replied (not that he should have, this is an employer-employee dispute). He was the only one who had access to the moderate rebels socials and they had done a mediation before. It’s very convenient that Blumenthal is attacking him on something that has already been settled and happened a few years ago right after Ben moved to China.
