MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘The Guardian’

How Bill Gates bankrolls the media outlet that claims it’s not backed by billionaires — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on December 15, 2021

Even worse is the fact the UK’s most right-on newspaper when it comes to climate change has survived thanks to the buying and selling of cars. The enormous losses of the Guardian Media Group have been sustained by flogging its stake in used-car website Auto Trader back in 2014, making “between £600 million and £700 million” on the deal. 

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/540780-guardian-funding-billionaires/

Rob Lyons

Rob Lyons

Rob Lyons is a UK journalist specialising in science, environmental and health issues. He is the author of ‘Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder’.

It likes to tap its readers for donations by claiming it’s funded by them, not the mega-wealthy. But, in reality, billionaires have forked out millions to support the UK’s premier right-on, left-of-centre newspaper.

If you want to know what the ‘woke’ set are thinking – on issues from climate change to trans rights – The Guardian’s the newspaper to read. While its print sales have been in decline, falling over the past decade from 248,775 a day to 105,134 in July this year, The Guardian is one of the most visited news websites in the world. 

The trouble is it keeps losing money. Four months ago, it was reported that the Guardian Media Group, which also owns The Observer, a closely related Sunday broadsheet, had lost over £10 million in the previous financial year, although that was still an improvement on the £17 million loss the year before. The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall in the same way as other newspapers, but does employ what computer types used to call ‘nagware’, constantly prompting users to sign up or to make donations. 

However, it has made one rather spurious claim on social media in support of this strategy: “We’re not funded by billionaires. Our readers’ backing gives us the independence to hold the powerful to account – and we’re just getting started.”

We’re not funded by billionaires. Our readers’ backing gives us the independence to hold the powerful to account – and we’re just getting started. #Guardian200— The Guardian (@guardian) May 4, 2021

Readers have certainly been generous. According to a Guardian story last year: “The Guardian now has more than one million subscribers and regular contributors, after support from online readers grew by 43% in a year. … When one-off contributions are factored in, more than 1.5 million people have supported the Guardian in the past year.” A million subscribers at £5.99 per month would bring in about £6 million. That’s handy, but doesn’t even cover the paper’s losses, never mind its overall running costs.

However, as climate commentator Ben Pile has noted, billionaires love The Guardian and are very happy to put their hand in their pocket to support its projects. For example, according to US outlet MintPress News, a thorough sift through donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation shows The Guardian has received a cool $12,951,391 in support. In fact, Gates and his now ex-wife have sprayed hundreds of millions of dollars across the media landscape to support the kind of journalism they approve of.

But the Gateses aren’t the only billionaires supporting The Guardian. A quick look at its website’s philanthropy section shows that Aussie billionaire Judith Neilson’s institute funds The Guardian Australia’s Pacific Project. The Open Society Foundations, created by Hungarian billionaire George Soros, have backed Guardian projects on America’s environmental inequalities and on transforming care using AI. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, set up by the late co-founder of Hewlett-Packard in the 1960s, supported its work on the state of the oceans. 

So the claim that The Guardian isn’t funded by billionaires seems rather dubious.

See the rest here

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Beyond Reparations – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on July 18, 2020

This is unfair, but as Thomas Sowell has long pointed out, the quest for cosmic justice is both totalitarian in implication and can lead only to continual sifting of the entrails of group and individual disparities, a sifting that itself promotes resentment in both individuals and groups, as well as conflict.

When American blacks go to Africa, not a few of them are inclined to thank their lucky stars that their ancestors were taken into slavery.

https://www.takimag.com/article/beyond-reparations/

Theodore Dalrymple

There is no proposal so foolish that it has no advocates, or sometimes even its fanatics. If hope springs eternal in the human breast, delusion springs eternal from the human head.

Recently I was scrolling through The Guardian looking for easy targets—The Guardian is an inexhaustible source of these, which are, of course, any journalist’s best friends—when I came across an article by Dedrick Asante-Muhammad. I don’t know whether this was the name he had at birth, but whether it was given or assumed, it seems perfect for a monomaniac, a fanatic, or a mere political entrepreneur.

The idea propounded in the article was that every black person in the United States with an identifiable slave ancestor should be given, as of right, $20,000 a year for 20 years. Those younger than 25 should have it put in trust for them till they reach that age. Thus—only thus?—will the difference in wealth between blacks and whites in America be annihilated.

Needless to say, the average reader of The Guardian, ever on the lookout for yet another reason to feel good about himself and morally superior to the rest of benighted mankind (or should I say humankind?), will not dismiss this idea with the snort of derision that it deserves, but roll it round in his mind as an oenophile rolls a mouthful of wine round in his mouth. For such a person, the prospect of economic confiscation—of others, of course—acts as the presence of blood in the sea is said to act upon sharks.

“Open societies have this great disadvantage: that they force you to look at your own part in your situation.”

The objections to the proposal are so many and so obvious that it is difficult to know where to begin. When American blacks go to Africa, not a few of them are inclined to thank their lucky stars that their ancestors were taken into slavery. No one, I presume, would suggest that they had incurred a financial debt to the descendants of those who took their ancestors into slavery, and to those who created and maintained the demand for slaves.

Large gifts of money do not always benefit those who receive them. This is true of groups as it is of individuals. I think it distinctly possible that if I had received a large sum at the age of 25 (or at any rate a sum that seemed to me at that age to be very large), I might have used it so unwisely that I would never have recovered from it. Naturally, individuals vary and some would benefit. But in general, good fortune is a more difficult test of character than bad, in part because bad fortune is apt to reduce the scope of choice—and choice is often disastrous for those of bad, juvenile, or even merely weak character.

Long ago, I visited a small island in the Central Pacific called Nauru a few times. Its population, about 4,000, had once been subsistence cultivators and fishermen. Their island was a source of valuable phosphate rock, which was mined by an organization called the British Phosphate Commission, the profits of which went almost entirely to Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

When Nauru gained its independence, the assets—the phosphate rock—were transferred to Nauru, and the Nauruans went almost overnight from being poor to rich, their country being at one time the richest, or among the richest, in the world.

The sudden accession to wealth did not have an altogether happy result for the Nauruans. They did not have to work; indeed, there was very little work for them to do. They ate and drank instead. In a way, the country was in the avant-garde of Western civilization, for half of its population began to suffer from Type 2 diabetes and became the object of medical study by, among others, the distinguished Australian physician Professor Paul Zimmet. Overall, the effects of money for nothing were not good.

It is hardly necessary to go into other objections to the scheme proposed in The Guardian, moral and practical. To do so would be like trying to refute the idea that the moon is made of marshmallow.

Is it very far-fetched to see a great deal of anxiety and even self-contempt, albeit unstated or subliminal, as well as condescension, in this proposal? After all, it is not deemed necessary to assist any other group in the way proposed, not even women. In other words, there is in it the suspicion that in an open society (and no society can be open without also being unequal), such as America has long been, blacks are doomed to end up, on average and as a group, at the bottom of the pile unless they are given special privileges.

No one doubts that prejudice exists against blacks (and not only, incidentally, among whites) in America. But prejudice by itself, provided it is not universal and there are people who do not share it, does not prevent ascension on the social scale, unpleasant as it must be for those who suffer it. It is not a lifetime ago that some of the elite education institutions in America placed limits—and very low limits—on the number of Jews admitted to them. No one would say, however, that (lamentable or disgraceful as this was) the Jews in America were impeded from advancement. And something similar is true of many other groups, some of which started off poorer than American blacks today, and whose members did not require immense subsidies to advance themselves.

It is obviously true that in any unequal society, life is easier for some people than for others, both as groups and as individuals. This is unfair, but as Thomas Sowell has long pointed out, the quest for cosmic justice is both totalitarian in implication and can lead only to continual sifting of the entrails of group and individual disparities, a sifting that itself promotes resentment in both individuals and groups, as well as conflict.

Open societies have this great disadvantage: that they force you to look at your own part in your situation. Unless you are a rip-roaring success, which very few of us are (and those few are often not very attractive as people), you are forced to confront your own ineptitude, lack of talent, bad choices from an early age, etc., etc. It is much easier to deny that your society is an open one, and then sink back into a mixture of apathy, politicking, and continuation of immediately gratifying but ultimately self-destructive bad habits.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Embargo and Other Stories, Mirabeau Press

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Advancing Propaganda For Evil Agendas Is The Same As Perpetrating Them Yourself – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on November 23, 2019

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/11/22/advancing-propaganda-for-evil-agendas-is-the-same-as-perpetrating-them-yourself/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

The Guardian has published an editorial titled “The Guardian view on extraditing Julian Assange: don’t do it”, subtitled “The US case against the WikiLeaks founder is an assault on press freedom and the public’s right to know”. The publication’s editorial board argues that since the Swedish investigation has once again been dropped, the time is now to oppose US extradition for the WikiLeaks founder.

“Sweden’s decision to drop an investigation into a rape allegation against Julian Assange has both illuminated the situation of the WikiLeaks founder and made it more pressing,” the editorial board writes.

Oh okay, now the issue is illuminated and pressing. Not two months ago, when Assange’s ridiculous bail sentence ended and he was still kept in prison explicitly and exclusively because of the US extradition request. Not six months ago, when the US government slammed Assange with 17 charges under the Espionage Act for publishing the Chelsea Manning leaks. Not seven months ago, when Assange was forcibly pried from the Ecuadorian embassy and slapped with the US extradition request. Not any time between his April arrest and his taking political asylum seven years ago, which the Ecuadorian government explicitly granted him because it believed there was a credible threat of US extradition. Not nine years ago when WikiLeaks was warning that the US government was scheming to extradite Assange and prosecute him under the Espionage Act.

Nope, no, any of those times would have been far too early for The Guardian to begin opposing US extradition for Assange with any degree of lucidity. They had to wait until Assange was already locked up in Belmarsh Prison and limping into extradition hearings supervised by looming US government officials. They had to wait until years and years of virulent mass media smear campaigns had killed off public support for Assange so he could be extradited with little or no grassroots backlash. And they had to wait until they themselves had finished participating in those smear campaigns.

This is after all the same Guardian which published the transparently ridiculous and completely invalidated report that Trump lackey Paul Manafort had met secretly with Assange at the embassy, not once but multiple times. Not one shred of evidence has ever been produced to substantiate this claim despite the embassy being one of the most heavily surveilled buildings on the planet at the time, and the Robert Mueller investigation, whose expansive scope would obviously have included such meetings, reported absolutely nothing to corroborate it. It was a bogus story which all accused parties have forcefully denied.

This is the same Guardian which ran an article last year titled “The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride”, arguing that Assange looked ridiculous for remaining in the embassy because “The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US”. The article was authored by the odious James Ball, who deleted a tweet not long ago complaining about the existence of UN special rapporteurs after one of them concluded that Assange is a victim of psychological torture. Ball’s article begins, “According to Debrett’s, the arbiters of etiquette since 1769: ‘Visitors, like fish, stink in three days.’ Given this, it’s difficult to imagine what Ecuador’s London embassy smells like, more than five-and-a-half years after Julian Assange moved himself into the confines of the small flat in Knightsbridge, just across the road from Harrods.”

This is the same Guardian which published an article titled “Definition of paranoia: supporters of Julian Assange”, arguing that Assange defenders are crazy conspiracy theorists for believing the US would try to extradite Assange because “Britain has a notoriously lax extradition treaty with the United States”, because “why would they bother to imprison him when he is making such a good job of discrediting himself?”, and “because there is no extradition request.”

This is the same Guardian which published a ludicrous report about Assange potentially receiving documents as part of a strange Nigel Farage/Donald Trump/Russia conspiracy, a claim based primarily on vague analysis by a single anonymous source described as a “highly placed contact with links to US intelligence”. The same Guardian which just flushed standard journalistic protocol down the toilet by reporting on Assange’s “ties to the Kremlin” (not a thing) without even bothering to use the word “alleged”, not once, but twice. The same Guardian which has been advancing many more virulent smears as documented in this article by The Canary titled “Guilty by innuendo: the Guardian campaign against Julian Assange that breaks all the rules”.

You can see, then, how ridiculous it is for an outlet like The Guardian to now attempt to wash its hands of Assange’s plight with a self-righteous denunciation of the Trump administration’s extradition request from its editorial board. This outlet has actively and forcefully paved the road to the situation in which Assange now finds himself by manufacturing consent for an agenda which the public would otherwise have found appalling and ferociously objectionable. Guardian editors don’t get to pretend that they are in some way separate from what’s being done to Assange. They created what’s being done to Assange.

You see this dynamic at play all too often from outlets, organizations and individuals who portray themselves as liberal, progressive, or in some way oppositional to authoritarianism. They happily advance propaganda narratives against governments and individuals targeted by establishment power structures, whether that’s Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Morales, Assange or whomever, but when it comes time for that establishment to actually implement the evil agenda it’s been pushing for, they wash their hands of it and decry what’s being done as though they’ve always opposed it.

But they haven’t opposed it. They’ve actively facilitated it. If you help promote smears and propaganda against a target of the empire, then you’re just as culpable for what happens to that target as the empire itself. Because you actively participated in making it happen.

The deployment of a bomb or missile doesn’t begin when a pilot pushes a button, it begins when propaganda narratives used to promote those operations start circulating in public attention. If you help circulate war propaganda, you’re as complicit as the one who pushes the button. The imprisonment of a journalist for exposing US war crimes doesn’t begin when the Trump administration extradites him to America, it begins when propagandistic smear campaigns begin circulating to kill public opposition to his imprisonment. If you helped promote that smear campaign, you’re just as responsible for what happens to him as the goon squad in Trump’s Department of Justice.

Before they launch missiles, they launch narratives. Before they drop bombs, they drop ideas. Before they invade, they propagandize. Before the killing, there is manipulation. Narrative control is the front line of all imperialist agendas, and it is therefore the front line of all anti-imperialist efforts. When you forcefully oppose these agendas, that matters, because you’re keeping the public from being propagandized into consenting to them. When you forcefully facilitate those agendas, that matters, because you’re actively paving the way for them.

Claiming you oppose an imperialist agenda while helping to advance its propaganda and smear campaigns in any way is a nonsensical and contradictory position. You cannot facilitate imperialism and simultaneously claim to oppose it.

They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they need that consent. If they operate without the consent of the governed, the public will quickly lose trust in their institutions, and at that point it’s not long before revolution begins to simmer. So don’t give them your consent. And for God’s sake don’t do anything that helps manufacture it in others.

Words matter. Work with them responsibly.

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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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‘Will even white people die?’ How to explain nuclear war to your kids First Dog On The Moon

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/10/will-even-white-people-die-how-to-explain-nuclear-war-to-your-kids

Exterminating white people.  This is what constitutes the ‘funnies’ in The Guardian .

Dog 1: “Trump is seriously talking about nuclear war? This is ridiculous!”

Dog 2: “Is it the end of the world, Dad?”

Dog 1: “Probably. It is grownup complicated but in 2016 Rupert Murdoch organised to put a maniac surrounded with white supremacists in the White House to be president of the USA.”

Dog 2: “What’s a white supremacist?” Read the rest of this entry »

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