cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/766438
Some of the replies and reposts have me chuckling.
100% behind Ben. He’s a goodamn foundation.
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?
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).
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.
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.
Lol ben seized the means
It’s sad how much the anti-vax cult has spread.
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.
