All posts tagged: The Guardian

Guardian getting behind Beto O’Rourke?

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Headlines are important, sometimes they’re the only part of any story people will read. They scan over the words, assume they got the gist of the article, and move on. It’s why they’re almost always the most dishonest part of any story in the mainstream news. Case in point: Beto O’Rourke, one of a crowded field of democratic hopefuls for the 2020 Presidential bid, raised 6.1 million dollars for his campaign, in 24 hours. This “stunning sum” apparently “smashes” Bernie Sanders’ record. If you read the article you’ll find, near the bottom, that Bernie raised 5.9 million in 24 hours. How 6.1 million “smashes” this record I’m not sure. I don’t have the dictionary definition of “smashed” memorized, but I’m fairly positive it isn’t “increase by slightly over three percent”. This sort of language is an indicator that O’Rourke is going to be the Guardianista pick. Well meaning liberals will rejoice in his ability to sound good whilst saying absolutely nothing of any value. His nice smile, his youth, and the fact he is as …

Jess Phillips Emerges as Establishment Pick to Replace Corbyn

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It seems The Times is willing to give column inches to any Labour MP willing to insult and undermine their leader, and is determined to try and tell the public which politicians are the “trendy” ones. To bring back that “cool Britannia” New Labour image. To force us to like them by clamouring about how progressive and normal and popular they are.

What “community standards” did this comment breach? #20

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The following comments – sent in to us by a reader – were censored by The Guardian. Which of the well-publicised CiF “community standards” did they breach? Removed comment, posted under the Politics live feed on Tuesday 5th of March: …aaannnddd the gap where it used to be: So: Which of the Guardian’s “community standards” did these comments break? Does it “misrepresent the Guardian and its journalists”? Is it “persistent trolling or mindless abuse”? Is it “spam-like”? Or “obviously commercial”? Is it “racism, sexism, homophobia or hate-speech”? Is it “extremely offensive of threatening?”? Is it “flame-wars based on ingrained partisanship or generalisations”? Is it not “relevant”? If none of the above – why were they taken down? See our archive of censored comments. And if you see any egregious examples of the Guardian censoring its “free” comment sections – email us at editor@off-guardian.org, and send us screen caps if possible

Anti-Capitalism is NOT Anti-Semitism

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Austerity is a brutal crime against humanity. The rich get richer whilst the poor are starving. The 1% deserve to be held up to scrutiny, criticism and even prosecution. Attempts to distract from political rhetoric based around class, wealth or inequality with unfounded accusations or a focus on identity politics are nothing but a well-oiled machine protecting itself.

Venezuela: Guardian sparing neocon blushes

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Kit Knightly This website started as a way to air opinions that The Guardian would not allow in their comments section. Over time it evolved into fact-checking. Rarely has it been so simple. This is The Guardian’s latest story on the unfolding crisis in Venezuela, it is headlined: Venezuela: Maduro accuses US of trying to ‘get hands on our oil’ That headline is technically true. Nicolas Maduro – the beseiged Venezuelan President and the MSM’s current “monster of the week” – did accuse the USA of wanting to control Venezuela’s vast crude oil deposits. He cited Iraq and Libya as recent examples of similar behaviour. What The Guardian did NOT mention is that John Bolton, Donald Trump’s neocon National Security Advisor, admitted that Maduro was right. He told Fox Business that Venezuela’s oil was a big motivation for Trump’s admin: We’re in conversation with major american companies now…I think we’re trying to get to the same end result here…it will make a BIG difference to the American economy if we could have American oil companies …

Venezuela: a study in opinion manufacture

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Today’s Observer runs an editorial on Why Venezuela needs consensus, not conflict. It opens with the image shown above, of an anti Maduro rally (or to be pedantically accurate, one in support of a Juan Guaidó “recognised” by the USA – dutifully followed by that long list of leaders beholden to Washington and Wall St. – as president). Note the absence of faces.

Venezuela? The bad guys are on Wall St.

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Philip Roddis With Washington talking up a military coup (Democrats for once in no hurry to berate Trump on the issue) and Russia a sufficiently interested party to have flown nuclear capable bombers into Caracas last month, it behoves us all to get up to speed on Venezuela. It should go without saying we can’t trust a word corporate media say but, case it doesn’t, here’s why. First, corporate media are not independent but reliant on market forces. This applies not just to the billionaire media but, for reasons given elsewhere, to Guardian and BBC too. Second, media both sides of the Atlantic have a long record of backing US predation on the global south. Never have they deviated from this – take the Guardian’s cheerleading on Iraq. Worse, they’ve abdicated a core duty in their refusal to explore motives that cast a very different light on Western interventions sold to us as humanitarian. Third, sanctions have sown economic havoc in Venezuela. They’re spoken of in such calm tones that an already innocuous word loses …

The Gilet Jaune and ‘France Profonde’

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On the 12th December The Guardian published an article entitled ‘If you want to understand the Gilets Jaunes you have to leave Paris’. The article had little by way of analysis, devoting itself to a standard ‘look at me I live in France’ one up man-ship. The ostensible topic, the Gilets Jaunes and questions concerning why now, who and where – surely the key questions – were largely ignored or under-developed.

The Fetishization of the Corporate Media

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CJ Hopkins So the corporate media have gone and done it again. As they have, repeatedly, for the last two and half years, they shook the earth with a “bombshell” story proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, or at least committed an impeachable felony in connection with something to do with the Russians, or Ukrainians, or other Slavic persons … which story turned out to be inaccurate, or not entirely accurate, or a bunch of horseshit. This time it was BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold, “a reporter with a checkered past” (i.e., a history of inventing his sources) who broke the “bombshell” Russiagate story that turned out to be a bunch of horseshit. Leopold, and his colleague Anthony Cormier, reported that Trump had directed his attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow, thus suborning perjury and obstructing justice. Their sources for this “bombshell” story were allegedly “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation …

Guardian Reports More “Good News”, Kids are Dying in Venezuela

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The Guardian’s Tom Phillips’ article “Venezuela Crisis Takes Deadly Toll on Buckling Health System” (January 06, 2019) is more good news for US psychopaths, such as Trump, Bolton and Pompeo. Children are dying in Venezuela. Sanctions are working!

Buzzfeed, Question Time & the purpose of Fake News

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in the last two months both Buzzfeed and The Guardian have issued “BREAKING NEWS” stories that were based on anonymous sources….both these stories were shown to be untrue in less than 24 hours.The important question is: Why does the media tell lies, if they know they will be revealed as such?

The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia

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As my regular readers will probably recall, according to my personal, pseudo-Chinese zodiac, 2017 was “The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken.” This year, having given it considerable thought, and having consulted the I Ching, and assorted other oracles, I’m designating 2018 “The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia.”

Discuss: Kerch Strait and Azov Sea Tensions

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The Guardian has a an opinion piece today, titled: The EU’s response to Russia must be bold and unanimous. It is written by German politician Norbert Röttgen, head of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee…and it is simply massively dishonest and one-sided. The “mainstream” narrative on Ukraine has been corrected to death in the alternate media, there is no need to go back over old ground, suffice to say, here are just few of the relevent facts which Mr Röttgen leaves out of his article: The Kerch Strait is incredibly shallow, it has a canal carved into to the sea bed to allow deep-draft ships to pass. Using the canal requires a pilot, and ships can only go in single file. The Ukrainian naval ships ignored these rules. Ships using the Kerch strait are required to give 72 hours notice, due to the narrowness of the passage and the shallowness of the sea. These rules have been in place for years. Ukraine ignored them. There have been calls – both inside and outside Ukraine – to …

Manufacturing Truth

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CJ Hopkins If you’re one of the millions of human beings who, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, still believe there is such a thing as “the truth,” you might not want to read this essay. Seriously, it can be extremely upsetting when you discover that there is no “truth” … or rather, that what we’re all conditioned to regard as “truth” from the time we are children is just the product of a technology of power, and not an empirical state of being. Humans, upon first encountering this fact, have been known to freak completely out and start jabbering about the “Word of God,” or “the immutable laws of quantum physics,” and run around burning other people at the stake or locking them up and injecting them with Thorazine. I don’t want to be responsible for anything like that, so consider this your trigger warning. OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at how “truth” is manufactured. It’s actually not that complicated. See, the “truth” is … …

The Guardian’s Bush obituary plumbs new depths of sycophantic hypocrisy

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We’re no longer supposed to examine the lives, characters or morals of our leaders. Only “honor their memory” and be “grateful for their service”. History is presented to us, not as a series of choices made by people in power, but as a collection of inevitibilities. Consequences are tragic, but unavoidable. Like long-dead family squabbles – To dwell on them is unseemly, and to assign blame unfair.

“People hold opinions I don’t share, we should stop them.”

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Kit Knightly Sixty percent of us believe in “conspiracy theories”, and we shouldn’t. At least according to Hugo Drochon, Professor of Politics at Nottingham University. He doesn’t raise the question of whether or not some “conspiracy theories” may be true, his blanket assumption is that all of them are not. His article is not about WHAT people think, WHY they think it, or IF they’re wrong. The article is about rationalizing social control – specifically steps the state can take to assert control over the political opinions of the electorate. Indeed the entire premise of the article is right there in the headline: Britons are swallowing conspiracy theories. Here’s how to stop the rot British people think things they shouldn’t, and here’s how we can stop them. The flawed logic is aggressive. The patronising tone nauseating. It’s the terrifying smiling face of a Brave New World. The article deals only in absolutes. There are “conspiracy theories”, and they are all wrong. Even such vague concepts as the idea the government might publish misleading statistics or …

The Rehabilitation of Robert Mueller

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The “Resistance” – the loose affiliation of liberals, progressives and neo-conservatives dedicated to opposing Donald Trump – is NOT a grass-roots movement. They don’t speak for the everyman or the poor or the oppressed. They are a distraction, nothing more. A parlor game. The face to Trump’s heel. The Resistance is the voice of the Deep State – Pro-war, pro-globalisation, pro-Imperialism. It just hides its true face behind a mask of “progressive values”.

The Hitlergate Hearings

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OK, so, that was a close one. For a moment there, I was starting to worry that the Democrats weren’t going to take back the House and rescue us from “the brink of fascism.” Which, if that had happened, in addition to having to attend all those horrible stadium rallies and help the government mass murder the Jews, we would have been denied the next two years of Donald Trump-related congressional hearings and investigations that we can now look forward to … I’m going to go ahead and call them the Hitlergate Hearings.

The Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic

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CJ Hopkins I suppose it was always just a matter of time until the global capitalist ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media combined their two main official narratives into a Ronco-type 2-in-1 kind of deal. That’s right, folks, your days of switching between the War on Terror official narrative and the Putin-Nazi official narrative are over, because now, for just $19.99, the Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic® takes care of all your official narrative needs with just the press of one button! Here’s how it works. First, you take your classic mentally-disturbed individual, someone like, say, John Hinkley, Jr., Mark David Chapman, or Travis Bickle, or a total wack job like Cesar Sayoc, and you paint whichever clearly psychotic crimes he’s committed as acts of “terrorism.” Don’t worry about the definition of “terrorism” or how it has become a virtually meaningless label the capitalist ruling classes and corporate media can slap onto anyone. Just keep saying “terrorist,” “terrorism,” and any other lexical derivatives of “terror,” over and over, like some kind of mantra … you know, like the Hare …

Facts and Questions in the “MAGABomber” Case

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Two days ago, suspicious packages were allegedly delivered to the homes of George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Later that day, and into the next, more people were “targeted”: Eric Holder, John Brennan, Robert De Niro, CNN. The list is still growing. So far, no one has claimed any credit for the packages, and none of the alleged bombs have gone off, or even got anywhere near their respective targets. Fortunately, no one has been hurt. We set down the basic facts, and the unanswered questions, here.