All over the Western world, a small but vocal segment of the population is protesting for ‘freedom’, but from what? This is a screenshot of their manifesto:
‘No medical apartheid’???? Interesting. I somehow doubt that your average Tradie – carpenter, plumber, electrician, mechanic – would come up with a phrase like that. I mean, what does it even mean?
Here in Australia, we do have both private and public hospitals, but private hospitals don’t have emergency departments, at all, so if you crash your Lamborghini, the ambulance will take you straight to a public hospital where you will find round the clock care. By contrast, private hospitals don’t have ANY doctors on staff. They only have nurses, and those nurses are not allowed to alter treatment plans during the night.
I know, because I had a very bad reaction to Pethidine after a partial thyroidectomy [in a private hospital]. Your thyroid gland is in your neck, so to cut some of it out, the surgeon has to ‘cut your throat’. Literally.
So there I was, in the middle of the night, with my throat swathed in bandages, throwing up even after there was nothing left in my stomach. Can you imagine what that feels like after you’ve just had your throat cut?
The nurses were allowed to give me anti-nausea injections, but they didn’t work because it was the Pethidine drip that was making me so sick…and they couldn’t take the drip out without the doctor’s say so…and the doctor wouldn’t make his rounds until about 8am.
Public hospitals aren’t swank, but the quality of the care is second to none. So is it the private hospital patients who are being treated as second class citizens? I think not. I also don’t think the people behind the freedom rallies are your average Joe.
How do I know? It’s right there in the public eye, on the freedom rally website:
Go ahead, click on the link and see how slick, how professional the website is. This site was not put together by a bunch of amateurs volunteering their skills to help the ’cause’. This is not the website of a grass roots movement.
The Freedom Rally website was put together by professionals. Not just professional webmasters but professional manipulators, the kind of people who work for big ad. agencies creating commercials to hook the unwary.
Everything about this site shrieks ‘money’! But wait, there’s more. This is from the website’s About page:
‘Australia Freedom Rally is a member organization of the World Wide Demonstration team, which coordinates the World Wide Rally for Freedom Internationally.
https://australiafreedomrally.com/about/
We support and implement the World Wide Demonstration Platform in Australia.’
If you click on the ‘World Wide Demonstration team’ link, you’ll be taken to a website that has a lot of admin. stuff – like the popups about cookies – in what looks like German. The site is just as slick as the Australian website, but nowhere is there any indication of who is behind the website…or who pays for it.
I did some digging, trying to find out who was really behind the organisation [spelled ‘organization’ by the way]. Eventually I landed here:
I don’t know what ‘Telegram’ is, but it’s up there on the main website page:
…and it offers a very slick ‘tool’ for third party developers. Who created it? Who paid for it to be created? Who is rich enough to give it away for free?
This article from the Guardian talks about an Australian who is helping to organise the local protests:
‘In Australia, a Melbourne-based group has helped promote protests throughout the pandemic. The Guardian has previously revealed Harrison McLean, a 24-year-old IT programmer from Wantirna South, had become a key organiser of the protests in that city.’
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/27/who-behind-australia-anti-covid-lockdown-protest-march-rallies-sydney-melbourne-far-right-and-german-conspiracy-groups-driving-protests
…but who is behind him? And why? Why any of this?
I know there are a great many disaffected people in the Western world. They’re getting left behind as the gap between rich and poor turns into an abyss. They’re getting angry with the status quo. They want their lives to be better. They’re primed to lash out. I understand all that, but if they are the kindling, who is the match?
Who is moulding all these disaffected people into a weapon? Who is giving them slogans? Who is paying for it? And what do ‘they’, whoever they are, hope to gain?
Do I believe the World Wide Demonstration is just about the lockdowns? No.
Do I believe the ‘message’? No.
Do I believe the people behind the movement are ‘pure’? Not in a month of Sundays.
I believe the Western world is ripe for a social ‘hack’, manipulation on a grand scale. Is it being driven by Russia? By China? By some individual or group with very deep pockets?
I have absolutely no idea, but the manipulation is sinister and very clever. And there’s money behind it, a lot of money. Whoever ‘they’ are, they’re good, and that should concern us all.
Meeks
Meeka's Mind 
February 19th, 2022 at 7:17 am
In the news today, a 7-year-old unvaccinated girl died of covid because her parents were still waffling about vaccines. Her death rests on the shoulders of all those who are providing misinformation and making a stand for “freedom from compassion,” which should be the last line of their list btw.
I’m going back to the Phantom of the Opera now. 😀
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February 19th, 2022 at 9:09 am
😦 The people spreading misinformation have blood on their hands, well and truly. To think that a child of just seven has died is bad enough, but covid deaths are not gentle, not a release. They’re cruel…
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February 19th, 2022 at 9:11 am
😦
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February 17th, 2022 at 7:30 pm
I’m not one for ‘conspiracy’ theories but this whole thing smacks of manipulation. You might find this article in the Atlantic interesting — it shines some light on who’s behind the so-called ‘Freedom Rally’ in Canada. https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/wait-what/620d0e79199fdd00213e628e/american-fantasy-of-canadas-freedom-convoy/
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February 17th, 2022 at 11:01 pm
That’s just like what happened here! So called Tradies from the construction industry staged a number of protests but a lot of them weren’t even Tradies. They were just dressed up to look like them – like kids at halloween, just meaner.
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February 17th, 2022 at 5:03 am
HI Meeks, Australians are fortunate to have such good public hospitals. Our public hospitals have good doctors because the private doctors do pro bono work at the public hospitals for community service and to get experience. You have to take your own bed linen and the quality of the nursing is quite poor as the staff are completely overworked.
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February 17th, 2022 at 11:40 pm
Take your own bed linen???? Sorry Robbie but that literally made my jaw drop. The public hospitals here have residents and consultants so many of the doctors are the tops in their fields. The nurses are overworked here too, but there are enough of them to provide good quality care, just maybe not top quality care. Our private hospitals are more comfortable, and you don’t have to share a room with anyone, but if I were really sick I’d rather be at a public hospital.
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:59 pm
I had Joe ÷=/5 Rogan rammed down my throat for a while via my son, who is sadly way too impressionable having had a narcissiisstically abusive father. He then woke up for a while. Now he is in a new phase but he is definitely over Joe Rogan.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:19 pm
I’ve only seen a snippet of him interviewing someone else, who then was on the panel of The Drum, otherwise I’d never have heard of him. Despite his protests to the contrary, he seems to enjoy controversy. Glad your son is no longer a fan.
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February 14th, 2022 at 11:56 am
As a species we’ve never progressed beyond the extended family/small tribe need for an authority figure to provide leadership, in the truest sense of the word, while everyone else heads out to do the farm chores. (aka taking care of the daily running of our lives 🙂 )
I find it amusing that the Americans, in general, are so anti-monarchy, (they had a revolution to defeat it, don’t’cha know, and certainly didn’t want a ‘class’ system) and yet, they embrace things like Prom Kings and Queens, just to use a very basic example, of the need to create a social hierarchy.
Then there’s the need for ‘heroes’. People call football players heroes for goodness sake!
We’re so desperate for someone, anyone who will take up that mantle that we’re willing to sell our humanity, and common sense, to the highest bidder.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:06 pm
-picks jaw off floor- I’ve never thought of it in those terms but you’re right. We want charisma and comforting lies from our politicians and muscle from our sports people. Hero worship. It seems the last thing we want to do is take responsibility for our own lives.
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February 14th, 2022 at 11:55 am
Fiona Hill US security expert talking about Russia:https://youtu.be/Smd7WCuYrTc
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:12 pm
I like that bit where she says there isn’t a new Cold War ‘we’re competitors’ – i.e. the US and Russia.
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:47 am
I found both schools the children attended had their gaps. Nowhere is perfect but in the end if they were content and not being bullied, I was ok with things.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:05 am
You’re right about all schools having their gaps, but there is a systemic problem with teaching ‘theory’ at the moment that’s causing a lot of children to fall through the gaps. And that’s just on the basics. There are more high level skills they’re not being taught at all. 😦
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:18 am
These days I make an effort to listen to views with which I disagree. Sky news is often nearly as bad as state run propaganda.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:23 am
Ugh. I cannot watch Sky news. You’ve got a stronger stomach than me. 😦
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February 14th, 2022 at 6:47 am
My take is that the current ‘end-mandate’ protests are a direct outcome of the extreme stress under which society is placed at the moment – underpinned by the failure of neo-liberal economics to prosper the majority. There are huge distortions in wealth distribution, and social media has created a platform for all kinds of expression that intensifies feeling. In the past few years governments have been voted in to change things, and haven’t – the abject failure of the Ardern administration in New Zealand to shift the fundamental economic patterns that have been dispossessing even the middle-income groups is a case in point. Suddenly into the mix comes a virus, and all these governments – already viewed with cynicism by an electorate that feels their own interests have been betrayed – start imposing necessary health-driven constraints. I don’t think anything has to be particularly organised, nor is there some malign and hidden entity with a master plan. Frustration and dispossession suffices, and to this extent I think these protests are proxy for much deeper issues. The protesters currently occupying Parliament grounds in Wellington are a case in point: police have been hampered when negotiating with them because they have no single leader and no obvious cause. They are simply there to protest …. something. History tells me that once these social movements gain momentum they grow and develop of their own accord. I don’t doubt that various people, even various states, have taken advantage of the situation and poked it along for their own purposes – but it doesn’t have to be co-ordinated or organised.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:36 am
I agree with all of that Matthew except for your belief that this movement can be self-organised. If it were just a grassroots movement then it would start with small groups that maybe contribute to a Kickstarter to get enough funding to…I don’t know, travel to XX and stage a protest. Once there others might see and join and the grumble might grow, but at what point does that amorphous grumble become a coherent manifesto? At what point does it get enough money to create its own messaging app? At what point can it afford to give that app away for free? At what point can if afford to create super slick websites with all the bells and whistles? Websites that would put a lot of commercial websites to shame?
The whole movement is professional in its organisation. An amorphous blob is incapable of the technical skills required. The Blob was primed by circumstance, yes, in the same way that the Germans were primed by their defeat in WWI and the Treaty of Versailles. But the Blob remains dry kindling until someone provides the spark. Who or what lit the Blob?
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February 14th, 2022 at 11:46 am
The GoFundMe campaign for the truckers here raised 10 million dollars in a matter of days with donations from all over the world. (it has now agreed to return all the funds from whence they came) The average schmuck sent in the usual $20-$50, but the big donors were mostly from foreign (mostly the US) countries.
I think these movements can grow enormous without anyone ‘pulling the strings’, in the beginning, but there are enough arseholes who will then hijack that momentum to further their own agenda … even if that agenda is ‘fuck the world’ while they video themselves doing it.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:17 pm
Good point, Widds, but what you say about the big donors worries me. Why on earth would a million/billionaire or a large company/corporation want to support trukkers? I’d really like to know how long this whole thing has been going on for, and that’s part of my frustration – I simply couldn’t find anything on any of the websites that gives dates or names or any actual ‘facts’.
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February 15th, 2022 at 7:07 am
The short and truly terrifying answer is, because they can. 😦 … the age of the ‘individual’, the ‘me first and bugger the rest’, mentality has created a social caste of these narcissists who are driven by the very worst of human behaviours.
I think it’s a sort of insanity driven by the awful truth of the scale of the climate disaster being very visible now, and the last two years of enforced ‘caring about the other by modifying your behaviour’, that has frustrated that narcissism into such irrational behaviour. Fear and greed, pure and simple. Humans are not a very nice species once we engage with each other in large numbers.
None of which excuses their actions, but the rest of society seems unable to force their elected officials into acting decisively to turn this trend around, because those elected officials have drunk from the same cool-aid tank as well.
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February 15th, 2022 at 8:11 am
‘because they can’… as if life is a game and winning is all that matters.
You’re right. This scares me more than perhaps anything else. I’ve seen that kind of behaviour in the games I play, but I assumed it was the /game/ bringing out the worst in some people. When I played FFXI and FFXIV – both mmo’s created by and largely for the Japanese market – I found courtesy and a degree of social cohesion I’d never seen before. And the odd thing is that the non-Japanese players quickly adopted the same good manners. Or they left.
I understand the frustration of people who have never really had to modify their behaviour for the benefit of ‘the other’ before, but how did we get to this point? How did hate become normalised?
And is there any way back?
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February 16th, 2022 at 11:28 am
There probably is, Meeks, but our species has yet to reach adulthood … so, no holding of breffs, I’m afraid. 😦
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February 16th, 2022 at 11:29 am
I think we’re actually two separate species that just happen to look alike. Those with empathy create things. Those without tear them down.
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February 14th, 2022 at 11:40 am
It brings to mind the 4th Crusade … only with better PR. 😦
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:20 pm
Oh Widds, don’t make me look it up! What happened in the 4th Crusade???
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February 15th, 2022 at 6:58 am
Imagine one of these ‘trucker’ convoys, of tens of thousands (in the beginning) mostly peasants and a few ‘noblemen’ who hadn’t already set out to make their fortune by raping and pillaging across the continent in the previous three crusades … instigated by a rabid religious leader, and ostensibly ‘led’ by a fanatical nut-job hermit by the name of Peter.
… going from western Europe to the Mediterranean, also raping and pillaging and burning towns, (small-time thuggery by the standards of the time) before they arrived outside Byzantium (Constantinople/Istanbul) a staunch ally of the then Pope. (Byzantium had been an Ottoman city until it had been ‘occupied’ by one of the previous crusades and ‘converted’ to Christianity)
For reasons that involved a disinherited prince and greed, the rabble were let loose on the city and pretty much razed it to the ground.
Having got a taste of that sort of destruction, they did the same thing to a few more cities before the rulers of Europe and afore mentioned rabid religious leader couldn’t stomach the atrocities and decided they ought to be aimed back at Jerusalem, and off to Jerusalem they went. Presumably to do more raping and pillaging.
Byzantium, once one of the greatest cities in the world at that time, being the nexus of the Silk Road, going east and west, never recovered.
If you can get the series The Fall Of Empires on YouTube, (it shouldn’t be geo-locked, but you never know these days) the episode titled ‘Byzantuim’ tells the story in much more detail. It’s fascinating in a horrific sort of way how these cycles of the rise and fall of empires happen.
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February 15th, 2022 at 8:18 am
I’ve never paid much attention to that part of European history, and I’m shocked. I mean I always knew religion, or those wielding the power in the name of a religion, were to blame for some awful atrocities – Not the Inquisition! – but this is just awful.
If we strip away all the gloss and glamour associated with war over the ages, all that’s left is a sick outpouring of destructive hate, as if the human race can’t go for long without needing to let the violence out.
Maybe climate change is for the best.
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February 16th, 2022 at 11:17 am
That’s the conclusion I frequently come to as well, 😦
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February 16th, 2022 at 11:28 am
…and then I hear a beautiful piece of music and decide that homo sapiens has something going for it after all. -shrug-
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February 16th, 2022 at 11:32 am
I know! 🙂 … perhaps we ought to change our designation from ‘homo sapiens’, to ‘paradoxias grow-up-already-es’ 🙂
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February 16th, 2022 at 11:26 pm
LMAO & ROFL!!!!! Wicked. 😀
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February 14th, 2022 at 4:10 am
I just started reading STRONGMEN Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat a professor at my alma mater New York University. It is about how democracy gets warped into authoritarian regimes. I’m terrified after just reading the introductory chapter! There is a good deal of media—and specially social media—manipulation that perpetuates falsehoods that all to many people believe. That leads naturally to the desire for a strong, macho, guy to take over. I honestly don’t know why, but people are gullible and when the slogan sounds right and they hear it often enough, they don’t question where it’s coming from and from whom.
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February 14th, 2022 at 5:51 am
Speaking as somebody who grew up in the UK, I used to listen to Russian propaganda on my shortwave radio. I didn’t believe a word of it back then, as people were constantly asking for asylum in those days. The thing was I distinctly remember being taught at school to be discerning about these things. People are way too inclined to believe material without checking it nowadays. I wonder when we stoped teaching youngsters to think.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:41 am
Wow…why did you listen to the propaganda in the first place? That’s amazing. 🙂
As for teaching kids to think…I remember in primary school, we were taught reading comprehension, and how to precis… By the time we hit high school we were well versed in logical thinking and logical method. These days? Teaching kids to use even basic tools like the 3 R’s is too onerous so they’re taught to be ‘creative’ instead. I have no problem with encouraging kids to be creative, but not at the price of basic literacy. I ended up having to teach the Offspring using syllables because the method used at school was useless. Sorry, ex-teacher here.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:46 am
I am a current teacher too.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:37 am
Apart from two years as a tutor, I gave up teaching children years ago. You’re brave.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:59 am
I taught my own children too. Particularly my son who is asthmatic. Children are not being taught to question and to think. I am a big fan of creativity. As a person who really believed in state education, I was really upset when we had to give up on the state system. Bullying was the main issue. Thinking and questioning was something I was taught as a matter of course. The children’s next school had an interesting range of teachers but they really encouraged the children to think.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:36 am
The Offspring went from state to private to private. The state school had one excellent teacher. After that it had neither academic excellence nor caring. Religious bullying was part of the reason we pulled the Offspring out as soon as we could. The first private school was good at caring but scholastically? Pah. The second private was good at the academic side but not that great on the caring. As you say…gaps.
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:00 am
Yes I loved listening to the propaganda. I found it hilarious.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:33 am
-snort- masochist! 😀 😀
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:11 am
To this day listening to propaganda has made me suspicious of a any country which claims it has all the answers. I travelled across Russia and Eastern Europe. I lived in America, Israel and the UK.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:33 am
-sigh- yeah. I stayed with relatives in Hungary in the 70’s, whilst Hungary was still part of the Eastern block. It had the worst aspects of both ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’. I hated the place.
Ultimate, though, I discovered that Australia really is ‘home’. Not perfect. Very much not perfect, but being behind the times relative to every other Western country has its advantages.
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February 14th, 2022 at 11:02 am
I am used to it now. Being behind the times is not always a bad thing. I do wish they would learn from the mistakes of other countries. For example I watched Australia bring in many of the educational practices from the UK, which had failed and been abandoned.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:22 pm
Yup. Education ‘theory’ has hobbled education in the last 3? decades.
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:34 am
I really only sent our children to socialise. I had nearly resorted to homeschooling them. Fortunately their second school took bullying very seriously. I used to teach classes with forty plus children in the UK. I fell down in many areas. I always anticipated that I would have to plug in a few gaps with my own children. They have both just finished university now.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:21 am
lol – sounds familiar!
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:13 am
* stopped
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:03 am
I’ve seen that book mentioned somewhere, just a few days ago. I’ll have to look it up.
I don’t know much about Mussolini but I keep being drawn back to Goebbels and the Third Reich. It’s almost as if he wrote the playbook for how to manipulate the masses in ten easy steps. The parallels to the present day are chilling to say the least. 😦
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February 14th, 2022 at 12:01 pm
As I understand it, some of those currently manipulating us are very well acquainted with Goebels playbook.
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February 14th, 2022 at 7:59 pm
I wouldn’t be surprised, not one little bit. 😦
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February 14th, 2022 at 2:52 am
Russiagate is a giant effort to influence people to BELIEVE that the Clinton campaign manufactured the Collusion evidence…the danger here is that the very real Russian connections are false. They are not. The trumpies didn’t enlist Russian involvement…it was the other way around. The Russians elbowed and insinuated themselves into the election process. The whole point was to convince the masses to learn to love the Russians…a good crash course on Cold War History makes it clear. Look at the situation in Ukraine right now…remember trump posturing against NATO?
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:06 am
Aaaah! Thanks, Pat. But I assume that once approached, Trump minions that accepted Russian ‘help’ would still be classified as traitors???
And yes, who could forget the look on Angela Merkel’s face as she looked at Trump. Poop on the sole of her shoe would have earned a softer expression.
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February 14th, 2022 at 11:49 am
Anybody listen to Fiona Hill. I love her she is so no-nonsense. I think she gives a pretty fair assessment of Russian shenanigans.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:14 pm
I’m always a little wary of people who insist they’re apolitical and unbiased – I’m not sure that’s really possible – but Fiona Hill is very impressive.
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February 16th, 2022 at 7:03 am
The minions haven’t a clue. Everything “we” used against trump they either never heard (if they watch only FOX News,) or were convinced not to believe it. Then FOX etc. turned it back on the Left. These are not the brightest bulbs. 😉 Hillary Clinton is the enemy of choice of the trumpies idiot-base. They hate her on general principals for being an educated woman. A favorite thing they use against her is that she “allowed” Bill to get away with his womanizing. BTW, the Feds really were watching/spying on tRump…which is their jobs: to watch potential traitors hobnobbing with the enemy.
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February 16th, 2022 at 10:30 am
So complicated. So the Trump campaign used emails stolen by the Russians to undermine the Clinton campaign at the worst possible moment, but now they’re accusing the Clinton campaign of manufacturing evidence against Trump?
Sheesh. 😦
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February 17th, 2022 at 3:55 am
ah…something like that. Insanity rules here. 0-)
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February 17th, 2022 at 11:41 pm
I’m starting to think insanity rules just about everywhere in the Western world, including Oz. 😦
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February 18th, 2022 at 6:12 am
Some nit-wit suggested that the U.S. should invade Australia for their repressive nature. Another nit-wit took her seriously and rampaged against the mere idea of attacking Australia. The thing is to decide which one is the greater nit-wit…the one that believed the invader was serious…or the original one. Who knows…maybe she was serious. hmmmm
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February 18th, 2022 at 9:11 am
Gawd….???? And here the Australian nitwits fear that China is going to invade. The conservative govt fears it’s going to lose the coming election because of its total incompetence during the bushfires and then the pandemic and the vaccine rollout, so what do they do? They’re accusing the Opposition of being the puppets of China. And that’s DESPITE our own spy chief going on the national broadcaster and basically telling them off for politicising the threat posed by China. Of course the voting nitwits will lap up the anti-China sentiment. It’s insane, but the conservative politicians have gotten away with so much already, they simply don’t care.
To misquote Goebbels: tell a lie often enough and people will believe it.
This is a boil that’s going to keep on growing until something awful comes along to burst it. I just hope democracy survives.
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February 19th, 2022 at 6:11 am
some of my people here are trying to make Canada out to be communist… one of my relatives called ME a communist the other day…omg if there were only pills for STUPID. It seems to me that most of these people just snoozed through World War II history.
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February 19th, 2022 at 9:14 am
Hah! I suspect they may have skipped that class entirely. The level of ignorance is truly astounding. And it’s a kind of wilful ignorance. Our education systems have truly dropped the ball over the last 20? 30? years.
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February 13th, 2022 at 7:04 pm
Good post, thanks. I don’t meant to sound irreverent, it is a serious issue, but when I get together with my best mate to chew the fat, we usually conclude that all the internet has really done is expose to the whole world just how thick-as-mince the vast bulk of humanity is.
Really, before the internet they were called “pub bores” and no one took any notice of them; now they all band together and celebrate their ignorance to the widest possible audience.
The ‘free’ world is not in a good place, and in a couple of decades when the two most powerful countries on Earth will be solid dictatorships (China and Russia), the ‘free’ world will heading straight down the toilet *sigh*
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February 13th, 2022 at 7:12 pm
I guess I started out as a believer in humanity. That belief has been eroded over the years, but it’s been the pandemic that’s made me question whether humans aren’t just a waste of oxygen. Not all, obviously, but if so many can be so… -bites tongue- Does our music and our art really compensate life for our wars and for shitting in the only world we have?
With news of foreigners being ordered out of Ukraine, the prognosis feels completely negative. Who knows where we’ll be in a couple of decades.
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February 13th, 2022 at 7:26 pm
Very well said. Ultimately I still think it’s a question of evolution: we are part-civilised but still have to fight base urges to violence we’ve had for millions of years. It’s gonna take a while and it’s going to need education. If you don’t educate your citizens, it’s easier to make them hate and bend them to violence.
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February 13th, 2022 at 8:38 pm
As an ex teacher I couldn’t agree more. I don’t where the education systems went wrong, I’ve been out of the loop for far too many years, but i suspect that in the quest to make kids ‘creative’ we’ve stopped giving them the tools they need for life. So many kids pass through the education system as functioning illiterates. It’s devastating.
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February 13th, 2022 at 3:08 pm
Yes, Meeks, money…and what money brings: power. I think JVL puts his finger on the truth behind the “freedom” rallies in whatever country.
https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/conservatisms-complicated-relationship?r=2xi1r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct
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February 13th, 2022 at 7:37 pm
That’s a great article. Thanks Stephen. Power yes, but which power is pulling the strings? I’m not totally wedded to my conspiracy theory. I’m sure there are ‘middle managers’ in the movement who are true believers, but a bunch of idealists and intellectuals are generally not best suited to spearhead a global movement, and it’s just too…slick.
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February 13th, 2022 at 2:49 pm
Don’t these quotes ring a few warning bells about what is happening at the moment?
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February 13th, 2022 at 8:24 pm
God yes. Germany was in a bad way and people were primed for a charismatic leader who could tell them what they wanted to hear. 😦
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February 13th, 2022 at 10:23 pm
I am nearly always suspicious of people with charisma,having been married to one of them for almost twenty years. I make an exception for Obama. I know he is very charismatic but I still like him.
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:34 am
lol – I agree with you about charisma AND Obama. I kept looking at his wife and it was so obvious that she loved and supported him. I don’t believe she would have done that had he been a bastard when the cameras were switched off.
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February 13th, 2022 at 2:48 pm
I find these “freedom” rallies disturbing, and hate that they seem to have started in Canada. That’s not “us!” Like you, I think the disaffected are being coordinated from behind the scenes.
The really disturbing thing is the non-response from governments. Mayors and local police forces are calling for help, but provincial and federal politicians just issue statements like “It’s time for everyone to go home,” and then duck back inside.
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February 13th, 2022 at 8:23 pm
Yeah, that surprised me too. Over here, I hoped the worst of the rabble rousers would be at least named and shamed, but instead they’ve been treated with kid gloves. I don’t get it.
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February 13th, 2022 at 2:46 pm
The quote from Goebels is so true. I found a great quote from Goehring who was asked how they had managed to get people to do their bidding:
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”― Herman Göhring
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February 13th, 2022 at 8:21 pm
Ouch…it’s hard to believe that was already out there close to 70 years ago. 😦
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February 13th, 2022 at 1:02 pm
I never thought I would see the issue of freedom so corrupted. I do agree with you that all this is being deliberately orchestrated. Somebody is deliberately using our own Western values against us and running a divide and conquer operation.
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February 13th, 2022 at 7:55 pm
Yes, that’s exactly how it feels to me too. ‘Divide and conquer’…and it’s working.
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February 13th, 2022 at 12:13 pm
I didn’t dig into it like you did. I’m mostly scared to death about the damage to children from constant masking, from stuff put into their bodies they might not need (or might need but the jury’s still out). So, for me, it becomes freedom of choice, part freedom of speech. Let me make my stupid decisions if that’s what they are. Didn’t we used to do that for anti-vaxxers? Not sure because I vaxxed my kids, didn’t worry about those who chose not to.
Does any of that tie into the truckers? I don’t know and probably won’t spend much time trying to figure it out! I have a good book to read. You may have heard of it–Miira?
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February 13th, 2022 at 7:49 pm
Here in Australia the government said that those over 60 could /only/ get the AstraZeneca vaccine because there was an associated potential health risk. I hate being a second class citizen and not being given a choice, so I refused to get the AZ for almost a year, but I had the good fortune to be able to self-isolate so my choice was never going to hurt anyone else. For me, individual choice is sacred until it infringes on the rights of someone else, and you can’t get any more infringed than dying.
I suspect the truckers have been manipulated just as our building workers were last year. When people are unhappy to begin with, it’s not that hard to focus their attention on a ’cause’. Goebbels did it in Germany, ad agencies do it all the time, and I fear that someone is doing it now. The question is – with malicious intent or just because they can, as an exercise in ‘power’. I wish I knew the answer.
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February 13th, 2022 at 12:08 pm
Probably the reason Xi sat down with Putin. They see no value in democracy, and are looking for ways to undermine it constantly. Let’s hope the governments are not naive.
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February 13th, 2022 at 11:35 am
Let’s get real meta. The authorities are targeting the private money provided by crowdfunding sites such as gofundme because it would dilute the power that the real money behind the rallies has. Yeah?
It’s an interesting thought, not one that I think deserves credence. Personally I think that protests are entirely predictable whenever authorities threaten individual income and livelihood. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
(Telegram, by the way, is an encrypted messaging app/twitter alternative which is fairly popular in right-wing circles. An alternative explanation is that people who are active on Telegram and believe in the cause are volunteering their time to create websites for like-minded people, and that money doesn’t have anything to do with it at all )
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February 13th, 2022 at 11:59 am
Thanks for the info on Telegram. I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of it before today.
I agree with you re disaffected people being ripe to protest, but it’s the, mmm, ‘flavour’ of the protests that first made me go ‘what the?’ Until very recently, ‘freedom’ was not something most Australians would have ever considered. Why? Because we’ve always felt free. Freedom is a uniquely American obsession. So how come Australians have picked up that particular meme? Sure, there was always going to be a part of the population that jacked up about the lockdowns and restrictions, but in the past, they would have stayed in discrete ‘groupings’ – anti-vaxxers in one group, conspiracy theorists in their group of choice. Having them all come together like this is odd to say the least.
I should also point out that unlike the US, almost ALL Australians have been fully vaccinated. That gives you some idea of the difference in our two cultures. Another point of difference is that we are a social democracy so the safety net extended to almost every part of the population during the pandemic has been extensive and almost generous.
So no, the motivation behind the freedom rallies is not straight forward here in Australia. Nor are the odd references to Trump. Pauline Hanson is our own homegrown Trump-wannabe, but her following is very very small.
All of which tells me that this is NOT a homegrown protest based on genuine grievances.
As for Telegram…someone[s] wrote it out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re handing it out for free, out of the goodness of their hearts. Someone[s] else created a highly persuasive world-view that smack of Goebbels-style manipulation, also out of the goodness of their hearts.
https://www.azquotes.com/author/5626-Joseph_Goebbels
Like-minded people…? I think they become like-minded, but only because they are manipulated into doing so.
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February 13th, 2022 at 12:25 pm
I see what you’re saying. It’s a small world, so it’s not surprising to me that certain memes and ideas would cross borders.
It’s interesting to me, but I’ve actually had this same conversation over pretty much every protest I can remember. I’ve talked to people who were convinced that BLM was astroturfed, as well as the initial anti-lockdown protests here in the States (April 2020.)
Of course I can’t prove any of that wrong, but my big objection to it is that it’s an easy out for anyone who doesn’t approve of the protest. The first stage of grief is denial. It’s much easier to off-load a cause you don’t approve of, or that makes you uncomfortable, as being fake than actually considering the concerns that are brought up by that movement.
So while I thoroughly approve of certain conspiracies (Epstein didn’t kill himself) I find conspiracies that are designed to ignore the concerns of segments of the population, be they large or small, as problematic. Emblematic of these conspiracies here would be both Russiagate and Stop The Steal. Both of these theories deal with the fact that huge portions of the country are in disagreement with each other by saying that the disagreement is actually fake, and I think that both have been extremely harmful.
So I’m not going to argue that what you’re saying isn’t possible. I’m just here to share a cautionary tale.
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February 13th, 2022 at 7:54 pm
I’m not denying the fact that X number of people have concerns/problems/issues etc. I’m simply pointing out that here in Australia they seem to be largely manufactured.
I am a bit confused though. I don’t know about ‘Russiagate’ but everyone has heard about ‘Stop The Steal’. Are you saying that all those Trump supporters came up with that idea on their own??? That it wasn’t orchestrated?
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February 14th, 2022 at 1:22 am
Russiagate is the theory that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election. To your point, it is now clear that the only evidence which ever existed for that was manufactured and paid for by the Clinton campaign. Both of these ideas were popular with large swaths of the population because they shunned responsibility for actually considering opposing viewpoints.
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:29 am
Hmm…another commenter said the Russian connection was real but that the Russians had approached the Trump campaign rather than the other way around. Do you have a link to proof about the Clintons?
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:45 am
If you’re not familiar with the whole saga this might be a bit confusing, but here are a couple for starters.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dnc-clinton-campaign-paid-for-research-in-trump-dossier-report/
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/580391-durhams-latest-indictment-more-lines-drawn-to-clintons-campaign
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:20 am
Thanks for the links but I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. Clearly missing the base context. I’ve just read a summary of the Mueller report but that seems to go too far back. What’s in the middle is missing.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:47 am
I followed the whole saga for years and I made an effort to listen to those spruiking the points you mention. Of course the Russians were involved. I used to be fascinated by the whole dynamic during the Cold War. The Russians were very successful at cultivating young men from top UK universities at one point. They had their fingerprints all over what has happened in the US in recent years. I speak as somebody whose father had high security clearance during the Cold War.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:52 am
I grew up during the Cold War too, and I remember some of those young men. The Russians have always been good at grooming people. I suspect they dangled tempting financial/business/power bait in front of Trump campaigners because that was the bait they’d be most likely to swallow.
The thing is, I’m sure the US and the UK have done exactly the same thing in reverse.
When a country like Australia bugs trade talks with an impoverished country to steal what little that country has…my disgust knows no bounds.
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February 14th, 2022 at 11:10 am
Yes sadly the Russians may indeed have learned a lot from us. I travelled through Russia on the Trans Siberian. My ex was dragged off by an excited looking Russian, waving a bottle of vodka. Maybe a lot of problems would be solved by getting together over a bottle of vodka.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:23 pm
lmao – No way. Shiraz or nothing. 😉
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:23 pm
Thank you. You really made me laugh.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:21 pm
lol – Good. 🙂
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:35 pm
It has been funny watching my youngsters get all over-excited about things. I remember saying to them it used to happen all the time. We expel their dip,moats then they expel ours. Funny story- we rented our house in Americs off two Americans in
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:54 pm
Also one of the biggest issues is setting men and women up against one another. Personally I went through a period of not liking men at all following an abusive relationship. Then I remembered I had always got along better with men than women before I met my ex.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:28 pm
It’s a world in which everyone has become the enemy.
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February 14th, 2022 at 9:44 pm
Sorry two Americans who got expelled from Russia for spying in a bit for that deal. We latervheard their tales of having been set up. Good old-fashioned Co,d War tactics. I almost miss it. Instead now We are dealing with idiots who believe every bit of crap they read on the internet. It used to be a bit more sophisticated. I once mixed with all the bigwigs in Washington DC. It was fantastic. I thought the Americans back then were the kindest people I had ever met. They would literally give you the shirts off their backs. They gave us furniture when we had none. Now at least one of my dear American friends has gone down the anti vac rabbit hole. I love her dearly but recognise there is nothing I can do to change her views.
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February 14th, 2022 at 10:26 pm
Two honest to god spies? Wow.
I think some of the Americans are still the kindest people you could ever meet, and a lot of them are here. Sadly the US seems to have split down the middle into angels and demons. It’s scary.
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February 15th, 2022 at 8:02 am
They were just an ordinary family. Pretty sure they were set up. A couple of Russians were expelled from The U.S. so the Russians retaliated.
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February 15th, 2022 at 8:22 am
Oh I see. Meh. The tit-for-tat of global diplomacy [sic] is stupid.
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February 14th, 2022 at 11:43 am
I got the impression that the whole “influence the American election” campaign began because Putin wanted the sanctions lifted. Maria Butina, who has admitted being a Russian spy specifically questioned Trump about his stance concerning the sanctions.
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February 14th, 2022 at 8:19 pm
That makes sense. Putin’s a megalomaniac but he’s not stupid. There’d have to be something more than just ‘messing’ with the Americans for him to put such a play in place.
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