Z Communications

Really cool to see Michael Albert mentioned on HN. He runs a great site called ZNet, a portal to really good political analysis from what you might call the "left libertarian" perspective. For example Noam Chomsky is a regular contributor, just to give you an idea. The design's a little dated and they're always looking for technical help. https://zcomm.org/

Noam Chomsky is 91. Holy crap. My favourite Chomsky thing is the very short shrift he gives to conspiracy theorists. e.g. Rethinking Camelot, his book about JFK - https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/chomsky/rc/rc-conte… - the thesis being that JFK was really no different to any other president at that time - the idea he was radical being a kindof post-hoc reconstruction - and hence there was absolutely no reason for anyone to want to bump him off. A methodological point is perhaps worth mention. Suppose that we were to concoct a theory about historical events at random, while permitting ourselves to assume arbitrary forms of deceit and falsification. Then in the vast documentary record, we are sure to find scattered hints and other debris that could be made to conform to the theory, while counter-evidence is nullified. By that method, one can "prove" virtually anything. For example, we can prove that JFK never intended to withdraw any troops, citing the elusiveness of NSAM 263 and his unwillingness to commit himself to the withdrawal recommended by his war managers. Or we can prove that the attempt to assassinate Reagan was carried out by dark forces (Alexander Haig, the CIA, etc.). After all, Reagan had backed away from using US forces directly in Central America (unlike JFK in Vietnam); he was cozying up to the Chicoms; he had already given intimations of the anti-nuclear passion that led him to offer to give away the store at Rejkjavik and to join…

Managing to challenge ones preconceptions is always going to take work. Also note that for someone getting their news from FOX News, the New York Times is a left-wing outlier. News is pretty terrible in Norway too, but I always feel like I'm in a sitcom whenever I visit the US/Canada. Where BBC and the Guardian appear as bastions against the establishment -- while they of course are very much mainstream. On the other hand, I'm quite grateful to many of the Republican bloggers/commenters for offering their view on US politics -- it can be easy to forget that the US has a strong intellectual tradition, and while you'll find me agreeing with/quoting Chomsky or Klein more often than anyone on the other end -- there are quite a few voices on the right that have strong and interesting opinions on freedom, independence, commerce, curbing of federal powers etc. Anyway, with HN being so dominated by the US in general, and Silicon Valley (including the part of SV that lives in NYC ;-) -- I find it can be quite a contrast to my other echo chambers... I'm afraid I couldn't suggest anything similar that is more left leaning -- maybe https://zcomm.org/znet/ or http://monthlyreview.org/ (but I don't really follow either -- and they certainly can't compare in any meaningful way with hn).

Noam Chomsky's "Necessary Illusions" goes into the thought control exercised in free democratic societies. https://zcomm.org/necessary-illusions/

Here: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/accenture-japan-visit-and-the-mystery-of…

There is a lot of shady stuff with Japan and USA surveillance. Japan has started fingerprinting all non-citizens in 2007. at immigration checkpoints in airports and harbors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-BIS The winning bid for this system was by Accenture, same company that handles US's fingerprinting system, and their bid was 100,000JPY, or approximately $900 at the time. This doesn't cover even the cost of one single machine. https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/accenture-japan-visit-and-the-mystery-of… A stateless corporation in Bermuda in control of millions of biometric IDs (fingerprints) that are usually hard to obtain for the US gov/spy agencies? In this post-Snowden world, I'm having trouble believing that there's nothing shady going on here.

democracynow.org https://zcomm.org/zmag/ http://www.congressionaldish.com/

Here are some perspectives: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/reflections-on-the-recent-paris-massacre…

> In the same way, I question how much "American hegemony" is pushed by America, and how much of it is "pulled" by other countries finding "American" values, perspectives, and positions to be more attractive than other alternatives. i think the pull exists, at least a little, mainly in areas in free speech, personal wealth accumulation, etc. but i think 99.99% is push, not pull. for the 'push' part, you can read this by chomsky (free, online there): https://zcomm.org/deterring-democracy/ it's not necessarily light reading, but...well, i think our reading abilities have dropped so low that it probably does qualify as complex reading now. if you don't share chomsky's professed values -- The Golden Rule, elementary moral principles, democracy (not just formal, but actually-functional/functioning), etc. -- you'd probably pretty quickly come to hate that book and all of Chomsky's professed views.

It's on here http://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/www/chomsky/rab/rab-2.html Simple searching on google showed me on the first page (third result). The amount of truth we see is relative to the intension we're having. The rest just seems invisible to us. Few more thoughts from Chomsky related to the theme of our discussion regarding truth: “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.” (Exactly fit for responses I got re my geo-political remark) “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.” (Yay, so true. But we're more concerned about how perfect and moral our regulation structure is, that it punishes the right people with right evidence... but evidence can be shown when it's the most convenient time to show them) “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.” (Who likes truth anyway?) “For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.” ("Hey, Germany ministers are towing the line and aren't repeating our propaganda, how can we show them their place?" "Well, let's call our regulatory depts., we must be having some violation reports waiting to be show light of the day at this opportune moment. Find the one with biggest potential impact, and, and we'll have the compliance of Germany without shotting a single bullet." "Yeah, this will also set example for other…

Anders Behring Breivik had a long manifesto that was meant to provide conceptual landscape behind his killing of 77 people. Unsurprising is the appearance of Geert Wilders, Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes et al. in there, but its remarkably instructive that the likes of the respected George Orwell are also cited. Part of his worldview (and not necessarily his course of action) is shared by a substantive part of the people coming from ethnic-European origin. Much of the less-than-graceful themes in the manifesto were from the doctrinal elements that contributed to the unprecedented carnage across Europe during the WWII, particularly symbolized by the horrific sufferings of the hapless humans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (There are similar aspects pertaining to the thoughts of Dylann Roof et.al). I wonder whether these affairs and the associated ideological terrains have been examined as widely and with as much interests. The recent horrific criminal acts in Paris have connections with France's colonial past with Algeria (https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/reflections-on-the-recent-paris-massacre… And Daesh, the brutal group implicated, has its genesis in other brutalities, not unlike other similar affairs in the past (http://johnpilger.com/articles/from-pol-pot-to-isis-anything-that-flie… In different settings with reduced level of invasions and imposed/incited sufferings, such as in Malaysia, things have remained at least as decent as any other.

Here is a list I keep for weekend reading Got some of these links from previous HN posts like this.. Not entirely tech sites http://nautil.us/ https://lwn.net/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/ http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ https://meaningness.com/ http://slatestarcodex.com/ http://www.britishpathe.com/ http://www.atlasobscura.com/ https://scholars-stage.blogspot.my http://www.counterpunch.org/ http://harpers.org/history/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/ https://zcomm.org/zmag/ https://the-artifice.com https://liliputing.com/ https://dev.to/ http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/ https://stratechery.com/ http://www.tedunangst.com/inks/