 Asanj is the greatest journalist of all time. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. It's funny how former Israeli Prime Minister Ahud Barak just deleted a tweet admitting that Israel has nuclear weapons, at the same time the Washington Post reports that U.S. allies have a don't talk about Nord Stream policy because of the answers it would turn up. There are many open secrets that everyone knows but isn't allowed to acknowledge publicly. The world's most famous journalist was just deprived of a visit from Reporters Without Borders because the British prison he's being kept in received intelligence that they are journalists. And yet all we ever hear about is how Russia and China mistreat journalists. Julian Asanj is the world's greatest and most famous journalist, and he's in prison solely for the crime of doing good journalism, but sure, let's all spend our time shaking our fists at far away authoritarian regimes for imprisoning journalists. Asanj is not only the world's greatest living journalist, he is the greatest journalist who has ever lived. There's really no valid argument against this. Seriously, name me a superior journalist. You can't. Asanj began his journalism career by revolutionizing source protection for the digital age then proceeded to break some of the biggest stories of the century. There's no one who can hold a candle to him, living or dead. The fact that he is now in prison for doing great journalism tells you everything you need to know about our society. And now he's in a maximum security prison solely and exclusively because he was better at doing the best kind of journalism than anyone else. That is the kind of civilization you live in. The kind that imprisons the best journalist of all time for doing journalism. You'll never convince me, it's an organic phenomenon, that the population always splits itself into two equal oppositional political factions which always leaves them in a deadlock unable to get anything done, and it always deadlocks in a way that benefits the rich and powerful. People who spend their time freaking out about China are the single dumbest group I interact with online. Not necessarily the nastiest or the most aggressive, but definitely the dumbest. They'll believe pretty much anything said by anyone, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it's critical of China. The instant they see literally any negative claim about China from literally anyone, all their critical faculties go right out the window and they turn into a bunch of foam-brained imbeciles. Probably the most well-known, out of innumerable possible examples was when Jordan Peterson shared a BDSM milking video because some disinformation account had implied that it documents abuses by the Chinese government. This dynamic seems to have its roots in the generations-long portrayal of the Chinese as a mysterious, inscrutable race whose culture is nothing like ours. That's the only explanation I can think of for why Westerners ascribe motives and agendas to their government that make no sense at all. Once you stop thinking of a nationality as normal human beings with hopes and dreams who love their families and want to get by just like you, you can believe anything is true about their motives and goals because you've turned them into space aliens or evil orcs in your mind. If you believe Chinese people are human beings more or less like yourself with similar motivations, then you're able to quickly recognize bullshit claims about their motives and behavior because they make no sense from a normal human perspective. Without that view you're lost. The other day someone I was arguing with online just casually referred to the Chinese as insect-like, comparing them to an ant's nest. Once you've dehumanized an entire nation like that, you've sedated all your critical thinking abilities into a coma. You've crippled your mind. Another reason why people with anti-China hysteria are the single dumbest group I interact with online is that they're constantly being fed moronic bullshit like this. And it's a tweet with an interview on Fox News of Gordon Chang, the propagandist, saying, China is preparing to kill Americans and we have to prepare to defend ourselves. Talking about Taiwan. They're constantly having brain poison like this mainlined right into their skulls by empire propagandists like Jordan Chang. China is preparing to kill Americans and we have to prepare to defend ourselves. You mean China is preparing to defend itself from completely undisguised military encirclement and potential U.S. intervention in an inter-Chinese conflict? A conflict on the other side of the planet from the United States? A conflict which you, Gordon Chang, would not be fighting in? Fucking idiot. The 2016 U.S. presidential election changed everything. Not because Trump himself changed things significantly, he didn't. But because the Western media formed a consensus at that point that it's their solemn duty to help the U.S. government win an information war against Russia. A consensus quickly formed that it was wrong for the media to report on the 2016 WikiLeaks releases, which were alleged to have come from Russian hackers, though still not proven to since this day. In that decision the last rays of real journalism in the mainstream media were quashed. Once all mainstream journalists accepted that it's their job not to report true facts about the powerful, but to advance the information interests of their government and or preferred political party, it was over. The last glimmer of life in a truth-based society was snuffed out. We've seen this on full display since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with journalists uncritically reporting unevidenced government claims, ignoring important questions like the Ukrainian death toll, even accepting the U.S. government's admission that it's using them to circulate lies in an information war. It could have gone the opposite way. The media could have seized on the corruption exposed in the WikiLeaks documents to spark an invigorated charge to investigate U.S. government malfeasance. Instead, it was used to hide, forgive, and facilitate U.S. government malfeasance.