Tag: social issues

Today’s show got kinda rambly and off-topic, but the focus is still social media fakes in the context of political and other discussion where there’s a high rate of disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation. We discuss some common tactics they use, and some ways you can push back against them, along with a bunch of rambling about some other stuff because frankly I was out of spoons about 9am today so I really wasn’t at my best.  I’m going to do this topic again in a more organized, informative, and concise way, but it’s still worth a listen.

In today’s podcast we’re talking about doublethink, how we fool ourselves, how we can trip over our own words without even realizing it, starting with an example from a prominent political page on FB where they invoked 1984, doublethink, and “Fairness Doctrine” all at once without ever realizing that in so doing, they were simultaneously warning against and advocating for government control of the media.

First episode of the new podcast.  Audio’s a bit clippy in spots, I’m not in the best possible environment; later eps should sound better.  These casts are archives of audio+video livestreams, most of which you can catch live at 8pm Eastern M-F at https://youtube.com/johnhenryus/live.

In this inaugural cast, we’re talking about “Modern Monetary Theory” and what it tells us about how our money works and why the general public needs to basically forget everything they think they know about economics at the national and international levels and start over from scratch.

Key concepts:

• Federal taxes don’t fund federal spending, or anything else.
• We don’t have to take from one thing to fund another
• We must tax the rich, but not to pay for things; taxing great wealth is a preventative measure to stop the democratic process from being subverted by the ownership class
• Stephanie Kelton and Bill Mitchell are your key figures in this concept
• I’m a messenger, not an economist.  If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of it, start with those two websites above.
• Orthodox and heterodox economists hate MMT, but they can’t build a cogent argument against it.  They’ve spent petabytes trying, but they can’t.
• Fuck Paul Krugman.