Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist who writes political commentary on US foreign policy, media, censorship, and Julian Assange.
HN commenters cite her as insightful on US empire, the Ukraine war, and Assange, mostly to support their own arguments.
I think John Mearsheimer summed it up quite well. Australia doesn't really have a choice. They don't really know what will happen if they go against China, but there are a lot of precedents on what happens to countries that go against the US. I guess the general consensus is to not risk that.
The Aukus deal is completely crazy. Australia is paying the US to build their own shipyards in the hopes that they get the right to share OLD submarines with the UK.
> “Now some people say there’s an alternative: you can go with China,” said Mearsheimer. “You have a choice here: you can go with China rather the United States. There’s two things I’ll say about that. Number one, if you go with China, you want to understand you are our enemy. You are then deciding to become an enemy of the United States. Because again, we’re talking about an intense security competition.”
> “You’re either with us or against us,” he continued. “And if you’re trading extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.”
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/14/on-war-with-china-australia-is-caught-between-a-rock-and-a-pentagon/
> Google provides useful products, and in exchange we might be targeted with annoying ads. Big whoop. Until now.
Enter a cage willingly, with barely any complaint, for minor convenience, then cry when you're taken to the slaughterhouse. It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.
And despite this, they remain willfully blind to other threats, that are smart enough to stay below the threshold: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/censorship-by-algorithm-does-far
> Four ways to build civil rights into Google products
A laughable chapter of the article, void of any actually effective suggestions, such as compelling Google properties to stop blocking the Tor network (duckduckgo and yandex allow Tor), or using free software that is actually under the user's control.
The problem is that would give users actual power and autonomy. But what the authors really want is for Google and other corporations to keep acting as internet police, but only enforcing rules they agree with, and not any others. That's why they want to build "civil rights" into products, and not "user freedom". That's why they get comments from an establishment Harvard professor, and not the FSF.
I'm an African American living in Asia. I have lived in China. And I have experienced much more racism in America than in China. Some will not believe me so I'm prepared to prove it if necessary.
Recently, certain politicians have made grave proclamations about people/thugs fighting for freedom in HK, Minneapolis, and other places around the world.
It should be interesting and instructive to observe the cognitive dissonance and resulting contortions of U.S. and other Western politicians as they address this grave matter.
I have observed that whenever some of my compatriots are presented with information that lies outside their regular programming, they label the messenger either a Chinese or Russian troll. This Australian woman has noticed this phenomenon: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03/19/liberal-npcs-hate-russia-conservative-npcs-hate-china/
These could be as a result of foreign influence operations by the Russians or the Chinese. Then again, this effect might simply be the result of the online labors of America's equivalent of GCHQ's JTRIG:
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group
We (Americans) are the masters of "foreign influence operations."
"... the WikiLeaks team has racked up numerous awards for journalism over the years, including the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism (2011), the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011), the International Piero Passetti Journalism Prize of the National Union of Italian Journalists (2011), the Jose Couso Press Freedom Award (2011), the Brazillian Press Association Human Rights Award (2013), and the Kazakstan Union of Journalists Top Prize (2014).
The claim that Assange is “not a journalist” is both an irrelevant red herring and a self-evident falsehood. It is made not by people with an interest in maintaining a small and specific linguistic understanding of what the word journalism means, but by people who want to see Julian Assange imprisoned by the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning because he made them feel emotionally upset. It’s a fact-free argument made entirely in bad faith for inexcusable motives: the desire to see a journalist imprisoned for telling the truth.
When someone says “Assange isn’t a journalist”, they aren’t telling you what Assange is. They’re showing you what they are. "
- from https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/04/07/assange-is-not-a-journalist-yes-he-is-idiot/
You might think Johnstone's assertions are wrong, but you too are lying when you say they are unsupported; in the sentence you are referring to, she linked to her own previous article which explains the history https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/experts-warned-for-years-that-nato as well as some guy named "Aaron I Killed" on Substack https://mate.substack.com/p/the-ukraine-crisis-sponsored-by-us?s=r and, more credibly, a FAIR backgrounder by Bryce Greene https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/.
These do in fact support the assertion. "Aaron I Killed" in particular seems perhaps partisan enough that his assertions should be handled with tweezers. The FAIR article is pretty solid and reliable; the only criticism I'd make is that, as progressives often do, it overstates the importance of the neo-Nazi movement in both Ukraine and in the US, for example neglecting to mention that the Ukrainian neo-Nazis lost all their parliamentary seats in the last election.
I haven't been watching RT so I don't know firsthand how much they're lying, but see a lot of secondhand reports that they're lying an enormous amount, and those seem reliable.
It’s 1984, folks. No joke.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/09/facebook-allies-with-us-regime-change-orgs-for-fact-checking-in-foreign-countries.html
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/10/01/twitter-suspends-accounts-for-propaganda-has-literal-propagandist-as-high-level-executive
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/20/ciad-a20.html
(As for the R’s, I saw but can’t find a clip of John Bolton bragging about helping R’s elect people with similar pedigrees.)
https://www.corbettreport.com/psychographics-101/
https://www.corbettreport.com/the-cfr-loves-domestic-propaganda-propagandawatch/
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/03/25/how-us-flooded-the-world-with-psyops/
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/13/the-victory-of-perception-management-2/
From 2007 BTW:
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1941