(12-14-2016, 06:48 AM)David Horn Wrote:(12-14-2016, 12:06 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: WikiLeaks is not Russian.
No, but Julian Assange has an agenda that seems to be anarchic as far as the West is concerned. He has no problem using Russian material to that end -- never mind that the Russians are far worse. He doesn't care. So WikiLeaks is a tool to implode Western government, and the Russians are more than willing to use that tool. At this point, even bald-faced lies seem to be acceptable to Assange, who sees himself as a freedom fighter under siege. Expect much more.
Just as bad -- expect America's oligarchs to develop an ethos much like that of slave-owning planters who hold that the rest of the world exists solely to enrich and pamper the economic elites... and those elites will call this subjection "freedom". Rights for economic elites beyond not being dispossessed imply that others are burdened with special duties to masters in all but name. Donald Trump found the opening for fascism in America -- contempt for the intellectually-active mind.
That happens when people of unbridled narcissism get complete power as a class over helpless people.
When this Trump nightmare is over we are gong to need major reforms of the educational as well as the political system so that we never fall for this horror again.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.