Floating in a Sea of Propaganda – part 4

It is not enough that our leaders have power; they want to be loved. That’s a fairly consistent pattern in powerful people; I think that sometimes it’s that they want to be able to convince themselves that their route to power was not ruthless and corrupt, or that they didn’t abuse their underlings too much.

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Floating In a Sea of Propaganda – part 2


There are good lies and bad lies, apparently. It’s bad propaganda when Russians buy ads on social media, but it’s good propaganda when the CIA does. The Soviet Union emitted a lot of propaganda, and Voice of America didn’t.

Meanwhile, the politically naive complain about “post-modernism” and how everyone acts as though the truth is relative. Well, what else did you expect? [part 1, stderr]

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Floating In a Sea of Propaganda – part 1

We float in a sea of propaganda and lies; the biggest lie of them all being that we don’t float in a sea of propaganda and lies. There’s a truth out there, and every media figure and politician earnestly tries to claim the high ground by indicating, with ritual dance-steps, that they are conveying the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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Capital: Asset Stripping and Leveraging 101

A friend of mine retired from an IT executive job and she and her husband decided to become wealthy capitalists in their retirement. Since the evils of capitalism are a frequent topic here on FtB, maybe it’s a good idea to do a quick explainer of how a few of those evils work. These are the simple ones, and I’ll describe them as cleanly as I can so you can understand what’s going on when you hear about it elsewhere.

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