Volume 270 | No. 26

The Politics of Agency

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by Richard M. Balzano The algorithm-driven debate-industrial complex recently gifted the internet another installment of its ongoing effort to merge cable news, professional wrestling, and civic collapse into a single monetized spectacle: Jubilee Media and Straight Arrow News released a video titled “1 Journalist vs 20 Trump Supporters” in which constitutional law attorney-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald volleyed geopolitical common sense into a clown car of personalities parroting curated conservative talking points and outright falsehoods about the Iran war—“Operation Epstein Fury.” I highly recommend the video to anyone wishing to observe the effectiveness of propaganda and the failures of the American educational system in real time. Among …

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Ruining America as a Business

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Interesting: on Tuesday, “The Grey Lady” caught up with us. Ever since we snuck into Lord Kenneth of Fleet’s stable of newspapers and rode away on The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper,™ we’ve been sounding the same barbaric yawp. Our more recently established colleagues went on reporting as if governance was proceeding more or less along the lines laid out centuries earlier on parchment. In contrast, our assumption, from the start of our stewardship, has been that journalism, as it was being practiced, mostly served a prop to hold up the façade of a Potemkin reality. The opinion section of The New York Times for September 1st …

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Volume 270, No. 26

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It is easy to see how a reasonable person keeping up with the news might conclude that the people in charge of this country are hell bent on destroying it. Either that, or we’ve been underestimating the destructive power of collaborative incompetence. Whichever it is, it’s distressing as hell. We, however, have gone to considerable effort to put ourselves in a position which obliges us to read and write about what more and more looks like the dissolution and degradation of a flawed but promising attempt by a bunch of evolutionary flukes to govern themselves. Normal persons grappling with such a task might be tempted …

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