Media criticism of an anti-WEF video by _The Duran_ ==== Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK72PDM8jXI Title: _Trudeau puts Canada, and The World on notice, 'The Great Reset' is being launched_ By fixating on a vague WEF policy and extrapolating wildly, the presenters are able to influence their viewers in favour of anti-democratic, far-right politics. For the entire video they are talking about Trudeau's speech, yet they never actually show a single clip from it. For them it's enough that Trudeau simply uttered the word "reset" (not even "great reset") while talking about the pandemic. If you actually watch [Trudeau's speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2fp0Jeyjvw) you'll see nothing but quite vanilla social welfare policies: helping the Canadian working class through covid, trying to address climate change and promoting international vaccination against covid. To the conspiratorial, this seems like evidence enough of a "New World Order" plot, which Alex mentions by name at [(15:55)](https://youtu.be/jK72PDM8jXI?t=955). However, by their own admission, the great reset (as they imagine it) would never actually work. So why devote an entire 25 minute video to its discussion? The reason they provide is that _even if_ it won't work, it will cause huge amounts of damage and suffering in the process [(16:59)](https://youtu.be/jK72PDM8jXI?t=1019). There's no evidence for this, apart from pure speculation on the part of the presenters. In my opinion, the reason for the fixation is that it helps advance their causes. Ironically, Duran talks about how the WEF could bring people on-board with the great reset by uniting people with fear [(13:13)](https://youtu.be/jK72PDM8jXI?t=793), yet that is exactly what this video seeks to do by talking about "damage" and "suffering". It is designed to create a boogeyman out of the great reset to bolster support for a host of far-right causes: covid denial, climate denial, Trump and Russia. I'll cover each of these below. For covid and climate change there's no explicit denial in this video, but denial of both is a common part of the great reset conspiracy theory (https://www.bbc.com/news/55017002). The logical leaps are along the lines of: * Elites want to profit from covid (true) --> (_implies_) elites must have created covid (false) * Elites want to address climate change (true) --> (_implies_) climate change is a hoax (false) Neither of these implications are justified. It's an inconvenient truth for the far-right that covid and climate change _are real_ and that they are _hard to fix_ and might require people to work together. Making a spectre out of "collectivism" and decrying all attempts at addressing either problem through collective action (or government intervention) is counterproductive. Trump is mentioned by name several times in the video, always in a positive light. In one section it's claimed that the reason for the US's political crisis is "the people who support these agendas want to drive a certain outcome and they don't really care about constitutions, democracies, elections" [(21:23)](https://youtu.be/jK72PDM8jXI?t=1269). Trump is portrayed as "the resistance" to this anti-democratic threat. Again this is ironic. Trump and his supporters are themselves an anti-democratic faction in modern politics, having attempted to [deny the 2020 election result](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election), culminating in the Jan 6 protest. In another section, they portray western democracies as weak and ripe for hijacking by the great reset [(15:11)](https://youtu.be/jK72PDM8jXI?t=911). In contrast, authoritarian states Russia, China and Bolsonaro's Brazil are portrayed as strong and resistant to WEF meddling. There is a very strange contradiction in this logic: Duran claims to be pro-democracy but writes off real democracies to promote anti-democratic, authoritarian states. In their other articles The Duran is openly pro-Russia, and is also affiliated with Russia Today ([source 1][media_bias], [source 2][lavelle_twitter]). [media_bias]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-duran/ [lavelle_twitter]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210925235032/https://twitter.com/plcrosstalk/status/905695410928447489 Additionally, the video omits several pertinent facts which don't fit the narrative: - Trudeau isn't a dictator, Canada is still a democracy. Flaws aside, it could not be easily hijacked by Trudeau even if he were a WEF pawn. - Large corporates DID profit from the pandemic, but not through a shadowy great reset, but from good old-fashioned neoliberalism: https://www.brookings.edu/research/profits-and-the-pandemic-as-shareholder-wealth-soared-workers-were-left-behind/ - Lockdowns were actually very effective at preventing the spread of covid and preventing loss of life (see: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02823-4). It was big business that had an incentive for the economy to "open up" and return to business-as-usual (consumerism). - The World Bank and IMF, which are only mentioned briefly in the video, are the main proponents of neoliberal ideology worldwide, which mainly takes the form of deregulation and privatisation: https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2019/06/what-are-the-main-criticisms-of-the-world-bank-and-the-imf/ --- _This section is my own personal opinion and isn't cited like the previous one, because I'm writing off the cuff and not specifically about the video_. I don't really care about the WEF's plans. I'm not in favour of any kind of great reset. I _am_ in favour of addressing difficult societal problems like covid, inequality and climate change. I see far-right propaganda like The Duran as a threat to people being able to make their own informed decisions. There are many alternatives to the right's criticism of elites, which _also_ don't involve authoritarianism or centralisation. Unions are organisations of workers, democratically controlled by their members, and capable of affecting political change. Even _Marxism_ (which is often confused with Marxist-Leninism by the right) is primarily an analytical framework _for capitalism_ which centres on contradictions and poor social outcomes. It is possible to read Marxist thought and apply Marxist analysis to capitalism, _without_ advocating for authoritarian communist regimes like we saw in the 20th century. A lot of the ills of neoliberalism affect workers and residents of developing countries, both of which are bread and butter for Marxist analysis. In terms of media, I know Marxist media is a probably a hard transition for someone accustomed to more individualist media. I'm actually not a Marxist, and prefer to read left-anarchist sources like: - CrimeThinc: https://crimethinc.com/ - Center for a Stateless Society: https://c4ss.org/ Both go hard on individualism, while simultaneously demonstrating a concern for building better societies free of coercion. To give a few examples of non-authoritarian interventions that I support, related to the above: - Abolish fossil fuel subsidies. In a free market, renewables will win (and are already winning). The state should not be propping up the fossil fuel industry to delay the transition. - For covid: free testing, free PPE, free vaccines, open research, open modelling, funding for ventilation improvements. No lockdowns, no mandates. My thesis is that money spent on these interventions would more than pay for itself through the economic damage avoided.
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Michael Sproul
Ethereum 2.0 client dev at Sigma Prime
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Critical Theory and Cultural Marxism

This is a response to Mark's Why do I say DEI is Marxist? I'd like to raise a few points and questions to counter the narrative you put forward in your piece. My intention is not to convince you wholesale of the merits of critical theory or Marxism, but to offer an alternative understanding of these subjects that is less extreme, and more in touch with reality as I see it. I'd like to keep this relatively brief, so I'll start with a few dot points summarising my position: One can accept critical theory as broadly "true" (or useful), without advocating any sort of revolution, violence, or hierarchy inversion. Critical theory has been influential on many modern social movements, but has also been diluted and adapted by the broader social context (capitalism, liberalism). I agree with you that Marxism is unpopular, but would go further to say that the number of people with an appetite for a Marxist revolution is vanishingly small. It's never going to happen, even if a cabal of shadowy academics wanted it to. Furthermore.. There is no cabal of Marxist academics intent on covert revolution through critical theory. This is a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence.

5/7/2023
Rewards Post-Altair

Expected Rewards The rewards you can expect on mainnet as of November 2 2021 are: Attestations: 0.0040-0.0042 ETH per day Blocks: 0.018-0.03 ETH per block Sync committee membership: ~0.08 per sync committee participation Why? The new sync committees feature has created a new role for validators. Every 256 epochs (27 hours) a new random group of 512 validators is selected to publish sync committee messages, which are similar to attestations.

11/2/2021
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