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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

> What a wonderful person.

I agree with the sarcasm here, but I must elaborate on how terrible a person Mr. Hedges is. There's a whole saga behind how he went from being a noted journalist to whining on Substack, and I've been tracking it for quite some time.

* First came the plagiarism revelations, which are detailed quite nicely here: https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer...

* Then came the self-plagiarism revelations (many of his Truthdig columns are rewarmed passages from his books). He's apparently also been editing his own Wikipedia page to remove critism, and at one point got into an edit war with another longstanding contributor. All the while, he's called Wikipedia a "tool of the elite". https://twitter.com/Mathlover2/status/1499650487481683968?s=...

* Finally, we have his aforementioned show on RT. While it may not be on YouTube, it's still very much available on rt.com, which I can access from the US as of this writing, and which allows people to download individual episodes.

I didn't know much about him before this, so thanks for the links. I have, though, made a study of the kinds of coverage propaganda outlets like RT, Press TV and CCTV show to western audiences (versus what's allowed or aired domestically); their constant attempts to wash their own dictatorship's warlike and repressive agenda through a melange of pseudo-progressive-sounding moral positions that are cynically designed to appeal to disenchanted Americans who have no clue how those same positions directly conflict with said dictatorship's actual policies; and the revolving menagerie of useful idiots, lunatics and traitors they employ to put a patina of believability on it through "arts and culture" with a heavy emphasis on the oppression of any group of people besides, obviously, the citizens of their own country or others they themselves currently make a career out of oppressing.

I'm hopeful this gimmick on which they've wasted vast resources is obviously bunk to almost everyone, at least in America. Even here in Portland, it would only spare you a few minutes before your lynching if you said you worked for RT rather than for Fox News.

I really don't understand the audience for articles like this. It's so blatantly disingenuous, and just... stupid. I guess there's a lot of suckers in the world who fall for stuff like this though.

More people need to read “Mother Night.”

“We are what we pretend to be.”

>RT, the propaganda organ of a totalitarian state which has currently banned the entire YouTube site.

In all honesty though - RT banned YouTube, and YouTube banned RT. Why would one be ok and the other not?

RT didn't block Youtube. The Russian government did. And up until the minute it did, RT continued to make money from advertising on it.

The reason one would be okay and the other wouldn't be is, to the extent that RT is a "private" enterprise, it's their right to determine what content is on their own platform, just as it's Youtube's right to determine what content is on theirs. It is not the government's right (in a free society) to determine what sites citizens can or cannot access.

RT's actual website with videos is still available in America.

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