[Peace-discuss] Noam Chomsky gets it wrong about hearing from RT, Lavrov, and Russian news

[kmedina67]

Okay, so saying that you CAN'T find out what RT or Chris Hedges is saying was incorrect. But it is pretty mind- blowing how access  changed- Karen Medina"The really great make you feel that you, too, can become great" - Mark Twain
-------- Original message --------From: "J.B. Nicholson via Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> Date: 7/24/22  21:05  (GMT-06:00) To: Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Noam Chomsky gets it wrong about hearing from RT,
  Lavrov, and Russian news https://twitter.com/SizweLo/status/1550548521882947586 appears to have an excerpt from a recent and (as far as I know) new Chomsky interview by Russell Brand. I couldn't find the whole interview. Here's a transcript of that excerpt.> Noam Chomsky: Take the United States today -- it is living under a kind of> totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime and is much worse in> many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970's, people in> Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television if they wanted> to find out the news. If today in the United States you wanted to find out what> Prime Minister Lavrov of Russia is saying, can't do it. It's barred. Americans are> not permitted to hear what Russians are saying. Can't get Russian television,> can't access Russian sources. That means also that fine American journalists like> Chris Hedges, one of the best, is cut out, barred from Americans 'cause he happens> to have a program running on RT (Russian television). You wanna find out what the> adversary is saying, which is of utmost importance, you can maybe tune into Indian> state television and find it out or you can read it on Al Jazeera. But the United> States has imposed constraints on freedom of access information which are> astonishing. And which, in fact, go beyond what was the case in Stalin Soviet> Russia.My response:RT America, RT's US branch, was shut down. This means that all RT America shows (including Chris Hedges' show "On Contact with Chris Hedges") were cancelled. YouTube also removed all RT channels including RT America's YouTube channel. Therefore you can't find "On Contact" on YouTube now. Some American journalists have moved to Russia and continued their RT careers (like Fiorella Isabel of Convo Couch and Rachel Blevins). You can find reports of their lives in Russia on their own channels on Odysee[1].Each of the following are fully accessible to Americans:RT's websitehttps://rt.com/RT's channel on Rumble.com publishes RT's videos and is constantly updated.https://rumble.com/c/RTNewsRT's channel on Odysee also publishes RT's videos and is constantly updated. Odysee is a decentralized alternative to YouTube (hosted on LBRY, a blockchain-based file-sharing and payment network)https://lbry.bcow.xyz/@RT:fdVK.com (a Russian social media service) also hosts an RT channel with videos.The same as above is also true for other RT outlets such as RT Documentaries and RUPTLY, RT's video service which makes documentaries and dead-roll camera footage. RUPTLY is, famously, the only news outlet to be on-site when Julian Assange was forcibly expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy[2].RT.com also hosts pages for each of its shows & their transcripts, including RT America shows. "On Contact" shows and transcripts, for instance, are found at https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/Lavrov's speeches can be found online including English translation (where Lavrov, who speaks fluent English, chooses to speak Russian instead). Here's a recent RT video segment which includes footage clipped from a Lavrov speech (the same video from two sources):https://lbry.bcow.xyz/@RT:fd/lavrov_cairo_2407:1https://rumble.com/v1dgckx-west-should-eliminate-obstacles-theyve-created-themselves-lavrov.htmlRT also has 24/7 running news on Rumble.com & VK.com.By now it should be clear that Chomsky's claim:> If today in the United States you wanted to find out what Prime Minister Lavrov of> Russia is saying, can't do it. It's barred. Americans are not permitted to hear> what Russians are saying. Can't get Russian television, can't access Russian> sources. That means also that fine American journalists like Chris Hedges, one of> the best, is cut out, barred from Americans 'cause he happens to have a program> running on RT (Russian television).is not true.All of these video-hosting services have YouTube-like user interfaces on their respective websites and so do so many of the privacy-respecting front-ends (like Invidious and other services). They're all just as easy to use as YouTube. They only require one to (literally) click another link and try. That's not a lot to ask, even of a non-technical computer user.I fully understand that YouTube (Google) is among the American companies which are currently cooperating with American government-led censorship instead of suing the US government for 1st Amendment violations (as Glenn Greenwald says Google could do in https://rumble.com/vtyr34-democrats-are-pressuring-companies-to-censor-for-them-a-violation-of-the-fi.html and https://youtube.com/watch?v=g_uSPwYiVFs entitled "Democrats Are Pressuring Companies to Censor For Them: a Violation of the First Amendment" and a corresponding article).YouTube is not the only way to see video online, nor is YouTube the only way Americans get videos online no matter how popular YouTube currently is. There are other ways of getting to RT's shows and segments, old and new. If Americans choose to remain ignorant of this fact and limit themselves to what YouTube distributes, that's unfortunate and only they can fix that for themselves. That is not an example of "living under a kind of totalitarian culture which [...] is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev".I recommend using Firefox because Firefox respects user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify the program. A Firefox add-on called "LibRedirect" offers an easy way to automatically use alternative front-ends for many privacy-disrespecting websites (such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Imgur, search engines, and Wikipedia) as well as front-ends that are fast and don't require privacy-busting Javascript (including Reuters, Medium, and Odysee). Visit https://libredirect.github.io/download.html for more details and complete source code. LibRedirect costs no money and is free software (free as in freedom) as well.[1] Rachel Blevins in Moscow: https://lbry.bcow.xyz/@RachelBlevins:5/testing%2C-testing...-live-from-moscow:aFiorella Isabel in Moscow: https://lbry.bcow.xyz/@TheConvoCouch:3/fiorella-in-moscow%2C-what-it%27s-really:3[2] Despite the world being told ahead of time that Assange was about to be expelled from the embassy, establishment outlets didn't stick around to capture their own footage. This means that those outlets which chose to show that footage had to license that footage from RT._______________________________________________Peace-discuss mailing listPeace-discuss at lists.chambana.nethttps://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
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