He retreads an old song we're all familiar with and like, but this guy obviously has a persecution complex: >The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numer

He retreads an old song we're all familiar with and like, but this guy obviously has a persecution complex: >The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom. When someone writes about a variety of abstruse topics, I can only draw on my limited experience with a few of those to judge their reliability about the rest. In this case, I happen to read Google News sometimes. So I know he's talking nonsense. I was deluged with stories about Cubans protesting for freedom. Sure, there were a few mentions that they weren't happy with the slow vaccine rollout, but the overwhelming majority of articles trumpeted the neoliberal party line and crowed about the protest song Patria y Vida. This kind of selective attention to what must feel like a personal insult accompanies that other signal of a persecution complex, the Poor Lost People Like Me trope >the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons. What he fails to understand is that the cliquishness of "his" group and the "narrative" of the "mainstream" are really one and the same phenomenon. Humans naturally try to find, redefine and support a cause or movement, which apparently reflects some primal culture-forming instinct. The idea that this is an external phenomenon -- that some outside, manipulative force is making people arrange into mobs -- is paranoia talking. Humans are natural mob-formers. The media will always seem to be pushing a narrative because it is made of human beings who feel powerful when they support a narrative. What is necessary is to see the world as it is while aware of this phenomenon, not to delude yourself into thinking you can outrun your own nature.