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Showing posts with label Justin Pemberton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justin Pemberton. Show all posts

Friday, November 4, 2022

Karl du Fresne: The pleasure of having one's prejudices confirmed


I forced myself to watch Web of Chaos, Tuesday night’s state-funded TVNZ documentary that promised “a deep dive into the world of disinformation”.
It’s sad that I should regard it as a chore to watch something I helped to pay for, but that’s the way it is. I wanted to satisfy myself that Web of Chaos was exactly what I expected, and so it turned out. There are few things more richly satisfying than having one’s prejudices confirmed.

The first clue was in the name of the director: Justin Pemberton. I vaguely recalled the name from somewhere else, and it soon came to me. Pemberton made Capital in the 21st Century, which I described in 2019 as a masterpiece of the propagandist’s art.

I wrote then that “The film uses every trick in the documentary-maker’s book to dramatise its message, which is that contemporary capitalism is overwhelmingly rigged in favour of the ultra-rich and basically rotten to the core”.