bbc v. rt is a terrible comparison. bbc has a mandate to publicly educate, and it's for internal consumption. it has satellite stations, but it's all old colonies, and still for internal commonwealth consumption. rt is an international broadcaster that exists to present a russian perspective to the outside world.

bbc needs to be compared to russian language media, and my understanding is that russian language media can be quite critical. westerners may be a little offset by the nature of it (putin has taken a hit in the media for not invading ukraine and letting the russians there be harmed), but it's relatively open. not perfect, but relatively open.

rt needs to be compared to something like voice of america (dare i say radio free europe), which is completely uncritical pro-american hogwash.

i don't watch rt because i'm looking for stable analysis. i watch rt to get the different perspective to balance out the brainwashing. it seems kind of nihilistic, and not particularly up to utopian british press values, but the truth is that oksana is correct.

nobody but your own conscience - except the boss that is taking 95% of your labour. total independence and no male companionship - except the boss on the harness, whipping for more and more product.

"imagine working 18 hours a day for a fraction of what could have been considered a fair minimum wage, and being so trapped in it that there is no time for art, literature or any of the other things that define humans as free. imagine, imagine....imagine being a wage slave."

that's negative freedom, for you. the freedom to be exploited by market forces, and be tricked into thinking it's somehow "liberating".

i'll stick with positive concepts of freedom, thanks - the freedom to exist outside the slavery of the factory, the market and the dollar.

i've been saying this for years: at the core, you're all calvinists.

this is a total straw man argument. this is why we throw around words like cis - because we have no desire whatsoever to infringe on your identity, no matter how much you want to fantasize about us raping you. which is why we chemically castrate ourselves, right?

hear that, guys? best way to get the chicks into you is to castrate yourself. they love that. that's right: bitches love castration.

here's the thing: try being born with a penis and showing up to work just with hair. forget the rest of it. the dominant society can't even get beyond hair length. i have to be a macho idiot in order to get a job in a fucking call center, whether i like it or not. and, you want to talk about being a fake? it's not for my benefit. honestly. it's to get the rest of the world to not place expectations on me that i am entirely incapable of living up to - and completely disinterested in trying to, and failing at.

and, frankly, i don't care about some hypothetical future two hundred years from now, after my corpse has been picked clean by insects and my bones are starting to break down under the weight of massive flooding from carbon emissions. if we were immortal, you'd have a valid argument. in infinite time, we'll get it right! unfortunately, we're all going to live our entire lives within a dominant patriarchal reality, and we're all going to have to find a way to learn to live with it, somehow. your critique is consequently about as relevant to reality as a discussion of jumping into the matrix, travelling through time (although this has been pretty much ruled out, anyways) or quantum computing. i'm going to live in the here and now, thanks, and it means adjusting to the reality that exists, not fantasizing about one that is generations and generations away from any realistic thought of application. you're completely failing the is/ought problem.