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Being forcefully pro-Palestine is the most efficient way to weed all the worst people out of your life.

It takes care of them all. Zionists. Islamophobes. Apathetic narcissists. Unthinking herd-minded right wing ideologues. Abuser-enabling “both sides” moral cowards. Emotionally stunted man-babies who turn every challenging conversation into an “allow me to play devil’s advocate” mental exercise to avoid feeling normal human feelings. Leaned-back, too-cool-for-the-current-thing victims of western meta-irony brain rot. It’s like spraying yourself with asshole repellant.

Supporting Palestine doesn’t automatically make you a good person; opposing genocide and apartheid is just the basic bare-minimum position we’re all morally obligated to take. But supporting Israel against the Palestinians absolutely does automatically make you a bad person.

Palestine is an interesting issue in that someone’s position on it doesn’t merely tell you about their politics, it tells you who they are as a person. If they can listen to you talk about all the horrific things Israel has done in Gaza and still have an objection to your position on the matter, then they’re not the sort of person you want in your life. If they can look at all those videos of shrapnel-shredded children and the satellite images showing entire neighborhoods pulverized to powder and then still think you’re the problem for opposing those things, then they’re showing you that there is something profoundly wrong with them as human beings.

I haven’t lost a single relationship I care about in these last three years. I’ve alienated a few obnoxious old acquaintances whom I’ve never liked, but all the people I actually value and want to keep in my life are fully on my side when it comes to hating Israel and supporting the Palestinians. Turns out I had done a pretty good job of surrounding myself with decent human beings in the years prior to the Gaza holocaust, but if I hadn’t I would have driven away the genocide supporters without a moment’s hesitation, and I would have been glad that circumstances forced them to expose their true nature to me.

You don’t even need to be that dramatic about it, though. Simply holding your position and refusing to be bullied out of it is generally all it takes to get such individuals to step away from you. If they know you think their whole worldview is wrong and that their values system is depraved, and they know they can’t talk you out of that perspective, then they’re probably not going to want to hang out with you.

In a world that has gone mad, it’s important to find little signposts of clarity to help you morally orient yourself so you don’t get swept up in the insanity with the herd. Palestine is one such signpost, because it’s such a blatantly obvious moral position to hold on to. But in a world that has gone mad, insisting on sanity will often turn the insane against you.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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It pisses me off whenever I see someone claiming that “AI music” is about to make normal music obsolete.

There is no such thing as “AI music” or “AI art”. AI cannot make music. It cannot create the experience of an artist using skill and intention to transport something from inside them into an audience through vibrations in the air. It can only mimic the noises of that encounter.

It’s like someone going “There’s no need to converse with anyone anymore because they’ve invented a machine which makes noises that sound like human speech!” You’d want to tell them “Hey, that’s not the same thing mate. You’re talking about a completely different experience which in no way satisfies what people are looking for in a conversation.”

Proponents of generative AI will sometimes say things like “I played an AI song for my friend who hates AI, and he loved it!” like that proves something, the argument being that if you can’t tell the difference then there is no difference. But that’s the same as saying there would be no difference between getting catfished by a chatbot and truly finding the love of your life.

When you’re talking about human interaction, which is what art is at its very nature, it absolutely does matter if there’s someone on the other end of it. Of course it does. There is not a species on this planet that produces art or music without doing so to connect or communicate with other members of its species. “AI art” does not meet the same needs as real art, in the same way a chatbot that generates friendly words would not meet the same needs as a real friend.

Sure generative AI can produce a noise that sounds a lot like the noise made when a fiddler runs her bow across the strings. It can even produce an effect that looks like a video of a fiddler playing a fiddle at the same time. But there is no fiddler, and there is no fiddle, so it’s not fiddle music. It’s just something that SOUNDS like fiddle music.

The same is true of all music, and all art, and the entire range of ways human beings connect to each other. Merely looking and sounding like something is not the same as being that thing. They can generate a chatbot effect for you that looks and sounds like your dead husband, but it will never be your dead husband, and it would not be healthy for you to pretend it’s the same thing.

Generative AI fans frequently display their aversion to exploring the depths of their humanity in the way they’ll stand in public saying “Look, this machine can mimic the sounds of a musician, so normal music is obsolete!” It’s like, what? What do you think music is, exactly? Just noises with a beat you can dance to? I mean I guess that’s all it is for some people, but those people are having a very shallow experience of the thing that music is, and probably a very shallow experience of life in general.

An effect that simply goes through the motions of imitating art can only appeal to someone who has just been going through the motions of living their life. If you don’t understand the significance of the difference between real human connection and something that merely looks and sounds like it, then that means your whole life is about the appearances of things rather the things themselves. It doesn’t matter if your boyfriend really loves you, it just matters that he never leaves. It doesn’t matter if your wife really enjoys having sex with you, it only matters that she puts out and makes it fun for you. It doesn’t matter if your adult children enjoy spending time with you, it just matters that they turn up to family functions and show you the respect you feel you are owed.

People like this are missing out on so very, very much of the human experience, but they don’t know it because they’ve never explored anything outside their immediate comfort zone. They want custom-made music feeding them “infinite personalized tunes” that sounds like the songs they already know they like. They want custom-made podcasts of artificially generated voices feeding them political opinions they already agree with. They want a robotic spouse that caters to their every physical and egoic desire, and they’ll buy them up as soon as they become available.

Don’t be like them. Don’t live like that. Don’t life your life running from true human connection. Don’t be a coward hiding from your own inner dimensions. Dive into the depths of this crazy human adventure. Explore. Expand. Be vulnerable. Be brave. Otherwise you’re just killing time and waiting for death in the shallow end of the pool.

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I hate it when people say humanity’s problems will be solved by “artificial superintelligence” as though all we need to fix the cruelty and abusiveness in our world is an AI that is smarter than a human.

Mark Zuckerberg voiced this talking point again today in a Twitter thread claiming that “superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses.” Last month he said the following in a statement titled “The Future is for Everyone — The Path to a Positive AI Future”:

“In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life. As we get closer to this moment, it is important to develop a philosophy for how we can best use superintelligence to ensure it improves all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety.”

These talking points annoy me because it’s an absolutely specious claim that artificial superintelligence will benefit everyone. Humanity’s problems are not caused by a lack of intelligence, our problems are caused by greedy plutocrats like Zuckerberg. It’s like a serial killer telling us we can stop serial killing by making serial killers smarter.

The argument hinges on the premise that humanity is suffering because we’re just not smart enough to come up with the right solutions, when in reality that hasn’t been the case for a very long time. Humanity has had the technology and resources to solve all its major problems for generations; we’ve just chosen to use our technology and resources making rich people richer instead.

We’ve long had the ability to end extreme poverty, to stop destroying our biosphere, to stop waging wars, to stop pillaging the global south at unfair prices, to stop imposing starvation sanctions, to end genocides, to remove money from politics, to institute true democracy, to create a well-informed electorate free from propaganda brainwashing, and to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. This hasn’t failed to happen due to our lack of superintelligence, it has failed to happen because the people with the power and the money actively stop it from happening.

No amount of added cleverness is going to make plutocrats less greedy, make warmongers less bloodthirsty, make politicians less corrupt, make empire managers less tyrannical, make imperial propagandists less deceitful and manipulative, or make capitalists less exploitative and ecocidal. Give them artificial superintelligence and they’ll just use it to grab up more money and control, just like they’re doing with the AI of the present day.

We can already see that AI is not making the world a better place. It’s already taking away jobs, facilitating war crimes and mass surveillance, poisoning art, and making people crazy and stupid. We’re already witnessing the results of more intelligent AI. Continuing to say we just need the AI to be more intelligent is like taking a pill to get healthy, having a terrible reaction to the medicine, and then deciding we just need to dramatically increase the dose.

Artificial superintelligence isn’t going to solve all our problems because our problems don’t arise from insufficient intelligence. We don’t need artificial superintelligence, we need basic human kindness. We need justice. We need ethics. No matter how much intelligence we add to the AI soup, it’s never going to magically add up to simple human morality. Which is what we’re actually going to need if we’re going to create a healthy world.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image by Anthony Quintano from Honolulu, HI, United States — Mark Zuckerberg F8 2018 Keynote, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72122390

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The Wall Street Journal has a new article out titled “Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?” about the rising levels of family estrangement in our society.

“Many experts believe that estrangements between adult children and their parents are becoming an epidemic in the U.S., just like divorce in the 1970s,” writes Elizabeth Bernstein. “Much like then, the movement is driven by a convergence of large societal trends — this time the rise of social-media algorithms, changing therapeutic approaches and a broadening definition of trauma.”

As has become the fashion these days, Bernstein largely pins the blame for this phenomenon on TikTok.

“Last month, more than 138,000 new videos that mentioned cutting off or going low-contact with parents were posted on TikTok, up more than 10-fold compared with August 2020,” Bernstein writes, adding that “More than 82% of the posts were by women.”

What gets very little consideration in Bernstein’s article is the much more obvious contributing factor to this rising trend: the fact that many parents are horrible to their children.

The reason divorce became an “epidemic” in the 1970s (though I would never use that word for it) is because people stopped feeling pressured to remain trapped in abusive and hurtful marriages. This rising trend in family estrangement looks very much the same.

It turns out that in a secular society without a lot of rigidly enforce patriarchal cultural doctrine, you actually have to be a decent person to your children if you want them to have a continued relationship with you into adulthood. Gone are the days where your progeny would feel pressured to maintain a relationship with you even if you choose to be an asshole to them, as much as that fact might annoy your average aging wealthy conservative Wall Street Journal reader.

You can no longer force your kids to have a relationship with you, in the same way you can no longer force your spouse to stay married to you. And just as the normalization of divorce has meant that spouses can no longer be abusive to each other if they want to remain married, the normalization of estrangement now means we as parents need to step up our game.

Without any enforceable cultural leverage to coerce our adult children to maintain a relationship with us, we need to make sure we’re giving them positive reasons to come calling. We need to be decent. We need to be kind. We need to be respectful and pleasant to be around. Because if we’re not, there’s no guarantee our kids will stay in our lives.

And that’s as it should be. There is no other type of relationship in which someone is expected to remain in contact with a person who is cruel to them. If I refused to be decent to my adult children, I would expect them to stay away from me. That’s completely normal.

I said this on Twitter a few hours ago and got dogpiled by conservatives calling me the devil incarnate. My notifications are currently full of angry people furiously defending their God-given right to treat their children like garbage and expect zero repercussions of any kind. Apparently conservatives are all about personal responsibility until you suggest that they are responsible for their own behavior toward their kids, because it makes them collapse into a bunch of blubbering crybabies.

I’m right, though. Of course I am. Be kind to your kids or they’ll stop talking to you. That’s the most normal position anyone could possibly put forward.

I have heard it said that the way our adult children treat us is our performance review for our job as parents. I couldn’t agree more.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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More and more humans are suffering from empire psychosis.

People who can’t go ten minutes without checking their phones, losing hours a day to social media and mindless scrolling.

People talking to chatbots, learning about the world from them, learning about life from them, making friends with them, forming relationships with them.

Binging on podcasts, binging on streaming services, binging on video games, binging on apps, binging on vapes, binging on treats delivered to their door by underpaid workers from bombed-out countries.

The bread was designed in a lab to be furiously addictive, and the circuses track your preferences to serve you up all your favorite performances.

Empire psychosis keeps us in a constant state of distraction and escapism, always scrambling to avoid the here and now like we’re trying to climb out of our own skins.

It’s a frenzied discontentedness. A persistent delusion that satisfaction exists right around the corner after the next restless squirm. It’s an artificially manufactured mental disorder. And it’s worth trillions of dollars.

In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people. Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us.

We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and consumerist messaging from mainstream culture to convince us that we need more than we have and that we aren’t okay the way we are. That we’re not beautiful enough, not stylish enough, not successful enough, not abundant enough. The products are designed to be dependence-forming so we need to buy them, and they’re designed to quickly become obsolete so that we need to keep buying more.

They trick us out of our natural state of contentedness and then sell it back to us. They deceive us into leaving our home and then charge us an admission price to come visit.

Something went wrong. Humanity went off course. They enclosed the commons, colonized the new world, constructed a tiered society of haves and have-nots, and now we’re all living like space aliens on our own home planet.

We do not have to keep suffering from their man-made madness. We can do the inner work necessary to come back to our own contentedness, and we can do the outer work necessary to take back what the manipulators have stolen from us.

We don’t need to keep consenting to this abusive relationship any longer. A healthy world is our birthright. We will tear down the madness machine and stand at peace in the soil of the planet we were born on.

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Tech plutocrats are the high-budget expression of the “everyone is twelve now” theory. You wanna go to Mars? Of course you do, you’re twelve. You think you can merge your consciousness with machinery and unlock the key to immortality? Hell yeah my twelve year-old homie. You’re gonna invent an Artificial Superintelligence God who will solve all our problems? Bless your twelve year-old heart.

Their visions for the future of humanity are never particularly wise or intelligent. It’s just a bunch of drugged-up rich guys using their vast fortunes to chart a course for our species that would sound totally awesome to the average preadolescent boy.

You ever hear about Jeff Bezos’ vision for our future? He brings it up once in a while. He wants to ship most of humanity offworld and have us all living in these giant spinning space tubes called O’Neill cylinders while only a few lucky individuals get to remain on humanity’s home planet. It’s true, look it up.

This is the best these freaks can come up with. Transhumanism. Space colonization. Virtual reality. ASI. Immortality. These are all visions which revolve around escape. Escaping from the human condition. Escaping from our planet. Escaping from reality. Running, running, running away in a mad scramble to get anywhere but here.

These aren’t positive visions for the future, they’re signs of deep psychological immaturity. They’re the symptoms of an inability to be with what is. Whenever you hear these guys bloviating about transcending our humanity or colonizing space they’re just telling you they’ve got a lot of unresolved early childhood trauma which led them to construct an entire personality around avoidance and restlessness.

They don’t know how to be at peace. Not with themselves, and not with the world. These are very emotionally primitive individuals. They are not wise. They are not kind. They are not happy. They are not even especially smart. They just have a particular kind of cleverness which has enabled them to succeed as parasitic middle men siphoning wealth off of other people’s labor in the specific type of dystopia we happen to live in.

And yet these are the men we’re allowing to rule our world. These are the people to whom we have handed the steering wheel of human destiny. A bunch of emotionally stunted manchilds who are drowning in a nonstop internal deluge of shame and inadequacy and unresolved mommy issues.

These are the men who have become our kings, because capitalism elevates whoever is wounded enough to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top.

You trust these guys to shepherd us into a healthy world? They can’t even be here now, at peace in their own skins. Mainstream culture worships these people because they have a lot of money, but they’re walking train wrecks.

This isn’t going to cut it. We can’t led these infantile narcissists lead humanity into the future. We’ve got to create a better system for ourselves.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image by Daniel Oberhaus — Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99823440

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Doordash has reached a historic $131.5 million settlement to repay workers in New York City for wages the food delivery app stole from them over the last four years, which sounds like a big win for the little guy if you don’t think about it too hard.

The Hill reports:

“Under the settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and city officials announced on Tuesday, DoorDash will pay $115 million to 260,000-plus workers it either did not pay at all or paid late. The food delivery company will also pay more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs.”

So all Doordash has to do is return the money it stole and pay a microscopic fraction of its $13.7 billion yearly revenue in penalties, and that’s it. Nobody’s going to prison. Nobody was threatened with jail time. It wasn’t even a criminal case; it was an administrative enforcement action by New York City regulators. Doordash’s billionaire CEO Tony Xu is as free as a bird.

A hundred and fifteen million dollars.

What do you think would happen to you if you stole $115 million from your employer?

Can you imagine that not being treated as a crime? Can you imagine going “Haha, ya got me! I’ll return the cash. Can’t blame a guy for trying!” and then paying a small fine and just going back to your life like it was no big deal?

Of course you can’t. You know you’d be arrested, handcuffed, prosecuted for grand larceny, and then spend many years behind bars.

Under capitalism it is strictly illegal for employees to steal from their employers, but if employers steal from their employees it’s not even a crime. It’s not even a petty misdemeanor. It’s perfectly legal.

Which is so obnoxious, because stealing from workers is obviously much more abusive and destructive than stealing from billionaire corporations. The wealthy executives of a gig economy app would not have their lives affected in the slightest by an employee stealing from their company, but workers who are struggling to pay their bills can be devastated by even a few missing dollars in their paycheck.

Employers stealing from employees is also plainly worse than the reverse because when an employer steals from an employee, they’re not just stealing their money. They’re stealing their labor. They’re stealing their time, which is the one thing you can’t make more of in this life. They’re stealing slices of your lifespan which you would otherwise be spending with loved ones and doing things that fulfill you. They’re actually stealing your life.

And yet it’s only illegal for employees to steal from their employers. Employers stealing from employees? That’s just business.

This glaring disparity between the rights of employers and employees exists because capitalism is all about using state power to protect the interests of capital. The most ardent proponents of our present system like to contrast capitalism with communism by claiming that communism can only be enforced through abusive excesses of state power, as though we don’t see state power dropping the hammer on the working class every minute of every day throughout our society. In practice the most significant difference between a socialist state and a capitalist one is whose interests state power is used to protect.

We live in a tiered society where the people actually turning the wheels of civilization through their sweat and toil are legally inferior to the parasitic middle men who skim the profits from their labor. This is not justice, and this is not equality, as hard as the propagandists of the capitalist empire might try to indoctrinate us into believing the contrary.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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I strongly disagree with the idea that it’s unhelpful to bully celebrities about their position on Palestine. On the contrary, I think we should bully them more.

We tend to underestimate the consequences of the fact that all the most amplified voices in our society are millionaires. Under capitalism the people with the largest platforms and the biggest audiences are all wealthy enough to have a vested interest in preserving the status quo, so they’re reluctant to rock the boat politically in any major way.

When all the most influential voices in our society are creating the illusion that the system is more or less fine the way it is by what they say and what they don’t say, it cannot help but significantly influence public political opinion. In this way celebrities function as a kind of goalkeeper preventing dissident thought from reaching the minds of the masses.

When you see Ed Sheeran bawling his eyes out onstage and playing victim because people are criticizing his muteness on the moral issue of our time, he genuinely does feel as though something is being taken away from him. He was enjoying being able to relax in the lap of luxury without having to go against the grain of establishment power in any way, never saying anything which upsets the Zionist billionaires or the media-owning class whose infrastructure he built his lucrative career on. Now that comfortable setup has been taken away from him a bit, and he feels victimized by the inconvenience this has caused him.

This dynamic is what holds the entire construct of celebrity in place in our society. If you make the billionaires happy you get to be a millionaire, and if you make the billionaires unhappy you get discomfort and loss. If you please the plutocrats you get the carrot, and if you displease them you get the stick. This is true whether you’re talking about pundits, news anchors, musicians or movie stars.

This system of carrots and sticks is the main adhesive holding the propaganda apparatus of the western empire together. As westerners we are taught that we live in a free society which is far superior to the “tyrannical regimes” of the global south, because under the tyrannical regimes the news is state propaganda and the entertainment is heavily censored. In reality westerners are consuming tightly controlled propaganda every day of their lives, because all their most influential voices are being aggressively regulated by the carrots and sticks of wealthy capitalists.

The only weakness in this system, apparently, is that it only works if the public plays along with it. If enough people decide to denounce and defund the empire’s celebrity goalkeepers for their complicity in imperial abuses, it turns out that we’ve got a stick of our own. Make it too uncomfortable to toe the imperial line and you’ll start seeing celebrities reluctantly follow the moral leadership of the public, thereby further weakening the vice-like grip of the imperial narrative control apparatus on our collective consciousness.

So we should do so happily and without hesitation. It is perfectly moral to ruin a millionaire’s day for both-sidesing a genocide. It is perfectly ethical to bully people with large platforms until they take a public stand against the abuses of the empire which has made them obscenely wealthy. It won’t solve all our problems, but it will weaken the power of the mass-brainwashing machine of the capitalist empire which has been manipulating the public into believing we don’t urgently need revolutionary change.

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The biggest AI threat isn’t artificial superintelligence wiping out humanity in a fit of mechanical vengeance like some digital Old Testament God, it’s the same oligarchs and empire managers as usual inflicting the same evils and abuses as usual upon their fellow man.

We’re already presently watching the empire building AI into its killing machines and causing all kinds of horrifying problems while these technologies become more and more complex and unpredictable.

CNN reports that US military AI “almost started a war” with China when it hallucinated intelligence showing a Chinese ship transporting nuclear weapon components to Iran; US military planes were apparently already in the air preparing to attack the vessel before human intelligence picked up on the error.

A recent Pentagon report has officially concluded that an over-reliance on Palantir’s AI-powered command-and-control system Maven contributed to the bombing of a school in Minab which killed 120 children attending classes on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

We learned early on in the Gaza holocaust that the IDF was using AI to help it bomb suspected Hamas members when they are at home with their families rather than when they are out in the battlefield using a program called “Where’s Daddy?” — a bit of Israeli humor about the fact that they would be killing the children of Palestinian resistance fighters when their fathers came home.

We’re seeing politicians like Bernie Sanders voice concerns that “AI could soon be smarter than humans and function outside of our control,” but the most obvious and imminent threat right now is not that artificial intelligence will outsmart us and escape our control, it’s that it is being fully controlled by humans who are stupid and evil.

Again, we know for a fact that powerful nuclear-armed military forces are knitting AI into all their systems. We’re watching them do it, right in front of our faces. An increasingly complex and confusing element has been added to an environment of already tense and dangerous military standoffs around the world as the US and its allies work to absorb the few remaining nations who have managed to retain sovereignty into the imperial power umbrella. And yet recent weeks have seen the mass media flooded with punditry speculating about possible scenarios under which AI might perhaps wind up leading to human extinction.

We already know the most likely scenario under which AI will get us all killed. If it happens, it will be because rich and powerful sociopaths knit these technologies into war machinery that is designed for killing humans at mass scale. Duh.

These developments are unfolding in the context of a frenetic new arms race with China in which nobody’s willing to tap the brake pedal for fear of falling behind. Any talk of regulation or slowing things down before they get out of control is dismissed because the competition-based systems which currently govern human behavior have thrust us into a nightmare of constant military expansionism and brinkmanship instead of collaboration and harmony, all fueled by the fact that this paradigm makes tech plutocrats and war profiteers obscenely wealthy.

That’s clearly the most immediate existential threat that AI poses to our species right now. There’s also the only slightly less frightening threat of artificial intelligence enabling our rulers to use mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems to stifle any revolutionary political movement before it gets off the ground, locking us into this freakish capitalist dystopia until the planet is an uninhabitable wasteland.

In any case, this isn’t a new threat. It’s the same old threat with new toys. Capitalism must end, and the empire must fall. Our very existence depends on it.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No AI used in any works.

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Every so often I like to write out an explanation of who I am and what I’m trying to do here, for the benefit of new followers and for my own mental clarity.

The Caitlin Johnstone project is actually run by two people: myself and my husband Tim Foley, who co-authors all my written works. Tim and I fell in love in 2014, started writing together in 2016 after we got married, and in 2017 we launched the audience-funded platform you see today.

Everything we publish is unconditionally free to view without any paywalls or advertisements; all our funding comes from voluntary donations from readers and viewers who feel inspired to support what we do. All our work is copyright-free, so everyone is allowed to republish, reuse, reappropriate, translate, or outright copy anything we put out without asking permission or providing attribution, so you’ll see things we wrote pop up on all kinds of platforms all around the world in many different languages.

I’ve lived my whole life in Melbourne with some brief stays in the UK. I received a journalism degree from RMIT in 2003 but didn’t do any news media work because I’d learned that the legacy press was too corrupt to do actual journalism in. So instead I focused on raising my kids, healing my inner wounds, and becoming a conscious person.

Tim was born in Philadelphia and lived most of his life in California, where he worked in healthcare. We met in an online discussion forum about spiritual enlightenment in 2011, we fell in love in 2014, Tim moved to Australia in 2016, and we’ve been falling ever since.

This project is basically just an outgrowth of that ongoing romance. We don’t have kids together, so we spend our time making creativity babies in the form of essays, poetry, paintings and books. We are each other’s muse so we’re rarely at a loss for inspiration, which is why we’ve been able to write so prolifically all these years. Our ultimate goal is to help create a healthy world so that we can live extremely long lives together in a harmonious future.

We have long conversations every day about what’s going on in the world and where we’re headed as a species, and our daily articles are generally outgrowths of those conversations. I function as the editor-in-chief of our project, determining the shape, feel, and ideological direction of our work, and having the final say in whatever gets published. Tim does most of the readings and videos because he’s good at reading aloud and I dislike appearing on camera.

Ideologically I sit well to the left side of the political spectrum; I am frequently called a communist, which is fine by me. I want a world where everyone has what they need, where plutocrats can’t leverage obscene amounts of wealth to manipulate our society to their advantage, and where we live in harmony with the global south instead of enslaving its people using military violence and economic coercion. I oppose tyranny, war, militarism, capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, the western intelligence cartel, mass surveillance, government secrecy, police brutality, censorship, propaganda, and the suppression of journalism. I despise racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, western supremacism, and all prejudices which harm marginalized populations.

I believe we live in a tyrannical mind-controlled dystopia at the center of an empire that is fueled by human blood, and that we ordinary people can change this by using the power of our numbers to force the creation of a just system. Westerners are currently too propagandized to understand the urgent need for revolutionary change, but I see signs that we are beginning to awaken from that trance.

Ultimately what’s needed is a radical transformation of human consciousness away from our self-destructive egoic patterning. We know that this is possible on an individual scale in the process commonly known as spiritual enlightenment, so there exists within us the possibility of such a transformation on a collective level as well. Anyone who has ever had a spiritual awakening knows you can hear the same teaching or pointer a thousand times before it finally hits home and rips your mind wide open, so just because we haven’t yet become a conscious species doesn’t mean we can’t become one.

It’s all about helping humanity see through its various illusions and delusions so that we can wake up to reality and create a healthy world. Everything I publish is pointed at this in some way. That’s what this project is and will continue to be, and I am deeply honored that so many people have been eager to come along for the journey.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No AI used in any works.

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I still believe humanity is headed toward a mass awakening, as unfashionable as that is to admit here in the late 2020s.

The fashionable thing to say these days is that everything’s fucked and we are headed to our doom, and that if anything changes it will be because the insanity of our capitalist system causes our material conditions to deteriorate so drastically that we are forced into revolution to survive. That things are bad because we’re a rotten people with selfish hearts who haven’t forced the revolutionary changes the world needs because, deep down, we actually like things the way they are.

People who want to look cool and smart in revolutionary political circles tend to say that if a mass-scale transformation of human consciousness were going to happen, it would have happened by now. That everyone’s already basically aware that we live in an abusive, propaganda-saturated dystopia ruled by tyrants, therefore our continued compliance with status quo politics is a conscious and deliberate choice made by the overwhelming majority of the western world.

But here’s the thing: anyone who has taken a deep dive down the rabbit hole of human consciousness and come out the other side knows it doesn’t actually work that way. Not on a personal level, anyhow.

Anyone who has had an authentic transformational awakening after a prolonged period of spiritual seeking will have experienced a sloppy, awkward, tumble of a journey into eventual freedom from egoic delusion. It’s not pretty. It doesn’t happen the way the mind imagines it happening. It doesn’t unfold in linear fashion, and, while it might have significant climactic moments after which nothing is ever the same, it doesn’t unpack all at once. It’s a clumsy, two-steps-forward-one-step-back ordeal whose most prominent characteristic is an absence of control.

But it does eventually happen. After a chaotic, unpredictable, frequently uncomfortable internal adventure, there’s a freedom, clarity, gracefulness and joy the likes of which you never could have imagined before the avalanche began.

I see no reason to believe our collective awakening should be any different. It’s not going to be a neat and tidy affair. It’s not going to look like the hippies imagined back in the sixties, with a prevalence of psychedelic drugs leading to a swift societal movement away from egocentric psychology and dominator politics. But we’ll get there. We are in the process of getting there already.

We are already a much more conscious species than we were at the turn of this century. Our ability to network and share information has exploded in ways that have turned us into a fundamentally different sort of animal. Young people care about a genocide which poses no direct threat to them as passionately as their grandparents cared about a war in Vietnam which they were being personally drafted to fight in. Concepts like “trauma” and “inner healing” are now household terms that our parents and grandparents were only ever dimly aware of. Any skillful spiritual teacher who’s been helping people reach enlightenment for a few decades will tell you that humans are popping out of their egos far more readily and frequently than they used to be. I myself am seeing the people around me in my personal life awaken and heal in ways I’d never dared hope for a few years ago.

I’ve seen too much to believe we cannot become a conscious species. I am more convinced than ever that we are headed there already. It’s going to be a shambling, shuffling mess of a journey, but we’ll get there.

The human potential for spiritual enlightenment has long been an unaddressed elephant in the room in our estimations of what we can achieve as a species, but that elephant has been loudly clearing its throat as of late.

We can’t run from our true nature forever.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

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Julian Assange is officially back on Twitter, restoring to the world an important voice we were robbed of by the US empire’s years-long campaign to silence the WikiLeaks founder via lifelong imprisonment for forbidden acts of journalism.

Not everyone will remember it but there was a time when this was almost impossible to imagine. It seemed almost certain that this man was going to die in Belmarsh Prison or spend his remaining years in some hellhole in America.

Now whenever my nephew catches me or my husband expressing pessimism about something working out, he tells us “Hey. Assange is free now.” It’s become our family code for “Anything’s possible. Don’t give up hope.”

We should really try to appreciate this. Never let hope die. A better world is possible. Anything can be.

In other news, it’s good to see the world rejecting Ed Sheeran’s policy of feigned neutrality on the Gaza issue. “I don’t pick sides” is a fallacy when there’s a massive power imbalance and a clear aggressor, especially when your own country is partially responsible for what’s happening. If your husband is abusing your child and you do nothing, you’re not a neutral party in that scenario, and when your kid grows up you’ll probably be blamed just as much as the father.

A modern military force hammering a giant concentration camp full of colonized people using high-tech weapons of mass murder with the help of your tax dollars is not a “war” that you get to be “neutral” towards. It’s a genocide, and you’re either for it or against it. There is no comfortable third option where you get to avoid picking a side and also avoid looking like an asshole.

One of the most idiotic talking points you’ll see these days is that it’s bad to criticize Israel without also criticizing Hamas. It’s like, what do you mean? You’re saying I can’t criticize a nuclear-armed high-tech military committing war crimes with the backing of my own country and its allies unless I also criticize a tiny group of besieged militants? You’re telling me I can’t say anything about the abuses of an apartheid state whose supporters are relentlessly assaulting my right to free speech and eroding civil liberties throughout the western world, unless I in the same breath also criticize a few thousand Palestinian resistance fighters who have done me no wrong? What the hell are you even talking about?

No I’m just going to criticize Israel, thank you very much. I am going to criticize the state whose genocidal atrocities are supported by the power structure under which I live and pay taxes, whose support network is systematically demolishing the rights of me and my countrymen. If you don’t like it, go fuck yourself.

I have a few more thoughts for today.

Firstly, I love it when I see Israel apologists whining about people responding to their screeds with “I ain’t reading all that. Free Palestine.” All hasbarists have is endless mountains of verbiage explaining why it’s fine and normal to drop military explosives on buildings full of children, so it enrages them when someone takes away their only weapon.

They don’t have truth and morality on their side, so all they have is words, words, words, words, words. Take that away from them and they’ve got nothing, and they know it.

And finally, new rule: if you deny that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, then the onus is on you to provide a convincing explanation for why every human rights group on earth (including the Israeli ones) agrees it’s a genocide.

If you hold that there’s an antisemitic conspiracy between all human rights groups, then the burden of proof is on you to show that conspiracy taking place.

If you hold that there’s been an Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate all human rights groups, then you need to provide proof of that conspiracy.

If you hold that there is no conspiracy and it’s just a coincidence that all human rights groups happen to think Israel is committing human rights abuses, then you need to provide a convincing argument why every institution of human rights experts coincidentally came to the same conclusion and are still incorrect.

You can’t just say “I disagree with their findings” or “That one group made an argument I find weak” or “It’s not a genocide because blah blah blah”. You need to address the unanimous consensus, because that’s part of the debate now.

Even flat earthers and climate deniers who claim all the experts are wrong at least try to provide arguments for why there’s a secret conspiracy to amplify faulty conclusions in the scientific community, but deniers of the Gaza genocide somehow seem to think they don’t need to address their dissent with the overwhelming consensus of experts in the relevant field.

You don’t get to do that, guys. That’s not a thing. If you’re claiming the experts are lying about one specific country, then you need to provide a detailed and believable explanation for why that might be.

I’ve yet to encounter a single genocide denier who can do this, online or otherwise. Not one.

P.S. Claiming you can’t accuse Israel of genocide until the ICJ rules it a genocide is exactly the same as claiming you can’t say Charlie Kirk was murdered until his killer has been officially convicted of murder.

___________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image by Kacy Bao / WikiPortraits, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=166320976

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There are some truly psychopathic ghouls in the Trump administration, including Trump himself, but as of today I am convinced that US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is the absolute worst of them.

As Israeli officials become more open about their plans for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip while the Macklemore controversy refocuses public attention on the abuses of Zionism, pro-Israel spinmeisters in both the mass media and the US government are falling all over themselves trying to regain control of the narrative.

During a frenzied ejaculation of propaganda on Newsmax about Macklemore and the pro-Palestine movement, Huckabee repeated long-discredited atrocity propaganda about the October 7 Hamas attack to explain why nobody should oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“These are the people that raped women in front of their own children,” Huckabee told Newsmax host Rob Schmitt. “That hacked off their genitals in front of their families. That lit elderly people on fire and burned them to death while they sat in wheelchairs. That did unspeakable things to children. That cut the heads off of babies and put other babies in an oven while they were alive. Now anyone who cheers that, they’re not just sick, they’re psychopathic.”

“Now if anybody says well that stuff didn’t really happen, well, we know it did, Rob, because Hamas taped themselves doing it. We have it on video,” Huckabee claimed.

To be clear, every single thing Huckabee says here is a lie. The claims about beheaded babies and infants cooked in ovens were soundly debunked in 2023, including in the Israeli press. There is zero video footage anywhere of any of the atrocities Huckabee describes. Israel apologists often make up all kinds of false claims about the video footage recorded on October 7 by Hamas GoPro cameras, trusting that the average member of the public will be too squeamish to watch the violent footage for themselves, but I assure you if you care to dive down that video rabbit hole you will find zero evidence of any of the acts Huckabee just listed.

It’s hard to find words to describe how evil this is. Huckabee knows he’s lying when he says these things. He’s 100 percent aware that he’s advancing atrocity propaganda to justify further Israeli atrocities.

When Huckabee first repeated these claims in October and November 2023 you could say maybe he didn’t know he was spreading atrocity propaganda because it took a few weeks for mainstream outlets to debunk the claim and for awareness of its inaccuracy to spread into mainstream discourse.

When he repeated the claim in September 2025, you could argue that PERHAPS Huckabee was just living in a tightly insulated Zionist echo chamber and was somehow still unaware that the claim had been comprehensively disproven.

But as he repeats this claim in May and again September of 2026, after being widely and repeatedly decried for spreading lies and atrocity propaganda, he is indisputably looking the world in the eye and lying to our faces with full and complete knowledge of what he is doing.

Which shows you that he’s been knowingly lying this entire time. This is a Trump-appointed US government official knowingly lying to the public so they will continue to support Israel’s US-backed abuses of the Palestinian people.

Think about how fucked up you’d have to be inside to do something like this. And this freak has the gall to call Palestine supporters “psychopathic”.

In that same deceitful, propagandistic Newsmax interview, Rob Schmitt said it’s actually the opponents of genocide who are falling victim to propaganda.

“It’s amazing how effective propaganda can be, how blinding it can be to what you would think would be otherwise reasonable people,” Schmitt told Huckabee, adding, “I hate to say this but it feels like the Islamist crowd is winning this war of propaganda. It feels to me now that there is more of an anger and a fury towards Israel than there is towards the heinous things that we saw on October seventh.”

Right, so, according to Trump’s henchmen in his administration and in the right wing press, long-debunked atrocity propaganda about Palestinians is actually true, and it’s actually the people who think Israel is committing criminal acts who are propagandized, and it’s actually the people opposing genocide who are the psychopaths. Up is down, night is day. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

The western world is ruled by lying, manipulative criminals. Revolution can’t come soon enough.

_______________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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As American rapper Macklemore becomes a frontline for renewed mainstream discourse about Israeli atrocities in Gaza, Israel apologists have been falling all over themselves to circulate the demonstrably false narrative that the artist has a history of antisemitic behavior.

Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft defended his intervention to remove Macklemore from the Ed Sheeran tour for saying “Free Palestine” onstage, falsely claiming in a statement that the artist has a “history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community.”

The Anti-Defamation League falsely claimed that Macklemore’s onstage pro-Palestine rhetoric is colored by the artist’s “record of demonizing Israel and Israelis, falsely accusing Israel of genocide and engaging in antisemitic rhetoric and behavior.”

“For years, Macklemore has pushed antisemitic tropes,” claimed ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt on news of the artist’s removal from the tour.

As is generally the case with people who defend the actions of the state of Israel, these claims are lies designed to advance the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.

I don’t generally enjoy talking about celebrities or picking apart the minutiae of their public controversies, but since this one has landed in my area of interest and is being frantically promoted by hasbarists on every corner of the internet, I’m going to take some time to debunk these claims point by point.

When Israel apologists claim that Benjamin Hammond Haggerty AKA Macklemore has a “history of antisemitism,” they are referring to one incident and one incident only. In 2014 Haggerty drew controversy for wearing a large fake nose in a performance which was subsequently decried as antisemitic, which would have been a fair claim if the artist had intended to depict a Jewish person.

The problem is that there is absolutely zero evidence this was the case. In a lengthy statement apologizing profusely to anyone he’d offended, Haggerty said he’d grabbed a bunch of costume supplies in order to disguise himself for a show where he could walk among the crowd and surprise them with a short performance.

Here’s an excerpt:

“On Friday night we had a surprise show at the EMP Museum in Seattle. Earlier in the day I thought it would be fun to dress up in a disguise and go incognito to the event, so that I could walk around unnoticed and surprise the crowd with a short performance. I picked up a bunch of fake mustaches and beards and grabbed a left over wig from our recent trip to Japan.

“As it turns out the fake noses they sell at the costume store are usually big (my nose didn’t fit most of them). So I ended up with a big witch nose. I went with a black beard, because that’s the furthest color from my natural hair. Disguise was the intention. I personally thought I looked very ambiguous in terms of any ‘type’ of person. Some people there thought I looked like Ringo, some Abe Lincoln. If anything I thought I looked like Humpty Hump with a bowl cut.”

A witch nose. It was a witch nose from a costume store. For Halloween.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Haggerty was lying about any of this. If there had been other incidents of the artist expressing hateful opinions about Jews, one could make the case that he may have been lying about his intentions with the fake nose incident. But there are no such incidents. There was the witch nose thing in 2014, and then saying “Free Palestine” twelve years later. I’ve been arguing about this with hasbarists online for two days, and not one of them has been able to cite a single example of hateful behavior toward Jews apart from him wearing a fake nose many years ago.

I’ve seen some people try to argue antisemitic intentions by citing the fact that Macklemore wore the outfit to perform his song “Thrift Shop”, playing into tropes about Jews pinching pennies, but anyone who makes that argument simply hasn’t listened to the lyrics of the song or watched the music video. It’s very clearly and unambiguously a song about shopping at a thrift store because you’re poor, not because you’re cheap; the line “only got 20 dollars in my pocket” is right there in the chorus. Unless being poor is an “antisemitic trope” now, that argument is out the window.

I’ve seen some people point to a still image from the incident in which Macklemore appears to be doing a “sieg heil” gesture, but that’s out the window too because (A) if Macklemore had done an actual deliberate-looking Nazi salute we would have seen video footage of it, and (B) we learned from right wing efforts to defend Elon Musk’s actual full-fledged Roman salute at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration rally that it is very easy to grab a still frame of a moving person with their arm in that position; I remember seeing Libs of TikTok share images of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris with their arms in the “Heil Hitler” position to argue that Musk’s blatant Nazi gesture was being mischaracterized. It seems clear that Macklemore was just dancing to the song and amping the crowd and had his arm up at some point in his movements.

And that is it. That’s the extent of the argument that Macklemore has a “history of antisemitism”. It’s a classic Gish gallop fallacy, where a bunch of individually weak arguments are clumped together to create the illusion of a strong argument.

In the same pro-Palestine speech which gave rise to all this artificial controversy, Macklemore said the following:

“To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you. My message is for peace; love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality.”

There is not one shred of evidence, anywhere, that these words were insincere.

A lot of the furor over the 2014 incident seems to arise from Jewish people not understanding that the average non-Jew simply doesn’t know very much about antisemitic tropes, and spends very little time in their day-to-day life thinking about Jewishness or antisemitism. If you showed the average gentile on the street a “happy merchant” meme, they’d have no idea what the hell they were looking at. As an Australian who was raised Catholic I knew next to nothing about antisemitic tropes until I started regularly engaging in online political commentary for a living, and neither did my Catholic husband from the United States. It’s simply not something non-Jews typically talk about or teach their kids to recognize.

I remember years ago tweeting something about Benjamin Netanyahu being “bloodthirsty” or something to that effect, and a follower DMed me politely suggesting I delete it because there’s a long antisemitic history of associating Jews with drinking blood. I remember being surprised; I’d sincerely had no idea, I was just making a comment about a warmonger’s constant warmongering. I deleted the tweet and avoided the term going forward. So speaking for myself I can very easily see a cradle Catholic like Haggerty putting on a fake nose in 2014 and never having it cross his mind that it might be interpreted by anyone as a hateful trope about Jews.

But even saying this gives way too much credence to the idea that the people decrying Macklemore as some kind of Nazi are acting in good faith. These are the same people after all who tried to spin the narrative that Greta Thunberg hates Jews because she posed for a pro-Palestine photo near an octopus plushie, claiming the octopus was historically sometimes used in antisemitic tropes.

People who defend Israel’s actions in Gaza consistently act in bad faith. Of course they do. They support genocide. They’re bad people. Of course someone who can keep supporting a live-streamed holocaust will also lie, manipulate, and pretend to believe things they don’t really believe in order to advance the information interests of an apartheid state. Truth and morality are not important values for them.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image by San Francisco Foghorn — Macklemore, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24696560

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Macklemore has been removed from the duration of a tour with Ed Sheeran for saying “Free Palestine” and criticizing Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

In an eloquent statement posted on social media, Macklemore said he was told by Sheeran that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft had barred him from the Gillette Stadium and coordinated with other stadium owners on Sheeran’s tour to follow suit.

Robert Kraft has a net worth of some $15 billion. He was once publicly handed a trophy by Benjamin Netanyahu honoring his commitment to the Zionist project, after which he gave a speech saying, “After my family, there is nothing I’m more passionate about than the State of Israel and my Jewish identity.”

Macklemore said Sheeran defended his decision to comply with Kraft’s demand by telling him that “the words ‘Free Palestine’ and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people.” Which really says a lot about the detached celebrity cloud that Sheeran has been living on. If it hurts your feelings to hear someone saying genocide is bad and people should have freedom, then you deserve to have your feelings hurt.

American oligarchs kicking an artist off a tour for supporting Palestine is a very in-your-face illustration of why mainstream culture is so vapid and fake these days.

This is what happens if someone stands on a large and influential platform and dissents against the imperial status quo. Their platform gets taken away.

Mainstream artists in our capitalist dystopia rely on infrastructure that is owned by billionaires, and if the billionaires don’t like what the artist is saying, the artist loses access to the infrastructure. In this specific case it was stadiums, but throughout modern history it has also been TV stations, movie studios, radio play, record labels, publications, etc. When the wealthy control all the major platforms, you don’t get to stand on a major platform and say things the wealthy don’t want you to say.

Macklemore explained this very nicely in his statement on the matter:

“What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I’m sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, ‘Free Palestine’ becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that’s why this time it became so important to silence me.”

If you’ve been wondering why more celebrities haven’t been speaking out about Gaza, this is why. They all know they’ll lose their lucrative platforms if they say anything that offends the sensibilities of the plutocrats they depend on for mainstream success. If they want to remain millionaires, they need to get along with the billionaires.

So they don’t say anything that offends the powerful. They don’t say anything critical of capitalism. They don’t say anything critical of Zionism. They don’t say anything critical of the western empire. They stick to churning out toothless tunes about romance and relationships, writing shallow lyrics about dancing and partying with your friends, making dopey Hollywood action flicks, and creating empty-headed sitcoms about friends getting up to hilarious antics in an imaginary universe where capitalism is working fine for everybody.

If you want to be a mainstream artist in this dystopia, your vehicles for creative expression are (A) propaganda or (B) empty distraction. That’s it. Nothing that edifies or helps improve the world is ever allowed past the keeper. The media-owning class wants us all to be a bunch of mindless, distracted, compliant consumers who march along to the imperial drum, so that’s the only type of “art” you get to make if you want to be rich and famous.

In that sense the mainstream artists of our day are actually just mercenaries for the western empire. Ed Sheeran kicked Macklemore off the tour as soon as the Zionist billionaire told him to, and will replace him with an opening act who promises never to say “Free Palestine” on stage. Sheeran is essentially just a rich, soft-handed thug responsible for keeping any dissident ideas from reaching the ears of his audience, which is why he’s been allowed to become as famous as he has. If it were Sheeran saying “Free Palestine”, he’d be the one getting banned from stadiums.

Mainstream culture is designed to keep us docile, ignorant and submissive while thinking we are free. This is the dystopia we were warned about generations ago by fiction writers describing the dark future they saw approaching. This is it. We are living in it.

___________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Here’s the text, for my subscribers who prefer to read:

Different people mean different things when they talk about having an awakening.

Some use “awakening” to describe the movement into revolutionary politics as you gradually discover that everything you’ve been taught about your government, your nation and your world is a lie.

Some use that word to refer to the process of awakening from the indoctrination imposed upon them by their family and their culture: religious beliefs, fundamental assumptions about sex and gender roles, what a healthy relationship looks like, abusive family dynamics they’d been trained to view as normal, etc.

Others use it to describe the process of awakening from the psychological trance of the ego and dismantling our maladaptive cognitive and perceptual mechanisms which cause us to suffer and view ourselves as separate from the world.

And a mature worldview understands that all of these groups are using the term correctly.

In this strange human adventure we are called to awaken on all levels: individually, interpersonally, and globally. None of these levels are more valuable than any other. You can awaken to them in any order, or at the same time.

To awaken globally means bringing consciousness to what’s really going on in the world. It means learning the truth about the abusive nature of your government and its allies, and unlearning all the lies you were taught about the “liberal democracies” of the western world. It means learning real history and reading real news, and expunging from your worldview all the fake history and the fake news you’ve been fed your whole life by the western empire. It means deeply reckoning with the suffering your rulers have inflicted upon your fellow human beings around the world, not just intellectually in your head but emotionally in your heart.

To awaken interpersonally is to bring consciousness to what’s really going on in your relationships, your social circles, and your community. Opening your eyes to the fact that you’re in an abusive marriage, or that your family is wildly dysfunctional, or that your church has put a lot of debilitating nonsense in your head. Learning to spot the manipulators, users and abusers in your life, and working to minimize the damage they can do. Discovering the various ways you yourself have been hurting or hampering the people in your life, and working to right those wrongs. Bringing harmony to your inner and outer circles of association by working to cultivate the healthy and uproot the destructive with relentless self-honesty. Cutting other people’s bullshit out of your mind and out of your life while building bridges to other people’s loveliness. Helping joy and love to thrive in the small social areas over which you have personal influence.

To awaken individually is to bring consciousness to what’s really going on inside you. By closely examining the nature of your own thoughts and senses, you can gain a profound experiential insight into the fact that there is no actual “me” inside your body having experiences of an outside world, and there never was. A deep, clear recognition of the fact that the “self” your thoughts refer to is a psychological work of fiction causes all energetic belief to fall away from the internal mental narrative, and life becomes much more peaceful and pleasant. This awakening can then be thoroughly educated into your operating system so that all your emotions, psychological tendencies, and fields of perception move fully into alignment with this insight.

People can be awake on one level but fast asleep on another. There’ve been spiritually enlightened gurus who can speak brilliantly about nonduality but have the politics of a CNN liberal. There’ve been powerfully lucid revolutionary leaders who abused their spouses and beat their children. There are beloved pillars of the community who are entirely trapped in egoic delusion.

Awakening on one level helps you to awaken on others. Awakening individually gives you the clarity to see which battles actually need to be fought and which are just candy for the ego. Awakening globally to the abuses and manipulations of the empire allows you to recognize the same abusive paterns and manipulations in yourself and in your interpersonal relationships. Awakening interpersonally helps you understand how your specific family and culture has shaped your psychology in ways that inhibit your awakening as an individual.

Our task is to try to awaken on all three levels. Let your curiosity and intuition guide you through the process of bringing consciousness to what’s really going on in yourself, in your relationships, and in your world, and then you can truthfully say you are doing your own small part to help humanity become a conscious species.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Western liberal democracies are like a narcissistic wife beater who postures as a sensitive he/him feminist on social media. Like a pop star who makes a show of fighting the power and defending the marginalized while supporting Israel.

Our society isn’t what it pretends to be.

Our entire civilization sustains itself through an endless river of blood, sweat and tears from the global south while making movies about fighting for justice and saving the world.

Our pundits wag their fingers at the “tyrannical regimes” in empire-targeted nations while our own rulers murder, starve and terrorize disobedient populations in order to dominate the planet.

In school they teach us that we are lucky to live in a free society where the people command the government with their votes and we have the right to express ourselves in whatever way we choose, when in reality wealthy oligarchs control the entire electoral process and our expression is aggressively manipulated through a complex system of censorship and propaganda.

We have no integrity.

To have integrity as an individual is to be the same sort of person you are at home as when you’re in public. To treat everyone with the same amount of kindness and respect regardless of whether they’re your boss, your child, your subordinate, or your friend. When all your thoughts align fully with all your words, and all your words fully align with all your actions, whether nobody’s watching or everyone’s watching. When the values you claim to hold are the same as the values people see you embodying in the life you actually live.

To cultivate integrity as an individual is to bring all of these factors into alignment, and eliminate all conflicts and contradictions between them in the way you live your life. To cultivate integrity as a society is no different.

And as denizens of the western empire we’ve got a long, hard journey ahead of us if we are to eliminate all the conflicts and contradictions between the type of society we claim to be and the type of society we actually have. In practice we’re about as incongruent with our theoretical values as any civilization could possibly be. We are an empire of frauds.

The fight for a healthy world is largely a fight to move us from fraudulence to integrity. To create a society in which our most noble aspirations and most deeply cherished values are reflected in the way our civilization is actually organized. That is the cause toward which we all strive, when all is said and done.

Gaining integrity as an individual means getting uncompromisingly real with yourself about what you’re actually like as a person. Gaining integrity as a society means opening as many western eyes as possible to the reality that everything we’ve been told about our civilization and about our world is a complete sham. Only then can we begin striking at the true roots of our problems and move into health and harmony.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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It’s so undignified how Zionists keep trying to resurrect the “stop calling it a genocide” conversation about Gaza when every relevant human rights group on earth says that’s exactly what it is.

The latest effort to revive this long-dead debate comes in the form of a letter signed by 5,000 high-profile Israel supporters like Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, Zionist megadonor Haim Saban, and neoconservative war criminal Elliott Abrams.

“We the undersigned are outraged and sickened by the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people: the lie that Israel committed ‘genocide’ in Gaza. We reject this accusation with contempt,” the letter says, followed by the usual mountains of hasbara verbiage.

The letter was assembled by a Zionist narrative management operation innocuously titled Creative Community for Peace, which was founded by music industry executives in 2011 to combat pro-Palestine activism.

And that’s it. That’s the whole entire story: a pro-Israel propaganda firm compiled a list of thousands of well-known Israel supporters telling the world they think Israel is nice.

You wouldn’t think “many influential people say they support Israel” is a particularly newsworthy story, but we’re seeing outlets like The Australian, The Times of Israel, The Wrap and Jewish News Syndicate publish articles about it like they’re doing actual news reporting, and hasbarists are frantically waving the letter around on every corner of the internet as you read this.

And all I can think to say to this nonsense is, nah. Nope. No. We’re not doing this anymore. This conversation is over.

In case you’re not aware, the list of human rights groups who say Israel is guilty of genocide includes the following:

1. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory

2. The International Association of Genocide Scholars

3. B’Tselem (an Israeli organization)

4. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (another Israeli organization)

5. Amnesty International

6. Doctors Without Borders

7. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

8. Human Rights Watch

9. The International Federation for Human Rights

10. Oxfam

The list of humanitarian institutions who say Israel is NOT committing genocide in Gaza includes:

1. Nobody

2. No one

3. Zero

4. Nothing

5. Nada

6. Zilch

7. Sweet damn all

8. A complete absence

9. Diddly squat

10. Bupkis

Pick any major human rights group who might be expected to take a position on whether a genocide is being committed somewhere in the world, and you will be able to find a statement from that group explicitly calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. There are zero comparable human rights groups taking the opposite position.

This means the debate is over. It’s been over for some time now. If you want to argue against the overwhelming consensus of experts in the relevant field today, then you must provide proof that all human rights groups are engaged in a secret conspiracy to spread lies about the state of Israel in order to undermine its interests. If you cannot provide proof of this conspiracy, you need to shut the fuck up.

That’s it. End of discussion. Tap out and go home.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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The other day I saw another great example of the way people in capitalist societies tend to reframe their dumb luck as the result of their own hard work and resourcefulness.

At the end of the last season of the surivalist competition Alone Australia, the winner Trent Felton was asked if he felt he’d just gotten lucky catching dozens of fish while all the other contestants starved, and he insisted that his success was actually due to the fact that he had made the wise decision to work hard obtaining food.

“My strategy when I went out there was food,” said Felton. “I’ve been a big fan of the show for a long time, and I’ve never really seen anyone leave ‘cause their shelter’s not quite up to scratch or anything like that, so from day one priority for me was food.”

Oh you made food a priority, did you Trent? On the show about obtaining food to survive in the wilderness? Wow, I bet your opponents wish they’d thought of that.

He’d just watched the same show we all watched. He saw all his other co-contestants taking far more extraordinary measures than he ever had to take in order to obtain fish and other nourishment, building boats to try to change their luck with the fish, constantly moving their gill nets and trying all kinds of lures and bait and still getting nothing.

But he couldn’t just be humble and say “Yeah, I was dropped off at the only decent fishing spot on the show during a season where fishing was the only way contestants were allowed to harvest animal protein. I got lucky.” He had to pretend his fortune was actually the result of his hard work and his clever “obtain food” strategy.

This is such a perfect example of the phenomenon we discussed the other day where people who’ve managed to thrive under capitalism assume the system is working fine because survivorship bias and just-world fallacy cause them to believe that everyone’s getting exactly what they deserve. If I have more than I need it’s because I worked hard to obtain it. If you have less than you need it’s because you didn’t work hard enough.

Our whole insane society runs on this premise. Those who got lucky say their fortune is the result of their own hard work and cleverness, so they should enjoy tax cuts and generational wealth while the less fortunate are sleeping on the sidewalk.

Meanwhile those who’ve been working their fingers to the bone just to survive in this shitshow know that money doesn’t actually reward hard work. In our society, money rewards being born into the right family, being cruel enough to exploit the working class, being sociopathic enough to externalize the costs of industry onto the environment, and being ruthless enough to crush anyone who is in competition with you.

Which is why we find ourselves ruled by a plutocratic class of psychopaths today, who preside over a tiered society of haves and have-nots whose continued stratification is foundational to the system under which we live. Sure, as an individual you might one day get lucky and move from the lower tier to the higher one, but such instances are just the “poor girl marries a prince” stories of our day. The odd exception to the general rule doesn’t change the fact that our entire civilization depends on the permanent existence of an impoverished underclass.

Those with clear eyes and humble hearts understand that there’s no good reason why we should be living comfortably while others struggle and suffer, and that we must do whatever we can to help create a more equitable society which uplifts those who are more needful than ourselves. We reject the temptation to tell ourselves stories about why we shouldn’t have to share our good fortune with those less fortunate, and we join hands with our brothers and sisters in humanity to help build a healthy world.

We have more than enough resources to care for everyone, if we would only redesign our systems to advance the interests of humanity over the interests of capital. There is no valid reason why poverty should continue to exist. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves, either intellectually in their heads or morally in their hearts.

As Buckminster Fuller said many years ago, “It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting high technology from weaponry to livingry.”

He was correct then, and he is correct now. We can still have a world like this. It’s not too late to change.

____________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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The Israeli press has published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after October 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory.

The first two come from a Haaretz article titled “Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs”, which was released ahead of an upcoming Haaretz book about the hostage standoff in Gaza.

Haaretz describes a call between Netanyahu and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, citing three foreign senior sources:

“A week and a half before October 7, 2023 the Emirati ruler called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes. In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.”

Haaretz reports that rather than pass these warnings on to Israeli national security officials, Netanyahu chose to sit on information which an unnamed Shin Bet official said could have “changed our entire assessment picture.”

Haaretz also notes that Israel had received similar warnings about a coming Hamas attack from Egyptian intelligence, which had been reported earlier. These are just two items in the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence indicating that powerful people in Israel knowingly allowed Hamas to inflict as much damage as possible on October 7 2023 in order to advance the murderous ethnic cleansing objectives we’ve seen rolled out in the years since.

Nothing will turn you into a conspiracy theorist faster than learning basic facts about what happened on October 7. But even without knowing those facts it already strains credulity to believe Israel had no advance knowledge of a complex attack which would require extensive open-air training in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land on our planet. Especially when you look at all the pre-existing military agendas Israel was able to push forward in the aftermath.

Later in that same article, Haaretz quotes a Palestinian politician named Samir Mashharawi describing what Hamas leadership told him during his mediation efforts between Israel and Hamas after October 7:

“He told me that in the first stage, they had no problem releasing all civilians without anything in return,” Mashharawi recounts. “I swear, those were his exact words: all civilians, without anything in return. They had only one condition: They wanted us to bring in an agreed-upon mediator as quickly as possible, so that negotiations could immediately begin over everything else.”

Mashharawi said Israel rejected the offer. A senior Israeli defense official corroborated this, telling Haaretz:

“The release of the hostages did not even enter the list of war objectives formulated by the government on the night of October 7. Could the proposal have been properly discussed and a decision reached? In substantive terms, the answer is yes. But the prevailing mood was like after Pearl Harbor: We had just suffered a brutal blow, we were in the midst of war, who had the bandwidth to talk about stopping the fighting and starting negotiations now, even if it was to save the lives of dozens of people, whose final number was still unknown?”

So all that hasbara about the hostages and the Bibas kids and how Hamas needed to be destroyed because they were refusing to release innocent civilian captives was complete bunk from the very beginning. Hamas offered to release them with no conditions but the opening of communication lines. Israel refused, because what they wanted was to steal more Palestinian land. It was never about the hostages, and anyone who said it was is a liar.

Lastly, a separate report in Hebrew from Haaretz quotes an Israeli air force reserve major describing how IDF policies and culture ensured the deaths of large numbers of civilians. Here are a few quotes, translated by Israeli-American political analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim:

1) He was involved in the March 23, 2025 paramedic killings in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah and said, “You could clearly tell these were rescue vehicles even as fire was opened on them from the ground. For no apparent reason, the force on the ground charged the convoy. They shot the first vehicle, the medical personnel got out, hid behind the ambulances and begged for their lives, and the soldiers shot them one after another.”

2) On how the yellow line was used as an excuse to kill innocent people: “The Palestinians didn’t know it existed, and the Air Force wasn’t always updated either. From the perspective of a farmer walking onto his own land — he has no idea he’s stepping into an area the IDF suddenly decided is a fire zone. And then all kinds of retroactive justifications started coming up. ‘He came for an arms deal.’ ‘He touched the ground, maybe he’s planting an explosive.’ To me it looked like they were trying to incriminate people with no intelligence and no proof.”

3) On how all morals were lost in Gaza: “”The feeling was that something tore, everyone had already become cynical about death, you can’t understand it from the outside. It’s not just fatigue, it’s an erosion of morality, of responsibility, of the sense that someone is still managing the event. Very quickly this whole business of ‘collateral damage’ disappeared from the considerations. They fire on anyone they see. The atmosphere started to be like the stands at a soccer match. The way you shout at a player, ‘Yalla, score,’ that’s how they shout at a soldier, ‘Kill him, strike him.’”

Like the other revelations, this report further discredits the lies the public was sold about Israel’s reasons for its atrocities in Gaza. All those lies about how Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza and only kills civilians because Hamas “hides behind human shields” has been thoroughly discredited by copious amounts of evidence that Israel was going out of its way to kill noncombatants throughout the course of the onslaught.

The world was lied to about the Gaza holocaust, just like it was lied to about every other act of mass military slaughter that the US involves itself in. Please carry these lessons into the future.

____________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2