This piece essentially functions like a strophic poem, with a series of successive stanzas which use a constant refrain (something fixed), and then use that as counter-point for the development of variations on the opening theme. It almost reminds me of Bach, his themes and variations. He takes a simple musical theme or idea, and then explores and develops it into an extremely rich, ironical, nuanced, and beautiful composition. The truth is revealed through a masterful use of counterpoint.
This piece above is like a hybrid form of poetic journalism. It uses real fact, but also communicates a higher poetic truth. It's original, polemical, innovative in form, and strives for Truth.
---"Consider The Possibility That This Is Already The Dystopia You Fear"------
No need to consider; I know it is. While people worried that the year Y2K might result in planes crashing, the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) was being quietly put into effect as Bush/Cheney were put quietly into office.
Except none of it was really "quiet." Anyone with ears to hear knew it was happening, and in the years since, the powerful have become even more brazen in their willingness to pretty much announce what they're doing out loud, knowing people don't believe there's a damn thing they can do to stop it. It's referred to as a "flex."
Being BLATANT, like US elite & media in the last few elections, hoodwinks retired yuppies and Creative Class™ churls into a specious obliviousness, that we're ALL in this crazy nightmare together. We can't HANDLE the truth. So we sacrifice all those we've red-lined amongst well-pads, CAFO shit ponds, melt-down reactors, burning tundra or their own shattered cities. Cuomo, Trump, de Blasio & now Biden's murdered close to 40K in my city alone. And they eagerly send little kids to school, so they don't miss happy hour or choir practice?
Your best piece in quite some time, not to leave the impression that your others have been in some way lacking. A quick look at the current simian state of our politics and media would seem to more than confirm your thesis.
I've known for decades that this was taking place and that it was only going to get worse, and I was one of a group which warned people that this was coming about, called "the hippies of the 60s."
I didn't want to live into the 21st century because of this knowledge, and it's just as bad as we predicted it would be.
So what do I do now? I can advise you to read certain books or watch certain documentaries to learn how to change, and you still won't listen to me, any more than you did when there was a whole group of us.
Consider too that good, bad, right, wrong, ugly and beautiful are all merely concepts, illusions, and do not exist in reality. Consider that our commitment to these concepts, as well as to the concepts of morals, values and ethics, keeps us firmly rooted in our cultural existential illusory mindset and therefore creates the schism called duality. Consider that all of this is a figment of our culturally and existentially indoctrinated imagination, that we believe or think this all actually exists when, in fact, there is no other animal or plant on the planet that even remotely comes close to such illusory patterns of living. Consider that cultural existential humanity exists entirely within the framework of illusionary values, morals, and ethics and is therefore insane. Including you. Including me. Consider this: the way to individual and societal sanity is not difficult. Only our lack of desire for the truth concerning the cause of human suffering and conflict and how to eliminate that cause from the mind keeps us from it. It's really just an addiction issue. Until we eliminate from the mind the culturally and existentially indoctrinated, illusionary concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, ugly and beautiful, great and inferior -- until we eliminate from the mind all value, moral, and ethical judgments, we will never be at one with reality. We will never be at peace and we will never know anything but confusion, conflict and a separate relationship from reality. Until then insanity will reign supreme and all the other creatures we have placed well beneath our so called superior consciousness will most certainly outlive us.
Very true Josh Liveright but while meditating on human suffering which you and I and everyone on this earth is part of, while looking at what causes this suffering, which is probably the human ego , action is needed . Not just action but right action . Right action comes from right thinking, right view, right speech and so on. it may be possible for large numbers to dispel the illusions you speak of but it requires the whole of humanity to shed our conditioning.To actually shed our monstrous egos.
Acknowledging the self-evident fact that the correct definition of a word belongs to the people who invented it and have been using it in the same way since the 1800s is not "worshipping" anyone. If you disagree with that definition you are simply wrong.
OK, Caitlin. I don't really know who invented the term "capitalism," but corporations were chartered and Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations before Marx was born, and Adam Smith was talking about the manufacturers of pins, not the East India Company.
I'll give you Webster's definition of capitalism:
a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government
Since "companies" (aka corporations) are just one of two distinct ownership classes within "capitalism" according to the above definition, with "individual" ownership comprising the other class of owners making up the entire set of owners, clearly "corporate" is not the same thing as "capitalism" but a subset of "capitalism." So you see, there IS a difference.
The difference is a corporate charter granted by government, which gives the beneficial owners of the corporation (aka shareholders) something called limited liability, a privilege that individual owners do not have. This relief from accountability is what enables shareholders to allow corporate managers to take risks that the beneficial owners would never allow if they were 100% personally liable for all risks. It's what allows corporations to become behemoths with huge financial power capable of dominating all branches of government, to become in essence an unelected government.
Because "corporate" and "individual" ownership and control are two distinct things that together make up the ownership class in a "capitalist" system, it's certainly possible to imagine a formerly "capitalist" system excised of its "corporate" ownership class.
When you use the term "capitalist" rather than "corporate," you are lumping individual owners in with corporate owners. You are equating the owner of the local independent grocery store or independent medical practice with corporate behemoths like Kroger or Kaiser Permanente.
Furthermore, in your workers paradise of all businesses owned by the workers themselves, those workers are accumulating capital. Are they not then "capitalists?"
Too bad you can't see the distinction between "corporatism," which eventually forces all individual ownership out, and individual or partnership owned "capitalist" businesses where the owners are fully accountable for the activities of their business, which would include worker owned co-ops.
There may be an argument to be made about the difference between "small-C" capitalism and corporatism. So long as worker-ownership of the means of production is not mandated, your point is moot; only when all companies with a market cap of over 10M are required by law, according to market cap and ownership, to have:
a) a unionized workforce
b) worker representation on governance boards
c) government representation on same
...only then will "small-C" capitalism be meaningfully distinguished from corporate-capitalism. Until then, the difference is largely invisible or intangible.
PS: a little less condescension would probably help your argument. Caitlin is *far* from *confused* about anything, from all I've read of her writings.
Dollars created by banks are associated with wealth and productivity only if the banker is held accountable for his bad loans. Government bailouts of those loans are not capitalism.
Bad debts do NOT create wealth, nor does any other type of fraud. That's why bankers must be held accountable, and NOT bailing them out is one imperfect way of doing that. Otherwise they continue bad behavior.
I've written about vaccine mandates and authoritarianism in Australia many times. You keep shrieking at me because I don't write about it constantly or predominantly, which is a silly thing that I don't know how to care about.
I listen to Russell Brand; Jimmy Dore; theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay (watch his series of interviews with William "Bill" Black); Real Progressives (and Macro'n'Cheese) for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT); and The Con documentary.
Find the DVD documentary How to Start a Revolution and read From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book by Dr Gene Sharp. Then read his three-volume series, The Politics of Nonviolent Action.
You can also read Silent Spring: Rachel Carson knew before any of us that climate change was starting in the 1950s.
I can't quite go along with this analogy of yours suggesting that the concerns about dystopian future scenarios extrapolated from the rollout of new more invasive forms of surveillance and "social credit" type compliance-tracking systems being now run through our electronic minders is is just them tightening the bolts on the cage meaning it does not represent a revolutionary change (in a negative sense) or a leap towards some kind of radically different reality.
I would describe what's happening in this way. In some regards those who represent the predatory or parasitic energy on earth have used all manner of coercion and psychological manipulation to "convince" us to both to get into the cage which they've convinced is not a cage and have been able to make it appear convincingly that we've gotten into it of our own accord and are staying there of our own choice, but now they are clearly signaling us their intention to ensure through means of technology that should we later decide we want to re-claim a birth-right as free humans, we can never get out and all they need for us to just not see the bars for a little bit longer.
i keep hearing that most Aussies were really angry with Novak Jokovic being treated special / differently than Aussies by the Australian political leadership, which then pressured the political leadership to deport Novak J. Does your real interaction with people around you confirm that, Caitlin?
Well, obviously; they couldn't even be bothered to READ either novels or history, so they'd doubtless have some buxom intern synopsize Mike Judge, George Miller... or Romero movie. ARE their still Cliff's Notes versions of 1984, The Wanting Seed, Tropic of Kansas, Parable of the Sower or Eight O'Clock in the Morning (without crayons to color in the pictures?) I'm guessing, our betters are pretty content to let our dystopia write itself, as long as their NASDAQ jumps another 120%... It's fallen 20% in a week? Oh!
Suddenly, in my 3rd week of Omicron (our 2nd COVID in 21 months) it's LPR, throat, joint & muscle PAIN, bad brain fog and POTS. So, back to work all. Plague, OVER!
This is brilliant.
This piece essentially functions like a strophic poem, with a series of successive stanzas which use a constant refrain (something fixed), and then use that as counter-point for the development of variations on the opening theme. It almost reminds me of Bach, his themes and variations. He takes a simple musical theme or idea, and then explores and develops it into an extremely rich, ironical, nuanced, and beautiful composition. The truth is revealed through a masterful use of counterpoint.
This piece above is like a hybrid form of poetic journalism. It uses real fact, but also communicates a higher poetic truth. It's original, polemical, innovative in form, and strives for Truth.
I really admire this model haha.
Thank you!
---"Consider The Possibility That This Is Already The Dystopia You Fear"------
No need to consider; I know it is. While people worried that the year Y2K might result in planes crashing, the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) was being quietly put into effect as Bush/Cheney were put quietly into office.
Except none of it was really "quiet." Anyone with ears to hear knew it was happening, and in the years since, the powerful have become even more brazen in their willingness to pretty much announce what they're doing out loud, knowing people don't believe there's a damn thing they can do to stop it. It's referred to as a "flex."
Being BLATANT, like US elite & media in the last few elections, hoodwinks retired yuppies and Creative Class™ churls into a specious obliviousness, that we're ALL in this crazy nightmare together. We can't HANDLE the truth. So we sacrifice all those we've red-lined amongst well-pads, CAFO shit ponds, melt-down reactors, burning tundra or their own shattered cities. Cuomo, Trump, de Blasio & now Biden's murdered close to 40K in my city alone. And they eagerly send little kids to school, so they don't miss happy hour or choir practice?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/thich-nhat-hanh-influential-zen-buddhist-monk-dies-at-age-95-11642812779
Your best piece in quite some time, not to leave the impression that your others have been in some way lacking. A quick look at the current simian state of our politics and media would seem to more than confirm your thesis.
I've known for decades that this was taking place and that it was only going to get worse, and I was one of a group which warned people that this was coming about, called "the hippies of the 60s."
I didn't want to live into the 21st century because of this knowledge, and it's just as bad as we predicted it would be.
So what do I do now? I can advise you to read certain books or watch certain documentaries to learn how to change, and you still won't listen to me, any more than you did when there was a whole group of us.
I wasn't alive in 60s, but I see clear as day what is happening now & where we are headed.
Trying to sound the alarm, but everyone is face-planted in their cell phone, lined up for yet another jab of useless magic potion.
I'll never give up, but you can't help but feel down sometimes...
Basically, no one cares? Or no one else can see the bigger picture?
I know tons of people smarter that me, so why can't they "get it"?
You've been at this longer than I have, and you are still going... you have my admiration & respect.
What should I be reading or listening to?
Oh, yes, p.s., you need to read The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen for an explanation of how our society got here.
Oops, my reply to you ended up as a comment on this thread. Go back to see it.
Consider too that good, bad, right, wrong, ugly and beautiful are all merely concepts, illusions, and do not exist in reality. Consider that our commitment to these concepts, as well as to the concepts of morals, values and ethics, keeps us firmly rooted in our cultural existential illusory mindset and therefore creates the schism called duality. Consider that all of this is a figment of our culturally and existentially indoctrinated imagination, that we believe or think this all actually exists when, in fact, there is no other animal or plant on the planet that even remotely comes close to such illusory patterns of living. Consider that cultural existential humanity exists entirely within the framework of illusionary values, morals, and ethics and is therefore insane. Including you. Including me. Consider this: the way to individual and societal sanity is not difficult. Only our lack of desire for the truth concerning the cause of human suffering and conflict and how to eliminate that cause from the mind keeps us from it. It's really just an addiction issue. Until we eliminate from the mind the culturally and existentially indoctrinated, illusionary concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, ugly and beautiful, great and inferior -- until we eliminate from the mind all value, moral, and ethical judgments, we will never be at one with reality. We will never be at peace and we will never know anything but confusion, conflict and a separate relationship from reality. Until then insanity will reign supreme and all the other creatures we have placed well beneath our so called superior consciousness will most certainly outlive us.
Very true Josh Liveright but while meditating on human suffering which you and I and everyone on this earth is part of, while looking at what causes this suffering, which is probably the human ego , action is needed . Not just action but right action . Right action comes from right thinking, right view, right speech and so on. it may be possible for large numbers to dispel the illusions you speak of but it requires the whole of humanity to shed our conditioning.To actually shed our monstrous egos.
Yes ego is also an illusion as well as self and therefore right thinking. When all that falls away reality is all that’s left.
Raw. Uninhibited. Truth.
Replace every instance of "capitalist" with "corporate" and this piece would be spot on. Caitlin is still just a bit confused about that.
No you just don't know what capitalism is.
https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1452733006649589760
Sorry, Caitlin. Marx was right about many things, but I don't worship him. The divide isn't left or right. It's top down or bottoms up.
Acknowledging the self-evident fact that the correct definition of a word belongs to the people who invented it and have been using it in the same way since the 1800s is not "worshipping" anyone. If you disagree with that definition you are simply wrong.
OK, Caitlin. I don't really know who invented the term "capitalism," but corporations were chartered and Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations before Marx was born, and Adam Smith was talking about the manufacturers of pins, not the East India Company.
I'll give you Webster's definition of capitalism:
a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government
Since "companies" (aka corporations) are just one of two distinct ownership classes within "capitalism" according to the above definition, with "individual" ownership comprising the other class of owners making up the entire set of owners, clearly "corporate" is not the same thing as "capitalism" but a subset of "capitalism." So you see, there IS a difference.
The difference is a corporate charter granted by government, which gives the beneficial owners of the corporation (aka shareholders) something called limited liability, a privilege that individual owners do not have. This relief from accountability is what enables shareholders to allow corporate managers to take risks that the beneficial owners would never allow if they were 100% personally liable for all risks. It's what allows corporations to become behemoths with huge financial power capable of dominating all branches of government, to become in essence an unelected government.
Because "corporate" and "individual" ownership and control are two distinct things that together make up the ownership class in a "capitalist" system, it's certainly possible to imagine a formerly "capitalist" system excised of its "corporate" ownership class.
When you use the term "capitalist" rather than "corporate," you are lumping individual owners in with corporate owners. You are equating the owner of the local independent grocery store or independent medical practice with corporate behemoths like Kroger or Kaiser Permanente.
Furthermore, in your workers paradise of all businesses owned by the workers themselves, those workers are accumulating capital. Are they not then "capitalists?"
Too bad you can't see the distinction between "corporatism," which eventually forces all individual ownership out, and individual or partnership owned "capitalist" businesses where the owners are fully accountable for the activities of their business, which would include worker owned co-ops.
There may be an argument to be made about the difference between "small-C" capitalism and corporatism. So long as worker-ownership of the means of production is not mandated, your point is moot; only when all companies with a market cap of over 10M are required by law, according to market cap and ownership, to have:
a) a unionized workforce
b) worker representation on governance boards
c) government representation on same
...only then will "small-C" capitalism be meaningfully distinguished from corporate-capitalism. Until then, the difference is largely invisible or intangible.
PS: a little less condescension would probably help your argument. Caitlin is *far* from *confused* about anything, from all I've read of her writings.
No need to "mandate" anything but the end of privilege an joint stock corporations. Mandates are diktats.
Dollars created by banks are associated with wealth and productivity only if the banker is held accountable for his bad loans. Government bailouts of those loans are not capitalism.
Bad debts do NOT create wealth, nor does any other type of fraud. That's why bankers must be held accountable, and NOT bailing them out is one imperfect way of doing that. Otherwise they continue bad behavior.
still not mentioning mandatory vax in aussie land and elsewhere?...https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaers-cdc-olympic-sprinter-pericarditis-pfizer-booster/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=f60c7a7b-b140-4120-95aa-6351ebe741c0
I've written about vaccine mandates and authoritarianism in Australia many times. You keep shrieking at me because I don't write about it constantly or predominantly, which is a silly thing that I don't know how to care about.
I listen to Russell Brand; Jimmy Dore; theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay (watch his series of interviews with William "Bill" Black); Real Progressives (and Macro'n'Cheese) for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT); and The Con documentary.
Find the DVD documentary How to Start a Revolution and read From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book by Dr Gene Sharp. Then read his three-volume series, The Politics of Nonviolent Action.
You can also read Silent Spring: Rachel Carson knew before any of us that climate change was starting in the 1950s.
I can't quite go along with this analogy of yours suggesting that the concerns about dystopian future scenarios extrapolated from the rollout of new more invasive forms of surveillance and "social credit" type compliance-tracking systems being now run through our electronic minders is is just them tightening the bolts on the cage meaning it does not represent a revolutionary change (in a negative sense) or a leap towards some kind of radically different reality.
I would describe what's happening in this way. In some regards those who represent the predatory or parasitic energy on earth have used all manner of coercion and psychological manipulation to "convince" us to both to get into the cage which they've convinced is not a cage and have been able to make it appear convincingly that we've gotten into it of our own accord and are staying there of our own choice, but now they are clearly signaling us their intention to ensure through means of technology that should we later decide we want to re-claim a birth-right as free humans, we can never get out and all they need for us to just not see the bars for a little bit longer.
>> all they need for us to just not see the bars for a little bit longer.
Yup. Well said.
i keep hearing that most Aussies were really angry with Novak Jokovic being treated special / differently than Aussies by the Australian political leadership, which then pressured the political leadership to deport Novak J. Does your real interaction with people around you confirm that, Caitlin?
Well, obviously; they couldn't even be bothered to READ either novels or history, so they'd doubtless have some buxom intern synopsize Mike Judge, George Miller... or Romero movie. ARE their still Cliff's Notes versions of 1984, The Wanting Seed, Tropic of Kansas, Parable of the Sower or Eight O'Clock in the Morning (without crayons to color in the pictures?) I'm guessing, our betters are pretty content to let our dystopia write itself, as long as their NASDAQ jumps another 120%... It's fallen 20% in a week? Oh!
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1482219593351450627
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/20/the-decline-of-unions-and-the-ongoing-struggle-for-workers-rigths/
https://www.dailyposter.com/biden-missed-his-best-chance-to-vaccinate-america/
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/un-report-the-worlds-farms-stretched-to-a-breaking-point.html
Biden missed best chance to vax america? are you braindead?...the damn vaxx is whats killing people...https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaers-cdc-olympic-sprinter-pericarditis-pfizer-booster/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=f60c7a7b-b140-4120-95aa-6351ebe741c0
Suddenly, in my 3rd week of Omicron (our 2nd COVID in 21 months) it's LPR, throat, joint & muscle PAIN, bad brain fog and POTS. So, back to work all. Plague, OVER!
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1482219593351450627
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/01/21/sick-j21.html