Listen to a reading of this article: My research has led me to conclude that there's an elite conspiracy to enslave us all and turn us all into brainwashed automatons mindlessly enacting the wishes of our rulers in a cruel dystopia built by the powerful, for the powerful.
In that same vein, perhaps we should be taking a closer look at anything we're NOT allowed to examine like the WWII official narrative that the good guys won and the bad guys lost, that the banking oligarchy--who are the Jewish aristocracy--is 'the ring to rule them all', Whitney Webb's credible journalism on pedophilia as blackmail over global leaders, and that the virus was the trigger but the vaccine was the gun.
I'm in full agreement with Caitlin on the issues she covers, having written my book on How to Dismantle an Empire. But her ridicule of those who take up the slack on issues she ignores is uncalled for. Like others, I've been dismayed that she lives in Australia and didn't cover the horrific takeover of Melbourne, the testing ground for sado-lockdowns.
Caitln may feel that nuclear armaggedon takes precedence over everything else. Others feel that way about climate armaggedon. Personally, I don't think we can get out of fulfilling the world's purpose that easily--I'm joking, but not. If there's meaning, and I think Caitlin and I agree there is, it's not for the world to go up in toxic smoke. And I think the idea that we can change the minds of the warmongers by marching seems to me ... naive.
In sum, I think Caitlin should listen to a wise person who says, "It's easy to see how others are misguided and delusional. It's much harder to see how we ourselves are misguided and delusional."
History has vindicated my decision to focus on the dangers of nuclear brinkmanship over lockdowns in an irrelevant part of the world that have been over for a long time and had no major consequence, regardless of how "dismayed" that makes your feelings feel. I have a zero-tolerance policy for gibberish about Jews ruling the world in my comments section; I will not let this become a gathering space for that bullshit. First and final warning.
Tereza did not characterize Webb’s work in any such way. She referenced Webb’s “credible journalism” as something we should take a closer look at. It was not referenced as an “objection” to your position on something that neither Tereza nor Webb believe. You just made that up.
I don’t know how you do it Caitlin. Whenever I try to explain this stuff to others I end up getting so convoluted and confused I feel it would have been better to remain silent and thought a fool than to have opened my mouth and removed all doubt
Teresa’s just leech. I try to not get too nego about People’s comments on here, but she routinely attacks Caitlin’s well made points in order to aggrandize herself. It’s tiresome and annoying. But also sad. There’s a couple of boys on this thread like that too. O well.
I followed Caitlin for a long time. I even have a few of her books which has really good poetry!
But I grew upset when we were facing the boot of the biomedical surveillance state.
I almost lost my job. Friends lost theirs.
Co-workers were coerced to take this rushed experimental shot. Some have lingering issues even to this day.
She gaslit us at the time, playing like it's not a big deal. I felt disappointed with others that did the same, Noam Chomsky, Chris hedges, Michael Hudson and others that coincidentally also went along with the 911 official story.
Am I wrong to be upset that after all this time of ignoring the issue, now she's saying how it's irrelevant?
That's like the mass media saying Vietnam is irrelevant because it's over.
I very explicitly and repeatedly opposed vaccine mandates and coercion. I still get called an anti-vaxxer to this day for doing so. You're free to disagree with my position that the lockdowns were not of major consequence relative to endlessly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed powers, but I personally can't understand how you make that make sense in your head.
I suspect you'd be the first to scream for a curfew once rioters break your windows, whether you agree with their politics or not. Puritan ideology is the problem, not the solution.
Jesu Christa, she can’t do everything!!! I’ve always been so annoyed at the circular firing squad so prevalent among Lefties. When the “Bernie bro’s”. started in on AOC for not following their advise and their agenda. Jeez. As if the woman isn’t doing enough already. And as if they were doing ANYTHING useful. I quit Glenn Greenwald because he couldn’t stop attacking AOC and start attacking Nancy Baloney who is really the dark queen of the empire. And now, because Caitlin dares to outline what she thinks is an effective method of building a movement on the Left, the guns come out and we all get in our little narcissistic circles and start shooting. Me included. Why not take what she says and grow up. I personally admire the hell out of this woman (AND AOC) and every step towards liberation that she facilitates. Nay sayers be gone. 🙀🧙♀️
Caitlin's written many times, Jean, about how those who criticize empire should stop cannibalizing each other. I completely agree with her. What I'm critiquing is her doing exactly what she says she's against. In Step 2, she says "Many fall for dopey right-wing narratives about Jews ruling the world, globalist pedophile cabals ... their ideology prohibits them from clearly seeing the real underlying dynamics of capitalism and the empire-building of their own government. They place far too much emphasis on things like vaccines and the future of transhumanism being used to someday create an Orwellian dystopia."
I don't think dismissing others with insults who ARE doing "a lot of hard, sincere, intellectually honest work sorting out fact from fiction" is building a movement. It's a cheap shot to not bother refuting their research and arguments but lump them all together as dopey right-wingers. None of us can do all of the research, but we can respect the people who are filling in the blanks between our own areas of expertise.
it just emphasizes our different perspectives. Those words in Step 2 were as important as anything else she wrote in this essay. Ideology does indeed lead people to very strange leaps of faith and faulty logic that leads to erroneous conclusions. And worse, IMO, it leads to distorted priorities; and further divides an already fractured public, just as badly, in fact (again, IMO) as the identity politics that has been used as a cudgel to keep the people divided and distracted..
In it, I talk about myths of superiority as the thing that leaves us vulnerable to lies and manipulations. My only dogma--the only thing I won't raise to question--is that I'm no better than anyone else. All disagreements I have with other people boil down to that same issue.
I can't remember but was it you I was talking to about people that are still talking about countries like they are independent. And people that judge individuals or people born in a particular country as a type is also nigh eve. Well, The Jewish people don't have a nation and just because they have a long history of banking that doesn't mean they are descendants of The high Priests of Anon. I think you are getting into trouble here because you are labelling a race of people as having nafarious intent. What I know is that is not your intention, in fact it is the opposite. Use YOUR words dear. 💚
I love how you try to weaponized my name. Its an old Rohm Emmanuel trick. It’s sort of the old finger in the chest kind of aggression. Frankly, I wouldn’t take anything you say into account about anything. You have—as the Brits say—blotted your copybook and need to be sent down. I see you as a parasite, not coming here to share a P. of V., but coming here to corrupt the discussion and try to funnel Caitlin’s readers over to YOUR writings. Fortunately, most readers of her work have become too educated, both intellectually and ethically to be fooled by you. Hush now.
Indeed, and this is one of the only cases I do not believe the swedish allegations against him. They are strangely convenient. And any intelligence "expert saying he was hiding from those swedish cases" is full of shit.
Of course the allegations were a pretext, just as the sudden concern of the British and American concern that Assange might be jumping bail in Sweden was a pretext.
Notice that, now that he is in custody, nobody is talking about extraditing Assange to Sweden to face the charges there, which in fact were dropped?
The statute of limitations ran out, so, those are a done deal. But I don't believe they were genuine. I have had US military intelligence allege lies on me. & I ain't nobody. But they let whoever have x ray satellite access. And this could get long... nM
They lied on me & I think it's clear they lied on him, just to get in a position to extradite
This is a very thought provoking article; all your articles are. I'm much older than you and embraced all the illusions until I took a critical thinking class and the layers of the onion began to erode. I've made it through steps one and two completely, but solutions are evading me. Engaging with the brainwashed is so difficult for me, plus I lack sound solutions.
If one has a basic concept of human nature, the solutions become more daunting. I wonder if anyone, even you Caitlin, could resist the heady thrill of power. It seems to me that throughout world history there has always been the oppressed and the oppressors. Even those who have the best intentions succumb eventually to power. And a huge proportion of people want to be told what to do and think. Even if a magic hand could present us with a clean slate, how long before someone would attempt to muck it up? And how many would be willing to stop the mucking?
Violence is not the answer. The answer is as Caitlin suggests raising consciousness, empowering the disempowered. Know, be, love and trust yourself. Practice kindness and understanding.
Violence begets violence. By far, resolving issues without violence results in a better outcome. Militarism, depending on Might Makes Right - lying through your teeth because you believe the end justifies the means - is a problem of our epoch.
I don't believe in absolute pacifism though (the same as Chris Hedges who is also not a absolute pacifist). I think under certain conditions and context, one has no choice but to resort to some kind of violence to defend yourself, or defend the society you belong to. Saying that though, those conditions are not at all as frequent as many will argue, and has almost never been the case for the United Stated in the last 50 years.
Not necessarily. Love even affects creatures though I don't know about scorpions. People do make friends with snakes which is how I first heard your story. I would suggest that love is the only way to change "sociopaths." Love is powerful regardless of what anyone thinks.
Feral—that’s a proverb! It’s not a fact! It was made up by some curmudgeon to justify his crappy attitude towards other people. And it passes for wisdom among other curmudgeons. I know—been there done that. Moreover sociopathy IS loved away everyday in every 12step meeting in the country. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. I’ve done it. We, none of us, has any idea what the true power of good is.
No, wishing doesn’t really work. But you can change your actions, and that will change your perception and that will change your reality. And as we all know, we make our own reality
To be clear, I'm not advocating violence, simply observing that it's just one part of a war, and states are continuously and always at war with their people.
Submission to predators is never an answer either. "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright" aaaaand you're lunch. The hippies tried pacifism, and now their cohort is the most deeply invested in the system rooted in and protected by violence, and often the first to call in the violence professionals to defend their feelings.
In fact, any offense against property, of whatever real or symbolic kind, can be, and sometimes is, coded as "violence". Some of Caitlin's tweets could very well be coded as violence by people who are invested in the world that she and many of us here hope to end.
Mysticism is cognitive violence. See how it works?
Hippies were not bought off by beliefs in pacifism.
It was individual identity, hedonism, and consumption that were manipulated by corporate interests and drove the sellout to the current Neoliberal hyper-individualism. All the anti-materialism beliefs of the Hippies were betrayed.
Excellent documentary on this corrupting process is "The Century Of The Self" by Adam Curtis:
Gandhi's and MLKJr.'s violent detachments have been written out of the myth we call history. You can pretend that the Black Panthers didn't contribute anything to the Civil Rights movement, but you would be ignoring material reality in favor of your feelings and your 401(k) disbursements.
Just as an observation—I think Stinky needs violence or his whole facade collapses. Like a beaten wife needs an abuser or else she has to take responsibility for herself and get away from the abuse. I’d say most of the U.S. population is like an abused wife that just soooo needs the abuser. Stinky is just the other side of it—saying no, you can NEVER get away from abuse and violence—here I’ll prove it to you, read my link!
I don't click on links. How about an example of mysticism as violence, or arbitrary coding or removing a subject from its context. What you wrote is not clear.
There were plenty of examples of arbitrary coding in this string.
Anyway, for your convenience: --8<--
Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes.[1][2][3] Hence, it is colloquially known as the hurrah/boo theory.[4] Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic,[5] but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson.[6]
Emotivism can be considered a form of non-cognitivism or expressivism. It stands in opposition to other forms of non-cognitivism (such as quasi-realism[7][8] and universal prescriptivism), as well as to all forms of cognitivism (including both moral realism and ethical subjectivism).[citation needed]
In the 1950s, emotivism appeared in a modified form in the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare.[9][10]
-->8--
As for myself, I am an error theorist.
An "error theory of ethics" is the view that the ordinary user of moral language is typically making claims that involve a mistake. The concepts of ethics introduce a mistaken, erroneous, way of thinking of the world or of conducting practical reasoning. The theory was most influentially proposed by John L. Mackie in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Mackie believed that ordinary moral claims presuppose that there are objective moral values, but there are no such things. Hence, the practice of morality is founded upon a metaphysical error.
Wow, this is great. I struggle with exactly these issues. It seems to me there has to be a spiritual element to our next social solution, which is why I think global warming is such a good teacher. A little humility, spare a thought for the planet, cultivate looking inward, pet your cat—those very simple, heart and intuition oriented actions that can, on any given day, lead me to drop the self righteousness I like to practice and practice the kind of forgiveness I want for my behavior that was less than stellar. ‘Course, I’m 78 and have the scars of doing it the self willed, narci way. So it’s slow going.
"... And a huge proportion of people want to be told what to do and think. ...."
This curious phenomenon may have something to do with the lengthy childhood of humans. By contrast a cat, for instance, matures in about a year; it has learned everything it can get out of cat culture and in any case its mother, authoritarian when it was a kitten, insists on it making its own living and getting off on its own. Humans, however, grow more slowly, have more to learn, and are additionally saddled with the group mind we call language, so that they spend fifteen or twenty years in an explicitly subordinate role. Moreover, when they do try to emerge into a more competent, more capable state, they are often punished, sometimes very severely, in the interests of social cohesion and performances of various kinds which may be useful to other members of their communities, especially those of the leadership caste, if there is one. It is no surprise, then, that many humans never fully mature into a reasonable degree of autonomy.
As a cat, we learn enough to survive in our first months of life, up to about a year old. Mice are for chasing, dogs are best avoided, trees are useful, once you learn how to climb down. A two month old kitten can get the concept. We do keep learning, however.
The reason humans take so long to mature is because so much of human survival is based upon abstraction. For instance, humans spend an inordinate amount of time chasing ciphers, now not on a piece of paper but on an electronic ledger somewhere. These ciphers are in turn an abstraction, and good luck laying a paw on them. You would have better luck catching the red dot from a laser pointer.
But humans organize their lives, their social status, their food and choice of mates around these abstractions. They kill and die for them, every day.
Childhood has not always existed for 20 years. Quick example is The Pony Express that used 11 year old boys. Do you know any 11 year olds capable today of that feat, or more importantly, any parents that would allow it? Is that fact good or bad?
Human life was less dominated by abstractions then.
Something I wrote at the time of the Fall of Kabul:
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a fraction of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
The humans are fundamentally flawed no matter how hard it is to accept by many. But once they do everything falls into place. And so it follows that bullies are to be met with force and literally thrashed.
It almost appears that morals and conscience were invented by the wicked to make the gullible follow them while they take control. Same for "debates", "peaceful protests", etc. Yeah, debate all you want, demonstrate all you want. That'll provide cover for the rulers to claim "democracy at work". But nothing fundamentally changes except by violence.
Morals and conscience were not invented. They are instinct. Bullies are not to be feared, not necessarily thrashed. As consciousness is raised we will be better and make better choices.
I agree. Also, the longer I try to practice growing my spirit the more I notice that I manifest what I think. Before I experienced that, I could indulge in all kinds of bluster and blowhard about other people and how awful and to blame they were. Now, I find I will have to deal with any stupid random negative thought I entertain, to my own detriment. Like this morning, I was walking down a beaten up road with lots of potholes and mud and it was starting to snow (Portland—freak weather) and I was grumbling about how cars were so stupid they made me get off the dry pavement when all they had to do was drive around me—but that would get their cars dirty…. And on and on I went in my mind blaming cars. And then a nice new white car what didn’t want to get dirty stopped and waited for me trudge slowly down the dry part of the street and pass her before she then took her turn. And I looked into her as I went past trying to say thank you, but she was not amused. And I realized that now I was the selfish self-centered narci who took up more that my share of the road. At 1st I felt bad, but then I just laughed. Because recently I have discovered the Laughing Buddha inside me and he is now my new teacher.
Even the morality of primates has been studied. The following quote is from research on the origins of morality:
One key element of human morality is prosocial concern, i.e., a concern not only with one's own but also with others' well-being, also referred to as other-regarding preferences by behavioral economists (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003). In the primatological literature, it is often referred to as proactive prosociality, to stress that the corresponding behaviors, such as for instance food sharing, are not the result of solicitation by recipients, begging, or even harassment, but that they are initiated spontaneously by the actor without triggering by other individuals (Jaeggi et al., 2010).
Over the last decade, proactive prosociality has been extensively studied in a number of primate species.
...
Most people know, if they pay attention, when what they are thinking, saying or doing is moral or not. Buddhists call it right actions... an old concept.
Power has been defined as the *hidden* potential for action. Someone openly carrying a long arm isn't powerful. They just have command of force. Money is power in the sense that it is unrealized potential action. The obscurity, and its powerful property, follows from the unrealized nature. Once spent (remitted), it is spent (exhausted) in terms of power. Once revealed, it is merely a potential for action.
Ultimately, in societies with an army of labor, power is a mystification of command. Most of us here will not be allowed near levers of command because they know we will simply trash the role and ruin it for the next person. I think neurodivergent people have an advantage here, which explains the middle-class freakouts about autism.
I don't think people want to be told what to do. They are told they want to be told what to do, while the other concerns of their lives keep them numb, exhausted, and disconnected from others. The idea that they should always be "doing" something in order to be valued keeps them exhausting themselves. The public performances of moral theatre keep them distrustful and self-disconnected (unless they join in the drama). The mass of mythology that shapes American society discourages them from employing their own sense-making. We are slaves, and glamor is one of the nine tails lashing us.
The solution may be found in making sure that stupid games remain stupid, and that stupid prizes remain socially inconsequential.
"I don't think people want to be told what to do."
Perhaps not, but they do want to retain their place in their social position. Few seem to have the courage to speak their mind if it goes outside of the current agenda for fear if being called names. Appears many of us haven't moved far from the playground. The current trend of labeling others as racist, anti-vaxxer, phobic, etc keeps masses silent.
It is mostly those who have property, of any real or symbolic kind, who are concerned about manners, propriety, conformity, keeping the fictions flying. Those who have no property and aren't immersed in commerce have little reason to care about that. Here's a fun read for you:
It's a basic principle of property. People who have it tend to act on its behalf rather than on behalf of their own lived experience. "The things you own end up owning you" -Chuck Palahniuk, _Fight Club_
As I am French, I wondered why my government and all those who call themselves "the elite" follow the United States so closely in all their endeavors and especially in the undeclared war against Russia, which is being waged. Are they afraid of the Russians? No, it is not consistent with going to tickle them on their borders. I have come to the conclusion that the French government as well as all other governments of the European Union are afraid of the American government. Fear of disappointing it by not being a faithful ally, fear of provoking its anger and that it no longer likes us. Our governments in Europe are much less afraid of Putin than they are of Biden and his band of megalomaniacs.
The European Union has turned the old European nations into the equivalent of banana republics that bow tremblingly to American shows of force.
Of course. What do you think the CIA and NSA are spying on European leaders and sweeping up information for? It's not so that they can solve crossword puzzles.
I should have added that the real US control is psychological, not blackmail. That's why the US could spy on Merkel and the incident be treated as a minor faux pas between friends, as if Obama had taken the last slice of pizza when everyone knew that Angela hadn't had any yet and Obama doesn't even really like mushrooms, but the US is part of The Club and everyone assumes that they must be good guys.
But if someone not part of The Club were to do something like that, we'd never hear the end of it.
You're onto the US! Fear is maybe our chief export. We've internalized Machiavelli and Kissinger, the German-American Machiavelli, who both taught it's more important for a leader to be feared than loved. Demented Joe B. is probably being coached to play the Nixon card, when that asshat told Henry the K about his great strategy in Vietnam was to make The Enemy believe Tricky Dick was just crazy enough he'd actually use nukes against them.
And now Biden is playing nuclear chicken with Putin. We're all spectators in this world-ending sport, unable to vote on whether we think it's worth it to defeat Russia if it means we all die, along with most other species. No one knows how this madness will turn out, but we're learning plenty about how Fear is the most potent weapon in a government's arsenal for getting what it demands: Full Spectrum Dominance, in the case of the US.
This is brill! I remember learning about how the 1st WW started and the teacher said it was due to “entangling alliances”. I didn’t get it in 10th grade but I think that’s what you are describing here—that sovereign nations are so entangled with ‘Merika, that one step out of line means a crashed economy, CIA intervention in any colonial holdings and media interference with the populous and elected officials. It was archdukes that did it then. Now it’s petty functionaries. 🤔😂
The difference with the situation before 1914 is that the European nations have given up all sovereignty. This goes back to the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, when the European leaders, winners of that war, let the American president Wilson dictate this bad peace. Marshal Foch, the generalissimo of the Allied armies, remarked to Clémenceau, "If we sign this treaty, we deserve to be hanged. This phenomenon of surrendering sovereignty was amplified with the end of World War II, when, once again, Washington and its British ally dictated the narrative: America had saved Europe and from now on it would protect it from itself. European leaders, fleeing from their responsibilities, terrorized by the USSR thanks to clever propaganda from Washington and London, built a Western Europe based on fear and submission to interests to interests. For those who doubt this, they need only recall the cries of fear that General de Gaulle's sovereign and independent policy aroused in Washington and in European capitals. The ten years of the General's power were a parenthesis quickly closed by his successors, with a cowardly sigh of relief in all chancelleries. Today, when I look at Macron, Sholtz, Baerbock or Trudeau, I see barking dogs looking in the direction of their master, Biden, to make sure that he is happy with them.
Yeah as an American, I'm blown away the EU and Germany especially, seemed to have just shrugged off the obvious act of US sponsored sabotage to the Nord Stream pipeline. Now pretty much authenticated by Seymour Hersh. I mean, who do you believe? Seymour Hersh or Uncle Joe demented Biden? Choice is pretty obvious to me.
The French press has been silent about the revelations of Seymour Hesch. Anything that contradicts the NATO narrative is ignored. And if, by chance, you have a name that makes it impossible to be totally ignored, such as Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of General Charles de Gaulle, and you dare to tell the truth about the events in Ukraine, you are called: "Putin's voice".
Puppet govts and puppet media did as they were told. The people are no the wiser.
Even in America, the other day I spoke to two adults with masters degrees who knew all about balloons, but has never heard of Seymour Hersh and has no idea about the U.S. and Norway blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Just to top it off, this happened while we were filling the gas (petrol) tank of an SUV of cartoonish proportions….at a…Lukoil….filling station in the US. Meanwhile all of Europe is implementing sanctions and turning off their heat to save moves.
Europeans have “leaders” that are stringing them along all the way to their demise.
Caitlin writes: "In "free democracies" you say what your rulers want you to say because they psychologically coerced you using propaganda"
But the coercion is far more than from propaganda. Most people are afraid of losing their jobs, reputation, careers, family, houses, income, standard of living and "freedom" (as in incarceration).
Those who effectively speak truth to power are ignored, belittled, smeared, fired, blackballed, marginalized, exiled, and even sometimes jailed. Been there, done all that.
An example of being fed propaganda since were were children is that the United States is great, we pledge our alligeance to the flag(you know some symbol?) Why? That were are an altruistic nation that does nothing but humanistic activities in other nations for their benefit. Example Ukraine, Iraq, Haiti...you can stop laughing now.
So...Then there is this economic system called capitalism that is apparently the best ever and if anyone disagrees, they are wrong, they are stupid, or they are an enemy. Capitalism requires ever increasing economic expansion. The planet has finite resources and takes longer to regenerate than capitalism needs. Eventually we will run out. Oddly, lets not forget other living things need those resources too.
The next problem with capitalism is that everything is a buyable commodity, everything is for sale. Slavery abolished no, there are also still endentured servants, you know, working to pay off debt. So who owns the lakes, rivers, fish, trees, air etc? Essentially it will be somebody.
We are already living in a dystopia society as you said, we have mass surveillence, state sponsored official narrative, you are told what to think. The transhumanism is already here. We are just physical servents to be used as the tools of the empire. Disinformation is absurd, who cares?? Why does the empire care? It shouldn't unless it effects its agenda. We don't have free speech. I am the 49th president of the United States, of course I am not...but I can say it. Why can't I say other stupid things?
I am awake but still learning and I find what you write helpful and important, thank you.
My media rule of thumb right now is to assume that whatever Biden, Blinken, & Raytheon - B B &R (TM) - say is projection (hypocrisy) and part of their messaging propaganda to divert and coverup what the US is actually doing which invariably is exactly the opposite of their claims.
"Whenever I talk about the hundreds of military bases the US empire is circling our planet with I always get people saying "We only have all those foreign bases because those foreign governments want us there for protection!"
Yes, yes I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the fact that the US subverts, impoverishes and destroys any weaker nation that refuses to facilitate its military interests. Foreign US military bases are "protection" in the same way extortion payments to the Mafia are "protection"."
And what happens when those client states don't want US "protection"? The 1975 coup in Australia and the 1980s manipulations in West Germany come prominently to mind. One might also consider the destruction of the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1970s Britain, although that may well have been MI5 acting on its own.
Note also that open fascists are now in power in Italy, but since they don't challenge American hegemony they are allowed to do their thing.
To your and Caitlin's points about the Mafia-like nature of US foreign policy:
"This sure is a nice country you have here. I'd hate to see a revolution get stirred up and destroy it. Why don't you let us put a military base here to keep you safe."
I’m not Christian but there are a few choice observations in that book. I like the idea that the world is a mirror—what I see in it is what I see in myself but don’t want to admit. The deeper I poke into myself, the more I see the validity of that idea. But I can change me, and thereby change the world—that to me is a very powerful idea.
I am not a Christian either. But from a literary and story point of view, the King James version of the bible has quite a bit of well written pearls of wisdom. It's unfortunate we live in a time where intellectually, (or perhaps academically) you are forced to eschew any kind of respect for most spiritual traditions, as materialism and darwinism is the intellectual de rigueur right now of our milieu. It's hard to rise above the milieu you find yourself in - fashion wise and philosophically wise. There's a small voice that often whispers to me that the materialists are right, that all I am is some kind of evolved biological machine that will soon disappear forever. A dark, nihilist view of life. On the other hand, believing in a 2000 year old religion that has been obviously redacted and doctored over the centuries, to let's face it: maintain political autonomy and control by an authoritative church - is also not very intellectually palatable. I find my own sources of wisdom I guess from multiple places, multiple books, multiple authors. Carl Jung happens to be my latest recent favorite. Joseph Campbell. Or a Rumi. But I also don't feel one needs to dismiss the bible altogether. You just need to separate the wheat from the chaff, and not take any of it too literally. A good deal of it was never meant to be taken literally anyway.
Jamenta, you might be interested in my post https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops. It presents some of the research on separating the wheat from the chaff. According to Bible scholars, 70% of what is attributed to Jesus was said already by someone else. So those pearls may be in there. It's not the redaction of the Bible that's the problem, from my decade of researching it, it's the original story that was written by the Roman Empire for their own purposes.
Yes I agree, some of the mythology surrounding Jesus predated his life. Much of what we have today is a pretty distorted version of what may have been there originally. Many early christian sects were completely wiped out from memory by the authoritative church organizations. What is important though, as Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung would point out: is the spontaneous emergence of mythological symbols from the collective unconscious.
Joe Atwill, who I cite in my article, goes deeper into questioning whether Jesus was a historical figure at all or a literary character invented by Josephus. He uses many different forms of technical literary analysis to show that the similarities between his writing and the gospels are statistically significant. If literary, the motives of the author matter. If the author's purpose is to discredit the revolutionaries and their ideology--the zealots who'd kicked Rome out of Judea--and instead substitute an impotent pacifism that gave Caesar what belonged to Caesar, it's propaganda we've been falling for for 2000 years.
I think it is likely a mixture of both. Altho, it's hard to 100% ascertain since there is not a ton of historical evidence, but enough (IMO) to establish the man did exist. And if not him, it would have likely have been some other wise soul. Many religions and spiritual traditions often arise from the insights of a few individuals. Of course, they can't control what comes after their time and how the words are redacted or revised to mean something a bit different from what was originally intended. I also believe that it was very likely Mary was Jesus' wife, based on some more recent research. There were some early christian sects where Mary played a central role to the emerging christian doctrines - and again, via the many councils and consolidation of faith through politics (or other means) - that got wiped out along with many other early Christian traditions. What we have today, doesn't reflect what was likely the earliest Christian beliefs.
What I am writing of course, to someone with a strong christian faith will probably be heresy. But all I can do is shrug my shoulders - since spirituality arises everywhere, mythology has been with humankind for millenniums, there have been 100s if not 1000s of different religions arising spontaneously within human consciousness. Many claim they are the chosen religion, and all other religions are false. So what can you say to that? However, I don't subscribe to the current en vogue Materialistic/Skeptic criticism that all religion is simply an opiate of the masses, or some kind of "sexual wish fulfillment fantasy" as Freud put forth. Materialism is just another kind of metaphysical belief system, another belief system about the deeper issues religion attempts to address: what ultimately is reality? What are we? What is consciousness? Does morality exist? Or is the universe just a machine and at its heart, a cold, grinding machination of which our individual existence is a brief flashbulb of existence and then we are put out forever? Currently - I don't subscribe to that Materialism religion. But neither do I subscribe to any other current religious doctrines. However, I suspect consciousness really is more than just complex electrons that happened to come together over time, and live my life accordingly by what I "suspect".
Teresa. I disagree. I used to try your kind of open mindedness on those who thought we were “on the same side” and believe me, I soon gave up on that. I used to have a casual friend from England with whom I talked politics and whenever we’d get into a shared notion, he’d go off on the Jewish conspiracy and the Rothchilds and some other stupid medieval theory blaming “the other”—had never even heard of PNAC, or the Powell memo—but expected me to be liberal enuf to listen to him pontificate about things I’d got over in college. I often feel the same way with some comments on this thread. A thread brought to us by the way, by CAITLIN! And frankly, I agree totally with her. There has to be an internal critique of how we are thinking, not just a mushy acceptance of what we are thinking. Your recommendations about who and how “we” “should” act and talk in this “movement” are not anything that I could ever accept, so I say kept calm and carry on Caitlin, you genius, and thank you for your clarifying thought processes that you share with us even tho many here try to tee off of you to start their own band wagon!!!
"Expansion of consciousness" can mean various things. For some it translates into navel gazing. For others, more in line with, naval gazing. Some hold we don't understand the nature of reality, and by that they mean, something like the operation of quantum mechanics. Which all goes to show the logical traps language sets up for us. Marx called this obscurantism - or introducing factors not pertinent to the subject. You don't need to know everything. But a little recent, and less recent history is helpful. Start with the idiocy of WWI and how that balloon got off. Then read something on Russia and the Tsars, and how communism, like the French Revolution, reinforced the idea that we are nor born slaves, but are made so. Then read Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold history of the United States. Also, Howard Zinn, A Peoples' History of the United States. There's piles more, many written by Americans. This will expand your consciousness in pertinent ways. Then protest against warmongering, injustice, flagrant fraud, as in the non-neutralizing vaccines bringing in millions for the fraud artists. But mostly, because it is a monstrous and imminent threat: the murderous war against Russia by the West in Ukraine. That's all you can peacefully do.
The US is urging "restraint" on the release of Sweden's Nord Stream investigation findings until it can pressure the Swedes into writing their report the way the US wants them to.
The only way I can see to escape this is through education and people being taught to question everything and not to believe the spin from our media and leaders, look at it again and hopefully see another reason for their words. We cannot keep believing all we are told as gospel. Thank you Caitlin again.
"Many fall for dopey right-wing narratives about Jews ruling the world, globalist pedophile cabals, elite conspiracies to make all our kids transgendered or whatever, because their ideology prohibits them from clearly seeing the real underlying dynamics of capitalism and the empire-building of their own government."
So who's ruling the world then? I'll give you my considered opinion. It's the *finance* capitalists. The ones who actually own the banks. The bottom line is ALWAYS [imaginary] money. They hold the world to ransom and play the long game. Just look at the 'debt' the USA 'owes' these shadowy characters & yet the banksters allow the bankrupt USA to fund wars and drunkenly swagger around the planet creating mayhem while consolidating power. The rest of the planet is choking on such debt & has to endure so-called austerity measures. Very strange! https://www.worldometers.info/us-debt-clock/ It's not so strange when one examines who these bank-owning banksters are, who they've teamed up with, & what their end game is.
What's strange is the decision to accept IOUs from the Federal Reserve as having value. We will see how the move by BRICS+ away from this system works. If they can base their new system on something that has actual value then they will be a real threat to the Cabal(whoever it is).
What if the Great Chain of Being is untrue, and no human really "rules" the world in a meaningful sense? Europe styles itself as a "club of values", which, aside from containing two interesting puns, offers a clue to how bureaucracies of nominal equals actually operate. Right now it's ruled by a particular system of values centered around having one's rightful possessions taken away, in "exchange" for which we "earn" value tokens. (Friedman and other neoliberals prefer the word "exchange" because he was running a psyop.)
It's true that creditors, those who control and judge the "universal" tokens of value, have an especially powerful role in fashioning the current order in broad brush strokes, but they don't coordinate it. The managerial class below them manages the assets of those banks, oligarchs, and other creditors, and the professional class gives them the tools to do so efficiently, each dipping their own beaks and taking their fees. It is here that the slavers reside.
As for debt, US public debt is the mirror to private assets, dollar for dollar. None of that "debt" is meant to be paid back unless one wants us all to have nothing. It's a fake gift, a white elephant. Elites use that big number as a scary narrative to hide their lordly rent, obscure the actual overhead costs of holding the order together, and to persuade us to stay captive within the order. David Graeber's famous book on _Debt: The First 5000 Years_ explains it in terms of history, and it's a most enlightening read.
It’s all of us. Anyone who uses a bank for “convenience” is part of the problem. Or drives a car. Or has a job, pays their bills, complies with Covid, lives in fear. We are all a part of the ‘Merican dream/nightmare. Try walking away from any of the above and see how difficult it is to get shut of this fungus we’re calling the Empire. This patriarchy, this corporate dominated capitalist militarist narcissistic paranoid patriarchy that hides in our Wheaties. Come on!!!
Not so sure about that. Like Rome they want the citizens of the capital, in this case pretty much the whole continental US, idle, indigent, sedated, and entertained.
They are against us driving you can tell because they push us to electric cars when there aren't enough raw materials in the earth to build one for all of us. Complying with the arbitrary safety ism is certainly a problem.
I am no longer afraid of them though. When I saw them coming after the J6ers and people like Mark Houck I was afraid. But then I thought about who isn't afraid of them. The Taliban isn't afraid. The Russians aren't afraid. The Saudis aren't anymore. They have used all of their power on those groups and failed to control them. When I saw that I decided to stop being afraid. That is when I gave up anonymity and started writing and posting openly.
"They place far too much emphasis on things like vaccines and the future of transhumanism being used to someday create an Orwellian dystopia, because their worldview prohibits them from recognizing that we're already living in a power-serving mind-controlled dystopia."
This is really some damaging, harmful, straight up blue-pill nonsense.
First of all lumping all these beliefs together in one basket with anit-semitic conspiracy narratives is straight out of the elite propaganda playbook which is frankly is fing evil, twisted mind-fuckery (I mean which freaking side are you on?).
And second of all let me put this for you very very simply so even your pea-brain can understand.
There is an actual race going on to stamp out dissent. There IS an actual class war being waged by the owners of the capitalist system and that war isn't being waged "accidentally" or by impersonal forces.
Just ask Warren Buffet (not a Jew to my knowledge) who said, "There is class war alright and it's my class, the rich class who's making war, and we're winning.".
So there you have it, the quiet part said out loud right in plain english so you don't have to speculate and the same thing has been said many times in many ways and observed by many shcolarly non "right wing" observers as well.
Whether or not the people making the war worship satan or gather in the woods in front of a giant stone owl (as has been documented that they do) isn't irrelevant, but neither is it the main event. The main event is recognition of the dual reality that 1) they are making war and further that they *know* they are making war, (IOW they at some level are consiously engaged in an organized effort to do so) and that 2) their war isn't an aimless effort, but has real, clearly defined objectives.
And the latter is not an unimportant point as the war being made by the elites, the "superclass" (one of the names they've given to themselves) isn't actulaly *just* a war for the sake of war, or just to maintain what they have, but it actually has a clearly-defined end-goal. that objective has been spelled out by the war-planners as total ("full-spectrum") domination, i.e. the elimination of the ability/capacity of those being made war upon to fight back or resist their enslavement/exploitation by the "superclass".
Again, this is a *conscious* objective of those Buffet identified as "making the war". It is not happenstance or a by-prodcut. It is the main event and involves a great deal of careful planning, coordination, strategy and a crazy amount of organization (though it is to some degree also self-organizing).
So deny/mock/dismiss/minimized this reality at your own risk but you are in fact doing the elites work for them by encouraging others to do so (while making yourself irrelevant) because our ablity fight back depnds not only on our ability recognize the system of empire/capitalism in the ways you are talking bout daily in you diatribes but also on our abliity to recognize how we are being made war upon by the architechts of these systems, meaning to recognize it's specific objectives & how they are being ccarried out/implemented through policy/exercise of power and sheilded by various propaganda operations in real time, and to counter them, again (in real time).
Recognition of these things (the system, the war being waged by it's owners/architects and the obectives of that war) is not mutually exclusive and I would submit that your failure and the failure of the left (with which you identify) to go far enough in it's analysis is the primary reason *why* the left has so completely fallen down on the job (a fact about which I've noticed a painful absence of any critique on your part).
And that is a problem, because if we fail to do this, there may actually come a point when what we have to say about it may actually become irrelevant because the possibility of organized dissent/resistance will have become so remote as to be for all intents and purposes non-existent and the thought itself will have become un-thinkable.
Hell, Step 1 and Step 2 are easy. I learned those as a kid in Catholic schools decades ago. Step 3 is impossible. People are lazy. They like being slaves.
Look at Ed Snowden and Julian Assange.
Make no mistake - The Empire recognizes free speech is its enemy.
"Free your mind, and your ass will follow" -Funkadelic
Shit god damn
Get off your ass and jam.
That must be the name of some think tank.
Actually the name of a renowned 1970s funk rock band, but it wouldn't surprise me if Brookings were to rebrand in that style.
It's so fundamental it must be. The minds were "freed" and the asses indeed followed. Now it's gender's turn. And so on.
"Ass" is synecdoche for the person. Why do you White people hate Black vernacular?
I'm a simpleton, I meant literally.
No that's a tampon ad
In that same vein, perhaps we should be taking a closer look at anything we're NOT allowed to examine like the WWII official narrative that the good guys won and the bad guys lost, that the banking oligarchy--who are the Jewish aristocracy--is 'the ring to rule them all', Whitney Webb's credible journalism on pedophilia as blackmail over global leaders, and that the virus was the trigger but the vaccine was the gun.
I'm in full agreement with Caitlin on the issues she covers, having written my book on How to Dismantle an Empire. But her ridicule of those who take up the slack on issues she ignores is uncalled for. Like others, I've been dismayed that she lives in Australia and didn't cover the horrific takeover of Melbourne, the testing ground for sado-lockdowns.
Caitln may feel that nuclear armaggedon takes precedence over everything else. Others feel that way about climate armaggedon. Personally, I don't think we can get out of fulfilling the world's purpose that easily--I'm joking, but not. If there's meaning, and I think Caitlin and I agree there is, it's not for the world to go up in toxic smoke. And I think the idea that we can change the minds of the warmongers by marching seems to me ... naive.
In sum, I think Caitlin should listen to a wise person who says, "It's easy to see how others are misguided and delusional. It's much harder to see how we ourselves are misguided and delusional."
History has vindicated my decision to focus on the dangers of nuclear brinkmanship over lockdowns in an irrelevant part of the world that have been over for a long time and had no major consequence, regardless of how "dismayed" that makes your feelings feel. I have a zero-tolerance policy for gibberish about Jews ruling the world in my comments section; I will not let this become a gathering space for that bullshit. First and final warning.
Also I think Whitney Webb would take great exception to having her work characterized as asserting that the world is ruled by a cabal of pedophiles.
That’s not what was asserted.
Well her work was referenced as an objection to the position I criticized, which was exactly that assertion.
Tereza did not characterize Webb’s work in any such way. She referenced Webb’s “credible journalism” as something we should take a closer look at. It was not referenced as an “objection” to your position on something that neither Tereza nor Webb believe. You just made that up.
I don’t know how you do it Caitlin. Whenever I try to explain this stuff to others I end up getting so convoluted and confused I feel it would have been better to remain silent and thought a fool than to have opened my mouth and removed all doubt
I like how matter of factly & and free of bullshit, you slapped that garbage down
Shh Tereza. You're dividing the movement.
Remember lockdowns didn't hurt nobody. Said by the person who works from home. I got plenty of friends that lost their jobs due to them.
Oh and the vaccines, no big deal right?
Again more people lost their jobs due to that apartheid. I had to go through exemption paperwork and submit to nasal PCR tests weekly.
But, I don't work from home.
Max Blumenthal calls them the laptop class.
That's why they aren't concerned about the 2 weeks to flatten the curve that lasted 2 years.
The laptop of luxury class. The lap cats of the laptop class.
Teresa’s just leech. I try to not get too nego about People’s comments on here, but she routinely attacks Caitlin’s well made points in order to aggrandize herself. It’s tiresome and annoying. But also sad. There’s a couple of boys on this thread like that too. O well.
I followed Caitlin for a long time. I even have a few of her books which has really good poetry!
But I grew upset when we were facing the boot of the biomedical surveillance state.
I almost lost my job. Friends lost theirs.
Co-workers were coerced to take this rushed experimental shot. Some have lingering issues even to this day.
She gaslit us at the time, playing like it's not a big deal. I felt disappointed with others that did the same, Noam Chomsky, Chris hedges, Michael Hudson and others that coincidentally also went along with the 911 official story.
Am I wrong to be upset that after all this time of ignoring the issue, now she's saying how it's irrelevant?
That's like the mass media saying Vietnam is irrelevant because it's over.
Or Iraq or Libya or Afghanistan....
I very explicitly and repeatedly opposed vaccine mandates and coercion. I still get called an anti-vaxxer to this day for doing so. You're free to disagree with my position that the lockdowns were not of major consequence relative to endlessly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed powers, but I personally can't understand how you make that make sense in your head.
Agreed. Can’t help but wonder what the real motivations are here.
Maybe not a motivation but a lack of motivation.
They pretend that we're the crazy ones for seeing more scams than they do.
And yet they proclaim how people are so ignorant to the scams that they see.
Hipocrisy is the currency of the privelaged.
Another issue Caitlyn didn't mention that deserves a closer look is 9/11. But that's now verboten.
I suspect you'd be the first to scream for a curfew once rioters break your windows, whether you agree with their politics or not. Puritan ideology is the problem, not the solution.
Jesu Christa, she can’t do everything!!! I’ve always been so annoyed at the circular firing squad so prevalent among Lefties. When the “Bernie bro’s”. started in on AOC for not following their advise and their agenda. Jeez. As if the woman isn’t doing enough already. And as if they were doing ANYTHING useful. I quit Glenn Greenwald because he couldn’t stop attacking AOC and start attacking Nancy Baloney who is really the dark queen of the empire. And now, because Caitlin dares to outline what she thinks is an effective method of building a movement on the Left, the guns come out and we all get in our little narcissistic circles and start shooting. Me included. Why not take what she says and grow up. I personally admire the hell out of this woman (AND AOC) and every step towards liberation that she facilitates. Nay sayers be gone. 🙀🧙♀️
Caitlin's written many times, Jean, about how those who criticize empire should stop cannibalizing each other. I completely agree with her. What I'm critiquing is her doing exactly what she says she's against. In Step 2, she says "Many fall for dopey right-wing narratives about Jews ruling the world, globalist pedophile cabals ... their ideology prohibits them from clearly seeing the real underlying dynamics of capitalism and the empire-building of their own government. They place far too much emphasis on things like vaccines and the future of transhumanism being used to someday create an Orwellian dystopia."
I don't think dismissing others with insults who ARE doing "a lot of hard, sincere, intellectually honest work sorting out fact from fiction" is building a movement. It's a cheap shot to not bother refuting their research and arguments but lump them all together as dopey right-wingers. None of us can do all of the research, but we can respect the people who are filling in the blanks between our own areas of expertise.
it just emphasizes our different perspectives. Those words in Step 2 were as important as anything else she wrote in this essay. Ideology does indeed lead people to very strange leaps of faith and faulty logic that leads to erroneous conclusions. And worse, IMO, it leads to distorted priorities; and further divides an already fractured public, just as badly, in fact (again, IMO) as the identity politics that has been used as a cudgel to keep the people divided and distracted..
Thanks for your reply, Roger. I completely agree about the importance of ideology, hence this episode: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/ideology-is-everything.
In it, I talk about myths of superiority as the thing that leaves us vulnerable to lies and manipulations. My only dogma--the only thing I won't raise to question--is that I'm no better than anyone else. All disagreements I have with other people boil down to that same issue.
Hi Tereza. Having fun?
I can't remember but was it you I was talking to about people that are still talking about countries like they are independent. And people that judge individuals or people born in a particular country as a type is also nigh eve. Well, The Jewish people don't have a nation and just because they have a long history of banking that doesn't mean they are descendants of The high Priests of Anon. I think you are getting into trouble here because you are labelling a race of people as having nafarious intent. What I know is that is not your intention, in fact it is the opposite. Use YOUR words dear. 💚
I love how you try to weaponized my name. Its an old Rohm Emmanuel trick. It’s sort of the old finger in the chest kind of aggression. Frankly, I wouldn’t take anything you say into account about anything. You have—as the Brits say—blotted your copybook and need to be sent down. I see you as a parasite, not coming here to share a P. of V., but coming here to corrupt the discussion and try to funnel Caitlin’s readers over to YOUR writings. Fortunately, most readers of her work have become too educated, both intellectually and ethically to be fooled by you. Hush now.
Totally with you on these points!
Indeed, and this is one of the only cases I do not believe the swedish allegations against him. They are strangely convenient. And any intelligence "expert saying he was hiding from those swedish cases" is full of shit.
Of course the allegations were a pretext, just as the sudden concern of the British and American concern that Assange might be jumping bail in Sweden was a pretext.
Notice that, now that he is in custody, nobody is talking about extraditing Assange to Sweden to face the charges there, which in fact were dropped?
The statute of limitations ran out, so, those are a done deal. But I don't believe they were genuine. I have had US military intelligence allege lies on me. & I ain't nobody. But they let whoever have x ray satellite access. And this could get long... nM
They lied on me & I think it's clear they lied on him, just to get in a position to extradite
This is a very thought provoking article; all your articles are. I'm much older than you and embraced all the illusions until I took a critical thinking class and the layers of the onion began to erode. I've made it through steps one and two completely, but solutions are evading me. Engaging with the brainwashed is so difficult for me, plus I lack sound solutions.
If one has a basic concept of human nature, the solutions become more daunting. I wonder if anyone, even you Caitlin, could resist the heady thrill of power. It seems to me that throughout world history there has always been the oppressed and the oppressors. Even those who have the best intentions succumb eventually to power. And a huge proportion of people want to be told what to do and think. Even if a magic hand could present us with a clean slate, how long before someone would attempt to muck it up? And how many would be willing to stop the mucking?
Perhaps other readers have the answer; I do not.
Violence is not the answer. The answer is as Caitlin suggests raising consciousness, empowering the disempowered. Know, be, love and trust yourself. Practice kindness and understanding.
Violence begets violence. By far, resolving issues without violence results in a better outcome. Militarism, depending on Might Makes Right - lying through your teeth because you believe the end justifies the means - is a problem of our epoch.
I don't believe in absolute pacifism though (the same as Chris Hedges who is also not a absolute pacifist). I think under certain conditions and context, one has no choice but to resort to some kind of violence to defend yourself, or defend the society you belong to. Saying that though, those conditions are not at all as frequent as many will argue, and has almost never been the case for the United Stated in the last 50 years.
Only a PMC Nazi would say that the results of the past 50 years are favorable and sacred.
You didn't read with comprehension the comment by jamenta.
It is coming to that, whether we like it or not.
You can't love away sociopathy, and kindness and understanding are but contemptible weakness to the sociopath.
Why did the scorpion sting the frog? "Because that is my nature."
Not necessarily. Love even affects creatures though I don't know about scorpions. People do make friends with snakes which is how I first heard your story. I would suggest that love is the only way to change "sociopaths." Love is powerful regardless of what anyone thinks.
Feral—that’s a proverb! It’s not a fact! It was made up by some curmudgeon to justify his crappy attitude towards other people. And it passes for wisdom among other curmudgeons. I know—been there done that. Moreover sociopathy IS loved away everyday in every 12step meeting in the country. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. I’ve done it. We, none of us, has any idea what the true power of good is.
As far as I can tell, it's an accurate description of observable reality. I can wish it away all I want, but it won't go.
No, wishing doesn’t really work. But you can change your actions, and that will change your perception and that will change your reality. And as we all know, we make our own reality
12 step programs have helped many people, but unfortunately, some people are so toxic that only detaching completely and from a distance is the only
avenue for self preservation. And forget about changing anyone but yourself.
I can't change others' actions. And if i were going to make my reality, I'd have made a different one.
Tell it to the leftists in Pinochet-era Chile.
To be clear, I'm not advocating violence, simply observing that it's just one part of a war, and states are continuously and always at war with their people.
Submission to predators is never an answer either. "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright" aaaaand you're lunch. The hippies tried pacifism, and now their cohort is the most deeply invested in the system rooted in and protected by violence, and often the first to call in the violence professionals to defend their feelings.
In fact, any offense against property, of whatever real or symbolic kind, can be, and sometimes is, coded as "violence". Some of Caitlin's tweets could very well be coded as violence by people who are invested in the world that she and many of us here hope to end.
Mysticism is cognitive violence. See how it works?
Hippies were not bought off by beliefs in pacifism.
It was individual identity, hedonism, and consumption that were manipulated by corporate interests and drove the sellout to the current Neoliberal hyper-individualism. All the anti-materialism beliefs of the Hippies were betrayed.
Excellent documentary on this corrupting process is "The Century Of The Self" by Adam Curtis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Gandhi and MLK, Jr. preceded hippies.
Gandhi's and MLKJr.'s violent detachments have been written out of the myth we call history. You can pretend that the Black Panthers didn't contribute anything to the Civil Rights movement, but you would be ignoring material reality in favor of your feelings and your 401(k) disbursements.
Just as an observation—I think Stinky needs violence or his whole facade collapses. Like a beaten wife needs an abuser or else she has to take responsibility for herself and get away from the abuse. I’d say most of the U.S. population is like an abused wife that just soooo needs the abuser. Stinky is just the other side of it—saying no, you can NEVER get away from abuse and violence—here I’ll prove it to you, read my link!
It is not either/or submission or violence. There are alternatives.
How is mysticism cognitive violence?
Violence is the forcible removal of a subject from their context.
But that's not what matters here. The point is that coding is arbitrary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism
I don't click on links. How about an example of mysticism as violence, or arbitrary coding or removing a subject from its context. What you wrote is not clear.
There were plenty of examples of arbitrary coding in this string.
Anyway, for your convenience: --8<--
Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes.[1][2][3] Hence, it is colloquially known as the hurrah/boo theory.[4] Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic,[5] but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson.[6]
Emotivism can be considered a form of non-cognitivism or expressivism. It stands in opposition to other forms of non-cognitivism (such as quasi-realism[7][8] and universal prescriptivism), as well as to all forms of cognitivism (including both moral realism and ethical subjectivism).[citation needed]
In the 1950s, emotivism appeared in a modified form in the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare.[9][10]
-->8--
As for myself, I am an error theorist.
An "error theory of ethics" is the view that the ordinary user of moral language is typically making claims that involve a mistake. The concepts of ethics introduce a mistaken, erroneous, way of thinking of the world or of conducting practical reasoning. The theory was most influentially proposed by John L. Mackie in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Mackie believed that ordinary moral claims presuppose that there are objective moral values, but there are no such things. Hence, the practice of morality is founded upon a metaphysical error.
I am a predator myself, as the local rodent population will attest, as well as prey for owls and dogs and Cat Eating Monsters.
Wow, this is great. I struggle with exactly these issues. It seems to me there has to be a spiritual element to our next social solution, which is why I think global warming is such a good teacher. A little humility, spare a thought for the planet, cultivate looking inward, pet your cat—those very simple, heart and intuition oriented actions that can, on any given day, lead me to drop the self righteousness I like to practice and practice the kind of forgiveness I want for my behavior that was less than stellar. ‘Course, I’m 78 and have the scars of doing it the self willed, narci way. So it’s slow going.
"... And a huge proportion of people want to be told what to do and think. ...."
This curious phenomenon may have something to do with the lengthy childhood of humans. By contrast a cat, for instance, matures in about a year; it has learned everything it can get out of cat culture and in any case its mother, authoritarian when it was a kitten, insists on it making its own living and getting off on its own. Humans, however, grow more slowly, have more to learn, and are additionally saddled with the group mind we call language, so that they spend fifteen or twenty years in an explicitly subordinate role. Moreover, when they do try to emerge into a more competent, more capable state, they are often punished, sometimes very severely, in the interests of social cohesion and performances of various kinds which may be useful to other members of their communities, especially those of the leadership caste, if there is one. It is no surprise, then, that many humans never fully mature into a reasonable degree of autonomy.
As a cat, we learn enough to survive in our first months of life, up to about a year old. Mice are for chasing, dogs are best avoided, trees are useful, once you learn how to climb down. A two month old kitten can get the concept. We do keep learning, however.
The reason humans take so long to mature is because so much of human survival is based upon abstraction. For instance, humans spend an inordinate amount of time chasing ciphers, now not on a piece of paper but on an electronic ledger somewhere. These ciphers are in turn an abstraction, and good luck laying a paw on them. You would have better luck catching the red dot from a laser pointer.
But humans organize their lives, their social status, their food and choice of mates around these abstractions. They kill and die for them, every day.
Cats are so much wiser.
Childhood has not always existed for 20 years. Quick example is The Pony Express that used 11 year old boys. Do you know any 11 year olds capable today of that feat, or more importantly, any parents that would allow it? Is that fact good or bad?
Human life was less dominated by abstractions then.
Something I wrote at the time of the Fall of Kabul:
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a fraction of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
You're speaking about very recent and maybe very transitory developments in human cultures. I don't know how seriously to take them.
Humanity has been dominated by symbol and abstraction pretty much from the time humans invented abstract thought.
Just that the domination is more all-consuming now than it was in the past. Good luck getting that genie back in the bottle.
Great point, not heard that take before.
Learn well The Iron Law Of Oligarchy and its corollary, The Iron Law Of Institutions.
The humans are fundamentally flawed no matter how hard it is to accept by many. But once they do everything falls into place. And so it follows that bullies are to be met with force and literally thrashed.
It almost appears that morals and conscience were invented by the wicked to make the gullible follow them while they take control. Same for "debates", "peaceful protests", etc. Yeah, debate all you want, demonstrate all you want. That'll provide cover for the rulers to claim "democracy at work". But nothing fundamentally changes except by violence.
"If voting changed anything, then they'd make it illegal."
They certainly made it impotent.
That’s why we have to quit looking “out there” and start looking inside. The answers will come.
Morals and conscience were not invented. They are instinct. Bullies are not to be feared, not necessarily thrashed. As consciousness is raised we will be better and make better choices.
Treating others the way you would like to be treated is very logical. One only hurts oneself by not following that moral.
I agree. Also, the longer I try to practice growing my spirit the more I notice that I manifest what I think. Before I experienced that, I could indulge in all kinds of bluster and blowhard about other people and how awful and to blame they were. Now, I find I will have to deal with any stupid random negative thought I entertain, to my own detriment. Like this morning, I was walking down a beaten up road with lots of potholes and mud and it was starting to snow (Portland—freak weather) and I was grumbling about how cars were so stupid they made me get off the dry pavement when all they had to do was drive around me—but that would get their cars dirty…. And on and on I went in my mind blaming cars. And then a nice new white car what didn’t want to get dirty stopped and waited for me trudge slowly down the dry part of the street and pass her before she then took her turn. And I looked into her as I went past trying to say thank you, but she was not amused. And I realized that now I was the selfish self-centered narci who took up more that my share of the road. At 1st I felt bad, but then I just laughed. Because recently I have discovered the Laughing Buddha inside me and he is now my new teacher.
Actually, they were. You're committing anachronisms, which is very usual for mystics, whose job is to manipulate causality by lying about it.
Even the morality of primates has been studied. The following quote is from research on the origins of morality:
One key element of human morality is prosocial concern, i.e., a concern not only with one's own but also with others' well-being, also referred to as other-regarding preferences by behavioral economists (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003). In the primatological literature, it is often referred to as proactive prosociality, to stress that the corresponding behaviors, such as for instance food sharing, are not the result of solicitation by recipients, begging, or even harassment, but that they are initiated spontaneously by the actor without triggering by other individuals (Jaeggi et al., 2010).
Over the last decade, proactive prosociality has been extensively studied in a number of primate species.
...
Most people know, if they pay attention, when what they are thinking, saying or doing is moral or not. Buddhists call it right actions... an old concept.
How am I lying about what I believe to be true?
Morality is a Greek ideology. I'm not interested in slave theories. If you want to be a slave to mystery, go on ahead.
Power has been defined as the *hidden* potential for action. Someone openly carrying a long arm isn't powerful. They just have command of force. Money is power in the sense that it is unrealized potential action. The obscurity, and its powerful property, follows from the unrealized nature. Once spent (remitted), it is spent (exhausted) in terms of power. Once revealed, it is merely a potential for action.
Ultimately, in societies with an army of labor, power is a mystification of command. Most of us here will not be allowed near levers of command because they know we will simply trash the role and ruin it for the next person. I think neurodivergent people have an advantage here, which explains the middle-class freakouts about autism.
I don't think people want to be told what to do. They are told they want to be told what to do, while the other concerns of their lives keep them numb, exhausted, and disconnected from others. The idea that they should always be "doing" something in order to be valued keeps them exhausting themselves. The public performances of moral theatre keep them distrustful and self-disconnected (unless they join in the drama). The mass of mythology that shapes American society discourages them from employing their own sense-making. We are slaves, and glamor is one of the nine tails lashing us.
The solution may be found in making sure that stupid games remain stupid, and that stupid prizes remain socially inconsequential.
"I don't think people want to be told what to do."
Perhaps not, but they do want to retain their place in their social position. Few seem to have the courage to speak their mind if it goes outside of the current agenda for fear if being called names. Appears many of us haven't moved far from the playground. The current trend of labeling others as racist, anti-vaxxer, phobic, etc keeps masses silent.
It is mostly those who have property, of any real or symbolic kind, who are concerned about manners, propriety, conformity, keeping the fictions flying. Those who have no property and aren't immersed in commerce have little reason to care about that. Here's a fun read for you:
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/manners-deference-and-private-property-or-elements-for-a-general-theory-of-hierarchy/
"Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose..'"
-J. Joplin
A Buddhist principle, then.
It's a basic principle of property. People who have it tend to act on its behalf rather than on behalf of their own lived experience. "The things you own end up owning you" -Chuck Palahniuk, _Fight Club_
As I am French, I wondered why my government and all those who call themselves "the elite" follow the United States so closely in all their endeavors and especially in the undeclared war against Russia, which is being waged. Are they afraid of the Russians? No, it is not consistent with going to tickle them on their borders. I have come to the conclusion that the French government as well as all other governments of the European Union are afraid of the American government. Fear of disappointing it by not being a faithful ally, fear of provoking its anger and that it no longer likes us. Our governments in Europe are much less afraid of Putin than they are of Biden and his band of megalomaniacs.
The European Union has turned the old European nations into the equivalent of banana republics that bow tremblingly to American shows of force.
Of course. What do you think the CIA and NSA are spying on European leaders and sweeping up information for? It's not so that they can solve crossword puzzles.
I should have added that the real US control is psychological, not blackmail. That's why the US could spy on Merkel and the incident be treated as a minor faux pas between friends, as if Obama had taken the last slice of pizza when everyone knew that Angela hadn't had any yet and Obama doesn't even really like mushrooms, but the US is part of The Club and everyone assumes that they must be good guys.
But if someone not part of The Club were to do something like that, we'd never hear the end of it.
Silly cat.
I like your analogy. Especially the extra little twist about the mushrooms.
The one that keeps coming to my mind about the Germans and the US is vulgar, so I won't post it to Caitlin's comments section.
Funny, as cats don't like mushrooms, either.
No.
Europe has been military occupied since 1945. Ditto Japan. South Korea since 1950s.
Coup seem to happen all the time in Africa and South America when the government disobeys the empire’s orders.
That’s brute force. Not psychological.
They don't need to do coups in Europe. That's Stockholm Syndrome.
You're on the old agenda.
Its 2023. If they are willing to blow up a European pipeline to ensure enslavement and compliance, well coups are on the table.
Watch this space for Hungary.
Never said that the Empire wouldn't resort to a coup if necessary, just that coups have not proven necessary.
You're onto the US! Fear is maybe our chief export. We've internalized Machiavelli and Kissinger, the German-American Machiavelli, who both taught it's more important for a leader to be feared than loved. Demented Joe B. is probably being coached to play the Nixon card, when that asshat told Henry the K about his great strategy in Vietnam was to make The Enemy believe Tricky Dick was just crazy enough he'd actually use nukes against them.
And now Biden is playing nuclear chicken with Putin. We're all spectators in this world-ending sport, unable to vote on whether we think it's worth it to defeat Russia if it means we all die, along with most other species. No one knows how this madness will turn out, but we're learning plenty about how Fear is the most potent weapon in a government's arsenal for getting what it demands: Full Spectrum Dominance, in the case of the US.
This is brill! I remember learning about how the 1st WW started and the teacher said it was due to “entangling alliances”. I didn’t get it in 10th grade but I think that’s what you are describing here—that sovereign nations are so entangled with ‘Merika, that one step out of line means a crashed economy, CIA intervention in any colonial holdings and media interference with the populous and elected officials. It was archdukes that did it then. Now it’s petty functionaries. 🤔😂
The difference with the situation before 1914 is that the European nations have given up all sovereignty. This goes back to the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, when the European leaders, winners of that war, let the American president Wilson dictate this bad peace. Marshal Foch, the generalissimo of the Allied armies, remarked to Clémenceau, "If we sign this treaty, we deserve to be hanged. This phenomenon of surrendering sovereignty was amplified with the end of World War II, when, once again, Washington and its British ally dictated the narrative: America had saved Europe and from now on it would protect it from itself. European leaders, fleeing from their responsibilities, terrorized by the USSR thanks to clever propaganda from Washington and London, built a Western Europe based on fear and submission to interests to interests. For those who doubt this, they need only recall the cries of fear that General de Gaulle's sovereign and independent policy aroused in Washington and in European capitals. The ten years of the General's power were a parenthesis quickly closed by his successors, with a cowardly sigh of relief in all chancelleries. Today, when I look at Macron, Sholtz, Baerbock or Trudeau, I see barking dogs looking in the direction of their master, Biden, to make sure that he is happy with them.
Yeah as an American, I'm blown away the EU and Germany especially, seemed to have just shrugged off the obvious act of US sponsored sabotage to the Nord Stream pipeline. Now pretty much authenticated by Seymour Hersh. I mean, who do you believe? Seymour Hersh or Uncle Joe demented Biden? Choice is pretty obvious to me.
The French press has been silent about the revelations of Seymour Hesch. Anything that contradicts the NATO narrative is ignored. And if, by chance, you have a name that makes it impossible to be totally ignored, such as Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of General Charles de Gaulle, and you dare to tell the truth about the events in Ukraine, you are called: "Putin's voice".
It is distressing of stupidity and cowardice.
The “EU and Germany” didn’t shrug anything off.
Puppet govts and puppet media did as they were told. The people are no the wiser.
Even in America, the other day I spoke to two adults with masters degrees who knew all about balloons, but has never heard of Seymour Hersh and has no idea about the U.S. and Norway blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Just to top it off, this happened while we were filling the gas (petrol) tank of an SUV of cartoonish proportions….at a…Lukoil….filling station in the US. Meanwhile all of Europe is implementing sanctions and turning off their heat to save moves.
Europeans have “leaders” that are stringing them along all the way to their demise.
Caitlin writes: "In "free democracies" you say what your rulers want you to say because they psychologically coerced you using propaganda"
But the coercion is far more than from propaganda. Most people are afraid of losing their jobs, reputation, careers, family, houses, income, standard of living and "freedom" (as in incarceration).
Those who effectively speak truth to power are ignored, belittled, smeared, fired, blackballed, marginalized, exiled, and even sometimes jailed. Been there, done all that.
An example of being fed propaganda since were were children is that the United States is great, we pledge our alligeance to the flag(you know some symbol?) Why? That were are an altruistic nation that does nothing but humanistic activities in other nations for their benefit. Example Ukraine, Iraq, Haiti...you can stop laughing now.
So...Then there is this economic system called capitalism that is apparently the best ever and if anyone disagrees, they are wrong, they are stupid, or they are an enemy. Capitalism requires ever increasing economic expansion. The planet has finite resources and takes longer to regenerate than capitalism needs. Eventually we will run out. Oddly, lets not forget other living things need those resources too.
The next problem with capitalism is that everything is a buyable commodity, everything is for sale. Slavery abolished no, there are also still endentured servants, you know, working to pay off debt. So who owns the lakes, rivers, fish, trees, air etc? Essentially it will be somebody.
We are already living in a dystopia society as you said, we have mass surveillence, state sponsored official narrative, you are told what to think. The transhumanism is already here. We are just physical servents to be used as the tools of the empire. Disinformation is absurd, who cares?? Why does the empire care? It shouldn't unless it effects its agenda. We don't have free speech. I am the 49th president of the United States, of course I am not...but I can say it. Why can't I say other stupid things?
I am awake but still learning and I find what you write helpful and important, thank you.
My media rule of thumb right now is to assume that whatever Biden, Blinken, & Raytheon - B B &R (TM) - say is projection (hypocrisy) and part of their messaging propaganda to divert and coverup what the US is actually doing which invariably is exactly the opposite of their claims.
"Whenever I talk about the hundreds of military bases the US empire is circling our planet with I always get people saying "We only have all those foreign bases because those foreign governments want us there for protection!"
Yes, yes I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the fact that the US subverts, impoverishes and destroys any weaker nation that refuses to facilitate its military interests. Foreign US military bases are "protection" in the same way extortion payments to the Mafia are "protection"."
And what happens when those client states don't want US "protection"? The 1975 coup in Australia and the 1980s manipulations in West Germany come prominently to mind. One might also consider the destruction of the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1970s Britain, although that may well have been MI5 acting on its own.
Note also that open fascists are now in power in Italy, but since they don't challenge American hegemony they are allowed to do their thing.
The US just protected Germany from the cheap gas.
Come on now!
We just protected the Germans from having Putin threaten to cut off their gas by cutting off their gas. 🤯
And the Germans are grateful for that. Like the Japanese for the atomic bombing since it helped them see the light.
Germans as a whole, refuse to admit the blindingly obvious, fighting hard to cling to comforting illusions.
Stupid Germans. But this nicely illustrates the psychology of most humans.
German idealism, I Kant even.
I'd say it's because Germans, on the whole, have fairly comfortable lives with generally functional institutions.
To your and Caitlin's points about the Mafia-like nature of US foreign policy:
"This sure is a nice country you have here. I'd hate to see a revolution get stirred up and destroy it. Why don't you let us put a military base here to keep you safe."
"Well everyfing breaks, dunnit Colonel."
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x75bt6
Not like those stupid 1930s fascists!
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" ~Matthew 7:3-5 #KJ
I’m not Christian but there are a few choice observations in that book. I like the idea that the world is a mirror—what I see in it is what I see in myself but don’t want to admit. The deeper I poke into myself, the more I see the validity of that idea. But I can change me, and thereby change the world—that to me is a very powerful idea.
I am not a Christian either. But from a literary and story point of view, the King James version of the bible has quite a bit of well written pearls of wisdom. It's unfortunate we live in a time where intellectually, (or perhaps academically) you are forced to eschew any kind of respect for most spiritual traditions, as materialism and darwinism is the intellectual de rigueur right now of our milieu. It's hard to rise above the milieu you find yourself in - fashion wise and philosophically wise. There's a small voice that often whispers to me that the materialists are right, that all I am is some kind of evolved biological machine that will soon disappear forever. A dark, nihilist view of life. On the other hand, believing in a 2000 year old religion that has been obviously redacted and doctored over the centuries, to let's face it: maintain political autonomy and control by an authoritative church - is also not very intellectually palatable. I find my own sources of wisdom I guess from multiple places, multiple books, multiple authors. Carl Jung happens to be my latest recent favorite. Joseph Campbell. Or a Rumi. But I also don't feel one needs to dismiss the bible altogether. You just need to separate the wheat from the chaff, and not take any of it too literally. A good deal of it was never meant to be taken literally anyway.
Jamenta, you might be interested in my post https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops. It presents some of the research on separating the wheat from the chaff. According to Bible scholars, 70% of what is attributed to Jesus was said already by someone else. So those pearls may be in there. It's not the redaction of the Bible that's the problem, from my decade of researching it, it's the original story that was written by the Roman Empire for their own purposes.
Yes I agree, some of the mythology surrounding Jesus predated his life. Much of what we have today is a pretty distorted version of what may have been there originally. Many early christian sects were completely wiped out from memory by the authoritative church organizations. What is important though, as Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung would point out: is the spontaneous emergence of mythological symbols from the collective unconscious.
Joe Atwill, who I cite in my article, goes deeper into questioning whether Jesus was a historical figure at all or a literary character invented by Josephus. He uses many different forms of technical literary analysis to show that the similarities between his writing and the gospels are statistically significant. If literary, the motives of the author matter. If the author's purpose is to discredit the revolutionaries and their ideology--the zealots who'd kicked Rome out of Judea--and instead substitute an impotent pacifism that gave Caesar what belonged to Caesar, it's propaganda we've been falling for for 2000 years.
I think it is likely a mixture of both. Altho, it's hard to 100% ascertain since there is not a ton of historical evidence, but enough (IMO) to establish the man did exist. And if not him, it would have likely have been some other wise soul. Many religions and spiritual traditions often arise from the insights of a few individuals. Of course, they can't control what comes after their time and how the words are redacted or revised to mean something a bit different from what was originally intended. I also believe that it was very likely Mary was Jesus' wife, based on some more recent research. There were some early christian sects where Mary played a central role to the emerging christian doctrines - and again, via the many councils and consolidation of faith through politics (or other means) - that got wiped out along with many other early Christian traditions. What we have today, doesn't reflect what was likely the earliest Christian beliefs.
What I am writing of course, to someone with a strong christian faith will probably be heresy. But all I can do is shrug my shoulders - since spirituality arises everywhere, mythology has been with humankind for millenniums, there have been 100s if not 1000s of different religions arising spontaneously within human consciousness. Many claim they are the chosen religion, and all other religions are false. So what can you say to that? However, I don't subscribe to the current en vogue Materialistic/Skeptic criticism that all religion is simply an opiate of the masses, or some kind of "sexual wish fulfillment fantasy" as Freud put forth. Materialism is just another kind of metaphysical belief system, another belief system about the deeper issues religion attempts to address: what ultimately is reality? What are we? What is consciousness? Does morality exist? Or is the universe just a machine and at its heart, a cold, grinding machination of which our individual existence is a brief flashbulb of existence and then we are put out forever? Currently - I don't subscribe to that Materialism religion. But neither do I subscribe to any other current religious doctrines. However, I suspect consciousness really is more than just complex electrons that happened to come together over time, and live my life accordingly by what I "suspect".
You? Who is “you”?
Ask the oracle at Delphi
Jen Psaki... Does any thinking Human on this planet want to hear from this red-haired Karen. What a tool of the Psychopathy.
Teresa. I disagree. I used to try your kind of open mindedness on those who thought we were “on the same side” and believe me, I soon gave up on that. I used to have a casual friend from England with whom I talked politics and whenever we’d get into a shared notion, he’d go off on the Jewish conspiracy and the Rothchilds and some other stupid medieval theory blaming “the other”—had never even heard of PNAC, or the Powell memo—but expected me to be liberal enuf to listen to him pontificate about things I’d got over in college. I often feel the same way with some comments on this thread. A thread brought to us by the way, by CAITLIN! And frankly, I agree totally with her. There has to be an internal critique of how we are thinking, not just a mushy acceptance of what we are thinking. Your recommendations about who and how “we” “should” act and talk in this “movement” are not anything that I could ever accept, so I say kept calm and carry on Caitlin, you genius, and thank you for your clarifying thought processes that you share with us even tho many here try to tee off of you to start their own band wagon!!!
"Expansion of consciousness" can mean various things. For some it translates into navel gazing. For others, more in line with, naval gazing. Some hold we don't understand the nature of reality, and by that they mean, something like the operation of quantum mechanics. Which all goes to show the logical traps language sets up for us. Marx called this obscurantism - or introducing factors not pertinent to the subject. You don't need to know everything. But a little recent, and less recent history is helpful. Start with the idiocy of WWI and how that balloon got off. Then read something on Russia and the Tsars, and how communism, like the French Revolution, reinforced the idea that we are nor born slaves, but are made so. Then read Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold history of the United States. Also, Howard Zinn, A Peoples' History of the United States. There's piles more, many written by Americans. This will expand your consciousness in pertinent ways. Then protest against warmongering, injustice, flagrant fraud, as in the non-neutralizing vaccines bringing in millions for the fraud artists. But mostly, because it is a monstrous and imminent threat: the murderous war against Russia by the West in Ukraine. That's all you can peacefully do.
The US is urging "restraint" on the release of Sweden's Nord Stream investigation findings until it can pressure the Swedes into writing their report the way the US wants them to.
Ya, like they did with Assange and the Swedish narrative on him.
The only way I can see to escape this is through education and people being taught to question everything and not to believe the spin from our media and leaders, look at it again and hopefully see another reason for their words. We cannot keep believing all we are told as gospel. Thank you Caitlin again.
"Many fall for dopey right-wing narratives about Jews ruling the world, globalist pedophile cabals, elite conspiracies to make all our kids transgendered or whatever, because their ideology prohibits them from clearly seeing the real underlying dynamics of capitalism and the empire-building of their own government."
So who's ruling the world then? I'll give you my considered opinion. It's the *finance* capitalists. The ones who actually own the banks. The bottom line is ALWAYS [imaginary] money. They hold the world to ransom and play the long game. Just look at the 'debt' the USA 'owes' these shadowy characters & yet the banksters allow the bankrupt USA to fund wars and drunkenly swagger around the planet creating mayhem while consolidating power. The rest of the planet is choking on such debt & has to endure so-called austerity measures. Very strange! https://www.worldometers.info/us-debt-clock/ It's not so strange when one examines who these bank-owning banksters are, who they've teamed up with, & what their end game is.
What's strange is the decision to accept IOUs from the Federal Reserve as having value. We will see how the move by BRICS+ away from this system works. If they can base their new system on something that has actual value then they will be a real threat to the Cabal(whoever it is).
Try paying taxes in BTC. For that matter, try buying oil from.the gullies tyrannies without USD.
Gulfie, not "gullie". Stupid autocorrect and lack of an edit.
My phone does that a lot... Changes my words. It does make me slow down.
That's why I call my "smart phone" a dumb phone. It's wrong half the time about nearly anything. Dumbphone. Has a nice ring to it.
What if the Great Chain of Being is untrue, and no human really "rules" the world in a meaningful sense? Europe styles itself as a "club of values", which, aside from containing two interesting puns, offers a clue to how bureaucracies of nominal equals actually operate. Right now it's ruled by a particular system of values centered around having one's rightful possessions taken away, in "exchange" for which we "earn" value tokens. (Friedman and other neoliberals prefer the word "exchange" because he was running a psyop.)
It's true that creditors, those who control and judge the "universal" tokens of value, have an especially powerful role in fashioning the current order in broad brush strokes, but they don't coordinate it. The managerial class below them manages the assets of those banks, oligarchs, and other creditors, and the professional class gives them the tools to do so efficiently, each dipping their own beaks and taking their fees. It is here that the slavers reside.
As for debt, US public debt is the mirror to private assets, dollar for dollar. None of that "debt" is meant to be paid back unless one wants us all to have nothing. It's a fake gift, a white elephant. Elites use that big number as a scary narrative to hide their lordly rent, obscure the actual overhead costs of holding the order together, and to persuade us to stay captive within the order. David Graeber's famous book on _Debt: The First 5000 Years_ explains it in terms of history, and it's a most enlightening read.
It’s all of us. Anyone who uses a bank for “convenience” is part of the problem. Or drives a car. Or has a job, pays their bills, complies with Covid, lives in fear. We are all a part of the ‘Merican dream/nightmare. Try walking away from any of the above and see how difficult it is to get shut of this fungus we’re calling the Empire. This patriarchy, this corporate dominated capitalist militarist narcissistic paranoid patriarchy that hides in our Wheaties. Come on!!!
Not so sure about that. Like Rome they want the citizens of the capital, in this case pretty much the whole continental US, idle, indigent, sedated, and entertained.
They are against us driving you can tell because they push us to electric cars when there aren't enough raw materials in the earth to build one for all of us. Complying with the arbitrary safety ism is certainly a problem.
I am no longer afraid of them though. When I saw them coming after the J6ers and people like Mark Houck I was afraid. But then I thought about who isn't afraid of them. The Taliban isn't afraid. The Russians aren't afraid. The Saudis aren't anymore. They have used all of their power on those groups and failed to control them. When I saw that I decided to stop being afraid. That is when I gave up anonymity and started writing and posting openly.
"They place far too much emphasis on things like vaccines and the future of transhumanism being used to someday create an Orwellian dystopia, because their worldview prohibits them from recognizing that we're already living in a power-serving mind-controlled dystopia."
This is really some damaging, harmful, straight up blue-pill nonsense.
First of all lumping all these beliefs together in one basket with anit-semitic conspiracy narratives is straight out of the elite propaganda playbook which is frankly is fing evil, twisted mind-fuckery (I mean which freaking side are you on?).
And second of all let me put this for you very very simply so even your pea-brain can understand.
There is an actual race going on to stamp out dissent. There IS an actual class war being waged by the owners of the capitalist system and that war isn't being waged "accidentally" or by impersonal forces.
Just ask Warren Buffet (not a Jew to my knowledge) who said, "There is class war alright and it's my class, the rich class who's making war, and we're winning.".
So there you have it, the quiet part said out loud right in plain english so you don't have to speculate and the same thing has been said many times in many ways and observed by many shcolarly non "right wing" observers as well.
Whether or not the people making the war worship satan or gather in the woods in front of a giant stone owl (as has been documented that they do) isn't irrelevant, but neither is it the main event. The main event is recognition of the dual reality that 1) they are making war and further that they *know* they are making war, (IOW they at some level are consiously engaged in an organized effort to do so) and that 2) their war isn't an aimless effort, but has real, clearly defined objectives.
And the latter is not an unimportant point as the war being made by the elites, the "superclass" (one of the names they've given to themselves) isn't actulaly *just* a war for the sake of war, or just to maintain what they have, but it actually has a clearly-defined end-goal. that objective has been spelled out by the war-planners as total ("full-spectrum") domination, i.e. the elimination of the ability/capacity of those being made war upon to fight back or resist their enslavement/exploitation by the "superclass".
Again, this is a *conscious* objective of those Buffet identified as "making the war". It is not happenstance or a by-prodcut. It is the main event and involves a great deal of careful planning, coordination, strategy and a crazy amount of organization (though it is to some degree also self-organizing).
So deny/mock/dismiss/minimized this reality at your own risk but you are in fact doing the elites work for them by encouraging others to do so (while making yourself irrelevant) because our ablity fight back depnds not only on our ability recognize the system of empire/capitalism in the ways you are talking bout daily in you diatribes but also on our abliity to recognize how we are being made war upon by the architechts of these systems, meaning to recognize it's specific objectives & how they are being ccarried out/implemented through policy/exercise of power and sheilded by various propaganda operations in real time, and to counter them, again (in real time).
Recognition of these things (the system, the war being waged by it's owners/architects and the obectives of that war) is not mutually exclusive and I would submit that your failure and the failure of the left (with which you identify) to go far enough in it's analysis is the primary reason *why* the left has so completely fallen down on the job (a fact about which I've noticed a painful absence of any critique on your part).
And that is a problem, because if we fail to do this, there may actually come a point when what we have to say about it may actually become irrelevant because the possibility of organized dissent/resistance will have become so remote as to be for all intents and purposes non-existent and the thought itself will have become un-thinkable.
As MLK said, "there is such a thing as too late".
Hell, Step 1 and Step 2 are easy. I learned those as a kid in Catholic schools decades ago. Step 3 is impossible. People are lazy. They like being slaves.