How Does Anyone Still Care About This Bullshit?
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
I truly could not care less who wins the US election; in my mind Dementia Meat Puppet and Reality TV Oligarch are both perfectly suitable symbols to represent the US empire. And that’s all a US president is: a symbolic representative with no real power.
I truly do not see how anyone can still give a fuck about this bullshit. It’s so obvious at this point that the US is being run by unelected empire managers who throw up half-dead, half-brained presidential candidates to trick Americans into thinking they live in a democracy. Those empire managers are going to do whatever they want to you regardless of how you and your compatriots vote. Your electoral system is a fake plastic toy they give you to play with so you won’t interfere with the gears of the imperial machine.
There are no answers in electoral politics. Start looking for answers elsewhere.
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Another military coup was thwarted in Bolivia on Wednesday when the people flooded the streets in support of their socialist government.
Everything in our society is geared toward making the people forget how many of us there are and how easy it would be for us to impose our will by rising up in massive numbers. The global south is the only place where anything real is happening politically these days.
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The way US officials keep falsely asserting that Israel has accepted a peace deal and Hamas is the only party rejecting it reminds me of that time they kept insisting that the real president of Venezuela was some random guy they chose for the position. They’re just trying to impose a narrative which has no factual basis whatsoever by rote repetition and sheer force of will.
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The biggest scandal Julian Assange exposed about the empire which rules over us was not its classified war crimes, nefarious covert operations or hidden corruption, but the fact that it will openly destroy the life of a journalist for exposing its criminality.
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The “Hamas uses human shields” argument is essentially “We have to attack civilian areas because Hamas hides in civilian areas knowing that we would never attack civilian areas, so that’s why we attack civilian areas every single day.”
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It must suck to be a supremely talented artist or a brilliantly insightful comedian and know you’ll never achieve mainstream success because nobody who says real shit attacking real power gets elevated in our fake plastic civilization.
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One of the biggest challenges when raising kids in this dystopia is being a good parent and protecting them from trauma while also making sure that, despite your good parenting, they still grow up with an aggressive distrust of authority figures.
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Keep opposing US warmongering for the rest of your life. Don’t let Gaza be a one-off. The US and its allies ALWAYS do evil murderous things like this, and they ALWAYS lie about it, and the media ALWAYS help them lie about it. This isn’t new, it’s just the first time in years that a large number of westerners have been fiercely critical of the foreign policy of the US-centralized empire, because it’s more obvious than the empire’s other crimes.
This shit has been happening continuously, and will continue to happen after the butchery in Gaza is done. You just need to pay very close attention to the US war machine and the critical voices who monitor its crimes.
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Opposing the US empire’s murderous foreign policy is where it’s at, resistance-wise. It’s where the lion’s share of imperial murder and tyranny takes place, and it’s the area the empire managers themselves place most importance on.
If you focus on domestic issues you’ll find yourself relatively well-tolerated by at least one mainstream political faction, but if you attack the imperial war machine you’ll get empire apologists jumping down your throat from all directions. This is because the ability to freely inflict mass military violence upon disobedient populations is much, much more important to the imperial power structure than domestic issues like abortion or LGBTQ rights, or even issues like police brutality and economic justice. This doesn’t mean those issues are unimportant, it just means they’re unimportant to our rulers compared to the emphasis they place on unrestricted mass military violence.
War is the glue that holds together the undeclared globe-spanning empire that is centralized around the United States. The war machine is the most aggressively-protected aspect of the empire for the same reason our bodies form protective bone barriers around our most vital organs with the skull and ribcage; it’s what’s most crucial for the empire’s survival. But, much like vital organs, it’s also the softest and squishiest part of the empire.
It’s much easier to point at the footage of what they’re doing in Gaza and go “This is bad” than to explain the abusive dynamics of economic injustice, exploitation and oppression taking place in your own country, because it’s so much more self-evidently evil at a glance. That’s why the mass media propaganda about the empire’s wars, militarism and genocidal atrocities is so much more aggressive than on domestic issues: it requires much more defending and apologia.
So the warmongering of the US and its allies and partners is the weakest, most vulnerable part of the imperial power structure, and it’s also the most vital, and it’s also the most dangerous and destructive. That’s why I personally choose to focus most of my energy on these issues. Not because other issues don’t matter, but because it’s the most energy-efficient use of my resistance.
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There’s a genocide going on in Palestine, people are sleeping on the streets by the White House, and these two are arguing over their golf handicap. They might as well be playing golf on the moon. In fact… b’bye! Watch out for that radiation belt, I hear it’s a doozy.
Forgive me for repeating myself:
Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. The technical term for this is a "beard".
Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind .
Taking into account how wildly unpopular most western politicians and their policies are with their respective publics, "democracy" as it is practiced is basically a cover for rulers to do what they want.
After all, your elected representatives approved this. If you don't like it, you can vote for a different carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppet, so until then, shut up and fall in line!