Your very concise argument is also a great explanation for the irrational animosity in the USA toward Cuba. It's not a threat, and the issue isn't ideology: it's defiance.
Happy to know that we have friends of Cuba here. The propaganda against Cuba was mainly to keep her achievements a secret from the rest of the "third world". The US empire feared the domino effect.
Same is true for Venezuela. Under Hugo Chavez, RIP, Venezuela was setting a new course for countries to move out of the US orbit. We see what's happened. Hugo dead, and Maduro vilified as a dictator, even though he was elected by a large percentage of the electorate.
So very true, Joy in HK. USA keeps destabilising Venezuela, funding an extreme right-wing opposition. Not only that the country's assets are frozen, and it is subjected to debilitating sanctions.
When life becomes harsh under these circumstances, and people try to earn a living coming over to the US, they are vilified and ostracised without any reference to the "why" they were forced to come out in the first place.
According to international polls, Cuba is far ahead of Amerikkka in both healthcare and education.
I hope like hell that Amerikkka does NOT normalize relations with Cuba: it would undoubtedly destroy their unique culture. Hubs and I are huge fans of old muscle cars (we’re in the process of restoring a ‘68 Camaro) and hope to visit Cuba one day…departing from nearby Canada, of course!
My bosses wife is from Brazil. They go atleast once a year to get all their exams, tests, scans, etc because they have better healthcare and it's universal so you could have mammo, colon, heart, prostate, etc etc etc exams and maybe have to pay $40.
And it's relatively easy to get a visa for Brazil that is good for TEN years!
I, and others, would rather "a lot of disappointments and losses" than become like the corrupt and cruel people who are governing us. They have made it so that you have to have about half a million dollars to even run for a potential leadership position, i.e. they have made it so that only rich, most likely corrupt people can run. I have been told that billionaires are just people too when I say shit about them. I am not so sure that is really true.
Are sociopaths (billionaires) actually "people"? That's a debate I've had with myself for years now. If they have zero empathy and no compassion for human beings, maybe they're just cactuses?
They are human, but sociopaths have machine-like thinking. And it's billionaires and corporations which run the world--corporations are certainly machines. So they are people, but not "just people" in the sense of being just like everyone else.
“…The rich are different, because when you have that much money, then human beings become disposable. Even friends and family become disposable and are replaced. And when the rich take absolute power, then the citizens become disposable, which is in essence what’s happened. There is a very callous indifference.”
As long as we acknowledge that rich people in the USA control the military and kill others, and control the economy to ensure there are enough uneducated poor people willing to join the military and kill others. The “circumstances” are engineered.
The flip side of overrating ourselves is that we at least can imagine a template to better ourselves.
And at least we are not “overrated” in our capacity, vulnerabilities and all, for moral understanding and contemplation of grace, virtue, beauty, justice, and a sense of our common humanity. There are some things going for us.
People certainly can be and are being victimised by what is not understood or known. My life is full of wish I had knowns. So we keep trying to understand.
There still is a 'common humanity.' I believe this.
Understanding 'humanity' is a goal worth pursuing BUT how does one navigate this 'pursuing?'
Education. Is of premier importance here. These poor teachers in the US/and other countries. They have curriculum (since Reagan if my memory of US education serves me well.)
Can you ask a question in school? IF you ask a question (as my daughter did in the USA School district) she was ignored. She came home crying.
Testing...testing came to the fore/ teachers had NO time to teach and answer questions.
I know many fantastic teachers in the USA who decided NOT to 'test' their students. They were thrown out.
Kids NEED to explore their own ideas BUT in the face of indoctrination they cannot do this.
When the Mainstream Media does NOT report truth....where are these kids going to go for answers?
I have stated my opinion with regard to MSM. SHUT THEM DOWN but you don't do this?
PROTEST outside MSM. NOT in the streets BUT outside MSM offices. These people are telling you lies every single day. and they are complicit!
When the Palestinian people are 'wiped off the face of the earth....you go to MSM offices/haul them out and ask them questions.
I meant it simply as I said it…we have a capacity to sense our common humanity. That is, we correctly conclude (and intuit?) a shared moral universe and a shared “universality” or “sympathy” of experiences.
And it is precisely that “spectrum” which makes meaning and depth of moral process. I never even implied that humanity “were something that is only good.” That’s neither “difficult to understand” nor is it “even more difficult to accept.” Understanding is essentially acceptance anyway.
Humans being overrated kinda reminds me of the joke about someone describing their brain as their favorite organ, but then wondering, but look what’s telling me this!
Just organisms with a human genome whose brains have suffered a diminution or loss of the feedback regulation that characterizes all well-functioning biological systems. So if, indeed they are "just people too", they are biologically dysfunctional and should be approached with extreme skepticism as one would anything dysfunctional, like an explosive on the thermodynamic edge of ignition.
Come on now, my friend. When you're right, you're a marvel. But I see this as a bit of misreading at best, a bit contrived, at worst. (Or perhaps a bit of devil's advocacy, which is cool, but I'm having a terrible day, so forgive me if I sound a tad ornery.)
I'm talking strictly about cybernetics , which, as you know, applies across ALL biological systems -- in this case, at the neuronal pathway level (pharmacological modulation if you will, something that the endocannabinoid system does in mediating retrograde modulation of synaptic strengths in most major pathways). My brain, those of folks I understand and respect contain sufficient feedback regulation that "recognition dawns" when the toes of others are being stomped upon or when what you (correctly) identify as the nonsense above flies at them from a diseased culture. i.e., there is recognition that there is indeed an illness in the culture into which their sense of rationality, empathy, and justice don't fit. So they/we reject it. If the bulk of humanity choose to ignore that feedback and instead swim in the shit, that's a commentary on the culture that our socioeconomic systems have produced, but it does not negate that the cybernetic aspects are in place biologically. Rather, if anything, it emphasizes the choice that these scumbags make to ignore the basic biology that properly modulates the behavior of every other organism on the planet.
Then, as with any learned response, the ignoring changes their neuropharmacology, and the sick shithead response becomes"wired-in"; they are who they are and have unconsciously learned it as their "normalcy".
If we then want to say that Homo sucks, that Homo is a bloody failure and the planet would be better off without us, you'll surely get no argument from me.
Hey man, I have no energy or time to make a detailed reply because as I alluded to yesterday, I'm dealing with real life in a crushing situation. So I'll just agree with one aspect. Modern psychiatry contains a lot of crap as argued by psychiatrist Bruce Levine in "A Profession Without Reason". A lot more to say but I'm under the gun; another metaphor. Have a nicer day than me.
I have a few moments and responding to you may remove my mind from its currently preoccupying BS .
First, Thomas Insel is quoted in the intro to Levine’s book, and I agree he’s a good source. Another point of agreement there — and here — is the entire free-form tossing about of psycho-/sociopath that regularly occurs on these threads, with precious little understanding of what that entails at the brain level, emphasized by the recent findings of how poorly “depressive disorders” are understood in the emphasis on quantities/durations of neurotransmitter in synapses, be it serotonin, norepi or whatever. One reason is that researchers are so trained at money grubbing that the following sentence or a variant is almost certain to appear near the end of a publication of even a fairly minor discovery: “It is hoped that these results can lead to the discovery of new drugs that may be able to blah blah blah” . Always the pitch to external modulation.
Meanwhile in referencing cybernetics, I deeply apologize to anyone like yourself who is astute enough to see it as overly mechanistic. I’ve been railing against mechanistic views of the brain for 50 years, and it was only meant to refer to as yet undiscovered feedbacks that I believe — like the endocannabinoid system — exist in the brain. Sophisticated modulatory systems that can act to trim the activity of what are commonly pegged (perhaps misleadingly) as major neuropharmacologic systems (dopaminergic, noradrenergic, GABAergic etc.). They’re major because they’re more obvious, easier to study. Have you seen much by Times science writers about the endocannabinoid system’s retrograde modulation of synapses? Me neither. Anything on that topic is either about CBD’s possibilities (mostly economic), clinical/cosmetic applications or whatever, or THC’s addictive potential. Heaven forbid, anything positive should be written in popular media about the system’s potential for value in neural dynamics. Meanwhile, external activation of that system is the only thing that control the pain and spasticity from my 25 y-o brain damage without the brutal side-effects of typical Pharma drugs. I am very much my own physician (with a bit of assistance from my ex-students who are or were practicing pharmacists).
But there’s is so little understanding of how neural systems, known and undiscovered, pharmacologically cross-modulate (what I should’ve said instead of cybernetics, but too many words); and I believe there’s much potential there for how socially aberrant (destructive) behaviors come about or are self-regulated so they don’t come about. And there are hints at additional modulatory systems — hints like the presence of vanilloid receptors in the brain (why a peripheral sensory neuron receptor for noxious chemical stimuli also exists in the CNS). So in my struggle for a word, “cybernetics” seemed right for non–life scientists, but to aficionados like yourself, it does indeed draw forth the mechanistic objections and rightly so! I hate with a passion any analogies that liken the brain to a machine. Okay, the heart is genuinely a blood pump. BUT, then when good physiology students delve into its self-pacing by a cluster of cells with sodium leak channels, the astute student realizes: “hey even this muscular pump kicks the ass of most machines I know about!”
Bottom line: when you write, “the human brain is simply too complex”, you ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. I’m convinced that there are yet several more modulatory systems to be discovered at the neuronal pathway level. Then to integrate all that into understanding it as a systemic whole will be super challenging. And might only be possible if many (or all) of the biases about depression, psychoses etc. are first discarded. I’m not optimistic about that. But . . . it’s none of my business; I surely won’t still be here.
On that note, duty calls. Gotta go. Great stuff, no matter how you twist it.
Thanks for the great links, including to the old hiphop video; it cleared my head.
One becomes a billionaire by being fixated on accumulating (not "earning") money to the exclusion of so much that enriches life. Psychopaths seem to be drawn to that existence, have you noticed?
I don't think so. They pretty much mean the same thing in the US. The Uniparty is a monopoly of the two major political party (a duo or two-sided monopoly).
Anarchy is definitely not chaos. Read Kropotkin, Subcomandante Marcos, Noam Chomsky, Proudhon, Emma Goldman. Check out Peter Gelderloos' books (he is also on substack). There are many more. The talk is all about creating equality, justice and freedom.
Politics is mind control. Both sides, all "factions" are tavistock puppets, and until
Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulate you will remain a pawn in someone else's game -Evita Ochel
Divide and Conquer
The media - both news and entertainment - have now politicized nearly everything in our society as an extremely powerful mechanism of control.
Most people will not act to secure their future, so long as they feel they have an advocate fighting for them in the public or political arenas. This is why Republican vs Democrat equals divide and conquer (we fight amongst ourselves while they decimate our support systems and establish totalitarian control). The human mind is binary. Our thought process can often be boiled down into terms (often ultimatums) of – this or that – and our adversaries understand - very well - the art of this war.
(Instead of you taking control of the system or working to prepare for the worst (growing a garden, digging a well, strengthening your community, gathering supplies, and becoming resilient) you hold out hope for a politician to sweep in and solve your problems for you. There is only one place this lack of action can take us. Power corrupts and Washington DC is as corrupt as they come.)
They know that politicization (pitting us at each other throats regardless of relationship status - neighbor, co-worker, friend, family) is so effective at manipulating us because most emotionally connect their personal belief system to the belief system of their political party, and so then any attack on their party – legitimate or otherwise – is interpreted by their brain as an attack on themselves. Reason and logic then jump out the nearest window as raw emotion takes the helm, thus making them even more susceptible to the predatory controlling influences.
These are extremely damaging and misfortunate exploits of human nature. Worse, these exploits are as easy to activate as flipping a light switch for the majority of the population - and they are currently being employed to their maximum effect.
The reason we are in this mess running headlong into tyranny is because the majority of people refuse to believe that the controllers would ever do this to us. These eternal optimists appear to be blind to this most fundamental construct of human nature: that power attracts and then corrupts nearly everyone who wields it—and the globalists - those obscure puppetmaster billionaires you never read about in Forbes and who've spent decades away from the disinfectant properties of sunlight - have indeed become quite corrupted.
I’ve tried and failed countless times to open their eyes to the truth of the situation – that the elites are evil incarnate, and that they want most of us dead, and that they want to enslave the rest of us.
And the stunning part about their blindness is that none of this is new: the psychopaths often rise to the top of every power structure over time as the bad drives out the good and as such tyranny has taken control of nations many many times throughout history. This time is no different, and the freedom we take for granted has actually been an aberration from the historical norm.
If people still cannot see this given how obvious what is occurring has become, then I do not see how we have any hope of turning the tide.
The normies will just keep on complying and believing what’s being done to them is for the greater good while they drag themselves and the rest of us into totalitarianism.
Ten upvotes for something you only briefly alluded to--key to avoiding getting sucked into the Red Team Versus Blue Team game is to establish yourself on some land, preferably in a community, where you can live off-grid, grow at least some of your own food, organize for local resilience, boycott the destructive corporations, thus simultaneously increasing your own self-sufficiency, withdrawing your support for the enemy and creating the nucleus for a local alternative.
The only winning move is not to play their sick game. They thrive on our energy and the fear they stir in us. The one thing these emotional vampires hate the most is for their manipulation and terrorism to get ignored. Cut down your TV & internet usage by 97%, go local, and all of their terror goes away meanwhile we become stronger as they flail around in angst. Here’s how:
Civilization, goes and old maxim, is never more than three meals away from barbarism—once the food deliveries stop, so does law and order. Therefore, the baseline of preparedness is as follows:
Put all your support behind your local farmers, then become your own. A garden in every lawn should be standard. You can no longer trust anything from a corporation, so cutting out reliance on a retailer is a good place to start thinking about your resiliency. ‘Incorporated’ City water isn’t viable either for its quality or reliability, so wells must be dug (there is no resource more important in your life than clean water, hands down).
Beyond that, begin ending your dependence on their enslavement protocol Federal Notes by creating local currencies and discovering the art of bartering, start stitching together webs of alliances with your neighbors for resiliency, defense, and resource sharing (they might grow what you do not and vice versa)—put the “common unity” back in community, and get control of those town councils and school boards (the one place we still hold all of the cards) and get your kids out of them. Finally: stop eating, listening to, and watching things that are bad for your mind, body, and spirit, and, if so inclined, spend a good chunk of your time on your knees each day.
All of the above is a recipe for success. Let's get to work building a future worth living in, together, because if we do not, Harari & Co will ensure we will not have one.
This is why your idea/plan would backfire in spectacular fashion if attempted at large scale ->
>>"Put all your support behind your local farmers, then become your own. A garden in every lawn should be standard."
(1) There isn't enough arable land on planet earth for EVERYONE to have a lawn (affording such land is another question)
(2) If EVERYONE tried to become their own farmer, we would head back to the hunter-gatherer days. Why? Because if everyone is spending so much time/energy/resources doing the same thing, who is going to do all the other important things that need doing to keep civilization going?
(3) Your idea of 'EVERYONE' being their own farmer is a humongous wastage of resources and completely impractical. Agriculture (and farming) benefits from economies of scale, not individual farmers/plots of land doing their own thing. The principle is the same as what applies during the industrial revolution. Feeding 8+ billion people on the planet requires advanced agricultural technoligies and methods (one option being vertical farming, etc.). Such things CANNOT be implemented if EVERYONE becomes their OWN farmer (as you suggest).
(4) I could go on with many more reasons why your line of thinking doesn't work in the real world, but I'm hoping you get the gist from the above 3 points.
Important problems to solve -> world hunger and poverty.
To solve this, huge economies of scale are needed, along with efficient distribution channels. This requires organization and cooperation - and NOT "everyone being their own farmer and doing things locally".
Infact, the opposite of LOCAL is needed - especially in areas where it is not possible to farm/practice agriculture/etc. due to geography/weather/water availablity/land conditions/etc.
I understand that you have had these arguments before.
But all the questions are still unanswered. i.e. resource utilization, efficiency, physical geography, land ownership, personal skill (not everyone can be a productive farmer), personal agency, and so many more...
I don't doubt your intention - in fact, I agree with your intention. My argument is that your approach for achieving what you want is misguided due to real-world undeniable realities.
>>"Having a small garden - everyone that can growing something"
For example, I hate anything to do with gardening/farming/etc. I prefer using my mental acuities rather than my physical body. I prefer spending my time reading, writing, software and computers (my official profession), and many other things. There are people more qualified than me that can do farming better than me. It makes no sense to give up all my skills (and the various ways I can help others with my existing skills) to pickup farming...
....division already there without my help...plus I WANT to be "divided" from "them"...don't care to be anywhere in the vicinity of fascists...NO NONE common ground there...
To further that thought, chaos is not randomness or disorder. It's the swirling interplay between order and disorder where evolution takes place. The mess is where the life gets in.
Actually, I meant to imply that I wouldn't mind if anarchy _were_ chaos. My motto would be "comfortable with chaos" rather than "order from chaos". I view chaos as the middle ground where appropriate balance can be found, and tend to resist pushing things toward an unnecessary degree of order. So if we're invoking ancient maxims, I'll pick "Μηδὲν ἄγαν" - nothing to excess.
Read a bit more about anarchy. You might be surprised to realize that it does not mean disorder, chaos, tyranny or lawlessness. It is basically about reversing the power pyramid.
Unions helped push america as left as it could go until the 1950s mccarthy/roy cohn backlash came. Unions have been destroyed in America in the last 50 years. Unions strongly supported the american Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Without Unions to educate them, the american working class just goes with whoever hates non whites the most (offer not valid for israel).
The real shit storm started with the similarly lobotomized moron Reagan...what a dopshit joke...the right is the victor...kill education, infiltrate school boards, kill unions...RESULT: The present insanity, evil, stupidity...
"Public discontent is being corralled toward establishment-friendly political structures so that it doesn’t head anywhere that can threaten the mechanics of the empire, while authentic opposition to capitalism, militarism and empire building is viciously subverted by any means necessary."
This. We're starting to see this here in recent "protests" (I think they're staged) that have taken over where we used to stand and protest against the genocide in Gaza. They're protesting everything "Orange Man Bad" but not a word about stopping the war in Ukraine or the genocide in Palestine. The public's discontent is being corralled toward things of little consequence so the killing and warmongering can continue unabated. Soon the public won't even remember there is a genocide going on in Gaza and they'll be cheering for the war in Ukraine to continue.
One of Caitlin's most cogent and focused political summaries, for which much thanks! In addition to her examples, let's consider the administrations of Clinton and Obama. Clinton grossly furthered deregulation, financialization and cutbacks to the social safety net. Obama let the endless wars go on endlessly, bailed out banks and auto companies rather than homeowners, and never pursued punishment for the banksters behind the Great Recession who survived and came back as rapacious as ever. Hardly surprising then that the Democrats have lost the working classes as well as educated dissenters.
Authenticity. Such a lovely idea. Thank you. When it actually happens, it's a thrill. But the corporate-government-media fused monster (fascism) must be assumed to be inauthentic, which feels soul-deadening.
There us however one large and widely distributed patriarchal religion that has been quite effective in triangulating parties for dramatic hysterical effect using our US electoral system to their advantage ever since the Cold War witch hunting days from war to covert war to war lies all over again. Everyone suspects something but get it all wrong. They now seem to own our Supreme Court.
Sorry Charles but this smells like exactly the type of political dead-ends that the above article cautions against. Blaming "the jews" for everything that is wrong is an extremely simplistic reflex (because I assume you weren't referring to the patriarchal religion that legitimized the colonization and genocide of the American continents and their inhabitants?). Is there an over-representation of zionist jews in the ruling elite? Absolutely. Are they alone up there? Absolutely not. Does the zionist lobby heavily influence or even direct U.S. Middle East policies? Absolutely. Do they own and run "everything"? Obviously not. Does it boil down to Judaism as a religion or the Jewish ethnicity? Not any more than European destruction of the planet boils down to Christianity and whiteness.
Sure, religion always ends up being wrapped up and exploited to different ends. As does ethnicity. But this is politics. And it's not simple.
It's not that people "suspect something" but get this part wrong. They suspect something but don't jump on overly simplistic and destructive conclusions and solutions that are historically associated with fascism and totalitarianism. In fact, zionism is another version of the same family of ideologies. They all get along very well, they all serve the capital rather than the people and we should be very cautious of falling into their traps.
Historically people that vent these ideas don't only detest Jews, but also left-wingers and socialists of all kinds. After you've pointed out who is to blame, I would be curious to hear what type of society you envision for the future.
I certainly was referring to a religion the Romans used for defamation of the people that were resisting their occupation. They became a transnational empire based on Roman and Viking warrior culture of looting and settlement of continents and the source is the history of antisemitism continuing to disrupt world culture. The use of defamation of character is now a standard use in defaming leaders to promote wars based on lies
All of western history has been dominated by their cultural of master male cardinal rules.
...not "seem" but are...SCOTUS (except for 3 ladies) is illegitimate...corrupt, grifters, liars, sexual predators...and their very own evangelical handmaid...losers all (but 3) BIGLY...
Musk and Trump are just errand boys for a factional shift within the sprawling power structure of the crumbling Empire. For the last 25 years or so, the small but rabid faction we've been calling the Neocons had seized the driver's seat. These are the oligarchs who, perhaps for reasons of capital allocation or perhaps just plain old nostalgia and stubbornness, were attached to the idea of Western Hegemony. Their primary strategy has been a vast game of geopolitical chicken: capitulate to us or we blow up the World.
By preparing alternatives to the US dollar, the non-Western oligarchs called the Neocons' bluff. This has resulted in the much larger group of factions within the Western power structure, let's call them the A-national oligarchs, to decide to cut their losses. They had been holding off for a while, to see if the Neocon gamble would pay off, but now they're calling time on the project. They'd already moved all their production to Asia in the 90's anyway.
Now, it may seem like the end of the US Empire will be a good thing, and in some ways it might be. But on the whole, we should be asking ourselves: what is replacing it?
Musk and Trump (that is to say, the massive concentrations of power within the shadow banking system that they represent) are indeed attacking the Deep State. That's because the Deep State IS the state. Democracy, elections, law, your precious fucking constitution and all that other fluff: just theatre, designed to distract you from the movement of power.
We're living through the end of the Era of Nation States, transitioning into a technofeudal Corporate Era. Meanwhile, the populace are either politically disengaged or obsessing over culture war bullshit.
The working class and the middle class are being set up to fight each other in some kinda woke/antiwoke fake civil war, leaving our real antagonists to carve up the corpse of empire before our eyes. Every public thing will be made private - the Final Enclosure.
It's all being broken up into a patchwork of corporate fiefdoms, real and virtual. SEZ's, FTZ's, freeports, etc - the whole world becomes the third world. North America and Europe will be ground down until they become the new pool of two-dollar-a-day workers, "worry free" serfs.
Remember, after the Empire is gone, we'll still be living in a world run by oligarchs. Don't pay attention to what they say, watch what they do.
For example, Trump says a bunch of outrageous shit about Gaza and and people lose their minds because they're taking it literally. The underlying message was to the Gulf oligarchs - you're gonna have to foot the bill here, but on the other hand, we're wrapping up Zionism in favour of more normal real estate deals.
Another example, Trump "spanks" Zelensky and large numbers of citizens fall over themselves, either in self-righteous pride or shocked indignation. What ludicrous kayfabe theatre! Stop identifying with your masters, we are cattle to them.
The Ukraine War was an invasion staged by Western oligarchs in a desperate attempt to crush the Russian economy and regain the kind of access they had in the 90's. They failed. Although Trump facilitated the invasion enthusiastically in his first term, he's now signalling the Russian oligarchs that not only are they dumping Ukraine, they're dumping NATO. Again, let's make a real estate deal.
The message we peasants can take from all this is simple: the world will not be going back to the way it was before. Stop hoping that national governments will be any sort of vehicle for our class aspirations. Local direct action is more likely to yield results.
Coming from a systems analyst like yourself, that's no idle compliment, so thanks. I do read a lot of your comments too, but my response to them is generally too complex for me to develop a reply before the whole conversation moves on. Short attention span internet!
While we wouldn't agree on every detail, I'd say there's a large common ground between us. Still, you manage to get my mental gears whirring, seeing things from new angles.
»”Still, you manage to get my mental gears whirring, seeing things from new angles.”
Thank you for the compliment. I enjoy discussions that lead me to think deeper (and sometimes examine my own biases, etc. - but it has to be in good faith and done in an environment of intellectual honesty/integrity).
Sure, for what it's worth, propagate away! No attribution needed - once an idea's in your head, it's yours too, with the added advantage that you'll probably mutate it a little. Intellectual property is anti-life.
"they're dumping NATO." Oh, if in the very unlikely event NATO was attacked they'd respond together. It should go back to being a harmless defensive alliance instead of a world domination tool.
Wow, your calling to my mind something Arundhati Roy once said:
"You know, I have stopped being able to think of things like Americans and Indians and Chinese and Africans. Because what has happened is that the elites of these countries, and the corporations that support their wealth, have seceded into outer space. They live somewhere in the sky, and they are their own country."
I think you're wrong. The deep state isn't the State, which may well have some very good roles to play in environmental protection etc, that is why Trump and Musk are attacking it.
The deep state is of course the money, BlackRock and Blackstone who own everything and call the shots. Trump and Musk themselves billionaires who love free markets without regulation on employee, animal or environmental rights are just doing what their little club need to make even more money. You are right 'nation's will be meaningless. Just areas controlled by BlackRock. Only China and Russia have the power to resist. Trump is working on Russia.
This is an important message. One phenomenon to be cautious of is parts of the far right preying upon the genocide in Palestine as a lever for some authoritarian right wing anti-semitic concoction, while strategically playing down or hiding their own hate for Arabs and Muslims. We need to be careful with our alliances and not join arms on instinct and indiscriminately with just anyone that talks about "zionist conspiracies".
Your very concise argument is also a great explanation for the irrational animosity in the USA toward Cuba. It's not a threat, and the issue isn't ideology: it's defiance.
Cuba has health care for the masses...with NO thanks to the evil the US perpetrates on them and the rest of the world....
Happy to know that we have friends of Cuba here. The propaganda against Cuba was mainly to keep her achievements a secret from the rest of the "third world". The US empire feared the domino effect.
Same is true for Venezuela. Under Hugo Chavez, RIP, Venezuela was setting a new course for countries to move out of the US orbit. We see what's happened. Hugo dead, and Maduro vilified as a dictator, even though he was elected by a large percentage of the electorate.
So very true, Joy in HK. USA keeps destabilising Venezuela, funding an extreme right-wing opposition. Not only that the country's assets are frozen, and it is subjected to debilitating sanctions.
When life becomes harsh under these circumstances, and people try to earn a living coming over to the US, they are vilified and ostracised without any reference to the "why" they were forced to come out in the first place.
Hi WITBD
According to international polls, Cuba is far ahead of Amerikkka in both healthcare and education.
I hope like hell that Amerikkka does NOT normalize relations with Cuba: it would undoubtedly destroy their unique culture. Hubs and I are huge fans of old muscle cars (we’re in the process of restoring a ‘68 Camaro) and hope to visit Cuba one day…departing from nearby Canada, of course!
The Miami Cubans play a similar role to the post-1945 Ukrainian disapora in Canada.
My bosses wife is from Brazil. They go atleast once a year to get all their exams, tests, scans, etc because they have better healthcare and it's universal so you could have mammo, colon, heart, prostate, etc etc etc exams and maybe have to pay $40.
And it's relatively easy to get a visa for Brazil that is good for TEN years!
I, and others, would rather "a lot of disappointments and losses" than become like the corrupt and cruel people who are governing us. They have made it so that you have to have about half a million dollars to even run for a potential leadership position, i.e. they have made it so that only rich, most likely corrupt people can run. I have been told that billionaires are just people too when I say shit about them. I am not so sure that is really true.
Are sociopaths (billionaires) actually "people"? That's a debate I've had with myself for years now. If they have zero empathy and no compassion for human beings, maybe they're just cactuses?
Cactuses don’t deserve that. They have a lovely niche in their ecosystem.
They do. I'm not sure why I used that term to describe sociopaths. Maybe "poison ivy" works better?
OH. My cactuses have BIG hearts and very prickly!
Oh, they're humans, all right.
Just pricks, through and through, right?
They are human, but sociopaths have machine-like thinking. And it's billionaires and corporations which run the world--corporations are certainly machines. So they are people, but not "just people" in the sense of being just like everyone else.
they have chosen not to be people, imo.
...nah. they ain't people...haha (isn't)...
There is debate that the ruling cult are hybrids from the Anunnaki - a non human force who feed off our “loosh”. Meaning our pain & suffering.
“…The rich are different, because when you have that much money, then human beings become disposable. Even friends and family become disposable and are replaced. And when the rich take absolute power, then the citizens become disposable, which is in essence what’s happened. There is a very callous indifference.”
- Chris Hedges
December 5th, 2013
Theirs is also the old Roman-era quote: Power corrupts. Absolute Power corrupts absolutely.
This is not a case of breed or nature. It’s a case of extreme wealth nurturing malformed people.
As long as we acknowledge that rich people in the USA control the military and kill others, and control the economy to ensure there are enough uneducated poor people willing to join the military and kill others. The “circumstances” are engineered.
Wait ‘til you see how manipulative and adaptive the species from the stars in the sky can be. Dr David Jacobs or the late Budd Hopkins can tell you!
The flip side of overrating ourselves is that we at least can imagine a template to better ourselves.
And at least we are not “overrated” in our capacity, vulnerabilities and all, for moral understanding and contemplation of grace, virtue, beauty, justice, and a sense of our common humanity. There are some things going for us.
People certainly can be and are being victimised by what is not understood or known. My life is full of wish I had knowns. So we keep trying to understand.
Keep going. What a wonderful comment. Learn/learn/learn.
Robert Jon Linder.
There still is a 'common humanity.' I believe this.
Understanding 'humanity' is a goal worth pursuing BUT how does one navigate this 'pursuing?'
Education. Is of premier importance here. These poor teachers in the US/and other countries. They have curriculum (since Reagan if my memory of US education serves me well.)
Can you ask a question in school? IF you ask a question (as my daughter did in the USA School district) she was ignored. She came home crying.
Testing...testing came to the fore/ teachers had NO time to teach and answer questions.
I know many fantastic teachers in the USA who decided NOT to 'test' their students. They were thrown out.
Kids NEED to explore their own ideas BUT in the face of indoctrination they cannot do this.
When the Mainstream Media does NOT report truth....where are these kids going to go for answers?
I have stated my opinion with regard to MSM. SHUT THEM DOWN but you don't do this?
PROTEST outside MSM. NOT in the streets BUT outside MSM offices. These people are telling you lies every single day. and they are complicit!
When the Palestinian people are 'wiped off the face of the earth....you go to MSM offices/haul them out and ask them questions.
Why did you do this?
Why did you continue to lie?
Were you helping your Country etc etc etc
I meant it simply as I said it…we have a capacity to sense our common humanity. That is, we correctly conclude (and intuit?) a shared moral universe and a shared “universality” or “sympathy” of experiences.
And it is precisely that “spectrum” which makes meaning and depth of moral process. I never even implied that humanity “were something that is only good.” That’s neither “difficult to understand” nor is it “even more difficult to accept.” Understanding is essentially acceptance anyway.
Humans being overrated kinda reminds me of the joke about someone describing their brain as their favorite organ, but then wondering, but look what’s telling me this!
But anyway, so good of you to set me straight.
Just organisms with a human genome whose brains have suffered a diminution or loss of the feedback regulation that characterizes all well-functioning biological systems. So if, indeed they are "just people too", they are biologically dysfunctional and should be approached with extreme skepticism as one would anything dysfunctional, like an explosive on the thermodynamic edge of ignition.
Come on now, my friend. When you're right, you're a marvel. But I see this as a bit of misreading at best, a bit contrived, at worst. (Or perhaps a bit of devil's advocacy, which is cool, but I'm having a terrible day, so forgive me if I sound a tad ornery.)
I'm talking strictly about cybernetics , which, as you know, applies across ALL biological systems -- in this case, at the neuronal pathway level (pharmacological modulation if you will, something that the endocannabinoid system does in mediating retrograde modulation of synaptic strengths in most major pathways). My brain, those of folks I understand and respect contain sufficient feedback regulation that "recognition dawns" when the toes of others are being stomped upon or when what you (correctly) identify as the nonsense above flies at them from a diseased culture. i.e., there is recognition that there is indeed an illness in the culture into which their sense of rationality, empathy, and justice don't fit. So they/we reject it. If the bulk of humanity choose to ignore that feedback and instead swim in the shit, that's a commentary on the culture that our socioeconomic systems have produced, but it does not negate that the cybernetic aspects are in place biologically. Rather, if anything, it emphasizes the choice that these scumbags make to ignore the basic biology that properly modulates the behavior of every other organism on the planet.
Then, as with any learned response, the ignoring changes their neuropharmacology, and the sick shithead response becomes"wired-in"; they are who they are and have unconsciously learned it as their "normalcy".
If we then want to say that Homo sucks, that Homo is a bloody failure and the planet would be better off without us, you'll surely get no argument from me.
Hey man, I have no energy or time to make a detailed reply because as I alluded to yesterday, I'm dealing with real life in a crushing situation. So I'll just agree with one aspect. Modern psychiatry contains a lot of crap as argued by psychiatrist Bruce Levine in "A Profession Without Reason". A lot more to say but I'm under the gun; another metaphor. Have a nicer day than me.
Hey Robert,
I have a few moments and responding to you may remove my mind from its currently preoccupying BS .
First, Thomas Insel is quoted in the intro to Levine’s book, and I agree he’s a good source. Another point of agreement there — and here — is the entire free-form tossing about of psycho-/sociopath that regularly occurs on these threads, with precious little understanding of what that entails at the brain level, emphasized by the recent findings of how poorly “depressive disorders” are understood in the emphasis on quantities/durations of neurotransmitter in synapses, be it serotonin, norepi or whatever. One reason is that researchers are so trained at money grubbing that the following sentence or a variant is almost certain to appear near the end of a publication of even a fairly minor discovery: “It is hoped that these results can lead to the discovery of new drugs that may be able to blah blah blah” . Always the pitch to external modulation.
Meanwhile in referencing cybernetics, I deeply apologize to anyone like yourself who is astute enough to see it as overly mechanistic. I’ve been railing against mechanistic views of the brain for 50 years, and it was only meant to refer to as yet undiscovered feedbacks that I believe — like the endocannabinoid system — exist in the brain. Sophisticated modulatory systems that can act to trim the activity of what are commonly pegged (perhaps misleadingly) as major neuropharmacologic systems (dopaminergic, noradrenergic, GABAergic etc.). They’re major because they’re more obvious, easier to study. Have you seen much by Times science writers about the endocannabinoid system’s retrograde modulation of synapses? Me neither. Anything on that topic is either about CBD’s possibilities (mostly economic), clinical/cosmetic applications or whatever, or THC’s addictive potential. Heaven forbid, anything positive should be written in popular media about the system’s potential for value in neural dynamics. Meanwhile, external activation of that system is the only thing that control the pain and spasticity from my 25 y-o brain damage without the brutal side-effects of typical Pharma drugs. I am very much my own physician (with a bit of assistance from my ex-students who are or were practicing pharmacists).
But there’s is so little understanding of how neural systems, known and undiscovered, pharmacologically cross-modulate (what I should’ve said instead of cybernetics, but too many words); and I believe there’s much potential there for how socially aberrant (destructive) behaviors come about or are self-regulated so they don’t come about. And there are hints at additional modulatory systems — hints like the presence of vanilloid receptors in the brain (why a peripheral sensory neuron receptor for noxious chemical stimuli also exists in the CNS). So in my struggle for a word, “cybernetics” seemed right for non–life scientists, but to aficionados like yourself, it does indeed draw forth the mechanistic objections and rightly so! I hate with a passion any analogies that liken the brain to a machine. Okay, the heart is genuinely a blood pump. BUT, then when good physiology students delve into its self-pacing by a cluster of cells with sodium leak channels, the astute student realizes: “hey even this muscular pump kicks the ass of most machines I know about!”
Bottom line: when you write, “the human brain is simply too complex”, you ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. I’m convinced that there are yet several more modulatory systems to be discovered at the neuronal pathway level. Then to integrate all that into understanding it as a systemic whole will be super challenging. And might only be possible if many (or all) of the biases about depression, psychoses etc. are first discarded. I’m not optimistic about that. But . . . it’s none of my business; I surely won’t still be here.
On that note, duty calls. Gotta go. Great stuff, no matter how you twist it.
Thanks for the great links, including to the old hiphop video; it cleared my head.
One becomes a billionaire by being fixated on accumulating (not "earning") money to the exclusion of so much that enriches life. Psychopaths seem to be drawn to that existence, have you noticed?
Truer words never spoken.
And it's that way everywhere in the west.
Look what happened to Jeremy Corbyn.
And here in Canada, I've seen people who I'd love to vote for not allowed to run both federally and provincially for different parties.
Moving to the right is not the way to go. Keep throwing sand in the gears, folks.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
This explains why the two factions of the duopoly are equally despicable.
You say "duopoly." I say, "Uniparty." Is there a difference?
I don't think so. They pretty much mean the same thing in the US. The Uniparty is a monopoly of the two major political party (a duo or two-sided monopoly).
Precisely. Move "off the grid." And off the grid. Anarchy is not chaos.
Anarchy is definitely not chaos. Read Kropotkin, Subcomandante Marcos, Noam Chomsky, Proudhon, Emma Goldman. Check out Peter Gelderloos' books (he is also on substack). There are many more. The talk is all about creating equality, justice and freedom.
Fabulous...any sistren mentioning Chomski et al. is my kind of gal! Bravo.
Politics is mind control. Both sides, all "factions" are tavistock puppets, and until
Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulate you will remain a pawn in someone else's game -Evita Ochel
Divide and Conquer
The media - both news and entertainment - have now politicized nearly everything in our society as an extremely powerful mechanism of control.
Most people will not act to secure their future, so long as they feel they have an advocate fighting for them in the public or political arenas. This is why Republican vs Democrat equals divide and conquer (we fight amongst ourselves while they decimate our support systems and establish totalitarian control). The human mind is binary. Our thought process can often be boiled down into terms (often ultimatums) of – this or that – and our adversaries understand - very well - the art of this war.
(Instead of you taking control of the system or working to prepare for the worst (growing a garden, digging a well, strengthening your community, gathering supplies, and becoming resilient) you hold out hope for a politician to sweep in and solve your problems for you. There is only one place this lack of action can take us. Power corrupts and Washington DC is as corrupt as they come.)
They know that politicization (pitting us at each other throats regardless of relationship status - neighbor, co-worker, friend, family) is so effective at manipulating us because most emotionally connect their personal belief system to the belief system of their political party, and so then any attack on their party – legitimate or otherwise – is interpreted by their brain as an attack on themselves. Reason and logic then jump out the nearest window as raw emotion takes the helm, thus making them even more susceptible to the predatory controlling influences.
These are extremely damaging and misfortunate exploits of human nature. Worse, these exploits are as easy to activate as flipping a light switch for the majority of the population - and they are currently being employed to their maximum effect.
Excerpt from: https://tritorch.com/folly
The reason we are in this mess running headlong into tyranny is because the majority of people refuse to believe that the controllers would ever do this to us. These eternal optimists appear to be blind to this most fundamental construct of human nature: that power attracts and then corrupts nearly everyone who wields it—and the globalists - those obscure puppetmaster billionaires you never read about in Forbes and who've spent decades away from the disinfectant properties of sunlight - have indeed become quite corrupted.
I’ve tried and failed countless times to open their eyes to the truth of the situation – that the elites are evil incarnate, and that they want most of us dead, and that they want to enslave the rest of us.
And the stunning part about their blindness is that none of this is new: the psychopaths often rise to the top of every power structure over time as the bad drives out the good and as such tyranny has taken control of nations many many times throughout history. This time is no different, and the freedom we take for granted has actually been an aberration from the historical norm.
If people still cannot see this given how obvious what is occurring has become, then I do not see how we have any hope of turning the tide.
The normies will just keep on complying and believing what’s being done to them is for the greater good while they drag themselves and the rest of us into totalitarianism.
Ten upvotes for something you only briefly alluded to--key to avoiding getting sucked into the Red Team Versus Blue Team game is to establish yourself on some land, preferably in a community, where you can live off-grid, grow at least some of your own food, organize for local resilience, boycott the destructive corporations, thus simultaneously increasing your own self-sufficiency, withdrawing your support for the enemy and creating the nucleus for a local alternative.
Now you’re talking!!
The only winning move is not to play their sick game. They thrive on our energy and the fear they stir in us. The one thing these emotional vampires hate the most is for their manipulation and terrorism to get ignored. Cut down your TV & internet usage by 97%, go local, and all of their terror goes away meanwhile we become stronger as they flail around in angst. Here’s how:
Civilization, goes and old maxim, is never more than three meals away from barbarism—once the food deliveries stop, so does law and order. Therefore, the baseline of preparedness is as follows:
Put all your support behind your local farmers, then become your own. A garden in every lawn should be standard. You can no longer trust anything from a corporation, so cutting out reliance on a retailer is a good place to start thinking about your resiliency. ‘Incorporated’ City water isn’t viable either for its quality or reliability, so wells must be dug (there is no resource more important in your life than clean water, hands down).
Beyond that, begin ending your dependence on their enslavement protocol Federal Notes by creating local currencies and discovering the art of bartering, start stitching together webs of alliances with your neighbors for resiliency, defense, and resource sharing (they might grow what you do not and vice versa)—put the “common unity” back in community, and get control of those town councils and school boards (the one place we still hold all of the cards) and get your kids out of them. Finally: stop eating, listening to, and watching things that are bad for your mind, body, and spirit, and, if so inclined, spend a good chunk of your time on your knees each day.
All of the above is a recipe for success. Let's get to work building a future worth living in, together, because if we do not, Harari & Co will ensure we will not have one.
Excerpt from and more on this here: https://tritorch.substack.com/p/united-we-stand-divided-we-fall
This is why your idea/plan would backfire in spectacular fashion if attempted at large scale ->
>>"Put all your support behind your local farmers, then become your own. A garden in every lawn should be standard."
(1) There isn't enough arable land on planet earth for EVERYONE to have a lawn (affording such land is another question)
(2) If EVERYONE tried to become their own farmer, we would head back to the hunter-gatherer days. Why? Because if everyone is spending so much time/energy/resources doing the same thing, who is going to do all the other important things that need doing to keep civilization going?
(3) Your idea of 'EVERYONE' being their own farmer is a humongous wastage of resources and completely impractical. Agriculture (and farming) benefits from economies of scale, not individual farmers/plots of land doing their own thing. The principle is the same as what applies during the industrial revolution. Feeding 8+ billion people on the planet requires advanced agricultural technoligies and methods (one option being vertical farming, etc.). Such things CANNOT be implemented if EVERYONE becomes their OWN farmer (as you suggest).
(4) I could go on with many more reasons why your line of thinking doesn't work in the real world, but I'm hoping you get the gist from the above 3 points.
Important problems to solve -> world hunger and poverty.
To solve this, huge economies of scale are needed, along with efficient distribution channels. This requires organization and cooperation - and NOT "everyone being their own farmer and doing things locally".
Infact, the opposite of LOCAL is needed - especially in areas where it is not possible to farm/practice agriculture/etc. due to geography/weather/water availablity/land conditions/etc.
I’ve been down this road over and over and over again.
Having a small garden - everyone that can growing something - is a path to barter and resilience.
Going local = taking the country back in a groundswell.
These ideas are the result of countless hours discussing and analyzing the situation. I have been at this for a very very long time.
I understand that you have had these arguments before.
But all the questions are still unanswered. i.e. resource utilization, efficiency, physical geography, land ownership, personal skill (not everyone can be a productive farmer), personal agency, and so many more...
I don't doubt your intention - in fact, I agree with your intention. My argument is that your approach for achieving what you want is misguided due to real-world undeniable realities.
>>"Having a small garden - everyone that can growing something"
For example, I hate anything to do with gardening/farming/etc. I prefer using my mental acuities rather than my physical body. I prefer spending my time reading, writing, software and computers (my official profession), and many other things. There are people more qualified than me that can do farming better than me. It makes no sense to give up all my skills (and the various ways I can help others with my existing skills) to pickup farming...
Ya...we're toast. Humans...well, maggots for sure, are intellectually...challenged...lobotomized? Alien brain [sic] takeover?
The choice is yours.
Keep falling for their divide and conquer overtures, yep.
Don't. Nope.
....division already there without my help...plus I WANT to be "divided" from "them"...don't care to be anywhere in the vicinity of fascists...NO NONE common ground there...
The division is between real reality vs their "reelity" nonsense. Meaning those of us they are trying to deceive into hating one another.
Yes, I agree, we are and need to be divided with those in control. Never attempt to find common ground with the devil. We can only lose.
To further that thought, chaos is not randomness or disorder. It's the swirling interplay between order and disorder where evolution takes place. The mess is where the life gets in.
Actually, I meant to imply that I wouldn't mind if anarchy _were_ chaos. My motto would be "comfortable with chaos" rather than "order from chaos". I view chaos as the middle ground where appropriate balance can be found, and tend to resist pushing things toward an unnecessary degree of order. So if we're invoking ancient maxims, I'll pick "Μηδὲν ἄγαν" - nothing to excess.
Read a bit more about anarchy. You might be surprised to realize that it does not mean disorder, chaos, tyranny or lawlessness. It is basically about reversing the power pyramid.
Thank you. Precisely.
Unions helped push america as left as it could go until the 1950s mccarthy/roy cohn backlash came. Unions have been destroyed in America in the last 50 years. Unions strongly supported the american Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Without Unions to educate them, the american working class just goes with whoever hates non whites the most (offer not valid for israel).
The real shit storm started with the similarly lobotomized moron Reagan...what a dopshit joke...the right is the victor...kill education, infiltrate school boards, kill unions...RESULT: The present insanity, evil, stupidity...
Whatistobedone,
Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK started the neoliberal capitalist backlash and the world is still experiencing its blowback.
That's DIPSHIT to be clear...
"Public discontent is being corralled toward establishment-friendly political structures so that it doesn’t head anywhere that can threaten the mechanics of the empire, while authentic opposition to capitalism, militarism and empire building is viciously subverted by any means necessary."
This. We're starting to see this here in recent "protests" (I think they're staged) that have taken over where we used to stand and protest against the genocide in Gaza. They're protesting everything "Orange Man Bad" but not a word about stopping the war in Ukraine or the genocide in Palestine. The public's discontent is being corralled toward things of little consequence so the killing and warmongering can continue unabated. Soon the public won't even remember there is a genocide going on in Gaza and they'll be cheering for the war in Ukraine to continue.
Rah! Rah! Rah! Keep men out of women’s sports!
It's a ridiculous and discriminatory tactic to take to distract the public from what's really going on in the world.
All of the ‘culture war’ narrative is manufactured nonsense. And it’s very effective. I get to hear all about it when I visit my parents and in-laws.
One of Caitlin's most cogent and focused political summaries, for which much thanks! In addition to her examples, let's consider the administrations of Clinton and Obama. Clinton grossly furthered deregulation, financialization and cutbacks to the social safety net. Obama let the endless wars go on endlessly, bailed out banks and auto companies rather than homeowners, and never pursued punishment for the banksters behind the Great Recession who survived and came back as rapacious as ever. Hardly surprising then that the Democrats have lost the working classes as well as educated dissenters.
One big party...corporate whores all...
Right on Caitlin. Fight the machine.
Authenticity. Such a lovely idea. Thank you. When it actually happens, it's a thrill. But the corporate-government-media fused monster (fascism) must be assumed to be inauthentic, which feels soul-deadening.
...not just "feels"...but IS...
SOUL DEADENING
There us however one large and widely distributed patriarchal religion that has been quite effective in triangulating parties for dramatic hysterical effect using our US electoral system to their advantage ever since the Cold War witch hunting days from war to covert war to war lies all over again. Everyone suspects something but get it all wrong. They now seem to own our Supreme Court.
Sorry Charles but this smells like exactly the type of political dead-ends that the above article cautions against. Blaming "the jews" for everything that is wrong is an extremely simplistic reflex (because I assume you weren't referring to the patriarchal religion that legitimized the colonization and genocide of the American continents and their inhabitants?). Is there an over-representation of zionist jews in the ruling elite? Absolutely. Are they alone up there? Absolutely not. Does the zionist lobby heavily influence or even direct U.S. Middle East policies? Absolutely. Do they own and run "everything"? Obviously not. Does it boil down to Judaism as a religion or the Jewish ethnicity? Not any more than European destruction of the planet boils down to Christianity and whiteness.
Sure, religion always ends up being wrapped up and exploited to different ends. As does ethnicity. But this is politics. And it's not simple.
It's not that people "suspect something" but get this part wrong. They suspect something but don't jump on overly simplistic and destructive conclusions and solutions that are historically associated with fascism and totalitarianism. In fact, zionism is another version of the same family of ideologies. They all get along very well, they all serve the capital rather than the people and we should be very cautious of falling into their traps.
Historically people that vent these ideas don't only detest Jews, but also left-wingers and socialists of all kinds. After you've pointed out who is to blame, I would be curious to hear what type of society you envision for the future.
I certainly was referring to a religion the Romans used for defamation of the people that were resisting their occupation. They became a transnational empire based on Roman and Viking warrior culture of looting and settlement of continents and the source is the history of antisemitism continuing to disrupt world culture. The use of defamation of character is now a standard use in defaming leaders to promote wars based on lies
All of western history has been dominated by their cultural of master male cardinal rules.
...not "seem" but are...SCOTUS (except for 3 ladies) is illegitimate...corrupt, grifters, liars, sexual predators...and their very own evangelical handmaid...losers all (but 3) BIGLY...
They own everything of influence.
Musk and Trump are just errand boys for a factional shift within the sprawling power structure of the crumbling Empire. For the last 25 years or so, the small but rabid faction we've been calling the Neocons had seized the driver's seat. These are the oligarchs who, perhaps for reasons of capital allocation or perhaps just plain old nostalgia and stubbornness, were attached to the idea of Western Hegemony. Their primary strategy has been a vast game of geopolitical chicken: capitulate to us or we blow up the World.
By preparing alternatives to the US dollar, the non-Western oligarchs called the Neocons' bluff. This has resulted in the much larger group of factions within the Western power structure, let's call them the A-national oligarchs, to decide to cut their losses. They had been holding off for a while, to see if the Neocon gamble would pay off, but now they're calling time on the project. They'd already moved all their production to Asia in the 90's anyway.
Now, it may seem like the end of the US Empire will be a good thing, and in some ways it might be. But on the whole, we should be asking ourselves: what is replacing it?
Musk and Trump (that is to say, the massive concentrations of power within the shadow banking system that they represent) are indeed attacking the Deep State. That's because the Deep State IS the state. Democracy, elections, law, your precious fucking constitution and all that other fluff: just theatre, designed to distract you from the movement of power.
We're living through the end of the Era of Nation States, transitioning into a technofeudal Corporate Era. Meanwhile, the populace are either politically disengaged or obsessing over culture war bullshit.
The working class and the middle class are being set up to fight each other in some kinda woke/antiwoke fake civil war, leaving our real antagonists to carve up the corpse of empire before our eyes. Every public thing will be made private - the Final Enclosure.
It's all being broken up into a patchwork of corporate fiefdoms, real and virtual. SEZ's, FTZ's, freeports, etc - the whole world becomes the third world. North America and Europe will be ground down until they become the new pool of two-dollar-a-day workers, "worry free" serfs.
Remember, after the Empire is gone, we'll still be living in a world run by oligarchs. Don't pay attention to what they say, watch what they do.
For example, Trump says a bunch of outrageous shit about Gaza and and people lose their minds because they're taking it literally. The underlying message was to the Gulf oligarchs - you're gonna have to foot the bill here, but on the other hand, we're wrapping up Zionism in favour of more normal real estate deals.
Another example, Trump "spanks" Zelensky and large numbers of citizens fall over themselves, either in self-righteous pride or shocked indignation. What ludicrous kayfabe theatre! Stop identifying with your masters, we are cattle to them.
The Ukraine War was an invasion staged by Western oligarchs in a desperate attempt to crush the Russian economy and regain the kind of access they had in the 90's. They failed. Although Trump facilitated the invasion enthusiastically in his first term, he's now signalling the Russian oligarchs that not only are they dumping Ukraine, they're dumping NATO. Again, let's make a real estate deal.
The message we peasants can take from all this is simple: the world will not be going back to the way it was before. Stop hoping that national governments will be any sort of vehicle for our class aspirations. Local direct action is more likely to yield results.
Well said and analyzed - thank you!
Coming from a systems analyst like yourself, that's no idle compliment, so thanks. I do read a lot of your comments too, but my response to them is generally too complex for me to develop a reply before the whole conversation moves on. Short attention span internet!
>>"but my response to them is generally too complex for me to develop a reply before the whole conversation moves on."
That's my loss, as I would love to receive feedback and hear what you have to say.
While we wouldn't agree on every detail, I'd say there's a large common ground between us. Still, you manage to get my mental gears whirring, seeing things from new angles.
»”Still, you manage to get my mental gears whirring, seeing things from new angles.”
Thank you for the compliment. I enjoy discussions that lead me to think deeper (and sometimes examine my own biases, etc. - but it has to be in good faith and done in an environment of intellectual honesty/integrity).
May I quote you everywhere, with or without attribution?
Sure, for what it's worth, propagate away! No attribution needed - once an idea's in your head, it's yours too, with the added advantage that you'll probably mutate it a little. Intellectual property is anti-life.
"they're dumping NATO." Oh, if in the very unlikely event NATO was attacked they'd respond together. It should go back to being a harmless defensive alliance instead of a world domination tool.
Wow, your calling to my mind something Arundhati Roy once said:
"You know, I have stopped being able to think of things like Americans and Indians and Chinese and Africans. Because what has happened is that the elites of these countries, and the corporations that support their wealth, have seceded into outer space. They live somewhere in the sky, and they are their own country."
D'oh, I hit "your" instead of "you're" on the autoselect - that'll teach me for texting as I fall asleep. Oh well, at leased now yule no eyes know AI.
I think you're wrong. The deep state isn't the State, which may well have some very good roles to play in environmental protection etc, that is why Trump and Musk are attacking it.
The deep state is of course the money, BlackRock and Blackstone who own everything and call the shots. Trump and Musk themselves billionaires who love free markets without regulation on employee, animal or environmental rights are just doing what their little club need to make even more money. You are right 'nation's will be meaningless. Just areas controlled by BlackRock. Only China and Russia have the power to resist. Trump is working on Russia.
Thank You Caitlin
This is an important message. One phenomenon to be cautious of is parts of the far right preying upon the genocide in Palestine as a lever for some authoritarian right wing anti-semitic concoction, while strategically playing down or hiding their own hate for Arabs and Muslims. We need to be careful with our alliances and not join arms on instinct and indiscriminately with just anyone that talks about "zionist conspiracies".
I’ve noticed this, too. Thanks for saying it.
Opinion is a flitting thing,
But Truth, outlasts the Sun—
If then we cannot own them both—
Possess the oldest one—
.
~ED
....and objective reality, facts don't give a poop what maggots think [sic] or believe...
I believe consciousness is an objective reality, not just subjective.
A great first step toward dissolution of the corrupt power structure is TERM LIMITS IN CONGRESS.
Say it long and loud. No more career politicians!
Yes!!👏👏👏👏 And campaign finance reform! (It is only legalized bribery. No reason for it to be legal!)
I think they're going to do away with politicians altogether. Billionaires like Musk are just going to have direct control.