Everyone understands. We're no longer at the edge of the abyss. We're falling and awaiting impact. The failure of the species to overcome its irrationality and resist the manipulations of violent psychopaths is manifesting, again. Please, please dear people, find your allies and cooperate to best endure.
Dont blame this crock of festering excretement on humanity! A lot of $, applied psychology and military went into misrepresenting the huge resistance movements that tried to stop this at each step of this 'plan' being put into place ... so not 'humanity' but rather a tiny group of amoral, greedy, sadistic people totally devoted to their own ??? and devoid of any inkling of what is for the common good. So no - dont you dare blame this crock of shit on humanity.
I figure about ~33% of Americans, the 'murKKKans, are Nazis in heart [sic] and soul [sic] - albeit they have neither. Hannah Arendt: 6“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
And keep them out of government and from having immense wealth. This Larry Black from the Epstein Files is one more demented pervert in a network of extremely wealthy perverts, sociopaths, and psychopaths.
You know what? I'd bet not...there is research that suggests that psychopathic traits appear more frequently in senior corporate roles than in the general population.
Extreme wralth existed in fuedalism - and I dont think all the landowners were sociopaths and psychopaths. However - in our 21st century - when we have the means and knowhow to ensure all creatures on Earth have lives with dignity ... there is no longer any excuse for us to tolerate the likes of the psychophants around Trump et al. However - after WWII - when thete was the impetus to avoid another 'Great War' we had 'social contracts' of sorts. Now however - there are none in the technocratic capitalist societies - and in places like the USA - it is more like a 'capitalist democracy' where it is 1$=1vote than the liberal democracies where after WWII it was 1 adult citizen 1 vote.
Psychopaths and sociopaths get power because THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT. That's ALL they want. And they want it BAD. The rest of us can't be bothered because we have better things to do. That's the problem in a nutshell. That's why we are ruled by psychopaths.
Early homo sapeins, the first 300,000 yrs were egalitarian, sharing, and non-violent and if someone tried to rise up and dominate, they gave them the silent treatment, a powerful weapon to deter aggression. But with civilization, a set of new institutions replaced the old, tho it dwells in our inherited traits, starting with replacing the commons with property, which created a new world of haves and have nots, thus inequality, thus hierarchy and monarchs, religion to justify, wars to protect the haves and expand their property. This is system which rewards greed and agression and the will to power; to change it, we must dismantle the institutions, redefine property and reclaim the commons, and learn to use the silent treatment to isolate the psychopaths who have been pushed to the top in a world of haves and have nots. But first we must unite and change our institutions, to once again align with our inherited traits of trust, altrusim, and cooperation and to reward compassion and reward empathy, conscience, and the honesty to reveal our true selves.
🌿I feel the pain and exhaustion in what you’re saying, and I agree that despair is exactly what this system feeds on. But I’d gently reframe one thing. This crisis didn’t begin with Trump, or Biden, or even billionaires. Those are symptoms, not the root.
The deeper rupture goes back tens of thousands of years, when humans shifted from relating with the living world to dominating it. When animals were first hunted beyond need, then herded, owned, bred, and turned into property. That moment normalized violence, hierarchy, and the idea that some lives exist to be used by others. From there flowed land theft, patriarchy, slavery, empire, and eventually governments captured by wealth.
What we’re watching now is not just a political failure. It’s the logical endpoint of a domination culture that treats animals, Earth, and ultimately people as expendable resources.
That’s why I don’t believe things are hopeless, because systems built on violence are inherently unstable. They must collapse. And they always do when enough people withdraw their consent.
Real power doesn’t start at the ballot box. It starts at the dinner table, in daily choices, in refusing to participate in normalized harm. Ending the mass exploitation of animals would do more to dismantle militarism, climate collapse, disease, and inequality than any election cycle ever could.
So yes, there are more of us than them. But the shift isn’t about becoming better rulers of the same broken system. It’s about outgrowing it. Choosing compassion over domination. Life over profit. Liberation for all beings, or none.
That’s not naïve hope. That’s historical reality catching up with us.🌱
A bit of an over simplification of our quite varied socio-economic pre-history and history. A great variety of cultures evolved - and died for a variety of reasons. Some were relatively egalitarian some were not. With the invention of money, capital, and book keeping ... 'wealth' got separated from serving a common good.
Unfortunately, Jews were always predominantly ostracised, not allowed to own land like others and therefore forced to "sit on benches" (from which the name Bank) lending out money with interest. Hence the invention of modern banking!
Then the wholesale slaughter of Jews in WWII led to a very vicious 🇮🇱 in response, as we all know.
The sins of stupid racist people are inherited for all humanity to bear.
Unfortunately, I understand that the Homo Sapiens who broke out of Africa were a violent lot, overrunning the much more peaceful Neanderthals in Europe who were not as agile to resist (but whose brains were larger). A genocide ensued. Modern humans do have a small amount of Neanderthal genetics from the encounter, but in the main we retain the genetics for ruthless competition as an option for survival.
The hope is that our brains have evolved sufficiently to not have to rely on our primitive instincts!
I would like it to be a requirement that to hold any public office, for a period of six months, all the applicants assets are frozen. They are thrown out into the street and must survive on the services that are available including public transportation and social services. If they receive personal assistance from friends or family they are permanently disqualified. This would put them in touch with the reality of many while deterring those who apply so they can live like royalty.
That won't fix it, we'd done that and still doing it and it doesn't work, obviously otherwise we wouldn't be where we are now. The thing that makes the conditions IMPOSSIBLE for psychopaths to thrive is to live with freedom of speech. That's all! Free speech is our ticket outta here. But what do freedom seekers do? They censor. So when you do something it means you consent to it. Every freedom lover must strenuously condemn anyone who censors. Period. Then the world will have the conditions that allows good people to thrive, not psychopaths. They hate free speech. They are always on the side of censorship. Identify them, they don't like that. That's why they cannot live without censorship.
I used to love reading dystopian fiction because I thought we weren’t living in one. Now, thanks to social media, we can see with our own eyes that the world is not at all what we were lead to believe. I have always been a left leaning Democrat and an antiziønişt Jew. I’ve never been fond of Republican policies and politicians, but I never in my wildest dreams imagined there were people and governments as evil, sadistic and corrupt as what we are seeing today. I always thought civil and human rights would slowly get better and better, but I no longer can have confidence in our future. What a hellscape we are seeing. Izzræl is trapped in a pathological trauma reaction that is destroying Gåzã, the West Bank and now intentions burning Patagonia, and infiltrating governments all over the world. Our current regime led by a narcissistic madman with a horrifying coalition of malevolent factions riding his coattails, is dismantling our democracy and terrorizing the American people. This whole nightmare scenario is something I never could have imagined or anticipated. I don’t know how we are going to survive and I feel terrible for my 4 young adult children who didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy the era of pleasant and hopeful ignorance we were living in before cell phones could show us all that we were living a lie.
Not totally living a lie - well - maybe for Americans who were ignorant of the bedlam their military and economic policies were inflicting on the world for a century ... in the name of freedom and democracy but really for a mercatile form of capitalism. Yet - if anyone said that to most Americans - their first reaction was how 'anti-American' the person is being. No - anti-imperialist. However - I dont think America has ever been as degenerate, corrupt and rotten as is this Trump administration and all the psychophant billionaires profitting from its brutality.
The tacit support of the US policies and overreach by the West through "ally ships" for their collective benefits is now haunting them. Recall Obama (so did the entire "civilized west") looked the other way for the crimes of Bush & Blair invading Iraq based on lies and then bailed out criminals of the 2008 financial meltdown rather than pushing for accountability.
However, right now, the orange clown felon at the helm is upfront with what US stands for, but when he says what he means, people don't take him seriously.
In a couple of years (if US elections should hold), don't be surprised when the next president, Democrats or Republican, asks you to look forward not accountability. That is the US! I hope I am proven wrong.
Read Howard Zinn’s “Peoples History of the United States” for a better perspective. Genocide, slavery and ruthless exploitation and environmental destruction were the foundations upon which “America” was built.
The period of approximately 1935 through 1970 was an anomaly.
At present I'm reading Ken Foĺlet's "Fall of Giants" set around WWI. Woodrow Wilson did not want America to join that war, yet when they did he wanted to be topdog. He instigated a secret multinational army sent to stop Russia from becoming a Soviet Republic, Wilson wanted it to remain a monarchy, as did UK, France and others. Seems like America has never stopped interfering in other countries in order to change the regime to their liking, and the fools ruling in Western/European countries allow it to continue. Every US president thinks he rules the whole planet and what a rotten job they've made of it to the detriment of their allies as well as their named enemies. Kennedy could have turned America around so, of course, he had to be assassinated as well as, later, his brother, Robert.
I guess, that taste of interfering, and ruining a country's right to rule the people who voted them into government, stayed with each following American president - until the present sick narcissist had his way in bought for him, and now he happily goes about ruining America along with those others he's destroying and no one has the strength to stop him - or are they all hoping for someone else to step up? Guess what, another couple of weeks, if that long, and we might be saying, 'Goodbye planet Earth.'
I would just add that the Dems are just Republican-lite. In their own way, they are just as bad. Worse, in some respects, because they betray peoples' hopes and drive them into the Republican camp.
.
And worst of all in that respect are Bernie and AOC who are the greatest "Hope Traitors" of our time. Bernie is an ardent Zionist and AOC is Zionist-complicit.
.
And AOC just now has been pounding away on the war drums to invade Iran. So, the two of them – Bernie and AOC – are the worst, because of being faux progressives, and misleading people.
.
Oh -- by the way, I've always liked reading dystopian fiction, for the opposite reason that you apparently used to like reading it. I like reading dystopian fiction, because I long ago concluded that we are indeed living in a dystopia and, after being exposed daily to so many lies in mainstream media that purports to be reporting actual facts, I am generally relieved to find myself reading dystopian so-called "fiction" that is the closest thing I know to speaking the truth about our daily lives.
Very interesting AlyxPraeger. Your adult children have come face to face with the brutal reality of now, because sadly an earlier generation thought ignorance was bliss.
Absolutely, it hurts like hell. Some days you wish something, anything, would shut them all down so we can catch our breath, but first - America, it needs to have the present government radically stopped. This going from one murderous group to another and another just to keep Drumpf's dementia-filled brain happy? It has to stop. There must be someone there with guts - but it needs more than just him removed, the whole inept yes-men needed cleaning out.
A whole new type of "not out for themselves only" government needs to be elected by the everyday people, not by billionaires choosing the president, that way lies death and destruction as we are seeing right now. Billionaires don't care because they think their money blocks any problems from coming their way. Time to prove that money doesn't buy as much as they want to believe.
I know someone will naysay what I write, that's your choice, but as long as we keep believing that we have no power nothing will change. Never forget; there are more of us than there are of them. They are the ones who should be afraid because of the way they have treated society, as if we are nothing. We are better than them, with all their money they are still miserable.
Attention, Caitlin! Power thrives on division, fear, discouragement, and resignation. Division stems from competition. Fear stems from a sense of powerlessness regarding the future. Discouragement stems from the disappointment that always follows the deception of illusion. Resignation stems from mental and physical exhaustion. Of course it hurts. But it was all predictable. Also because it has happened many times before. Now the situation is worse than before the First World War and is suspended only because of the existence of nuclear weapons. How many times have you written that we are many and they are very few? Now you understand that it doesn't matter, because the system's "memes" have distorted the minds of many. After all, no change has ever arisen spontaneously from the people. It needs a trigger. To do so, you need holistic information, willpower, and courage. And the conviction that you are not alone. I am here. And power, even the power to change reality, is not measured in quantity. It is measured in quality.
Funny, then, how the French Revolution managed to overthrow their monarchy with no phones, or social media, no television, just enough people sick to the teeth of living in such moral poverty as well as physical poverty because a few people lived it up and cared nothing for the suffering they're greed caused.
I used to call them sociopaths because they hide their true agendas of pure evil destruction and the most inhumane actions towards any living beings but you are correct psychopaths. It's gut wrenching when hearing and watching this behavior every minute of the day!
Nothing is more precious than honesty, which you have offered.....now get out into the street and join the millions whose outrage has turned to action.
Oh it seems from here that you’re still riding the crest! You are far, far from alone. Douglas Rushkoff’s latest Substack titled something like “you’re not crazy” says it well: just trying to explain how this world works makes you sound like a crazed conspiracy theorist. Presumably it’s going to get even more bonkers. Luckily there is also a ton of good developing out there as well. But yeah, those in the seat of centralized power are unfathomable right now. Offering a hug, from another part of the internet.
I think the tempo of chaos is exactly the point. It keeps everyone unbalanced. The first rule in battle is to put your opponent off-balance. This is exactly what the Trump administration is doing. I fear there will be no let-up in this strategy. The more threatened they feel, the more chaos they will create. I, like so many others, feel overwhelmed and can offer no solutions that do not increase the level of chaos. I live in despair.
Hello Rai, I hear you loud and clear! A lot of us can relate to the sense of feeling ungrounded and simply reacting to everything around us. One antidote to despair for me is when I connect with history - the history of others who devoted their lives to the struggle for a better world. When I read the words of Che, or Lenin or Rosa Luxembourg I feel an instant connection to the larger struggle and can sense my place within it.
Thanks, Lizzy. Of course, you are right. Humanity has been here before, countless times. Tyranny has repeatedly been overcome to create a better world (for a time). But I do despair that we, as a species, keep repeating this cycle. Perhaps this is the nature of the human condition, and we are destined to do so forever (or until we destroy the planet). I do agree that we must never stop striving for a better world, and learning from those who walked before us is key to achieving this. But I still feel despair. For the endless suffering imposed by those who act in self-interest rather than collective benefit. At the end of the day, my despair is tempered by hope and a belief that love will prevail over self-interest. We all have a role to play in achieving what John Lennon expressed in the song 'Imagine'. This song remains my anthem as we navigate this current struggle.
I’m not sure we are more divided than ever. In the USA and in the UK we see people protesting who never did before. No doubt there are still differences, but authoritarianism and fascism seem to be uniting more people in opposition to the Empire. The psychopathic oligarchs are very powerful and it may already be too late (given nuclear weapons and climate change), but I think there is a very small glimmer of hope. Hang in there Caitlin, we need your voice.
I feel you about the Zeitgeist. For me it was after COVID when I felt that my ability to map and interpret the world, and idealism, were pretty much shot. Lately it's just constant milieu of bad and I don't even want to look on my phone or read about anything. Anyone with power is psychopathic, cynical, nihilist and normal people who think and feel seem to have no say about the world we live in.
Really reinforces my impression that humanity really is headed for a dark night of the soul which includes not just ecological and systems collapse, but full moral and spiritual reckoning.
🌹There is so much cruelty, and it hurts - because violence has been normalized so deeply we are taught to see it as inevitable, even natural.
But history tells a different story. Large-scale violence did not begin with politics or ideology - it began when humans learned to hunt, then herd, then turn living, feeling beings into property that could be owned, dominated, and killed at will. That logic - domination, extraction, expendability - did not stop with animals. It spread outward into land theft, patriarchy, slavery, empire, and war.
What gives me hope is that for the first time in history, people who see this brutality have a daily, tangible way to withdraw consent from it - from our own plates. Ending animal agritorture and domesecration is not a side issue; it is a direct interruption of the oldest training ground for violence.
A vegan world is not naive - it is evolutionary. It is a world where we stop rehearsing domination three times a day and start modeling the values we claim to want - empathy, justice, restraint, and care.
For anyone wanting to explore this deeper, I recommend An Unnatural Order by Jim Mason and Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson - both trace how systemic violence against humans is inseparable from violence against animals.
The rulers may be psychopaths - but the people still have a choice. And that choice starts closer than we are taught to believe.🌻
"They’ve done such a good job dividing us and conquering us."
They really have. I'm still amazed at how clueless some adults are about what is really happening in the world... They refuse to connect the dots. I guess there's some kind of comfort they get from being in the dark all the time? Personally, I'd be more anxious if I didn't know what was going on. But you're absolutely right, Caitlin--our rulers are psychopaths and their job is to make everything awful for us. All the more reason that we make things "awful" for them instead--GENERAL STRIKE!
It truly is divided. Here in US, on META platform, there’s the anti-🧊platform vs. the anti-illegals, pro 🧊platform, vs it’s all staged, false flag, AI platform. I’m on the, It’s All Wrong AND Violent AND TRAUMATIZING IN OUR FACE PLATFORM. Genocide in Palestine is bad enough, and seeing Americans getting unalived in real time on a daily basis is shocking and utterly disturbing. We walk amongst monsters. We’re saddened, to say the least. And it’s been this way for a while , and there’s no relief coming, in fact it may get worse, but we’ll keep pushing back with the truth to the best of our ability, and take a page from the Palestinian perseverance story and courageously continue on till justice and morality prevail.
Everyone understands. We're no longer at the edge of the abyss. We're falling and awaiting impact. The failure of the species to overcome its irrationality and resist the manipulations of violent psychopaths is manifesting, again. Please, please dear people, find your allies and cooperate to best endure.
Dont blame this crock of festering excretement on humanity! A lot of $, applied psychology and military went into misrepresenting the huge resistance movements that tried to stop this at each step of this 'plan' being put into place ... so not 'humanity' but rather a tiny group of amoral, greedy, sadistic people totally devoted to their own ??? and devoid of any inkling of what is for the common good. So no - dont you dare blame this crock of shit on humanity.
I figure about ~33% of Americans, the 'murKKKans, are Nazis in heart [sic] and soul [sic] - albeit they have neither. Hannah Arendt: 6“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
> — The Origins of Totalitarianism
About 10 percent of humans are psychopaths. We need to establish a method to identify them and provide padded cells.
And keep them out of government and from having immense wealth. This Larry Black from the Epstein Files is one more demented pervert in a network of extremely wealthy perverts, sociopaths, and psychopaths.
Would extreme wealth exist if not for sociopaths and psychopaths?
Who said, “Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime?”
Balzac?
You know what? I'd bet not...there is research that suggests that psychopathic traits appear more frequently in senior corporate roles than in the general population.
Scum floats.
Interesting.
Extreme wralth existed in fuedalism - and I dont think all the landowners were sociopaths and psychopaths. However - in our 21st century - when we have the means and knowhow to ensure all creatures on Earth have lives with dignity ... there is no longer any excuse for us to tolerate the likes of the psychophants around Trump et al. However - after WWII - when thete was the impetus to avoid another 'Great War' we had 'social contracts' of sorts. Now however - there are none in the technocratic capitalist societies - and in places like the USA - it is more like a 'capitalist democracy' where it is 1$=1vote than the liberal democracies where after WWII it was 1 adult citizen 1 vote.
Psychopaths and sociopaths get power because THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT. That's ALL they want. And they want it BAD. The rest of us can't be bothered because we have better things to do. That's the problem in a nutshell. That's why we are ruled by psychopaths.
.
Pretty good, Annie Gottlieb. Pretty darn good!
.
Early homo sapeins, the first 300,000 yrs were egalitarian, sharing, and non-violent and if someone tried to rise up and dominate, they gave them the silent treatment, a powerful weapon to deter aggression. But with civilization, a set of new institutions replaced the old, tho it dwells in our inherited traits, starting with replacing the commons with property, which created a new world of haves and have nots, thus inequality, thus hierarchy and monarchs, religion to justify, wars to protect the haves and expand their property. This is system which rewards greed and agression and the will to power; to change it, we must dismantle the institutions, redefine property and reclaim the commons, and learn to use the silent treatment to isolate the psychopaths who have been pushed to the top in a world of haves and have nots. But first we must unite and change our institutions, to once again align with our inherited traits of trust, altrusim, and cooperation and to reward compassion and reward empathy, conscience, and the honesty to reveal our true selves.
🌿I feel the pain and exhaustion in what you’re saying, and I agree that despair is exactly what this system feeds on. But I’d gently reframe one thing. This crisis didn’t begin with Trump, or Biden, or even billionaires. Those are symptoms, not the root.
The deeper rupture goes back tens of thousands of years, when humans shifted from relating with the living world to dominating it. When animals were first hunted beyond need, then herded, owned, bred, and turned into property. That moment normalized violence, hierarchy, and the idea that some lives exist to be used by others. From there flowed land theft, patriarchy, slavery, empire, and eventually governments captured by wealth.
What we’re watching now is not just a political failure. It’s the logical endpoint of a domination culture that treats animals, Earth, and ultimately people as expendable resources.
That’s why I don’t believe things are hopeless, because systems built on violence are inherently unstable. They must collapse. And they always do when enough people withdraw their consent.
Real power doesn’t start at the ballot box. It starts at the dinner table, in daily choices, in refusing to participate in normalized harm. Ending the mass exploitation of animals would do more to dismantle militarism, climate collapse, disease, and inequality than any election cycle ever could.
So yes, there are more of us than them. But the shift isn’t about becoming better rulers of the same broken system. It’s about outgrowing it. Choosing compassion over domination. Life over profit. Liberation for all beings, or none.
That’s not naïve hope. That’s historical reality catching up with us.🌱
How do you give the silent treatment to a psychopath you’re expected to work with?
Refuse to work with and/or for psychopaths.
Too late.
Yep
A bit of an over simplification of our quite varied socio-economic pre-history and history. A great variety of cultures evolved - and died for a variety of reasons. Some were relatively egalitarian some were not. With the invention of money, capital, and book keeping ... 'wealth' got separated from serving a common good.
Unfortunately, Jews were always predominantly ostracised, not allowed to own land like others and therefore forced to "sit on benches" (from which the name Bank) lending out money with interest. Hence the invention of modern banking!
Then the wholesale slaughter of Jews in WWII led to a very vicious 🇮🇱 in response, as we all know.
The sins of stupid racist people are inherited for all humanity to bear.
According to anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, "if someone tried to rise up and dominate," they killed him.
Unfortunately, I understand that the Homo Sapiens who broke out of Africa were a violent lot, overrunning the much more peaceful Neanderthals in Europe who were not as agile to resist (but whose brains were larger). A genocide ensued. Modern humans do have a small amount of Neanderthal genetics from the encounter, but in the main we retain the genetics for ruthless competition as an option for survival.
The hope is that our brains have evolved sufficiently to not have to rely on our primitive instincts!
I would like it to be a requirement that to hold any public office, for a period of six months, all the applicants assets are frozen. They are thrown out into the street and must survive on the services that are available including public transportation and social services. If they receive personal assistance from friends or family they are permanently disqualified. This would put them in touch with the reality of many while deterring those who apply so they can live like royalty.
.
Fantastic, Mathew! Brilliant idea! It should be implemented tomorrow. If only we could.
.
That won't fix it, we'd done that and still doing it and it doesn't work, obviously otherwise we wouldn't be where we are now. The thing that makes the conditions IMPOSSIBLE for psychopaths to thrive is to live with freedom of speech. That's all! Free speech is our ticket outta here. But what do freedom seekers do? They censor. So when you do something it means you consent to it. Every freedom lover must strenuously condemn anyone who censors. Period. Then the world will have the conditions that allows good people to thrive, not psychopaths. They hate free speech. They are always on the side of censorship. Identify them, they don't like that. That's why they cannot live without censorship.
I used to love reading dystopian fiction because I thought we weren’t living in one. Now, thanks to social media, we can see with our own eyes that the world is not at all what we were lead to believe. I have always been a left leaning Democrat and an antiziønişt Jew. I’ve never been fond of Republican policies and politicians, but I never in my wildest dreams imagined there were people and governments as evil, sadistic and corrupt as what we are seeing today. I always thought civil and human rights would slowly get better and better, but I no longer can have confidence in our future. What a hellscape we are seeing. Izzræl is trapped in a pathological trauma reaction that is destroying Gåzã, the West Bank and now intentions burning Patagonia, and infiltrating governments all over the world. Our current regime led by a narcissistic madman with a horrifying coalition of malevolent factions riding his coattails, is dismantling our democracy and terrorizing the American people. This whole nightmare scenario is something I never could have imagined or anticipated. I don’t know how we are going to survive and I feel terrible for my 4 young adult children who didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy the era of pleasant and hopeful ignorance we were living in before cell phones could show us all that we were living a lie.
Not totally living a lie - well - maybe for Americans who were ignorant of the bedlam their military and economic policies were inflicting on the world for a century ... in the name of freedom and democracy but really for a mercatile form of capitalism. Yet - if anyone said that to most Americans - their first reaction was how 'anti-American' the person is being. No - anti-imperialist. However - I dont think America has ever been as degenerate, corrupt and rotten as is this Trump administration and all the psychophant billionaires profitting from its brutality.
The tacit support of the US policies and overreach by the West through "ally ships" for their collective benefits is now haunting them. Recall Obama (so did the entire "civilized west") looked the other way for the crimes of Bush & Blair invading Iraq based on lies and then bailed out criminals of the 2008 financial meltdown rather than pushing for accountability.
However, right now, the orange clown felon at the helm is upfront with what US stands for, but when he says what he means, people don't take him seriously.
In a couple of years (if US elections should hold), don't be surprised when the next president, Democrats or Republican, asks you to look forward not accountability. That is the US! I hope I am proven wrong.
Read Howard Zinn’s “Peoples History of the United States” for a better perspective. Genocide, slavery and ruthless exploitation and environmental destruction were the foundations upon which “America” was built.
The period of approximately 1935 through 1970 was an anomaly.
At present I'm reading Ken Foĺlet's "Fall of Giants" set around WWI. Woodrow Wilson did not want America to join that war, yet when they did he wanted to be topdog. He instigated a secret multinational army sent to stop Russia from becoming a Soviet Republic, Wilson wanted it to remain a monarchy, as did UK, France and others. Seems like America has never stopped interfering in other countries in order to change the regime to their liking, and the fools ruling in Western/European countries allow it to continue. Every US president thinks he rules the whole planet and what a rotten job they've made of it to the detriment of their allies as well as their named enemies. Kennedy could have turned America around so, of course, he had to be assassinated as well as, later, his brother, Robert.
I guess, that taste of interfering, and ruining a country's right to rule the people who voted them into government, stayed with each following American president - until the present sick narcissist had his way in bought for him, and now he happily goes about ruining America along with those others he's destroying and no one has the strength to stop him - or are they all hoping for someone else to step up? Guess what, another couple of weeks, if that long, and we might be saying, 'Goodbye planet Earth.'
.
Well said, Alyx Praeger, well said.
.
I would just add that the Dems are just Republican-lite. In their own way, they are just as bad. Worse, in some respects, because they betray peoples' hopes and drive them into the Republican camp.
.
And worst of all in that respect are Bernie and AOC who are the greatest "Hope Traitors" of our time. Bernie is an ardent Zionist and AOC is Zionist-complicit.
.
And AOC just now has been pounding away on the war drums to invade Iran. So, the two of them – Bernie and AOC – are the worst, because of being faux progressives, and misleading people.
.
Oh -- by the way, I've always liked reading dystopian fiction, for the opposite reason that you apparently used to like reading it. I like reading dystopian fiction, because I long ago concluded that we are indeed living in a dystopia and, after being exposed daily to so many lies in mainstream media that purports to be reporting actual facts, I am generally relieved to find myself reading dystopian so-called "fiction" that is the closest thing I know to speaking the truth about our daily lives.
.
Nice to have you back, Sean Bodhivajra S.
Very interesting AlyxPraeger. Your adult children have come face to face with the brutal reality of now, because sadly an earlier generation thought ignorance was bliss.
It hurts like hell; I don't know how you keep going. I'm just glad that you do.
Absolutely, it hurts like hell. Some days you wish something, anything, would shut them all down so we can catch our breath, but first - America, it needs to have the present government radically stopped. This going from one murderous group to another and another just to keep Drumpf's dementia-filled brain happy? It has to stop. There must be someone there with guts - but it needs more than just him removed, the whole inept yes-men needed cleaning out.
A whole new type of "not out for themselves only" government needs to be elected by the everyday people, not by billionaires choosing the president, that way lies death and destruction as we are seeing right now. Billionaires don't care because they think their money blocks any problems from coming their way. Time to prove that money doesn't buy as much as they want to believe.
I know someone will naysay what I write, that's your choice, but as long as we keep believing that we have no power nothing will change. Never forget; there are more of us than there are of them. They are the ones who should be afraid because of the way they have treated society, as if we are nothing. We are better than them, with all their money they are still miserable.
...and ain't that the truth. The pursuit of money for its own sake leaves a human being an empty shell, the soul long gone.
It feels like 1984 on steroids. I am finding it difficult to even read about it any more.
Attention, Caitlin! Power thrives on division, fear, discouragement, and resignation. Division stems from competition. Fear stems from a sense of powerlessness regarding the future. Discouragement stems from the disappointment that always follows the deception of illusion. Resignation stems from mental and physical exhaustion. Of course it hurts. But it was all predictable. Also because it has happened many times before. Now the situation is worse than before the First World War and is suspended only because of the existence of nuclear weapons. How many times have you written that we are many and they are very few? Now you understand that it doesn't matter, because the system's "memes" have distorted the minds of many. After all, no change has ever arisen spontaneously from the people. It needs a trigger. To do so, you need holistic information, willpower, and courage. And the conviction that you are not alone. I am here. And power, even the power to change reality, is not measured in quantity. It is measured in quality.
Funny, then, how the French Revolution managed to overthrow their monarchy with no phones, or social media, no television, just enough people sick to the teeth of living in such moral poverty as well as physical poverty because a few people lived it up and cared nothing for the suffering they're greed caused.
I used to call them sociopaths because they hide their true agendas of pure evil destruction and the most inhumane actions towards any living beings but you are correct psychopaths. It's gut wrenching when hearing and watching this behavior every minute of the day!
Nothing is more precious than honesty, which you have offered.....now get out into the street and join the millions whose outrage has turned to action.
Solidarity. It really does hurt bad.
Oh it seems from here that you’re still riding the crest! You are far, far from alone. Douglas Rushkoff’s latest Substack titled something like “you’re not crazy” says it well: just trying to explain how this world works makes you sound like a crazed conspiracy theorist. Presumably it’s going to get even more bonkers. Luckily there is also a ton of good developing out there as well. But yeah, those in the seat of centralized power are unfathomable right now. Offering a hug, from another part of the internet.
I think the tempo of chaos is exactly the point. It keeps everyone unbalanced. The first rule in battle is to put your opponent off-balance. This is exactly what the Trump administration is doing. I fear there will be no let-up in this strategy. The more threatened they feel, the more chaos they will create. I, like so many others, feel overwhelmed and can offer no solutions that do not increase the level of chaos. I live in despair.
Hello Rai, I hear you loud and clear! A lot of us can relate to the sense of feeling ungrounded and simply reacting to everything around us. One antidote to despair for me is when I connect with history - the history of others who devoted their lives to the struggle for a better world. When I read the words of Che, or Lenin or Rosa Luxembourg I feel an instant connection to the larger struggle and can sense my place within it.
Thanks, Lizzy. Of course, you are right. Humanity has been here before, countless times. Tyranny has repeatedly been overcome to create a better world (for a time). But I do despair that we, as a species, keep repeating this cycle. Perhaps this is the nature of the human condition, and we are destined to do so forever (or until we destroy the planet). I do agree that we must never stop striving for a better world, and learning from those who walked before us is key to achieving this. But I still feel despair. For the endless suffering imposed by those who act in self-interest rather than collective benefit. At the end of the day, my despair is tempered by hope and a belief that love will prevail over self-interest. We all have a role to play in achieving what John Lennon expressed in the song 'Imagine'. This song remains my anthem as we navigate this current struggle.
Lizzy Liberty, I am with you in connecting with " the history of others who devoted their lives to the struggle for a better world".
Rosa Luxembourg: Someone famously wrote, " She told the poor the truth, so they did away with her".
I’m not sure we are more divided than ever. In the USA and in the UK we see people protesting who never did before. No doubt there are still differences, but authoritarianism and fascism seem to be uniting more people in opposition to the Empire. The psychopathic oligarchs are very powerful and it may already be too late (given nuclear weapons and climate change), but I think there is a very small glimmer of hope. Hang in there Caitlin, we need your voice.
I feel you about the Zeitgeist. For me it was after COVID when I felt that my ability to map and interpret the world, and idealism, were pretty much shot. Lately it's just constant milieu of bad and I don't even want to look on my phone or read about anything. Anyone with power is psychopathic, cynical, nihilist and normal people who think and feel seem to have no say about the world we live in.
Really reinforces my impression that humanity really is headed for a dark night of the soul which includes not just ecological and systems collapse, but full moral and spiritual reckoning.
🌹There is so much cruelty, and it hurts - because violence has been normalized so deeply we are taught to see it as inevitable, even natural.
But history tells a different story. Large-scale violence did not begin with politics or ideology - it began when humans learned to hunt, then herd, then turn living, feeling beings into property that could be owned, dominated, and killed at will. That logic - domination, extraction, expendability - did not stop with animals. It spread outward into land theft, patriarchy, slavery, empire, and war.
What gives me hope is that for the first time in history, people who see this brutality have a daily, tangible way to withdraw consent from it - from our own plates. Ending animal agritorture and domesecration is not a side issue; it is a direct interruption of the oldest training ground for violence.
A vegan world is not naive - it is evolutionary. It is a world where we stop rehearsing domination three times a day and start modeling the values we claim to want - empathy, justice, restraint, and care.
For anyone wanting to explore this deeper, I recommend An Unnatural Order by Jim Mason and Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson - both trace how systemic violence against humans is inseparable from violence against animals.
The rulers may be psychopaths - but the people still have a choice. And that choice starts closer than we are taught to believe.🌻
"They’ve done such a good job dividing us and conquering us."
They really have. I'm still amazed at how clueless some adults are about what is really happening in the world... They refuse to connect the dots. I guess there's some kind of comfort they get from being in the dark all the time? Personally, I'd be more anxious if I didn't know what was going on. But you're absolutely right, Caitlin--our rulers are psychopaths and their job is to make everything awful for us. All the more reason that we make things "awful" for them instead--GENERAL STRIKE!
It truly is divided. Here in US, on META platform, there’s the anti-🧊platform vs. the anti-illegals, pro 🧊platform, vs it’s all staged, false flag, AI platform. I’m on the, It’s All Wrong AND Violent AND TRAUMATIZING IN OUR FACE PLATFORM. Genocide in Palestine is bad enough, and seeing Americans getting unalived in real time on a daily basis is shocking and utterly disturbing. We walk amongst monsters. We’re saddened, to say the least. And it’s been this way for a while , and there’s no relief coming, in fact it may get worse, but we’ll keep pushing back with the truth to the best of our ability, and take a page from the Palestinian perseverance story and courageously continue on till justice and morality prevail.