Sunday Funny Pages: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
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Got some fun and relatable comic strips for you to share on social media:
Garfield knows what's up:
Marmaduke dropping truth bombs, as usual:
This is pretty insightful. Whoever does the Dilbert comic should consider getting into political commentary:
I'd honestly never noticed Family Circus has such biting social commentary:
Man I forgot how high-brow this comic was:
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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BREAKING: Sources report violent right-wing extremists have seized the US Capitol, established a globe-spanning empire, and murdered millions of people.
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Think tank name translation guide:
Foreign = War
Policy = Crimes
Democracy = Neoliberalism
Strategic = Murderous
International/Global = Imperialist
Relations = Domination
American = Oligarchic
Research = Indoctrination
Institution/Institute/Council/Center/Foundation/House = Propaganda Firm
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Me, an idiot: It's disturbing how government-tied Silicon Valley oligarchs exert so much control over people's access to free speech.
You, a genius: It's not a free speech issue because you can still take your opinions down to Ye Olde Printing Presse and distribute them manually on horseback.
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We haven't talked enough about how the US military not only lied for twenty years about their stated goals in Afghanistan nearly being accomplished, but it turns out they were also lying about doing anything during that time that could possibly have led to their stated goals being accomplished.
Seeing the "Afghan government" just melting under the Taliban after the US pretended to spend twenty years building it up is like paying someone billions of dollars to build a palace and then after twenty years checking it out and realizing the whole thing is a stage play set made of cardboard.
A military which can afford to spend trillions on a twenty-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making horrible people wealthy is a military that needs its budget slashed to ribbons.
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When your elected officials never ask "How do we solve this problem?" but rather "How do we solve this problem without upsetting rich people or warmongers?", most of the problems will necessarily remain unsolved. This is of course entirely by design, because the circumstances which created the problems were set up by and for the rich people and warmongers.
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Anyone who accuses you of working for a foreign government when you criticize US imperialism is accidentally admitting that they cannot imagine any possible scenario under which someone might criticize the worst impulses of the most powerful people on earth without being paid to. They're giving you a very embarrassing insight into the way they think and live. They're telling you that they are unprincipled hacks who never question authority and only speak from within the framework of blind sycophantic loyalty.
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It was a major propaganda victory for imperial narrative managers to convince people that being skeptical of any claim about a foreign government made by the US — no matter how flimsy the evidence — is the same as Holocaust denial.
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The poor have all the responsibility and none of the wealth or power, and for the rich it's the exact opposite: all of the power and wealth but none of the responsibility. Nobody ever tells them "See all that plastic in the ocean? That's your fault. Fix it." They burn the world for fun and profit and face no consequences. They're a bunch of spoiled little boys with flamethrowers.
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If it had just been "Let's end racism" instead of "Let's end racism by supporting horrible corporate warmongers" there'd be a lot less racism today.
Any time I talk about racial justice I get people calling it "identity politics" when it's really not; becoming conscious of racial injustices in our society isn't about promoting any political party or politician, it's about becoming conscious. But people assume that because it's been so exploited for so long.
If people weren't so acutely aware of the disgusting ways in which race and racism have been leveraged to promote the political agendas of absolutely horrible people and parties, that aversion to seeing this stuff would not be there. It doesn't take a genius to recognize phoniness, opportunism and cynicism when you see it; most people can smell it a mile away. This causes a rejection of the examination of the problem of racism which would not be there otherwise.
The fact that racism has been exploited in a way that prevents it from being healed is itself a metastasis of that same racism.
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Stomp out the authentic revolutionary impulse and you're left with inauthentic revolutionary impulse. You don't kill people's impulse to rise up and push for change, you just get them doing it in weird, ridiculous, ineffective ways. Hence the pseudo left and "populist" right.
Most of the bizarre things about western politics in general and US politics in particular ultimately boil down to this. "Okay we need to overthrow the elites and change things... let's elect that rich casino guy for president." All the IDpol and shitlib stuff, same thing.
If the door to real leftward movement hadn't been bolted shut, you wouldn't see one side trying to change things by freaking out about immigrants and trans people and the other side trying to change things by punching them in black bloc without either threatening real power. What you'd see is change.
This situation of course suits those in power just fine. They're happy to have the right advancing their interests and the left shrieking impotently at anything that moves for all eternity. That's why they spent generations deliberately turning that into the existing reality.
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The problem of course is that those who profit from promulgating war seldom if ever experience the consequences of their actions -- only the benefits, which tend to be monetary and prestige. A little Raytheon white phosphorus lobbed at heads of the Bill Krystols of the world and we'd see a much different world.
The Internet holds the promise of helping unify humanity; no doubt that is a reason it's being so heavily attacked, censored, and homogenized.
Those killed working in the Pentagon on 9/11 were called innocent victims. No doubt the Empire said the same thing about those manning the Death Star after the Rebel Alliance blew it up. So you see, not really so far, far away.
Our military likely did their job well in Afghanistan. We trained a relatively large military force how to march, communicate, shoot modern weapons, etc. However, while you can teach the techniques and technology of warfighting, you cannot "teach" motivation. You cannot teach troops to defend an occupier's puppet government when you have armed revolutionaries in THIER country.
It is insulting that our government (both parties) felt that we could not handle that simple and obvious truth - especially as it is a re-run of Saigon - a war in which many of us Boomers were forced to participate. It was also obvious that the only motivated military in the field back in the 70s were North Vietnamese and Viet Cong guerillas (the analogue to the Taliban).
Be prepared to see this re-occur again and a gain as the empire accommodates to reality. After we shocked and awed the Iraqis, Bush banned every uniformed Iraqi soldier from ever serving in the future. Yet, our useless press seemed baffled by how ISIS came from out of nowhere - and so well-trained too. Like Taliban, they too are just waiting in the wings for us to skedaddle. Thus, gaslighting America now is just kicking the politically-embarrassing can down the road a bit.