Caitlin needs to befriend some wealthy benefactor who will just buy up ads everyone and run these notes on the radio, billboards etc.
Get a couple billboards that read, “You Can Measure The Health Of A Society By How It Treats Its Warmongers And Its Peacemongers” with the accompanying image.
I'm afraid you understimate the level of propaganda here in the US. Most of the 99% already know ours is a really sick society (and the 1% definitely know - as they are the ones that primarily make it so sick), but choose to ignore admitting to it (because then they would have to do something about it to resolve their cognitive dissonance). They (the 99%) are unable to wake up from thier stupor and capitalism-induced coma to do anything significant about it.
Until people start starving and dying in the US, I don't see anything else waking them up (unfortunately). I know my view is very pessimistic, and I hope I am wrong about it...
Chang you are pragmatic. A nuclear strike, general strike , or a complete rebellion could work. On the other hand perhaps our selected leaders will have an epiphany and start serving the people. Preferred of course. Until the filthy lucre is removed from the system the money lust will continue.
That actually provides the foundation for the lower class to start seeing common cause in throwing off the shakles and changing the system they living under.
Romanticist fantasies and Les Miz aside, revolutions do not happen when the 1% are united, as they will do whatever it takes to retain power.
Rather, revolutions happen when the 1% are divided amongst themselves, usually as a result of a foreign threat or an inability to divide up the spoils, and 1% factions start casting about for allies.
I don't think "they" are really 99% anymore. It's much smaller than it used to be.
What's lacking is a positive vision for the future.
Solutions exist, but one first has to get out of the mindset that everything is going to shit and everyone is too brainwashed to respond to genuine ideas.
If we can shake the Malthusian zero growth death-cult programming, then new Renaissance cities, Fusion-powered cities, revitalization of the land, and future-orientated pro-development policies become quite immediate.
And on top of that the banks can be broken up like they were in the 1930s, with things like Glass-Steagall.
The reason China and other countries are advancing and their people have forward-looking and optimistic outlooks is because they've actually being developing the productive sectors of the economies, and their societies are growing, rather than shrinking in order to continue servicing a parasitic financial system.
There are plenty of solutions. We just have to talk about them instead of complaining. A lot of people would probably ditch the programming if they were offered forward thinking ideas.
I'd like to make a couple of points. One, I was a long time USCG officer who led drug interdiction raids in Central and South America, as well as CO'ing a couple of ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean. I got out long before the turn of the century, and NOT ONCE did my orders mention anything about "national security." But you talk to Coasties and Naval people now, and EVERYTHING is "national security." Even repairing buoys on the Great Lakes or running a Naval recruiting office. You see, to keep up appearances, we have to scare the living shit out of everyone to keep the ruse going.
Second point: you, me, all of us have no real say on anything that goes on. You've made that point admirably many times. However, one of the first things you learn in Macroeconomics 101 is the old "guns and butter" trope. Corporations make both, but they make more with the former, hence the never-ending wartime footing. Hell, we can't even win a proxy war with the billions we're funneling into Ukraine and Israel. Biden doesn't want the hostages back; Biden wants corporations to keep on funding this clusterfuck ad infinitem. He could pull the plug on the billions he gives Israel every few months, and THAT would stop the war...but no.
Corporations win each time, every time, all the time.
There may yet be some hope. I saw an article headline the other day that said, "The poor (US) cannot even afford to shop at the Dollar General Store anymore." Capitalism has destroyed its consumer base. Eggs were $3.74 a dozen in Aldi's today. When milk goes for $10 a gallon or more and gasoline hits $20/gallon, we might start seeing some changes... In the form of guillotines. The corporations might cease to exist. The wars abroad will come home.
Well, they aren't going to win much when their rampant consumerism and lack of attention to the environment brings about catastrophic climate change. Or when one of those idiots decides that the war needs to be nuclear.
Susan T - nature is more than capable of changing climate far, far more than humans have done the past 200 years. There really is zero credible evidence that climate has done anything abnormal the past 200 years. And as for thinking that carbon dioxide is a poison, well, words fail me. The earth has been greening since 1980 (NASA satellite data) and elevated carbon dioxide levels help with that, because plants photosynthesise faster with more carbon doxide around.
Lack of attention to the environment is indeed a rather more addressible and pressing problem. Deforestation isn't acceptable, polluting rivers with toxic chemicals isn't either. But equally, building vast settlements in flood plains, near oceans with high tides is absolute madness. Floods WILL happen, it's just nature's way.
The problem the world has about 'the environment' is that a bunch of city dwellers without any science education think that 'urban heat islands' represent 'dangerous climate change'. It's nothing to do with climate change, it's changed urban environment adding more and more heat-absorbing materials with fewer and fewer trees which can cause local cooling.
And as for warming up since 1800, well I'm very pleased about that: the world is healthier, food is easier to grow, less people die of severe cold and malnutrition. You wouldn't want to go back to the climate of 1816, 'the year without a summer', I promise you, let alone the winters of 1740 and 1684.
We still have some way to go to reach warmth levels of 5000 years ago, the 'Holocene Climatic Optimum'. That's not something that children are taught in schools, because they need to be brainwashed. But somehow or other, neither human beings nor polar bears died off during that multimillennial period of post-ice age warmth.
nope we are changing the climate. you are just repeating a list of long refuted fossil fuel talking points. it's not a bunch of city dwellers with no science education pushing this, it's national science organizations in states that have every reason to resist if the science were bogus. Tell Russian and Chinese scientists it is a fraud.
Yes, agreed. Our country, and much of the world, is in a cycle where the accumulation of capital is paramount. Once engineers could become CEOs because knowing how to design and build a product was regarded as essential. Now it’s manipulating stocks and contracts. This shift has devalued human intelligence and creativity and instead encourages a mental illness, a form of hoarding, collecting money in order to collect more money. Currently there are over 750 billionaires in the US, and they are destroying our business and our democracy.
"But you talk to Coasties and Naval people now, and EVERYTHING is "national security." Even repairing buoys on the Great Lakes or running a Naval recruiting office. You see, to keep up appearances, we have to scare the living shit out of everyone to keep the ruse going."
It's this thing called "9/11". Since that date almost a quarter century ago, everything in the US is about "national security". We can't have freedom of speech (that goes against the official narrative) because of "national security". We must continue to give the IDF bombs to blow up children to smithereens because of "national security" in some round about way. We've made Americans paranoid and afraid of their own shadows. Like groundhogs, but without the cute holiday around it.
Assange was not only smeared as an antisemite and russian agent, but firstly as a rapist. That is how they got him at first, even if everything was later dismissed for lack of any evidence (read: Blatant lies). Never underestimate the power of blatant lies in the wrong hands (and they are always from the wrong hands)
I often worry about you being jailed or killed. Simply for being a compassionate beautiful voice(your husband literally). The problem is the propaganda paints war as good an necessary. Those on the side of the empire are heroes, those that oppose are villains. Yet by killing people and destroying livelihoods, war demonstrates man's highest level of ignorance. For war can only happen when men choose not to solve a problem using their intelligence.
You mean "had" to? Effectively he did and he got it.
He's out now. Biden's goal achieved. I'm not accusing Assange - he's a man that needed saving his life. He probably realized that the so called freedom-loving democratic western public didn't care a fuck about what he was fighting for. So his giving middle finger to the west as a whole I do not condemn at all. In fact, he should have done it much earlier. The sheeple are not worth the effort.
russian_bot, I am sure you will agree with me that Assange is one of the noblest of human beings who exposed the war crimes of empire and their torture chambers, at great risk to himself. We have to honour him with our hearts and minds.
His 'crime ' was ripping away the mask and leaving the so called civilised west naked and its barbarism revealed in all its gory. Maybe you are right that the "...so called freedom-loving democratic western public didn't care a fuck about what he was fighting for...". But more important is what Assange's selfless action revealed to the people of the Global South.
May Assange's courage never be forgotten. Inspire more human beings to emulate him.
I will leave you to unravel why I used 'has' instead of 'had'.
Spot on, Caitlin. Dr. King talked about this, re treating ‘maladjustment’ in psychology. He opposed becoming adjusted to an unhealthy society and called for an international society for creative maladjustment..
And Gandhi, when asked his opinion of western civilization, said ‘It would be a good idea.’ Or something to that effect.
My prescription: benevolence and biophilia.
Akin to the golden rule, but must include nature. Check out regeneration.org for a massive compilation of ecosystem healing methods.
" In our (non-healthy) society, it’s the best way to make sure you spend your life in perpetual obscurity."
I've come to terms with spending my life in "perpetual obscurity" because at least I know that I'm not a genocidal-enabling monster who can as easily send 2,000 pound bombs to a genocide to mangle and burn children's bodies as they can order a martini or one of their propagandists who smugly sell these horrors as if it were detergent or toothpaste. I can live with not being a sociopathic hypocrite. Having empathy doesn't pay well (or offer health insurance in the US), but at least it keeps me sane. I'm thankful for all the other sane folks here at Caitlin's newsletter, too.
1. I did not tell anyone that color (and religion) is meaningless.
2. In using Ukraine - and Ukrainians - to fight a proxy war against Russia, the deep state of the USA has sent hundreds of thousands of "white" Ukrainians to their deaths and horrible hell-like living situation prior. The idea that we are defending Ukraine and "helping white people" is idiotic if not insane. For Pete's sake, the Russians they are fighting - what color are they?
TPTB are not saying genocide is OK, they deny genocide is happening.
As far as white supremacy - where exactly are they saying it? And why white supremacy? Is black supremacy OK? Brown? Purple? Rainbow?
What TPTB are saying is that indeed supremacy is OK, but it's the empire's - so called rules-based order where they come up with the rules as they go. Effectively claiming supremacy. Only what's white about it?
Caitlin, as usual, you have aptly and succinctly encapsulated the core issue.
I will that many others will read, understand, agree and share this.
I have only one, sincere question: How do we remove those people responsible and build nations and a world where they never again can "play with our world like it's their (your) little toy", to quote Bob Dylan from Masters of War?
A good start would be not to vote for the duopoly parties either in the USA or Australia. Good alternaties would for example be Jill Stein (green Party) or Australian Citizens Party in Oz
Erwin Warth, I am glad that we have the Greens in Australia. It is amusing - if it wasn't tragic - the spectacle of the two main parties vying with each other in a contest of " who best to serve the US empire "!
Certainly the differences between the major parties in both the US and Australia are small in relation to what drives their policies and what it is critical to change for any significant improvement.
Unfortunately the electoral systems make it extremely unlikely that any minor party can achieve government, though I agree that can never change unless voters give them support. However, it is hard to persuade people to do that unless they see a significant prospect of it accomplishing positive change. Media ownership and skewed fear-mongering usually works against that. At the last Australian election, for instance, the Greens were the only party to put out a comprehensive policy platform but though they increased support, it was still far too little to give them any chance of forming government.
It's not just the political parties, it's the foundational way the entire system operates. It's the structure of the hierarchy that has fascism baked into it.
There's no way to get this system designed for oligarchy to become an agent of peace. It has so many laws on the books from a local to a federal level that reinforce the status quo. To see any appreciable change even with the right people in charge you'd have to also replace most of the sitting judges in the country and strike down thousands of legal precedents.
Caitlin isn't wrong. Look how protesters against the Vietnam war were treated. Look at how protesters against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan were treated. Always, war is acceptable in the immediate and only condemned after the fact, after the damage has been done.
"I wish I knew how to wake people up" - that is your problem: you think they're asleep whereas they're fully awake and are absolutely fine with anything that ensures their well-being.
The most frustrating thing is that so called thinking people can't see it. They think the non-thinking ones are asleep or unaware whereas those are neither. They're just different. And they're the majority.
My day was brightened by a couple visiting my state from Germany. They commented positively about my back car window posters that said no funds to Israel or Ukraine! They spoke of the problems of Ukraine refugees in Germany.. I commented that the German Jewish Holocaust should never have resulted in the Palestinian Nakba! Neither of us was going to solve the problems, but they were pleased that there was protest in USA.
50 years later we are seeing the end result of neoliberalism, fragmented societies where wealth is privatized and debt socialized. Political "elites" are bought and paid for, the new feudalism has arrived.
I agree with this article even more than others that you have written. "War is the most insane thing humans do." And now that they are threatening nuclear war, it is even more insane. Do they not realize it will the end for them too? Their bank accounts will not get them out of this one.
This should be broadcast on every radio station.
This is the kind of artful public service announcement we actually need.
Perfect!
Caitlin needs to befriend some wealthy benefactor who will just buy up ads everyone and run these notes on the radio, billboards etc.
Get a couple billboards that read, “You Can Measure The Health Of A Society By How It Treats Its Warmongers And Its Peacemongers” with the accompanying image.
That would cause some nice ruckus haha.
I'm afraid you understimate the level of propaganda here in the US. Most of the 99% already know ours is a really sick society (and the 1% definitely know - as they are the ones that primarily make it so sick), but choose to ignore admitting to it (because then they would have to do something about it to resolve their cognitive dissonance). They (the 99%) are unable to wake up from thier stupor and capitalism-induced coma to do anything significant about it.
Until people start starving and dying in the US, I don't see anything else waking them up (unfortunately). I know my view is very pessimistic, and I hope I am wrong about it...
Hi Chang
I reiterate: until there is war on Amerikkkan soil, Amerikkkans are going to support wars.
Hell, even then…
Chang you are pragmatic. A nuclear strike, general strike , or a complete rebellion could work. On the other hand perhaps our selected leaders will have an epiphany and start serving the people. Preferred of course. Until the filthy lucre is removed from the system the money lust will continue.
The country has been bewitched by the oligarchy’s use of divisive tactics such as racial stratification, as a distraction.
However, as capitalism accelerates in its ruthlessness, it’s now ravaging the poor in increasingly equal rates:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32697
That actually provides the foundation for the lower class to start seeing common cause in throwing off the shakles and changing the system they living under.
Romanticist fantasies and Les Miz aside, revolutions do not happen when the 1% are united, as they will do whatever it takes to retain power.
Rather, revolutions happen when the 1% are divided amongst themselves, usually as a result of a foreign threat or an inability to divide up the spoils, and 1% factions start casting about for allies.
This is true of the French revolution, but how about China with the Communist revolution?
I don't think "they" are really 99% anymore. It's much smaller than it used to be.
What's lacking is a positive vision for the future.
Solutions exist, but one first has to get out of the mindset that everything is going to shit and everyone is too brainwashed to respond to genuine ideas.
If we can shake the Malthusian zero growth death-cult programming, then new Renaissance cities, Fusion-powered cities, revitalization of the land, and future-orientated pro-development policies become quite immediate.
And on top of that the banks can be broken up like they were in the 1930s, with things like Glass-Steagall.
The reason China and other countries are advancing and their people have forward-looking and optimistic outlooks is because they've actually being developing the productive sectors of the economies, and their societies are growing, rather than shrinking in order to continue servicing a parasitic financial system.
There are plenty of solutions. We just have to talk about them instead of complaining. A lot of people would probably ditch the programming if they were offered forward thinking ideas.
My two cents.
Why it'll never make it there.
I'd like to make a couple of points. One, I was a long time USCG officer who led drug interdiction raids in Central and South America, as well as CO'ing a couple of ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean. I got out long before the turn of the century, and NOT ONCE did my orders mention anything about "national security." But you talk to Coasties and Naval people now, and EVERYTHING is "national security." Even repairing buoys on the Great Lakes or running a Naval recruiting office. You see, to keep up appearances, we have to scare the living shit out of everyone to keep the ruse going.
Second point: you, me, all of us have no real say on anything that goes on. You've made that point admirably many times. However, one of the first things you learn in Macroeconomics 101 is the old "guns and butter" trope. Corporations make both, but they make more with the former, hence the never-ending wartime footing. Hell, we can't even win a proxy war with the billions we're funneling into Ukraine and Israel. Biden doesn't want the hostages back; Biden wants corporations to keep on funding this clusterfuck ad infinitem. He could pull the plug on the billions he gives Israel every few months, and THAT would stop the war...but no.
Corporations win each time, every time, all the time.
There may yet be some hope. I saw an article headline the other day that said, "The poor (US) cannot even afford to shop at the Dollar General Store anymore." Capitalism has destroyed its consumer base. Eggs were $3.74 a dozen in Aldi's today. When milk goes for $10 a gallon or more and gasoline hits $20/gallon, we might start seeing some changes... In the form of guillotines. The corporations might cease to exist. The wars abroad will come home.
Imperial wars always come home.
like chickens to roost
Indeed. It’s equal opportunity exploitation now, no one left unravaged
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32697
Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility
Raj Chetty, Will S. Dobbie, Benjamin Goldman, Sonya Porter & Crystal Yang
WORKING PAPER 32697
DOI 10.3386/w32697
ISSUE DATE July 2024
Well, they aren't going to win much when their rampant consumerism and lack of attention to the environment brings about catastrophic climate change. Or when one of those idiots decides that the war needs to be nuclear.
Susan T - nature is more than capable of changing climate far, far more than humans have done the past 200 years. There really is zero credible evidence that climate has done anything abnormal the past 200 years. And as for thinking that carbon dioxide is a poison, well, words fail me. The earth has been greening since 1980 (NASA satellite data) and elevated carbon dioxide levels help with that, because plants photosynthesise faster with more carbon doxide around.
Lack of attention to the environment is indeed a rather more addressible and pressing problem. Deforestation isn't acceptable, polluting rivers with toxic chemicals isn't either. But equally, building vast settlements in flood plains, near oceans with high tides is absolute madness. Floods WILL happen, it's just nature's way.
The problem the world has about 'the environment' is that a bunch of city dwellers without any science education think that 'urban heat islands' represent 'dangerous climate change'. It's nothing to do with climate change, it's changed urban environment adding more and more heat-absorbing materials with fewer and fewer trees which can cause local cooling.
And as for warming up since 1800, well I'm very pleased about that: the world is healthier, food is easier to grow, less people die of severe cold and malnutrition. You wouldn't want to go back to the climate of 1816, 'the year without a summer', I promise you, let alone the winters of 1740 and 1684.
We still have some way to go to reach warmth levels of 5000 years ago, the 'Holocene Climatic Optimum'. That's not something that children are taught in schools, because they need to be brainwashed. But somehow or other, neither human beings nor polar bears died off during that multimillennial period of post-ice age warmth.
nope we are changing the climate. you are just repeating a list of long refuted fossil fuel talking points. it's not a bunch of city dwellers with no science education pushing this, it's national science organizations in states that have every reason to resist if the science were bogus. Tell Russian and Chinese scientists it is a fraud.
You might have a different opinion we’re you to become acquainted with Peter Ward’s work.
I learned a great deal from a couple of his presentations.
Smedley Butler articulated it quite a while ago in his "War Is a Racket".
Yes, agreed. Our country, and much of the world, is in a cycle where the accumulation of capital is paramount. Once engineers could become CEOs because knowing how to design and build a product was regarded as essential. Now it’s manipulating stocks and contracts. This shift has devalued human intelligence and creativity and instead encourages a mental illness, a form of hoarding, collecting money in order to collect more money. Currently there are over 750 billionaires in the US, and they are destroying our business and our democracy.
"But you talk to Coasties and Naval people now, and EVERYTHING is "national security." Even repairing buoys on the Great Lakes or running a Naval recruiting office. You see, to keep up appearances, we have to scare the living shit out of everyone to keep the ruse going."
I don't understand. How is this frightening?
It's this thing called "9/11". Since that date almost a quarter century ago, everything in the US is about "national security". We can't have freedom of speech (that goes against the official narrative) because of "national security". We must continue to give the IDF bombs to blow up children to smithereens because of "national security" in some round about way. We've made Americans paranoid and afraid of their own shadows. Like groundhogs, but without the cute holiday around it.
Assange was not only smeared as an antisemite and russian agent, but firstly as a rapist. That is how they got him at first, even if everything was later dismissed for lack of any evidence (read: Blatant lies). Never underestimate the power of blatant lies in the wrong hands (and they are always from the wrong hands)
I often worry about you being jailed or killed. Simply for being a compassionate beautiful voice(your husband literally). The problem is the propaganda paints war as good an necessary. Those on the side of the empire are heroes, those that oppose are villains. Yet by killing people and destroying livelihoods, war demonstrates man's highest level of ignorance. For war can only happen when men choose not to solve a problem using their intelligence.
Caitlin, You make a powerful point in having the pictures of Biden and Assange side by side - the contrast of what they stand for.
Isn't it sad and ironic that Assange has to ask for a pardon from Biden.
You mean "had" to? Effectively he did and he got it.
He's out now. Biden's goal achieved. I'm not accusing Assange - he's a man that needed saving his life. He probably realized that the so called freedom-loving democratic western public didn't care a fuck about what he was fighting for. So his giving middle finger to the west as a whole I do not condemn at all. In fact, he should have done it much earlier. The sheeple are not worth the effort.
russian_bot, I am sure you will agree with me that Assange is one of the noblest of human beings who exposed the war crimes of empire and their torture chambers, at great risk to himself. We have to honour him with our hearts and minds.
His 'crime ' was ripping away the mask and leaving the so called civilised west naked and its barbarism revealed in all its gory. Maybe you are right that the "...so called freedom-loving democratic western public didn't care a fuck about what he was fighting for...". But more important is what Assange's selfless action revealed to the people of the Global South.
May Assange's courage never be forgotten. Inspire more human beings to emulate him.
I will leave you to unravel why I used 'has' instead of 'had'.
Spot on, Caitlin. Dr. King talked about this, re treating ‘maladjustment’ in psychology. He opposed becoming adjusted to an unhealthy society and called for an international society for creative maladjustment..
And Gandhi, when asked his opinion of western civilization, said ‘It would be a good idea.’ Or something to that effect.
My prescription: benevolence and biophilia.
Akin to the golden rule, but must include nature. Check out regeneration.org for a massive compilation of ecosystem healing methods.
Thanks to you both for your sane commentary🙏
" In our (non-healthy) society, it’s the best way to make sure you spend your life in perpetual obscurity."
I've come to terms with spending my life in "perpetual obscurity" because at least I know that I'm not a genocidal-enabling monster who can as easily send 2,000 pound bombs to a genocide to mangle and burn children's bodies as they can order a martini or one of their propagandists who smugly sell these horrors as if it were detergent or toothpaste. I can live with not being a sociopathic hypocrite. Having empathy doesn't pay well (or offer health insurance in the US), but at least it keeps me sane. I'm thankful for all the other sane folks here at Caitlin's newsletter, too.
I only use the adjective percipient to describe deeply lucid analysis. This is that.
The powers that be are trying to corral us into believing that genocide and white supremacy are A-OK.
White supremacy? Huh?
What color are the Palestinians we are funding IsraHell to slaughter?
By contrast, what color are the Ukrainazis we’re “defending”?
Remember when the news shills said of the Ukrainians, They’re so much like us!
Those Palestinians, eh, not so much.
So don’t you dare tell anyone that color ( and religion) is meaningless.
1. I did not tell anyone that color (and religion) is meaningless.
2. In using Ukraine - and Ukrainians - to fight a proxy war against Russia, the deep state of the USA has sent hundreds of thousands of "white" Ukrainians to their deaths and horrible hell-like living situation prior. The idea that we are defending Ukraine and "helping white people" is idiotic if not insane. For Pete's sake, the Russians they are fighting - what color are they?
You conveniently left the other sides' color. Israelis are not quite white. And Russians are as white as Ukrainians.
Try again. Maybe pick some other color.
Never mind that. It's shitlibs' fallback when they can't come up with a coherent term.
Diana is correct. What’s wrong with saying it?
TPTB are not saying genocide is OK, they deny genocide is happening.
As far as white supremacy - where exactly are they saying it? And why white supremacy? Is black supremacy OK? Brown? Purple? Rainbow?
What TPTB are saying is that indeed supremacy is OK, but it's the empire's - so called rules-based order where they come up with the rules as they go. Effectively claiming supremacy. Only what's white about it?
So no, Diana is incorrect.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Caitlin, as usual, you have aptly and succinctly encapsulated the core issue.
I will that many others will read, understand, agree and share this.
I have only one, sincere question: How do we remove those people responsible and build nations and a world where they never again can "play with our world like it's their (your) little toy", to quote Bob Dylan from Masters of War?
A good start would be not to vote for the duopoly parties either in the USA or Australia. Good alternaties would for example be Jill Stein (green Party) or Australian Citizens Party in Oz
Erwin Warth, I am glad that we have the Greens in Australia. It is amusing - if it wasn't tragic - the spectacle of the two main parties vying with each other in a contest of " who best to serve the US empire "!
Certainly the differences between the major parties in both the US and Australia are small in relation to what drives their policies and what it is critical to change for any significant improvement.
Unfortunately the electoral systems make it extremely unlikely that any minor party can achieve government, though I agree that can never change unless voters give them support. However, it is hard to persuade people to do that unless they see a significant prospect of it accomplishing positive change. Media ownership and skewed fear-mongering usually works against that. At the last Australian election, for instance, the Greens were the only party to put out a comprehensive policy platform but though they increased support, it was still far too little to give them any chance of forming government.
It's not just the political parties, it's the foundational way the entire system operates. It's the structure of the hierarchy that has fascism baked into it.
There's no way to get this system designed for oligarchy to become an agent of peace. It has so many laws on the books from a local to a federal level that reinforce the status quo. To see any appreciable change even with the right people in charge you'd have to also replace most of the sitting judges in the country and strike down thousands of legal precedents.
Caitlin isn't wrong. Look how protesters against the Vietnam war were treated. Look at how protesters against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan were treated. Always, war is acceptable in the immediate and only condemned after the fact, after the damage has been done.
I wish I knew how to wake people up and get them to see that slaughtering tens of thousands people is not okay.
Even when people spell out genocide shitlibs refusing to see it as wrong.
Patrick Lawrence highlights what shitlibs say when asked to stop the genocide.
https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/03/patrick-lawrence-gaza-kamala-harris-and-the-disgrace-of-denial/
Gosh. These people are saying that opposing the genocide will lead to the election of Trump. But he supports the genocide. It don't make no sense.
I guess the idea is that we should never criticize anything the gvt does as this will lend support to Trump. That's too weird.
"I wish I knew how to wake people up" - that is your problem: you think they're asleep whereas they're fully awake and are absolutely fine with anything that ensures their well-being.
The most frustrating thing is that so called thinking people can't see it. They think the non-thinking ones are asleep or unaware whereas those are neither. They're just different. And they're the majority.
My day was brightened by a couple visiting my state from Germany. They commented positively about my back car window posters that said no funds to Israel or Ukraine! They spoke of the problems of Ukraine refugees in Germany.. I commented that the German Jewish Holocaust should never have resulted in the Palestinian Nakba! Neither of us was going to solve the problems, but they were pleased that there was protest in USA.
Perhaps scientists should move homo sapiens to the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. We are indeed destructive animals.
Ask any cat.
Meow.
My cat is Bastet. My wife is Cleopatra. Good deal eh?
50 years later we are seeing the end result of neoliberalism, fragmented societies where wealth is privatized and debt socialized. Political "elites" are bought and paid for, the new feudalism has arrived.
Exactly, Robert Billyard. I have come to the same conclusion. Yanis Varoufakis terms the new feudalism, techno-feudalism.
Good point, it is very “techno”
I agree with this article even more than others that you have written. "War is the most insane thing humans do." And now that they are threatening nuclear war, it is even more insane. Do they not realize it will the end for them too? Their bank accounts will not get them out of this one.