radiofree.asia

Category: narrative matrix

  • The US Empire Is Evil And You Should Want It To Fail: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    To rule the world, make it rely on a single dominant financial system you control so anyone who disobeys you can be cut off from the economy you’ve made them dependent on for survival—whether they’re a nation, a protest movement, or an individual—without having to fire a shot.

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    I don’t “support dictators”, as one will inevitably be accused of doing whenever scrutinizing imperial propaganda narratives. I do however always hope the US fails to accomplish its objectives against every government that it targets, because the US is far and away the single most tyrannical regime on this planet.

    I don’t support tyranny, I oppose it. It just happens that the major force of tyranny in this world isn’t where the TV tells you it is.

    No other regime has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression. No other regime is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases. No other regime works to destroy any nation which disobeys it using starvation sanctions, war and terror. Only the US-centralized empire does this. While supporting most of the world’s dictators.

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    Anyone who talks about the Ukraine situation like it’s just Putin being evil, while ignoring the actions of the US and NATO which got us here, is a disinformation agent.

    You just don’t find this information anywhere in mainstream news and punditry, so you don’t find it anywhere in mainstream discourse either. It’s just “PUTIN EVIL HITLER RAHHHH!” It should really be common sense by now that when the entire western political/media class starts screaming that a government is acting like an evil supervillain you’re probably being propagandized, but most people are still swallowing it hook, line and sinker.

    This is really and truly as deep as most western analysis of this situation goes:

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    The onus is not on anyone else to prove that US claims about Russian operations are false, the onus is on the US to prove that they are true. The burden of proof doesn’t magically disappear just because some pundits and politicians said something in an assertive tone.

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    Still can’t get over how the liberal media spent years yelling about Trump Nazis and then immediately turned around and started doing PR segments for actual Nazis.

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    Boy I haven’t been called a Kremlin propagandist this much since like 2018. Thing is, everything I was saying about western Russia narratives in 2018 has since been completely vindicated.

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    It’s not that the US elects incompetent leaders who make bad decisions that kill millions of people with warfare, it’s that the global US empire is held together with military violence and the threat thereof. It’s an intrinsically evil institution and you should always oppose it.

    It’s not that the US government has done evil, it’s that the US government is itself evil. The very way it has set itself up to operate in the world necessarily means it must exert endless violence and oppression to keep populations functioning in its interests. That’s evil.

    The Mafia hasn’t happened to make bad decisions throughout its history that resulted in the unfortunate demise of certain individuals, it’s an institution explicitly set up to reap profits by exerting and threatening violent force. The US empire is exactly the same. Same evil.

    It’s not that the American people keep accidentally electing warmongering thugs, anymore than it’s an accident that the Mafia is always led by men who are willing to bully and kill. The US empire is an intrinsically thuggish and violent institution, and needs that kind of leader.

    The US empire is just a rich man’s mafia. And you should want it gone for the exact same reason you don’t want your neighborhood to be tyrannized by violent mobsters.

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    The best critics of empire propaganda are mostly just people who went to journalism school and simply remember what they were taught about how journalism is supposed to look. Their commentary is usually nothing more than pointing out all the mass media lapses in basic journalistic ethics. It’s just kind of where you naturally wind up if you keep your attention on journalism without letting the pressures of the machine squeeze you into forgetting what you know about what it’s supposed to be.

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    One of the main things I do here is try to help articulate the scope of the horrors of the empire. Because we’re in it, and it’s so aggressively normalized by the mass media, it becomes easy to overlook, like water for a fish. It’s hard to really notice something you’re marinating in all the time. Hard to see the horror with fresh eyes.

    We have all the information we need to understand the horrific nature of the empire, it just gets obscured and distorted and spun by imperial narrative management, so people don’t really see it clearly. The challenge isn’t so much obtaining evidence of the depravity of the empire as helping people to really, truly see the evidence we already have.

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    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The US Has Zero Moral Authority: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Post-Iraq the US has zero moral authority. The narrative managers aim to suck you in to arguing about the minutiae of the inner workings of the latest target of the empire, when in fact a simple “Shut the fuck up, it’s none of your business” is all they deserve.

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    What the US and its proxies are doing with Yemen is universes more horrific and universes more urgent than what Russia is doing with Ukraine.

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    The Ukraine invasion that never arrives is showing us once again that when it comes to Russia you really can just completely ignore all the so-called “experts” in the mainstream media. Just dismiss 100 percent of everything they say. Any random schmuck’s best guess is better than theirs.

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    The US has spent years accusing Russia of inflaming far right extremism in America and that whole time they were fixing to ship weapons to Nazis in Ukraine.

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    Putin should run an aggressive propaganda campaign insisting the US is about to invade Mexico and threatening severe repercussions if it does, then when the invasion fails to materialize take credit for it and say it’s because of his bold actions against the Biden regime.

    “Oh, right, it’s not like the US already has a history of annexing Mexican territory or anything, you despicable White House propagandist. And I guess you’ve never heard of a little thing called IRAQ??”

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    Saying we need to defend Ukrainian democracy is like saying we need to defend Iowa’s fjords.

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    To be a westerner is to be continuously inundated with made-up stories about evil tyrants who want to terrorize the world while living under a vast empire that is actually terrorizing the world.

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    Boy I feel sorry for all those ignorant assholes who don’t watch the news and have no idea that Putin is invading Ukraine and Trump was a Kremlin agent and Saddam had WMDs and capitalism is totally working and America is the greatest country on earth.

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    Looking to the mainstream media for truth is like looking to a prostitute for love. That’s not what they’re there for. That’s not their job.

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    The type of financial blockade they’re setting up in Canada today will with 100 percent certainty be used against other protest movements which pose a problem for the powerful tomorrow. Including the ones you support.

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    It’s not about Zero Hedge. It’s not about Russian propaganda. It’s not about Covid misinformation, election security, foreign trolls or QAnon. It’s about ruling power structures needing to normalize and expand the regulation of online speech to protect consent for the status quo.

    Few people understand just how important it is for the powerful to control the narrative about what’s going on in the world. It’s the primary thing standing between the status quo and revolutionary change. They’d do anything, and I mean anything, to keep it.

    When governments and their media mouthpieces keep offering diverse and unrelated reasons why online information needs to be more strictly controlled, it’s not hard to see that the strict control of information is itself their real objective. Today they’re back to focusing on “Russian propaganda”. Tomorrow it will be back to “Covid misinformation” or “domestic extremism” or some other justification. But that’s all they are: justifications. For something they already intend to do and have been working toward for a long time.

    It’s like if some stranger kept following you around telling you all different reasons why it’s very important that you hand him your wallet. At a certain point it must occur to you that it’s not really about those reasons he’s giving you, it’s just him trying to get your wallet.

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    The US empire does not promote democracy, it violently opposes it and subverts it at every opportunity. Opposing the planetary domination of the US empire is what promotes democracy.

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    Westerners are so propagandized that the ones I encounter find it easier to believe I just so happen to support every evil regime in the world, whether capitalist or communist, than to consider the possibility that the US regime is the real evil and I simply oppose that evil. They actually imagine I’m looking at each of the governments being targeted by the US empire, thinking “Hmm, this Kim Jong Un has some good ideas. Oh look, I also agree with Vladimir Putin! And the Iranian government as well! All their positions sound good to me.”

    I mean, how brainwashed do you have to be to think that? It can’t possibly be because the US and its allies are quantifiably the most destructive and murderous power structure in today’s world, and opposing such a beast is a completely normal thing that literally everyone should be doing.

    Person criticizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth = RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA!

    Entire western political/media class pumping out uniform plot hole-riddled narratives about governments who disobey Washington = just the normal news teaching you what’s true.

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    Hollywood movies allow us to fantasize about beating up murderous villains, stopping terrorists and defeating evil empires without having to actually stand up to them in real life, which we don’t want to do, because we’re afraid of them, because they’re our own government.

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    Internet communists like to talk tough about supporting violent revolution but we all know we’re so far from any kind of real revolution at this point in the game that it’s about as brave as saying you’re willing to fight Skeletor.

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    Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media are just as integral a part of the empire as its military.

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    Don’t worry if people call you a “contrarian”. Frequently disagreeing with mainstream consensus is probably a sane and healthy thing to do in a profoundly sick society.

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    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The US War Machine Is Just A Rich Man’s Mafia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    If you “vote out fascism” and then the president you voted for turns out to have the same effective policies as the previous administration, it’s time to start asking who the fascists actually are.

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    Hoo you’ve done it now, CIA. You are in trouble. It was all good fun when you were doing fine normal stuff like toppling governments and running torture programs and assassinating people, but collecting bulk data on Americans?? You better prepare for some accountability, mister!

    And the next time you suggest the CIA might be up to something nefarious, you’ll still get called a crazy conspiracy theorist.

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    “Abolish the CIA” is almost too weak a position for an agency that should never have been made in the first place and should have been dismantled in the fucking nineteen sixties.

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    The US war machine is just a rich man’s mafia.

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    It’s not about Joe Rogan. It’s not about Covid misinformation. It’s not about QAnon, Russian trolls, domestic extremists or election security. It’s about ruling power structures needing to normalize and expand the regulation of online speech to protect consent for the status quo.

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    A liberal is someone who yells all day about far right truckers and far right Joe Rogan and then applauds when their president gives weapons to literal Nazis.

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    Very excited to find out whether “The US intelligence community says Putin has decided to invade Ukraine any minute now” is the kind of psyop that’s just designed to ramp up cold war hysteria or the kind of psyop that’s designed to prime us for US proxy war aggressions.

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    The PR black eye the US empire sustained from the Iraq invasion ensured that it will greatly preference using proxy forces over US troops wherever possible. Middle Eastern jihadists, Latin American reactionaries, and Ukrainian Nazis all make very good proxy forces for the empire.

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    A lot of confusion about Russia and Ukraine could be easily avoided if English language news media would end the appallingly unethical practice of printing unsubstantiated assertions by opaque intelligence agencies and presenting it as a “scoop”.

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    The burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. It’s so weird how everyone will apply this standard to things like internet forum arguments and high school debates but not to immensely consequential claims by the most powerful institutions on the planet who have a well-documented history of lying.

    Make a claim that could result in winning a Twitter argument and you’ll immediately be asked for proof. Make a claim that could result in thousands of deaths and it will be reported as fact by The New York Times.

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    So to recap:

    Nation stationing troops inside its own borders = hostile aggressor.

    Nation circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging nonstop wars, working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, pushing nuclear brinkmanship = just normal democracy freedom stuff.

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    Those who called you crazy for warning that cold war escalations could lead to hot war will be the first to tell you when hot war approaches that it is unavoidable and must be supported.

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    Is there any doubt that the same propaganda machine which convinced half the US political spectrum that the highest levels of their government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin could convince the public that a proxy war started by US/NATO/Ukraine was actually started by Russia?

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    News media reporters and editors are just as culpable for the mass murders committed by the US military and its proxies as the troops who fire the weapons and the generals who give the orders. And military personnel who kill people in unjust wars are exactly as culpable for those crimes as any other murderer.

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    People who say China is as evil as the US simply haven’t learned enough or thought honestly enough about the evils of the US.

    China is better than the US. That’s not because China is flawless, it’s because the US spending the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions and working to destroy any nation who disobeys it makes it quantifiably worse than literally anyone else.

    China is a surveillance state. The US empire is a surveillance state that also kills millions of people in wars of aggression.

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    Rightists need to invent fairy tales about evil elites ushering in a Marxist dystopia because they are ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility that the evil elites are already getting their every wish fulfilled by our mundane, boring capitalist dystopia.

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    Dissolution of the state in today’s world just means instant absorption into the US-centralized power structure. As long as the US empire is what it is and does what it does, states are necessary and criticisms of their existence are childish nonsense based on immature analysis.

    If China, North Korea, Venezuela or any other empire-targeted nation became an ideal stateless, classless, moneyless civilization it would instantaneously be absorbed by the empire. This self-evident fact invalidates all purist arguments against those governments. If your worldview does not account for the fact that there is a globe-spanning power structure working to absorb and subjugate all populations, you do not have a reality-based worldview. The empire is the very first obstacle to any leftward movement toward health in this world.

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    The status quo is held in place by psychological compartmentalization. It’s held in place by propaganda and brute force, naturally, but it’s also equally propped up by the basic human tendency to avoid sincerely engaging with information that threatens to destroy our worldview.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Nigeria Is Planning A False Flag In Switzerland: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    I’m declassifying evidence that Nigeria is planning a false flag operation in Switzerland. Are you ready? Here it is:

    Nigeria is planning a false flag operation in Switzerland.

    See, the evidence is me asserting it. If you doubt this evidence, you’re a propagandist for Nigeria.

    What? You want proof? I just gave you the proof. I gave you my declassified intelligence assessment.

    I mean obviously I can’t give you the raw intelligence you’re asking me for without revealing sources and methods and compromising intelligence officers in the field. Is that what you want? For me to compromise intelligence officers in the field? Do you work for Nigerian intelligence?

    The evidence is secret. It’s secret evidence. What I can give you is the information we’ve obtained through thorough intelligence gathering methods in which our intelligence agencies have a degree of confidence. You’re free to doubt it and believe Nigerian propaganda instead, if that’s the sort of person you are.

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    Making your whole thing about opposing a rival political party is what people do when they lack the integrity to oppose the murderous empire that’s fully backed by both parties.

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    That saying “They got you fighting a culture war to stop you fighting a class war” is something you’ve got to take seriously. You can’t just dismiss it. Because if it’s at all true, even somewhat, then discourse on today’s left is completely fucked and ultimately power-serving.

    Certainly you can’t reduce everything to class. Racial and sexual power dynamics are of course very real. The problem would be if those in power kept everyone focused on culture war dynamics instead of class, and kept the discourse from threatening real power. Is that happening? Is it happening at all? To any extent? Because to any extent that it is happening, power is being served and our own interests are being undermined.

    You can’t just leave this question unanswered and unaddressed. It needs to be sincerely grappled with.

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    Whenever your anger is focused on any figure besides the western empire and its facilitators, the propagandists have succeeded in doing their job.

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    It’s obvious that the Iraq invasion was facilitated by propaganda. It should be equally obvious that the powers who pushed that propaganda would have developed and refined their methods and learned new techniques since 2002, and that they would be using those tricks in today’s world.

    Any time there’s a new escalation against an imperial target you’ll get people comparing the propaganda to the lead-up to Iraq, and then you get people pushing back with “This isn’t Iraq! It’s different in X ways!” But it wouldn’t look exactly the same. The science of propaganda has advanced a lot since that time.

    There’s always some reason why this or that act of militarism or interventionism is completely different from its disastrous predecessors. Always. It’s all just bullshit designed to throw off our basic sense of pattern recognition.

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    I’m a tankie, but only because that word now means “Anyone who focuses their criticisms on the most murderous power structure on earth.”

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    Anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to fight the Russians hasn’t watched enough MMA.

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    Someone who wants to make peace with Russia in order to focus on ramping up aggressions against China is as worthless to anti-imperialists as someone who wants to legalize drugs so that law enforcement can focus on locking up gay people would be to civil libertarians. Being dovish on Russia but hawkish on China is not better than being hawkish on both; you’re pushing the same amount of aggression toward what is ultimately the same imperialist agenda, you’re just doing it a little differently.

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    The trouble with social media hate mobs is they don’t work on the people you want them to work on. Being subjected to a bunch of people yelling at you online can ruin your day if you’re a caring person who’s affected by how people feel about you, but if you’re a sociopathic politician, pundit or celebrity it’ll just be funny to you. So if you’re a healthy person you can be easily silenced and shut down by a few aggressive social media accounts, while if your brain has a missing or malfunctioning empathy center you’re guaranteed to keep your voice. It’s one of the many ways our setup uplifts sociopaths.

    Until we find a way for healthy people to be as comfortable in the spotlight as sociopaths are, they’ll always have a massive advantage over us. So many aspects of our society are tilted to the advantage of people with no empathy, like the way capitalism rewards anyone who’s willing to do whatever it takes to out-compete everyone else and climb to the top. In a sense that’s the source of all our major problems.

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    If you want to have integrity you want your personal psychology to line up with your political ideals. Plenty of leftist men harbor deep-seated misogyny. Many libertarians who promote personal responsibility blame their personal problems on others. You want it all to line up.

    It’s nothing to be ashamed of if your psychological landscape doesn’t match your ideals; that’s pretty normal. It’s just a matter of patiently doing the inner work necessary for your mind to match your ideals, your speech to match your mind, and your actions to match your speech.

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    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Propaganda Warps Our Very Humanity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    There’s so much more to propaganda than just manufacturing consent for governments and wars. It trains us what to value. What to think a successful human being looks like. Where to place our interest, energy and attention. It shapes our very personalities. It warps our humanity.

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    Show me someone who doesn’t think propaganda has much power and I’ll show you someone who’s been highly propagandized.

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    If people could understand the massive, yawning gulf between the world as it actually exists and the narratives we’ve been fed about it since childhood, there’d be immediate revolution. The real world is as different from the propaganda world as it is from any work of fiction.

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    The CIA is officially forbidden to conduct operations in the US. What the CIA is not officially forbidden to is hand an unscrupulous American news reporter a bombshell scoop about a foreign government which just so happens to build a narrative in the US that advances CIA objectives.

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    That which has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. It applies to arguments, it applies to claims by US intelligence agencies.

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    Propaganda has distorted people’s perception of reality so severely that Twitter cares more about musicians pulling their content from an app because they don’t like a podcaster than the fact that the most powerful government in the world is flirting with nuclear war.

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    America’s buddies Saudi Arabia and Israel have been bombing their neighbors constantly with extensive US support. The friendship between these nations and the US exists not in spite of their nonstop military butchery but exactly because of it.

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    If all the countries involved in a dispute say there won’t be a war and only one country says that there will be, it’s not hard to figure out who the aggressor and instigator is.

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    There are easily ten thousand issues in this world that are of greater concern than the fact that Russia annexed a small territory that overwhelmingly wanted to be annexed in 2014.

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    It’s not that I always side against the US, it’s that I side against whatever side is in the wrong and that tends to be the most powerful and destructive regime in the world. If you don’t think believe the US could be consistently on the wrong side of foreign policy disputes, it’s because you’ve been extensively propagandized about its behavior on the world stage.

    It can’t rightly be called anti-US bias if your criticisms of the US are unassailably correct. You simply cannot dispute the fact that no other government is doing anything that rises anywhere near the level of depravity as spending the 21st century killing millions of human beings in wars of aggression. It’s not that I have some arbitrary grudge against the United States and frame all my positions on every issue to fit that bias, it’s that the US really is quantifiably and demonstrably the most tyrannical government on earth by an extremely wide margin and thus naturally tends to be in the wrong.

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    The social engineers will always prefer to censor dissident voices online via algorithm manipulation rather than overt deplatforming when given the choice, simply because it silences a lot more people with a lot less public outcry.

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    If you agree with an ideological faction on every issue it’s not because you share the same values and principles, it’s because you suffer from a lack of values and principles. You’re just a blind follower of the herd.

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    Gonna go get a degree from an Ivy League university and become a senior fellow at a prominent think tank so I can make extremely intelligent observations like “Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler and Ukraine is Poland” and “Xi Jinping is Adolf Hitler and Taiwan is Poland”.

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    We’re seeing the narrative that Tucker Carlson is a Russian agent aggressively pushed by mainstream pundits not to attack Carlson himself, but to manufacture the consensus that anyone who criticizes US policy on Russia is suspicious and untrustworthy.

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    If you get your information about the world from Tucker Carlson you’re just as MSM-brainwashed as if you get your information about the world from Brian Stelter or Rachel Maddow. The brainwashing just happens in slightly different ways. Sure Carlson might say true things I agree with sometimes, but so does Anderson Cooper; they just tell different truths and different lies. Propaganda doesn’t work if it’s all bullshit all the time; there has to be some truth mixed in.

    The people in my mentions who regurgitate MSM talking points on China because they heard it from Tucker Carlson think they’re so very different from the people in my mentions who regurgitate MSM talking points on Russia because they heard it from Wolf Blitzer, but they’re not. They’re exactly the same.

    The TV man is not your friend.

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    If Russia was an actual threat they wouldn’t have to keep lying about it all the time.

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    In ancient history our stress hormones were used on saber toothed tiger attacks. Now they’re used on made-up mental narrative fluff like whether we’re adequate, what others think of us, a podcaster saying things we don’t like, Vladimir Putin annexing Eastern Europe, or China taking over the world.

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    It’s not legitimate to complain that people talk about problems without taking action or offering solutions. Spreading awareness that there’s a problem is taking action toward a solution. All positive shifts in human behavior are always preceded by an increase in awareness.

    You’re not going to get to solutions until a sufficiently large percentage of the populace understands and accepts that they are needed. Even if you do come up with the perfect solution on your own without the help of the collective, you won’t have the numbers to enact it. Maybe you’ve read a bunch of books and got a fancy degree and you’ve come up with the perfect utopian model for society, but it’s going to make jack dick difference if only you know it. People first need to understand that our current systems don’t work, and then to understand why.

    ______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • It Takes A Touch Of Madness: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    It takes a touch of madness to take seriously the possibility that your entire society is insane.

    That’s why devoted critics of the oligarchic empire are often a bit odd; something in them was driven to wade into waters that most people aren’t psychologically prepared to enter.

    It’s not that questioning the status quo is madness; just the opposite: it’s that “Maybe everything I’ve been taught is a lie and everyone I know is wrong and all the information I’m getting is designed to serve the powerful?” isn’t the sort of question you tend to ask when everything’s going your way. If you had a happy idyllic childhood where mummy and daddy loved you very much and have lived a life where things generally go okay for you, you’ll likely be psychologically stable, but you’re a lot less likely to go “Hey wait a minute—maybe all of this is bullshit!” That type of insight tends to fall to those who are just a hair off-kilter.

    So here’s to all you heroic lunatics, waking the world up one pair of eyelids at a time. The smileyface gear-turners might scoff at you right now, but the world needs you, not them.

    ❖

    Consider the possibility that all the Russia hysteria we’ve been fed the last few years was carefully rolled out to manufacture consent for the exact escalations against Russia that we’re seeing today, and all the framing of Russia as the hostile aggressor has been ass backwards.

    Let’s not forget after all that this has been fundamentally driven from the beginning by the same intelligence agencies who have an extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing.

    ❖

    Politicians and pundits feel free to claim with absolute certainty that Russia is about to launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine because five years of Russia hysteria have taught them that they will suffer exactly zero professional consequences when they’re proven wrong.

    ❖

    Of all the countless westerners who learned the word “Crimea” five minutes ago and have been mindlessly bleating it at anyone who criticizes the US narrative on Ukraine, exactly zero of them are aware that an overwhelming supermajority of Crimeans prefer to be part of Russia.

    A referendum was held in 2014 in which Crimeans overwhelmingly voted to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, the results of which mirrored a similar vote in 1991 to secede from Ukraine which the Ukrainian government overruled. These results have been further confirmed by western pollsters in 2015 and 2019. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans prefer to be part of Russia is a settled matter beyond dispute.

    ❖

    To be honest I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people on the left for the way they chose at this crucial point in history to pour tons of energy into tearing down other anti-imperialist socialists who don’t agree with them about government Covid measures. People on both sides did this.

    By this I obviously don’t mean disagreement or debate about vax mandates or whatever, I mean the way people have been making it about the person and not the ideas. Actively smearing and attacking members of a small powerless faction and creating deep sectarian enmity where there didn’t used to be any.

    I mean, we’re staring down the barrel of extinction on multiple fronts while the depraved status quo becomes more and more entrenched, and you think it’s a wise expenditure of energy to sow division and trash the reputation of powerless people who don’t agree with you on one thing? Says a lot about your clarity.

    I think it revealed a lot about who’s actually in this to help make the world a better place and who’s just in it for ego and aggrandizement. If someone disagreeing with you about this one thing means you need to focus your fire on them instead of on the empire, you’re just in this for ego.

    _________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • Washington Thinks US Borders End At Neptune: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Yep. Just hanging around, killing time, waiting to find out whether the US is going to start World War 3 now or a little later on.

    ❖

    Washington: Russia’s gonna invade Ukraine.

    Moscow: We’re not gonna invade Ukraine.

    Kyiv: Yeah Russia’s not gonna invade Ukraine.

    Washington: Russia’s definitely about to invade Ukraine.

    Entirety of western media: RUSSIA 100% CERTAIN TO INVADE UKRAINE ANY SECOND NOW

    ❖

    Both Moscow and Kyiv agree that there wil be no unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. Washington keeps insisting that if there’s a war Russia will be the aggressor, but in reality all that has to happen for their not to be a Ukraine war is for US/NATO powers not to start one.

    ❖

    It’s actually a bit enraging to see western elites kicking around people’s emotions and personal psychology like a motherfucking hacky sack with bullshit propaganda all the time just to make money for the military-industrial complex and advance some dopey geostrategic agendas in Eurasia.

    ❖

    Biden says “everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” Jen Psaki says Eastern Europe is “our eastern flank”. The US government firmly believes its territorial borders extend to the outer planets in our solar system.

    ❖

    NATO is bad, actually.

    ❖

    The US government is the most evil and destructive regime on this planet and you should want its leadership to be ineffectual and its agendas to fail.

    I’ve never encountered anyone who can refute my claim that the US is quantifiably the most evil and destructive government in today’s world. They try, but they generally weren’t even aware of the facts that I use to make my case until I show them to them. This says so much about the power of US propaganda.

    Hardly any westerners are aware that the US government has spent the 21st century slaughtering millions in wars of aggression, or that it’s circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates. This stuff should be the first thing anyone learns when they’re beginning to research international conflicts and global power dynamics. Instead it’s like this obscure esoteric secret that’s hidden from them while they’re fed an IV drip of propaganda about Russia and China.

    ❖

    If you’re a leftwardly-inclined politically active person in the western world, you will eventually discover that many of the figures you were initially drawn to are terrible on imperialism and militarism. How you respond to this discovery says a lot about your character.

    ❖

    Whenever someone regurgitates a western propaganda narrative, ask them what articles they’ve read disputing that narrative. If they say “none” (or more commonly “What articles dispute this??”, which means the same thing), they’ve admitted to having no idea what they’re talking about. And at that point they’ve already lost the argument, because they just admitted they’ve done no real research into whether or not their claim is actually true. They just told you they’re blindly regurgitating television narratives without bothering to check if they’re factual.

    If the narrative you just repeated is the same as what the TV and the US State Department are saying, and you haven’t researched opposing perspectives on that narrative, you haven’t done any actual research at all. You’re just a mindless automaton acting out your programming.

    After this has been established, you can go ahead and say they’re done. If they keep going I sometimes say “If I had just admitted to doing zero meaningful research into whether or not the claim I just made is true, I personally would shut the fuck up about it.”

    ❖

    The old model of slavery came with bad PR and you had to feed and house your slaves. The new model of slavery has great PR, you don’t even have to pay them enough to house themselves, plus it’s easy to profit from the way the slaves are always forced into debt with interest.

    __________________________

     

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • Undermining US Global Hegemony Is Good, Actually: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    China and Russia are right to try to undermine US unipolar hegemony. The planet is not America’s property and efforts to stop it being treated as such are good.

    It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and still believe the US is a force for peace and justice in this world.

    ❖

    The belief that China is trying to become the next unipolar global hegemon is premised on the idea that Beijing has been watching the floundering US empire burn itself out and get crushed under its own weight after just a few decades and thinking “Oh that looks awesome! Let’s definitely do that!”

    ❖

    “No no you don’t understand, the US needs to keep bombing and starving civilians and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship and arming extremist militias and supporting dictators and destroying any nation who disobeys it. Otherwise the world might be taken over by a tyrannical regime!”

    ❖

    You could very easily fill a list with one thousand things Americans should care about more than the one year anniversary of a few wingnuts wandering around the Capitol Building for a bit and then leaving.

    ❖

    Americans have always had a special love for fake fighting. Civil War reenactments. Pro wrestling. Jerry Springer. Democrats vs Republicans.

    ❖

    Biden is a better Trump than Trump was; he’s advancing all Trump’s policies more effectively than Trump and actually doing things that Trump only talked about. If Trumpers had any actual ideological consistency instead of vapid partisan hackery they’d all be Biden supporters.

    ❖

    Please consider the possibility that it’s not a coincidence that Democrats have done literally exactly what those who oppose “vote blue no matter who” said they would do when they took power.

    ❖

    Nobody gets censored for “covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the so-called Facebook whistleblower, before that it was domestic extremism, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinfo and fake news. The reality is much simpler: people are being censored on the internet to normalize censorship on the internet.

    ❖

    Don’t underestimate how badly our rulers need to regulate speech on the internet. Their very survival depends on preventing awareness of the exploitative and oppressive nature of the status quo from spreading into the mainstream. They’d do literally anything to stop it.

    ❖

    Leaving mainstream social media platforms for fringe social media is just marginalizing yourselves. It’s doing the narrative managers’ job for them. By all means join alternative platforms also, but don’t quarantine yourself from the mainstream crowd as long as that’s where the people are. That’s just giving the bastards what they want.

    The whole objective of internet censorship via de-platforming and algorithm manipulation is to quarantine the mainstream herd away from wrongthink. Leaving is just doing exactly what they want you to do. You need to stay and disrupt establishment narratives where you can be seen.

    Sure you maybe have free speech on those small fringe platforms. You have free speech on a desert island, too. It doesn’t matter what you say if people don’t hear your words. If you oppose the status quo, you need to oppose it wherever your voice can influence people.

    ❖

     

     

     

    There is no “human nature” apart from our immutable physiological features. What we’re dealing with in matters of societal organization is the human condition; conditioning by propaganda, by early childhood trauma, by generational trauma. And we can heal all of that conditioning.

    People who cite “human nature” to argue that society must necessarily be organized a certain way are only ever talking about their own conditioning. If they think it’s human nature to be selfish and competitive, they’re just telling you how they’ve been conditioned to be.

    ❖

    The narratives about what’s going on in our world had already become unsustainably shrill and muddled before Covid; now it’s gotten so bad it affects the decisions people make in their everyday lives. Humanity is approaching a white noise saturation point with narrative itself.

    Which could end up being a good thing, in the long run. All of humanity’s problems ultimately boil down to an unwholesome relationship with mental narrative. If that relationship becomes so strained that it snaps, maybe we can replace it with something healthier and more truthful.

    _____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Everyone who’s freaking out about wokeness and identity politics can relax. Liberals are 100 percent certain to get bored with that schtick and forget all about it without having helped a single member of any minority or marginalized group. Ask the immigrants and the kids in cages.

    ❖

    Anyone to the left of Ted Cruz is a communist. Anyone who opposes US imperialism loves and supports the governments it targets. Anyone who defends Palestinians hates Jews. Move the Overton window far enough toward your side of the debate and you can spin even the slightest hint of disagreement with you as dangerous extremism.

    ❖

    People who spend their time freaking out about communism are hilarious. Even if you believe communism is always necessarily evil, if you live in the western empire you’re so far from experiencing communism it makes more sense to spend your time fretting about shark attacks or being struck by lightning. If you’re reading this odds are you live in an English-speaking nation. If you live in an English-speaking nation your government is so very, very, very far from espousing communism that it would make more sense for you to spend your time worrying about being eaten by lions.

    Even if you believe everything the TV tells you about communism, the simple economic realities of your nation and the mountains of violent force keeping it in place mean that of all the many, many existential threats you can worry about, communism should rank near dead last.

    ❖

    Reverse Batman: A working class ninja spends his nights beating up kleptocratic billionaires whose thievery has created the socioeconomic injustice that’s destroying his city.

    ❖

    ❖

    Balanced commentary in the west does not mean criticizing all governments. Balanced commentary in the west would be correcting the wild imbalance in our current media environment by focusing on criticizing the most powerful and deadly governments who barely receive any criticism.

    ❖

    The powerful are able to manipulate humanity collectively to such an extent that our compliance now has us staring down the barrel of extinction on multiple fronts. No individual can stop them. They won’t be stopped until the people begin thinking and organizing collectively too.

    Which is of course why all collectivist movement is stomped out with whatever degree of violence is necessary. Our rulers are not even the slightest bit worried about us as individuals, but they are absolutely terrified of the idea of having to face us as a unified collective.

    If individualism ever had an argument to begin with, it certainly hasn’t got one anymore. Humanity’s collective behavior is now so powerful that it can literally end our world. The only thing we can control now is whether that collective behavior is pointed toward health or destruction.

    Oh you just want the government to leave you alone and let you go about your business as an individual, do you? Well guess what blossom? Even if you went off grid and lived a truly independent life, the ways the powerful are organizing the collective will still get you killed by nuclear war or environmental destruction. Even if you support a radically individualist status quo like voluntaryism or minarchism, you’re never going to get a chance at creating that status quo without mass-scale collective organization against the current status quo. An “anarchist” who dismisses mass collective organization is just a LARPer.

    The need to begin thinking and organizing collectively has shown up at your doorstep. The luxury of thinking of yourself as an individual is no longer yours. Unhealthy mass-scale human behavior will destroy us all if we cannot make the changes necessary to turn it toward health.

    We will either rise as a collective or perish as individuals. All other options have been taken off the table.

    ❖

    Humans are not rational animals. That’s clearly evident in our behavior at mass scale and as individuals. We are driven by our conditioning. If any kind of “free will” can be said to exist at all, it’s only to the extent that we choose to bring consciousness to that conditioning.

    ❖

    The only obstacle to the creation of paradise on earth is the limits of human perception. Our inability to see what’s happening behind the veils of government secrecy. Behind the distortions of propaganda. Behind the illusory nature of the ego. We just need to find a way to see.

    Seeing is all that’s required. If enough people could clearly see what’s going on in their world, in their government, and in themselves, the shift into healthy and harmonious functioning would immediately change from seemingly impossible to self-evidently inevitable.

    ____________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • Refusing To Oppose US Tyranny Is Siding With It: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The US and its allies are pushing the world toward nuclear armageddon. The US and its allies armed Al Qaeda in Syria. The US and its allies are carrying out a literal genocide in Yemen. The US and its allies are deliberately starving children by the thousands. Shut up about Russia and China.

    Desmond Tutu said “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This is especially true of the unjust situation in which the largest power structure on earth oppresses and tyrannizes populations around the world to force their obedience. Refusing to take a clear stance against that power structure is siding with it.

    ❖

    William Van Wagenen has a new article out with The Libertarian Institute documenting the mountains of evidence that the US and its allies were supporting Al Qaeda-tied militias in Syria from the beginning of the war, in direct contradiction of the mainstream narrative that that started later.

    This is what happened in Syria, it’s what happened in Libya, and it’s what was on track to happen in Xinjiang before Beijing said “nah” and launched its crackdown. The west isn’t mad at Beijing for committing a “genocide”, it’s mad at Beijing for preventing one.

    Like so many other western propaganda operations these days, this one is predominantly about China’s Belt and Road Initiative which it plans to use to help rise above US hegemony and create a multipolar world. The actual interest in Xinjiang has been about the fact that it is a key geostrategic region that the western empire would greatly benefit from balkanizing away from China so it can’t fulfill the crucial role planned for it in the BRI.

    Criticize Beijing’s crackdown in Xinjiang all you want, but it is indisputably orders of magnitude less draconian than the US “war on terror” approach which has killed millions and displaced tens of millions since 9/11.

    ❖

    Yes, China’s government is more authoritarian than yours in some ways. Also, you’re being deceived by a massive, sweeping propaganda campaign about the things China’s government does and the threat it poses to you. Both of these things are true. They do not contradict each other.

    ❖

    If somebody somehow managed to leak 100 percent of all classified information on all US government malfeasance, it probably wouldn’t have the effect you’d imagine. The mass media would either ignore it or spin it into obscurity, and it would be quickly shuffled out of the spotlight. We may be sure this is true because there’s already more than enough publicly available information on US government depravity to completely discredit all of its leading institutions. The reason that information hasn’t caused uproar and unrest is because of narrative management. Propaganda is the ultimate enemy.

    The real problem isn’t access to information so much as the way that information is presented to the average citizen. That’s why it’s so important to attack and discredit the means of information presentation at mass scale wherever there’s an opportunity. Imperial narrative control is our real prison.

    ❖

    You can understand why the US political system refuses to bring Americans out of debt and impoverishment by imagining what would happen if it didn’t. Ordinary people would use their new financial influence to create a system that serves them rather than serving a globe-spanning empire. In a system where money equals power, people would begin using their new economic power to change political and economic realities for their benefit. They’d begin working to divert wasteful war machine spending to themselves. The oligarchs who control both US political parties can’t have that.

    Money is power and power is relative, so those with lots of money are incentivised to keep as much money as possible for themselves to maximize their power. If everyone is a king then nobody is a king. There is a tremendous amount of power riding on keeping Americans poor and busy.

    ❖

    Echo chamber dynamics and cognitive biases are the uncrowned rulers of the human worldview. They shape our perceptions of what’s happening in the world and tend to do so without ever even being noticed. That’s why introspection and self-awareness are fundamental to understanding.

    ❖

    The world is burning and psychopaths are brandishing armageddon weapons in the name of global domination. If you are going to spend any of your remaining time on this planet fighting, it would probably be wise to spend it fighting for something that truly matters.

    __________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • China Is Not A Problem That Westerners Need To Solve: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    They’ll jail you for stealing from your employer but not from your employees. They’ll jail you for whistleblowing on civilian-killing drone strikes but not for killing civilians with drones. They’ll jail you for insider trading unless you’re doing it openly in the US Congress.

    ❖

    The main difference between Hollywood stories about evil psychopaths trying to conquer the world and real life is that in real life the psychopaths succeeded a long time ago.

    ❖

    I used be mad that the US is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and slaughtering people by the millions in imperialist wars and destroying any nation which disobeys it but then someone informed me that China is building stuff in Africa which is clearly far worse.

    ❖

    ❖

    “China is going to take over and give me a social credit score” is the new “Muslims are going to take over and impose Sharia law.”

    ❖

    “Of course there’s a lot of propaganda about China, but it’s still definitely a threat.”

    “How do you know that?”

    “Oh my god dude, it’s all over the news!”

    ❖

    I’m comfortable holding my positions on China even when I’m getting hate mobbed for them on Twitter because I already saw all that with Russia and was completely vindicated. It taught me that in a highly propagandized population there’s no correlation between how loud people yell at you and how right they are.

    I can tell I’m pushing against a wall of pure propaganda when I write about China because so many of the objections I get from people are empty appeals to emotion. No facts, just vapid, sputtering outrage that I would dare question what the TV told them about a government the US doesn’t like.

    Another clue is the repetitive nature of the objections. Everyone’s bleating the same lines, just as they’ve been programmed to.

    ❖

    I’m not even one of those high-octane commies who defends China because it is communist. It’s just clear to me that a mature and impartial analysis of the actions and power dynamics at play shows the US is the aggressor in these escalations and China is responding defensively to those aggressions.

    ❖

    ❖

    The only way China invades Taiwan is if it is provoked. The only way it would be provoked is if that provocation was orchestrated by the US. They’re fearmongering about Chinese aggressions in a tense standoff that’s only tense because of US aggression.

    ❖

    China is not actually a problem that needs to be solved.

    ❖

    Western media virtually never use the word “detente” in reference to cold war escalations against Russia and China. They go out of their way to avoid informing people that de-escalation is even an option. The decision to plunge into cold war brinkmanship has already been made and fully committed to.

    ❖

    I’m not “pro-CCP” or “pro-Kremlin”, that’s just what I look like from inside a propaganda-warped reality tunnel when I say things about US aggressions that fall outside the virulently pro-US Overton window that’s been constructed for you throughout your entire life.

    ❖

    The Biden administration could very easily restore the Iran nuclear deal at zero risk to anyone simply by ending the unilateral US sanctions and coming to the negotiating table with the original agreement. They could have done it many months ago. The JCPOA has not been restored because they chose for it not to be.

    ❖

    As the US war machine’s pivot to Asia sees it scaling down operations in the Middle East, the mass media are now permitted to do critical reporting on the fact that civilian casualties from US airstrikes are frequent and grossly under-reported. And of course they are. Duh.

    The only people to whom these revelations are surprising are those who’ve been assuming you can drop military explosives on inhabited areas without killing civilians. Which is something you only believe because it is comfortable.

    ❖

    Doing commentary on US warmongering is like being in a hostage situation with a crazed gunman who’s already killed a bunch of hostages, but most of the people in the room act like you’re a weird freak for talking about the gunman all the time instead of focusing on other things.

    “Oh my god you only ever criticize that crazed gunman. Enough about the crazed gunman already! One of the other hostages just farted, how come you’re not criticizing her??”

    ❖

    We still kill people for worshipping the wrong god. It’s just that now our god is a capitalist empire.

    ❖

    Watching porn to learn how to fuck is like watching pro wrestling to learn how to fight.

    ❖

    People say “Journalism is not a crime,” but it actually is a crime when those in power say it is. That’s precisely the problem with the Assange case. Many evil things have been legal, and many good things have been illegal. We’re looking at an effort to make critical natsec journalism on the US war machine illegal.

    ❖

    Extinction is the future’s bouncer. If humanity can’t transcend its maladaptive conditioning and become a species that collaborates with its ecosystem, the bouncer will turn us away at the door like the dinosaurs with a “Sorry man, but you’re not on the list.”

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • The Assange Issue Is NOT Complicated: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The most powerful regime on the planet imprisoning a journalist for journalistic activity is as brazen and obvious an act of tyranny as you could possibly come up with, and yet you still get pseudoleft pundits acting like you’re some kind of weird freak for expecting them to oppose it.

    The Assange issue is not actually complicated. The most powerful government in the world is trying to extradite a journalist and try him under the Espionage Act for exposing its war crimes. It is that simple. This isn’t some super complex subject that you defer to the experts on.

    That’s one of the things that’s so frustrating about this case. It’s such a blatant abuse of government power that virtually everyone would normally be ideologically opposed to it, but because there’s been so much media spin on it for so long people don’t see it.

    Don’t imprison journalists for exposing the truth. I mean, like, duh. This should really be such a mainstream issue that fringey types like myself would see no need to focus on it, and if the media environment wasn’t being so despicably manipulated it would be.

    ❖

    China is far, far better than the US. That doesn’t mean China is awesome, it just means the US is far, far worse than anyone else in terms of tyranny and destructiveness. Working to destroy any population which disobeys you anywhere in the world makes you worse than anyone else.

    The only reason nobody seems to recognize this in the west is because the US has such phenomenally excellent global narrative control. If it didn’t, the entire world would’ve laughed when the butchers of the Middle East started pretending to care about Muslims in Xinjiang.

    People will respond to this by saying things like, “China is more oppressive domestically, US is more oppressive abroad.” But nothing China is doing domestically is anywhere remotely as bad as what the US is doing abroad. Nothing China is currently doing rises to the level of the US killing millions and displacing tens of millions just since the turn of this century in still-ongoing military operations.

    This is an unassailably correct position; there exists no robust arguments to the contrary. The only reason people experience so much cognitive dissonance whenever I say this is because so few step all the way back and look at the big picture of our present reality as it currently exists.

    Maintaining an awareness of the indisputable fact that the US is by far the most destructive government on earth gives you a much clearer perspective in our current media environment, because you see that it’s always vastly worse than 100 percent of the governments it tries to demonize.

    ❖

    It’s amazing how many people I’ll interact with who blame China for the rising authoritarianism of their own governments. It takes a lot of propaganda consumption to believe western governments using western means to oppress westerners has anything to do with China.

    ❖

    “Left-versus-right is just designed to keep us divided against each other.”

    No that’s capitalism. Capitalism is what’s designed to do that. And you either oppose that right-wing, divisive, competition-based model or you don’t.

    Sure Democrat-versus-Republican, Tories-versus-Labour etc is fake and divisive bullshit, but those are right wing, capitalist parties. You either support their ideology or you oppose it. This is a real distinction and pretending otherwise serves nobody.

    ❖

    Capitalism depends on scarcity. Go to a communist country and give everyone a bunch of free stuff and everyone will be better off. Go to a capitalist country and give everyone a bunch of free stuff and you’ll collapse the economy.

    Capitalism needs lack. Lack is capitalism’s number one product.

    ❖

    Democratic Party leadership and its allied media will always find some reason to take the focus off the need for healthcare and economic justice. Sorry can’t talk about healthcare and wealth inequality, gotta shriek about Russians. Sorry can’t talk about healthcare and wealth inequality, gotta shriek about anti-vaxxers. Sorry can’t talk about healthcare and wealth inequality, gotta shriek about Trump’s 2024 campaign. Sorry can’t talk about US healthcare and wealth inequality, gotta shriek about some other thing.

    ❖

    Humanity arrived on the scene through a frightening and violent process of death, mutation and natural selection, leaving a bunch of trauma conditioning imprinted on these newly-evolved massive brains of ours even long after the threats have gone. We’re still sorting that out.

    ___________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • The Assange Case Is The US Defending Its Right To Lie: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Assange case is the most powerful government in the world defending its right to lie to you.

    ❖

    Q: What’s the difference between how the US deals with journalists it hates and how Saudi Arabia deals with journalists it hates?

    A: Speed.

    ❖

    The US is currently building a network of long-range missile systems on a chain of islands near China’s coast for the explicit purpose of threatening China. You can tell who is the aggressor in US-China tensions by asking yourself what would happen if this situation was reversed.

    Per Washington’s own logic it would be perfectly reasonable, and indeed responsible, for China to set up military arsenals along both US coastlines to “contain” it and “deter” attacks on Latin American nations, as the US has an extensive history of launching such attacks and will surely try to again. But we all know what the US response to such behavior would be.

    ❖

    It’s a bit annoying living in a world that’s ruled by a dying empire whose increasing desperation to retain control could lead it to initiate a dangerous military confrontation with a major power at any time.

    The rise of China crashing into the Washington doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost is an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object situation that could very easily end in nuclear armageddon.

    If the preservation of US unipolar hegemony requires continually escalating military brinkmanship against nuclear-armed Russia and China as well as powerful forces like Iran, then the claim that US unipolar hegemony makes the world a more peaceful place is plainly false.

    ❖

    You currently have a much higher chance of dying as a result of a nuclear war instigated by your government or its allies than as a result of someone else refusing to take a Covid vaccine. You hear about the latter threat but not the former because the mass media exist to protect imperialist agendas from scrutiny.

    ❖

    You know you’re getting scammed when your government ends a long and expensive war and then the military budget goes up.

    ❖

    There is no sector of US government policy more significant and consequential than the command of the most powerful military force ever assembled. There is also no sector of US government policy with less oversight, accountability, or press scrutiny.

    ❖

    Besides a brief window after 9/11 the US has never really been able to sell the narrative that governments it wants to ramp up aggressions against are about to attack its easily-defended shores. So instead it does ridiculous things like claiming those governments are about to invade Ukraine and Taiwan.

    The US empire never attacks, it only “defends”. All its aggressions are always about “defending” freedom and democracy, “defending” human rights, “defending” nations that can’t defend themselves, etc. Often it even “defends” preemptively, before the attacker has done anything. Sometimes the attacker is the last to find out that they were planning an attack.

    ❖

    Ever since getting our eviction notice I’ve struggled to be creative because my mind is so focused on the daunting task of finding a nice yet affordable place for my family to live, and it really makes me feel for everyone for whom housing security is a chronic creativity drain. All to pay for the privilege of living on the fucking planet we were fucking born on.

    I mean, think about how much creativity and innovation our species is missing out on because our dopey, primitive societal models force people to spend so much brainpower just figuring out how to stay fed and housed. That brainpower could have gone toward improving our world.

    ❖

    Really I’m just a mother. I’m just a mum who wants a healthy planet and a healthy society for her kids, and I advocate the things I believe will facilitate that. You can add whatever -ists and -isms you want on top of that, but my true ideology is motherhood.

    ❖

    Right now being smart and informed is a detriment to happiness because things are shitty and the more you understand the harder it is to be happy. Once we create a healthy world this will reverse; the more you understand about the world the more uplifted and optimistic you’ll be.

    _________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Our Rulers Are Not Rational Creatures: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We survived the nuclear horror of the cold war only to see our rulers turn around and start another one for no legitimate reason, this time against two nations simultaneously. And almost no one objected.

    The first cold war was colored by a healthy fear of nuclear annihilation, by support for detente in mainstream political factions, and by an understanding that this was a situation we should ideally get ourselves out of as soon as possible. This new cold war features none of these, and is against two nuclear powers, Russia and China, instead of just one. Twice as many unpredictable moving parts. Twice as many things that can go cataclysmically wrong. And this one’s got a whole new dimension of danger in the race to put weapons in space. Our odds here are not good.

    I probably won’t feel such an urgent need to keep talking about this as much once I start seeing some real sustained acknowledgement in mainstream circles that there is a very very dangerous game being played here and heroic efforts need to be made to de-escalate it. But right now there just isn’t. Everyone is asleep at the wheel. Nobody’s noticing how dangerous this nuclear tightrope walk is getting.

    ❖

    China is the same kind of country it was during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. All that’s changed is the level of power it has on the world stage, and therefore the threat level it poses to US planetary domination.

    ❖

    China is building up its military might in correct anticipation of an eventual confrontation with the US empire. The empire’s choices are now (A) abandon the goal of indefinite unipolar hegemony and pursue detente, or (B) orchestrate some kind of massive attack soon before China becomes too powerful to defeat.

    ❖

    I will admit to being more rude to hysterical anti-China types than I am to most people. This is partly because the agendas they’re facilitating are so dangerous, and partly because they’re often a very abrasive combination of stupid and uninformed yet arrogant and condescending. They’ve seriously got the worst low-info/high confidence ratio of any faction I’ve ever encountered.

    ❖

    ❖

    Many Bible verses have done lots of damage over the years, but among the most destructive has been “The poor you will always have with you” from Matthew 26:11. It’s been used often to argue that poverty cannot be eliminated, which at this point in our development is simply false.

    As Buckminster Fuller once said, “It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.”

    Allowing poverty to continue is now a choice. It’s not a choice being made by you or me or any ordinary person, but it is still a choice, being made by the drivers of global capitalism. We could eliminate it, but we don’t, and we accept this as normal because we’re brainwashed.

    We could be living in a world where people collaborate with each other toward everyone’s benefit but instead we’re waiting around to find out if we’ll all die in a nuclear holocaust because some neocons convinced everyone in Washington that the US must maintain unipolar hegemony.

    ❖

    “How come you still write about the world like nothing’s changed since Covid?”

    Because as far as my line of commentary is concerned nothing has. We’re still hurtling toward armageddon and dystopia just as I was describing before 2020, there are just new justifications and details behind some aspects of that trajectory. We’re still headed for disaster unless the people rise up and use the power of their numbers to turn us away from the trajectory toward doom, and that’s still not going to happen as long as people are being propagandized. This is all still the case just as it was in 2019.

    The emotions of the Hot News Story of the Day often make it hard for people to clearly see the horrific nature of the status quo that has already been in place for a long time, the abuses of which have been far, far greater than the Covid-related ones. In terms of abusive systems held in place by propaganda and authoritarian force, the ones we had in place in 2019 dwarf the measures we’ve seen put in place since by orders of magnitude. Many just didn’t notice them because they’ve been conditioned to accept them as normal.

    A big part of what I do here is try to help people see the mundane horrors of the status quo with fresh eyes. If someone was teleported here from an alternate Earth with a healthy society, they’d never stop screaming.

    ❖

    Leftists who spend a lot of energy conformity-policing the online left are admitting that they’re only in this for the egoic currency of social media reactions. There’s no other reason to look at our world’s problems and decide that’s the most useful expenditure of your energy. If you look at the dire straits humanity is in and then decide you’re going to spend your time and energy calling Jimmy Dore a fascist or Max Blumenthal an anti-vaxxer or whatever, you’re admitting you’re not in this to make the world better. You’re not interested in fixing this thing.

    ❖

    ❖

    The most powerful people in our world pursue power for its own sake and do so with amoeba-like levels of wisdom and insight. Don’t attribute any higher order of decision-making capability to them than you would to any random acquaintance in your life. If anything, attribute less.

    Most people are deeply unconscious and patterned. Ruling elites are no exception, and in fact they are more unconscious. It’s a common error to think of these people as rational actors; really their minds are running on autopilot in response to conditioning put in place long ago.

    That’s why you’ll see them continuing policies which destroy the biosphere they depend on for survival or escalating military aggressions between nuclear powers. They’re not making cool, rational decisions, they’re acting out impulses within themselves that they don’t understand.

    You’ll hear people say “They wouldn’t nuke themselves, it’s irrational” or “If the climate situation was really that bad they’d have taken drastic action long ago,” but this assumes you’re dealing with rational minds and not what are essentially neurological computer programs. Really you’re just looking at highly traumatized organisms mindlessly acting out patterns set in place much earlier in their lives to cope with distress and gain a feeling of safety and security. And virtually none of those patterns are useful for running the world in a sane way.

    Any analysis which holds that elites wouldn’t do something simply because it’s not rational is an analysis which omits the important fact that, as Robert Heinlein put it, “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.”

    These people are not gods. They’re barely even humans.

    ❖

    You’re far from the truth if you believe the official government runs things. You’re closer to the truth if you believe unelected plutocrats and secretive agencies run things. You’re standing in the truth if you see that the self is an illusion and no one ultimately runs things.

    ❖

    It’s not true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; the absence of beauty is. Beauty is everywhere; it’s the natural, default state of perception. The inability to see beauty in something is the result of mental projections added onto that natural state by the beholder.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • The US Manufactures Weapons And Consent: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The only manufacturing jobs left in the US are military weapons and consent.

    ❖

    Gotta keep dropping bombs because they gotta keep making bombs. Gotta keep making bombs because they made the entire economy dependent on bomb-making. This is the only type of system that could possibly work.

    ❖

    The goal of internet censorship is to suppress and marginalize unauthorized ideas so much that the internet actually becomes a net negative for ordinary people, because the only ones who will be able to rapidly share ideas of consequence will be the propagandists and their acolytes.

    ❖

    Because people who object to US-led imperialist aggressions against their governments are routinely purged from social media, those of us who do not live in nations that are being targeted by those aggressions have a special duty to forcefully speak out against US imperialism.

    ❖

    “Come to our Summit for Democracy,” said the nation whose elections are completely fake and whose intelligence agencies have interfered in scores of foreign elections and which openly works to topple democratically elected governments around the world all the time.

    I mean, come on:

    ❖

    Capitalism is such a garbage system that news media will shriek all day about “crime” like it’s this mysterious alien phenomenon being inflicted upon society from the outside instead of a very obvious symptom of economic injustices with very obvious and widely known solutions.

     

    ❖

    I was fully expecting Biden to be absolute shit but I will still admit to being disappointed that he just flat-out lied about ending the war in Yemen. Yes I know it serves me right for getting my hopes up. But it is still horrific that this atrocity continues.

     

    ❖

    “You’re Australian, don’t write about America.”

    You’re a literal empire. Everyone gets to talk about you. Shut the fuck up.

    When people would tell me to shut up about the US because I’m not American I used to point out that my co-writer/husband Tim is American, but I quickly realized that’s giving way to much credence to the idea that non-Americans can’t criticize a planet-dominating unipolar empire.

    ❖

    Covid is interesting in that it has a propaganda campaign that everyone’s aware of and encouraged to participate in. So you’ll see things like when Jimmy Dore got slammed earlier this year for talking about his adverse vaccine reaction, not because it was false, but because it hurt the propaganda effort.

    There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that Dore lied about having adverse reactions, but he got raked over the coals anyway. You see things like that all the time: people forcefully discouraged from talking about raw facts because it might hurt the vaccine effort or whatever.

    You are free to believe this propaganda campaign is a good thing, or that it’s a necessary evil, but what you can’t do is deny that it’s a propaganda campaign. There’s a concerted effort to manage perception, and the rank-and-file public is actively participating in that effort.

    None of this is to deny that there’s misinformation about Covid and vaccines etc; there’s an incredible amount of stupid bullshit and sloppy thinking out there. But there’s also a fair bit of real information that people simply cannot discuss outside certain echo chambers without being stomped down.

    This is a fairly new development, where the public is encouraged not just to share a certain message but to aggressively shut down anything which doesn’t perfectly align with it regardless of whether or not it is based in fact. Narrative managers are watching this one closely.

     

    ❖

    The increasing likelihood of nuclear war between the US power alliance and Russia and/or China is the most important issue in the world. It’s self-evidently priority number one, because there will be no politics, protests, Covid vaccines, racial issues, healthcare etc if we are all dead.

    There is no other issue that could instantly turn all the other issues into a non-issue tomorrow. Opposing the way the US and its allies are rapidly ramping up hostilities against Russia and China simultaneously and shutting down any possibility of detente must be our foremost priority.

    I just keep seeing a day not far in the future were a nuke gets discharged amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions between nuclear-armed nations and all we’ll be thinking about as the world ends is all the stupid nonsense we’d been arguing about previously.

    ❖

    The advent of nuclear weapons didn’t prevent a third world war, it just postponed it. It is not a coincidence that the two most powerful nations the US has been unable to absorb into its field of control are nuclear-armed ones. But now a final confrontation is on the horizon.

    After the second world war the US became the top imperialist aggressor, and since it couldn’t take out Russia and China it set about absorbing weaker nations into its imperial folds. Now only a few nations remain unabsorbed, and the drums of war against Russia and China are beating ever louder. There was a tiny four-year window after Hiroshima before Stalin got the bomb, and China followed five years later. By doing so they were able to postpone a direct confrontation with the US empire for the rest of the century, but they’ve been marked for absorption ever since.

    And now the campaign to shore up total global control is approaching its final stage.

    ❖

    Things are fucked, the people who are making them fucked will keep doing so until stopped by the public, and the public is being psychologically manipulated away from stopping them by propaganda. That’s our whole struggle right now, and it’s happening on many different fronts.

    __________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

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  • A Sense Of Perspective, If You Please: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The US and its allies feigned impartiality on the conflict in Ethiopia this whole time and then someone literally just recorded a Zoom conference of western diplomatic insiders casually chatting about wanting the TPLF to topple the sitting government and leaked the video.

    ❖

    “Should the US and its allies intervene militarily in-”

    No. The answer is no. The answer is always no. As evidenced by generations of unbroken history in the modern world. How fucking hard is that?

    ❖

    Issues that make sense to focus on a lot:

    • Our imminent doom via nuclear war or environmental collapse
    • Imperialism
    • Dystopian authoritarianism
    • Abuses of capitalism

    Issues that don’t make sense to focus on a lot:

    • Electoral politics
    • Society getting “too woke”
    • Social media feuds

    ❖

    “Eww China has reeducation camps, can you believe that? Imagine, a program for systematically changing the thoughts people think to make them obedient. It’s so creepy and Orwellian. Can’t wait to find out what else CNN has to tell me about the world after this commercial break!”

    ❖

    As the US ramps up brinkmanship with Russia and China it has simultaneously upgraded its nuclear arsenal to make nuke blasts more destructive and thereby capable of eliminating an enemy’s underground warheads. This will make an enemy more likely to strike first to avoid being disarmed.

    ❖

    I keep tripping on how weird it is that the US empire is charging into new cold wars with two nuclear-armed nations simultaneously for the first time ever and hardly anyone seems to think humanity’s most imminent threat could be all those armageddon weapons we’ve been stockpiling. I mean, how stupid would we feel for missing that one?

    ❖

    “There’s no threat of nuclear war,” said the smart person. “I trust the US war machine which consistently makes the worst possible decisions in every instance to perfectly navigate a hair-trigger nuclear standoff on two fronts every hour of every day for the foreseeable future.”

    ❖

    People who think MAD will continually keep the world safe from nuclear armageddon (A) don’t understand the factors that are most likely to lead to nuclear war and (B) haven’t thought very hard about what the “M” and the “D” stand for.

    The belief that Mutually Assured Destruction will protect us even amid reckless cold war escalations is insane. Only detente can provide safety, with the ultimate goal of complete disarmament.

    ❖

    The US is going to start a nuclear war with Russia or China and the online left will still be focused on the Leftist Heretic of the Day for several minutes after the first bombs hit.

    ❖

    FYI it doesn’t matter how correct you were about Russiagate being bullshit if you are now deep throating MSM China narratives with zero gag reflex.

    ❖

    FYI it’s not okay to be a grown adult at the end of the year 2021 and still believe Joe Biden is a good president.

    ❖

    Some people enjoy being whipped bare ass whilst receiving humiliating verbal insults. Some people enjoy publicly proclaiming that Democrats will surely do the right thing this time and getting their hopes up high that they will. Don’t kink shame.

    ❖

    The opinion that there should be literally no dissent anywhere at all about government Covid policies which affect everyone is one of the most bat shit insane beliefs you could possibly come up with.

    ❖

    Racism is a real problem that must be made conscious AND ALSO the issue is often manipulated to protect the status quo.

    Climate change is real AND ALSO manipulative plutocrats are looking to benefit from it.

    Covid is dangerous AND ALSO it’s being used to advance unjust agendas.

    Because our brains are wired to reject any information which could threaten our worldview, it provides more cognitive ease to simply dismiss every part of any idea that might add layers of complexity to your position. But doing so distorts our perspective.

    ❖

    It’s gotten to the point where any time I see exciting new anti-imperialist voices emerge in left media I start inwardly cringing because I know there’s going to be a vicious hate campaign directed against them using leftist-sounding language and given leftist-looking legitimacy.

    Highly effective anti-imperialist voices will always be attacked and undermined and leftists will always be manipulated into distrusting them. There will always be a reason found for doing this. And people fall for it every damn time.

    ❖

    All of humanity’s problems are ultimately due to ego. Ego is ultimately born of a desire for control. The desire for control is ultimately a maladaptive impulse which we’re all eventually going to have to relinquish in order to have a healthy world.

    _____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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  • Space Colonization And The Myth Of Separateness: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    I’m old enough to remember people defending the incarceration of Nelson Mandela with “He’s a criminal, he cheated on his wife, people died because of him!” Now they smear Assange but history will vindicate his defenders. The only question is how long, and will it kill him first?

    ❖

    I only see random douchebags with hardly any followers smearing Assange online now. It used to be highly influential pundits doing it. Virtually everyone knows his case is bullshit at this point, even if they don’t have the balls to admit it.

    ❖

    Did you hear about the billionaire-engineered virtual reality universe where consumers plug into another world that’s like a cutesy fantasy version of real life? They’re calling it “the mainstream news”.

    ❖

    The year is 2031. The sky is red and we all live in cubicles but we don’t notice because our Meta goggles only show us happy Pokemon trying to sell us digital accessories. We’re at war with China but the news is only reporting on the controversy over whether Peppa Pig is a SWERF.

    ❖

    Covid vaccine mandates will radicalize workers more than today’s western left ever could.

    ❖

    If you speak out against “anti-vaxxers” more than you do against western imperialism then just put on a pussyhat and add a blue wave emoji next to your name on Twitter, because you’re a worthless shitlib now.

    ❖

    The overall behavior of the United States government has changed a tiny fraction of a single percentage point since Trump left office.

    ❖

    If you’d seen a video clip of me calmly watching a child drown in a swimming pool and doing nothing to help, would it ever occur to you that I should be in charge of the world? That’s how weird it is that we let billionaires who could end world hunger at any time shape society.

    ❖

    All of the problems that proponents of space colonization claim it will solve can be far more realistically addressed by sociopolitical changes and technological innovations geared toward protecting and preserving life here on Earth. The only reason anyone takes it as a given that humanity needs to become independent from Earth’s ecosystem to survive is because they assume the destructiveness inherent in capitalism are an inescapable constant. And there is literally zero reason to believe it’s even possible.

    The only reason anyone even believes it’s possible to colonize space is because cognitive and perceptual biases cause us to assume that the human organism is separate from its ecosystem. It is not. The biosphere is one inseparably unified happening of which humans are part.

    We developed these biases of perception out of evolutionary necessity; our recently-evolved prefrontal cortices gave us unprecedented capacity for abstract thought, but it couldn’t help us advance our survival unless we thought of ourselves as separate from sabre-toothed cats etc. In reality the biosphere isn’t made up of separate “things” any more than a tornado or hurricane is. An organism is just a process, a happening, that is in nonstop interplay with the rest of the ecosystem on every level due to its need to eat, breathe, drink etc.

    We’re interconnected with this planet in so very, very many ways, many of which we probably don’t even know about since we’ve never actually tried to live independently from it. Our brief visits to space have been nothing more than glorified scuba excursions that were 100 percent dependent on supplies and support coming directly from Earth.

    But because we’re conditioned to think in terms of a separation that doesn’t actually exist in real life, we think we’re these separate things that could just ship off into the stars. Really it’s like thinking you can snip a swirling eddy out of the river it appears in.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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  • The Democratic Party Will ALWAYS Be This Way: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Chevron—the actual corporation—just sent a lawyer to prison for standing up to the fossil fuel industry, and now British judges are weighing whether or not to send a journalist to a US jail cell for practicing journalism. Western nations need to shut the fuck up about human rights in other parts of the world.

    ❖

    It’s important to remember that before Assange was dragged out of the embassy on a Trump administration arrest warrant in 2019, liberal journalists would mock and smear him relentlessly any time he was in the news. They are silent now, but they helped pave the way for what’s happening now.

    Never forget that liberal journos participated in a nonstop smear campaign of shocking aggression and astonishing scale against Assange from 2016-2019, and that their smears helped manufacture consent for his imprisonment. Not until they were confronted with the cold hard reality of a journalist being arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for publishing did they realize this isn’t a fucking game and shut up.

    Now he’s in prison, for practicing journalism, and his health is fading, and they are silent. I hope they’re silent and ashamed. I hope one day they look in the mirror and see someone who helped torture an autistic man for doing their job better than them.

    ❖

    So are we all just supposed to pretend it’s fine and normal that the most important press freedom case of the century is proceeding without the presence of the defendant?

    ❖

    The worst atrocities in history have all been legal. All the worst examples of genocide, slavery, tyranny and bloodshed have been allowed or actively facilitated by the state. The persecution of Assange is geared toward entering the imprisonment of journalists into this category.

    A regime which legally extradites and imprisons journalists right out in the open for reporting on its crimes is more evil and more tyrannical than a regime which disappears journalists in secret, because its entire system supports such acts of tyranny and publicly asserts that it is fine. At least the ones who hide it are tacitly acknowledging that it is immoral by hiding it instead of proudly demonstrating its fascism in broad daylight.

    Obviously journalists who expose severe malfeasance in the US war machine will always be at risk for being targeted, but establishing such journalism as actually illegal and capable of being prosecuted legally, right out in the open, would be a huge victory for the war machine.

    ❖

    The Democratic Party is doing exactly what anyone who knows anything predicted it would do when they reclaimed the White House and the Senate and it’s going to be rad watching American liberals learn exactly zero lessons from it.

    Right after Biden was sworn in I wrote that the next two years are going to be the Democratic Party at its most transparent, because the Democratic Party exists to kill all leftward movement in the most powerful government on earth.

    “Unable to blame their refusal to advance progressive policies and basic human decency on Trump and Vladimir Putin these next two years, they’ll be forced to kill any leftward movement all on their own,” I said. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now. It’s not about Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema or the Parliamentarian, it’s the Democratic Party doing the thing it is built to do. The only thing it ever will do. If it wasn’t Machin and Sinema it would be someone else.

    But watch the mental gymnastics people do to claim that the problem is not electing the right kind of Democrats.

    ❖

    ❖

    It’s crazy how easy it is to brand yourself an up-punching anti-fascist without ever actually opposing the most fascistic agendas of the most powerful government on earth.

    ❖

    Facebook changing its name to Meta feels the same as when one of my spiritual friends would change their name to Ramana or Moksha or some grandiose bullshit. It’s like shut the fuck up Darryl, you’re a white asshole from the suburbs like the rest of us and you work in IT.

    ❖

    Notice how none of the Australians who oppose their government are asking the US for crushing economic sanctions like US puppets in nations like Venezuela do? That’s because they’re not being paid to ask for those things by CIA fronts like the National Endowment for Democracy. No normal person asks to be starved.

    ❖

    The best argument against the current world order is the world order itself. We’re destroying our biosphere while flirting with nuclear armageddon and waging endless wars, and those who shape global policies are focusing on censoring the internet and giving everyone a digital ID.

    ________________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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  • Capitalism Is Violence: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I always get people telling me, “Capitalism just means free trade.”

    No it doesn’t, that’s just some stupid nonsense libertarian types started saying a few years ago. Capitalism means what the Marxists who coined and popularized the term have been saying it means since the 1800s: the owners of the means of production exploiting workers by paying them a fraction of the wealth they generate. Capitalism is a system which financially coerces those who have nothing to sell but their labor to sell it to the owners of the means of production, necessarily at a price that is far below the amount of value they generate and with no influence over the industries they are powering with their work. It is inherently exploitative, and leads to corporations with no human interest pursuing profit at all cost even at the expense of the ecosystem we all depend on for survival.

    Even those who support capitalism understand this distinction if they’ve done a tiny bit of research outside their partisan echo chambers. You don’t get to just change someone else’s definition of words to defend your belief system from their criticisms; that’s not a thing.

    By distorting this definition, supporters of capitalism can object to its critics with “This isn’t real capitalism, because trade and finance are regulated by corrupt governments.” No it’s capitalism. Real capitalism is not just entirely compatible with the corruption of capitalist governments but an unavoidable component of it. Saying “It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s crony capitalism” or “It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s corporatism” is the same as saying “It’s not my chain smoking that’s the problem, it’s my emphysema!” One inevitably leads to the other.

    Only narrative says I should be able to use my socioeconomically advantaged position to hire workers who exponentially multiply my wealth for a fraction of what it costs me to pay them. Capitalist narrative, created and promulgated for generations by those who benefit from it.

    ❖

    A system which financially coerces those who have nothing to sell but their labor to work for companies for a fraction of the value they generate is violent. It is aggression. It is simply legalized theft. The only reason this isn’t obvious to everyone is centuries of capitalist propaganda, and if people ever manage to free their minds from that indoctrination and begin moving to redistribute the wealth the capitalist class has stolen, guess what will happen? Armed forces will be deployed to kill them until they stop. This is on top of the global war on communism that has been going on for generations. The entire thing is violence, and is held in place by violence.

    ❖

    Malignant narcissists don’t typically seek out therapy, partly because they’re wired to assume they’re perfect and partly because our current systems reward the tendencies of malignant narcissism. We are ruled by untreated malignant narcissists who were elevated by this system.

    ❖

    It’s a pretty interesting coincidence how western news media just happen to keep discovering reasons why censorship of internet platforms is gravely necessary in a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by global narrative control.

    ❖

    The most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election wasn’t a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control. All the other bullshit since then has followed from this.

    This was when the belief among mainstream journalists became widespread that internet censorship is needed and that it is their duty to manipulate public opinion. Another 2016 WikiLeaks drop in 2020 would never have been reported on by the mass media, as evidenced by their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story.

    Now we’re seeing an increasing homogenization of online information as the media class cheers on censorship in the name of fighting Russia, white supremacism, Covid misinformation, and in the name of protecting US elections, while the media acts weirder and weirder. The way the entire mass media jumped right on board the Russiagate narrative instead of asking what’s true, for example, or the way many questionable claims about Covid which have since been invalidated were asserted with adamant aggression; this all followed from that moment.

    And now we’re watching cold war escalations continually ramp up against Russia and China, and the mass media are forcefully and uncritically pumping all US government narratives into public consciousness. The 2016 reshaping of their values lubricated the way for this.

    ❖

    “You only criticize the US and its allies, not Russia or China!”

    Focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive government requires no defense. It’s not weird that I do it, it’s weird more people don’t. Those who want to hear criticisms of Russia and China are advised to switch on the nearest television.

    It’s such a dumb complaint.

    “It’s so strange and suspicious that you only focus on the worst impulses of the globe-spanning power structure which is vastly more destructive than any other in existence instead of yelling about the same governments as every billionaire media outlet throughout the entire western world.”

    Durr.

    ❖

    Remember when moral panic was a specific thing that would happen once in a while instead of western civilization’s general continuous state of existence?

    ❖

    Our rulers always have to choose between bread and circuses or accelerationism; they’re either choosing to keep the people mollified and distracted while stealing a little or to risk provoking revolution by stealing a lot. Right now they’re picking the latter. Interesting choice.

    When you look at it that way you realize that even when something horrible is happening it could also be leading to something very healthy. They’re walking a delicate tightrope walk while trying to keep their greed from consuming them. They’re not really in control here.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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  • We Are Ruled By Apes With PR Firms: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    So yeah basically we’re watching sociopathic oligarchs shore up more and more control over the global population and our electoral systems are rigged to prevent us from doing anything about it and our information systems are stacked to prevent mass-scale direct action against it.

    You can’t vote your way out of a problem you never voted your way into in the first place. You can’t have a revolution while everyone is being successfully propagandized into accepting things as they are. Any solution is therefore going to have to come from somewhere they haven’t secured.

    So we’re all just kind of watching this happen and hoping for what amounts to a miracle, or really a stack of miracles. What gives me hope is that I know humans have a lot of surprises within themselves that they haven’t even begun to explore yet. We might just get some miracles.

    ❖

    The behavior of global oligarchic power structures makes a lot more sense when you see that it’s not as much a lucid elite conspiracy as it is a few barely-conscious humans compulsively acting out psychological dynamics within themselves that they don’t really understand. Elite conspiracies happen to be sure, but what’s ultimately driving them is not a complete and coherent vision for the future which takes all things into account but rather the simple egoic impulses of barely-evolved primates blindly trying to shore up control like chimps asserting dominance.

    The sociopaths who rule our world are no more conscious of their own inner processes than your average serial killer. They can act out their impulses in a way that looks very organized and efficient, but the driving forces beneath it are the least-evolved aspects of humanity. We are ruled by apes with PR firms.

    That’s why they often behave in ways that are nonsensical. Some ask why they’d continue killing the biosphere and flirt with nuclear war when it can kill them, for example. And the answer is not that nuclear brinkmanship is a phony performance or that climate destruction is a hoax, but that you’re dealing with the same dumb stimulus-response impulses as any other basic organism.

    It is true that the drivers of the US-centralized empire want to live as gods, able to cause famines or rain fire in any part of the world which disobeys them. It is not a coincidence that the few remaining parts of the world where they cannot do this are the parts you’re most forcefully trained to hate.

    But these are not gods enacting grand visions from on high; they are organisms acting out the same forces that have been unfolding since the Big Bang just like the rest of us. And they are less conscious of the way those forces are playing out within themselves than your average healthy human, not more.

    ❖

     

    No normal people want digital identity laws passed. Rank-and-file members of the public aren’t sitting around going “Man it sure sucks we can’t prove our identity online with a digital ID that contains all our information.” Only the powerful want this, and for good reason.

    ❖

    If voicing very basic human rights concerns about mandates and digital IDs will get you called an “anti-vaxxer” (and it will), is there any reason to treat that label like it’s a real thing with any actual meaning?

    ❖

    Trans people are not a threat to you, immigrants are not a threat to you, Russia and China are not a threat to you. Please stop letting the world’s worst people manipulate you by tugging at the strings of the least-evolved parts of your brain.

    ❖

    First hackers, then Havana Syndrome microwave beams. It sure is crazy how Russia keeps attacking the US in invisible ways that only US intelligence agencies can see.

    I’m old enough to remember when advancing US military objectives needed to be justified by actual, physical events, like planes crashing into buildings. Now it’s justified by invisible, unverifiable allegations for which the evidence is classified.

    ❖

    To be absolutely clear, the US government has appointed itself the authority to unilaterally decide which of the world’s populations get to eat and which do not, and to imprison anyone who tries to facilitate unauthorized eating in a US-sanctioned nation.

    ❖

    “Tax the rich” is a great banner for Democrats because it’s completely meaningless. “Tax them” how much? Enough to level the playing field or a tiny percentage that won’t make any real difference? It’s perfect for Dems because it sounds revolutionary but is just more of the same.

    “Tax the rich” in practice just means “Tax the rich a tiny amount more which will make no difference and will be rolled back the instant Republicans are in control.” In practice slow, incremental change always means no change at all.

    ❖

    Inequality makes you less safe, not more. No matter how much money you obtain, the greater the disparity between you and others the more unsafe you are, and the more you have to rely on outer structures of protection which need constant maintenance.

    This is why I’m always talking about how dumb the wealthy people who rule our world are. Their reptile-brained thinking isn’t good enough to even serve their own interests, let alone the world’s.

    ❖

    The purpose of establishment propaganda is to deceive the ruled into believing that their interests are one and the same as the interests of their rulers.

    ❖

    I see the fact that we are hammered with propaganda so aggressively 24/7 as cause for hope, not despair. The fact that they have to work so hard to keep humanity this crazy means the gravitational pull is toward sanity, and they’re fighting harder and harder against that pull. It takes a lot of education to keep us this stupid.

    ❖

    It really is a struggle between light and darkness, in a sense. A struggle between those who want to make things visible, conscious and clear against those who want to keep things secret, unconscious and distorted. Dysfunction can’t survive if all its mechanisms are clearly seen.

    Those who want truth and health want things transparent, honest, and awake. Those who want untruth and dysfunction want government secrecy, propaganda distortion, and a deeply unconscious public. The latter are the ones in power right now. The former are trying to oust them.

    Every positive change in human behavior, whether individual or collective, has always been preceded by an increase in awareness, by becoming aware of something that was previously hidden. Those who want positive change want to increase awareness. Those who don’t want it all dark.

    But of course it’s not as clear-cut as good guys vs bad guys, us vs them. Within even the best among us there are parts which want to keep some things endarkened, and within even the worst of us there are parts which yearn for truth. So really it’s an impersonal, universal fight.

    No matter how conscious you are, coming all the way out of hiding is still a lifelong journey. You’ll still find parts of yourself that have been hiding from the light of consciousness you never would have guessed were there many years down the road. We’re all waking up together.

    Our collective awakening will look like that too. Things are going to keep becoming more and more visible, and just like individual awakening it will be awkward as fuck sometimes. And just when we think we’re done, whole new levels of previously endarkened inner territory will emerge. But the basic trajectory, whether individually or collectively, is the same: things becoming more and more visible, with a corresponding increase in harmony. The secrecy of the powerful giving way to transparency, distortions giving way to clarity, lies giving way to truth.

    How are we still being deceived? How are we still deceiving ourselves? It’s the same question and its resolution happens in the same movement; it’s just that one is directed outward and the other inward. They’re both equally important for our collective movement into the light.

    Dysfunction and clear seeing cannot coexist, collectively or individually. If dysfunction is occurring, it’s because something remains unseen. Our purpose here is to try and see it all; to let the human adventure behold itself from all different angles.

    And move toward harmony.

    _____________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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    Image via Pixabay.

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  • Crypto Invalidates The Money Narrative: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It’s trippy how a government that’s been democratically elected by free people behaves in exactly the same way you’d expect a government to behave if it was run by corporations.

    ❖

    I just cannot understand how we keep failing to solve the world’s problems using a system of making as much money as you can while paying your workers as little as you can and offloading as many of your costs onto the biosphere as possible.

    ❖

    What’s funny about Joe Rogan is he clearly didn’t start off with an oppositional relationship to the mainstream media; that opposition was thrust upon him by the mass media constantly lying about him and smearing him for having a large audience without conforming sufficiently to establishment groupthink.

    So now you’ve got someone with a massive platform who nobody can control openly asking if the public is being propagandized by the media about nations targeted by the US-centralized empire. If he keeps chasing that rabbit, things could get very interesting and/or very ugly.

    ❖

    Propaganda is the answer to most important political questions. Why are things so fucked? Propaganda. Why do people keep supporting corrupt parties and voting for corrupt assholes? Propaganda. Why is there no antiwar movement? Propaganda. Why don’t the people rise up? Propaganda.

    ❖

    What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has institutional safeguards which prevent dissent from having any effect?

    ❖

    You don’t actually have “free speech” in your country if there are mountains of institutional roadblocks set up to prevent anyone from using their speech to effect meaningful political changes. It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say.

    “I can say whatever I want in my country!” Yeah you can say whatever you want on a desert island too, and because your status quo is locked in place in countless ways it will make the exact same amount of difference.

    ❖

     

    Wikipedia is just as aggressively manipulated by imperial narrative managers as news media and social media. Whoever controls the narrative about the world controls the world itself.

    ❖

    The financial elite hate crypto not because crypto itself poses a threat to their empire, but because its existence is destroying trust and belief in the “realness” narrative of money among regular people. Bitcoin is imaginary, but it’s worth real money. Why? Because money is also imaginary.

    The complexity of the markets is absolutely essential in controlling the narrative around why a few live like kings while the rest work like slaves just to keep a roof over their heads. You, regular person, are not meant to understand it. Because if you did it could not continue.

    If you define crypto as shares it makes it clear that shares don’t need to be based in any kind of physical reality in order to create “value” in a market-based system. Crypto as currency makes it clear that currency doesn’t need the trade of a national economy to back it.

    Crypto shows that it’s all made up, this whole psychopathic numbers game where the digits on your bank app dictate whether you live or die, or the digits on spreadsheets dictate whether we avoid near-term extinction or not, it’s all made up. And we can change it whenever we like.

    I’ve always hated Monopoly. What a tedious, vindictive waste of a perfectly good afternoon. I am so pissed off that we’re going extinct over what essentially is just a global game of Monopoly that virtually none of us want to play.

    ❖

    In the escalations between the US and China, one is the aggressor and the other is acting defensively. You can tell which is which by asking yourself how the other would react if the situation was reversed. If China started doing this to the US there would be war instantaneously:

    Image

    People say “That military presence is to protect China’s neighbors from Chinese aggression.”

    Look up all the USA’s murderous interventions in Central and South America. China would be far more justified setting up a military presence to protect nations like Cuba and Venezuela. Yet it doesn’t. This means between the US power alliance and China, Washington is the aggressor and Beijing is acting defensively in response to that aggression. The reason western news media do not report on these escalations in this way is because western news media is propaganda.

    When you’re used to being in power a movement toward equality can feel like a personal attack. Marginalized groups being elevated gets turned into “There’s a war on white men!” China refusing to let the US rule the world gets turned into “China’s trying to take over the world!”

    ❖

    That there would be a second cold war was guaranteed after the success of the first one. If your empire succeeded in attaining global hegemony in a game of subversion and manipulation which happened to greatly enrich your military-industrial complex, why wouldn’t you do it again?

    I mean sure you’re gambling the life of every terrestrial organism every day you roll the dice on brinkmanship with nuclear-armed nations, but you wind up sitting pretty if your gamble pays off and the world doesn’t get incinerated. It’s a no-brainer for people with no brains.

    ❖

    Seems like every country on earth gets compared to Nazi Germany except the imperialist one that’s been slaughtering people by the millions to conquer the world because it believes it’s exceptional.

    ❖

    ❖

    Things are so deeply, deeply fucked in so very, very many ways, and they are getting worse so very, very fast. And because status quo narrative control is so effective, hardly anyone is even aware of this. If humanity makes it out of this mess alive, it will look like a miracle.

    But also, there is so very, very much we do not understand, and humans have so very, very much untapped potential we simply haven’t woken up to yet. There is plenty of room for future miracles to be hiding in all that space.

    We are where we are because of our collective conditioned behavior patterns. Any movement away from our self-destructive patterning will necessarily come from an unpatterned direction, and will therefore be unexpected and unanticipated. That’s why it will look like a miracle.

    We go on because we go on. Because our heart keeps beating and our lungs keep inhaling, and because the human organism is deeply hardwired to desire life, and because life is beautiful and delightful. We fight on because what the hell else are we going to do?

    ❖

    As power-driven agendas of global conquest give rise to international propaganda wars that are increasingly turning our information ecosystem into white noise and indecipherable gibberish, people may soon cease looking outside themselves for truth and begin looking within.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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  • Real Cancel Culture: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    “To protect Taiwan we must be prepared to go to war with China.”

    ~ Imperialists who just lost a war to the Taliban

    ❖

    I’m genuinely disturbed at how many people would be willing to fight a world war over Taiwan’s governmental preferences. The power and effectiveness of the imperial propaganda machine never ceases to amaze me.

    ❖

    The astonishing amount of pushback I’m getting for my very sane and normal “Let’s not fight World War Three over Taiwan” position makes it abundantly clear that many people don’t truly understand that starting a war means you have to actually send actual human beings to go fight that war.

    The correct response to someone who supports going to war if China attacks Taiwan is “Are you enlisted?”

    The correct response when they inevitably answer “no” is “Then shut the fuck up.”

    ❖

    People who are fine with the idea of increasing aggressions between nuclear-armed nations simply haven’t thought hard enough about what nuclear war is and haven’t learned enough about the many different ways it could occur. It’s a comfort held in place by compartmentalization.

    ❖

    The decision to go to war with China would be the single most important and consequential decision ever made in human history. You’d have to weigh it against millions to billions of deaths. Defending Taiwan’s preference of government clearly wouldn’t weigh enough to justify that cost.

    ❖

    The empire’s greatest weapon is not its military but its propaganda machine. There’s simply never been anything like the global narrative control provided by the western news media, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. The military fights wars, the propaganda machine wins them long before they start.

    A lucid and well-informed examination of the world’s problems will keep bringing you back to this one fundamental issue: that Earth’s inhabitants are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into organizing themselves in ways that serve the powerful instead of the people.

    ❖

    Congratulations to those who were awarded the same highly esteemed Peace Prize as Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger.

    ❖

    Conduct critical journalism on an empire-targeted government: get a Nobel Peace Prize.

    Conduct critical journalism on the empire: get a CIA plot to assassinate you.

    ❖

    Real cancel culture is when the CIA plots to assassinate a journalist for publishing authentic documents in the public interest.

    ❖

    ❖

    It’s very cute how we all think that everyone else is gullible except for us. Even assuming that is true is already very gullible.

    ❖

    Humans are not inherently fucked up, we’re just traumatized and manipulated by an abusive system into doing fucked up things. Very few of the ugly behaviors we see in people would exist if we had conscious and compassionate systems in place for organizing ourselves in this world.

    Everyone gets that it’s wrong to blame an entire group on the misdeeds of a few of its members, but few people seem to apply that same logic to humanity as a whole. All our systems are dominated by the worst among us, simply because they’re sociopathic enough to climb to the top.

    Really it just boils down to the fact that the majority don’t understand how sociopaths’ minds work or how to counter them, and that the trauma of preceding generations keeps giving rise to sociopaths. I think the initial trauma stretches back to our evolutionary ancestors who literally spent their lives running from giant monsters who were trying to eat them. Our nervous systems still operate that way today, even though those monsters are long gone.

    If we could just catch a break for one or two generations to heal that trauma, I think we’d be fine. But we keep passing our trauma on to new generations because the worst among us keep thwarting everyone’s attempts to set up conscious systems.

    ❖

    To compensate for the fact that it won’t ever give the left any economic concessions the empire has been loudly amplifying some concessions on racial and sexual justice, so now even though nothing really changed you still get rightists saying politics moved “too far to the left”. This gives the propagandists a couple of different tools: it keeps discourse tied up on issues that will never hurt the agendas of any plutocrat or warmonger, and feeds into the culture war dynamics which facilitate us-vs-them propaganda tactics.

    Propaganda is the foundation of all our problems, and the us vs them dynamic is the foundation of propaganda. If humans can awaken in a visceral, experiential way to the reality that all is one we can inoculate ourselves against propaganda and begin moving toward health together.

    __________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Richer You Are The Creepier You Get: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    So the Facebook “whistleblower” all the mass media are loudly amplifying today is pushing for regulations that Facebook just happens to fully support, likely because the trillion-dollar corporation knows it will impose costs that make the emergence of future competitors impossible?

    Cool. That’s not suspicious at all.

    ❖

    They said we need internet censorship because Russia.

    They said we need internet censorship because Covid.

    They said we need internet censorship because election security.

    They said we need internet censorship because Capitol riot.

    They said we need internet censorship because domestic extremists.

    Now they say we need internet censorship because Facebook whistleblower.

    Pretty sure they just want internet censorship.

    ❖

    It’s so lucky how the political/media class and US intelligence agencies have been so very solemnly concerned that we have too much free speech on the internet and they just keep happening to get these viral news stories which show that internet censorship is a dire necessity.

    ❖

    Chevron literally sentenced a guy to prison and a new Bloomberg article argues that Amazon and Facebook should be made UN members and New Statesman argues that “tech billionaires are the new revolutionaries” and the mainstreaming of psychedelics is driven by corporate investors.

    ❖

    ❖

    Corporations, politicians, media, military and intelligence agencies are all the same class, and they have far better class solidarity than the rest of us.

    ❖

    Crazy how we learned the CIA planned to assassinate Assange and spied on him and his lawyers and the US prosecution relied heavily on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester and we’re still like “Man I hope the extradition case gets dropped.”

    That’s how bad things are.

    ❖

    Really rich people are creepy and they do creepy things. Billionaires spend a lot on media influence to manufacture consent for their existence and for the status quo their kingdoms are built on, but also because they need lots of PR assistance since they’re so fucking creepy.

    Image

    The richer you are the more divorced from normality you become. You don’t even know how a normal person acts. It never even occurs to you that people will think you look creepy devouring a baked lizard or buying up vast swathes of America’s farmland.

    You lose the part of yourself that goes “Hmm, better not do that publicly, people will think I’m creepy.”

    Before you know it you’re blasting off on a $5 billion carnival ride to space in a rocket that looks like a penis going “Yeah, this is fine. This is just normal stuff.”

    Image

    I mean, come on.

    Just coming right out and saying you want to ship all the normal people into space to breed in giant rotating cylinders? That’s creepy. That’s really, really creepy.

    And what’s even creepier is the ways they’re trying to cheat death so we’ll be stuck with these freaks forever.

    ❖

    As soon as the subject turns to Israel AOC always loses all linguistic faculties and transforms into this weird babbling space alien.

    This is the same kind of indecipherable word salad as her initial statement on her “present” vote on Iron Dome funding, and it’s the same as her word salading when she was questioned about Palestinian rights a few months earlier.

    Word salading is sometimes called “narc speak“, because it’s a technique often used by narcissists to confuse, overwhelm, and exert control over their target.

    ❖

    The farthest-left politicians in the most powerful government on earth just believe capitalism should be a little less abusive and the empire should be a tiny bit less murderous.

    ❖

    If your country’s political moderates support war, militarism, ecocide and authoritarianism, it means you are governed by violent extremists.

    ❖

    Don’t defend officials from your government. Just don’t do it. Do whatever you need to do to drive that power-worshipping, propaganda-instilled impulse from your mind and flush it down the toilet where it belongs.

    ❖

    Calls for civility toward government officials are always power-serving and anti-populist in nature. They’re born of an elitist fear that the common riff raff may realize their true power.

    ❖

    It is very revealing that western media never expose the malfeasance of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth, and this most certainly distorts people’s worldview, and this is most certainly not an accident, and it is most certainly worth talking about.

    ❖

    Futurists who predict an imminent explosion of innovation enabling a human biotechnology fusion which exponentially enhances people’s brains, senses and lifespans fail to appreciate that those technologies will inevitably be under the control of sociopathic intelligence agencies.

    ❖

    Make birthdays about everyone saying why they’re glad they had another year with that person. Make funerals about everyone saying why they’re sad they don’t get any more years with that person.

    ❖

    This believing we’re our bodies thing is driving everyone crazier and crazier in all sorts of ways and eventually we’re just gonna have to snap out of it and wake up to our true nature.

    __________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Corporations Are The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    You’d think the revelation that the CIA planned to assassinate an award-winning journalist for journalistic activity would have been a bigger deal.

    ❖

    Capitalism hinders progress because it ensures that all mass-scale human behavior will be driven by the pursuit of profit. For example, a huge global issue we have right now is cleaning up the pollution in our oceans. That is an easily solved issue if you take out the profit motive; you don’t wait for market forces to find some way to make it profitable, you just get in there and clean it up. But with the profit motive it’s almost impossible to conceive of it ever being solved.

    How often have you been excited by a great idea only to feel that familiar disappointment wash over you as you realize that it will never happen because it won’t make anyone any money? That’s how the profit motive stunts innovation.

    The profit motive will never find a way to leave a forest alone or minerals in the ground. There’s no business plan that makes money out of moms being paid to bring up healthy, happy, secure children. You can’t find a way to make money out of people driving less or buying less. There is no money in curing an illness, only treating it. There is no money in solving poverty, only in setting up a multi-million dollar “charity” that never actually intends to solve poverty because it’s a business and a business requires endless expansion.

    People who proffer the market as a solution to our massive problems have either never really thought about the restrictions of the profit motive, or they are heavily invested in pretending those restrictions don’t exist. I don’t respect either of those positions.

    ❖

     

    The corporations are the government. If you didn’t believe it before, believe it now that human rights lawyer Steven Donziger has effectively been sentenced to six months in prison by Chevron itself.

     

    ❖

    Never attribute to an elite cabal of Satanic pedovores what can be adequately explained by capitalism.

    ❖

    Jeff Bezos steals $2537 per second.

    ❖

    Remember when we learned that a very wealthy person can for a relatively small fee hire an army of former Mossad agents to terrorize, intimidate and subvert any private citizen?

    ❖

    It’s pretty fucked up how our criminal justice systems are like a century behind our understanding of developmental psychology, trauma and addiction.

    ❖

    Imagine if young people deployed to remove plastic from the ocean instead of to kill foreigners for Lockheed Martin.

    ❖

    The US and its allies have every obligation to absorb the immigrants fleeing the conditions created by the imperialist warmongering and economic exploitation inflicted upon them by that power alliance. If you want people to stay in their own countries then stop destroying those countries.

    It’s funny how defenders of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations often bleated “You break it, you bought it,” but they always meant “We broke their country therefore we need to continue the occupation” and not “We broke their country therefore we need to take in all the people fleeing the conditions we created.”

    ❖

    Wow Australia’s such a mess, I don’t understand how a continent-sized military base with no bill of rights that was built on prison labor and genocide and apartheid could be experiencing human rights issues.

    ❖

    Picture the most intrusive, Orwellian government you can possibly imagine: watching your every move, controlling everything you do. That’s the kind of power we should have over any system of government. Total transparency and accountability to the people, total control by the people.

    ❖

    I just cannot understand why all these damn anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists don’t trust a government that actively works against the public interest 100 percent of the time.

    I mean if you can’t trust institutions that are deliberately constructed to subvert the common good for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful at every turn, who can you trust?

    ❖

    Leaving aside the horrifying normalization of worldwide online speech being controlled by Silicon Valley plutocrats, does anyone actually believe that censoring vaccine skepticism will lead to increased trust in the vaccines? Does that really sound like something that would work?

    “Obviously the best way to convince conspiracy theorists to trust their institutions is to have an elite cabal of billionaire megacorporations in Silicon Valley coordinate the blanket censorship of their online speech.”

    Yeah great idea, dipshit.

    ❖

    If there are future humans on the other side of the existential hurdles our species is approaching there is a zero percent chance that they still destroy the environment to manufacture useless junk because they all need jobs to keep numbers in their bank accounts so they don’t starve.

    ❖

    When you actually love someone you are intensely curious about them and fascinated by them. You want to know everything about their inner world and what makes them tick, and you delight in what’s revealed to you with profound appreciation. If this isn’t happening, it isn’t love.

    ❖

    A lady in a spirituality group I used to frequent announced she was filtering the fluoride out of her water and made a really big deal about it. Every day she’d gush about her amazing third eye visions and how great she was feeling and how she pities all our poor calcified pineal glands. Then one day someone showed her that the filter she was using doesn’t actually filter out fluoride.

    I think about this often.

    ❖

    So much of what we call spirituality is just the mind searching for things that are already the case. Peace. Freedom. Presence. Boundlessness. Unconditional love. These things are already here, are already you. Just obscured by the mind’s flailing around trying to create them.

    _________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • There Is No ‘Good’ Form Of Capitalism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Don’t side with the powerful against the less powerful. Just don’t. Don’t side with police against protesters. Don’t side with the US against the targets of western imperialism. Don’t side with Israel against Palestinians. Siding with the powerful means you’ve taken a wrong turn.

    ❖

    It sure is a strange coincidence how all the US government’s grave concerns about Julian Assange endangering national security all manifested in ways that just so happen to look exactly the same as the world’s most powerful government persecuting a journalist for telling the truth.

    ❖

    May all the journalists who helped manufacture consent for Assange’s persecution one day look in the mirror and see someone who helped the most powerful government in the world torture an autistic person for doing their job better than them.

    ❖

    Watching TV when you’re not used to it is like a nonstop machine gun punch-in-the-face reminder of how completely unsustainable capitalism is.

    ❖

    Q: What is capitalism?

    A: Capitalism is a system of transferring blame for society’s problems from the people who cause those problems onto the people who are hurt by them.

    ❖

    ❖

    Q: What is democracy?

    A: Democracy is getting to choose between a political party who doesn’t think the abuses of capitalism are excessive enough and a political party who thinks the level of abusiveness is just about right.

    ❖

    There is no “good” version of capitalism. Any system in which human behavior is driven by profit will necessarily see a steadily mounting rise in exploitation, inequality, ecocide and militarism, because all of those things are profitable. We need to end the profit motive itself.

    ❖

    Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that wealthy and powerful people would manipulate global affairs in all sorts of immoral ways over a paltry trillions of dollars.

    ❖

    Indie media figures who spend a lot of time sniping at and talking shit about other indie media figures do so solely because their interest in social climbing and sectarian tribalism grew to exceed their interest in the values which brought them to indie media in the first place.

    Nobody really talks about the way you get pulled into different factions once you start gaining a following in indie media, but it’s very much a thing. You get added to group chats, people cozy up to you and amplify you and ask to be amplified, then before you know it you find yourself involved in agendas and sectarian spats that have nothing to do with your values. Takes a lot not to get drawn in.

    ❖

    Remember when CNN staged a scripted interview with a seven year-old Syrian girl to have her explain that Assad was responsible for a recent sarin gas attack and drum up support for US military interventionism?

    I think about this a lot. She’s plainly either reading or reciting from a script, which means CNN’s Alisyn Camerota necessarily had the other half of that script. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

    ❖

    “Why don’t you talk more about Covid and vaccines, Caitlin?”

    Yeah why don’t I spend my life trying to explain a nuanced and evolving perspective about a hot-button issue to hysterical people on the internet who are all determined to misinterpret the words I’m saying, sounds fun.

    ❖

    People say Marx was smart but I’ve read his stuff and he barely spends any time at all yelling about Jimmy Dore.

    ❖

    AOC’s habit of word-salading on difficult issues is what you get when you have news media driven by access journalism who politicians know will never try to pin them down on their answers and say “Yeah nothing you just said makes sense. Please explain what you meant by that?”

    Politicians of a certain level understand that as far as the media are concerned it doesn’t matter so much how you answer as that you answer. If it’s a difficult question you just keep your mouth moving without actually saying anything until the question goes away.

    This is why it always feels like you’re being lied to when you watch presidential debates. Candidates understand how to keep their mouths moving and word salad about freedom and American democracy and whatever without actually giving a concrete answer to a difficult question.

    They do it because they know it works. And they know it works because they know the plutocrat-controlled media are driven by empire apologia first, ratings second, advertisers third, and holding the powerful to account somewhere near the bottom of the list.

    ❖

    Democratize the media, free the internet, end government secrecy, end corporate and financial secrecy, end patents, establish centers for psychedelic use and consciousness expansion, eliminate most laws and thereby most police and prisoners, govern in rotating shifts like jury duty, eliminate mass-scale manipulation including advertising, build systems for collaboration with each other and our ecosystem, end all war and militarism, get mothers all the material support they need to raise mentally and physically healthy children, end wealth inequality, give everyone enough, make shelter, water, food and air inalienable human rights.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Electoral Politics Does Not Work: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It says a lot that AOC wasn’t even able to vote against an Israeli apartheid measure that everyone already knew would pass regardless of her vote.

    I mean, how far gone is your progressive revolution if you’re not even allowed to have a perfectly safe performative “no” vote? If even the illusion of opposition is banned?

    ❖

    People say, “Why pick on AOC when other lawmakers are way worse?”

    They’re not worse, they just perform different functions. The Manchins and Sinemas kill leftward movement openly, the AOCs encourage the left to feed their political energy into a party that’s built to kill leftward movement.

    It happens that one of these manipulations is much easier for leftwardy-inclined people to see than the other; it’s easier to recognize Manchin and Sinema-type bullshit than AOC-type bullshit. So you’ll see some factions on the left putting special emphasis on pointing out the one that the general public needs a lot more help recognizing.

    ❖

    I don’t know who needs to hear this but there is no functional difference between a politician who votes a certain way because they want to and a politician who votes a certain way because systemic pressures push them to.

    It’s like Trump supporters saying he wanted to fight the Deep State but the Deep State wouldn’t let him. It’s like, okay, so? Who gives a fuck? Either he’s an asshole or an impotent puppet, either way fuck him. Same with AOC and her constant establishment capitulations. Whether they’re serving the empire because they want to or because they have to, it’s clear and undeniable that electoral politics isn’t the way to advance the interests of normal human beings. The system simply does not allow for that.

    The absolute least important thing in the universe is how some politician’s feelings are feeling inside. It does not matter what secret intentions they have in their heart. All that matters is what they do. If they can’t do what you need them to, it means they’re useless. Period.

    ❖

    The single greatest threat to freedom and democracy is not foreign governments, nor the authoritarian measures being implemented by our own governments, but the fact that giant media and tech companies are used to continuously manipulate the way people think about all of those governments.

    You are not free if your mind is not free. It doesn’t matter if you were free to say and do whatever you want if the powerful are still actively manipulating the thoughts you think, because all your words and actions will arise from those thoughts. Mental sovereignty comes first.

    ❖

    In an alternate universe the governments of a parallel Earth responded to the pandemic by pouring money into healthcare systems, transferring wealth from their nations’ richest to their poorest, and saying “Here’s a new vaccine but it’s up to you whether you use it or not.”

    ❖

    It’s true that knowledge is power. That’s why the powerful work to control people’s access to knowledge through the internet and news media. It’s also why there’s privacy for the powerful and radical transparency for the public, instead of the other way around as it ought to be.

    ❖

    Biden proclaiming that the US is no longer at war because he moved a few thousand troops out of Afghanistan is the most Trump-like thing that has happened so far in this very Trumpian administration.

    ❖

    The US is like “We do not seek a new cold war, we simply seek to remain the unipolar dominator of the entire planet and maintain the ability to unilaterally destroy smaller nations which disobey us. And we’ll do anything to accomplish this, including waging a new cold war.”

    ❖

    George W Bush should never be able to give any speech anywhere without people in the audience cutting him off to yell about his war crimes.

    ❖

    Invented a highly effective new antidepressant that I hope to get to the market ASAP. It’s not a pill it’s just a big wad of cash taken by force from giant corporations.

    ❖

    Mothers and nurses work harder than any billionaire on earth.

    ❖

    People complain about how I do my thing here and say I should do it some other way, and I totally get it. One time I went to an AC/DC concert and they played not one note of smooth jazz. I was so angry.

    ❖

    We are ruled by a nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure which is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways and that power structure has somehow seamlessly paced us from fearing terrorists to fearing Russian hackers to fearing anti-vaxxers instead of fearing it.

    ❖

    Someone who calls you an “anti-vaxxer” for expressing moderate and reasonable human rights concerns about brand new government policies that affect everyone deserves as much respect as someone who calls you an “anti-semite” for voicing legitimate criticisms of Israeli apartheid.

    ❖

    Having principles means having them even when they don’t further your personal agenda. You may enjoy the sight of having your politics enforced by gunpoint today, but it completely demolishes your voice and integrity when police brutality comes for you tomorrow. Those little self-serving lies that we tell ourselves about how our principles don’t apply here because of blah-blah reason are the levers by which the powerful manipulate us into further and further submission.

    ❖

    Propaganda works because it plugs into our most fundamental egoic mechanisms: identity and fear. Identify tightly with a group or political faction and you’ll accept propaganda which comes from there. Be driven by fear and that will be used to herd you into power-serving agendas.

    If you want to free your mind from the chains of power it’s not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts. The most important step to freeing your mind from its shackles is to remove from yourself the psychological hooks to which those shackles are attached.

    ______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Talkin’ About Armageddon: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The fact that our world is hurtling toward man-made obliteration on multiple fronts should probably occupy more of our conversational bandwidth than it does.

    ❖

    My basic overall position is that humanity is about to end itself via climate chaos or nuclear war due to global capitalism and oligarchic imperialism, that propaganda prevents people from rising up to stop this, and our only path out is a mass-scale psychological transformation.

    If you’ve ever been curious why I don’t write more about this or that subject, it’s usually because the above is my area of focus. Everything I write points to this in some way. That’s what I do here.

    ❖

    There are a lot of narratives circulating about what’s really happening between the US and China and whether the aggressions are actually as dangerous as they seem, and all of these narratives are rendered moot by the undeniable buildup of US military weaponry around China.

    ❖

    If you’re more concerned about China’s domestic affairs than your own country’s aggressive foreign policy toward China it’s because you’ve been propagandized. Change your media consumption habits accordingly.

    ❖

    Not even the craziest imperialists want a hot war with China. They’d much rather China to bow and be absorbed into the US-centralized empire as so many other nations before, or to collapse and fragment after a decades-long subversion campaign à la the USSR. In that order.

    The empire will happily make life miserable for Chinese people in coming decades to pressure Beijing into accepting that it’s in the people’s interests that the PRC kiss the ring. The problem of course is that China will be resisting these maneuvers in ways that can easily blow up in catastrophic ways. It’s entirely possible for any of the planned escalations and proxy conflicts geared toward undermining nuclear-armed China to provoke a response which causes a chain reaction from which there is no return.

    A simple miscommunication, misfire or weapons malfunction could do it. In a steadily intensifying “great power competition” that imperialists are saying will likely consume the entire 21st century, that’s a lot of chances for something to go catastrophically wrong. We repeatedly came close to this happening in the last cold war.

    And none of this insane brinkmanship is necessary. There’s no reason the US and China can’t simply get along and work toward the benefit of the world together. The only obstacle to this is a few western imperialists deciding US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost. There’s no legitimate reason the life of every terrestrial organism must be gambled over some moronic geostrategic agenda which benefits none of us, just because a few people with too much power got some idiotic ideas between their ears.

    Don’t consent to the new cold war. They’re working so hard to manufacture the consent of the public for this bullshit because they require that consent. So don’t give it to them. Fight the unleashing of this omnicidal horror every step of the way.

    ❖

    ❖

    “Why is there a labor shortage?”

    There’s not a labor shortage, there’s a paying people enough to live shortage.

    “So people aren’t coming to work because they’re tired of being robbed by the boss?”

    Yep. The problem with capitalism is you eventually run out of other people’s money.

    ❖

    Most of us intuitively understand that our true enemies are the powerful and not other rank-and-file members of the public, and most of us immediately forget this understanding the instant we log on to social media.

    ❖

    You don’t own your comrades. A lot of people will get angrier about a political ally disagreeing with them on one percent of total issues than a political enemy disagreeing with them on 99 percent.

    ❖

    Most people navigate social interactions like novice poker players: they bluff the opposite of whatever hand they’re holding. If they feel inferior they act superior. If they feel small they act big. If they feel vulnerable they act invincible. If they feel dumb they act like they’re smarter than you. Don’t buy into their bluffs. Be gentle.

    ❖

    If you resolve on a deep level to get real with reality, to want the truth at all cost whatever it is, it will turn your life upside down. You’ll lose careers, relationships, you’ll experience white-knuckle terror. But you’ll also give life a chance to astonish you with miracles.

    ❖

    Science tells us that matter and time don’t exist in the way our minds perceive them and what we’re actually experiencing are our own conceptual models of something that isn’t actually there. So, you know, feel free to change your own story in whatever way works for you and start over whenever you want.

    _____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Propaganda Scrambles Our Minds: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    America is a unipolar superpower governed by octogenarians who work for corporations and banks where military weapons are made by prison slaves to be launched at impoverished foreigners while celebrities attend lavish galas and police guard food in dumpsters from the homeless.

    ❖

    Propaganda warps people’s perspectives so drastically their own opinions don’t even adhere to the values they’ll tell you they hold. A liberal will get angrier about a random member of the public circulating a conspiracy theory than about government agencies killing children with bombs. Political Twitter got angrier about Joe Rogan taking ivermectin than the Pentagon murdering an entire Afghan family and lying about it. All sense of proportion and perspective has been scrambled.

    ❖

    Facebook has had a two-tiered system where famous people won’t be censored or suspended for posts normal people would be. Politicians and celebrities freely ignore mask rules while their servants are forbidden to. They all think they’re better than us, and our systems agree with them.

    ❖

    ❖

    If you rise to a position of influence in the western world you will immediately find yourself surrounded by people who are very interested in making sure you support status quo power structures, whether you’re a celebrity, a politician, or a social media executive.

    ❖

    It’s weird how nobody’s even saying the vaccine isn’t working as well as they’d hoped it would. You’re not even allowed to say that. Everyone’s really disappointed but they’re pretending they’re not because anything but 100 percent big-smile cheerleading gets you branded an anti-vaxxer. Everyone’s gotta do this weird, super tense, phoney happy smiley dance about how perfect and not-at-all-disappointing the vaccine is, because being truthful about how disappointed you feel hurts the vaccination campaign and therefore means you’re worse than Hitler.

    ❖

    The world is ruled by plutocrats and secretive government agencies and propaganda has enslaved public consciousness to ensure our compliance with their agendas. Global capitalism will grow ever more abusive until it is dispensed with. This was all already true long before Covid.

    “The Great Reset will let corporate elites rule the world!”

    They already do.

    “They’ll be able to surveil us for state control!”

    They already are.

    “They’re taking our freedom!”

    Your freedom was illusory.

    “The vaccine is mind control!”

    No that’s what the media’s for.

    ❖

    If it wasn’t the World Economic Forum and the “Great Reset” it would be something else. Capitalism will always inevitably become more unjust, oppressive and corrupt and will keep taking on new forms to continue its cancerous spread. The ultimate problem is human behavior being driven by profit.

    ❖

    At some point we’re going to realize that market forces and the profit motive do not have the wisdom to navigate through the existential crises humanity now faces. Only question is whether we’ll realize this in time to do something or realize it in our final gasps as a species.

    ❖

    If Australia were to pivot its loyalty from Washington to Beijing, western media would suddenly take an interest in Aboriginal human rights and news cycles would be flooded with stories about the need for blockades to punish the Canberra regime for its brutal lockdown oppression.

    ❖

    The worst thing about Australia is America.

    ❖

     

    ❖

    The most evil thing Biden has done as president is continuing Trump administration policies. The most evil thing Trump did as president was continuing Obama administration policies. If you can’t see this, it’s because you are blinkered by a manufactured partisan reality tunnel.

    ❖

    Contemplating the very real possibility of nuclear war is good personal practice. Nothing gets you rearranging your priorities in your day-to-day living like an acute awareness that you could look out your window at any moment and see a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon.

    ❖

    Most of the horrors in our world are man-made, and most of those man-made horrors are born out of a desire to control. A desire to control outcomes. A desire to control other people. A desire to control entire populations. A desire to control wealth. A desire to control the world. It’s all born of an egoic inability to let life be as it is.

    ❖

    Your elections are fake. Your politicians are puppets. Your species is driven by the interplay of preceding forces stretching back throughout our entire evolutionary history and all the way into the Big Bang. The self is an illusion. No one is in charge. This is all made of love. You are love.

    ________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Manufacturing Dystopia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We live in a world of manufactured lack, manufactured enemies, manufactured crises and manufactured consent. We’ve had sufficient resources to care for everyone for generations. All our wars are based on lies. All our problems are cooked up by a few psychos with too much power.

    ❖

    Ever since he came to Australia my American husband still finds it strange to see a parrot out in the open instead of sitting in a cage. I feel much the same whenever I see George W Bush.

    ❖

    The capitalist class has never voluntarily returned anything it has stolen from the working class; every time it manages to give people less it never reverses it, no matter how much greater profits become. Capitalism is never going to get less abusive. It will only grow more so.

    ❖

    If there were good billionaires they wouldn’t still be billionaires.

    It’s impossible to be a good billionaire, not just because it’s immoral to remain that wealthy in a world full of need and because all billionaires are parasitic middlemen siphoning the profits off other people’s labor, but also because in order to obtain that much wealth you generally have to manipulate the actual movement of human civilization to your benefit in some way.

    ❖

    “You’re anti-American!”

    No I’m anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-empire, anti-ecocide, anti-oligarchy, anti-capitalism and anti nuclear brinkmanship. It just happens that the US is at the center of a globe-spanning power structure that is the worst offender on all these fronts by an extremely wide margin.

    ❖

    The most evil and destructive things Trump did as president weren’t the Trumpian things but the American things. The things his predecessors and his successor are also guilty of doing.

    ❖

    If the US empire ran out of excuses to use and test its extremely profitable military arsenal on impoverished foreigners, it would simply invent more excuses.

    It’s hard to wrap your mind around, because it’s so much more profoundly evil than we’re ever taught to anticipate, but it really is an objective fact that people who make money manufacturing military weapons have a tremendous amount of influence over how and when those weapons are used. A war profiteer can pour money into campaign contributions which incentivize policymakers to push for acts of military interventionism, and pour money into think tanks and lobbying to give those policymakers an excuse to do so. This is all perfectly legal, and it happens constantly.

    It’s exactly the same as murdering human beings at mass scale and selling their body parts for a tremendous profit. And it’s deemed perfectly reasonable and acceptable.

    ❖

    I grow continually more and more amazed at how western media get away with citing think tanks funded by governments and defense contractors to promote imperialist propaganda. If everyone understood that they do this constantly and what that means, it would end the mass media.

    ❖

    The real heroes of 9/11 were those precious few who immediately took a stand against the jingoistic hysteria that swept across public consciousness and opposed the horrors the western empire was about to unleash upon the world.

    ❖

    History seldom vindicates the peacemongers. Not because they aren’t right, but because history is written by warmongers.

    ❖

    Covid could just as easily have been used to transfer wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest and pay people to voluntarily stay home and to take the vaccine. Instead it’s seen a massive wealth transfer to the very wealthiest, and vaccine mandates that will hurt the poorest.

    ❖

    We’re a few months out from seeing American libertarians angrily sharing around a video of police beating an unvaccinated Black person for noncompliance with some new authoritarian law, and seeing liberals in the comments cheering for the police.

    ❖

    Don’t look to other leftists to figure out how to think about a given issue, look at the values and priorities which led you to the left in the first place. The group consensus and your most deeply held values will not always be in alignment.

    Humanity is deeply insane, even the parts of humanity which align with your ideological preferences. For this reason it’s never a safe bet to go along with the consensus positions of your ideological faction instead of figuring things out on your own based on your own values.

    ❖

    There are a lot of people who correctly ask “who benefits?” whenever there’s a potential false flag event yet fail to ask who might benefit from a religion whose teachings glorify poverty, meekness, humility, docility, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

    ❖

    True humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, and it isn’t thinking of yourself less. True humility is the deep, all-pervading insight that the very phenomenon we call “self” is pure illusion.

    ❖

    You just have to wonder how much of a mass-scale psychological pummelling human consciousness can take before it snaps. And you have to wonder what might lie on the other side of that snap. Maybe something bad. But maybe something very, very good.

    ❖

    It’s a tricky tightrope walk the oligarchs have to do, making sure they don’t steal too much of our wealth and freedom all at once so we don’t rise up and take it back. It’s easy to forget that we’re actually the ones with all the power here. Only problem is we don’t yet know it.

    They’re more afraid of you than you are of them. It’s true of spiders, snakes, and oligarchic imperialists.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The World’s Deadliest Terrorist Group: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The CIA just casually discussed sinking a boat full of Cuban refugees and planting bombs in Miami and blaming Castro, but you’re bat shit crazy if you suspect such agencies may have had similar discussions about other geostrategic situations and decided to go through with it.

    ❖

    There’s more public criticism of ordinary people taking ivermectin than there is of planet-dominating power structures driving humanity to armageddon.

    ❖

    Nobody who supports internet censorship does so because they’re worried they themselves might consume dangerous words and believe them, it’s always to protect other people from dangerous words. It’s about the most megalomaniacal, emotionally stunted desire anyone could possibly have.

    They see themselves as responsible adults who can be trusted to independently sort out truth from falsehood, but see other people as infants who cannot be trusted to do this. This is nothing other than garden variety narcissism.

    ❖

    Internet censorship via monopolistic government-tied tech corporations isn’t just a problem because of free speech issues, it’s a problem because the way it’s applied is completely uneven and power-serving: politicians and the mass media circulate disinformation constantly without ever being censored. It’s not just silencing people, it’s actually shifting power upwards.

    ❖

    There is no path forward for humanity on this planet without complete female reproductive sovereignty.

    ❖

    Imagine if the world’s deadliest terrorist group got their hands on drones and cruise missiles and nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers and circled the planet with hundreds of military bases and began waging wars and destroying any country which disobeyed their dictates.

    ❖

    No, Texas conservatives aren’t like the Taliban. No, US government authoritarianism isn’t like China or North Korea. You know what it’s like? It’s like America. It says so much that the most corrupt and destructive nation on earth keeps comparing its homegrown depravity to foreign nations.

    ❖

    It’s crazy how there are guys whose whole entire job is trying to get large number of people killed by mass military violence and we just let that be a thing like it’s a perfectly legitimate way for someone to be.

    “Hey why does that mustache guy keep trying to get large numbers of people violently killed?”

    “Oh he’s just one of those war starty guys.”

    “What?? Why are there war starty guys??”

    “I dunno. Isn’t that normal? I just assumed it was normal to have war starty guys.”

    ❖

    Every single soldier who died in Afghanistan died in vain. Don’t make up sugary fairy tales about it, just stop letting it happen.

    ❖

    Are soldiers working under the US empire the worst people in the world? No. But in terms of moral standing you’d have to rank someone who murders foreigners on behalf of imperialists and war profiteers below most of the people in your average prison.

    ❖

    “If it wasn’t us waging all these wars and killing all those people it’d be someone else” sounds very much like the sort of thing an abusive tyrant would say.

    ❖

    There’s no good reason to respect the analysis of anyone who thinks China’s behavior on the world stage is worse than or equally as bad as America’s.

    ❖

    Australia is the only so-called democracy in the world which has no bill of rights of any kind. Most people are unaware of this, including most Australians. What you’re seeing in Australia is simply what happens when you add a pandemic response on top of a nation with no foundational legal protection from government overreach. That’s why our Covid measures are so notoriously harsh relative to other western countries.

    ❖

    Modern gods are corporations and banks, faceless inhuman entities whose agendas of growth and conquest supercede even the wishes of their own executives. Our gods are insatiable devourers controlled by no one. Our gods have no heads.

    ❖

    At a time when our species is hurtling toward its own demise we ought to be coming together and working in unison to avert disaster, and it says so much about the power of propaganda that we are instead doing the exact opposite.

    ❖

    All of humanity’s problems are ultimately due to a misperception of the way things are.

    Propaganda causes us to misperceive reality in a way that benefits establishment power structures, so we don’t rise up and use the power of our numbers to put an end to the ecocidal, omnicidal status quo which oppresses and exploits us.

    Advertising causes us to misperceive our own bodies and the source of real contentment, leading to the obsessive consumption habits necessary for turning the gears of capitalism.

    Ego causes us to misperceive our own experience of consciousness and the information which enters our minds through the senses, leading to the suffering and dysfunction which ultimately underlies all abuses in our world.

    What we need, then, is clear seeing, both outwardly and inwardly. An end to government secrecy and the mass-scale manipulations which distort our perception of reality. An end to restrictions on psychedelic tools which help people behold their inner processes with lucidity. A greatly elevated prioritization of self-honesty and self-reflection to help us see through the ego’s illusions.

    We can’t move toward health until we can see where we’re going.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.