radiofree.asia

Category: narrative matrix

  • Propaganda Is The Source Of All Our Problems: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    We don’t talk nearly enough about the fact that wealthy and powerful people are constantly pouring vast fortunes into manipulating the way we perceive our world and that this is the ultimate source of all our major problems.

    Democracy is a meaningless concept when the primary factor in determining how votes will be cast is the wealth that plutocrats have poured into mass-scale media psyops to manipulate public perception of reality.

    People babble about “freedom” in a society where almost everyone’s mind is in a cage built by the powerful. Caged birds singing that they can do whatever they want inside their cage.

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    Covid could just as easily have been used to transfer wealth downward as upward. The only reason wealth has shifted to the wealthiest among us instead of the most needful is because we have systems in place which allow money to translate to political influence and policy making.

    Without such vast wealth inequality the public would have the money to crowdfund their own political campaigns, legislative initiatives and media outlets. That’s why the rich actively work to keep others poor. It’s not so they can buy one more private jet, it’s to maintain power.

    Because money is power and power is relative, the plutocrats have a natural incentive to use their financial clout to shape things so the majority remains poor. We have a system which makes you king if you’re richer than the masses; if everyone’s king then no one is king.

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    We’re as angry as we ought to be, but because of careful narrative manipulation our anger is directed at each other instead of the people at the top. People often have more emotionality toward someone expressing the wrong opinion about AOC or ivermectin than they have toward the oligarchy.

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    The mass media could just as easily have spent this time framing the Afghanistan withdrawal as a good thing and applauding Biden for doing it, and if they had Biden’s approval would be soaring and everyone would think the withdrawal was great. These people control perception of reality.

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    Invade a nation, kill hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, stay for decades, accomplish nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy, drop everything and leave, then have your armed goon squad take PR photos with local infants so everyone thinks your military is awesome.

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    Afghanistan has been captured by a tyrannical violent extremist group and I hear the group that’s replacing them when they complete their withdrawal is pretty bad too.

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    The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics will be split between news media reporters for their breakthrough discovery of the existence of women in Afghanistan.

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    My neighbor attacked me when she caught me in her house at night going through her valuables. This proves she’s always wanted to attack me in my home. I need to go fight her over there so I don’t have to fight her here.

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    Just in case you were wondering if the mass media had run out of the absolute worst people to consult about US wars:

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    Q: What is free speech?

    A: Free speech is when war profiteers are allowed to openly lobby for more wars and the mass media are allowed to brazenly lie to us and corporations are allowed to buy government officials and members of the public are allowed to say whatever they want as long as they say it quietly in the privacy of their own home.

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    When poor people claim that spies are attacking their brains with high tech ray guns it’s called paranoid schizophrenia. When government officials say it it’s called Havana Syndrome.

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    The US military presence in Australia is an illegitimate occupation that was only made possible by CIA coups and intimidation.

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    Saying America’s warmongering has “come home” whenever it abuses its citizenry is a bit dramatic. Get back to me when there are nonstop airstrikes on major US cities and depleted uranium in LA and military blockades on Texas are starving children to death by the thousands.

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    Modern mainstream western culture is just mass-produced propaganda for the idea that worldwide human behavior should be driven by consumption and the pursuit of profit.

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    The fact that spiritual enlightenment is a real and attainable thing is possibly the most under-discussed and under-appreciated political reality in ourworld, because it has huge, sweeping political implications since it could solve all our problems if collectively realized. But whether we discuss it or not it might happen anyway as humanity approaches its adapt-or-die point.

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    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.

  • OMG Afghanistan Is Invading Afghanistan: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    During the Trump years the media wept for the poor kids in cages and ignored all the bombs he was dropping. Now the media ignore the kids in cages and weep for the poor neglected bombs.

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    The US empire will literally invade a country so it can spend decades using the people who live there as target practice for its expensive new military technologies and then tell you to worry about motherfucking Cuba.

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    Sure is a crazy coincidence how government foreign policy decisions that would advance humanitarian interests always happen to align perfectly with government foreign policy decisions that would be extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers.

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    Love how everyone suddenly started babbling about China taking America’s place in Afghanistan. Like Beijing’s been watching all the world powers smashing their heads against military interventionism in Afghanistan and thinking “Yeah that looks awesome, we should definitely try that.”

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    Bush era war criminals are louder than ever right now because they’ve lost the argument. The Afghan “government” proved to be an illusion, proving they spent 20 years lying to us about what they’d been doing there, so now they’re trying to salvage their reputations and legacies.

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    I can’t believe there are still highly influential people saying we need to keep raining military explosives on the Islamic world to make Muslims less extremist.

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    Everyone’s freaking out that Afghanistan is invading Afghanistan.

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    The Biden administration is perpetuating and advancing all of Trump’s policies better and more efficiently than Trump himself and it’s hilarious that MAGA people still oppose him just because Candace Owens told them he’s a communist.

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    The fact that Joe Biden’s mind has declined sharply in recent years is significant not because it means the US president can’t lead the country, but because it shows no US president ever leads the country. Republicans keep highlighting the fact that the sitting president’s brain doesn’t work to suggest that a Republican president would be more competent, but of course that’s not true. You’d just be swapping an impotent puppet with dementia for an impotent puppet without dementia.

    The most powerful government in the world is run not by its elected officials but by a loose nationless alliance of plutocrats and government agency insiders who Americans never get to vote for. This has been obvious for a long time and gets more obvious by the day.

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    The debate over Covid policies has split anti-imperialists, socialists, Assange supporters etc in a way that’s mighty convenient for the powerful. We could probably all be more open-minded, keep watching and learning, and not expect everyone to agree with us about everything.

    Just as a general rule it’s probably wise to avoid “If you’re not for us than you’re against us” doctrines. I tend to back away slowly from anyone I see getting that way, and that impulse has always proved a healthy one. Mature adults can agree where they agree and disagree where they disagree and not have that be a major issue.

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    “Don’t blame the troops, most of them saw the military as their only path out of poverty.”

    Ah so we come back once again to the problem being capitalism.

    Rob the rich because you are poor and they’ll give you a prison sentence. Put on a uniform and go kill impoverished people overseas because you are poor and they’ll give you a medal.

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    War profiteering is what you get when you mix capitalism with a globe-spanning power structure that works to maintain unipolar domination at all cost. The war industry surfs on the empire like dolphins on the wake of a freight ship, except in this case the dolphins also help steer and accelerate the ship.

    The military-industrial complex was inevitable. You cannot maintain a global order without the constant threat and application of mass military violence to hold it in place. It was inevitable that an industry would not only arise to meet that demand, but begin using the wealth it generates to manufacture support for more war.

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    All the worst things in the world happened because some humans took some dumb thought in their heads a little too seriously. War, torture, genocide, slavery, exploitation, oppression, ecocide, it’s all because of a human tendency to imbue the noises between our ears with the power of belief.

    Some primates evolved the capacity for abstract thought a while back and the giant brains relative to the size of the birth canal meant we have to spend our formative days helpless and surrounded by giants, which is very scary and inherently traumatic. As we grow we start taking our thoughts very seriously as we try to obtain safety and security in the midst of this cacophony, and then ego happens as a result of this.

    So really all this drama is ultimately just a species that’s in an awkward transition phase where it hasn’t yet developed a mature relationship with its newly evolved brain matter. I bet the ancestors of birds looked really awkward for a while at first too, before they could fly. Flight in our case would look like a mature relationship with our big brains where thought exists as a mere tool that we can use when it’s useful and set down when it’s not, rather than as a compulsive force which dominates our experience due to our conditioned habit of giving it belief.

    And of course it’s very possible that we kill ourselves off before we make it out of this transition phase; it’s happened to many other species before us. But either way this is temporary. Either way any belief that this brief chapter in our story is illustrative of “human nature” is silly.

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    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 System Is Rigged For Endless War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks.

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    Nobody gets “credit” for ending the Afghanistan occupation. Everyone involved in keeping it going for twenty years gets blame. That’s it. You don’t get a trophy for not murdering more people.

    But it’s not surprising that the Afghanistan war took twenty years to end. If anything, the way the deck is stacked in favor of perpetual war, it’s surprising it happened that fast.

    Military members who support imperialism get promoted. Those who get to the top go on to work for war profiteers. The war profiteers fund think tanks which promote more wars. The mass media report “news” stories citing those think tanks. These stories manufacture consent for more wars.

    The war industry reinforces itself. Those who get to the top of the war machine move on to the private sector and spend their time lobbying for more wars which create more eventual Pentagon officials who go on to lobby for more wars. Peace should be easy. This is why it’s not.

    It’s horrifying when you realize how much of the behavior of the most powerful military in history is driven by the simple fact that weapons manufacturers don’t make money if those weapons aren’t being used. The most powerful government on earth is stuck in a self-exacerbating feedback loop where the behaviors of the war machine are dictated by the war industry, and people wonder why it’s so hard to end wars. With a cycle this vicious, you can only end the wars by ending the empire.

    This is what you get when mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit. As long as war is profitable, you guarantee that more wars will happen. As long as ecocide is profitable, more ecocide will happen. As long as corruption is profitable, more corruption will happen. Meanwhile, peace is not profitable. Demilitarization is not profitable. Nuclear disarmament is not profitable. Getting plastic out of the oceans is not profitable. Leaving trees standing is not profitable. Leaving oil in the ground is not profitable. Freedom is not profitable.

    The religion of profit drives all human behavior. And it’s a death cult that will end us all if we don’t end it first.

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    Some people seem to think it’s only justifiable to end a military occupation if you can continue to control everything that happens in that nation after your military occupation ends. This is the same as believing it’s never okay to end a military occupation under any circumstances.

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    The mainstream media always cheerlead a US president’s foreign policy when it involves mass murder on an unthinkable scale and always criticize a US president when he tries to stop doing this. That’s all you really need to know about the trustworthiness of the mainstream media.

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    Corporate media is mind control at mass scale. People who identify as smart, independent thinkers have their minds altered by it every day, and they believe they came to those opinions on their own. Until this problem is addressed, none of our other major problems are going away.

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    “How are we supposed to get everyone vaccinated if we don’t make it mandatory?”

    Uhh, you don’t? You don’t begin with the assumption that the existence of a nasty respiratory virus justifies forcing or coercing everyone to inject themselves with a brand new drug they don’t trust?

    I mean, compelling people to take an injection that they are actually afraid of is a huge deal. Can we not at least agree on that? Can we not at least agree that forcing someone to receive an injection they fear would be so serious that you’d better have an amazingly bulletproof argument for doing it? I think so. And I don’t think such an argument exists at this time.

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    It’s important to follow and be followed by people you disagree with. You’ll see a lot of crap, but you’ll also keep yourself from falling into a self-validating echo chamber and eventually finding yourself saying something like unvaccinated people should be denied medical care.

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    Expecting a communism-oriented country to look like a utopia in the midst of a global imperialist war against communism is like expecting a family to look like a Norman Rockwell painting while they are being chased by wolves.

    Saying communism doesn’t work because nations who try to espouse it don’t look like thriving utopias while they’re being relentlessly assaulted is like saying a new invention doesn’t work because a band of armed thugs kept shooting and stomping on it during the demonstration.

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    Poverty is the result of an abusive system and telling the poor to “Get a job” or “Get a better job” has always enabled that abuse. Now that small businesses are being killed by that same abusive system, many who used to enable its abuses by saying this are becoming its victims.

    Blaming poverty on the poor in a system that’s literally built on the premise of a permanent underclass has always been insane, but if you’re making good money and lack empathy it’s easy to think they’re just lazy. Only when such people are screwed by the same system do they see.

    ________________________

    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.

  • Serious News For Serious People: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    BREAKING: Experts are worried the Afghanistan withdrawal may lead to the spread of global terrorism now that the terrorists are no longer tied up with the task of occupying Afghanistan.

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    Welcome back to Serious News Network. For years experts have been trying to understand how dropping military explosives on people could fail to advance humanitarian aims. Here to shed some light on this mystery is an employee of a think tank that’s funded by arms manufacturers.

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    We will know we are moving toward a healthy society when those who promote war and militarism are not rewarded with esteemed political, media and government careers but chased out of every public area they try to enter and forced to live out their remaining days in lonely misery.

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    The fact that the mass media continually seek out expert foreign policy analysis from warmongers who’ve been consistently wrong about everything for decades is by itself enough reason to fully dismiss them.

    Case in point:

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    It’s clear that the plutocratic media are going to be spinning the narrative that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a terrible mistake in every way possible over the coming months in an attempt to discredit opponents of US interventionism on both sides of the aisle.

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    The only time western news media are allowed to criticize US foreign policy and ask government officials critical questions is to press them to be more hawkish and aggressive than they already are. For a hilarious example, watch this clip:

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    The US military officially had a $14 billion annual budget for Afghanistan operations in the year 2021. The next official military budget should fall by at least that much. If it doesn’t, you’ve been scammed.

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    The answer is the US government needs to stay the fuck out of all other nations. Doesn’t matter what the question is.

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    The lesson from Afghanistan is not just that any US military interventionism will inflict unfathomable death, devastation and trauma at incomprehensible cost, but that the entire power establishment will resist ending it for decades and paint anyone who finally does as a buffoon.

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    Republicans and Democrats are all talking about the Afghanistan withdrawal completely differently than they would be if it had happened in exactly the same way under Trump. The extent to which you are able to recognize this is the extent to which you are unplugged from the partisan puppet show.

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    Most of the doofy Afghanistan takes you’re seeing from people are the result of the fact that most westerners don’t think very hard about exactly what war is and what it means. They’re weighing things like “women’s rights” against this nebulous, highly compartmentalized thing they’ve never truly examined. They’re just like “Yeah we just put the troops there and we just keep them there and they do whatever it is they do, and then the women get to have rights and go to school! It’s wins all around!” They haven’t looked at that big empty space in their reasoning where the war goes.

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    Imperial narrative managers like to spin war as this super complicated, esoteric thing that nobody but the most elite scholars can understand, and many unfortunately buy into it. Really it’s the easiest thing in the world to understand: mass murder for power and profit is wrong.

    Many western leftists avoid foreign policy discussions and just focus on domestic policy for precisely this reason: they believe the bullshit spin that it’s this super complicated thing they could never hope to understand. When in reality it’s the simplest aspect of the empire: a globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple. The rest is just details that you can unpack as you learn about each empire-targeted nation.

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    “OH MY GOD think of the people of Afghanistan!! We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!!”

    I mean I guess we could all open our wealthy nations to all the refugees who want to leave.

    “Oh. Oh no. Haha! No. I just meant dropping bombs on them or something, I’m not a lunatic.”

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    Boy I sure hope Afghanistan is a sign the US is rolling back its insane policy of endless military expansionism and-

    Oh.

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    If you view capitalism as the problem, you will see the increasing inequalities and abuses of the so-called Great Reset as par for course. If you think capitalism is great and just needs less interference from government and central banks, you’ll see it as a freakish aberration.

    It used to be common to be able to afford to raise a family on a single income. Now it isn’t, and the wealthy are wealthier than ever. That didn’t happen by accident, it happened because of concerted efforts to manipulate the system which gradually widened the wealth gap to what it is today. The deliberate advancement of agendas like deregulation, globalization, federal ops to sabotage leftist movements, union busting, and the methodical legalization of more and more money in politics have created unjust systems which cause more and more wealth to hemorrhage upward.

    What we’re seeing in the wealth transfers etc since the Covid outbreak is more of the same, with small businesses collapsing while billionaire megacorporations rake in unprecedented profits. We’ll be seeing more such things as capitalism moves to its next infernal iteration.

    Most of what rightists are saying when they object to Covid measures funneling more and more wealth and control upward basically boils down to “No! Stop! You’re breaking the capitalism!” But they are not breaking the capitalism, they’re fulfilling it. The capitalist class is carrying capitalism to the end of the Monopoly game.

    This is one reason rightists are (generally speaking) more freaked out about all this than leftists. They’d be happy to see capitalism returned to its 2019 levels of oppression, which in reality would just be rewinding to immediately before another similar kleptocratic move anyway. Leftists would not be content with this; they want to end the entire system which gave rise to this occasion.

    So now what we’ll probably be seeing is more and more rightists who used to yell “Get a job!” or “Get a better job!” at people who complained about poverty getting screwed over and thrown into poverty themselves by the same system which was screwing over the people they used to yell at. More people will likely come to understand that their businesses closing and their work vanishing was the result of the system screwing them, and hopefully recognize that the same is true for the poor people they used to turn up their noses at.

    If that happens, maybe we’ll see real movement.

    Which is what leftists have wanted all along. Leftists have always wanted a mass-scale uprising against the systems of exploitation, inequality and injustice which gave rise to the situation we now find ourselves in. It’s just that other ideologies are now, perhaps, starting to catch up.

    ______________________________

    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.

  • Stop Believing US Military Invasions Have Noble Intentions: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    I love how everyone’s just pretending the Afghanistan Papers never happened and the Taliban takeover is some kind of shocking tragedy instead of the thing everyone knew would happen because they’ve been knowingly lying about working to create a stable government this entire time.

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    If the US had a free press and was anything like a democracy, the government wouldn’t be getting away with squandering thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on a twenty-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making assholes obscenely wealthy.

    Thousands of human lives. Trillions of dollars. If western mass media were anything remotely resembling what they purport to be, they would be making sure the public understands how badly their government just fucked them. Instead it’s just “Oh no, those poor Afghan women.”

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    War apologists talk about “doing nothing” like that’s somehow worse than creating mountains of human corpses for power and profit. “We’ve got to DO SOMETHING about the Taliban! We can’t just do NOTHING!”

    Uhh, yes you can. Please for the love of God do nothing. Doing nothing would be infinitely better than more military interventionism in a nation you’ve already tortured for twenty years for no valid reason.

    People who think US interventionism solves problems just haven’t gone through the mountains upon mountains of evidence that it definitely definitely does not at all. Nobody honestly believes the US needs to invade every nation in the world with illiberal cultural values; they only think that way with Afghanistan due to war propaganda. And women’s lives in Afghanistan have still been shit under the occupation.

    They had twenty years to build a stable nation in Afghanistan. Twenty years. If you believe that’s what they were really trying to do there, or that results would be any different if you gave them twenty more, you’re a fucking moron.

    If you think the US needs to be in Afghanistan so the Taliban doesn’t take over then have some integrity and intellectual honesty and admit you want perpetual occupation. In which case you should be arguing for Afghan annexation so they get votes and congressional representation.

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    The objection shouldn’t be that there was no “withdrawal plan”, it should be that there was no occupation plan. Nothing was done in those entire twenty years for the long-term benefit of Afghans. The entire plan was “Stay and plunder as much as we can until we feel like leaving.”

    And of course more than this we should be upset that the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan at all, killing hundreds of thousands of people for no legitimate reason.

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    When all you’ve got is an insanely overfunded military every problem looks like a job for your insanely overfunded military.

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    I am once again asking you to stop believing US military invasions have noble intentions.

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    And stop blaming this on the “corrupt Afghan government”. There was no “Afghan government”; there was just whatever random Afghans happened to be willing to align with the occupying force that invaded their country while it was there. All blame rests entirely on that occupying force.

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    Now would be a great time to un-rehabilitate public opinion of George W Bush.

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    People who think the US military can be used for good remind me of that scene in Edward Scissorhands where he’s going around the house accidentally slashing things and then trying to fix them but he can’t fix them because he’s got horrible scissor hands that can only slash.

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    Every time mass military murder fails to achieve good things the proponents of mass military murder show up saying “The problem is we didn’t murder enough people.”

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    You’ll never see westerners so concerned about humanitarian issues as when there’s a chance some distant part of the world might not be subjected to military occupation by the most murderous power structure on earth.

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    Oh no, the country is immediately returning to the state it was in before we started using mass military violence to force it to look a bit different for a while. That’s like dressing your kid up as Batman for Halloween and then getting sad the next day because Batman’s gone.

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    Can’t figure out why Americans keep consenting to a government foreign policy of piracy and mass murder which is killing people by the millions via starvation and military violence. All that theft must be buying them awesome benefits like great healthcare and quality of life. Americans must be the happiest most thriving people in the world.

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    So many movies depict young men coming home from World War 2 like “Howdy Ma, hey Pop, boy it’s great to be home, now I gotta go see about that girl!” instead of hollowed out husks who’d go on to live out miserable half-lives beating their children and trying to drink away their trauma.

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    I still can’t get over how mainstream news stories about empire-targeted countries can be based entirely on reports by think tanks that are openly funded by weapons manufacturers. How is the fact that this is journalistic malpractice not obvious to everyone in the world?

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    The international symbol for the United States should be the Pentagon. It’s far more representative of what that nation stands for and what it does than some flag or an eagle.

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    War is the worst thing in the world. It’s the single most insane, destructive and unsustainable thing humans do. People who tell me I shouldn’t focus on it as much are people I just disregard, because they simply don’t grasp the horrific nature of war and the need to condemn it.

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    Sure they could have just killed Assange. But then the message to journalists would’ve been “We’ll get you if you expose our crimes, but we’ll have to be sneaky about it,” which is less intimidating than “We’ll get you if you expose our crimes, and we’ll do it right in the open.”

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    Western rightists are being trained to blame western civilization’s rising authoritarianism on “communism” and “Marxism”, and as a result they are reacting to anti-capitalists like myself with increasing shrillness and hysteria while the actual (very capitalist) authoritarians go unopposed.

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    Just another regular reminder that there will never be peace and economic justice as long as the majority are successfully convinced by establishment propaganda that those things are not in their interest. The propaganda machine must first be discredited and rendered nonfunctioning.

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    If you’ve got any urge to write articles or make videos or a podcast, just do it. You’re infinitely more qualified to be the media than people who are paid by billionaires to lie, and they’re not asking anyone for permission to speak. If Chris fucking Cuomo gets a voice, then so do you.

    You don’t have to be perfect or professional quality or whatever; hell, give yourself permission to outright suck at first if that’s how it plays out. Give yourself permission to not be perfect and just learn as you go and correct your mistakes as you make them. That’s allowed. Again, no matter how bad you are you’re still infinitely more qualified to report the news and tell the truth than any of the shitstains who are being platformed by multibillion-dollar media outlets right now, and whatever you make will be better than what they make. Just do it.

    Don’t stop if you don’t get a big audience right away, or if you never do. It’s not about that. If you can open even one person’s eyes to one aspect of reality, you are helping humanity to become a more conscious species by that much. That’s what it’s about. That’s what matters. And even if you don’t do that, fleshing out your ideas in some public medium is a great way to help yourself become aware of more things and deepen your own understanding, so you’re still improving humanity by that much. So no matter what happens you can’t lose.

    If we’re ever to turn things around it will be the result of a very large number of us grabbing a rope and tugging. You don’t have to be a megastar, you just have to do your bit. Start from there and see what happens.

    ❖

    It’s impossible to be a truly good person without loosening your relationship with mental narrative. If you’re clinging tight to thoughts and beliefs you’re not able to relate to life as it is, you’re just relating to your own mental stories, so you can’t respond to life wisely.

    Les Miserables’ Inspector Javert is a perfect depiction of what goes wrong when you emphasise narrative over reality, in his case replacing true goodness with moralism, with shoulds and shouldn’ts and rules and laws instead of responding to life as it shows up like Valjean. In contrast to Javert, Valjean is able to recognize that Fantine’s plight was a result of his own negligence even though she shows up as a prostitute in trouble with the law. Because his eyes are open to life as it is, he’s able to exercise true compassion and help her and Cosette.

    People like Valjean are able to see through not just their own mental narratives, but the narratives that are imposed upon them externally by mass-scale propaganda. People like Javert will support every power agenda no matter how depraved, because they believe mental stories.

    ❖

    Ego doesn’t make it out alive. One way or another, it’s a goner. It either dies by being seen through, or it takes us all out with it. The good news is that every single one of us gets to make that choice in every single moment.

    __________________________

    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.

  • We’re Destroying Our World Over Imaginary Nonsense: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We are killing each other and our ecosystem over an economy made of debt books and imagination.

    ❖

    In Hollywood the US military is usually either shown fighting Nazis in World War II or in modern times fighting fictional enemies and fantasy monsters like zombies, aliens, or Godzilla. This is because in all modern real life conflicts, the US troops are the villains.

    You get a lot of moral clarity and focus once you understand that the US and its allies are the most murderous power structure on earth by an extremely massive margin. You see that criticism of other power structures is not just hypocrisy, but a distraction from the real evil.

    ❖

    Rather than the American flag or the bald eagle, the symbol everyone uses to represent the United States should be the Pentagon.

    ❖

    Notice how both “progressive” Democrats like TYT and The Squad and “populist” Republicans like Trump and Tucker Carlson pay lip service to opposing war, yet still want the US to remain the global unipolar hegemon. This is bullshit, because you cannot have such an empire without endless violence.

    You can’t have a globe-spanning unipolar empire without using mass military violence to hold it together, because otherwise the world will just do what it wants to do. Opposing war without wanting to dismantle the empire is like opposing the use of whips and chains but not wanting to end slavery.

    ❖

    If you think making military personnel get a Covid jab is barbaric wait til you hear what else they make them do.

    ❖

    Censoring people for talking about Covid policies that affect everyone is what you get when your institutions have such an extensively established track record of deceitful and unethical behavior that you know you can’t win the public over through simple argumentation and facts.

    ❖

    The more your ideology prohibits you from seeing capitalism as the problem, the more frantic you will be to seek out other explanations for why the world keeps getting more unjust and tyrannical.

    ❖

    I don’t know what narrative manager came up with the brilliant idea of training Covid skeptics to start referring to the “Great Reset” as a “leftist” or “Marxist” agenda, but it’s a great way to alienate leftists who’d otherwise be sympathetic to opposing plutocratic power grabs.

    ❖

    We all grew up watching movies about heroes saving the world from fictional threats and now we’re just sitting here watching the world die in real life.

    ❖

    During the partisan debates about the latest IPCC report, remember that our ecosystem is hurtling toward collapse on many other fronts besides climate change; there are many other indications of collapse besides warming. The way the debate fixates solely on temperature and carbon levels is like if someone has stage four cancer throughout their body and they’re in a coma and their vital signs are dropping and the doctor says death is imminent, and everyone’s arguing over whether or not low blood pressure is necessarily a bad thing.

    ❖

    For decades people have been saying climate change is a hoax that’s being used to set up a one world government, and all that’s happened during those decades is the planet getting hotter while the powerful do nothing because ecocide is profitable.

    Everyone who thinks climate change is a hoax being used to advance sinister agendas can relax; no actual things will be done in the name of preventing climate change. The news cycle will move on once again and everyone will forget all about it. You know how you keep saying Democrats are trying to take your guns and nothing ever happens? This is that.

    ❖

    For generations incremental reform has been the dominant political strategy for advancing positive change, and the only incremental reform we’ve seen is toward more war, more ecocide, more corruption, more exploitation and more oppression. It’s time to admit incrementalism doesn’t work.

    How to fight climate collapse by working within the system:

    • Elect corporate warmongers who promise to start moving toward sustainable energy in the next century as long as it doesn’t inconvenience the powerful
    • Cloth grocery bags
    • Maybe Elon Musk will save us?
    • Paper straws

    ❖

    Don’t just ban evictions, cancel the rent. Don’t just cancel the rent, cancel the predatory scam of renting itself. Don’t just cancel renting, cancel capitalism. Don’t just cancel capitalism, cancel the entire competition-based model of human behavior that’s driving us to extinction.

    ❖

    War is just the most overt manifestation of the manifold abuses inherent in a system where human behavior is driven by competition rather than collaboration.

    ❖

    There are centuries of institutional infrastructure supporting capitalism and generations of mass-scale psyops programming public thought, and people wonder why it’s so hard to effect real change.

    ❖

    Our entire civilization is a bubble that’s going to have to burst fairly soon. Only thing we have any degree of control over is how that bursting happens.

    ❖

    At this point the only change agent I still have faith in is humanity’s latent potential for a mass-scale collective awakening from egoic consciousness.

    _________________________________

    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

    Featured image via Pixabay

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Rent Is A Scam: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A poor person in the US has to bend over backwards and degrade themselves in all sorts of official and unofficial ways for a few bucks in welfare, but the Pentagon can spend trillions on a 20-year war that achieves nothing but making assholes rich without being asked a question.

    ❖

    The bad news is the oligarchic empire is ratcheting up authoritarian control with the goal of trapping us in an Orwellian dystopia so gradually we don’t notice, but the good news is they won’t succeed because they’ll get us all killed via nuclear war or climate collapse first.

    ❖

    Always blame the manipulators, not the manipulated.

    ❖

    Q: What is a landlord?

    A: A landlord is someone who is paid by a tenant for the privilege of keeping vandals and disuse from destroying their investment property (which they will sell at an immense profit) while complaining about having to do maintenance on their own investment.

    ❖

    Q: What is rent?

    A: Rent is a double-dipping scam wherein a landlord has a tenant pay off the loan on their investment property for them and then evicts that tenant and sells the property for a lot of money.

    ❖

    People complaining about the US eviction ban are like, “Oh help me, I am a landlord and my investment property isn’t yielding free money. I am a lord, I cannot get a job, I cannot work for my hands are like gelatin desserts.”

    Nobody is entitled to make free money tenenting their investment property. If your rent scam isn’t working, sell your investment like a normal investor.

    ❖

    “If you don’t let landlords evict tenants they’ll have to sell their property to BlackRock!”

    Yeah, that isn’t the killer argument you think it is.

    • It assumes renters care which lord they’re exploited by
    • Selling means you make money, boo hoo
    • It just means we need a revolution to take back what institutions like BlackRock have stolen.

    ❖

    “Can you think of a better way to provide shelter?”

    Redistribute wealth, redistribute property, eat BlackRock executives alive.

    ❖

    “You’ve clearly never owned a rental property.”

    No I’ve never exploited a system premised on the continued existence of a permanent rent-paying underclass. That’s like telling me I can’t criticize child abusers until I’ve abused a child.

    ❖

     

    Hiring mainstream news agencies to help you fight “misinformation” on your social media platform is like hiring David Duke to help you diversify your workforce.

    ❖

    Mandatory vaccines would be a violation of bodily sovereignty and vaccine passports are authoritarian abuses and people should be allowed to discuss this stuff on the social media platforms everyone uses and the army shouldn’t be policing the streets of fucking Sydney.

    ❖

    The mass media just spent years leading the world on a wild goose chase for Trump-Russia collusion that never existed and now have the absolute gall to act like people are deranged lunatics for not trusting them about elections, viruses and vaccines.

    ❖

    Global capitalism is beginning to look like the end of a game of Monopoly.

    ❖

    Right wingers are always very concerned that they’re being manipulated into doing stupid left-wing things to advance an authoritarian agenda and not at all concerned that they’re being manipulated into doing stupid right-wing things to advance an authoritarian agenda.

    ❖

    Rightists: The global elites are grabbing up all the power and wealth!

    Leftists: Yep. Have been for a while.

    Rightists: It’s called the Great Reset!

    Leftists: Sure you can call it that.

    Rightists: We need a global revolution!

    Leftists: Yeah we’ve been saying that since the 1800s.

    ❖

    I’ve been writing every day for years about how the oligarchic empire is pushing us toward authoritarian dystopia and extinction and we’ll all die if we don’t have a global revolution very soon, and the scamdemic people keep yelling at me for not saying this using their jargon.

    ❖

    Me, every day for years: They’re ramping up authoritarian agendas and if we don’t all rise up immediately we’ll all be killed.

    Scamdemic crowd: God DAMMIT Caitlin, why can’t you understand that things are SERIOUS now???

    ❖

    Whenever I say I don’t comment on certain aspects of the Covid narrative because I’m bad at science people tell me “Well I’m no good at science and I understand what’s going on with Covid perfectly!” Uhh no, that just means you’re less real about what you know and don’t know.

    If it requires no scientific smarts, like knowing soldiers shouldn’t be policing civilians in Sydney, then I’m on it. If it does then I’m kind of lost. What’s weird is my husband/collaborator is just as bad at that stuff as me; we haven’t got a scientific brain between us.

    I’ve been looking at this thing for over a year and there’s a lot I just can’t wrap my mind around, and I’m not going to just accept other people’s analysis on faith if I can’t verify it for myself. If you say you get it, you’re either better at science than I am or less honest.

    __________________

    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

    Featured image via Piqsels

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • There’s Never Been A Better Time To Crush Capitalism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The US is on the brink of a massive eviction crisis and the ecosystem is dying and the world order is maintained by endless violence and we’re being rapidly transformed into a brainwashed slave class, but it was a small price to pay for some billionaires to pretend to be astronauts for a bit.

    ❖

    There’s nothing more enraging than a system which treats the homeless like the problem rather than homelessness.

    ❖

    There would be a lot more opposition to the emerging use of police robots if they called them “robotic cops” instead of “robotic dogs”.

    ❖

    Every ruler since the dawn of history has been acutely aware that there are a lot more of us than there are of them, and that even their own forces could turn against them at any time. That’s what makes robot technologies so appealing to the oligarchic rulers of our age.

    ❖

    Millions of highly traumatized men came home from the World Wars and started families and poured all their trauma into the minds of their children. That trauma has been passed down through subsequent generations. That’s the real lasting legacy of those wars, not the stuff in the movies.

    ❖

    The only way to believe lesser-evil strategizing works is to believe the “two” evils in question are actually two separate and distinct power structures operating in opposition to one another.

    ❖

    It’s cool how US progressives are learning that the Democratic Party is a narrative management op designed to continually derail the possibility of economic justice in America, and it’s sad that this lesson will be completely forgotten in the next partisan politics news cycle.

    ❖

    We were always headed toward more and more inequality, impoverishment and authoritarianism, whether you want to call the next step in that direction “the Great Reset” or some other name. We will necessarily continue along that trajectory until we replace our dominant systems.

    There has never been a better time to crush capitalism.

    ❖

    The theory: The individual is prime, everyone gets total financial freedom, and the government is kept from becoming a tyrannical dictatorship.

    The practice: Billionaires become tyrannical dictators who turn people into uniform consumers and machine cogs with no financial freedom.

    “I am an individual!” yelled the faceless indoctrinated cog in the corporate machine while churning out products for other faceless indoctrinated cogs to help them escape the feeling of futility brought on by the meaninglessness of their predicament.

    Societies which purport to prioritize the rights of the individual do so only up until the point where individuals start talking about maybe not not wanting to be ruled by billionaires and secretive government agencies anymore, then suddenly the rights of those individuals get a lot less important.

    ❖

    I might actually end up moving away from using words like “capitalism” and “socialism”, because they have completely different meanings to people from different ideologies. Leftists understand what I mean by those words, but those to the right of me consistently misunderstand what I’m saying because of the way those words are used in their ideological circles. I could just use other words to describe the same stuff I’ve been talking about.

    I run into people who think socialism is when the government does something authoritarian, or when the government does anything at all. I’ve been told that capitalism is when people do what they want to do (someone once literally told me hugs are capitalism), and that capitalism is anything that’s good. You can’t get around communication barriers that thick if you want to convey ideas to large numbers of people, and there’s not necessarily any reason to try to do it that way when I can instead just talk about economic injustice, how everyone should have enough, how systems where mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit-chasing will always lead to imperialism and ecocide, and how greatly people’s lives would be improved if there was democratic control in areas like the workplace.

    I might stop using -ist and -ism words altogether, or use them sparingly, and just talk about the actual concepts without having to rely on any label which tries to capture them all. I already kind of do this, but I can do a much better job of it. I’ve never had a stimulating conversation with anyone who uses a lot of -ists and -isms anyway; mostly they just use it as a crutch to hide the fact that they don’t understand the individual components of the concepts being discussed.

    ❖

    If you mentally mute the ideological worldviews, partisan bickering and sectarian spats and just look at humanity as a whole, what you see is a species on a trajectory toward its own extinction. We are collectively deciding right now whether we continue on that trajectory or not.

    Because change is inevitable and life is inseparable from its ecosystemic context, every species eventually hits a juncture where it has to either adapt to changing conditions or perish. Our juncture just came along faster than most. We either adapt or go extinct.

    Because our adapt-or-die juncture came about as the result of our unwholesome relationship with our newly evolved capacity for abstract thought, our adaptation will necessarily need to take the form of moving from an unwholesome relationship with thought to a wholesome one.

    The good news is that we already know such a move is possible. The bad news is that up until now it’s been fairly rare. A movement from a dysfunctional relationship with thought to a healthy one is what the phenomenon commonly referred to as spiritual enlightenment is. What’s changed is that we are now being squeezed toward adaptation by the same kinds of pressures that other species have come under which caused them to attain flight, camouflage, prehensile tails, etc.

    And we just might make it.

    ❖

    Just throw sand in the gears of the machine and try to wake people up in whatever way you can. No one person can win this, but we can each shine a bit more light on things for others and make life a bit harder for the bastards. You can’t do everything, but you can do your bit.

    ____________________________

    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.

  • A Race Between Revolution And Robotics: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Basically we’re looking at a race to see if the deterioration of material conditions inherent in capitalism leads to mass-scale revolution before the plutocrats have the technological and legal ability to roll out robot and drone security forces.

    ❖

    We’re fed non-stop messaging that we’re inadequate unless we buy certain products, that mass military slaughter is normal, that madness is sanity, and that you’re the problem if you can’t keep your head above water in a system that’s designed to drown you, and people wonder why there’s a mental health crisis.

    ❖

    The problem is that while not many people really benefit from the status quo, those who do are in a position of influence over everyone else. So you get a non-stop barrage of media pundits, movies and TV shows acting like everything’s fine, and this shapes our entire culture.

    ❖

    What we need first and foremost, more than socialism or anarchism or any other ism, is real transparency. We need people’s vision of what’s going on in the world to be unobscured by government/corporate/financial secrecy and propaganda. Once we can see, we can figure things out from there.

    How can we navigate toward a healthy world when we can’t even see what’s happening? Militaries understand that you need intelligence before you can act efficaciously; you need to be able to look before you leap, to see and know what you’re dealing with so you can take action which accords with reality. Truth is hidden and obscured from us precisely for this reason: because knowledge is power, and they want all the power.

    That’s what Assange was going for when he founded WikiLeaks: a tool to help the people see and know what’s going on in the world so we can act in an informed way.

    That’s also why he’s in prison.

    The amount of power one is given should have a directly inverse relationship with the amount of secrecy they are allowed to have. Power with secrecy is illegitimate. If you’ve got power over people you don’t get to keep secrets from them.

    ❖

    Whenever I say the US is the most destructive government in our world today, the only people who argue with me are those who simply haven’t thought very hard about how many people have been killed by America’s current wars and sanctions regimes.

    ❖

    ❖

    Hi I’d like two trillion dollars over the next twenty years to build a giant brick mountain in the middle of the desert.

    “What? No, piss off.”

    Okay well can I have two trillion dollars over the next twenty years to murder people in Afghanistan for no legitimate reason?

    “Sure, why not.”

    ❖

    Most of the time you hear someone crying about people being oppressed by a tyrannical authoritarian foreign government they’re really just crying because they want those people to be oppressed by the tyrannical authoritarians in the United States government.

    ❖

    “Capitalism is responsible for the historically unprecedented level of human thriving today. Also, anything you say to criticize our current system is invalid because this system isn’t real capitalism. Both of these things are true for me somehow.”

    ❖

    If you ever get lonely just whisper “I do not care for Elon Musk” to yourself and his fans will come crashing through your wall to defend his honor.

    ❖

    “I don’t like the US ruling the world with nonstop violence either, but if it wasn’t us it’d be China!”

    No unipolar global hegemon ever once existed in human history until three decades ago. Stop thinking of it as some unbreakable law of nature that there must always be one.

    Saying you can’t end the US empire because China will replace it is the same as saying you can’t stop raping someone because then someone else would rape them.

    Westerners act like the desire to conquer a planet is some kind of inescapable inherent trait in human DNA because it’s more comfortable than considering the possibility that it’s a mind virus that is unique to our society. The idea that China wants to become the next unipolar dominator assumes (A) China has the same values and interests as western imperialists, and (B) that Beijing is looking at the US empire eating itself alive and thinking “Yeah, that looks awesome! That could be us someday!”

    Many people say China openly wants to replace the US as the unipolar hegemon, but if you actually examine the sources of their claim it’s always just China saying it wants a multipolar world and western propagandists falsely spinning that as evidence that China wants to become the next unipolar dominator.

    Not even Hitler wanted to take over the entire world, he just wanted to expand Germany’s borders and dominate Europe; that’s why he was fine with the prospect of a Japanese empire throughout Asia. Acting like taking over the planet is an inherent drive within us all is a total propaganda fabrication.

    ❖

    An adept manipulator doesn’t always need to feed you lies; they prefer to get you inventing your own lies and gaslighting yourself.

    An adept empire doesn’t always need to topple governments by military force; they prefer to manipulate the nation’s people into doing it for them.

    ❖

    The saying “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” rings true not because it’s inherently hard to imagine the end of capitalism, but because vast fortunes are poured into propaganda campaigns to keep us from imagining a better world.

    The lion’s share of the propaganda machine’s energy goes not into manufacturing consent for new toxic agendas but into manufacturing consent for the systems that are already in place. Into keeping everyone thinking this bat shit insane paradigm is normal and the only way things can possibly be.

    __________________________

    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 ‘Harm Reduction’ President Keeps Killing People: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Boy this US-led world order sure is working out great. This was definitely worth killing millions of people in imperialist wars for.

    ❖

    The “harm reduction” president just bombed Afghanistan and Somalia and added further sanctions to Cuba.

    ❖

    As total mass media blackouts on important news stories become more common, the challenge increasingly is not just obtaining newsworthy information about the powerful via whistleblowing, investigative journalism etc, but also finding ways to get that information seen by people. Which is awful, but it also means people like you now play a much more important role in the media, because you don’t need to be an investigative journalist or whistleblower to find fun and creative ways to get important critical information in front of people’s eyes.

    Those who can get people to actually see critical information are just as important as those who obtain that information, because since the media won’t report on it, getting it circulating online is highly important. If you can do this, you’re making a huge difference. Find ways to distribute information by packaging it in fun and interesting ways to get it to go viral online or offline; use memes, distribute flyers, give talks, anything you can think of to open people’s eyes to what’s going on, and you’ll be doing humanity a tremendous service.

    All the journalists and whistleblowers do important work, but their work won’t make a damn bit of difference if nobody sees it. We can’t all do what they do, but we can all help spread awareness in our own unique and creative ways.

    The most important thing is getting unauthorized information over the walls of the echo chamber of people who already know about it. We all kind of talk to ourselves in our little circles, so we want to get ideas and information out to people who don’t normally hear such things.

    ❖

    The cool thing about having a US president with obvious dementia symptoms is it makes it clear that the administration is running independent of his authority, which is like training wheels for the reality that all administrations are run independent of any president’s authority.

    “Hmm, it turns out a presidential administration can run fine even if the president has a degenerative neurological disease. Perhaps the presidency isn’t as important as advertised. Perhaps the most powerful government in the world isn’t being run by its elected officials at all.”

    If the president were in charge then the presidency which campaigned as the anti-Trump wouldn’t be continuing all of the Trump administration policies that powerful people care about. Yet it is.

    If Kamala takes over for Joe, all that will change is the US will go from having a fake puppet president with dementia to having a fake puppet president who doesn’t have dementia.

    ❖

    “It’s not dementia, Biden has a speech impediment! A speech impediment which causes a rapidly exacerbating shift in personality and demeanor and ability to organize thoughts over a period of several years!”

    ❖

     

    While everyone’s fighting to make sure all American schools teach kids that slavery was bad and the KKK is immoral, perhaps you could get them teaching kids that murdering millions of people in other countries for power and profit is also not good.

    ❖

    Basically what happened was a hundred years ago some communists overthrew the Russian Empire, and then the entire worldwide capitalist class spent the next century inventing propaganda and surveillance systems and robot and drone technologies to help make sure that can never happen to them.

    ❖

    Me: We need to end the system which destroys our environment for profit and leads to widespread mass murder and injustice and world-threatening nuclear escalations because if we don’t everyone will die.

    Army of weird idiots: You just don’t understand economics bruh

    ❖

    I have not one shred of respect for the position that one mustn’t criticize vaguely progressive politicians because “they’re the best we’ve got”. The fact that a few shitty imperialists are “the best you’ve got” is the problem. A system which filters out any politicians who aren’t shitty imperialists must be criticized.

    “Don’t say the shitty imperialist is a shitty imperialist! They’re the least shitty imperialist we’re allowed to have!”

    That’s exactly why you do need to say they’re all shitty imperialists! Only being allowed to elect shitty imperialists is a huge problem; you can’t just not talk about that.

    ❖

    ❖

    I go on binges of focusing on China a lot because the success of the imperialist propaganda campaign against Beijing honestly freaks me the fuck out. It’s really, really creepy watching more and more people’s minds fold and transform into tools of the Pentagon in real time. It’s like watching a zombie outbreak.

    A big part of the problem is that just as the insane don’t know they’re insane, the propagandized don’t know they’re propagandized. Criticize all the anti-China propaganda that’s going around and people say “Why are you defending a government that wants to take over the world and harvest my organs and give me a social credit score??”

    And they think that’s normal. They have no idea their mind has been hijacked and made into a tool of cold warriors and the military-industrial complex; they think they’re defending an objective reality. This is a major challenge, because nobody’s going to remove a blindfold if they don’t believe it exists.

    ❖

    The last secretary of state openly admitted the US is sanctioning Iran into the Stone Age so that the people will get so miserable they rise up against their government, and yet when protests happen in Iran due to shortages caused by sanctions there are still people who buy it.

    ❖

    Every mistake I’ve ever made in this job was the result of listening to other people instead of trusting my gut and moving with my own intuition and inspiration. I’m too experienced at this point to ever let anyone cajole me into writing about their pet topic in their way.

    ______________________

    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 US Is The Absolute Worst: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    America has the single worst government in the world. Shut the fuck up about Cuba.

    Hands off Cuba and regime change America.

    ❖

    “Stop saying the US is the worst government on earth! Others are way worse!”

    Name one. Name one that’s currently doing anything that rises to the level of murdering millions and displacing tens of millions in imperialist wars and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it.

    You can’t. You can’t name a single government that’s anywhere near as destructive and tyrannical as Washington today. All you can do is talk about what other governments have done generations in the past or pretend domestic oppression is as bad as killing millions in unjust wars.

    The US is the most tyrannical regime on earth. Indisputably. Yet because it has such an effective propaganda machine, few people let this indisputable fact inform their worldview and foreign policy perspectives to the extent that they should.

    ❖

    People only believe the US military can be used to solve problems because they’ve spent their lives watching Hollywood movies glorifying the troops and showing happy endings being reached by Good Guys shooting Bad Guys. That’s why they fall for the bullshit over and over again.

    The US military is the One Ring. Everyone thinks they can use its power for good, but it can only ever unleash evil.

    ❖

    Israel bombed Syria again. The fact that bombings are routinely ignored by news media when they don’t target the US or its allies is yet another item in the mountain of evidence that western media is pure propaganda.

    ❖

    Hahaha why no I cannot pay you a fair wage you lowly Amazon worker, I need that money for a five billion-dollar carnival ride!

    ❖

    Blaming unvaccinated people and conspiracy theorists for your country’s problems is the shitlib version of blaming poor people and immigrants for your country’s problems. It’s false, it’s dumb, and it’s very convenient for those who are actually causing your country’s problems.

    ❖

    “We’ve got to do something about all this disinformation,” said the empire that is made entirely of disinformation.

    ❖

    Better ways for the US government to fight disinformation:

    • Spread accurate information
    • Stop being an evil, opaque and inherently untrustworthy institution
    • Stop actively sowing disinformation

    ❖

    Every day the western media spend manipulating people into accepting the murderous and exploitative oligarchic imperialist status quo as normal, they are engaging in disinformation that kills an immense number of people. But you’ll never see the president working to silence them.

    The oligarchic empire has no problem with disinformation. It couldn’t exist without disinformation. Its real objection is to people having the ability to share information which it does not control.

    Just in America untold thousands of people die every single year as a result of an exploitative status quo which makes them sick and impoverished, and this is made possible solely because of a highly advanced propaganda campaign by the plutocratic class. Once you get out of America’s borders the death toll is far higher, where people are slaughtered by the millions in imperialist wars, proxy conflicts and sanctions regimes the consent for which is manufactured by aggressive disinformation ops.

    ❖

    A fondness for ice cream is neither a political achievement nor an interesting personality trait.

    ❖

    It’s creepy how manipulative Jen Psaki is anytime she’s challenged on something gross the administration is doing. It’s always “Well Ted as you’re well aware it’s perfectly normal and good that we’re doing that thing, and you’re kind of crazy and weird for suggesting otherwise.”

    The ugliness isn’t that she’s bad at her job, it’s that she’s very, very good at her job. All US press secretaries are professional liars, but the way she’s able to skillfully perception manage any oppositional question to make the questioner look like a weirdo is something rare.

    ❖

    ❖

    “Ugh, why must you attack even the US politicians who are furthest to the left??”

    Wrong question. The correct question is, why are all US politicians who are operating on the national stage a bunch of shitty imperialist swamp creatures without a single actual leftist among them?

    ❖

    Telling anti-imperialist socialists not to fight with progressive Democrats who are neither anti-imperialist nor socialist is just telling them to shut up and let Democrats control the American left.

    ❖

    Mainstream pundits are like “The far left wants to end wars and income inequality, but that’s just unrealistic fairy unicorn talk because people like me are paid by billionaires to prevent that from ever happening.”

    “I understand that you want peace and healthcare and a living wage, but you need to be pragmatic and realistic about the fact that we’re going to pour vast fortunes into sabotaging all your attempts to get those things.”

    ❖

    There’s a focus on profit-driven solutions to climate collapse because our profit-driven global model always values making more things (“men’s work”) and never values cleaning things up (“women’s work”). That’s also why most of the work traditionally done by women is unpaid.

    You’re only ever going to look for solutions to problems through the reality tunnel you’ve been conditioned to look through. For thousands of years human civilization has been valuing the making of more things and devaluing the unmaking of things, when the latter is what we need right now. The oceans are our planet’s best carbon sink, for example, and their ability to do that is being choked to death by plastic. Removing plastic from the oceans will not be profitable; it will cost a lot. So there’s no big push to do this. It’s being ignored.

    Ending growth for its own sake, producing less, consuming less, paying people to stay home instead of commuting to pointless jobs; all of these would help the ecosystem far more than producing some new battery made of strip-mined materials. But there’s no profit, so they’re overlooked as viable solutions.

    Because we’ve got millennia of conditioning toward the worldview of “Men’s work valuable, women’s work free,” even the most awake among us can scan right over the obvious solutions to ecological collapse without seeing them, because it would mean a wildly different way of being. That’s why people so often succumb to hopelessness on this front, and why the quote “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” rings so true for us: because from the point of view we’ve been conditioned to look through, there is no solution. We cannot consume our way out of this.

    When in reality there is a solution right here under our noses, it’s just not good for billionaires. It’s going to cost a lot, and it’s going to entail doing a lot less. But it will work, and, if we can pry the fingers of the bastards off the wheel, it can be put into action.

    ❖

    False spirituality gives you beliefs. True spirituality destroys 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.

  • Cuba, Space Billionaires, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Many leftists shy away from speaking out against western imperialism because they see international dynamics as too complex, when really it’s the least complex part of the capitalist empire. The world’s largest power structure murders human beings to exert control. See? Very simple.

    If you understand that police brutality is a problem or that oligarchs are robbing the working class, then the idea that they’re also holding together a globe-spanning empire using nonstop mass murder should be super easy. Only propaganda spins it as more complicated than that. Once you see how simple it is, how profoundly evil it is, and how all the other abuses of the empire depend on it, you understand that opposing the war machine of the US-centralized power alliance should be the very foremost priority of any leftist. It is the head of the beast.

    ❖

    US interventionism is literally always disastrous and literally never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will, yet any time there’s any strife anywhere in the world you get Americans saying “We’ve got to DO something!”

    Why no. No you do not. Please, please please don’t.

    ❖

    The US government is waging wars around the world, circling the planet with military bases, ramping up nuclear standoffs and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, so naturally the news media are urgently warning us about the horrible tyrannical government of Cuba.

    ❖

    Yes the US has been deliberately strangling Cuba with the goal of fomenting unrest. Yes it has been attempting regime change ops in Cuba up to and including invasions and hundreds of assassination attempts. No you may not blame the US for unrest in Cuba, you goddamn tankie freak.

    If you try to connect unrest in Cuba with the USA’s extensive history of interventionism there, people yell at you for denying the Cuban people’s “agency”. Agency, agency, agency, agency. They’ll factor in all sorts of agency except the Central Intelligence kind.

    It’s wild how the US has an intelligence agency whose actual job is causing instability and unrest in nations who disobey the its dictates, and it has a very extensive and well-documented history of doing so, but you get called a crazy idiot if you say “CIA” during periods of unrest and instability in those nations.

    Only a deranged lunatic would suggest that the CIA might be doing the thing it literally always does.

    ❖

    I’m teaching my kids about socialism by unilaterally imposing sanctions on their food and toys and then when they complain saying “See this proves socialism doesn’t work.”

    ❖

    When US blockades on Cuba cause suffering, the suffering proves that socialism doesn’t work. When US-backed blockades on Yemen cause suffering, it’s an unfortunate and tragic accident of nature.

    ❖

    Space colonization will never happen. It’s a delusion promoted by billionaires who have a vested interest in marketing the idea that the ecologically unsustainable nature of status quo capitalism can be resolved by turning humanity into a spacefaring species. They are lying.

    Capitalism has no answer for the destruction of our ecosystem. Money and profit motive have no wisdom for dealing with this predicament. That’s why capitalism stans either pretend the destruction isn’t happening or pretend the world is about to be saved by greedy tech oligarchs.

    The most forceful defenders of Elon Musk are always also rabid capitalism proponents: they know that if billionaires can’t save us from the consequences of ecocidal capitalism using technological innovations, then their entire worldview is invalid. But they can’t, and it is.

    Ecological collapse is coming up far faster than getting even a single living thing to Mars, but all the Mars people want to talk about is their dumb rockets. It’s like the house is on fire but your toddler wants you to stop and play Thomas the Tank Engine with him.

    Image

    I write words for a living yet I cannot find any which adequately express my rage at people who think it’s fine that ecocidal capitalism is killing our home because Daddy Elon is going to fly us all to Mars.

    “Hmm it seems we’re turning earth into a barren desert. The only possible solution is for us all to fly up into space to live in a barren desert.”

    The solution to humanity’s problems is not to attempt the impossible task of fleeing to space, it’s to transcend our self-destructive patterning and move into a collaboration-based relationship with each other and with our ecosystem. Just like any individual who refuses to accept responsibility for their predicament, we’re collectively flailing all over the place to place the solution anywhere but on us changing. We’ll either become a conscious species or we’ll die. There are no other options on the table.

    ❖

    Anarchism sounds good in theory but in practice it just means regurgitating foreign policy talking points from the US State Department on the internet.

    ❖

    Only those who have not metamorphosed personally rule out the possibility that humanity can metamorphose collectively.

    ____________________________

    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.

  • Sunday Funny Pages: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    ❖

    Hey kids! Got some fun and relatable comic strips for you to share on social media:

    Image

    Garfield knows what’s up:

    Marmaduke dropping truth bombs, as usual:

    Image

    This is pretty insightful. Whoever does the Dilbert comic should consider getting into political commentary:

    I’d honestly never noticed Family Circus has such biting social commentary:

    Image

    Man I forgot how high-brow this comic was:

    ❖

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    BREAKING: Sources report violent right-wing extremists have seized the US Capitol, established a globe-spanning empire, and murdered millions of people.

    ❖

    Think tank name translation guide:

    Foreign = War
    Policy = Crimes
    Democracy = Neoliberalism
    Strategic = Murderous
    International/Global = Imperialist
    Relations = Domination
    American = Oligarchic
    Research = Indoctrination
    Institution/Institute/Council/Center/Foundation/House = Propaganda Firm

    ❖

     

     

    Me, an idiot: It’s disturbing how government-tied Silicon Valley oligarchs exert so much control over people’s access to free speech.

    You, a genius: It’s not a free speech issue because you can still take your opinions down to Ye Olde Printing Presse and distribute them manually on horseback.

    ❖

    We haven’t talked enough about how the US military not only lied for twenty years about their stated goals in Afghanistan nearly being accomplished, but it turns out they were also lying about doing anything during that time that could possibly have led to their stated goals being accomplished.

    Seeing the “Afghan government” just melting under the Taliban after the US pretended to spend twenty years building it up is like paying someone billions of dollars to build a palace and then after twenty years checking it out and realizing the whole thing is a stage play set made of cardboard.

    A military which can afford to spend trillions on a twenty-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making horrible people wealthy is a military that needs its budget slashed to ribbons.

    ❖

    When your elected officials never ask “How do we solve this problem?” but rather “How do we solve this problem without upsetting rich people or warmongers?”, most of the problems will necessarily remain unsolved. This is of course entirely by design, because the circumstances which created the problems were set up by and for the rich people and warmongers.

    ❖

    Anyone who accuses you of working for a foreign government when you criticize US imperialism is accidentally admitting that they cannot imagine any possible scenario under which someone might criticize the worst impulses of the most powerful people on earth without being paid to. They’re giving you a very embarrassing insight into the way they think and live. They’re telling you that they are unprincipled hacks who never question authority and only speak from within the framework of blind sycophantic loyalty.

    ❖

    It was a major propaganda victory for imperial narrative managers to convince people that being skeptical of any claim about a foreign government made by the US — no matter how flimsy the evidence — is the same as Holocaust denial.

    ❖

    The poor have all the responsibility and none of the wealth or power, and for the rich it’s the exact opposite: all of the power and wealth but none of the responsibility. Nobody ever tells them “See all that plastic in the ocean? That’s your fault. Fix it.” They burn the world for fun and profit and face no consequences. They’re a bunch of spoiled little boys with flamethrowers.

    ❖

    If it had just been “Let’s end racism” instead of “Let’s end racism by supporting horrible corporate warmongers” there’d be a lot less racism today.

    Any time I talk about racial justice I get people calling it “identity politics” when it’s really not; becoming conscious of racial injustices in our society isn’t about promoting any political party or politician, it’s about becoming conscious. But people assume that because it’s been so exploited for so long.

    If people weren’t so acutely aware of the disgusting ways in which race and racism have been leveraged to promote the political agendas of absolutely horrible people and parties, that aversion to seeing this stuff would not be there. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize phoniness, opportunism and cynicism when you see it; most people can smell it a mile away. This causes a rejection of the examination of the problem of racism which would not be there otherwise.

    The fact that racism has been exploited in a way that prevents it from being healed is itself a metastasis of that same racism.

    ❖

    Stomp out the authentic revolutionary impulse and you’re left with inauthentic revolutionary impulse. You don’t kill people’s impulse to rise up and push for change, you just get them doing it in weird, ridiculous, ineffective ways. Hence the pseudo left and “populist” right.

    Most of the bizarre things about western politics in general and US politics in particular ultimately boil down to this. “Okay we need to overthrow the elites and change things… let’s elect that rich casino guy for president.” All the IDpol and shitlib stuff, same thing.

    If the door to real leftward movement hadn’t been bolted shut, you wouldn’t see one side trying to change things by freaking out about immigrants and trans people and the other side trying to change things by punching them in black bloc without either threatening real power. What you’d see is change.

    This situation of course suits those in power just fine. They’re happy to have the right advancing their interests and the left shrieking impotently at anything that moves for all eternity. That’s why they spent generations deliberately turning that into the existing reality.

    ___________________________

    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 Problem With Yemen: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A big part of the problem with Yemen is that the photos of starving kids are too often captioned with “Ohh, look how sad” instead of “Your government is doing this on purpose.”

    ❖

    Warmongers are saying, “If we leave Afghanistan and it returns to Taliban control it will be like the whole war achieved nothing!”

    Uh, yeah. Yeah it will be lots like that. How about that, huh?

    ❖

    The only reason Americans think it matters who’s president is because no one’s ever compiled all the data about the entirety of US government behavior around the world to show what a microscopic fraction of a percentage point of that data actually changes between administrations.

    ❖

    My social media feeds are full of Americans literally trying to crowdfund their own survival while the nation’s worst are adding hundreds of billions of dollars to their wealth, but wanting to change this system makes you an extremist.

    ❖

    The Assange case isn’t about national security, it’s about narrative control. Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people, it endangered a globe-spanning empire’s ability to control our understanding of what’s happening in the world. This could not be permitted.

    ❖

     

    Listening to The Young Turks defend themselves from the outrage that has rightly come their way in left wing media circles you’d think Jimmy Dore broke into their studio and forced Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian at gunpoint to lie about Aaron Maté being a secret agent for a foreign government.

    Imagine if all the people yelling that it’s time to move on from TYT smearing Maté as a secret agent of foreign dictators had from the very beginning just spent all that energy telling Cenk and Ana they need to retract and apologize for a disgusting and unacceptable act. If left indie media had simply united along the very simple and obvious “No we don’t accuse leftist antiwar journalists of being secret agents for foreign governments”, this would have resolved very quickly and wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near as vicious as it did.

    It’s not okay to smear antiwar journalists as secret agents of a foreign government. It’s not okay to smear antiwar journalists as secret agents of a foreign government. For fuck’s sake, people. This should be the most basic, bare-minimum, slap-in-the-face obvious position for everyone to the left of Joe Biden.

    ❖

    It’s just absolutely amazing the amount of creativity people will pour into coming up with excuses for supporting the worst impulses of an unfathomably corrupt and murderous globe-spanning empire.

    ❖

    The revolution will not be televised, because someone dug up its old tweets and now the revolution is too problematic to platform.

    ❖

    The next anti-imperialist socialist voice to rise to a position of prominence will with absolute certainty become the subject of many urgent news reports solemnly informing us that that person is problematic for some reason. Might be antisemitism, might be Kremlin cronyism, might be something else, but they will find something to warn us about, and they will warn us and warn us until that prominent voice is distrusted and its influence nullified.

    Seriously, try to think of an influential voice who consistently opposes western imperialism but hasn’t been smeared as an antisemite, a Kremlin asset, a closet right-winger or a kook at some point. Such figures simply are not permitted to emerge without being viciously smeared anymore.

    If western leftists ever want to be more than a glorified group chat, they’re going to have to stop letting this happen. They’re eventually going to have to plant their feet and resolve to keep shoving toward their agendas regardless of deliberate divisive concern trolling tactics about the specific individuals within that movement.

    As soon as the capitalists figured out that leftists actually have values and care about things while their opponents do not, and that this could be weaponized, they were guaranteed to keep doing so to keep the left down. At some point we do need to stop letting them do this and just go.

    ❖

     

    It is good that people are becoming more aware of the very real distinctions on the American left. Progressive Democrats are not the same as anti-imperialist socialists, and pretending otherwise was only causing unhelpful tension and confusion. It’s good there’s more clarity now.

    This doesn’t mean the two groups need to be isolated from each other, it just means they’re different and it’s important to be aware of that. There are issues on which the two groups are in alignment, and they can work together on those issues. But be aware of the differences; it’s just like how antiwar right-libertarians can work together on some issues with antiwar socialists, but it does no one any good to pretend those two groups are the same. Progressive Democrats can likewise be worked with on some issues, just be crystal clear on the differences.

    ❖

     

    More and more manipulators are coming out into the light and being seen for what they are. More and more often the predators are no longer hidden in the tallgrass or camouflaged as logs in the river, but out in the open on a white tile floor with everyone looking at them.

    This trend will continue.

    _______________________

    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.

  • TYT, Jimmy Dore, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

     

    ❖

    Nothing about America changed in any meaningful way after Trump took office or after he left. An oligarchic empire kept doing the things the oligarchs and imperialists had always planned on doing. All that changed were the narratives laid on top of this very boring reality.

    What actually changed? The tweets. The punditry. The levels of pundit-manufactured hysteria on each side. Nothing real and significant in terms of actual government policy and behavior. The powerful capitalize on people’s inability to distinguish narrative from reality.

    ❖

    Your support for socialism is just narcissistic public masturbation if it does not include rigorous opposition to US imperialism. So is your social justice activism. So is your environmentalism. So is your anti-fascism.

    ❖

    ❖

    You know what would’ve been a lot worse than a vile McCarthyite smear against an important antiwar journalist igniting an ugly war in online left media circles? A vile McCarthyite smear against an important antiwar journalist being tolerated by online left media circles.

    I keep seeing people say things like “This feud is destroying the left!” Alright, first of all, no it isn’t, that’s stupid. Secondly, even if it was, no “left” that tolerates the use of disgusting McCarthyite smear tactics to marginalize important anti-imperialist journalists would be worth saving.

    I mean imagine a different timeline where The Young Turks had said Aaron Maté is paid by the Russian government and working for dictators, and nothing happened? Imagine if that had caused no controversy at all and everyone had just let that slide on through? How much worse would that have been? Imagine if people in online US media circles had just gone “Yep, yeah, that’s how we behave now”, and it became normal and acceptable for unprincipled progressive media outlets to target Maté and other anti-imperialist voices with that smear? Would you have preferred that?

    Now imagine another timeline where instead of this becoming a contentious issue where those on one side try to blackmail the other into silence and half of lefty media takes the side of the blackmailing McCarthyites, everyone had just condemned the smearers from the start? How much better would that have been?

    So we’re not in the best-case scenario where everyone just says “Yeah nah, fuck off” when McCarthyite smear tactics are deployed, but we’re also not in the worst-case scenario where they have widespread acceptance on the left either. That’s a  good thing.

    ❖

    Jimmy Dore is popular because he’s passionate, interesting, and speaks to ordinary people across the political spectrum instead of just to pseudo progressives or elitist university Marxists. Getting upset about his popularity instead of just doing what he’s doing is pretty silly.

    Part of the widespread vitriol toward Dore is due to jealousy about his popularity and influence, and part is due to a belief that he’s the wrong kind of voice to be leading the left. But in both cases the solution is to just do the thing that makes him so popular and influential yourself, not to bitch and moan while continuing your failed approach. I’m always seeing people talk about how their dad hates both parties and just discovered Jimmy Dore and loves him or whatever. What are Dore’s haters doing to appeal to ordinary disenfranchised working class people like this? They’ll say they want to, but their actions and methods say otherwise.

    And if you can’t do what Dore has done to become so popular—appealing to ordinary people in an interesting and accessible way—you should probably rethink getting into the left political commentary thing anyway.

    ❖

    ❖

    “How come you always criticize America instead of your own government?”

    The US staged repeated coups in Australia to ensure we remain a continent-sized military base for imperialist agendas in Asia and they’re jailing Assange with impunity. Washington is my own government.

    ❖

     

    Manipulators can only project. They don’t have the imagination or empathy to create something out of whole cloth to say about you, which is great because all you have to do is listen carefully to what they say about others with the realization they are just telling on themselves.

    In order to really say something that is true and meaningful about someone else’s character, you have to have the ability to lean in with empathy to understand them. People who have spent their lives manipulating others rather than working with them, don’t have empathy.

    This is good to know about yourself too. If you are ever stuck hating on someone and you know it’s petty and it’s not helping you, try reversing what you see in them and see if it’s just something that you do too, something that needs to be seen, loved, listened to and let go of.

    These things are sneaky though. Obviously it’s not going to present in you the exact same way as you hate it in others or else you would immediately see your own hypocrisy. They will take a little coaxing and a lot of love to draw out. Make sure you feel safe and do it by yourself. Then, when you’re feeling comfy, identify what you suspect is the core motivation of the behavior you see in the person that you hate. All it takes then is to get honest with yourself about if that motivates you sometimes.

    Be real playful and gentle about it. Most of the time, that’s all it takes. Just an “Ah, yeah I do do that,” and that’s usually enough to stop your reactiveness. Even if you do do it again, you will be watching yourself more closely and collecting more data. Once it’s fully seen, it will leave by itself. And you might continue hating that person, that’s cool, but it’s those kinds of hypocrisies that we hide from ourselves that cause a lot of psychological distress and prevent you from seeing yourself and the world as it is, and not through a veil of dissociation and self-hate.

    If you’ve looked and looked and you still can’t find it, then that’s fine. Some people really are just assholes and they need to wake up to themselves, nothing to do with you. Always worth doing the work on yourself first though. You’re the only asshole you can actually change.

    ___________________________

    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.

  • Happy “Independence” Day: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Today America celebrates its hard-fought victory in its fight to free itself from the rule of British monarchs so it could be ruled by US oligarchs.

    ❖

    Hollywood trained us to fear psychopathic killers prowling around in the dark so we won’t notice the psychopathic killers who rule our world in broad daylight.

    We’ve been trained to fear the serial killer covered in blood and wielding a chainsaw so we won’t notice the serial killer wearing a suit and wielding a pen.

    ❖

    The fucking ocean caught fire and they just bombed Iraq and Syria and they’re killing kids in Yemen and ramping up nuclear escalations against Russia and China, and Facebook is warning users that it’s those who criticize this system who are the dangerous extremists.

    ❖

    Step 1: Train the public to only accept “reputable sources” like the New York Times, WaPo, CNN etc and to dismiss indie media as Russian propaganda.

    Step 2: Make sure the “reputable sources” don’t cover stories that are inconvenient for the powerful, leaving only indie media to report on them.

    This new trend of complete mass media blackouts on inconvenient stories is a problem for many reasons, among them the fact that it’s just so hard to fight. How do you deal with all mass media outlets collaborating in unison to black out important stories?

    ❖

    ❖

    It’s important to understand that the imperial propagandists don’t just tell us what to think; they also train us how to think. Feeding us bad information is only half their job; the other half is shaping the cognitive frameworks by which we form opinions about that information.

    This is why the mass media have “opinion” segments as well as “news” segments. They’re not there in case you were curious what Johnny McThinktank’s opinions are on the issue of the day (they know you weren’t), they’re to model the acceptable parameters of thinking on that issue. And the acceptable parameters of thinking will always take it as a given that the mechanisms of oligarchy and empire mustn’t be interrupted or inconvenienced in any way. Differing opinions will be modeled on how those mechanisms should be advanced, but never if they should.

    That’s how come the renowned expert PhD pundit will often have a less truth-based worldview than your stoner flatmate with an eighth-grade education. Because they’ve been trained on both what to think and how to think, they’ll pour all their intellect into defending lie-based worldviews.

    ❖

    The most dangerous extremists of our age are not radical jihadists, nor fundamentalist Christians, nor white supremacists, nor communists, nor anarchists, but mainstream adherents to the status quo politics that are murdering people around the world and driving us to armageddon.

    This should not be a controversial thing to say. Certainly some of the above groups are dangerous and wrong, but they are objectively far less dangerous and deadly than the mainstream mass murdering ecocidal extremists who people inaccurately label “centrists” and “moderates”.

    ❖

    Dear younger generation,

    Sorry for destroying the environment, but in our defense we did everything we possibly could short of inconveniencing ourselves in any way or doing anything we don’t like doing or taking any kind of meaningful action.

    ❖

    American warmongers want to bring democracy to Iran, China, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and, eventually, at the very bottom of the list, perhaps to the United States as well.

    ❖

    Congratulations to all my fellow westerners as we celebrate our 100th anniversary of pretending we are superior to the Communist Party of China.

    ❖

    Westerners have always been far more savage and brutish than any of the populations around the world they’ve ever set out to “civilize”, and that remains the case to this day. Only reason this isn’t clear to us all is our school books were written by westerners.

    ❖

    The US empire’s treatment of Julian Assange has exposed the evil and corruption of the US empire more than Assange himself ever could.

    ❖

    A government whose solution to homelessness is to criminalize the homeless is a government that should not exist.

    ❖

    Western Marxists talking about violent revolution when they can’t get 20 people at a protest are like a little boy talking about fighting supervillains when he can’t even tie his shoes. There won’t be revolution, violent or otherwise, while propaganda rules public consciousness.

    Any talk of any kind of revolution is just vapid LARPing as long as people are being successfully propagandized away from rising up, and they are. Your dreams of revolution are so very, very far away right now you might as well be talking about magic. The violent revolution vs peaceful revolution debate on the left is as meaningless as arguing over what company makes the best model of magic wand. No revolution is happening, at all, until the left addresses the problem of mass-scale media psyops first.

    ❖

    Q: What is the populist right?

    A: The populist right are Republicans who want to go to war with China instead of Syria.

    ❖

    ❖

    “Why didn’t you leave your abuser sooner?”

    If I’d left sooner then that would’ve been when I left, and you’d just be asking me why I didn’t leave sooner than that. Maybe just blame the abuser for abusing.

    ❖

    Ultimately the problem is that mass-scale propaganda institutions are fully unified in their consent-manufacturing narratives while the rest of us are rabidly divided against each other.

    ❖

    People who’ve experienced spiritual enlightenment talk about how they now see how everyone’s stories about life are false. Opening your eyes to what’s going on in our world is very much the same: seeing the propaganda narratives which have nothing to do with what’s true or real.

    If you ignored the intense partisan narratives and just dispassionately observed the large-scale behaviors of money, resources and weapons, you’d have no idea the US got a new president in January. But if you listen to the narratives, it’s supposedly a night-and-day difference between this administration and the last one.

    Whether you’re talking about personal narratives or mass-scale narratives, they are entirely different from life as it actually is. The babbling stories in our minds are simply ineffective tools for describing reality; the more we get our heads above them, the clearer we can see.

    _____________________________

    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.

  • You Ordered Healthcare, You Got Airstrikes: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    Americans: healthcare please

    Biden: Sorry, did you say airstrikes on Iraq and Syria?

    Americans: no, healthcare

    Biden: Alright, you drive a hard bargain, but here are your airstrikes on Iraq and Syria.

    ❖

    It is journalistic malpractice to parrot US government claims about acts of military mass murder on the other side of the planet being “defensive”. The only strikes near the Iraq-Syria border that could accurately be called “defensive” are those launched by the inhabitants of those nations upon the invading western military occupation. The only actual defensive action that the US could legitimately take to protect troops in the Middle East would be to remove US troops from the Middle East.

    ❖

    Those who said “we can push Biden to the left” get criticized every time this administration takes another rightward turn, but they don’t get criticized enough for the fact that they never even try to push Biden to the left. At no point have they ever even tried.

    ❖

    Nobody in America had any idea the Parliamentarian existed until the Democrats needed an excuse not to advance progressive causes.

    ❖

    The Biden administration is killing people around the world and ramping up cold war escalations while eroding civil rights with new “domestic terror” policies, so naturally Republicans are focused on worrying about dying in imaginary concentration camps during an imaginary White People Holocaust.

    ❖

    ❖

    Yeah okay let’s give control of the world to the nation built from slavery and genocide and founded by witch-burning Puritan lunatics, what could go wrong.

    ❖

    It’s a safe bet that if the world found out all the profoundly evil things the US government and its allies did in Syria it would damage US imperialist consensus-building far worse than the Iraq invasion. That’s why so much narrative management gets poured into ensuring this never happens.

    ❖

    The whole Intercept/TYT foreign policy schtick is going “It’s possible to promote all CIA/CNN narratives about every US-targeted government AND give meaningless lip service to opposing war against those governments. You can do BOTH.”

    Mehdi Hasan built a whole career on this.

    ❖

    Many “right-wing conspiracy theories” began as left-wing conspiracy facts.

    ❖

    I started saying “US intelligence cartel” a while back because the cutesy label “US intelligence community” was like saying “the ISIS Capades”.

    ❖

    Isn’t it weird how we’ve learned that the US prosecution against Julian Assange relied heavily on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester, yet Assange is still in prison?

    ❖

    We haven’t seen anything like the complete mass media blackout on Stundin‘s revelation that the Assange prosecution relied on false testimony since the complete mass media blackout on the OPCW leaks.

    In the information age the powerful place emphasis not just on managing what information gets out to the public, but how that information is received and perceived. Now legit bombshells like the Stundin story and the OPCW leaks can come out without having any real impact, just due to perception management.

    In this new paradigm, investigative reporting and whistleblowers are still of course important, but just as important as obtaining the information is addressing the problem of getting it unfiltered into public attention. It doesn’t matter what information you get if no one sees it, and even if it is seen you still need to deal with imperial media spinning what’s seen in a power-serving way. Today you could publish solid, indisputable proof that the FBI was behind the Capitol riot, for example, and the narrative managers would quickly manipulate it into a nothingburger.

    This is also why you’ll see narrative managers working so hard to advance smear campaigns against anyone who presents narratives that are inconvenient for the powerful; if they can generate enough public suspicion and dismissiveness toward someone’s voice, no one will ever listen to them. That’s why fighting smear campaigns is so important.

    ❖

    Almost all good business practices are terrible human being practices. To be a good businessman you have to harden the humanity out of you. This is why capitalism creates and elevates terrible humans, and why we are being led into extinction by assholes.

    Even seemingly benign business practices like “maintaining cash flow” are inherently corrosive to human nature. You need to break something good in you in order to hold back from paying people for as long as possible, while chasing people to pay you ASAP to keep up your cash flow.

    ❖

    Interrupting criticisms of capitalism to yell “That’s not REAL capitalism!” is like interrupting a magic show to yell “That’s not REAL magic!” Okay it’s not the imaginary fantasy thing you have in your head, but it’s also the only way the thing we’re discussing has ever existed and ever will exist.

    ❖

    It’s not just that “the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence” as Bukowski said. It’s that people with empathy and humility can be shamed and intimidated into silence by the crowd while narcissists just dismiss the crowd as irrelevant insects. The result is that the real artists and visionaries with solid grounding in their inner depths are often brutalized into silence by those who throw rocks at things that shine, while those without functioning empathy centers rise to positions of significant influence.

    And I think maybe the lesson here is that we must become so very awake that we have the inner spaciousness to tolerate and heal our way through a bombardment of attacks.

    ❖

    Certainty that humanity is doomed is not a reality-based position. We barely know anything about our universe, our minds or our world. Anything is possible. Rigid pessimism about our fate is grounded in ignorance and intellectual arrogance, not “realism”. Doesn’t mean things aren’t bad, but there’s no rational reason to give up hope or stop fighting.

    ❖

    It is true that we are plunging headlong into a continuum of exponentially expanding weirdness and that familiar patterns are rapidly evaporating. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. To paraphrase Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to preserve normality in a profoundly sick society.

    ______________________________

    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. 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. 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 Right And Wrong Lessons From Afghanistan: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Your efforts to understand the world will fail unless you account for the fact that (A) echo chamber dynamics have a vastly under-appreciated effect on the way we all take in information, and (B) that rich and powerful people are actively trying to manipulate your perception of reality.

    ❖

    The correct lesson from Afghanistan instantly beginning to revert back to Taliban control the moment the western occupation ends is not that the occupation needs to continue, it’s that it should never have happened in the first place.

    “Oh no, bad things are happening because we’re leaving!” No, bad things are happening because you went in. You spent two decades hammering that poor nation with bombs and war crimes, and now they’re just going right back to where they were before you inflicted that upon them. Everything that’s happening in Afghanistan today is the fault of the invaders.

    The argument that the occupation has been a boon for human rights is just plain false, and is premised on the idea that the western empire should invade every nation with illiberal cultural values and force it to change at gunpoint. Even if that ridiculous premise were accepted, it has been clearly established that such a thing is impossible.

    How fucking obnoxious is it that westerners are now wringing their hands over the fact that when they stop forcing Afghanistan to be a certain way at gunpoint, the fate of Afghanistan starts being determined by Afghans? Enough with this white man’s burden bullshit, freaks.

    ❖

    Don’t tell people not to fantasize about Jeff Bezos’ icy body spinning through the vacuum of space for all eternity. It’s kink-shaming.

    ❖

    How to be an American leftist:

    • Focus exclusively on domestic policy in the most warmongering nation on earth
    • Criticize governments who are resisting US interventionism instead of US interventionism
    • Pay more attention to obscure abstract concepts than nonstop mass murder

    ❖

    US politicians always have Twitter bios like “Father of Kelly, husband of Leanne (she’s the real boss!), VERY amateur shower singer,” instead of like, “Rapist of Syria, murderer of Yemeni kids, destroyer of your children’s future.”

    ❖

    Yemen alone completely invalidates the moral authority of the US-centralized power alliance to determine what rules the world should play by.

    ❖

    It’s not actually possible to be excessively critical of the US empire. There’s a common notion that there needs to be some kind of “balance” between criticism of the US power alliance and its enemies. No there doesn’t; the US government is objectively far worse than any other. No other government is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, and waging nonstop wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century.

    Criticizing the US empire far more than its rivals is balance; criticizing it the same as you’d criticize US-targeted governments is what would be imbalanced, because the US and its allies are far, far more murderous and destructive than anyone else. It should be criticized more. You’re not being impartial if you pretend the US is as bad as China, Russia, Iran, etc; you’re being heavily biased in favor of the US, because you’re greatly helping to advance the interests of the far worse government by placing it on equal footing with the others.

    You see so many dry, elitist wankers acting like they’re being detached and impartial by treating all governments equally, when in reality they’re being anything but. All governments are not equal; one is clearly and demonstrably far, far more destructive than any of the others.

    ❖

    It’s just so amazing how many leftists yell at journalists like Aaron Maté and Glenn Greenwald for using Tucker Carlson’s show to get important perspectives out to a mainstream audience compared to how few leftists yell at other mass media outlets for refusing to platform those important perspectives at all. Like there’s a whole sector of Twitter which seems to spend all its energy bitching about anti-imperialists going on Carlson to share anti-imperialist perspectives, and if you search their tweets you’ll find zero posts yelling at CNN or MSNBC for never platforming anti-imperialists.

    Dissident ideas need to get out to the mainstream. The fact that no other outlets ever platform those ideas besides Tucker Carlson is the thing which should outrage people.

    ❖

    If you’re not despised by the Intercept-TYT-Bellingcat media faction, your work probably isn’t that good.

    ❖

    So much of what the CIA used to do covertly it now does overtly; NED, working in media punditry, etc. Pretty soon they’ll just be openly selling narcotics door to door like Girl Scout cookies.

    ❖

    Fun fact: among people who tell you you’re only socialist because you’ve never studied economics, exactly zero percent of them have ever read a book by a Marxian economist.

    ❖

    If I were a thieving oligarch or a murderous imperialist I would be very happy that Americans are all focused on arguing about critical race theory.

    ❖

    Come read my superintelligent Marxist essay about why the left should remain a highly exclusive club no bigger than the size of a public library speaking event. Medium says it’s just a 97-minute read. It’s got over six views and counting. Hope you like footnotes!

    ❖

    Hey remember when Wonder Woman came out the same year Hillary Clinton was supposed to become president and invade Syria, and the villain was a guy who murders villagers with poison gas, including children? That was a bit weird, huh?

    Like there was literally a scene where Wonder Woman finds a village of civilians killed with poison gas, and screams about how awful the bad guys are for “Killing people they cannot see! Children. Children!!” How many other superhero movies have you seen where the bad guy just kills kids with poison gas?

    Hillary had been openly planning to invade Syria with tens of thousands of US troops to cripple Assad’s air defenses and control Syrian air space, a very dangerous and deadly move which would have required a lot of consent manufacturing.

    And you can say well it was set in World War 1, poison gas was a big thing then. Okay, but why set it in World War 1? The character Wonder Woman didn’t exist until 1941. There was no reason it had to be set during a time when poison gas was a big thing, but they chose to anyway.

    ❖

    They say youth is wasted on the young. No, youth is wasted on schoolwork.

    ❖

    Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they provide but for the hallucinations they remove.

    ❖

    I have a conspiracy theory that plutocrats conspire with secretive government agencies to advance murderous and exploitative agendas, and I have another conspiracy theory that some deep force of nature within us is conspiring to awaken humanity from the propaganda of our rulers.

    Humanity is becoming more conscious. Awkwardly, sloppily, like a toddler, we’re becoming more and more aware of what’s going on inside us and what’s going on outside us. There are a lot of ugly things which wish to remain hidden as the light expands, but they can’t hide forever.

    _________________________

    The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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. 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

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Emperor Has No Authority: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If you think the Biden administration caging kids at the border is bad, wait til you hear what it’s doing in Yemen.

    ❖

    Would you be willing to murder a child every ten minutes to advance US geostrategic interests in the Middle East? Because that’s exactly what the US government and its proxies are doing in Yemen.

    ❖

    Imagine watching a political party consistently demonstrate the exact same pattern of behavior for generations and then thinking it’s about to change.

    ❖

    When the US changes political party leadership you’ll see minor superficial changes which don’t affect the powerful at all—letting trans people in the military or whatever—while leaving all the actual dynamics of oligarchy and empire intact. This creates the illusion of change.

    You don’t get to vote on oligarchy or empire. You only get to vote on what window dressings they use from year to year.

    ❖

    It’s weird how Biden’s obvious dementia has made it essentially mainstream knowledge that the president doesn’t actually call the shots in the US government but everyone’s still going to treat the next presidential election like it matters anyway.

    I mean it was basically already mainstream knowledge, as evidenced by the fact that whenever you’d point out that Obama or Trump were continuing the same evil policies as their predecessors their supporters would say “Come on you can’t just expect the president to do things.” But then the next presidential election rolls around and once again it’s “THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME”, even though deep down everyone knows it’s basically an audition for who gets to play the lead character in a scripted theater production that’s been running for generations.

    ❖

    I always get people saying “You can’t say my president has dementia! You’re not a doctor!”

    It’s funny how Biden’s obvious cognitive decline used to be something establishment Democrats openly discussed, but when he become the Democratic frontrunner it suddenly became something you can’t say unless you have a medical degree. Please people, just compare recent footage to footage of him a few years ago. If all his very obvious mental lapses aren’t enough to convince you, the fact that he’s indisputably a completely different man should.

    Watch the man in this video:

    Then compare that trainwreck to the man in this video:

    Or you don’t even need to go back that far:

    If you tell me you’re seeing the same level of cognitive functioning in the first video as the second and third video, you are lying.

    Compare that drastic change to what we’ve seen from Bernie Sanders, for example, who aside from his appearance and voice changing with age still has the exact same personality and demeanor he had forty years ago:

    Again, this is important to flag not for partisan reasons, but because it makes it abundantly clear that the elected officials of the most powerful government on earth don’t actually run things. The official head of an empire doesn’t have anything to do with the actual operation of that empire; it’s being run by unofficial unelected forces from behind the scenes. The emperor has no authority. People’s attention should be drawn to this fact.

    ❖

    Defending press freedoms without defending Julian Assange is attacking press freedoms.

    ❖

    Israel’s Gaza Policy:

    – Trap an ethnic group in one of the most densely populated areas on earth.

    – Routinely drop military explosives on them knowing you will definitely kill civilians.

    – Claim they’re using “human shields” because they live in a densely populated area.

    There is no confusion in the Israeli government about the fact that they will kill civilians any time they do this. They know full well they are doing something that will necessarily kill people who are not “Hamas”, but they spin it as being exclusively about Hamas anyway.

    ❖

    Q: What is Russia?

    A: Russia is a strange enchanted realm whose magical properties render western minds completely incapable of forming rational thoughts about it.

    ❖

    The powerful understand that narrative control is everything, so when someone with influence begins punching holes in power-serving narratives, it is 100 percent certain that you’ll see them smeared very aggressively at some point. It is very important to prevent these smear campaigns from succeeding.

    It can be tempting to avoid confronting smearmeisters, because they’ll always make it an ugly fight. But the only alternative is to let them control the narrative about you, which is the same as letting them control you. Because, again, narrative control is everything. If you’re being targeted in this way it really is necessary to wade into the muck and make sure you’re making your smearers look worse than they’re trying to make you look, make sure their gross behavior damages their reputation worse than it damages yours.

    If you’re actually interested in making a difference and helping the world you need to not just put out solid work but also protect your reputation, because if you let the smearmeisters control your reputation it won’t matter how solid your work is since nobody will look at it.

    Making sure their smears damage them more than they damage you is the only way to create some space for yourself and your work, because it’s the only thing that deters them. Otherwise they’ll keep smearing and smearing until there’s no possibility of your work having any impact.

    ❖

    The more conscious you are the more conscious people around you will become; there’s an outward ripple effect that’s amazing to watch. Becoming deeply conscious of your inner world and your outer world is the best way to help wake up humanity, because consciousness is contagious.

    __________________________

    The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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. 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 Fucking President Has Fucking Dementia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    When receiving information about the world it’s necessary to scrutinize not just the information, but also the means by which the information was brought to your attention and who could benefit from its circulation. Few bother doing all of these things, which is why most people are confused about the world.

    ❖

    The fact that Biden is continuing all of Trump’s policies means those who believed Trump was fighting the establishment must now admit that either (A) they were wrong or (B) Biden is also fighting the establishment.

    ❖

    The only people promoting the idea that Joe Biden has dementia are right wingers, left wingers, and Joe Biden.

    People tell me I should criticize Biden’s policies and not his obvious mental decline, but a very clear sign that the most powerful government on earth is not being run by its elected officials is actually an extremely noteworthy fact that everyone should be talking about.

    The only face more suitable for the US empire than a sociopathic billionaire is a decrepit warmongering corporate whore with dementia.

    ❖

    When imperialists say an issue is “complicated” what they really mean is that a very simple matter has been covered over by a lot of complicated spin and propaganda narratives.

    ❖

    I tried to infiltrate MSNBC and CNN but they won’t hire me because I have no CIA experience.

    ❖

    Jimmy Dore lives so rent-free in Cenk Uygur’s head that BlackRock is trying to buy it.

    ❖

    The best way to get rich as an intelligence agent is to run media influence operations posing as a “former” intelligence agent.

    ❖

    The main difficulty with socialism is that when a nation tries to move away from the most toxic aspects of capitalism, the most toxic aspects of capitalism immediately begin arming local proxy militias and working to cut it off from the world economy.

    ❖

    Any evil deeds you suspect the US empire might be perpetrating in secret are probably not as bad as what it is doing openly in Yemen as you read this sentence.

    ❖

    A society which supports the butchery in Yemen is not going to abandon factory farming and animal cruelty. We are very, very far from treating our animal cousins properly if we can’t even stop slaughtering our own.

    ❖

    The difference between a centrist Democrat and a progressive Democrat is that one favors slow incremental changes which never actually happen, whereas the other favors slow incremental changes which never actually happen.

    ❖

    The shrinking audiences for The Intercept and TYT shows there’s not actually much demand for the area between (A) real criticism of capitalist imperialism and (B) MSNBC. Once your eyes begin to open you tend to move quickly from mainstream to radical without hovering in between.

    ❖

    ❖

    My whole life is interacting with binary-minded dimwits. You hate Democrats so you must be a Republican. You criticize the US empire so you must think China is perfect. You’re skeptical of the Pentagon’s UFO narrative so you must think all UFOs are weather balloons and swamp gas.

    ❖

    I know this UFO thing doesn’t interest some of my regular readers, or leftists in general, but it is a major news story of a highly suspicious nature which just so happens to fit in nicely with preexisting US cold war objectives. It does need critical coverage and analysis.

    ❖

    Mainstream media: We must stop the spread of crazy conspiracy theories even if we have to censor the entire internet.

    Also the mainstream media: The US military says it’s been lying about UFOs for decades and maybe space aliens are flying around above your house.

    ❖

    Mainstream media pundits now believe UFOs are real because the US war machine told them so, which says very little about UFOs but says a lot about mainstream media pundits.

    ❖

    If you’re going to accept that (1) UFOs are being piloted by non-human intelligence, (2) that their focus is on nuclear weapons facilities, and (3) that sightings are becoming more common, you’ll have to conclude that they ramp up operations whenever we engage in insane cold war escalations.

    My point of course is not that these are aliens (I have no idea what any of this stuff is), it’s that any position that accepts points 1, 2 and 3 should logically want less militarism, not more. Which will be important to keep in mind as Official Narratives unfold going forward.

    ❖

    People bitch when I say landlords shouldn’t be a thing like “How dare you, I’m a landlord and I collect rent to pay for my retirement!” Well, nobody should have to build their retirement on the economic premise of a permanent underclass. If they do, something has gone very wrong.

    ❖

    I heard someone say mothers are expected to work like they don’t have kids and parent like they don’t have a job, and that really says it all. This impossibly high-pressure way of existing is the “equality” mainstream feminism has given us.

    ❖

    I feel kind of silly about how I used to try and explain why I write about some issues and not others. I write entirely from inspiration; I’ve never once felt like I’m in control of what dances its way into my head. The honest answer is I write what I write and I don’t know why.

    _______________________

    The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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. 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.

  • Poverty Is A Weapon Of The Powerful: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    Learn enough about what’s happening in the world and you realize that most people in your society have worldviews that are completely and utterly wrong. This can seem bold, perhaps even arrogant, but if most people weren’t deluded about the world, the world wouldn’t be so fucked.

    And it’s not that people are dumb; intelligence has little to do with it. Some of the most intelligent people on earth promote the same deluded worldviews as everyone else. The problem isn’t intellect, it’s manipulation, and anyone can be manipulated no matter how smart they are. This mass-scale manipulation is the result of wealthy people buying up narrative influence in the form of media, political influence, think tanks, lobbying, NGOs, etc, in conjunction with the mass-scale manipulations of the powerful government agencies which are allied with them.

    The powerful work to manipulate the way the general public thinks, acts and votes to ensure that they remain in power. They pay special attention to who the most influential people in our society are, which is why the most prominent voices are so often the most delusional. There are filters in place designed to keep anyone from rising to positions of influence if they don’t support the consensus worldview promoted by the oligarchic empire, and once they do rise to influence they are actively herded into echo chambers which reinforce that worldview.

    This is further exacerbated by the fact that the most influential voices in a virulently capitalist society will be those who have profited and benefited from the status quo. Of course they’re going to believe the system is working fine; it treats them like royalty.

    This is why you can’t defer to recognized authorities when it comes to understanding your world; the system which selects and installs those authorities is designed to serve the powerful, not to tell the truth. The responsibility for understanding your world is yours, and yours alone.

    ❖

    ❖

    Poverty itself is a weapon of the powerful. Keep people too poor to fund political campaigns and you keep them powerless. Keep them too busy to research and they can’t see through your propaganda. Keep them desperate and you can get them hating each other instead of hating you. They’re not just robbing ordinary people so they can have more for themselves; the poverty itself actually benefits them. They would benefit from keeping you poor even if it gave them nothing else.

    It is not a coincidence that the most crucial nation in the oligarchic empire, the US, has the highest level of this kind of weaponized poverty. There’s a lot of power riding on what happens in America, so the powerful do everything they can to keep Americans under control.

    ❖

    People who act like China lifting millions out of poverty is no big deal have never lived in poverty.

    ❖

    If you don’t oppose western imperialist agendas against China then none of your other anti-imperialism matters. All of the western empire’s aggressions on the world stage are ultimately about smashing China; that’s checkmate on the global chessboard in the eyes of the empire. Preventing the rise of any other nation has been the foremost priority of the US empire since the fall of the Soviet Union. All the other little chess moves on the board have revolved around this ultimate goal. China is the only nation in a position to surpass the US.

    The western empire has been acutely aware that China would need to be smashed since before the empire had its headquarters in Washington. As Winston Churchill once put it:

    “I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.”

    ❖

    Uh-oh, looks like Peru is going to need some help with its Freedom and Democracy. Anyone know any powerful governments who might be interested in helping Peru get some Freedom and Democracy?

    ❖

    Still mad at Assad for arming Al Qaeda and ISIS against himself and then imposing starvation sanctions on Syrians to keep himself from rebuilding the country.

    ❖

    I’m writing a horror movie about a group of psychopathic murderers inserting themselves into the world’s most powerful positions and terrorizing entire populations using the most deadly military force ever assembled.

    ❖

    It’s weird how few of the people opposing specific aspects of the imperial war machine do so on the foundational principle that murdering people is wrong and trying to dominate the entire planet is bad.

    ❖

    Electoral politics is decoy revolution. Don’t like the status quo? Elect Obama for Hope and Change! Still dislike the status quo? Elect Trump, he’ll fight the establishment! Oh no, Trump’s a fascist! Quick, fight fascism by electing Biden! And you elect the status quo each time.

    ❖

    Trump may have permanently broken liberals’ ability to think about politics in a way that doesn’t revolve around Trump.

    ❖

    Only infantile bootlickers want government-tied monopolistic internet platforms controlling what people can and cannot say about government Covid responses that affect everyone.

    ❖

    Oligarchs using disasters to rob the people and siphon their wealth to themselves is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism. Covid isn’t an aberration but a continuation of a well-established pattern, one which will necessarily last as long as the exploitation of the working class.

    “The Covid scam is the most evil thing happening in the world!”

    No, you only think that because most of the time this well-established pattern doesn’t affect you personally in a concrete and observable way. This has been happening for a very long time, and it’s going to keep happening until the end of capitalism.

    ❖

    ❖

    It’s funny how people think AI is going to save humanity when the people who control the AI are the worst humans alive.

    ❖

    FYI what divides the left is not leftists saying things that other leftists disagree with, it’s leftists being incapable of tolerating other leftists saying things they disagree with.

    ❖

    Once you’re clear that human behavior is driving us into extinction via nuclear war or climate collapse, once you’ve really grokked into the reality of what this means, it’s hard to take the sectarian ideological stuff seriously. We’re fucking dying, people. Quit dicking around.

    ___________________________

    The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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. 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.

  • Divide And Brainwash: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    In 2016 the most corrupt and murderous government on earth dealt with public discontent by selling a sociopathic billionaire as the anti-establishment presidential candidate, then in 2020 sold a lifelong empire lackey as the revolutionary people’s uprising against that candidate.

    “You want a revolution? Here. Here’s a revolution for you to have. There. Done. Glad you got that out of your system.”

    ❖

    – Set up an imperialist oligarchy which rules as tyrannically as any monarch.

    – Remain hidden and unaccountable.

    – Propagandize people into thinking they’re free.

    – Whenever there’s unrest due to systemic injustices, let them elect one of your employees who promises to change things.

    ❖

    The imperialist oligarchy deliberately keeps the public poor, busy and confused and then directs their resulting anger toward Russia, China, immigrants, and people from the other political party. Our anger at each other protects them from our anger landing where it belongs.

    ❖

    Propagandists know you don’t need to give the average person factual reasons to believe something. You don’t even need to give them financial reasons. All you need is to make sure your claim validates their current worldview. Rigidly-held belief structures facilitate propaganda.

    ❖

    Americans will happily give Israel billions of dollars a year to murder Palestinian civilians and then brush off a panhandler on the street because he might spend the money on booze.

    ❖

    Israel is getting another Prime Minister who was partly raised and educated in the United States with extensive ties to US power and speaks English with an American accent. Stop acting like these are two separate countries.

    ❖

    The US power alliance’s genocide in Yemen remains the single ugliest thing that is happening in our world today. What will it take for humanity to cease averting its eyes from this horror?

    ❖

    ❖

    Enlisting in the US military should be infinitely more taboo and shameful than being a sex worker.

    ❖

    Until mass media was invented the best carrying agent for establishment propaganda was religion.

    ❖

    I have no problem with people saying that the furthest-left politicians in the most powerful government on earth should be a lot further left than they are. Setting up centrists like AOC as “far left” and “the best we’ll ever get” builds a roadblock to further leftward movement.

    ❖

    “Leftists” who try to derail the anti-imperialist conversation by concern trolling about human rights within Pentagon-targeted nations are the same as rightists who try to derail the racial justice conversation by concern trolling about “black-on-black crime”.

    ❖

    One of the biggest challenges for a developing anti-imperialist, at least in my experience, is learning to differentiate between those who actually want to end the oligarchic empire and those who just want the empire to act a bit more cosmetically nice than it does. These are two completely different positions, especially because the latter is pure fantasy: you cannot have a globe-dominating unipolar power structure that doesn’t use violent force to maintain that world order. Yet the two groups often wind up moving in overlapping circles.

    I’ve never had trouble knowing what my own position is toward the empire, but I’ve often struggled figuring out who shared that position. There was a long unfolding process of going “Ohh, we’re not on the same page at all. You want entirely different things from what I want.”

    Most of the sectarian fighting you see on the left splits along those lines: those who want to end the oligarchic empire, and those who want the oligarchic empire to be a bit nicer. These two positions are ultimately irreconcilable, so those factions will never get along.

    ❖

    If there are indeed extraterrestrials and they are indeed flying around our world in strange aircraft, we are more likely to get the truth about this from the extraterrestrials themselves than from the US military.

    ❖

    The US government is pure swamp; you can’t use the swamp to fix the swamp. Democrats were never going to use a Special Counsel to remove Trump. Trump was never going to take down the Deep State. The US government isn’t going to investigate itself and reveal the truth about aliens.

    ❖

    Perhaps the best explanation for the many reports of unidentified flying objects demonstrating maneuvers and features we don’t understand is that we’re hurtling through a vast and mysterious universe that our barely-evolved primate brains know almost nothing about.

    ❖

    If there are ETs visiting us they probably already treat this planet more like a home than we do.

    ❖

    Humans focus on outer space to avoid focusing on inner space.

    ❖

    Maybe the world really did end in 2012. Everything’s been unraveling into an exponentially expansive field of weirdness ever since.

    _______________________

    The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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. 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 Screams Of A Dying Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Ana Kasparian’s infamous Young Turks tantrum about Aaron Maté was the screams of a dying empire.

    Some want to dismantle the imperial slaughter machine and create a harmonious world; others just want the imperial slaughter machine to give them healthcare. These are two entirely different positions. It’s not strange that these factions feud—it would be strange if they didn’t.

    US progressives who smear The Grayzone and other anti-imperialist media never have any other equally anti-imperialist media that they promote and uphold as good. This is because they are imperialists.

    ❖

    The only way to do actual foreign policy journalism in the western world is to make a conscious decision to tell the truth without being bullied into accepting any unproven US narrative, no matter how badly they smear you and no matter how hard it is to find work and make a living.

    ❖

    US liberals are orders of magnitude more outraged about a small group of wingnuts making people nervous in the Capitol building for a few hours than they are about the fact that their government is constantly murdering people around the world.

    ❖

    The blame for public distrust in government and media institutions rests solely on those government and media institutions.

    ❖

    Most westerners know that Bush and his allies destroyed Iraq, while hardly any westerners know Obama and his allies destroyed Syria. That right there tells you why we haven’t seen any full-scale US ground invasions lately. America’s solution to the PR crisis caused by the horrific consequences of its military interventionism has been to switch to preferencing sanctions, blockades, and proxy wars where violence is outsourced to other powers so the US doesn’t take the blame.

    Syria is a perfect example of this new model of imperialist slaughter. The US power alliance absolutely demolished that country by arming jihadist proxy forces and then sanctioning the hell out of it to keep it from rebuilding, all with the goal of eventually toppling Damascus, but the general public is completely unaware of this.

    And make no mistake, good PR is absolutely essential to the operation of the empire. They don’t pour that much energy into manufacturing consent because it’s fun, they do it because they have to. You can’t rule a managed democracy without good perception management.

    The need to avoid bad PR fallouts is why Bush-era “Hulk smash” ground invasions are largely a thing of the past. It’s also why the US empire now has a secretary of state who vocally supports the new model of subtler imperialist butchery:

    Trump supporters act like it’s something special that their guy “started no new wars”, but the fact that he didn’t has nothing to do with Trump himself; it’s just the new model of imperialist butchery to favor sanctions and proxy conflicts instead, which Trump absolutely did.

    ❖

    Netanyahu’s right-wing thuggishness causing a PR nightmare for Israel is a good example of why the US-centralized power alliance increasingly prefers liberal manipulators to head many of its “democracies”. An Israeli Obama wouldn’t have lost control of the narrative like that.

    There’s just not enough public support for wingnuts for them to operate as effective stewards of empire in the western world anymore. That’s why so many oligarchs and imperialists disliked Trump; not because they disagreed with him on any important policies (they didn’t), but because he sucked at perception management.

    ❖

    ❖

    The US empire only recently started ramping up aggressions against China because while China’s economy is doing well, its military nowhere near rivals the empire’s, and that’s the real currency. If your neighbor has $100 and you have $100 plus a gun, then you actually have $200.

    ❖

    If you’re having trouble interpreting a particular Bible verse, it’s because the correct interpretation is “This is an ancient document authored by confused men whose words have no relevance to my own experience.”

    ❖

    History is one long string of horrific atrocities with the dominant religious institutions of the time either doing nothing or actively participating.

    ____________________________

    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. 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. The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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.

  • Australia Is A Giant US Military Base With Kangaroos: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to this article:

    ❖

    Everyone around the world should criticize the US empire constantly and without apology. Nobody anywhere ever needs to justify or defend criticizing the most powerful, destructive and influential government on earth. It’s always right to criticize America, in any way you choose.

    ❖

    Consider the possibility that the most powerful government on earth got that way largely by being willing to do whatever it takes to claw its way to the top, no matter how many people it’s needed to kill and oppress to get there and remain there.

    ❖

    The US empire is the single most depraved and murderous power structure on earth. The Democratic and Republican parties are two Nazis arguing over which route to take to bring their captives to the concentration camp.

    ❖

    Growing up in crushing poverty is inherently traumatic. Not everyone who’s been traumatized goes on to hurt people, but everyone who hurts people has been traumatized. Supporting a status quo which includes an impoverished underclass is supporting widespread crime and violence.

    ❖

    ❖

    If you believe anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, then you’re naturally going to see an uptick in “anti-semitism” every time Zionism rips children’s bodies apart with explosives.

    ❖

    What is being done to Palestinians would be horrific and inexcusable regardless of the ethnicity or religion of their persecutors. Opposing apartheid injustice and abuse has nothing to do with opposing anyone’s religion, and attempts to claim it does are made in bad faith.

    ❖

    If I wanted to sabotage the pro-Palestine movement, I would make myself a part of the conversation by criticizing Israeli abuses and supporting Palestinian rights, then I’d start going “This rise in anti-semitism sure is concerning though, can we pause and focus on this please?”

    ❖

    Zionists will spend 100 times more energy attacking and smearing an influential Jewish defender of Palestinian rights than opposing a brazen Jew-hating white supremacist. Supporters of Israeli apartheid don’t care about fighting anti-semitism, they care about narrative control.

    ❖

    The rapist was forced to murder his rape victim because she tried to fight him off. The rapist has a right to defend himself. Rape has a right to exist. This is actually a very complex issue, too complicated for you to understand.

    ❖

    ❖

    If Moscow hadn’t intervened in Crimea in 2014 and Syria in 2015, the US wouldn’t have begun training us all to hate Russia in 2016.

    If Russia would’ve just let the US do its thing with the Ukraine coup and the proxy war to topple Damascus, there would not have been a Russia panic, because the US war machine would not have felt an argent need to manufacture one. But then Russia would’ve eventually found itself surrounded by a sea of hostile empire and forced to relinquish its sovereignty.

    Same goes for China asserting its own power regionally and economically. At some point Russia and China both realized that if they don’t start taking bold action to prevent the US empire from absorbing the entire world, they’re going to slowly see their allies and trading partners disappear until they’ve got no choice but to join. That’s all we’re seeing with all this hysteria.

    If you don’t interfere in the empire’s agendas of conquest and absorption, it won’t be in a hurry to get rid of you; it will just absorb you when it’s got time and nothing else to devour. Interfere with its war machine, though, and you’re in for it.

    ❖

    Steal from The New York Times. It’s not legitimate for the “paper of record” whose narratives shape your world to hide its stories from you behind a paywall. Use apps, use private browsers, use archive.is; any method used to access NYT and similar outlets without paying them is perfectly legitimate. That information is your right; you shouldn’t have to pay a plutocratic propaganda institution just to find out what it’s telling people.

    ❖

    ❖

    The US-centralized oligarchic empire has no ideology and no values beyond the acquisition of more power. If Islamic fundamentalism serves them in one part of the world they’ll support that there, while simultaneously backing woke progressivism overseas if that serves them in that part of the world.

    Imperialists often favor corporate liberals over conservatives in the western world because they now see liberals as better custodians of the empire’s western branches. There’s dwindling support for Bible thumpers and racists in our society, so the empire seeks better drivers.

    And you may be sure that the opposite would have been the case if our society hadn’t become too conscious to accommodate the right’s ugliest aspects at mass scale. If racism had retained widespread popular support, all oligarchic institutions would’ve backed Trump to the hilt. All they care about is power and continuing their reign.

    ❖

    If you think it was a big red pill to realize that the media’s narratives about the world are nothing like real life, wait til you realize that the same is true of your own narratives about your own life.

    _____________________________

    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. 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. The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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.

  • America’s Chief Exports Are Marvel Movies And Human Suffering: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to this article:

    I’ve never had anyone from the UK or Israel tell me I can’t criticize their government because I don’t live there, but Americans say this to me all the time. American exceptionalism is an entirely unique mind virus.

    Criticizing the most powerful, destructive, and influential government on the planet should be normal and ubiquitous around the world. It should not be something that stands out as unusual or inappropriate. Yet when Americans see it, that’s exactly how it shows up for them.

    This is of course because Americans are the most propagandized population on earth, which is due to the fact that the US is the hub of a globe-spanning empire with an unprecedented amount of power riding on its continued operation. Can’t have the locals meddling with the machine.

    ❖

    If the world truly saw that killing someone with starvation is no better than killing them with bombs, that abusing human rights overseas is no better than abusing them at home, and that US “allies” are functional US member states, a lot more US evil would be seen for what it is.

    ❖

    There is nothing, literally nothing, that the US condemns other governments for doing that it does not also do:

    Saying the US is guilty of something it criticizes other governments for doing doesn’t mean what those other governments did was okay. What it does mean is that the US has absolutely no legitimacy in criticizing anyone for doing it.

    ❖

    America talks a big game for a country whose chief exports are Marvel movies and human suffering.

    ❖

    There are many words which could accurately be used to describe someone who supports a status quo of endless war, nuclear brinkmanship, oppression, exploitation and ecocide, but “moderate” isn’t one of them.

    ❖

    Conflating discrimination against whites with racism against people of color is like conflating going on a diet with dying of starvation.

    ❖

    FYI it’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2021 and still believe that Trump was a good president.

    ❖

    It’s pretty funny how they went to all that trouble killing Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to prevent Palestinian rights from going mainstream and then Israel’s own actions made it mainstream anyway.

    ❖

    Saying Palestinians are responsible for their current situation is essentially claiming that a population caused its own genocide. It’s claiming they oppressed, displaced and mass murdered themselves by failing to obey the orders imposed on them by a hostile occupying force. Which happens to be the exact same argument that has been made in preceding centuries by apologists for genocidal settler colonialism in Australia, Africa, and the Americas.

    ❖

    Palestine occupies such a special place in activism because people intuitively recognize it as a potential turning point in the evolution of humanity’s collective consciousness. A chance to say it’s no longer okay to kill and displace an indigenous population and take their land. A chance to stop engaging in a deeply unconscious and wildly traumatizing behavior that humanity has been engaged in since the dawn of civilization. A chance to collectively recognize “Okay, we don’t do that anymore” and evolve into a better kind of species.

    Palestine moves something deep within people and captures the human imagination about what might be possible, what kind of world we could create together if we just got a little more sane.

    ❖

    ❖

    There’s an immense gap between those who want to dismantle the US-centralized empire and those who merely want the empire to behave a bit more nicely. These two factions happen to be aligned on opposing the abuse of Palestinians right now, but the gap will highlight itself again.

    ❖

    Attempts to turn the conversation about Palestinian suffering into a conversation about anti-semitism are cynical and manipulative and should be dismissed accordingly.

    ❖

    Dark ugly family secrets can remain taboo subjects for decades, then something erupts and everyone starts talking about them. This shift in the Israel narrative feels kind of like that.

    ❖

    You can tell how establishment-indoctrinated someone still is by how much of the status quo they try to hold onto. We can still keep capitalism, it just needs reform. We can still keep the Democratic Party, it just needs reform. We can still keep our military, our alliances, etc.

    ❖

    I make my living from entirely voluntary and unconditional donations by strangers who enjoy the writings I publish for free and I let anyone use my work for free, and I still get people doing the “and yet you participate in capitalism haha” thing whenever I criticize capitalism.

    ❖

    Trauma self-perpetuates. Abused parents abuse their children, traumatized leaders and executives pass their trauma on to everyone below them, Israelis pass the trauma of their ancestors on to Palestinians. Only by turning inward do we heal the trauma and stop the cycle.

    _________________________

    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. 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. The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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.

  • US Presidents Are Always Evil Because The US Empire Is Evil: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to this article:

    ❖

    Joe Biden is a corrupt, murderous empire lackey. He is also a very normal US president. The same was true of Trump. The same was true of Obama. The same was true of Bush. If you can’t see this, it’s because propaganda and partisan politics have warped your perception of reality. US presidents will always be evil because the US empire is evil and only evil people will be allowed to participate in its operation.

    By far the single most important job of a US president is to take responsibility for decisions on empire management that would have been made regardless of who is in office, whether Democrat or Republican or tuna fish sandwich. Their job is to provide the illusion of democracy, letting you feel as though you “voted out” the perceived perpetrators of various misdeeds while leaving the actual power structure responsible for those misdeeds fully intact.

    It’s like rectifying a corporation’s misdeeds by firing the secretary. They just rotate in a new secretary every few years.

    ❖

    Nobody is born supporting nonstop military expansionism and regime change interventionism. It takes a lot of education to make us this stupid.

    ❖

    It’s always hilarious how the US pretends its “unwavering support” for Israel is some kind of principled stance based on morals and not the need to have a nuclear-armed military enforcer in the most resource-rich region on earth.

    ❖

    Anti-semitic this, anti-semitic that. Hey, maybe supporters of a brutal apartheid ethnostate shouldn’t be the authorities that people look to on what constitutes religious bigotry.

    ❖

    Opposing Israeli war crimes is anti-semitic. Opposing US imperialism is sexist. Opposing starvation sanctions is homophobic. Opposing proxy wars is misgendering. Opposing nuclear brinkmanship is kink shaming.

    ❖

    If I’d been getting my information from western mass media I would believe that Israel incinerated Gaza in self-defense because Hamas attacked it with rockets completely unprovoked for no other reason than hatred of Jewish people. These outlets are propaganda firms.

    ❖

    Israel deliberately destroying the offices of over 20 news outlets in Gaza is narrative control at its most overt. Reminds me of a Game of Thrones quote: “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”‘

    ❖

    Saying Jewish people have a right to exist and saying a brutal apartheid ethnostate has a right to exist are two completely separate claims and anyone conflating them is being knowingly manipulative. The self-evidently true claim that Jews have a right to exist has nothing whatsoever to do with the self-evidently false claim that nations have rights.

    Nations are conceptual constructs with no independent existence outside the human imagination. Saying Israel has a right to exist is the same as saying Bugs Bunny has a right to exist, except if you needed to murder a bunch of kids every few years to keep Bugs Bunny around.

    ❖

    Saudi Arabia is killing far, far more children in Yemen every single day than Israel just killed in Gaza and it would be good if opposition and activism reflected this.

    ❖

    If you ever feel dumb, remember that there are people who believe it’s “populist” to hate China — even as the machines of war pivot toward Asia — because a Fox News pundit and a US president told them so.

    ❖

    CIA applicant Tucker Carlson is not anti-warmonger, he’s just the new model of warmonger. He’s not pushing for an end to wars, he’s pushing for the military pivot to Asia that the entire empire already wants anyway. If you care about peace and truth, stop listening to Tucker Carlson. The very last place you should be looking for answers is an extremely mainstream TV show on the network that pushed the Iraq invasion harder than anyone else.

    ❖

    Mental illness doesn’t help with art; art helps with mental illness. People with diagnoses often become artists/musicians/creators because making stuff is good medicine, so naturally they make more stuff.

    I think this distinction is important because there’s a toxic belief that artists need their mental illness to create. It deifies the illness rather than the medicine. You can just make art until you feel better and then you can keep making art because it feels good.

    ❖

    Meditation is good, especially the part where you notice that meditation is never not happening and the entire universe is meditation.

    _________________________

    My work is , 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. 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. The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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.

  • Actually, That Was America: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to this article:

    – Make a show called Actually That Was America.

    – Tell average Americans on the street about evil things America did, except you tell them it was a country the US government doesn’t like.

    – Film their reaction.

    – Scream “ACTUALLY THAT WAS AMERICA!”

    – It never gets old.

    – You never run out of evil things.

    ❖

    Have the media brainwashed you into believing that Biden is different from Trump yet? They’re sure as hell trying.

    They need you to believe Biden is a big change from Trump because that would mean the electoral system can be used to advance real change so there’s no need to rise up and seize the means of production and eat the rich and launch your landlord into the sea with a giant slingshot.

    ❖

    Most political commentators are like pro wrestling ringside commentators, talking about completely fake dynamics as though they are real while being listened to attentively by idiots and children.

    ❖

    Reminder that anyone who wants to republish, translate or use any or all of my work has permission to do so free of charge, with or without attribution, in whole or in part, altered or unaltered. Put it on your blog, make merchandise, make pamphlets, make books, use it however you like.

    ❖

    I can’t say with any confidence that things are going to get better, and I can’t say with any confidence that things are going to get worse. What I can say, with a very high degree of confidence, is that things are going to get much, much stranger.

    Republicans believe Trump ended wars and fought the deep state. Democrats believe Russiagate was legit and Biden is a progressive who is fixing America. As the empire falters, the real world and the narrative world are becoming more and more divorced with less and less overlap.

    We each inhabit two very different worlds simultaneously: the real world and the narrative world. As the status quo unravels and we hurtle into a mysterious abyss of ever-increasing weirdness, those worlds are drifting further and further apart.

    ❖

    ❖

    I know Jimmy Dore says it a lot, but we really should keep coming back to appreciate the fact that a comedian with a podcast turned out to be an infinitely better journalist than literally everyone in the mainstream media.

    ❖

    The mass media always lie in the interests of the empire for the same reason workers try to please their bosses. The US empire is basically a giant corporation, of which the mass media are a part, and mass media employees figure out very quickly that they only get promoted by advancing imperial narratives.

    ❖

    Me, constantly: Democrats and Republicans are part of the same oligarchic imperialist power structure and work in conjunction to advance the interests of that power structure.

    Shitlibs, constantly: Caitlin only criticizes the Democrats and never the Republicans!

    ❖

    Kissinger years

    noun

    A metric which describes the increased lifespan of a sociopath due to lack of stress from empathy, eg “I know John Bolton is old, but he’s not that old in Kissinger years.”

    Sociopaths don’t experience stress like we do. They actually seek out the sensation of stress. It’s called “sensation seeking.” They enjoy the chaos; it doesn’t exhaust them or make them sick, it energizes them. Keep this in mind when thinking about US foreign policy.

    This is why assholes like Kissinger live forever, and the ones who care the most wear themselves out young.

    That’s one of the reasons why I place so much emphasis on awakening. Awakening gives you a bee’s dick of space from the turmoil around you. In knowing your true self, you can return home for replenishment and pick off any unwanted mind parasites you picked up on the way. The key is to lean back into awakening so you can see clearly, but then lean back into life so you can feel it all.

    ❖

    Every positive change in human behavior, individually or collectively, has been preceded by an increase in awareness. Anything you can do toward this end makes a difference, whether it’s spreading awareness through a conversation, a tweet, or street graffiti. Your efforts matter.

    One doesn’t end an addiction or self-destructive behavior until they become conscious of the inner dynamics feeding into it. Societal illnesses don’t end until people become conscious of how wrong they are. Dysfunction and consciousness can’t coexist. Your efforts matter.

    All that is wrong with our world is the result of human unconsciousness. All that is good in our world is the result of an expansion of consciousness. Anything you can do to help make even a tiny part of humanity a tiny bit more conscious of the truth makes the world better.

    Never let anyone tell you your efforts toward this end don’t matter. Never give in to pessimism on this front. Any effort to increase awareness of what’s true necessarily makes the world a better place, as surely as switching on a light in a dark room makes it brighter.

    It doesn’t matter how big or how bright your light is, all that matters is that you shine it. None of us are big or bright enough to enlighten the world on our own, but together we can make a giant star that drives out the darkness and guides us into a healthy, harmonious world.

    ❖

    The US empire is evil and the news media are lying to you and China is not your enemy and neither is Russia and nuclear brinkmanship is insane and sanctions are murder and we’re slaughtering kids in Yemen and capitalism is killing us and enlightenment is real and peace is possible. The end.

    __________________________

    My work is , 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. 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. The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. 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.

  • Capitalism Rewards Sociopathy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to this article:

    You can tell how backwards our society is by how much easier it is to thrive in it as a sociopath than if you have any other serious mental disorder.

    If instead of money our society valued connection, emotional intelligence and empathy, people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or other severe psychological issues would get all the support and care they need, while sociopaths would flounder. It would be a handicap instead of an advantage, because attributes like compassion and vulnerability would be valued instead of the willingness to do whatever it takes to get to the top no matter who it hurts.

    A highly emotionally conscious world is what we should all want, since most of our world’s problems are ultimately due to the fact that people without functioning empathy centers in their brains get to the top in the way we have things set up now. If we become deeply caring and healthy, sociopaths won’t be elevated.

    ❖

    Capitalism is like polyamory; sure it might work okay for some people, but generally the ones who reap the most rewards from it are those who don’t care about other people’s feelings.

    ❖

    Introducing SlaveApp, the app that summons a criminally underpaid individual to provide whatever service you want.

    SlaveApp: You Know It’s Wrong, But God It’s Convenient And Affordable™.

    ❖

    Biden was appointed to get things back to normal, but there can be no “back to normal” for a dying empire in a rapidly shifting global paradigm. You can tell by how hard they’re having to work to spin this desperate, ridiculous clusterfuck as a normal presidency.

    ❖

    All the fangirling over Jen Psaki is getting really gross. She’s supposed to be charismatic you dopes; she’s responsible for managing the perception of an entire empire. The world’s most destructive government having skilled perception management is a bad thing, not a good thing.

    ❖

    US presidents always get praise for the small smattering of half-decent things they do, but no blame for the far, far greater mountain of evil things the US empire does during their presidency. People look at the everyday butchery and oppression of the empire as normal, required stuff.

    When you try to inquire as to who is to blame for all the everyday evils of empire, the wars, sanctions, oppression, exploitation, propaganda, authoritarianism and ecocide, you can’t get any straight answers. It’s widely thought of as something that kind of happens magically, by itself.

    And that’s just so revealing, for a civilization which prides itself on its respect for the individual to refuse to place any blame on any individuals responsible for the worst crimes being committed on our planet right now. Individualism is for the little people.

    It’s hard to blame people for believing dumb conspiracy theories about the powerful, considering the fact that proven conspiracies by the powerful are usually a lot worse. The conspiracy of the US power alliance to slaughter children in Yemen and lie about it is far worse than all the QAnon stuff, for example.

    Corporate media propaganda is another example. Wealthy elites and government agencies are indeed conspiring to manipulate the thoughts of the entire population; this is a fact that has been studied and documented for decades. It happens in a mundane way, but it’s a huge, creepy conspiracy. I mean, just think about it: powerful elites are engaging in mass-scale mind control to justify murder and genocide around the world. This is a fact. The only reason it doesn’t give people the thrill of 5G nanobot mind control conspiracies or whatever is because we’re used to it.

    If everyone could just truly see the empire and what it does with fresh eyes, just the verified facts that we know about, they’d tear it all down bolt by bolt. That’s why so much energy gets poured into ensuring that they don’t see it.

    People keep waiting for a big reveal, for some investigative journalist or leak to expose the abusive dynamics of the powerful. Thing is, that already happened: there’s enough public evidence already. It’s just that people can’t see it with fresh eyes. That’s what we need to change.

    The big reveal already happened. If there was some massive WikiLeaks drop or whatever ripping the veil off all the ugliest secrets of the empire, we’d still have what we have now: a propagandized populace ignoring all the mountains of evidence for horrific acts of the powerful. The problem isn’t getting the information, the problem is getting people to actually look at it. That’s what I place my emphasis on: finding new ways to get people to look with fresh eyes and really see the ugly monster that’s right in front of their face.

    ❖

    Our priorities get skewed by the way the powerful think in global mass-scale terms while normal people don’t. Even well-intentioned people think police violence is more of a problem than war, or that lockdowns are more dangerous than brinkmanship with China, because it’s something local that can affect them personally.

    This is just a product of normal human psychology. If I’m a store clerk I’m unaffected by things happening on the other side of the world, so I don’t think about them. If I’m a war profiteer or empire architect those dynamics affect my bottom line, so I do think about them.

    __________________________

    I’m celebrating the hardback release of Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers by making a pay-as-you-feel PDF available.

    The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 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.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • What If EVERYONE Threw Shoes At Bush? Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The US didn’t re-enter Iraq in 2014 to stop ISIS, they re-entered Iraq in 2014 to stop Soleimani from stopping ISIS.

    This is important to note right now, because that’s the main argument we’re hearing against withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan: “Oh the terrorists will take over and we’ll just have to go back like in 2014.” They didn’t have to go back in 2014; the people who actually live in the Middle East could’ve resolved it on their own if there wasn’t a world-dominating empire trying to control everything.

    The “war on terror” has never been about defeating violent extremist factions, it’s been about keeping the nations in the region from relying on Iran to defeat them, and about justifying endless military expansionism in a key geostrategic part of the world. It’s been about ensuring the US power alliance, not Iran, is the dominant military force in the Middle East.

    Soleimani was the strongest argument that the “war on terror” isn’t actually necessary. And that’s essentially why he’s dead now.

    ❖

    I’m thinking of writing a horror story about a dystopian world where weapons manufacturers are allowed to pay large amounts of money to agencies called “think tanks” which circulate narratives designed to convince government policymakers to start wars that profit the arms industry.

    It’d be just like those other dystopian horror novels about giant corporations butchering the poor for money, except instead of selling human flesh they’re selling the weapons used to kill them.

    What do you think? Too out there and unbelievable?

    ❖

    In tyrannical regimes they don’t let political dissidents speak. In free democracies they just refuse dissidents any influential platforms and use algorithms to keep revolutionary ideas from being heard by a significant number of people.

    ❖

    The US has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century and its Secretary of State spends all day tweeting about how other countries are human rights abusers.

    No other government has done this. No other government has killed millions and displaced tens of millions since the turn of this century. Yet when you say this, you get accused of “whataboutism”. No, idiot, distracting from the world’s very worst offender is the “whataboutism”.

    ❖

    Even if all US narratives about China were 100 percent true (and they aren’t), Washington would still be a far, far worse human rights offender than Beijing and in no position to criticize human rights abuses at all.

    ❖

    Every time George W Bush makes news headlines and it’s not because of a war crimes tribunal, it’s a reminder that laws are for the little people.

    ❖

    What if EVERYONE threw their shoes at George W Bush?

    ❖

    ❖

    In a remotely sane world creatures like John Bolton would not be given mainstream platforms for decades on end, they would be driven out of every town they enter until they’re forced to crawl into a cave eating bats in the darkness for the rest of their miserable lives.

    The simple fact that this reptile keeps getting platformed is by itself complete evidence that our world is dominated by psychopaths. You never see anti-imperialists on the mainstream media, but John fucking Bolton gets the spotlight whenever he wants it. That’s how bat shit crazy our world is. The status quo has no legitimate claim on anything ever.

    ❖

    The rising threat of nuclear war is the most urgent matter in the world and it’s insane that we’re not talking about it all the time.

    ❖

    The day the world ends will start like any other. People will go to work, argue with strangers online. No one will expect it. Then there will be a miscommunication, misfire, miscalculation or malfunction which leads to a nuke being deployed among heightening cold war tensions.

    The end of the world won’t be the result of some epic Hollywood struggle between good guys and bad guys. It will be the result of garden variety human stupidity. Someone being a little careless amid the day-to-day management of the US empire’s struggle to maintain global hegemony.

    It will be a stupid mistake, just like all the other stupid mistakes humans have made since we first stood upright. Only difference is we won’t be around anymore to recognize and appreciate how stupid this particular mistake was, and to learn from it, and to grow.

    ❖

    There are mountains of evidence that the US and its allies bombed Syria on false grounds in 2018, and yet people who point this out get called “Assadists” and “atrocity deniers”. For scrutinizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth using evidence and journalism.

    The entire argument that the OPCW scandal is fake boils down to a bizarre conspiracy theory that OPCW investigators collaborated with Damascus and Moscow to spin Douma as a false flag for some reason. This would’ve been laughed out of the room if it weren’t backed by the empire.

    It’s freakish that you get accused of war crimes denial when actually trying to get a war crime solved. The facts are in, the Douma incident needs to be ripped wide open, and Aaron Maté needs to be showered with awards for his excellent work exposing this scandal. It’s crazy that it’s 2021 and people are still acting like you’re a treasonous freak if you believe the US power alliance might lie and manipulate about a government it openly wants to topple, whose country it has been bombing and occupying, right next door to Iraq.

    ❖

    It will never stop fascinating me how full online discussion forums are of accounts who spend their time supporting the foreign policy objectives of the most powerful and destructive government on earth while pretending they’re brave, up-punching rebels.

    ❖

    Someone could publish all the darkest secrets of the western empire online and within hours the imperial narrative managers would have everyone convinced that the leaks don’t matter because the person who published it knows somebody who knows somebody who is anti-semitic.

    ❖

    White supremacism is a lot easier to see when you zoom the camera all the way out and look objectively at the way resources, bombs, and human labor are moving on the world stage as a whole.

    ❖

    The majority of people get that the news is at least somewhat bullshit; the problem is there’s no consensus on why. Is it incompetence? A liberal conspiracy? The plutocratic class protecting its interests (ding ding)? Our job is to clarify both that the MSM lies to us, and why.

    If people understand that plutocratic and imperialist interests are being protected by the billionaire media, they know what lies to watch out for. Otherwise all the confusing white noise leaves them screaming at the TV about trans people trying to destroy society or whatever. There’s so much bullshit swirling around that it’s hard to know which way is up. The key is to help people figure out what way’s up, using simple pointers, so they can orient themselves to truth and reality.

    ❖

    Watch this video if you’re unsure why I focus on US politics over Australian politics:

    ❖

    People are so kind to me. I’m basically a digital street busker, relying entirely on reader donations, and I somehow wound up on the kindest, most generous online street corner where people give me money to do what I love full time. I’m really lucky, and I’m very, very grateful.

    ❖

    The internet is a consciousness-expanding substance and our rulers are working to censor it for the same reason they censored psychedelics: dysfunction and awareness cannot coexist.

    It’s also the same reason abusers work to isolate their victims and cult leaders seek to isolate their members: outside eyes bringing consciousness to their abusive dynamics makes the abuse much harder to perpetuate.

    It’s also the same reason the ego tries to convince us not to look too hard at its nature. At every level of the human fractal it’s a struggle between consciousness and unconsciousness, and between those forces who would benefit from each.

    ❖

    People fail to live their lives in awe, wonder, delight and deep peace for the same reason people keep consenting to abusive governments: our lives are ruled by narrative. And the solution to both is the same: intense curiosity about what’s going on underneath the narratives.

    ❖

    Governments are made up and their economies are collective hallucinations and their money is imaginary and our society is pure narrative construct and the individual self is an illusion.

    Have a nice day.

    ____________________

    I’m celebrating the hardback release of Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers by making a pay-as-you-feel PDF available.

    The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 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.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Stop Siding With The Powerful: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The US government’s armed goon squad executed a 13 year-old special ed student whose hands were empty and in the air and they’re telling Americans to worry about Russia and China.

    ❖

    The word fascist gets thrown around a lot, but if admitting you support police executions without trial as long as the victim is a “thug” doesn’t meet the definition, I don’t know what does. And that’s exactly what anyone who smears such victims is admitting.

    Send all cop apologists to a desert colony where they can set up their Judge Dredd dystopia that lets police execute anyone without trial if they’ve been labeled a “thug”.

    ❖

    Defending the most powerful is always the wrong position. Defending cops from the people. The rich from the poor. The US empire from weaker powers. White people from the causes of people of color. Men from feminism. Israel from Palestinians. You’re just helping to create a more unjust and imbalanced world.

    Most people intuitively grasp this, which is why a lot of effort by the powerful goes into making the up-power party look like the down-power party. But that just proves that power knows it can make itself more powerful by getting more people to defend and side with it.

    You’ll see such distortion in attempts to spin the leaders of empire-targeted governments as the up-power party just because they’re the dominant power within their own nation, even though they’ve got the might of the entire US-centralized power alliance stacked against them.

    That distortion is also what you’re seeing when the US plays the poor widdle victim to Russian hackers and terrorists, or when people talk about Israel as this tiny little underdog surrounded by enemies when it’s armed to the teeth and backed by the entire US power alliance.

    That distortion is also what you’re seeing here:

    You could make the case that the US State Department exists primarily to reverse the perception of the powerful and the weak in the eyes of the international community. Read Tony Blinken’s Twitter page; that’s practically all he ever does.

    This is generally who I spend all my time arguing against: people who are defending powerful from the weak, and people who are trying to spin the powerful as weak and defenseless.

    ❖

    In totalitarian countries the government spy agency tells the news media what to publish, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies the government spy agency says “Ooh buddy have I got a scoop for you,” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.

    ❖

    “It’s not about ‘left’ versus ‘right’ Caitlin, that’s just something the elites made up to divide us.”

    Okay well what do you call the thing where there are no elites because we took what they stole and created a fair and equitable society where everyone has enough? I want that.

    ❖

    Who cares if there are extraterrestrials? If there are we’re nowhere near mature enough as a species to interact with them anyway. Hell, we have giant-brained leviathans swimming in our own oceans whose mental lives we don’t understand at all, and we’ve nearly killed them off.

    Some people hope the ETs will save us from the conditions we’ve created for ourselves. No they won’t. If there are ETs and they have noticed us they’re certainly not going to give a psychotic omnicidal species powerful energy technologies. There will be no ET ex machina ending.

    Our species is like a guy with a completely fucked up personal life who keeps chasing goals and accomplishments outside of himself thinking it will make him happy. We need to stop looking up to the stars and focus on our severe issues right here. We’re on our own for this one.

    And while we’re on the topic, what are we doing about this?

    Image

    Anything? No? Okay, well, cleaning this up needs to happen, and soon. We’re choking ourselves to death here and it’s madness and no one talks about it because cleaning is not sexy or profitable. One of the many reasons capitalism is unsustainable is that it offers no reason to pour human effort and ingenuity into eliminating the giant garbage continents forming in our oceans, or to leave fossil fuels in the ground, or to stop strip mining, or leave forests as they are.

    One way we could make it profitable is fining the corporations for every branded piece of garbage of theirs that we find in the Patch. Ten bucks for every Coke can, etc. That will fund the operation and put the responsibility for closing the loop on packaging right where it needs to be.

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    New book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.