By Caitlin Johnstone: Propaganda is so advanced that rank-and-file members of the public
will openly cheerlead their government’s imprisonment of Assange so that
their government can continue to lie to them.
~
The focus
shouldn’t just be on bad things done by individual plutocrats – Gates
did X, Bezos did Y etc. The primary focus should be on how we shouldn’t
have a system which allows any individual to have that much power over our world. No individual should have that much power to do that much harm.
~
You couldn’t create a more perfect profit-generating scheme than war. Entire civilizations can be streamlined into the task of cranking out top-of-the-line, name-brand killing machines at the drop of a false flag. War will continue as long as human behavior is driven by profit.
~
If you want more of something, apply capitalism; if you want less of something, apply socialism. Capitalism is great for making a ton of stuff, but for making less stuff it’s shit, whether that be making less illness, less pollution, less ecocide, less war, less prisoners, etc. Right now we live in a world that needs a great reduction of a great many things, and there’s just no way to get there as long as human behavior is driven by profit.
This is obviously true of things like healthcare, where actually eliminating illness kills demand. But it’s also true of even things like charity programs, where if you actually fix the problem people are throwing money at then a lot of professionals lose their income sources. You’ve got to actually incentivize people to disappear the problems, but capitalism doesn’t have an effective way of disappearing things. It necessarily incentivizes people to perpetuate them.
This is just common sense business practice that anyone who’s ever run a business should understand. If you make products, your goal is to create and sell as many products as possible. If you sell services, your goal is to create as many clients as possible. So if your business is war machinery, you will necessarily be incentivized to lobby for as many wars as possible. If your business is medicine, you will be incentivized to keep as many sick people around as possible. As long as we’re motivated by profit, such things persist.
Trying to consume our way out of our current predicament is like trying to eat your way into weight loss.
~
“That’s not real capitalism!” is not an intelligent response to leftist criticisms of our current approach to money and profit as a motivator of human behavior, it’s just playing pedantic word games. Nobody cares if you feel like your pet word is being mistreated. Address the damn argument.
~
In the debate about “cancel culture” it’s important to remember that the rank-and-file public yelling that someone has shit opinions is completely different from powerful media-controlling plutocrats deciding who does and does not get a voice. These two separate things should not be conflated.
~
If cancel culture could keep John Bolton from ever having a job more prestigious than cleaning bathrooms I would embrace it with all my heart.
~
I don’t like talking about this, but what the hell is the point of the US Green Party if it’s going to run candidates that aren’t disruptive to mainstream establishment narratives? It looks like the whole strategy this year is to avoid confrontation and controversy at all cost.
If you actually want to be the party of change, you must not only be unafraid of controversy and conflict, you must actively seek it out. Nothing about the status quo deserves to be coddled or left undisrupted. The whole machine needs to be forcibly exposed in front of everyone.
Obviously Hawkins will be overall better on policy than anyone else on the ballot. I’m not disputing that. He will also refuse to aggressively attack the mainstream candidates and force himself into the mainstream conversation. He’ll play a small target and let them ignore him.
~
Liberals hate leftists because leftists are a constant reminder that liberals aren’t what they pretend to be.
~
Liberals often say “Have you read the Mueller report??” as a way of arguing that there was some legitimacy to the Russian collusion narrative. Funny thing is they themselves have never read it, or they’d know that narrative had no legitimacy. They just read bullshit pundits said about it.
~
I feel like in all the fuss about Jesus we too often overlook the fact that the empire which became the backbone of western culture was so sociopathic and sadistic that it had a policy of nailing dissidents to pieces of wood and leaving them to die slow, torturous deaths.
~
The Catholic Church getting corporate welfare is the most 2020 thing ever.
~
The most important job of a parent is to help their child make their mistakes as safely, as quickly, and with as little trauma as possible.
~
Anyone who’s done real inner work knows it’s seldom comfortable when subconscious things become conscious. There’s a reason that stuff was kept out of consciousness in the first place. This is true of large-scale collective movements into consciousness as well. It’s awkward, and it ain’t pretty.
~
My pet conspiracy theory is that the world is conspiring to awaken the human species into a healthy relationship with its newly evolved capacity for abstract thought.
Source
~
The focus
shouldn’t just be on bad things done by individual plutocrats – Gates
did X, Bezos did Y etc. The primary focus should be on how we shouldn’t
have a system which allows any individual to have that much power over our world. No individual should have that much power to do that much harm.~
You couldn’t create a more perfect profit-generating scheme than war. Entire civilizations can be streamlined into the task of cranking out top-of-the-line, name-brand killing machines at the drop of a false flag. War will continue as long as human behavior is driven by profit.
~
If you want more of something, apply capitalism; if you want less of something, apply socialism. Capitalism is great for making a ton of stuff, but for making less stuff it’s shit, whether that be making less illness, less pollution, less ecocide, less war, less prisoners, etc. Right now we live in a world that needs a great reduction of a great many things, and there’s just no way to get there as long as human behavior is driven by profit.
This is obviously true of things like healthcare, where actually eliminating illness kills demand. But it’s also true of even things like charity programs, where if you actually fix the problem people are throwing money at then a lot of professionals lose their income sources. You’ve got to actually incentivize people to disappear the problems, but capitalism doesn’t have an effective way of disappearing things. It necessarily incentivizes people to perpetuate them.
This is just common sense business practice that anyone who’s ever run a business should understand. If you make products, your goal is to create and sell as many products as possible. If you sell services, your goal is to create as many clients as possible. So if your business is war machinery, you will necessarily be incentivized to lobby for as many wars as possible. If your business is medicine, you will be incentivized to keep as many sick people around as possible. As long as we’re motivated by profit, such things persist.
Trying to consume our way out of our current predicament is like trying to eat your way into weight loss.
~
“That’s not real capitalism!” is not an intelligent response to leftist criticisms of our current approach to money and profit as a motivator of human behavior, it’s just playing pedantic word games. Nobody cares if you feel like your pet word is being mistreated. Address the damn argument.
~
In the debate about “cancel culture” it’s important to remember that the rank-and-file public yelling that someone has shit opinions is completely different from powerful media-controlling plutocrats deciding who does and does not get a voice. These two separate things should not be conflated.
~
If cancel culture could keep John Bolton from ever having a job more prestigious than cleaning bathrooms I would embrace it with all my heart.
~
I don’t like talking about this, but what the hell is the point of the US Green Party if it’s going to run candidates that aren’t disruptive to mainstream establishment narratives? It looks like the whole strategy this year is to avoid confrontation and controversy at all cost.
If you actually want to be the party of change, you must not only be unafraid of controversy and conflict, you must actively seek it out. Nothing about the status quo deserves to be coddled or left undisrupted. The whole machine needs to be forcibly exposed in front of everyone.
Obviously Hawkins will be overall better on policy than anyone else on the ballot. I’m not disputing that. He will also refuse to aggressively attack the mainstream candidates and force himself into the mainstream conversation. He’ll play a small target and let them ignore him.
~
Liberals hate leftists because leftists are a constant reminder that liberals aren’t what they pretend to be.
~
Liberals often say “Have you read the Mueller report??” as a way of arguing that there was some legitimacy to the Russian collusion narrative. Funny thing is they themselves have never read it, or they’d know that narrative had no legitimacy. They just read bullshit pundits said about it.
~
I feel like in all the fuss about Jesus we too often overlook the fact that the empire which became the backbone of western culture was so sociopathic and sadistic that it had a policy of nailing dissidents to pieces of wood and leaving them to die slow, torturous deaths.
~
The Catholic Church getting corporate welfare is the most 2020 thing ever.
~
The most important job of a parent is to help their child make their mistakes as safely, as quickly, and with as little trauma as possible.
~
Anyone who’s done real inner work knows it’s seldom comfortable when subconscious things become conscious. There’s a reason that stuff was kept out of consciousness in the first place. This is true of large-scale collective movements into consciousness as well. It’s awkward, and it ain’t pretty.
~
My pet conspiracy theory is that the world is conspiring to awaken the human species into a healthy relationship with its newly evolved capacity for abstract thought.
Source
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