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One of the weirdest things about the mass media propaganda which manipulates the way people think, act and vote to maintain the status quo is the fact that mainstream news outlets routinely cite the employees of think tanks that are sponsored by war profiteers and government powers as expert sources for their reports. And they just get away with it.

To pick one of nearly infinite possible examples, here in Australia the Murdoch press are currently citing a report generated through the funding of governments and weapons manufacturers to whip up public hysteria about the ridiculous fantasy that China might attack us. The most egregious of these is a write-up from Sky News whose headline reads, “Lowy Institute report: China possesses ability to ‘strike Australia’ with long-range missiles, bombers“.

On social media Sky News is sharing this story with the even more incendiary caption “China now has the military arsenal to pose the greatest threat to the Australian mainland since World War II, experts warn.”

Sky News Australia
✔@SkyNewsAust

China now has the military arsenal to pose the greatest threat to the Australian mainland since World War II, experts warn.https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/defence-and-foreign-affairs/lowy-institute-report-china-possesses-ability-to-strike-australia-with-longrange-missiles-bombers/news-story/66706e2f1a28b186d4f90177582be87d?preview=true …

Australia ‘firmly within reach of Chinese long-range missiles’

China now has the military arsenal to pose the greatest threat to the Australian mainland since World War II, experts warn.
skynews.com.au

The “experts” in question are the Lowy Institute, named after its billionaire founder, which is funded by multiple branches of the Australian government including ASIO and the Department of Defence, by major financial institutions, and by weapons manufacturers like Boeing…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

After Russiagate, Why WOULDN’T People Be Skeptical About Covid?

August 7, 2021

After Russiagate, Why WOULDN’T People Be Skeptical About Covid?

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You hardly ever hear about Russiagate anymore. The last time it made a blip in the radar was when disgraced Collusion author Luke Harding published a very thinly-sourced story in The Guardian claiming to have proof that Donald Trump was a Kremlin asset, but other mass media outlets barely touched it and it vanished as quickly as it came.

Looking at mainstream news outlets in 2021, you’d hardly know they’d recently spent years hammering the story into public consciousness that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government, day after day after day after day after day.

But they did. Vast fortunes were raked in off the public interest generated by click-friendly stories about the latest BOMBSHELL revelation involving some peripheral member of Trump’s associates perhaps maybe having some kind of contact with a Russian national at some point. Entire careers were built on this.

Then the Mueller investigation invalidated the entire claim by failing to indict a single American for conspiring with the Russian government, and the mass media who’d spent the previous few years bashing everyone in the face with that story just kind of slowly sidled away from it.

And now they act like it never happened.

Now I’m going to ask you to put yourself in the shoes of someone you might not normally be inclined to.

Imagine you’re someone on the political right watching this whole thing unfold. Imagine that from late 2016 to mid-2019 you were watching the mass media aggressively shove this story down everyone’s throat that a US president, whom you support, is secretly working for a hostile foreign government with the goal of subverting the United States of America. ..

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It’s About The System, Not The Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

July 31, 2021

It’s About The System, Not The Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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If the working class had as much class solidarity as the ruling class has there never would’ve been a ruling class.

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Stealing someone’s labor is worse than stealing their property, because it’s theft of their life; you can replace property if you want, but you can’t replace hours of life. And rigging the system so people need to work longer hours in order to survive is this form of theft at mass scale.

Right now it’s ass backwards: people have to spend their lives away from their loved ones in pointless jobs, and if you tell the cop your employer stole hours from you he’ll just shrug while if your employer tells the cop you stole a company iPad you’ll be hauled off in chains.

This would all be a lot less confusing if we said people get paid by the Life Unit instead of by the hour, because it makes it much clearer what you’re actually trading. “You want a unit of my life for seven dollar bills and a quarter? Fuck you.”

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Six months into Biden’s presidency it’s definitely not okay to be a grown adult and still believe Trump was a uniquely monstrous president.

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Biden may be stopping all progress and breaking most of his campaign promises, but he did also campaign on bringing back the Obama years so in that sense he kept all his campaign promises.

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Focusing on individuals instead of the system creates the illusion that if you replaced the individuals you could fix the problems with the system. The individuals are symptoms of the disease.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Consciousness And Dysfunction Cannot Coexist

July 27, 2021

Consciousness And Dysfunction Cannot Coexist

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If you are reading this, it’s likely the result of a long and ongoing process where at some point you got very curious about what’s going on in the world and managed to punch through the fog of mass media psyops with a mixture of research, logic, and insight. But the fact that you had to do this means everyone is being constantly psychologically assaulted at mass scale by very powerful people.

You never signed up for this. None of us ever signed up to have our minds pummelled with continuous plutocratic psyops working to manipulate the way we perceive reality. This is an unprovoked act of aggression against us all, and a violation of our personal sovereignty.

Mass media, think tanks, NGOs, algorithm manipulation, social media censorship, the entire education system: all the systems which we’ve been conditioned to look to to figure out what’s going on in the world are just indoctrination programs disguised as information and education. It is disgusting, and it is abusive.

As long as the wealthy and powerful are manipulating the way we think, act and vote at mass scale, they’re going to keep enacting their psychopathic will upon the world. We’re going to have to find a way to wake up from the blanket of perception management they’ve laid over our species, or we will go the way of the dinosaur.

Luckily, we already have our answer on how to do that in everything we know about our species already. The only thing that ever leads to positive changes in human behavior is an expansion of consciousness.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our World Is Dying Because We Don’t Value Un-Making Things

July 25, 2021

Our World Is Dying Because We Don’t Value Un-Making Things

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I talk a lot about how we’re destroying our environment with a global system where human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, how the power structure which dominates that system does so by violence, exploitation, oppression, and the threat of nuclear war, and how we’re all going to die if we don’t change this system.

Whenever I say this I get a bunch of capitalism cultists bleating “You just don’t understand economics bruh,” which is the line they’ve been trained to say to anyone they see criticizing capitalism. It’s silly for a number of reasons, among them the fact that nobody who regurgitates that line understands economics themselves, and the fact that one’s understanding of economics has nothing to do with the death of the ecosystem our species relies on for survival.

The claim that anyone who opposes capitalism “just doesn’t understand economics” is premised on the notion that unfettered capitalism is the best way for a civilization to attain economic growth, which is arguably true; governments like China saw their economies explode when they started implementing elements of capitalism for pragmatic reasons. If you want to create a bunch of stuff and generate a tremendous amount of wealth, a good way to do that is by giving the capitalist class the protection of the state so they can rake in billions of dollars exploiting the global proletariat without being guillotined.

Problem is, that only looks like a valid point if economic growth is the only value by which you judge a system’s success. If you value quality of life, overall happiness, health, average lifespan, education, eliminating poverty, homelessness and hunger, and many other possible metrics, nations like the United States are far from ideal…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You’re Not SUPPOSED To Trust The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

July 18, 2021

You’re Not SUPPOSED To Trust The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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I still can’t get over how brazen the Biden administration is being in just announcing that it’s their place to determine who should be banned from social media platforms and how little backlash there is against this.

Just imagine the outrage if Trump had done this. Seriously, imagine it. The Biden administration instructing the world’s largest social media platform who to censor is the biggest “Imagine if Trump had done that” moment so far.

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They said we need internet censorship because of Russia.

They said we need internet censorship because of Covid.

They said we need internet censorship because of election security.

They said we need internet censorship because of the Capitol riot.

They said we need internet censorship because of domestic extremism.

Pretty sure they just want internet censorship.

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The US government is without exception the single most corrupt and destructive force on this planet. It is the very last institution on earth who should be in charge of deciding what online content is true or false. Absolute dead last.

I trust the wisdom of the collective to sort out what’s true infinitely more than I trust the wisdom of the US government and Silicon Valley plutocrats to do it for us.

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If people think their government is lying to them and trying to hurt them it is entirely the fault of the government and no one else.

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You’re not supposed to trust the government, and governments aren’t supposed to act in a way that requires your trust. If you find yourself ruled by a secretive power structure which demands your blind faith in its righteousness, something has gone horribly wrong.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Biden Administration Completely Kills The “It’s A Private Company So It’s Not Censorship” Argument

July 17, 2021

Biden Administration Completely Kills The “It’s A Private Company So It’s Not Censorship” Argument

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In what’s surely the biggest “Imagine the outrage if Trump had done that” moment to date, the Biden administration has admitted that it is giving Facebook a list of accounts to censor for spreading “disinformation” about the Covid-19 response.

“We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki told the press on Thursday. “Within the Surgeon General’s Office, we’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts with people, who are popular with their audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content. So, we’re helping get trusted content out there.”

Psaki told the White House press corps that the administration has a list of accounts who produce most of the anti-vaccine information on Facebook, which civil libertarians are decrying as an obviously authoritarian government overreach.

“The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as ‘problematic’ so that Facebook can remove them,” Glenn Greenwald said on Twitter in response to the news. “This is the union of corporate and state power — one of the classic hallmarks of fascism — that the people who spent five years babbling about fascism support.”

“If you don’t find it deeply disturbing that the White House is ‘flagging’ internet content that they deem ‘problematic’ to their Facebook allies for removal, then you are definitionally an authoritarian,” Greenwald said. “No other information is needed about you to know that. There is no circumstance — none — in which it’s acceptable for the White House or any other agency of the government to be providing lists to Facebook of ‘problematic’ content it wants removed, yet that’s exactly what Psaki says they’re doing…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Assange Case Isn’t About National Security, It’s About Narrative Control

July 10, 2021

The Assange Case Isn’t About National Security, It’s About Narrative Control

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Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

As someone whose life’s work before his imprisonment was combing through documents of an often classified nature, he’d have been in a prime position to know. He’d have seen time and time again how a nation’s citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a government or its military.

As the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder continues to trudge on with the UK government’s granting the Biden administration permission to appeal a declined extradition request, claiming that it can safely imprison Assange without subjecting him to the draconian aspects of America’s prison system which caused the initial dismissal, it’s good to keep in mind that this is being done entirely for the purpose of controlling public access to information that is inconvenient for the powerful.

The prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act is being touted by the US government as a matter of national security; you can’t simply allow journalists to publish classified information about the things its military forces are doing in the nations they occupy, because that could endanger American lives.

Leaving aside the fact that the Pentagon already admitted years ago that it could not find a single instance of lives being lost due to the publications for which Assange is currently being prosecuted, this case is not and has never been about national security. This case has always been about narrative control.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The System Isn’t There To Protect Us From Criminals, It’s To Protect Criminals From Us

July 3, 2021

The System Isn’t There To Protect Us From Criminals, It’s To Protect Criminals From Us

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Iraq war architect Donald Rumsfeld has died. Not in a prison cell in The Hague, not murdered by bombs or bullets, but peacefully in his home, surrounded by loved ones, a week and a half shy of his 89th birthday.

The imperial media are giving their fallen master a king’s tribute, with headlines describing the psychopathic war criminal as “a cunning leader“, “a man of honor and conviction“, or simply as “Former defense secretary at helm of Iraq, Afghanistan wars“.

The cancerous Washington Post, who just the other day mocked the life of the late antiwar hero Mike Gravel with an obituary branding him the “gadfly senator from Alaska with flair for the theatrical,” describes the child killer Rumsfeld as the “influential but controversial Bush defense secretary” in its headline about his death.

The New York Times wasn’t much better. Take the headline “Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Term Alaska Senator, Dies at 91 — He made headlines by fighting for an oil pipeline and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud. After 25 years of obscurity, he re-emerged with a quixotic presidential campaign.” Compare this to the headline “Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary During Iraq War, Is Dead at 88 — Mr. Rumsfeld, who served four presidents, oversaw a war that many said should never have been fought. But he said the removal of Saddam Hussein had ‘created a more stable and secure world.’”

There’s been criticism as well, of course; online sentiments about Rumsfeld’s death have not been nearly as worshipful and hagiographic as they’ve been toward other disgusting war whores like John McCain…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Weird, Creepy Media Blackout On Recent Assange Revelations

June 30, 2021

The Weird, Creepy Media Blackout On Recent Assange Revelations

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As of this writing, it has been three days since the Icelandic newspaper Stundin broke the story that a key witness in the US government’s case against Julian Assange had fabricated allegations against the WikiLeaks founder. And yet, somehow, Assange is still in prison.

Weirder still, not one major western media outlet outside of Iceland has reported on this massive and entirely legitimate news story. A search brings up coverage by Icelandic media, by Russian media, and by smaller western outlets like Democracy Now, World Socialist Website, Consortium News, Zero Hedge and some others, but as of this writing this story has been completely ignored by all major outlets who are ostensibly responsible for informing the public in the western world.

It’s not that those outlets have been ignoring Assange altogether these last few days either. Reuters recently published an interview with Assange’s fiance Stella Moris. Evening Standard has a recent article out on Assange’s plans to marry Moris in Belmarsh, as does Deutsche Welle. It’s just this one story in particular that they’ve been blacking out completely.

And it’s not that the mainstream press are unaware of this story. Mainstream western reporters spend a lot of time on Twitter, and Assange’s name was trending in the United States after the Stundin story broke. Tweets about the article by high-profile accounts like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have many thousands of shares each. They’ve all seen the article. They all know it’s newsworthy. They’re just choosing not to report on it.

It reminds me of the blanket media blackout that occurred while the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was hemorrhaging leaks revealing a US government-tied coverup in the alleged chlorine gas incident in Douma…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Rules-Based International Order’ Means Washington-Based International Order

June 25, 2021

‘Rules-Based International Order’ Means Washington-Based International Order

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The US government has shut down multiple news media websites based in the Middle East, including Iran’s state-owned Press TV, and al-Masirah TV which is owned by the Houthi group Ansarullah in Yemen. The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it had seized 36 Iranian-linked websites, claiming without evidence that they were associated with “either disinformation activities or violent organizations” and were shut down for a violation of US sanctions.

This would be the same US government that is imprisoning Julian Assange for journalism which exposed US war crimes, the same US government which paid for the weapons used to destroy more than 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza last month, the same US government whose unipolar domination of the planet is made possible by the journalism-destroying propaganda of the media-owning plutocratic class in alliance with sociopathic government agencies.

This would also be the same US government which constantly pays lip service to the need to protect the freedom of the press, as part of the “rules-based international order” it purports to uphold in the world.

The Biden administration has been bleating “rules-based order” so frequently and with such obvious meaninglessness that even The New York Times voiced some criticism of the way that vapid, idiotic phrase is being used instead of the well-defined term “international law”. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies wrote for Salon last month:

For Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order” seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with “other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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

June 6, 2021

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

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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.”

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– 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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

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

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Screams Of A Dying Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

June 2, 2021

The Screams Of A Dying Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US Isn’t An Israel Puppet, Israel Isn’t A US Puppet: It’s One Empire

May 25, 2021

The US Isn’t An Israel Puppet, Israel Isn’t A US Puppet: It’s One Empire

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Nearly 200,000 protesters attended a pro-Palestine demonstration in Central London on Saturday afternoon, another clear sign that support for Palestinian rights is becoming increasingly mainstream and the imperialists are losing control of the Israel narrative.

The real consequence of this is that people will begin losing trust in the government and media institutions which support Israel, because without trust the empire can’t propagandize people, and without the ability to propagandize us our rulers cannot rule. There’s no risk for Israel of losing US backing due to the US government suddenly evolving a conscience or listening to its constituents, that won’t happen, but losing control of the narrative poses a major problem for the empire. Someone’s image is going to have to change, and those changes could end up benefiting Palestinians.

We’re already seeing this narrative management campaign come into play as mainstream outlets are now permitting some serious criticisms of Israel. This is done cynically to prevent people from losing trust in propaganda institutions, but it also has real effects that can benefit real people. This is a good example of how expanding consciousness is always beneficial, even on the most depraved institutions. The more aware the public becomes of abusive imperial power dynamics, the less abuse the empire can get away with. The empire losing control of the narrative is always a good thing.

As criticism of Israel’s malfeasance becomes more widespread, so too do attempts to analyze exactly what Israel’s role is on the world stage and why it receives so much support from the United States…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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

May 22, 2021

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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