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If You Believed Something Else, You Wouldn’t Be Sitting Here: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

If You Believed Something Else, You Wouldn’t Be Sitting Here: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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It sure is interesting how stuff keeps happening that makes free speech on the internet something dangerous which must be curtailed. Covid, the Capitol riot, Russian propaganda, all of which just happen to require tightening restrictions on our single best tool against the powerful.

Had online platforms not agreed to curtail speech in alignment with the US empire, they would with 100 percent certainty have been broken up by antitrust cases and been replaced by other monopolistic companies that would censor in alignment with imperial interests.

You’re not permitted to ascend to power within the system unless you cooperate with existing power structures. If you don’t, you’ll be stopped in your tracks and replaced with someone who will.

A rookie journalist who doesn’t advance narratives favorable to US imperialism will keep getting called to the editor’s desk until they get the message. When rookie social media sites first showed up it was the same thing, except instead of the editor’s desk, it was US congressional hearings.

Western journalists learn very quickly that they can only get published by mainstream outlets by promoting narratives that are favorable to US imperialism. Example:

 

This is how propaganda occurs in the west. It’s not that Jeff Bezos emails Washington Post reporters saying “Promote US wars!”, it’s that only reporters who support imperialism see their articles published and their careers rise. As Noam Chomsky famously said in an interview with Andrew Marr, “If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

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Space Colonization Is A Capitalist Perception Management Op

Space Colonization Is A Capitalist Perception Management Op

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The world’s two wealthiest people are fighting over the moon, which just says so much about where our species is at right now.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a dispute with NASA over whose private space exploration corporation will get the $2.9 billion US government contract to return to the moon. I gleaned this annoying piece of information by way of an obnoxiously sycophantic Atlantic puff piece titled “Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going to Do This Mars Thing”, subtitled “From his private Cape Canaveral, the billionaire is manifesting his own interplanetary reality—whatever the cost.”

The mainstream press cannot get enough of these two unfathomably wealthy plutocrats and their outspoken ambition to colonize space, with Musk advocating Mars colonization and Bezos preferring to ship us all offworld to live in giant Amazon space tubes. They love it for the same reason they love war and status quo politicians: it fits in beautifully with the capitalist world order.

Space colonization is largely a capitalist perception management op promoted by the likes of Musk and Bezos to strengthen the narrative that it’s okay to continue the world-raping global capitalist principle of infinite growth on a finite world because we can escape the catastrophic ecological consequences of that paradigm by fleeing to space.

“Ecocidal capitalism is fine, we’ll just go to space before it kills us!” is the message we’re all meant to absorb. And too many do. A large obstacle to waking people up to the existential crises we are facing as a species is the blind faith that technology will save us from the consequences of our mass-scale behavior, and therefore we don’t need to change. Which suits the world’s richest men perfectly.

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What If The Big Reveal Already Happened?

What If The Big Reveal Already Happened?

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Do you remember how there was global outrage after the Panama Papers exposed a massive international tax evasion scheme involving many high-profile wealthy elites, leading to mass incarcerations and sweeping overhauls to the world’s taxation and legal systems?

No?

How about the huge scandal when it was revealed that the CIA unilaterally funds its own clandestine operations via secret drug trafficking programs to circumvent the oversight of elected bodies, leading to the dismantling and disbanding of the entire CIA? Or the time WikiLeaks exposed war crimes leading to tribunals at The Hague and a complete restructuring of the US military? Or all the criminal investigations and paradigm-shattering arrests after we learned that powerful intelligence agencies have been using child sex slaves to manipulate our society via blackmail?

You don’t? Hmm. That’s weird.

I mean, it is weird, right? It’s really, really weird how any time there’s a major scandalous revelation about the powerful, there’s a lot of noise about it for a few days, and then essentially nothing happens. Mainstream news media might report on it for a bit (though sometimes if it’s really inconvenient for the empire they won’t even touch it), they trot out the pundits to manage the narrative in such a way that ensures nobody in power will ever face any consequences, and then it is quietly memory-holed.

It’s weird. But we can’t deny that it’s real.

There are many people who understand that we are ruled by sociopaths who manipulate our society into alignment with their greedy and power-grabbing agendas, and that most of our world’s problems arise from this fact…

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Reject Mainstream Culture: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Reject Mainstream Culture: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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Hey remember when we learned that the CIA unilaterally funds its own clandestine operations via drug trafficking without the permission or oversight of any elected body and then everyone went “meh” and forgot about it?

It’s strange how many westerners who grew up watching Star Wars still side with the evil empire on every foreign conflict.

A foreign policy perspective which does not begin with and account for the fact that the US government is the most powerful and destructive force on earth, and that its behaviors are aggressive instead of defensive in nature, is a foreign policy perspective based on fantasy.

People tell me, “You just hate America!”

I don’t even know what this means. What specifically is it that I hate? The people? The dirt the country is built on? Or is it possible that my actual target is the most powerful and destructive government in the world and the oligarchy which runs it?

“I hate the USA” is as nonsensical a statement as “I love the USA”; the land that label points to is so vast and its people so diverse that nobody can have any emotional relationship with it. Beyond that it’s a just collection of conceptual constructs which exist only in our imagination.

 

Americans: Help!

Republicans: Fuck you.

Democrats: We need to come together and have a conversation about the help you need because these things take time and there’s a process and really it’s not just about the what it’s also about the how and the how sometimes gets lost in the what of the how of the how what how…

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The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust

The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust

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This year has marked the first time ever that trust in news media dropped below fifty percent in the United States, continuing a trend of decline that’s been ongoing for years.

Mass media punditry is divided on where to assign the blame for the plummet in public opinion of their work, with some blaming it on Russia and others blaming it on Donald Trump. Others, like a recent Forbes article titled “Restoring Public Trust In Technology And Media Is Infrastructure Investment” blame it on the internet. Still others, like a Washington Post article earlier this month titled “Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values” blame it on the people themselves.

The one thing they all seem to agree on is that it’s definitely not because the billionaire-controlled media are propaganda outlets which manipulate us constantly in conjunction with sociopathic government agencies to protect the oligarchic, imperialist status quo upon which the members of the billionaire class have built their respective kingdoms. It cannot possibly be because people sense that they are being lied to and are fed up with it.

And actually it doesn’t ultimately matter what mainstream pundits and reporters believe is the cause of the public’s growing disgust with them, because there’s nothing they can do to fix it anyway. The mass media will never regain the public’s trust.

They’ll never regain the public’s trust for a couple of reasons, the first of which is because they’ll never be able to become trustworthy. At no point will the mass media ever begin wowing the public with its journalistic integrity and causing people to re-evaluate their opinion of mainstream news reporters…

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Maturity Is Discovering How Everything You Believe Is A Lie

Maturity Is Discovering How Everything You Believe Is A Lie

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You get your first taste of it when you’re little. You find your Christmas presents in your parents’ closet in early December, or maybe some older kid just tells you that Santa Claus isn’t real.

What the hell? What the hell is this? Some freaky psyop run by your parents, just for kicks? And all the other parents are in on it too? And Hollywood? All those movies and TV specials about Santa were just lies? How far does this go?

What is this strange reality?

Ah well. We’ve all got to grow up sometime. From now on you only believe in real stuff, like the Tooth Fairy.

Thus begins a maturing process of discovering the various ways you’ve been deceived about what’s real which, hopefully, continues for the rest of your life.

When you get a bit older you might start gathering information which causes you to realize that some of the people in your life might not have been telling you the truth about some things. Soda and Pop Rocks can’t really cause a dangerous explosion. Your eleven year-old friend probably hasn’t “boned” every girl in class. You actually haven’t been seeing Dad much since the divorce.

And that’s usually about as exciting as it gets for a while, because you’re a young person trying to learn how to function in the world and you can’t learn if you believe everything you’re being taught is a lie. But that period of credulity doesn’t last long. Not if you’re lucky.

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It’s The Media’s Job To Normalize War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

It’s The Media’s Job To Normalize War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Exactly zero percent of the world’s worst criminals are in prison. Imperialists. War profiteers. Ecocide profiteers. The very worst of thieves are financial elites. The system isn’t designed to protect us from society’s worst, it’s designed to protect society’s worst from us.

I don’t write much about the specific individuals who drive the oligarchic empire because individuals are not the problem, the system is. Right-wing conspiracy analysts prefer to focus on specific corrupt elites because they like to think if you just got rid of them, capitalism would work fine. And it just wouldn’t. If you rounded up and executed all the sociopathic ruling elites today but left our current systems intact they’d just be replaced tomorrow. A competition-based model where war, corruption, oppression and exploitation remain profitable guarantees this.

A lot of right-wing conspiracy analysis today ultimately boils down to “These bastards are ruining the capitalism!” But capitalism is already ruined, and ruinous. As long as it’s profitable to destroy each other and our ecosystem, the ruin will continue. That’s the real problem. Making it about individuals feeds into the false impression that the individuals are the problem, and absolves us of our collective responsibility to move out of our competition-based model to one in which we collaborate with each other and our ecosystem to create a healthy world.

As long as we have systems in which it’s advantageous to be sociopathic enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead, we will find ourselves ruled by sociopaths. The names and faces on those sociopaths are ultimately irrelevant. They’re a symptom of the underlying disease.

It’s the mass media’s job to normalize war and abnormalize peace. It’s our job to do the exact opposite.

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Meditations On US Forces Firing A Howitzer Into The Empty Desert “Just To Say We’re Here”

Meditations On US Forces Firing A Howitzer Into The Empty Desert “Just To Say We’re Here”

I saw a line in a recent New Yorker article about America’s endless wars, and it’s been been rattling around in my head ever since:

“In Syria, McKenzie visited the Green Village, a community of decrepit apartment blocks near a bombed-out oil facility that served as the operational headquarters for the final push to erase the caliphate, in 2019. These days, the only military action there is from U.S. forces firing a 155-millimetre howitzer twice a week into the surrounding desert, at no specific target, ‘just to say we’re here,’ one officer told me.”

U.S. forces firing a 155-millimetre howitzer twice a week into the surrounding desert, at no specific target, “just to say we’re here.”

Tell me that’s not the sexiest line you have ever read in your entire life. The poetical beauty! The ennui! The oh-so-relatable existential ache! Oh God, I need a cigarette.

I mean it just hits on so many different levels. Could you ask for a better snapshot of life within the soulless US war machine than a small cast of Beckettian soldiers, waiting around near a bombed-out oil facility for a Godot who never arrives, firing heavy artillery rounds into the desert twice a week for no reason whatsoever? You just want to hang it in an ornate wooden frame with the caption “YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK, LADIES AND GENTS” and then shove it so far up Tom Cotton’s personal anatomy that it takes an entire emergency room team to extract it.

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The Problem Isn’t Human Nature, The Problem Is A Few Manipulative Sociopaths

The Problem Isn’t Human Nature, The Problem Is A Few Manipulative Sociopaths

The Principia Discordia is the primary text of Discordianism, which has been described as either an elaborate joke disguised as a religion or a religion disguised as an elaborate joke, depending on who you ask.

One section describes a short dialogue between the Principia‘s author “Malaclypse the Younger” (Mal-2) and “the Goddess”, who speaks to him through a radio:

One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?

“O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!”

WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON’T SOUND WELL.

“I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.”

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?

“But nobody Wants it! Everybody hates it.”

OH. WELL, THEN STOP.

At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.

“WELL, THEN STOP.” As you would expect from a joke disguised as a religion (or religion disguised as a joke), this is both funny and profound.

Because doesn’t it kind of feel like that’s the message we’ve been getting? From the divine if you like, or from the universe, or just from the mundane reality of our situation?…

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caitlin johnstone, human nature, sociopaths, war,

Money Is Made Up And We Can Change The Rules Whenever We Want

Money Is Made Up And We Can Change The Rules Whenever We Want

Have you ever noticed how online capitalism cultists who condescendingly tell socialists they “just don’t understand economics” are always unable to lucidly defend their own understanding of economics?

If you’ve never pressed such a character to clearly and concisely explain what it is you “don’t understand” using their own words, I highly recommend that you try it, because it’s one of the funniest things in the world. If you keep interrogating them about each aspect of their belief system, demanding that they explain exactly what it is they know and how they know it, they will invariably end up getting frustrated and telling you to listen to this or that economist if they don’t rage quit on you altogether first.

It’s really fascinating how consistent this experience is; talk to other online leftists about it and if they’ve ever really engaged the argument they’ll have had the same experience. Someone who truly understands something will be able to clearly and concisely tell you in their own words what they know and how they know it, and someone who strides in talking down to you about how you “don’t understand economics” is certainly claiming to know something, but when you really plunk them down and interrogate their understanding you will always find it to have been a lot of empty bluster. They don’t understand their own position, they’ve just listened to a bunch of capitalists explaining their position to them in an assertive tone and assumed it must be unassailably correct.

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War Is A Rich Man’s Game: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

War Is A Rich Man’s Game: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

War is always powerful people making up fake reasons for poor people to kill each other.

Capitalism is working great if you ignore how it’s about to destroy our ecosystem and kill everything.

Socialism is the collective’s best self-defense against sociopaths.

In the old days the rulers would kill those who criticized the dominant power structure. Now they just make sure such people never ascend to prominent platforms or positions of influence.

And, if that fails, they kill them.

Most of what gets called journalism today is really just advertising. Advertising imperialism, capitalism, status quo politics, status quo mindsets. All this fuss about journalists leaving for Substack and stuff is really just outrage over people leaving the advertising industry.

Imperialists see the American people as nothing more than local fauna who need to be kept from interfering in the business of the empire. That’s why keeping Americans poor and ignorant has so much institutional support; it keeps the local fauna away from the gears of the machine.

Supporters of western imperialism are always wrong because the western empire is always wrong. The western empire is always wrong because imperialism itself is immoral and requires the perpetration of great evils to maintain. It’s really a lot simpler than people make it seem.

The only way to justify support for western interventionist foreign policy is to believe that western interventionism is ever actually humanitarian in nature. The only way to believe western interventionism is ever humanitarian in nature is to be an intellectual infant.

Don’t buy into the narrative that Democrats are resisting leftward movement in order to appease Republicans. It’s so much worse than that: they’re not appeasing Republicans, they’re appeasing their own donors.

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Mainstream Journalism Doesn’t Exist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Mainstream Journalism Doesn’t Exist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Journalists should be exposing inconvenient truths about powerful people in their own nation and its allies. Instead the people we call “journalists” criticize enemy nations, smear political dissidents, demand increasing amounts of censorship, and advance narratives that are convenient for the powerful.

The “war on terror” is a false pretext for interventionism in the Middle East and the “war on drugs” is a false pretext for interventionism in Latin America.

Lula being free and eligible to run again in Brazil is a very big deal with huge implications for US imperialism. This isn’t like some fake leftist getting into the Democratic Party or whatever, this is a real thing that will have real consequences in a nation with huge geostrategic significance to the US empire. The empire invested many years staging a coup in one of the largest nations on earth, and it’s not just going to let it be reversed without a fuss. I’m bit nervous about what will happen.

The Monroe Doctrine is literally just the US saying “Latin America is our Africa. You guys get those brown people over there, these are our brown people over here.”

I love how pundits talk about the Monroe Doctrine like it’s a real thing that has actual legitimacy. “Well we can’t have Russia and China interfering in Venezuela, that’s just the Monroe Doctrine.” No, how about you fuck all the way off from any country not named the United States of America.

We could be collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem to create a beautiful, awesome, healthy world. Instead we’re all competing with each other working meaningless jobs creating pieces of landfill which serve no purpose besides turning millionaires into billionaires.

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They Don’t Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream

They Don’t Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream

One of the most consequential collective delusions circulating in our society is the belief that our society is free. Our society is exactly free enough to create the illusion that we have freedom; from that line onwards it’s just totalitarianism veiled in propaganda.

I get comments from people every day wagging their fingers at my criticisms of western imperialist agendas against nations like China or Iran saying “If you lived over there you wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the government the way you criticize western governments!”

It is true that dissidents are permitted to criticize the government systems of the US-centralized empire to an extent, but only to an extent. Yes, as long as my criticisms of capitalism, oligarchy and imperialism remain relegated to the fringes of influence I am indeed permitted to express my views unmolested. If however I somehow ascended to a position of significant mainstream influence I would be targeted and smeared until my reputation was ruined or I had a psychological breakdown and went away. You may be certain of this.

The managers of empire do not work to crush and silence all dissent like a conventional totalitarian regime would do. They are much more clever than that.

In a society that maintains the illusion of freedom in order to prevent outrage and revolution, it does not serve rulers to stifle all dissent. Just the opposite in fact: their interests are served by having a small number of dissidents hanging around the fringes of society creating the illusion of freedom. If Johnny Hempshirt over there is allowed to stand on a soapbox and criticize the US war machine, then the US must be a free country.

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It’s Not A Political Problem, It’s A Propaganda Problem: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

It’s Not A Political Problem, It’s A Propaganda Problem: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

While we all fixate on electoral political solutions, the powerful focus on narrative control, because that’s where real power is at. The people who pose an actual threat to the machine are those who disrupt its narratives and narrative control agendas. Everyone else is harmless.

If the majority of a troubled population believes their political system is operating in a way that is demonstrably very different from the way it actually operates, then that population doesn’t have a political problem, it has a propaganda problem.

Berners watched the mass media actively sabotage the Sanders campaign day after day in two consecutive elections, and went “The problem is not enough progressives in government!” No, the problem is the billionaire media are constantly lying to everyone. Create a truth-based information ecosystem and politics will move toward health by itself.

As long as the ruling class is successfully using mass-scale narrative manipulation, it won’t matter what political strategies you employ because they’ll just manipulate that too. Everything we try will be neutered by propaganda until fighting propaganda becomes our number one priority. The narratives around your insurgent third party will be manipulated to the advantage of the powerful. Your progressive takeover of the Democrats will be narrative managed into impotence.

You can’t politics your way around narrative manipulation. You’ve got to make it the issue. You don’t measure how effective someone is against the machine by what their campaign platform says or what their strategies are, but by how disruptive they are to the narratives and narrative control of the powerful. If they’re not disruptive on that front they’re not effective.

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When America Voted Out Fascism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

When America Voted Out Fascism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Biden may be trying to extradite a journalist for exposing US war crimes, and he may be inflicting mass murder and starvation sanctions on disobedient governments around the world to ensure perpetual global domination, but at least America voted out fascism.

The “two” party puppet show is always fake. Always, always, always, always. When you get really into a movie you forget it’s a movie. You don’t see the screen, you don’t see the actors; you’re enthralled by the show. Getting caught up in the puppet show is the same: buy into any part of it and you lose sight of reality. As soon as you mentally reify it because you really like this or that Democrat or really hate this or that Republican, you lose your ability to see what’s happening. You lose sight of the puppeteers and the strings as you clap along with the performance like a child.

There is no meaningful difference between a government with one status quo-enforcing party and a government with two status quo-enforcing parties.

We inhabit two worlds: the real world and the narrative world. In the narrative world, the US drastically changed on January 20th. In the real world―the world minus its narrative soundtrack―all the money, weapons, troops and people are moving basically the same as they were on January 19th.

If President Biden had all the exact same policies and positions but an (R) next to his name, American conservatives would be ferociously defending him from liberal attacks. If parallel universes exist this is definitely happening in one of them.

The most dangerous predators are the ones you don’t see. It’s true in nature, it’s true in interpersonal relationships, and it’s true in politics.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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