#notes from the edge of the narrative matrix

[never-was-has-been]

She's not wrong and history clearly shows this...if you're willing to do a bit of reading & critical thinking...Give it try..🤔 🤨

[arabian-batboy]

"We're The Fucking Terrorists

Hezbollah is killing Israeli soldiers who are invading their country while Israeli soldiers are deliberately killing women and children and medical staff and journalists.

Guess which side the west calls terrorists?

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, “terrorist organization” is a completely arbitrary designation which is used as a tool of western narrative control to justify war and militarism. In effect it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them.”

The open letter to President Biden from 99 US healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza contains a quote from Dr Mark Perlmutter, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”

You know what? We’re the fucking terrorists. We are. All of us who live in the western power alliance who haven’t stopped our governments from backing this mass atrocity.

The word “terrorist” won’t have any meaning or relevance until it applies first and foremost to the giant globe-spanning power structure that is inflicting this nightmare upon our species."

Everyone should read the read of this article or listen to its reading (here)

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Find a protest near you here: X, X, X, X & X

Donate or join Palestine action here: PALESTINE ACTION

[darkmaga-returns]

Warmongering senator Tom Cotton made an interesting comment during the confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard the other day which acknowledged the mostly unspoken truth that the US government cares less about whether the nations it partners with are free and democratic than how well they serve US interests.

“In a fallen world, we have to take our friends where we find them,” Cotton said. “No question, stable democracies make the most stable friends, but what matters in the end is less whether a country is democratic or non-democratic, and more whether the country is pro-American or anti-American.”

“I’ll confess that those views may be somewhat unconventional, but look at where conventional thinking has got us,” Cotton added.

Far from being unconventional, the senator from Arkansas is simply stating out loud the standard foreign policy orthodoxy which all Beltway swamp monsters share but tend to keep between themselves. It’s not very often you hear a US empire manager come right out and admit they only care about planetary hegemony and that their whole schtick about spreading freedom and democracy is a sham. They’ll pick a US crony dictator over a sovereign democratically elected leader ten times out of ten.

Just something to keep in mind the next time US warmongers start clamoring for more regime change interventionism in a strategically valuable country in order to liberate its people from tyranny.

[vague-humanoid]

We're The Fucking Terrorists - by Caitlin Johnstone

[theculturedmarxist]

Our civilization is sick because all its systems ensure that human behavior is driven by profit, and health isn’t profitable. Nobody gets rich from everyone staying healthy all the time. The gears of capitalism will still keep turning if its populace is made shallow and dull by bad education and crappy art made for profit. Billionaires aren’t made by leaving forests and oceans unmolested, consuming less, mining less, drilling less, using less energy. The economy doesn’t soar when the world is at peace and nations are working together in harmony.

If you programmed an advanced AI to arrange human behavior solely around extracting the maximum amount of profit possible using existing technologies, its world wouldn’t look a whole lot different from the real one. We’re being guided by unthinking, unfeeling systems that don’t care about the good of our minds, our hearts, our health, or our biosphere, which will sacrifice all of the above to accomplish the one goal we’ve set them to accomplish.

It’s just a dogshit way to run a civilization. It doesn’t work. It’s left us with a dying world full of crazy morons hurtling toward nuclear armageddon on multiple fronts. Our systems have failed as spectacularly as anything can fail.

It’s simple really: we settled for capitalism as the status quo system because it’s an efficient way to churn out a lot of stuff and create a lot of wealth, but now we’re churning out too much stuff too quickly and society is enslaved by the wealthy. So now new systems are needed.

❖

So much of modern political life consists of the ruling class tricking the public into trading away things the ruling class values in exchange for things the ruling class does not value. Trading revolution for the feeling of being revolutionary. Trading actual freedom and democracy for the story of having freedom and democracy. Trading away the civil rights our rulers actually care about like unrestricted speech and freedom from surveillance in exchange for culture wars about racism and transphobia. Trading real labor for imaginary money. In every way possible we’re being duped into trading away real power for empty narrative fluff.

❖

One part of the problem is that in this mind-controlled dystopia people are prevented from knowing how deeply evil their government is, so the idea of their government surveilling them and regulating their speech and their access to information doesn’t scare them like it should.

This is why it annoys me when people say “Stop talking about the problems, we need to talk about solutions!” It’s like mate, we’re so far from ever being able to implement solutions — we haven’t even gotten to a point where a significant number of people know the problems exist. Step one is spreading awareness of the problems and their sources, because nobody’s going to turn and fight an enemy who they still believe is their friend. Systemic solutions are pretty far down the track from that point.

❖

It’s a pretty well-established fact by now that free will doesn’t exist nearly to the extent that most religions, philosophies and judicial systems pretend it does. Our minds are very hackable and propaganda is very effective. If you don’t get this, you don’t understand the problem.

Do a deep dive into cognitive biases and how they operate. Look into the research which shows our brains know what decisions we’re going to make several seconds before the conscious mind thinks we’re making them. You’re going to tell me these are organisms with free agency?

In order to understand what we’re up against you have to understand psychological manipulation, how effective it is, and why it works, because mass-scale psychological manipulation is the primary force preventing the public from turning against our rulers in our own interest.

❖

It seems like a lot of the inertia and self-defeating hopelessness that people have about fighting the machine comes from knowing the political awakenings of the sixties fizzled out, but I don’t think that would be the case if people understood just how much hard work the machine had to put into making them fizzle.

I mean, we all get that the death of activist movements didn’t just happen on its own, right? We all know about COINTELPRO? Known instances where one out of every six activists was actually a federal infiltrator? The roll-out of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed?

The amount of energy the western empire has poured into killing all leftist and antiwar movement is staggering, but people just think the acid wore off and the hippies turned into yuppies and the Reagan administration happened on its own. It didn’t. They had to work hard at that.

The revolution didn’t organically fizzle out, it was actively strangled to death. And what’s left in its place is this defeatist attitude where people want a healthy society but believe it can’t be attained, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We COINTELPRO ourselves now.

People think we can’t use the power of our numbers to force the emergence of a healthy society, and we don’t deserve one because we dropped the ball. But we didn’t knowingly drop the ball, we were manipulated out of it. And the manipulators had to work very, very hard to do so. Those movements died out because the machine understood very clearly that it needed to stomp them out with extreme aggression and knew exactly what it needed to do to accomplish this, while ordinary people did not. It’s not a fair fight if only one party knows it’s a fight.

The machine won one battle and everyone’s acting like they won the war. They didn’t. We can absolutely pick up the fight again, and we can overwhelm them with our numbers. If we had any idea how hard they had to work to win that one battle, this would be clear to everybody.

[onetwofeb]

[...] The unspoken premise behind the plan to keep capitalism going is that the world will be saved by sociopathic tech plutocrats like Elon Musk. The idea is to just continue the plan of infinite growth on a finite world until hopefully some tech company produces technology that makes such growth sustainable in a way that both (A) benefits everybody and (B) turns billionaires into trillionaires.

That’s the assumption underlying the decision to keep capitalism in place even as we watch our biosphere disappear before our eyes, and it’s pure fantasy. As long as mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, you’re going to see the interests of humanity and the ecosystem subverted by that pursuit. The belief that capitalism will rescue us from the ecological disasters it creates assumes that the blind pursuit of profit for its own sake will somehow possess the wisdom necessary to preserve the delicate ecosystemic context upon which human life depends while also ensuring that we all have a decent quality of life (as long as we work hard enough, of course).

This is a religious belief. It’s blind faith dogma, based on literally nothing other than one’s desire to believe it. It ascribes a wisdom to the “invisible hand of the market” that is tantamount to claiming that capitalism is being steered by God. It’s something people want to believe because the alternative is falling back on some form of socialist system to ensure our survival on this planet, which we in the west have been indoctrinated into reflexively dismissing.

Market forces are not guided by wisdom, they are guided by greed and fear, and by the unresolved early childhood trauma of the Musks and Theils and Bezoses of this world. Capitalism is a great way to guarantee more production and consumption, but it is completely useless for curbing ecocide and restoring planetary health. [...]

[warllikeparakeetiii]

India-Pakistan Ceasefire, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

[vague-humanoid]

One reason westerners are so clueless about communism is because every four years the most influential western nation launches a massive months-long disinformation campaign about what communism is. People like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Lauren Boebert and Tim Pool have been claiming Kamala Harris is a Marxist for proposing price controls, a measure that was also put forward by noted communist Richard M Nixon.

Republicans are so fucking stupid that every few years they start shrieking that they’re under attack from “communism”, and by “communism” they mean the opposing US party which supports the exact same capitalist status quo they support but with tampons in the boys’ bathroom.

God I wish Democrats were as cool as right wing idiots make them sound.

[tetelbierg]

Johnstone: ".... So everyone who said the Biden administration was working for a ceasefire lied. They lied that whole entire time. They committed genocide and lied about it, and then they said you were crazy and irresponsible if you didn’t support them.

People’s rage should shake heaven and earth.

❖

The US has committed another huge massacre of civilians in Yemen, this time bombing a detention center full of African migrants in Saada. Some 68 people have reportedly been killed, making this Trump’s worst massacre in Yemen since his terrorist attack on a Hodeida fuel port killed 80 people earlier this month.

Trump’s massacres of civilians in Saada and Hodeida are much more evil than anything he has done in the United States domestically, but they’ve received almost no attention from the media or from Democrats because in the eyes of the empire Yemenis don’t count as human beings and killing them is normal. ...."

[cathare612]

The IDF Didn't Just Target Hospitals, They Destroyed Individual Medical Machines

[darkmaga-returns]

Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin reports that lifesaving medical equipment inside the hospitals in northern Gaza has been methodically destroyed, “smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore.”

“You have to ask: What is the motivation of such action? These machines are made to save people’s lives, mothers, fathers, children,” Seguin writes.

But we all know the motivation. The motivation is to make the Gaza Strip unlivable for Palestinians.

I mean, what excuses could the Israel apologists possibly produce for this one? Were Hamas hiding in the ventilators? Were the MRI machines being used as human shields? Was there a weapons stockpile in the defibrillator? Was the incubator moving in ways that made IDF troops feel unsafe? What’s the hasbara line on this, exactly?

Doesn’t look like there is one. After all the lies about Israel’s reasons for systematically destroying Gaza’s healthcare facilities, they’ve now dropped all pretenses and are openly targeting medical equipment itself for destruction. The goal was always to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable in order to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.