 Violent extremists get called moderates by a violent extremist empire. The Imperial press have been revealingly using the words moderate and centrist to eulogize the warmongering former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, who passed away on Wednesday. Centrist former Senator Joseph Lieberman has died at 82, reads a headline by NPR. As a moderate Democrat, Mr. Lieberman developed a reputation in Washington for crossing party lines. As well as simply crossing members of his own party, says the BBC. Joe Lieberman, a former longtime Connecticut Senator and moderate Democrat who became the first Jewish American nominated to a major party's presidential ticket as Al Gore's 2000 running mate, died Wednesday at age 82, writes The Wall Street Journal. Joe Lieberman, centrist senator and first Jew on major U.S. presidential ticket, dies at 82, writes the headline from The Times of Israel. In reality, there was never anything moderate about Joe Lieberman. He was a violent extremist who only looked like he walked a political center line through the lens of a violent extremist empire. In an article titled The Extent of Joe Lieberman's Evil Doing was truly remarkable, Branko Marchatich writes the following for Jackamon, quote, Lieberman is also an all-around hawk, unconcerned with government spending when it's in the service of bombing some far-off country or another. It's hard to find a war Lieberman hasn't supported. From both wars against Iraq, he was one of only 10 Senate Democrats to vote for the first, to the Balkans in the 90s, to Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and an ambiguous commitment in Ukraine and many others. If you're a fan of the bloated, largely unaccountable, centralized security bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security, thank Lieberman. He not only came up with the idea, but introduced the legislation that created it. He also supported the terrifying appointments of John Bolton under both Bush and Donald Trump, citing his strong moral compass, end quote. Beltway swamp monsters like Lieberman only get called centrist and moderate because they have ideological overlap with both of the increasingly indistinguishable mainstream political parties in the United States, both of which reliably support war, militarism, imperialism, capitalism, and oligarchy. Their differences are presented as massive by the imperial propaganda services known as the mainstream press to create the illusion of choice and competition, but they actually sit within an extremely narrow ideological bandwidth on the political spectrum. One of the worst mistakes you can make when formulating your understanding of the world is to begin with the assumption that the truest and most accurate position must lie somewhere near the center of the two major political perspectives you see laid out all around you. It's a mistake not only because assuming that the center position must be the best one is a type of fallacious reasoning known as the middle ground fallacy. The correct position between drink a gallon of bleach daily for good health and a drink zero bleach daily for good health is not drink half a gallon of bleach daily for good health. It's also a mistake because the entire framing arises from a situation that has been artificially engineered by the powerful. It's a well-documented fact that the rich and powerful pour vast fortunes into manipulating the political and media landscape in ways that serve their interests. Their control over the news media and Silicon Valley tech platforms is used to set the agenda and influence public perception by determining what issues will receive attention and which won't in ways that preserve the political status quo they've built their empire upon, thereby shrinking the overton window of acceptable debate down to a very narrow spectrum whose outcomes can't threaten their interests in any way. This is what Noam Chomsky was talking about when he said the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. People assume there must be truth in the mainstream world view because so many others are invested in the mainstream world view. When really the only reason that world view is mainstream in the first place is because so much wealth and influence has gone into making it mainstream. The propaganda matrix can lull you into believing the false dichotomies of this two-party political framework because of how ubiquitous and widely believed it is and how aggressively it gets shown in everyone's face from day to day which can dupe you into losing sight of where a true moderate position might actually rest. One way to resist succumbing to this cognitive quicksand is to keep a clear vision of what a healthy world would actually look like so that you are always acutely aware of just how far the mainstream world view is from a sensible position. Sometime before he fatally self-immolated outside the Israeli Embassy in protest of the US government's support for the Gaza Genocide, Aaron Bushnell wrote the following on Reddit, quote, I've realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world because I've imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now. What I'm trying to say is it's so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild with idealistic dreams of what the world should look like and let the pain and anger at how it's not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine. It's not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow but we have to be willing to fight today, end quote. It's valuable to hold a positive vision of what a truly healthy civilization would look like because it's important to be clear on what it is you're fighting for but it's also important because if you don't, you leave an opening for these bastards to convince you to believe absurdities like that Joe Lieberman was a moderate.