 Oh my god, Afghanistan is invading Afghanistan. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. During the Trump years, the media wept for the poor kids in cages and ignored all the bombs he was dropping. Now the media ignore the kids in cages and weep for the poor neglected bombs. The US empire will literally invade a country so it can spend decades using the people who live there as target practice for its expensive new military technologies and then tell you to worry about fucking Cuba. Sure is a crazy coincidence how government foreign policy decisions that would advance humanitarian interests always happen to align perfectly with government foreign policy decisions that would be extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers. Love how everyone suddenly started babbling about China taking America's place in Afghanistan. Like Beijing's been watching all the world powers smashing their heads against military interventionism in Afghanistan and thinking, yeah, that looks awesome. We should definitely try that. Bush era war criminals are louder than ever right now because they've lost the argument. The Afghan quote government proved to be an illusion, proving they spent 20 years lying to us about what they'd been doing there. So now they're trying to salvage their reputations and legacies. I can't believe there are still highly influential people saying we need to keep reigning military explosives on the Islamic world to make Muslims less extremist. Everyone's freaking out that Afghanistan is invading Afghanistan. The Biden administration is perpetuating and advancing all of Trump's policies better and more efficiently than Trump himself and it's hilarious that Maga people still oppose him because Candace Owens told them he's a communist. The fact that Joe Biden's mind has sharply declined in recent years is significant not because it means the US president can't lead the country but because it shows no US president ever leads the country. Republicans keep highlighting the fact that the sitting president's brain doesn't work to suggest that a Republican president would be more competent. But of course that's not true. You'd just be swapping an impotent puppet with dementia for an impotent puppet without dementia. The most powerful government in the world is run not by its elected officials but by a loose nationless alliance of plutocrats and government agency insiders who you never get to vote for. This has been obvious for a long time and gets more obvious by the day. The debate over COVID policies has split anti-imperialists, socialists, Assange supporters, et cetera in a way that's mighty convenient for the powerful. We could probably all be more open-minded, keep watching and learning and not expect everyone to agree with us about everything. Just as a general rule, it's probably best to avoid if you're not with us then you're against us doctrines. I tend to back away slowly from anyone I see getting that way and that impulse has always proved a healthy one. Mature adults can agree where they agree and disagree where they disagree and not have that be a major issue. Don't blame the troops. Most of them saw the military as their only path out of poverty. So we come back once again to the problem being capitalism. Rob the rich because you are poor and they'll give you a prison sentence. Put on a uniform and go kill impoverished people overseas because you are poor and they'll give you a medal. War profiteering is what you get when you mix capitalism with a globe-spanning power structure that works to maintain unipolar domination at all costs. The war industry surfs on the empire like dolphins on the wake of a freight ship. Except in this case, the dolphins also help steer and accelerate the ship. The military industrial complex was inevitable. You cannot maintain a global order without the constant threat and application of mass military violence to hold it in place. It was inevitable that an industry would not only arise to meet that demand but begin using the wealth it generates to manufacture support for more war. All the worst things in the world happened because some humans took some dumb thought in their heads a little too seriously. War, torture, genocide, slavery, oppression, ecocide, it's all because of a human tendency to imbue the noises between our ears with the power of belief. Some primates evolved the capacity for abstract thought a while back and the giant brains relative to the size of the birth canal meant we have to spend our formative days helpless and surrounded by giants which is very scary and inherently traumatic. As we grow, we start taking our thoughts very seriously as we try to obtain safety and security and then ego happens as a result of this. So really all this drama is ultimately just a species that's in an awkward transition phase where it hasn't yet developed a mature relationship with its newly evolved brain matter. I bet the ancestors of birds looked really awkward for a while too before they could fly. Flight in our case would look like a mature relationship with our big brains where thought exists as a mere tool that we can use when it's useful and set down when it's not rather than as a compulsive force which dominates our experience due to our conditioned habit of giving it belief. And of course it's very possible that we kill ourselves off before we make it out of that transition phase. It's happened to many other species before us. But either way, this is temporary. Either way, any belief that this brief chapter in our story shows human nature is silly.