 Stop believing U.S. military invasions have noble intentions. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. I love how everyone's just pretending the Afghanistan papers never happened and the Taliban takeover is some kind of shocking tragedy instead of the thing everyone knew would happen because they've been knowingly lying about working to create a stable government this entire time. If the U.S. had a free press and was anything like a democracy, the government wouldn't be getting away with squandering thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on a 20-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making assholes obscenely wealthy. Thousands of human lives. Trillions of dollars. If Western mass media were anything remotely resembling what they purport to be, they would be making sure the public understands how badly their government just fucked them. Instead it's just, oh no, those poor Afghan women. War apologists talk about doing nothing like that's somehow worse than creating mountains of human corpses for power and profit. We've got to do something about the Taliban! We can't just do nothing! Uh, yeah you can. Please for the love of God do nothing. Doing nothing would be infinitely better than more military interventionism in a nation you've already tortured for 20 years for no valid reason. People who think U.S. interventionism solves problems just haven't gone through the mountains upon mountains of evidence that it definitely, definitely does not at all. Nobody honestly believes the U.S. needs to invade every nation in the world with illiberal cultural values. They only think that way with Afghanistan due to war propaganda. And women's lives in Afghanistan have still been shit under the occupation. They had 20 years to build a stable nation in Afghanistan, 20 years. If you believe that's what they were really trying to do there, or that results would be any different if you gave them 20 more, you're a fuckin' moron. If you think the U.S. needs to be in Afghanistan so the Taliban doesn't take over then have some integrity and intellectual honesty and admit you want perpetual occupation. In which case you should be arguing for Afghan annexation so that at least they get votes and congressional representation. The objection shouldn't be that there was no withdrawal plan. It should be that there was no occupation plan. Nothing was done in those 20 years for the long term benefit of Afghans. The entire plan was stay and plunder as much as we can until we feel like leaving. And of course more than this, we should be upset that the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan at all, killing hundreds of thousands of people for no legitimate reason. When all you've got is an insanely overfunded military, every problem looks like a job for your insanely overfunded military. I am once again asking you to stop believing U.S. military invasions have noble intentions. And stop blaming this on the corrupt Afghan government. There was no Afghan government. There was just whatever random Afghans happened to be willing to align with the occupying force that invaded their country while it was there. All blame rests entirely on that occupying force. Now would be a great time to unrehabilitate public opinion of George W. Bush. People who think the U.S. military can be used for good remind me of that scene in Edward Scissorhands where he's going around the house accidentally slashing things and then trying to fix them but he can't fix them because he's got horrible Scissorhands that can only slash. Every time mass military murder fails to achieve good things the proponents of mass military murder show up saying, the problem is we didn't murder enough people. You'll never see westerners so concerned about humanitarian issues as when there's a chance some distant part of the world might not be subjected to military occupation by the most murderous power structure on earth. Oh no, the country is immediately returning to the state it was in before we started using mass military violence to force it to look a bit different for a while. That's like dressing your kid up as Batman for Halloween and then getting sad the next day because Batman's gone. Can't figure out why Americans keep consenting to a government foreign policy of piracy and mass murder which is killing people by the millions via starvation and military violence. All that theft must be buying them awesome benefits like great healthcare and quality of life. Americans must be the happiest, most thriving people in the world. So many movies depict young men coming home from World War II like, howdy ma, hey pop, boy it's great to be home, now I gotta go see about that girl. Instead of hollowed out husks who've gone on to live the rest of their lives miserable beating their children and trying to drink away their trauma. I still can't get over how mainstream news stories about empire targeted countries can be based entirely on reports by think tanks that are openly funded by weapons manufacturers. Now is the fact that this is journalistic malpractice not obvious to everyone in the world. The international symbol for the United States should be the Pentagon. It's far more representative of what that nation stands for and what it does than some flag or an eagle. War is the worst thing in the world. It's the single most insane, destructive and unsustainable thing humans do. People who tell me I shouldn't focus on it as much are people who I just disregard because they simply don't grasp the horrific nature of war and the need to condemn it. Sure they could've just killed a saunge, but then the message to journalists would've been we'll get you if you expose our crimes, but we'll have to be sneaky about it, which is less intimidating than we'll get you if you expose our crimes and we'll do it right out in the open. Western rightists are being trained to blame Western civilizations rising authoritarianism on communism and Marxism, and as a result they are reacting to anti-capitalists like myself with increasing shrillness and hysteria, while the actual very capitalist authoritarians go unopposed. Just another regular reminder that there will never be peace and economic justice as long as the majority are successfully convinced by establishment propaganda that those things are not in their interest. The propaganda machine must first be discredited and rendered non-functioning. If you've got any urge to write articles or make videos or a podcast, just do it. You're infinitely more qualified to be the media than people who are paid by billionaires to lie, and they're not asking anyone for permission to speak. If Chris fucking Cuomo gets a voice, then so do you. You don't have to be perfect or professional quality or whatever, help give yourself permission to outright suck at first if that's how it plays out. Give yourself permission to not be perfect and just learn as you go and correct your mistakes as you make them. That's allowed. Again, no matter how bad you are, you're still infinitely more qualified to report the news and tell the truth than any of the shit stains that are being platformed by multi-billion dollar media outlets right now, and whatever you make will be better than whatever they make. Just do it. Don't stop if you don't get a big audience right away, or if you never do. It's not about that. If you can open even one person's eyes to one aspect of reality, you are helping humanity to become a more conscious species by that much. That's what it's about. That's what matters. And even if you don't do that, fleshing out your ideas in some public medium is a great way to help yourself become aware of more things and deepen your own understanding. So you're still improving humanity by that much. So no matter what happens, you can't lose. If we're ever to turn things around, it will be the result of a very large number of us grabbing a rope and tugging. You don't have to be a megastar, you just have to do your bit. Start from there and see what happens. It's impossible to be a truly good person without loosening your relationship with mental narrative. If you are clinging tight to thoughts and beliefs, you're not able to relate to life as it is. You're just relating to your own mental stories. So you can't respond to life wisely. The character Inspector Javert from Les Miserables is a perfect description of what goes wrong when you emphasize narrative over reality. In his case, replacing true goodness with moralism, with shoulds and shouldn'ts and rules and laws instead of responding to life as it shows up, like Valjean. In contrast to Javert, Valjean is able to recognize Fantine's plight as a result of his own negligence, even though she shows up as a prostitute in trouble with the law. As his eyes are open to life as it is, he's able to exercise true compassion and help her and Cosette. People like Valjean are able to see through not just their own mental narratives, but the narratives that are imposed upon them externally by mass-scale propaganda. People like Javert will support every power agenda no matter how depraved, because they believe mental stories. Ego doesn't make it out alive. One way or another it's a goner. It either dies by being seen through, or it takes us all out with it. The good news is that every single one of us gets to make that choice in every single moment.