 Assange exposes the empire's true face, notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. Julian Assange is a journalist who's been imprisoned for doing journalism on war crimes by an empire that claims to defend journalists and oppose war crimes. Assange and his persecution expose the giant plot holes in every story the western power structure tells about itself. About its love of free speech and the free press. About its opposition to tyranny. About its wars and why it wages them. Assange exposes the empire's true face. And in that sense it's interesting that the empire made the decision to jail and silence Assange. Since in doing so it exposed its own tyranny and criminality far more than WikiLeaks ever could have hoped to. Assange said, it is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers. If you accept this as true, you must also accept that there are precisely zero good journalists anywhere in the western mass media and that Assange is the greatest journalist who has ever lived. The moderate position on Ukraine is to hold both Russia and the US empire responsible for their respective roles in starting and continuing this war. That's the middle ground position. But this position is regarded as freakish fringe extremism in the western mainstream and you'll be accused of literally conducting scyops for a foreign government if you voice it because the western mainstream is just that freakishly extremist. The mainstream position in the west is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom and that Moscow is 100% responsible for this conflict in every way while the US is just an innocent little flower who just wants to protect freedom and democracy. When you actually spell out what the mainstream position on Ukraine is, it sounds like a silly fairy tale for children but that's what all the most influential western pundits, politicians and government officials are actually saying. That's how batshit insane things are. The Overton window has been shifted so far in support of NATO warmongering that this middle ground position is now regarded as fringe extremism so they just debate things like whether or not cluster bombs should be used to fight this war that is obviously 1,000% Russia's fault. As is often the case, this dynamic has already been well described by the elderly scholar who we all love to share our thoughts and opinions about Noam Chomsky. 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, even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on. While all the same, the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. Here's a tweet by Katelyn. Ukrainian flag usually just means US flag. 99% of the time you see someone flashing a Ukrainian flag or saying I stand with Ukraine. What they really mean is I support the US proxy war and hope Washington succeeds in its goals to use Ukraine to hurt its long-time geopolitical rival. The claim that NATO is a defensive alliance that set up to promote peace is a lie that's refuted by a swift glance at recorded history. In terms of evidence, it's crazier than saying there are alien aircraft in our skies, but you constantly hear respected pundits saying it. The US presidential race is that wonderful season American liberals set aside to remind socialists that they hate them far more than they hate the right and would cheerfully burn the whole country to the ground before they'd share one iota of power with them. Here's a tweet by Ian Bremmer about Cornell West. Presidential candidate Cornell West, more closely aligned with Putin than Trump is, not easy to pull off. The only people who hate leftists more than rightists do are liberals, which is a bit funny because rightists think leftists and liberals are the same. It's trippy how people pour such effort into disputing whether the planet is warming when the biosphere is showing us many, many other signs of looming collapse. They completely ignore the ocean dead zones, plummeting insect populations, loss of wildlife trees, fertile soil, etc. I mean, what specifically is the claim here? That there's a big evil plot across the entire scientific field to lie about warming, but all the other signs of environmental collapse are legit? Or are those fake too? If so, why only focus on the one message that benefits fossil fuel companies? Obviously, there are powerful people looking to exploit global warming to shore up wealth and power. That's to be expected. It would be surprising if it wasn't happening. None of that changes the need to drastically change the way humanity operates on this planet right away. One reason it's so hard to set up beneficial systems is because in negotiations, manipulators always push for the absolute maximum amount of gain they can possibly grab, while good people only push for a normal, human-sized amount of space for themselves. You see this constantly in union negotiations and politics alike. People come to the negotiation table with demands that are viewed as reasonable by those in power and then are negotiated back halfway from that point of reason as a compromise, while those with the power grab up everything they can get their mitts on and walk back only if forced to. This has a ratchet effect over the years, which sees ordinary people losing more and more power to the ruling class. That's not going to change until normal people stop letting the manipulators set the bar at what's reasonable and start pushing out space for themselves with as much force and entitlement as bad people. People are going to have to stop coming to the negotiating table with their compromise and instead show up with the demand to take back everything that was stolen from them and more with as much force as necessary.