 Capitalism has failed as badly as anything can fail. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. No, no, you don't understand. This U.S. war is completely different from all the other U.S. wars. See, the U.S. is intervening in Ukraine for humanitarian reasons. We're fighting a bad guy who is an evil dictator that loves war crimes and genocide. Not like all those other interventions. If the U.S. proxy war was meaningfully different from other U.S. wars, they would be justifying it using different arguments, not the exact same ones. The war propaganda is airing reruns. Western punditry is rife with op-eds, arguing that the U.S. needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt. And they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the U.S. like its own actions would have nothing to do with it. If World War 3 does indeed occur, it will be because the drivers of the U.S. centralized empire continued accelerating toward that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to their inability to relinquish their goal of unipolar planetary domination. Pointing out the various flaws and historical attempts at communism does not address the problem that if we don't move from competition-based models to collaboration-based ones, we're going to destroy all life on this planet in short order. We've still got to find a way to change. Have issues with Stalin and Mao? Okay, cool. Our competition-based models are still destroying our biosphere and shoving us toward nuclear war. Our survival still depends on moving toward collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem toward the thriving of all beings. Babbling about Stalin and Mao doesn't magically change the fact that we can't keep doing this thing where human behavior is driven by profit and competition, leaving aside that many problems with communism have been wildly exaggerated and others are the direct result of sabotage and economic warfare by the capitalist empire. Those criticisms never address the problem that capitalism has no solutions for our current existential crises, so we need systems which can address those existential crises. I see no models with any hope of sustainability that don't involve a radical transition from competition to collaboration at every level. We will either accomplish that transition or we will go extinct. It really is that simple. People tell me, capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best system we've seen. It's literally killing us. It's brought us to the brink of extinction by environmental collapse or nuclear armageddon. That's literally the worst failure that any system could possibly achieve. When your back is against the wall and your choices are between radical change and extinction, you've no other options but to try radical change. That's the juncture we are at right now. The status quo political establishment has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. We could have a world of peace, equality, justice, health and harmony, but instead we're marching toward dystopia and extinction. It is entirely within the reach of human potential to have a collaboration-based civilization where everyone works together toward human thriving. Our rulers have delivered only competition-based systems which do the exact opposite. They failed the test. Time for something new. It doesn't get any more fail than, yeah, we've competed ourselves into a situation where there might be a nuclear war that ends literally everything any minute now. That's the most fail you can have while still being alive enough to acknowledge the failure. The facts are in. They failed. A system that fails to that extent does not deserve to exist and should not exist. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and if we can just shake each other awake from the propaganda-induced coma we're all in, we can force the creation of much better systems. Mass media propagandists work so hard to discredit the grey zone because they know that tomorrow it could be their own emails getting published revealing corrupt collusion with Western officials and intelligence insiders. Let yourself be happy. If you can't do it for you, then do it for the world. Refusing to let yourself be happy is just keeping that much happiness out of the world. It's making it a worse place to live. Be happy. Refusing to let yourself be happy just deprives the world of that much happiness. Refusing to let yourself be loved just deprives the world of that much love. Refusing to let yourself be at peace just deprives the world of that much peace. Be happy. Not because you deserve it or any of that other empty narrative fluff, but because the world is a hard place and any spark of happiness is sorely needed.