 Sunday Funny Pages. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. Breaking. Sources report violent right-wing extremists have seized control of the U.S. capital, established a globe-spanning empire, and murdered millions of people. Think Tank Name Translation Guide. Foreign means war, policy means crimes, democracy means neoliberalism, strategic means murderous, international or global means imperialist, relations means domination, American means oligarchic, research means indoctrination, institution, institute, council, center, foundation, or house means propaganda firm. Me, an idiot. It's disturbing how government-tied Silicon Valley oligarchs exert so much control over people's access to free speech. You, a genius. It's not a free speech issue because you can still take your opinions down to ye old printing press and distribute them manually on horseback. We haven't talked enough about how the U.S. military not only lied for 20 years about their stated goals in Afghanistan nearly being accomplished. It turns out that they were also lying about doing anything during that time that could possibly have led to their stated goals being accomplished. Seeing the Afghan government quote just melting under the Taliban after the U.S. pretended to spend 20 years building it up, as like paying someone billions of dollars to build a palace and then after 20 years checking it out and realizing the whole thing is a stage play set made a cardboard. A military which can afford to spend trillions on a 20-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making horrible people wealthy is a military that needs its budget slashed to ribbons. When your elected officials never ask, how do we solve this problem? But rather, how do we solve this problem without upsetting rich people or warmongers? Most of the problems will necessarily remain unsolved. This is of course entirely by design because the circumstances which created the problems were set up by and for the rich people and the warmongers. Anyone who accuses you of working for a foreign government when you criticize U.S. imperialism is accidentally admitting that they cannot imagine any possible scenario under which someone might criticize the worst impulses of the most powerful people on earth without being paid to. They are giving you a very embarrassing insight into the way they think and live. They are telling you that they are unprincipled hacks who never question authority and only speak from within the framework of blind sycophantic loyalty. It was a major propaganda victory for imperial narrative managers to convince people that being skeptical of any claim about a foreign government made by the U.S., no matter how flimsy the evidence, is the same as Holocaust denial. The poor have all the responsibility and none of the wealth and power and for the rich it's the exact opposite. All the power and wealth but none of the responsibility. Nobody ever tells them, see all that plastic in the ocean? That's your fault. Fix it. They burn the world for fun and profit and face no consequences. There are a bunch of spoiled little boys with flamethrowers. If it had just been let's end racism instead of let's end racism by supporting horrible corporate warmongers there would be a lot less racism today. Anytime I talk about racial justice I get people calling it identity politics when it's really not. Becoming conscious of racial injustices in our society isn't about promoting any political party or politician. It's about becoming conscious but people assume that because it's been so exploited for so long. If people weren't so acutely aware of the disgusting ways in which race and racism have been used to promote the political agendas of absolutely horrible people and parties, that aversion to seeing this stuff would not be there. It doesn't take a genius to recognize phoniness, opportunism and cynicism when you see it. Most people can smell it a mile away. This causes a rejection of the examination of the problem of racism which would not be there otherwise. The fact that racism has been exploited in a way that prevents it from being healed is itself a metastasis of that same racism. Stomp out the authentic revolutionary impulse and you're left with inauthentic revolutionary impulse. You don't kill people's impulse to rise up and push for change. You just get them doing it in weird, ridiculous, ineffective ways. Hence the pseudo left and the quote populist right. Most of the bizarre things about western politics in general and U.S. politics in particular ultimately boil down to this. Okay we need to overthrow the elites and change things. Let's select that rich casino guy for president. All the id politics and shitlib stuff, same thing. If the door to real leftward movement hadn't been bolted shut, you wouldn't see one side trying to change things by freaking out about immigrants and trans people and the other side trying to change things by punching them in black block without either ever threatening real power. What you would see is change. And this all of course suits those in power just fine. They're happy to have the right advancing their interests and the left shrieking impotently at anything that moves for all eternity. That's why they spent generations deliberately turning that into the existing reality.