 The system is rigged for endless war. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. I still can't find the words to describe how insane it is that all the experts who spent 20 years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy, while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks. Nobody gets credit for ending the Afghanistan occupation. Everyone involved in keeping it going for 20 years gets blame. That's it. You don't get a trophy for not murdering more people. But it's not surprising that the Afghanistan war took 20 years to end. If anything, the way the deck is stacked in favor of perpetual war, it's surprising it happened that fast. Military members who support imperialism get promoted. Those who get to the top go on to work for war profiteers. The war profiteers fund think tanks which promote more wars. The mass media report news stories citing those think tanks. Those stories manufacture consent for more wars. The war industry reinforces itself. Those who get to the top of the war machine move on to the private sector and spend their time lobbying for more wars, which create more eventual Pentagon officials who go on to lobby for more wars. Peace should be easy. This is why it's not. It's horrifying when you realize how much of the behavior of the most powerful military in history is driven by the simple fact that weapons manufacturers don't make money if those weapons aren't being used. The most powerful government on earth is stuck in a self-exacerbating feedback loop where the behaviors of the war machine are dictated by the war industry and people wonder why it's so hard to end wars. With a cycle this vicious, you can only end the wars by ending the empire. This is what you get when mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit. As long as war is profitable, you guarantee that more wars will happen. As long as ecocide is profitable, more ecocide will happen. As long as corruption is profitable, more corruption will happen. Meanwhile, peace is not profitable. Demilitarization is not profitable. Nuclear disarmament is not profitable. Getting plastic out of the ocean is not profitable. Leaving trees standing is not profitable. Leaving oil in the ground is not profitable. Freedom is not profitable. The religion of profit drives all human behavior, and it's a death cult that will end us all if we don't end it first. People seem to think it's only justifiable to end a military occupation if you can continue to control everything that happens in that nation after your military occupation ends. This is the same as believing it's never okay to end a military occupation under any circumstances. The mass media always cheerly to US president's foreign policy when it involves mass murder on an unthinkable scale and always criticize a US president when he tries to stop doing this. That's all you really need to know about the trustworthiness of the mass media. Corporate media is mind control at mass scale. People who identify as smart independent thinkers have their minds altered by it every day, and they believe they came to those opinions on their own. Until this problem is addressed, none of our other major problems are going away. How are we supposed to get everyone vaccinated if we don't make it mandatory? Uh, you don't? You don't begin with the assumption that the existence of a nasty respiratory virus justifies forcing or coercing everyone to inject themselves with a brand new drug they don't trust? I mean, compelling people to take an injection that they are actually afraid of is a huge deal. Can we not at least agree on that? Can we agree that forcing someone to receive an injection they fear would be so serious that you'd better have an amazingly bulletproof argument for doing it? I think so. And I don't think such an argument exists at this time. It's important to follow and be followed by people you disagree with. You'll see a lot of crap, but you'll also keep yourself from falling into a self-validating echo chamber and eventually finding yourself saying something like unvaccinated people should be denied medical care. Expecting a communism-oriented country to look like a utopia in the midst of a global imperialist war against communism is like expecting a family to look like a Norman Rockwell painting while they are being chased by wolves. Saying communism doesn't work because nations who try to espouse it don't look like thriving utopias while they're being relentlessly assaulted is like saying a new invention doesn't work because a band of armed thugs kept stomping on it during the demonstration. Poverty is the result of an abusive system and telling the poor to get a job or get a better job has always enabled that abuse. Now that small businesses are being killed by that same abusive system, many who used to enable its abuses by doing so are becoming its victims. Blaming poverty on the poor in a system that's literally built on the premise of a permanent underclass has always been insane, but if you're making good money and lacking empathy it's easy to think they're just lazy. Only when such people are screwed by the same system do they see.