Julie London – Cry Me A River
An elite in Slovakia was shot. A few thoughts in rebuttal as elites throughout the West close ranks around the unjust violent order they control.
First, we do not live in democracies, so you can’t attack democracy by attacking those who claim to represent it. We live in a global oligarchy with provincial, fenced-off zones of control, where elites tell lies and make corrupt deals in petty competition with one another for power through silly popularity contests. These people do not represent our interests. They represent the oligarchs, everywhere in the world. It’s not politics. It’s business. It has nothing to do with people or progress.
Second, there are no such things as human rights, either as a consistent ethical or legal concept or as a matter of practical fact. There are things that humans do, and things that other humans will allow them to get away with, things humans can take and hold and things they can’t. Thousands of people are, intentionally and through simple neglect, murdered by the global oligarchy every day. Human life means nothing to them, only the preservation of their systems of authority.
Third, because each of us not born to or gifted with tremendous, unprecedented wealth is, in essence and in fact, a slave, we should shed no tears when one of the mighty is harmed. It is both gratifying on a personal level, a kind of social blessing for all to enjoy, and an important political lesson when our world is reminded that elites bleed just as easily as the rest of us 🦀
Finally, the person in question isn’t worth your tears: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/25/robert-fico-slovakia-veteran-populist-prime-minister
Daft Punk – Da Funk
And, I mean, they’re really pissed at all of us saying this is a mistake, for sure. Cops beating the shit out of college students, DHS all up everybody’s ass, weird shit going down on socials, the whole thing. Europe’s just as bad, I hear. The truth is, though, that you all can pour all the tax dollars you want into the cult of Zionism and its project of ethnic cleansing, and you’ll get the same shit result as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the War on Terror. Colonizer always loses. Look it up 🙂
Richard Hawley – Long Black Train
Two decades of draconian expansion of surveillance and repression, during what was called the War on Terror, which they lost anyway and only succeeded in getting a bunch of people killed and creating more, and more brutal, militants. Massive expansion of corporate power and influence over governments everywhere, so much so that you can no longer tell where the line is between the oligarchy and the state. And the states serve well.
Then comes a resurgence of fascism, not just in the US but everywhere, because that is the most efficient way for the oligarchy to combat reform, which is, of course, what fascism has always been about. Stopping progress by shocking the system backward. Then there’s a pandemic, that the oligarchy used, globally, as a massive upward wealth transfer opportunity, at the expense of millions of lives. A second, preventable, holocaust. Something like 7 million dead, likely low-end.
Then there’s a fascist coup attempt in the States (and in Brazil, lol). Nobody who matters faces any consequences and as elections approach it gets memory holed. Some people are even blaming the left for that, too, because why not? Nothing matters. Then Russia’s fascist oligarchs decide to just take another country. The West initially doesn’t want to do anything, but then decides that it’s a great opportunity for war profiteering, so they’re putting on a decent show, now.
Then some guys do a mass shooting because their entire population has been under lockdown for 75 years, enduring a slow-burn genocide (and more security / war profiteering, I might add), and so Israel decides to just do a little light ethnic cleansing. We’re not supposed to notice it, and we’re supposed to vote for the people backing it. If you don’t follow those rules you’re a criminal and states will come after you. The oligarchy decides who lives and dies, and who is human.
Twenty three years of this garbage, since 9/11. And you’re supposed to keep smiling and giggling at stupid memes and pretending like everything’s normal. Go to work. Pay your bills. Keep voting for this stuff. And let me tell you another thing, whenever you demonize or vilify the migrant, what you are doing is putting the handcuffs on your own wrists, because borders are the method by which the oligarchy continues the charade of what they call civilization.
There’s a whole discourse around it, but what it boils down to is that rock-solid borders are kind of a new thing, and they exist not to keep people safe but to keep people imprisoned. See, the way capitalism works is through a gradient of haves and have nots, of takers and those from which it is taken. A hierarchy from disposable, to slave, to exploited laborer, to functionary, to politician, to billionaire. Borders are how they control labor, and how they police you.
Borders are also how genocides occur, how wars burn on for years, how child labor happens, how workers go into cobalt mines and never come out, how Europe disposes of its waste, how America builds its enclaves, how Iran kills little girls, how Saudi Arabia kills women and dissidents, how Israel kills Palestinians, how Russia kills its own and Ukrainians. All of these things happen because borders, rulers, and laws are sacrosanct to the oligarchy. Morality is not a factor.
And it’s all happening in this compacted timespan of our wretched lives because oligarchs have spent the time since the second world war trying to freeze human civilization at the apex of colonial acquisition and violent control, and using reactionaries and fascists and war to maintain that frozen state, which exists solely to turn suffering and sacrifice into comfort for their class and those who serve it.
And they might have gotten away with it, were it not for the interconnections of contemporary civilization, climate change, and their own corruption and insatiable appetites and greed. But, as it stands, we are not waiting for collapse, we are in the midst of it. Their global empire is rotting and crumbling around us, almost in real time. So, they will police us. They will dispose of those who are not useful to them. They will take and kill and destroy until no one is left.
So, you’ll all forgive me if I don’t bother trying to hide how I feel about it all. I’ve spent my entire adult life watching the oligarchy destroy this civilization. The fact of the matter is that it is them and their system or every living thing on this planet. It’s all interconnected, all the problems, all the broken systems, every living thing’s suffering. Every politician contributes to it. Every person of wealth contributes to it. Every normie, radical moderate fool contributes to it.
It’s beyond reform or redemption. It’s just evil, in its purest form. It deserves to collapse, to be brought down, to be destroyed. If we don’t figure out how to do that it will be the end for this species. Anything that can be done to disrupt the order they have built is a positive step on our road to collective survival. We, living things, are nothing to those who rule us. They should mean nothing to us. It’s not a struggle for some imagined moral superiority. It’s a struggle for survival.