Politics and policy are not abstractions. Everything that one human being, that one living thing, does to another is personal. What may happen after is equally personal. That is all there is.
by achrilock
by achrilock
Politics and policy are not abstractions. Everything that one human being, that one living thing, does to another is personal. What may happen after is equally personal. That is all there is.
by achrilock
Listen, I’m from the southern regions of this hell hole, and we tend to have a different take on things than, say, someone from New England or the West Coast. Or Europe. But I think we all need to return to the old ways. Ain’t no law or justice that touches rich people or politicians or rulers. Nothing but legislatures looking for ways to fuck people over, spy agencies violating people’s shit and fucking them over, and state militants following orders to do occupations and genocides everywhere.
It’s a fuckin’ mess, and laws, blathering, and whining are useless tools for cleaning it up. We need to abandon this liberal legalistic nonsense. We need to do things the way they were done in the old days. If a noble fucks you over, that’s a vendetta. If it’s bad enough, or hurts you enough, that’s a family or clan blood feud. You meager need to remember how to hold a proper grudge against the mighty. Isn’t that what the Old Testament says? ‘Thou shalt not fuck around lest ye fucking find out?’
by achrilock
The thing you gotta understand about imperials, whatever flag or bullshit brand they’re pushing, is that they are very capable and dangerous in large numbers, or even in smaller enclaves or alone, when they feel the heat of the machine at their backs. Disrupt the flow of that feeling of power, however, or catch them at a temporal or physical point where they feel vulnerability, and the facade collapses. Most are cowards at heart. That’s why they signed up to work for the empire. Think about it.
by achrilock
The thing you gotta understand about corporate journalists, or any professional on the corporate take and ladder in neoliberal world, is that, whatever their politics or their intentions, their entire life is built on a pedestal of absolute obedience to and repetition of the narrative. They step out of line their kids don’t get insurance. They don’t pay their mortgage. No more zippy plane rides or access. They have to move to ‘other’ America, where we all live. Few are willing to pay that price.
by achrilock
Citizens are reminded that when dissent is criminalized, when rules are overtly weaponized against dissent for the benefit of the state and its controlling oligarchs, the dissenters become criminals, and may then act as criminals, as they have nothing left to lose. This is not a boon to the machine, but rather its ultimate detriment, as the veneer of fairness under the supposed social contract is broken. There is only afterward an imperative to destroy the machine, piece by piece.
Movements are precisely that. They move. They act upon the system of their own volition. Taking advantage of favorable opportunities that may present themselves, yes, but also not waiting for circumstances or authority to decide for them. Standing in the street is an advertisement, a call to action. It is but the first step in initiating change. Placed, comfortable radical moderates, and the rules they enforce, are the foot soldiers in the oligarchy’s war on all that is good and beneficial.
by achrilock
People are operating in terms of factional, short-term gains, rather than of principle, justice, or long-term stability. That’s why these situations don’t make any rational sense unless you are settled deep within one of the (powerful) factions. Whenever this pattern of thought, policy, and action occurs on a global scale, we see world wars happen. Whatever your brand of bullshit, you would do well to note this reality. Once such matrices of ill cause and effect catalyze, there is no going back.
This is really no different than previous global conflagrations, and its fronts are not limited to the Middle East. There are fronts in Asia and Eastern Europe and Africa as well, equally capable of unraveling global peace and security. What it comes down to are the imperial cores of the US, Russia, China, and Europe leveraging proxies within a global struggle, not even for the benefit of their own people or for some ideology, but for the primary benefactors of their power, their oligarchs.
You don’t need to be a scholar to understand it. Listen to western media’s ‘man on the street’ interviews with Israelis (and never hear from Iranians…). The essence of it boils down to ‘we deserve a blissful existence regardless of our actions because we have attached ourselves to this larger entity, where’s our fucking money and weapons?’ Peoples, like Israelis or Iranians, cannot find equilibrium or peace with one another under such circumstances. They exist as fanatical imperial outposts.
The imperial cores have made a farce of their own international legal framework for dealing with friction and crises (as power always does to any legal framework it controls, the law works only for power, not principle or justice). Therefore, the conflicts are expressing themselves as combative to varying degrees. There is no avoiding or changing this until the fundamentals of the system are changed.
The machine is global, does not recognize borders with regard to its perceived enemies, and feeds upon capital and life to perpetuate itself. Resistance, and the foundations for the machine’s destruction, must begin locally but must be extended globally. This international political economy is not sustainable in a dying world. It can only hasten everyone’s destruction.
Power has one enemy, being those who would dethrone it. ALL people, anywhere and everywhere, who would live justly and peacefully and sustainably have one enemy, and that is hierarchical power.
by achrilock
Also, totally done with Ukraine. You should have condemned the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. You have had multiple opportunities to do so. You have refused all of these for your own self-interest. None of us is free unless all of us are free. Good luck 🌻
by achrilock
If only all lives meant as much to everyone as Israeli lives. But of course, as we all have seen, they do not.
by achrilock
There are forces in all three places, Iran, Israel, and the US, who would like to see a conflict like this really jump off, though. If you want to prevent a wider war, it’s those factions you should be watching, not the sky. As for me, I’m idly chillin’ with a brew in the ‘bite each other’s dicks off loool’ camp.
by achrilock
There is an intellectual, tactical argument to be made for electing the worst possible leaders, including and especially Trump, in any electoral contest.
There’s the socio-procedural argument that Joe Biden and the Democrats betrayed their base and the people on so many issues, returning to the old neoliberal oppressions, handing the country to foreign governments, banks, police, and Wall Street, at the expense of those who placed them in office, and betrayal must be punished, lest it lead to further betrayals.
There is also the more broad perspective of the prospects of the system itself. If a system is not serving you and ‘waiting it out’ is not an option, then it stands to reason that your goal should be to disrupt and damage that system to its breaking point. The oligarchy uses system shocks as tools and weapons repeatedly. Should their victims deny themselves this same option? Electoral politics cannot and will not save us, but, if leveraged appropriately, they could help us defeat our oppressors.
The counterargument is, of course, a moral one, that voting for such candidates would ‘feel wrong.’ That harm would come as a result. But I would suggest that the groups who would face oppression under such circumstances are already facing that oppression simply by different, supposedly ‘cleaner’ hands. Or, perhaps that figures like Trump ‘foster authoritarianism.’ But, so does the congress and the Biden White House, each and every day. There is little practical difference, except impressions.
People like Trump break systems of planned domination between states. They corrupt and destabilize the domestic state itself, forcing factions that would otherwise oppress the people to oppose these internally destabilizing gambits. Most importantly they demonstrate, openly, honestly, practically, and in real time, the hypocrisy of the neoliberal global order because they lack the knack for smooth dishonesty of their political rivals. They cultivate massive, intense anti-hierarchical sentiment.
In short, if the oligarchy is at war with itself this presents opportunities for subjects of global capital and empire. It saps resources they would ordinarily use to oppress the people. It disrupts their organizational structures and alliances. Yes there is indeed a strong strategic argument to be made for helping collapse along. The people have no use for that which does not serve them and their interests. Why deny ourselves the indirect assistance of the best monsters that power has to offer?
by achrilock
Follow your grandfathers’ ways of thinking and their policies, and you will end up with a copy of the world they made, unjust and unstable as it ever was, and without the excess energy and time they had. America traded a rambling reactionary for a rambling reactionary, each as problematic as the other and both dedicated to bringing back the dying, dysfunctional world that old white westerners see as the glory days. For the world to survive and thrive, all empires, that whole worldview, must die.
by achrilock
The western press used OJ Simpson’s bullshit to cover up a genocide in the 90s, too.
by achrilock
I don’t see any beauty in it. None at all. Greatest crime ever committed, this existence, and finding and killing God is the only justice to be had. But, since that is most definitely beyond our reach at present, and since most of you are too weak in mind and character to even consider it, the next best thing is for us to kill each other and then ourselves. Just to show the bitch that it isn’t the boss of us. All of my smiles are false, rose-colored filters for the many children who surround me.