37 Comments
Sep 1, 2022·edited Sep 1, 2022

Putin is likened to Hitler, and consequently, our (currently only at the proxy level) war against Russia likened to WWIi because that happens to be the most convenient narrative for pushing for war and empire.

They say that for a man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, however, the company that sells hammers wants to convince us that everything is a nail.

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World War II or III

World War II was not our Greatest War,

When the Allies destroyed Hitler and fascism!

It was the worst destruction ever perpetrated,

On people and the planet,

Ending in a Cold War stalemate,

Endlessly building bigger weapons,

Too terrible to use!

How callous, reckless and wrong for the Allies,

To warn, “Putin is just like Hitler!”,

And must be stopped before he invades Europe!

After Hiroshima, another war is M.A.D.

We Sheeple are being led ever closer

To the apocalypse 😱

With complete disdain for

Diplomacy, détente, or deescalation 😢

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"I'm so glad I don't live in a country like Russia or China where people are forbidden to criticize their government. I live in the west where I'm free to criticize Russia and China all I want."

That line had me in stitches.

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I love eastern philosophy, but it isn't an either /or proposition. We think on many levels. Great to turtle-up on a regular basis, but meditation is just like any drug: don't let it control you. Love the hell out of everyone on one level, and on another, recognize the enemy. There is only one way when it comes to systems, and Rosa Luxembourg pointed to it more than a hundred years ago: socialism or barbarism. The 1% or civilization. Not both. And barbarism and the 1% VS civilization have the edge right now, quite a large one too.

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Bleeding the coffers is war on its own peoples. Inflation which results , a theft from your pocket book. Ukraine is part of a return to feudalism. Carving up productive land to the barons of control requires a war to displace the people or green policies to make farming unproductive. Voila. The war on the family more division of the "enemy" we the new serf.. you are an interesting one. Supporting the policies of the wef objectives while criticizing the empire. And thereby devaluing the nation state. I think you're a clever plant in the substacks.

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Weapons Drive For Peace... I think I know what happened to all our local peace demos now. After February of this year, the neolib/bluemaga types fell for the propaganda and felt uncomfortable saying stop selling arms to Nazis. Talk about all the "noise in the head" these confused souls have to deal with!

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"The word courage tends to evoke images of heroes and daring rescues, but in real life courageous people mostly use that attribute for confronting uncomfortable truths within themselves." Spot on. More people must develop this kind of courage and fast if we are going to make it as a species.

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WOW! - Poignant, concise & brilliant as usual. I equate "woke" as the new "hippie" or as a parallel "conspiracy theorist" - these are all Establishment monikers used to dismiss an individual outright - like calling someone crazy - when you label them with slander, then you can dismiss them entirely - much easier to label than to work at understanding their point of view or message. With "woke", there is so much purposeful baggage attached to this term stemming from a cult movie "They Live" - you're woke, you think Lizards from Mars have taken over. Woke folks are the problem in the west??? Really, is it the woke folks that are the Global threat??? Or is it War profiteers & the puppet class of Politicians who are Propagandizing & Manufacturing consent for a Proxy War with Russia? Bifurcation of the citizenry is always an Establishment's aim. The more divided the population is - the easier they are to manipulate, a population's strength in numbers is eliminated by the Ruling Class and the people in our society wind up arguing with each other ensuring status quo. The constant categorizing and pigeon holing of people in this manner is purposeful by the Corporate Class as well as the Political Class = Team Trump/Team Biden doing nothing more than creating followers in a cult that wind up believing anything their dear leader says or excusing their many criminal acts.

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The fact about who is bleeding who dry is coming to an end. BRICS will bleed us dry and that is coming sooner than they think. The western economies are debt based sinkholes. Corporations are up to their eyeballs in debt despite record profits during the pandemics. The recent debt forgiveness (student loans) is the weak attempt to save the banks from collapse. Our money based on derivatives and complex monetary pyramid schemes are an illusion to real wealth.

BRICS economies are driven by fuel, food and commodities. They dig by hand and hoe. We use machines and fuel. No money and no fuel will mean we have nothing. The soy boy, neutered males we have raised will be kitty cats on any battlefield.

The Ukraine war was a major misstep by the elite and we will starve in our million dollar condos, freezing to death.

Get back to basics fast. The locomotive is out of control and off the cliff dragging us with it.

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"The difference between western philosophy and eastern philosophy is the difference between a poet who knows how to diddle words to craft a clever turn of phrase and a poet who actually has something real to say. The east plunged to the depths while the west bobbed on the surface."

But this very observation is western 'philosophy' !

There's a lot of humans in the world. Eastern Western is a tabloid trope. US imperialism is an existential threat to us all. Mainstream mass culture is commodified propaganda. It's trash.

But... Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Brontë, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Rilke, Tsvetaeva, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Kerouac, Baldwin. Not trash.

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Some very obvious truths couched in a vile diatribe of hatred and resentment. Nothing positive, nothing of hope nothing of a solution. Miserable is the description that comes to mind. You obviously have talent, determination and a desire to share your opinion. Opinions are cheap and numerous, solutions are difficult and require compromise by all who wish for improvement. “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley is my prescription for a more positive viewpoint. Capitalism is unfair, corrupt and out of control, all other forms of organizing society are unfair, corrupt and lead to totalitarianism. The grass is seldom greener.

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Sep 1, 2022·edited Sep 1, 2022

"We're poppyfields in westmeath. Not only are we small, we are also stupid."

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When I first read this piece, I thought, "Caitlin's endorsing Hitler!" Later, upon rereading, it appears that she isn't exactly endorsing Hitler, but of course she's endorsing those other socialists, the communists, with sentences like: "[Rightist] thought shapers just changed the definition of "communism" to mean having a government and sometimes seeing a Pride flag." False.

I like Caitlin's writing because she is good for teaching people about propaganda. And she is incredibly vivid, which is what you get when you employ sweeping over-generalizations the way communists employed gulags, purges, propaganda, and nuclear tests. Her takedown of Western Philosophy is Exhibit A: in a few sentences, she dismisses Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, and everyone else. If she got any more sweeping, she'd take out carbon and oxygen as worthless atoms.

I'll keep reading her, though. She's vivid. I learn from her. She's taught me a lot. But I think her flirtation with history's mass murderers is really just some kind of a test to see which of her readers will stick with her, no matter what.

(P.S. I am trying to disagree respectfully. Responses that engage in sheer raw hatred will get ignored.)

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You state that opposition to wokeness may be “fueling the very thing you're trying to get rid of by providing evidence that there are all these hateful bigots who need to be forcefully opposed.”

I’m a fan of yours and seriously puzzled by this. You seem on the verge of defending wokeness, or whatever you think wokeness is, by means of the standard woke non-argument that people who have a problem with it must be driven by bigotry. This is seriously pathetic. There is no inconsistency whatsoever between anti-imperialism and anti-wokeness. These should reinforce each other. The imperialist shares deception, hypocrisy, exceptionalism, racism, narcissism and stupidity with the woke.

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