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Today in dystopia, the military-industrial complex is reassuring investors that the wars will indeed be endless.
Asked about concerns over falling defense stocks in a recent interview on CNBC, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet replied, “Investors need to know and understand that this demand is not fleeting — it’s permanent.”
In 2023 Taiclet called Washington’s soaring military budget “as good an outcome as our industry or our company could ask for.”
These people are such evil freaks. War profiteering should be fucking illegal.
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A Washington Post photojournalist was savagely beaten by a gang of Israeli settlers who were attacking Palestinian villagers on Friday, reportedly with the support of the IDF.
The reporter, Heidi Levine, said her assailants “just kept kicking me and kicking me, like probably 50 times” while she was wearing a clearly marked PRESS vest.
This is why everyone hates Israel now. They just can’t seem to stop themselves from doing evil things in broad daylight.
The western political/media class are always making up bogus excuses for Israel’s plummeting worldwide approval rating, from antisemitism to TikTok to Iranian propaganda, but ultimately public opinion of Israel is falling because there’s a glaring contradiction between Israel’s PR interests and the way Israelis actually conduct themselves.
In other words, Israel’s PR problem is caused by Israeli behavior. They can increase their propaganda budget as much as they like and western hasbarists can churn out all the narrative spin in the world, but it still won’t cancel out what happens when you just film Israelis doing Israeli things.
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A judge in Brazil’s top electoral court ruled on Thursday that Meta has been algorithmically favoring right wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro over President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, instructing the social media titan to cease its election interference and begin providing equal treatment to both candidates.
Meta’s own employees have acknowledged election interference favoring Bolsonaro over Lula, as Reuters reports:
“Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that the Instagram accounts of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were hindered by restrictions during the country’s election, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday, citing messages it reviewed.
“The messages also acknowledged the platform recommended the profile of challenger Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his WhatsApp channel, according to the report.”
This Zuckerberg scale-tilting is a reminder of why right wing “populism” has been so successful: it is able to posture as a revolutionary anti-establishment movement while still retaining the backing of western oligarchs and empire managers. It gets the votes that come with opposing the status quo without actually opposing the status quo. It gets the popularity of revolutionary politics with none of the cost.
Capitalism leads to dissatisfaction, so some charismatic wingnut stands up and goes “You know, the problem is that we haven’t capitalismed hard enough! Those fat cats at the top don’t want you do know this, but what we actually need is MORE capitalism! MORE wealth for the wealthy! MORE authoritarianism! MORE abuse of the marginalized! And we should probably also send way more money to Israel for some reason!”
It’s a complete scam from top to bottom, but it works. It exacerbates all the problems we’d already been seeing because doing more of the same stuff that created the problems isn’t going to solve the problems, but the human mind is very hackable, and people are easily duped. These Trumpian fraudsters are able to ride popular sentiments of discontent into elected office with the backing of all the plutocratic parasites who’ve been leeching off the voters this entire time. We’ve been seeing it in the United States, we’ve been seeing it in Brazil, we’ve been seeing it in Argentina, Italy, India, and in surging iterations of the same scam in various political factions all around the world.
The question is, what comes next? What comes after people see through the scam and realize their beloved Trumps and Bolsonaros were working for the same establishment they despised and bolstering the status quo they’d been suffering under this whole time? Whatever the backlash is, we can be sure the empire will try to find some way to manipulate it and steer yet another generation back into support for the capitalist world order.
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Sinesto on Twitter asks, “Hi Caitlin. You are brilliant on Palestine, but I still don’t get why you are not sympathetic to the people of Ukraine?”
Well Sinesto I am sympathetic to the people of Ukraine. That’s why I want a negotiated settlement to end the war, which is what polls say the people of Ukraine want, rather than continuing to force them to keep fighting and dying in a war they don’t support like the people of Washington want to do.
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I refuse to even think about claims that chatbots are conscious beings whose rights must be protected until I live in a society where all humans are treated as conscious beings whose rights must be protected.
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Basically there are three different groups:
1. People who know things are fucked but are too busy, exhausted and propaganda-addled to oppose the status quo.
2. People who benefit from status quo fuckery.
3. People who know things are fucked and fight the status quo.
Group 1 is the largest. Group 3 is the smallest.
Right now those of us in the third group can’t do anything about the exhaustion and busyness of the people in the first group, but we CAN do something about how confused and propagandized they are. The most important thing you can do to help nudge us toward revolution at this juncture in history is therefore to inform, educate and spread awareness to counteract all the status quo indoctrination keeping public consciousness away from revolutionary politics.
By doing this we can start moving people from Group 1 into Group 3. Once Group 3 outnumbers Group 2, things will start moving very fast.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.
Feature image is a screen grab from CNBC (fair use).
