Dear Conspiracy Theorists...

...I agree wholeheartedly that the government and big business are up to no good and are essentially using the virus as a biological weapon. We have a lot in common, and I genuinely hope you don't take this post too harshly. I don't mean to be insulting, but you have the facts entirely wrong.

All this stuff about the virus being a big load- It's not true. The virus is very, very real.

I've read the fake documents pushed by Qanon types, and the reason they are so obviously bullshit is that they all seem to adhere to the same supervillain logic. 

Fact check: High level criminals, governmental or corporate, do not refer ominously to "The Plan" and do not gloat openly about the virus being profitable with arch quotation marks like a fucking supervillain. Nor do they refer to "The unquestioning nature of the masses" and ominous "plans" for "Global Finance and Mass Inflation" or whatever.

In fact, high level criminals are boringly banal. They hide most of their crimes in plain sight behind a wall of boring text so laden with jargon and euphemism that it's almost impossible to decrypt what the hell they're going on about. They talk about "derogation from the customary workings of market‐​based capitalism", "Trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights" and "Certain Provisions of the TRIPS Agreement", not "mwwaaaahahahahaaaa then we'll kill everyone and the world will be MINE!"

Also most of the actual documents that reveal their Eichmann-esque thought processes are publicly available. And they're horrific enough. They don't need a leet haxxor to reveal the "troof", people don't bother reading that stuff because it's so boring! Example:

https://www.cato.org/free-trade-bulletin/unnecessary-proposal-wto-waiver-intellectual-property-rights-covid-19-vaccines

Why, one might almost think that conspiracy theories such as the one about Bill Gates putting microchips in the vaccine were chaff to cover the real scandal: Uncle Bill is personally preventing vaccines getting to people in poor countries so that pharamceutical companies can make even MORE money.

I don't want to be insulting, but there's no nice way to say this: Stop watching capeshit movies and get off Facebook, they're rotting your brain. And if you want a conspiracy, a real one, take a look at this shit:

https://thediplomat.com/2021/06/why-are-indians-so-angry-at-bill-gates/

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/

https://mg.co.za/coronavirus-essentials/2021-01-30-bill-gates-big-pharma-and-entrenching-the-vaccine-apartheid/

Now that's a real horror, that's happening in the real world: Millions of people in developing countries - most of the worlds' population, in fact- are being held hostage so that pharma companies can make even more money. The system has begun to feed on death - and if you're an anti-vaxxer, or one of the countless conspiracy buffs making it all about you, you're not resisting - you're an integral part of it.

 Have some empathy for others and use a little logic. What do you think has happened to all the people who have died? The death toll is in the millions now - What do you think they died of, if they didn't die of COVID? If they didn't die, where do you think they went? Hillary Clinton can only fit so many people in her sex dungeons.

Again, the truth is boringly banal, and all the more horrific for it: Our leaders don't give a shit about us or anyone else: all they care about is their belief that making money is more important than saving lives. If they can make more money by developing treatments for COVID than by distributing a vaccine, they'll do that. 

Have you ever wondered why the anti-vaxx movement is joined at the hip to the far Right? Vaccines are the most efficient form of medicine ever developed, and that's a problem for capitalists: They don't "cure" disease, they stop you getting sick in the first place! 

Better for Big Pharma that the disease spreads uncontrollably, then it can be cured using free market techniques like charging people an arm and a leg for medication - like they do in America, only far, far worse.

By trying to keep people from getting vaccinated you're helping the virus spread, and that helps the system because it makes it more likely the vaccine proof mutations will breed, and more "cures" will be needed- and pharama companies make so much more cash from those that it's unbelievable.

As it turns out, however, our fearless leaders can't get away with leaving us in the West unvaccinated (Trump tried it, and look what happened to him) - but they can certainly hold up distribution to poor countries. The fact that this is going to lead to millions more deaths and probably leave COVID endemic is incidental to them - the system of "intellectual property" is more important to them than people, and always will be.

Do you see how self-centred and naive you've been, conspiracy theorists? You've been doing your enemies' work for them all along. 

Conspiracy theories are just that - theories. They lack hard evidence and they make no sense. Ask yourself a question: Do you believe this stuff because it sounds good and feels right, or because it makes sense?

Thinking for yourself doesn't mean that you fall for a pack of lies because it makes you feel good - it means that you think before you believe some random made-up stuff off 4chan, every bit as much as you think before you absorb the prattlings of the "mainstream media".

By all means, think for yourself, don't take everything the media says on trust.  But for God's sake: Think. Because Social Media and internet posts are also media, and they gets exploited by people with even fewer scruples than mainstream media. 

Think about anonymously produced stuff: Anyone can make this content, for any reason. It doens't have to be true - nobody loses their job if an item turns out to be false, there's no scandal, nobody has a reputation to uphold or a career to watch out for - it's a complete free for all.A lot of it is just assholes talking shit for the fun of it. Other stuff is guys farming for clicks. And there's no reason to believe a word of it.

(PS yes this is another ex-Reddit comment, expanded massively for a general audience)

Colston: Correcting some misunderstandings

 (This is an old Reddit post, with slight edits and a little extra at the start)

It's a year since the Colston statue was toppled, starting a transatlantic iconoclast movement that, some argue, went a bit nuts. (At one point someone even started a petition against a statue of Ghandi ffs!) I would like to set the record straight as to how it all started, because a lot of people now describe this movement as some kind of ultra-woke, cancel culture nonsense, when in fact, it started as a VERY good thing indeed.

In many ways, this was a very local affair. Here in Bristol, England, half the city is named after Colston - streets, schools, even pubs and office towers... And the man was a horrible shit. A mass murderer who ran a corporation called The Royal African Company - a company which trafficked in human misery and made fortunes out of mass murder and slavery, a man whose crimes rival those of any Nazi - but which he gets away with because he did it long ago. OK, he did it long ago, does that mean we have to deify the bastard?

Local businessmen had erected the statue and made him into a city father over a century after his death - and continued to defend him well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Year after year you'd hear these bloated borgeous scumbags defending a man who belonged in an unmarked grave following execution, not on a plinth in the centre of town. The council did nothing to address the widely held issues people had with the guy, and eventually, local people took matters into their own hands.

You can't understand the Colston affair without understanding Bristol's local politics. The city has a sizeable black community and a long history of inter-racial solidarity dating back to World War 2, and the powers that be, from the Merchant Venturers (dodgy local freemason types who kept bits of Colstons' corpse around to worship) to our useless centrist council, did sod all about it. To understand what Colston meant to black people, it was as if they'd kept a statue of Eichmann up in the middle of Warsaw "because history".

Bristol was in many ways built on slavery and black people know this. It's part of local black culture to curse our status as a "slave port" - especially Afro-Carribeans, the literal descendants of those enslaved by Colston. There has been the bare minimum of official acknowlegments of the citys' part in this crime against humanity, until recently the only acknowlegements of it were: a tiny plaque in an out of the way part of the Docks, a mural nobody noticed, and a footbridge patronizingly named after some bastards' house slave - this in a country that is obsessed with history!

I backed the toppling of Colston and still do. It was a great moment for my city, where people came together in solidarity to do something that had needed to be done for a long, long time. This wasn't "cancel culture", this was grass roots, democracy at work. People had tried everything, and nobody did anything about it. And then one day... they did.

This isn't America (thank God). Colston wasn't George Washington, he was a grubby, nasty piece of shit who would be hunted down like a dog if he did what he did today. He didn't deserve a statue, he deserves to be used as a toilet. Yeeting him into the docks was the best thing that Bristol did in a long time. Nothing "stupidpol" about it - quite the opposite, that day there was an incredible atmosphere of solidarity and love, I haven't seen anything like it before or since. Please don't assume we're as stupid and ahistorical as Americans - we know exactly what we're doing.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Normies VS NEETS: Why do people hate the unemployed?

(This is another repost of an overly long Reddit comment that was too good to lose. Might put it in a magazine or something later)

Very Short Answer: Resentment.

 

Short Answer: They want to be like us, but they don't have the guts. It's easier to resent those who have escaped the system than to resent the system itsself.

 

Long TL;DR Answer: Resentment. Also they just like having someone to dunk on. If you're a wagie it's a bit like being a woman in medieval culture - you're looked up to in theory, but in practice you are treated like dirt. You're essential to society, which literally needs you to reproduce itsself - yet you're society's bitch.

 

It is a peculiar quirk of the human mind that it likes to take short cuts. The mind concentrates on what appears in front of it, that's how magic tricks work. In a slave society, people see slavery and subjugation as normal - even their own! It's cope - if you can't escape, you make a virtue out of necessity and come to see your own subjugation as not only normal but necessary. (Examples: Black Republicans. Working class Tories. Female ISIS recruits.)

 

So the system enslaves people, but people don't resent those who enslave them, they admire them - instead, they resent free people, whom they see as "unfairly" escaping the "natural" conditions of bondage.

 

Thus, if you're a wagie, when someone comes along who is the same as you yet has managed to escape slavery, you're gonna hate those fuckers.

And much like medieval women, who fetishized "purity" and "motherhood" (because they had no choice) and despised "prostitutes" and "witches", wage-slaves fetishize "hard work" and "productivity", and also despise the "lazy" and "antisocial" NEETs.

 

Because NEETs, like the witches and whores of ye olden times, represent what society's slave class wants yet can never have - freedom.

 

Look at what they say about us "They don't work yet they got better stuff than what we have!". Of course this isn't true, what they actually resent is that we don't really care about having what they have. We know what's really valuable - our right to choose to do what we want with our lives.

Medieval witches flew around on broomsticks - a powerful symbol of magic and freedom. We're the witches of industrial society, flying away from their prison-world on broomsticks of imagination!

 

And that's why they hate us.

On The Great American CRT Controversy (not old video monitors)

(This is an old Reddit comment with an extra bit at the start for context)

Critical Race Theory is not complicated. It's basically a well-meaning, liberal attempt of American academics and activists to come to terms with the racist atrocities of the past (including the recent past).

It has a lot going for it, sure. However, it probably does have to be taught with some delicacy; in any event, liberal education did exist before it, and it will exist again whether this particular approach gets binned or not. Racism is too big a part of American society to just be ignored, the question is whether it gets taught in this particular way.

 In the same way, conservative education (if you can call it that) will continue to exist whatever the outcome of the current controversy. (unfortunately)

Rightwingers want to ban Critical Race Theory because CRT is unpopular, especially with their base.

 

Banning it is an easy win - they'd be stupid not to come out against it.

Meanwhile liberals like CRT because it is very popular with their base. Promoting it is an easy win - they'd be stupid not be for it.

 

It's like when politicians in Japan argue about teaching WWII atrocities 80 years after the fact, or when Russian politicians rehabilitate Stalin, while our own Prime Minister is a big Winston Churchill fan because it only annoys the far Left and Churchill is still a beloved figure in England. (He's even on our £5 note!)

 

Rightwingers are into national pride and all that shit, and their base love 'em for it - and it's easier and cheaper than actually doing something useful, like I dunno, cracking down on gangsters or fixing the economy.

 

In the same way, your leaders don't have the ability to solve your country's systemic and ongoing problems, inculding very serious matters like eco collapse and economic stagnation, partly because they're so corrupt and sclerotic, partly because they're constantly obstructing each other, so they argue about this stuff instead. 

 

It's a displacement activity , like scratching your head.

So much to post about, thank god nobody reads this shit

 So let's do a quick run-down of wot I reckon will happen:

Nobody will be punished for the U.S. coup attempt.

Nobody high-up, that is. Obviously Kyle and Karen Assault-Weapon McTaserBalls are gonna get the book thrown at them. That's what they're for - they're basically cover for the attempted coup.

Trump will get away with it, and so will his confederates. As a result, couping your way to power will be seen as risk-free, and there will be another attempt, either four years from now or eight years from now. It won't end well.

The Coronavirus will probably go on for a good few years.

Not enough people will take the vaccine for it to provide herd immunity. As a result, the virus will mutate until the vaccine is no longer effective. It might even become more deadly, though I think it is as likely to become more transmissible and less deadly.

The post-Coronavirus world will be vicious for Westerners.

Westerners are used to being rich and in charge. This is now over. The post-pandemic world will be divided into the places that handled it well, and the places that didn't. 

Those that didn't will become the new "second-world", relegated to developing country status. Our economic ideology means that we will never be able to pull ourselves out of it, because the rich will call in their loans long before we can finish the job of fixing the economy. After all, unrestricted pillage and corruption is working fine for them.

It will be a horrible new world of vicious competition for resources, particularly for ordinary people. I just can't see the rich relaxing their stranglehold on democracy now they have so much power; they are able to brainwash people into going out to work in the middle of a pandemic, hell, they (or more likely, the Russians) even get people to turn down vaccinations! Which brings me to

Politics is over, and so is this blog.

I probably won't be blogging anymore, at least not on this page. The situation is just so utterly fucked, I don't see politics having any power to change anything for the better anymore. Politics is over, it was over as soon as people lost the ability to think for themselves. 

Political freedom only means anything if you have free will, and we don't have free will anymore.  Instead, we have become a society of meat robots prey to weaponized memes, conspiracy theory bullshit, and out-and-out brainwashing.

How did Mander describe us? "A mass of Manchurian Candidates", indeed.

Fuck that noise.

We're about to kiss goodbye to 20 years of peace.

Well, there goes the Good Friday agreement. Although it's touted as a tabloid-friendly attack on asylum seekers and victims of contemporary war crimes (ie, those committed in Iraq and Afghanistan), you can bet they'll also prevent the prosecution of British soldiers for other war crimes - including those committed during the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The GFA specifically rests on the existence of strong human rights laws. This is because before human rights laws existed, the British had a terrible habit of murdering Irish people in the street.

Needless to say, this is the stuff of which insurgencies are made.

When I was a kid, IRA bombings and bomb threats were so common that it was a regular feature of urban life to have the bomb squad rock up and cordon off random buildings that had been targeted. Every night on the news you'd see reports on the latest from NI - people shot, blown up, and tortured by the security forces and / or terrorists. It wasn't like the War On Terror - this was normalized, completely routine.

Nowadays, terrorists will be able to bomb us from the air. A couple of drones and that sense of security, of being on the safe side of a wall, will be history. Then the cops will get tooled up and start blasting people again.

It starts with society deciding that certain people don't matter. It ends up with a world where nobody matters.

Leftist failings and the possibility of Anarcho-Social Democracy

Some problems and a possible solution

OK, I know I'm always going on about this, but really...

WHY ARE OUR GUYS SO DUMB?

Take this article for example. Let me show you why it is a stupid article.

1. She allows herself to be photographed looking like she has just been sucking on a delicious lemon.

This really is a beginner's mistake. Presentation is vital; would you read anything written by someone who constantly scowls disapprovingly at you?

2. She mistakes privileges for rights and rights for privileges.

The title says it all (and yes, I have said the same thing on this very blog). But that is wrong. It is bad framing. Being alive should never be considered a privilege, and as soon as you do so, you lose.

Is there such a thing as "white privilege"? Well, yes, you could put it that way, perhaps, although it is grammatically incorrect, at least in white-majority countries. 

But it is not helpful to frame it in this way, especially when you are speaking in terms of life and death. I repeat: Being alive should never be considered a privilege; modern juristictions and successful activists speak instead of "human rights". This article mentions the phrase "privilege" 11 times. It mentions "rights" not at all. Although at the bottom of the page, it says "all rights reserved."

Perhaps it was  bad interview. If someone had printed an interview with me and it came accross like that, with its sour portrait and its endless scolding of an entire group of people, I would ask to have it taken down. If they refused, I would then approach a lawyer.

Claudia Rankine clearly isn't a stupid person. I am sure they don't hand out PhDs to morons. But intellectuals, especially American intellectuals, seem especially prone to behaving like idiots. It's as if their intelligence works against itsself; they get so wrapped up in signifiers and concocting new forms of jargon that have to be explained at length, that they forget that their function as activists isn't to show everyone how clever they are and flex their intellectual muscles, it's to help with "the work", to stop these horrific human rights abuses in their tracks.

Again, America is a huge part of the problem. Americans have a really hard time understanding the concept of universal rights, "the Commons" - something we all share and all have as a birthright. Even though universal human rights were supposedly enshrined in their Constitution, that document is the oldest that I know of that confuses rights with privileges - notoriously, the right to have a gun is enshrined before the right to a fair trial, the right not to be enslaved, the right to vote, the rights of women to vote, the right to life itsself, and even the right to your own property, practically a religion over there, is not considered as important as the right to bear arms. Everywhere else in the world, having a gun is like having a car, it's a dangerous weapon and in the wrong hands can kill even the person who owns it, so they are subject to stringent controls and licensing. Not so in the USA.

Americans also don't understand the concept of wealth held in common, even abstract concepts such as human rights, because to them everything is private. They think that if one person gains, another must lose. Everything is a zero-sum game to them. So that explains that- the capitalistic culture of the US is a form of ideology, in the Slavoj Zizek sense, which tends to taint everything a person does. To use the language of the Social Justice activists, the problem is systemic and unconcious.

But that doesn't explain why the Left has been so stupid in the past.

I've been either a left-wing activist or a keen supporter or at least a sympathetic observer of the Left for thirty years. I went to my first protest in 1990; I went to my last protest in 2019.

Since then I've seen big wins - like the Poll Tax campaign, gay rights, and local victories for squatters and the homeless - morph into terrible, horrible losses.

I've watched the Left, or as they were then, the environmental movement, screw up in the 1990s. As a result, the environment is fucked.

I've watched the Left screw up the anti-war movement in the 2000s. As a result, the government can basically bomb the shit out of anyone they feel like.

I've watched the Left screw up the anti-capitalist movement in the late noughties and early 2010s. As a result, capitalism has, as Umair Haque puts it, gone full Soviet - the government spends endless amounts of cash propping up the stock market and big business while the people literally go hungry on breadlines.

Now the Left are screwing up on human rights and ethnic minority issues, as a result, the American police are a literal death squad and racist attitudes are entrenched at all levels of society, and not just in the USA. The news is grim for sexual minorities as well; even many Leftists of the previous generation are openly hostile to Transgender people, including people whom I know personally.

This isn't just an American problem - I've watched all this happen in the UK as well. I've watched as black activists framed their cause in terms of resentment for whites, I've seen anti-capitalism degenerate into a pointless conspiracy theory jerk-off, I've observed the anti-war movement rapidly turn into an anti-Semitic bandwagon of sympathy for terrorists, and I've been there when environmentalists sat around and got stoned, got in peoples' way, or just smashed things up for the cameras.

It has driven me to despair. I no longer believe the Left will be relevant in my lifetime except as a straw man for the Right to knock down, a sort of controlled opposition.

I think the only hopeful strategy remaining is to elect social-democratic and liberal parties (which the Left also oppose unless they're in charge of them). We can then leverage our protests to get what we want from them, as they are more likely to resort to reform than the Right (who simply repress protest with brutal violence).

ANARCHO-SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

This is the meaning of Anarcho-Social Democracy. "Anarcho-", which means "going to demonstrations, drinking a lot, listening to punk rock and dressing all in black", means you're not confined to any particular leftwing party or ideology. This decentralization has disadvantages, but the great advantage is that it is hard for any one group or party to monopolize power. It also means that anyone, anywhere, can join in, from liberals to socialists to sympathetic capitalists (depending on the issue of course). Anarchism is, generally speaking, inclusive.

Social democracy, because, well, you have a vote, it's the only formal power you have, so you might as well use it to elect a somewhat more sympathetic government than we would have otherwise. It's not much, granted, but it exists and you'd be stupid not to excercise this right.