Crocodile Tears For Gaza While Backing Its Destruction: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It says so much about US politics that Biden’s most vulnerable political weak point is the fact that he’s sponsoring a genocide, but Republicans can’t attack him on that point because they support the genocide too.

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It’s amazing how fast the bill to ban TikTok is being shoved through by US lawmakers. This would easily be the single most significant act of direct government censorship in US history.

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Nothing’s more enraging than seeing the western officials who are making this genocide possible weep crocodile tears about how “heartbreaking” it is. You’re fucking doing it to them you shitstains! It’s like beating someone to death while sobbing about how tragic their untimely death will be.

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Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are quantifiably much, much, much worse than October 7. We’re begging the western press to give as much weight to the suffering inflicted upon Palestinians by the Gaza genocide as the suffering inflicted on Israelis by October 7, when in reality it deserves much, much more weight.

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We’re about two weeks out from seeing mass media reports like “Biden administration to begin airdropping child-sized coffins into Gaza to aid Palestinians in their unfortunate time of need.”

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Democrats: We stand for justice and equality and we oppose racism and oppression!

Palestinian: Oh so you oppose the genocide in Gaza then?

Democrats: Oh god no. No we meant, like, we want more Latinx landlords.

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Saying it’s racist and evil to criticize Zionists is like saying it’s racist and evil to criticize conservatives. It’s a fucking political ideology.

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The thing is we don’t know how to do this. We don’t know how to keep eight billion homo sapiens alive without destroying the ecosystem. We don’t know how eight billion humans can share the earth without wiping each other out via the armageddon weapons they invented. Without hurting, exploiting, oppressing and enslaving each other.

We’ve got some ideas about how this could be done, but we’ve never actually done it. In the extremely short amount of time this planet has had billions of humans on it, we’ve never come anywhere remotely close to figuring out how to avoid cataclysmic disaster and nightmarish dystopia. We’re still very much on that trajectory, and because of the competition-based systems we have in place, nothing is happening to steer us away.

So we are all — every single one of us — right now doing something that we don’t know how to do. We are living on this planet, but we don’t actually know how to. We are one of eight billion humans who don’t know how to sustain a world of eight billion humans. We’re in the water, but we don’t know how to swim.

And we could all probably use a little bit of humility about this. Everywhere we look we see pundits, politicians and thought leaders talking about what changes need to be made to our society and our world in confident-sounding voices, but none of them actually know. The very best of them have some educated guesses as to how we might start making the necessary changes to avoid various disasters, but since we haven’t even started making any real changes, they don’t actually know. We’re a bunch of lost little kids who can’t find their parents.

Obviously we need to learn how to swim, because these are the waters we were birthed into. I mean only to say here that our collective efforts to learn how to swim would probably be aided by a lot more curiosity about how swimming might actually occur and what it would actually look like, and a lot less confident-sounding bloviation from people who’ve never swam an inch in their lives.

A humble curiosity about this entirely unprecedented situation we’ve found ourselves in would probably serve our species well.

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/crocodile-tears-for-gaza-while-backing