Friendly Reminder That This Photo Happened, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Just a friendly reminder that this photo happened. For the record this is the only image anyone should ever use when sharing any information having to do with Jeff Bezos; I don’t care if it’s about Whole Foods stocks or a new series on Amazon Prime.

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I feel like we don’t talk enough about how there are flying death robots constantly dropping explosives on civilians from the sky but all the news is about Trump tweeting mean things about Obama.

I also feel like if there were flying death robots constantly dropping explosives on American civilians from the sky, the news would not be about Trump tweeting mean things about Obama.

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Watching liberals trying to feign enthusiasm about Biden is like watching a gay Republican trying to get an erection for his wife.

“Ooh yeah, I’m totally into this! This is so hot to me, yeah!”

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It will never stop being fall-to-the-floor laughcry hilarious that the US has an evil idiot president who can’t form a coherent sentence and exacerbated a deadly pandemic, and the only answer has been a fake Russia scandal, a fake impeachment, and a candidate with holes in his brain.

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I used to say capitalism is making us all crazy and driving us to extinction, but then some smart person on the internet totally owned me by saying I should move to Venezuela.

Touché my clever fellow. Touché.

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People who are still wearing war propaganda goggles are often shocked that I am fine with saying things that are offensive to US military members. This is because I don’t see them as some magical class of special people. When you take off those goggles, you won’t either.

They’re just people with jobs. Of course they’re not the ones primarily responsible for starting wars, but they absolutely do facilitate the imperialist agendas of an insatiable war machine. They’re not “heroes”, they’re not defending anyone’s freedom, and their employer is evil. The only purpose all that “blah blah our brave men and women in uniform” bullshit serves is ensuring that there will always be more young bodies to throw into the gears of the war machine. It’s a toxic viewpoint which serves no one but powerful sociopaths.

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People often argue against my criticisms of US warmongering by citing World War 2, blissfully unaware that having to reach all the way back to the cusp of living memory to find an example of a US war that could arguably be justified proves my position right and theirs wrong.

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“You shouldn’t knock QAnon people, Caitlin, we want the same things and we’re on the same team. Now do as the 8chan anon says and place blind faith in the president of the United States.”

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QAnon people would be way less annoying if they weren’t all also suffering from the delusion that they are well-informed.

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Money is power. Power is relative. Sociopaths seek money to obtain wealth/power and are incentivized to bring down the relative wealth/power of everyone else. This is why the saying “a rising tide lifts all boats” doesn’t work in real life; someone’s drilling holes in all the other boats.

In a system of capitalism/competition, sociopaths always win, since they’re the ones who are willing to do anything to get ahead (a problem made worse by the fact that wealth kills empathy). Once they’re ahead they’re motivated to keep everyone else down. The narrative that competition and the rat race uplifts everyone is necessarily false, because the rats who climb to the top of the rope have every incentive to cut it behind them. Everything they value is offered as an incentive to keep everyone else from succeeding.

Capitalists argue the real problem is too much government, which plutocrats can manipulate to gain more power. But even if we eliminated government altogether and went full ancap, wealth would still give you a huge power edge and power would still be relative, maintaining this same dynamic. A very wealthy person will necessarily have more power than someone with very little wealth, regardless of how much government you have.

It’s impossible to design a system where one can obtain way more wealth than anyone else and not be incentivized to, and capable of, sabotaging everyone behind them to expand their own relative power. Some sort of collaborative model is the only way our species survives.

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Space colonization will never happen and can never happen. People mistakenly believe it’s possible for the same reason we’re killing our environment: we egotistically imagine that we are separable from the ecosystemic context in which we evolved.

The closest we’ve ever come to space colonization is glorified scuba expeditions, where supplies are brought in from our native environment. And this is as close as we’ll get (with perhaps some relative advancement), because the human organism will never be a separate entity. The closest we’ll ever come is extending our ecosystem a bit beyond its natural boundaries by carrying finite parts of it out with us.

Space colonization isn’t impossible due to some limitation on the potential of technological innovation, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what the human organism is and its relationship to its ecosystem. People believe space colonization is possible because they believe, erroneously, that we’re separate from earth in some way.

We’re not separate from the planet, and we never will be. We’re connected to the ecosystemic context in which we evolved in innumerable highly complex ways. You have an entire ecosystem in your guts with its own relationship with the outer ecosystem, to name one of many possible examples.

Believing you can use technology to extract a human organism and send it to a separate space colony with its own artificial ecosystem is like believing you can extract a ripple from the pond in which it’s appearing, or believing technology will someday enable your shadow to run around separately from your body. We are just not nearly as separate and separable as conventional minds imagine.

The unspoken assumption behind the infinite growth required by capitalism is that we can expand into space and explore the stars, and we just can’t. That’s a delusion arising from a fundamental misperception of what a human organism is. We’re destroying our home like idiots while looking to space for salvation, and we simply will never live there.

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Another dumb thing rich people talk about is uploading our minds onto computers to obtain immortality and survive an apocalyptic world. Science doesn’t even know what consciousness is or how it works, but they imagine they can put theirs into a machine somehow.

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Believing people can learn to self-govern in healthy collaboration with each other and with their ecosystem is infinitely more sane and rational than believing the world’s problems will be solved by greedy tech oligarchs.

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The ego says “You can’t dispense with me; I am you, I am your true nature, without me you will fail.”

Capitalism says “You can’t dispense with me; I am you, I am your true nature, without me you will fail.”

Both are liars.

Both are impostors.

Both are sickness posing as health.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/friendly-reminder-that-this-photo-happened-and-other-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix-6c5f11f9b5a0

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