JOHNSTONE

People who believe US military intervention solves problems are as dumb as flat-earthers but infinitely more destructive. It is always disastrous and it never achieves what its proponents claim it will achieve. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/15/us-intervention-is-never-ever-ever-the-solution/

They are living as kings on wealth they made by raping the planet we all live on, whose health we all depend on for survival, and because their mass media propaganda is so successful it hardly ever even occurs to anyone that they should have to pay for it. They take what they want and do as they please, at our expense, for free. They are spoiled little boys with flamethrowers.

The people who are leading us to armageddon are hailed as charitable and industrious job creators. Rob a man for money and they'll call you a thief. Rob a planet for money and they'll call you a philanthropist.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/our-rulers-have-all-the-power-and

Featured image by Maxpixel.

Freedom is not free. It takes billions of dollars worth of mass media propaganda to manufacture the illusion of freedom.

Reading by Tim Foley.

When US blockades on Cuba cause suffering, the suffering proves that socialism doesn't work. When US-backed blockades on Yemen cause suffering, it's an unfortunate and tragic accident of nature.

Reading by Tim Foley.

A military which can afford to spend trillions on a twenty-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making horrible people wealthy is a military that needs its budget slashed to ribbons.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article version: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/sunday-funny-pages-notes-from-the

But perhaps the most annoying thing about all the melodramatic garment-rending over how close the US Capitol came to being taken over by violent extremists is that the US Capitol has been under the control of violent extremists for a very long time already.

For all the fretting everyone has been doing about fascists and white supremacist groups, those are not the violent extremists posing the greatest threat and amassing the highest body count today. Neither are the communists. Neither are the anarchists. Neither are the radicalized Muslims, nor the fundamentalist Christians, nor the environmentalists, nor the incels. No, the most dangerous and deadly group of violent extremists in our day are adherents to the mainstream status quo politics of the US-centralized power alliance.

And it's not even close. Certainly many of the groups listed above are dangerous and undesirable, but they're not the ones raining explosives upon families around the world for power and profit. They're not the ones brandishing nuclear weapons with steadily increasing recklessness as they ramp up a new cold war against Russia and China. They're not the ones poisoning the air and the water and rapidly destroying the environment we all depend on for survival. They're not the ones enslaving humanity to a brutal, oppressive and exploitative global capitalist system which leaves far too many toiling for far too little when there's plenty for everyone. 

That would be the so-called "moderates" of the western empire, who in reality are anything but.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/violent-extremists-took-over-the

A big part of the problem with Yemen is that the photos of starving kids are too often captioned with "Ohh, look how sad" instead of "Your government is doing this on purpose."

Reading by Tim Foley.

The US government is not afraid that unauthorized publication of government secrets will lead to Americans being killed, it's afraid it will lead to their knowing the truth. The powerful understand that narrative control is everything, and that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on keeping the masses from having a lucid perception of what's really going on in the world. There is an unfathomable amount of power riding on their ability to continue doing this.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-assange-case-isnt-about-national

Compartmentalizing is when we mentally separate information or experience from our existing understanding of ourselves and our world and kind of sweep it under the carpet so we don't experience cognitive dissonance anymore. We don't delete it; the information is still there to be accessed if we want to, but it's placed in a separate file and treated as though it exists in a parallel alternate reality.

Compartmentalization sometimes comes into play when a wife discovers that her husband has been sexually molesting their child; she files the information away into a separate container, because the way that information would shatter her world if she held onto it is too frightening and the cognitive dissonance of holding both worlds at the same time too uncomfortable.

Compartmentalization comes in when we're scrolling through our news feed and see something about the horrors that are being unleashed upon Yemen with the help of our government; it doesn't square with the model of the world we've been trained to hold in our minds, so we dissociate it from our model.

It comes in when we remember that we were lied to about Iraq. It comes in when we think about what humankind's way of living on this planet is doing to our ecosystem. It comes in when we think about the fact that nuclear weapons are a thing and that cold war tensions are escalating. It comes in when we are reminded that our government is participating in the torture and imprisonment of a journalist whose only crime was trying to bring the truth out from the locked files it's been hidden away in so we can make it a part of our worldview.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-empire-depends-on-psychological

In a 1933 essay lamenting the rise of Nazism in Germany, Bertrand Russell wrote: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Which is of course a dynamic that's still at play in the modern world; the Dunning-Kruger effect is a thing, and one need only to look at American presidents to see that there's little relationship between one's intelligence and how far they can rise if they get it in their heads that they ought to be in charge of things.

But I think a much bigger factor in the problems our world faces is not so much about intelligence as empathy.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article version: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-sociopaths-are-cocksure-while