Fascists To The Left Of Us – Commies To The Right

Here we am, stuck in the middle with us

Note for new readers – auto-estimated reading times are greatly exaggerated (lots of pix/links)

Hey folks!

In my last piece I talked about the way almost everything in the modern western world exists in two parallel versions, one which might be broadly described as aspirational (genuine, old-school), a product of the side of ourselves that (because of access to gratitude) grows and learns and strives to become more useful to others over time. The other version of everything that sounds aspirational is the fake cynical pre-packaged version that appeals to our bitterness, jealousy, resentment, tribalism, secret love of mob violence, pride in hatred, and a whole complex of things that many of us feel when extremely upset, and some feel very nearly always.

Sorting out the real, or sometimes untangling the thin real thread which has been buried in a block of toxic garbage, is tricky for several reasons. The simplest good reason is there are a lot of kinds of aspirations, and none of us have a big enough awareness to incorporate or even consider all of them.

Another interesting and basically positive thing (that is, true aspiration) is that there are quite a few issues which we might reasonably describe as being of effectively infinite importance – things like the quality of our food, or how we raise our kids, or how we think of our rights and our place in society.

But many people spend their whole life on just one of these, or even one small specialist part within, without ever recognizing many other also infinitely important factors which are inevitably connected in dynamic ways to whichever aspect of reality they have selected as their sole (and justified) focus.

Beyond that, it can be very hard when we are passionate about any infinitely important aspect of life, to recognize that the implementation of all aspirations, comes always by finite imperfect means. That is, the humans and institutions around us are not and have never once been ideal structures. They have flaws and moving parts which do not always function as anticipated. Our passion for aspiration must never blind us to this reality-feedback (crucial to all complex functioning systems) or we may easily destroy, where we hoped only to build (I’ll give a brutal real-world example of this, shortly).

In other words – even high-integrity people with great intentions have many limits and blind-spots.

On the other side, it gets a million times weirder still, because there are even more ways to be false, sneaky, corrupted and corrupting than there are to try to do something good and useful in the world.

Last time I spoke about how many movements which were once powered by aspirations for broad common benefit, upheld and advanced by individuals who were principled and self-sacrificial, and capable of group effort, have become strangely like mind-controlling cults, hostile to all non-believers.

It is very important (and also very difficult) for us to step back and recognize that the level to which religion has been rejected in the west really is historically unprecedented. Many moderns believe that religions persist because of oppressive power structures and cultural inertia. I am a lifelong atheist myself, but I am convinced that religions persist because they address real human problems that did not go away, just because modern people got cynical, and rejected humility, wisdom and group-belonging altogether (which has proven to be a staggeringly profitable long-term mass-cynicism – just sayin’).

The really strange thing is that bitter narcissist atheists who deny religion ever had a humane purpose, are exactly the same kinds of ‘virtue’ (narcissism) obsessed people who have helped to undermine and often outright destroy the aspirational values and qualities of their own movements, mostly by taking things which are political philosophies, and embracing them instead as all-encompassing moralist, Manichean (pure-good versus pure-evil) and sanctimoniously proselytizing religious movements.

I’m going to give you a very clear and probably shocking two-sided version of this one, right up front (then spend the rest of the essay explaining and apologizing for it) ;o)

For many decades now, religious-fanatic type partisans on the left have been responding to any criticism of modern feminist theories and practises as it if is a direct attack on basic women’s rights.

This is exactly the same quality of deliberately unfair and extremely dangerous conflation we are now seeing as supremacist Zionists insist that criticizing the Israeli government is the same as antisemitism.

Criticizing insane, life-harming, fury-promoting policies and individual cultists in any identitarian movement which has (by being identitarian, that is, fundamentalist, instead of principled) gone off the rails, does not in any way make you opposed to sound and widespread established goals and principles.

In fact, if you didn’t begin from care about the principles, you wouldn’t bother making the criticism!

My technician head insists on adding a key point. A movement which cannot ever be criticized (for whatever sort of reason or sacred quality we have decided to bestow on them) is a movement which absolutely cannot be trusted with power by the general public and society as a whole – because power which does not allow or consider critical feedback from citizens IS DICTATORSHIP (functionally, regardless of ‘feels’). Even if such structures emerge with high integrity leaders guiding them at first (incredibly rare in the modern age) their unchallenged status will still corrupt them, in no time flat!

(In England, you can now literally be arrested for wearing an anti-genocide T-shirt. And when you can’t even protest war, without the state charging you and hauling you away, speech really is dead!)

Now let me turn the flame down and give you an example of confusing one thing with another on a much smaller and easier to see scale, that you’ve probably experienced personally. Did you ever work in a place with a team of people who got along and did their jobs well, and then someone new joined, and all of a sudden there were a thousand kinds of unnecessary drama, every single freakin’ day?

I bet you noticed what happened yourself – that new disruptive person didn’t understand that was a workplace where people gathered for a particular (paid) purpose, and was not their close personal network of family and friends, who might be (generally) obligated to meet their emotional needs.

They brought a whole complex of wrong needs and expectations into a situation where others did not do that – and incredibly, it only takes that one person with lousy ego-boundaries adding that one inappropriate load, to force everyone around them to be bent out of shape, in order to carry that load!

You would think the skilful majority would ultimately win and bring them round to their way of being – both more effective as workers and happier in their days, but as Timothy Leary discovered long ago, while trying to figure out a form of therapy which would not be distorted by the bias of the therapist (early work in group-therapy techniques) “The weakest member of the group determines the game” (Definitely one of the most depressing deeply insightful quotes of the twentieth century).

There is even a positive-aspirational aspect to the corruption which can enter into a formerly functional group, here, because we often bend principles which are proven valid and useful, for what we think of as compassion, only to realize the rule itself saved many from harm, which the exceptions never could.

Now let me offer an important real-world case, which we all should have learned from (and pretty much no one has, as far as I can tell). I can vividly remember the eighties movements against modern psychiatry and in particular, uncompromising objections to absolutely all forms of involuntary care for the mentally ill. The partisans of this movement described absolutely all people in mental hospitals as victims “The Psychiatrized” unjustly imprisoned and denied their rights to freedom and flourishing.

Meanwhile, city governments looked at a huge expense, and hated being accused of being evil, so they killed two birds with one stone, and in countless cities around North America the populations of people who were looked after full time in mental hospitals went down by thousands (or tens of thousands).

Homelessness was INSTANTLY increased many times over, and has never been under control since.

We now understand clearly that people are actually different. Some do need full-time care, and don’t know-it, and some need a lot of (expensive to government) professional support, to do well and thrive.

Taking a political demand and turning it into a Manichean and emotionalist religious crusade did absolutely catastrophic and still unrepaired damage to the exact group of people who were supposed to be being saved. And, like I say – still no sign of learning lessons, let far alone any hope of an apology.

Now that I’ve rough-sketched the scale of the hazards and the some of the difficulties in recognizing how we are first corrupted away from principles, let me introduce some powerful tools for doing better.

Tool one for today is simple as heck (and one my long-time readers have heard a few times before) –

Variation between individuals exceeds variation between types

We all know this is true from our own lives and friendships. Not only that, it is true logically also – or else we really would end up saying and believing totally insane things like “all n people are the same.”

The creepy thing is, after many decades of realizing in common that such all-encompassing statements of virtue or blame were in every case completely asinine, we now make such dangerous blind assertions again, proudly and shamelessly, with words which suggest aspiration, but ends which are entirely evil.

When I think about human personalities, I think about musical instruments. What makes one instrument sound different from another, even when they play the same note? The overtones!

Every pitch also contains a certain proportion of double that frequency, and quadruple, and so on – the ratio between these extra notes inside the main note, is all we need to tell one instrument from another.

Some people are very social, some people are very observant, some people are sensitive and troubled by it, some are far more resilient but also less aware of subtleties. There is no ‘correct’ person, and the fact that such a thing really is implied by a huge number of our modern ideologies is a big clue that they are dead wrong (sometimes by accidental mutation passed-on, but often by a process of selective funding and pruning in academe, thanks to donor-Oligarch influence, sustained over many decades).

There is no such object as “Black People” or “Women” or “The Jews”. There are individual human beings with ideas lives and attitudes which place them all over the spectrum, on all kinds of things.

But let me try angling into this sideways, to shed light on the general error, instead of getting bogged down in specific dogma quicksand and rhetorical minefields laid for years (by corporate-faker finks).

One of the most curious aspects to my completely demented ‘experimental’ education was that even from an early age, we students didn’t just plan our own curriculum, define our own outcome goals and then judge each other’s work or presentations, we all studied educational theory itself, while we did it!

Now, I was in a mind-controlling cult at the time (and under the thumb of the sadistic headmaster, who, as the son of the matriarch of the cult, was immaculate by proximity) so I can’t honestly claim to have made a lot of use of insights from people like Piaget and Montessori at the time, but I was consciously sensitized to the question of how do people learn, in a way which was unusually disconnected from all conventional systems of education, before I was ten years old (half a century ago).

I have never stopped thinking about and studying this question since, and my screwy working life, one part technician, one part junior educator (lab assistant at community college, special ed assistant and librarian at an alternative junior high-school, instructor at private college, and model at art university) has given me a rich sampling of witness from several very different points along the educational path.

I wrote in much more detail about this in a previous piece to which I’ll link below – but to refresh, “Representation Matters” is a great example of aspirational sounding, deeply misguided bullshit.

If you look at the words alone, you could make a case they make sense, but we have to understand the informing theory which actually operates in favour of the already powerful, to see the trap.

The reason our modern use of representation matters serves powerful (corporate) evil is because in practise we take the phrase to mean representation of physical categories matters. As I said in my more detailed piece about this, the only place representation like that really counts is Noah’s freakin’ ark!

If you have already decided the rich have won, gig-work, hopelessness and ever increasing greed and ever less power and rights for citizens is just our inevitable future and you want to surrender to that and them completely, and start sucking-up to the most evil and destructive club of bastards on earth...

Well then you need to load-up one pair of each “Type” on your escape-yacht for the super-rich, so even as the peasants drown by the millions or burn in nuclear fire, our betters can assure us “Yes, but we weren’t biased about the one thousandth of one percent we saved. We’re fully representational, so you can all die happy, suckers!”

Now this is a great place for me to introduce another idea-tool I use so often that I never put it away.

Always measure from at least two directions.

Not just how much less is this than perfect? But also, how much more is this than nothing?

One part of doing this is about the true aspiration powering gratitude I talked about in my last piece. The other absolutely huge practical bonus which comes to us from gratitude, is genuine respect.

Books have a lot of wisdom and information in them. The internet, same deal (though very chaotic).

But human beings are the only things on earth that know how to do, how to make ideas work in the world. Because I’m an enthusiast for a lot of different subjects, I can report this works very generally – the price you must pay, to get the benefit of a whole lifetime of wisdom from any expert, is respect.

I don’t mean they don’t also deserve payment (the true “sincerest form of flattery”). I just mean that people who know subtle and powerful things love to share them, if you show you are ready to hear.

Conversely, you can track down the exact person who knows just what you need to know, but if you insult them, pretend you already know what you clearly do not, or show lack of respect for knowledge or skill itself, your perfect teacher is liable to tell you to bugger-off (and quite right to do it, too).

So – mentally and emotionally we gain hugely when we measure how much more is this than nothing, and think about how much skill and work went into taking it this far (so we can build on that, instead of discarding centuries of hard-earned wisdom, then learning very old, very hard lessons, all over again).

We also gain spontaneous tutelage from wise people around us, who consistently respond to the combination of genuine respect and enthusiasm with astounding generosity, even when they are highly cantankerous by nature!

So now, having shown the big flaw, let me also apply that same measure twice rule to the idea of “representation matters” in the opposite direction – positively, because as a wise man once said

“The opposite of a trivial truth is simply false. The opposite of a great truth is often also true.”

Working in education (and coming from a cult obsessed with psychotherapy) I have always been interested in three very obvious groups (pretty sure my teacher friends will have seen these, too).

Some students are somewhere in the middle, only semi-serious about studying, tempted by a lot of foolishness from their friends (and being their temptation, in turn) they haven’t yet gained mastery over their own attention, and so miss a lot that might be very useful to them later. But they get by (and have fun, which is great and important when we’re young – just not when it distracts us so completely, that we miss our brain’s rather limited natural physical window of maximum learning, altogether).

Some students bring their own self-discipline and active interest, and do extremely well. Most natural teachers pay particular attention to these natural students, as a way to encourage others who are in the middle to adopt some of their more effective study habits (though I’m not sure this works, very often).

Then there are some who are just plain having trouble, and there are a lot of different reasons for this (with additional emotional problems recently, thanks to the deteriorating mental health of young people in the western world as a whole – coinciding not at all coincidentally with cellphone social-media).

You might think that as a natural multi-discipline keener, my own sympathies would be with the good students, but you would only be one part right. I am as much a natural teacher as a natural student, so I am, like all of my type, approximately incapable of resisting a natural student, and try to give any who present, whatever gems seem like they might be most useful to them, and their particular challenges.

On the other hand, I’m also the odd man out, the weirdo, the one who asks the questions that you aren’t supposed to ask, and says the things that others were taught never to say. Beyond that, my screwy upbringing put me so far out of sync with normal young people of the time, I was an outsider even in terms of knowledge of the traditions of my own society! So my deep lifelong emotional sympathy is naturally with the one who feels unheard or left behind, and doesn’t know how to make it better.

This cohort, the group who are at risk of failing altogether, turning what was an aspiration into a source of shame and pain (and debt) instead of a proof of accomplishment, are the ones who really can be reached by ‘representation of types’ but it is not anything as crude or simplistic as racial or any other physical category of types. The range which is required to make a well balanced institution which can serve students of all three types is a wide range of different personalities. Different ways of seeing and dealing with the world, thinking about it, and approaching work and learning.

I had this experience myself when I did ten months at community college in my early twenties, after never having read a textbook or done a formal ‘exam’ in my entire life. We electronics students had a whole series of classroom ‘labs’ to progress through, before getting to our specialty lab, which took up the last half of our course time. The introductory instructors were informative, but none of them struck me as someone that I could see myself becoming. But in our specialty (Audio Repair) lab, I, and many other grateful eighties misfits met the much missed Ed Hutchinson, who played in a (great) and very active local band, ran a busy (and superb) small recording studio and ran his own field-repair service which had saved countless local gigs from last-minute technical disaster. He even had awesome taste in music – and just that fast, everything about the whole course changed for all of us. It wasn’t my study habits that improved, Ed made me believe I had a place in the world I was training for.

I observed this same wonderful dawning effect many times from the model stand, where a student who I had seen struggling in another class (with a teacher who reached some of their students, but not this one) suddenly lit-up and shone in the presence of someone whose whole ‘vibe’ or philosophy of life made infinitely more (and more welcoming) sense to them.

Sometimes, we really just need to hear the right overtones, before we can learn how to resonate!

Now let me try another idea tool which comes in handy a lot a lot.

You can only be paid for a thing once, so be clear in advance about the pay you actually want.

When I think about this powerful idea, I also think about those cultures which do not consider a gift a true gift, unless it is anonymous. Do you want to be helpful, or to get gratitude? (imply obligation)

Many people use modern tribalist ideologies as a way to justify the fact that they are bitter (and pouting about it). They rationalize their own favourite sport of anger, to make it always the fault of some one or something else, preferably an entire category of other. Again, this sounds like aspiration in all kinds of ways, the slogans are full of good intentions, on the surface. But it often works exactly like bigotry.

In fact, when we look closely at the way we do this rationalization trick, we notice something kind of hilarious. We pick whatever fury-sink suits our own personal lifestyle best, and adjust our overtone structure of blame-externality so that it doesn’t ever interfere with our personal whim or preference.

I’ll start with a mea-culpa here (best practise, no?) and just point out that people who are on the poor side and live in big cities with cheap transit can afford to have an attitude about the environment that many others – who they depend on, for all kinds of basic goods commodities and necessary services – can not. Uncompromising disdain for a tool is easy, if you don’t need (or can’t afford) the tool yourself!

In fact, taking these wrongly-mixed things apart in myself, so that I could separate the clear science and systems repercussions from the (awfully pleasurable) game of rationalization and other-blaming, which had entered-in alongside, was one of my first big growth steps away from tribalism, and into gratitude.

I am heartbroken by how many of my older single friends have ended up resenting the entire opposite sex, as the obvious cause of their unhappiness. Of course this is ignorant and self-harming to an extent almost beyond belief, but it is also getting very close to a religious movement now, on both sides (which is truly tragic for the way it undermines relationship itself, and so, must be fixed, and fast!).

Yes, some men and women really are worse than we can easily imagine, and some are the best and most powerfully transformative friends and family that could possibly enter our lives. Because (drum-roll, please) Variation between individuals exceeds variation between types!

Of course my friends of faith find outrageous horrors to object to, among the atheists (a shamefully easy hunt, these days) just as my rigorously secular pals find corruption in all forms and structures of religion, and in so doing, discard a great deal of wisdom which they in particular, very much need.

I also have middle-class friends who were environmentalists who considered cars and oil outright evil, when they lived in a city with great transit, then immediately modified their entire philosophy (direct from bike to minivan), rather than learning to wait for a country bus! (that is, at least try the experiment of putting their own convenience, where their very loud mouth was, for all those bellowing years) ;o)

One particular rationalization that I wish I could forget, summed up this false-faith side of environmentalism perfectly. A dear “Oil is evil!” friend, who moved to the country and got a car, explained plaintively, “It’s not easy, when you aren’t in a city.” Correct! (though late to the party)

But, just to be clear (and measure from both directions), the environment was a screaming emergency which called for massive governmental control of individual lives until it became any less than easy?

Honestly, if this is the standard of self-sacrifice and commitment of lifelong Eco-activists, and the models are correct, we are all in some very big trouble. Mind you, it does help to explain how so many still seem able to believe in the bankers’ version of BigGreen (a staggering taxpayer cash-grab), even after its main proponents have spent this whole demented century openly prioritizing racist warfare for corporate profit, instead of actually rebuilding our infrastructure for well-planned future thriving.

(Reminds me of Zelensky’s cronies pocketing billions which were supposed to build defence lines!)

Yet another common way that we shop-for and then binge-on convenient others to resent and blame for our lousy lives isn’t just consumerist, it has been known-ridiculous for literally thousands of years.

City mice hate town mice. Town mice hate city mice. (because both are rather stupid about the other)

But one thing is very different from Aesop’s time (and even our own culture, a few decades ago).

Nowadays, city people have megaphones (all of BigMedia), and town people are effectively gagged.

It didn’t used to be so disproportionate. Tens of thousands of small towns used to have local papers and journals to reflect their own lives and ideas. That didn’t drown-out the influence of the slick city papers (then radio, then television) but it did dilute it significantly, and reflect local life with more compassion. Also important (and something my younger friends won’t have seen so often), many of these small town two-bit papers broke absolutely huge stories that the majors would have missed entirely, because they just didn’t have their attention in the right spot, the way a small responsive local paper often does.

So now let me have a run at the city-mouse version. Small town people are wild and unsupervised, they go out to the woods with guns and form militias and they go to church, which is itself suspicious!

Tragically, as US media has been more and more centralized in fewer and fewer corporate hands (thanks to scumbag Bill Clinton) many institutions that once had some genuine principle have also been corrupted by those same corporate gatekeepers and cheque-signers (and flunkie-bribers).

Which means one can now quote from famous NGO brands and even whole university programs, to ‘prove’ the city mouse paranoia, and reach the conclusion sought by this evil corruption – which is “Something MUST BE DONE.” Expressed as a screaming demand, and offering unsound politicians absolutely vast power to destroy rights and lives wholesale, while “responding to clear public will.”

Most of my Canadian born pals are city mice (like me), but thankfully, I made friends with a bunch of truly amazing country mice when young, and I’ve met plenty more from all around the world, since.

To town people, city people are creepy cold impersonal narcissistic conformists who form shocking mindless mobs at the drop of the hat and burn cars for reasons they can’t even properly articulate.

Which means of course that “Something MUST BE DONE!” about the danger posed by these citizens afar – all because righteous we, in our whichever mouse certainty, are greatly upset – by propaganda.

Just watch-it!

Let me make this more clear and dramatic, by adding another useful distinction, when we’re looking at groups and movements. As I’ve mentioned, I thought of myself as pretty radical as a teenager, and certainly did a lot of homework about the world and history, to back-up my ‘revolutionary’ ideas.

Then I met a guy who did voter registration drives on the South Side of Chicago during the crack epidemic of the eighties, and had to stand aside from every door he knocked on, just like a police officer, lest he be felled by a shotgun blast through the door, before someone even asked who’s there?

He listened to me ranting on for a few minutes with a quiet smile and then said, “So you’re a radical, huh? Got any weapons training?”

Which was when I realized that I was actually an intellectual. At best, the sort of principled fool who complains usefully about the naked and despotic emperor, only to be put to death by the new emperor, because he still won’t shut-up about the imperial nakedness thing, despite the change of despot!

A pamphleteer, not a partisan. And of course, a pamphleteer has two special duties. Figure out how people think, and figure out how to help them see what they already know, in more useful ways.

The really wonderful and entirely unexpected alchemical transformation involved in that pursuit, is the more we listen, the more our sympathies are broadened, our minds more richly informed, and as time passes, the furious might even become the grateful, and the anarchist end up teaching (wonky) civics!

Or stay bitter, of course. And we can see philosophies with this quality of hostile dissection of respect, from behaviourism to existentialism to post-modernism, reaching back – and always highly promoted by the program-endowing wealthy – into the early part of the twentieth century, as we’ve all tried to figure out how to live with mechanization – and the rich have tried to figure out how to keep the leash on all of us (their birthright serfs, after all), and where possible make it even stronger, despite the long extant and obvious possibility of effective material plenty for the entire world. No more poverty - anywhere.

But let me get back to that town mouse and country mouse and ‘serious radicals’ on both sides, thing.

One of the ways tribalism makes us stupid is by making us sort for ideas which make us feel right already (and proud of it), so we never bother to check if the opposite of that great truth is also true.

All of my leftist friends in the 80s were deeply convinced that the US government (and through the western block, the rest of the ‘advanced west’ also) were using underground right-wing militias to scare lefties, and also to keep them ready for use as an expendable and deniable irregular infantry of provocateurs and shock-troops, should any genuinely revolutionary moment actually arrive.

Articles, entire books, institutions of leftist virtue, all ‘confirmed’ that the government was secretly far right and dangerous because of that, so anything that was in any way left was therefore ‘resistance’.

There are also a number of leftist martyrs of genuine high-quality, and shocking incidents of state malfeasance which still resoundingly demonstrate that the aspirational left has, for at least a century, been seen as enough of a threat to the worst and most corrupted power centres of the state, for the state to use deadly violence against them.

So, therefore city mice are right and town mice are bad and MUST BE STOPPED, right?

Not so fast, city mouse!

The problem is that my friends on the right have just as much evidence that the oligarch corrupted state apparatus is terrified of citizen-organizing on the right, and will go to outright lethal lengths to assert state power, even to those who want nothing more than to be left alone.

I know many people watched the Branch Davidian compound burn with some secret glee, because they were convinced that everyone inside was a loser or a crazed fanatic, and might as well burn in hell.

But I watched that place and all those children burned alive by state action, and the urban compound of the MOVE group also (where the city Fire Marshall himself was quoted as saying “Let it Burn!”) and saw something very much like the commune in which I was raised.

Deeply twisted, perhaps (in the case of the Davidians, certainly), but still something which one could recover from, then rebuild and ultimately transcend altogether – unlike say, being burned alive.

On a way more intimate level, Biden’s FBI investigated thousands of parents, simply for wanting to speak before their local school boards about curriculum decisions – as if they were presumed dangerous extremists just for having questions – in many cases without even properly hearing their (often fair, sound, and widely held) points!

Again – democratic institutions which are hostile to citizen feedback – are not democratic instititions!

Most troublingly (unprecedentedly rights-threatening for all of us) January 6^th was used as an excuse to make protesting (in this case, very clearly state-provoked rioting) a felony! So much for the right of free assembly – and the fact that the (fake mob) left celebrated this, simply because this one battle went ‘against their tribal foes’ was both stunning and nauseating, for those of us who still thought there was a powerful undercurrent of state skepticism and principle abiding there. Nope, that ship sailed long ago.

So, we’re both screaming mobs, now – and simultaneously we’re sane humane people, terrified of the scary other, and begging the government to “DO SOMETHING” which always means something which isn’t inside our law or cultural tradition, which means break the system, all because we refuse to see the simple truth – that this is a one-hundred percent two-sided game (and betrayal).

The most greedy, manipulative and outright evil power-factions on earth use BOTH sides constantly and also harm them deeply, just as often. They don’t care about the aspiration side of any movement, they pay for anyone who can create theatrically useful disruption and fear in any other target faction!

Let me hit that fantastic Frank Zappa quote again, and confess that even I thought he was being just a bit cynical, when I first heard it (while he was alive and very lively, in every interview he gave).

“The illusion of freedom will continue exactly as long as it is profitable. Then they’ll take down the sets, the lights and the curtains and we’ll all be left staring at the bare brick wall at the back of the theatre.”

Then is right now (worse and worse, this whole century). That is “why anti-tribalism.”

And BTW, as superb as some intellectual analysts on the left remain, in terms of economics and politics (as also acknowledged by many on the right in independent media, most refreshingly) they are still shit at planning and concentration of message for the win (the single best trick of the historical, still broadly aspirational, early union movement). The fact is, the trucker convoy put every leftist protest in decades to shame, because they actually won their (righteous) point. Which was not anti-v#x in any way, but opposed only to state compulsion. And when we can’t oppose state force, we can’t oppose ANYTHING.

Plus, shhh, but when the actual revolution does come, my brother – they do have weapons training!

Not saying tribalism doesn’t provide a lot of emotional entertainment, and a great blame-sink for every misery in our own chaotic and cross-directed lives. But you know what’s better? WINNING CHANGE

Real change, that is. Lord Acton pretty much nailed it in 1887 (or so it has been said, for ages).

“The issue which has swept down the centuries, and which will have to be fought sooner or later, is the people versus the banks.”

That means everything that you can can hyphenate with “Big” or “Deep,” everything which plots and creeps, every nasty job-destroying combine, nature-raping globe-strider and skimmer off the poor.

Against little old us (that is, if we get our heads on right – every sane human on earth – I bet on we!)

Or we can keeping pouting, watching TV and scrolling our feeds and we’ll soon be granted the cathartic “knowledge” like, totally for real – that it’s all hopeless and even better, it’s all their fault!

Which means we (good virtuous haters of ‘them’) are all entitled to go back to infinite ice cream (patterns of self-destructive escapism) and keep dancing to Nero’s catchy fiddle tunes – yay!

But here’s something that nobody peddling empty-calorie emotionalist or profitable consumerist forms of escape (and the spirit-numbing compliance, which it always lubricates) will ever tell you.

Gratitude isn’t a capitulation, it is an activation. And happiness isn’t having someone to blame.

Happiness is duty to gratitude.

(A truth the truly faithful among my religious friends, never forgot – bless them for it!)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh and, for any who are frustrated I didn’t go directly at my title – Fascists to the left?

Yes, the supposedly sane modern Germans in government now plan to destroy their economy to emergency re-arm so that they can fight a great war with Russia again!

The big bad scary “far-rightists” in the afd (and also the still principled leftist Sarah Wagenknecht) mostly want a return to peace prosperity and jobs again – so of course they MUST BE STOPPED.

Commies on the right? OMG, aren’t you even following economics? (not on stupefying BigNews, but from actual solid independent market coverage). Trump is making command-economy moves that have not been seen since the second world war (while employing the imperial British Panopticon, digitally).

Stalinists, eat your freakin’ heart out!

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Now here are a few choice links:

Here is something both compact and (as so often, from him) stunningly relevant, from Arnaud Bertrand

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I recently mentioned that nobody cares about divisions when society is healthy, here’s a brilliant Croatian writing about the deliberate destruction of his much-missed Yugoslavia (by the exact same cabal of western finance-finks who have just utterly smashed and mass-murdered Ukraine).

From permanent wars to permanent peace

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Here is a SUPERB detailed and impeccably well sourced long-form piece about the long-term extremely creepy abuse of law (to empower war and intervention) by the most corrupt parts of the US deep state (restoration of America, this sure as f#ck ain’t)

The politicization of U.S. legal and financial warfare

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There is no one alive who goes directly at the “Continuity of Agenda” of the corrupted American state as well as Brian Berletic. He can be a bit horrifying at first. But he’s got all the documents to prove his points (and the fact that others act as if those documents don’t even exist, and there is no way of knowing policy, is very suspicious, doubly-so once you’ve seen it demonstrated repeatedly).

The New Atlas - with Brian Berletic

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But I know a lot of my friends are still faithful to TV (propaganda, of whatever flavour) and need an easier transition step, with many more references to their familiar (though almost entirely false) view of modern geopolitics.

The team(s) at Breaking points have a fun and useful approach, they have a leftie and a rightie both covering the same story (or giving some extra context, to the other’s feature). Better still, they are all fairly non-conformist lefties and righties (not pure-tribalist idiots), so you’ll hear a lot of new good stuff, from that range alone.

Look for Emily Jashinksy and Ryan Grimm (the B-hosts) who are way better than the main team!

Breaking Points - Sagar and Chrystal - but especially Ryan Grimm and Emily Jashinsky

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My all-time favourite journalist – with an almost crazy level of courage integrity (and cheerful unsinkability) in combination, remains Glenn Greenwald, whose outstanding show can (and should) be found every night on Rumble

System Update with Glenn Greenwald

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My favourite Gen Z writer (most insightful about digital culture and mental health) is still Freya India. Her blend of courageous questions, sharp insights and real (not maudlin) compassion is fantastic!

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Finally, though I have shared this one before (and have a few small historical quibbles) it really is must-watch stuff

(And exactly why Lord Acton’s quote has never stopped resonating, through centuries)