Category Archives: Uncategorized
Dear Jeffrey Marsh
I see you’re having a hard time on social media. A mother told you to stop trying to communicate with minors without parental consent. Here concerns were and are valid and not just because the optics are not good. If you encourage a child to keep secrets from their parents, even if your intentions are pure, you are still making them more vulnerable to abuse by others.
You are not a licensed psychotherapist. A therapist has to go through therapy themselves in order to obtain accreditation. If you had been through such a process, you would likely have obtained some valuable insights about your own personality that might make you a better coach. If your therapist is highly competent, they may have been able to diagnose a potential personality disorder that your videos suggest you may have. A member of my family is a narcissist, but he has made the effort to understand his condition and to try to ameliorate it. Personality disorders cannot be cured, but they can be treated with some success.
Most narcissists are unable to consider the possibility that they are wrong about anything, even in the face of evidence. You’re probably smarter than most of them though. You should be smart enough to realize that the optics of sending a veiled threat to a woman who criticized your behaviour is, shall we say, sub-optimal, especially since your fans are sending disturbing threats that they may harm her innocent daughters.
If you want the internet to get off your back, you should make the effort to tell your fans that targeting this woman and her daughters is unacceptable. You ought to make it clear that you don’t condone criminal harassment or abuse. If you cannot do that, you should consider finding a good therapist to deal with your anger management issues, because I don’t think your brand will survive unless you get over your sense of being the one and only victim in this situation and rise above your negative emotions.
Karma is a great teacher. May your outcomes be commensurate with your efforts.
Peace.
It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Manufacture Consent
Not for public consumption. Seriously, don’t share this with the unwashed masses.
Dear fellow “journalists”
The task of reporting is not a simple one. Each and every day, reporters and editors at publications like The Onion make difficult decisions about which issues should receive attention, knowing that their coverage will influence not only how people think, but also how they act. This responsibility is at the core of an ongoing debate over whether news coverage of transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people is unduly biased against women. As the world’s leading unknown blog publication with a daily readership of dozens, Connect All The Dots is compelled to weigh in. We firmly believe that it is journalism’s sacred duty to lie like a bad rug on an AGP’s shiny bald head.
“Quentin” is a 14-year-old female (observed at birth) who now identifies as “non-binary” because all her friends jumped on the bandwagon when they discovered rainbow alphabet soup TikTok last summer. She loves wearing a binder, because when her dad’s best friend gets drunk and tries to grope her breast now, she can barely feel it. Ha! Take that, Creepy “Uncle” Joe! Quentin has been very depressed lately because she can’t come up with a perfect set of original neo-pronouns that are so ridiculous she and her friends will piss themselves laughing when her teachers are forced to use them. She’s looking forward to the rush she will get by punishing her parents in creative ways for “gendering” her “incorrectly” because that’s what kids with Borderline Personality Disorders do.
Just Kidding. We won’t tell you about our friend’s confused daughters. Instead we’ll blow sunshine up your ass and pretend none of these children grow up and realize they’ve been gaslit and had their bodies sterilized and mutilated by professionals who ought to have known better. Nobody reads ancient novels like Frankenstein anymore, and if they do, they usually don’t even catch on that the real monster was the doctor.
Good journalism is about finding the stories that support the narrative that serves the greedy billionaires who prefer nobody ever notice that voting doesn’t actually work anymore. Well, not unless you’re stinking rich, lol. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, destroying women’s rights is the lodestar that shapes our current coverage. Divide & Rule tactics are essential to prevent people from noticing their “democracy” is fake, so let’s keep the kleptocracy charging ahead while women have been sent back to the starting blocks. Roe v. Wade was just the appetizer. Enabling sex offenders to invade all female spaces is the main course that will drive women back to the kitchen to make sammiches. It could take decades for them to escape if we can keep the lid on this, and by then society should be absolutely atomized so working class solidarity will be impossible. Shame that BLM race war didn’t catch on, that would have been great for our bosses. If it all goes sideways, defense contractors can easily engineer an alien invasion, so the 99% will be too distracted to build guillotines or put the 0.01% through a wood chipper feet first.
We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on terfs, aka “anti-trans activists,” which we want the public to believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as hateful bigots who want to literally murder all trans people. Our bosses insist we remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic human rights of women and girls as antiquated bigotry, and we will chant nonsense like “transwomen are women” over and over again in hopes that repetition of this obvious lie hypnotizes people as effectively as sissy hypno porn does. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives the sterilization of children an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to take full advantage of women’s natural propensity to give people the benefit of the doubt, and the fact most of them are too damn busy working 3 bloody jobs just to keep the lights on.
Much of the recent debate concerns medical procedures, particularly in children, and whether things like hormone replacement therapy or gender-affirming surgeries are safe and appropriate. Indeed, there are critical questions to be asked about the social complexities of gender, as well as medical ethics in a profit-driven healthcare system. We are simply not interested in any of that. Instead, we will use flawed data and spurious logic to repeatedly write the same hand-wringing emotional blackmail & hit pieces until the science makes it clear we’ve mutilated thousands of children unnecessarily and then we will never speak of it again. We may pine for the fantasy of journalistic integrity, but let’s not kid ourselves, that was never really a thing, and we have bills to pay. Detransitioners must continue to be unpersoned just like the vaccine-injured. (This broadcast brought to you by Pfizer. lol.)
Naturally, courageous reporting like ours has its detractors. Our critics accuse us of homophobia, misogyny & grooming just because we destroyed the lesbian social world & women’s sports, put male rapists into women’s prisons, and force children to call men “she”: which trains them to let their guard down for the AGPs and drag queens who need to get the important message through their little heads that boys can be girls, even though we know that’s a lie. We will never speak of the reason doctors don’t call it a “sex change operation” anymore.
We must continue to “no-platform” and silence women who speak the truth about sex change being impossible because, well, we don’t have an actual argument. All we have is contradiction and that makes a fun Monty Python sketch, but hasn’t worked as well where public policy has actually been debated. Free speech is a serious threat to the narrative our employers are paying for, so lets follow the CBC’s lead and demonize words like “freedom” & “women’s rights” and use every trick in the book to make people afraid they’ll be fired or jailed if they step out of line. That should help keep things chill, while defense contractors shoot down some more weather balloons to “prime the pump” for the 24/7 fire hose of fear porn about a possible “alien invasion” the bosses can roll out when the time is right. I expect that plan will unfold right around the time criminal investigations of the pandemic response begin to bear fruit.
For more evidence of our time-honored journalistic commitment to Manufacturing Consent, please see our previous coverage of 9/11 truthers, WMDs, Defund the Police, “our democracy” and every bit of election coverage ever.
Institutions with massive platforms like ours must be open to different ways of erasing women and mutilating children. We must never, ever admit the truth that humans cannot change sex. We must conflate and confuse sex and gender, especially in messaging to children, but we must not reveal what children are being taught about gender in school. Parents tend to be horrified when they find out, but we can frame their response to make them seem like a bunch of dangerous rednecks. The exception to conflation is used whenever someone points out the obvious scientific fact that humans can’t change sex and we can fire back with “its gender, stupid, don’t you know the difference?” No need to reinvent the wheel here, all we need to do is grab the whole bag of misogyny that is the Men’s Rights movement and slap a rainbow sticker on it.
All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to ensure voters in a “democracy” are well informed? Is it to say what we’re paid to say by greedy billionaires who have been fisting the 99% for decades? We know where we stand, proudly sucking billionaire teat, knowing that fist will be up someone else’s arse.
Research shows that men who undergo medical “transition” are no less a threat to the safety of women and girls than other men. Crime stats tell us that almost all sexual predators are men who, by definition, have multiple victims. This probably explains why all women have learned how it feels to be prey long before they reach adulthood. Let’s not talk about the potential connection between the growing numbers of girls who don’t want to be female, and a reported increase in the number of girls who are sexually assaulted every year, which is about one in five now. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.
—The Onion Editorial Board, among themselves, probably.
Debunking Owen Jones
… is too easy.
We don’t often see such a bracing display of blatant misogyny as in Owen Jones’ recent video. For convenience, I’ve organized my slap-downs by timestamp. This is just a quick reaction, so if I’ve missed anything, feel free to let me know in the comments.
1:50 “Start from a place of humanity” Women and girls are human too, and we have unique sex-based rights because of our biology. Men – as a category – represent a threat to our physical safety. #BeKindToFemales
7:30 Parents who don’t accept their child’s homosexuality today are putting them on the trans train so they can have a “straight” child. This is medical conversion therapy. How can you not see this as child abuse?
9:15 “Bad faith” Sorry, no. Apples and oranges. Expanding rights for gay, lesbian and bisexual people did NOT VIOLATE anybody else’s rights.) How tf can you not see that letting men into female spaces violates women’s rights? Not only can males IMPREGNATE females, they are statistically significantly bigger, stronger, faster, and more violent. Males are a threat to female safety! “Trans women” must be excluded from female spaces, not because they’re trans, but because they are male.
12:08 Adoption. Some people believe every child deserves a mother who is female. I’m one of them, because my gut says this is the same safeguarding issue for which males are excluded from female spaces.
13:50 Not all men are predators, but almost all predators are men who, by definition, have multiple victims, which is why all women know how it feels to be prey. This is why single-sex spaces exist. Allowing the sex class that contains almost all the sexual predators to invade the intimate spaces of the sex class that contains almost none, is going to enable and facilitate crimes against women and girls.
14:58 If “It is not a psychiatric disorder” why is gender dysphoria listed in the DSM-V? If gender dysphoria is not a mental disorder, why are taxpayers expected to pay for their hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery? You can’t have it both ways.
16:12 “Trans women already use women’s toilets” but they should not be doing so. When men pretending to be women were few and far between some were granted the privilege, by an abomination known as a “legal fiction,” to use women’s facilities. The privilege has been abused and should therefore be revoked.
17:45 He says there’s “not even one example based on people having a gender recognition certificate” My argument is that the GRC should not exist and nobody should be allowed to falsify their sex on a driver’s license or passport either. No person born male should ever be allowed into female spaces because a significant number of men who claim to be trans are sexual predators. The census proves they are more likely to be jailed for sex offences than other men. There was an argument to be made in favour of the abomination that is “legal fiction” but the world has changed a great deal since then, and lying on documents now causes more harm than good. We could add a field instead. Record natal sex accurately alongside whatever gender you please. You can get married as a “woman” if you like, but stay out of girls’ locker rooms.
18:20 OK now you’re either stupid or lying. There is evidence there are many more crimes against women in unisex change rooms. The woke media chooses to NOT report attacks that show trans people in a bad light no matter what those people have done unless its truly exceptional, but peaktrans has plenty of examples on their website.
18:49 “Democratic will” my arse. Polls showed most Scottish voters OPPOSED the bill. Scotland, like many other nations, is a fake “democracy.” His rant digresses at this point, but “Tories bad” is irrelevant in this discussion.
20:22 Trans people define “hate crime” as anything people do that fails to validate their delusion. Humans cannot change sex. Men can never be women. Words have meanings and meanings matter. “Misgendering” means “correctly sexing” and it is not “violence.” We have the right to freedom of thought and opinion. We have no obligation to lie for others’ benefit.
20:36 I searched for evidence that men who pretend to be women are assaulted in the men’s toilets where they belong. I could not find any. “Trans women” must be excluded from female spaces, because they’re male, not because they’re trans. The bathroom assaults I found all happened in the women’s facilities and the victims were perceived to be trespassing males, or were women attacked by male sex offenders. It turns out, “trans women” are #SaferInTheGents.
20:47 He compares detransition to abortion. No. Abortion does not maim women for life and make them infertile. Abortion is only needed by women who have reached sexual maturity. The trans community is trying to transition young children who cannot possibly give informed consent.
21:30 “Trans women” are clearly not women. Women are exclusively female and no human has ever changed their sex. We are seeing a modern, society-wide example of the conformity experiments that were conducted by Solomon Asch.
21:50 Comparing privileged female leaders who virtue signal as trans allies to Handmaids is indeed unfair. The women you describe are much more analogous to Aunt Lydia.
22:45 “Anti trans activists” are not the people you are speaking to. You attack women’s rights campaigners, and your blatant misogyny has been noticed. We know you’ve got your knickers in a twist because of the rising wave of support for Kellie-Jay Keen. There’s a reason this gets under your skin. Deep down, you know we’re right.
23:40 Nobody is trying to “wish trans people away” Owen. We just want men to stay out of female spaces regardless of gender identity. It that really so hard to understand?
24:00 Hyperbolic rant anticipating that women who campaign for human rights will suffer a “final humiliation” and we will “suffer” to see trans people thrive. He’s clearly salivating at the prospect of his fantasy of our “humiliating” defeat coming true. He has a lot in common with the incel community. He doesn’t understand that we want men who are trans to thrive, just not inside our spaces.
24:27 He claims “all you achieved was to make the lives of a minority who already suffer so much pain and hurt and anguish and fear that little bit harder that’s your only contribution on this planet.” Defending young girls who don’t want to be forced to strip naked in the presence of men is unworthy of anyone’s time, in Owen’s view. Defending women inmates from merciless sexual harassment and assault is not nothing, even if the trans lobby pretends they don’t exist.
25:10 He says the fear-mongering about the consequences of those anti-women laws “will be will be disproven” No, mate. The consequences of the laws are already apparent. You cannot deny that women have been sexually assaulted in prison by male sex offenders who have intact genitals, in violation of international laws that prohibit housing men and women prisoners together.
Some men objectify women and reduce us to our body parts. Some hate us because they want to fuck us and we don’t let them. Some gay men find the very thought of vagina disgusting, but they don’t treat the women in their lives like dirt. What is your excuse for your palpable hatred for women who defend women’s rights, Owen?
Your arguments are seriously flawed. Your manipulative hyperbole is unpersuasive. You’ve got nothing because the facts are not on your side, Owen. Women will not submit to your petulant bullying.
Standing up to the Bullies in Ottawa
Can there be any doubt that we are at a critical tipping point?
Divide and Rule strategies work really well. Canadians have been split along so many different axes that we’ve become not just polarized, but atomized. The obvious purpose of increasing polarization is to ensure people are divided so deeply over issues like abortion or vaccine mandates we can’t join forces to reclaim political power that was stolen from us by corporations decades ago. No matter what the most crucial issue is for you – climate change, abortion rights, workers’ rights – it cannot be solved by voting unless and until voters regain some of the democratic power they have lost, and that will require solidarity on the single issue we have to solve first: representation.
There was a brief, shining moment in the late 60’s when voters, workers and consumers were making progress and the average North American enjoyed the best standard of living in the world, but when restrictions like environmental protections ate into profits the corporations were just not having it. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce developed a very successful plan to take power away from voters, which was described in the infamous Powell memo. This led to the rise of neoliberalism in the U.S., Canada and beyond, accompanied by a massive, ongoing transfer of wealth from the working class to the obscenely rich.
Today’s greedy billionaires meet at Davos and speak quite openly about their global plans for The Great Reset, digital currencies and control of the narrative, because they know there is currently nothing we can do to stop them. We cannot hope to solve this with incremental improvements. If we delay much longer it will be too late to prevent the catastrophic erosion of what rights we have left.
If Canadians want real representation, instead of just the illusion of choice, we need to demand more than just resignations of the worst politicians or we’ll just be playing Whack-a-Mole forever. We need an independent Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform that cannot be manipulated or derailed by any political party. After we finally get rid of first-past-the-post elections, we’ll be able to end other corrupt practices like the “party discipline” that keeps the donor class in control of the agenda.
No peaceful revolution has ever failed if 3.5% of the population participated. The simple math of a few million people standing up for their rights across the nation defeats the state monopoly on violence because there is a limit to how many peaceful protesters Trudeau can unjustly jail. If we want our children and their children to experience real democracy we will have to stand up to the bullies in Ottawa now and demand more than just an end to unethical vaccine mandates.
Happy Canada Day.
No Vote for You!
I’ve been indoctrinated since birth to believe I live in a democracy but I no longer believe this big lie. Rich people believe in democracy and this is rational because they generally get what they vote for. For the rest of us, the process of electoral politics looks something like this:
- Vote for a candidate who makes promises to rich and poor voters.
- Candidate keeps promises made to the rich and breaks promises to the poor.
- When the poor are fed up, they kick said politician to the curb in an election, which may be years down the road, and vote for a different candidate who makes promises to rich and poor voters.
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
Of course I am generalizing and exaggerating. Sometimes policies are implemented that help the poor, but these can be rolled back too, which means progress is slow and incremental, while corruption gallops merrily along. Not all politicians are corrupt, but those who are do a lot of damage.
When rich people are the only voters who influence public policy the form of government is called plutocracy, not democracy. The ruling class loves high voter turnout because it lends legitimacy to leaders who really only have the illusion of the consent of the governed. It is very important for them to maintain the illusion for two reasons.
- Voters won’t demand that democracy be restored or rebuilt if they don’t realize it effectively ended decades ago.
- As long as the illusion of democracy is maintained, the ruling class can insist “voters” are responsible for policies that destroy lives and livelihoods. The illusion of “democracy” allows plutocrats to blame their victims.
Every vote cast helps maintain the illusion of democracy. This is why I will not vote for any candidate until we make democracy real again. I’m not suggesting that others should follow my lead if they live in a swing riding and feel they must vote strategically, which should not need to be a thing, but those of us who live in ridings where the outcome is a foregone conclusion should feel confident in declining their ballot if they so choose.
A large number of declined ballots is a signal that the government lacks legitimacy. I don’t recommend just staying home and refusing to participate, however, because silence is consent.
How to decline your ballot according to Elections Ontario:
“Tell the election official that you are declining your right to vote when they hand you a ballot. This is a public process done out loud.
“The election official will mark “declined” on the back of the ballot. Your ballot will not be placed in the ballot box but in an envelope for declined ballots.”
I received these additional instructions from Elections Ontario via email: “To decline your vote by mail ballot with candidate names, write decline on the back of the ballot. Then follow the instructions provided in the voting kit to return the ballot.”
Philosophy Tube’s Worst Video Ever
I admit I haven’t seen every video they’ve produced, but I nominate the recent Vaccines and Freedom take as the worst video Philosophy Tube has ever produced. Despite listening carefully to what Abigail said, I will remain the in the control group of the massive experiment that is covid vaccine research.
The video is based on “research” conducted by the Royal Institution which gives the game away in this section addressing reasons people don’t get vaccinated.
The researchers go out of their way to focus attention on unknown long term side effects while completely ignoring the well-known adverse events that have been maiming and killing people since the vaccine rollout began.
You cannot claim to be addressing the philosophy around vaccines vs freedom without even mentioning the Trolley Problem, or its variant, the Fat Man pushed off a bridge. We are being encouraged to push healthy children onto the tracks, allegedly to “save granny,” without regard for the huge variation in risk/benefit ratios for the young vs the old.
We can play thought experiments on the issue of forced or coerced vaccination all the day long, but where the rubber meets the road is in the courtroom. A judge in Ontario recently delivered a very thoughtful decision in which he stopped a father from vaccinating his children against their will. The documents which approved the vaccine for the 5-11 cohort in Canada stopped short of recommending the vaccine for healthy children. They have since modified that, but at least one vaccine death of a minor was covered up in a clear attempt to avoid contributing to vaccine “hesitancy.”
Another failure in this video was the failure to discuss the issue of informed consent for medical procedures. The right to bodily integrity is absolute. Nobody should be allowed to inject anything into your body without your permission. The thing about informed consent that the mainstream propagandists don’t want us to talk about is that it MUST be voluntary. If any form of coercion is used, including any threat of harm like job loss, informed consent has not been obtained, and this renders any medical procedure thus performed to be highly unethical.
Some of the people who were forced to get the vaccine to keep their jobs suffered serious harm as a result of that vaccine. Who should be held liable for that harm? Many of these workers cannot afford to sue employers or medical practitioners for the damage done. They have been pushed under the trolley and will never be made whole again. Mandates for covid vaccines in particular are highly unethical because these vaccines can kill.
The very real, if minuscule, risk of death by vaccine cannot be ignored. Is it “safe” to play Russian Roulette? No, it is not, and it does not matter on a philosophical level whether the magazine holds six rounds or six million. You can choose to gamble with your own life, but NOBODY can force you to play that game without your voluntary informed consent. Let’s not even get into whether those who have already been vaccinated were properly informed of the potential risks.
For many people the risk of serious harm or death from Covid justifies the decision to be vaccinated, but the risk/benefit ratio for each individual depends on multiple intersecting factors including age, co-morbidities and level of exposure to the virus. Apart from the balancing of individual freedom with “the greater good” (which is always a huge red flag covering all manner of evils) a blanket policy to vaccinate everyone will not provide the benefits claimed. Whether a particular unvaccinated person can articulate a “good” reason to decline the vaccine is irrelevant because very good reasons do exist, even though the media refuses to discuss them. It was no accident that the most compelling reasons for vaccine hesitancy were ignored by Philosophy Tube in their ridiculous video & the “research” commissioned by the Royal Institution was nothing but a blatant straw-man logical fallacy.
An open letter to my elected representatives
Canadian truckers are right. It is long past time to end vaccine mandates because they violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, specifically section seven which guarantees “security of the person.” Using the threat of job loss to coerce a person to get a medical procedure they do not want is illegal and deeply unethical. This is why vaccine mandates must be abandoned immediately as a public health strategy. If you are unwilling to recognize and support the Charter rights of Canadians, you should resign immediately.
https://justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/art7.html
Understanding The Matrix
What I find most compelling in the Matrix films is the deep connection between the fiction and the world we inhabit. Filmmaker Lana Wachowski has indicated the red pill represented the medication used in the process of gender transition, which is a beautiful interpretation. Great art often contains several layers of meaning, but alternative perspectives are not all created equal. Trying to hijack these films to use as right-wing propaganda is abhorrent, but let’s not feed oxygen to that dumpster fire. The Matrix could also be identified with the forces of capitalism but people are oppressed in other economic systems too.
When I began, many years ago, to try to dig to the foundations of what is wrong with the world, I learned about things like corruption, regulatory capture and Manufacturing Consent. Then I read a mind-blowing 2014 study by Gilens & Page which demonstrated that the only demographic group in the U.S. who get the policies they vote for are the wealthy. The U.S. is not a republic – not a “representative democracy” – in anything but name. The U.S. is an oligarchy. The few who rule are very rich, but if a majority of rich people tried to steer the country to the left to avoid impending pitchforks, they would likely fail.
The Matrix is real and it is constructed of lies.
The lies begin in early childhood. The tooth fairy myth conditions children to go along with a false narrative, if they know what’s good for them, or the money won’t appear under the pillow. Many adult Christians still pray to God like he’s Santa Claus on steroids.
The really Big Lie foundational to so many others is that average people have the collective power to change the world by voting. There was a brief shining moment between the Summer of Love and the infamous Powell Memo when it seemed possible, and millions clung to that shimmering narrative because it felt good, but it was just a mirage in the desert, an illusion forever beyond our reach. Those who are well off find it easy to believe that “representative democracy” is real because they generally get what they vote for, but they are blind to the hard fact that 90% of us do not.
There are many binary categories used to divide and rule us. Increasing polarization only serves the machines and should be guarded against. There are many Big Lies that need to be recognized as such and transformed into new truths:
“Freedom”
“Democracy”
“The American Dream”
“Work hard and you’ll get ahead”
“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain”
In our world, every vote you cast supports the illusion. Every vote supports The Matrix of Lies. Every vote represents more power and wealth extracted by a handful of greedy multi-billionaires to be used against everyone outside their circle. If you find this statement very uncomfortable, you know what cognitive dissonance feels like. We desperately want this to not be true. I now recognize this discomfort as a weapon wielded against us. Our cognitive dissonance keeps us stuck in The Matrix. Fear of pain keeps us stuck; and fear of the chaos we’ve been told will certainly emerge if we fail to comply.
Many of us would like to nuke the entire political & socioeconomic system and some even think it necessary, but we could rise above The Matrix instead. If you wait until the corporate media gives you permission to do so, you will be forever at the mercy of sentient beings who really don’t care if their insatiable greed and lust for power hurts or kills you and the people you love. Many of us, faced with the dawning of this painful truth, just take the blue pill and I cannot fault them for it. None of us want to acknowledge that we are all unwitting agents of The Matrix or that our compliance supports it and empowers it.
I don’t know how all this will end. I’m not going to fly off and save the world, but I can take one step at a time and try to move in the direction of truth. I like to think this is what happens after the movie ends.
Edit: I wrote this before I learned about #MassFormation, which is perhaps a more accurate description for what is happening than #CognitiveDissonance.
The Big Lie Part 4: Cancel Plutocracy
One of the malevolent subsidiaries of the Big Lie is that “there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.” It is true that you can’t just ‘vote’ your way out of an oligarchy, but a variety of alternative tactics will be required to rebuild democracy. Some may march in the street with symbolic pitchforks and be mauled by militarized police, but that spectacle may not be necessary just yet. There are still ways to get the job done without risking tear gas & rubber bullets. Hope is not dead, but this window of opportunity is shrinking fast.
There are several grassroots initiatives undermining the oligarchy/plutocracy and the smartest ones frame our common enemy as “corruption” instead of “capitalism” or “billionaires” because neither the liberals nor conservatives can win this battle without help and trying to restore democratic power only for “my side” is obviously a non-starter. The only way to restore power to all the people from whom it was stolen is to strive for unity in a non-partisan anti-corruption movement.
Expect the plutocrats to fight this every step of the way. Edward Snowden and the subsequent Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed the underhanded information warfare tactics already used successfully to divide & rule us. The billionaires’ lackeys will drive wedges into any anti-corruption movement along as many fault lines as possible. Divide & rule has always been the plutocracy’s strongest defence and it is clear how they have weaponized identity politics to this end.
Those of us who have the patience and tact to use “mental ju-jitsu” skills to de-escalate polarized conversations might train others how to do it. We need to get in touch with the fundamental humanity of people who are literally being framed as our enemies. Setting up our fellow citizens to be attacked by others is criminal and the deep state and/or private contractors engaged in psychological and information warfare ought to be held accountable.
Although corruption is often framed as a monster, huge beyond our reach, there are many ways to hack tentacles off this beast. Some suggest overturning Citizens United would require a constitutional convention, but the Koch network have clear intentions to hijack such an event for their own benefit. Grassroots groups all over the country have already used initiatives in state & local races to enact anti-corruption laws. When enough states clean up their own backyards, we’ll hit a tipping point and the American Anti-Corruption Act can be implemented at the federal level.
Once that happens, parties and candidates not beholden to the wealthy will be easier to elect and it when they reach a critical mass in both houses, it will be possible to mend shredded infrastructure and the social safety net. Eventually, deeper forms of corruption can be addressed, like regulatory capture. It’s time for the trust-busting that finally cut the robber barons down to size to make a comeback. Perhaps one day robust independent oversight of the alphabet agencies can be developed to protect civil and privacy rights and bring the military-industrial-complex to heel.
Opinions differ on which of the many crises we face is the worst one but logic keeps leading back to a singular, fundamental truth. Undermining the plutocracy must come first – chronologically – because voters can’t solve any other problems until they have the power to do so. The Big Lie of “democracy” deliberately blinds voters to the fundamental problem that needs to be solved before all others, so let’s hold the corporate media accountable for malpractice and get to work on solving the core problem.
This post is part of a 4-part series.
The Big Lie Part 1: “Democracy” (The U.S. is not a republic)
Part 2: Duopoly = Oligarchy = Plutocracy (How they get away with it)
Part 3: Plutocrats = Looters (Why we need to fix this)
Part 4: Cancel Plutocracy (How to solve the problem)
The Big Lie Part 3: Plutocrats = Looters
The first two essays in this series laid out the Big Lie of “U.S. democracy” and why it is so hard for the truth about oligarchy/plutocracy to get any traction in the media.
Corporate plutocracy in the U.S.. deprives people of their democratic power, but it does not exist to seek power alone. Incomprehensible volumes of wealth and income have been sucked from the pockets of the poor and working class by the ultra-rich, and this cash vacuum has been turbocharged by the pandemic response.
About a month before the Gilens & Page study was published, billionaire venture capitalist Nick Hanauer gave a TEDtalk in which he warned his peers:
“I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when.”
The apparent response of the ruling class has been something akin to “Alrighty then, a police state it is!” Whether the uprising Hanauer warned of can be avoided or merely delayed remains to be seen. Anyone who has read history ought to know it’s a bad idea to create a massive demographic of angry people who have literally nothing to lose. The corporate Democrats seem as oblivious as the French aristocracy before their heads began to roll.
One might expect the plutocrats to throw us a bone like Medicare for all out of consideration for their own self interest, if not the suffering poor, but despite the massive financial hardship caused by the pandemic, very little is being done to alleviate the acute suffering of tens of millions of people. With massive ongoing protests in many cities and calls for a General Strike, this callous disregard for human suffering may seem remarkably shortsighted, but the oligarchs see things from a higher perch than the rest of us.
The plutocracy stays on top by the effective use of Divide & Rule tactics. They hide in the shadows while encouraging voters on the left and right to see one another as enemies. They play a Polarization Game of their own design in which they are the only possible victors. None of us can “win” such a game by taking sides. On the contrary the only way the rest of us can beat the plutocrats at their own game is to refuse to be played. We win when we recognize those who vote differently as people and acknowledge our shared humanity.
Instead of getting stoked against the enemies we’re told it’s OK to hate, we all need to burst our Orwellian filter bubbles and develop our awareness of the way propaganda is being used to dehumanize us all. We need to recognize that the horrors we’ve been told will be visited upon us if ‘the other side’ wins are falsehoods that pale in comparison to what dystopian nightmares our lives may become if the current corporate technocracy is not brought under human and humane, democratic control, and soon.
Continued in Part 4
This post is part of a 4-part series.
The Big Lie Part 1: “Democracy” (The U.S. is not a republic)
Part 2: Duopoly = Oligarchy = Plutocracy (How they get away with it)
Part 3: Plutocrats = Looters (Why we need to fix this)
Part 4: Cancel Plutocracy (How to solve the problem)
Connect ALL the Dots 