Diabolical-dialectical - A's Blog Thingy

I think the turbolift is stuck…

“You don’t miss college, you miss communism”

It’s a little bit silly, but I have this little Hippocratic oath for data designers in the book. There are two basic questions I encourage them to ask themselves. One is, does it increase self-determination of poor people? And two, if it was aimed at anyone but poor and working people, would you be able to do it? And if you answer “no” to either of those, don’t do it. You’re on the wrong side of history.

The High-Tech Poorhouse

I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

One of the absolute biggest failures of the US/Western "left" is the fact that most people are only capable of being anti-imperialist in the abstract and/or in hindsight. "Of course invading Iraq was bad!" people will say. "Of course invading Vietnam was bad! Of course the US lied about Iraq in the 90s to initiate the Gulf War!" (and Vietnam in the 60s, and Iraq again in the 2000s). But when it comes to what the empire is doing now people get fucking goldfish brains and are incapable of critically analyzing any new information. You see, we just have to stay in Syria to save the Kurds and defeat Assad. We just have to go to war with China if they try to reunify Taiwan to protect democracy. We should have stayed in Afghanistan to protect women and girls. Or people will try to both-sides it and say "well of course US imperialism is bad, but [insert Official Enemy State here] is just as bad if not worse!". Then when the empire makes its move and inevitably it kills thousands of people and makes the world objectively worse, then people will say "oh I guess it was bad after all", and the "anti-imperialists" of 20 years from now will pat themselves on the back for remembering that bad thing the empire did and knowing it definitely was bad.

All of this is supremely useless. If anti-imperialism means anything it means stopping the empire before it ever even starts, and if it does start, doing any and everything possible to sabotage and defeat it.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Theses on Feuerbach

Two decades of conspiracy theorizing about the extent to which 9/11 was an "inside job" have revealed no all-encompassing sinister secrets or grand plots except the least exciting smoking gun of all: that terrorism and mass death are a feature, not a bug. The creation, financing, support, control, and loss of control of terrorist groups has been one of the key weapons in the arsenal of american imperialism since the 1970s. The "inside job" is that the cycle of murder is intentional even if the individual events may not be.

The fact that the US intelligence apparatus runs a constant treadmill of funding governments and organizations to topple their enemies that then in turn need to be fought by more US-funded client states and terror groups is not a failure of foreign policy, or a shadowy conspiracy by some deep state, it's simply how foreign policy works in modern empire. It works for them! Look to Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Panama, the post-Soviet states. Every butchering leader or violent radical cadre that turns from a help to a hindrance to the USA becomes yet another opportunity for the exercise of force and the continued operation of the military-industrial-intelligence complex.

You don't need thermite or holographic planes or insurance fraud or budgetary coverups to explain the simple fact that if the USA is willing to accept millions of dead in the imperial periphery as the basic digestive process in the ourobouros that is imperial power-dealing, then a couple thousand dead in the imperial core is at worst a regrettable hiccup, and at best an unexpected twist, a chance to take another bite, a new opportunity to launch yet more destructive adventures abroad, which will in turn cause their own crises and opportunities, on and on circularly forever until the whole thing collapses or is brought down by force.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/virginia-eubanks-interview-automating-inequality-poverty

one thing about me is I love brutalism. I love concrete. I love not living in a house with cardboard walls and I love looking at a building and thinking this imposing boy would survive a nuclear war

Here is a masterlist of every single genocidal statement made by the State of Israel, all appropriately quoted and sourced.

These statements cannot be retracted.

Quote from the Israeli State Minister of Agriculture and Development.

And yet, Zionists will tell you that “This is not a genocide, Hamas are using Palestinians as human shields!”