Art In Architecture // Wien Leopoldstadt

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.

Like, this may come as a shock to people like Tumblr liberals who are totally stuck in the Western anglophone neoliberal ideology echo-chamber but like, outside of the west, out there where the majority of the worlds people live, Kwame Nkrumah's thought is taken more seriously than Milton Friedman's. So why will left liberals engage with Friedman's thought, even if only to debunk it, but not engage at all with Nkrumah's writings on neocolonialism, and just write it off?

There's a common charge leveled by supposedly "open-minded" liberals toward anti-imperialists, that we just 'blindly' support any force that's contravailing US the US on a regional or global scale, but how am I supposed to take this seriously as anything but projection?

We anti-imperialists often make specific, verifiable claims about happenings in global geopol, such as that the so-called "Free Syrian Army" consisted mostly of salafi jihadists allowed into Syria through their northern border with Turkey, and that it doesn't make sense that a civil war could simply Materialize in a country like Syria which right before the war started had one of the lowest ratios of guns to people in the world, or that the Maidan coup regime that swept into power in Kiev in 2014 was heavily infiltrated with fascists, and would not have been able to consolidate power without the instrumentalisation of fascist gangs and paramilitary organizations.

The liberal response to these specific claims, then, is to point to reports from corporate media with every incentive to lie, themselves doing no independent investigation but instead parroting verbatim the word of the State Department as fact, and dismissing all independent media investigations out of hand with no further thought.

In a situation such as this, can that response really be considered "open-minded"? It seems that time and time again intellectual rigor is reserved for discussions of technocratic tinkering within the west's iron curtain, and not the lives of people outside of it.

There's plenty of brain-juice to be expended on justifying why the US economy is actually in good shape and the people saying they're struggling more than before are just stupid, but when it comes to considering why African heads of state choose the China Development Bank over the IMF as an economic partner or Russia over the NATO states as security partners, these leaders of millions are dismissively written off as histrionically anti-Western, paranoid, and too mentally weak to see through Russian and Chinese propaganda. Is it this really a 'rational' way to look at the world?

Personally, I think not.

I think the turbolift is stuck…

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

Drawing in mspaint? Cool, impressive,  But whenever I see that, I think about the person who makes their art in power point  Every time I see them it boggles me

(their account)

EPISODE 400: Sky's the Limit

Read the previous episode→

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"

new favorite reddit user

Rudolf Bauer Space, 1932