An interesting take on First World/bourgeois identity politics. This is more or less my long-held position on these questions as well.
The American Victim Complex: An age-old tradition Reply
A great takedown of victimology and the oppression olympics, Left and Right.
Ron Paul on Noam Chomsky & Crony Capitalism 1
Ron Paul sounds almost like a left-anarchist is this and Noam Chomsky sounds almost like an an-cap. It’s a shame the gap between an-coms and an-caps is so vast when we agree 90% of the time.
The Death of the American People and Empire Reply
Truth Time: Marxism is Stagnating Reply
A great takedown of the old guard Communist parties AND the First World Left by Unruhe. The one thing I disagree with Unruhe on is that I don’t consider the old guard Commies to be moving toward fascism, much less “third positionism,” but toward bourgeois nationalism (in fact, they’ve already been there for a long time, with Putin and Xi being the most obvious examples). And the critique of the embrace of academic leftists gender studies ideology by Western Maoists is spot on as well.
Bernie Sanders Proves 3rd Worldist Theory Reply
This is from late 2015 but still very succinct given the current buildup to next year’s election.
The Empire of Faux Liberalism Reply
A Facebook reader offers some interesting insights about the nature of the present global empire, and empires generally. It is true that empires are often more culturally “liberal” or “progressive” than the societies that they subjugate and conquer. Alexander the Great spread the Hellenistic culture throughout the Ancient Near East. The Romans were certainly more advanced and more of a cosmopolitan culture than many of their backwater provinces. The European colonialists were frequently more liberal than the conquered peoples of their empires (for instance, the Spaniards largely put an end to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice and the British outlawed the suttee). Napoleon was something of prototype for modern liberal imperialism. It was the American empire that ended emperor-worship in Japan.
Keith Preston: Saudi beheadings highlight barbarian nature of regime 1
Press TV: Listen here.
The beheading of 37 Saudi nationals across the kingdom this week underscored once again that Saudi Arabia is “one of the most reactionary and retrograde states” in the world today, says an American political analyst in Virginia.
“It is up to United States to re-enter talks, not Iran” 1
State as Aberration with Keith Preston of AttacktheSystem.Com Reply
We Are All Julian Assange!: An Anarchist Soliloquy Reply
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
These are the days, dearest motherfuckers. These are those days. These days. These days of rage. These do or die days. These all or nothing days. These days with the ice caps melting and the seas rising to drown their wayward children. These days with the empire collapsing all around us in heaps of flames like the glowing red spires of a thousand Notre Damme’s. Days of hysteria and blindness. Days of gnashing teeth and talking heads decapitated from the reality they pontificate upon. Days of drones strikes and indefinite detention. The end of days for the worlds most abominable superpower, exit stage right. But the actors in this epic tragedy are revolting. Swing low, sweet cherry, Helter Skelter is coming down with a fight. Nero’s finale is rapidly becoming a concerto. In days like these, truth has become a precious commodity. The kind of glimmering prize that even the better angels of our nature are tempted to horde. But sadly sometimes even horded prizes can be taken for granite. Washed away in the rapids of filth that can only be called “truth” in parentheses.
Trump, Netanyahu, Saudis leading us closer to catastrophe 1
This should be the most important political issue in the United States right now but it’s not because….idiocracy.
Washington State Politicians Drop Cynical Attempt to Impose Taxes on Gold & Silver Reply
Sound Money Group, In-State Dealers, and Grassroots Activists Deter Tax-Hungry Politicians
By J P Cortez
Well, here’s some encouraging news…
Efforts in Washington State to impose sales tax on gold and silver were SHUT DOWN today thanks to intense efforts by the Sound Money Defense League, a group of in-state coin dealers led by Dan Duncan, the Association of Washington Businesses, and a large number of vocal grassroots supporters.
Here’s the backstory…
Since last month, a few misguided Washington State senators and representatives have been trying to ram through a new tax on constitutional money.
Their cynical efforts stalled out last month on the senate side, and today, the House Finance Committee voted decisively against imposing a new sales tax on precious metals.
Keith Preston: US has been at war throughout most of its history Reply
Press TV. Listen here.
The United States has been perpetually at conflict with other nations throughout most of its history, following the expansionist tradition of past empires, says an American political analyst in Virginia.
“We had the War of 1812, the Mexican war, the Civil War, the wars with various Native American nations (tribes), the Spanish–American War, the two world wars, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Iraq twice, Afghanistan, just to name some of the major ones,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.
“We also have to consider all of the different wars that the United States has played an indirect role in terms of either engineering coups or arming insurgents or funding a particular state that is engaged in a war against its domestic population,” Preston told Press TV on Tuesday.
“When we add all of those wars, we see that the United States has literally been involved in wars in probably hundreds of different countries and territories over the past couple of centuries,” he added.
PressTV-US ‘most warlike nation in history’: Jimmy CarterFormer US President Jimmy Carter says America has only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making the country “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”
Former US President Jimmy Carter said Sunday that America has only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making the country “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”
Speaking at his regular Sunday School lesson at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Carter said the reason for most US wars was Washington’s tendency to force other nations to “adopt our American principles.”
Carter said that China, in contrast to the US, had made massive economic progress by maintaining peace. “How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?” he asked.
The US has “wasted, I think, $3 trillion” on military spending. “It’s more than you can imagine. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”
“And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover. We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong,” Carter told the congregation.
AnPrim On Fire: Human Supremacy Within Anarcho-Primitivist Narrative 4
By Ria Montana, forest & wetland rewilder https://veganprimitivist.wordpress.com/
Within anarcho-primitivism plays an ongoing dialectic pinpointing origins of the problem of civilization. Impugning only capitalism or the industrial age is much too timid. From the left, radical environmental activist leader and author Derrick Jensen impugns the point people exceed their capacity for self-sufficiency, the dawn of cities. In the trilogy Ishmael, The Story of B and My Ishmael fiction writer and civilization critic Daniel Quinn renders agriculture as humans’ dichotomizing choice to be Givers or Takers. Couple city settling with plant cultivating & animal herding and you’ve hit the collective anprim sweet spot.
Looking farther back than agriculture as the start of humans’ split with nature slashes approval. Anarcho-primitivist author and Anarchy Radio host John Zerzan’s look back to origins of art and language has appealed to some but with less enthusiasm. In his 3/13/19 radio show Zerzan reals in analysis on the catalyst of controlled fire, instead positioning civilization’s birth at the point humans domesticated animals and plants. Some say focusing at this fixed ~10 millennia point paints too simple a picture, ignores all civilizations’ embers heating up, culminating to ignite the world ablaze.
Techno-Fire
The debate on civilization’s origins parallels the debate on what qualifies as a technology. Values connoted by technologies are biased to support the interpreter’s view on origins. For example, those who blame agriculture see the plow as an obvious tool of civilization. Those who include controlled fire in the blame see hearths uncovered in archeologic digs as technological shifts in humans’ relationship with living communities that set the stage for domestication of plants and animals. Agriculture-blaming purists deny that using fire is technology toward civilization, perhaps to justify keeping fire in their rewilding repertoire, or perhaps in an effort to ward off criticism of hunting and cooking animals. In the premise set forth here placing civilization’s origins with the beginnings of human primate’s colonizing lifeways, inventions such as mortar and pestle are not catalysts toward civilization if they are not used as colonizing instruments, but spears are catalysts toward civilization if they are used as colonizing instruments, no matter the complexity of design. (Yes other species use hunting implements, but not in a way that degrades and massacres large scale living communities in a mega-regional and eventually worldwide colonizing schema as humans have.)
Reasons not to take the Julian Assange story at face value 16
By Adam Ormes
News from Nowhere
Witnessing the uniformity of the popular response to Assange’s removal from the Ecuadorian embassy demonstrates that precious few commentators are willing to discuss the numerous ‘red flags’ in his story. It would seem therefore that it is this reluctant sleuth’s duty to lay them out.
There are perhaps 5 main points to consider here:
- Assange’s connection to ‘The Family’ child LSD brainwashing cult – which was very likely an intelligence operation. Substantiating evidence for this claim is provided below.
- Assange’s hacker alias, which he used from the age of 16, was Mendax – meaning ‘liar’ in Latin. He was caught after a police raid in 1991, and charged in 1994 “with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges (the other six were dropped), and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. The perceived absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood were cited to justify his lenient penalty.” [link]
- Assange’s relationships with US government. “On the 17th of November 1994, Julian Assange replied to an email from NASA employee Fred Blonder(,) the UNIX toolkit coordinator at NASIRC (NASA Automated Systems Incident Response Capability). (…) Someone from Los Alamos National Laboratories (mcn) was copied on the email (identity unknown). Also copied on the email was Quentin Fennessy from Sematech. SEMATECH was formed in 1987 as a partnership between the United States Government and 14 U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturers.” Likewise, his former hacking comrade Pieter Zaitko, who went on to work for BBN Technologies, a DARPA military contractor, claimed that Assange’s “graduate work had been funded by a US Government grant, specifically NSA and DARPA money which was supposed to be used for ‘fundamental security research’.” This was subsequently revoked; however it begs the question as to how and why such funding was obtained in the first place. [link]
The Strange Success of Russiagate Reply
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
It was the popcorn fart heard round the world. After two years of the vilest Russophobic hysteria seen since McCarthy was hauled off to a laughing academy in a straight-jacket, Robert Mueller, patron saint of butt-hurt Dems and indefinite Muslim detention, came to a conclusion on Russiagate only stunning to those of us who don’t live outside the bulletproof walls of stone blind denial. After 37 indictments for totally unrelated Beltway scumbaggery. After $26 million of the taxpayers pilfered dollars flushed down the fucking toilet. After five hundred thousand hours of unhinged sore losers like Rachel Maddow giving Alex Jones a run for his money screaming their bloody heads off about one grassy knoll after another. The results of the great Russian Inquisition of 2019 are bupkis, notta, zero, no collusion whatsoever between one Donald J. Trump and the Putin regime. You could have heard a pin-head drop at MSDNC.
In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war 4
By Greg Jaffe and Jenna Johnson
Washington Post
At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred recently on one point that was once nearly unthinkable: The country is on the verge of “civil war.”
First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump’s. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.”
The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of diGenova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him — although she placed the blame squarely on the president.
Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”
With the investigative report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III said to be nearly complete, and with impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election campaign ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or in the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there is talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.
Turkey has been moving away from American paradigm Reply
Press TV. Listen here.
Turkey has been moving away from the traditional American paradigm, a political analyst in Virginia.
Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com. said Turkey was gradually moving away from the traditional American paradigm and heading in a different direction leading towards Russia.
PressTV-‘Turkey moving away from US sphere of influence’Turkey has been moving away from America’s sphere of influence and improving its relationship with Russia, says a political analyst in Virginia.
Preston told Press TV that tensions between Turkey and the United States especially rose when Donald Trump became the US president.
Preston said since the Trump administration came to power, there is clearly some tension between the United States and other traditional US allies in NATO.
He said a number of issues were the reason for the tensions.
One reason noted by Preston for the increased tensions with Washington is Ankara’s decision to purchase a Russian missile defense system.
“Turkey and the United States are now having a conflict over the question of Turkey’s acquisition of weapons from Russia,” Preston said.
Fuck the Border 6
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
Well, he finally got what he wanted, dearest motherfuckers. That vile crusted jizz rag we call a president has finally managed to manufacture an actual crisis at the border. After months of saber rattling conspiracy theories about secret jihadists and child actors, after years of demonizing people escaping the shitholes that Uncle Sam dug himself in the killing fields of the Northern Triangle, the grand swarms have finally arrived, too great in number for even the Donald’s enemies on the fake news to ignore. Naturally, Trump is playing up this tragedy as vindication for all his racist wolf-crying but the sick reality is that it’s likely largely the result of it. A self-fulfilling doomsday prophecy for the MAGA era.
Jill Stein: Rachel Maddow is “Brain Dead” 2
Former Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein returns to PRIMO NUTMEG to discuss a plethora of controversial subjects. Dr. Stein answers questions about Venezuela, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, third-party politics, the corporate media’s RussiaGate smears against her, the details of her appearance with Vladimir Putin at the 2015 RT dinner in Moscow, the Green New Deal, cancelling student loan debt, and whether or not she is running for President in 2020.
Reflections on Electoral Politics (Not a Pleasant Thought) Reply
Voting is fine as a cultural ritual (like trick or treating on Halloween or setting off fireworks on July 4), but the outcomes of elections are merely reflections of pre-existing cultural patterns.
Elected officials are the employees of the ruling class/power elite, and their job is to implement pre-determined policies that are based on the consensus of elites regarding their own interests. The policies are worked out in think tanks and elite foundations controlled by elite donors and financiers. Anyone who gets elected president has to either do the bidding of the board of directors or be forced out. The elite has gone out of their way to undermine Trump, even though he is one of them, but just doesn’t play by the rules (like gatecrashing the primaries) and goes off script occasionally and actually tells the truth (like how the WMD claim in Iraq was a hoax). Someone who was genuinely antagonistic to elite interests would be out in heartbeat: framed, impeached, criminally charged, assassinated, whatever. Jimmy Carter seems to have been a decent guy. But who was running his foreign policy? Zbig B, who cultivated the Taliban and the Khmer Rouge as clients. Gerald Ford was probably a decent guy? But who was running his foreign policy? Henry the K, who greenlighted Surkarno’s massacre of 500,000 Timorese.
If Tulsi was elected prez either she would have to go the same way as Obama, or have the wrath of the ruling class come down on her 100 times greater than what it’s been with Trump. The same would be true of a Ron Paul-like Republican, a Jill Stein, or a Constitution Party president. I do think that electoral campaigns have a valuable propaganda function, which is why I promote Tusli now, Stein in 2016, Ron Paul in 2008/2012. In my perfect world someone like Carne Ross would be in the Democratic primaries, and someone like Marc Victor in the Republican primaries. But the goal of electoral campaigns should be to disseminate propaganda, not to “win.” The voting thing will happen on its own as ideas permeate the wider culture. A good example is the way that weed legalization and gay marriage went from being fringe ideas to being normalized. But at Antonio Gramsci, F.A. Hayek, Max Weber, Alain de Benoist, and plenty of others have pointed out, it’s winning the war of ideas that matters. The rest will happen on its own. As I once wrote elsewhere:
“The standard pattern in the history of the advancement of radical movements is that a new revolutionary outlook first captures the imagination of the intellectual elite, who become dissenters, and this new outlook then advances into the ranks of those who are most likely to opt for radicalism, or who have the least to lose by doing so. So, in turn, the intellectual dissidents are joined by student radicals and rebellious youth, bohemians and counterculturalists, members of the lumpenproletariat and the underclass, and marginalized or outcast social groups. Eventually, radical ideas begin working their way into the ranks of the conventional proletariat, and then into the middle class, and, finally, the establishment, with social reactionaries reluctantly being dragged along.”
The Amish have a pretty cool take on voting: “The Amish don’t vote in national elections. They vote in local elections. They do so because they have decided long ago that to vote for anyone on the national stage is to vote for a corrupt, lying, scheming Son of Satan. They won’t do it. Instead they argue that on the local level their vote just might make a bit of difference.” I generally agree with this although I think it’s a bit defamatory to Satan to compare him to the political class. https://www.patheos.com/…/disturbed-by-the-presidential…
