So, I went to London to speak to the Left … no, not “the Left” you’re probably thinking of. Not the mask-wearing, Ukrainian-flag-flying Left. Not the pronoun-using, segregationist Left. Not the WEF, WHO, FBI, CIA, DHS, and MI6-loving Left. Not the global-capitalist New Normal Left. The other Left. The old-school Left. The “Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Putin-loving, far-right-extremist” Left.
I disagree. Capitalism is what you call it, but you are not using the term correctly. This is corporate fascism. The State works in partnership with private actors. It's what makes Nazi Germany. And what makes the modern French state, and to a lesser degree the US state. If it was capitalism you would have free markets and free trade. But you have nothing like that. The opposite of that. It is run on behalf of the elites who own shares in large corporations, or who are benefiting by being vastly overpaid by the State. Capitalism isn't anything like this.
If you are in the US, compare the somewhat capitalist veterinarian. You bring your cat to the vet and the vet tells you the cat is sick. "How much" you ask, and you make a financial agreement. That is capitalism.
Instead, if you are a person and you go to the doctor, vast organizations are involved. They pay the doctor who is working for a large medical corporation. You never know what it costs, and neither does the doctor. You have choices only to the degree the insurance companies and government allows. Payment is according to government order.
If the vet or the doctor were diagnosing and treating the same thing, say a broken leg, the vet would cost $1000 and the doctor would cost $10,000 but you wouldn't know it's $10,000.
Corporate fascism is the scourge. Don't say this is capitalism. Capitalism is the only thing that due to its extraordinary productivity is responsible for our rising above the animals and the primitive peoples and having amazing wealth and material success. Capitalism enriches everyone.
Corporate fascism makes us poorer and poorer because it is nothing but parasites leaching off of us and there are fewer and fewer productive people and more and more leaches. They pay people to become leaches in return for their political support. One reason Singapore has a much better economy and system than the USA.
Whoa. This is genius. And it gives me hope (that someone could see it and name it so clearly).
Isn't our response then to re-encode values in every way possible -- through critical thinking, in the family, in the church, in the community. Local, local, local, eschew brands, turn off the TV, meet in person, fight to defend non-corporate values wherever they flourish?
So GlobalCap is creating a reality, that's largely unopposed, (except by reactionary groups that do not understand what they are up against) though within that reality - with superficials differences - they have no ideology or values. A meaningless reality then, requiring compliance to exist in. That sounds right and inline with the larger transhuman plan to cyborg us.
Still, it won't work because at the end of the day - and whether people understand this framing or not - humans are meaning-making beings. The pressure of having meaning gutted will act a catalyst and push people into action even if that is messy and ineffective and uncoordinated. Over time, they will simply not comply and will do something else - create something else. Nature doesn't do meaninglessness either, so this will fall apart, because, of its own lack of substance.
I say this as an old school Leftist who thinks "class" is considerably more important than whatever "designer, uber aggrieved, micro-identity" anyone might have dreamed up today - no matter how righteous and special said "identity" might make them feel.
If they can change the definition of what a "woman is" to include the guy standing in front of you waving his penis around - it's pretty small potatoes to simply alter any and all language and concepts to fit the PSYOP of the moment - as in changing the definition of "a pandemic," or of what a "vaccine is," or of what constitutes "herd immunity," what constitutes "a coup," what a "Nazis" is, what an "unprovoked invasion" is, what "government censorship is," etc. etc.
As someone who paid far too little attention for far too long - to the "Woke" controlled demolition of language and our collective reality - I finally started paying attention when all those death threats and rape threats against J.K.Rowling piqued my curiosity. I mean what outlandish transphobic hate speech could Ms. Rowling have uttered to incite such a violent response? Imagine my surprise when after I had read every word she had spoken on the topic I found that I completely agreed with her - thus being forced to face the fact that I too am now clearly yet another shameless "hateful transphobic bigot" - yeah, a TERF. I mean sure, I totally support the basic equal "rights" of trans-people - but at the end of the day I do put my trust in science based biological reality rather than anyone's gender delusions - and I really don't think penis's belong in women's rape shelters, domestic violence shelters or women's prisons - no matter what "identity" is attached to that penis. Call me "old school."
So between the assault on language, free speech and basic civil liberties at play in the "Woke" culture wars, AND the clearly parallel assault as part of the covid propaganda operation and Ukraine - I've come to develop a deep an abiding appreciation for ANYONE who can still think for themselves and who can summon the courage to openly question the continuous stream of propaganda being pumped out like raw sewage by virtually all Western MSM 24/7. Strange bedfellows are now clearly the order of the day. I sincerely appreciate my Libertarian and Conservative sisters and brothers much more today than I did only a few years back.
Labels such as "left" vs "right" - "liberal vs conservative" have been turned inside out and on their heads by the massive propaganda assault involved in first "Russiagate," then "Trump Degrangement Syndrome," then the "Covid Operation," and now "Ukraine." So if you still have two functioning neural synapse left to rub together - and you're willing to think for yourself rather than needing Fox News or NPR to "tell you" - "what to think" - I'm more than happy to call you "comrade."
“The old-school Left. The ‘Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Putin-loving, far-right-extremist’ Left.”
Now that’s my kind of Left 😁 The free-thinking, liberty-loving, anti-tyranny, tolerant-of-differing-viewpoints, truth-seeking, anti-GloboCap, peace-defending Left ✌️
The system you aptly describe as "GloboCap" is far closer to Fascism than capitalism (in my opinion it *is* outright Fascism). A truly free market is does not include oligarchical elites and "too big to fail" corporations so heavily integrated into the state apparatus you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
As someone else mentioned here, this has everything to do with the final stages of "Democracy" and very little to do with capitalism which no person alive has but a passing experience with.
Eh. Left, right, whatever. Like Greenwald has said over and over, "my ideology hasn't changed, my principles are still my principles." I was always a big progressive, hated both Bushes, loved Dennis Kucinich. I have no issues allying with the populist right. Go Rand Paul and Matt Gaetz and anyone else standing in the way of this garbage.
A big part of the problem is the role captured governments play, having monopolies on violence as they do. Without government capture, the globalists would not have nearly the power that they do. Allow people to self govern and the worst problems go away.
"Global capitalism has no ideology … There is no ideological territory outside global capitalism. There is no “outside.” There are no external adversaries."
Global capitalism is bent on privatizing the commons, which consists of the genes we are made from, the air we breathe, and whatever else they haven't privatized yet for whatever reason.
They are doing this in order to reset the monopoly board, or as they would put it, to "save capitalism".
This isn't an ideology? Of course its an ideology. A very sharp dividing line I would say.
Oh, and they're also trying to reduce the population by 95%. Malthusianism isn't an ideology? Transhumanism?
I don’t understand this left and right thing. I am an American and an individual. You seem to think there are opposite teams in different countries that have shared beliefs and values. I think there might be, but there is a vast majority of individuals with families that just want to live freely without any of the other two opposing groups bugging them.
Call us the anti-politics group. We judge everything on an individual case by case basis.
By the way, all the “isms” are intellectual creations to attack or gain advantage in a debate. The “isms” can’t exist if you evaluate everything on a specific case by case basis.
I've been saying for years that labeling our enemies as "leftists" or "communists" is a serious mistake that complicates and thwarts our efforts to deal with society's real problems. There are very few principled leftists remaining in this country -- about the same number as real white supremacists. The only principles you need to assess an ideology are: adherence to the rule of law, freedom of expression, and reliance on common sense. Whether those against those ideas are on "the left" or "the right" is irrelevant. They are all enemies of free people.
I think what you wrote here is helpful. Where to go from here though? I don't think people are ever going to agree on the definitions of words that derive most of their meaning from a dualistic way of thinking. "I'm definitely not X, therefore I'm Y. Don't tell me Y is distorted/wrong/delusional/changed from when I first understood it. That's X-talk." The underlying ideologies behind some of these words are just so entrenched in our psyches that invoking the word is almost sure to launch people into righteous arguments, which beautifully keeps us squabbling under the divide+conquer rubric that is working so well right now.
Agreeing on our language may just have to come last. I suppose conversations like this have to continue as the collective works out on a mental level that we're stuck here and no one is going to argue their way out of it no matter how logical they their they're being. In the mean time we can also be focusing on tangible micro-steps to regain and strengthen whatever common ground we can find at the human-to-human level. Do I have 3 other friends who want to garden and collab on food preservation? Great. 10k of those 3-people collabs = greater food sovereignty. I don't need to agree with them on everything in order to share food prep duties during harvest season. We CAN do this. Not sure how long it'll take or how rough the road but the human to human spirit of collaboration is something we have on our side, should we choose to activate it. And we don't have to like each other to collaborate on one or two small things which achieve SOMETHING we can identify as a shared value.
"When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich".
--Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Looks like the opposite happened: the rich ate the left.
I disagree that they have no ideology. The WEF certainly has an ideology, and it is probably indicative of the hidden hands behind them. James Lindsay of New Discourses has made a convincing case that they have embraced an unholy mix of Hermeticism and Gnosticism. They shall become as gods, while those of us they (in their infinite mercy) permit to live can eat ze boogs and be sequestered into reservations! These are luxury belief systems, once embraced by debauched aristocrats, to be indulged in between bloody wars and bloodier orgies. They still are. They are just riding the transformative powers of capital. It didn't have to be evil, but it is.
Thank you. This is a very useful insight and pragmatic framing. I have a few suggestions of what can we do to push back:
I believe that awareness, calm resistance to the directions our institutions are pushing us in, and (self)-knowledge are key.
By becoming trauma aware, we can learn to spot the signs of defensive nervous systems at play. We can learn to recognize the Survival Styles in people, and stop electing, rewarding and idolizing the folks who clearly display them.
We can refuse to live in fear, and become aware of the fear mongering for what it is. We can read up on the “science” of Nudging, and learn how the magic is trick done. This makes it much harder for us to be fooled or tricked into fear.
Most of all, we can stop consuming the news media. Indeed, this is the number one recommendation I give to people with chronic illnesses who want to reduce their symptoms. I guarantee this will not only make us less fearful, but will also improve our quality of life.
We can also resist the divide and conquer tactics emanating from out institutions, which seek to get us to dehumanize, other and blame each other.
We can identify and attend to our addictions.*
We can avoid the junk, and prevent the need for pharmaceuticals.
We can help other people who are still stuck in chronic defensive nervous system states to wake up, and come back to a calm place. This cannot be achieved simply by argumentation with facts and logic, because this just feeds the defensiveness, so must be done by appealing to the right brain hemisphere via re-connection to love and common humanity, through metaphor, comedy, poetry, music, awe and beauty.
It's not capitalism, it's democracy. As for Leftists, they are just people manipulated into doing what the government and corporations already want. Most "Conservatives" too, only slower. Someone said that the real purpose of democracy is to hide the real leaders, and I think it's true. You know only the puppets, not those who are behind them. That said, I think despotism is growing, so I really see little advantages or real freedom: https://contrarium.substack.com/p/western-samizdat
I disagree. Capitalism is what you call it, but you are not using the term correctly. This is corporate fascism. The State works in partnership with private actors. It's what makes Nazi Germany. And what makes the modern French state, and to a lesser degree the US state. If it was capitalism you would have free markets and free trade. But you have nothing like that. The opposite of that. It is run on behalf of the elites who own shares in large corporations, or who are benefiting by being vastly overpaid by the State. Capitalism isn't anything like this.
If you are in the US, compare the somewhat capitalist veterinarian. You bring your cat to the vet and the vet tells you the cat is sick. "How much" you ask, and you make a financial agreement. That is capitalism.
Instead, if you are a person and you go to the doctor, vast organizations are involved. They pay the doctor who is working for a large medical corporation. You never know what it costs, and neither does the doctor. You have choices only to the degree the insurance companies and government allows. Payment is according to government order.
If the vet or the doctor were diagnosing and treating the same thing, say a broken leg, the vet would cost $1000 and the doctor would cost $10,000 but you wouldn't know it's $10,000.
Corporate fascism is the scourge. Don't say this is capitalism. Capitalism is the only thing that due to its extraordinary productivity is responsible for our rising above the animals and the primitive peoples and having amazing wealth and material success. Capitalism enriches everyone.
Corporate fascism makes us poorer and poorer because it is nothing but parasites leaching off of us and there are fewer and fewer productive people and more and more leaches. They pay people to become leaches in return for their political support. One reason Singapore has a much better economy and system than the USA.
Whoa. This is genius. And it gives me hope (that someone could see it and name it so clearly).
Isn't our response then to re-encode values in every way possible -- through critical thinking, in the family, in the church, in the community. Local, local, local, eschew brands, turn off the TV, meet in person, fight to defend non-corporate values wherever they flourish?
So GlobalCap is creating a reality, that's largely unopposed, (except by reactionary groups that do not understand what they are up against) though within that reality - with superficials differences - they have no ideology or values. A meaningless reality then, requiring compliance to exist in. That sounds right and inline with the larger transhuman plan to cyborg us.
Still, it won't work because at the end of the day - and whether people understand this framing or not - humans are meaning-making beings. The pressure of having meaning gutted will act a catalyst and push people into action even if that is messy and ineffective and uncoordinated. Over time, they will simply not comply and will do something else - create something else. Nature doesn't do meaninglessness either, so this will fall apart, because, of its own lack of substance.
How long, how many left? No idea.
Thanks.
I say this as an old school Leftist who thinks "class" is considerably more important than whatever "designer, uber aggrieved, micro-identity" anyone might have dreamed up today - no matter how righteous and special said "identity" might make them feel.
If they can change the definition of what a "woman is" to include the guy standing in front of you waving his penis around - it's pretty small potatoes to simply alter any and all language and concepts to fit the PSYOP of the moment - as in changing the definition of "a pandemic," or of what a "vaccine is," or of what constitutes "herd immunity," what constitutes "a coup," what a "Nazis" is, what an "unprovoked invasion" is, what "government censorship is," etc. etc.
As someone who paid far too little attention for far too long - to the "Woke" controlled demolition of language and our collective reality - I finally started paying attention when all those death threats and rape threats against J.K.Rowling piqued my curiosity. I mean what outlandish transphobic hate speech could Ms. Rowling have uttered to incite such a violent response? Imagine my surprise when after I had read every word she had spoken on the topic I found that I completely agreed with her - thus being forced to face the fact that I too am now clearly yet another shameless "hateful transphobic bigot" - yeah, a TERF. I mean sure, I totally support the basic equal "rights" of trans-people - but at the end of the day I do put my trust in science based biological reality rather than anyone's gender delusions - and I really don't think penis's belong in women's rape shelters, domestic violence shelters or women's prisons - no matter what "identity" is attached to that penis. Call me "old school."
So between the assault on language, free speech and basic civil liberties at play in the "Woke" culture wars, AND the clearly parallel assault as part of the covid propaganda operation and Ukraine - I've come to develop a deep an abiding appreciation for ANYONE who can still think for themselves and who can summon the courage to openly question the continuous stream of propaganda being pumped out like raw sewage by virtually all Western MSM 24/7. Strange bedfellows are now clearly the order of the day. I sincerely appreciate my Libertarian and Conservative sisters and brothers much more today than I did only a few years back.
Labels such as "left" vs "right" - "liberal vs conservative" have been turned inside out and on their heads by the massive propaganda assault involved in first "Russiagate," then "Trump Degrangement Syndrome," then the "Covid Operation," and now "Ukraine." So if you still have two functioning neural synapse left to rub together - and you're willing to think for yourself rather than needing Fox News or NPR to "tell you" - "what to think" - I'm more than happy to call you "comrade."
“The old-school Left. The ‘Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Putin-loving, far-right-extremist’ Left.”
Now that’s my kind of Left 😁 The free-thinking, liberty-loving, anti-tyranny, tolerant-of-differing-viewpoints, truth-seeking, anti-GloboCap, peace-defending Left ✌️
The system you aptly describe as "GloboCap" is far closer to Fascism than capitalism (in my opinion it *is* outright Fascism). A truly free market is does not include oligarchical elites and "too big to fail" corporations so heavily integrated into the state apparatus you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
As someone else mentioned here, this has everything to do with the final stages of "Democracy" and very little to do with capitalism which no person alive has but a passing experience with.
Eh. Left, right, whatever. Like Greenwald has said over and over, "my ideology hasn't changed, my principles are still my principles." I was always a big progressive, hated both Bushes, loved Dennis Kucinich. I have no issues allying with the populist right. Go Rand Paul and Matt Gaetz and anyone else standing in the way of this garbage.
A big part of the problem is the role captured governments play, having monopolies on violence as they do. Without government capture, the globalists would not have nearly the power that they do. Allow people to self govern and the worst problems go away.
All this left crap has ALWAYS originated from the huber rich to destroy societies and humanity through puppets like Marx, Engels, Schwab et al.....
"Global capitalism has no ideology … There is no ideological territory outside global capitalism. There is no “outside.” There are no external adversaries."
Global capitalism is bent on privatizing the commons, which consists of the genes we are made from, the air we breathe, and whatever else they haven't privatized yet for whatever reason.
They are doing this in order to reset the monopoly board, or as they would put it, to "save capitalism".
This isn't an ideology? Of course its an ideology. A very sharp dividing line I would say.
Oh, and they're also trying to reduce the population by 95%. Malthusianism isn't an ideology? Transhumanism?
I don’t understand this left and right thing. I am an American and an individual. You seem to think there are opposite teams in different countries that have shared beliefs and values. I think there might be, but there is a vast majority of individuals with families that just want to live freely without any of the other two opposing groups bugging them.
Call us the anti-politics group. We judge everything on an individual case by case basis.
By the way, all the “isms” are intellectual creations to attack or gain advantage in a debate. The “isms” can’t exist if you evaluate everything on a specific case by case basis.
I've been saying for years that labeling our enemies as "leftists" or "communists" is a serious mistake that complicates and thwarts our efforts to deal with society's real problems. There are very few principled leftists remaining in this country -- about the same number as real white supremacists. The only principles you need to assess an ideology are: adherence to the rule of law, freedom of expression, and reliance on common sense. Whether those against those ideas are on "the left" or "the right" is irrelevant. They are all enemies of free people.
I think what you wrote here is helpful. Where to go from here though? I don't think people are ever going to agree on the definitions of words that derive most of their meaning from a dualistic way of thinking. "I'm definitely not X, therefore I'm Y. Don't tell me Y is distorted/wrong/delusional/changed from when I first understood it. That's X-talk." The underlying ideologies behind some of these words are just so entrenched in our psyches that invoking the word is almost sure to launch people into righteous arguments, which beautifully keeps us squabbling under the divide+conquer rubric that is working so well right now.
Agreeing on our language may just have to come last. I suppose conversations like this have to continue as the collective works out on a mental level that we're stuck here and no one is going to argue their way out of it no matter how logical they their they're being. In the mean time we can also be focusing on tangible micro-steps to regain and strengthen whatever common ground we can find at the human-to-human level. Do I have 3 other friends who want to garden and collab on food preservation? Great. 10k of those 3-people collabs = greater food sovereignty. I don't need to agree with them on everything in order to share food prep duties during harvest season. We CAN do this. Not sure how long it'll take or how rough the road but the human to human spirit of collaboration is something we have on our side, should we choose to activate it. And we don't have to like each other to collaborate on one or two small things which achieve SOMETHING we can identify as a shared value.
"When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich".
--Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Looks like the opposite happened: the rich ate the left.
I disagree that they have no ideology. The WEF certainly has an ideology, and it is probably indicative of the hidden hands behind them. James Lindsay of New Discourses has made a convincing case that they have embraced an unholy mix of Hermeticism and Gnosticism. They shall become as gods, while those of us they (in their infinite mercy) permit to live can eat ze boogs and be sequestered into reservations! These are luxury belief systems, once embraced by debauched aristocrats, to be indulged in between bloody wars and bloodier orgies. They still are. They are just riding the transformative powers of capital. It didn't have to be evil, but it is.
Thank you. This is a very useful insight and pragmatic framing. I have a few suggestions of what can we do to push back:
I believe that awareness, calm resistance to the directions our institutions are pushing us in, and (self)-knowledge are key.
By becoming trauma aware, we can learn to spot the signs of defensive nervous systems at play. We can learn to recognize the Survival Styles in people, and stop electing, rewarding and idolizing the folks who clearly display them.
We can refuse to live in fear, and become aware of the fear mongering for what it is. We can read up on the “science” of Nudging, and learn how the magic is trick done. This makes it much harder for us to be fooled or tricked into fear.
Most of all, we can stop consuming the news media. Indeed, this is the number one recommendation I give to people with chronic illnesses who want to reduce their symptoms. I guarantee this will not only make us less fearful, but will also improve our quality of life.
We can also resist the divide and conquer tactics emanating from out institutions, which seek to get us to dehumanize, other and blame each other.
We can identify and attend to our addictions.*
We can avoid the junk, and prevent the need for pharmaceuticals.
We can help other people who are still stuck in chronic defensive nervous system states to wake up, and come back to a calm place. This cannot be achieved simply by argumentation with facts and logic, because this just feeds the defensiveness, so must be done by appealing to the right brain hemisphere via re-connection to love and common humanity, through metaphor, comedy, poetry, music, awe and beauty.
It's not capitalism, it's democracy. As for Leftists, they are just people manipulated into doing what the government and corporations already want. Most "Conservatives" too, only slower. Someone said that the real purpose of democracy is to hide the real leaders, and I think it's true. You know only the puppets, not those who are behind them. That said, I think despotism is growing, so I really see little advantages or real freedom: https://contrarium.substack.com/p/western-samizdat