Nut Brittle

complete falsehood from idiots, all day, every day

Joe Biden, last week:

"I'm the first president this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world."

The United States is bombing targets in Yemen now, this week, and was bombing targets in Yemen last week, and has been fighting an undeclared war in Yemen for more than nine months — with a notable lack of success, as the CENTCOM commander just reported to his superiors. Biden spoke on July 24; here’s what was happening on the same day:

Without even taking into account the endless escalation in the American proxy war against Russia, or the US support for the Israeli war against Hamas, or any of the other examples given here, it’s just not at all true that “the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” It’s what the President of the United States says, and it’s obvious nonsense — not merely incorrect, but so objectively and entirely untrue as to be a dispatch from a fantasy world.

It is, in other words, normal. We live in a late-Soviet flood of baldfaced fakery, somehow having Eastern Bloc culture in a nominal republic. Government statements are false. Political declarations are false. Expert opinion is false. The news is false.

We don’t live with a world of Potemkin villages, because Potemkin villages are carefully constructed facades that are painted up to look real; rather, we live in a world in which piles of dirt and random trash are labeled as villages, Potemkin Potemkin villages, non-facades pretend-described as facades that are then said to be villages. “Look at that beautiful town,” the elected official declares, pointing at literally nothing.

And this moment of ubiquitous unreality seems extremely familiar. A system of control touches people at every step…

…but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

“Farcical elections become the highest form of democracy,” a famous description of Eastern Bloc political culture said. Politico reports that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, the person chosen by Democratic Party voters in their primary elections, was shoved aside — “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way” — by a former Speaker of the House, after which his running mate transferred the campaign fund to herself and seized control of the party delegates. So you should support Kamala Harris, who personally won zero delegates through the primary election process (twice!), to fight to protect our democracy.

Everything is absolute howling bullshit, an empty storm of meaning-assaultive noise. Here’s the next paragraph of that block-quoted description above:

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system. 

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. We live in a rotting, insane, gormless, brittle structure of relentless manipulation and naked dishonesty. So don’t. Cultural and political systems that always lie are covering their emptiness. The death of basic factual reality in daily discourse is a sign of incipient institutional death, hidden by whitewash and lens gauze. The shambling, slurring carcass of what used to be Joe Biden is a metaphor for the entire political system that props him up with its rotted frame.

So this reaction to a California Republican who calls for a fight over the state’s future…

Given Democrat control of all levers of power in the US - the media, academia, the unions, Hollywood, etc - in order to succeed, the GOP needs to use insurgency tactics in order have success. Insurgency is how the Afghans defeated both the Russians and the US. It’s how the Viet Cong were successful in South East Asia and how Fidel Castro defeated both the US government and the Mafia in Cuba. My point - waging war against super majorities in states like California and New York are a waste of valuable and limited resources. Insurgents don’t do frontal assaults on the castle. They chose winnable smaller targets which create a string of successes that panic and demoralize the enemy.

…strikes me as exactly the wrong response. We live in a rotten, decaying, ruined system that demands lies and lives on necessary fakery. Attack on all fronts. Batter it down. A system represented by the ascendancy of Kamala Harris is not something to withdraw from and attack as insurgents. It’s a near-self-ruined agglomeration of empty noise. Withdrawing to wage an insurgency against…these people? No. I’m not going to run for the hills and go full-Red Dawn against Corey Jackson, who appears to be slightly dumber than the average golden retriever.

El Gato Malo: “i am flat out calling the top.”

In my bones, I agree. The Woke Ascendancy is an idiotic shambles. Let’s GO.