All idealism regardless of type can be summed up in one belief: that it is not possible to improve the world. Materialism, on the other hand, posits that it is possible. Is it any wonder that Capital goes to such lengths to keep materialist thought out of its public discourse? The worker who believes they cannot improve their lot poses little threat to Capital.

man pointing at butterfly Is this Butlerian Jihad?

Yeah. I am fairly confident more of those “injuries” were fatal than the US/Israel want to admit, and I also doubt they have as many confirmed kills as they are claiming.

It’s going to have to hit $5/gallon in the Midwest and Southern US before we really see much reaction from the USians, and it would have to be sustained. There will be plenty of grumbling before we hit that point, but no action. That’s my prediction anyway.

Of course. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. I just hope CIA propaganda loses any appeal it may have outside of the imperial core. As for inside the core, it’s hard for me not to feel ‘doomer’ about the state of the working class. I think there would have to be a sudden, extreme change in material conditions before the working class would start to ‘wake up’ en masse here.

I’m impressed. The US legal system is incredibly anemic when it comes to punishing corporations for violating workers’ rights. I hope we really can achieve a multipolar world, one where a standard like this is upheld to emulate, and not the rotten neoliberal legal morass of the West.

If the US regime actually wanted to stop Israel, they could stop sending them boatloads of money and materiel. The fact that they haven’t stopped materially supporting Israel renders all of this hemming and hawing about how the US allegedly doesn’t like it moot. It’s all theater to keep the Western public from questioning the narrative.

Get libs to stop reading The Atlantic challenge: impossible

Cognitive dissonance. Looking at their own government means acknowledging all the ways they themselves are complicit. Plus, Americans are largely programmed from birth to defer to authority figures. That’s largely not true of Europeans, or at least not by the same mechanisms, so I don’t know what their excuse is.

EDIT: I’m agreeing with you, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear.

Who owns the Military Industrial Complex? Who owns the corporations? WHOSE INTERESTS ARE THEY?

If you live in the USA and you haven’t studied USA history critically, beyond what you were taught in school, then you really don’t understand it at all. I get that Citizens United is a tempting scapegoat, but it was not better before that; all Citizens United did was strip away some of the pretense.

I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out. When I was younger, I always thought I’d get out at the first sign of trouble, but now that I’m older, I’ve realized I can’t bring myself to. Even if I could escape, I’d be leaving friends and family at the mercy of whatever comes next. I don’t know that I’ll survive the next couple of decades, but I’m trying to make peace with it.

Fix Or Repair (Toilets) Daily