If rationality ever returns

implement vastly insufficient environmental measures which accomplish nothing other than allow liberals feel like they’re doing something for a few years. These two parties are not meaningfully different from each other on environmental issues. ——————— The plutocrat-owned western political/media class has built up a collective doctrine that you cannot simply end overseas wars and bring the troops home, and that anyone who says you can is a lunatic. That’s all it is though: fact-free religious doctrine, espoused on blind faith. When it

Insights

comes to large-scale governing and international matters, the mainstream perspective is only mainstream because extremely wealthy people poured vast fortunes into making it mainstream. There’s no collective wisdom or truth in it, it’s just what power wants us to believe about what’s going on. ——————— As long as the powerful are propagandising the people, the people aren’t truly operating with free will. Anyone who’s escaped a relationship with a manipulative abuser understands that you’re not really operating with much free agency while you’re being psychologically dominated. ——————— Leftists: I want socialism, an end to imperialism, and revolutionary change.

Liberals: I want capitalism, endless war, and the status quo. Also I have pink hair.

Rightists: These are the same to me. ——————— There are no war heroes, only war victims. CT

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian blogger. Her website is www.caitlinjohnstone.com

Thomas S. Harrington If rationality ever returns …

Historians will marvel their existence with hope and opulence, or the often unsuccessat the suicide of Euro- optimism, and subsequently, ful pursuit thereof, we fatally American culture set in with the construction of perhaps unhinged ourselves from the motion by a virus that the freest and most comfortable contemplation of, and engagement killed 3 of 1000 people, the vast culture that humanity had ever with, the only things that life has majority of whom were over 75 seen, suddenly decided to close ever been about ≠ love, friendand with already compromised up shop and terminate that ship, survival and the pursuit health. project before this puny scare. of joy within the often difficult

They will wonder and marvel They will examine the super- trials of this existence, and that at how the culture of consumer- stitions that made them do it, we simply gave up, exhausted and ism suddenly sapped most in this superstitions as absurd as the devoid of imagination and vital cultural space of the basic desire wearing of garlic garlands in ambition. CT to live as freely as possible in medieval times – but presented the face of the nemesis that has dishonestly and hubristically in Thomas S. Harrington is professor always stalked each and every the name of science, and wonder of Hispanic Studies at Trinity inhabitant of the earth: death. at the astonishing inversion College in Hartford, Connecticut.

They will wonder and marvel of basic social aspirations and His most recent book is A Citizen’s at how the inhabitants of this thought processes. Democracy in Authoritarian world, who as recently as seven They will, I suspect, ultimate- Times: An American View on the decades before had responded ly conclude that by garrisoning Catalan Drive for Independence to infinitely greater threats to ourselves in cubicles of material (University of Valencia Press).