The Cliff

Joe Biden supporters talk about incremental change. They point out that it took decades for us to get to this point, and that it will take decades, maybe forty years, to reverse the damage.

But we don't have 40 years. We don't even have ten. In 10 years we pass the point of no return. Hundreds of millions or billions of deaths become inevitable, and at that point the struggle for survival and the resource wars will make any sort of sane human civilization impossible.

It's not pleasant to contemplate, but the only way I see the human race surviving at this point is via a worldwide revolution. And I honestly don't know if that will happen.

But it's very clear that the powers-that-be, including the DNC and the RNC, will do everything they can to maintain the status quo as we head over that cliff.

* * *

I can't get away from that ten years. Realistically, we need to make profound changes in the world's economy and society as quickly as possible - within five years or less, there must be fundamental change on a level we've never seen before, or the odds of human extinction are huge.

I can't get that out of my mind. I can't let it go. For Sebastian's sake, if nothing else. The DNC and RNC have made it INCREDIBLY clear that they won't allow the fundamental change we need, as long as they exist. Hell, Biden literally SAID "nothing will fundamentally change" to his Wall Street bankers.

I'm not voting for Trump. But to me, it's clear that we've reached the point where the "lesser evil" is still too evil to accept. Human extinction isn't something I will agree to, no matter which puppet of the oligarchs is offering it.

And although I've voted all my life, I've finally reached the point where I'm convinced that voting is truly meaningless. I'll vote anyway, I suppose, out of habit. But it's painfully obvious that voting isn't going to save us. The ONLY way that humanity survives, as I see it, is mass protest and revolution.

Luckily (?) the greed of the 0.01% is creating a hothouse environment for exactly that. With unemployment reaching Great Depression levels, conditions are ripe for the sort of anticapitalist revolution that FDR only barely managed to forestall. Since the DNC successfully blocked our modern equivalent of FDR, it seems inevitable to me that there will either be a revolution...or we'll have the most technologically advanced and brutal authoritarian society that humanity has ever witnessed.

For a little while. Until the Earth will no longer sustain human civilization or life.

Sigh...talking and thinking about this stuff depresses the hell out of me.

* * *

I'll never vote for Trump, and voting for him is stupid if only because the DNC would be perfectly happy to have him re-elected; he's good for their campaign donations, and the oligarchs who own both parties don't mind Trump.

But I am convinced that the DNC defrauded their primary voters twice now. That they stole MY vote. Trump didn't do that; Biden and the DNC did, and they did it to make sure that they could keep looting the planet, killing off humanity, and keeping billions of us locked in desperation and poverty for whatever remains of our lives.

That makes it personal. I EXPECT the Republicans to be mad dogs; that's what they are. But the DNC was supposed to be a counter to that, as was the media. Both sold out to the same oligarchs who own the RNC. To paraphrase Treebeard:

"[They] ought to know better: they DO know better. There is no curse in Elvish. Entish. or the tongues of Men bad enough for such treachery. Down with [the DNC]!"

I won't vote for Trump. But I understand those who will.

And if it's any comfort, it doesn't matter anyway. Our votes are meaningless, and the differences between Trump and Biden are comparatively minuscule.

* * *

The problem is that as a privately-owned corporation (and owned by one of the world's richest oligarchs, to boot), the First Amendment doesn't apply to Facebook. And the structure of Facebook allows faceless moderators and admins to wield censorship and bans like a club.

Worse still, Facebook is very troll-friendly; I don't know how many people remember 2015-2016, but the DNC hired David Brock and his "Correct the Record" to send armies of trolls in to every progressive and pro-Bernie group. None of those groups survived, as I recall. I wrote an article about spotting trolls and the techniques that trolls use to take down groups in the hope that it might help people to resist them, but it didn't stop me from being banned by a troll from Krystal Ball Rising.

The thing is, there's no real alternative to Facebook. Well, there's Reddit, but they're even MORE susceptible to troll attacks than Facebook is, thanks to their "voting down" algorithm; all the trolls have to do is get enough of them into a group (or enough accounts, anyway) to vote down posts and make them effectively invisible.

Outside of Reddit and Facebook, all you've got are ghost towns. Google Plus had some activity going on, but Google killed that off. So I could go to some small social media site and write (as I do on Blogger), but nobody will ever read what I write and it will never spark any conversation.

We have free speech only insofar as it's controlled or nobody hears it. That's not freedom at all.