Revolution = Hope

I'm sitting here when I should be in bed, sleeping. And suddenly I felt something that I haven't felt in a long time.

Hope.

I always hoped that the people would wake up and DO something to save us all from the species death that the oligarchy has been driving towards. For years, decades, people told me that it was hopeless; that people were sheep, and would meekly take anything that the elite inflicted on them.
I'd reply that I refused to believe that; that there was a point of pain past which people COULD NOT simply endure. A point past which all the TV, all the propaganda, all the threats would fail. That at heart, we'd fight - for our children's future, if nothing else.

But I was always afraid that maybe, just MAYBE, I was wrong.

Maybe these protests will be crushed. Maybe. But if they are, they will be followed by more, and bigger ones.

Humanity just might survive after all.

Another routine murder by the police

The institution of the police has been a failure from the beginning. They were designed from the start as agents of repression of working people and the poor. They cannot be reformed; they can only be abolished and replaced by something new and better. Possibly a citizen corps which rotates on a yearly basis as a matter of public service. So that every citizen knows what it's like to be a peace officer.

Trump vs Biden

Three tangible differences between Trump and Biden:

1. Biden is more of a warmonger. His Senate record shows 100% support for war, every chance he got. Trump seems a bit nervous about war, at least some of the time. But Biden is unequivocally for it. If he's elected, we can expect a lot more war deaths. War against Venezuela and Syria will be virtually guaranteed. Biden has made that clear.

2. Although Biden may de-emphasize the most blatantly racist elements of Trump's policies, the media will flat-out ignore virtually EVERYTHING that Biden does. Things may not be quite as bad for many minority groups, but there will be a blackout on abuses - which means that many of the people who've been abusing children in cages, for example (cages which Obama and Biden BUILT, mind you) will be able to escalate that abuse with impunity.

3. Biden stole our votes. There is no greater crime imaginable against democracy. For all his shittiness, Trump didn't do that. Biden and the DNC undermined the democratic electoral system and rigged the primaries a second time. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm damned if I'm going to give my vote to the people who've made it clear that they have nothing but contempt for the democratic process - and for all the causes that I support.

One final point in which Biden and Trump are effectively the same: climate change. With his "middle ground", fossil-fuel-friendly approach, Biden has made it overwhelmingly clear that "nothing will fundamentally change on climate policy. Which means a death sentence for humanity. Trump and Biden are cyanide and arsenic. When offered a choice between the two, the sane response isn't to look for minor harm reduction. It's to yell "FUCK NO!" and fight like hell.

If we want to live, our only option is revolution. Voting means nothing any more. Vote if you want; like masturbation, it's meaningless but harmless. But the age of mass protest is coming. Get ready for the revolution.

Truths

The rich are eating us. It should be the other way around.

They're not our leaders. They're our jailers.

The Worst President Ever?

There is ALWAYS someone worse. And what's more, every time you accept the supposed lesser of two evils, you make it inevitable that there WILL be worse.

When Reagan was elected, everyone said "This is insane. He's the worst President there could ever be."

Then Bush was elected. And people said "HE'S the worst President there could ever be."

Then Bill Clinton was elected and sold the Democratic Party to Wall Street. Nobody said that he was the worst except some Republicans, but the damage he did to our democracy was irreparable.

And then we had George W. Bush. And people said "Oh, NOW we get it. This is beyond insanity. He's surely the worst President we could ever possibly have."

Then Obama was elected. He was charming and well-spoken, and he built cages for immigrant children and gave himself the legal right to spy on and drone-kill Americans secretly without a trial. His cabinet was virtually all Wall Street people who looted the economy and crushed working people. But nobody said that he was the worst, because he was charming and black and he was a Democrat. Still, the damage he did to our democracy was irreparable. And Wall Street gained still more power over the system.

Then Trump was elected. And now people are saying "Oh, God, what kind of crazy world are we living in? Surely this is the worst President there could ever be. No one could possibly be worse."

To which I reply: "Oh yeah? Just wait."

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

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.

 

Banned by a troll

This is a follow-up to "How to Spot A DNC Troll". This morning the Facebook group I'd written it for was gone. Posts I'd saved from that group were gone. Notifications on comments and posts I'd made there were likewise gone. When I looked up the group, Facebook reported that it didn't exist.

But it turned out that I'd been kicked out of the group and permanently banned. I checked with a mod who's a friend, and she couldn't find out what had happened - and she was afraid to ask other mods for fear of being banned herself.

That's a classic development in troll attacks. Odds are that a troll weaseled into a mod position, and got rid of me for posting the article. At a guess, the group really will be gone within two months.