Since you’re an American, you hate history, you hate philosophy, you hate anything that might make you think. So I’ll explain what Two Minutes of Hate is. It is the required two minutes of righteous anger that the citizens (party members) in the book “1984” are allowed to partake in once a day. It is a distraction to keep people from thinking about the evil machinations of Empire. They made a movie out of the book. Here’s the Two Minutes of Hate scene from the movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4zYlOU7Fpk
I would say that our media is in a constant, perpetuating state of “two minutes of hate”. The “I hate Trump” rallies are two minutes of hate. The media either hating, or coming to the defense of, comedians who do anything in effigy against Trump is two minutes of hate. The New York Times writing hit pieces on Lee Camp and Jimmy Dore, two Lenny Bruce-like comedians that offer truthful knifing commentary about our rotting democracy is propagandized two minutes of hate. Then there’s issue or policy-focused distractions: Single payer now! (never gonna happen) Fight for $15! (cities are coming around — Seattle has been at $15/hour for a couple years now and on July 1, 2017 a bunch of other cities upped their minimum wage). The eternal race issue! I have white privilege! My black friends don’t! And in the midst of all this two minutes of hate blasting across your media and social media, you are insidiously being distracted and lulled, enslaved, manipulated and kept busy like ants with no purpose while the most powerful world leaders watch you destroy yourselves and the planet from the inside out. They are literally laughing all the way to their many many off shore (“I don’t wanna pay taxes! Wah!”) banks.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but the do-gooders, the peace makers, the anti-war activists and the progressives, are no longer. They have no actual influence in our country. No presence, no imprint, not even an iota of a whiff of an ideology that they ever existed. They’re gone. Say bye-bye. America is in the shitter. Believe otherwise? You’re in denial where it’s safe. Wrap yourself in your safe space Bernie Sanders logo blankie and never let the gnarly, prickly truth touch your precious skin.
Holly writes capitalism has dickslapped the planet, and she has it partly right.
There’s also that pesky Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act that your best friend Barry gifted to you on Christmas 2016. Don’t feel like reading the boring, long wording of it? It basically says you can be silenced if you describe something. Oh look over there: Chris Hedges filed a lawsuit against the Obama Administration for violations of the Fourth Amendment (illegal search and seizure without due process). Better not write about it. You could be a terrorist! Zero Hedge: Look! We have our own Ministry of Truth! (another “1984” reference).
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos who went in with the CIA to the tune of billions to make sure this Orwellian nightmare of legislation could continue to anesthetize and lobotomize our puny brains. There simply is no room for questions, intellect, or critical thought. Bezos’ Amazon.com is a cancer, like Wal-Mart, on small town America by the way. And he is running the show.
Or what about the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has complete control of our election outcomes? This is in direct violation of the Constitution by the way. No bizarrely Orwellian named outside agency has the right to control and “legitimize” our elections. According to the Constitution, only the States have the right to do that. But the hell with the Constitution! Because Russia! Our elections use voting machines that can be easily hacked and manipulated by any source, inside our borders, or out. We had so much register flipping going on in the 2016 General that lifelong republicans were coming up libertarians and told they couldn’t vote, lifelong democrats were coming up republicans and told they couldn’t vote. California was handing out the toilet paper ballot called “provisional” ballots during the primaries and names that had been registered online weeks in advance had suddenly disappeared off the voter rolls. Debbie Lusignan, of Adams, MA, did a series on YouTube detailing election integrity. David Chiu, some nonsensical local politician here in San Francisco, showed up mob-style with his band of cronies, pushed his way to the front of a line that voters had been waiting in for hours, and forced all his votes on the ballot first. That local tactic is a really good example of how our country is run. By the mob. Bernie Sanders’ own attorney even said “There are too many inconsistencies to ignore.” But, he ignored his attorney and the inconsistent exit polls because it’s not his job to be President.
I’ll pause while your head explodes.
Bernie Sanders was never planning on being President. He was a sheepdog to bring in more registered voters to the Democratic Party and to bring party unity: My medium article from April 2016 kind of explains it. The point is, he played his part beautifully. 14 million new registered democrats entered the party in 2016. The Party had alienated its base during the Clinton Administration (Hillary Clinton calling black youth Super Predators wasn’t the best way to ingratiate your voting base and Bill Clinton signing the Omnibus Bill which made us the most incarcerated nation on the planet thus bringing back legalized slavery didn’t help either) and they knew entering into the 2016 election cycle that they were in big trouble. The last 20 years had seen a sharp decline in registered Democrats. They needed a man who spoke the language of the people and Bernie did. He’s not a bad man. He’s just a company man. He did his job well. A whole new generation of voters entered into politics with gusto and made the mob great again! And when it came time to endorse Hillary he did. And the only reason Hillary Clinton ran for President was because she was under investigation for having private, unencrypted servers in her home. What better way to mess with the FBI and throw them off the scent than to run for President of the United States. It’s all about distraction and deflection.
But let’s stop for a minute and swallow some hard truth about ourselves. It’s bitter. But here goes. Our country exists because we threw a hissy fit and ran away from home. We then stole something that wasn’t ours from one culture and then exploited another culture to build it up. And, that’s the crux of it. There just isn’t any other way to look at it. We continue these diabolical, entitled spoiled actions across the globe (because it worked really well with us in the first American Revolution) and slap the word “freedom” on it to make it look pretty. Or how about “democracy?” I know, let’s slap the words “In God We Trust” on our currency in the 1950’s which just so happened right around the same time as the Cold War hysteria. Coincidence? Come on…Throw in a little brainwashing religion and voila! You have an entire society that is incapable of critical thought and entitled. Look, even when the so-called hero Nathan Hale was hanged, George Washington admitted that Nathan never said “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” It was propaganda that the Father of our Country made up. George was Martha’s second husband by the way. She was older, the First Lady was a cougar. She had children from another husband when she married George Washington. Widowed, and having been around the block, she was instrumental in teaching George that unlike English politics back home, the new world here in the colonies, was going to be about people liking you. And, to this day, we vote based on personality not policy. We are such suckers because we are American. So, the very foundation of our country during the American Revolution is based on a bloody lie and a popularity contest, not what’s best for the people. And one example of that truth is our healthcare system: every other modern nation, including England, treats healthcare as a human right. We don’t. Because we don’t care about rights. We care about being right. There is a difference.
After all, Barack Obama was a classist who willingly signed off on some of the most dystopian and draconian policies our country has ever seen. He never closed Guantanamo Bay, as he promised he would. Guantamo Bay, according to the United Nations, is in direct violation of human rights and operates outside any global law. He dusted off a Republican Program which makes insurance companies insanely wealthy while they get to kill people who need healthcare and called it The Affordable Care Act. He funneled money into our private prison system, thus encouraging modern day slavery. He murdered a 16 year old American child with a drone because the child “might” grow up to be a terrorist. He helped orchestrate and encourage the waste, fraud and abuse of the banks who waged financial war against new home owners, pension holders and the elderly and then forced the citizens to pay the taxes to help bail out the banks. Those taxes we paid allowed the fraudsters and bankers to walk away with billions of dollars in commission checks while the homeless rate and unemployment rate in America soared. He kept allowing his crazy eyed Secretary of State to use the Clinton Global Initiative to funnel weapons and arms to our ally, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia then gave the Clintons billions of dollars in return for the weapons. I’m sure somewhere in there Obama got some sort of kickback for looking the other way. It’s not that Obama is a Muslim, see. It’s that he allowed a radicalized country that abuses the Muslim faith to commit genocide on Yemen. He has signed legislation that allows for social media and all our electronic devices to spy on you, in tandem with the NSA. We have no privacy. We are spied on everywhere which is a violation of the Constitution. Speaking of Edward Snowden, he targeted, jailed, punished and tortured more whistleblowers than any American president in history. Speaking of undocumented workers, he deported more than any President before him. He drank the poisonous water of Flint, MI and lied to the American people when he said it was fine. After 10,000 children had been diagnosed with varying degrees of brain damage and infectious diseases. He is a a duplicitous, malicious sociopath who talked about how climate change was increasing due to carbon emissions and various other man made and man caused toxins, yet did absolutely nothing to resolutely change our infrastructure. Other countries are going car-free in the next few years and have houses and buildings and systems in place that are powered entirely by wind and solar. The United States is the only modern nation that has made zero changes to our carbon footprint. Not to mention we are the only country that doesn’t use the metric system. Obama had you believe his hands were tied on so many things that would truly make America thriving. But he lied. He did this because we are entering into a new age and he ushered that new age in with elegant duplicity. What is it?
Technology has taken over every aspect of our life. Apple has more money in its coffers than the United Kingdom and Canada combined. Where there is money, there is power and influence. When a corporation that does not pay taxes has more money than actual democratic nation states, we have a problem. Alarm bells should be sounding off all around us, the citizenry. Facebook has more more money than some nation states. How does a Harvard School drop out suddenly become one of the most wealthy men in the world? Because he works in tandem with the CIA and the NSA to run various social media psychological testing through your Facebook feed. How is it that all my friends who work in tech here in San Francisco and really don’t contribute anything worthwhile to the community or the world at large have so much money? How is it that Uber, based out of San Francisco, is an unsustainable business model, yet Saudi Arabia has infused nearly $100 billion into it? Perhaps the better question is why did Saudi Arabia invest in Uber?
Everyone is asleep and distracted and just plain stupid, and entitled. BitCoin is worth more than the American dollar. There’s talk of Universal Basic Income going around. Elon Musk is for it. Mark Zuckerberg is for it. And Hawaii has just passed it. We will need some kind of income for survival in a world that is becoming increasingly uninhabitable, and inoperable. And you can forget about stopping war. War Is A Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. It’s a book. Read it. Our leadership tells you that war is necessary to bring democracy to crude, backwards barbaric countries. But really it’s about seizing land and oil and resources. If it weren’t for the United States trying to “save” Iraq, we wouldn’t have terrorism. We are training and arming the militants that want to destroy the Syrian Government. Syria, which has a democratically elected leader. We may not like Assad, we may not agree with everything. But he has a country that was just fine on its own before we got involved. How do we justify our involvement in another coup of another country? Propaganda, that’s how.
We prop up some hysterical false narrative. And even Hollywood is in on it when they gave the Academy Award to The White Helmets movie. Paid actors, funded by a organization based out of New York, used recycled victims, and were actually perpetuating violence against the Syrian Army who are successful at fighting off the terrorists.
We are, and always have been, since our country’s inception, grabby trouble makers, liars, propagandists, and our borders which you think are so strong, and so impenetrable from these abuses of power which, in my opinion, were borne in the Truman administration, are becoming brittle with each passing day. Truman, by the way, whose parents dressed him as a little girl as a child was installed as our President. Imagine what a different outcome our world would be if Henry Wallace, the true popular choice, had been allowed to be President.
We keep letting these things happen and we are in our sixth mass extinction. Everyone walking around knows this on some existential level. Some talk openly about it. Some immerse themselves in magical thinking religion to avoid it and wait for the day to be taken up to heaven. Some don’t even believe any of it is real, and cannot conceptualize anything outside of 1950’s America, when white privileged people could afford to make minimum wage, put their kids through college, own a home and go on vacations and have a retirement to live comfortably on.
There is a system in play that is designed to make you obsolete. You are nothing more than a marketing mechanism for them to make money off of. You are nothing more than a potential slave to eventually make money off of. The erosion of our Constitution, the personality politics at play and the complete decimation of your basic human identity and rights has made you expendable. And you seem to be fine with that.