A Fake “Cure” Much Worse Than the Disease

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There seems to be a gathering consensus around a false either-or: A society must impose extreme lock-down or go hog-wild with business as usual including leaving the non-wealthy ill and dependent to fend for themselves. (Of course any US version of martial/police-state law will do that as well.)

 

As usual, the rational, healthiest alternative gets less support: Take reasonable care and precaution for the elderly and other vulnerable groups, act with reasonable prudence (no mass gatherings, avoid indoor gatherings as much as possible), but otherwise continue to live life. This is the most psychologically healthy perspective, whose goodness for mental health in turn contributes to how it’s best for the individual and collective physical health.

 

But more and more people seem to be embracing the notion of the police state imposing draconian restrictions in order to “save” them from a danger the system itself generated, and which we already know the system will use only as a pretext radically to increase its power and control and to escalate its plunder of all the people.

 

This embrace of police state power includes many of our self-alleged “alternative”, “dissident” types. As with so many other things, they talk tough when nothing seems immediately at stake, but the moment things start to look serious they run home to Authority mama. It reminds me of the advent of ISIS, where many erstwhile “leftists” suddenly turned into NATO-mongering neocons.

 

Almost no one has authentic principles any more. Everything’s fake. And that’s why it’s always so easy for governments to continue their totalitarian progress.

 

Thus we’re being set up for a much more radical clamping of “emergency” power, like after 9/11 but much more severe; and like after 9/11 the “war on terror” turned out to be a permanent emergency requiring the permanent maintenance of what were called the “temporary” restrictions, so the same is being set up to stem from the pandemic emergency, at a much more total level.

 

It’s typical of the psychological crisis that the ubiquitous term “social distancing” has no stable meaning but can mean literally anything, so when someone uses it by itself there’s no way to tell what they really want to see happen, assuming they themselves have any firm ideas at all as opposed to floating unanchored on the froth wave of panic.

 

I’ve seen it mean everything from “Continue to live life, get outside, do the things you enjoy, get together with people in small groups, just keep a few feet away” (which is what those who feel healthy should be doing) to “Weld yourself shut inside your bomb shelter and never emerge again.”

 

As for the system authoritarians calling for people to bury themselves alive or issuing orders that people do so, no doubt they have nice big properties themselves where they can stroll about to their hearts’ content. They probably live in swank gated developments where everyone will continue strolling the streets. Their own private parks will remain open while I’ve heard examples of how they’re insanely closing public parks in some places. Literally the exact opposite of what any sane society not run by psychopaths would do. We know that just as fresh air and sunshine are important for the recovery of those who fall ill, so these along with physical exercise outdoors are critical to sustaining the health and well-being, physical and mental, of those not sick. (The NJ state park system so far is maintaining sanity: They’ve closed visitor centers, restrooms and other indoor facilities but are keeping the parks themselves open for recreation and are encouraging people to get out and enjoy the outdoors, precisely because it’s good for the individual and public health.)

 

But as we’ve known for a long time from every other health policy the elites impose, so the currently touted anti-medical, anti-health isolation indoors is for the non-wealthy who, as far as the system cares, ought to die anyway. And today we have a near-consensus among both the mainstream and fake-“alternative” media classes that all people ought to surrender to this systemic imprisonment and destruction.

 

If there were a way to test it, I’d bet any amount of money that deep down it’s not really any physical fears for themselves, let alone for others, that has everyone losing their minds and shrieking for the government to imprison them all in order to save them, but rather they’ve come unhinged from seeing the tottering of their worthless economy of worthless ecocidal junk.

 

Thank god I still know some people in real life who still retain their humanity and vow to continue living as human beings, even as so many are, in real time, openly screaming that they want to rush to permanent totalitarianism right this moment.

 

And over NOTHING even remotely comparable as an evil to the “cure” for which they shriek.

 

If you’re thinking any lock-down and regime of restrictions on movement really are likely to be temporary, remember that even if warmer weather does suppress the worst of this round of the Corona pest, it may repeat the 1918 pest’s performance and come back more powerfully in autumn. And this cycle could be repeated for years.

 

None of that may happen, but the idea of it all is at the core of the government’s malign perspective, every bit as virulent as the idea that “terrorism” is a permanent feature of our lives, and therefore so must be the police state measures allegedly against it.

 

In every case it’s never the drugs/terrorists/viruses which need to be controlled and dominated, but the people.

 

 

 

 

 

Crossroads

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It’s ironic, given how the Chinese have been grossly slandered so far by the US government and media, that here all of humanity can contemplate a monumental example of the saying always attributed to the Chinese, “a crisis is also an opportunity.”

 

If only all the people now resorting to a simplified state under the pest’s duress would take that to heart and realize this is not only a much better way of life as such, but a far healthier and resilient way in the face of the many escalating crises shortly to break upon us. Measures against this so-far mild pandemic already prove in principle that neoliberal globalization and the continuing metastasis of the economy are not necessary and can be dismantled permanently without the sky falling.

 

The other option, and so far it looks more likely, is that in the same way that enough Americans for a quorum have accepted a permanent state of partial lockdown and police state encroachment since 9/11, if the federal government were now to order a much more comprehensive lockdown along with restrictions on movement and gatherings, allegedly “temporary” for the duration of the pandemic, but then this pandemic turned out to be as open-ended from the point of view of government policy as the “global war on terror” has been, and the lockdown became effectively permanent, odds are no one would object or resist.

 

Humanity is at a world-historical pivot point and can go the right way or the wrong way, perhaps a very wrong way. The threat of tyranny must be added to medical common sense as we realize the right way to live for now is to take special care and precaution with the vulnerable elderly, but not otherwise radically amputate the limbs of our lives, limbs which will remain sufficiently functional if we choose to use them instead of crawling into an isolation chamber to be locked behind us.

 

 

 

 

 

Tests of Strength

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Many years ago I began noting on these pages how bourgeois ideology had won complete victory in the minds of Westerners and their apes around the world, no matter what superficial politics various groups still profess as a hobby. I’ve noted that We’re All Lumpenproles Now.

 

We’ve seen how “the Left” offers no alternative to maximum exploitation within the death machine, let alone to the death machine itself.

 

We saw how the British left, faced with the prospect of striking a blow against globalization through Brexit, where their rightful anti-globalist task was to fight for a socialist or at least progressive Brexit, instead ran home to globalist mama and joined the elites shilling for the EU.

 

Here in America we’ve long been nauseated by the disgusting spectacle of “progressives” and many “leftists”, even those who have solemnly sworn “Never Again”, running home to the Democratic sheep pen every chance they get, every time the Party retches up another fraudulent fake-leftish celebrity.

 

We’ve seen how the concern trolls for the environment, every kind of mainstream “eco-friendly” type shedding crocodile tears for the Earth and its climate, runs home to every kind of corporate collaboration and “Green New Deal” mama. That means ecocidal Business as Usual, just the “green” capitalist, fake-“renewable” version.

 

These in common express the indelible devotion and commitment of all existing political groupings to the economic society: Its perpetuation and continued aggravation unto maximum ecocide, maximum genocide of natural peoples, collective suicide.

 

And the first returns indicate that this will be true of the Corona pandemic as well.

 

There are already many comparisons of the Corona pest with the climate crisis, how civilization is equally unprepared for both, for the same self-destructive reasons, and how the pest will highlight in a much faster and more visible way this lack of will or ability to prepare, adapt, mitigate.

 

That’s true, and we must go further. The knee-jerk response, not just from the system, its media, and the usual mainstream conformists but of self-styled “dissidents” as well, is to reinforce all the patterns which brought us to this crisis: Conformity to state and corporate decrees, self-sacrifice in terms of doubling down on psychological and now physical isolation, all consciously and explicitly for the sake of getting the economy back on track as soon as possible.

 

This universal panic on behalf of the economic society includes the rejection of the lessons of hundreds of years of medical experience, reinforced by the experience of the 1918 influenza pandemic, that the best preventive as well as treatment includes sunlight and fresh air, while hunkering down in one’s bomb shelter is the wrong way to go. This is especially true for the sake of psychological health. As the economic system has long known, isolation is demoralizing and physically weakening. That’s why the system has worked so hard to structurally reinforce mass atomization and isolation and indoctrinate the atoms into the belief that this is natural, desirable, at any rate inevitable. But physical and mental health depend on activity and community. Today more than ever we have a test of strength for those who normally profess these principles.

 

To say again, we should take rational precautions, avoiding mass gatherings or any unnecessary crowded indoor context. But this must not extend to our necessary coming together with loved ones and friends, those with whom we share the seeds of humanity and community. We mustn’t let fear and indoctrination (and in the end almost all the fear is really fear of the system itself, its physical and economic threats) blast away this truth. We must continue to live as humanly as possible, for the sake of both our human future as well as our short-run physical and mental health.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Double Down, or Free Ourselves

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The reaction to the Corona pest, a product of the economic civilization, is becoming a great escalation of the psychological pandemic native to this economy.

 

The great cultural trend of modernity has been to atomize and isolate human beings. Through economic and political processes they are driven to lose all reality of community and solidarity. Through the physical and cultural fact of being gathered into great masses they lose all grounding and are forced to float without anchor amid a featureless sea. Through indoctrination into ideologies of Mammon, productionism and liberal individualism they are induced to see this atomization and universal faithlessness as the god-given way of the world, if not a positive good.

 

Today we reach a milestone on this road toward maximum isolation, as the fear-mongering campaigns of governments and media urge or order people to isolate themselves physically as much as possible. Even inside a house the inhabitants should stick to separate rooms.

 

Reasonable prudence is one thing, and obviously people should avoid mass gatherings. As much as possible we should avoid needless indoor assembly. That includes almost all “jobs”, but then humans always should have avoided being shackled to that system. So the pest changes nothing there in principle, it only gives a special impetus. Those who never cared about psychological and spiritual disease finally show signs of taking some action against the fear of physical disease.

 

 

But beyond this the call to hunker in a personal bunker, a physical and psychological state close to hunkering in a bomb shelter because you fear the missiles are flying, is a great escalation of the whole trend toward isolation, atomization, dehumanization.

 

Contrary to the evolution denial of the whole modern ideology of spiritual atomism, humans evolved over millions of years to live in small, tight-knit communities where each is responsible for all and dependent upon all. This never changed during the period of the dominion of modern economy. On the contrary, the modern campaign of spiritual genocide seeking to eradicate all human communities and replace them with a vast technocratic bureaucracy ruling over a vast mass of atoms has generated a universal pandemic of psychological and spiritual dislocation, confusion, distraction, despair, psychopathy.

 

Today more than ever, as the diverse crises converge toward a great pivot, combine their amplitudes toward the great Kinesis, today more than ever it is critical that we come together to rebuild our communities. The way things are going we may need to put our energies into projects for weathering the storm, extreme adaptation. So be it, this combines the necessary practical action with the necessary renewal of community.

 

Most critically at such a moment, we need to see one another and mutually affirm that we’re not going to be terrorized into hiding from one another. We’re not going to react to this acute crisis of the economic civilization by self-reinforcing the atomized isolation this civilization always has worked to instill in us as second nature, as anti-nature.

 

 

For me personally, my main social activity is to go out on group hikes. I do that several times a week. I’ll be going out again twice this weekend. I’ll keep getting together for as long as others are getting together. These aren’t people I know well from anyplace else in life, they’re casual friends and acquaintances I’ve met and gotten to know through our shared love of hiking. This shared love for the outdoors, including for many of us the wish to relearn so much about nature, knowledge the modern society has worked hard to eradicate in us, could be a seed for a more resilient, self-sufficient, organic and human community. If nothing else it’s still a shared will to continue to live and to enjoy living, and to share this enjoyment in spite of the paranoia against all such sharing which the system is working to instill in everyone.

 

Don’t give in to it. The needful mindset and action remain the same as they always were: Resist the system as much as possible, work to rebuild our human communities, sustain a healthy mind and soul.

 

 

 

 

The Economy’s Plague

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As the Corona pest becomes a psychological pandemic as well, many feel panic over how the alleged panic of others is disrupting “the economy”. We see how many even among erstwhile dissidents suddenly want to run home to ecocidal economic mama.

 

But if the economy wasn’t based 100% upon destruction and disaster, including all the just-in-time tightropes it deliberately walks at all times, including all “outsourcing” and deliberate eradication of all regional self-sufficiency, it wouldn’t be so vulnerable even to severe crises.

 

Propagandists and their apes cite FDR’s warning against falling prey to “fear itself.”

 

But the pandemic is causing only a portion of the ambient fear-itself. The great majority of it was already free-floating and now is being concentrated by this pest. That includes all the anxiety constantly generated by the ecocidal commodity economy.

 

Many fear a non-linear totalitarian jump in police state powers stemming from the alleged need for forcible quarantine, lockdown, martial law, a much greater leap even than the government’s cynical manipulation of 9/11 to vastly increase the scope of its aggressive militarism, surveillance state and police regime.

 

Everyone should indeed fear this. But it’s what they all support at every turn, all ultimately for the sake of the commodity Mammon economy.

 

There’s a famous quote from Ben Franklin which is often cited and almost always in a misguided way: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” This is often paraphrased using “freedom” and “security” instead, no matter. The gist is that people are willing to give up real freedom in exchange for a very false sense of safety. This is certainly true as far as it goes.

 

But in reality it doesn’t go far since today neither freedom nor security mean anything compared to economic consumption, producing and consuming worthless junk, being as destructive and wasteful as possible, and the fundamentalist religious worship of “the economy” as such. Almost all Western or Westernized peoples willingly, eagerly throw away all freedom and security for the ecocidal economy’s sake.

 

Nothing is more enslaving and self-enslaving, more antithetical to all freedom (except the Sodom and Gomorrah license of the rich, which isn’t freedom either – none of them ever looks free to stop accumulating, stop at vastly more than Enough, go be happy and enjoy life), than the economic death march.

 

The economy is the source of the Coronavirus pandemic in the first place, and it is the cause of all the death and travail that comes from this pest. The pest and its effects, including any economic disruption up to and including collapse, is a blow purely self-inflicted by a civilization at war with its own biological basis, including waging war on its own people. The pest arose either from a US bioweapon experiment/attack, or it is a pandemic arising from the economics of globalization (deforestation, factory agriculture, cramming masses into slums and shantytowns, the demolition of all public health systems and all decent access to decent health care except for the rich). The system is deploying every kind of scapegoating in its try to cover up its complete culpability while trying to continue with Business As Usual as much as is politically or physically possible.

 

They scapegoat individuals who their system deliberately has deprived of accurate and truthful information (about this pest and about everything else, going back as far as anyone alive can remember), those they deliberately have deprived of all sense of stability and security and community sufficiency and resilience (again going back as far as we can recall), scapegoat them for giving in to fear (which is a manifestation of the ideology of capitalist-liberal individualism into which they all were indoctrinated).

 

They scapegoat people for behaving exactly the way the elites of the economic society normally want them to behave, the elites which long have expended such massive resources to indoctrinate and propagandize the people into exactly such behavior, they scapegoat them now that we’ve reached a crisis where this behavior boomerangs on the slave economy itself.

 

If you must insist on weeping for the plight of the economy, at least put the blame where it belongs, 100% on the elites. No amount of panic (and none of us knows at this early date what really constitutes panic, as opposed to prudence) on the part of the people could exceed the bounds of the mass-psychological atmosphere the elites of the economic civilization deliberately have instilled in these masses, who this economy deliberately atomized in the first place.

 

 

Having said that, people should not panic. The reason is not because this can aggravate the disruption of the economy which is so grossly disrupting itself, but for their own psychological sake and practical resiliency. (The same reason for personal energy conservation – not because this will lower by one BTU’s worth the amount of fossil fuels the economic civilization will extract and burn, or that it will stave off even one part per million of rise in atmospheric carbon concentration, but for reasons of personal psychological health and practical reasons of personal, family, community resiliency.)

 

It’s this social/cultural/economic system which has destroyed community and family, atomized everyone, driven the modern pandemic of anomie, anxiety and despair. People who feel so demoralized in turn are more vulnerable to physical illness, just as people who are part of an intact, mutually responsible and reinforcing social group feel better psychologically and physically are less vulnerable.

 

Now more than ever we need to rebuild real community, relocalize how we produce what we need and truly want, rebuild food sovereignty, community food security, a renewed way of living with and in the land rather than as parasite squatters on its surface.

 

Such squatters are the most vulnerable to every extreme wind, howling from the economy itself such as crashing oil prices, from the climate crisis, from the pandemics driven by the globalization and ecocide inherent to the economic civilization. Those who live by this economy shortly shall die of it. If the Corona pest turns out not to be the Big One, it’s yet another shot across the bow, a last warning before this imminent advent.

 

 

 

 

“The Fire is in the Minds of the People”

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(Title quote from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed.)

 

“It is climate/weather with extreme conditions of drought, low humidity, high temps and high winds, not fuels, that is responsible for all large wildfires. I have not seen a single exception.

 

“Topography and fuels do influence blazes, but if you don’t have the right weather conditions, ignitions do not blow up into huge conflagrations.

 

“In the case of Paradise, as well as in many other large fires I’ve visited over the years, “fuel reductions” failed in the face of extreme fire weather. In a sense, the continued advocacy for “fuel reductions” by various public agencies, forestry schools, collaboratives, and the like is delusional, and borders on maleficence since it lulls communities into believing if they only cut enough trees and brush, they won’t have to worry about wildfire.”

 

It is malefic because they say, “If you give us license to log as we see fit, you can continue with business as usual with less fear of fire.”

 

That’s a direct lie which dovetails perfectly with the mass psychological imperative sense that Business As Usual, such as extreme commodity logging, must continue.

 

Indeed, Business As Usual as a whole is dependent upon business as usual for each significant part, such as logging.

 

The more the specters of the climate crisis, the wholesale poisoning of humanity’s food and water, or pandemic threats like the Coronavirus threaten to shut down the economic machine, the more stubbornly the mass of atoms will double down on denial and take refuge in the most idiotic, long refuted lies.

 

 

So in any context what they really want is any kind of lie which lets them believe they can fix any problem while continuing Business As Usual.

 

The climate-industrial movement and its “Green New Deal” vision of capitalist utopia comprise the biggest, most encompassing lie: “If we make a few minor tweaks to Business As Usual as a whole, we can continue Business As Usual with no fear of global heating and climate chaos.”

 

And so to circle back to industrial logging, putting it in this perspective:

 

1. Climate change, through escalating heat, drought, dryness and high winds, is driving ever greater fire. The science is unanimous, where it comes to wildfire the climate and weather trump all.

 

2. Logging corporations and their kept government agencies join hands with climate deniers to find scapegoats and invent lies, all toward the lie that “thinning” (logging) is an anti-fire action when it really makes fires more common and worse. They propagate their campaign of lies in order to claim that not only mustn’t they stop, they must escalate Business As Usual.

 

Ecocide and disaster capitalism always come together to form this escalating feedback loop and will continue to do so until they collapse completely.

 

3. In the meantime their lies are believed or tolerated since almost everyone, including the mainstream “environmental movement”, really wants Business As Usual to continue.

 

More profoundly, they believe on the level of fundamentalist religion that the economic civilization must continue and escalate.

 

Thus it’s not just ironic, but in a deep sense appropriate, that the last great disaster capitalist blow-out is going to be precisely the green-capitalist binge, “Green New Deal”, fake environmentalism’s obscene proposal to keep raping the Earth in the very name of saving it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Super-Elections

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Your electric cars will fare no better in the desert they help bring

 

 

I no longer think there will be alternatives within the system. In principle it remains true that the people could change their consciousness and rise up with a great movement against the commerce-based society, not to “repair” it or save it from itself but for the sake of a truly human vision and value system, as well as for the sake of saving themselves in the most biological sense since this system promises nothing to human beings but mass death.

 

In principle that remains true, but in practice there’s zero evidence it will happen, or that such a movement visibly ever will exist at all. For example most Americans, as proven by their vote and other actions, are hostile toward Medicare for All, something which can be enacted within this system at will, which faces zero physical or economic obstacles but exclusively political and psychological ones, which would significantly improve the lives of almost all Americans, and which is an absolute necessity if the coming big pandemics are to have their impact blunted at all.

 

(Such things are meant to save the economic society from its own self-destructive extremes. Measures like Medicare for All probably could extend the lifespan of the ecocidal economy and empire for a few years. They can’t overcome its overall radical impetus toward complete self-destruction. That can’t be done within the inherently self-destructive framework.)

 

The reason for this hostility is denial about the viability of the economic system itself. The 2020 election is an existential referendum, a referendum on to be or not to be.

 

Sanders is part of the capitalist faction which publicly implies that not-to-be is possible and advocates limited measures to reform and shore up the system, such as Medicare for All and a “Green New Deal”, in order to postpone the self-destruction of the system.

 

When voters vote against these measures by voting Republican or for the corporate Democrats, they really express denial that not-to-be is possible. Therefore they vote to make the destruction and self-destruction as total as possible. Thus they vote effectively Not to Be.

 

In a purely Darwinian sense, in terms of the most straight physical self-preservation within this system, one’s position on Medicare for All is a litmus test. If the great majority of Americans remain hostile toward even this modest measure, what prospect is there of the much greater sea change required to take the much broader perspective against the murderous and collectively suicidal economic society as such.

 

 

Previously I thought only Sanders could beat Trump barring some wild card. Then it seemed the Corona pandemic might be this wild card. Trump has looked utterly incapable of dealing with it, even on a demagogic level. Now it looked like a regular corporate Democrat able to talk a good game about the pandemic could beat Trump.

 

This is part of the explanation for the resurgence of the clearly senile Biden. While nobody would reject Biden on moral grounds of his evil, since the voters themselves are evil or don’t care about evil, it seemed like they might reject him on the grounds that he’s clearly in a state of dementia. Throughout history people have been willing to tolerate great tyranny and evil in their rulers as long as they perceived these leaders to be reasonably intelligent and competent, while inescapable perception of tyrannical stupidity and incompetence can bring on a revolutionary situation.

 

If Sanders looked more reasonable than his Democratic comrades or Trump, that was an attraction, just as the Democrats other than Sanders have looked more stupid than Trump. But if the pandemic perspective says Trump is now even more stupid than the corporate Democrats, while Sanders stands for Medicare for All and other “reforms” which challenge voter denial and are reviled by the corporate Democrats, this makes even Biden look relatively attractive to a larger number than before.

 

But there’s more here. Prior to one’s sense of the Sword of Damocles dangling over the economic civilization as a whole, there’s the immediate terror of the pandemic. Here if nowhere else, Medicare for All is resounding an alarm. Here the voters’ best chance for literal survival is at stake. There can be no more potent institutional barrier to the march of a virus than people being free to go to a doctor and to stay home when they’re sick, while the destruction of this freedom lays bare the whole invasion plain. Nothing else the US government could do, short of full-scale quarantines and shootings, can make a difference.

 

If even under conditions of this imminent extremity the people still vote against the reform faction (this includes tolerating the Democrat Party stealing the nomination from Sanders, the way his “movement” bowed and knelt in 2016), the denial must run much deeper and more viscerally. It can mean only the psychological will to deny the pandemic itself. This denial is the real force regardless of whether a person has conscious “right thinking” or not. It’s the same as where someone consciously “believes in” the climate crisis and calls for fake solutions like Green New Deals but really wants, does, supports, votes for nothing but Business as Usual. The only difference is that the pandemic-denying mental patient recovers from cognitive dissonance at the expense of running a much greater, more immediate risk of personal death, since for most people and especially Americans the pandemic is a more immediate threat than climate chaos and global heating.

 

Therefore it seems the voters are doubling down on denial by combining their existing hostility to Medicare for All and everything it stands for, with denial that a massively lethal pandemic is at hand. (If COVID-19 turns out not to be the Big One, it’s still only a matter of time.)

 

In that case, Trump’s denial strategy will become the right one. If the pandemic is gradual enough over the 2020 span that the election can be held at all, and the election is denial vs. denial, Trump again will win. The Dembots already have signaled.

 

 

The US and Western societies in general will hunker in the bunker exactly like Hitler in 1945, seeking only to drag out that mode of existence and destroy as much of the Earth as possible in the time remaining while destroying as much as they can any potential for any human future. They’ll do that until they collapse out of their own physical impossibilities (finite resources, Earth’s capacity to sustain total environmental insult, an economic and mass-psychological system 100% dependent on both of these) or destroy themselves in an acute spasm, most likely a pandemic or nuclear war.

 

By now the fake elections have found their terminal register, denial. The voters vote in order to deny. This is the purpose of this ritual of civic religion. They vote to make the destruction and self-destruction as total as possible. They vote Not to Be. This is where modern electoral democracy always was heading.

 

This vote for collective suicide is part of the economic civilization’s onslaught of total ecocide. It was always a kamikaze suicide ride. Electoral politics can and will do nothing but go along for this ride, accelerating it wherever possible.