A Smoking Myth

“Of course it’s cool to smoke!”

“Why else do you think we do it?”

“Because it tastes good?!”

To be fair, I was revved up, talking to a pair of kids about my embogglement that millennials have picked up the cigarette again. Here I was, thinking that my generation saw the death-throes of the myth of the ‘cool smoker’, and then fifteen years later its right back with a vengeance.

What I entered into, believing it was an abstract conversation, turned personal when I realise that the old goat across the table was an avid smoker.

And in the same fairness, I think that we need to take a closer look at the smoking “cool” factor under a microscope if that’s, with any seriousness, supposed to be an argument in favour of an addictive, filthy, toxic habit which for the previous decade has been relegated to a proclivity of the uneducated.

Celebrities, ray-ban’d camels, white-shirted James Dean look-a-like motherfuckers, the sensuous lips of some fake Audrey Hepburn craddling a phallic roll of paper between her lips, and the virile frontiersman in a wide-brim hat and fluttering longcoat; smoking ads have peddled hard the vision of the cool smoker. The independent, the confident, the rebellious, the determined; essentially The Strong. Not dissimilar from a cancerous cod-piece, swinging into battle like someone stuffed a banana down their britches before going to war in some medieval conquest.

And to be fair – an erect penis leading your way into armed conflict might just be one notch more lethal than slowly killing yourself by turning your lungs to papier-mâché.

But here’s the thing tho… Smoking cigarettes does not make you strong – in fact quite the opposite! There’s nothing about the sexually decisive or ruggedly independent inherent to huffing a cancerously spiked upper ten times per day. Your virility is actively decreased from smokin’ ’em, with your general health crumbling slowly over the course of decades, equating the habit to slow suicide. And that isn’t even getting into the mechanics of what makes people not just develop the habit, but what which makes them take one out of their pockets…

Whenever I hear a person saying they “need a smoke”, it is used as a coping mechanism. From stress, fright, tension, whatever have you. Surely as much out of comfortable habit as any medicinal reason. It’s essentially used as a coping mechanism. Combine that with the myth; the myth of the strong resilient frontiersman or the sexually charged femme fatale, gazing at your through a haze of smoke seeping out their mouth. Odds are that these myths are as addicted to smoking as the general population. Which means that they are, right at the moment of the memorialization of the myth, having a smoke to cope with something. Stress, nervousness, fear, or excitement. The myths are essentially self-medicating right in front of you while at the same time selling you the image of strength and independence, self-reliance and determination.

So why are people smoking? That’s essentially what the old man asked me, although beit rhetorically. Well – my answer is simple, and not just for his benefit. Because they’re being told to. The tobacco industry spent 8.2 billion USD in 2021 on ads (in America) meant to convince people to smoke. Meanwhile, in 2024, the National Cancer Institute received 7.22 billion USD in funding. More money is being spent to convince you to smoke than is spent on trying to cure the prime complication of smoking cigarettes: Cancer. You are a smoker because billions of dollars have put puppet strings on you – first by making you believe the myth of the cool smoker, and then once you’ve had your drag, to make you irresistibly dependent upon the thing.

The only difference between cigarettes and heroin is that cigarettes have a better PR department.

No one likes to be told that they’ve built their image on a lie. That they’ve been tricked. It so very often leads to the person turning that lie into a core part of their identity – like encapsulating the shame with a cyst of pride. Whatever it takes to escape the guilt, they instead burrow deeper into the myth they’ve been sold. “Of course smoking is cool. Why else would we do it?” To me, the answer seems self evident. You’re doing it because you were tricked. Because you were fooled and lured into a chemical dependence that pollutes you. You’re doing it because you were young, dumb, impressionable, and you made a mistake.

Everyone can be fooled. Everyone does get fooled. No one’s safe from it, and it’s okay. Everyone’s gullible until they learn not to be. That alone doesn’t make you an idiot.

Perpetuating the myth while you’re coughing your corroded lungs out, and getting pissy and dismissive when someone questions your delusions? Yeah – that’s a different story though…

/Sebastian Lindberg 14/5-2024

Skyfall Over Rafah

Yesterday (6th of May), the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) ordered that Rafah, part of southern Gaza, was to be evacuated. This, it was believed, came at the head of another push by the IDF to finalize their invasion of the Palestinian “open-air prison”.

For you to understand just how immaculately insane this order is, you need to understand what Rafah is. Rafah is the last, southern, vestige of the Gaza strip not pulverized by the nuclear war machine of Israel, the last strip of land that Israel hasn’t bombed, bulldozed, and executed their way through.

And any observant observer may just realise the profundity of the natural follow-up question to the IDF order:

Evacuate to where?

There is no more Gaza strip after Rafah. There is no where to go. Israel lets no one out. Egypt lets no one in. There is. No where. To go.

Except Muwasi. A little bedouin town along the coast – a strip of land about the size of four square kilometres – that Israel has declared a “safe zone”, that is supposed to house every Palestinian in Rafah (estimated about 1.7 million people) until… further notice.

That’s how today’s column was supposed to go, carrying on to elucidate on Israel’s cruelty and genocidal intent, explaining the insanity of calling 2,4 square meter per Palestinian a “humanitarian refuge”. But then the bombs started dropping in Rafah, tonight, while we were sleeping. On this day, seven months since October 7, Israel made good on its threat to level Rafah, giving the 1.7 million people there naught but a rough 24 hours to relocate.

This campaign is simple to understand if you look at what’s being done. The Gaza strip is being levelled, at an increasing rate. While Israel is bargaining for off-shore oil drilling contracts under the guise of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s populist extremists are battling the clock as internal political resistance against their murderous regime is on the rise, not to mention international grass-root outrage, and they’re trying to finish up their unsustainable military campaign as quickly as possible – not for the sake of Israeli hostages but in accordance to their Hannibal doctrine. This is the ethnic cleansing of a strip of land, pushing civilians into the sea through maniacal cruelty, to take land and make a buck off of fossil fuels.

There’s no justice to this. There’s no proportional response in anything the IDF has done since October 7th, or before for that matter. This is the text-book definition of ethnic cleansing, no different than the orchestrated famines of Soviet Ukraine or Nazi Germany. This is the labour of eradicating a population from plots of land that you want for either greed or religiously delusional entitlement.

And while all this is being done for the sake of glory and national security, I’m left to wonder… Just what atrocities does a nation state have to commit, and how much cruelty does the international community have to turn a blind eye to, until it justifies vengeance?

/Sebastian Lindberg 7/5-2024

Selective Sacrality

Last week we took a laughing-stock kinda look at the “controversy” of banning TikTok in the US, with a glimpse toward the wail that TikTok, a Chinese Big Corpo software psyops, represented some hallmark First Amendment right for the public.

It is not. There is nothing “free” about a corporate algorithm deciding who is heard where.

But worry not! If you’re concerned about your freedom of speech, or the lack thereof, in the gReAtEsT cOuNtRy On EaRtH, then oh boy do I have somewhere to point your infringed indignation! Just turn your ire over here!

That is what actual transgression of free speech looks like. When students – young people – those of us not yet encumbered with mortgages and compromised integrity – stand up against ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and colonialism, and in turn are censured by their academic institutions. Y’know, the kind of institutions that are SUPPOSED to be ramparts of higher cognition and moral upbringing, of truth and integrity, but instead prove to be cowardly cesspools of corporate dependency.

When universities threaten young people for expressing their democratic rights and political displeasure, THEN you have infringement upon your precious First Amendment privilege. When colleges send in the cavalry – quite fucking literally The Cavalry! – to disperse democratic congregations of protest, THEN your vaunted freedom of speech and expression and gathering is being threatened.

But no. Of course you don’t care about young people’s right to protest a morally corrupt government, not as much as you care about watching a never-ending stream of funny videos and cosmetic tutorials. But that’s not the real reason why you’re not as upset about the martial intervention against university protests as you are about losing your precious ha-ha brain-scramble. The real reason is that thousands and thousands of students all across your gLoRiOuS aMeRiCa don’t have a multi-million dollar ad department backing their message, so you don’t get those precious advertisements telling you what to think about the disruption of democratic discourse and protest. Because how could you ever make up your own mind if instructions weren’t given to you in neat one-minute bursts of custom engineered opinion. It’s not like you could do like these young people and take a stand against a wrong done by your civilization’s hand against another without clear commercial direction.

It says something about the institutions of higher learning in the US, when presidents and deans condemn and extra-judicially prosecute children for speaking up against injustice in an organized fashion. It makes it plain that those great palaces of learning have compromised moral authority for the benefit of political benefactors and corporate sponsors.

As it turns out, those rights of free speech are oh so sacred only for as long as you have nothing worthwhile to say.

/Sebastian Lindberg 30/5-2024

Shooting TikToks in a Barrel

The US House of Representatives finally – FINALLY – voted through additional military aid for beleaguered Ukraine. Unfortunately, the bill also included aid to Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing. You know how US politicians like baking poison and idiocy into the cookie dough so that even the most sure-fire bills become a moral compromise. It’s almost like the legislative forces in the US are allergic to just doing unambiguous good.

Oh, and also, a ban on TikTok was included in the bill. Like chocolate chips.

Let us – first and foremost – ask ourselves “why”. It started with Trump’s nationalistic worrying about Chinese influence. While the Orange Hydra started his presidency getting chummy with both Jinping and NK’s Kim, those relationships lasted about as long as a spray tan. So when Trump couldn’t sell his presidency on “fixing” the US relationship with China, he elected instead to demonize them as part of a nationalistic campaign.

The Republican Cult of Trump is thus out for blood with China (just like the Democrats are out for blood with Iran). And banning Chinese-owned TikTok is one front of that war. Because they’re concerned that US user data is up for grabs for the Chinese government, so unless TikTok sells it’s Chinese shares to US corporations, a ban will be in place in 9-12 months.

… this is one of those things where only half the truth’s being sold by either side on the subject …

The Reality: Most social media sells its data to whoever wants to pay the most for it. Same’s true about Facebook and Whatsapp and Instagram et.al.. That’s the business model. If you don’t buy the service, then as a content creator you are the product. That’s how Trump got elected to begin with – by Facebook et. al. selling your data to campaign organizers.

It is also true that the Chinese government can seize corporate assets in China at a whim. They’ve done it before, so it stands to reason that they’ll do so again. It is also true that the TikTok owner ByteDance runs a very different TikTok domestically than it does internationally. At home, TikTok premiers science and education. Globally, TikTok spoon-feeds users vapid dances and cat videos. TikTok is a platform which selectively makes one population smarter and the others dumber. TikTok is a psyops app.

The Hypocrisy: Ever since the anti-Trust binge back in the early 20th century, the US government has acted decidedly pro-corpo, with very few actual infringements on monopolies. Sure – they sometimes drag Mark Zuckerberg or Elon in front of Congress to sweat a little, but they do very little to challenge the tech industry. So to single out a social media platform, not for what incriminating damage it does but rather that it doesn’t serve specifically American billionaires, is not just a little hypocritical.

Same goes for the aggressive bitchery which TikTok’s launched to combat the looming ban. Since the ides of March, TikTok’s spent 5 million USD on TV ads, hoping to mobilize the some 170 million US users of the platform into political action, rallying around the idea of “infringement of their First Amendment Rights”. As if a parasitic social media app, which like a leech thrives on the people using it, was the foundation of public discourse. If you’re so concerned about your right to free speech and expression, go grab a pallet and have a soliloquy in the town square. It’s not like there’s an avalanche of cognitive value on social media anyway.

The US gunning for TikTok for its ill effects on the population is a valid concern veiling jingoistic protectionism of the same evils. And if you’re one of the many content creators who have hitched your entire identity, value, and financial future on sucking the dick of one of the Seven Devils of social media, you really only have yourself to blame that it’s not turning out to be a sustainable business prospect (says the man with literary delusions who’ve started streaming on Twitch).

Most social media is a poison to body and mind. Shooting those corpo parasites out of the sky is a public service. Bring out the fucking flak cannons, I say! Dakka, dakka! But don’t discriminate.

And if you think that your “free speech” will ever be given to you by a corporate algorithm, then you must not be very clear on that “free” part of it…

/Sebastian Lindberg 23/4-2024

If Only, Vol. 1

These columns have been severely lacking for positivity as of late.

And when even I can feel that lack, you know it’s gotten bad. But what’s a chronicler to do when the world is so full of care and every headline screams despair; and all is rape, starvation, war, and life seems vile?

Maybe this is how old beat cops feel – so worn down by the sheer tragedy of it all that the only recourse for their worn out neanderthal brains is to go home and beat on the wife or strangle a black kid. But y’know what! There’s a better way. There’s got to be. So for the benefit of our sanity, let’s make like a Canadian bank and go loonie, shall we?

So let us indulge in some wish fulfilment instead!

Putin’s dead. He died in his marble bunker during an autoerotic asphyxiation-accident while watching the Teletubbies on repeat. And although the Kremlin is in turmoil of where to extort this year’s Christmas Party’s funding, federated states across the nation break away into self-governance – which has turned out a surprisingly unbloody affair, seeing as the vast majority of local government officials proved vacant from their posts in favour of their Cyprus villas.

In solidarity, or perhaps fearing for his own health, Xi Jinping brokered a deal with Tibet to be allowed into a life-affirming, non-masturbatory monastery, spelling the end of Chinese occupation of the mountainous country. Analysts believe this will usher in a wave of declarations of independence, citing Commie the Pooh’s exit from public life as a sign of a swift turn for the region’s imperial nation.

Meanwhile, in India, the nationalist driving his country to ethnic cleansing, Narendra Modi, has, for the first time in recorded history, faltered in spreading hate on camera when his son came out of the closet on live television while converting to Islam. As the RSS reels from the unexpected reveal, both Hindus and Muslims across the country rejoice at the, perhaps, most honest moment in Modi’s aggressive political media campaign yet, and rally around the hope that this will affect a benevolent turn in the old bigot’s soul.

On the other side of the world, Elon finally left on his rocket. America sighs a sigh of relief as the mogul finalized his bid to take his vision of “the best and brightest” to the stars. Post-launch, prosecutors find Mar-A-Lago empty, Hollywood quiet, and most of the federal and corporate government devoid of shareholders. Although this will no doubt spell economic woes in the years ahead, the Pentagon has promised to unlock Fort Knox, and the launch engineers of the departed “Space Force Super-One!!!” generational space ark reassure us that they have included a Voyager-style gold plate on the tip of the craft apologizing most sincerely and profusely to any and all intelligences that the travellers may encounter and please ask them not to judge us leftovers by what they may find aboard the spacefaring phallus.

In closing, a convoy of a million children were observed marching out of Ashkelon and crossing over into northern Gaza, carrying with them everything from clean water and first aid supplies to Cheeto’s and mommy’s Valium, taking the besieging IDF forces by surprise. In public statements, recorded and released across multiple platforms at the time of the first border crossings, the children proclaim that they refuse to let the sins of their parents become their own and elect instead to stand with the oppressed. The confusion of IDF soldiers only increased as startled marksmen are accused of anti-Semitism for no longer being able to tell Jewish and Palestinian children apart. A public condemnation and resolution against further ethnic cleansing in Gaza or any remaining Palestinian territory was signed during an emergency meeting at the UN Security Council after the initial hour of the march, suspected only to have passed because the US secretary to the Security Council is believed to be currently drinking Mai Tai’s on Elon’s rocket.

If only the world was sane, eh…

/Sebastian Lindberg 16/5-2024

The Fears of a Weak State

Last week, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, voted through a new law permitting the violation of press freedoms of any foreign media network which may pose a “threat to national security”. Warmonger, hatemonger, fascist, and condemned corrupt politician, Benjamin Netanyahu spared no time to declare the Qatari news network Al Jazeera as public enemy number one and “terror channel” for its on-site reporting of Israeli war crimes and unrestricted murder of both civilians and international aid workers in Gaza.

Because a tyrant can never be tolerant of opposition. And since Al Jazeera is just about the only international news media still operating within Gazan borders, even though the Israel Defence Force (IDF) has been targetting journalists and those journalists’ families since long before the war (see, for example, the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh).

Some may be outraged by this new law. Some may get defensive, like zionists are wont to get. And some may be surprised. But the eradication of press freedoms are not news, nor isolated to Israel. Report after report, from organisation after organisation, sing the same tune: The freedom of the press is dwindling, far and wide. From Russia to the US, from Israel to Iran, and even from the “liberal capital” of the world – the European Union – news networks are being diminished. For much the same arguments, no matter where you go. Whether it’s the US presidential office hunting down Assange for exposing US war crimes, Russia targetting dissenting voices, Turkey jailing anyone who disagrees with Erdogan, or the EU trying (and failing) to ban Russia Today and Sputnik news channels, they all argue the same thing: That they’re fighting a war against misinformation.

Naturally, it’s the reigning regime which defines what’s misinformation and not. Which is understandable. Every weak government since the dawn of history has made great efforts to gain a monopoly of the country’s propaganda, from Rome to Nazi Germany, and beyond.

So instead of just decrying Israel as another apartheid rogue state, let us take a look at the very explicable mechanics behind the erosion of press freedoms, the loss of transparency of government, and the diminishing of public access to reliable and fact-checked information:

Let’s begin our journey with an informed public. Such a population is knowledgable of the minutiae of governance, and the implications of foreign policy and relations. Such a public is difficult to control by ruling parties, and hold their government accountable. They are a demanding sort, holding their leaders accountable and responsible, and aren’t easily swayed by ideological red herrings.

But it is difficult to find people who are willing to lead such a public, for people capable of taking responsibility are prone to avoid it. Instead, cowards and opportunists fill the ranks, who absolutely do not want an informed and knowledgable public. How much easier for them would it not be if the public were malleable and easily herded toward whatever new shiny thing that was dangled in front of them.

So as the quality of the leadership inevitably falter, the will to erode the intellectual capacity of its public is conversely increased. And with enough desire to undermine, or at the very least cease the maintenance of, the informed nature of the public, the institutions of upholding that virtue are slowly picked apart. Schools decline, news networks are turned into partisan propaganda machines, and science is being debated by people who never understood the scientific method. And as a result, people are made ignorant.

And though an ignorant public is easier to be herded by its government, it turns out that they’re also easier to be manipulated by other governments.

And once facts and knowledge becomes increasingly subservient to emotion and belief, that control becomes a tug-of-war with other puppeteers. Some of those outside voices may even maintain a modicum of integrity and offer facts and knowledge to the undermined public, but they’re easily rationalized into the same corner as belligerent foreign interests.

And so “national security” replaces “accountability”, and press freedoms are curbed to maintain the slipping control of the failing regime.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

If a government had a public which could tell truth from lies, then misinformation, foreign or otherwise, would be no threat. But which capitalist government could maintain its power with such a public to begin with? And so, the eradication of a free press inevitably follows, not as a sign of foreign threats or a destabilized geopolitical landscape, but as the consequence of domestic corruption of both the public and the elite.

For it is a weak state which fears information.

/Sebastian Lindberg 9/4-2024

Swagging the Dog

Pendants. Stickers. Pins. Mouse mats. Plushies. Cat ears. Chain mail finger caps. Hoodies. Frilly skirts with the face of an Evangelion humanity project reject stamped on the ass. Little ceramic mushrooms with wash board abs. Flowery hairbands to keep thinning hairlines receding. Coasters. Mugs. Dolls. Big dolls. Little dolls, with nuclear warhead machine guns. Artisanal picture frames. Six-by-four inch artwork suitable for bookmarks.

And somewhere squeezed ‘twixt all that, some literature.

During Easter weekend I manned a booth at a local nerd con for to sell my book, ‘The Last Box’, and the rampant commercialism boggled my mind. It is a commonly known fact that nerds are prone to buy enough tit-n-tat to landfill the Sea of Serenity so that they can brandish their fandoms, but Ho-Ly Fuck b’ys, you don’t see such a hunger for bits and bobs and trinkets as at a gaming convention.

Nerds, to be fair, is not the only demographic which bogs themselves down in useless crap, but by the nameless God of detritus, they gotta be the worst, non? Oh, come off it – fess up! Even YOU have to admit that the nerd accumulation of sub-culture defining paraphernalia is in a league of its own.

Which lead me to wonder as I always do: Why?

It has been made explicit to me, that one should not judge people by their passing appearances, and perhaps particularly not when they indulge themselves in the depths of their guilty-or-otherwise pleasures. Perhaps I’m just especially judgemental, or perhaps it comes with the territory of being a writer; that I’m always constructing and deconstructing people as characters to be used or frankensteined into some lovable abomination in the pages of my prose. Regardless, I doubt my observations are particularly unique or controversial, if perhaps uncouthly blunt, and even though no one should judge a book by its cover, which I can tell you after getting into publishing that people absolutely always do!, I feel warranted to voice an observation.

Nerds are tribalistic totem-toters. More so than any other demographic, including the LGBT-crowd or sports supporters. How’s that? Well – nerds are outcasts. And geek culture is a flag for outcasts to rally around – to find kinship and enough people-at-arms at your back to be loud and proud about it.

It’s hard to separate the chicken from the egg – did the outcast turn to nerd shit for being ostracized, or was it the nerd shit that turned them into outcasts to begin with – but the connection is self-evident to the point of undermining the relevancy of this column. Looking at con-goers walking past, from the relative separation of a booth table, and seeing all the ways the people there distinguish themselves – both voluntarily and involuntarily – it’s easy to assume that the lowest common denominator is some shape or form of being a pariah. Be that by looks, behaviour, personality, beliefs, priorities, or just by refusing the drink the normies’ Kool-Aid. The con is the place where all these people, with intimate experiences of being alienated, can join with the herd and be loud-n-proud for once.

Which may be why they’re ever so thirsty for their tit-n-tat, their commercial junk. Because every pin, every sticker, every bit of nerdy flair they can get their hands on and slather all over themselves is a tribal flag. The cat ears and flowery hairbands on Gen-X old men, the shirts and plague doctor masks and the cavalcade of pins of increasingly obscure manga, is akin to wearing the nation’s flag all over your body. It says “I am different from you, and I am a part of something greater”, or at a con such as this; “I’m just like you, and we must band together”. Like shields and aegises and bulwarks for to protect oneself with from the persecution that no doubt most have felt at one point or another.

To many people at the con, it seemed so vitally important to look – as garishly as possible – like a nerd. For community. Or for empowerment.

All of which – if we elect not to go into the pervasive problems of the psychology of tribalism – is fine and understandable. People want to belong. Even outcasts want as much, and there very much is empowerment in letting your freak-flag fly high.

But I’ve seen scant few other demographics who are as easily preyed upon by commercialism as nerds. They’ll buy buy buy any gods damned thing if it fits into their tribal sensibilities. If money equates to labour, imagine how much of a nerd’s blood sweat and tears is invested in identity-proclamations and insistent needs to prove to oneself and the rest of the world that they are a part of or akin to something greater.

In the eyes of Big Corpo, nerds must look like fattened cows, jostling to be first in line to be slaughtered. Oh? You’re offended and disagree? There are Pikachu butt plugs. You wouldn’t find Arsenal or Gucci, or any of our other cults, caught dead with that kind of branding. You could spackle the Gryffindor colours on tampons, sell them for ten times the price, and watch the nerds line the pavement for a chance to buy your cotton wads.

“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” – this is known (and coming on being a boring statement by now). Getting exploited is nothing unique, not to nerds or anyone else. But there’s something especially discomfiting with the fever pitch with which nerds descend on cutesy garbage, gobbling down any fucking thing that their corporate leash-holders deign to produce and market.

So. Maybe… reign it in? Just a bit? You’re (statistically) a forty year old white man. You’re not being chased down the aisle by jocks any more. You don’t need to build a Hadrian’s wall of plastic swag to keep yourself safe. It’s okay. Your disparate tribe isn’t the underdog any longer. You don’t have to prove to anyone that you like what you like. Just sit down in your ASOIAF gamer chair with lumbar support and sip your commemorative Berserk pomegranate and blood orange Lipton tea from your Starscream limited edition coffee cup, and be content that you’ve signalled your allegiance enough.

/Sebastian Lindberg 2/4-2024

Postmodern Politics

Four gunmen walk into a concert hall and start firing at any and all they find within. With assault weapons and grenades they slaughter, topping the destruction off by setting the building on fire.

And though people mourn, while loved ones are in shock, the politicians spin the attack to their best benefit. Because in our postmodern world, ‘seeming’ is more important than ‘being’, and any situation is obfuscated by enough plausible suspicion that what’s real and not becomes a fickle point of view.

An Afghanistan offshoot of ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. A claim that’s hard to verify, either by its own virtue or that of the ones capable of actually confirming it aren’t trustworthy themselves. Regardless, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP, cheer for what’s broadcast as a proof-of-concept for their capacity to export their violence (which of course they would consider an organizational success, if but for naught but a promotional victory). Meanwhile, the US claims to verify the responsibility of the attack, by supposedly having intercepted information of the impending assault, which they promptly handed over to Russia (which of course they would want to claim, because it suits the US to prod Russia to open a new front in the east). Supposedly, Russia ignored the tip, no doubt not trusting anything that comes out of the mouth of their on-again-off-again cold war nemesis. And as for Russia, Putin claims the attack was orchestrated by Ukraine, keeping the country’s military focus squarely fixed on their resilient little David-opponent (which of course he would, to avoid facing the fact that Russia’s globalist military initiatives on Muslim soil, such as in Syria or Africa, bears consequences).

The truth? Muddled in there somewhere. It’s difficult to trust an Islamic fundamentalist propaganda machine. Just as it’s difficult to trust the US in anything they say. And we know just how highly the truth is valued within and without the Kremlin’s bloodied walls.

The ISKP claim makes more sense than Putin’s effort to attach blame to Ukraine. Russia’s been meddling with the destabilization of Muslim nations for a long time. Their fateful invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 gave birth to the modern Mujahideen, and thus, the Taliban and modern Islamic fundamentalism. And that’s not even accounting for the Wagner group’s forays around the globe.

Then again, if Russia was pulled into the same kind of prolonged War on Terror that has bogged down the US for over two decades, that would certainly benefit Ukraine.

Cicero’s argument ‘cui bono’ (who benefits) has been a staple of political analysis just as much as in criminal investigations since Rome rose, and long after it fell. But today, when everyone spins everything to benefit politically and personally from every possible tragedy, collective as well as personal, it only serves to paint everyone as guilty.

And maybe that’s the key? Maybe while we operate within the cynical confines of a postmodern political landscape, where nothing has ‘a priori’ value, where the name of the game is spin-spin-spin and all the tails are wagging the dog, maybe Cicero is more right than he ever intended to be. Maybe when integrity is lost in the eaves of The House, everyone really becomes guilty, if not by deed, then by profiteering.

/Sebastian Lindberg 26/3-2024

Just Like Tyranny, But Real

The Overlord is on the brink of dominating the land. His armies sweep across the last vestiges of resistance, and we’re playing the part of a martial justiciar enforcing his law in his new domain.

We commit war crimes, we torture prisoners of war, we call civilians subversives to let us murder them, we burn towns to the ground, and we feed captives and friends alike to the insatiable mouth of military intelligence. Make no mistake; we’re the baddies. That’s the intent of the experience. It is an effort to explore how people and society functions under authoritarian rule, and how cruel and vicious that rule’s machine of war is on the ground it churns to bloody mud.

In this 7 year old game, and we are the bad people. There’s no controversy to it – no discussion – it’s an obvious mission statement. We work for an evil dictatorship and we commit evil acts in its name.

Which makes it feel very strange to live through the current state of the real world, where murdering civilians, torturing PoWs, and levelling entire cities for the sake of conquest, is somehow legible for moral debate. Atrocities which turn my stomach and are considered “evil” in make-belief, are then transposed verbatim into the real world where those very same acts are somehow… supposed to be interpreted as… anything but?

The human capacity of self-delusion has always been… let’s be generous and call it “impressive”. We put much cognitive and verbal effort into rationalizing our bad decisions and cruel acts as somehow otherwise, and once we entrench enough of them into our identity, we become particularly sensitive to other people not sharing in our delusions. We commit more and more atrocities, if only to somehow prove to ourselves and others that the deed was in fact not all that bad, if nothing else by sheer dilution. We convince ourselves that if we just keep doing worse and worse things, the “evil” we make manifest in the world will somehow become less pungent or potent.

It doesn’t.

We are what we do. Our actions define us. If we commit ourselves to “evil” acts, to ruthlessness and cruelty and violence and sadism, then that is what we are no matter what psychopathic polish we put on it.

/Sebastian Lindberg 19/3-2024

The World’s Most Confused Clown

Musk is making himself a bellend. Again.

What now, eh. Did the nutsack make another apocalyptic car out of rusting sheet metal? Did he try to sell another brand of commercial flamethrowers to the public? Did he tank another social media giant by taking over the reigns?

Nah – nothing quite so devastating, though no less moronic, this time.

Musk has sued Sam Altman and OpenAI, essentially for “breach of contract”.

S’just one little bitzy problem there, big shoots: There’s no contract.

Musk co-founded, read “helped finance”, OpenAI in 2015, but three years later, in February of 2018, the billionaire told OpenAI that he wanted the company to be folded into his own Tesla’s AI development efforts. OpenAI, with its strangely corporate/non-profit hybrid structure, told him (in nowhere near as colourful language, little doubt) to bugger off and kick rocks. So Musk left. And started spouting cautionary tales of the development of AI soon thereafter.

Almost like a spoilt child who’d been told “no” and now doesn’t want to play the game any more, and doesn’t want anyone else to either because the game is dumb and dangerous and no one should want to play it anyway!

Fast forward a few years and a pandemic later…

OpenAI has a crisis of faith, you may say, and the board attempts a coup d’eta against their CEO and (real) founder Altman (allegedly over the emergence of the next-level AI Q*). The coup fails, and OpenAI has since been without a solid board of directors. And here comes Musk – entering stage left – to get back on his billion-dollar complaint equity, to harp about OpenAI having lost sight of its founding principles, possibly due to the launch of its language model GPT-4 not being released for free.

Thus; a lawsuit, filing “breach of contract” without the existence of a contract. I swear, it boggles my mind that an asshat like Musk can maintain a legal department on retainer that’s so bored that this sort of tomfoolery becomes a top priority. One woulda think they had bigger concerns keeping the man-child fiscally afloat. But nope, apparently they don’t, so instead they slyly generate legal work for themselves by letting their overlord argue that “monetary donations to a non-profit corporation” somehow implies an IOU.

This whole thing really only stands to prove one thing, doesn’t it? That there’s no such thing as meritocracy in a capitalist society. Because if capitalism actually rewarded intelligence and integrity and ingenuity, then how come such a fucking nincompoop can stand as one of the world’s richest men? Fuck; even Pagliacci wouldn’t be caught dead in the same waiting room as this confused clown, would he?

Figure it out.

/Sebastian Lindberg 12/3-2024