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

The Bubonic Orange in the Sickening Fruit Bowl

So; Argentina has a new president – a singular leader of chainsaws and organ trade.

The self-styled anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei won in, well… a landslide one might say, with 56% of the popular vote, so no doubt he’s actually the “people’s champion”. Despite, y’know… the promises of dismantling the government, the proclamation of a culture-war against the left, swapping out the failing peso for the dollar, and generally turning the country into a libertarian theme park.

At risk of judging people by their appearance as far as political competence or philosophy goes, once this mad-lad gets going (for example on his rage against the left) he takes on the mad sheen of a person getting off on shaking puppies so hard that their necks snap.

The alt-right is cheering. Big corpo and investment firms are jubilant. And so too are Argentines.

I know fuck-all about the political and economical situation of Argentina. If one is to believe the reports, the country is suffering from record breaking poverty rates, a triple digit inflation, and soaring debt. As far as I can tell, half the width of a world away, Argentina isn’t doing too hot. Which brings me to my thoughts, not on these Trump-alikes popping up across the globe like mold on a withering orange, but rather on the environment of the fruit bowl in which they’re allowed to rise to power.

Because if there’s one thing that the likes of Boris, Åkesson, Trump, Modi, Bolsanaro, and now Javier Milei are all correct about, it’s that there is something truly rotten in their neighbourhoods. This much is undeniably true. Because if it wasn’t true, if their societies were hale and whole, then they would never have sprouted into power.

You see, in the same way as with Hitler or Stalin, despots such as these cannot attain any real power without societal collapse and discontent. They are by no means a cure, as they claim, of the dysfunction of society, but they very much are a symptom. And the reason why they’re so hard to get rid of once they take root is because the establishment, the same establishment that created the environment in which these fungi flourish, don’t want to or aren’t capable of either seeing and/or accepting the fundamental illness of their circumstances.

The Trumps and Modis and Milei’s aren’t the problem. Pay heed: They’re not the solution either! But the only way they can resonate with a public is because that public is fed up. And until there’s a solution on the board (which as far as I can tell there isn’t) these beasts will keep cropping up.

This has been the story for as long as it’s been written down. The leadership becomes complacent, indulgent, and corrupt. The societal functions start to deteriorate. The people get fed up. Madmen invigorate the masses. And in their unproductive, insane, ways of “helping” (because there’s not an adult in the room) they end up burning the house down to its foundation.

Good luck, Argentina. I fear it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. For you and for all of us.

/Sebastian Lindberg 21/11-2023

No Bird is Free in the Aviary

As journalists are banned, mention of competition is throttled, and employees are threatened and fired, it feels incumbent upon anyone with even a sliver of a platform to comment upon the social media upheaval of the year; Elon Musk’s tyrannical takeover of Twitter.

The South African greed monger has been stalking the social media giant since April, at first being refuted and throwing a hissy fit. But eventually, as is usual in the upper echelons of Corporation, money has the final say, and for a wooping 44 billion USD, Twitter finally caved this October.

“The bird is freed”, he world’s richest man proudly announced. Which exact bird he referred to is unclear. It certainly wasn’t the employees left at the company, who were either fired or subjected to the mother of all ordered overtime. And it certainly weren’t the general users, with mentions of competitors being muted and journalists being banned. The only bird apparently freed in Musk’s aviary seems to have been the vulture Trump, unshackled again and just as unhinged as before his time-out, sparing not a moment to broadcast the release of Trump-centric trading card NFTs as Christmas gifts.

As with most powerful men promoting freedoms to gain public support, their cherished freedoms seems an exclusive privilege, offered only at the benevolence of the overlord.

But people forget that Twitter, and its ilk, was never about freedoms. Social media isn’t a public service or a public right. Twitter, for all its past benefits and ills, has always been a private company, bent on making money from human-to-human interaction. No matter how often the PR departments of Facebook or Twitter or TikTok speak of “connecting human beings”, the only connection these companies have ever cared about is their connection to your wallet. Or better yet, a connection to the bigger wallets of those that want to understand how and why you do your connecting.

Social media has become as a revolutionary step in communication technology as the telephone or printing press. But despite its public influence and presence, social media isn’t a public service. It is a public leech. From the start, its intentions have been to bleed people dry. Through subscriptions, advertisements, or a source of data to sell to whomever wants to manipulate the public the most. If people want a public good, a place designed not to bleed people but to connect them, they should search out platforms that aren’t run by Machiavellian shit-stirrers or robotic facsimiles, but are open-sourced and free from capitalist agendas.

Twitter hasn’t fundamentally changed under Musk’s regime. It is what it always was; a platform where its users are the product. To expect Twitter to be otherwise, pre- or post-Musk, is naïve to say the least.

The only difference between now and then is that Musk is worse at hiding Twitter’s true nature.

/Sebastian Lindberg 19/12-2022

Clapped By A Boulder – A Giuliani Story

There’s a story, a made up fictional one, totally and completely untrue, I’m currently reading, about a little kingdom along a little river, that has a God for a King. This little God-King of his little kingdom is sacrosanct to all, or so everyone is made to believe. For when a stonemason of this little kingdom by this little river unwittingly shakes the God-King’s hand, societal pressure forces the stonemason to cut off his own hand for having touched divinity.

This is a totally made up story. It bears absolutely no likeness to the real world. Because in our real world, the God-King is a criminal lawyer named Rudy Giuliani.

“As if a boulder hit me”, he says, accompanied by remarks that Giuliani couldn’t repeat on camera, “about what I am”, which turned out to be a scumbag.

The warehouse worker who dared to lay his filthy hand upon the God-King in his little kingdom by his little river… no, sorry, that’s the entirely fictional story; upon the former New York mayor, scumsucking Trump henchman, and demonstrable liar who has since last summer been suspended from practising law in New York because of his incessant falsifications to courts, lawmakers, and the public, is now facing criminal charges.

Let us make this absolutely clear. A New York warehouse worker is hounded by a deranged ex-lawyer for a slap on the back and calling the documented scumbag a scumbag. In New York. New. York. Supposedly the most rough-edged city^{(citation pending)} in the most rough-edged country in western civilization. Imagine, just out of pure speculation, if the law treated everyone equal, if the US was a sovereign state for the people, by the people, if the police department and the courts treated everyone there as equals, how many fucking assault charges would be raised every single second in that big wormridden apple.

Far be it from me to say that the naturalisation of “criminal” behaviour invalidates the illegality of the act, but… Good citizens of Gotham – I mean, New York! Riddle me this! How many times have you clapped someone on their shoulder or back hard enough to rock them a widdle step? How many times have you called someone a scumbag, or something similarly derogatory? Plenty? Tons? Ten times a-day? Thought as much…

It begs a question, doesn’t it? How come all these politician hard-asses, these vanguards for truth and justice, these self-proclaimed later day scions for responsibility and calibre and hard truths, these gun-toting, pro-life, evangelical crusaders, often turn out to be such massive fucking wimps?

/Sebastian Lindberg 28/6-2022

A Radical Examination

I would like to talk about the word “radical”. You know, that one word pundits and politicians are so fond of using to stigmatize opponents and discredit opposing ideas and priorities. The rhetoric pooper scooper that gets employed every time one needs to toss a stand over the hedge and into the fringe. With increasing frequency the word is deployed, and I would like to take a little look at it, if you don’t mind, to see if it holds up to industry standards.

Let’s get the boring bullshit out of the way first. Because we have to, otherwise there’re bound to be a few eyeglass-pushing motherfuckers creaking out a chorus of well-actuallies from out the woodwork. According to Oxford Languages, the word radical as an adjective relates to the change of the fundamental nature of something. According to Merriam-Webster, aside from a few gardening, chemical, and mathematical applications, the word radical relates to the fundamentals of a thing, or refers to the different to the usual or traditional.

There. Boring stuff’s done. Definitions all very fine and dandy and useful. But not terribly interesting in and of themselves. Instead, what is interesting, is how the term radical has been twisted and used to describe an opinion or change that is a fundamental threat to your way of life.

We saw this practise come into full swing during the Trump-era. In a climate of change and division, the word was turned into a condemnation. “The Radical Left” was out to destroy the American Way of Life, and so on and so forth. Like it was a bigger threat to some hypothesized ideal than even bin Laden or corn syrup ever was. Anything and anyone that didn’t serve Trump’s interests were branded as “radicals” so they could easily be dismissed. And that rhetoric stuck around, even after the Orange Hydra slipped out of office with his tail between his legs. Employed by the GOP as well as the Dems.

And it isn’t just on the American side of things where “radical” has become an adjective for the unhinged. So too does the European Union struggle with the stamp of the (he)radical. As an example from little Sweden, this summer saw an escalation of a decades old struggle between environmental conservationists and a national network of some of the most influential (and most pollutive) industries in the nation. And now, the government seems poised to bulldoze the decision of the Environmental Court just to keep the lime quarries of the island Gotland running. To make a long and infected story short, the government is going to extra-judicial lengths to justify the continuation of environmentally destructive efforts for the sake of jobs and economic growth. And naturally, those who oppose the expansion and wish to protect the groundwater and the unique natural reserves around the quarry at the cost of hundreds, thousands of jobs at mills or plants or quarries nation-wide, are dismissed as environmental radicals. Woodland crazies and disconnected city folk who don’t understand what it means to support a family or pay a mortgage.

In a way, radical is an en vouge way to describe a fundamentalist. A dangerous erratic element whose opinion isn’t grounded in the reality that we live in. Be it the abolishment of governments like what the anarchists of old believed. Or the institution of an absolute government, like what the communist argued. Or the preservation of an environment at the cost of contemporary privileges, like what the green movement believes in. The term radical has been and is being used by the status quo to dismiss fundamentally alternative values to those that the status quo promotes.

So if we look at the word as it’s used today; a dismissal of points of views for ideological reasons, and look to apply it to current circumstances… what do we get then? What exactly is the radical perspective? Is it radical, as the capitalist conservatives in the US would like to claim, to invest billions of US tax dollars into infrastructure, healthcare, and green initiatives instead of wars? Or like the industrial socialist government of Sweden like to think, that it is radical to put thousands of people out of unsustainable work because their employers couldn’t be arsed to find sustainable alternatives to their destructive business models just to save ground water reserves?

Fundamentally, the question of what is radical and what is not is a matter of a schism of perspective. For someone stuck in a post-war fantasy, where the future looks bright and rosy-cheeked, it is understandable that some defeatist prophecy of coming doomsdays seem taken out of fiction. Likewise for those who grew up underneath the rotting pizza of privilege, those doomsdays are already here and those post-colonial privileges are mere houses of cards putting on their best Wile E. Coyote-impressions. To either, the opposite position looks radical. But it is the distance, the division, that really feeds the notion of radicalism. Not the positions themselves.

We live in a polarized society. People have never been so rich as they are today. There has also never been as many people suffering from extreme poverty as there are today. Humanity has never been more powerful than we are today. Humanity has also never been as seemingly powerless to change our trajectory. And what is radical to one person is an absolutely fundamental truth to another. So whenever a politician or a pundit or a journalist uses the word “radical”, that person isn’t really saying that the “radical” position isn’t founded in reality. They’re saying that the “radical” position isn’t rooted in their reality. That they cannot conceive a world where that radical position or perspective or ideology is relevant. The west cannot conceive of a world where humanism bows to the word of God; so the likes of Jihadists and Hindu nationalists or the Taliban are radicals. The conservative capitalists of the western world cannot conceive of a world where its resources don’t just sprout from the ground at their beck and call, how it would be possible to not be able to afford exclusive access to clean water, so obviously the habitat can’t be dying and the resources can’t be running out and the Green movement are just radical alarmists. And a person who’s never had the opportunity to have a career to invest in or a family to support or a mortgage to pay can’t fathom how a job at the mill or plant can be more important than clean water and breathable air for future generations. And that’s where the “radical” comes in. A lazy dismissal of what we do not understand, and what we don’t want to try to.

In the end, it might behove us to limit the use of “radical” as a dismissive slur. Because in our current state of affairs, it doesn’t really designate what is based in reality and what is not. It isn’t used as Oxford and Merriam-Webster would like to argue as a word to denote a fundamental change of the nature of things. It only nominates what the speaker can’t understand their subject’s position.

Or, astronomically worse yet, that they don’t want you listening to try to understand. Because why should you labour to understand something that doesn’t share a reality with you?

It’s a dangerous assertion. Even in arguments where there’s a clear right and a most distinct wrong. Because with the world being as it is, we can’t really afford to lazily dismiss opposing forces as simple mad-cap bastards not worthy of your consideration or respect.

Even when – maybe especially when – we think they’re demonstrably wrong.

/Sebastian Lindberg 28/9-2021

The Democratic Pied Piper

I fucking called it! I did! I fucking did! I don’t know if it’s documented somewhere in my slew of columns over the years, I hope it is, but I called it! Woot!

This week, a leak oozed out of WikiLeaks that, if true, would validate a few theories on how the hell Donald Trump came to power. It was an e-mail, sent around the Hillary Clinton campaign, which detailed tactics on how to destabilize the Republican presidential race of 2015. One such tactic consisted of promoting and pushing along extreme Republican candidates for the purpose of pushing “reasonable” Republicans towards the fringe, and alienate the Republican party from the US population. Three examples were given in the memo; Ben Carson was one. The Cancun-cunt Ted Cruz another. And last, but certainly not least, the name Donald J. Trump is documented. Clear as day.

And I called it! Hah!

From the start of the 2015 presidential campaign, I’ve said that Trump has to be a ringer. The notion to put him, the blathering buffoon that he is, in the spot-light, could not have been a serious suggestion. No one should have been able to predict that the US public would be stupid enough to elect a racist, misogynist, clinically diagnosed idiot, into the White House. They did, but that’s beside the point. The point is that no one could have believed it.

What plenty of people could believe, did believe, and now post-script; can observe, is that Trump really did shake the Republican party off its axis. And without the benefit of hind-sight, imagining that we’re back in 2015, who would you think would have benefited from such an upheaval? Naturally: The Democratic party.

I mean, all the signs were there. The fact that Trump previously had more connections to Democrats than he had to Republicans. Considering that the Clintons and the Trumps were buddies for years. Just look at how glum the Orange Hydra looked as he was inaugurated. Though to be fair, Trump only really ever looked happy when he was psyching himself out in a room full of Trump-cultists or when he was oogling girls with the elite pimp Epstein.

Let’s wind the clock forward five years. Trump’s presidency is finally over. The Republican party has devolved into a personality cult of Trump. The Orange Hydra himself has gone insane. And the Democrats, although they didn’t manage to put Hillary on the throne despite their best efforts, managed to get another warhawk imperialist bully seem like a “moderate” choice to the US public. Bully-Biden seems like a relief next to Trump (anyone would have), and the DNC can play the saints when really they’re just going back to the dysfunctional status quo.

These five years later, the real winners are none other than the Democratic Party and their corporate sponsors. Maybe not in the way they wanted to, and maybe a victory over a simmering civil war tastes sour to them, still; they ended up on top. And that’s what politics is all about, right? Never mind that the “pied piper”-stratagem didn’t work quite as they had intended it to. Never mind the utter chaos that was sowed. All because there were too many degenerates in a degenerated country that thought that grabbing someone by the pussy was a revolt against political correctness rather than assault.

So how did he become president then, if it was just a show to fuck up the Republican presidential gambit? If he was really a ringer from the Democrats, or at least promoted by the Democrats as the email details, wouldn’t they have just been able to pull the plug when it got close to the finish line?

Well, not necessarily…

Just like Cracked Magazine envisioned, haven’t you ever pranked a friend, and the joke just ran away from you? I do not think anyone in Washington or Wall Street could imagine just how dumb they’ve made their population. I do not think anyone had expected the magnitude of the divide that Trump’s antics would cause. And as soon as shit gets real, it becomes very hard to just pull out. Imagine how angry all those racists and bigots and misogynists and white supremacists would have gotten if someone had broken the campaign off and told them “it’s just a prank, bruh!”.

/Sebastian Lindberg 23/3-2021

On the Subject of Beauty

We live in a pretty vapid society. I would like to have argued that with social media and self-styled “influencers” cropping up like black mold across the media spectrum, that we even live in a particularly vain time. But I don’t think I can. The adulation of physical beauty standards have been part-and-parcel with civilization for a long time. Social media and the internet has just increased the bandwidth.

Many people… I would even say most people, are enamoured with the idea of physical beauty. Even if some of us have given up on the notion of attaining whatever golden standard floats around in our collective consciousness at any given time or place, we tend to be jarred out of our jadedness whensoever it slams us in the face like what some department store cosmetic section might.

We are undone by beauty. We are gobstruck by beauty. And so many of us act as if beauty is the greatest attainable attribute that a human can hope for.

But to me, human attractiveness and beauty looks not like a blooming orchid but rather a hissing cobra. As opposed to the norm, whensoever I am confronted by beauty, I retreat in fear of being bitten. Because I have learned, from sordid lessons supplied to me by beauty paired with cruelty, that human beauty promises nothing but manipulation, control, and inevitably hurt.

You see, no one is immune to the siren song of human-to-human attraction. Not a hormone-laden teenager, nor an old fart with nothing to show for but a bank balance. And not your garden-variety misanthrope either, no matter how hard I’ve tried to insulate myself. And once that force of nature (or force of botox and silicone, as the case might be for some) has snared another, it seems to me to be very difficult to untangle oneself from that trap again.

For very few labour to attain our ridiculous beauty standards without some intentions to push all those efforts along. Maybe they wish be better treated. Maybe they want to be adored. Maybe they want the attention. Or maybe they’ve applied sales market arguments to their whole sense of self: If you’re not seen, you don’t exist. No matter the reason, however, it all boils down to a particular desire. They want power. Power and influence over other people.

You see, people function not dissimilarly to an electric current. People tend to take the path of least resistance. They tend to make use of whatever advantage they’ve got. If they’re strong, they tend to rest on martial or athletic laurels. If you’re smart, you tend to labour academically. And if you’re beautiful, and can influence people to bend like reeds in the wind at your whim, you tend to make use of that handy ability over any other. Most people play to their strengths. And if you don’t have to work physically or mentally to get ahead in life, but can bend other people to your will to put the work in for you, odds are you will. It’s not a matter of laziness or psychopathy. It’s human nature. We, as a general principle, tend to make use of the path of least resistance.

Personally, I’m allergic to being controlled. To being manipulated and twisted without my consent. So when such perceived beauty turns its eyes upon me, my knee-jerk reaction isn’t to bend like a reed, but to shy away as if a vengeful deity suddenly turned its attention to me. If beauty smiles at me, my heart cries wolf and tells me to dismiss the attention as manipulation. If beauty touches me, my fluttering heart does not belie excitement, but rather anger that someone would so brazenly take advantage of me.

Because why would beauty grace me with any other intention?

It’s a bitter state of mind. It is a bitter state of being. I recognize fully that my convictions and spontaneous reactions stem not necessarily from truth, but harsh lessons ingrained by emotional scar tissue. But try as I might, I cannot unlearn those lessons. Because no matter how hard I search, I cannot find sufficient argument against them.

So what? What relevance does my emotional trauma and convictions have to society at large?

Well, I think plenty of people will agree that our current zeitgeist is too enamoured with the notions of beauty. I think most would agree that people would be better off if skin-deep allure wasn’t peddled so tirelessly as one of the chief virtues of modern civilization. And though I wouldn’t want to argue that anyone should share my fear of falling under the influence of someone’s beauty, I think everyone would be well served of giving up the notion that earthly appeal is somehow indicative of virtue, or even a virtue onto itself. Because as it stands, nearly fifty percent of the population of a supposed world power supports a gilded spoon fashion designer whose daddy president sortof kinda wants to fuck as a peer to a doctor of quantum chemistry chancellor of another nation state.

Beauty isn’t goodness. Beauty is power. And any power needs to be respected more than it is revered.

/Sebastian Lindberg 2/3-2021

The Gorman Detachment

Last week, the US left fell in love with the young poet Amanda Gorman. Standing before a wary Washington D.C. with soldiers patrolling the city streets, the young black woman recited a poem dedicated to the dawn of the next political phase of US politics.

But across an ocean, her words chilled me to my core.

“We seek harm to none, and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true”, the poet spoke convincingly. “That even as we grieved, we grew. Even as we hurt, we hoped. Even as we tired, we tried. [That we’ll forever] be tied; victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.”

In wrapping up, Ms. Gorman sagely declared that; “One thing is certain; If we merge mercy with might, and might with right; then love becomes our legacy.”

Pretty words. Good delivery. A proud moment for a nation that has teetered on the brink of autocracy for the past years. And yet, these beautiful words, confidently delivered, seem to me to be utterly disconnected with the state of the united territories of North America and their context with the rest of the world.

Gorman speaks a hymn to harmony. She sings a song of never again sowing division. And that the world, if it were to say anything to describe the USA, should describe it thusly. Meanwhile, an aircraft carrier sails into the South China Sea to promote “freedom of the seas” in the face of Imperial Chinese expansion into the region. Meanwhile, the USA arm and foster division between Taiwan and mainland China. Meanwhile, the US feeds a civil war in Yemen that has killed more than 100’000 people. Meanwhile, the US supports an increasingly apartheid Israel which has surgically divided, oppressed, and murdered the Palestinian people. Meanwhile, the US hunt down the people (Assange, Snowden, Winner, Manning, et. al.) that have given voice to and provided proof of the USA’s war crimes for the rest of the world to see. Meanwhile, the USA sanction any prosecution that tries to hold the nation state accountable for its wartime sins.

While all these atrocities are committed in the name of US-branded “freedom and harmony”, Ms. Gorman speaks of a merger of Might and Right that shall write Love as the legacy of one of the most warlike nations in modern history.

And all of these tone-deaf promises come from a young activist. A person that should seem like a glimmer of hope in an decreasingly impressive US population. A lauded poet, feminist, and civil rights advocate already by the age of twenty two. This is, according to a liberal state of mind, of which I despite my many bitter grievances still am of, one of the good guys. And yet, even one so promising as her, validates the return of the warmongering status quo of the American World Police with a poem of Harmony and Mercy made Might as Right.

Fine. Her words are a hope; not a track record. And truth be told, I’m not much one for spoken word poetry. And maybe her words just aren’t for the rest of the world (even though she references our supposed reverences once or twice like some American Exceptionalistic wet dream). And we know that the Overton window has been tilted off its axis in US discourse for the past years, in large part due to you know who…

But if this is the young, progressive hope for the future of US politics and activism? Then I fear. I fear for the world. I fear that the US warmongering establishment were the true victors after four years of Trump. I fear that the insincere labours and promises to fix homelessness, joblessness, healthlessness within the American experiment’s borders will lure the population to turn a blind eye at how the nation acts outwards.

Because if Ms. Amanda Gorman’s words are representative of the ray of hope that the decent half of the US population craves, if her praise of any kind of Might as Right is to be listened to, if the next generation of US progressive activists is this out of touch with the US’ role vis-a-vis the rest of the world… then things will inevitably get a whole lot darker before there’s even a chance of them becoming brighter again.

And at 100 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock, I doubt we can tolerate much more darkness before there’ll be no one left to see the dawn.

/Sebastian Lindberg 26/1-2021

A Red Herring Temper Tantrum

I remember the awe I felt in September of 2001. I didn’t believe what had happened. I couldn’t. I was in high school, and for hours, I thought it was a joke in poor taste. It wasn’t really until the next day, on the 12^th, that the notion that the Empire was vulnerable really sank in.

As part of growing up, even far away in Scandinavia, it was a monumental moment. Much like, I suspect, the murder of JFK or perhaps V-day.

Last Wednesday wasn’t like that. The storming of the Capitol building in Washington DC felt inevitable. Granted, it was an important moment in the history of the US and for it’s position as the dominant power in the western world. But it wasn’t a surprise. It had been foretold. So foretold, in fact, that it seems that some parts of the MPDC were even in on it. For the past four years, five if you include the election process of 2016, the American democratic experiment has been steamrolling toward this conclusion.

I hate to admit it, but it is not without a fair amount of schadenfreude that we from the outside witness the United States of America tear itself to bits. It is not without reason that the internet brought out popcorn to watch the prototype of modern democracy burn its own credibility to the ground. Americans may not like hearing it. Nor will neoliberals or free market sharks. But it is not just China and Russia and North Korea that have been gloating this week.

So then, will this be the wake-up call that the US needs to get its shit together? One might hope, but don’t count on it. We’ve already heard talks of a new front on the ‘War on Terror’, turning inwards against the growing threat of domestic terrorism. The ‘War on Terror’ was a heinous reaction in its first incarnation, and there is absolutely no sign that this next facet of it will be anything but another step towards turning the USA into a police state. Or, I should say, even more of a police state.

Look, there’s no punch line here. Other than perhaps a lame “I told you so”. The governance of the World Police took a nasty hit. But even a half-naked Buffalo Boy bumbling his way through the Capitol building won’t likely be rock bottom in this decline.

The bottom line is this: The US may very well be in need of a revolution to get back on a decent track. Certainly not the kind of revolution that these MAGA-cretins thought they would deliver, but a revolution that shapes a country where childish outburst like this won’t just benefit an empowered elite to entrench their status quo of warmongering resource colonialism. But all they got was this red herring thinly veiled as a privileged and uneducated temper tantrum. Which is just plain sad.

/Sebastian Lindberg 12/1-2021

A Toxic Pardon

It looks like the Orange Hydra is getting antsy. The Cult of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are failing. He’ll soon be out on his ass, and his judicial immunity stripped from him. Odds are he’ll be hunted till the rest of his days once he leaves the oval office. And in some sort of last ditch effort, the Trump seems to try and curry favour with the world around him with the age old US tradition of last minute presidential pardons (a fucking foreign concept to anyone living in a proper Rechtstaat).

According to a self-styled “scoop” from Axios, the news media outlet of Jonathan Swan fame, the president is considering a long list of names for his New Year’s pardons. Possibly in a desperate attempt to clean his name up a bit after his disastrous presidential stint. No president before him has used the office’s pardoning powers to the extent he has, and if the Axios report is to be believed, the Orange Hydra plans to go out with a bang.

Now, to be absolutely fair, most of the people Trump have already pardoned have been cronies of his. From corrupt money launderers and scam artist politicians, perjurers and racist sheriffs. With some good-will names thrown in for good measure in a meagre effort to balance the self-serving scales.

According to the scoop, plenty of names (to quote the beast; “anyone he’s ever met”) are circling in Trump’s tattered mind. And as soon as the report came out, speculation and requests have bloomed aplenty across the punditry and political lines. Names like Snowden and Assange, to name a few of the prolific ones.

And wouldn’t that be nice?

So why are we talking about this? Well, as the very real possibility of Trump blundering into a benign decision of pardoning unjustly convicted and hunted people like Assange or Snowden, it brings up a very important distinction that the modern day political discourse is very bad at discerning. Namely that just as good people can make bad decisions, so too can bad people make good decisions. And in a discourse climate where arguments ad hominem and other logical fallacies are ripe, it is important to talk about this potential event.

Trump has not been a good president. This may be controversial domestically, but I think it’s fair to say at this point. He’s corrupt, barely functional on a cognitive level, a bully, a bigot, and insecure of the highest level. Even though whatever criticism you can levy against him is also true of most other politicians (e.g. that he’s a liar, corrupt, self-serving, etc.), he has single-handedly tumbled the Overton window off its axis.

That being said; none of that means that every single little (or big) thing the Orange Disaster does has to be a bad thing. For example, if he were to pardon the US’s greatest citizen Edward Snowden, that would be a good thing. And it would not reflect poorly on Snowden just because Trump tried to use the pardon of the whistleblower as a publicity stunt. Even broken watches are right twice a day, and even blind chickens find a kernel every now and again. Just because you hate Trump does not mean that you automatically have to hate every single thing he does, or every little thing he associates himself with.

Yes, I know this may be difficult for an American audience to hear, but it’s none the less true. If Trump pardons Snowden and/or Assange, I think that would be a good thing. Not a single US soldier’s death, regardless of US politician war-hawk propaganda to the contrary, has been provenly attributed to Snowden’s leaks of mass surveillance. And as for the case against Assange, it doesn’t matter if you believe that he’s a rapist or not (as the shadow prosecution of him has tried to allude), what he’s hunted by the US for is that he dared to do a journalist’s job in disfavour of the US war machine. No matter what you think of the persons, the actions that they’re hunted for were not villainous acts. And so, them being pardoned by presidential decree, even though that might not completely solve their plights, would still be good things.

If you think that Snowden or Assange shouldn’t be hunted by the US, and the Trump pardons them, it doesn’t mean you’re somehow compulsed to stop hating Trump. If you dislike Snowden or Assange as people, that doesn’t mean that you have to decry their courageous acts as traitorous. Never forget that just as an essentially good person can sometimes be at fault, so too can a despicable person sometimes get it right, even if it’s by accident.

/Sebastian Lindberg 15/12-2020