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“You don’t miss college, you miss communism”

soundscape of young green martian playing with pvc pipes

s h a p e c a t s

Rudolf Bauer Space, 1932

It’s a little bit silly, but I have this little Hippocratic oath for data designers in the book. There are two basic questions I encourage them to ask themselves. One is, does it increase self-determination of poor people? And two, if it was aimed at anyone but poor and working people, would you be able to do it? And if you answer “no” to either of those, don’t do it. You’re on the wrong side of history.

The High-Tech Poorhouse

via Macbaconai

Two decades of conspiracy theorizing about the extent to which 9/11 was an "inside job" have revealed no all-encompassing sinister secrets or grand plots except the least exciting smoking gun of all: that terrorism and mass death are a feature, not a bug. The creation, financing, support, control, and loss of control of terrorist groups has been one of the key weapons in the arsenal of american imperialism since the 1970s. The "inside job" is that the cycle of murder is intentional even if the individual events may not be.

The fact that the US intelligence apparatus runs a constant treadmill of funding governments and organizations to topple their enemies that then in turn need to be fought by more US-funded client states and terror groups is not a failure of foreign policy, or a shadowy conspiracy by some deep state, it's simply how foreign policy works in modern empire. It works for them! Look to Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Panama, the post-Soviet states. Every butchering leader or violent radical cadre that turns from a help to a hindrance to the USA becomes yet another opportunity for the exercise of force and the continued operation of the military-industrial-intelligence complex.

You don't need thermite or holographic planes or insurance fraud or budgetary coverups to explain the simple fact that if the USA is willing to accept millions of dead in the imperial periphery as the basic digestive process in the ourobouros that is imperial power-dealing, then a couple thousand dead in the imperial core is at worst a regrettable hiccup, and at best an unexpected twist, a chance to take another bite, a new opportunity to launch yet more destructive adventures abroad, which will in turn cause their own crises and opportunities, on and on circularly forever until the whole thing collapses or is brought down by force.