Category Archives: Morality

war on everything, by el gato malo

The goal is endless, profitable war, not victory, From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

including and especially you

The case against cats: Why Australia has declared war on feral felines | CNN

we live in the age of the war machine.

the purpose of the war machine is not to produce victory.

the purpose of the war machine is to produce war.

war unending.

war on everything.

permission to think the unthinkable and excuse to do that which is inexcusable.

it is the triumph of the terrible and the tyrannical.

the war on covid, poverty, injustice, drugs, terrorism:

it’s all the same.

war is the worst of humanity. it is the end of cooperation, the end of rationality, the abrogation of ethics.

war is permission to “do what it takes to win”

this cannot be the way.

war is the end of good choices and the embrace of conflict, the end of citizenship and the pursuit of subjugation.

it is the end of humanity and the beginning of amoral destruction of the enemy.

perfect for politicians.

anathema to the free breath of we the people.

this is jingo as justification.

and this war machine will roll right over you and if it does its job well you will never even guess at the real reasons why.

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The Kherson question, by Nora Hoppe

Perhaps the overriding factor is war is the spirit and morality of those who are fighting it. From Nora Hoppe at thesaker.is:

Untitled:Users:Nora:Desktop:Kherson.jpg

 

Preface:
I have no idea about war… I have never experienced one. I understand nothing of military campaigns, strategies, manoeuvres, weapons, etc. I’ve only seen several war films, read novels featuring war and followed the news on various wars…

* * *

I have heard that each war is different, and that comparisons are only useful for “certain aspects”.

I follow the news regularly on Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine. And I have recently read and heard many varying and divisionary views on the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson, a city that is now lawfully part of Russia.

Dispensing with the views of the pro-NATO side, which are of no interest, I am observing the division of thought amongst analysts, journalists and commenters in forums siding with the Russians: There are those who are outraged and see the withdrawal from Kherson as “a disgrace”, “a sign of weakness”, “an embarrassment”, “a poor strategy”, “unattractive optics”, etc. Others see it as the outcome of a difficult but wise decision – that was primarily made to save the lives of Russian soldiers, who would have been cut off by a massive flood if NATO were to blow up the Kakhovka Dam. (There may well be additional tactical reasons for the withdrawal, but they are not (yet) known to the public.)

When people speak of the “optics not looking good“… a film set immediately comes to my mind (I have worked in the film world for many years). And that immediately tells me how some people view this operation – as spectators: it has to have a good catchy script, suspense, uninterrupted action and – heaven forbid – no lulls! It has to ultimately supply a dopamine release. It has to have a “Dirty Harry Catharsis”.

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Drowning in Western Hypocrisy: The Nord Stream Saga, by Kayla Carman

The money sentence: “The majority of Western society doesn’t realise it’s in an abusive relationship with its own government.” From Kayla Carman at strategic-culture.org:

Would Uncle Sam just sit back and chill if Russia backed a coup in Canada to help implant a pro-Russian president that outlawed the English language and was unable to control government troops murdering pro-U.S., Canadian citizens near the border?

As Hannah Ardent once remarked, “What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” Currently, nothing is more rotten to the core than the institutions of the West.

The USA’s latest claim, following events in late September, would have us all believe that Russia blew up its own gas pipeline to Europe, despite having sole control over the on/off valve, which makes as much logical sense as launching a range of chocolate teapots. The Western media have lapped this up without critique, unsurprisingly, failing to question why Russia would engage in such an act of self-sabotage, instead focusing on how, given it occurred in Danish waters, this provocation justifies the potential for a NATO-led World War III. No consideration is given to the fact that Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs, and Assad’s chemical weapons attacks were all proven, under scrutiny, to be false flags to garner public support for more aggressive U.S. foreign policy.

In The Fate of Empires Glubb asserts that, “In spite of the endless variety and the infinite complications of human life, a general pattern does seem to emerge… the life-expectation of a great nation, it appears, commences with a violent, and usually unforeseen, outburst of energy and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism, and frivolity.” The decadence and decay are palpable. Gleefully, the Western media propagandises the public to support the desperate imperialists as they fight to the death to maintain hegemony. A fight which, for anyone that understands the deterministic and cyclical nature of history and empires, knows, they cannot win. But before we consider these absurd claims of Russian sabotage within the context of hypocrisy, let’s turn our attention to events that occurred earlier in September.

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Conservative Candidates Take Note – DeSantis Dominated In Florida For These Reasons, by Tyler Durden

Maybe the secret to winning election is to stand by principles a majority of the electorate supports. Who knew? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Many Republicans are experiencing a bittersweet election week with some impressive wins, but not the “red wave” that they were hoping for.  With a Congressional majority looking like a certainty and the Senate up in the air, it’s an overall victory for conservatives but not a slam dunk defense against leftists and Joe Biden.  What we do know is that while there was no red wave, there was certainly no blue wave either.

This tells us a few things:  For one, Americans are more entrenched in their political views than ever and they aren’t likely to budge.  When governors like Gretchen Whitmer or Kathy Hochul can win reelection after attempting to impose hardcore authoritarian measures on their constituency during the covid scare, it becomes clear that Democrat voters are too mentally challenged to recognize they are harming themselves.  Maybe those people deserve what they get.

By extension, conservative voters are far more nuanced.  They aren’t interested in voting for a candidate just because they identify as GOP, they want that candidate to share their values and concerns and take action.  If a candidate doesn’t show courage and stand immovable against establishment agendas, conservatives may just stay home rather than vote for them.

For example, in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman managed to defeat Dr. Mehmet Oz despite Fetterman’s brain being scrambled by a stroke during the campaign.  Democrats will vote for ANYONE that will keep their state blue, they even reelected a dead Democrat House candidate in PA (Tony DeLuca).  Meanwhile, Oz avidly promoted the covid mRNA vaccines after pretending to be skeptical of them, and tried to sell his followers on them despite there being many questions of safety and efficacy.  A lot of conservatives fought hard and took considerable risks in defying the mandates, and some felt betrayed by Oz’s apparent truce with Big Pharma.  This may have contributed to his election loss.

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Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain, by James Howard Kunstler

We have yet to find in the alternative media one scribe for whom Emily Oster’s plea for amnesty and forgiveness went over well. Certainly not James Howard Kunstler, at kunstler.com:

By now, everybody and his uncle has seen Emily Oster’s plea for “pandemic amnesty” in The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about… really… everything. Emily’s wazoo is so stuffed with gold-plated credentials (BA, PhD, Harvard; economics prof at Brown U) it’s a wonder that she could sit down long enough to peck out her lame argument that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

Emily wasn’t “in the dark.” She had access to the same information as the Americans who recognized that everything the public health authorities, the medical establishment, and many elected officials shoveled out about Covid and its putative remedies and preventatives was untrue, with a patina of bad faith and malice — especially when it was used to persecute their political adversaries.

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Anarchy in America: We’re Being Gunned Down Like Dogs in the Street, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Speaking of dogs, some of the things police do to dogs is horrid. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming

Things are falling apart.

How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.

We are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time.

Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the American people wake up a little more to the grim realization that they have become captives in a prison of their own making.

No longer a free people, we are now pushed and prodded and watched over by twitchy, hyper-sensitive, easily-spooked armed guards who care little for the rights, humanity or well-being of those in their care.

The death toll is mounting. The carnage is heartbreaking. The public’s faith in the government to do its job—which is to protect our freedoms—is deteriorating.

With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later, and all the government does is shrug and promise to do better.

Things are not getting better.

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Destroying Western Values To Defend Western Values, by Caitlin Johnstone

America has been destroying morality to save it for a long time. From Caitlin Johnstone.com:

So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.

While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

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We Need Covid Accountability, Not Amnesty, by Quoth the Raven

We need congressional hearings, trials, and prison sentences. From Quoth the Raven at quoththeraven.substack.com:

The same Democrats who pushed for imprisonment, fines and even removal of custody of children simply for being unvaccinated now want to make a peace offering.

At the beginning of 2022, I made the prediction that we would see the end of vaccine mandates and that the general populace’s deteriorating tolerance for nonsense would force a pivot in how the absolutely hysterical media covered Covid.

Fast forward eleven months and the same crazed media lot, most recently characterized by The Atlantic, is now pleading for mercy from those it shunned and ridiculed during the pandemic, under the guise of asking for “amnesty”.

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID,” Emily Oster wrote this week.


Oster’s plead for the decency that her ilk failed to offer up to most Americans during the throws of the pandemic comes at a point where the Covid narrative has been all but lost by the Democrats and the mainstream media.

There have been several recent large wins for the unvaccinated who had the constitution and backbone to stand up for themselves throughout a year of being constantly berated and ferociously scorned as second class citizens.

A majority of the media and Democrats had demanded that these people be removed from society and generally subject to scorn and ridicule. Now, in a moment that many of us knew would eventually be coming, apologies are being made around the world for how the unvaccinated were treated.

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The Shame of the Covidians, by Thomas Harrington

At what point does being consistently and disastrously wrong about so many important issues weigh on an individual’s conscience? From Thomas Harrington at brownstone.org:

 

This, of course, stays between us” he said to his young coworker as they went their separate ways in the hotel parking lot. She, who was already feeling a bit queasy about what had transpired—it had not gone as she had hoped—quickly nodded her head as she clicked the fob to open the door of her car. 

Yes, she would keep it quiet. It was definitely better that way for him, but just as much, she thought, for herself as she had done what she had said she would never do: sleep with a more senior co-worker. 

She briefly rehearsed conjuring a new story about how it had come to pass, one that suggested he had forced it all upon her. But she knew it wasn’t true. She had always been an independent woman, nobody’s fool. And pretty honest with herself as well. In remembering and acknowledging her own agency in the process leading to the encounter she said to herself, “Yes, it’s definitely best that every hint of what occurred never go beyond this place and this moment.” 

And thus was born a Pact of Silence, one of millions established each day across the world.

Shame is an incredibly powerful emotion, one that when imposed by parents or certain authority figures in very, very limited doses in the process of a child’s trajectory toward adulthood—which is to say, the process through which he or she begins to generate an autonomous sense of morality—can serve a certain educational purpose. 

And once its lessons have been internalized in the adult, it can serve as a brake upon the well-known human tendency to get carried away and do stupid and regrettable things. 

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Putin: “The situation is, to a certain extent, revolutionary”, by Pepe Escobar

Putin sees the epochal change coming to the world order. Too bad Washington doesn’t have a clue. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

In an all-encompassing address to the plenary session of the 19th annual meeting of the Valdai Club, President Putin delivered no less than a devastating, multi-layered critique of unipolarity.

From Shakespeare to the assassination of Gen Soleimani; from musings on spirituality to the structure of the UN; from Eurasia as the cradle of human civilization to the interconnection of BRI, SCO and the INSTC; from nuclear dangers to that peripheral peninsula of Eurasia “blinded by the idea that Europeans are better than others”, the address painted a Brueghel-esque canvas of the “historical milestone” facing us, in the middle of “the most dangerous decade since the end of WWII.”

Putin even ventured that, in the words of the classics, “the situation is, to a certain extent, revolutionary” as “the upper classes cannot, and the lower classes do not want to live like this anymore”. So everything is in play, as “the future of the new world order is being shaped before our eyes.”

Way beyond a catchy slogan about the game the West is playing, “bloody, dangerous and dirty”, the address and Putin’s interventions at the subsequent Q&A should be analyzed as a coherent vision of past, present and future. Here we offer just a few of the highlights:

“The world is witnessing the degradation of world institutions, the erosion of the principle of collective security, the substitution of international law for ‘rules’”.

“Even at the height of the Cold War, nobody denied the existence of the culture and art of the Other. In the West, any alternative point of view is declared subversive.”

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