,

Hallo.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

One point I will always adamantly insist on is that it's entirely possible to live a joyful and exuberant life in the midst of this abusive dystopia.

There's a pervasive, unexamined notion throughout revolutionary politics that there's some kind of nobility in being miserable. If it isn't seen as noble, it's at least seen as rational, because everything is so unjust and unhealthy.

There's a widespread assumption that your level of political awareness should have an inverse correlation to your level of personal happiness, because of all the tyranny, injustice, poverty, genocide and ecocide. That it would be selfish to be happy in a world so deeply troubled.

But that's rubbish. Nobody is helped by your misery. By depriving yourself of joy, you are only depriving the world of that much joy. Being more joyful makes you more energized, more helpful, and more useful to the cause, and it brings joy to everyone around you.

Being joyful is a skill, and like any other skill it takes practice. But it's something we all have access to if we want it.

Being joyful doesn't entail hiding from the misery of the world or compartmentalizing away from the reality of what's happening; quite the opposite, in fact. It entails opening yourself all the way up to what's happening in each moment and feeling it all with the heart of a poet. It means becoming MORE sensitive, not less, because a stripped-open sensitivity is where ubiquitous beauty is found.

We always have access to joy because we always have access to beauty. Beauty is everywhere. Even in dystopia. Even in this slow-motion armageddon we now find ourselves in. Even in the exhaust fumes and the flashing screens. Even in the polluted oceans and falling bombs. Everywhere you look, everywhere you feel, everywhere you listen, an overpowering beauty shines forth.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that's false. Beauty is in everything. The FAILURE to see beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is just another word for the experience of having truly seen something. If the eye is failing to see the beauty in a given moment, the fault lies with the perceiver, not with the perceived.

You know that feeling when you're showing someone your favorite movie for the first time, and it's at your favorite part, and you look over at them to see their response, and they're missing the whole thing because they're looking at their phone?

Most people live their whole lives that way. Missing all the best parts while fixating on empty nonsense. Keeping their attention wrapped up in their mental monologues of judgement and worry. In their endless search to distract themselves from the present moment. In their doomscrolling and other addictive behaviors.

They're missing moment after moment of radiant, electrifying beauty, and they're trading it all for so very, very little. They're going to look back on their lives from their deathbeds and realize that they weren't really there for it. That they missed all the best parts while chasing their goals, running away from their aversions, and trying to distract themselves from the tedium of it all.

The best parts that get missed are the parts our minds tend to dismiss as boring and unworthy of our attention. The daily commute. The wait in the elevator. The kitchen cleanup. The hanging of laundry. The sights outside the window. The sounds inside the room. The feeling of the floor under the feet and the air in the lungs. Every single moment of this is packed full of staggering beauty.

I insist that this is true. Insist on it. If we were fighting holy wars over this principle, I would happily die on the front lines defending it. There are very few things in life that I hold a rock-solid uncompromising view on, but the fact that there is beauty in everything is one of them. Anyone who disagrees is simply wrong, and I will tell them so with great vehemence in my voice.

Don't waste your precious time here missing the beauty of each moment. This is more important now than ever, because we don't know how long humanity's adventure on this miraculous blue world will last. Tomorrow has never been guaranteed to any of us, but these days it's not even guaranteed to our species.

We are all going to die. Maybe we will die one by one, or maybe we will all die together in one frightening moment. In either case, we owe it to ourselves and to our world to try our very best to deeply appreciate every moment of every day of the time that we have left.

Just keep bringing your attention back to what's here and now, and keep looking for the beauty in it. I swear to you it's there. It's there in the feelings in the body. It's there in the sights, sounds and smells of everyday living, no matter what else is happening in your life or in our world. Keep looking for it, and you'll get better and better at seeing it.

That's how life becomes more joyful. Not by chasing the highs or running from the lows, but from learning to relish the beauty that's inherent in terrestrial sensory experience every single moment of your life, no matter what else happens to be occurring.

Learn to do this, and you can live the rest of your life knowing that even if it all comes crashing down one day, at least you'll know you tried your very best to make sure you didn't miss the miraculousness of your time here.

[zellie @zellieimani]

If Hitler and the Nazis drew inspiration from America’s state sanctioned violence against non-Whites, ICE aren’t really acting like Nazis. They’re acting American.

[orph @orphcorp]

future generations will think of us as primitive for how we used to log onto the internet & just expose our minds to hyperpolluted & adversarial information environments without any cognitive or psychological guardrails

[KNEECAP @KNEECAPCEOL]

Fuck Orbán
Fuck Orbán
Fuck Orbán

Chants from one of our shows in Poland last year 🔥

[Siddharth @DearthOfSid]

No country in the world needs a regime change as much as the United States does.

[Peter TOTO💜 @petermarietoto]

john waters at the no kings rally in provincetown

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The only worthwhile “western culture” in modern times is culture which rejects and opposes the dystopian nature of western civilization and the abuses of the western empire.

Western civilization is what’s bombing Iran. It’s what’s strangling Cuba. It’s what’s torching Lebanon. It’s what’s exterminating Palestine. It’s what stole Venezuela. It’s what’s plundering the labor and resources of the global south. It’s what’s keeping the systems in place which are killing our ecosystem and driving us closer to nuclear armageddon.

There is no sane and truthful position to have toward all this but vehement rejection.

Westerners — particularly white westerners in nations with colonialist histories like the United States and Australia — often struggle to find their cultural moorings. It can be difficult to find an authentic position from which to express art and take your stand as a personality when you feel culturally rootless and historically ungrounded. It causes a kind of dissonance with our lives that can haunt us until we die.

The best way to resolve this dissonance is to take your stand in opposition to the perverse society into which you were born. Express from the standpoint of resistance to this horrifying nightmare civilization that is fueled by human blood.

We live in a sick and intensely mind-controlled dystopia where everything is fake and stupid. Mainstream culture is a nonstop celebration of the vapid and inane. The movies glorify cops and soldiers. The music exalts capitalism, consumerism, egotism and frivolity. The products are made by wage slaves and the fuel is obtained by war. The food is designed to reap profits rather than to nourish. The news media is designed to propagandize rather than to inform.

It’s a disgusting civilization, to be honest. The more you learn about it, the more repulsive it becomes.

How could anyone relate to the human experience from inside this hellscape in a truth-based way, except by opposition? The only way to participate in “western culture” is to help create a new kind of culture which stands squarely in opposition to it.

As Terence McKenna once said, “We have to create culture. Don’t watch TV. Don’t read magazines. Don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow… Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

The only way to create culture with sincerity in this dystopia is by forcefully rejecting its fraudulence and abusiveness, and embracing revolution and resistance. To do anything else is to give tacit approval to the horrific nature of this civilization, and it will always ring a bit hollow and dissonant, because it is ignoring the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is the unacceptable depravity and deceit that’s going on all around us.

So if you want to make art, make revolutionary art. If you want to express yourself, express your defiance of the western empire. Oppose the wars. Oppose the militarism. Oppose the imperialism, the ecocide, the injustice, the tyranny.

That’s the only way to be authentic in an inauthentic society.

[ian maxton @attheimax]

sally rooney and javier bardem are proof the art/politics thing is pretty easy actually: make whatever work you think is interesting and when given the opportunity be principled and clear in the statements you make from the platform earned through that work

[Michail aka Opium Hum / Hyper Real Radio @opiumhum]

John Gerrard's "Western Flag" is probably the most relevant work of art right now.

[kev joon @never_oppressed]

Gut wrenching photo of Red Crescent rescue workers in Tehran recovering toys belonging to the children killed in US/Israel strikes.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

UNICEF’s @1james_elder: “168 girls killed in a school in Iran…When the killing of children doesn’t dominate the news politics, something fundamental has shifted…if a child can be killed and it doesn’t feel like a loss for all of us, then I think we’ve lost more than we realize”

[, @13ernhard]

@pghgraffiti

[, @13ernhard]

@pghgraffiti

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Plumber, socialist, anti-racist, champion of working class communities… watch Hannah Spencer’s victory speech here. “We are sick of our hard work making other people rich”. Massive blow to Starmer’s genocidal “Labour” party.

[Jonathan Fine @jonathanbfine]

There’s an essay by the German author Heinrich von Kleist that I think about whenever someone rhapsodizes about artificial intelligence. The title of the essay is “On the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking” (Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden).

[Stephen Barlow @SteB777]

Let me try a direct upload of the video to X, to see if it is rendered any better. The Starling murmuration on Sinker's Fields, Whixall, this evening.

[Le Cinéma Club @lecinemaclub]

“I needed to make something that was not in the past, but about what is still happening.” KAOUTHER BEN HANIA

The Tunisian director behind the Oscar-nominated THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB speaks to us about making a film that deals with the present. https://t.co/aKmzYyUrpq

[Boston Smalls @smalls2672]

His name is Seamus Culleton. He's been here for 20 years and is married to a U.S. citizen. He is speaking out about his experience in ICE detention for the last 5 months. Please listen and share.