frederick schmidt

I am just enjoying the song and dance of life

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

Nice little butterfly

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

@hiiisuki Hiiii

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

@ichichiha Happy birthday

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

Guy ugly sweater day

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

@mav_gx Hi

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

Hi there

[Matthew Cooke @thematthewcooke]

Is MAGA fascist? You decide. New video. This is the history.

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

@orihimemika0408 Very nice

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

One of the reasons socialists don't focus on conspiracy analysis and the deep state as much as the right is because it's not our only argument. It's not that conspiracies and parapolitical power structures don't exist, they absolutely do, but because we're not ideologically compelled to make excuses for the unavoidable abuses of capitalism we don't need to act like any specific cabal of machiavellian elites is the source and summit of all our problems.

The rightist suffers from the delusion that capitalism would be working perfectly fine if a few nefarious individuals weren't scheming behind the scenes ruining the capitalism for everyone. The leftist recognizes that corruption, corporatism, inequality and domination are the inevitable products of a profit-driven system under which the capitalist class are able to exploit the working class who have nothing to sell but their labor. We therefore often find it less important to focus on the specifics of the way those abuses are playing out, because we understand that even if you eliminated all the current oligarchs and their secret plans and the strings they pull to manipulate the official government, if you didn't also replace our entire system with something radically different they'd be replaced by new oligarchic manipulators in short order.

For those who understand the inherently exploitative, ecocidal, unjust and violent nature of capitalism, the strongest arguments against status quo power structures are not invisible conspiracies happening in secret, but the monstrous abuses that are happening right out in the open. The genocide in Gaza. Our dying biosphere. The fact that people struggle to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table while others fly private jets to private islands paid for by the exploitation of thousands of impoverished workers. The fact that the most powerful country on earth doesn't have a real healthcare system. The fact that an empire-like alliance of western governments and their proxies keeps expanding its warmongering, militarism and nuclear brinkmanship around the world with the goal of complete planetary domination.

It is an indisputable fact that rich and powerful individuals conspire with each other to the detriment of ordinary people, and at times it can be useful to highlight who those individuals are and the things that they are doing. But the leftist sees people opening their eyes to these abuses as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. When the rightist spotlights those abuses it's to say "Look what these individuals are doing! If we just removed these individuals from power everything would be working fine!" When the leftist does so it's to say "See these are the kinds of people who rise to the top under a system where human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit and profit is most readily obtained through exploitation, injustice and ecocide. These kinds of people will always rule over us until we have replaced that system with a different one."

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

Finally went to the wall

[stephen west @iamstephenwest]

At 89 years old, Bertrand Russell was arrested for protesting against nuclear weapons. He was charged with breach of the peace and sentenced to a week in Brixton Prison. The court offered to let him go if he promised to be on his best behavior. Russell refused, saying, “No, I won’t.” So he served the time.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Within the storytelling of western politics and punditry there exists a fictional type of mental illness which only affects people the US empire doesn’t like.

If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, its crazy lunatic government will flip out and nuke us all.

Watch out for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, those guys are a bunch of maniacal antisemites who want to attack Israelis just because they’re Jewish.

Oh no, Putin is invading Ukraine completely unprovoked because he’s a madman who hates freedom and won’t stop until he’s conquered all of Europe.

China is building up its military because the megalomaniacal Xi Jinping wants to take over the world; all those US military bases surrounding China are just a defensive measure to contain Beijing’s insanity.

Assad just went nuts one day and started slaughtering his own people out of nowhere.

Gaddafi is a sexual sadist who’s giving Viagra to his troops to help them commit mass rapes in Libya.

Saddam Hussein is so crazy and evil he’s trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction to give Americans another 9/11.

The North Koreans used to be far too insane to be allowed to have nuclear weapons because they’d nuke San Francisco immediately, but after they obtained nuclear weapons they were miraculously cured of this rare psychological disorder.

The stories of the western empire ask us to believe that everyone who finds themselves in the imperial crosshairs is an irrational actor whose loony behavior can only be attributed to some uncontrollable defect within their own minds, or who will soon snap and do something nutty if they are not contained by force.

One antagonist who never appears in these fairy tales of the western empire is the western empire itself. In the storytelling of the western empire, there is no globe-spanning power structure which is constantly inflicting violence and destruction upon populations around the world while seeking to crush any population who disobeys its dictates. It’s just a bunch of irrational psychos, seeking nuclear weapons and becoming aggressively militaristic for no other reason than because they are crazy, while the totally normal alliance led by a totally normal country in North America innocently responds to their crazy behavior.

That’s the story. In real life, the most aggressive and unreasonable actor on the world stage by far is the empire-like power structure that is loosely centralized around Washington DC. Nobody else is constantly waging wars of aggression around the world. Nobody else is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases for the purpose of global domination. Nobody else has spent the 21st century killing millions of people and deliberately targeting civilians with starvation sanctions in countries on the other side of the planet. Only the US-centralized empire has been doing these things.

But we are asked to believe that this vicious imperial power structure is the only rational actor on earth, and that those who resist its aggressions are the crazy ones.

And you are told that if you can’t see this, then you’re crazy too. You’re a crackpot. A conspiracy theorist. A paranoid nutball whose voice should be marginalized and whose ideas should be dismissed with a scoff.

You are crazy if you don’t believe what the world’s craziest power structure says about its enemies being crazy.

It is gaslighting on a global scale. It is madness, and that is why this civilization has gone mad.

Let’s hope someone finds a way to protect the world from the insanity of the western empire.

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

@sunshinesina143 Bubbly

[Adam Conover @adamconover]

This wave of right-wing politics is feeling really familiar…

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

@sunshinesina143 Happy birthday

[Adam Conover @adamconover]

Ever since Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement, the global economy has been on a roller coaster ride of stupid.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The hypocrisy of right wingers cheerleading the Trump administration's assaults on free speech makes it clear that they have no idea why free speech came to be valued in our society. They think it's because it feels nice to be able to say whatever you want, and it upsets their feelings when people tell them they shouldn't say "retard" or make unkind remarks about trans people. They seriously think it's all about them and their feelings. They've never put any more thought or research into it than that.

From this point of view it makes perfect sense for them to say "It's fine to deport that person for criticizing Israel, because they're not a citizen. They don't have free speech rights." They think free speech is just a nice perk that lets you enjoy the nice feelings of being able to say whatever you want; the people having their green cards and student visas revoked for inconvenient speech don't have citizenship, so they don't get to feel the nice feelings.

But it has nothing to do with anyone's feelings. The first and foremost reason free speech is important is because it puts a check on the abuses of the powerful. The First Amendment of the US Constitution isn't there to ensure US citizens get to feel nice feelings, it's there to restrict the government's right to restrict the free flow of information, thereby enabling the citizenry to effectively organize any necessary opposition to the status quo. At least in theory.

Free speech, if sufficiently realized, could solve all our problems. If information was really flowing freely without being constantly manipulated and obstructed by the rich and powerful, our rulers would no longer be able to manufacture consent for our abusive status quo, because everyone would be aware of how bad things are and how much better they could be.

It is only because the rich and powerful are able to do things like buy up media companies, rig algorithms, fund think tanks, decide what films get made, decide who gets famous and who remains marginalized, silence and deport political dissidents, and restrict access to information by deeming it "classified" that our abusive political norms are able to be maintained. If information was truly democratized and freely flowing, nobody would tolerate being impoverished, sickened and oppressed for the benefit of a few oligarchs and empire managers.

The US government isn't deporting critics of Israel because it wants them to feel bad feelings, it's deporting them because it doesn't want Americans to hear legitimate criticisms of US foreign policy. They aren't merely violating the rights of the speaker by restricting the flow of this information, they're violating the rights of anyone else who would hear it. They are doing this to help ensure public consent for a genocidal status quo that a populace with an informed mind and an informed conscience would never consent to.

[frederick schmidt @fredleeschmidt]

Feeling strong

[Existential Comics (find me on bluesky) @existentialcoms]

"Efficiency" for billionaires just means "less money for the poor". They making their businesses more "efficient" by cutting salaries.

They will make social security more "efficient" by paying out less. They will make medicare more "efficient" by covering less. It never ends.