Anarchoblogs

so apparently rand is going to remark this evening that it is not clear who is running the government of the united states. it is a united states senator, hinting at the awful truth: intelligence coup. the brennan-feinstein conflagration is where this pinches immediately on the senate. got a little prediction for you, though. in the next few weeks, some sort of scandal will bloom around rand paul. if it does, here is the likeliest etiology: leaked by intelligence sources through several insulating layers to rachel maddow or chris hayes. they're going to want msnbc doing to him what it did to christie: day after day of relentless coverage. or honestly, fox is almost as hostile, and that's where you'd want to destroy him for the republican nomination. they will want him to understand who did it, so they will convey their own responsibility one way or another.

so here's an argument that one might hear at some point from putin, which i feel even angela merkel might receive with a certain sympathy: the greatest threat of totalitarianism, everywhere in the world, is presented by the government of the united states. the government of the united states is engaged in a new imperialism on a new terrain. these are capacities that should be interpreted by everyone, starting with the citizens of the united states, as presenting an extreme threat: i want you to really think about the access to power that this world-wide surveillance/control provides. any country in the world can and should represent this thing as an invasion of sovereignty. the blackmail possibilities alone - on ceo's, political leaders (including the domestic congress and supreme court), military people - are crushing. they have all the passwords, hence access to infrastructure systems, missile systems, everyone's accounts, etc. in this light, that putin has sheltered snowden makes him plausibly a brave fighter for freedom in the face of an emerging world totalitarian state. this is, putting mildly, ironic.

venezuela, ukraine: there they have pride. there they want freedom. here, we face one of the most effective exercises of totalitarian power ever created: a universal system of continual surveillance. why aren't we out in the streets, filling molotov cocktails and erecting barriers against storm troopers? because americans of our time hate and fear liberty, and love and respond sexually to their own subordination. all we want is to be raped by repulsive idiots such as james ("fucking") clapper. 

russia is capable of producing pussy riots. we are capable only of producing squads of hillary clintons: currently focus-grouping her positions and indeed her entire personality. 

i just want to say this up top: no doubt the tea party consisted of ignorant rednecks operating out of racial resentment. their opinions were manipulated by fox and rush, rather than by the harvard j.d.s manipulating the opinions of decent people from portland. however, they were so, so right about obama, and about the nature of the american government now, and about the fact that the american political tradition of freedom, as enshrined in the constitution, is over, betrayed. so absorb that. pardon my 'you' but i can't help it: they were right and you were wrong. they were true and you were false. they were clear and you were muddy. they were zoysia and you were astroturf. they were oppressed and you were oppressors. they said something and you said nothing. birtherism turned out to be a nice false symbol of the truth, which is perhaps why it has a bizarre power and immunity to evidence. right the man was born in america. but he is not an american as i would understand what that means.

as you may know, i reject the left/right spectrum as a way to describe anything, though sometimes i slip and use the locutions because everyone else is working with it. so the nyt or guardian, say, while in every sentence using 'crazy', also in every sentence go 'far right.' is cruz to the right of john mccain? in virtue of what? what does that mean? think of the set of positions you yourself associate with 'the american right': cheney's poisitions, say, and also rand paul's. really we need a taxonomy and not this bullshit anymore.

also i want to say this to the american left: you are outraged that someone would try to stop obamacare or whatever it may be; you want government running smoothly (and you regard protest movements as insane). now, i want you to understand what you are supporting when you support the democratic party, obama, and so on: among other things wall street in a huge way, and a total surveillance state. you are supporting the most intensely bourgeois vision of america ever articulated: government by lawyers, professors, bankers, google, and standardized-testing experts. are you comfortable with that? are you aware of that in yourself? i have this funny feeling that by your own ideals you are endorsing something terribly wrong. and you and many others are being pushed into taking a set of randomly grouped or flatly incoherent positions, or positions poised exquisitely opposite your professed principles, because you are flummoxed by this left-right bullshit.

an obvious entailment of the nsa situation is that, in fact, we have no idea who is running our government and hence, more or less, our lives. indeed, we have no idea what our actual form of government is or who holds the real power, like egyptians who were under the delusion that they'd elected their president. this should please liberals, for example, who regard the constitution as a ridiculous anachronism that keeps us from helping everyone through universal coercion. well, the constitution and the form of government it prescribes has been a joke for a long time, as anyone can now see thanks to snowden; certainly it has no resemblance whatever to the Thing currently running our lives: they leave some little institutions and phrases in place as a kind of show or historical re-enactment: that capitol, white house, supreme court in dc: it might as well be colonial williamsburg.

anyone who in fact controls a system of universal surveillance - i mean who has day-by-day management of the thing - can control anyone they please and make them do what they like. if keith anderson is in the mood, he's riding obama as in a performance of dressage. he controls who is in or out in the joint chiefs, the state department, justice, congress. he's in control of what limitations other branches of government impose on him. whoever or whatever the fisa rubber-stamp system is, it will end up doing precisely what he tells it to do. i'd recommend violent insurrection if it didn't seem entirely hopeless. so what i'd say is: just go limp, cultivate radical passivity: give up. this america thing was never going to work out anyway. people don't want to be free. and even if they do, they definitely don't want anyone else to be.