Why I Refuse to Vote Anymore

 America is an imperial slaughterhouse and every four years that bloody kill room floor hosts a jingle-brained three-ring-circus that the men with hammers call a presidential election season. A ghastly, multibillion dollar display of buggery, cuckery, pomp and circumstance in which spineless sociopaths without a gag reflex are pitted against each other in a shit eating contest while we the people are all shamed into picking sides by pitiless wonks who won't stop shouting that this glorified reality television abortion is the most important democratic happening in recorded history and that we won't have the right to complain about getting raped for the next four years unless we choose our rapist.

Fuck you, I ain't voting. After Satan knows how many cycles of this shit, I'm through. I won't do it anymore and you can all go ahead and burn me at the stake so long as you use ballot boxes for kindling and put the latest debate on mute while my eyeballs melt. Anything is better than spending ten months straight pretending that choosing my least least-favorite millionaire to be the Pentagon's mouthpiece for the next four years is a fucking democracy because it's not. 

This doesn't fucking matter, and we all know it. Even if a few good radicals managed to find a way to shut down the corporate tractor beam of the two-party system long enough to get a half-decent son of a bitch into the White House he would still just be little more than the nicest guy at the concentration camp. America is a plutocratic dictatorship, and these elections are little more than pet fashion shows for their poodles.

I used to vote. I used to be pretty goddamn passionate about it too and not because I bought into that holier-than-thou lesser-of-two-evils bullshit either. I was a diehard protest voter who realized that this thing was a show but tried to hijack it anyway in hopes of using the platform it provided to further a populist movement against empire. 

My strategy was pretty simple, I would pick whichever candidate was the most aggressively antiwar and do everything I could to keep the censors from yanking them off the stage for as long as humanly possible in the hopes of waking just a few zombies from their military-industrial slumber. During my first election I campaigned like a motherfucker on fire for Dennis Kucinich and then voted for Ralph Nader when they tried to package a sweet-talking bologna salesman named Barack Obama as a pacifist based largely on the color of his skin. 

In 2012, I put my proletarian pride aside to support Ron Paul when I was still a Guevara-quoting communist because I saw the way that this plainspoken free-market peacenik galvanized an antiwar movement in freefall after the Bush Junta finally fucked off. I voted for Jill Stein twice before supporting Jo Jorgensen in 2020. I switched parties from Green to Independent to Libertarian as I abandoned Marxism for a more free-market oriented hybrid of post-left anarchism and Queer libertine socialism, all while maintaining the same goal of smashing the war machine by any means necessary and those means included manipulating the empire's own circus as a zoonotic tool for agitprop. 

So, what happened? 2020 happened and then a savage midterm followed like Rosemary's afterbirth. In an age of Trump and anti-Trump hysteria, the election cycle itself became an increasingly violent tool for division and its effects on the people around me became increasingly horrifying. As a muckraking anarcho-populist, bottom unity is my bread and butter, the basic notion that left and right and conservative and liberal are totally irrelevant labels in the face of the fact that everyone outside of the country club is getting fucked by the same greedy elites in both major parties. 

I had worked my ass off for years reaching out to antiwar conservatives and convincing them that Queer people like me were not the enemy and in a single election season I saw all of this hard work washed away when the Christian Right turned my gender identity into their latest electoral boogeyman and other trans people responded by seeking shelter behind the strong arms of progressive warmongers while MAGA "isolationists" decided to put America first by going after our kids.

It got worse. It spread. People stopped having positions anymore, they just had enemies. Even sensible radicals like Noam Chomsky had to vote for a white power warmonger like Joe Biden in order to stop a white power warmonger like Donald Trump from doing all the horrible shit that Joe had already spent the eighties and nineties doing. The MeToo Movement devoured itself when they refused to stand with one of that jackal's victims and Black Lives Matter followed suit. Then January 6 came, and pissed-off people finally rose up in anger against power, but only in defense of more power, wasting legitimate revolutionary momentum on throwing a hissy fit for the other rapist on the ticket.

The elections themselves have become a device for lower class division in ways never seen before. This is no longer simply a tool to distract a nation from the monster behind the curtain. As the American Empire begins to collapse beneath the rust of its sins and rapidly disintegrates into just another failed state it is turning the two-party system into camps of rival apocalyptic suicide cults who have been convinced that the fate of humanity rests on the whims of a single reality television rodeo clown named Donald J. Trump. 

If he gets elected democracy is over or if he doesn't get elected democracy is over. And even third parties have been infected by this partisan contagion, with my own adopted Libertarian Party collapsing into a petty bitch fight between antiwar voters who hate Trump and antiwar voters who hate trans kids enough to let him speak at our convention. 

You stupid motherfuckers don't seem to realize that democracy is already over in this country and Donald Trump is nothing but a symptom of the final stages of this electoral cancer. When Donald Trump was president, the same bullshit wars rolled on towards oblivion. All of his Putin ass kissing didn't stop him from eviscerating nearly every Cold War treaty we had left with the Kremlin. And since Trump has been chucked from the White House, the same bubbling cauldron of chaos continues to permeate throughout Babylon while the same concentration camps remain packed to the gills on our prolapsed border. 

The system has already collapsed. Only the illusions remain but the illusions have become existential, something falsely tribal for people to cling to for warmth while the mandarins prepare for a final kamikaze assault on the inevitable Eurasian Century in Ukraine and Taiwan.

Well, I'll say it again, just one more time, I'm done. American "democracy" has somehow become even worse than an illusion. It has become a full-blown mental illness, and I have enough of those already. There is nothing remotely revolutionary to be done with this circus ride anymore if there ever was to begin with. I will no longer validate a flunked empire with my vote. 

But that doesn't mean that I'm finished waging war against war. I have simply altered my tactics to something more realistic than hijacking the Hindenburg and I seriously suggest that anyone serious about opposing empire do the same. We must do the polar opposite of engaging this systemic sickness. We must actively disengage. We must drop out.

With the empire twisting and flailing in the wind like a scarecrow, now is the time to build something new to survive the collapse of the old. We can do this by using the new tools of distraction like social media to create a thriving counter-economy in which all goods and services can be exchanged free from taxation or corporate interference on the dark web, or you can kick it old school and just start a farm. Either way, the idea of this tactic, known in left libertarian circles as agorism, is to starve the powerful of the resources of our labor while fostering self-sufficient voluntary societies that don't require a managerial class to function.

From there we secede from the state and create a vast panarchy of many stateless societies. Every self-sufficient voluntary community divorces itself from an increasingly illegitimate union and declares themselves to be a sovereign nation existing totally free from borders wherever its citizen's roam. Each of these polities would come with its own government, its own schools, its own militias, its own medical services, but all of which would be completely voluntary and completely un-dependent on physical territory. 

My Queer Hillbilly Autonomous Zone could exist in the same goddamn apartment complex as the Rastafarian Republic and the Mormon Fundamentalist Dutchie of Deseret. We could borrow sugar and make peace deals over Friday night poker. America could become a bit more like it was before the white man and his electoral circus fucked it up, a disorganized tribal hodgepodge of competing governments without a monopoly on the use of force. It wasn't perfect but nobody got nuked because there was nothing big enough to be worth destroying the world to evaporate.

Maybe it'll fail. Maybe humans really are fucked. But if that's the case, I would much rather go down building something than standing in line to vote for some asshole who represents a system defined by tearing people down. You can do whatever the fuck you want this November. I'm through telling other people how to live. Just don't expect me to feel guilty for not indulging your electoral fetish because I've got better shit to do with my time.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post

* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode

* Driver by Soccer Mommy

* Shine On Sweet Jesus by the Flaming Lips

* Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

* The Concept by Teenage Fanclub

* Quarry by Wednesday

* Buildings by Regina Spektor

* Lessons Learned by Matt & Kim

* Some Candy Talking by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* Seattle by Public Image Ltd.

The Big Business of Electing War Junkies, From Trump and Kamala to Zelensky and Bibi

 If you were foolish enough to take sociopaths at their word, you could be forgiven for believing that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the world's most violent pacifists. Both of these repugnant candidates for Godfather of Babylon seem to traffic in vague suggestions of world peace punctuated by breathless declarations of total war. 

Donald Trump seems to be attempting to make avoiding nuclear apocalypse in Ukraine a cornerstone of his barely coherent campaign platform while simultaneously calling the Democrats Marxist pussies for not murdering more children in Gaza. 

Meanwhile, Kamala seems to be running a campaign devoid of even the pretense of a platform beyond some Disneyfied reimagining of her biography that carefully excludes the fact that she was a pampered Berkley brat who grew up to be a glorified prison warden. But, in the few cases where her Clintonian handlers actually let her speak, Kamala, she-wolf of Pelican Bay, tends to lean heavy on vague calls for a ceasefire in Palestine snuck between proclamations of the sanctity of Israel's right to defend itself from infants and pregnant women. 

The end result of this contrarian food fight matinee is an election between proven killers promising peace when it's politically correct for their target constituency and promising catastrophic violence pretty much everywhere else. 

Regardless, it's hard to believe that a diligent observer with a view unobstructed by their own asshole could come to any conclusion other than the sad fact that both Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much fucked under either one of these belligerent imbeciles. 

In fact, both bloodbaths seem to be largely defined by the multitude of opportunities for peace that have been grievously sabotaged by America's two-party war machine and the quislings they groom, but let's focus on the ones in Kiev first and circle back to Tel Aviv for the finale. 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine actually began with Vladimir Putin offering a proposal to the US on mutual security guarantees defined by a perfectly reasonable request that Ukraine not be made a member of the NATO colossus. It was only after the US responded to this offer by doubling down on turning Russia's next-door neighbor into a gas station for the military industrial complex that Putin sent in the troops he had been amassing on the border for leverage. 

However, even then he limited this raid to between 120,000 and 190,000 soldiers. More than enough skinheads to fuck shit up and raise cane but far short of the number necessary to overthrow and indefinitely occupy a nation of Ukraine's size. 

Putin may be a cold-blooded sociopath in his own right, but I still strongly suspect that the initial goal of his bloody little "special operation" wasn't conquest but a brutish attempt to terrorize Ukraine into neutrality, and it nearly worked.

A round of peace talks in Istanbul held within the first few months of the war were said to be 90% prepared by Ukraine's own advisors and they continued even after the horrors in Bucha were uncovered. It wasn't until Boris Johnson showed up unexpectedly in Kiev that this peace was successfully averted. 

Both then-Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, and former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, acting as intermediaries during the talks, have admitted to witnessing this screw-job firsthand, with Schroader remarking, "Nothing could happen because everything else was decided by Washington... the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed too."

Basically, the Atlantic Empire, represented by the US, the UK, the EU, and NATO, made Volodymyr Zelensky a counteroffer to Putin's latest ham-fisted peace proposal; fight this fucker forever and we'll foot the bill. Flash forward a couple years and Zelensky is the one launching his own insane special operation inside Russia's Kursk Oblast. 

Nothing about this operation makes any rational sense from a purely strategic standpoint. At a time when Ukraine is getting pulverized by Russia on the frontlines of the Donbas, they decide to send more than a thousand of their best armed and best equipped men over the border to occupy 1,000 square kilometers of strategically irrelevant territory where they are being quite predictably decimated as we speak.

No two western analysts can seem to agree on what the fuck Volodymyr Zelensky hoped to achieve with this mess but that's because no two western analysts seem to be considering the possibility that two years into his embrace of Babylonian proxy-dom, Volodymyr Zelensky has become a full-fledged war junkie, cruising the bloodlands for another fix.

This invasion of the invaders came on the eve of a planned summit in Qatar that promised to see both Russia and Ukraine cease strikes on each other's energy and power infrastructure. These were set to be the first serious negotiations held since Istanbul and many western security wonks have trotted out the spurious argument that Zelensky was simply maneuvering for a better strategic position in these deals with a surprise invasion of the nation he was allegedly trying to convince to trust him. 

It doesn't take a genius to figure out a far more likely outcome to such outrageous behavior and here it comes. The peace talks are dead as disco with no sign of revival in sight. However, Russia wasn't the superpower that Zelensky was trying to make a deal with.

This man's already fragile government has collapsed into a hive of corruption and vicious infighting in the years since he chose war, with the military holding more power than Parlaiment and generals being fired left and right for rampant insubordination. 

The only thing keeping these gangsters from tearing each other to shreds in a civil war is a forever war with the gangsters next door. In this context, Zelensky's invasion of Kursk appears to be some sort of absurd advertisement to his western sponsors, and he hasn't exactly been shy about admitting it.

As Ukrainian conscripts are blown to bits on Russian soil, Volodymyr has announced a grand "Plan for Victory" which he apparently intends to submit to both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this September. 

What precisely this plan entails remains a mystery, but Zelensky has stated that it will involve a proposition to increase his crumbling nation's participation in "the global security infrastructure", signaling even further integration of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the for-profit western defense industry.

This proposition mirrors one that Vlod made just last year when he invited 250 international defense companies from 30 countries to participate in Ukraine's First International Defense Industries Forum where a former comedian who once ran as a peace candidate promised to establish a "special economic regime for the defense industrial complex" while turning his country into one "Big Israel." 

If you want a preview of what such a horror show might entail, just take a glimpse south to the Holy Land and look upon Washington's works, ye mighty, and despair.

Israel has developed into a veritable military industrial peace-deal shredding machine, and nobody shreds them like Benji Netanyahu who seems to come up with a fresh new way to sabotage a ceasefire every single week. His latest is the six hostages allegedly executed by Hamas during a military raid in the tunnels below Rafah, but even Bibi's own constituents aren't buying this bill of goods. In fact, they are rioting in the streets, with the family members of the slain hostages leading the charge against a veteran war junkie who has reduced himself to using genocide to keep his scheming ass out of prison.

This is Volodymyr Zelensky's future foretold in the present and while it is very tempting to look at the crimes of such proxies as purely blowback, the reality is actually something far more sinister. 

Both Bibi and Zelensky perform their heinous stunts with the full cooperation of American military intelligence. In fact, we have "advisors" on the ground in both of these countries providing them with everything from satellite imagery to detailed logistics on how many children they can expect to kill with our bombs. 

Why would any superpower behave so despicably? Because war is a racket, and America has built an empire to corner the market. Look no further than the Pentagon if you still don't believe me.

The man commanding that death star shaped liked Satan's asshole is one Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, a former board member of Raytheon, which is one hell of a coincidence considering that Raytheon just happens to be the corporation which produces both Stinger missiles and Javelin rockets, dated military hardware flying off the shelves since Ukraine began lobbing them at Putin's gestapo. 

Raytheon also just happens to be the corporation that manufactures Israel's Iron Dome rocket defense system, which might explain why a Zionist isolationist like Donald Trump hired Lloyd Austin's predecessor, Raytheon super-lobbyist Mark Esper, to serve as his last Secretary of Defense.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, anything from black tar heroin to Super Mario Bros. can become an addiction as long as it derives pleasure from the addict. But only a state can turn a relatively peaceful and popularly elected prankster like Volodymyr Zelensky into an unhinged and unimpeachable genocide junkie like Benjamin Netanyahu, and with a pusher like Uncle Sam on every corner, a new junkie gets elected every other minute. 

So, why then should our elections be any different? Trump or Kamala, Zelensky or Bibi, smack or coke... pick your poison and spike up soldier, it gets worse.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH  

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Lightning Man by Nitzer Ebb

* Ever by Flipper

* You Trip Me Up by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* March of the Pigs by Nine Inch Nails

* Heroin by the Velvet Underground

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Just One Fix by Ministry

* Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine

* Here Comes Success by Iggy Pop

* Mistress by Red House Painters

Opposing War Should Not Be a Partisan Issue

 America is deeply engaged in two simultaneous and rapidly expanding proxy wars that could both very easily end in a nuclear third world war... 

I want you to sit down with that sentence for a couple of minutes because it is a fact that no one denies and a point that gets chucked around a lot on the campaign trail of our current presidential election circus, but I don't feel like anyone with power is really homing in on the downright existential insanity at play here. 

NATO is supplying a conscripted slave army in Ukraine with deadlier and deadlier machinery as Kiev launches the first foreign invasion on Russian soil since Operation Barbarossa in the Kursk region. Meanwhile, America continues to arm Bibi Netanyahu to the fucking teeth and shield him with goddam aircraft carriers while he slaughters Arab babies on live television and bombs everyone and anyone in the neighborhood who tries to get involved.

Both of these conflicts are the result of America's vampiric imperial foreign policy. Both of these conflicts are pretty much guaranteed to drag the world deep into Dr. Strangelove country if they haven't already. And both of these conflicts would end in a week if Uncle Sam simply closed his checkbook. Where the fuck is the antiwar movement? Well, they're busy going to war with each other at your local diner over which candidate is a marginally less repulsive sack of shit and which nuclear Armageddon is worth being more freaked out about. 

An unprecedented amount of red meat rural Americans in flyover country are sick to death over seeing huge gobs of their tax dollars going to blow shit up in Ukraine but most of these same nouveau-isolationists have also been deluded into believing that we should send even bigger gobs of their hard-earned cash over to Israel so they can blow up orphanages and maternity wards in Gaza. On the flipside, kids on the left have never been more willing to confront the sacred cow of the Israel lobby on behalf of one of the most marginalized populations on the planet and yet they are still too terrified of being labeled as a Putin puppet to take down their Ukrainian flags and hold Volodymir Zelensky to the same standard.

Once again, dearest motherfuckers, we have come to the part of my weekly diatribe where I inform you that this is no coincidence. This is in fact the entire point of the two-party system, to divide and conquer, to sic poor people on poor people, to chop the country into color coordinated warring parties like the Crips and the Bloods so that you rubes are all too busy ripping each other's throats out and riding dirty on drive-byes to realize that the same oligarchs win no matter who's left standing because they supply the TEC-9s.

The only difference this time is that the empire they represent is getting too violently reckless to hide behind abortion clinics and gay bars alone. So, they have you fighting over which war to stop first. Which nuclear holocaust do you find more alarming? Do you want to die in the desert or the steppes? What form of imperial suicide are you willing to kick your neighbor's ass to defend?

Aside from what should be the fairly obvious notion of 'Hey stupid, let's just stop bombing people', there is also the fact that there is nothing particularly special about either one of these fatted proxies that we are being prodded into coddling with weapons of mass destruction. To put it simply, if you oppose one you should probably oppose the other for the same damn reasons. Israel and Ukraine, or rather what America's steady diet of missiles and lobbyists have turned these countries into, are equally grotesque fanged manifestations of Westphalian orthodontia.

Everything that conservatives hate about Ukraine they should hate about Israel. After all, what is Israel but the original Ukraine? A toxic, tax sucking, moocher state with about as much regard for the sanctity of human life as your garden variety back-alley abortionist. Israel slurps down $3.8 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars a year so they can build condos for Ashkenazi atheists on the ruins of Jesus Christ's tomb. And don't even give me that shit about these ghouls being America's number one ally. This is an ally that openly spies on our universities, businesses, and government facilities and has been directly implicated in tampering with CIA equipment in the Holy Land and in engaging in criminal espionage in the homeland.

This is an ally who has illegally acquired hundreds of nuclear warheads and literal tons of biological weapons and still demands that we go to war forever with any Arab on the block that they frame for possessing weapons of mass destruction. This is the ally that lobbied your local congress goon to vote for every bullshit war that your nephew lost a limb in. And these weren't the first Americans they've killed either, because this is also the ally who attacked the USS Liberty in 1967, murdering 34 American crew members and wounding 171 others with torpedoes and napalm in what appears to have been an attempt to hoodwink us into nuking Egypt for them during their Six-Day War. 

And to all my fellow social justice warriors righteously rising up against genocide in Gaza, everything that sickens you about Benjamin Netanyahu should also sicken you about Volodymyr Zelensky because the longer NATO's crusade cranks on in Ukraine, the more those two crooks look like the same fucking guy. Let's not forget that long before Russia invaded, America's coup-appointed proxies in Kiev launched a bloody eight-year war against the people of the Donbas, killing some 14,000 people, most of them Russian-speaking civilians, with cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and neo-Nazi mercenaries, all because they asked for a divorce when Kiev tried to ban their language.

None of this justifies Russia's own sickening behavior but Russia's sickening behavior hardly justifies Zelensky's either. A man popularly elected to end the savagery in the Donbas is now sending Ukrainian conscripts to die in Russia in an insane scheme to take it back by force. All the while this little Putin has used his unlimited war powers to nationalize Ukraine's tv news, lock up journalists, ban 11 opposition parties, shutter his nation's largest Orthodox church, and hold off presidential elections indefinitely. Does that honestly sound like the kind of "democracy" that you're willing to blow up the world to preserve?

This absurdity would all be pretty brazenly obvious to any sane population not being brainwashed into believing that even pacifism is a partisan sport that requires capitulation to some mythic lesser evil. And the worse thing is that neither party is actually particularly interested in peace in either theater. 

Donald Trump may talk a big game about peace with Russia, but this was the motherfucker who armed Ukraine to the fucking teeth during the height of Kiev's genocidal campaign in the Donbas. This is also the motherfucker who triggered the build-up of Russian troops on Ukraine's border by throwing dress rehearsals for World War 3 in the Black Sea with nuclear compatible battleships. And this is why Trump's supposed bosom buddy, Vladimir Putin, still refuses to endorse the Orange Bastard, wisely noting the total lack of any concrete peace proposals being put forward. 

As for Kamala Harris, while that wretch shook her ass on TikTok and gushed about ceasefires and Palestinian dignity for the cameras, her administration sent Israel another fat check for $20 billion dollars and tossed Arabs and Jews out of her DNC coronation just for holding up peace signs. The Democratic Party also used that sacred event to make Barack Obama's Memorandum of Understanding, promising Israel a standing order of $3.8 billion dollars a year in military aid until at least 2028, an official part of the party's platform, essentially guaranteeing that Kamala's first term will be one defined by empty threats and blank checks. Not to mention a warzone that can't possibly be maintained without expanding it directly to China's doorstep in Iran.

This is insane and we all know it. I am a genderqueer anarcho-feminist, a dick swinging daughter of the culture wars, but I will go to church tomorrow and break bread with fundamentalist fag-bashers if it means preventing nuclear oblivion and this is what it's going to take. America is an antiwar nation with a war machine that has grown into the greatest threat to humanity in recorded history. If we can't drop our tribal bullshit for five fucking minutes to keep this psychotic duopoly from blowing up the world then maybe that's the fate we deserve, but our kids deserve better. 

Fuck both parties and all their proxies. Opposing war should not be a partisan issue. We should all be a part of the same antiwar movement and that starts with us throwing these war parties beneath the treads of their own tanks before they can blow us all to kingdom come.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Hatebreeders by the Misfits

* Times Like These by Foo Fighters

* Eighties by Killing Joke

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* The Flaming Spear by Sonic Youth

* Party at Ground Zero by Fishbone

* Finest Worksong by REM

* Let's Have a War by Fear

* We Were Never Alive by Brigitte Calls Me Baby

* El Scorcho by Weezer