#103

Fine. I'll bite. You want some fucking opinions about Venezuela? You want someone to tell you what to think and feel about it even though there is but the slimmest chance that it is any of your motherfucking business or anything you could fucking hope to remotely comprehend or materially influence?

Look no god damn further.

*

It's like I just said. You don't fucking know. You don't understand Venezuelan history--did you look any up? Any at all? Did you even read the Wikipedia article? Was that utile, if you bothered?

There are no useful links. I'm not going to send you to a twenty-minute video that will succinctly and accurately sum up the situation because any such video is hollow propaganda.

Stuff like that is everywhere, the internet sits chin-deep in hideously gross oversimplifications and anti-history. I cannot comprehend why in the living devil motherfuckers consider themselves educated on a subject, matter, event, concept, text, or issue after ten minutes of reading, a conversation or two, and a half-hour of what passes for thought in such skulls.

No, I am not being an asshole! That was me being generous. Said motherfuckers usually just watch a single video, made by someone in the CIA, a troll, a communist, or a complex admixture of any of the aforementioned.

What do you truly know about past and U.S. activity in Venezuela specifically? What do you truly know about the people who live there? If it's direct witness or direct word of mouth, how big is your sample? What were their sources? How does their credibility rank, at a guess? Do you know for sure they were really there, or understand things competently themselves? If you're relying secondhand, on reporting or writing or hearsay, what were sources of the reporting, how biased their publication, who paid them, who funds the publication? Did you bother to check? Do you really know what it means to be "on the left" in that country? In that sphere of influence? What do you know about each dictator specifically? Do you know the actual, full, complete story of La Revolución Bolivariana? How about the big one, Bolívar's actual revolution, and what it accomplished, and how? You know who Andrés Bello is? You know if that's a relevant question? How about economics? How much oil, when did it become an issue, what lake does it come from, what are the problems with that? What's the other main export? The staple crop? The GDP before Chavez and what happened after? How about the GDP before Caldera? You know who Rafael Caldera was, what his policies were like? What do you know about the post-Chavez strikes? About the news on the ground day after day, month after month? You follow that news pretty carefully as it happened for the last nineteen years? You know the current "government" is the Fifth Republic, right? What can you tell me about the other four? Were there really four? Who is Aquiles Nazoa? How about Antonio Arraiz?  How many native Venezuelan tribes can you name? What year was the country founded? What was Nicolás Maduro's job before he became president? What is the name of the mountain north of the capital? What is the name of the tallest waterfall in the world, and where is it? Here's a clue: it's not in fucking Cuba. If you think you know the answer--do you know its real name? What do you know about the Venezuelan prison system? The school system? About Venezuelan public transportation, Venezuelan bureaucracy, its culture, its demographics? You know there's a German mining company at the source of the largest river in the country (know its name?) fucking it up mining some gold? What company? Why German? What is the history of German naturalists exploring Venezuela and its ramifications? What year was Venezuela "discovered" and by whom? What country has supplied Venezuela with the jets for its air force? Why do Venezuelans eat so much pasta--when they can get it? Is there still racism in Venezuela? How is it different and similar to racism where you live? 

Don't know where to stop, but I could go on. I could ask you questions until my fingers bleed. How many answers do you really, truly believe you possess, and if it's actually a lot, so what? That makes you right? And if you're right--fucking somehow--so what?

Hopefully you're starting to come around to my point. You don't know shit. You're not fucking qualified. And if you are, you're probably not on Twitter talking about it, you're doing a real fucking job that takes up too much time and effort for you to participate in the masturbatory punishment chatter war that is ripping apart the collective psyche. Soon we will be no more than particularly violent gibbons, screaming particularly ugly sounds.  

*

Okay. Okay. Now. Please listen carefully. This part is what I really want to say.

Nothing is ever as simple as the corporate headline, the great leader, or the social alphas in your politically-charged echo chamber make it out to be. They make that shit seem simple in order to control you, which is to say, in order to use you, which is to say, to dehumanize and abuse you in order to profit off your ignorance and gain power from your manipulated acquiescence.

Whatever they are talking about, whatever they are saying, that is the game, and you are the piece.

*

Well! I don't think I actually need to write anything else except

SHUT
YOUR
TRASH
FUCKING
HOLES
ABOUT 
VENEZUELA

AND 

GIVE THIS A THOUGHT, NOW 

EVERYWHERE YOU WEREN'T BORN, DON'T LIVE, AND DIDN'T SPILL BLOOD


I'm talking to other Venezuelan immigrants! I'm talking to immigrants at large! I'm talking to U.S. citizens! I'm talking to ALL OF YOU, EVERY LAST ONE

SHUT
UP

SHUT 
UP

YOUR "DIALOGUE" IS FUCKING NOTHING


*

by all that is holy, don't you have your own problems?


--JL

#16

The pride we take in what we think we know is catastrophic. Knowledge has a well-deserved reputation for its many utilities as well as for its psychic pleasures and rigors, but it cannot shield you from ignorance, which is always vaster and stronger than knowledge. No person in one lifetime can accumulate enough knowledge to outweigh their own ignorance, speaking proportionally.

Power, maybe, but paper power. Sometimes literally.

Speaking practically, everything you think you know about a person doesn't add up to jack shit in the face of what you couldn't possibly know, including your own trueborn mother or child. I don't feel like I need to offer a lot of support for this statement, but maybe I find people more complex than most like to admit they are. I understand the flair and the paycheck that go with seeking out the good old lowest common denominator.

Hackable human beings! At the mercy of the corpostate! I guess if you didn't grow up with a million stories like this to hand, falling onto your head in their tottering heaps at the used bookstore, this is an alien notion with one of those payloads which inspires that revulsion which precludes clear thinking.

Frankly, it is a transparent shell game these terrormongers are constantly playing. I mean, look. People can't be both smarter, better-informed, and more literate than they've ever been and laughably psychically malleable at the same time. Unless maybe these things are complementary, and sort of play off each other, maybe as trends? I dunno. Parallel evolution. Sympathetic parasitism. Are you feeling my spitballs? That's what this is. Trickster vs. Lawgiver. Man vs. Self , but also that one Escher drawing of the hands drawing each other--generative Ouroboros, in a backdrop of boundless stagnation which gives way eventually to the fertility which will degenerate, die, stagnate, and so forth unto infinity. Get this: the drawing and the backdrop both represent people fucking each other, in two totally different ways. Spitballin'.

That our field of action which goes unpunished can be limited by forces we have absolutely no way to influence bespeaks a situation where negative freedom is compromised, quantifiable, and reduced even to zero. Our freedom to act and think in ways that lead to punishment and even destruction, in futility, for nothing, for ideas that may not matter and cannot be proven, for a stupid and shitty thing like love, for whatever, really--that we are always, always free to do, which is positive freedom and should not exist but does.

That we can be hacked implied that we were first programmed, which is already delicious, but even better, it suggests that as programs which can hack one another, we are programs which can build firewalls to protect themselves and other programs. In a hack or be hacked world, defenses and advantages always spring up, must always spring up. Vacuums yawn as titans fall, and the young lions rush onto the killing grounds, to find who will rise above the rest. The metaphors, you see, just keep on coming.

It's a complex universe, folks. There is no need to listen to assholes trying to sell it as a solved game. I suspect one good way to get hacked is to go around trying to win a bunch of arguments. It's all just fractals, in a sense.

By way of saying: it's all a very stylish way of showing, as always, that nothing is new and things are the exact same as they have ever been. Fresh coat of paint and a new angle; people buy the car all over again, perhaps for even more money than the last time around.


--JL