A scene of Hell
Jan Brueghel The Elder (Flemish, 1568 - 1625)

Since a lot of people ((Actually nobody, but let's go with the flow.)) have asked me what I think about the recent so-called storming of the American Capitol, I'll spare a cent.

The meeting place of the American congress ((The United States Capitol.)) was under siege.

The siege was planned in the open. Donald Trump, the current president of the USA, fanned anti-democratic flames by explicitly telling people to rile against his losing the presidency, basically by any means necessary. Police took selfies with terrorists and also let—not perhaps the same as allowed—terrorists storm the Capitol.

I have a few thoughts about this.

The storm of the American Capitol is terrorism (not protests)

The people who stormed the Capitol weren't simply 'protesters' nor were they only weird citizens looking for justice (bar a few possible exceptions). They were terrorists.

The definition is important as it balances sanity back to where it should be; To belittle the terrorists is like saying 'boys will be boys' instead of 'this man raped her and must face consequences for it'.

I can't help but consider some of the terrorists as victims, even though they were actively involved in what could, at times, be described as some sort of mental coup d'état. They were being part of a cult where they believed 'stop the steal'—a stupid phrase that was often used during the storm—was fact; Take time to listen to videos of these people try and explain 'the truth' to people, and I think you will get my point. It provides insight into a mad world, yet falls horribly flatly as none of the asinine theories I've heard are even based on verifiable facts. QAnon and similar conspiracy theories are abound and deeply affect how these people think; I believe all humans want to belong, to feel loved, and to feel part of a group, at least at some point in life; History shows how people who feel they've been slighted in life want to belong so badly that they throw themselves into something that makes them feel part of things, no matter what the consequences, as with racism, desperation, rage, religious beliefs, etc.

Regardless of what these people did, they must suffer consequences for it, and (preferably soon) know that they are terrorists by definition.

The storm of the US Capitol was planned online weeks before it happened

People who say 'oh, we didn't know about this until it happened' are OK to say that, if they're not supposed to maintain law and order.

Thing is, a lot of such entities in the US have tried to state that they couldn't be aware of it.

The whole thing was planned online and openly for weeks.

Big tech companies support themselves, not humanity, and certainly not ethically

What do I mean by this? Doesn't it strike you as strange that companies that now want to seem kind, compassionate, and anti-fascist started behaving in those ways after Joe Biden was elected president of the USA?

It's not like these companies tried to alert authorities of what was about to happen. They don't want to be 'rats', even though that would mean they had actually followed their own guidelines for once.

Facebook has so many fundamental flaws that it's hard to know where to begin. They abuse their users, sell their user experience, perform psychological experiments on users where they create create ways to explicitly allow people to target ads to people who 'hate Jews', abet negativity as that creates more content, abet the Myanmar genocide, etc. A lot of these problems are applicable to Instagram, too, and they're owned by Facebook. The same goes for WhatsApp, who recently decided to end privacy for their users by starting to transfer WhatsApp user data to Facebook, in order to make even more money.

Twitter has always, to quote their CEO, 'sucked at dealing with abuse'. And they continue doing this.

Amazon is one of the biggest republican donors, if not the biggest, and they directly support QAnon—while doing things like building concentration camps for ICE and racist facial-recognition software—

In Germany, laws require that if any citizen feels abused via the Internet, companies that host the offending material must act within 24 hours from the report is made. This didn't lead Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, and the rest of the big tech companies to leave Germany: they hired more staff and tightened up things.

The problem: they acted because they had to.

Twitter have permanently banned Donald Trump from their platform. Andrew Lazar created a Twitter account named SuspendThePres a long time ago. The sole purpose of the account was to repost exactly what Donald Trump had tweeted to see whether his account would suffer consequences.

In other words: Twitter ban people left and right, but not their breadwinners, regardless what they do.

Since Twitter banned Donald Trump, extreme-right wing idiots sit tight as they don't want to lose their 'followers'.

The same goes for Twitter itself, Facebook, Amazon, etc. They're quiet now, except for issuing some cul-de-sac of a comment, as with Cheryl Sandberg—COO of Facebook and billionnaire—who issued a blithe video where she ultimately said Facebook don't support violence (Except when they do, which is all the time; She did not say this).

There's much to be said for choosing not to be on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the likes. There are new alternatives popping up all of the time.

Joe Biden will probably not save you

Chris Hedges, one of my favourite political analysts, wrote this article in December 2020. Here's a short quotation from the article:

Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead.”     

The list of new administration officials includes retired General Lloyd J. Austin III who is being nominated to be secretary of defense. Austin is on the board of Raytheon Technologies and a partner at Pine Island Capital, a firm that invests in defense industries and also includes Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee to be secretary of state.  Blinken, who was deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state, is a strong supporter of the apartheid state of Israel.  He was one of the architects of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and a proponent of the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, resulting in yet another failed state in the Middle East.

Hedges, Chris. 2020. “The Great Delusion.” Scheerpost.Com. December 21, 2020. https://web.archive.orghttps://web.archive.org/web/20210114085647/https://scheerpost.com/2020/12/21/chris-hedges-the-great-delusion/.

If the USA is to become a trustworthy democracy, its constitution must change. From this article:

C.J. Polychroniou: According to popular conception, the United States is a “nation of immigrants,” although this formulation significantly excludes Native people — who were already here, and were subjected to colonization, displacement and genocide at the hands of European immigrants — and also excludes African Americans, whose ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved. When it is described as a “nation of immigrants,” the U.S. is often portrayed as a varied nation where people have the freedom to pursue their dreams of a better life while maintaining their own cultural, ethnic and religious distinctiveness or uniqueness. Yet, the truth of the matter is that inequality and oppression of the “Other” have been ongoing political and social realities since the origins of the republic. In fact, today we have a president in the White House who makes no bones about wishing to see non-white people, even elected representatives of the U.S. Congress, leave the country because they challenge the status quo and seek a United States with a more humane and democratic polity. Meanwhile, the very rich are enjoying political privileges like never before. Noam, what are some of the tangible and intangible factors that seem to be pushing the country — socially, politically and economically — backward rather than forward?

Noam Chomsky: Trump’s diatribes successfully inflame his audience, many of whom apparently feel deeply threatened by diversity, cultural change, or simply the recognition that the White Christian nation of their collective imagination is changing before their eyes. White supremacy is nothing new in the U.S. The late George Frederickson’s comparative studies of white supremacy found the U.S. to be almost off the chart, more extreme even than Apartheid South Africa. As late as the 1960s the U.S. had anti-miscegenation laws so extreme that the Nazis refused to adopt them as a model for their racist Nuremberg laws. And the power of Southern Democrats was so great that until ‘60s activism shattered the framework of legal racism — if not its practice by other means — even New Deal federal housing programs enforced segregation, barring Black people from new housing programs.

https://chomsky.info/20190724/

If Biden's politics are controlled by vastly wealthy corporate interests, he will naturally serve their bidding if he wants to keep getting money/power. American democrats and many other people around the globe like the idea of a democratic American president, just because they are not republican; The label is not interesting: What they actually do, is.

Some corporations, like Microsoft, like to give to the democrats, although they give to people like Biden, and very different money to socialist candidates; just check this page to see the difference between donated monies between Biden and Bernie Sanders.

I will be mortified if Biden's administration seriously take on the climate crisis. Doing slightly better than Trump won't count, as we'll find out in the very near future.