@Snode "Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe." -- Frank Zappa

Politics seems to run upon a "bandwagon effect," in which the game everyone plays is "follow the leader." It doesn't seem to matter if the "leader" is some a-hole with dementia: Ronald Reagan suffered from it in the second half of his second term, and Joe Biden is probably in the early stages now. Of course, the game is itself bogus and (to quote Zappa again) “without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” This truth is where anarchism gets its strength as a way of thinking.

Outrage is common. Appropriate outrage is nice. Intelligence is helpful; intelligence asks, "how can I help?" And so, for instance, we see Daily Beast's attempt to take down Briahna Joy Gray in light of a pseudo-debate about Ukraine:

Not for a second did the guy Gray was talking to, Joe Cirincione, ask himself or anyone else whether or not war, war that has so far killed nearly 500,000 Ukrainian troops, was or is the appropriate solution to his sob story about Ukrainian children. So, no, he's not helpful, nor is he appropriate. He's outraged, though. He would be proof of Frank Zappa's thesis about stupidity were he not merely a distant satellite of stupidity's current vortex, whose name is Joe Biden.

There's a point in one of his political diatribes where Nick of RBN exclaims: "the neocons are fkn CHILDREN." So, as regards children, some advice from Fred Rogers:

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."

Maybe this explains why the only country in the Middle East that would meet with Joe Biden was Israel. The other countries' "leaders" were looking for helpers per Mr. Rogers' advice; Netanyahu, on the other hand, was looking for money.

My mind is numb, my soul is cold. I want to know why we accept this, when Americans end up living on the street, the mentally ill ministered to by the ER and the police, and why we're awash in drugs. Why it's acceptable that kids going to school have an automobile or a shelter as a permanent address. Why we can take care of non citizens at our borders, but not our own. Why billions magically appear for foreign nations, and tough on what we need, we can't afford it. Why bombs are far more important than health or education. Why America is now about somebody making money from every aspect of life, no matter who is harmed, and our government passing handouts to special interests on both sides, but not us.

Why medical care is rationed by how much money can be extracted from us. Why a lot of our medical woes come from the industrial food designed to act like crack. Why the increasing despair we experience eventually morphs into the good old days to be replaced by new and improved despair.

Why and how we accept spin and propaganda as information and news, and politicians rail about where somebody pees. Why we let our leaders off the hook time and time again, only to have to endure the next 2 or 4 year cycle of lies, neglect and abuse all to make sure Zuk Bezosmusk Winfry is comfy and pampered.

We are so broken.

@Snode

Why is there no outrage over all the harms and indignities we face as citizens from our government, corporations and the wealthy?

There probably is a lot of such outrage out there. Is such outrage publicized? Organized? Not co-opted? Effective?

In previous diaries, I have argued that the effective thing to do would be to build some sort of institution that could stand outside of the two-party system. The immediate concern, of course, will not be satisfied for a year -- replacing Joe Biden. Pointing this out is why I write diaries such as this one. I'm imagining a future in which the residents of Gaza, -- what's left after Israel has killed 100,000 of them -- are revealed to be suffering from all of the various malnutrition-related ailments. Maybe added to this situation will be events such as Hezbollah singeing northern Israel to a crisp or if the Russians were to hand the Iranians a stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Such events will have to be treated as opportunities. When they happen, ask all of your loyal Democratic Party friends this question: back in 2020 you thought Donald Trump would be Hitler and that his second term would be the end of the world. So you voted for Joe Biden. Where are those thoughts now?

During the Age of Utopian Dreaming, human existence sucked like it does today. What made such existence bearable were the various utopian dreams which spread throughout the world on the wings of the Enlightenment. (Well, utopian dreaming existed before then, but mostly in an escapist capacity, in the sense in which belief in a Heaven is escapist.) Life was short and work was hard drudgery performed every day until you burned out, but at least there was the dream of the Ten-Hour Day and ultimately of the revolution promised in the Communist Manifesto. Here it must be said that the model which inspired the Communist Manifesto was the uprisings of 1848. Later, the inspirational model was the Paris Commune of 1871. You had an organization, the International Workingmen's Association, to make such utopian dreams true.

Later, of course, after the founding of the Trilateral Commission in 1973 and the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile that same year, you had the grim years in which the only permitted utopian dream was that of capitalism itself. We are still living through that time, and it is why all of the outrages are so painful -- there is no serious countervailing utopian dream through which we might tell the objects of outrage to fk off, and we are suffering from the complete atrophy of political imagination of which Cornelius Castoriadis complained.

Today there is a concerted effort by a united owning class of the US and of Europe to crush such dreams. (For some reason they have not yet pounded on the doors of the Japanese elites to donate.) They feel so united in crushing such dreams, in fact, that they think they can destroy their own self-proclaimed neoliberal dreams of a pure, universal capitalism, so they can destroy the dreams of the Russians and of the Chinese of a capitalism of their own. Neoliberalism has become neoconservatism, and if you thought neoliberalism was stupid, well... Maybe this is the way the whole capitalist system goes down.

There is still hope.

over things I know I will not be able to change in the slightest way. Since Reagan everything has been monetized, even outrage. Fox and wingnut radio have made a fortune being outraged about anything, real or manufactured, and the libs thrive on selective indignation. The media chooses the most uninformative way to convey news. Something happened, be outraged, pick a side. To be constantly outraged over something that in the end there is no way you could influence borders on mental illness.

Why is there no outrage over all the harms and indignities we face as citizens from our government, corporations and the wealthy? Are the kidnapped Ukrainian kids on a par with the babies dumped out of incubators when Saddam invaded Kuwait? I don't know, but we went to war over it anyway, like the Gulf of Tonkin. I can't listen to most programs any more because of the level anger and the reaction it provokes in me, and lack of facts it presents, that in the end means nothing. It's become like the exaggerated acting in the silent film era to take the place of spoken words.

I don't mean to derail your post, it's well thought out. I react poorly to most of the program clips and I'm trying to figure it out.