Who Are You Voting Against?

evil vs evil: may the lesser [wo]man win!

No one is even pretending that they’re voting for anyone anymore. This has entirely become a game of ‘preventing the lesser evil.’ And many people are no longer playing that game. More than any time in my experience, more people are openly stating that they will not vote for either side.

In this episode, I look at some of the Substacks that have come out and said they won’t be voting. And I’m celebrating that as a sign of progress!

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the energetic vote

In Don’t ask me who I’m voting for, Alicen Grey writes:

Don't ask me who I'm voting for.

I will not be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election,

very simply because no mortal has the right to rule over me — let alone over an entire country.

I used to believe the absurd premise that voting was about choosing the “lesser evil” — and that not-voting made me responsible if the “evil-er” candidate took office.

But now I understand that voting is a giving-of-consent:
consent to a system that only presents evil options
and calls this “necessary.”

Alicen also talks about the energetic vote:

The Most Important Election Ever actually takes place on a day-by-day, moment-by-moment basis.
It’s the Energetic Election fractally contained in every single choice you make —
how you spend your money,
what media you consume,
who you keep as friends,
and even the very thoughts you choose to think.

In fact, the U.S. Presidential Election wouldn’t be the soul-insulting circus that it is, had we not COLLECTIVELY (🫨!) energetically voted, little-by-little, choice-by-choice, for our own self-subjugation, cultural-degeneration, and humiliation-as-entertainment.

We chose our way into this evil system,
and we must choose our way out.

And includes this illustrative meme:

Alicen also uses the phrase I Magi Nation linking back to her article from April 2022 that uses that phrase. Showing that the interverse is alive and well, I’ll link my article from Dec 2023 at the end on I Mage a Nation.

Metaverse: The Land of No Imagination

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slack-shaming

The subversive Conspiracy Sarah writes I’m Exercising My Right Not to Vote:

I'm Exercising My Right Not To Vote

As long as we believe that choosing the lesser of two evils means that we are exercising our right and our privilege we remain ensconced in a system that methodically pilfers our earnings under the auspices of necessity…When the only actual necessity is the continued belief that our shackles are representing our freedom. …

They need us to believe that casting our vote for someone with whom we vehemently disagree means that we are using our voice and being heard.

Do you want to eat diarrhea or vomit? It’s your choice. Make your voice heard. Exercise your right!

She also shows an app so you can know who of your friends and neighbors has voted and shame them into it … if that will support your side:

VoteWithMe and OutVote let you snoop on which of your friends voted in past elections and their party affiliations — and then prod them to go to the polls by sending them scripted messages like “You gonna vote?”

“I don’t want this to come off like we’re shaming our friends into voting,” said Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of OutVote, a start-up in Boston. But, he said, “I think a lot of people might vote just because they’re frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t.”

And Sarah includes a revelatory list of the campaign slogans of Presidents since Nixon and what they did when elected. She ends with:

And now, in this “most important election in history” (psssst…they say that every time), we have the motherfucker that delivered the vaccine herd culling murder shot (and still brags about it as a success), and someone that wasn’t ever actually selected by anyone anywhere (and tried to mandate the herd culling murder shot).

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serpents of the deep state

Whitney Webb interviews James Corbett on Dissecting the (s)Election:

Dissecting the (s)Election with Whitney Webb

Two of the most astute political analysts on the planet look into why ‘voting harder’ will not solve the problem. This taught me things I hadn’t known about the manipulation of the term Deep State, coined by Peter Dale Scott to mean the puppet masters who stay in charge no matter who’s elected. A wake up moment for me was a conference called 911 & the Deep State where Scott spoke along with Ellen Brown, from whom I learned for the first time how money worked.

It became used for whoever was the government on the other side. And then it became those reliable bureaucrats who keep government humming along no matter who’s in charge. Harmless and beneficial! Safe and effective!

Another word that’s been purloined is libertarian. James has done a two-part series on Peter Thiel in which he writes:

In reality, Thiel couldn’t be further from the “radical libertarian” that he has claimed to be or from the anti-government crusader the establishment media outlets insist he is. Indeed, after spending decades equipping the intelligence apparatus and the military forces of America, Israel and their allies with the most high-tech surveillance and targeting systems known to man, Thiel is now on the verge—thanks to his bought-and-paid-for lackey, J. D. Vance—of taking over the White House.

The truth, of course, is that Thiel is not a libertarian at all. He’s not even the uptight Silicon Valley nerd who features in the occasional Wall Street Journal interview or New Yorker profile or Joe Rogan podcast. Instead, Thiel—like Bill Gates—is an increasingly important wheeler-dealer in the global oligarchy, a hub from whom one can trace many spokes of the globalist agenda and discern the contours of the coming technocratic prison state.

Both Thiel and Elon Musk made their hefty campaign donations—$45 million a month for Musk—dependent on Trump making Vance his VP. Vance had been a principal at Thiel’s investment firm and was also endorsed by the Heritage Foundation, and Palantir and Tesla execs.

It’s worth listening to the interview in full for a deeper dive beyond things I knew. And there’s a mention of the rebranding of Russell Brand that was also enlightening.

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sheep or guerrilla?

From the clever and forthright Tonika at Visceral Adventures:

A Pox on Both Your Political Houses

If you’ve heard “Vote blue no matter who!” or “Ride the red wave!” and have nodded in agreement, then you might be a normie.

If you have never wondered why your life doesn’t seem to fundamentally change, why wars rage on for years at a time, or why the value of your buck keeps diminishing no matter if you’re living under a blue-colored or red-covered government, you might be a normie. Heck, if you don’t even realize the value of your money is diminishing, you’re an NPC of the order of which reading this article will produce entirely undramatic drafts from the Overton window.

If you held your nose and cast your ballot for the lesser evil, you might be a normie.

Continuing in the sheep theme:

But segueing to a more evolved species:

Tonika includes David Graeber’s 3-min brilliant take on politics:

David talks about the Republican con, in which a candidate pretends to be stupid, resulting in the predictable ridicule of them by the Democratic academic and professional elite. This causes the base to say, “I bet they’d make fun of me too and say I’m stupid.” This makes an Ivy League graduate rich enough to buy their own college relatable to the working class.

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deconstructing the debate

In the comment thread of an article, marta of Becoming You/Me/We wrote:

I visited my family and had intense conversations about politics. My brother still sees the "good intentions" of the democrats, gives them the benefit of the doubt. I shared your list of how to have a better argument and we all liked the list very much. Patted ourselves on the back for liking each other. I tried to get everyone to talk about what evidence would change your/my minds, but no one wanted to address that. I'm not sure there is evidence that could change my mind into trusting democrats or really any national politician. What about you? Is there evidence that could lead you to trusting a national politician?

I answered:

Since we already have the liking each other covered, I'll define the terms in your question, "Is there evidence that could lead you to trusting a national politician?"

"Lead towards" is a good phrase that indicates a continuum, not an absolute. So I'd interpret that as 'what evidence would move me towards rather than away.'

"trust" is something I define the same as belief—making up your mind in advance of the evidence or experience. I don't believe in believing or trusting, even in personal relationships. Trust implies an unspoken contract, that you've given someone power over you in exchange for something else. That's unfair to the person who's being 'trusted' because they may not have wanted that power. It binds the other with self-sacrifice.

"national" is a clue as to what that unspoken agreement is. Why do we want one person to have power over 330M people? I think because we identify with 'our' candidate and feel it will give us power to impose what we want on all the rest. I think we need to question that desire within ourselves.

"politician," from its etymology, would be a person who determines policy. That's not what Presidents do. They act in ways that supersede policy, make exceptions to it, or veto policy that's been laboriously set by Congress. What's the point of having policy?

To rephrase your question, "Is there evidence that could move you towards giving up your power over yourself for an implicit contract of power over 330M others?" my answer is yes! The only legitimate use of power over others, as in a parent, is to give someone eventual power over themselves. If any national candidate had a platform of giving communities economic control over their own labor, I'd devote as much power as I had to getting them elected.

The word ‘trust’ also means someone will do what they say they’re going to. But no one’s even bothering with that anymore. As irrelevant as ‘who are you voting for?’ is the question, ‘what do they stand for?’ There are no platforms, no policies, no proposals, no promises. After Obama said the first thing he’d do was close Guantanamo, maybe they learned their lesson about being specific.

I don’t entirely agree with Alicen, Sarah, James and Whitney. I don’t think we can vote with our dollars. Is it a vote in God’s Free Energy Empire when it’s followed by five ways to donate and courses, shirts and albums to buy? We can’t reject the political system without an economic system, I think. To give the best of ourselves for free would require system change, and I don’t think we’re I-Maging that Nation into being in any organized way, especially as a collective.

I don’t know that refusing to comply with the system makes any difference to the system. It goes on, chewing up lives. It requires tremendous independence to refuse the system—no need for a job, a house, or anything where they have leverage over you. Typically it requires getting money from people who are complying with the system, like James and Whitney do.

James talks about the need to go off-line and form connections with people in your community. For me, those connections depend on keeping my mouth shut! Keep those online connections, I say, because those are the people with whom you are I-Maging a new world—something we should be doing much more deliberately.

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spheroiding the earth

A year and a half ago, Mathew Crawford interviewed me on What Do We Want From a President? This was when RFK jr was bright, shiny and new as a candidate. The interview is on Rumble where I just noticed that Mathew describes himself as a Spheroidal Earther ;-)

Mathew recently did an interview on Doc Malik called Education, Power & Rediscovering Independent Thought:

#244 - Mathew Crawford: Education, Power, and Rediscovering Independent Thought

I wrote in the comments:

On Tonika's Visceral Adventures, a commenter just dubbed him Math Crawford, which I thought was apt and a great mnemonic device for that single t! I'm halfway in and SO impressed that you've kept Math to a single topic! Our convos generally prove his point about infinity for the number of times you can segue and then segue from a segue.

I love Mathew's business title, The Art of Solving Problems, and looking at it as pattern recognition—something we share in this conspiracy space, I think. Tonika had written, "naming the problem specifically is half the solution," which I've worded as 'If you get the question right, the answer is self-evident.' That seems to go with how Math looks at math.

To solve this problem we need to name it: Communities don’t own their own labor because they don’t own the credit system backed by the housing. They therefore can’t take care of families and each other without serving the rich. My book, How to Dismantle an Empire, spends four sections understanding the problem and the last two imagining the solution.

This is the first (and so far, only) book in the series A 2020 Vision. We’ve spent the last five year dismantling the empire of lies, going deeper than I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime. The past has unravelled. With the next five years, I’d like to use my domain a2020vision.org as a collective hub to imagine the future in all these different areas. What would we do if we owned the credit backed by the mortgages, so we could own our own lives? It’s time to write How to Build a Commonwealth together.

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Conjuring your i-land in a mind without borders, this episode is how to mage our heartlands into existence. Uses Sane Francisco's 50 Shades of Beige, What's in a Name, Really? for the AI Extravaganza, Victory Palace on ImageNation: the Only Nation, Charles Upton on Can AI Write Poetry? and Gavin Mounsey on nature as the oldest scripture.

Answer: Decentralize, and get out of the way. Mathew Crawford interviewed me on his Rounding the Earth podcast. In this video, I summarize some points and elaborate on others. We talked about geoengineering, the duodecimal system, cryptocurrencies, the Greater Reset, trust in the resistance movement, and telling the truth. I quote from Ellen Brown on How the War on Crypto Triggered a Banking Crisis and CJ Hopkins on The Great Divide. The 90-min interview is linked in the Substack.

In response to Caretology, I explain why mothers are natural economists, how carets could turn a golf course into a food forest, farm & restaurant, and why universal basic income is ordering pizza in your parent's basement. I continue to explore the caret system with William Hunter Duncan and John Wright.