This is an “unlisted” YouTube video because it’s for paid subscribers. https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/victoria-nuland-preemptively-warns

“It’s the third election in a row,” says Rachel Maddow with a told-you-so grin, “in which Russia has tried to interfere to try to get Trump into the White House.”

“He’s at it again,” responds former State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, the same smile on her face (it seems they’re struggling to hide their joy this time around). Nuland, who has worked for both George Bush and Dick Cheney, has become a go-to warrior for Dems as a leading pusher of stolen election claims as well as a driving force behind the Ukraine-Russian War. “This time [Putin’s] not even trying to hide his hand, and he has far more sophisticated tools.”

Russia’s so-called tools in the past amounted to, as evidenced in the Mueller report and an FBI investigation, a few thousand dollars spent on social media posts, such as the ‘buff Bernie’ meme. This time, Nuland claims, Putin has a sophisticated new AI, plus $10 million spent on influencers to steal the election for Donald Trump. This accusation, of course, needs no further investigation from Maddow.

Only another smile.

On the other side of our terrible election, Donald Trump is making new threats against Iran that sound equally crazy. After his pet Sean Hannity asked why Kamala Harris is encouraging Iran to assassinate him (what?), Trump went on an unhinged rant about how the US should treat Iran.

And when it comes to our terrible treatment of other countries, it’s harder to find a more one-sided relationship than the US-Ukraine alliance. And Ukrainian President Zelensky seems to be finally realizing that as well, calling out the US for pushing him into a needless war which has led to the deaths of countless Ukrainians.

It’s a terrible week on corporate media as always. Watch with Katie and Aaron to hopefully laugh instead of cry at all of it. Thanks for supporting Useful Idiots, subscribe to watch the full episode here

We have entered a strange, late-stage Empire era, comparable to the Soviet Union’s Glasnost, in which elements of the US imperial braintrust can see with blinding clarity Washington’s entire hegemonic global project is stumbling rapidly and irreversibly towards extinction, and announce so publicly - but their insight does not translate into evasive governmental action at home. The RAND Commission report elicited no mainstream coverage or comment whatsoever, proof positive there isn’t a concomitant effort to manufacture consent for its radical, far-reaching prescriptions.

Were the Commission’s recommendations remotely plausible, a multipronged PR campaign would’ve immediately ensued to convince Americans of the righteousness of the Empire’s mission, and the necessity of investing in US “defense” to the tune of trillions. The media’s silence on the report’s damning findings definitionally reflects an omertà among the US political class. They well-know American reindustrialisation can’t happen. So, the fatal “disconnect” between Pentagon operational and industrial planning identified by RAND will endure, and with it ever-intensifying US military impotence. We’re spectating the Empire’s final acts in real-time.

While there’s a permanent crisis of the family, there’s also a permanent opportunity for capitalism to re-assert its power via the reconstruction of the family.

Throughout the book, Cooper traces the ways in which neoliberal and neoconservative forces have united to essentially move the responsibility for social reproduction from public or state responsibility to private and market responsibility.

But Cooper is also keen to point out that left-wing responses to the crisis of the Fordist family wage have often ended up falling into a conservative trap of actually reifying the family as a singular transhistorical construction.

Melinda Cooper’s book: Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

I hope you go over there, get your little brain all scrambled up with PTSD, and then come back here and see how much the United States cares about you, pookie.

Interview with Gabriel Rockhill about his article, Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek.

The interviewer doesn’t have much interesting to say IMO. I would skip over most of his segments.

[The cultural imperialist project] polices the left border of critique, but it does it at an objective vs subjective level. And what I mean by that is that there are coordinates for what the dominant discourse is, and what people need to know if they want to be in these conversations. And it creates a reality, which was very much my reality coming up, where I was interested in radical theory, because I grew up as a farm kid working construction. I knew what exploitation was. I knew what oppression was. I knew a lot of horrible things about the world because I was living them in the capitalist empire. And I gravitated toward what I thought were the most radical things, but I was not aware of the objective conditions that structured that radical discourse in such a way that all of the real discourses—which were anti-imperialist and liberatory—were actually largely excluded from those debates. And so I read a bunch of Negri and Žižek and Badiou and all of these people, and eventually realized, well, I’m looking in the wrong place. I’m looking in the place that the empire tells me I should look for radical theory.

PATO: The Pacific and Atlantic Treaty Organization

Their cooperation is forcing NATO to build closer ties with like-minded countries in the Indo-Pacific. For the first time, senior officials from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan took part in a meeting with NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday.

They baddies are “forcing” NATO into this. The poor imperial core, being dragged around again. #AlwaysTheSameMap

Citations Needed podcast: The Always Stumbling US Empire: "Stumbling", "sliding", "drawn into" war––the media frequently assumes the US is bumbling its way around the world. The idea that the United States operates in “good faith” is taken for granted for most of the American press while war is always portrayed as something that happens to the US, not something it seeks out.

Also, doesn’t “CRINK” already have a name, the Axis of Resistance?

Anyway, death to POTATO.

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism

John Mearsheimer is a realist who’s still and always faithful to the liberal international order, unlike the also liberal Jeffery Sachs. All-In Summit 2024: John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs

Philosophy professor Hans-Georg Moeller, author of A Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality

For [Harris] the two things are the same: on the one hand objective moral truth (universal morality), and on the other hand scientific facts about what increases wellbeing and what doesn’t. […] I think the two things are very different from one another.

Just as religion is not something that depends on the existence of god, but is a specific social practice, a specific form of communication that relates to a certain unrealistic assumption; likewise morality is a specific discourse, a specific way of acting, that relates to and derives from making unrealistic assumptions about something that doesn’t exist.

Follow-up video: If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Democrats were the most gullible 😐

jwz: Perennial "Fuck the Blue Angels" post.