caitlin has met the enemy and it is us as pogo said so many years ago;

It takes some learning and insight to understand that western civilization really is the absolute worst. There can be a kind of hipster outsider tendency to judge your own society more harshly than you do others, and at first glance it can look like that’s what’s going on when you see western critics of the western empire denouncing the criminality of their own government and its allies much more harshly than governments like Russia, China or Iran. It’s not until you’ve done a fair bit of research that you go, wait, okay no, we are actually quantifiably far more destructive than any other power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. We really are the bad guys. We really are the evil empire, and everyone slamming our side as murderous monsters are absolutely correct.

Whenever I say this I get westerners going “Oh yeah well I’d much rather live here then over there” or “Oh well if it’s so bad here then why don’t you go live over there?”, but the fact that they immediately start babbling about where they’d prefer to live is just a symptom of how sick and twisted this civilization is. They’re so cognitively and emotionally divorced from the violence and tyranny their government is inflicting upon the global south that they think the question of which countries are worse than others is a question of how pleasant it would be for them personally to live in. It’s like yes asshole, it’s very nice to be living in the imperial core that’s receiving the benefits of mass murder and imperialist extraction, and it’s less nice to live in the countries where the murder and extraction is happening. That’s the entire fucking point here.

It can be nice to live in the western world, but the western world is not nice. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet, and it’s not even close...........more.........