“If you’re voting for those parties, you have a mental illness. It’s no longer a debate.”

–Canadian Commie, Ignoring Climate Change to Death

He specifically means the Libs and Cons in Canada, but of course those are just the northern versions of the Dems and Reps down here, and the same applies.

His assertion comes in the context of what we all continue to fail to do about the destruction of the climate and our own Civilization. Of course, neither corporate party gives a damn about the suffering that will result from the destruction … so it follows logically that continuing to support them in spite of that means your head is broken.

I don’t have any major issues with that formulation, even setting aside the climate change issue. What capitalism and Empire have brought us, even before they bring us literal burning to death, is more ugly and wrong and anti-human than not.

We’re not just on the evil path to hell as a party or a nation or as an identity faction like black or jewish or working-class person. We’re on the road to hell as a species.

Anybody who wants you to be worried about Meghan and Harry’s family issues, or the fortunes of the Cuomo mafia, or cellulite on your thighs, or any of that other bullshit they handwave about to distract you from the reality unfolding in front of your eyes, does not have your interests at heart. Nor do they have sane human values at heart. They’re selling you lies for their own gain, and if you buy it, you very well may have a disorder of the brain, or at the very least you’re a dog running after a tennis ball they’ve thrown and told you to fetch.

CC Jon goes on to assert that even up there where they have alternative parties, the NDP and the Greens, those parties are still captured by corporatism, capitalism, and institutionalism, and so no better. I’m not quite as willing to give up all hope on electoral remedies, but I will say that we do not have the luxury of twenty years to build movements into parties and then start real change from there. If voting for D’s and R’s is useless and insane, but voting can still change things, it will have to happen very fast.

So … what then?

CC Jon first says that millions of people have to take to the streets. Then he says that the same millions need to organize to take the over minor parties and use them as an electoral battering ram to break down the walls and take the power away from those who abuse it.

The prescription strikes me as muddy and improbable.

I still think we’re genuinely doomed. All of us. Really.

I stand very alert and ready to be proven wrong. That’s my politics now. A partitioned segment of my brain that remains on standby ready to seize the right opportunity for honest revolution, should one ever appear.

But until that happens, if it ever does, the rest of my brain and being will continue on, recording and reporting and publishing the reality of our reality with as much truth and integrity as one flawed human and a few of his digital fellow travelers can muster up. I’m losing the desire to be sardonic and cool. I just want to tell you real stories, show you real images, not because they’ll save the world, but because hearing, sharing, speaking, listening, passing the painted words back and forth

Is the best we have for each other, at the dawn of the apocalypse.