The First World Problem

is a psychopathic definition of freedom that values individual profit over human emancipation, uses money to make the media into a business of lies owned by the very same psychopaths, turns mother nature into an overfished trash dump, entitles elites to ciphon trillions, murder millions of innocent civilians, and projects the symptoms of their disease, the poverty of their vision onto the entire planet and its populations.

First world freedom is about workers in developing countries working for pennies, in sweat shops.

I want to bring up Sartre here because the comments section on a recent post was besieged by libertarians mansplaining his writing to me.

Let’s talk about responsibility.

American citizens are complicit in a hell of a lot of humans rights violations worldwide, caused by the corporate oligarchy that we fund with our tax dollars.

Scott Beauchamp’s recap on the season finale of Serial sums it up nicely:

This is the “end-stopped line” that the show finishes on: the accusation that we’re the ones to truly blame, as a society, for not doing everything we could to end the war or prevent it in the first place. Our complicity hangs in the air, as unresolved as the war that we’re still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. I know this season of Serial wasn’t as popular as the last, and I think besides the occasionally alienating complexity of the military, this collective culpability is primarily the reason why. The entire season builds up to a guilty verdict, not for Bergdahl or the Army, but for a daydream nation willfully insulating itself from the violence being waged in its name, half-bored by the brutal projects of empire.