The Duopoly is a Disease

In the land of the free, we are given a choice every election cycle: Red or Blue. Coke or Pepsi. The illusion of choice wrapped in patriotic fanfare. But beneath the spectacle lies a truth most Americans feel in their gut but rarely say out loud: the two party system is a rigged game, a duopoly that has hijacked our democracy.

The Democratic and Republican parties are not ideological opposites; they are co-managers of an empire. One plays good cop while the other plays bad cop, but both serve the same masters: corporations, lobbyists, and the wealthy. They compete for power the way monopolists “compete”: by making sure no true alternative ever gains traction.

Independent and third-party candidates are routinely locked out of debates, buried by media blackouts, and crushed by impossible ballot access laws. Why? Because both parties know that real competition would expose how little they offer beyond symbolic bickering and bipartisan stagnation.

The duopoly thrives on division. Democrats and Republicans whip their bases into a frenzy over culture issues while quietly agreeing on endless war, corporate welfare, and mass surveillance. It’s no accident. The spectacle distracts us while they pass the same bloated Pentagon budgets and sell off public goods to private hands.

Gridlock isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It keeps meaningful reform off the table. Medicare for All? Dead on arrival. A living wage? Maybe by 2050. Climate action? Let’s ask ExxonMobil how fast we can move. The duopoly ensures nothing truly threatens their donors’ profits.

Leftist movements such as socialists, anarchists, and greens are smeared or ignored not because they’re fringe, but because they challenge the core of the system: capitalism, imperialism, police power. The establishment doesn’t fear chaos, it fears organization. It fears a population that realizes there are more than two ways to govern ourselves.

Likewise, when libertarians call for ending wars or dismantling the surveillance state, they’re treated as dangerous radicals. Any idea outside the red-blue matrix must be neutralized.

So what’s the way out?

Break the machine.

It starts with refusing to legitimize the duopoly. Don’t let “vote blue no matter who” or “lesser evilism” guilt you into obedience. Demand more: ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, ballot access reform, we need mass political education and direct action.

We need to organize outside their system. That means building dual power: worker co-ops, mutual aid networks, radical unions, and community councils that don’t wait for permission from Washington. The future won’t be won in the voting booth alone. It will be built in the streets, on picket lines, and in the quiet rebellion of everyday people saying “enough is enough.”

The bottom line is this: the two party system is not a democracy. It’s monopoly politics. It doesn’t represent us. It contains us. And like all monopolies, it must be broken.

We don’t need better Democrats or nicer Republicans. We need a new system entirely, one that serves people and not profits.

Barking Mad: The Philosophy of Wilfred

The FX show “Wilfred” is one of my all-time favorite shows. I never saw the original Australian version, but the American one struck a chord with me. I’ve watched and re-watched it several times. It’s philosophical. It’s stoner comedy. It’s dark. It’s all the things I love.

On the surface “Wilfred” is a stoner comedy where Ryan (played by Elijah Wood), is a clinically depressed ex-lawyer who tried to kill himself, but instead found himself talking to his neighbor’s dog, who appears to him as a full-grown man in a dog costume. Hijinks ensue. But beneath the bong smoke and profanity lies something far more profound: a surreal meditation of identity, sanity, and the human condition.

At its core, “Wilfred” is about the search for meaning in a meaningless world. Ryan’s life is sterile, scripted, and empty. He’s alienated from his family, his former profession, and himself. Enter Wilfred: a creature who embodies chaos, instinct, and the id run wild. He shits in Ryan’s neighbor’s boots, humps teddy bears, and goads Ryan into ever-more reckless behavior. But Wilfred is also, somehow, Ryan’s guide — his Virgil through a very shaggy Inferno.

The question that hovers over every episode: Is Wilfred real? Is Ryan insane? Does it matter?

This is classic absurdism. Think Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus: the recognition that life has no inherent meaning doesn’t lead to despair — it leads to freedom. Wilfred doesn’t hand Ryan answers. He hands him paradoxes, jokes, and humiliations. But in doing so, he forces Ryan to confront the absurdity of his own life and to choose whether or not to keep pushing the boulder.

Philosophically, Wilfred could be read as Ryan’s shadow self — Carl Jung’s idea of the hidden, repressed parts of the psyche. Wilfred says the things Ryan won’t say. He acts on the desires Ryan suppresses. He’s at once friend, enemy, conscience, and saboteur. It’s like Fight Club if Tyler Durden wore a dog suit and loved Scooby Snacks.

Freud would have a field day here. Wilfred is all id — sex, aggression, pleasure, impulse. Ryan, meanwhile, is ego — repressed, neurotic, obsessed with doing “the right thing.” Their interactions often mirror Freud’s model of the mind in conflict. And the battleground? Reality itself.

But what makes the show so intriguing is that Wilfred isn’t just destructive. He’s also deeply wise in a perverse way. He teaches Ryan how to feel, how to trust, and ultimately how to live, not by giving him control — but by forcing him to let go of it. Just as Tyler Durden said to the Narrator in Fight Club: “Just let go!”

In a society that values productivity over introspection, “Wilfred” dares to ask: what if your mental breakdown is the most honest moment of your life? What if the voice in your head isn’t something to silence, but something to listen to, especially when it’s telling dick jokes?

Wilfred represents the part of us that refuses to play along with the farce of normality. He sniffs out the hypocrisy in Ryan’s family, the cowardice in his friends, and the rot at the heart of every polite interaction. He is, in many ways, Ryan’s subconscious revolt against a life lived on autopilot.

It’s no accident that Ryan meets Wilfred at his lowest point. He’s suicidal not because he wants to die, but because he doesn’t know how to live. Wilfred doesn’t save Ryan with self-help cliches or pharmaceuticals, he drags him through absurdity until Ryan sees the game for what it is. Not a test to be passed, but a joke to be told well.

In the final season, the show doubles down on ambiguity. Wilfred might be a hallucination. Or a trickster god. Or some ancient being teaching Ryan spiritual lessons in the only way Ryan will accept. Or he might just be a dog and Ryan is insane.

The brilliance of “Wilfred” is that it never tells you the answer. Like any good philosophical riddle, it trusts the question to do the work. It doesn’t resolve — it disturbs. It doesn’t comfort — it challenges.

And maybe that’s what makes it feel true.

In a world screaming for certainty, “Wilfred” howls for ambiguity. It’s a show that understands mental illness not as a glitch to be fixed, but as a symptom of something deeper: a culture that has lost touch with play, instinct, and wonder.

So if you ever find yourself talking to a man in a dog suit, don’t panic. Sit down. Light a joint. Listen. He may not be real. But he might just be right.

Why I Broke Away from Nietzsche

Like a lot of people, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche in high school. Call it teen angst or whatever you will, but he felt dangerous, electric, liberating. While everyone else was parroting morality or chasing grades, Nietzsche was telling me to reject the herd, smash idols, and carve my own path. It felt like rebellion with a brain.

However, over time I outgrew him. Not because I stopped caring about meaning or individuality, but because I realized what kind of individualism he was selling, and who else was selling it.

Nietzsche championed the “Ubermensch,” the one who rises about the herd to create new values. Ayn Rand gave us John Galt, the genius industrialist who shrugs off society to build his perfect world. It hit me one day that these two weren’t as far apart as I once thought. Both glorify the exceptional individual. Both sneer at the masses. Both turn their back on solidarity.

What started as an inspiration to think freely began to feel like an excuse to disengage. Nietzsche was attacking morality from above. Rand was doing it from the boardroom. Either way, it ended with contempt for the people I now wanted to fight alongside.

I’m sure my readers know by now, but what really broke the spell was Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus didn’t offer me transcendence (or male and femalescendence for all you transphobes out there.) It didn’t demand I become a god. It simply asked me to imagine Sisyphus happy. That small act of rebellion — accepting the absurd and refusing to despair — hit harder than a thousand pages of will to power.

I realized I didn’t want to overcome the herd. I wanted to organize it. I didn’t want to create values in a vacuum. I wanted to challenge the systems that crush people every day. Nietzsche gave me the tools to reject inherited meaning, but he had nothing to offer once the dust settled.

Nietzsche lives in the realm of aesthetics: life as art, suffering as transformation, truth as personal creation. But when you’re watching the wealthy elite hoard resources, cops brutalize communities, and working people drown in debt, aesthetics isn’t enough. You need ethics. You need justice. You need solidarity.

Nietzsche taught me to question everything, and in turn, I had to question him too.

I didn’t reject Nietzsche because he was wrong about everything (did that with Rand.) I rejected him because he wasn’t enough. He lit the fire. Camus gave it direction. Socialism gave it purpose.

If Nietzsche taught me to become who I am, then breaking with him was part of that becoming. And maybe that’s the most Nietzschean move of all.

The Government Just Gave Itself Permission to Ignore the Law

Let’s not sugarcoat this: the U.S. government is gutting what little remains of “checks and balances,” and most people are too distracted or disillusioned to notice.

Buried inside a House bill—unrelated to taxes, mind you—is a ticking time bomb aimed directly at the rule of law. A quiet little provision would block all funding to enforce contempt of court orders. Read that again. If this passes, the executive branch can ignore court rulings with zero consequences. It’s not just a loophole—it’s a license to violate the Constitution.

Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert, laid it out plainly: if the government defies a judge, nothing can be done to force compliance. No enforcement. No consequences. No rule of law. “The greatest effect of adopting the provision,” he warns, “would be to make countless existing judicial orders unenforceable.” Translation: the courts become a theater of empty gestures, while the executive runs wild.

This isn’t theoretical. The Trump administration has already ignored court orders, including the Supreme Court’s ruling to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from a black-site-style detention in El Salvador. They just didn’t do it. And now? They’re trying to make that standard operating procedure.

This is what a dying democracy looks like: not in flames, but in red tape and fine print. Congress didn’t vote to abolish the Constitution—they just cut its funding.If you still think the system can be fixed from within, ask yourself: What happens when the system rewrites the rules to ignore its own crimes?

This is not just a Trump issue. This is a bipartisan rot. They’ve built a government that polices protestors, jails whistleblowers, and spies on everyone—but suddenly when it comes to holding itself accountable, it’s “too expensive” to enforce the law?

The lesson is clear: the government does not fear the courts. It fears accountability. And it will rewrite reality itself to avoid it.

Burn your illusions. The state is not your protector. It’s a self-perpetuating power machine, and it just found a way to cut the brakes.

“Every Life is Precious!”

Says the GOP, while slashing Medicaid and SNAP that keep actual people alive.

Joni Ernst: “Well we all are going to die.” That’s the GOP’s response when people warn cuts will kill the poor, the sick, and the elderly.

So let me get this straight:

A fetus = sacred.

A hungry child = expendable.

A disabled adult on Medicaid = acceptable casualty?

If “life is precious,” maybe stop pushing policies that treat it like a budget item.This isn’t pro-life. It’s pro-birth, pro-corporate, and anti-human.

When Was America Ever “Great”?

“Make America Great Again!”

I’m tired of hearing it. Not just because it’s overused, but because every time someone says it, I want to ask: “When, exactly, was America great? And for whom?”

It’s a nostalgic slogan, sure. But nostalgia has a habit of airbrushing the past until only the myths remain.

Let’s break it down.

Was America “great” economically?

Maybe during the post-WWII boom. But that was also a time when women were shoved out of the workforce and back into the kitchen. Black Americans were still living under Jim Crow. Unions were strong, but mostly white. The middle class was expanding, but only if you fit the mold.

Militarily?

America’s always had a big stick. But we’ve also used it to prop up dictators, overthrow elected governments, and keep the Global South under our thumb. That’s not greatness — that’s empire.

Culturally?

Sure, American art, music, and innovation have been influential. But much of that greatness came in spite of the system and not because of it. Black musicians, queer writers, immigrant inventors — they created brilliance while fighting for the right to exist.

So who was America great for?

White, straight, cisgender men with money. Everyone else had to fight for scraps or fight to survive.

That’s what “Make America Great Again” means to a lot of people: Make it comfortable again for the people who used to have a monopoly on power. It’s not about greatness. It’s about control.

We don’t need to make America “great again.” We need to make something entirely new. Something built on truth, equity, and justice — not nostalgia for a past that never existed for most of us.

Even Elon Musk Thinks the New “Big Beautiful Bill” is a Joke

You know a bill is bad when even Apartheid Clyde — the meme king of capitalism and Trump’s former efficiency czar — calls it out.

Apartheid Clyde took aim at the Republican-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” (yes, that’s the actual name of the bill. No, I’m not shitting you.) It’s a monstrosity of legislation that somehow manages to combine massive tax cuts for the rich, bloated defense spending, Medicaid restrictions, and a fresh punch in the gut to clean energy. And just like that, Republicans have found a way to spend trillions while pretending they’re fiscally conservative.

Apartheid Clyde, who once led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Trump, publicly slammed the bill for ballooning the deficit and betraying the message of DOGE. “It can be big or beautiful, not both,” Musk quipped, a rare moment of clarity from someone who once called himself a “free speech absolutist” while banning critics from Twitter (I’m still never calling it “X.”)

Let’s be real: Apartheid Clyde isn’t exactly a paragon of progressive virtue. This is the guy who spends his time playing CEO cosplay and beefing with journalists online. But when even he is sounding the alarm on a Republican spending bill, you know it’s not just ugly — it’s a Trojan horse stuffed with billionaire tax breaks and red meat for MAGA donors.

The Congressional Office Budget estimates this “beautiful” disaster will add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That’s more than the GDP of Germany, and somehow, the Republicans still claim we “can’t afford” student loan forgiveness or universal healthcare.

So why is Apartheid Clyde breaking ranks now? Simple. The bill fucks with his brand. It undercuts clean energy (bad for Tesla), bloats defense (bad for his whole “efficiency” thing), and makes him look like a sucker for ever aligning with Mango Mussolini in the first place. Self-interest is a hell of a drug.

Still, his critique opens a window: when even a techno-libertarian billionaire thinks the GOP has lost the plot, maybe it’s time to stop pretending they ever had one. The “Big Beautiful Bill” isn’t governance. It’s graft dressed up in patriotic drag.

If you’re pissed about this bill, don’t just laugh at Apartheid Clyde’s tweets. Organize. Disrupt. And remember: the people writing this legislation don’t care if you live, as long as they get paid.

The Hardest Thing to Do is to Do Nothing

I mentioned a while back my top five favorite books. One of which is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. On its surface it’s about addiction, entertainment, and tennis, but I got something more out of it, especially after reading it a second time. It cracked open a hard truth: most of us are addicted, not just to substances or screens, but to never being still.

The characters in the book are addicts in every sense: addicted to drugs, entertainment, achievement, self-destruction. But underneath it all is a deeper affliction: a fear of sitting with themselves. A fear of silence. A fear of being. That hit me hard.

We live in a culture wired to keep us stimulated. Boredom has become unbearable. Stillness feels like a threat. We scroll endlessly, binge-watch, overwork, overthink. We’re so used to noise that silence starts to feel like failure. And Infinite Jest doesn’t just expose this, it rubs your face in it. Over and over. For over 1000 pages.

Wallace seemed to understand that the most addictive thing in the world isn’t drugs or fame or entertainment. It’s escape. And the most radical, uncomfortable act in a world built on escape may be to simply sit. To be quiet. To be present with your own mind without numbing it, avoiding it, or filling it with static.

Reading Infinite Jest is kind of like detox. You get frustrated. You want to look away. You want to grab your phone. You want out. And maybe that’s the point. The book is an endurance test, not just of attention, but of self-confrontation. It doesn’t reward you with answers, it dares you to sit in the mess and feel it.

And maybe that’s where recovery — whatever that means for each of us — actually begins.

Burn It Down

Not with fire and torches. It’s time to accept what we already know deep down: this system is broken beyond repair. No amount of voting, begging, or incremental reform is going to fix the rotting corpse of capitalism. We’re not dealing with a system that needs tweaks. We’re dealing with a system that feeds on exploitation, shits out injustice, and hands us a smiley face sticker for surviving another day under it.

We keep getting told we just need to be patient. That change is slow. That “the adults are in charge.” Meanwhile, the planet’s boiling, wages are stagnant, housing is a scam, billionaires are playing god, and the police still treat poor people like target practice.

How much more do we need to see before we admit this isn’t a glitch … it’s the design?

We don’t need to fix the system. We need to replace it. All of it. The politics, the economy, the structures that define who gets to live with dignity and who gets ground into dust. We’ve spent decades duct-taping injustice and calling it progress. That era’s over. It’s time for a clean break.

We need to start over. From scratch. Build something that works for everyone.

That means no more letting the wealthy write the rules. No more pretending corporations are people. No more parties that pretend to fight each other while feasting at the same donor buffet. No more bootlicking billionaires like they’re gods just because they hoarded enough money to make themselves unaccountable.

Let’s stop asking how we can work within the system. Start asking how we can undermine it. How can we hack it, sabotage it, expose it, and ultimately make it irrelevant.

It’s not radical to want food, housing, healthcare, and freedom. What’s radical is tolerating a system that denies those things in the name of “freedom.” What’s radical is watching the wealthy hoard enough money to end world hunger while telling the rest of us to work harder.

We are not obligated to keep this going. We don’t owe this system our loyalty. The people in power want us to believe we’re powerless without them. But the truth is that they’re nothing without us.

It’s time to organize. To disrupt. To create parallel systems. Mutual aid, worker co-ops, community defense, direct action, cyber sabotage, mass noncompliance — whatever it takes to grind the gears and flip the switch.

Overthrow doesn’t have to look like a revolution with marching bands and guillotines. (Though … you never know.) It can look like refusing to play along. It can look like walking away from the scripts they hand us and writing something new.

This isn’t a call to chaos. It’s a call to clarity. The future is not going to be handed to us — we have to take it.

Tear it down. Start over. Let’s build something worth living in.

Love is a Choice

We’re taught to think of love as something that happens to us, like a lightning bolt out of nowhere. Movies and songs frame love as this overwhelming emotion that sweeps you off your feet and takes over your life. But that version of love, while intoxicating, is incomplete.

Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a choice.

Anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship—romantic, familial, or platonic—knows that emotions are fickle. Some days, you feel deeply connected. Other days, you don’t feel much at all. Life gets in the way. People change. Routines dull the spark. Stress takes a toll.

If love were only an emotion, it wouldn’t survive these cycles. But if love is a choice, then it can endure. Because choice isn’t reactive. It’s active. You decide to keep showing up, to keep caring, to keep investing.

When you choose love, you take ownership. You’re not just along for the ride. You’re steering. That means:

You don’t walk away when it’s hard.

You apologize when you screw up.

You listen when you’d rather be right.

You support when you’re tired.

You stay when it would be easier to leave.

It’s not always romantic. It’s rarely easy. But it’s real.

“Falling in love” is passive. It implies we had no say in the matter. That sounds nice until things fall apart, and then suddenly, we’re powerless again. But love, when it’s a choice, gives us power. Not control over the other person, but control over how we love.

You don’t “fall” into long-term love. You build it. Brick by brick. Day by day. Choice by choice.

Like a craft or a discipline, love improves with practice. You can get better at being patient, at setting boundaries, at giving grace, at showing up. None of those are feelings. They’re skills. Feelings can inspire love. They can deepen it. But they can’t sustain it alone.

Love that’s only emotional burns hot and fast. But love that’s chosen—again and again, on the good days and the bad ones—is firewood. It keeps you warm for a lifetime.