Demonocracy

Although there is a long history of bomb attacks on Shia Muslims in neighbouring Pakistan, there has never been such a large-scale attack in Afghanistan, raising fears that radical outside groups are being drawn into the already complex and fragmented Afghan insurgency.
-The Guardian

Well it is certainly fortunate that we liberated these poor people from the Taliban.

It is worth recalling, as we all wring our hands over the depredations of Wall Street and the inability of some twenty-five-year-old Americans to repay hastily accrued "student" debt, that the American empire is still in full-on bone-crusher mode.  These things can't readily be divorced, the one from the other; nevertheless, as a matter of emphasis, it's good to remember that there's extraction, and there's extraction; the machinery of profit exports its more sordid forms of violence just as it exports its most exploitative forms of labor; pepper spray is to the cluster bomb as the service sector is to the sweat shop.  This is another reason why when folks say that OWS and like minds are naive in their disengagement from electoral politics and their belief that their civilization is irrevocably broken and unrecoverable, I spit on the sidewalk.  OWS is insufficiently cynical.  America is quite willing and able to destroy whole societies, yet you believe it is somehow morally indefinsible to avoid the ballot box; you think it anti-democratic?  Democracy has delivered the greatest military juggernaut in the history of mankind.  You will of course say, oh, no, America is an ersatz empire; it can barely control a restive province or two full of primitives.  I say you've got the spyglass backwards.  We can smash whole countries in heedless, half-cocked campaigns barely funded by fraudulent national accountancy.  And your response to this monstrosity is to say that we ought organize within the existing channels?