⛧ First Church of Hypocrisy, Blasphemy, and Self-Righteousness ⛧

Someone on FB didn't understand why someone's pet was being called a "rescue" if they had to pay money to get it, so I enlightened them:

It's something done here in the US, a scam, like how they charge thousands of dollars to get a single aspirin from the hospital when you're sick.

See, the city collects domestic animals like dogs and cats that have gotten loose on the streets. If you've shelled out money for a microchip and/or a collar and the city picks it up, you get your pet back. If nobody claims the pet because there's no proof that anyone owned it, the city instead sells the animal for an exorbitant fee that's still cheaper than getting a pet from a breeder, and they try to sell this as a good thing by calling it a "rescue." But it's only called a rescue because if they don't sell the animal within a certain amount of time, they just kill it and toss the body in a dumpster like PETA does. Hence, if you buy into their racket, you're "rescuing" the pet from being murdered by the state for the crime of existing in an unapproved way.

So, like I said, a scam. Or a racket? It's capitalism at work, either way.

Someone on a Facebook post asked what I'd eat still even if I was a billionaire, and I answered:

Well that's not going to happen. I'm too nice a person to ever become a billionaire. If I owned a business, I'd be paying my employees $35 an hour, paying for full health insurance for them, giving them maternity and paternity leave, paid time off, four day work weeks, six hour shifts, and being generous with raises. I would be honest and fair with my customers, offer a quality product, and be honest and fair with my suppliers. With all that in mind, even if I was selling something with the same viral hit status as Beanie Babies and the Macarena combined, I'd never be a billionaire because all of this is opposite of what billionaires do. Billionaires becomes billionaires by lying about the quality of goods or services, overworking and underpaying/undercompensating workers, price gouging, cheating their customers, embezzling, and all sorts of horrible things. Nobody good or kind ever becomes a billionaire. Which is why they use charity to improve their PR. If you think a billionaire is a good person, their PR worked on you. You bought their lies. And those charities... the amounts they donate may sound like a lot of money, but it's not even 0.001% of their wealth. Deciding they're good people for donating millions of dollars is the equivalent of holding a parade for a guy making $15 an hour who tossed a penny at a homeless guy once.

"Fewer than one in four employees feel strongly that their organization cares about their wellbeing."

Well no fucking shit. Fewer than one in four employees are fucking idiots.

When will people learn that employers don't care about employees? They don't even care about customers. Employees are expendable draft horses to them, and in their worldview customers only exist as a means of getting money. It's like enticing cows to hang around your house just so their poop will fertilize the lawn. Customers: you are the cows and your money is the manure, in this metaphor. Employees: you are a tool they will readily replace when they've worn you out.

Remember, everyone:

Landlords are parasites!

For those who doubt that claim:

Landlords squat on land that could otherwise have been sold to decent people and then hold it for ransom, forcing people living in poverty into desperation to keep their shelter, going so far as to cut back on food and other necessities to give 30% or more of their income to some asshole who's eating lobster everyday and living like a king off their hard work. So let's see... an organism that's so lazy it thrives by sucking away resources from other organisms that do all the hard work, to the point that it severely weakens or even kills the host, IE the very definition of "parasite." Sounds like a good definition of landlords too. You gonna try to refute that claim with any actual evidence or are you going to call me names and leave in a huff like so many conservatives and liberals do?

Them: Why do customers give you verbal abuse for 20 minutes straight and then say "I know it's not you, it's not your fault".
If you know it's not my fault then why are are you yelling at me Susan?

My response:

Because these companies excel at being customer hostile. I don't understand how people can ever be calm with how user hostile these helplines and shit are. It's literal, actual torture and I for one, my version of autistic meltdowns is losing control of my temper. I literally can't stop it once it gets going, I have tried. It's usually caused by the situation I'm calling about, including the user hostile nature of these customer service numbers, and if I've been tortured thus for 20 minutes before I even get through to a human, I'm using every spare ounce of energy to try to keep my cool, and it doesn't take much to push me over the edge into a meltdown. And then if what pushed me over wasn't something the person on the other end did, I feel shame and apologize.

Which is why I prefer to get help from chat line customer service because it's generally less stressful and I can do other stuff on the computer while I wait for a response. Whereas on the phone I have to listen to the same goddamn music over and over and over again, often interrupted sporadically by an ad or some shit that briefly tricks me into thinking it's a human being at last. Repetitive music is literally a torture tactic used by actual torturers, so is it any wonder that hold music is so stressful?

News flash: if you fucking torture your customers when they can't get away because they need your help, then of course some of them are going to snap. Funny how that works.

If you are not an anti-capitalist, then you either have no compassion and no soul, or you are extremely ignorant about capitalism. Capitalism cannot be redeemed, cannot be reformed.

Capitalism needs the poor and the homeless to function at all, and if you think there's ever a good reason for someone to be poor or homeless, you have no bloody compassion and you deserve my contempt and the contempt of every decent human being ever.

Capitalism needs theft and exploitation of workers to function at all, and there is no possible way to change that. Increasing the minimum wage to a living wage is a nice stopgap measure, the equivalent of putting your finger in a hole in a dam to keep it from collapsing and drowning everyone for a little while. Except that's not the best metaphor, either, because dams can be replaced or refurbished, while there's nothing anyone can do to make capitalism anything other than a violent system of exploitation, oppression, and class warfare.

If you think it's a good thing, or a natural thing, for some people to steal from other people and call it being an employer, especially if they then hoard so much money that they personally have more money than a family of four could spend in two or even three entire lifetimes, then I don't like you, and I never will.

If you defend the oppressive one-percenters, if you defend capitalism, then I consider you either ignorant or immoral or both.

If you look at a poor person or a homeless person and say they deserve what they got, if you call them lazy, if you think there's ever any reason why someone should not deserve to eat and have shelter and have access to clean drinking water, then I consider you immoral and possibly even evil.

If you're in favor of defunding welfare programs that help keep struggling people alive, then you are an immoral and evil person. If you are someone who has voted to defund welfare programs, you as bad as a mass murderer and deserve to rot in prison.

If you support evicting people who don't pay for water that has continually been poisonous for years now, then please, go move to one of those communities and drink nothing but their tap water for however long it takes you to see sense and join the fight for clean drinking water.

Seriously, why are we even needing to discuss any of this? The evil of capitalism is self-evident, I don't understand how anyone can think differently than I do on this topic, and I doubt I ever will. Every individual who defends the evils of capitalism makes me lose a little more hope for humanity, and makes me gain a little more hatred for the people who are so monumentally ignorant and/or monumentally immoral. It makes me wonder how we can even be the same species.

The thing about anarcho-capitalism that really gets me is that it's a contradiction of terms. If you remove the current government and replace it with a capitalist system where the corporations can do what they want, that isn't anarchism, that's corporatocracy, IE government by corporations. You'd just be replacing one kind of government with a worse kind of government.

This morning I woke up, and in the few minutes after that, I had the random memory of someone mocking another communist for using products from capitalism (such as computers), and I thought about what my response to that would be. And this is what I came up with:

By that logic, communists should retreat to the wilderness, build a cabin on the land built with... what? Stone tools? That I’d have to knapp from flint, but I’d have to either teach myself how to do that, or else learn the skill from someone for free, someone who learned it from someone else and so on down the line, because books or YouTube video would involve CAPITALISM, so I can’t learn from those. And I’d have to have a garden with all local foods grown from local seeds, again using stone or wooden tools. And hunt for meat with stone tools, too. Because OMG can’t spend any money, can’t support capitalism, heavens forfend we support capitalism to fucking SURVIVE.

Sometimes I think about how the religion that brought us “the love of money is the root of all evil,” “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and was so anti-usury for so many centuries somehow also gave us capitalism, an economic philosophy that is inherently evil and promotes greed, exploitation, racism, colonialism, and profiting at the expense of all compassion or reason, which most people in that religion now endorse, and I grow very confused. It makes no sense.

But then, that same religion is also responsible for genocides, spreading hatred in the name of its god, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.

Gee, I wonder if the gnostics might be right about Yahweh being an evil demiurge. Most of his worshipers look more like the popular depictions of evil Satanists than the “good Christians” they claim to be.

(In before " ‘Not all Christians!’ *baby crying noises*")

Okay, so this is a case of Fay and I giving each other ideas. Basically, something I was reading and telling her about made her think of how she does pacts with her deities, and then she got this thought about "divine money" that was pre-charged with attention (food of the gods), with their names on and such, to be redeemed later.

Thinking about that, I realized something. What I don't like about money is that cash money (and even the numbers in the bank) represents hours of one's life that one will never get back. These hours are deposited to employers, who get the most value out of the deal because the amount the workers get paid is highly disproportionate to the value of their labor, and/or the products they help to make. Thus, it's a lot like that one movie, "In Time," starring Justin Timberlake, wherein time is literally money. Granted, in the real world being given money doesn't let us live any longer in the strictest sense, but it does pay for food and lodgings... things that ought to be human rights, but I would digress if I went down that road right now.

So, basically, capitalism is a system by which a lot of people beg the folks in one circle of power to use them, spending hours of their days and labor to "buy" money, which is spent on other things. But again, the employers (users) get the lion's share of the value, getting rich when they sell their product or service at a greatly marked up rate. Now, if employee (the used) pay was only a little less than what the employer made, and working conditions were excellent (or as excellent as they can be, given the job type; some jobs are inherently more dangerous than others), and taxes actually paid for medical stuff, education, infrastructure, etc. instead of wars and tax breaks for wealthy dickheads, etc., then capitalism might be a good system. But capitalism is an inherently greedy system, and thus promotes greed, so it can never be a good system for long.

Now in state communism, the employers have been replaced entirely by the state. Which means that state communism is at least as bad as capitalism, and in many cases even worse. It tends to be a more unstable system, too.

So obviously the solution is simple: either change what money means, or abolish it altogether.

Changing what money means would entail some experimentation to find a meaning for money that is best for all involved. Instead of money being generated by "hours of my life doing something tedious," as it is for most people, money might be given its value by some other means. I don't have any suggestions right now.

Part of the reason I have no suggestions, is because I think the idea of money is outdated. With our current technology, and the rate of its advancement, if we don't kill ourselves off first or collapse our civilization back to the bronze age, then money will soon become obsolete. Technically, we already have the technology and infrastructure now to make both money AND government obsolete. The only obstacle to getting rid of government is all the people around the world (most of them in our own culture) whose thinking hasn't changed much at all since the bronze age. Most people still live in a world where they're convinced resources are scarce. It's only the people with certain knowledge, observation skills, and intelligence who realize that we could easily become a post-scarcity society in just a couple years if we all pitched in and also changed our thinking.

A large part of changing the thinking is expanding everyone's world. Most people don't think outside of their own little lives; they don't think globally, and they're too short sighted to recognize the dangers to our species, that we're doing to ourselves. So an expansion of the common wo/man's worldview is essential. It's already too late for most adults, so we need to focus on the children.

Anyway, in the end the point is, our current system doesn't work. Capitalism doesn't work, and replacing employers with the state (as in state communism) doesn't work either. So we either need to figure out a new monetary system with all new method of giving it its value, or scrap money altogether and go post-scarcity. We can do it already, and evolving technology just makes it easier and easier. The only thing in our way is our collective thinking.