"Rescue"

Oct. 16th, 2024 02:22 pm
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
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.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
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.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
"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.
alex_antonin: mwah ha (mwah ha)
Since I'm on disability, I think maybe I should take up a hobby of applying for jobs just for fun, and then asking all kinds of weird questions at the interview, like "So if I volunteered to take Christmas eve and Christmas day at the regular non holiday pay, could I then in exchange get my local Satanic coven's ritual goat sacrifice off with PTO? It's the following Friday the 13th. If it helps, we'll be roasting the goat after the sacrifice, I can bring you some leftovers. Martha makes the BEST goat curry this side of the Mississippi."
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
A message to all people who try to boycott companies like Kellogg's or Burgerville that are working hard to stop unions because they want to keep abusing workers:

I feel ya, but I can also just about guarantee you that you're already supporting this company, you just don't know it. And I can also guarantee you that boycotting any company in this day and age is effectively impossible because every brand to exist (including store brands) are owned by one of three or four mega-corporations that keep buying and selling brands off one another and are deeply in cahoots with one another. It's still a good thing to try to boycott brands as a way to show them your displeasure, but it is ultimately pointless in most cases.

In that way it's like voting in a two-party system like the US, where both parties are ultimately working for the same billionaires; do you want to vote for Original Flavor Fascism or Diet Fascism?

This is what our world has come to: where we have to find other methods to fix problems. Voting with your money doesn't work. Voting with your votes doesn't work. We're probably best off following in the footsteps of the French Revolution and uh, cutting the snake off at the head, as it were.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
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?
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
On someone's FB, they made the comment "the entitled generation" in response to the fascist shit-stain from the Capitol invasion who was wearing a "Viking" hat. I was like "Ok boomer" and they got pissy about that, so I responded:

Don't conflate this dickwaffle's cuntistry for some generational thing. "Entitled generation," LOL. It's boomers who are the entitled generation, raised in a world of cheap education, cheap housing, and high wages. Millennials and gen Z have inherited a capitalist hellscape even worse in many ways than the days of the robber barons and child labor and sweatshops, where we have to work two full time jobs and sign up for food stamps to afford both rent and food, with the caveat that more and more companies are ditching full time jobs in favor of part time jobs so they don't have to pay for health insurance for their workers. Wages haven't adjusted for inflation since like, the 50's or 60's or maybe 70's. And it's all the fault of the boomer generation. But it's not a generational issue, it's a class issue, because it's the wealthy motherfuckers who are guilty of making things this way.

It's boomers that have all the Karens and Chads yelling at stressed out, underpaid workers and trying to get people fired just for a chance at free food despite the fact they live in their own houses that they own and drove there in their own cars they fully own while the Millennials and gen Z kids are kind and compassionate to those poor workers because they've been in that position before.

Do I hate all baby boomers? No. I have plenty of friends in that age bracket. Like you (Brooke) and others. But it pisses me off when any of them make unfounded accusations against younger generations like claiming they're "entitled" or some shit, when A. People saying that shit are projecting their own crap onto others, and B. Y'ALL EMEFFERS RAISED THOSE KIDS, so if y'all've got complaints about them, you've only got yourselves to blame.

Also, it's really fucking fucked up when someone's reaction to fascism is to blame the younger generation. Fascism was invented in the 20's and 30's, that shit ain't on us. Older people invented that particular memetic disease, and if it's spread to the younger generation that's nothing to do with generation and everything to do with the fact that these neo-fascists are rich, privileged shitstains.

Oh and lastly, you're misusing the word "entitled" like so many people these days do. An entitlement is something you legitimately deserve because you actually fucking earned it. The attitude of this fascist fuckwaffle is the opposite of entitlement, because he doesn't deserve his privilege and he sure as fuck did nothing to earn it. He's got the privilege to where he can take the Nazi route solely from an accident of birth, and your misuse of the term "entitled" just feeds into his delusions of superiority.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)


Image is a tweet by EnygmaAnn reading "Let the kids believe in Santa. After all, you still believe the troops fight for our freedom."

I personally disagree. Tell kids the truth from the beginning. Don't teach them to believe in nonsense. It's one thing for them to be imaginative, it's another thing entirely to let them believe propaganda. Santa Claus is pro-capitalism, pro-wealthy Christmas propaganda. He's an unquestioned moral authority who uses slave labor but expects kids to behave themselves, teaching children to obey authority even when that authority is a hypocrite. Sure he gives out "free" gifts, but coincidentally only to rich families, promoting the ideology of prosperity theology (the idea that if you're rich it's because God/Santa/the universe/whatever loves you, and if you're poor then that is a moral failing of yours). There is no way to interpret this figure that redeems him.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
Them, conservatives: I just don't want my tax money paying for these social programs.
Me, a leftist: Me too!
Them: Oh, so you ag--
Me: The only people who should be paying taxes are the billionaires and multi-millionaires. Tax them all at 75%! Why, Jeff Bezos alone could probably let us triple the budget on education and social programs AND pay off the national debt in a few years! And even taxing them at 75%, they would all still be billionaires because a billion is an astronomically high number, and they make more money in a day than you and I have made in our entire combined lifetimes!
alex_antonin: Alex Avatar (Alex Avatar)
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.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
As much as I want to think a revolution could help change our economic structure to communism, I think it's not going to work out that way. Feudalism didn't vanish until after the plague wiped out most of the labor, making feudalism ill adapted to the new realities of the world, so it got abandoned and replaced.

Now I'm not saying we need another plague to bring about the destruction of capitalism. I doubt that would work, anyway. I think capitalism is just either going to crumble under the weight of unsustainable growth, undercut by the depletion of fossil fuels, or else it'll just become obsolete once we figure out how to make 3D printers that can print things as complex as the Star Trek replicators can. Or, more likely, a combination of those two things.

Speaking of that, I think a large reason why so many people argue against communism is because they can't conceive of an economic system centered around stability rather than growth. It's like cancer cells trying to comprehend just being part of a normal, healthy organ.
alex_antonin: (Baphomet)
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.
alex_antonin: mwah ha (mwah ha)
So this idiot was like "If you support Bernie Sanders you might as well be a self proclaimed communist cause he's a communist dressed in "democratic socialists"

My response:

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Them:

I mean if you want a president like Fidel then sure

Me:

Socialism and communism are two entirely different things. The US is already partly socialist. Public roads are socialist, as are public parks, public utilities, and the safety nets like food stamps, welfare, and WIC.

And anyway, judging an economic system by the fact that it's not been successfully implemented yet without problems is stupid. I'll bet the first attempts at capitalism had peasants and lords both going "Oh this new capitalism, it'll never take off, feudalism is the way to go!"

Communism is, in fact, the natural state of human beings, along with tribalism. The only thing is, you can't exactly force it to fit modern man's city-dwelling state, it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort, but I think it's worth it. Capitalism is dying, running out of resources to exploit, so we need something to replace it. And with 3D printers, we're soon going to have a post-scarcity society, which will mean communism, because capitalism depends on scarcity to function.

He then had the gall to suggest I didn't know how socialism and communism interrelate. My response:

I see how communism and socialism are interrelated. I just don't see how anyone can think that either is a bad thing. Sure, attempts made at communism so far haven't worked out very well, but then capitalism's early years began with the mass murder of millions, the forced enslavement of millions more, the destruction of cultures and languages, the implementation of systematic racism, and countless other atrocities that continue to this day. So far, all the problems and atrocities of the few attempts at state-enforced communism (I am an anarcho-communist, myself) look like nothing compared to capitalism's reign of terror.

And you know, if we can figure out how to get communism to work without exploitation and atrocities, I for one will be glad to see the end of capitalism, with its ongoing enslavement of children in foreign countries, its plundering of natural resources, its pollution and carelessness for the environment, and everything else wrong with capitalism. And I think anyone who isn't a communist is a soul-less bastard who cares only about greed.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
My communism aside, I don’t understand shopping on a holiday. When and where I was growing up, you’d be doing good to find even a single grocery store that was open on Thanksgiving, and even then it was only open until like, noon. In other words, Thanksgiving was like another Christmas. Easter was the same way; in one town I lived in, absolutely nothing was open on Easter.1 Which is why I personally hate most holidays: because I hate shit not being open just because people are celebrating the fake birthday (or supposed zombification) of a man they worship while simultaneously ignoring everything he actually said in life.

Thanksgiving I have mixed feelings about; I hate the history, but I like the idea and I like the food. I’m not much fond of Xmas/Yule anymore, as it does nothing for me, and is just a whole two or three months of being tortured by repetitive shitty music that should never have been recorded in the first place much less played ad nauseum for 50 or 60 years. I also don’t like change, I tend to treat even the holidays I do celebrate (Halloween and [kinda] Thanksgiving) much like ordinary days, and I tend to forget about other holidays until there’s some disruption in my day, so any holiday that causes significant numbers of businesses to be closed, bus lines to run less often, or causes other disruptions to my day, tend to be holidays I despise.

That said, I’d rather go back to the days of nothing being open during the holidays, than continue for one more year with this feeding frenzy that Thanksgiving and Black Friday have become. It’s vile, it’s disgusting, and anyone who shops on Thanksgiving or Black Friday should be ashamed of themselves. Let those workers go home to their families, for fuck’s sake! The greedy corporations don’t need your money from those days, no matter how much they claim otherwise. And people like me will get over the inconvenience; a little inconvenience is worth knowing people to whom the holidays still mean something to will get to enjoy them.

1 = That was the most boring day I can ever remember having, because I had no Internet at the time, nor cable, nor even a TV. I just walked around town most of the day, marveling at the utter emptiness everywhere, feeling like the last human being left on the planet.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
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*")
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
Capitalism is selling a 2 liter bottle of soda for $1, and a 12 ounce soda for $1.69.

Capitalism is charging $1.50 for a bottle of water, when there’s a free water fountain 20 feet away.

Capitalism is charging $700 per month for a shitty apartment with a landlord that never fixes anything, and it’s not even rent to own, even though you end up paying more for that shitty apartment in three years than a whole house would cost.

Capitalism is having millions more empty houses than there are homeless people, and just letting the houses sit empty while people die needlessly on the street.

Capitalism is turning the basic human right to health care into a privilege and charging 100 times more for everything than it actually costs.

Capitalism is selling a college education as being necessary to get a job, then charging 100 times more for everything than it actually costs. And then blaming the students when their degree turns out to be worthless, rather than owning up to being guilty of false advertising.

Capitalism is charging customers absurdly high prices, paying employees slave wages, and then wondering why the economy is failing.

Capitalism is making money betting that the economy will fail, and then acting surprised when the economy fails.

Fascism is when the government lets corporations do whatever the fuck they want to, because the corporations own the government.

Fascism is the government bailing out the banks when they lost while betting the economy would fail, because the economy failed.

Fascism is the government giving corporations so many tax breaks that they aren’t paying any taxes at all, and a bunch of free money on top of that, then acting surprised when there isn’t any money to pay for anything.

Fascism is the government giving businesses loans with 0% interest, but giving college students loans with interest so high they’re still paying on the interest when they’re 50.

Capitalism is using prisons as a source of free slave labor. Fascism is the government helping out prisons-for-profit in ways that include training entire races of people to accept that they should act like criminals, just so they can be arrested and used as free slave labor. Fascism is also giving control of prisons over to private corporations where the slave masters can do whatever they want to without any oversight.

Fascism is the government letting the CEOs and PR managers and other high-up muckity-mucks of big corporations get jobs in the government agencies that are supposed to be regulating and overseeing the very industries those companies are involved in, which makes about as much sense as would having criminals presiding as judges over their own trials.

Fascism is the government letting corporations control the country, even when they’re driving us right over a cliff.

Madness is that there hasn’t yet been a violent overthrowing of the government despite all the above being true.

Madness is that we’re all slaves, but most of us think we’re free.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
So there was this photoset somebody posted on Tumblr, and some people were criticizing it. Here are the pictures:




And the criticisms were mostly uber-patriotic propaganda bullshit like "How dare you. You might not approve of some of the military decisions made by anybody, but that does not mean we should not support the people who sacrifice their lives for us on a daily basis. I will always support the troops."

You can read the rest of it by clicking here.

What follows is my addition to the post:

I support the troops, because as they are just more victims of the capitalist war machine; capitalism ruined their lives by making them so poor and making jobs so scarce that joining the military was their only viable option. They are exploited workers just as much as Wal-Mart wage slaves are, if not more so for being forced to kill mostly innocent people abroad, getting shot at or worse, and coming home with amputations/wounds and/or PTSD. But I do not support the military as an organization, which is like hating Wal-Mart but supporting Wal-Mart workers.

I would support the military as an organization if it was defensive only. But 99% of what our modern military does is pick fights in other countries, killing brown people - including women and children - all for oil to fuel the capitalist imperialist hegemony.

When the military budget gets slashed down to half or less of what it is now, and all that extra money put into education and welfare, the military's focus switched solely to defense, and the military actually begins to spend the money to care for both their soldiers and their veterans, then I would support it. (Especially as an important step towards total abolition of governments and militaries worldwide.)

Frankly, anyone who criticizes this picture set has obviously not considered that it is entirely possible to support the troops but not support the military as an organization. The two are not mutually exclusive. Criticizing the military does not necessarily mean you don't support the troops, and thinking otherwise is absurd. The reason they are dying is to protect the greedy capitalist system and the ruling 1% who profit off all the war and destruction as a means toward world domination and resource theft. We haven't had need of the military in a defensive capacity for at least 30 years; the military has been entirely offensive for all that time, fighting wars in other countries over things that would not have impacted the lives of the common people at all if the greedy capitalist pigfuckers in charge hadn't gone off empire-building.

That whole "they're protecting our freedom" thing is now, and has been for decades, entirely propaganda to justify the imperialist warmongering to the common people. And if you've swallowed that load of bullshit, I feel sorry for you.er. The reason they are dying is to protect the greedy capitalist system and the ruling 1% who profit off all the war and destruction as a means toward world domination and resource theft. We haven't had need of the military in a defensive capacity for at least 30 years; the military has been entirely offensive for all that time, fighting wars in other countries over things that would not have impacted the lives of the common people at all if the greedy capitalist pigfuckers in charge hadn't gone off empire-building.

That whole "they're protecting our freedom" thing is now, and has been for decades, entirely propaganda to justify the imperialist warmongering to the common people. And if you've swallowed that load of bullshit, I feel sorry for you.
alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
One of my Tumblr followers reblogged the following:

An oxymoron:

patriotic liberal.


To which I responded:

If by "patriotic" you mean possessing a blind obsession with the supposed superiority of your country and your supposed freedoms, so strong that you ignore the blatant signs of this country being turned into a fascist oligarchy since at least the Bush era, frothing at the mouth at any criticism of your leaders when they are busy raping white children, bombing the shit out of brown children, systematically destroying this country's freedoms in the name of their bronze age religion, destroying the environment in the name of capitalism, and turning a blind eye to myriad forms of blatant corruption, thinking the sun shines out of Republicans' asses while simultaneously being a racist asshole to Obama and accusing him of all the shit that the Republicans have been doing for decades, then yes, I am not patriotic.

If, however, you define patriotism as caring more about the ideals that this country was founded on, and the constitution, than you do for the leaders who are corrupt assholes; if you define patriotism as recognizing that this nation is becoming fascist and you desperately want to stop that and return us to true freedom and not just the empty buzzword "freedom,"; if you define patriotism THAT way, then I am a bigger fucking patriot than you or your ilk will EVER be.

Profile

alex_antonin: TST Antifascist (Default)
Bishop Sanctimonious the Hypocritical

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
456789 10
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 11th, 2025 12:13 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios