⛧ 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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*")

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.