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thedanceronthestreets · 4 years

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PEDRO PASCAL GQ GERMANY - OCTOBER 2020

Original text by Esma Annemon Dil

Fotos by Doug Inglish

Styling by Simon Robins

Translated by @thedanceronthestreets

Intro: A broken tooth could almost have been the reason for our meeting with Pedro Pascal to be cancelled - and with that our conversation about roots, his new movie and times of change.

Interview: It is almost eery how empty the streets of Los Angeles are under the gleaming sun. While Europe is finding its "new normal", people in L. A. are cutting their own hair even without being neurotics. Many of them have not seen their friends in half a year. The pandemic is out of control. So are the reactions to the situation. Inviting someone to a "distance drink" in the backyard can lead to the same consternation as proposing a relationship partner exchange.

All the more of a surprise was Pedro Pascal's immediate confirmation. To the drink, not the partner exchange. He is one of the winners this year - and if Corona had not forced the movie industry to go on a holiday, he probably would not have had the time for this drink. After "Game of Thrones", the series in which his head was squished, followed 2015 the leading role in "Narcos" as a DEA agent on the hunt for Pablo Escobar, and now the leap onto the big Hollywood screen. As of 1. October the Chilean will appear in the blockbuster "Wonder Woman 1984". Furthermore, the second season of the "Star Wars" series "The Mandalorian" will start in October with him as the main character - unfortunately underneath the helmet. But we all seem to be under the same helmet in 2020. It is this man we want to meet, who worked as a waiter in New York a couple of years ago. Whose parents are political refugees that settled in Texas, and one day their son decided to walk into a drama club in high school.

And then the cancellation. While we were preparing the house and garden for Pedro's drink and fashion shoot, which isn't an easy task under L. A.'s restrictions, his management called in with terrible news: Pedro has - no, not Corona - had to receive emergency surgery due to a sore tooth and is now lying in bed with a swollen cheek, making talking or shooting impossible. The sun shines onto empty streets. And our empty garden.

A few days later, he stands in front of the door anyway, no huge bulge in his face, but stitches in his gum. No limousine service that dropped him off, he arrived in his own car and picked up his makeup artist on the way. He helps her to carry in all the equipment and states first and foremost: "I've got time today!" What a star! It does not seem like we are about to ask him how he managed to become a Hollywood sensation, but rather him asking us that question. Pedro Pascal! So, what kind of star is he then?

Pedro Pascal: Sorry for ruining your plans. The operation was a total emergency.

GQ: Really? We were wondering whether the swelling was the result of a secret trip to the plastic surgeon. Apparently, because of the quarantine in Hollywood, their schedules are packed.

Sorry to disappoint you. A few days before our appointment I raced to the hospital with a tooth fracture and the worst pain I've ever felt - a hospital where the severe Corona cases are treated. I was unable to contact any dentists! Right before I parked, a specialist called back. I'll spare you the details of the surgery, gruesome. The pain was excruciating despite the 10 anaesthetic shots. The doctor said I wasn't the only one going through this, a lot of people grind their teeth at night thanks to stress.

What are you most afraid of at the moment?

The way the government is handling the pandemic scares me more than the virus itself. The lack of intelligent crisis management is a moral disgrace. The leadership crisis makes orphans out of all of us - we're left to fend for ourselves.

How have you spent the last few months?

With frozen pizza in jogging trousers in Venice Beach. I live in a rear building that's in the garden belonging to a family. In reality there are enough good takeout restaurants around that area, but for some reason I like salami pizza from the supermarket.

That doesn't exactly sound like the movie star lifestyle. What does it feel like to be forced from top speed to zero?

Considering the things happening in this world, my own state really isn't the top priority. But I would have to lie, if I said I wasn't disappointed. The entire cast and crew of "Wonder Woman 1984" put so much heart and soul into the production. We had so much fun on set. I had hoped to carry this feeling of exuberance around the globe to the openings of this movie.

You are part of a political, socialist family that fled the Pinochet regime in Chile. What do you remember from back then?

My sister and I were born in Chile, but I was only nine months old when we claimed asylum in Denmark. From there, we moved to San Antonio in Texas, where my dad worked as a doctor in a hospital.

Texas isn't exactly considered to be socialist utopia. How well did you settle in?

San Antonio isn't a cowboy city but rather very diverse with large Asian, Afro-American and Latino communities. In my memory it's a romantic place, culturally inclusive. The cultural shock only hit when we moved to Orange County in California later. Suddenly, the environment was white, preppy and conservative.

How were you welcomed in California?

To this day I'm ashamed when I think about how I let my classmates call me Peter without correcting them. I'm Pedro. Even without growing up in Chile, the country and language are part of me. I was quite unhappy in that place. At least I was able to switch schools and visit one in Long Beach, where I felt more comfortable. With its theatre programme, I found my path.

Could you visit your family's homeland as a child?

Yes, after my parents ended up on a list of expats that were permitted to re-enter the country. First, there was a big family gathering, then me and my sister were parked at some relatives' place for a few months while my parents returned to Texas. They probably needed a break from us. They'd had us at a very young age, had a vibrant social life, and my mother was doing her doctorate in psychology.

Was your mother a typical young psychologist that tested her knowledge at home?

You mean whether I was her lab rat? Absolutely. I can remember weird sessions camouflaged as games, where someone would watch my reactions to different toys. Even though I couldn't have been older than 6, I knew what was happening. My favourite thing was to be asked about my dreams. That was always a great opportunity to make up fantastic stories.

Was that your first performance?

Definitely! My strong imagination alarmed my mother, because I'd rather live in my fantasy world than in real life. I didn't like school. I ended up in the "problematic kid" category. At some point the subjects got more interesting and my grades improved. So many children are unnecessarily diagnosed with learning disabilities without considering that school can be daunting. Why is it acceptable to be bored out of your mind in class, when there are more stimulating ways to convey knowledge?

With everything happening in the world this summer: Do you believe that social hierarchy structures are genuinely being reconsidered?

Hopefully. After the lockdown my first contact with people was at the Black Lives Matter protest. The atmosphere was peaceful and hopeful until the police got involved and provoked violence. At least during these times we can't avoid problems or distract ourselves from them as easily as we usually do. It seems that the pandemic provided us with a new sense of clarity: we don't want to go on like this.

The trailer of "Wonder Woman 1984" represents the optimism of the 80s. That almost makes one feel nostalgic nowadays.

That holds true. It's two hours of happiness. Patty Jenkins, the director, managed to make a movie full of positive messages. We shot in Washington, D. C., then in London and Spain - which now sounds like a different time.

Do you miss travelling?

I've only now realised what a privilege it is to just pack up your things and fly anywhere. With an American passport you can travel freely. And that's why the small radius we live in now is kind of absurd. Over the last few years I often retreated in between takes, because I was always on the road and overstimulated. Friends complained about how comfortable I had become. We all took social interactions for granted and realise now how reliant we are on human connection. Now, I wistfully think about all the party and dinner invitations I declined in the past.

In L. A., people spend more time indoors or in nature than in other metropolises. Could this city become your safe haven after New York City?

My true home is my friends. Ever since I was young I've lived the life of a nomad and haven't set roots anywhere. Until recently, my physical home was a place for arriving and leaving and hence I didn't want to overcomplicate living by owning lots of things. The opposite actually: Without having read Marie Kondo's book, I got rid of all the stuff that was unnecessary and lived a very minimalistic lifestyle.

Is there something you collect or could never say goodbye to?

Books! I still own the literature I read during my teen and university years. Recently I found a box of old theatre scripts and materials back from my uni days at NYU. I can't separate from art either, same as lamps or old pictures. Furniture and clothes are no problem though, they can be chucked.

Do you remember any roles that were defined by their costumes?

Yes, "Game of Thrones" comes to mind immediately. During that time I first understood what it means, as an actor, to be supported by a look. I owe that to costume designer Michele Clapton. She developed these very feminine robes and brocade cloaks for my role that looked very masculine when I wore them. I felt sexy in them. And very important were of course Lindy Hemming's power suits and Jan Sewell's blond hair for the tycoon villain Maxwell Lord in "Wonder Woman 1984". Relating to the style, I couldn't really see myself in the role since the shapes and colours of the 80s don't really fit my body. My type is the 70s.

Do you adopt such inspirations into your private closet?

At this point in time, I'll choose any comfortable outfit over a cool look. Sometimes I mourn the days when I defined myself with fashion. It's a bit mad when I think about how, in the 90s as a teenager, I would go to raves; a proper club kid with crazy outfits: overalls, chute trousers, soccer shirts and a top hat like in "The cat in the hat knows a lot about that!" by Dr Seuss. Later in NYC I was part of a group that placed immense value on wearing a certain style. The fact that I only walk around in joggers nowadays is actually unacceptable!

Normally, actors who work on comic screen adaptations become bodybuilders and eat ten boiled chicken breasts per day. You don't?

My body wouldn't be able to handle that. I find it difficult enough to maintain a minimum level of fitness. As of your mid 40s, you suddenly need a lot more discipline. Until the tooth incident happened, I worked out a couple of times a week with a trainer to keep the quarantine body in shape.

What would annoy you the most, if you were your own roommate?

I can be very bossy. I have to gather all my goodwill not to force my movie choice on to everyone else. When I want something, I'm not passive aggressive about it, I attack head on. Also, I can get caught up in tunnel vision: When i feel down, I can't imagine that I'm ever going to feel better again. I have difficulty with seeing the bigger picture when experiencing problems or emotions. Method acting really wouldn't be my thing. That's why I try to only work on projects that feel good and where people encourage and lift each other up.

While you were trying on the outfits you pointed out a lack of self-esteem. How does that coincide with your career?

Isn't it interesting how traits and circumstances go hand in hand? Self-esteem comes from the inside, but it's also influenced by what society believes. We use critical stares from the outside against ourselves. I lived in New York for 20 years, I studied there and worked as a waiter up until my mid 30s, because I couldn't live off acting. It was always so close. The disappointment of always just barely missing a perfect part or opportunity is exhausting. When is the right time to stop trying and what's plan b? That's not just a question actors ask themselves, but anybody who struggles to earn a livelihood - unrelated to how much potential they have or how close their dream may seem. We are beginning to see now how our narrow definition of success is destroying our communities. At the same time, it's becoming obvious that, until this day, your family background and skin colour determine your chances of living a dignified existence.

What are the positives of becoming a leading man later in life?

I have the feeling that I've got control over my life - without the pressure of having to accept projects or be a social media personality. That surely also has to do with the fact that I'm a man. Women are surely pressured to appear quirky at any age.

Life is always a management of risks - especially at this time. For what would you risk losing something?

Usually, if you don't play the game you're not going to win anything. That applies to friendship, love, work, creativity. Anything that really means something to me, is worth the risk.

Wonder woman 1984 will appear in cinemas 01.10. The 800 million dollar earning DC comic franchise is moving into the New York 80s with its sequel. It looks spectacular - only Pedro Pascal with blond hair in a three piece Wall Street suit looks better.

#pedro pascal #gq germany #Gq

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acti-veg · 4 years

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Unrelated question: Being from a relative poor family and from a country that was a communist doctatorship in the past I quite hate both capitalism and communism. Or at least I'm critical of them. I struggle to imagine how they could work or if they could be balanced somehow. I was wondering if there are any good pieces on how the economy should function that you'd recommed me to read. I definitely identify as a leftist anarchist cause I wouldn't tolerate another communist doctatorship. Some say that communism/socialism can't work in the large-scale and that it will always result in dictatorship. Do you think that's true?

There is really no balancing the two ideologies, since they are fundamentally contradictory. The means of production cannot both be run by individuals for private profit, and communally/publicly owned and run for the benefit of the public. Of course, communism and capitalism are not the only options, there is anarchism, socialism, and many other ideologies in-between. You can be anti-capitalist without being an advocate for communism. I myself would not advocate for the kind of dictatorial one-state communism that the USSR achieved, which I assume is what you are referring to here.

The thing to remember, is that capitalism isn’t working in the large-scale, and wealth inequality is worse than it has ever been. Look at the US - the poster child for capitalism is suppressing voters, the sitting head of state is encouraging armed militias and threatening not to leave should he be voted out, as well as trying to censor the media and propagandising with racist rhetoric - all the hallmarks of a budding dictatorship. If you ask most people in capitalist countries like the US and the UK if capitalism working for them, their answers probably wouldn't surprise you. Capitalism is only seen to ‘work’ because it works for those who control the message, and continuously tell the public that it works, despite their own lived experiences to the contrary.

I don’t believe that communism or socialism is any more susceptible to becoming a dictatorship than capitalism is, honestly, it all depends on how the transition is handled during the revolution or transition itself. If you entrust power to a person or a small group, even in an interim capacity, the danger of authoritarianism is obvious. That isn’t a unique feature of socialist ideologies.

It also depends on the form of socialism/communism that you are advocating for. Personally, I advocate for the means of production to be owned by the public, not the state, and, for a rigorous system of de-centralised democracy, where power is given to local councils and worker’s unions, not a centralised government. There is a much lower chance of a dictatorship forming when power and wealth is de-centralised in this way, far lower than under capitalism, I’d argue, where the apparatus of the state is centralised and much easier for a small group to exercise disproportionate control over the people.

In terms of books to read, I’d recommend Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Utopia For Realists: And How We Get There, and finally, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. Have a look at them on Goodreads and see which ones you’d like to explore - I have them all on my politics and history reading list too, which you can find here.

#ask #politics #capitalism #communism #socialism

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berniesrevolution · 5 years

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Food coops, housing coops, credit unions, and other such institutions are sometimes referred to as the “solidarity economy.” How do these institutions relate to working-class power? Do they offer working-class people some shelter or respite from capitalism? Do they perhaps even “create the new world in the shell of the old”? Nick Driedger and Eric Dirnbach, two veteran members of many institutions of the solidarity economy, debate these points.

Eric: We all noticed this recent article about the campaign for “postal banking,” where United States Postal Service branches would offer much-needed banking services for folks who lack access to bank accounts. The USPS actually used to do this up until the 1960s, and other countries still have it. This would obviously be helpful for many low-income people, who are forced to pay high fees at check cashing stores, and of course Wall Street banks hate the idea because they don’t want the competition. Unfortunately, according to the article, the national credit union association allied with the banks to lobby against it, which was news to me.

Now, I’m a member of a credit union and a fan of the concept. Financial institutions owned and run by their members are a great alternative to handing over our money to the standard, capitalist banks and increasing their power over us. Credit unions are in principle more accountable to their members and their communities, and have policies that are much more progressive than banks. And yet they took this bad stance against postal banking, deciding to protect their turf, just like the capitalists.

This reminded me of the recent Organizing Work exposé about bad labor practices and union-busting at a number of food cooperatives. I’m also a fan of food coops and have been a member of several, and those practices are extremely disappointing. Another problematic example is the Mondragon coop network in Spain, which I think is really impressive, but also incorporates a second-class tier of international workers who are not member-owners and who have even gone on strike against the coop.

Overall, these are examples of “solidarity economy” organizations behaving like capitalist enterprises. The solidarity economy can be described as a network of organizations and practices like worker coops, housing coops, community land trusts, food coops, credit unions, time banks, community gardens and other entities that are alternatives to capitalist businesses. A segment of the left, and I would include myself here, believes one strategy (along with others like union organizing) to help transition beyond capitalism is to grow this economy in opposition to capitalist practices and prefigure the better socialist world that we want. A hundred years ago they called this idea the “Cooperative Commonwealth.” But these examples of bad, non-solidarity politics undermine that ideal.

Nick: In the article you mention, we see an example of an arm of the United States government being called on to provide a new public service. The City of Cleveland specifically called on the United States Postal Service to provide banking services through post office outlets. These calls are also coming from grassroots campaigns among postal workers’ unions in the USA and Canada, who want the government to expand services, better serve rural communities and undercut payday loan companies, which are often the only way for many working people to cash their paycheques, at exorbitant rates.

I am a member of four different consumer cooperative businesses, and had my first job at one of them. The United Farmers of Alberta is an institution where I live. At one time, it was a political party, and for a number of years, a long time ago, it was the government of the province. I am a member and buy feed for my chickens and ducks there, and when I was sixteen they gave me my first job. It had benefits and clear hours and a job description. It paid head and shoulders above what most businesses in rural Alberta will pay a teenager.

I am also a member of my small town’s credit union. The manager of this credit union is a big player in the local United Conservative Party. I pay my insurance through The Cooperators Insurance. The manager of this coop was our New Democrat (social democratic party in Canada) representative in the provincial government that just fell in Alberta a couple of months ago. In the past, I have voted for left candidates for the board at Mountain Equipment Co-op (a camping supply consumer coop popular in Canada) who wanted to push for stronger ethical purchasing guidelines and support the cause of Palestinian rights.

Cooperatives in Western Canada are political and there is politics inside of them. They are often on their local chambers of commerce, and there is both a left wing inside the cooperative movement as well as a very strong right wing.

Where I live, coops are also a part of the local history. My family in a Saskatchewan farming community have worked for generations at a consumer cooperative simply called “The Co-op,” which provides groceries and fuel in many communities. In many rural communities in Western Canada, no one would have electricity if not for early rural cooperatives. Later, government services followed, like Alberta Government Telephones (which was privatized in the 1990s). Often coops would establish services that would be picked up as public services later. The words “Cooperative Commonwealth” have a deep resonance with people and a history here. Even a lot of conservatives consider the history of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (forerunner of the New Democratic Party) a history working people and farmers can be proud of on the prairies.

Eric: That is a fascinating history and I’d love to learn more about coops in rural areas. Clearly coops were organized over the years to meet the needs of rural residents. Agricultural supply and electrical coops are great examples of this. More modern examples are the internet service coops.

I’m more familiar with coops in an urban setting. I’ve lived in my housing coop in New York City for about ten years and was just elected to the board, so I’ve been thinking about this place a lot. Morningside Gardens, with almost 1,000 apartments in six buildings, was founded in 1957 and has a pretty rich history of cooperative activity, with many committees, clubs and other organizations formed. Folks started a cooperative workshop for woodworking and ceramics, a nursery school and a retirement service in the 1960s, which are all still running. The retirement service allows senior residents to age in-place and not have to move to a nursing home.

Members here have also been involved in community-issue organizing for decades, such as supporting local libraries, fighting for good subway and sanitation services, and campaigning for better local zoning to restrict luxury condos. Residents have formed several babysitting coops over the years. A theatre group was formed in the 1980s which still exists. In the last few years, several buildings have started a “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” mutual aid program, which is like an informal timebank where folks help each other with household tasks.

We had a food coop for over 30 years; that closed in the 1990s. I spent some time reading our old newsletters to learn about it and write up a history. The food coop members advocated for better consumer protection and product labeling laws in the 1960s and 1970s when the entire grocery industry was against more regulations. The coop also supported the United Farm Workers grape boycott and the Nestle baby formula boycott. In the 1960s, it started a credit union, which lasted for 15 years, so low-income members could have access to loans they couldn’t get at a bank. The coop also helped start at least two other food coops nearby, with funding and technical assistance. It made a small profit in most of its years and often returned a rebate to the members, thus keeping money in the community and out of the hands of a billionaire grocery boss. And it was a union shop. One of my neighbors worked as a bookkeeper there in the 1970s and 1980s and still gets the union pension today.

All this seems really positive to me and was enabled to a large extent by the cooperative setting. Of course, some of this activity could happen in a similarly-sized apartment complex of renters, owned and managed by a landlord, but a lot of it wouldn’t. Bosses and landlords monopolize power, decision-making and wealth. Workplace and tenant unions fight to expand worker and tenant power, of course, but ultimately the boss or landlord still owns the property and extracts the surplus value and rent. The process of people running their own key institutions requires a lot of volunteer work, but this cooperation I think builds skills and confidence and creates more opportunities and the desire to work together on other projects.

Now, I don’t want to overstate the situation here; this isn’t Full Communism. Of course there have always been folks who see it as just a nice place to live and are less engaged in its internal life and politics. And capitalism has intruded on our utopia. The coop was “limited-equity” for decades, meaning that apartments were priced at below market value to keep them affordable. This was because our coop originally received tax breaks and other assistance arising from the 1949 Housing Act, which was intended to create affordable housing (and has a complicated history). Then there was a contentious, long-running debate starting in the 1990s where a majority of residents voted to shift to market-rate pricing over time.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #worker cooperatives #democratic socialism

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theyearoftheking · 5 years

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Book 5: The Stand

Bloggers note: if you’re looking for a complete plot summary and a list of all the characters in this epic tome, this is not the blog post for you. Proceed with caution.

Once upon a time, there was a precocious ten year-old, with divorced parents. One parent embraced her weirdness and didn’t pay attention to what books she was bringing home from the library; and the other parent was my dad... who constantly wondered (aloud) why I wasn’t like normal kids.

Being of slightly above-average intelligence, I saw this as an affront, and did subtle things just to piss him off. Subtle things “normal” children probs wouldn’t do. The summer I was ten, my dad had picked up a paperback copy of The Stand, and was raving to me about how good it was. I remember he was fixated on people falling dead in their bowls of Chunky soup.

“Sounds like a cool book, maybe I’ll read it,” I commented.

“This isn’t a book for children. You still haven’t read that copy of The Hobbit I gave you.”

Hold my beer, motherfucker. I’m here for it. And The Hobbit was boring af. I never got past all the singing.

Just to piss him off, I read the book cover to cover, faster than he did. You know, like normal vindictive ten year-old girls do. I don’t have a lot of memories of my dad growing up, but I hold onto this one fast and tight, because I got mine in the end. I was like the Trashcan Man of the fifth grade set. Just with a worse haircut. See below.

Needless to say, my comprehension of The Stand almost thirty years later is a little bigger, wider, and deeper. It’s also colored by other epic “Good vs. Evil” reads (sigh, yes... even Tolkien); and King’s other works (mostly The Dark Tower). While at times this was not an easy book to read, I’m glad I powered through it. Ultimately, I feel rewarded I didn’t give up on page 872 like I had initially wanted to. I’m also glad I didn’t go with my gut instinct of reading the original released in in 1978, and then later on the uncut edition that was released in 1990. One reading of The Stand per year is more than enough, thank you. And besides, there’s fun pictures along the way! I mean, if I’m being honest, the book is mostly pictures with just a few words here and there to break it up. I’m absolutely kidding.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

First of all, I picked the worst fucking time to read this book. Coronavirus is probably going to kill the whole world, and I refuse to be one of the survivors like in The Stand. There’s not enough bourbon in Kentucky for me to survive that shit show. Additionally, my family is huge into board games, and we thought Pandemic might be a fun cooperative game to try. Spoiler: it’s awesome, we’re all hooked on it. I highly recommend it for your next game night. Maybe an End of the World/Pandemic theme?? You can all wear gloves and masks, eat shelf stable foods and bottled water, and play REM on repeat. Sounds... awesome.

But I digress. The Stand is your ultimate post-apocalyptic good versus evil showdown. A government employee with Captain Trips (the world ending virus) goes AWOL from his base, and takes a frantic road trip across the country with his family, where he manages to contaminate everyone he comes in contact with.

What is Captain Trips? Well, I’m so glad you asked! To hear a doctor explain it, “We’ve got a disease with several well-defined stages... but some people may skip a stage. Some people may backtrack a stage. Some people may do both. Some people stay in one stage for a relatively long time and others zoom though all four as if they were on a rocket-sled...”

The virus spreads (like viruses do), until there’s less than 15,000 people left in the country (rough estimate). The people still alive start having two types of dreams; either scary nightmares about The Walking Man, or peaceful dreams about Mother Abigail. Again... good versus evil. Guess who is who. If you need clarification, let me give you this one little quote about Randall Flagg, courtesy of Mother Abigail, “He’s the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is a little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he’ll call them. He’s started already. He’s getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he’s ready to make his move, I guess he’ll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones... the lonely ones... and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”

And his followers?

“They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.”

Yeah. I’m just going to leave that there for you to read and digest.

So, the remaining people from all over the country either ended up in Vegas with Flagg, or Boulder with Mother Abigail and The Free Zone; which is basically Bernie Sander’s Utopian dream.

God damn it! I swore I wasn’t going to get political and compare Donald Trump to Randall Fla-

Ok, so The Free Zone. Most of the people who come to Boulder, want to meet Mother Abigail Freemantle, the one hundred and eight year old black woman they’ve been dreaming about. She’s got a self-described case of the shine, and speaks stupid relevant truth to her followers, “I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart.”

I’m not religious, but that hit hard. And it shows you the clear difference between Randall Flagg, and Mother Abigail.

Later on, Mother Abigail also hits us over the head, and explains to us why this book is titled, The Stand: “But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand. You will go, and you will not falter, because you have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God’s help you will stand.”

Spoiler: it doesn’t quite go according to her plan. Very few are left standing at the end.

So, The Free Zone. People come together, dispose of dead bodies, get electricity turned back on again, clear the roads of abandoned cars, and form a de-facto government. While lots of characters come and go (die. They die.) throughout the book, there are a few mainstays in The Free Zone: Franny, Harold, Stu, Larry, Nick, Tom, Nadine, and Lucy. But again... good versus evil. While most of the residents of The Free Zone are good, Flagg is able to whisper in the ears of some members, mostly Harold and Nadine, who end up defecting and making the trip to Vegas.

While socialist utopia is succeeding in Boulder, Flagg is ruling with fear of crucifixion in Vegas. His henchmen include Lloyd, and The Trashcan Man. Oh, Trashy... maybe one of King’s most iconic characters. He’s a bit of a firebug (understatement of the century), and really goes out in a blaze of glory (ha. Pun intended).

In fact, the two heroes of this book are Trashcan Man, thanks to his epic nuclear disaster; and simple-minded Tom Cullen, who is able to infiltrate Flagg’s inner circle, and successfully make it out, rescuing Stu Redman, who is dying in the desert with a broken leg and a horrible infection along the way. Tom Cullen is the character you root for. But Trashy is the character you’re always curious about. He’s like that rebel guy you dated in high school for ten minutes, and now stalk on Facebook, because you want to see what shady shit he’s up to twenty years later.

This is the biggest oversimplification I think I’ve ever written. The onus is on you to just pick up the damn book and read it yourself. Do it soon, because you might not have a lot of time left, what with Coronavirus breathing it’s death fumes down our necks.

For those still keeping track, we have TWO Wisconsin references in The Stand. The first was on page five, set in a gas station in East Texas, “...had covered himself with glory as a quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone on to Texas A&M with an athletic scholarship, and had played for ten years with the Green Bay Packers...”

I can’t help but feel Steve is a closeted Packers fan. He lives in Maine, so I know he’s contractually obligated to be a Patriots fan (gag), but come on... homeboy loves him some green and yellow.

The second reference comes from our friend Trashcan Man, while trying to find a walking route of possible destruction. “He had planned to get over to the west side of Gary, near the confusion of interchanges leading various roads towards Chicago or Milwaukee...”

Question... does Gary, Indiana still smell in a post-apocalyptic world? Asking for a friend.

We also start getting the Dark Tower references fast and heavy. I didn’t make note every time Steve referenced wolves, crows, or wheels; because we’d be up over a million references now. And Randall Flagg himself is straight out of The Tower. So that’s fun. And we have our first “ka” reference: “And it came to him with a dreamy, testicle-shriveling certainty that this was the dark man, his soul, his ka somehow projected into this rain-drenched, grinning crow that was looking at him...”

‘Tis ka, bitches.

Total Wisconsin Mentions: 8

Dark Tower References: 4

Book Grade: A-

Rebecca’s Definitive Ranking of Stephen King Books

The Shining

The Stand

‘Salem’s Lot

Carrie

Night Shift

Next up is The Dead Zone, which I must have watched a million times as a kid, because my mom was obsessed with it, but I’ve never actually read the book. So this should be fun! I mean... who doesn’t love reading a book and imagining Christopher Walken without his cowbell as the main character?

Long Days and Pleasant Nights, Rebecca

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 6 years

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Dude, people don't grow like bacteria. It's not a simple "add resources, get more people" situation. There's a lot more factors to consider, like housing and wellbeing. Besides, resources aren't in short supply right now, they just aren't being distributed very well. There's food overflows in some area, like w/ cheese in America, and shortages in others.

So we forgo the environment for the foreseeable future in order to accommodate growth and consumption trends right now…

its interesting because its like a smoker planning to kick his habit by smoking more cigarettes thinking eventually his own cravings will naturally plateau and THEN he will do something about stopping smoking… even tho its like, what if lung cancer hits before then? Isn’t the issue that the doctors have been screaming for the past while to stop because the cancer is immanent?

>It’s not a simple “add resources, get more people” situation.

it’s more like, increase living quality, get more people consuming and producing emissions at more “advanced” level society consumption habits. Seems everyone is invested in the riding out growth trends train, citing china, when the real exponential population growth and GDP development trend rests in africa. So the population plateaus, thats still 100-200 years of a bloated population demanding the lifestyle of the west. The west can AFFORD to move from industrial to post-industrial, but the rest of the world is either just getting started, or in china’s case, completing the rise into industrial. Unless the west really cuts it’s standard of living to help regions like africa move into post-industrial without first moving to industrial,

Like i don’t think people get the sense of scale of these industrializing and pre-industrialized countries here. The population of all of finland is the same size of one of hundreds of MODERATE sized cities in China. In 10 years, the population of Delhi will rise 10 million more and rival the population of ALL OF CANADA. Lagos, today is roughly 20 million and that’s projected to at least DOUBLE by 2050.

We just experienced a series of riots and protests in France against raising gas prices to mitigate impact to the environment. If the Enlightened, population declining west is that resistant to tightening it’s own belt to save the planet, imagine how these countries that just started rapidly industrializing out of colonialism and poverty will react when westerners tell them to stop industrializing and forfeit it’s sovereignty to the socialist international. Africa is beginning to industrialize almost solely so China can render Africa it’s OWN China to buttress Chinese consumption habits the way America did to China to sustain itself.

Besides, resources aren’t in short supply right now, they just aren’t being distributed very well. There’s food overflows in some area, like w/ cheese in America, and shortages in others.

Do you even understand how much emissions will be burnt JUST for the logistics of moving food and resources around the world in such an equitable manner and tracking populations? The amount of sovereignty and independence the developing world will have to forfeit in order to facilitate that? The cultural costs of REEDUCATING POPULATIONS so they don’t overpopulate themselves to cataclysm? The amount of new infrastructure, industry and fossil fuels required simply to feed EVERYONE and EVERYONES offspring for the indefinite future?

These food resources aren’t in short supply now because the rest of the world subsists on 1/100th what the west does. You ideologues have a habit of looking at a number from 5-10 year old census data, believe it’s STATIC and endlessly ejaculate everywhere on how to lift everyone up when the process of lifting ourselves up is itself, alone crushing the environment, informed solely from what we read and the luxurious lifestyles we take for granted. Either we dramatically CUT our lifestyles and habits to facilitate fairness or we rapidly exhaust the planet’s ability to sustain life as we have it in order to maximize production to lift everyone up to our standards of living, including the poorest in our societies.

You can’t utopia yourself out of this complex web of predicaments on the precipice.

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pandoradeloeste · 6 years

Text

Let’s Go Steal A Dystopia: a proposed season 6

(partially inspired by my state being on fire and my country shooting noncombatants in another country with tear gas)

TL;DR: Season 6 is about the actual building of Leverage International. Step 1: do not post the Black Book to the dark web with no context or groundwork. (Guess which step Hardison skipped.)

Season 6 opens with a 30-second recap of the last scene in The Long Goodbye Job: the team gathers around the hard drive containing the Black Book, Hardison talks about putting it on the dark web and building Leverage International, Eliot promises to take care of them until his dying day, and we have the overhead shot of Nate and Sophie leaving with Parker’s line about being OK playing over it.

SMASH CUT to the trio parkouring through a not-quite-dystopian Portland street. Parker is grim and no-nonsense, and has none of the joie de vivre that usually accompanies her skilled physical work. Hardison is holding a tablet and frantically hacking as he runs. Eliot does his best to keep rioters and security mooks from attacking Parker and Hardison. As they reach their destination, Eliot pulls out a gun and methodically shoots the mooks who are about to reach them. Parker and Hardison watch Eliot for a second and share a look that says that this isn’t the first time he’s shot someone on a job since Moreau, and they know what it costs him.

The job for the first two episode is fairly simple, something like “a CEO is holding my husband hostage to make me program a bad thing, help me get him back”. The job takes two episodes and we don't actually see much of it, because we have a lot of worldbuilding to get through. The episodes are structured like an episode of Lost, where a lot of the time is spent in flashback to what happened when the team assumed that Leverage International would just happen on its own when they declared open season on the corporations that caused the financial crisis.

With no organization, it was every thief and team for themselves, leading to complete chaos. Teams got in each other's way, starting fighting among themselves, some of the more amoral people saw the Black Book as an opportunity to exploit corporations' weaknesses and grab power for themselves - it’s basically Game of Thrones by way of Shadowrunners. Meanwhile corporations, who have various world governments (including our own) in their pockets, complain that they’re under attack, and governments respond by removing constraints on corporations (goodbye antitrust laws and consumer protections) and restricting civil rights in the name of “security” - basically the authoritarian bullshit we’re seeing with Trump but turned up to 11. People protested, which made the government crack down harder, and the cycle continued until the US now has fully militarized police using sonic cannons and live ammunition against anyone they think is antifa, and not even pretending to do actual police work anymore.

(And oh yeah, climate change is still happening, probably not being helped by the Louvre and most of Portland burning down.)

Within the team, things are not looking good. The trio is keenly aware that their weaknesses helped create their current global crisis.

Hardison did what he was warned not to do: he got overconfident and made a mess, and then tried to fix it alone and made it bigger, until it was so big a team of three couldn’t contain it. When he’s not trying to put out fires, he’s paralyzed and obsessing about the body counts in Turkey and Estonia, the arrest rates in NYC, the migrant caravans at multiple countries’ borders being met with tear gas and bullets, etc.

Parker hasn’t learned how to be a leader so much as as the team member that comes up with the plan, but she knows it’s her responsibility to do something about the mess they made, and it turns out that being your romantic partner’s boss is Really Fucking Hard. She’s spent the last year making all the rookie leadership mistakes and swinging back and forth between authoritative and lax, micromanaging and overly hands-off, accidentally favoring Eliot and then Hardison, and stressing herself out until she occasionally has to run off and steal some diamonds solo to chill out.

Eliot. Sweet, loyal, gruff Eliot “I said I would take care of you till my dyin day and dammit Hardison I meant it” Spencer. He’s tried to pull the other two out of their guilt and shame spirals too many times to count, and he’s running himself into the ground trying to keep them safe while they try to fix the world, while also run some more mundane Leverage, Inc. jobs on the side (mostly on his own because the other two are too focused on their global crises and personal failings). A few months ago, after they narrowly escaping one of the police militias, Eliot came to the conclusion that the only way to keep his promise to Nate and Sophie was to start carrying a gun again. The only thing keeping him upright and fighting is his determination not to abandon Parker or Hardison.

During the first job of season 6, something happens to snap them out of it (I’m a fan of the “one team member has a meltdown that triggers catharsis for the whole team” method). Somehow they pull each other back, recommit to holding each other accountable and making each other better ("for better or worse we change together") and start actually building Leverage International.

It's slow going because whoever came up with the phrase about herding cats clearly never tried to get forty of the best criminals in the world, only half of whom speak English, to work together. First there's the logistical problem of finding them and getting them together (Tara and Quinn are gone, nobody knows where Nate and Sophie disappeared to, Archie died before things got really bad, and Hardison can't talk about Cha0s without breaking something), then getting them all to agree to the same principles and values. It’s basically several episodes of The Nigerian Job, but in multiple languages and a lot more in-fighting. The finale is a big ambitious job taking down a large company, maybe Wakefield, that solidifies the international team.

Seasons 7 and 8 are the "let's go steal a capitalism" seasons. This is when the major powers (US, Russia, China, EU, etc) have basically given up all pretense of governing, and it's up to Leverage International to basically perform a dozen coups all at once and rebuilds them as socialist states with better antitrust laws, universal healthcare, strategies to rein in climate change, and free housing. I’m bad at building utopias, though - I’ll let someone else plot that out.

#leverage #fanfiction

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maximuswolf · 4 years

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A serious discussion about the future of the left. via /r/communism

A serious discussion about the future of the left.

Introduction:

Comrades who share this wonderful discussion forum of r/communism, I want you to take a moment to ask yourselves, what is it that we want? What are we fighting for? I imagine most of us are fighting for abolition of private property, collective ownership over the means of production and distribution, a dissolution of the state as an apparatus for control by the bourgeoisie, democratization of all parts of life, better healthcare and welfare for those who need it, and other such extremely noble aims. I myself believe in all of these very strongly. But I'm afraid that many on the left (unintentionally, I hope) are preventing us from achieving these aims, or even actively taking us backwards, towards fascism. So, in what I'm sure will turn out to be an extremely long essay, I want to take a while to discuss action that we all should be taking. I hope everyone reads this through to the end. If you dislike it, feel free to downvote, but please read till the end regardless.

Part I: The Current State of the Left

This might start out kinda rude, but we on the left really suck. A lot. We seem to view people with other beliefs as inferior, deluded, and misinformed idiots who are only capable of seeing just past the end of their noses and unable to view the big picture. And, on some level, I do understand the impulse. It can be hard to put up with their stupid arguments, blatant mistruths, and denial of facts. But a lot of leftists (I myself am also guilty of this) respond to these with insults, ad hominem and name-calling. This is not effective. As hard as it is to get this through our heads, we need more people. If you hang out only in far-left chatrooms, patting all your Marxist-Leninist comrades on the back at how great it feels to own liberals and progressives, you are the problem. The future of the left lies in those people. If you ask an average person off the road what they think about leftists, they’ll usually respond in one of three ways; They’ll either shrug and say they don’t care, call them whiny snowflakes who only complain, or call them belligerent pricks who won’t shut up. Across all my time on planet earth, even when I talk to people who I know hold similar values to my own, they all think of leftists as these 3 things. This isn’t a group that’s going to attract new people. If anything, they’ll be pushed further away. And we need these people. I know many like to talk about revolution like it’s an excuse for them to not have to engage with liberals and progressives, but you’re delusional if you think that. If today, a revolution began in The United States, do you think it has any chance of succeeding? Revolution can only occur with a large enough power base, either among the people or among armed forces. We don’t have any opportunity to raise forces like the red army, so our power base needs to come from people. Average, milk-toast liberals and progressives. That is where the future of the left is.

Part II: Liberalism and Marxism

Liberalism, that is, the philosophy of the enlightenment, is a philosophy that is incompatible with Marxism. Liberalism came about as a way to justify capitalism, and pushed faux progressivism to legitimise capitalism’s promise of a new, equal society. Hate liberalism as much as you want. But liberals, the people who believe in the ideology, are not incompatible with us. Many share similar ideals of a free and equal world, many do in fact support things like healthcare, women’s rights and greater equality of income. They’re just misinformed. They have been the target of misinformation and propaganda from the day they were born, and so are unable to believe in socialism. They view communism as some sort of demonic entity, trying to take over the foundations of society and enslave everyone. And you insulting them isn’t really helping matters. It’s a sad fact that far-left leaning people, and even socialists, are an extreme minority in most of the world. Most people are moderates. Its just that the people with the most extreme beliefs are also often the loudest, and so are disproportionately represented in media and online circles. This is also why neo-nazis seem so common on the internet-they’re just the ones who shout the most. This isn’t about who’s right or wrong, it’s just a fact that the vast majority of people in every country are moderates, neither far-right nor far-left. And so that’s why we need to go on a crusade against misinformation. Now, let’s go onto Marxism. I won’t demean you by defining Marxism, so let’s get to the point. Don’t. Call Yourself. A Marxist. 99% of the time, if you call yourself a Marxist, people will automatically stop listening. As hard as it is, call yourself a socialist (or some variation thereupon). People have been conditioned to associate Communism with authoritarianism, even though they aren’t at all related. Socialism, while still heavily bastardised, lacks that same association with the regimes of Stalin or Mao, so they’re more palatable to the general public. And again, our aim is to convert the people who are aligned with us socially into being aligned with us politically.

Part III: The Art of Proselytising

To convert the liberals is a difficult task. It can be hard, because a lot of leftists get very invested and personal in defence of their ideology, which can be a good thing in small doses. However, when a person listens to a debate or reads transcripts, do you think they will side with the one who shouts and talks incoherently, or the one who has complete control and is calm and confident? When talking with anyone about politics, stay calm. Calm and collected people are far more attractive to others than brash and loud ones. Even if the opponent’s points are patently bullshit, counter them in a way that doesn’t actively demean them. Wait for them to lost patience and get flustered. Your aim is to try and win over people who may have an open mind. So far has been advice pertaining to formal debate. But how do you chat with liberal friends just in general conversation? Very simple. Don’t demean them. If they talk to you about a liberal policy that they like, support them. Agree. As long as that policy isn’t actively harmful, there is no harm in saying that you like it too. Don’t respond by going, “Heh, this changes nothing. The problem is capitalism, and these policies are just to keep you content enough to stop asking questions.” This actively discourages them from your ideas by putting it in their head that the things they want are fundamentally different from the things you want. Instead you respond with, “yeah man, that’s really cool!” Agree, and then later bring it up how you think that we could expand on that idea and bring it into the realm of something more in line with actual socialism. And when they talk about a liberal policy they dislike, try and show them how a more left-leaning policy would be more in line with their ideal society. I know this is vague and unspecific, but I want this to be as universally applicable as possible. Lastly, know when to stop. If someone seems averse to your ideas, don’t push them into reading Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto. Just accept it and move along. After all, if you push too hard, they may give up on you completely and we don’t want that. Their will always be more chances in the future to try and convert.

Part IV: Choosing your Targets

This is a short section. Don’t bother trying to convince ethnic nationalists, neo-nazis or other members of the alt-right in informal forums. It’s a fruitless endeavour. You need to accept that they have committed themselves to a belief which holds no evidence to support it, and so no matter what evidence you bring up to dismiss their claims, it wont matter. In formal debates you can engage them and show how their beliefs are false, but just don’t bother otherwise. Anarcho-capitalists are generally beyond help, but not always. A good litmus test is to ask them if they think trans rights should be promoted. If yes, there is still hope. If not, give up. Ancaps take a lot of work to convert though, so you’ll be in for the long haul. Liberals are your prime targets. They have social values which align with our own, we only need them to realise that those social values would be best served under socialism rather than capitalism. Because one thing to remember is that when it comes to pure facts, logic and evidence, we have the right beaten hands down. Its not even a contest. We just need to make ourselves feel more appealing to the liberals.

Part V: Please, Think Realistically

Change will not happen just suddenly. It needs to be systematically created, and we are the ones who need to do it. It can be comforting to think that the revolution will come, it will be glorious and we will henceforth live in a communist utopia. That’s not going to happen. First off, we need enough people for a revolution. As someone who lives in India, I can tell you what the general reaction to the Naxalites is here- fear, paranoia and mistrust. I understand their goals, but unless more people support them, they will be able to do nothing. We need to plant seeds of this support ourselves. It really disturbed me to see leftists unironically planning to vote for Trump because it would show the Democrats that their model wasn’t working (or something like that) while forgetting that by doing so they would be giving power over to a far-right demagogue who would probably just directly execute you if he could. Us being correct doesn’t mean we are above the mundane conflicts of society. We are as much a part of it as anybody else and so we need to be able to put ideals on the backseat to pragmatism. So why do I bring this up? Because arguing for ideas like the abolition of private property will get you nowhere. Most people are going to frightened by such ideas, so instead we need to dial it back. We can still keep our ideals, but when converting people start small. “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you could visit a hospital without going bankrupt? Or maybe if you had a say in the decisions at your company rather than just listening to your boss all the time? Or maybe if the people at the top weren’t so much richer than everyone else?” Such ideas will seem mundane to us. But to the average person they’re incredibly attractive. Don’t talk in terms of vague, high-minded ideals or all-encompassing social change. Focus on how their life would improve under socialism. The sad truth is, not many people care about the greater good. To get through to such people, you need to show them how they would be better off.

Conclusion: It’s 3:30 am here, I’m really sleepy

We need the support of more people. When talking to them, approach people with earnestness and respect. It leaves a better impression. Don’t be overly humble however. Talk about tangible change that the average person can clearly see would improve their lives. Stop insulting people, and get out there to start actively engaging with others. Lastly, know how to prioritize your enemies. Don’t treat fascists, liberals and soc-dems the same, they all warrant different reactions and by acting like they’re the same, you actively push them closer together.

Good Night Comrades.

Submitted November 13, 2020 at 02:26PM by ARandomAnimeFanNo16 via reddit https://ift.tt/3lumWG5

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specialchan · 4 years

Text

A serious discussion about the future of the left. via /r/communism

A serious discussion about the future of the left.

Introduction:

Part I: The Current State of the Left

Part II: Liberalism and Marxism

Part III: The Art of Proselytising

Part IV: Choosing your Targets

Part V: Please, Think Realistically

Conclusion: It’s 3:30 am here, I’m really sleepy

Good Night Comrades.

Submitted November 13, 2020 at 02:26PM by ARandomAnimeFanNo16 via reddit https://ift.tt/3lumWG5

0 notes

driveaugust1-blog · 5 years

Text

Some Candid Thoughts On My Conservative Home State, Which I So Desperately Wanted To Leave

I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, and for as long as I can remember, I could not wait to leave. Despite the fact that I did have a fairly progressive group of friends, Georgia felt like nothing more than an oppressive conservative bubble. My high school was pretty unofficially segregated, and I remember being taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. I attended a dance studio owned by two men, who never talked about the fact that they lived together and wore wedding bands. I did everything I could to let everyone know how much I resented the south. When I decided I was going to go to college in Vermont, I could tell how much it bothered even some of my teachers — which only reinforced my thinking that the south was Bad, and New England was Good.

(I didn’t quite know it at the time, but I grew up with a lot more financial privilege than many, if not most, of my peers. I always knew I’d be able to go to college wherever I’d like, without going into debt, because my parents could afford it — my mom was able to go to college seven or eight states away, and she wanted the same thing for her kids. And lucky for her, she was able to cover the costs of that.)

I was expecting to find in Vermont the liberal Utopia I desperately wanted to live in, and in a way, I did. My college boasted dozens of inclusive on-campus clubs, centers for LGBT students and students from multiple cultural backgrounds, and a robust Women’s and Gender Studies program. I attended a free sex-ed event called “I <3 Female Orgasm” and took a “sociology of sexualities” class my freshman year (and from both learned I’d been a lot more sheltered than I’d previously thought). I met lots of people with different gender identities and sexual orientations who actually spoke of them openly. And heck, composting bins were everywhere!

I can honestly say I love Vermont with a huge piece of my heart. But it, and all of New England and the rest of “liberal America,” is far from the Utopia I’d believed it to be. I could see evidence of this on my college campus alone. I once got lured into a meeting for a Catholic anti-choice group based on the promise of free pizza, and I could always count on inducing a few eye-rolls if I ever brought the word “anti-feminist” into conversation at a party. And there were many even more insidious occurrences. Some of my friends were called homophobic slurs on multiple occasions — someone I knew even got a block of ice thrown at their head from a moving car. There were many student protests against my school administration’s apparent lack of resources and opportunities for marginalized students. One of my school’s fraternities got shut down after passing around a “rape survey” (it looks like the chapter is going to be reinstated).

I had left my red home state, but the same red ideologies still followed me. They weren’t everywhere, but they weren’t exactly hidden, either.

Now, of course, I recognize that it’s a rather simple life lesson: the world isn’t black and white, and there are all kinds of people with all kinds of flawed worldviews and blind spots everywhere. A progressive Utopia does not exist. For instance, I recently walked by a huge, rather daunting anti-choice rally in the middle of Manhattan’s Times Square. Massachusetts, as I only learned as an adult, is a notoriously racist place to live, and it hit a 10-year high in reported hate crimes in 2017. Bigotry isn’t unique to the south, or to “Heartland America.” But here’s the thing: you don’t hear people say “it’s time to cancel the entire state of Massachusetts.”

For this reason, I’ve been disheartened by many reactions I’ve seen from liberal and progressive people in response to the backwards anti-choice bills that have recently passed in Georgia and Alabama.

Now, I understand why film production companies would refrain from working in Atlanta while such a law is in place. I think that’s a really powerful move, and hopefully one that won’t be for naught. I am hopeful that neither of these bills will go into effect, thanks to efforts like those from the ACLU. But I also understand that, for the people living there, these kinds of boycotts may only do more harm to their livelihood, whether or not they actually induce change. (And for the record, I think you can be personally against abortion but still understand that criminalization will never be the answer. Abortions have been performed for thousands of years, and there is ample evidence that they will continue to occur even if they are made to be illegal — they will simply be much, much less safe.)

I’ve also noticed many dismissive, unkind, often ignorant responses from individuals, saying things like “can we finally just cancel the south” and “life begins the moment you leave Alabama,” as if it’s a choice for poor and/or marginalized individuals to just up and move to a different state whenever they feel like it. It hurts to think about all the people in “red” states who are going to suffer because of these potential laws, and who may already be suffering — and how cavalierly so many supposedly progressive people act towards their livelihoods.

It’s important to remember that a big part of why red states stay red is because of who is in power — and how they manipulate the law and practices in their own favor. In fact, polls have shown that not one state’s population has more than 25% support for a ban on abortion. And frankly, if it wasn’t for some really shady alleged voter suppression during Georgia’s most recent gubernatorial race, Stacey Abrams may very well be the governor of Georgia right now.

All of this is to say that there are people with different views everywhere — there are people who have oppressive, racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic beliefs in every corner of this country. Yes, it is immensely upsetting when my home state tries to pass laws taking away basic health rights from women and other people with a uterus. (And it’s especially upsetting when you consider that Georgia does have some really wonderful, borderline-socialist programs in place, like the HOPE scholarship program.) I understand why many people would want to move away from red states in their adult lives, both for their own safety and to find community. But while I may fundamentally disagree with people with conservative values, I still want to see a world where they can benefit from legislation that reflects my values. I want them to have livable wages and social safety nets, including easy access to healthcare. To dismiss an entire group of people simply because of their state government, when the reality is that hate exists everywhere, is fundamentally unkind — and the opposite of progress.

(If you’re in a position to be able to and would like to assist in helping people with barriers to entry for the healthcare they need, read this.)

Image via Unsplash

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Source: https://thefinancialdiet.com/i-couldnt-wait-to-leave-my-conservative-home-state-but-it-deserved-better/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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bearhatarmy · 6 years

Photo

Here’s a hot take from conservative pundit and massive transphobe music fan, Ben Shapiro. Normally I would tackle the more serious topics Ben discusses, but this really felt like it deserved a response.

Though, if I wanted to take a more serious angle, I suppose I could make the argument that rap is a huge part of the black community’s cultural identity & heritage and by belittling it, Ben is insulting and diminishing one of a marginalized group’s main creative outlets that they use to communicate their struggles.

But that would be racist! Ben isn’t racist! He is constantly explaining over and over just how not-racist he is. Which is what all non-racists have to do.

This has nothing to do with racism and Ben has some solid FACTS explaining why.

HE LIKES JAZZ, OKAY?

AND OPINIONS ARE NEVER RACIST.

I GUESS.

EVEN THOUGH HE SAID IT WAS A FACT.

So, to be clear, this will just be a not-serious analysis about Ben’s totally not-racist FACT that rap is not-music.

Let’s get this not-party started...

You see, Ben is famous for his motto, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

He’s even leveraged his factual wisdom and made it into merchandise.

That’s a real thing people can buy. It even has 6 whole reviews on Amazon!

Beyond the Box rated it with 3 stars saying, “It's okay but small.”

(Aww, just like Ben!)

And Tim S. described the shirt’s fit as “Liberals are destroying the country.”

(I’m pretty sure that means it’s a tad itchy.)

Before I saw Ben’s factual tweet, I really FELT like rap was an amazing musical artform. It took poetry and made it musical. It gave people a new way to express themselves that didn’t require expensive music lessons or even instruments. A friend could just bang on a table while you let it flow. It made creating music more accessible. And as long as you had good rhythm you could participate. It FELT groundbreaking at the time.

The very first cassette tape I bought was Good Vibrations by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. (I know that isn’t a great start, but I was like 10, okay?) The very first compact disc I bought was 2 Legit 2 Quit by MC Hammer. (Don’t laugh, he was the shit in 1991.) As I reached my formative years, I started listening to DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Beastie Boys, and House of Pain.

I jump’d around. (squeeEEEEEee)

But as some of you may have noticed, most of my musical selections were very mainstream. You’ve probably also noticed that I am very... white.

To this day, even! I think it is a chronic condition.

My skin is near translucent due to lack of sunlight. I often say things like “indubitably” and “bloviate” and “I’m sure this chicken will be fine with minimal seasoning.” And at one point I owned the entire Creed discography.

I was in desperate need of a Hip Hop education.

Now using the official Rules of Republican Conduct™, if I want to talk about something with a racial component, all I need is a single black friend. This will absolve me of any consequences.

Interesting Froggie Fun Fact... I went to a mostly black high school!

Check this out...

That’s TWO black friends!

Shawn is the one teaching me a complicated handshake I instantly forgot. And Marcus is photobombing us in the back there.

I wish I could say our school was super progressive and everyone got along dandy. But in the mid-90s that just wasn’t the case. There were no major conflicts, but a lot of the white kids would sort of... self segregate. They’d all choose lockers in the same area. They’d sit in the same area at lunch and in class. And not a lot of them would interact with black kids outside of school.

That said, I did not get the segregation memo. I got along with everyone. I’m not saying I was some amazing colorblind trailblazer crossing racial boundaries at every turn. My locker was in the white section too. And I only had two black friends (not pictured) that I hung out with outside of school.

But I do think humor can break down a lot of barriers. And I used comedy to cross those invisible lines from time to time.

Do you remember “Yo Mama” jokes?

Like uhhh... Yo mama so old, her social security number is 1. Yo mama so lazy, she stuck her nose out the window and let the wind blow it. Yo mama so classless, she’s a Marxist utopia.

You get it.

Before school or before class, a lot of kids would have these competitions. They would face off with their best motherly insults and typically the person who received the loudest “OH DAAAAAAMMMMN!” would be declared the winner.

One day I just kind of decided to make fun of Shawn’s mama. After a few seconds of stunned silence I got the loudest OH DAMN of anyone and we were suddenly friends. And then his friends were my friends too. Our friendship didn’t go outside the school premises, but it was still a lot of fun joking around with them at lunch or when we were supposed to be doing homework.

Shawn and I started a sort of cultural exchange. He would tell me about all of the amazing music he was into. And I explained why Batman: The Animated Series was not a kid’s cartoon. IT WAS ANIMATION. Says it right in the name.

He introduced me to a wide range of artists of color. Old and new (at the time). We talked about Boyz II Men, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Prince. He introduced me to Mary J Blige who I follow to this day. And Aaliyah :(

He also told me about not-music.

Ya know... rappers.

I’ll be honest, sometimes this was challenging for me. I did not like or understand everything he suggested. I had a lot of racist baggage leftover from an all-white Catholic elementary school and my brain resisted for longer than I care to admit. But after seeing Shawn’s passion for this not-music, I became rap-curious and willing to keep an open mind.

Let me try to name-drop from memory...

Puff Daddy, Lauryn Hill, Wu-Tang Clan, Naughty By Nature, Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Dr. Dre, Biggie Smalls, Ice Cube, and some guy named Tupac Shakur. You’ve probably never heard of him.

He’d even sneak a Walkman in his backpack so he and his friends could sample his latest acquisitions.

He’d be like, “Hey Ben, you want to listen to some Master P?” And I’d be like, “Sure! You wanna listen to Nine Inch Nails?” And he’d be like, “Naw, I’m good.”

Okay, so the cultural exchange could be a bit one-sided at times. But Batman bonded us all.

Admittedly, when I was at home, I still mostly listened to Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Stone Temple Pilots on repeat. And I do not listen to a great deal of Hip Hop these days. Mostly due to lack of guidance. I don’t have a Shawn in my life anymore. (But that Cardi B Money song was crazy good. And I’m not just saying that cuz the video had boobs.)

Shawn was able to get me to a place where even if I didn’t like what I was listening to, I understood why other people enjoyed it. I really learned to appreciate rap and many of Shawn’s suggestions made an appearance on my super rad 90s Winamp playlist.

Sometimes when I was having a bad day, it was nice to have a good day to fall back on.

So when I was very whitely bobbing my head to the beat of that communal Walkman, I didn’t think my friends were stupid. I didn’t think I was stupid. I didn’t FEEL stupid.

But facts are facts. And my feels about facts don’t matter.

You see, Ben Shapiro is known for being a master debater. You can find videos of him CRUSHING LIBRULS WITH LOGIC. Or DESTROYING FEMINISTS with TRU FACTS. Perhaps even DEMOLISHING SOCIALISTS with STATISTICS.

His big Harvard brain is pretty relentless when it comes to DESTROYMOLISHING The Left.

He’s great at taking standard conservative talking points, couching them in academic speak, and peppering them with dubious facts that don’t always hold up to scrutiny after the fact. Some might argue he cherry picks his opponents and the subject matter, creates scenarios where his point of view will be well received, and uses bad faith tactics to give the appearance of the upper hand.

But that would be speculation and this post is all about FACTS.

And Ben’s facts are too powerful to dispute. I doubt anyone is up to the challenge. Not even a transgender woman with epic makeup, glorious costumes, creative lighting schemes, and a degree in philosophy could take him to task.

It’s just... unpossible.

*cough* Contrapoints *cough*

Sorry, had a froggie in my throat.

SO... let’s see Ben defend “rap isn’t music” using his fancy debating skillz. It took him 6 years to come up with this, so I’m betting it’s bulletproof.

OH I SEE.

He plays CLASSICAL music.

CHECKMATE, RAPPERS!

Ben Shapiro DESTROYGASMS Hip Hop with UNDERWHELMING TWEET.

If you’ll allow me to expound his logic, being a classically trained musician makes you more specialer than a regular musician. It makes him an arbiter of what is and is not music. I forgot that classical musicians were automatically given that power.

I know Ben only ever presents facts, so I’d like to take him at his word, but I think I’d like to see this music master perform something. Just to be sure he has the proper classical credentials to make these bold claims.

Here is a music video he produced for The Daily Wire. Clearly a high budget homage to one of the most thrilling television themes in recent history.

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Did anyone else feel like they were watching 3 robots play the blandest arrangement ever conceived? Or was that just me? SUCH ENERGY.

I will say, those special effects were... something.

And Ben really PWNED CNN. I’m sure they felt that slice all the way in their Atlanta headquarters.

Ben, if you’re reading this, that video was totally funny in the way you intended. People are definitely laughing with you and not at you. I didn’t cringe even a little.

But does this prove that Ben is a proper CLASSICAL musician? With all the power and privileges that entails?

Does he have the authority to judge musical worthiness?

Despite his robotic performance, I suppose he did hit all the correct notes and everything.

Is music like facts? Does music care about your feelings?

I think what we need is a comparison. Something we can judge Ben’s performance against in order to gauge his level of classical musicianship.

This is Tina Guo.

She is a Chinese-American immigrant from Shanghai. She moved here at the age of 5. She probably was able to sneak in because there wasn’t a border wall yet. She is taking the jobs of American classical musicians. Probably why Ben isn’t in a top-tier symphony orchestra as we speak.

Tina is a cello prodigy who was trained classically. She attended the USC Thornton School of Music for professional cello studies on a full scholarship where she studied under Nathaniel Rosen and Eleonore Schoenfeld--some of the most influential cellists of the 20th century.

She also made a huge splash on YouTube casually playing Flight of the Bumblebee as a teenager. No biggie. I’m sure Ben can play that too.

Oh, and do you remember that badass Wonder Woman theme written by famous composer Hans Zimmer?

That was her playing the lead.

Now for the comparison.

Watch Librul Immigrant DESTROY the Game of Thrones theme that she arranged ALL BY HERSELF without the help of a BIG STRONG MAN.

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I don’t know.

I think that was a smidge better than Ben’s version.

What do you folks think?

So here is the dilemma.

We have two CLASSICAL musicians who are at nearly identical skill levels...

HOWEVER... after some investigation...

It’s possible Tina Guo thinks rap... might be music.

*GASP*

THE EVIDENCE

One of her favorite ways to practice improvisation is to jam along with Hip Hop tracks she finds on YouTube.

Now, conservatives like Ben LOVE dictionary definitions. It’s their go-to debate tactic when trying to legitimize the idea of racism toward white folks. So let’s use the dictionary really quick.

When I looked up what this “jamming” word meant, it sent me to “jam session.” I was shocked by what I found.

Musicians? MUSIC? But those backing tracks she practiced to were used for rap non-music. BEN I AM CONFUSED.

I think I need to dig deeper.

After scouring the internet for almost 2 minutes I was able to find something even more shocking.

Here is LIBRUL CLASSICAL SNOWFLAKE IMMIGRANT FEMINIST MUSICIAN sharing the stage with a CUCK NON-MUSIC RAP ARTIST.

That kinda looks like Tina Guo... and LUPE FIASCO.

*DOUBLE GASP*

And I’ve double checked this... it seems this Lupe fellow is definitely a rapper.

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

I mean, she has her cello. And he has a microphone. But it’s a FACT that rap isn’t music. So I guess they are doing some experimental anti-music performance together.

ANOTHER SHOCKING IMAGE HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION AFTER ANOTHER 12 SECONDS OF GOOGLING.

What the heck, Tina?

Why are you, A CLASSICAL MUSICIAN, on a stage with Common? Another rapper!

I’m a little worried that Tina might be stupid.

Ben’s FACT clearly states if you think rap is music, then you are stupid.

And not only is Tina playing music near a rapper... I’m pretty sure she is playing music WITH a rapper.

That’s like... double stupid.

I really don’t know what to feel about these facts I’ve uncovered.

These FACTS kinda FEEL like bullshit.

At least I can take comfort in the absolute fact that Ben Shapiro is a solid 5 feet 9 inches tall. It gives me comfort knowing he can ride any roller coaster he wants.

Sick burn, Ben. Though you’re kind of implying that when Milo sees you he is giving you blowjobs. I’m sure you’re fine with that implication. It’s not like you’re homophobic or anything, right?

The important thing is that everyone knows how you’re a big boy. Two inches taller than Napoleon!

I mean, it would be silly to lie about such a thing so easily disproved, right? And there is nothing to be ashamed of if you are a shorter individual. My mom is short I think she’s the best!

So I’m confident you are 5′9″ as you have stated.

I CAN’T FEEL ANY MORE FACTS, BEN.

MY SOUL CAN’T TAKE IT.

You know what... screw it.

I’m going to make it serious.

Not liking rap isn’t racist.

Telling people they are stupid for liking rap is super racist.

And being too stubborn to apologize for a 6-year-old tweet compounds that racism.

Liking jazz is just the musical version of “I have a black friend.”

Not understanding that rap is a cultural staple vital to the black community and then comparing it to frickin’ Titanic makes it profoundly racist.

And... *takes a deep breath* continually defending a shitty 6-year-old tweet as recent as last July, even though you could probably just apologize, blame it on youthful ignorance, delete it, and never have to deal with it again, just because you can’t ever admit you ever said anything wrong...

Well, that just makes you look...

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evilelitest2 · 7 years

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100 Days of Trump Bonus Edition: Bioshock

Welcome back to 100 days of Trump...bonus edition, where we talk about what made Trump possible though...well more than 100 recommendations. I am finishing these last few up before i move unto my next project, invading and conquering Moldovia.

So Bioshock 1 almost made it on the primary list, but i backed off, mostly because I played bioshock infinite and fucking hated it, particularly its extremely demented understanding of politics (you can see it here). And I kept wondering to myself if I was overvaluing the first Bioshock after the disaster of infinite and upon further reflection, I do admit that the first one does the sort of piss ant thing of talking about issues more than actually addressing them....Despite that though, I think it is worth checking out. Just ignore the terrible ending and the useless moral choice system.

So Bioshock is about Objectivism, the intellectual black hole where good ideas go to die, and is about Andrew Ryan (GET IT) an objectivity billionaire who builds an underwater....Ayn Rand (GET IT) city where his Free Market Utopia can live in peace. And it immediately goes to shit like...holy crap.

And his initial pitch sounds pretty good if you like empty hollow rhetoric to you know....facts

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Notice how the entire philosophy of this is basically “Guess what, you are a special awesome person who doesn’t have to abid by the rules” but it doesn’t take a genius to reason how fundamentally myoptic it is, because if you want to have a city (let alone a country) based on these principles, you are going to run into problems, because to get a society running you need to make decisions based on the city rather than a bunch of individuals with a god complexes. And what happens when those individuals run into each other and start to compare egos? Oh right, if everybody is special, there isn’t any room for compromise.

Its kinda interesting how much Objectivism borrows from Marxism actually, I mean listen to this (and trust me, this speech is a lot more articulate and compelling than anything Ayn Rand wrote, it is only three mins for example)

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Huh, an endless cycle of history being based on a lie spread by the ruling classes? An obsession with ownership of labor. A love of broad sweeping historical generalization rather than a more nuanced approach that takes into account various trends, and a conspiratorial dismissive of all things he doesn’t like as in fact being the same? Huh, sounds like the writings of a certain German philosopher with a big beard, except Marx at least had the decency to have a sense of humor. Also very noticeable how he claims that FDR was being taken over by communist, when in fact the New Deal actually killed the Communist/Socialist movement in the United States, because if you can get out of the depressing using capitalist means, there is no need for a revolution.

The obsession with “the parasite” reminds me of nothing so much as “The Kulak” or “The Jew” in Soviet and Nazi circles, or heretic we see in Christian of Islamic Fundamentalism. Because Utopian self indulgence always seem to end to the same boring end. But its romantic, say what you will about the man, he sure can make a speech, and that romantic ideal of a society is very tempting, while the practical reality of building a country, based on checks and balances has its faults, but it is fundamentally practical, because you have to assume this society will deal with the actual unsexy realities of running a country. Ryan and by extension most of this sort of Koch Brothers Trumpian right wing Utopian just sort of expects things to work out if you are dismissive enough and self indulgent enough, that if you massage your own ego just a little bit more, that will make the difficult problems of governance go away.

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Huh...personifying the market as some sort of living sentience, for somebody who rejects religion you do sure seem to have a very predestination perspective, I mean if the market is some sort of personified sentence then you don’t have to offer actual solutions to the problem now do you? Just like if feudalism is gods plan, if the Purges are natural step in the march towards true equality, if genocide is just the battle between the races, that means you don’t have to bear personal responsibility for when it all falls apart. And indeed it really does fall apart.

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You do have to love the fact that he compares people wanting food to not die to sexual predators, which is not so dissimilar of the the attitude of our own ...job creators.

Because if you try to built John Galt’s home for imaginary political philosophizers at the bottom of the sea, you need to take into account some pratical realities. They cut off contact with the surface to keep socialist ideas from infecting their free market utopia, but in doing that, you create regulation, which allows a black market for smugglers. But ultimately, men (and this really is a male centric game and philosophy) are not inherently rational, Andrew Ryan certainly isn’t with his refusal to understand how markets work when narcotics are involved

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But so is everybody else, human beings are not wholy rational creatures, and if you don’t account for that, you find yourself with a golf club in your brain.

But this philosophy always seems to find adherents, in large part because it is extremely self indulgent, this is an adolescent power fantasy, you are the most special misunderstood creature in the world and everybody else is just holding you back. But if everybody thinks that way, what do you in a society which necessitates poverty to exist, if you have no welfare state, then society will need losers and what happens to those losers when they realize they can’t become captains of industry but only mop toilets. And whats more, what happens when you get a ruthless ambitious man who doesn’t wish to be held back by the petty morality of reverence for the free market?

A shitty final boss fight, thats what.

#100 Days of Trump #Bioshock #Objectivism #Ayn Rand #Andrew Ryan #frank fontaine #Free Market #Great Chain of Industry #War on Drugs #Koch Brothers

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imaginaireradical · 8 years

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Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.

By David Graeber

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

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stupidfluster · 5 years

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A Cosmic Apology: Proposal for a Middle Grade Novel

IT’S LIKE NARNIA BUT WITH 50% MORE SELF LOATHING

I’d like you to meet Ash. She’s a 13 year old self-styled archaeologist with a labradoodle named Gertrude. And every particle of her being believes that Celtheste, the mythical homeland of her Gradmama’s stories, is real. She’ll do anything to get there. She’ll run away from home and stow away on a cargo ship. She’ll even break into what appears to be an underground paramilitary compound if it will lead her to the place she’ll finally fit in.

Then there’s Griff, a 14 year old, hyperactive bookworm, whose Friday afternoon is ruined when he involuntarily shape-shifts into the boy he has a crush on. Sure, he wished on his last birthday candle to please be someone else, anyone else besides himself, but this is a little much. Now he’ll do anything to go back to his normal, conventionally freakish self—even make a deal with his dead dad’s glamorous, but shady ex-wives.

What unfolds is Cosmic Apologies, the story of two kids who land themselves in another world, on opposite sides of an apocalyptic, interdimensional plot. It’s The Wire meets Narnia: a dual pov, middle grade fantasy caper with a kid cop chasing a kid smuggler down a steampunk silk road. But more than that, this project is a homecoming story. It’s about two kids returning to the land of their heritage. A place they must make sense of as they make sense of themselves.

THE SHAPESHIFTER IS THE HERO, THE GIRL GETS THE GIRL

Returning to Celtheste myself has been its own delicate operation. It’s a world I started building as a kid, so excavating it as an adult—piecing it together from old maps, drawings, and journals—has unearthed a lot of troubling data. I don’t have to ask, for instance, why all the heroes I drew were spikey-haired blonde shitgrinners with rippling eight-packs. Or why the “Asia themed” countries were all afterthought samurai subplots. I was creating a mythological homeland using the only language I knew; a language that could barely describe me, much less make sense of me.

My dad is a pastor. He’s sitting across from me, dictating his Good Friday sermon into the old IBM. My mother is a pianist. She’s playing and singing in the next room, something Christian and in Mandarin, bright and blurry with right pedal. I’d be lying if I said this project wasn’t secretly for them. It was my Masters thesis, actually: a 30,000 word explanation of my queerness in the form of a middle grade fantasy novel. I thought maybe if they read it, they’d understand. Like Griff, I was a kid who wanted to be someone else, someone less confusing. Like Ash, I wanted somewhere to fit, some place I didn’t feel like an alien. But what I really wanted was to make sense. To them, to myself, to the world. To be a thousand things at once and have that be okay.

I don’t know if my parents will ever read this book, or if it’s going to make a difference to them. But I know I need to write it. Fantasy, I think, is the only genuine way to explain my reality. All my intersecting identities; the big pile of labels I am to people—what they really are is a mess of criss-crossing, misaligned worlds I’ve always had to navigate and bridge. And this project helps me do that, helps render all that confusion into mythology, into personhood. This project is for the kid me, who traveled to Celtheste not to escape or to be someone else, but to try and be himself when no one would let him. This is for him and every other border-hopping, code-switching, displaced, misplaced, mixed, flipped, and remixed kid, whose reality is so absurd that only magic makes sense to them. The kid whose mythological origin is more Grace Lee Boggs than Hercules, more Oakland than Camelot. The kid who, to everyone else, is a heap of labels, or an interesting case study, or a big confusing mistake, or some indecipherable monster, or sad, broken thing. This is for them.

MY GAY, POSTRACIAL, SOCIALIST UTOPIA

And yet, the world of Celtheste is not a gay, postracial, socialist utopia. I’m not here to write a morality tale, I just want to build a treehouse for the people I love. And we all know that treehouses are at their best when they sit at an ungodly height; twisted into thick, ancient, unfeeling branches; threatening to fly apart for no reason.

When Ash and Griff arrive in Celtheste, the castles and queens of Grandmama’s stories are bullet-ridden and staving off revolution respectively. There are too many immigrants, too many bombings, and civil war (read: great power proxy war) is making a comeback. This is a world where the gods murdered magic and magic murdered the gods. It’s a world bubbling over with ethnic cleansing, violent space-race espionage, and vicious, deranged, fully sentient orcas.

But I’m not interested in gritty, either. I’m not interested in cynicism. I just wanted a fantasy world that wasn’t stuck in timeless ahistory, that felt true to the cultural and political blender of our own ever-globalizing world. And more than that: I don’t think you can pretend with kids anymore. That our world isn’t as dark and absurd as it is. In Cosmic Apologies, the kids aren’t here to save their world. They’re learning how to reach out and touch it—wonder at it, feel its anguish and gratitude, hold a piece of it and see what happens.

ITS NOT FOR CHILDREN, IT’S FOR FUTURE GROWN-UPS

Cosmic Apologies is about what happens. To that piece of the world, and to the kid who holds it.

I’m writing it to honor the weird little kid I was and to be the voice and the representation that he craved, that I think a lot of people are still craving. No input has been more meaningful and useful to me than the letters I received from an eighth grade class in Tucson after they read the first two chapters of Cosmic. The response I received from them and from other young people of color, children of immigrants, queer folks, and all their intersections, has confirmed to me that the work I am doing is important.

Because if you haven’t been able to tell already, I trust and respect children deeply. I trust their instincts. I trust their perspectives and their frustrations. I trust them to ask for what they need out of the world. And if they learn to trust me as an author, I intend to honor that trust with my life, with my every word. Nothing would make me happier.

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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There are still perfect moments. Not too many of them, but they happen. In my last one, I was sitting on a balcony in the quiet part of the French Quarter, eating a pistachio muffin and sipping an iced coffee. I was with an old friend, and we were talking excitedly about things we had read. There was a breeze, and we could see boats going by on the Mississippi River. In the distance, we heard the sound of a trumpeter playing on a streetcorner. I was wearing a comfortable shirt, it was spring, and there were flowers around. Music, food, sunshine, friendship, plants, old architecture, proximity to a body of water, and intelligent but unpretentious conversation: to me, these are all the elements needed for total peace and satisfaction.

I’m sure you have your own list of ingredients for a personal paradise. (Some people like snow, they tell me.) They rarely come together all at once, and when they do, it’s usually only for a moment. But what a moment! Kurt Vonnegut has a lovely quote that describes these sorts of times: “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” Unfortunately, that isn’t what I usually murmur. Because underneath the feeling of bliss there is always a certain amount of frustration and anxiety. And what I end up murmuring is: “Since this is so nice, what is humanity doing with itself?”

The perfect moments do not end up being entirely perfect, then. They end up being exasperating, because I can’t help but be angry that such nice experiences are possible, yet aren’t ubiquitous. On a planet capable of being so extraordinarily beautiful and pleasant, why are so many things so absolutely rotten for so many people? The ingredients of the good life are not complicated. It’s a trumpet, a muffin, a river, and a nice day, basically. And yet we have a world filled with border walls, solitary confinement, drone strikes, gang violence, car accidents, student debt, preventable diseases, Walmarts, and Donald Trump. There’s so much loneliness, so much misfortune. So many children who never see a friendly face, so many old people who wait each day for a visit. In the U.S. alone, 40,000 people get desperate enough to take their lives every year. No, that’s wrong: 40,000 people succeed in taking their lives; for every suicide there are 25 suicide attempts, and God knows how many other people who hover on the brink. How could things go so horribly wrong when they seem so easy to make right?

Illustrations by Christopher Matthews

It’s very difficult to be comfortable in one’s personal “perfect moments,” when one realizes just how many people don’t even get many bearable moments, let alone perfect ones. And in some respects, one person’s pleasures are built on other people’s discomforts. The street musician playing the trumpet is underpaid and struggles to pay for the basics (I’ve talked to him about it), because tourists treat him as part of the scenery. I buy my muffins at the coffee shop around the corner, where the workers probably don’t make too much more than the Louisiana minimum wage of $7.25/hr when it takes about $20/hr to afford a decent apartment here. Some of the world’s most delicious food is made in this small city, but it’s made by people who toil and sweat and suffer and get very little thanks for it. (This is not to mention all the animals that die so that we can feast on them.) It seems almost grotesque to talk of perfect moments, because to perceive them that way requires insulating ourselves and ignoring everything around us. The French Quarter, for instance, is visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year, who come to stroll under the oaks of Esplanade Avenue and look at the fabulous Spanish colonial architecture. When you’re rumbling along in the St. Charles streetcar, looking at the antebellum mansions and smelling the magnolias, you can genuinely think you’re in a kind of Eden. But this is also a city where ⅓ of people are in poverty, where 150 people are murdered every year, and where the incarceration rate is the highest of any state in the country (which is, in turn, higher than any country in the world). What looks like a city of charm and luxury is actually a city of drastic racial and economic inequality, built by slaves and sustained by injustice.

It’s certainly enough to put you off your muffin. But I don’t think becoming aware of reality means that we have to lessen our enjoyment of the world’s wonders. That way lies an unhelpful negativity: “Isn’t this garden beautiful?” “I guess it is if you don’t think about how all the time spent making it could have been spent trying to end mass incarceration.” Instead, I think it’s possible to pair feelings of joy/appreciation with corresponding feelings of realism/responsibility, and we can view perfect moments not as an ignorant indulgence, but as a vision of the kind of experience that we ought to make accessible to everybody. They’re little glimpses of what we should be fighting for, and it’s actually important to have reminders of what the good life might consist of, and to have reassurances that it’s not actually fantastical to think we can achieve heaven on earth. We already have heaven on earth, it’s that we only have it fleetingly, and it’s not available to everybody.

Basin Street is a street Where the folks, they all meet In New Orleans, the land of dreams You’ll never know how nice it seems Or just how much it really means

—Louis Armstrong, “Basin Street Blues” (1928)

It’s important to use present-day experiences as source material for dreams of social transformation, because nowadays, it can be difficult to imagine a future that is substantially different from the present, except in ways that are horrific. It’s not that nobody can imagine things changing. It’s that the two possibilities seem to be either “like this, only more so” and “civilizational annihilation.” Granted, you still hear one or two moonbeams insisting that “a better world is possible.” But even that is a phrase rather than a vision, a chant meant to reassure us that we haven’t given in yet. The most creative imaginings of possible futures are bleak. Several times, this magazine has published articles on the regrettable trend toward dystopian film and fiction, which even the Star Trek franchise has succumbed to. The observation “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is tragically accurate.

The future wasn’t always like this. Once, long ago, people devised extraordinary utopias. From the original one—Thomas More’s 16th century satire—to the Victorian-era visions of H.G. Wells and William Morris, to the feminist science fiction novels that dared to dream of a world without men, in times past there were countless available tomorrows, only some of them depressing. George Scialabba, in his lecture “Slouching Towards Utopia,” notes the strange contrast between the popular literature of the 19th century and that of our own time. The bestselling books of the 1800s were exhortations to moral progress, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and Edward Bellamy’s utopian Looking Backward. (By contrast, over the last century, Scialabba says, it was probably The Da Vinci Code, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Hite Report.) The success of Bellamy’s novel is particularly noteworthy. As a novel, there’s not much to it: a Bostonian falls asleep and awakens in the year 2000, where he is shown around a future socialist society. But Bellamy goes into detail about the operations of future-Boston, presenting a world in which labor is minimal, goods are distributed equally among all, crime is treated as a medical issue, and everyone retires at age 45.

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#politics #the left #current affairs #utopia #democratic socialism #socialism #ecosocialism #capitalism #class oppression #depression

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jimdroberts · 5 years

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Britain, Brexit, and Zugzwang

There’s a saying in chess that describes a position whereby the player whose turn it is

Zugzwang should be Batman’s nemesis.

can’t make a move that won’t lose him the game, such a position is called, zugzwang. In British politics similar situations are called Brexit.

How did we get here?

Google images with a search for, “Brexit Timeline.” It results in an array of graphical representations and psychedelic colours of confusion illustrating just how the UK will negotiate their way through the eight levels of hell. Each timeline is different and every timeline is about as accurate as a bumblebee with a machine gun, leaving me to deduce that nobody has the faintest idea what is going on.

Just look at the timelines, it’s madness I tell you!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Brexit Timeline – How Did We Get Here?

2010, Conservatives win a general election without a clear majority. The Conservatives form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

2015, In an attempt to win an outright majority, David Cameron pledges a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), despite the fact that he was pro-Europe. The Conservatives win an outright majority.

June 2016, Britain holds a referendum to decide whether it’s to remain a part of the (EU). Despite all media predictions, a majority of 51.9% of people vote to leave the EU. Within 24 hours David Cameron resigns as prime minister and like a leader of a banana republic, goes into exile on the French Riviera, where he settles down to write his memoir, also known as his excuse, the memoir fails to mention performing any sexual acts on the severed heads of pigs.

“David Cameron announced he is stepping down in the wake of a vote, which should make me happy, but it doesn’t. It’s like catching an ice cream cone out of the air, because a child has been hit by a car. I’ll eat it! But it’s tainted somehow.” – John Oliver

June 2017, riding Following the departure of David Cameron, Theresa May mistakes a wave of national euphoria for what is actually a burgeoning sense of scorn, ridicule and contempt towards her. Failing to recognise this

Ever wondered what a person looks like having just been given £1 billion?

she calls a general election, not an easy thing to do given the Fixed Term Parliament Act requiring five years between elections. Conservatives win the election, but take control of a hung parliament. To have a majority they form a coalition government with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a sort of stone-age sect of religous zealots whom Theresa May gives £1 billion. Some called it a bribe, while others wanted to know where the magic money tree’s hidden. Despite the £1 billion pay off, the DUP consistently fail to support the prime minister on most Brexit votes. Still, whats £1 billion to a government preaching austerity?

March 2019, the Conservative Party tire of Theresa’s inability to make progress on brexit.

July 2019, members of the Conservative Party elect Boris Johnson as their leader and next prime minister.

Despite promising the nation that, he’d rather die in a ditch than fail to leave the EU on

Brexit’s been one disappointment after another.

October 31st, 2019, Boris Johnson delivers on neither Brexit, nor corpse in a ditch materialise. I wasn’t fussy, I’d have settled for a drain, trench, even a gutter. But no, the fat, flatulent, shaggy haired mop head lives on, and after what must have taken minutes of thought, decided to throw the decision back to the public in the form of a general election. Appealing to the same electorate, who in recent times has shown a proclivity to vote for the most chaotic scenario possible. I ask myself, why’s that trend going to stop? Leadership isn’t delegating the problem to everyone else, that’s scapegoating.

Boris hopes the ball lands on, erection.

Following the roulette disappointment, Boris disposes of his blond wig and thinks really hard about holding his erection.what to o next. fear of overheating his brain, Boris takes of his blond wig and decides whether or not to call an election.

Clowns to the Left of me, Jokers to the Right

So, come December 12th, who do you vote for. American cultural anthropologist, Margaret Mead famously said:

If you went to a restaurant, and the only choice you had was between a turd sandwiches or Jellied moose tongue, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for you to go looking for somewhere else to eat. Elections in the UK are like this, they offer no choice that you can enthusiastically endorse, just a choice of the lesser evil.

Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve. …’

Russell Brand – Guardian

It’s at this stage that people can get angry with the abstaining from voting argument, they remind you of how lucky we are to have a democracy. They’re quick to inform us that voting is the only time the poor have as much say as the wealthy. And if they’ve still failed to convince they’re likely to trundle out, the very old and very tired, it’s a civic duty; which it’s not. Jury service is the only the only civic responsibility in the U.K. No, democracy isn’t being asked to choose between two groups of equally incompetent people who will inevitably balls things up, just in slightly different ways.

Perhaps journalist, Heydon Prowse most accurately explains the trend in the results of recent elections and referenda in the west”

…vote, revolt, “turn voting into a protest too”

Heydon Prowse

We live in a system where only one of two political choices ends up running the country, but people now understand that neither does anything to make their lives any better. The underprivileged will remain underprivileged, the under paid won’t become better off, in fact relatively wages have stagnated for twenty years, and the uneducated, and unemployed will continue to seek solace by watching reality television.

In reality there’s only two choices:

Don’t vote, because none of the candidates are capable of doing the job; or

Go all in with Margaret Mead and choose the lesser of two evils in the hope that the one you pick might be capable screwing things up marginally less than the other choice.

The exhilaration what western democracies promise us.

So Who is the lesser of Two Evils?

It’s an interesting question, it comes down to choosing between an egotistical, nefarious, dishonest, man who can’t keep track of how many children he might have fathered, and a man who looks like he’s just crawled out from beneath your compost heap at the

Jeremy Corbyn whispers Karl Marx, and promises his turnips that the means of production will be shared between all the vegetables.

bottom of your garden, and then preaches anachronistic left wing dogma to your vegetable patch. For years I’ve given Corbyn the benefit of the doubt, thinking that he can’t possibly prescribe to the tenets of Marxism the media claim he does, but he’s never clarified just how far his socialist beliefs go. Might he turn into an English Pol Pot, force everyone to work in allotments as he engineers his agrarian utopia? It sounds stupid, but then again, nearly everything that’s come out of Westminster for the past five years has been stupid. But the peculiarities of the Labour party don’t stop with Corbyn, in fact it’s only the beginning. Corbyn’s shadow home secretary is Diane Abbott, a woman so spectacularly incompetent that she takes a calculator to bed so she can count the sheep. To appreciate how dimwitted Diane Abbot is, the video below shows the most spectacularly embarrassing interview by a senior politician that I’ve ever witnessed:

youtube

So with Boris Johnson’s only opponent, resembling a cross between Lenin and Worzel Gummidge, and seemingly focused on winning the allotment vote of the UK, and with his sidekick displaying the mental faculties of sub-optimal kindergarten student, you would think that all Boris needs to do to win this election is stay alive until the morning of December 13th. If only it were that simple.

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson

Yes, that really is his name, dePfeffel. If it’s not right to judge a book by its cover, then it must be an even greater superficial objectification to judge a person by their name, but what the hell is a de Pfeffel? Sounds like a catastrophe in a patisserie in which the pretzel dough and the waffle batter got mixed together and spawned the Antichrist of pastries, a de Pfeffel. No, it’s actually something far more sinister. The von Pfeffel family, after narrowly missing out on starring in, The Sound of Music, is a German, Bavarian, family of considerable historical wealth and influence. Finding out any more about them is difficult, but doubtlessly you have a neurotic, conspiracy theorist friend who’ll soon get you up to speed.

If only Boris’ problems stopped at de Pfeffel. He’s a renowned Islamaphobe, homophobe, adulterer, racist, and outright liar. In fact, he is quintessentially the British Donald Trump. The more ridiculous he behaves, the more support he gets. Johnson appeals to a disenfranchised electorate, as he appears to them to be a break from the norm. Let’s look at some of the most infamous dePfeffel moments.

In August 2018, Boris remarked that Muslim women who wear burkas resemble letter boxes. Note, that at the time he was Britain’s Foreign Secretary, a role requiring awareness of cultural nuances. Look I’m all for a joke, but… What kind of mind could consider that an appropriate thing to say?

Whilst in his position of Foreign Secretary, Boris intervened in the delicate situation of British-Iranian woman, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who was being held captive on charges of espionage. Boris stated that she wasn’t a spy, but teaching journalism, something which she also wasn’t doing. During Boris’ time as Foreign Secretary, the conditions of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe worsened, with her no longer being allowed to make telephone calls to her husband, and there now being great concern for her mental well-being.

In his column for the Daily Telegraph in 2002, Johnson described people from African Commonwealth countries in the following way, “It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies,” later he added to this mentioning, African people as having “watermelon smiles.” As I said, I like a joke, but racial slurs, well they’re just not funny.

Homophobia, in the past Johnson referred to gay marriage as being akin to humans marrying dogs. And infamously referred to gay men as tank-topped bumboys.

Boris Johnson is a survivor, he’ll say whatever it takes to climb the greasy pole, irregardless of what he says being true or not. You can’t get a more blatant example of his lies than the time he wrote one on the side of a bus. He was right in saying that the UK pays the EU 350 million pounds a week, but it takes into no account how much money the EU sends the UK per week, and how much money the UK saves with free trade with the EU.

Vote for Me – Righting the Wrongs

It’s a face of honesty, trust, sound judgment and leadership.

My manifesto is somewhat limited but at its core is righting wrongs through revenge. Essentially I would achieve this by displaying David Cameron’s head on a spike after it had been inserted into his own bottom. Whilst I freely admit that this does little to resolve the Brexit issue, I do believe it would give the country a much needed boost to morale.

The End Is Not Nigh

As an expat who’s lived outside the UK for almost twenty years, personally, I don’t care who wins the election and goes on to form a Rabelaisian government of idiots; I learnt the word Rabelaisian recently and I’m rather fond of it. I just hope that there’s something positive in this for everyone, which of course is impossible. I still firmly believe what I thought the morning after the referendum; that Britain will never leave the EU. If the powers that be wanted to leave, then Britain would have left by now. Whomever wins this election is unlikely to win a majority, leaving the UK with a fragile coalition goverment once again. One thing I’m certain of, we can’t keep standing in the middle of the road, because when you do that you get hit by traffic from both directions, or worse, you could fall off your horse and cart.

In conclusion, this election will conclude nothing.

Explaining Brexit in five seconds, be like…

Come December: Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right Here I am, stuck in a polling booth Without a clue what to do. Britain, Brexit, and Zugzwang There's a saying in chess that describes a position whereby the player whose turn it is…

#Boris Johnson #Brexit #Jeremy Corbyn #Opinion

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