God [img]damn[/img] this is fun.
Thinking well is better than snorting coke.
The struggle for justice may parallel recovery from a bad relationship. "I was oppressed!" could sometimes just be a way of saying "I was insufficiently dominant!" Forget the genealogy of social norms on a grand scale: This is still who we are, right now, at the microscopic personal level.
One of those old classmates I respect then said:
We're at that stage where everyone says, but they have a good job and at least don't physically abuse you. Meanwhile you're hiding the scars both physical and emotional. You can't leave because you're afraid what will happen to you and your children. Your a prisoner of capitalism. You can't eat because they say you're too fat. You can't see a doctor because you're just lazy and faking it. You don't work hard enough because the partner makes all the money. Meanwhile you're taking care of the house, the children, cooking the meals and exhausted at the end of everyday. The partner of course takes business meetings at the golf course and watches his underlings do must of the actual work. If you try to assert your dominance you get beat down more by a partner much stronger than you physically and with all the power financially. It's a perfect metaphor. i was just thinking about it earlier this morning.
Me back:
You're right. You're describing real problems, a real trap, a real hostage situation. We're going to be squeezed into a box of circumstances, and we'd damn well better like it and be team players, or at least pretend to be, or we starve. In that case, the "I'm being oppressed!" rings true. Capitalism sucks, it's true. (I just think most of the alternatives are worse.) Then again, you could leave the relationship. It's quite difficult, yes, because the abusive partner -- contemporary American capitalism -- will be stalking you wherever you go, still trying to control you, trying to punish you for leaving. But it's possible, if you have the will. You can find a way to live in the wilderness, like hermits, like our ancestors did for hundreds of thousands of years, everywhere on earth. With families to feed just as many calories. They managed. We have higher expectations now, of course, we expect medical care, we expect comfort and security, we expect machine-crafted perfection in our goods and tools, we expect entertainment, we expect education, we expect toilet paper and diapers. But we'd be able to survive -- except for a horrific percentage of pregnant women, infants, and cripples -- without that stuff. We did literally survive without any of it, for hundreds of thousands of years. No one was ever diabetically fat. Everyone had equal (equally non-existent) health care. We were free from capitalism! But we were still trapped, still hostages, still oppressed by circumstances beyond our control. Those circumstances being: The human condition. The need to obtain energy, to create warmth, to stay dry, to keep hygienic, to protect the young, and if there's time left -- and there was way more time left back then -- to have some fun. (It's actually the mammalian condition, broadly.) The struggle is real. But the struggle is also very ancient, timeless even, and permanent. I think once we conjured up an endgame scenario of an ideal society, with perfect abundance and endless leisure, we've been using that as an impossible-to-match compared-to-what measuring stick ever since. And I think that's a bad move. Both the feasibility and desirability of a society where no one struggles are vastly overrated. We can't have it, and even if we could someday, we'd soon discover we don't really want it. So we're stuck cooking, stuck caring for spawn, stuck gathering fruit, stuck hunting for loot, stuck making tools, stuck being exhausted at the end of the day, stuck doing the same fucking thing the next day, forever, until we die. And that's okay. It sucks in a lot of ways, but it can still be fun, ultimately. It could and should certainly suck less, though. Overthrowing capitalism isn't going to make things suck less, unfortunately. If it were only that easy. It's relatively easy, if you're a logical observer of reality, to figure out the top hundred ways that capitalism sucks, to name the five most fundamentally appalling immoralities capitalism is founded on, to trace the obscenely unfair history of almost every fortune, to analyze the self-perpetuating rules built into the system, to identify the contradictions that could (and will, if unchecked) bring the whole system down. It's extremely hard to figure out how to solve it, is the problem. Marx (and every acolyte) is full of brilliant, devastatingly true analysis of the problems. But just as full of bad solutions. And even fuller of shit, when it comes to being honest about their own failures. (For ideologues so committed to self-criticism, they don't do much of it, and only ever from a limited, self-reinforcing purity-test framework -- not any input from the opposition, which would be glad to helpfully point out their worst flaws, if the left weren't so busy with apologetics and political theater and superfluous analysis and capturing power.) I agree with the left about capitalism in a what's-wrong way, not in a how-to-make-things-right way. With exceptions. I think cooperative ownership is the greatest economic idea around. The world should be teeming with Mondragons. Workers working for a business in order to make a profit for the owners...who are themselves. To me, an economic ignoramus in the big picture, that seems like the purest, most perfect form capitalism could possibly take. But alas, the egghead left is so married to their intellectual thesis, so trapped by binary definitions, and so eager to defend their territory, that they will refuse to see that as capitalism. "A co-op is the opposite of capitalism!", they protest. Capitalism requires those golfing capitalists who do nothing but extract value from others, according to the left. Who are blindly overlooking a golden opportunity to sell the public on worker-owned businesses as the New Capitalism, the Best Capitalism. Co-ops are pretty much the epitome of American self-sufficiency. It should be an easy sell. But commies are terrible salesmen, and they're too caught up in the dogma and jargon of their own branding to realize an unorthodox winning play. Maybe someday. But in the meantime, while we wait, instead of impotently petitioning the masters of the universe to change the setup that's so ridiculously in their favor, instead of trying (and succeeding) in subverting all norms and brainwashing the youth to hate their own society, I have a better idea: Let's just embarrass the everlasting fuck out of the rich. Pretty sure the First Amendment allows for groups of protestors to walk up and down the street outside rich people's homes and golf courses and high-level corporate meetings and auctions, holding signs and singing songs that mock them for being decadent cunts. I would even add an explicit disclaimer sign that no political change, however sensible or necessary, is being promoted by the protest -- it's just a shamefest. Neighbors being judgmental of self-indulgent, hypocritical (especially in the case of rich progressives, oh what an easy target they make), wealth-hoarding, wasteful twats. In a political vacuum, no concept of "social justice" or even "justice" required. Just a moral crusade at the personal level. "WHY THE FUCK DO YOU NEED THAT?" "Do you think you deserve all this?" "WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO IMPRESS?" "You're going to die someday, too, and you can't take this shit with you." "GOT ANY ROOM?" That kind of thing. Hopefully way funnier than that, and there are lots of lulz to be had at the expense of the rich, to be sure, but that's the gist. Imagine a movement, in cities and suburbs all over the country, of poor people picketing rich people, relentlessly questioning their moral character. The bickering and defensiveness and guilt-ridden looks of discomfort...all the memes there'd be. Shit, there might even be a political consequence, however much one is disavowed by the protestors as the point, because if it happened spontaneously this summer, and went viral enough, and didn't go off the rails, it might propel Bernie to victory. Ah, except for: He's rich now, too! He'd have to pull a Thoreau and move to a shack in the woods, lol, to maintain his cred. Or he'd have to start defending the right to "do well", which is rich-progressive-speak for "I undeservedly extracted someone else's wealth for all this, too, but it's cool because I'm not a conservative who brags about it." Humblerich, lmao. Fucking posers, hypocrites. The hypocrisy of rich progressives is just a bit more infuriating to me than the hypocrisy of rich "Christian" conservatives. But I hate them both, and I want to see them both humiliated -- personally, not as an amorphous "class" -- for the greater good. So, how do I make this idea good enough to go viral? Write an alt-present journalistic account of it? Just share this comment on the right Facebook page at just the right time?
But, to clarify, my original meaning was that some people who claim to be oppressed and seeking justice, are just mad because deep down they feel like they should get to be the dominant ones. Same for relationships. "You didn't love me enough!" could sometimes just mean "I didn't have as much control over you as I wanted." Note well: Some, sometimes.
[zip ahead]
(Repeating points I've already made here.)
(Worth repeating, though.)
Bro, he's literally a democratic socialist. I know that's not as left as a tankie, but it's still decidedly Leftist. He absolutely has in his heart a dream of a Glorious Revolution, which he may have to moderate and disguise for the sake of political respectability, but I have no question that he believes his presidency will be but a first incremental step in the process of overthrowing capitalism. He does not want to save capitalism. He is not a social democrat. I mean, I hate to fall back on definitions, but a socialist by definition is someone who wants to overhrow capitalism, abolish private property, centralize decision-making, etc. He just nominally belongs to the faction of socialists who swear to god that their socialism will be "democratic", not coercive like all those other bad socialisms. (It's fun to add "democratic" to anything to make it sound nicer. "Democratic cancer", "democratic gulags", "democratic nuclear war", etc.) But I respect him for being honest. Most of the other Dems who call themselves progressives are just closeted socialists using the nomenclature of "progressive" as a beard to maintain their respectability. I'm a political weirdo, so I would prefer either a president picked randomly via a lottery (the original democracy, sortition) which is essentially None of the Above, or a co-presidency based on Roman co-consulship, which is essentially All of the Above. So, I'm all for Bernie for Co-President. Whatever he and Trump can ever agree on, will surely be good for America. Neither would be able to fuck everything up. (Who gets to push the button will be decided in a coin flip, with a single quarter included in the nuclear football from there on.) I would prefer not to vote for Trump because in this election, unlike the last, he wins the contest for Most Associated with Jeffrey Epstein, unless Bloomberg is nominated and picks Hillary. But my other primary issue is avoiding civil war, and Bernie alone would be aggressive enough on gun control to trigger the right wing into starting a civil war, which the right wing would dominate because they have all the guns and most of the sympathy of cops and soldiers, and then we'd live in a post-war society ruled by right wingers who'd make Trump look like Bayard Rustin. I told all that to the Bloomberg rep who contacted me to campaign for him (lol, no) and I haven't heard back, go figure.
Forward...
A little apostasy (or is it?) from me:
Pelosi? Nah, she's just a hack in it for the power. I'm sure you're right, she and Schumer are just corporate whores who lean left. But, say, Obama? That motherfucker was a communist. An ingenious one, too. Here's the question: If the Marxist analysis of capitalism's fatal flaws is true, and capitalism is driving itself off a cliff, and running as or ruling as an open commie is out of the question, and the only positive progress toward the revolution you can make is a set of tiny little steps that'll be erased by the next administration anyway, then why bother trying to capture control of the wheel and only temporarily steer the car in a slightly better direction. Just let the fucking thing run off the road, lol! If anything, whenever you have the opportunity, steer it a little more TOWARD the cliff by giving the capitalists exactly what (they think) they want, which will ensure the next economic catastrophe, which will create a window for a real revolution. It's the reason why Obama did approximately nothing to punish banksters and fix Wall Street. Why would he ever want to, lol? Let them fail, bigger and better, until they can't get back up. Heighten the contradictions, inflame grievances. Alinsky was a smart motherfucker, too. So was Frank Marshall Davis, Obama's Communist (large-c) mentor. Bill Ayers, his other Communist (large-c) mentor, is not as smart, but he'd probably be down with the plan, too. Accelerate! Imminentize the eschaton!
Think about it more. Tell me how an overt communist president could have done better to hasten the revolution.
Me again:
Yes! Trump *might as well* be a communist. [Or, an enemy agent, period.] If he's an asset of Putin's, would it not be a perfect sabotage maneuver of Putin's to get a president elected who would do all sorts of wrong but popular things, or wrong and unpopular but "pro-business" which actually FRAGILIZES America even more? And DESTABILIZES us with severe polarization? I don't know about you, and I do remember how the polarization also took leap-forwards during Iran-Contra and Monicagate and the 2000 rigged election and Iraq, with brief respites of solidarity, like a week or a month, during 9/11 and the 2008 bankster bailout crisis, but I remember the polarization REALLY ramping up post-Trayvon, and then ESPECIALLY after Ferguson. There are 100 better ways the president could have responded. Imagine if we had Lincoln then. Or FDR. Or Kennedy or even Eisenhower. Imagine an Obama who delved into his own unique stereoscopic perspective on the turmoil and controversy and agony, and delivered speeches, regularly, because it was important to instruct the public, a moral duty, that were equal to his racist grandmother or Jeremiah Wright speeches in equanimity and fairness and uncomfortably real for Everyone to reckon with. But he did no such thing! He INFLAMED the shit out of things, by omission, by NOT saying the right things, which he should know enough to say if being an egghead "organizer" counts for anything, and by subtly INDUCING division and cross-cultural suspicion. Like I said, he's a genius at what he does. Expert level. Unmatched. And, like Trump, if Obama wasn't literally a communist saboteur, then HE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN! Seriously, though. These leaders are so thoroughly awful, all of them, that they might as all well be enemy plants. FUNCTIONALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE!!! God, we're so up shit's creek, no paddle, but we got our hands, time to splash some shit, and yes, on bOtH siDEs.
This is narcissistic galaxy-braining...but is it wrong?
(That reminds me, I should bump the Megalomania thread.) To honor my 6999th post, a quartet of Bill 
