Quibbles

Francis Bacon

The other day, out of curiosity, I was googling "2024 Vote Regret" and I found 2 vote regretters.  Both of them regretted their votes ...  for Kamala Harris!   To be fair one of the regretters was that jackass on ESPN Stephen A Smith I think his name is and he was basically being a contrary dick on Bill Maher.  The other was Charlamagne Tha God and he was retroactively regretting endorsing Kamala Harris as VP in 2020.  But my point is, there is really no satisfaction to be gotten from seeking regret from anyone who didn’t vote for Harris, because they don’t seem to exist.  There are a few Trump regretters by now to be sure.  But trying to get people to admit that had Harris won we would not be in the position we're in is something like saying the moon would be green if it had grass growing on it.  My conclusion—and I’m not talking about dyed in the wool democrats or dupes but about smart people whose primary goal was avoiding what we’ve got now—we’ll never get the credit we deserve or any gratification for having tried to make the worst outcome of the 2024 election not happen, no matter how hard we seek.  (The silver lining: the whole fucking shithole of a country appears about to be ready to come crashing down around us now.  And I hope it does.  And when we wrest the charred remains from the bloated motherfuckers who are engaged in destroying it for their own superfluous gain right now, let's do it right next time-- for all of us.)  (And Fuck Them!)

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Black Pill by Elle Reeve presents up close journalism about the sorts of internet denizens that our government's (hence our) violator Elon Musk fancies himself to be-- the edgy troll.  Insightful and adventuresome-- I'll miss reading it when I'm done with it.  Specifically, it concludes things about free speech absolutism that have been on my mind quite a bit lately—namely that it mostly serves nazis and racists who laugh behind the backs of useful idiot free speech advocates on the left.  I don’t know what to do about it, and Elle Reeve hasn’t yet said what to do about it if she has an opinion about that.  It’s sort of a black pilled predicament that the ones whose odious speech is most tenderly catered to are the ones basically advocating for surrender to the racist and misogynist and fascist notions that already hold sway in why things suck.  Meanwhile speech and thought of the left is actively and openly being banned by those aggressively pushing the freedom to be fascist.  Speech has consequences.  It gets people killed.  It undoes centuries of struggle.  Discuss.

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Talking to a friend in my age range who was laid off a couple of years ago and who, after a futile two year search for someone-- anyone-- willing to take a chance on hiring a 60-something job candidate in his field, is cresting on adopting a stance that he is now permanently involuntarily unemployed, I am definitely of the opinion that even a “good job” is taken out of necessity, not desire.  The work I’m trying to force myself to get back to (yet writing this instead)-- I wouldn’t do it if I wasn't afraid of starving myself and my family.  My friend is not happy about the lack of agency he feels he has in his economic life, but it does not escape either of our attention that he and I are both the age that people not too long ago used to retire at anyway and in spite of everything in this stingy culture that is sending him the contradictory message that his unemployability makes him less than human, being outside the proletariat truly has its perks.  I think my friend, being no longer an exploited value producer is in the natural state.  We’re trained to feel that the natural state is wrong.  But the natural state is the right state to be in if you can get there.  It’s just that the voices that encourage it are few and far between.  Society is set up to thwart the natural state.  Like almost everything about capitalism, the attitude of society to the natural state -- fear!-- is expressed as a lie.  We can’t bring ourselves to say we fear people living in a natural state because that way lies the end of capitalism.  Instead we say the natural state is deficient. Capitalism is deficient.

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Privatization is not just an idea about how to reform the manner in which government provides service to its citizens.  It is the looting of our common treasury without our permission.  It is looting that makes the looting that Fox News is eager to warn us about when well-felt anger manifests itself among the people of the city after the latest outrage of indignity perpetrated on them by the constabulary look like mutual aid.  The object of privatization is to make the purview of government not the provision of a common good from the pool of our collective tribute, but rather to afford scoundrels who by hook or by crook find themselves "elected" to higher office  the opportunity to entitle their already bloated capitalistic patrons and cronies who got and keep them there to abscond with our treasury for their own profit, leaving them to see fit how poorly or even whether the once public now private service they have been gifted dominion over is delivered.  The beneficiaries of privatization are thieves twice over, for they steal not only our treasury-- the money that we who are not the beneficiaries of the wealth protection industry are coerced to supply for it for nothing in return-- but also the money that they then charge us for whatever it is our tax dollars have been granted them to retail or to rent to us. In spite of the clever sounding justifications that think tanks have been bribed to come up with, privatization is not "a cool thing to try", it is a crime committed by both the privatizers and the recipients of these corrupt officials' largesse with our money that should uniquely be punishable by public execution of both the privatizers and their profiteers.  Even murderers can be reformed.   Privatizers and their profiteers are irredeemable.  But seeing that they get their desserts (and we ours) is up to us.

Look closely- It's not an ad for a pickle.  It's dead-scalp Elon Musk.