2006-12-04

Living With Unemployment

The advan­tages of inter­net radio con­tinue on.

They, they always try to blame it on the blacks
But it’s really those in power that stab you in the back Newtown Neurotics, Living With Unemployment

Be the first to comment on this...


2006-11-17

Ding-Dong!

The Witch is Dead! The Witch is Dead!

Here’s a gen­tle fist in the air, ded­i­cated to The Wicked Witch of the Midwest, the man who made it accept­able to say “democ­racy” when you mean “free-market capitalism”.

One sum­mary of his posi­tion on Chile described it as “freer mar­kets led to free peo­ple, and that Chile had an unfree econ­omy, which led to a dic­ta­tor­ship, which then imple­mented open econ­omy poli­cies, and later became polit­i­cally free.” A loose trans­la­tion of that would be “stop fuck­ing with the money and we’ll let you vote, you damned peasants.”

(For the naysay­ers, I’ve seen the movie the sum­mary describes, and the sum­mary is faith­ful to his expressed views.)

Be the first to comment on this...


2006-10-10

Sanity Has Left The Building

It’s actu­ally pretty amaz­ing how crazy TV has got­ten since I stopped watch­ing it. Obviously, I can’t know for cer­tain how crazy it is, since I don’t own one, but I read blog­gers talk about ABC putting on shows about “how soon is the apoc­a­lypse,” and sup­pos­edly some CNN anchor was recy­cling bull­shit from WorldNetDaily (the same folks who brought you the “American Hiroshima” amuse­ment park ride last year) about an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. And when that didn’t hap­pen there was sup­posed to be a nuclear attack on the U.S. in 2006-09-12, and then again in late September — or, for those read­ing this in the archives, a month and a few weeks before I wrote this, respec­tively. I could knock on wood, but I won’t: Fate can kiss my ass.

Politically, I think the U.S. wants to attack Iran shortly after the mid-term elec­tion, but I have an itch­ing sus­pi­cion the mil­i­tary won’t be ready in time. In which case a Democratic vic­tory may pro­vide some fric­tion — though not enough to stop another war.

And, for the record, America is in such a state cul­tur­ally that Mutual Assured Destruction is presently con­sid­ered the mea­sured response among the polit­i­cal class — thanks for vot­ing with your fetuses, freaks.

Meanwhile, another 10 mil­lion peo­ple slid into poverty this year. Those already in poverty were (unsur­pris­ingly) pushed even lower down. The wealthy are throw­ing the mid­dle class off the lad­der by the hun­dreds of thou­sands, and they knock oth­ers off in a mad scram­ble not to hit bot­tom, who in turn knock those below them off the lad­der, and on down the line until the num­ber of fam­i­lies liv­ing in their car swells some more. A few souls from the mid­dle classes don’t even bother to scram­ble and choose to swan-dive instead — much respect, thump thump.

Be the first to comment on this...


2006-06-17

Re: Class?

Comments are busted at Ms. Aniston’s blog (it com­plains about a miss­ing captcha, except there’s nowhere on the page to enter it), so I’ll throw my answer to her ques­tion here:

One pos­si­ble method of determing class is to use sta­tion in the hier­ar­chy as a met­ric. If you have a boss, and you have peo­ple who call you boss, you’re mid­dle. If you only have those who call you boss, you’re upper. If you only call oth­ers boss, you’re proletarian.

Of course, that gets murky when you’ve got “team leader,” and journeyperson/apprentice sit­u­a­tions, which comes back to the IWW’s met­ric: can you fire oth­ers? If so, you are a boss. Perhaps not the boss, but cer­tainly a boss. If you can­not fire oth­ers, you are not. I should prob­a­bly note that I’m not in favor of sim­ply grant­ing small busi­ness own­ers a pass. Ultimately all small busi­ness own­ers are sim­ply large busi­ness own­ers in an infan­tile state — those who do not aspire to be bil­lion­aires are on the way to sell­ing their busi­ness to those who do. I liked Trotsky’s take on their role (and dan­ger) in Fascism: What it is and how to fight it.

Be the second to comment on this...


2006-05-21

One, Two, Three, Four

I Declare Class War!

In the end this per­son decided that Tena’s sis­ter didn’t have the right per­son­al­ity, because she required too much direc­tion, and hav­ing lured her away from a per­fectly good job with Chinese employ­ers (which paid more!), she turned around and fired Elsa after 9 months or so. This per­son is actu­ally rather nice in many ways, really funny, and per­haps it’s not her fault she found her­self tem­per­me­n­tally unsuited to employ a maid, but it was still a kind of shitty outcome.

I found that mon­stros­ity after my first legit­i­mate “where it takes you” net­surf­ing in a long while. It was on the blog of a per­son who was taken note of for tak­ing note of sex­ism in comic books, com­plete with the dis­burb­ing but hilar­i­ous “if it were equal” ver­sions: Superhero crotch shots. Which means the per­son who wrote that tripe is at least in favor of sex equal­ity. Still won­der why fem­i­nists get stereo­typed as priv­i­leged white women?

Be the first to comment on this...