Thanks to Stewart for pointing me at this beautiful description of why the cuts to public services are founded in bullshit.
Now get back to arguing about immigration, benefit fraud, and abortions while the Tories have their quails eggs on toast.
For a while now I’ve had a “bee in my bonnet” (horrible cliché I know but better than the bug/ass one) about the only battle that matters: rich vs poor.
During our lunch break today a “heated debate” (horrible cliché I know but better than slanging/match one) took place about politics. The cause can be discussed later, but yet again it touched on my main gripe about all politics, in all countries, in all historical periods: we’re all avoiding the real issue, and that is intentional.
In a nutshell, what I’m trying to say is that throughout history there has only been one battle: rich versus poor. Additionally, the rich have taken it upon themselves to divert the attention of the poor from this battle and onto other, less important things. For simplicity, from this point on I’m going to refer to “the rich” as “the thumb”. You could substitute “The Man”, “The Police”, “The Military” or “The Market” there, because they all exist for the same thing: protection of the rich.
It’s also important to realise that “The Thumb” doesn’t include people who earn X hundred thousand dollars a year. As rich as these people are, they’re still under The Thumb – it just affects them less. The Thumb is a class of people whose income is difficult to discern because they have so many ways to hide it.
The important thing to realise about The Thumb is that they only have one job, and they’re very, very good at it: diverting our attention from the battle against rich and poor, to other shit that doesn’t matter.
When do you ever hear about people being angry at the rich?
People bitch about immigration, taxation, socialism, social security and all of the other things that are, financially, a piss in the ocean compared to the amount of money made by The Thumb. Compare the amounts of money that were plucked out of thin air during the GFC and given back to The Thumb. The only people who got hurt were the poor! Poor people were evicted! How does that help anyone at all?
We are all subjected to propaganda every day of our lives ranging from discussions about celebrities, Chilean Miners trapped in a hole, X-factor contestants, to Democrats Vs Republicans. These are all fake – they are distractions from the real battle of rich vs poor. And we go along with it.
33 Miners rescued in [currently Thumb-friendly] Chile. Good for them. But where was the reality TV show showing the devastation of the thousands of people in Pakistan following the floods? Well, they’re only Pakis after all I suppose. Muslims. No 24 hour coverage of thousands of families dealing with their grief. No 24/7 coverage of the poor families who were made homeless even though no-one else could afford to live in their old house either. No-one really cares…unless they are given in-depth details of the problem. But that needs the media. So, as the media is run by The Thumb, this kind of topic gets left out of the schedule.
OK end of rant. Remember, in the words of Faithless: Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.
My first Quine:
#!/usr/bin/perl $str="dXNlIE1JTUU6OkJhc2U2NDsKCiMgVGhpcyBpcyBteSBmaXJzdCBR dWluZSEKIyBmYXRzcXVpcnJlbC5vcmcvdmVnaGVhZAoKcHJpbnQgIiMhL3 Vzci9iaW4vcGVybFxuXCRzdHI9XCIkc3RyXCI7XG4iLmRlY29kZV9iYXNl NjQoJHN0cik7Cg=="; use MIME::Base64; # This is my first Quine! # fatsquirrel.org/veghead print "#!/usr/bin/perl\n\$str=\"$str\";\n".decode_base64($str);
(thanks to Gary for cluing me in to Syntax Highlighter)
Another lacklustre update: