#polemic mendicant

[wastheimparsiblepolemicmend-blog]

Job creators: not actually a thing

So every now and then this idea pops up. Don't tax the business owners, they say, because then there will be fewer jobs and people will be poor and starve. Well, no. If job creators created jobs that would be true, but they don't. At best, and this is being generous, they're work finders. That's ignoring the good chunk of the time that they employ people just to move around money. As if there were a more blatant waste of resources. Ok, you might say, if they aren't job creators then where do jobs come from? I'm glad you asked, hypothetical straw person. Jobs are made of work, and work is created by the existence of a need. People need food, there's agriculture. People need shelter, there's construction. People need gadgets, there's manufacturing. That's all there is to it. Now, for the sake of argument, we'll say that in our perfect world we are still using a medium of exchange. You know, money. I doubt we would be, but let's work with it. What's a fair finder's fee for locating and organizing work into jobs? Enough to live comfortably, of course, but more than the work itself? Should the finder's fee exceed the value of the labor to the workers? If you're reading this then you probably know the answer, of course it isn't. That's the backbone of capitalism though. The idea that the allocation of work is worth more than the work being allocated. I'd ask how we got it so backwards, but that's a topic for another day. I like to blame the calvinists, but it's much bigger than that, and blame only gets you so far. So what do we do from here? Well, we question, and we push the idea that job creation is a farce, a duplicitous and destructive lie meant to keep the people docile and powerless. Of course, none of this is to say that these "job creators" don't put in a lot of effort and hours, I'm sure many of them do. What I'm saying is that work allocation is an overvalued skill set and they like it that way. We used to call them heroes of industry. Remember friends, burn your flags and kill your heroes.

[wastheimparsiblepolemicmend-blog]

On landlords and empty buildings

You know what I don’t like? Boarded up windows to protect empty floor space from people who would otherwise make use of it. I see a headline a few days ago about how millennials are killing department stores with a picture of a boarded up sears, and my first thought is, hey, that could make a pretty nice commune. Of course, they almost certainly won’t let that happen. It’s not zoned right, of course, and it wouldn’t turn the company a profit. It might hurt property values and we can’t have that. On top of it all, have you seen the state of squatters’ rights in America? It’s shameful.

Ok, so what does that have to do with landlords? You could argue that there’s a difference between commercial and residential leasing, even if it’s a small one. You could even argue that landlords are providing a service deserving recompense, in the case of purpose-built apartment complexes. “Good” landlords even take care of repairs and utilities. Of course, this requires that we set aside the fact that landlord is an explicitly extractive profession, which is no small hurdle, but we’ll get back to that.

For functional communities to exist, they must be at least mostly self-sufficient. Landlords are not part of the community, often owning too many properties to be on close terms with their tenants, but always because of the imbalance of power between owner and renter. A kind and benevolent master is a master still, and a community is made of peers. If you need plumbing, you need a plumber; wiring, an electrician. For nothing do you need a person or company to whom you owe rent.

And back to my earlier point, about the extractive nature of landlording. What do they mean by taking land that they explicitly cannot use, because if they had a valid use they would not be renting it out? In no other profession is the inhumanity of capitalism laid so bare, except maybe in the medical insurance industry. They look at their fellow humans and see dollars, and when they can no longer afford the rent, for whatever reason, they kick them out on the street. Good luck, hope you have somewhere else to go, bye bye.

Sometimes it’s because the tenant lost their job or became sick, leaving our most vulnerable with little to no recourse. Sometimes the neighborhood gets popular and they get the boot to make room for richer people. Gentrification makes me so ravenously angry. If you want to uplift an area, uplift the people. Here’s a thing I heard about recently. People getting kicked out so that their apartment could be rented out on airbnb, because it was more profitable to leave the apartment empty a large portion of the time than to have a permanent tenant.

Now, I like architecture, and a good portion of the architecture I like is not terribly utilitarian. I get that rich people are the ones that invest in this architecture, as a monument to their own mortality. There’s no reason for this to be the only way though. Art is the creation of the people, and so must architecture be. We don’t need landlords for inspiring arches or imposing facades. Oh, and before I forget, even now the president is making money as a landlord, if you needed another reason to side-eye them. Remember friends, burn your flags and kill your heroes.

[wastheimparsiblepolemicmend-blog]

Trump: the worst treated politician ever?

Now, obviously only someone with no grasp of history could make that assertion, so it's no surprise that Trump said it. I will grant that some people are just meant ol' meanypants to him in the media, and in the public too. I'm definitely in that group. But even as hyperbole, that's a bit much. Granted, I live under a rock, so maybe I missed it, but I think things could be much worse for him. Let's go back a few years. I seem to recall a time not too long ago over in France involving rulers being parted from their heads en masse. I feel confident that Trump has never had to worry too much about the citizenry coming for his literal head. Maybe that is too far out of living memory though. How about the Romanovs? They haven't even been dead a hundred years, killed by bolsheviks. Do you think Trump worries about American Bolsheviks walking up to the White House to bayonet him? I don't. But PM, you might be thinking, both of those were examples of nobles being killed, and isn't it a bit of a stretch to say being emperor is the same as being president? Well, hypothetical straw person, I don't really think so, but for the sake of argument I'll grant it. There's no shortage of elected officials to look at. Let's look at Saddam Hussein. Arguably a democratically elected president, found hiding in a hole in the ground and hung. Do you think Trump lives in fear of the American military hunting him down and executing him? Now let's look a little closer to home, and in a lower magnitude of severity. Most people reading this will remember president Obama. Now we're getting in a similar ballpark. Did you know anti-Obama protesters burned him in effigy? Anti-Trump protesters are doing that too. That probably doesn't feel too nice. But even Obama had it worse, because Obama had to deal with American racism. There's no mass of people calling Trump an ape, and that's not just because he's too ugly to be one. No one is saying Trump's wife is actually a man, so he gets to dodge that homophobia and transphobia. People are mad at Trump because they think he's incompetent and is going to fuck shit up. That's all. Now, I don't really feel bad for any of the rulers that I've listed. They were oppressors of the people and responsible for far too many deaths. Trump doesn't deserve better than any of them, but he's going to get treated better than any of them, most likely. We haven't had a real American uprising since the civil war. The worst he has to worry about is some talking heads insulting him. Boo fucking hoo. Yeah, it's hard when people are mean, but that comes with the bloody job. If you don't like it, resign and go retire to some private island somewhere. Remember friends, burn your flags and kill your heroes.

[wastheimparsiblepolemicmend-blog]

Russia, a red herring?

So, even from under the rock I crawled under for the last bit of time, I've been hearing a lot about Russia. Especially about how Russia undermined our election process to install Trump as a puppet in the White House. I don't know if they did or not. It's probably not impossible, but I also know Hillary didn't need any help losing. Here's the thing though. Did they install a puppet? It doesn't matter. You might be thinking to yourself, doesn't matter? But honest elections are the cornerstone of our society! Well, hypothetical straw person, I see how you got there. We've been told that for years, even as the voting districts were gerrymandered every which way from Sunday. No friends, American society is not built on honest elections. It's built on not rocking the boat. For the most part we manage to not kill our neighbors, but we also shirk our inherent responsibility to prevent the abuse of power, which is something even patriots would claim to support. Now Russia, I'm not too happy with Russia. Hearing about their treatment of lgbt individuals makes me ravenously angry. Their continued destabilization of the countries to their south, most famously Syria right now, is a crime against humanity. But let's flip that coin. We created daesh, and now Russia is our ally against them. There's a certain amount of information sharing that is going to go on. And here's another thing. If Trump wants to share classified information, well, the president gets to decide if it's classified or not. Why would we give the winner of a popularity contest that power? Well, assuming you accept the validity of the existence of classified information, because some dead guys thought a popularity contest would be better than a king. So, maybe? But I digress. Is Russia the enemy? Well, yes, but no more than our own government is. They're oppressing their people and we're poisoning ours. From what I hear, Flint Michigan is still having water problems. People are in danger of losing their homes and children because they don't want to pay for poisoned water. The Dakota access pipeline that got forced through leaked and is poisoning the water supply, just as predicted. And we're still not significantly closer to distributed ownership of the means of production or advanced integrated automation. So tell me, is it Russia that's keeping this from us? I know so many people wanted Hillary to be president but we know that she sides with the capitalist class. We know that she supports the use of force by the state. Remember friends, burn your flags and kill your heroes.

[wastheimparsiblepolemicmend-blog]

Bombs are not your friend

Not conventional bombs, not thermobaric explosives, and especially not nukes. I could see making an argument for Molotov cocktails being your friend, maybe, but even that’s in a really limited scope. Military grade explosives are just about the most anti-populist thing I can think of, and I find it deeply perplexing that so many of my countrymen, who claim to care about people, support using bombs.

I’m going to go out on a tangent from my basic philosophy for a moment, and I’m going to explain what war would always look like under a truly populist government, as if such a thing could exist. No bombs, because bombs are expensive and sloppy. Too much collateral damage and too much unproductive production. Little to no standing army, because soldiers are for killing soldiers and keeping them is a drain on the economy.

So what do we have, in this hypothetical situation? A small group of assassins. Don’t waste time and money killing the common people, take out the decision makers. That is a war that cares about the people. No bombs, no automatic weapons, because any situation they get into that requires that many bullets is a failure of planning. Let the people get on with their lives.

Of course, I’m talking about this because of the recent bombing of Syria. Not just Syria though, apparently we dropped a MOAB in Afghanistan. Those are bloody expensive, you know? Remember Flint, MI? Apparently that one bomb could have paid for the needed repairs multiple times over. We’d rather spend that on loud noises and death though.

Bombs are not your friend, because Adnan Q Prole over in Syria is not your enemy. He’s just a person trying to live his life and have a family. He’s got more in common with the people who got sarin-ed than with Assad. Assad, from what I hear, might not even have been responsible, but even if he was, we just burned a shitload of money to kill people that aren’t him. Because that’s what war is.

I hate war. War is for chumps and the people that exploit them. We let the masters whip us into a lather against our brothers and sisters while their masters do the same. It’s the leaders who are responsible for the atrocities, mostly anyway. I’m not forgetting the bloody food animals in our armed forces who get their jollies by torturing prisoners. But it all lands back on the leaders, and guess who tends to see the end of the war.

If a leader is unlucky, maybe they die. Often they get a luxury prison suite until people forget about them a bit. Hell, sometimes we even leave them in power after killing a line of people to their door. Because what better way to show you care about an oppressed population than to kill a bunch of them and then let their oppressor continue with business as usual. Beware of any who would turn you into a weapon or inspire you to take up arms against strangers. Remember, burn your flags and kill your heroes.

[wastheimparsiblepolemicmend-blog]

So it finally happened.

Well, I say finally. It only took a few months, which isn't long at all. So, what am I talking about? Well, when I heard that Trump sent ships to North Korea my response was basically, yeah, that makes sense. Of course that happened. Of course Trump was allowed to send military force to threaten a country that doesn't really have the ability to threaten us. I'm not the only one either, apparently. The democrats are lining up to approve of the expensive and ineffectual bombing of Syria, with the most common complaint being that Hilary didn't get to. This also doesn't surprise me, because the legal authorities only benefit from the illusion of the status quo being acceptable. Trump's clusterfuck of a presidency is preferable to reworking the system to eliminate state violence for these people. So here I am. I'm getting threat fatigue. Sure would be nice if the republicans would get threat fatigue, but as I understand it their brains don't work that way. Trump trying to start world war 3 hits me as business as usual now, and John Q Public doesn't have the memory span to know why this isn't what he wants. Chemical attacks killing children, absolutely terrible. Too bad we couldn't have done something. Oh wait, we had that option and refused. I'm going off on a tangent here and I'm going to put forward a bad idea. Ok, so we know that the war in Syria is largely a proxy war. Fuck proxy wars. If we cared about the people we're backing, we would attack the other side's backers. Distract from the proxy war with a direct war and let the people settle. Now, obviously this would result in a lot of deaths, making it a bad idea, but proxy wars are meat grinders that we throw otherwise uninvolved people into. By backing any side we just add fuel to whatever fire is already there. But the political establishment has effectively endorsed Trump, as we knew they would, because the alternative would be disassembling the oppressive power structure that is their bread and butter. Maybe it's ok if Trump isn't the focus of the fight, but that doesn't mean the fight is over. It is just more proof of the necessity of the fight. They are not here for us. They are there for the rich and connected. Don't let threat fatigue drown your fire. Remember friends, burn your flags and kill your heroes.

[wastheimparsiblepolemicmend-blog]

Trump's environmental policy

So Trump is getting rid of the EPA. Now, apparently it shrunk some under Obama, but that was a financial issue. This is not. Now, the EPA is a government agency, so I'm not going to say it's entirely a good thing, but a regulatory body for environmental concerns is not optional under capitalism. A mechanism for maximizing measurable (read: short-term) profits will reliably harm the environment. Right now it looks like we won't have the environmental protection agency much longer, because, you know, it cuts into profits. Is it inefficient? Almost certainly. Does that mean, given the current system, that we don't need it? Definitely not. And it's not being replaced by anything either as far as I've heard. This is very much not acceptable. And who's going to suffer the most when the environment goes to shit? I'd bet good money it's not Trump or the other rich people and politicians. It's always the poor, often those too poor to afford a law suit, because of course it is. And it comes to my attention that there is a certain portion of the Christian population of this country that actually want to wreck the environment. Why would they possibly want this? They've got it into their twisted little brains that if they make earth unlivable then their god will have to come back. It's like they never even read their book, oh wait, most of them haven't. If they had they'd be familiar with the concept of stewardship. That's right, Christians have been charged by their god with the preservation of the environment. They've also been warned against trying to coerce their god, but, you know, it's not like that matters when there's unbelievers to torture. Of course, I may not like Christianity, but I'm not going to say they're all like that. Just far too many. Ideally we wouldn't need the EPA. In a system that was not centered on the extraction and concentration of wealth it could easily be unnecessary. We're working on this, but we're definitely not there yet, and we certainly won't be while Trump is president, or likely while the office of president persists. We've only got the one planet for the foreseeable future so it had better be able to keep us alive. We're not really heading in that direction. So, friends, fight the removal of this necessary function of our government, corrupt and evil though it is. The government is not here for us, but bits of it have been coerced into serving us. We need those environmental protections to survive to the transition. Don't let them be taken away. And remember, in the quest for a sustainable future, to burn your flags and kill your heroes.

[wastheimparsiblepolemicmend-blog]

War, what is it good for?

Well, not terribly much. I'm sorry to say, I'm not ready to write off war entirely as a concept, as much as I'd like to. Ok, now that I've dug myself into this hole, let's see it I can dig myself out of it. War is not good. Killing people is not good. Spending a significant portion of the economy on weapons is not good. Got my bases covered? Good. Here's a little trick to see who is on the wrong side of a war. Who is getting sent to die? If it's the young and the poor, that's the wrong side. You might notice from this criterion that pretty much every side in every war ever is the wrong side. There's a reason for that. War, as a rule, does little to nothing to benefit the masses. Now, I know, it's always easy to get the young to sign up for the meat grinder. They tend to not have a sense of their own mortality. But here's the problem. These are the people meant to be building the future. These are the years for contributing the most to the community, building ties, maybe starting a family. This is literally our future that we're sacrificing on the altar of the rich and the old. Let the old go fight if it's worth fighting. Let the people who have their lives behind them go fight to protect what they've already built, instead of sending people to die who haven't had the chance to build anything. If you're going to have a military, have them turn away everyone under, say, fifty. See how cautiously they move then, how judiciously they apply force. So, is any country ever going to do that? I'm not holding my breath. Wars are fought on the whims of the rich and well-situated old. They'll never fight. And here's the kicker, which is no surprise if you've been paying attention. Without their orders I'm not sure if there would ever be another war. They don't see the young that they're sending to kill and to die as people. They don't know how. Remember friends, burn your flags and kill your heroes.