Everything I don't like is Communism.

 

There seems to be some weird short-hand a lot of Americans tend to use when it comes to negatively describing things they don't like, resorting to calling it "Communism," or "Marxist," even "woke." What these people fail to understand is that the words they are using to describe the things they don't like are so far removed from the things they don't like that they do not realize they are unwitting pawns subject to racist and antisemitic dog whistles that lead to saying dumb things like, "Dodge put this stupid lockout module that means you have to go to the dealer to read codes and is therefore Communist because Dodge wants it's workers to collectively own the means of production," revealing themselves as being extremely ignorant and convinced it's relevant to hindering right to repair. If this person knew anything, they would find that Communist would actually champion their fight for right to repair because allowing corporations to bilk their customers is antithetical to what they stand for. 

So many of these Midwestern and southern dudes that build themselves up as being "rugged individualists," and describe themselves as being highly "capitalist," don't realize the reason their backwater town of three thousand people is so economically repressed is precisely due to those very Capitalistic pressures being taken to their logical conclusion. When corporations realized in the 80's that they could ship jobs overseas and pay those people significantly less than an American worker, well, Americans were no longer competitive any more and more and more while Americans gained access to cheaper and cheaper shit made in China, we were not paying the true cost of those products. Americans were happy as long as stuff was cheap, but wages stagnated and collective bargaining all but disappeared, leaving workers having to accept increasingly worse and unsafe conditions. Safety costs money, why spend that money protecting the people that work for you when you can operate in a country that has none of these protections, and even if they do, they are so limply enforced that  they are a none factor. Whatever Capitalists pocket by ignoring working conditions goes back to the shareholders.

In America, where everyone is equal under law, shareholders happen to be more equal. See, workers do the work, they put their bodies on the line to produce the products that Capitalists sell back to us, and when Capitalist decide the majority of us should live in poverty while also with holding the resources we need in order to function and survive within society, those corporations have broken the social contract. Capitalists take advantage of the roads that our taxes paid to pave, they take advantage of the police and emergency services our taxes pay for, they use the air traffic controllers that are so burnt out that they cannot even think straight, yet consistently Capitalists will tell their employees to "be smart with your money, invest early and be consistent," but when their rent goes up $250 but they only got a twenty five cent raise, how exactly do you expect that worker to cover the difference? Should they work a gig job that places all the burden of cost on the "contractor," because you don't actually work for the company, you just use their platform, a platform that often gaslights and obfuscates how much money you will be making and the majority of the time you are reliant on tips, tips that can easily be retracted for arbitrary reasons.

A few years back I got a real dystopic email from Capital One in regards to an Uber Eats order I made, apparently the transaction was flagged because I have the driver a generous tip, I think it was $25. At the time I was working two jobs and I was tired and hungry and just glad to get some food so I tipped the driver accordingly. Which brings me to my final point, American workers having been working to damn hard for too fucking little, and even with a decent paying job costs have risen so much that it's largely wiped out by not keeping up. There was a brief period of time during COVID where many people finally had some bargaining power and forced corporations to capitulate or lose workers, but all of that progress was quickly reversed the moment the pandemic was declared "over." Speaking of progress, there was a time in this country when religion was the single greatest force for social change, yet when you look at it now, it's largely steeped in Capitalist mystique and instead pushes for "prosperity," convincing religious people that if they give money to the church that God will some how pay it forward to them, so while the people who attend these mega-churches are living in squalor, their pastor owns several private jets and mansions. Couple that with the people who claim that they don't like "woke," Jesus and you have a recipe for social stagnation, not just wage stagnation.

While corporations and individuals increasingly become more and more wealthy while also paying fewer taxes,  guess where the majority of the tax burden ends up? On us you fucking morons. Tax the rich, national all industry and allow workers to decide for themselves the direction of economy, because right now a very small group of people benefit from the work of the rest of. Guys like Elon Musk with his DOGE claimed to be looking for fraud, waste and abuse with our government, yet he never put that scrutiny on himself, because if he did hed reveal that he's actually one of the biggest welfare queens of all time, receiving billions from the federal government for his SpaceX company. So while 42 million Americans lost their food stamps, children went without formula, Musk was taking money that could have been spent providing these services for citizens. Taxes, as many don't seem to comprehend, pay for services that we all use. Want better roads? Higher taxes. Universal healthcare and education? Higher taxes. When you spread them out among every American citizen and those big numbers ultimately become small, so while your taxes may have risen $500, that $500 pays for your healthcare and education.

Want Less Abortion?

 

Fund Social Programs. That's it, that's all you gotta do. Stop making raising children a finical burden and instead create programs that regardless of someone's income make it easier for them to raise their children with or without a partner. Just like how Prohibition was a complete disaster as far as enforcement goes, trying to make it illegal on a state-level is just making a bad situation worse. Peral clutching and worrying about the business of other people is what got us to this point in the first place so stop making this about "encouraging bad behavior," and admit it was never about that in the first place and it was just you being a judgmental ass hole being self-righteous. I know most of the people proclaiming to be "Christians," have no actually read the bible, but even I in my complete ignorance think there's a part in it that says something about "The first without sin should cast a stone," meaning we've all fucked up at some point in our lives and punishing otherwise innocent children for the circumstances of their birth is non-productive or conducive to a functioning society.

For those worried their taxes will go up to fund such programs, just remember that at the time of this writing now, our government is spending billions bombing Iran in the pursuit of some non-determinate goal, meaning if we got money for bombs, why not money for children? The whole point of society is for people to come together collectively and take care of one another, yet for centuries we have been gaslit and lied to by Capitalist that it is a virtue to be a "rugged individualist," in the fear of "socialism." The thing about fear is that it is largely rooted in ignorance, and as much as I hate repeating myself I think this ignorance stems from a lack of reading or even critical thinking, people are ceding those functions to other people, people that are taking advantage of that trust and convincing the public to vote against its own self-interest. 

Other negative side effects of abortion prohibition is that regardless of whether it's legal or not, some women are going to be desperate enough to receive the service and will turn to unqualified and dangerous organizations to obtain it, so by providing it through the government and funding it you are actually reducing the amount of harm that would be done by bad actors. It's the same thing with drugs, the more you try to make something illegal, the higher the demand for whatever you're trying to restrict, and as economics has taught us, higher demand means higher prices to compensate for the risk of obtaining and distributing it. Legalize it and all of that demand is still there but because you control the environment in which it is distributed you can also collect massive taxes up front while providing a clean facility with people who can, in cases of emergency, provide aid. Another bang on benefit of legalizing these activities is that it frees up funding that went to law enforcement to further expand and improve these services, because while the numbers may sound scary at first, when you break them down over the entire population of the country they average out to costing each of something like 30 cents per year.

So in conclusion, you want less abortions to happen? Make it easier to have children by funding social programs. Eliminate means testing and make these programs universal, defund enforcement and use that money to help people who actually live in this country. The single largest factor in crime is not some innate factor of a particular portion of the population, it's the concentration of poverty and the lack of funding of schools and other community facilities that historically happen to be in neighborhoods over represented by people of color. Spend tax money on diapers and formula, not bombs.

They don't Care that they Suck...

 

No matter how much you point out how much conservatives suck, they just pretend to not understand what you tell them and continue on with their shitty lives, making things worse for everyone else. I hate the fact that I live in a world where an inanimate object has more rights than my girlfriend and daughter, that worker rights are being eroded for the sake of our "economy," and that we're once again being dragged into another forever war at behest of a wildly unpopular Republican president precisely to enrich his supporters who are all mysteriously heavily invested in oil futures. I think George Orwell saw the future and realized that the power that be hate anyone who tells the truth, and it's sad that we live in a world where it is easier and more profitable to lie.

I think the point is to make you feel like you're insane, because every day I wake up and go to work I am met with the reality that any moment my employer could get a bug up their ass and completely up end my life for no other reason than for the sake of their profits and shareholders. The fact that we put shareholders ahead of workers is just one more example of how fucked up our priorities truly are, because without workers there are no profits, yet all shareholders do is provide "capital." When you inherit your wealth it just means you behave as though you are entitled to profits, and when you all you're interested is profit, you become a sociopath only focused on reducing costs, like the amount of hours your workers are able to work, or cutting their compensation. Why give a worker a raise that would cost your company, millions, if not billions of dollars when you can spend tens of thousands of dollars to give them a shitty ham sandwich with a bag of chips under the guise of "Worker Appreciation."

Companies have half a billion dollars to buy back their own stock, but they don't have money to guarantee their workers 40 hours a week, and when you apply this kind of thinking to rest of society it makes sense why things are so shitty. I wrote about this mentality previously when I wrote about the "Fuck you, I got mine," mentality, it's couched in the ideals and aesthetics of Ayn Rand's decrepit and backwards "objectivism." The idea that "greed is good," has lead to the dystopic and horror world we live in. The lie we tell ourselves to maintain the status quo, when people hear that "socialism is on the rise," and then all the weirdos come out of the wood works and tell us "Socialism never works because reasons." Willingly and openly licking the boots of their Capitalist masters, showing them that they are in fact good boys and girls and that they do not have any independent thoughts in their heads because when profits are the only thing you're concerned with you cannot think of others or the whole fiction falls in on itself.

Humans are social creatures, the whole reason we exist today is because we rely on each other, as long as we continue to believe the lie of the individual we will continue to live in a world where it's normal for people to be mad at Ms. Racheal for speaking out about the genocide in Palestine and imply she is anti-Semitic because she has a little girl that had her literal leg and foot blown off from bombs dropped by Israel is a new level of brain rot that permeates our cultural zeitgeist. Society is also a human construct, meaning it can anything we want it to be, yet for some reason we keep propping up people who destroy our environment and  make our lives worse and those people don't care that you hate them because they know they have the power and you do not.

As I speak Republicans are rushing to change voting laws because the only way they remain in power despite being unpopular is by making it harder to vote. When you hear people push the idea that "Voter ID laws can't be racist because everyone has an  ID," or "Why is it so hard to show ID to vote when I have to show my ID when I buy Alcohol/Cigarettes, ect..." Ignores that voting is something that is established as a right we have in the constitution. The only time we have ever introduced barriers to voting were to limit and who could vote. These losers want to win by default because they know they suck and they don't care.

Just like Capitalist encircled the commons in the past, now they are trying to do so with the population. From banning abortion to now trying to charge a woman with murder if they leave to receive one or have a miscarriage because the society Capitalists want in America is one where none of us can leave for "better jobs," because we will all be working the same shitty jobs that do not offer enough money to survive. The "DoNt TrEaD oN mE," crowd sure love treading on everyone else, as long as it's anyone outside the group of people they care about.

Caring about other people does not make you weaker, it does not make you a "beta," or a "cuck," it shows that you're paying attention and you see the bull shit going on around you and you're not buying it. I have two kids, I want them to live in a better world. It starts with us, organize your neighbors, organize your co-workers, organize your community and tell these fuckers to eat a flaccid penis because the status quo ain't working any more.

HaVe YoU tRiEd HiTtInG yOuR kId?

 I live in the south. A lot of people, especially in Tennessee seem to think it's reasonable and rational to hit their kids. I've had several conversations with people where I have regaled them with the shenanigans my daughter has gotten up to and I am often met with the response, "I'd beat the shit out of my kid if they did that," which makes me wonder why these people had children in the first place? Did they just want someone to abuse? 

Personally, I don't think there is an appropriate time to use corporal punishment (This is an example of the type of people I am talking about, using the bible as justification for their shitty behavior and be sure to read the one lone comment on this article and the lack of acknowledgement from the author almost a decade and a half later) on any kid, let alone a toddler. There are better, more healthy ways to discipline and teach your kids consequences to their actions other than physically throttling them because they slightly inconvenienced you. 

It's like changing their diaper, sure it's gross and they'll fight you every step of the way and it can be hard to do when you're tired but you do it anyway because for some reason you love the unreasonable little hellion that can't do it for themselves. That's the thing though, our kids rely on us to provide them with safety, to offer them security when they don't even know what to expect, and when you hit your kids you are violating that trust between you and your child. 

Was I mad when my daughter got into a bag of sugar and then proceeded to pour it all over the floor so that I had to clean it up? Yeah, it sucked, but hitting her would not undo what she did and it would just make me feel like shit afterwards, and that's the thing though, why do people think this is "normal?" People complain about violence and crime within society but they don't ever look at themselves and see that their attitudes towards themselves and even their children are a reflection on society.

It starts in the home and I decided that I was going to raise my children differently, that's not to say I do not show them discipline, I usually just redirect their behavior, or I isolate them from the problem and find a better way to unpack both my emotions on the situation but to also address theirs in the moment too. My little girl is getting smarter every day and she does not have a mean bone in her body, she's more inclined to try and feed you than she is to just throw a fit because she did not get her way. 

While our parents may have used corporal punishment on us, and their parents probably did too, however not sound cliche, violence is not an answer to our children misbehaving. When you hit them, all you are doing is showing that if you want people to comply with your demands you just hold a sword of Damocles over their head in the form of your emotions until they give in, and while it may work some of the time, it just fucks up and distorts their perception of other people and does not equip them to be able to navigate the real world when they become adults.

Stop using the bible to justify hitting your kids.

Being a Dad

 

Silly boy

I've been a dad to two beautiful little kids now for about three years, my daughter is two and a half and my son is going to turn one in a few weeks and in that time I've done a lot of diaper changing 
and bottle feedings and I've come to learn what it means to be patient with someone and how to really care for some one. It hasn't been easy, of course, I have had my share of crash outs and fights with my partner along the way, but that also led to me getting treatment and therapy that have made me a better person so that I can continue to be there for my kids.

 Life is hard, sure, and expensive, but I have been blessed to have my kids to anchor me where I need to be so I can get up every day and face a shitty world of inequality and existential dread as our rights as workers are slowly eroded away because we're all more preoccupied with surviving that we are too tired to fight back against the autocratic demands of Capitalism. 

Not that anyone reads this blog, but if you took the time to check in with me, thanks I guess. I want to write and make some new content, but life keeps catching up with me as I seem to rather sleep more than to wake up and record something new. I won't make any promises but I have some ideas for videos I could make and I hope you all look forward to it because it'll probably be poorly edited with bad sound just like everything else I've made.

Side note: I've been working on an essay and when I do finish it I will record it in audacity and upload it with maybe some magic arena as B-roll in the background. Stay tuned I guess.

Devil May Sigh... Thanks Netflix.

 

I don't know how Netflix manages to take an IP like Devil May Cry and turn it into the most boring mini-series I've watched in a long time. The biggest sin of this show is just how boring it is, and as a fan of the series they made a bunch of baffling and weird choices that make me wonder if the people that made this show ever played the game. If you're looking for something to watch and you want to turn your brain off, the pyscho-babble that they try to insert to explain things that never needed to be explained before will leave you rolling your eyes and wondering why they even bothered to explain it in the first place, the sound track of the show is also kind of weird too. They choose to appeal to washed-up guys like me that never grew up past the early 2000's sonically, the opening theme is "Keep Rollin'" by Limp Bizkut, and later episodes play such gems as "Butterfly," and an off-brand version of "Devil Trigger," that is played too late and loses its effect as fan service. The show's attempt to be grounded and emotional also kind of fall flat as characters are killed off unceremoniously left and right and most of the time you're just left waiting thinking, "Wait, who was that again?" 

Want me to say something nice about the show? There's some hints and glints that they understood Dante as a character at least, some of his signature goofiness shines through, and Marry is a good foil to him but she's also kind of the worst both personally and morally. There is also an episode that tries to explain some character's back-stories, but they come too late and end up being tonally weird considering the episode that follows it. I feel the back story should have come a lot sooner and the show just spends to much time spinning its wheels going no where. Oh, and the show also smashes lore and characters from DMC 2 which is just disappointing. I think the franchise as a whole ignores that game entirely so the fact that they thought it would be a good idea to throw it in at the end of the show.

Over all, if you're a fan of the series you'll just be left wanting and bored. Skip it.

FYIGM

 So there seems to be this attitude of "Fuck you, I got mine," in this country. Why give people a home to live in for free when you've spent your entire life working/paying rent? Why provide hungry people with free food and clean water when you've been surviving on ramen noodles and off-brand soda? The answer to these questions and my initial point is, we all should access to these things regardless of whether or not they're able to work.

Finland figured this out, and it's cheaper to just give people a place to live so that they can then get a job, however again the problem of labor in this country is that everyone is working more than ever but still not making ends meet, and that is by design. Capitalist want our labor but do not want to pay for it. 

Libertarians will tell you, "Oh you don't have the right to earn a living, but you do have the opportunity to earn it." The problem with this sentiment is the fact that they think they are in a position to dictate to you what you "earn," while they are the same people exploiting your labor and are the reason you're working three jobs and still not making enough to live. When the "free market," says you should be homeless or go without food, is it really a "free market?"

Which brings up the false dichotomy that people operate under that the scary "leftists," just want to tell everyone how to spend their money and how their taxes should be spent while not acknowledging that under our current system that's exactly how it works right now, just instead of the government providing services, services we need to exist in society, are provided by private interests that funnel public money into their private coffers while we get evicted from our homes and live out of our cars.

When Republicans and Democrats speak of "freedom," they are not talking about you and mean, they're talking about corporations, which thanks to Bush Jr. are now people and are able to spend as much money (speech) as they want to gas light the rest of society into privatizing things that used to serve a public good; like schools. School vouchers for private schools is just a way to divert your tax dollars to religious charter schools that will deliver worse results and probably close within a year or so because their business model is unsustainable; but they still got your money.

Is all lost? Not exactly, you can become "woke," and call the bull shitters out on their bull shit and push back. Remember, these same people only think democracy belongs outside of the workplace because they control the public narrative, but the social contract applies to us all so why keep contributing to a system that only seems to benefit the interest of the owning class at the expense of everyone else? I should take my own advice here, but maybe we all should be voting for people who actually represent our interests and start grass root organizations but if voting got us here in the first place, will it also get us out of it? As long as both parties serve capital, I doubt things will change.

TL;DR Eliminate capitalism while we still can or we will be nothing more than digital serfs working the Farmville fields as our society and environment collapse around us and it's too late to reverse it.