Crony Capitalism is just Capitalism

 Captitalism is a zero sum game, corporations are only interested in one thing; Profit. When profit is the only thing that matter to Capitalist, guess what ends up happening? The people who make those profits possible are the ones left holding the bag and are usually on the losing side of the "free exchange," that Capitalist claim to be in favor of. Capitalist have figured out they do not actually need people in order to extract profit from their labor, they just rig our economy to work in their figure and after almost 20 years of being able to barrow money at close to 0% interest has conditioned Capitalist to a system of doing nothing and being rewarded buying back their own stocks while suppressing the wages of everyone that works for them outside of the executive suite. So while our rents get ever higher and groceries become ever more expensive, the people least affected by these prices are standing on our necks, "trickling," (pissing) down on us the wealth they extracted from our labor while threatening to evict us from our homes and reminding us that the only reason we live in poverty is because we are not working hard enough without recognizing there are not enough waking hours in a week someone could possible work at the low wages they offer for us to make enough money to cover our expenses in the first place and you start to realize how much these mother fuckers have been lying to us. No amount of equivocation and semantic juggling can change the fact that Capitalist do not pay us enough money for us to survive in the conditioned they have created and that all the problems in society and our economy are 100% a direct result of the shitty lobbying and policies they vie for in the government.

So how do you fix all these problems? 

Possible, and easy solution include things like: Pay fucking people a livable wage. What does a "livable wage," look like? Well, according to people smarter than me, if minimum wage had kept up with productivity gains in our economy, we'd all be making $25 an hour base, yet minimum wage remains at $7.25 an hour. Ask yourself, who benefits from a low minimum wage? Do you think it's a valid argument to make when you say, "But if we raise wages businesses that cannot afford the higher wages will either raise prices or lay people off," ignoring that corporation still raise their prices while laying off thousands of workers reporting record breaking profits in the process? Thought terminating cliches like this have held a stranglehold on our society and have kept us in the same place for two decades.

Another solution to this problem would also be: Tax the mother fuckers. There was a time when the highest marginal tax rate was 91% over any dollar made after two million dollars, and you know on it's face that seems pretty harsh right, the government is taking 0.91 of every dollar you make in tax over two million dollars, but guess what? You still have two million dollars, how much fucking money do you actually need? This was back in the 1950's. so adjusted for inflation two million dollars really works out to about 22 million dollars today, which last I checked is still a lot of fucking money. Guess what those taxes could used to do? Pay for food for poor people, provide them with housing, education, healthcare and anything else someone would need in order to participate in society, it would uplift millions of hard working Americans out of poverty and would allow for even more people to do things like what ever the fuck they want, including starting their own businesses. 

Wait, we can't do that, Capitalist hate actual competition, they'd rather form cartels and collude with each other to keep prices high. Look no further than the current ISP industry we have in this country. You can be a customer of Xfinity, or Time Warner or any other ISP, but guess what? They all offer the same shitty slow internet at the same shitty high price of about $100 a month, or you can get their "budget plans," where they charge you a reduced rate for a certain period of time, apparently at their own cost, but the way they make their money from offering such a "great deal," is by locking you into their digital fiefdom and extract exploitive fees from you for services that you would otherwise not have to pay for. 

The problem with Capitalism is that while, yes it does give us more choices to spend our money on, it also has a tendency toward consolidation giving you the delusion of choice, these sociopaths are not satisfied with having some of the money, they want it all, and if grandma/grandpa has to starve to death all so they can extract another 25 cents of profit from them, well I guess they're gonna starve. When you realize the arguments against doing anything other than Capitalism have been the same lame and untrue ones that they have used for hundreds of years it makes it all the more difficult to accept that it's preferable to the collective ownership of all industry so that it can work for the benefit of the many instead of a few unelected ass holes that decide to lay you off every year while enjoying exorbitant bonuses from buying back their own stock instead of reinvesting that money into higher wages for their employees. As long as Capitalism prioritizes shareholders over workers our stratified soceity will continue to reward those who do not work over those who just own everything while their nepo-children (*cough* Elon Musk) cosplay as self-made capitaines of industry. 

Truthfully, no has any idea what the fuck they are doing and we are all just trying to survive, and I for one would prefer to not live with the oppressive boot of Capitalist stamping down on my neck. That is why we should organize and form organizations to resist Capitalist interests and to push back against their steady march towards the extinction of our species all at the behest of a few people that already own everything to begin with.

Diablo IV is Boring.

 

I like Diablo games, been a huge fan since Diablo II. One of my fondest memories of playing the game was a Necromancer I made that dumped all his stats into strength to use a Field Plate I had found in the secret cow level only to wind up with a character that could not die, tanking incoming damage and killing everything with bones spells, it was one of the weirdest but funnest experiences I ever had playing a spell caster in Diablo, and it was all divergent gameplay, fast forward to Diablo III and and a lot of the game is "streamlined," but kept a lot of what I liked about the pervious game; Endless dungeon diving. I came to the game after they got rid of the real-world cash auction house so I don't know what the game was like during that time, but I still had a good time and I liked what I saw. Thing is, I mostly just main playing a Barbarian, because what's not to like about a big dumb idiot wielding weapons too large for anyone else to use? 

Now comes Diablo IV, at first I was really hooked with the game play, I enjoyed the first season and thought the end-game loop was fun, but I found myself being frustrated by the lack of polish and optimization of the game, I would experience huge lag spikes that would cause me to be alive one second and dead the next. These spikes were not entirely the games fault mind you, I've got a shitty GeoForce 1650 and 32 gigs of RAM so I'm not exactly packing the best rig for the game. It was not until I got a Playstation 5 that I came back to the game and just found the experience to be soupier, game ran better, I was able to actually progress and play the game without much issue. Then came the expansions. I bought Vessel of Hatred on PS5, but when I came back to PC found that I would have to buy it again if I wanted access to it, which is dumb, because I already bought the game, so I held off on buying the latest expansion for at least a month. I bought the latest expansion on the PS5 because, well the game runs better and that's just easier to use I guess, but in the preceding month that was September, do you know how much time I spent actually playing the game? Like three days. 

I work over night so when I get home sometimes I will sit down and play my console, usually until I am to tired to keep my eyes open, and you know what? Diabo IV is the only game that has bored me to the point where I literally fall asleep while playing it. My DPS rotation as a barbarian is just generate fury, spend it on whirlwind and rinse and repeat, but monsters have so much life and take so long to die that I find myself checking out before anything can happen. The reason I stopped playing entirely was because I made it to the part where you fight a memory of Inarius and after spending 15 minutes fighting the guy I only cleared like maybe 20% of his life bar while being no where near dying. How do you take an action game and make it so god damn boring that I'd rather sleep than engage with it?

Whole reason I even got the expansion was due to a sale, even bought all three battle passes because I accumulated enough platinum without spending any cash from pervious seasons and I don't think I am going to pick it up again. I'm more interested in God of War right now.

What's worse than bad?

Boring, fucking boring. When something is bad, at least it is something, boring on the other hand, is just a waste of time. 

When it comes to anime, few are as bad as "The Heavy Knight Games the System." The first 10 minutes of the show is an incompetent sizzle reel "showcasing," all the "cool fights," in the show without any actual context. 

I kept watching out of morbid curruiosity, and after watching the first four episodes that were out at the time I came to the conclusion that the show was wholly and completely boring. 

Nothing actually happens, the "characters," are paper thin and cartoonishly transparent and their motivations are baffling and confounding, dialogue is a jumbled mess of people who have never spoken to other people before and veers into "so bad its at least entertaining," and as you watch you'll notice the show likes to reuse animation and assests to not only save money but also waste your time. I found myself yelling at the TV more than once for the show to get to the fucking point only for a scene to drag on longer than nessacarry.

 Not that I am known for recommending anime or anything, but if you see this show on Crunchyroll, skip it. Watch Re:Zero instead.

Saying the Quiet Part out Loud...

 

The poor Capitalists.

I'm tired, like really tired. 

More and more articles like this are being written about Capitalist who are saying the quiet part of their intentions for society out loud and they think we're all stupid and that their position is not only reasonable, but correct because, well, they own Capital and Capitalism rewards those with the most amount of Capital because obviously it only flows to the most "efficient," use of course; never mind where it's going is to sociopaths that want you to die in the fucking street for the sake of their profits.

Dear reader, I want you to ask yourself a question, "What's the point of society?" Ask Capitalist and they will tell you it's to protect their investments, which, in a way, is true, however, when your investment is in something that people require to survive and participate in society, it kind of changes that dynamic and makes you really wonder, "Why does our society bend over backwards to appease these petty property owners?" These people are the same kind of people that would evict you in the middle of Winter in Ireland during the Potato famine because it is more profitable for them to replace the serfs that were part of the land, who had lived there their entire lives, with sheep. I think it's time we put people before profit, that we restructure our society to focus on the well-being of all with whom live within it. I would think the moment we eliminate all the destabilizing and poverty exasperating forces within society we would see a drastic decline in crime and a reallocation of resources towards social goods that things like a militarized law enforcement apparatus would no longer be necessary. 

Instead, we'd rather spend billions of dollars bombing Iran and sending 50,000 troops in a uncoordinated and incompetent ground operation. Trump has gone on record saying we can't afford social programs because we're too busy destabilizing the middle east. Marco Rubio even suggested that Iran would be better off it spent it's tax money on social programs instead of terrorism and militarization, unironically exposing how morally and intellectually bankrupt our government truly is.

Fuck these people, fuck capital, and fuck anyone who willingly licks their boots in the hope that the oppressive boot of the state does not stamp down on their neck; just because you occasionally find a peanut hidden amongst their shit-caked boots does not mean the state will spare you when they are done with the minorities you so gleefully and joyfully voted for.

Adult Children

 

A growing trend in the south has been public institutions likes schools and libraries trying remove books from their shelves under the guise of "protecting children," however the truth of their motivation is to save themselves from having to acknowledge that gay people exist and that minorities are our friends and neighbors and that they are just trying to live their lives because however much they claim to "love freedom," they sure love removing it from groups that are historically marginalized. These people are FUCKING COWARDS, I cannot believe that they are so weak willed that the mere pretext of representation is enough to shatter their shallow world view and expose that they are empty and fucking rotten inside. The more we tolerate and allow these people to think they are normal, that they are reasonable, the more we normalize the idea that some people are in fact more equal than others and we wind in a downward spiral that ends with a break down of societal trust. Every accusation is a confession by these people, they should be ashamed of themselves. These people are not normal.

Everything I don't like is Communism.

 

"EvErYtHiNg Is CoMmUnIsM!" -This duffus here.

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.

Some people are more equal than others.

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.

Your average Republican Voter...

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 he'd 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. Every year we don't tax wealthy people is another year we allow them to further insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions and allowing them to then also use said wealth to further lobby the government to make our lives worse.

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.