Original RI quotes only

[psynapz]

orca psyops

[JackRiddler]

One of the big difficulties is that people have been so thoroughly socialised over at least the last 40 years to isolate and atomise themselves in pursuit of a solo career. More and more people's lives allow them less and less time with friends or family, or even workmates they can trust, to say nothing of any broader solidarity. Their only real affective identification is with themselves in some current-or-future (real-or-imaginary) successful form, or with the TV and movie avatars that embody and promote that image of Lone Wolf striving & struggle and eventual, inevitable success.


We can all be as uniquely brave and handsome as this, if we only make the effort. Or are you scared to pull your gun?

The more that paradigm begins to crumble, as it must (because capitalism is not sustainable), the more frightened and anxious people become, especially if they're no longer young and already have everything invested in that fragile self-image. The investment is not just emotional & psychological, of course, but also very heavily material: college loans, mortgage, car[s], credit cards, and all the other building-blocks of the permanent-debt prison. It therefore becomes all the more likely that this "middle class" will vote for anyone who promises to ease their own personal tax burden. (If they pay less in tax, then their inevitable permanent debt will indeed become marginally less worrying, at least for a while. Hence the triumph of selfishness in the one-voter-at-a-time ballot-box [very like an office cubicle, or an Internet café, or a peepshow], and the triumph of short-termism in election politics.)


Democracy in action. They'll be staring at a different screen tonight, in the privacy of their own homes.

So, however ludicrous it may be, your average Republican- or Tory-voting taxi driver or call-centre manager still identifies more closely with Clint Eastwood and Warren Buffett than with his only slightly lower-earning colleagues and neighbours. (After all, he might yet get fabulously rich - it's a logical possibility, if not an empirical one.) Anything beyond those maybe-genial but always-competitive personal contacts is an abstract field populated solely by unknown and abstract Winners and Losers, and the entire culture permits only one possible identification. The alternative is too grim to contemplate and therefore to be avoided, exactly like the plague. Clint Eastwood is not a cowardly barkeep; Clint Eastwood is a man who creates his own destiny, all on his own. (What do you mean "fictional"? Get real!)


Not Clint.

The horrible word "losers" has only gained currency in the last 20 years. No solidarity is possible with "the losers", for they too could have been Warren or Clint had they only had the guts and grit to make that minimal effort. When the going got tough, they could have got on that horse and pulled that gun. The world was their oyster. They are guilty of moral and purely personal failure, or so we're told, incessantly. In essence, that incredibly useful epithet denotes nothing other than what used to be known as the working class and the unemployed, and the culture holds them solely responsible for their own fate -- just as all those "self-made" zillionaires allegedly forged their own heroic destiny entirely through their own honest efforts. (It's all smoke and mirrors, of course: If anyone is a parasite or a moral failure, then Warren Buffett is, and not the millions of impoverished wage-slaves who make his cunning "investments" so obscenely profitable without him ever having to break sweat.)


Work overtime for nothing, you whingeing pricks.

Joe Bageant said recently that one of the most amazing achievements of the American Right was to have persuaded the average citizen [now: consumer] that everyone is middle class. "Middle-class" means on the make, going places, forging ahead, beholden to no man, on the up and up. Thatcher and Blair performed the same conjuring trick in Britain while the same transfer of wealth to the top 2% was being craftily effected. Meanwhile, unions were smashed, real wages depressed, student grants replaced by student loans, a living wage supplanted by endless ruinous credit, savings made way for permanent debt, and former workers (and strikers) were forced into the isolation of unemployment while their sons and daughters entered the isolation of the office cubicle. At long last, they were "middle class".


A clean working environment, where no one needs overalls.

Instead of actually being able to make things, people were suddenly expected to take pride in just selling the things now being made for a fraction of the price by the new invisible proletariat in the "rationalized" Dickensian sweatshops of the Phillippines and Haiti, where strikes were also far less likely and much more easily suppressed. The UK and the USA were now "service economies" (sic), like the stately homes of old England. Wise men had decided that.


Modern and flexible: the 21st-century British working class.

[Insert Here: 5,000 words about the rise of Prozac, the triumph of cable TV, the fragmentization of dissent, the normalization of precarity, the enthronement of the cryptocrats, and the ever-increasing importance of the gazillion-dollar global Terror Industry. Oh yeah, plus the extinction of the biosphere, incidentally.]

- I've just noticed I'm ranting. Worse, I'm ranting to (or at) the converted, and in an electronic vacuum to boot. Well, I don't know how to conclude this rant briefly or elegantly, so I'm just going to wind up with the hopeless invocation, "Smash your TV."

Maybe we should all smash our computers too, while we're at it, if possible by throwing them through the nearest bank window. Sometimes I think the best thing that could happen would be a sudden and total blackout of all electronic communications media, including the phone. Within a month I think you'd see something very like a social revolution.


First Global Convention of Former Bloggers, Washington D.C., December 21, 2012.

[Allegro]

What a fascinating relic. The American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company creates the child avarice market by mass-producing penny toys to feed the desire of children less than rich, and in doing so, created a monster. Now we have a nation of greedy, wanting individuals whose early years were composed of a whirlwind of want and aquisition centered upon birthdays, and ultimately, Christmas. Here we celebrate of the birth of an impoverished infant in a cow stall who grew up to preach disdain for all material things, and we celebrate that birth by the purchase of mountains of worthless sweatshop and machine made crap which fills the shelves of countless stores in stripmalls and catalogue outlets across the land. The legacy of those raised upon the crummy products which followed in the wake of these seemingly-harmless trinkets is to have grown up to destroy the world, essentially. It's only fitting that the chore of making this crap has fallen now to the Chinese, who will no doubt replace America as the hegemonic "superpower" by the neat trick of shoveling more and more trash into the greedy, slavering hands of unwaiting kids in the states, as they secure their final diagnosis of near-autism, ADD, ADHD, etc. and subsequent drugged-into-submissive-consumerism "treatment".

Someday that little toy museum will be seen for what it is - a memorial to a place where imagination, common-sense, and sufficiency went to die in the service of buy-it-and-throw-it-away. How lovely that the factory burned to the ground - ahead of the curve.

Excuse me now, my Christmas cookies are burning. Original.

[Allegro]

So. Let this officially mark the approximately 903rd time I've tried to impress the notion that charities and non-profits of every stripe are quite frequently pure sinkholes of unalloyed evil on an implacably indifferent world and failed.…
See comment in its entirety.

[nathan28]

So Paul Thompson = Alex Jones = David Ray Griffin = Jeff Wells = some Tea Party goon obsessed with Obama's "true" nationality = Cynthia McKinney = some paranoid anti-Semite = some guy who believes Elvis was kidnapped by Martians = Gore Vidal = some Illuminati buff = Lynn Margulis = Lyndon LaRouche = David Icke = Hugo Chavez = Nico Haupt = Naomi Klein.

They're THE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS! And they're all the same, that lot! Eh, guv'nor? Weirdos and loonies! Not sane & sensible, like you and me, squire! Eh? Eh? EH?

[DeltaDawn]

Whoever here says it, thank you because just love it....just can't remember who you are....

Quote at the end of blog: "I'm just saying....."

[Maddy]

They're so brazen now, they know they're above the law, and nobody except freaks like us on the Internet will even think twice about it.

[Jeff]

I don't "wave people away" from that crap - I describe it as I see it. Criticism once again conflated with censorship - the defense of the weak.

[Allegro]

(Humans and lemmings must have a common ancestor...)

[MacCruiskeen]

I could never really eat a McDonalds burger without knowing deep inside I just swallowed the ground up bad parts of an alien sphincter. That's why they sell 'em avec du fromage.

[Allegro]

From "history" we know that successful popular movements are those that alienate and hound intellectuals, conflate macho posturing with courage, and make their videos by setting randomly chosen traumatic scenes of carnage to a cool soundtrack. If they can manage to recruit a demographic that's 90 percent male, inarticulate, and under 30, they're on their way. Because words never changed a thing. Refer.

[Jeff]

I wanna make a zombie movie in which the remaining humans survive by pretending to be zombies. since zombie-on-zombie violence is generally minimal, and they can just pretend to be slow dumb zombies who get stuck in corners and are slow, they never have to eat anyone. periodically they can slip away for some private pretend-zombie "me time" - find some more twinkies and dinty moore, get drunk (makes pretending to be a zombie easier should any real zombies show up). The scene where pretend-zombie boy meets pretend-zombie girl, and they realize neither of them is a real zombie will be pivotal. Eventually they realize there are no real zombies... everyone else was just pretending too. Almost everyone... some people just took it too far and actually became cannibals. but they're all dead now. From being cannibals, duh. So eventually everyone realizes they can stop pretending.

and I'll call it, "What now must we do?"

[Allegro]

I'd just like to ask all remaining contributors to the Roman Catholic Church a question.

Since you're still voluntarily supporting this outfit with your money, how can you live with yourselves? Refer.

[Allegro]

In a similiar situation, IF I had not already been greviously injured or killed as a fighter or bystander, I would probably try to marshall all my collective effort towards novel, even outrageously unique, creative venues, to assert and validate and reaffirm my community's and our nation's inherant human value and dignity, to invent and rediscover different forms of resistance that engage vibrant creative energies and insights, to challenge conventions about 'justice' and security that keep the people and region mired in outdated, morally bankrupt and spiritually-flawed concepts about what is 'right' and just, possible and necessary, ideals re: our capacity for compassion and empathy.

What those creative forms might be I don't know, but I would expect a full range of activities and projects, from music and plays to public performances, artworks and outreach, dramatic enactments and skits and role-playing theatre, guerrilla theatre, creative alliances, depicting/making life and art-works as a form of 'survival'.

I've been thinking of something like a worldwide project of awareness and solidarity, ie. Greater Galactic Gaza Airlift Project, a step-or-ten-further than the 60's Pentagon levitation-meditation anti-war activism demonstration thang ... See entire comment.

[Peregrine]

Simulist

So "Christian leaders of all denominations" are going to "turn from" their "wicked ways"?

And that'll happen on May 1st?

Then the big news will be on Sunday, May 2nd, after so many of them will have suddenly stopped inflicting their congregants with useless guilt, and resign.