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When you look at the sales pitch for Capitalism and how it’s supposed to function, it feels to me as though it were crafted in order to conjure up fictitious images that reflect the undisclosed desires of an individual. They want it to sound empowering and even morally righteous. They will tell you with hard work, you’re going to be rich! I’m sure, for the most part, that everyone is familiar by now with how the sales pitch goes. It’s usually something about the free market. A little about how anyone can be rich if they come out with a really great product. Something along those lines. Typically it doesn’t pan out like this. Hell even the pointless right-leaning version of Wikipedia acknowledges that, and they have a near 50-page long article about how homosexuality is the root of all sorts of social diseases. Consider this:
“One self-regulating feature of capitalism is competition, which helps maintain fair market value for goods and services. However, unrestrained or pure capitalism may sometimes create a positive feedback loop in which a small number of individual accumulations of capital grow ever larger, eventually becoming so few as to limit effective competition, thus ceasing to strictly be free-market capitalism. In this regard, pure capitalism is unstable.”
It’s not really unstable. It’s how the system was designed to work. You start a business, it gets big, you become a corporation in order to function at higher and higher levels economically, with one real goal in mind. The only goal of a corporation is to increase profits for it’s shareholders. That’s absolutely it. That’s essentially the nature of the beast, and it shouldn’t be really surprising when corporations begin interfering in politics. When you have the money, you can influence the power, and with the money and the power you can begin to stack the deck against anyone else coming to take your piece of the market. You can begin to eliminate competition, and you can ensure that only the people who play by your rules ever get to experience what it’s like to be one of them. Wealthy. Keep in mind that when I refer to wealth, I’m not talking about a couple of million. I’m referring to the type of money that grants you political power. That’s not something that’s obtainable, except on a small scale, to anyone but a corporate entity.
When a corporation’s activities negatively or positively impact a society they actually have crafted a term for this so that when they speak of it, anyone but those familiar with the term, will be unaware as to what they are referring to. This is an important function of what I have started to dub ‘corp speak.’ The purpose of corp speak, is to obfuscate the meaning of what they are saying so that the layperson will not be able to actually comprehend whatever point they are making. The particular term, in this case, is an ‘externality.’ Wikipedia defines an externality like this.
Click to continue reading “The Scorpion and The Frog”
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Throughout my life, it had always been difficult for me to grasp what was so compelling about tabletop strategy and RPG games. I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around how fiddling with pencil and paper games and using your imagination would ever be preferable to an NES (or a NES, if you’re a retard and pronounce the console name “Ness”). And now that I’ve discovered Warhammer 40,000… well, I pretty much skipped all of it anyway, because the Dawn of War series is on the PC. Lulz.
Seriously, I never collected much of anything apart from Nintendo junk when I was under age 12, and from about 13 to 17, it was comic books. I never seemed to be able to geek out properly, not in the sense of enjoying something like tabletop games or D&D. I think the reason for that beyond their limitations in the area of graphics and sound, two big limitations when you’re a teenager, is that they were kind of boring.
That’s right, I said it. Dungeons and Dragons bored the hell out of me, as did every other copycat RPG where you rolled dice and talked a lot. No thanks, if I was going to be a loser, I was going to do it right and do it alone. It was in 2007, however, that I discovered that one of those copycats went on to become something amazing: Warhammer.
Click to continue reading “Dawn of War”
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For a long time the neighborhood in which I am currently occupying was ran by a board of directors consisting of annoying and bothersome old people who felt the need to intervene on everyone’s decisions as to the appearance of the property that they, most of the time, actually owned. It’s a fascinating thing, the American Dream, you search for it and when you finally obtain the very thing that you had been seeking you immediately find ways and excuses to project your ’sensible’ notions on why every house should be a boring gray with white curtains and fretting over cats walking across your lawn. Now, when I refer to the American Dream, I’m talking about a family, a retirement, a nice house or condo in a quiet neighborhood and, with any luck, a white picket fence. Maybe a chance to grow old and sit on your lawn and lazily yell at young people to get the hell off said lawn and quit drawing penises on your lawn gnomes with a sharpie. These notions of the ideal existence were what was shoved down the throats of suckers during the, what I lovingly call, the ‘old days,’ which roughly consists of all the time prior to the date I was born. The thing was, in chasing the American Dream, most people were broken, or didn’t like what they had built up to turning into a royal hassle, or didn’t like what they became in the process.
This article is about those people, because, somehow, this neighborhood is a net for those kinds of people. Those from the older generations that may have tasted the American Dream, and then… lost it. This neighborhood, with it’s ugly gray condos stacked uniformly with it’s ugly bushes and ugly walls that reek of plainness as it seems to me, has always looked like the kind of place place that the old go… not to retire, but to linger through the last of their days till they keel over and die. I know, I know… that sounds terrible. Think about it this way, most of these people are already dead on the inside! You say that doesn’t make you feel better? Well, I guess you can’t please everyone. My point is that they very boring, very old, and very nosy people have managed to keep this neighborhood safe from most of the problems of the Orlando sprawl simply by it’s intrinsic nature. The moment some kinds wandered in the cops were tipped off right away, the moment someone yelled, cops called. Pretty much if you were making more noise than it takes to knit, you had the cops called on you. This is good for me, in a way, because I make hardly any noise at all. This bad for, say, any college kids that want to throw a party or anyone selling drugs out of their houses.
Click to continue reading “The New American Dream”
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Popularity: 59% [?]
A thought occurred to me at work today. That the idea of elections is curious insofar as it’s intention. It seems to me that people in general tend to enjoy the process of voting because they can appoint someone who most closely agrees with their pretenses and if that person fails or does not do it properly they can feel justified in blaming that person for being an imperfect human being and not an avatar of their personal morality. Therefore it is though they appoint a babysitter to make their decisions for them, and if they don’t like how they handle it they can simply interchange one for another without ever having to examine if the person’s actions are flawed because the set of morals and pretenses they follow are flawed as well. Simply put, it takes the responsibility of the voter away and puts it in the hands of someone else.
Blame is an easy thing to pass and it’s even easier to judge someone if you don’t like how they handle their appointed position because then, even though that was a person that previously one might have been predisposed to agree with, they end up making one look bad, and we can’t have that now can we? This is the typical modus operandi of the average voting citizen.
Click to continue reading “Elected Babysitters”
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Popularity: 18% [?]
It is far easier to tell lies than it is to be honest. The reasoning being that honesty takes absolutely no creativity, there’s no real mystery or drive to want to know more in most cases . When one lies about their day they can add all sorts of interesting anecdotes and quips which would not work in an honest portrayal. No one really is excited to hear that you went to work, listened to talk radio, hated your life and was so bored you spent the day looking for meaningless tasks to do to kill time till you could drive home in a traffic jam and make it inside just in time to plop your ass down in front of the television and bear witness to people bitching about getting parking tickets on yet another ‘reality’ show and people having their souls crushed when they are coldly told they have no talent and paraded out in front of the viewing audience on American Idol. Honesty is easy, only when it doesn’t require you to face your day to day reality. Life is much more exciting when you can pretend that things are much more interesting than they really are. Applied to yourself and of your own personal truth we find honesty is a bit more difficult and rather unpleasant to look at. When people face their reality it seems to crush them, because perhaps, in lying, most of them were hoping one day that the lies would become truth. In this willful self-deception people merely set themselves up to be disappointed and for the most part unwilling to accept the face they finally see reflected in the mirror.
The truth is that your life, is probably, really boring. So boring you want to scream. It’s why people lie. It’s why everyone lies, including me though notable less so as of late. Who wants to face reality when reality is ultimately ugly and harsh. When someone lies to you, most people are probably aware of it. Yet it is accepted, digested, processed, and then met with more of its kind during the rest of the course of the conversation in which it was initially uttered. In a way a lie can make you want to really get the truth that much more, because the truth, once covered with a lie, seems to be something more desirable than it may normally be.
Click to continue reading “Frontin’”
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In tarot, the card which represents drastic change or finality is the death arcana. Fittingly the numerical value given this arcana is 13, which happens to be my favorite number. Besides the unlucky implications I feel it suits me in it’s own way.
Today is/was inauguration day, the buzzword this time around is ‘change.’ It also gives the media it’s chance to give itself a handjob as they talk about this being so historic because the president happens to be black. I feel this does a great disservice to Obama in and of itself because it implies that it is only so significant because he is black and not because he’s an intelligent or well-spoken man. All day today it was ‘who thought we’d ever elect a black man into the white house?’ That kind of rhetoric.
Click to continue reading “The Death Arcana.”
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Popularity: 21% [?]
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