Linguistic Mystics

Mr. Repose
The Warden

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The Library of Discontent

The Scorpion and The Frog

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.

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Exploitation of the Dead for Fun and Profit

If you live in Central Florida, you’d have to agree with me that this Caylee Anthony case has completely got out of control.  It’s disgusting how the media has been going on and on about this for months.  You’d almost believe there was nothing better to talk about.  Certainly not the housing crisis…

… or joblessness…

… or Central Florida Blood Banks profiteering off donated blood for their board of directors…

… or the endless homeless problem…

… or the rising murder rate…

…or the State’s lame duck do-nothing governor who only seems to be able to take a position when it comes to what brand of  brand of sun-tan lotion to use in between press conferences where he assures everyone that ‘everything’s going to be fine’ as long as you don’t ask questions or think about the situation at large, of course.

To think, that those are just things that I’ve thought of off the top of my head.

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Jam Box

Consider This

The reputation of a man is like his shadow, gigantic when it precedes him, and pigmy in its proportions when it follows. — Charles Maurice de Talleyrand