A Grim Anniversary
And here’s a link to the article. OC Media is one of the very few mostly neutral media outlets you can find that talks about the Caucasus region, focusing on Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. This article features an opinion from an Azeri and an Armenian on the state of their respective countries a year after the war. I don’t read a lot of articles from the Azeri point of view, so I found it interesting. Is it wrong of me to find schadenfreude in the fact that Azerbaijan’s “victory” has actually made things worse for their country in many ways? Their disabled veterans are being denied benefits for frivolous reasons, the suicide rate for their veterans is up, a culture of violence has taken hold of the country (and yes, it is a pity about the femicide and domestic violence, I certainly don’t like that, no schadenfreude there, but what do they expect these bloodthirsty soldiers who filmed themselves beheading Armenians and posted it on social media to do once they re-entered society being celebrated as “heroes”), the cost of rebuilding the areas of Artsakh that they invaded, ethnically cleansed and destroyed last year with bombs and illegal white phosphorus (it’s only a war crime if you lose, right) is astronomical, and I’m sure destroying Armenian churches, cemeteries and ancient artifacts to erase any evidence that Armenians ever lived there can’t be cheap either. Well boo hoo. If not schadenfreude, then at best I feel indifference. They did it to themselves. Some might use Azerbaijan’s dictatorship as an excuse for all of this, but if they really wanted to they could overthrow their government. Hell, Armenia did it a few years ago. But they don’t want to. Their fascist, genocidal, xenophobic government is a reflection of the majority of the people who live in the country. Just like America deserved Trump. As a society, they are complicit in the crimes their government commits. Sure there are a minority of Azeris who see the bigger picture and aren’t nationalists, and who disagree with their government. Even the ones who are nationalists were fed propaganda from the cradle up and taught to see Armenians as boogeymen, so is it really their fault? People are people, after all, ethnicity and nationality are arbitrary social constructs, countries aren’t real, we’re all just a bunch of monkeys on a floating space rock. But does this change anything? It doesn’t make Armenia and Artsakh’s 3,000+ soldiers and 80 civilians any less dead. Not to mention the 5,000-ish deaths on their side, which I am at best indifferent about. I get that they’re victims of their own repressive regime, used as cannon fodder to protect a politician’s ego. But I stop short at pity. I don’t feel obligated to feel bad for them, any more than an African American would feel bad for dead Confederate soldiers. I’m no Dalai Lama, I guess.
So you see, I want to rise above nationalism, I don’t want to hate people I have never even met, but this sort of thing just drags me back down. I struggle with it. There’s a dark part of me that wants to hate. There’s a more rational and logical part of me that does not. It’s been a rough one year anniversary of this war, all that negativity is being dredged up again by all the news outlets. If they won’t shut up about it soon I’m going to have to unfollow all the Armenian Facebook pages and YouTube channels again because I really don’t feel like reliving this war for the next month and a half. It will keep me up at night if I let it. I still haven’t rejoined the Armenia subreddit because it’s so relentlessly depressing. I wasn’t even directly affected, but it still weighs heavily on me. There’s no use being depressed over something I can do nothing about. I can only imagine how horrible it must be for people who were directly affected. Do I have sympathy for Azeris grieving over lost loved ones on the anniversary of the war? No. I can confidently say I do not. Best I can muster is indifference. I blame them for any hardships they’ve faced because of this war that their own government started. Maybe I’m a hypocrite, or maybe I’m just not enlightened or compassionate enough. At least I can admit it. And I can try to psychoanalyze the reasons I feel this way.
One last thing from the article; it’s both sad and hilarious that the Azeris have a proverb like “a close neighbor is better than a distant relative”. Because they’re just soooo nice to their neighbors. I wonder when, in the brief history of their artificially-created country that they pretend is ancient, the entirety of which they’ve spent hating Armenians, they had the time to come up with that proverb.
That’s Not How You Spell “Eat”
“Ah yes, Alexandria Ocasia Cortez, the left’s only hope in US politics. Don’t ever criticize her, she may not be perfect but she’s doing her best to push the Dems left. She’s changing the system from the inside. Why does the left always attack its own and self-sabotage? Stop gatekeeping and dismissing every politician that doesn’t pass your unrealistic purity tests. I don’t see you coming up with any better ideas, so if you aren’t either coming up with the actual solution to all of society’s problems or out there attending protests and throwing soup cans at the riot police you’re just a keyboard warrior and shouldn’t be allowed to have political opinions.”
Ahem, anyway, just regurgitating any counterpoints I’ve seen in regards to criticism of this political stunt. What do I think? What’s my useless keyboard warrior opinion that I have while doing nothing to come up with a better option or actively work for change myself? I’m glad no one asked! Well you see, there’s no politician on Earth that I trust. Because if anyone who stood any real chance of making progress and changing the status quo came forth they’d be assassinated long before they got elected into a position of power, like Martin Luther King Jr. for example. Simply put, AOC is where she is because she’s not a real threat to the ruling class.
I see AOC as the “Stone Cold” Steve Austin of politics. In the late 90s Steve Austin’s gimmick in the WWF was as a champion of the working class, a brash antihero going up against the evil boss Vince McMahon and foiling all of his dastardly plans. He satisfied the wish fulfillment we all have of beating up our boss. Why McMahon didn’t just fire Austin, sue him or get him thrown in jail after stunts such as filling McMahon’s car up with cement and spraying his whole family down with beer through a pressure washer hose was never really adequately explained. Realistically I don’t think even WWF’s rating war with WCW was important enough to keep someone who’s physically harmed you and destroyed your property employed in your company. I suppose there were one or two times Vince actually did fire Austin, but it never stuck, he was always back the very next week. But this “sticking it to the man” was all on television. Austin was still getting his paycheck from the same billionaire he claimed to oppose onscreen. Everyone was buddies backstage. He was never an actual threat to the WWF, in fact he was their biggest asset at the time. The fans were meant to see him as one of them, when he was just another highly paid performer.
Politics is just like pro wrestling. It’s all a show. But far too many people buy into political kayfabe, while wrestling’s scripted nature is common knowledge now. Thinking AOC is on your side is like thinking a Hooters waitress really finds you attractive. She’s no more “one of us” than Steve Austin was. She answers to the same puppet masters as every other politician in the US. “Tax the rich”. How wimpy. What a slap on the wrist. Taxing the rich isn’t enough to solve class inequality and rampant climate catastrophe. The rich always find tax loopholes. And 90 percent of taxes go towards building tanks and bombs and militarizing the police force anyway. This hollow publicity stunt has no more meaning than Steve Austin telling his adoring fans to give him a “Hell yeah”. It’s showboating. It’s performative. Entertainment Tonight wouldn’t be talking about it if it were an actual threat to the ruling class. She’s one of them. You’re either capitalist or anticapitalist, and if you’re capitalist, as she is, you’re not the left. No matter how much you claim you want to “reform” capitalism. The Democrats aren’t the left. They are how the ruling class keeps the left contained. They are manufactured opposition, in charge of keeping the masses from rioting.
Do I have any better ideas? On the internet you’re required to come up with a better idea if you’re going to criticize anything. You’re not allowed just complain and offer no alternative. (And that’s why I write this blog series instead of getting into internet arguments!) Of course, this is just a silencing tactic for someone who has no real counter argument. It’s just like when a conservative tells a liberal to leave the country if they don’t like it. But let’s see what I can come up with. I mean, I guess we could all vote for the Green Party and just see what happens. At the very least, if they still lost the ruling class would have to admit that voting doesn’t matter and the system is rigged. If the outrage at this was great enough we could look at dismantling the electoral college and gerrymandering. But noooo, third parties can’t win because no one votes for them, and no one votes for them because they can’t win, because no one votes for them. Circular reasoning. And besides that it’s all their fault when a mainstream candidate loses, apparently. American politics is doomed. There’s no fixing it. You can’t win. The only ways to win are things people will never do because they’ve been conditioned not to. Revolutions and such. It’s like my solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict; there’s a super easy and obvious fix to the problem that no one’s ever going to do.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
Don’t you love it when this argument comes up? Checkmate, atheists. Gee, I wonder why for 200 years no scientist ever thought to themselves “huh, you know monkeys still exist, if we evolved why didn’t they?” I guess they think scientists are trying to perpetuate some Satanic hoax. Good thing we have geniuses like Tim Allen to poke holes in their fragile logic in ways surely no one else has ever done. Following this “logic”, you might say “If English is a Germanic language why do people still speak German?” Or how about “If rock music has its roots in jazz why are there still jazz bands?” Turning it on Christians themselves, “If Christianity originated from Judaism why are there still Jews?” Your misunderstanding of science isn’t a valid argument against it. My other favorite non-argument is “the Theory of Evolution is just a “theory”, dur hur, theories are like guesses right?” Conflating the word “theory” with “hypothesis” isn’t a valid argument either.
I never really watched Home Improvement, I’m not a very big fan of the Toy Story movies, but it is unfortunate that Tim Allen turned out to be a conservative propagandist dickwad.
Steve Returns, I Guess
I was already about ten years old when Blue’s Clues first aired, so I never watched it. But it was impossible to avoid the hype when the former host Steve Burns came back to explain why he left the show and give the generation younger than me an encouraging pep talk. I eventually watched the video, and I can see how if you grew up with the show his speech would be touching. I got a similar feeling when I watched Mr. Roger’s final message. It’s like finally hearing back from an old elementary school teacher, a message from an old friend who you haven’t seen since 3rd grade or maybe even a grandparent who died when you were young. So I get it, even if Steve’s speech really didn’t move me much.
I did watch Nick Jr. in my early childhood, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, before Blue’s Clues. We had Eureeka’s Castle, the Littl’ Bits and Maya the Bee, but you know who my hero was at that time? David the Gnome. Is he ever going to come back with an encouraging pep talk? No, because he died in the last episode. And it was a very blatant, unambiguous death; he didn’t hop on a bus and disappear like your Steve did, kiddies, he journeyed with his wife to a mountaintop and purposely died because it was his time and that’s what gnomes do. It was almost like he and his wife had a suicide pact and wanted to die together before they got too decrepit, and neither would have to live without the other if one of them died first. You lucky mid-90s toddlers. You don’t know what it is to grieve at such a young age. Here’s the episode if you feel like having a cry.
Anyway, here’s another funny meme I found based on the whole event. Ha, I remember wanting to watch Child’s Play as a kid but my mother wisely didn’t let me.
Is the Meaning of Life Work?
Let’s unpack this Orwellian dystopian message. Now work in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. Work could be raising a child, work could be doing art, or writing stories, it could be household chores, planting and growing your own food, hunting and fishing, hell even playing a video game is a type of voluntary work if it’s difficult. Work can even be fun in that case. So yes, humans like to work, they like challenges and working toward goals, and life wouldn’t have meaning or purpose if all you did was stare at the wall all day (although there is something to be said for taking the time to get off the internet, drop every other distraction, lay down and simply exist with your thoughts every now and then, something a lot of people are afraid of doing). But how about when you’re working for someone else, to make their lives easier, to help pay for a CEO’s yacht while you’re compensated with bread crumbs, commuting to work for an hour, working from 9-5, wasting your limited time on Earth staring at a computer screen in a cubicle 40 hours a week while being constantly yelled at and disrespected by both customers and management, and micromanaged by supervisors breathing down your neck and getting on your case for taking too many bathroom breaks, until you’re too old and worn down to be of any use to them anymore, and the only alternative to this torment is loss of healthcare and income, potentially ending up starved and homeless?
This is a perversion of work. It’s not the same thing that work was before the Industrial Revolution. And these are the kinds of jobs the vast majority of Americans have. Work can be fulfilling when it’s something you do because you want to do it. That’s not most jobs these days. These days most work is based on coercion and exploitation. They threaten workers with it often, but they would have already replaced the working class with robots by now if the point wasn’t social control. They’ve tied healthcare to employment, they’ve taken away the ability for most people to grow or hunt for their own food so that we are dependent on corporations for our food supply, they’ve put in place rent and mortgages and dozens of other bills, they’ve subjected the populace to constant subliminal messaging in the form of advertisements so that they will spend their money on frivolous wants and be forced to work more to afford their needs, all to keep the lower classes too desperate and preoccupied to protest against their tyrannical rule. The Protestant work ethic was created to keep people obedient, to be willingly exploited and to actually be proud of their exploitation. They convinced people that the enemy is not their own oppressors but other workers, illegal immigrants, “lazy” people. And they make sure we don’t think too much about how temporary life is; death is to be hidden and ignored, only something that happens to other people. Think too hard about death and you might not like wasting all of the years of your adult life where you’re still able-bodied working for a greedy corporation. It’s the biggest scam ever perpetrated. And even once you’re aware of the scam, you can’t exactly opt out of it because of the sheer amount of people who are unaware.
So yes, the statement is technically true, depending on how you define “work”. I’m not opposed to work in general, but I am opposed to work as defined by modern American culture, and as likely defined by whoever put that statement up on the wall of the workplace. And that’s pretty much the opinion on the antiwork subreddit where this screenshot comes from. It was there that I was exposed to the works of David Graeber, which woke me up to a lot of this.
Uh Oh, the Antivaxxers are onto us!
Bahahaha! This gave me a good laugh when I read it. Someone give this person a gold medal in mental gymnastics. Looks like maybe Breitbart is worried that their readership is dying off. So the left is using reverse psychology to get the right to kill themselves off. Genius. Now I don’t know what’s more wrong in this post; the fact that he thinks the left has anything to do with drone strikes, that the left is “fascist”, or that the left is in any way organized! I occasionally lurk around on the Herman Cain Award subreddit and read about all the dumb Trumpsters who refused to get the vaccine, insisted Covid was a hoax, posted a bunch of stupid antivax memes on their Facebook accounts (and there’s only like 20 antivax memes on the whole internet, it’s always the same ones), and then ended up dying from it. It’s addicting in a weird way. I feel bad for their loved ones, and it is really sad when they realize too late how wrong they were, but a lot of these people picked their literal hill to die on, and go to their death beds still ranting about conspiracy theories and blaming the democrats and the Chinese for their illness. At this point Trumpism is a cult, and not getting the vaccine is drinking the kool-aid. They’re drowning on blood clots with tubes shoved up every single orifice in their body to own the libs. Nothing has made me more relieved that I got vaccinated than reading that subreddit, and learning what it’s really like to die of Covid. Worst shot I’ve ever gotten that I can remember, but so worth it. A lot of people still don’t know what happens to those who die from it. The media isn’t talking about it, it’s all happening behind closed doors, in overcrowded hospitals. Sometimes the people featured on the Herman Cain Awards will be idly posting their conservative bullshit memes on Facebook, and one week later, they’re dead. It happens fast sometimes. Other times it drags on for a month. Or they think they’re getting better and showing improvement, only to die two days later. Scary stuff.
You know what, I demand a reboot of the show The Walking Dead, but in this version there was a vaccine for the zombie virus that conservatives refused to take, so they all became zombies and that’s how the apocalypse happens. It’d be more realistic.
