Been a while. I got very busy for a couple months with my comic and with writing and such, and the blog was largely neglected. But there was all kinds of stupid crap on social media to talk about this month. Especially with regards to the war in Ukraine and such. So I started collecting it again.
Yay Sanctions
Hey, I know, let’s punish regular working class people for being born under a dictatorship. That’ll show Putin who’s boss.
Honestly this does nothing to hurt Putin and his oligarchs. The US is shooting itself in the foot too because now the price of everything in this country is going up. Although, I am convinced the fossil fuel industry is just using the war as an excuse to price gouge, while getting everyone to blame Russia for it instead of them. How much oil did we get from Russia, like 2% of the total oil imports? They’re robbing the working class blind while spreading war propaganda at the same time.
Anyway, the US just wants to be the only bully in the world, no one else is allowed to be one. Like I said in another blog, no one sanctions the US when it invades other countries on flimsy excuses just to steal their resources, or instigates coups against leftist governments. Not that I’m really rooting for either side. A lot of people on the left, particularly those with authoritarian leanings (aka “tankies”) fall into the trap of being pro-Putin because they think “NATO=Bad so Putin=Good”. Even though Putin is closer to being a fascist than a communist. You have to walk a philosophical tight rope to remind yourself that both sides suck. Maybe one’s a bit suckier than the other, though. But the invasion didn’t come out of nowhere. Iran gets sanctioned and they pretty much mind their own business, they haven’t invaded a country or started a war since 1826 against the Russian Empire, almost 200 years ago. Imagine the US going that long without invading someone. You can’t.
Reddit Chatter: Should Armenia Just Be Part of Russia?
This was an interesting discussion I saw on the Armenia subreddit. I initially scrolled past it without giving it too much thought, but the ideas refused to leave my brain, so I went back and screencapped it for my blog. This is what I do instead of actually commenting there and getting into an internet argument. Because I don’t completely agree with the comments.
What if Armenia just became a Russian province? Is it the only way to protect Armenia from Turkish expansionism and genocide? Or would it lead to a slow genocide of a different kind at the hands of Russia? The commenters on the subreddit are unanimously opposed to the idea, for reasons they provide above. My thoughts, taking their reasons into consideration, are as follows. Obviously there’s no point in entertaining this idea right now until we see how the Ukraine war pans out. Russians are actually moving to Armenia in droves to escape the sanctions these days. Meaning Armenia at this moment is better off independent. Armenia has enough on its plate without dealing with sanctions. Now, Azerbaijan obviously would love to eventually erase Armenia off the map and destroy any evidence that the Armenians ever even existed. They don’t even try to hide it. Turkey isn’t quite as adamant about it, probably because of international pressure, but they would eventually do the same thing if no one was stopping them. We’ve seen it before, their attitudes haven’t changed in the slightest since 1915. Would Russia really have the desire to erase Armenia in such a way? They aren’t friends to the Armenians at the end of the day, and are just using them, but at least they don’t have vitriolic hatred for Armenians. Yes Lenin gave Western Armenia to Turkey. Yes Stalin relocated thousands of Armenians to far off parts of the Soviet Union, imprisoned and killed many Armenian intellectuals, and is he one who turned Artsakh and Nakhichevan over to the Azeris in the first place. I ought to know Stalin was a dick, he sent my own grandfather to the gulag. But it’s not the Great Purge anymore, it’s not even the Soviet Union anymore, and Stalin has been dead since 1950s. Russia might repeat something like this down the road, they might not. I don’t think the incentive is there, personally. I could be wrong of course.
If Armenia was ever forced to choose, if it ever gets to a point where retaining independence would lead to the destruction of Armenia and the country has to pick its poison, I would think joining Russia would be the better option, as an absolute last resort. If Russia even agrees to it of course. Turkey and Azerbaijan aren’t going to attack Russia. Sure Russia could always decide to pull out of the region and give up land to the Turks like they have in the past, but they could do that today and the same thing would happen. No one else is going to lift a finger to help Armenia, that much was made clear in 2020. Anyway we’re already in that situation, they’re the ones protecting the borders, and if they leave, Armenia is screwed. In fact they’re less likely to pull out if Armenia becomes part of Russia. But that might be the very reason Russia may prefer an independent Armenia, they still have the option to pull out and leave Armenia to the wolves if protecting it becomes too costly. Sure they have a protection pact with Armenia in the CSTO, but who’s going to make them enforce it? They sure as hell aren’t doing anything about Azerbaijan infringing on Armenia’s borders and taking cheap shots at villagers.
In any case, you have to put your pride aside if it means survival. Pride can get you killed if you take it too far. Armenia is already a colony in all but name anyway. I would love for a return to the grand Armenian Empire of Tigran the Great. But it’s not happening. I wouldn’t have been saying any of this before the 44 Day War in 2020, but that was sadly a wake up call. Armenia might be able to beat Azerbaijan one on one, but they’ll bring their buddies Turkey and Pakistan to the party like the fucking cowards they are. Armenia is at best on extremely thin ice, if not completely screwed in the long term. That said, at the moment, remaining independent is the best course of action. The world isn’t so distracted by the Ukrainian war that they wouldn’t notice Azerbaijan erasing Armenia from the map and completing the Armenian genocide. Yet, anyway. They’ll just keep taking cheap shots at the border and trying their best to force Armenians to leave the country as a slow motion continuation of the genocide, for now.
Just get rid of cars
I love this edit. The comic has been floating around for years, but normally in the last panel the guy gets thrown out of a skyscraper. Instead he’s thrown into a large, wasteful, empty parking lot with the saddest tree in the world growing there. I hate the way American cities are built. In the town I’m living in now they can’t wait to mow down every last remnant of the nature that was here before and pave over it with stupid parking lots. Most Americans don’t know what a walkable city would look like. I saw it in Yerevan, Armenia. Buses and taxis were affordable and numerous, there was a subway system that could take you anywhere in the city, and the streets were much more pedestrian friendly. At the busy intersections they had underground tunnels for pedestrians to cross the street as opposed to dangerous crosswalks. You really didn’t need your own car to get around. Just you wait until gas becomes unaffordable, and people finally realize they’re stuck in the middle of ten miles of suburbs with no way to get to a grocery store other than a two hour walk because of how stupidly their cities were planned. This is what white middle class people get for wanting to be segregated. Suburbs were supposed to be fortresses to keep the people of color away, really. Car culture is a byproduct of America’s capitalistic obsession with individualism over community. The car has become an extension of the ego, of the “freedom” people think they have, but actually don’t. Insecure people with fragile egos have been duped into buying huge gas guzzling trucks they don’t need so that they can feel tough, costing them excessive gas money, and getting trapped in debt for car payments as well. Another way to keep people working. And it is going to come back and bite everyone in the ass one day. Because like the comic says, they’ll do anything but actually solve the damn problem.
See this? Might as well be a map of the town I live in now. Parking lots, golf courses, vast expanse of suburbs, shopping centers, freeways, streets where everyone still drives like they’re on the freeway. And with assholes driving their golf carts down the sidewalks like they don’t have to follow any traffic laws, not even the freaking sidewalks are safe. What I wouldn’t give for a bit of nature.
It’s been known for a long time that Nestle is one of the most evil companies in existence. They steal and bottle water from communities that depend on it, even in places like California where there’s been a drought for years, they don’t believe water is a human right, they have child slaves in Africa harvesting their chocolate, the list goes on. If these people could bottle oxygen they’d use child slaves to do it and charge $10 a bottle and say oxygen isn’t a human right.They secretly own like at least one third of everything at the grocery store, meaning you really have to do your research on which brands they own if you want to boycott them. It’s nearly impossible. (By the way, isn’t it nice that we live under capitalism where there’s variety at the grocery stores? Yeah, right.) But after they refused to stop doing business with Russia and help punish poor people for being born under a dictatorship, suddenly that was taking it too far. They even got hacked by Anonymous recently. That’s cool and all, but where was the outrage at the even worse stuff they’ve done? Most people only get mad about whatever the media tells them to be mad about.
So Conservatives are going to start campaigning for the erasure of medical debt now, right? …right?
Don’t you just love the Red Herring fallacy? It’s such a good silencing tactic, because now we’re talking about medical debt instead of student loan debt. So much easier than coming up with an actual counter-argument to why student loan debt should be forgiven. My answer: why not both? Get rid of all debt. Abolish money while you’re at it. It’s not real. Money and debt are just another form of social control. Another way to keep the working class subservient. To keep the working class busy at dead end jobs their whole lives, rather than questioning if it’s really freedom that they have.
I wonder who makes these stupid memes. Probably bots. That’s how the internet works these days, there are more bots than people. I don’t think most conservatives have the brain power to make memes by themselves. Some corporate firm makes fake profiles and distributes them in conservative circles, where people who are easily manipulated by such drivel eat it up, because they’re all weak-minded idiots. Yeah, I don’t have any sympathy for conservatives anymore, I am sick of them, they’re all blithering imbeciles. But it was the student loan companies that created this meme. I’m sure of it. Those student loan companies need to fucking burn. Too bad Biden’s not going to do a damned thing about them, even though he promised to. He’s the one who helped make it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans. He’s buddies with these sharks. So I never believed his promise for a second. I have much better reasons for hating Biden than conservatives do. See there’s a big difference between medical debt and student loan debt, you can declare bankruptcy on medical debt, and it falls off after seven years anyway. Not like student loan debt that you’ll be paying off until you’re 80 years old because of the interest rates.
Well, some people will anyway. They’re never getting a penny out of me. Bastards. Luckily I don’t own anything worth repossessing. What are they going to do, take my cassette collection? I’ll flee the country before I give them a red cent. They can suck it.
The Nestle Boycott
Why doesn’t Anonymous go hack the student loan companies while they’re at it? Free a generation from subservience.
Oh my Gods shut up shut up shut up about the Oscars
The internet has forced me to pick one of these unfunny memes that flooded my Facebook feed on March 28 to talk about, so I picked the one that shows what bullocks it all was. You really think this was real and not some convoluted publicity stunt? You must think pro wrestling is unscripted too if that’s the case. This is literally just like getting psyched over Steve Austin giving the Stone Cold Stunner to Vince McMahon. There’s no way in hell this was real. I can’t wait until next week when everyone forgets about this and talks about something else. This is worse than the similarly unfunny Bernie Sanders in mittens meme that swamped my Facebook feed in early 2021.Aren’t there better things to talk about? By the end of the month when this Oscar charade happened it already sounded like people in the US had even grown tired of talking about the Ukraine war. I bet most of these memes were made by bots, just like that student loan one earlier, and the bot accounts shared it all over social media, just to keep everyone distracted from the crumbling US economy, the class divide, the looming climate catastrophe, the spike of COVID deaths resulting from people pretending the pandemic is over when it’s not, or anything else that actually matters. I mean, I guess every form of entertainment is a distraction to some degree, but the Oscars, as well as other award shows, and the Super Bowl, they have this extra pretentiousness about them and they’re presented as something important and newsworthy when they aren’t. Makes it somehow more insufferable and insulting to one’s intelligence than say a movie or TV show. Who won best picture in 1992? Or even 2017? You would have to look it up. No one remembers. Because it’s unimportant. The ratings for the Oscars have been failing for years with younger people realizing it’s all bullcrap or simply not watching cable TV anymore, so they must have paid some bot company big bucks to make it look like the whole internet cares about this stupid staged incident. Gods I hate the Oscars, and any other awards show, it’s just a bunch of smug rich people sniffing each other’s farts and telling the working class what they’re supposed to like, steering them clear of anything subversive. They always screw over animation too.
See that? Apparently someone at the award ceremony said animation is “something kids enjoy and adults have to endure”; well your award show is something gullible people enjoy while the rest of us have to endure the next day when the internet doesn’t shut up about it. I guess South Park is a kids’ show. How behind the times do you still have to be to think all cartoons are for kids? Where have you been for the last 30 years? And you know what, I’ll watch any kids show or movie if it’s good. Anyone who has a problem with it can shove it.
And an independent film never wins because all the big studios have the stupid awards rigged in their favor since they’re the ones with the money. Just like how you’ll never hear non-mainstream music at the Grammy’s, or whatever the stupid music award show is called because I don’t give a fuck. Award shows are a relic of the pre-internet TV age and need to die already. It’s not the 1950s anymore.
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