The Doom Scroll ~ April 2022

 

April was a bit quieter than March was. Almost no one talks about the Ukraine war anymore, and you have to really dig to find any news about it. Typical. Then again I don’t watch TV news, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve completely stopped talking about it there too. Also everyone stopped talking about the Oscars within like three days, even faster than I predicted. Last March may as well have been ten years ago as far as the internet is concerned.  

And I’m 36 years old now as of this month. Halfway to 72. If my life were a cassette I would be close to where you flip it over to side B, if I’m not there already. See if my life were a cassette, it’s one where I have no idea how long it is. Hopefully I am still on side A, hm?

Anyway, time for another blog of political yammering that maybe one or two people will read if I’m lucky! Well that’s also because I’m too shy to share it very widely. Time to scream into the void, as it were. 

The Elongated Muskrat

I remember back in 2016 or 2017 when someone came out with a browser add-on that censored the name “Donald Trump” wherever it appeared or changed it to something else like “Drumpf” or whatever, because everyone but his cult of worshipers was so sick of hearing about him every second of every day. I want one for this bastard. I hate seeing him all over Facebook and Reddit, and even on the space documentary videos on YouTube that I put on to fall asleep each night. I try never to give him the attention he is so starved for, but I suppose I’ll do it just this once. The Muskrat has one of the most punchable faces I’ve ever seen. He almost always has a smug, shit-eating grin on his face. Then he spews bullshit about how if you work hard you might be as rich as him, even though he himself has never worked a day in his life, all he does is take credit for other people’s inventions. All he did was inherit a slave-driven emerald mine from his daddy. He delights in being the most arrogant, smug prick in the world. You know what I bet a lot of his worshipers have in common? I’m sure a lot of them grew up watching Duck Tales, which taught a generation that greedy, rich, selfish misers are the heroes and anyone who tries to make them part with even a dime of their money is a supervillain. Then again I don’t think he has as many fans as he makes it seem, a lot of his online defenders are just bots, not real people.

So the Muskrat bought Twitter recently. He doesn’t have enough money to pay taxes or pay his employees fairly, but he can buy websites for $44 billion or whatever; enough money to make every person on Earth a multi-billionaire, but then it wouldn’t have value and the concept of money itself would be exposed as the imaginary numbers meant to keep humanity trapped in a caste system that it is. Twitter was already a cesspool anyway, I’m glad I don’t go on there. Facebook may suck and is run by another evil rich bastard but at least they don’t seem to have a dedicated internet lynch mob that goes after anyone who says the slightest wrong thing; like what happened to Lindsey Ellis for example. It’s actually designed to manufacture rage. Keeps the working class fighting each other rather than the rich. Anyway, I predict that Twitter will either stay just as bad or get even worse. I’m not hip enough for TikTok so I’ll keep being a boomer and stay on Facebook while longing for the days of MySpace. 

Okay, well let’s do “capitalism” then. “No! That’s socialism!”

Have you heard? Hippie communes are capitalist! It’s so funny when conservatives try to catch the left being hypocritical, when their entire worldview is rooted in hypocrisy. Like “Aha! Didn’t you know that anything good is capitalism and anything bad is communism? Gotcha!” So if it is capitalism then why aren’t we doing this? If you’ve been reading these Doom Scroll blogs I’ve complained about useless lawns in suburban areas and advocated for growing our own food and trading it with neighbors for a while now, which actually was a common practice in rural areas of the United States until around the middle of the 20th century, when the “nuclear family” and “rugged individualism” concepts caused everyone to become estranged from their neighbors and trapped by their 40 hour a week jobs, working more hours than a medieval peasant. Because part of how the corporate class keeps the rest of us enslaved is by controlling the food supply so that we must submit to jobs or starve. This is helped by a large number of idiots with Stockholm Syndrome. It’s not entirely their fault, the school system is designed to keep people stupid, and convince people they’re free when they’re anything but. When Florida passed that “Don’t say gay” bill, for instance, they really just want to ensure most of Florida’s youth will still grow up to be ignorant bigoted rednecks.

Anyway, why don’t we just switch the definition of everything to get the working class conservatives to join the left? Okay fine, communism is now capitalism, and capitalism is now communism. The Nazis were communists, wealthy communists rule the country, get Antifa to change their names to Anticom, and there you go. It would at least work for economic issues, we’d still have to find a way to trick them into agreeing with the left on social issues like racism, homophobia and sexism and the like.

Don’t tread on the boot.

So this guy is either knowingly spreading propaganda by pretending to have solidarity with working class white people (which sadly many of them will eat right up like the obedient little sheep they accuse everyone else of being), or he’s so brainwashed himself that he thinks some higher authority than the over-militarized US police force is actually going to oppress him and take his guns away somehow, or perhaps he just sees “Don’t Tread on Me” as a meaningless conservative catch phrase, which is also possible. Seems like oppressors and white supremacists always want to pretend they’re the victim (see also Turks who somehow believe Armenians were committing genocide against them during WW1), so who knows what he believes. Who do you think would be the ones “treading”? Who has the authority in this country? They should change the wording on the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag to “Tread on everyone else but me, unless you’re rich, then you can tread on me and I’ll just blame it on liberals or minorities.” It’s really too bad the conservatives ruined the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, it could have been a great rallying cry for the working class, but the fascists tainted it just like they tainted the swastika and the toothbrush mustache.

I knew it would happen.

I’ve mocked the right enough for one post, let’s pick on the democrats, the wannabe left. It is amazing how quickly this topic was dropped when Biden won the election. I remember the liberals wailing at the far left in 2020 that if they dared vote for the Green Party (like me) or abstain from voting they were siding with Trump and damning Latin American children to waste away in concentration camps at the US border (which were actually opened under Obama). And then what happened? The Democrats got their votes, absolutely nothing was done about it, the liberals went back to sleep, and it actually doesn’t matter who’s president because nothing really changes either way. The same shadowy puppet masters are still in charge behind the scenes. And who’s going to be blamed in a few decades when the mass graves at these detention centers are discovered, just like at the Native American boarding schools? Not the ones who deserve the blame. Politics is all just a sideshow. It’s pro wrestling, they’re all actors who are buddies backstage and get their paychecks from the same billionaire. Even your precious Bernie Sanders and AOC. The purpose of the Democrat party is to corral the left into accepting the status quo no matter how awful it is. But at least the big bad orange man didn’t win and is off the TV and Twitter (for now anyway, every wrestling show needs a heel after all, and the political equivalent to Wrestlemania is coming up in 2024). 

What a sick country this is. I wish some American nationalist would “help me pack” like they always say they’re going to do to anyone who’s offended by their flag on their stupid t-shirts and bumper stickers. Maybe they’ll help buy my plane tickets too. Come on, help get rid of a leftist.

Why do people speak in code?

Is this true? Why don’t people just say what they mean? I’ve never understood it. I’ve never been able to read between the lines in social interactions. You know, my son is autistic, and since he’s autistic I’m pretty sure I am also autistic. I’m going to get myself diagnosed whenever I can. My previous therapist said there was “no need” for me to be diagnosed officially because it isn’t disabling. But I would still like to know that about myself for sure. In the meantime I’ve been lurking around in autistic circles online, without saying I’m undiagnosed because a lot of them get really gatekeeper-ish when you admit that. But I’ve been learning a lot about myself lately. My son has taught me a lot about myself. I guess I was most likely always autistic. And it explains so much. I was bullied for my autistic tendencies in school, my first girlfriend dumped me because of my autistic tendencies, it just explains so much about all the adversity I’ve faced and how I never really felt like I fit in with the rest of society. I have always felt different, an outsider. I think differently from the people around me. I used to like to rock back and forth because it soothed me, until I screwed up my spine and tailbone doing it. I get obsessed with random topics for a few months until I move onto the next thing, I have bizarre rituals like keeping track of my top songs each month (as seen on this blog). It’s me, who I am. I thought I was done figuring out my identity, but apparently not.

The Doom Scroll ~ The Worst of Social Media (Special Wartime Edition) March 2022

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. 

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

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.

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.

The Doom Scroll - November 2021

 

Doing another of these again. I didn’t do it last month because my tablet got run over by cars (yes, plural) and by the time I got a replacement I had much bigger fish to fry. 

You might have noticed I changed the name of the blog. I suppose I’m just in a different headspace now than I was when I started the blog. To be a bard in today’s society is to dwell in obscurity unless you’re lucky enough to win the publishing lottery and be chosen by the ruling class if they think they can profit off your work. To create anything is to scream into the abyss. Eventually our voices will be silenced one by one, and eventually we will be forgotten no matter how famous we become. I care not for fame anymore, because I’ve realized this. I’m just going to keep writing and drawing whatever I feel like. The audience for my webcomic is growing, though. Ultimately, the thought of being famous, of being heard by a large number of others, kind of scares me, and yet I keep screaming because I can’t stop. It’s what keeps me alive. 

Anyway, yes, online rubbish from November. I have a nice selection of it to go over this time. 

Black Friday Blackout and Reddit Drama

I made sure not to spend a dime on Black Friday, did you? To not consume is an act of rebellion against our wealthy overlords. I’ve worked through a couple Black Fridays in my day, and they are hellish for people in retail or in call centers. People are forced to work overtime, unable to call in sick without being fired, and trampled over by customers either figuratively or literally. The whole machine would come to a screeching halt if everyone stopped spending money on Black Friday. Not that I hold much hope for enough people participating in Buy Nothing Day for that to happen. Then again, sales were down this year. Maybe it worked? If it turns out to be a trend, maybe. 

The online push for Black Out Black Friday came loudest from Reddit this year. And this sadly came around the same time that the capitalist class discovered the Antiwork subreddit, and moved to extinguish their dangerous ideas, which to be clear aren’t necessarily against all forms of work, just the exploitative kind where you’re giving up years of your life to make someone else richer. Yes, in the midst of the Great Resignation, with more people quitting their crappy jobs than ever, the subreddit hit a million subscribers, and then the media took notice.  Even Goldman Sachs started shaking in their breeches because the subreddit was getting too big. My beloved little club of like-minded individuals who see the truth of the situation of workers in the US was then quickly subverted and compromised. Flooded with posts from suspicious brand new accounts gradually changing the conversation of the subreddit from discussing the reality of the exploitation of the working class, to discussing wage inequality between races and genders, how they quit their jobs, the ethics of tipping waiters, or blaming everyone’s woes on Boomers instead of the rich. Things that either pit the working class against itself or otherwise don’t threaten the system as a whole. It was being brigaded by fake accounts started by corporate shills. The bots haven’t been enough to completely derail the subreddit, but they’re clearly trying. The people who were serious about Antiwork fled and created their own smaller subreddits. The post I’m about to share below might well have been the final nail in the coffin:

When Reddit Inc. posts something like this, it’s over. “Aww see, not all business owners are bad. We got them to listen to us, mission accomplished. Now stop complaining and get back to work.” If anything in this post really happened, it wasn’t in America that’s for sure. But I think it’s fake. “I’ll take ‘Things That Never Happened’ for $500, Alex.” Something similar happened a few months ago when the media discovered the Herman Cain Award subreddit, and it was subsequently forced to block out the names and pictures of idiotic antivaxxers who chronicle their ironic demise to Covid on their public Facebook pages. This practically neutered the subreddit, it’s not nearly as effective anymore if you can’t see the names and faces behind the posts. The Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements took some time for the capitalist class to subvert and extinguish, but they’ve really been on top of nipping the antiwork movement in the bud before it caught on. Probably because that’s an even bigger threat to them.

So yes, back to Black Friday. A new subreddit called Black Friday Blackout was started as kind of a sister subreddit to Antiwork, in hopes of spreading the word to boycott Black Friday. Then the media caught wind of Antiwork. Shortly after, one of the moderators on Antiwork did a post trying to call off the Black Friday Blackout, calling it unrealistic, and instead encouraged only boycotting Amazon and nothing else (which wouldn’t actually hurt them much, since they do Cyber Monday). It was obvious that the mods had either been bribed, threatened, or had guns pointed to their heads. This resulted in a messy divorce between the two subreddits, and a splintering of the community. Now Antiwork has been largely de-fanged. Maybe it’s not completely hopeless, not every post seems to be from a mysterious bot and you still see some traditional antiwork discourse on the subreddit. Even if the mods have sold out or been replaced by corporate shills, it’s not like they can go around deleting posts for no good reason without people getting suspicious. But it’s clear that the subreddit has been compromised. It is now under the microscope and subject to the Psychological Operations of the ruling class. I’m just sad that it got discovered, I miss the days when it was more niche. It definitely changed my perception. But, the fact that the subreddit blew up the way it did means enough people are waking up. It’s bigger than Reddit. Can the idea be subverted forever?

The most depressing job recruitment ad ever.

So you’re 65 years old, you’ve been working since you were about 18, and finally after almost 50 years, you can live your life again as you choose, for the years you have left. But why retire when you could be flipping burgers while being yelled at by customers and managers? All the younger employees got fed up with the abuse and left, but that just spells opportunities for you! You can even relive your youth by getting uncontrollable facial acne! 

Don’t the people in the picture just look like they’re laughing at you? Oh haha, look at that old geezer who needs to go back to flipping burgers for poverty wages to get by, what a loser. Are these just corporate executives dressed in normal people clothes? I can’t imagine reaching old age and being forced to work fast food. It used to be that the elderly lived with their families and were taken care of and treated with respect. Nowadays they’re just thrown to the wolves. They have to keep working until they literally can’t work anymore, at which point they’re thrown into retirement homes that take them for every penny they’re worth, and forgotten. If they don’t end up homeless. Everyone in the US is too individualistic to care. 

Fast food jobs are best done by people who are still in denial that they’re going to die one day and they’re giving up their best years to a greedy CEO. By the time you’re of retirement age it’s a little harder to live in denial about impending death. I know some elderly people get bored after retirement and actually choose to work (likely due to a lifetime of brainwashing and basing their self-worth on their employment status), but you really want to spend the last years of your life where you still have your wits and your motor skills doing this kind of a job? Would anyone ever actually choose that? Not to mention the job is a lot harder if you have arthritis, back pain, a bad hip, etc. Managers don’t let you sit down and rest, and they’re not going to like it if you need a lot of bathroom breaks, as elderly people often do. I remember at the call center I worked at, there was this elderly guy who had to work there for the insurance. He had a weak bladder, and he still got chewed out by his supervisor all the time for taking bathroom breaks too frequently. He shouldn’t have been working, he should have been on disability. It’s like the rich are trying to squeeze every last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, getting as much work out of the poor as they can, even at the end of their lives. How sad that anyone has to do this. If I got to this age and had to work fast food in order to survive, I would probably consider just ending it all on my own terms because by then life’s not going to get any better. At least if you’re doing this kind of job when you’re young there’s still some sort of hope that you’re eventually going to get a better job. By 65 and older it’s a little too late to climb the corporate ladder.

Cartoons then and now

This is at least a couple years old, but it’s been making its rounds on Facebook again. It mocks the homogeneous so-called CalArts style of animation that was popular for most of the 2010s. In some ways I agree with it, but it is being a bit disingenuous and unfair. Firstly, you really can’t use anything by Hanna-Barbara that isn’t 1940s Tom and Jerry as an example of good character design and animation. Only someone with their nostalgia goggles on would forget about the cheap, thick-lined, jerky animation of the dozens of Scooby Doo clones they produced. Animation really reached a nadir in the 1970s, and hasn’t been that bad since. The 1950s through the early 1980s is known as The Dark Age of Animation for a reason. I’m sure none of the cartoons below are quite as bad as that.

But yeah, other than that, the character designs in a lot of modern cartoons might be the same, but character design and animation are two different things. The characters can be much more expressive than this meme suggests. Another thing that was rather new to television animation in the 2010s was the storytelling. American cartoons almost never had ongoing storylines before then. They were always episodic, each episode was standalone so someone who was new to the series could jump right in without missing anything. The most you might see was a two-part episode. Anime always did storylines though, and that’s probably what influenced American animation. The only one out of the new ones I’ve watched is Steven Universe, but that had a very intriguing story that kept me watching the whole series. There were a few standalone episodes, but not many.

I do miss hand drawn animation, and I think it can still do things digital animation cannot. Nothing today quite captures the animation style of the 1930s and 1940s, when the art form was at its peak. But, this meme is cherry-picking. I’d much rather watch Steven Universe than Woody Woodpecker, who I find to be one of the most annoying classic cartoon characters, even if the animation was better (although I don’t think it was, from what I’ve seen it really wasn’t the best of the 1940s cartoons, Universal’s animation really couldn’t hold a candle to Warner Bros., MGM or Disney). That just goes to show, there were crappy cartoons back then too. Every era of animation is a mixed bag. 

Are Right Wing Libertarians even Real?

Oh Chris Farley, how I miss you. Adam Sandler, not so much. Anyway, when I take those political compass tests, I come out as a left libertarian. There’s also left authoritarian (people who believe Stalin did nothing wrong, and would probably call my grandfather’s memoir about his time in the Soviet gulags CIA propaganda), right authoritarian (fascists), and right libertarian (republicans with bongs). But the more I think about it, I don’t think it’s possible to be both conservative and libertarian. Conservatives love authority. The self-professed conservative libertarians say they’re are all about no government, but really they just want to cut out the middleman and be ruled directly by corporations, without the pretenses. They believe in anarcho-capitalism; they want to get rid of government but still keep capitalism. Who needs health regulations and antitrust laws? Why shouldn’t five year olds be sent to work in factories and coal mines?  Let’s just allow all the corporations to merge into one mega conglomerate and declare Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk the overlords of Earth and be done with it. Of course without government who’s going to bail out the corporations with our misappropriated tax money every time they tank the economy? That’s probably the only reason we still have a government at this point. That and paying for the military.

But anyway, wanting to give all the power to the rich and have nothing to regulate them is still authoritarian. In fact it’s even more authoritarian than a traditional dictatorship or a theocracy. These are the type of people who fly both the “Don’t Tread on Me” and the “Blue Lives Matter” flags in the back of their rusty old pickup truck, oblivious to how those two flags actually contradict one another. I’ve seen them compared to indoor house cats; they believe themselves to be independent, but their lives are dependent on systems they don’t know exist. They think they want freedom, but when they escape the house and have to face nature and the elements they don’t know what to do and they starve. They have no idea how horrible it would be if they actually got their way. And in the US the word “libertarian” is always equated to these self-deluding fools. I think it was done on purpose to whitewash actual libertarianism, which is a leftist political position. It’s all about muddying the waters, that’s how the wealthy stay in power. Those political compass tests are bollocks. 

See this? Racist Karen and Facebook Conspiracy Theorist Karen are almost always the same person. What we call conservative libertarianism is really just a different brand of conservative authoritarianism. That’s why the political compass fails, and it was probably invented for the sole purpose of granting legitimacy to this actually nonexistent political ideology. 

The Horrors of Fire Emblem Heroes Addiction 

This blog post is getting too political, let’s talk about video games for a change. In February I started playing a mobile game called Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s the first mobile game I’ve ever really gotten into, since I’m a bit old school and prefer playing video games on the TV with a controller. I’ve been a fan of the Fire Emblem games for more than a decade now. It’s a series of strategy role playing games that play like a more complicated version of chess, or like Dungeons and Dragons but it does all the math for you. In 2017 Nintendo came out with this mobile game, which crosses over all of the Fire Emblem games and lets you collect characters from every game to use as your own little army. It’s very fun, it has a good story, and it’s very addicting. 

The luckiest I’ve ever been on this game. Three 5-stars.

The game is actually free to download and play. But…there’s a catch. You’ll constantly be tempted throughout the game to spend real money, in order to buy “orbs” which you need to summon new characters. Summoning new characters is kind of like playing a slot machine. You spend orbs on each summoning (the first pull is free) and usually get crappy, weak characters but every now and then you get a good one. You can slowly and gradually earn orbs for free by just playing the game and completing different challenges, which is what I do, but spending money to get them would be so much quicker and easier. The lucky pull you see above is incredibly rare, especially for someone like me who never spends any money on it. But then you get people like the unfortunate fool in the first screenshot above who get hopelessly addicted and spend thousands on it. At least they’re helping to pay for the game’s high quality cutscenes and such, which oddly are far superior to the cutscenes in any of the console Fire Emblem games, even the most recent one, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. They’re the people who always beat my ass in the game with their absurdly strong characters that they’ve been building up since the game first came out. Gives me a bit of shadenfreude to read about stuff like this. But at the same time it’s kind of sad too. This is the devious undertone of the game. Sure it’s a fun game, but its purpose is to drain the wallets of suckers. Not to mention what could happen if an impressionable kid who didn’t know any better started playing it and decided to steal mommy’s credit card.

But what a dopamine rush it is when you claim your waifu. Isn’t she beautiful?

By the way, the Fire Emblem fandom is full of a lot of weirdos and pervs that love to drool over fan art, and you’ll see them on full display in the Fire Emblem Heroes Hell Facebook group in the comments. I follow it out of morbid fascination. Yeah, ahem…just research purposes. Hey don’t give me that look, at least I only lurk there and I’m just quietly appreciating the fan art. Some of these people love to openly and publicly announce their weird fetishes. Anyway, be warned if you decide to tread there.

The Rewards of the Veteran

Isn’t severe PTSD, possibly losing limbs, and watching your friends die all worth it if you get a free donut on Veteran’s Day? Poor fools. Veteran’s Day is known as Armistice Day in every other country, marking the end of World War One. But that was too anti-war for America, so they started this propaganda holiday. It’s all about fooling enough people to fight their pointless wars and bully other countries. Don’t you want to be held in as high regard as our veterans? You even get free donuts! If you really want to honor the veterans, you’d be antiwar. But the US pushes this twisted idea that to honor veterans you should be in favor of more wars so that more veterans will be created. It also helps to have a boogeyman to fight, like “terrorists”. I wonder if the Department of Defense (more like Offense) paid for this promotion, just like they pay Hollywood to make pro-war movies. 

Top Five Regrets of the Dying

This is something I think about a lot, if you haven’t noticed. I don’t want to die with regrets. It started when I had a potentially life-threatening condition in 2018, and I didn’t have health insurance at the time, so it could have been a possibility that I would have died. I’ll to ahead and admit it was meatal stenosis. You can look it up. Luckily I was able to get it taken care of in an emergency room (in an incredibly painful manner). Still got the medical debt from the whole thing. Another thing that changed my whole outlook on life was when I started getting bouts of depersonalization and derealization (DPDR), late 2019. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never had it, but you just start becoming hyper-fixated on reality and existence. Like how strange plants are, how weird that the sky is blue, and especially with me, in awe of astronomy and the universe. You start thinking about stuff most people just take for granted. You start feeling like a puppet that’s become self aware and realized it is a puppet. Life is bizarre, and nonsensical. Some people who get DPDR snap. It makes them miserable. They want to be cured and go back to their ignorance. Some people manage it. But I actually kind of like having DPDR. I like being able to think outside the box. Once you have it, it changes you. You’re no longer immersed in reality.  

Anyway, I’m going to go down this list of common regrets of the dying and see how I’m doing.

1. I think I’m doing well in this regard. Especially lately. I’m doing my comic, my blog, I’m writing what I want to write, I no longer care about money or fame. I’m pretty content, all things considered. 

2. This one is important to me. I want to watch my son grow up, I don’t want to miss out on his childhood. And I haven’t, so far. 

3. You know when I look back on my school years, I do wish I’d talked back more and stood up for myself. I already feel this regret. If I could do it all over again I wouldn’t have taken all the shit I took from teachers and bullies back then. I could be doing better at this from now on. I’m rather shy and timid though, so it is difficult.

4. This one has been hard too ever since I moved to Florida. Facebook is pretty much the only way I keep in touch with friends. If I had more money I would be flying back to California for visits more often. This is one I don’t have much control over, sadly. 

5. Thanks, I’m cured! I feel like this one is ableist. When you have actual chronic depression you can’t just decide to be happy. Brain chemistry doesn’t work that way. But just because someone is dying doesn’t mean they’re suddenly all-knowing, I guess. I do my best with what I can. 

The Doom Scroll ~ The Worst of Social Media ~ September 2021

 

What a terrific month to be a member of the human species, am I right? It’s like with each passing month I feel less and less like a participant in society. Like I view everything from the outside. But am I really above biases and being in an echo chamber? Am I guilty of dismissing information that contradicts my established worldview? I try not to be, but maybe it does happen. Most people would deny this even if they are in an echo chamber. And yet there are times when, for instance, despite knowing on an intellectual level that nation states are nothing but a social construct designed to control people, I am tempted to feel hatred toward Azerbaijan and its people for their acts in last year’s war. It is a shadow that has followed me for a whole year now. Nationalism, as it were. It’s one of the main things still dragging me down, keeping me from being above tribalism. I’ve blogged about this struggle before, and I still stand by what I said back then. But I feel like since the war I’ve gone backwards from the progress I had been making. Well, since I’m already talking about this now, why not dig up an article to commentate on that I saw on Facebook. Let’s get this emotional roller coaster started. It will be therapeutic.

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.