CNN, who I have been informed have only just recently become “centrists”, really want us to feel bad for rich, Republican ( which apparently didn’t stop the Democrat President from nominating him for a 2nd term ) Federal Reserve chair, Jay Powell, who had the “iron stomach” to provide “shock therapy” ( as if this writer is giggling ’hind their mouth while glancing @ Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine ), AKA suffering & destitution for others, while he takes no economic risks if he makes any mistakes, a perfect example o’ the US’s “meritocracy”, where only the lower classes have to accept the consequences for their actions — or for the actions o’ their superiors, as they get laid off for economic & business policies that they had nothing to do with:
Part of the reason Volcker is remembered so favorably by Powell and others is that it required a savvy mind and an iron stomach to a) understand the problem of rampant inflation, and b) implement the painful shock therapy of interest rate hikes that cost millions of people their jobs. Volcker’s plan worked, but it really sucked for a while. There was indeed some pain, to borrow Powell’s euphemistic phrasing.
Considering povertyrose in the 80s, I want to ask how Volcker’s plan ”worked”, but unlike CNN’s writers, I don’t need to pretend to be too stupid to understand what Volcker’s main goals were. One might wonder why the government would want to sabotage the economy for the many for the sake o’ keeping a tiny minority o’ rich people’s hoarded gold stacks still valuable & able to borrow money @ the cheap right before midterms, but we have to remember that Powell is a Republican, so the answer is probably that he wants to screw o’er Democrats. The better question is why Biden would nominate a Republican for a 2nd term ’stead o’, say, Janet Yellen, who led the US to have the lowest unemployment rate since 1970. The best answer is that Democrats are idiots ( specifically, it’s probably for the sake o’ “decorum” o’ following the long-held pattern o’ always giving Federal Reserve chairs 2 terms, which Trump broke when he only gave Yellen 1 term, as Republicans understand that having mo’ power is always better than following made-up rituals that only help the other side ).
“Volcker’s mantra, one he told me again and again through 2008-9, was that in a crisis the only asset you have is your credibility,” Austan Goolsbee, an economist who advised the Obama administration, wrote in 2019 just after Volcker died at age 92.
“¡The only thing that matters is that we keep the scam ’live!”.
But, wait, we have a bonus bit from CNN:
Congrats, rich people — you ranks are multiplying. Thanks to gains in the stock market and soaring home prices, the world got another 5.2 million millionaires last year, nearly half of whom are in the United States. It’s the largest increase in millionaire numbers for any country in any year this century, according to Credit Suisse, which published its annual global wealth report this week.
Well, it’s good to see we have some good news in this dire economy for on —
Meanwhile, the pandemic has pushed about 100 million people into extreme poverty, raising that global total to 711 million in 2021, according to the World Bank.
O… Right… & there’s ’bout 20 times as many people now in destitution. But “congrats”, I guess. Thank the Invisible Hand for that stock market that, nonetheless, is still not high ’nough, so we need to raise those rates & throw some mo’ people out onto the street. A real human being with any semblance o’ empathy would put the massive increase o’ poverty @ the top & be much mo’ morose, but as we’ve established time & time ’gain, US news organizations aren’t staffed by humans, but by sheltered sociopaths.
It’s that time ’gain: time for ’nother example that proves we live in a postparody world where the most ridiculous satire is, in fact, reality.
Yes, in our hypercapitalist dystopian world, this is real headline I read from Reuters, a news organization people keep telling me is s’posedly 1 o’ the best sources for information: “Gen Z poses a problem for the luxury industry”. As you can see, the zoomzooms have grown up ’nough to join an ol’ tradition that millennials have been a part o’ ( & are still a part o’ ) for decades now: newspapers whining ’bout young people not buying ’nough stupid shit. Thruout the past 2 decades there were way mo’ news articles than I e’er needed to read in my lifetime whining ’bout how millennials were too good with their money to invest in housing bubble schemes to buy shitty, o’ervalued McMansions in suburban wastelands so they can be surrounded by illiterate yokels with houses painted entirely in MAGA election stickers, unlike their parents who went bankrupt buying useless houses in 2007. &, ’course, we can’t forget that unforgettable article we looked @ in my Pulitzer-winning treatise on equisquiliology, “A Year o’ Yuppie Inanity with Mozilla’s Pocket ( An Unpublished Classic )”: “The Raisin Situation”, wherein the fucking The New York Times ( Jesus, what a dogshit ’scuse for a newspaper ) described the valiant efforts o’ some rich guy to bring enlightenment to the savage millennials like Promethean fire & manipulate convince them to buy mo’ raisins.
From $300 bucket hats to $900 sneakers and $700 t-shirts, the high-flying luxury sector is fretting over the appetite among financially stretched Gen Z consumers for such “aspirational” purchases.
If you didn’t catch it, “aspirational” here is a euphemism for “stupid & pointless”.
If you pay close attention you might catch the words “financially stretched” & be curious ’bout the point o’ view o’ the Gen Z people & how they feel ’bout their own financial struggles. Well, you’ll have to use your imagination, as Reuters could only find time in their busy schedules to examine the financial struggles o’ billionaires trying to make up for that li’l bit o’ extra gold they won’t be able to add to their Scrooge McDuck swimming pools o’ gold.
Whereas in North America and Europe, inflation and a rising cost-of-living are hitting discretionary incomes of young consumers especially hard, China’s problem is different.
“In the U.S., inflation is a huge issue, the major focus of a lot of luxury companies … In China, it’s the youth unemployment rate that’s alarming right now,” Kenneth Chow, principal at consultancy Oliver Wyman said.
You selfish proletarians probably thought that unemployment is only a problem for you & your inability to afford basic needs like food & rent, but you forgot to consider the harm this causes for luxury sellers: if you can barely afford to buy food or pay rent, ¿how will you e’er pay them for $300 bucket hats?
Government data for July registers the unemployment rate of China’s urban population aged 16 to 24 at a record 19.9%, exacerbated by the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns and a crackdown on big tech firms that traditionally hired droves of graduates.
“This might be the first time that a lot of young adults (in China) are facing (such an) economic impact, so it will be a testing ground on how these consumers are going to spend on luxury items going forward,” Chow said.
Yes, Chow certainly has his word cut out for him, figuring out the magical mathematical equation to get people without money in a deeply dysfunctional economy devastated by a deadly pandemic & the pall o’ rising authoritarian politics to buy mo’ $700 T-shirts with the words “Ne’er Trust a Taco Tuesday Fart” on it. My thoughts & prayers are out there for our brave luxury sellers.
“If a recession happens, then I will 100% buy less or maybe even stop buying altogether,” said U.S.-based luxury lifestyle and travel TikToker Jeffrey Huang, 28, who shares his Louis Vuitton shopping trips and hauls with his 150,000 followers.
The cancellation o’ Pokémon Card Unboxing #243,143 was mo’ tragic than the premature cancellation o’ Firefly.
And big brands have signaled their intention to grow top end sales of $10,000 handbags and $5,000 coats rather than focus on attracting new entrants onto the bottom rung of the ladder.
This is a smart plan: in economies where the total amount o’ money isn’t shrinking, but the # o’ people who have money are shrinking, with those few gaining much mo’ money, it makes sense to rely less on selling several affordable goods to the masses o’ people going broke & rely more on trying to get as much money out o’ the few goods they sell to the shrinking % o’ rich people, relying on their psychological need for conspicuous consumption to reinforce their economic superiority.
“As the prices are rising, I’m becoming more and more cautious because I feel like I did do a good amount of spending in the last year,” said Sara Yogi, a 26-year-old San Francisco, California resident, adding that she may hold off buying a $2,900 Prada bag and one costing $3,200 from Bottega Veneta which are both on her wish list.
You can tell things are dire when people are reducing themselves to the level o’ caveman savagery by withholding from themselves, like water from a parched throat in a desert, $2,900 bags — which is ’bout $2,900 mo’ expensive than the bags you can just cadge from your local Walmart’s self-checkout stations.
This shift to focus on core luxury consumers also encompasses a cohort of wealthy Gen Z consumers less likely to be impacted by inflation or unemployment.
“1% o’ Gen Z consumers are reported to have said, ‘Fuck you, I’ve got mine’”.
But the concern is over would-be buyers who were meant to help Gen Z account for a fifth of all spending in the luxury goods sector globally by 2025.
You other failures, on the other hand, are shirking what you’re meant to do, which is raise your peoples’ abstract # up to 20%. ¿Have you no shame, poor people? ¿Have you no concern for your responsibility to luxury sellers?
Some luxury labels, including Balenciaga and Dior, are embracing the metaverse —
¡Nope! ¡Stop! ¡I’ve heard ’nough!
This is why Marxism is outdated: imagine wasting so much o’ your time writing 3 volumes attempting to critique capitalism in detail when nowadays you could just say, “Look, guys, capitalism led to the metaverse. ¿What mo’ proof do you need?”.
Virtual sneakers from brands like Gucci have already proved wildly popular, with a price point of $17.99.
Who wants to bet that these virtual sneakers can’t be bought with virtual money.
Whether in the real or virtual world, entry-level products call for high levels of creative investment.
“Creative investment” is an interesting way to say “stupidity”.
“There is this young crowd of consumers that are entering into the market that requires a lot of creativity at more affordable price points,” said Bain partner Claudia D’Arpizio, adding that not all brands are equipped for this.
Yes, I can imagine it takes a lot o’ imagination to convince people to spend money on shit that doesn’t e’en exist ’stead o’, you know, stuff that actually exists & has a use. & by “imagination”, I mean “lying”.
There is good news for brands, however.
Well, that calms my breathing a lot. When unemployment is almost 1/5th o’ the youth population, my greatest concern is always how Tony the fucking Tiger is weathering the storm.
If they do find the right offering of entry-level products, or if the economic situation of Gen Z consumers improves, the desire for luxury products remains undimmed.
This is idiotic. If people don’t have money, they can’t buy shit, no matter how “right” the offering — well, ’less they buy on credit, which will ’ventually run out, & would just be a short-lived bubble if many people did that & would lead to many o’ you idiotic companies going out o’ business. That’s basic math. They keep hammering in the importance o’ some vague “solution”, mostly revolving round inspiring or convincing consumers, when the problem isn’t a lack o’ desire, but a lack o’ money. ¿Are they so stupid that they think poor people can be convinced into becoming richer by enticing them with luxuries?
& the situation for Gen Z consumers won’t improve: if fewer people are buying things, then fewer things will need to be produced, & thus fewer jobs are needed, which will only cause unemployment to rise, & therefore fewer people with money & fewer people buying things. This is also basic math & the basics o’ how recessions work.
“Young people in China are enthusiastic about luxury products,” Yi said. “Lockdowns, or the temporary unemployment rate won’t change their long-term preferences.”
What Reuters fails to mention is the obvious solution to this seemingly inharmonious contradiction ’tween unemployed youth’s desire for expensive, useless junk & their lack o’ money to buy said junk: have the government tax these luxury sellers’ excess money & redistribute to the poor youth so they can buy this junk. Or better yet, only redistribute to people not dumb ’nough to want virtual sneakers & let the luxury sellers go bankrupt, ’cause, now that I think ’bout it, these luxury sellers provide no value to society whatsoe’er & the world would be better off if they were gone. In short: no, Reuters, I don’t give a shit ’bout the problems o’ businesses who don’t belong in any halfway meritocratic or productive economy. A bigger question is why Reuters does & why anyone would consider Reuters a news organization worth taking seriously.
While posting some haiku to Twitter I happened to spy “#BoycottCNN” ’mong the typical adspam that covers that website &, being someone who doesn’t watch CNN, ’cause I have some semblance o’ taste, I was curious ’bout what salacious scandal happened @ the most boring, milquetoast news show out there:
It’s things like this that convince me that I’m the only American who lives on planet earth. ¿How dense do you have to be to call CNN a “new” corporate oligarchy. ¿@ what point weren’t they? ¿& centrist move? ¿What were they before? ¿Liberal? Decades ago I remember them pumping out union-bashing shit. ¿Wasn’t their most prominent anchor before Erin Brunett, a conservative?
“Good morning and Happy Sunday to everyone who agrees that if CNN has consciously decided to push Republican positions, it’s time to #BoycottCNN,” one user tweeted. “I’m watching @MSNBC exclusively now.”
This is how moronic Americans are. Yes, in Soviet America pushing Republican positions is “centrist” — being biased in favor o’ 1 side in the most blatant way is “centrism”. This isn’t e’en taking into consideration the demographic to the left o’ Democrats, far larger & mo’ diverse than what few maniacs are to the right o’ fascist Republicans. Apparently the overton window has moved so much that no longer does supporting merely a pseudodemocratic republic, as opposed to a genuinely democratic republic without the electoral college, & you’ve read this rant before, count as “centrist”: now “centrism” is outright opposing democracy. The US has gone all the way back to medieval times & supporting democracy is a radical leftist agenda. This is why nobody should e’er take the word “centrist” seriously & anyone who uses it unironically is a moron. Also, nobody should take mainstream US politics seriously or Americans as people seriously.
& ’stead o’ going to an actual serious left-wing news show, like Democracy Now!, or learning how to read & reading the various left-wing newspapers out there, like The Nation, or, hell, watching the fucking Daily Show would be better than god damn CNN, they ’scape the cOrPOraTE oLIgArCHy by going to Microsoft NBC, famed community-oriented small press. What a depressing existence these failson “leftists” live. That’s like being a gamer & only playing mobile lootbox games or being a music fan who only listens to tiktok songs. I can’t fathom any reason why someone should punish themselves by watching either news show. To put it into perspective, as much contempt as I have for The New York Times & fucking The Guardian, e’en they are mountains ’bove CNN & MSNBC. Fucking YouTubers like Big Joel giving Marxist analyses o’ The Bee Movie are ’bove their level. You’d be better off not getting any news @ all & being completely oblivious, since I’m pretty sure CNN & MSNBC are like Fox News & make people less informed than an alien’s guesswork.
Some left-leaning CNN fans —
Nope. This doesn’t exist. You might as well start with “Some dry water”. ¿How much are they leaning left? ¿1°?
Many pointed out Malone and his companies’ support of Trump might reflect CNN’s centrist move.
& I point out that “support for fascist who tried to set himself as dictator for life = centrism” is proof that the entire American conception o’ politics is a black hole o’ mental cancer.
Similarly, many also criticized CNN’s Jake Tapper for not pushing back against lies about the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search in an interview with Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw on Sunday’s “State of the Union.”
After Crenshaw said that he hasn’t seen “any evidence that Trump was even give these documents back,” Tapper did not correct this unsubstantiated claim, despite CNN’s timeline on the probe that reported the DOJ served a subpoenaed at Mar-a-Lago in June.
Also: in the US “centrism” means literally fucking lying. If you are biased in favor o’ truth itself, you are a far-left communist. If you believe in journalism that does its actual job & doesn’t lie, you are a far-left communist. Cool country you have here.
The only thing that can make CNN relevant again is a massive boycott.
Nothing will make CNN — or TV news in general, since only ol’ people watch TV — relevant ’gain. Which means this boycott is as meaningful as boycotting a newspaper or COBOL: they’re already way less influential than the average incel on Facebook & are already on their way out.
But a’least the article ends on a high note:
You don't "both sides" it in journalism. You don't give fascists and Nazis equal time.
If one side says "water is wet" and the other says "no, water is dry" you don't have guests on taking up valuable time telling people how dry water is. You report the facts. #BoycottCNN
The only other American who isn’t lobotomized is a man named “Pants McShirt”. This is objective, 100% scientific proof that the US was a mistake & ne’er should’ve happened.
It just had to happen… I just had to stumble on ’nother row o’ dumb articles, & this time from our ol’ friends, The Atlantic, who took time off jerking themselves off o’er the dead bodies o’ Ukrainians to write 5 mo’ shitty news articles. Get out your tier-list cards. Here are the contenders that jumped out @ me while reading some random article I don’t remember:
The 1st 1 I saw already makes me hurl just @ the title & excerpt: “The One Witness at the January 6 Hearing Who Matters Most” & then below that we get the answer: “It’s you”. ¡Boo! ¡Get the fuck outta here! Considering all I did was make lame cum jokes while watching it — tho still, depressingly ’nough, better than the jokes most o’ the rest o’ the internet was making @ the time — ’cause nothing intelligent was said during it, I doubt that.
We can see this thru this very article, where Frum strings simple sentences, 1 after the other, since Frum ne’er graduated elementary school & ne’er learned such arcane esoterica as a subordinate clause:
The fatalism was always wrong. The important thing to remember about the Trump presidency is that he was beaten again, and again, and again. His protective congressional majority was stripped away in 2018. He was twice tainted by impeachment. He was defeated for re-election. His conspiracy to overturn that president election defeat was thwarted.
’Cept ’course the fact that he took control o’ the supreme court, which have unilateral power to defeat laws or e’en create laws based on what arbitrary interpretation they make up from the constitution, & Trumpists are taking o’er key local governments that are able to pass laws that mess round with the electoral system. There’s a reason people keep comparing 1/6 to the Beer Hall Putsch: if you fail a coup & don’t suffer consequences, try, try ’gain.
But if there is one lesson to take from the Trump years, it’s not the cynical Twitter joke “LOL nothing matters.”
I, WHO AM DEFINITELY A HUMAN BEING & NOT A FLESHY DROID, KNOW HOW THE YOUNG HUMAN PEOPLE TALK. THEY SAY LOL IN ALL CAPS & SAY NOTHING MATTERS LIKE THAT METALLICA SONG.
Now the world will know the full truth.
This was wrong. We learned only shit e’eryone already knew already.
So here’s where you come back into the story. The greatest theorists of American government have again and again warned against the delusion that the Constitution is some self-balancing mechanism, “a machine that would go of itself.” People make that machine go: people who make good choices or bad ones, people who are active or who are passive when their country needs them. People like you. You.
Awesome, since I’m the one who gets to say, I say we throw ’way the constitution & replace it with 1 that wasn’t thrown together @ the last second, just as Thomas Jefferson would’ve wanted, since it’s forced ’pon the public gainst their will & its imbecilic 2nd amendment is currently the greatest cause for the mass shootings that massacre children every few weeks.
The recently defeated president of the United States tried to overturn the Constitution rather than accept the outcome of an election. Brave and patriotic people stood up and stopped him at the time. Brave and patriotic people are seeking to hold him to account now.
So, yes, lol on the idea that Americans sitting on their fat asses & watching a government play will stop fascism from happening & lol on the idea that Americans, who have always been fascist, including war-criminal-collaborator David Frum ( who, I know, is Canadian — but they have fascists, too ), are going to do anything to stop it any mo’ than the average German did anything to stop the rise o’ the Nazis. David Frum should be grateful Americans have been thinking “lol, nothing matters” for the past few decades or else they might’ve guillotined him as well as his empire-building boss, as they rightfully deserve.It’s not fatalism when you call your fellow American out like you fucking see them ( specially when I know that in the long, long run Englesist Magical Socialism will rise from the ashes o’ fascism, since we’ll all be dead, & the Zombie Marx will rule — bet you thought I forgot ’bout that ol’ running gag, ¿didn’t you? ).
& lol on The Atlantic pretending like they’re liberals while letting war-criminal-collaborator fascists write for their rag.
I love how my quickly-scrabbled-out rant had mo’ sources cited ( Frum’s had none ) & was better written, despite using dumbass ampersands ’stead o’ the word “and” & writing like I’m an Irish Shakespearean gang member, & am stoned while writing this. Turns out the “smart approach to marijuana” is to write shitty. Should’ve smoked up — would’ve thought o’ something much cleverer than this glorified hallmark card. If Frum had turned this article into my high school he wouldn’t gotten a D @ best.
& this fucker has the god damn gall to pretend like Marcel Proust is his favorite writer, as if he e’er read his magnum opus. Get the fuck outta here. ¿Who you trying to fool here?
This entire article was nothing but “nihilism bad, America good”, but wasted several paragraphs reiterating this point in basic sentences. It’s hard to imagine writing a worse article.
Tier: F
Next we have “How San Francisco Became a Failed City”, which is strange, since I know people who live there, & it seems to be doing pretty well. In fact, those fuckers brag to me ’bout how it’s not raining in the middle o’ June there. Well, sucks to be them — I like the rain, give me all that shit, pour your misery down on me.
This article is a bunch o’ concern-trolling by some boomer ’bout how c-c-crazy far-left San Francisco is ’cause they don’t have ’nough people getting the shit beat o’ them by pigs. They do what many boring-ass boomers do & pretend like they grew up so left-wing, but then they rebelled not by being actually clever or unique, but by just going e’en mo’ backward ’stead o’ e’en mo’ forward, as if that takes any extra braincells, & in the process, only prove what ol’-fashioned, reactionary boomers they are. For fuck’s sake, they think helping homeless people is radical left, when it’s decades ol’, guillotining people is the new radical left trend. Get with the times. Christians now help homeless people, & when they start doing shit, you know you’re not radical anymo’, ’less you’re Thousand Foot Krutch.
My grandmother’s favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by, groceries in hand. If someone wanted to travel by unicycle or be a white person with dreadlocks or raise a child communally among a group of gays or live on a boat or start a ridiculous-sounding company, that was just fine. Between the bead curtains of my aunt’s house, I learned you had to let your strangeness breathe.
Your grandmother was referring to you, ’cause if you think this try-hard quirkiness is strange in the slightest you are as dull as butter knives. I love how this idea wastes several paragraphs telling me their life story, only for their life story to be that they’re 1 o’ a million mediocre bougie losers. Nobody fucking cares; get to the point.
It was always weird, always a bit dangerous. Once, when I was very little, a homeless man grabbed me by the hair, lifting me into the air for a moment before the guy dropped me and my dad yelled. For years I told anyone who would listen that I’d been kidnapped.
Add that to shitthatdidnthappen.txt.
If he ever got to heaven, Herb Caen, the town’s beloved old chronicler, once said, he’d look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”
O my god, ¡nobody fucking cares! ¡This is fucking dreck!
All o’ this shallow detail is a desperate attempt to prove that they’re totally not 1 o’ those conservatives in the red states; they totally love San Francisco & its “strangeness”, so long as the gross poor people get sent to jail for their disgusting poorness. Rather than priming me to see them as level-headed & balanced for their ability to appreciate “lefty” things so long as they serve their particular bougie amusement, I’m left repelled by what a self-centered douche this writer is.
When they finally focus on something other than their terrible life story, they get to the point: Chesa Boudin sucks dick ’cause he’s too left-wing. We see a perfect example o’ this in lush detail wherein the writer describes their disgust in seeing druggies in the open, with, like, syringes & food. Wow, that’s so much worse than kids getting shot up or people going to jail for life for stealing hedge clippers or black people getting murdered e’ery year. This is why I can’t e’en empathize with right-wingers: they’re so fucking lame. ¡Nobody cares ’bout your baby problems! O, no, you had to look @ a boy wearing a skirt. Sorry I didn’t let you pick out my wardrobe, assholes. Only the most boring fucking loser would care. All this person succeeded in doing is ensuring that nobody will e’er invite them to a rave ’cause they’re fucking bummers who’ll probably narc to the popo — & nobody likes them.
A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.
Good. Homeless people are cooler than office workers & tourists are fucking parasites.
(Laughs). I had no idea this article was written by a ghost.
It’s too bad San Francisco was the only place in the whole world to have COVID.
Funny ’nough, later on this same idiot will complain ’bout schools in San Francisco taking too long to open, so apparently this writer is fine with children dying o’ COVID so long as there’s no “learning loss” for children too dumb to read books on their own, ’cause s’posedly “ventilation” will cure that right up, right ’long with Alex Jones’s special juice.
The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.
Funny how this writer complains so much ’bout all the money given to the filthy homeless, but wants to waste extra money on maintaining school infrastructure rather than have kids stay @ home & do e’erything they need to do just as well ’cause you don’t need to be physically near each other to read books & hear other people talk. & before you say “but kids need to be physically near each other to interact”: you are a fucking ol’-ass boomer who is irrelevant to the 21st century; no children nowadays communicate thru meatspace, but entirely thru the digital realm, e’en when physically in school. This is precisely why ol’ losers like this shouldn’t be deciding policy “for the good o’ children” they don’t e’en fucking know.
Anyway, after this writer freaks out ’bout seeing a naked child — ’cause, as per Kurt Cobain, they’re a closet pedophile — & failing to get a police officer to give a shit, they spew some anecdotal evidence o’ drugs doing what drugs normally do & blame the lack o’ police officers to beat the shit out o’ druggies, which will magically make them not do drugs anymo’. Red states have that & are still swarming with opiates. If your city’s only problem is 700 out o’ 800,000 people dying o’ drug use in 1 year, your city’s doing pretty fucking well.
This whole obsession with needing mo’ police is funny, given they admit this statistic:
You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019. Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.
’Gain: if shoplifting, which doesn’t e’en affect anyone who isn’t rich, & car burglaries — anyone who owns a car is a polluting asshole, specially in a tightly-packed city where just ’bout anything you need is just down the street & there’s perfectly good public transit, & the world is made a better place if car-owners are harassed into no longer using their planet-killing machines — is the worst problem your city has, you’re doing pretty OK.
Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.
Sorry, let me fix this:
Because it turns out that people on the leftI also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.
Also, leftists don’t believe in property: they believe Property Is Theft™.
The rage against Boudin was related to that locked-up soap, but it went far beyond it.
Bougie motherfuckers are raging ’cause they have to ask for an attendant to get soap. I want you to note the amazing capitalist innovation that this soft-on-crime law has created: rather than rely on violent state force, which inconveniences both them & the criminal, whose life is ruined ’cause their dumb ass decided to shoplift soap, when they should’ve just refused to leave the premises & stunk up the store so that customers leave in droves till the shop owner begs them to take some free soap & use it, the shop adds security, which protects their wares just as well as the police — better, in fact, since there’s no risk o’ the glass shooting you or ignoring your calls for help ’cause they have mo’ important things to do than fight soap thieves — & prevents a thief from being a thief without ruining their future potential. ¿But who cares ’bout that when this Karen has to do 1 extra thing to get soap?
The Atlantic’s so fucking lazy they couldn’t e’en proofread their captions: 1 o’ them says “Students outside of Lowell high schol”. I think e’eryone @ The Atlantic needs to go back to schol.
Anyway, back to the school shit, ’cause I can’t stomach a bunch o’ landowners whining ’bout how best to utilize their plantations with the NIMBY-YIMBY-BIMBY shit. Spoiler: they try to pretend that some rich asshole buying up land for houses & slumlording o’er people is the cure to homelessness. How homeless people would be able to afford this rent is a mystery; but one would be delusional to think this writer actually has solutions to problems other people have, when homeless people & school children are just fodder for this rich asshole to complain ’bout how lefties inconvenienced them.
Anyway, after some bullshit ’bout how black people are the real racists for complaining ’bout white supremacy & ’cause 1 black person said something racist gainst Asians — ’cause white people are ne’er racist gainst Asians — we get to the improvements:
But Breed was angry, disappointed with the progressive faction and how it had let the city down. A few months earlier, Breed had announced a new approach to crime, starting with the Tenderloin, whose streets and sidewalks are full of fentanyl’s chaos. She declared it to be in a state of emergency and approved three months of funding for increased law enforcement there.
The order was mostly symbolic—the drug problem isn’t limited to a few bad blocks. Often a sweep of the homeless just means pushing the tents and dealers down the road. And anyone who lives in San Francisco knows the Tenderloin has been an emergency for years. But it allowed the mayor to trot out some new rhetoric: “What I’m proposing today and what I will be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and I don’t care.” It was time, she said, to be “less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”
For those not paying attention: that “bullshit” that we shouldn’t “tolerate” is homeless people. How the police will magic them ’way is a mystery — the could always kill them, ’course. Probably they’ll be sent to jail, which will cost mo’ tax $s — tho that could be offset with a li’l slave labor — but that’s a price worth paying so this Karen won’t have to look @ groddy people.
& then they summarize this article in the best way:
The other day I walked by Millennium Tower. Once a symbol of the push to transform our funky town into a big city, it’s a gleaming 58-story skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco, and it’s been sinking into the ground—more than a foot since it was finished in 2009. A group of men in hard hats was just standing there, staring up at it. The metaphor is obvious, but San Francisco has never been a subtle city. I’d like to believe those guys finally had a plan to fix the tower. At least they seemed to accept that it needed fixing.
Ayn Rand’s grand Atlas is sinking thanks to dirty poor people, & now John Galt has returned to lift it back up & drive ’way all the undesireables.
This article did have some statistics, e’en if manipulated & taken out o’ context, & missing relevant statistics. ’Course, it’s worse than useless for gaining any information, as it’s essentially dishonest; but if we set our standards so high that an article needs to @ bare-minimum be educational in some way all The Atlantic articles will be F-tier, so we have to lower our standards a bit. This article also had some sentence variance, so it’s not as brain-damaged as Frum’s opus ’bove. But it’s way too long & full o’ irrelevant detail & I think I hate Frum a li’l less than this writer. Frum is just brain damaged; this writer is a legit asshole. It’s hard to believe a legit war-criminal-collaborating fascist is mo’ likeable than a harmless Karen, but that’s how it is.
Here is another idea the committee might consider: Take a moment to praise Mike Pence.
All right, here: he is not 24/7 a walking bag o’ toxic waste. ¿You happy now?
Congress can name a building in his honor.
“Congress hereby declares this the National Mike Pence Outhouse”.
The House and Senate could propose nonpartisan resolutions recognizing Pence for his service to democracy.
This is fucking stupid. Mike Pence is a “hero” ’cause he wasn’t a criminal. Yes, normalizing insurrection by treating the refusal to participate in such insurrection not as one’s duty as a lawful citizen, but as a bonus makes perfect sense. While you’re @ it, ¿why don’t I get a building named after me ’cause I don’t shoot up a school? ¿Doesn’t that make me a hero? ¿Did not most o’ the US government refuse to cooperate with Trump’s great heist? ¿Do they not all deserve buildings named after them? ¿Why should Mike Pence get a special reward for being 1 o’ the “good” Republicans, while Democrats get shit, ’cause we just expect them to not be insurrectionists? Any economist will tell you that that’s a good way to encourage people to be bad in the long run by treating bad actions equally as good — which is exactly why centrists are 100% to blame for the toxicity o’ the Republican party by enabling them by refusing to treat them as worse than Democrats, thereby encouraging them to get worse & worse, since they’ll always be treated as equally as bad as Democrats, no matter how bad they get, which is something leftists have been warning ’bout for years & only now have centrists begun to realize it.
He should have been much more aggressive in repudiating Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election.
So, he did less than what the average Democrat does, but deserves a better reward. This is logic in The Atlantic’s tiny brain.
Democrats ought to be trying to pry these voters away from the Republican Party in the event that Trump runs again. By making it clear that the Democratic Party appreciates Mike Pence as a hero of democracy—and that GOP lawmakers do not—they might just persuade a small but crucial percentage of these Pence Republicans to cross over in 2024.
This is so unbelievably stupid, I refuse to believe the person who wrote this isn’t a Republican troll — in fact, considering he wrote an article titled, “Great leap rightward? Nah, just finding balance”, he almost certainly is a Republican, just the fake-centrist kind that are going extinct, ’cause as had happened after the Great Depression in e’ery country, the US, now nearly 15 years into its recent depression, is dividing into the same social-democracy-vs.-fascist lines, with moderate conservatives & liberals crumbling ’tween them. Republicans aren’t going to vote for a Democrat ’cause they told them a Republican candidate is great; they’ll vote for that candidate ’stead. Trump didn’t win by swaying Democrats by praising Clinton; he won by swaying Republicans — you know, their target audience — by convincing them he’s a real Republican by hating Democrats. Maybe Democrats should cater to all those young Democrats they bitch ’bout ne’er voting for them rather than the 17% o’ Republicans who approve o’ Pence ( vs. the 51% o’ Republicans who still stick by Trump ). What pisses me off the most is that as imbecilic as this “advice” is — which, ’gain, I think is disingenuous with the goal o’ sabotaging Democrats — Democrats are just stupid ’nough to take it.
I almost want to rank this lower than Frum’s article, since its central argument is much stupider. Frum’s inane feel-good bullshit was a’least harmless, if an opiate for the masses; this article’s message is actively stupid &, whether its dumbass writer acknowledges it or not, unquestionably acts toward moving the Overton Window & normalizing right-wing insurrection by treating those who don’t engage it as centrists, maybe e’en liberals, who deserve praise. Howe’er, structurally, it is better written than Frum’s 2nd-grade-crayon-scrawlings.
Tier: E
“Vaccines for the Littlest Kids Have Already Flopped” is the least interesting, which is to say it’s the least shitty, since we know The Atlantic is incapable o’ making compelling & intelligent articles, so what we end up here is a bunch o’ “news” that anyone not living under a giant Alf pog knows: the US government fucked up, as they always do ’cause the Republicans have strongly normalized an incapable government, which has e’en spread to Democrats, who aren’t exactly obsessed with a functional government themselves, mixed with Americans being uneducated dumbshits produced a strong stew o’ rising COVID cases. Most o’ this article is just stating facts with a few generic anecdotes that are, thankfully, not as “spiced” up as that San Francisco article novella I had to suffer thru, so it wasn’t too offensive to read.
The only part I have to comment on are the final 2 paragraphs, where The Atlantic’s lowest-common-denominator-sense creeps in:
There will be no simple solutions here. Financial incentives could help. School mandates, too, are an effective way to get immunization rates up, though in recent months, several states have introduced legislation to ban such measures. But the biggest and most difficult change will be cultural: repairing parents’ relationships to immunizations, and making COVID shots a little-kid routine. Every person I spoke with for this story stressed the importance of community outreach, and one-on-one conversations, starting with pediatricians, many families’ most reliable touchstone for care.
So we spend the length o’ a cough mentioning that some vague financial or legislative rules could “help” & offshore the work o’ going into detail to actually informative, scientific journals, & then sputter on ’bout “cultural” solutions, based on the advice o’ the same mass o’ idiots whose idiocy is a major cause o’ the problem. Yes, I’m sure a doctor telling their Fox-News-poisoned-brained patient that vaccines won’t put Microsoft 10 into their bloodstream will work. Till this article came out, doctors ne’er e’en considered the possibility o’ advising their patients to take vaccines. ¡Give this writer a nobel prize for their astounding advice!
It can work. Puerto Rico, which has one of the highest immunization rates in the entire country, also leads the U.S. in uptake of kids’ COVID shots—a trend that experts such as Mariola Rivera Reyes, a pediatric pulmonologist, attributes to the territory’s strong sense of community and trust in local leaders. “Almost all the parents I’ve talked to have been very enthusiastic,” said Rivera Reyes, who has taken to social media to connect with parents. “We haven’t encountered the resistance we can see in the mainland.”
“It can work” — then goes on to describe how it worked in a country with a “strong sense of community”, & therefore nothing like the US & an unworkable example. Please tell me how this virulently capitalist newspaper is going to help make the US mo’ community-oriented when they’ve been helping the forces that have been working toward the opposite for as long as they’ve existed.
Tier: B
The last article is just an advertisement for Jack White’s obsession with vinyl, which I give ’bout as many fucks for as the # o’ good articles The Atlantic has written. To be fair, given the choice ’tween Jack White & the Church o’ Scientology, I’d pick the former any day.
Tier 🤷
That’s all we have for now. Making you sit thru anymore o’ The Atlantic would be torture enhanced interrogation techniques. As an extra score count, I should note that this “liberal” newspaper has given us a 3/1 on Republicans vs. Democrats ( I assume anyone who believes that the vaccine is effective & won’t sell all your organs to China is a Democrat ). ’Mong those 3 Republicans were the US version o’ Goebbels; the ultimate example o’ a Karen whose only political stances are hating homeless people & drug users & wanting children to die o’ COVID; & a fervent fan o’ Mike Pence & who also has some weird obsession with falling birthrates, like all conservatives scared by the modern world do. Considering The Atlantic’s idea o’ “liberalism” is deliberately stoking cold wars & being imperialists — which is, I remind you, in fact, a key component o’ fascism — it’s no surprise.
So ’twas no surprise when looking o’er The New York Times’s list for the best books in the last 125 years ( that seemingly random # is due to it being a celebration for their own book reviews section ) that they also have terrible tastes in terms o’ literature. During the initial preliminaries we had a bizarre hodgepodge: Ulysses right next to“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” ( not only does The New York Times stupidly insist on using the inane US title made up by ignorant executives ’cause they thought US readers would be as dumb as them, they also picked 1 that hardly any Harry Potter fan would pick o’er, say, The Goblet of Fire or The Order of the Phoenix ), The Great Gatsby next to Charlotte’s Web. ( If they were going to include a kid’s book, ¿why the hell would they pick a book that mo’ people probably know ’bout due to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon rather than something like Alice in Wonderland, which has actual literary value & is 1000-times mo’ influential? ). Meanwhile missing are À la recherche du temps perdu, which is regularly put up there with Ulysses; no The Magic Mountain; no Gravity’s Rainbow; no Moby Dick; no Petersburg by Andrei Bely (admittedly an underrated gem e’en outsidethe New York Times ); nor a single book by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Falkner, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Umberto Eco, Borges, Yukio Mishima…
But since then they’ve narrowed it to 5 choices. Let’s see what these choices are:
5. Beloved
This isn’t a bad choice, tho NYT readers probably only know ’bout it now thanks to the brilliant marketing assistance Republicans are giving Toni Morrison by banning it from schools for making white kids feel queasy, a common character-building exercise schools employ ( Republicans, as everyone knows, are disgusted by the idea that their children might build mo’ character ’bove their own feebleness ).
I want you to keep in mind this entry’s ranking for later, tho…
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude
Also a solid book, tho I can’t imagine anyone truly familiar with Latin American literature ranking this as higher than much o’ Borges’s work ( indeed, it’s a post on r/unpopularopinions ), which was much mo’ experimental & arguably mo’ influential. Granted, this is probably the only Latin American work these honkeys know.
3. 1984
& here’s where it all goes downhill. This book is dogshit. Isaac Asimov wrote a famous devastating review gainst this book & its cynical attempt to half-assedly exploit science fiction without understanding an iota o’ that genre & all its nuances as a tool for pure political propaganda by a man who, howe’er great his politics were ( a’least before he started McCarthying people he suspected were communist, gay, “too anti-white” — read: opposed to racism gainst black people — to the UK’s IRD ), ne’er had any respect or understanding for art as art itself, who saw it as nothing beyond a tool for propaganda, as everything else. Beyond politics this book has no value: its characters are 1-dimensional strawmen, its language is basic, & the world-building is shallow & inane — a whiny teenager’s idea o’ how e’en totalitarian societies operate, which is why teenagers ( & those whose politics is mentally adolescent ) love it so much.
But e’en as propaganda, this book is an utter failure: it’s an amazing self-own that such a vociferous democratic socialist created the greatest tool o’ propaganda gainst socialism, used primarily by alt-right hacks like Ben Shapiro, which is easy thanks to this book being so broad & vague — which is precisely why it “resonates” with everyone: it allows everyone to fill in the “evil” side with whate’er they want. That the man who warned ’bout the emptiness o’ terms like “democracy” & “fascism” would write a book with heroes & villains so empty is a shocking failure. His nonfiction, specially his essays & Homage to Catalonia, are far better than this waste o’ time.
2. “The Fellowship of the Ring”
The New York Times are such morons that they don’t e’en realize that this isn’t a book, but part o’ a book: mistaking The Lord of the Rings as a “trilogy” ’stead o’ a single, unified book separated into volumes by the publisher gainst Tolkein’s wishes for crass business reasons is a classic amateur move. For anyone else it’d be nitpicking, but it’s hilarious to me that an organization that prides themselves on s’posed honest integrity would make a basic mistake that you’d get roasted for on fucking TV Tropes, the website that lets anyone add whate’er conspiracy theory they want without citations & calls themselves a “buttload mo’ informal” than Wikipedia ( which also wouldn’t let such a sloppy mistake slide ). This is pretty much exhibit A evidence that it’d be safer to get your news from Wikipedia than The New York Times ( which is not to encourage getting one’s news from Wikipedia ).
They also lose points for not using the kickass psychedelic book covers they used in the 60s official US editions as their image:
Some might expect me to laugh @ The New York Times for putting a mainstream fantasy work @ the #2 spot; but while I myself would not consider The Lord of the Rings the 2nd best novel o’ the last 125 years, or e’en in the top 10, I can see some reasoning ’hind its inclusion: it’s unquestionably the most influential book on this list that pretty much created the modern fantasy genre as it exists. That deserves some props. It also has a lot mo’ literary value than people give it credit: it has finely-crafted worldbuilding that pays attention to details down to the moon cycles with believable fantasy languages ( helped by Tolkein being a legit linguist ). While the characters can be hokey sometimes, there is mo’ moral nuance than one might remember: it’s a clever twist that the ring is vanquished not by the nobility o’ the heroes, who it turns out, are not so heroic that they can o’ercome the ring’s power, but by the pitiful Golem, who accidentally drops it in the volcano trying to steal it — & is only able to ’cause earlier in the book the heroes decide to spare him. Granted, it’s just conservative Christian “turn the other cheek” slave morality; but genuine Christian morality is mo’ refreshing than the might-makes-right white-&-black morality that conservatives oft erroneously pass off as Christian morality. Moreo’er, tho, this book has excellent prose, specially its scenery descriptions, which is a rarity in a lot o’ contemporary literature, both “literary” & “genre”.
It’s better than Harry Potter & certainly several leagues ’bove 1984, as well as the next book on this list…
1. To Kill a Mockingbird
This choice for #1 book o’ the past 125 years is such an amazingly bad choice — & yet so perfect for The New York Times’s main demographic. Its o’errated mediocrity is merely a reflection o’ The New York Times.
Much as 1984 is only beloved as juvenile political propaganda, To Kill a Mockingbird is mainly beloved as a weak white-centric attack gainst racism — which is specially bad when you consider Beloved, a much better book in every way that’s much mo’ devastating & unsentimental in its criticism o’ racism, was 4 books below. That none o’ Ralph Ellison’s books made it on this list or e’en the preliminary list is criminal. These fuckers thought god damn Charlotte’s Web is better than Invisible Man. What toilet paper o’ a newspaper.
& yet, it can’t be a surprise that the multitude o’ self-indulgent white liberals who read The New York Times would prefer this self-masturbatory tract o’ the noble middle-class white lawyer who tries to save a black man, who is treated mo’ as a prop to demonstrate our white savior’s greatness than as a real person, from the savage poor whites. Mixed in this book is a ton o’ classism: only the upper-middle-class lazy-libertarian Atticus, who opposes systems o’ racial inequality but praises systems o’ economic inequality that are just as racist, & Tom Robinson’s rich employer are depicted as anti-racism ( the book doesn’t acknowledge that both these people — the Atticuses have a black servant — exploit their racist society to get cheap labor out o’ black people ). It legit reads like a South Park episode, & is a twisted view o’ the real world: tho there are definitely racist, dumb, & repulsive poor white people, rich white institutions are the leaders in exploiting racism for their gains.
In addition to its weak-ass politics, this book doesn’t have all that much literary value. Compare Beloved, with its anachronistic chapter order & its greater use o’ imagery, color, symbolism, & just o’erall much better prose. To Kill a Mockingbird is a thoroughly unexperimental book with prose so basic & repetitive it becomes tedious to read real quick & makes hardly any use o’ the large gamut o’ tools the English language & structures put @ the writer’s disposal. Ironically, Truman Capote’s friend hardly did a better job o’ writing rather than typing than Jack Kerouac.
Here’s an example o’ the stellar prose in this book:
The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on the corner, a safe distance from the Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm around the fat pole, staring and wondering.
The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long agodarkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard— a “swept” yard that was never swept— where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.
& that was me trying to find a relatively good part o’ the book. It’s hardly the worst prose in the world — ¿but this is the kind o’ prose in the best book o’ the past 125 years? ¿Better than the flowing detailed descriptions o’ À la recherche du temps perdu? ¿Better than the haiku-like sharp details & experimental subjective perspectives o’ Virginia Woolf’s The Waves? Give me an hour & I could probably find 100 books with better prose than this book, which hardly has any better prose than your average Stephen King or James Patterson. I think Brandon Sanderson probably has better prose & unquestionably Lord of the Rings does.
Meanwhile, most o’ the prose is tedious dreck like this:
Mrs. Merriweather seemed to have a hit, everybody was cheering so, but she caught me backstage and told me I had ruined her pageant. She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic. He said he couldn’t see my costume much from where he was sitting. How he could tell I was feeling bad under my costume I don’t know, but he said I did all right, I just came in a little late, that was all. Jem was becoming almost as good as Atticus at making you feel right when things went wrong. Almost—not even Jem could make me go through that crowd, and he consented to wait backstage with me until the audience left.
I know some people take the “show, don’t tell” thing too far & demand that everyone “clench their fist” & bark like dogs rather than just be pissed off, but “She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic” might be 1 o’ the most sterile way to describe something, specially since the sentence right after already shows how he shows sympathy, so this sentence is redundant filler. I refuse to believe this isn’t rough draft material.
& I know this is s’posed to be a child narrating ( ¿tho is it s’posed to be a child now or an adult reminiscing ’bout their childhood? ), but e’en children aren’t this dull, & it’s not as if children are this grammatically correct, anyway. Contrast with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is also from the perspective o’ a child, which has much mo’ character to its hick talk — not the least o’ which ’cause Mark Twain put much mo’ care into the various dialects. Also, Huckleberry Finn is a comedy, so its plain talk works better than when To Kill a Mockingbird tries to use it for s’posedly profound speeches.
Here’s an example o’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s much better prose:
We judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.
Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a towhead to tie to, for it wouldn’t do to try to run in a fog; but when I paddled ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn’t anything but little saplings to tie to. I passed the line around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I couldn’t budge for most a half a minute it seemed to me—and then there warn’t no raft in sight; you couldn’t see twenty yards. I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But she didn’t come. I was in such a hurry I hadn’t untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn’t hardly do anything with them.
As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the towhead. That was all right as far as it went, but the towhead warn’t sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadn’t no more idea which way I was going than a dead man.
Note that when this book’s telling, it just tells in short sentences, saving its long, multi-clause sentences for mo’ detailed description. Also note how the hick talk is done thru a much livelier dialect, rather than just sounding like it’s coming from an uneducated robot.
Keep in mind, most wouldn’t say that Huckleberry Finn has anywhere near the best prose o’ all literature — it’s just 1 o’ hundreds with better prose than To Kill a Mockingbird.
While this book is relatively short @ 96,000 words, its main plots — Tom Robinson’s trial & the mystery o’ Boo Radley — are e’en shorter. So short, in fact, that this book could probably be a novella if not for all the padded-out dialogue of ordinary people doing ordinary things. There’s 1 scene that goes on for several pages wherein Jem tries to give a note to Boo Radley, which just goes back & forth with filler dialogue, only to end on a shaggy dog story when Atticus stops him. This kind o’ stuff isn’t inherently terrible: Ulysses, widely considered 1 o’ the best works o’ English literature, is mostly just ordina — well, people doing ordinary things. But that book plays a dozen literary tricks as it does so, which is why there are entire books dedicated to footnotes for every few sentence o’ that book, while there’s nothing to say ’bout e’ery “Thank you” & “No, sir” in this book. Plus, e’en its prose is better: nothing in this book will compare to the lavish way Bloom describes the uses o’ water in the “Ithaca” chapter.
’Nother contrast. Here’s 1 o’ the dozen or so pointless scenes in Mockingbird:
One afternoon a month later Jem was ploughing his way through Sir Walter Scout, as Jem called him, and Mrs. Dubose was correcting him at every turn, when there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” she screamed.
Atticus came in. He went to the bed and took Mrs. Dubose’s hand. “I was coming from the office and didn’t see the children,” he said. “I thought they might still be here.”
Mrs. Dubose smiled at him. For the life of me I could not figure out how she could bring herself to speak to him when she seemed to hate him so. “Do you know what time it is, Atticus?” she said. “Exactly fourteen minutes past five. The alarm clock’s set for five-thirty. I want you to know that.”
It suddenly came to me that each day we had been staying a little longer at Mrs. Dubose’s, that the alarm clock went off a few minutes later every day, and that she was well into one of her fits by the time it sounded. Today she had antagonized Jem for nearly two hours with no intention of having a fit, and I felt hopelessly trapped. The alarm clock was the signal for our release; if one day it did not ring, what would we do?
“I have a feeling that Jem’s reading days are numbered,” said Atticus.
“Only a week longer, I think,” she said, “just to make sure…”
Jem rose. “But—”
Atticus put out his hand and Jem was silent. On the way home, Jem said he had to do it just for a month and the month was up and it wasn’t fair.
“Just one more week, son,” said Atticus.
“No,” said Jem. “Yes,” said Atticus.
( “‘Come in!’ she screamed”, followed immediately in the next paragraph, “Atticus came in”, is some prime bathos ).
Anyway, here’s the far better “boring” scene from Ulysses:
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
( This is also bathos, but intentional, & much mo’ interesting & obviously took much mo’ work to conjure up than the filler dialogue before ).
OK… but all these problems would be… acceptable, I guess, for the best book e’er if the plot & characters were jaw-droppingly well-written. Well, they’re not. The story is average @ best, but the characters are straight-up terribly written. This book stars not 1, but 2 Mary Sues: the aforementioned noble white middle-class lawyer, who has no flaws, & his spoiled brat o’ a narrator who’s not like all the other girls & spends most o’ the book praising her flawless father. I should add that this book is heavily based on Harper Lee’s own upbringing, so it’s a shock that the characters who represent the author & her beloved father are depicted as perfect. This legit reads like a bad fan fiction or webcomic.
There are 3 types o’ characters in this book: the perfect anti-racist white heroes, the vile racist poor white villains ( so vile that the main villain has to stoop to attacking the Finch children, e’en tho racist people rarely go round killing the white children o’ e’en antiracist white people, ’cause apparently killing black people isn’t evil ’nough ), & the black people, who are all peaceful, servile Uncle Tom 2ndaryprops to warm all the white liberal hearts. 1 sickeningly sappy scene depicts a large community o’ blacks giving food to their white Jesus, Atticus. The 1 time a black person does anything resembling active resistance is when Tom Robinson tries to flee from jail & is shot to death, which is considered foolish by our noble whites & worth mo’ noble pitying. In this book black people are worthy o’ nothing beyond pity. That’s why they’re symbolized by the titular mockingbird that’s killed: they’re cute li’l pets to make rich white liberals feel good ’bout themselves ( to be fair, the other “mockingbird” is a shy abused child, who is also a pet for well-off people, & his abuse is ’nother example o’ the evil o’ poor people ). Heaven forbid this book depict actual struggle — ¡perhaps e’en with violence! — as that would make this book’s white audience squeamish & they would probably turn round & root for their white supremacist society. This book’s outdated relic o’ racial ( & specially economic ) politics is perfect for an outdated relic that is The New York Times, whose own politics are consistently early-20th-century.
Special note should be given to their critic note for this book. In addition to acknowledging their idiocy in missing a basic fact stated plainly ( since subtlety was beyond Harper Lee’s literary skills ) in this book when they 1st read it, they @ 1 point brag ’bout how New York is so much better than the savage rural lands ’cause they know how to leave people ’lone ( said the airbag who probably supported “Stop & Frisk” for “improving law & order” ), leaving e’en an urbanite elitist like me wishing to Allah that Al-Qaeda would bomb these fuckers ’gain.
Since I know all you hip Zoomers, Moomers, & no-longer-hip Xoomers like tier-lists, we’re going to be placing these on tiers.
Note: this whole image is copied directly from a screenshot o’ Newsweek’s website; the glitchy clipping on the right edge o’ the circle is how it is on the website, not something I caused.
1st we have “The State Should Never Have the Power to Kill People”, said next to a face that is giving an honest-to-god Dreamworks smirk, as all the serious pundits give. It’s a nice sentiment, but 1 that the state is unlikely to take him up on ’cause as it turns out they care mo’ ’bout power than being good — shocking, I know.
This article, as it turns out, is a high-school level debate essay ’bout the death penalty. It includes such wacky irrelevant hedging points, like that this doesn’t apply if Hitler’s ghost is coming @ you with a gun. In that case, then I guess killing is OK. Nowhere in these 2 short paragraphs does he mention any statistics or note that Europe has done ’way with the death penalty decades ago & has far less crime than the US, nor does he bring up the fact that a huge proportion o’ death penalty victims are black people charged under questionable evidence, many cases o’ which have been o’erturned after the exonerated has already been toasted. ¡Whoopsie! I should probably provide links to back up those bold statements I just made; but this guy didn’t e’en provide any statistics, e’en made up 1s, so this wacky blog still somehow has higher standards than Newsweek, & middle school debate classes have higher standards than both o’ us. That’s why you need to stay in school, kids not reading this ’cause only ol’ people read blogs anymo’: otherwise you’ll be some junky writing blogs like this or @ Newsweek.
Tier: D
But for balance, under this we have smiling sitcom dad saying that, no, “The Death Penalty Is Appropriate for Proven Killers”, &, holy fucking shit, it makes the previous article look like ’twas written by James Baldwin.
For 1, he doesn’t seem so strong on his opinion, mo’ that it’s a question whether killing suspected criminals necessarily prevents murder, ’cause “you would need apples and apples”, & we only have apples, not both apples & apples. ¡That’s too many apples! You would also need to “hop into a time tunnel” & see if removing the death penalty in this alternate reality would reduce the murder rate — or just not increase it, since, by definition, ending the death penalty would decrease the murder rate if all else is equal, since, you know, it involves murdering people. ’Course, you could also just try removing the death penalty in the reality we currently exist in & see if that increases the murder rate or just compare to Europe; — a strange land that neither op-ed writer seems to know exists — but I think this op-ed writer is just very excited by the potential o’ jumping in time tunnels, ¿& who am I to dampen their dreams?
The next paragraph sputters on that nobody knows what’s good or not, but that it’s definitely true that in some unknown circumstances, killing is permissible. Perhaps we need to create a save state in real life, kill someone, record the results, & then load state, & then compare the results to see whether or not said killing was permissible. What this op-ed writer does know, howe’er, is that blanket statements like “thou shalt not kill” — a phrase only ol’ cranks would use, since the vast majority o’ Christians use modern Bibles that are written in contemporary English & don’t mix up Easter & Passo’er like that filthy English monarch, James’s, Bible, no matter how low the dumb apostles’ who forgot how Jesus magically created fish from nothing after they already saw him do it’s standards were — doesn’t count, ’cause there exists “biblical” killing, so whate’er vague moral reason one has for being gainst the death penalty, it can’t be “biblical”. What this “biblical” killing is is vague. The Ol’ Testament certainly has plenty o’ places wherein God tells Jews to throw rocks @ people who have sex outside o’ marriage & God himself has no problem killing people ’cause they made him shitty fire, but I was under the understanding that Jesus amended that rule & said that only people who ne’er sin can throw rocks @ people. ¡But he didn’t say anything ’bout lethal injection! ¡It’s not uncommandmental!
Tier: F
Next we have some nerd who can’t e’en comb his fucking hair before he took his picture, tho he did have his photographer crop his hair so that it looks like a spaghetti monster, declare, “Hungarian Election Results Defy Easy Narratives”. That’s startling news: it’s almost as if Hungarians are complex human beings & not stereotypical robots.
But the other articles I’ve read have lowered my standards so much that this turns out to be the least bad o’ them so far. Perhaps I should praise him for pointing out something perhaps obvious to well-educated people, but not to Newsweek readers.
Tier: B
Anyway, we need to move onto something much dumber, “Why Is Biden Waging War on Charter Schools That Benefit His Base?”. I had no idea Biden’s base were religious nuts who are ’fraid o’ their children being possessed by the Satanic dinosaur bones o’ the theory o’ natural selection & the spectre haunting America, CRT, or “Communist Reality Tanning”.
No, apparently that base is poor people & minorities, who are badly taught by underfunded public schools, so it makes sense to take funding ’way from public schools so charter schools can teach minorities how slavery was awesome. This writer does, a’least, post evidence ’hind their claim that charter schools have mo’ black teachers & principals. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t actually claim that charter schools have mo’ black teachers, only that black students are mo’ likely to have black teachers, & the writer doesn’t mention that these statistics come from a right-wing think tank, not a genuine, peer-reviewed study. In fact, all the references this writer uses are blatantly anti-Democrat think tanks, such as this study propaganda article that starts with evil quotes from Democrats, including Biden himself, who he should apparently be gainst — I mean, he’s a Democrat, so we can assume he hates himself. So apparently Biden’s base are Republicans. That’s probably true; but unfortunately, they will ne’er vote for Biden e’en if he lets McDonalds run everyone’s schools & mandates morning prayers to Jesus in all schools. Howe’er bad public schools may be, I can’t help but notice that the 1 I went to in high school would have standards too high for this writer’s caliber so far, as they would surely grade this down for such sloppy sourcing.
As for the deductive points he makes, well…
But competition helps everyone.
Um, ’cept for the people, who, you know, lose said competition, genius ( which is always poor people ).
In fact, the market is terrible for education, since in the market the customer is always right, whereas in education, by definition, the customer is wrong; if they were right, there would be nothing for them to learn, since being “right” means you know everything. This is why market solutions to education, rather than correcting people’s misconceptions, merely back up their biases — just like how newspapers like Newsweek fail to challenge their middle-class readers’ sheltered political delusions, but, rather, repeat them back. If those being educated don’t like certain “facts” being taught to them they can take their money to a source that gives them “facts” they do like; & since, by definition, since they need schooling, these are uneducated, & thus ignorant, people, they don’t e’en know if they’re shooting themselves in the foot, since they’re too uneducated to tell reality from bullshit.
Or do they just think that they can do what they want because they believe that we’re all stupid?
They can do whate’er they want, which means they’ll probably renege on their attacks on charter schools if said charter schools kick up money to them, & you are stupid, so I don’t know why you’re criticizing them for having an accurate reflection o’ reality.
I love how this writer talks ’bout obvious trickery & believing their audience is stupid when this writer tries to claim that capitalist markets lead to equitable outcomes. I guess that’s why the US has such economic equality, unlike Finland with their stupid high level o’ general happiness & well-being & their 100% public schools.
Still, he is right ’bout American public schools failing Americans: this is the only explanation for why so many Americans would believe in such a stupid solution like charter schools. What he fails to realize, ’cause he’s an American, & therefore stupid, is that American public schools aren’t failing ’cause o’ socialism, they’re failing ’cause they’re run by Americans: much as you can’t have inmates run the asylum, you can’t have idiots educate idiots. There’s an obvious solution, but 1 that’s politically impossible ( given that Americans are too stupid to realize they’re stupid & too prideful to accept such a solution ): the US should hire teachers & education administration only from highly-educated countries like Finland or Japan to completely control the US public education system ( for a good price, ’course, since Finlandians & Japanese are too smart to babysit Americans for free ) so that some o’ their education spreads to us, & then, once we’ve become mo’ educated, we’ll be able to try public schools run by Americans themselves ’gain.
On 1 hand, this writer’s logical arguments are simplistic & laughably counterintuitive; on the other, they were a’least savvy ’nough to make their lies look convincing with deceptive statistics that are likely to trick the average Newsweek reader. While a teacher — who we can ignore, anyway, since they work @ filthy socialist public schools, & thus are pro sending your black children to the gulag — would grade this essay down for neglecting to bring up relevant controversies, such as the lack o’ standards leading to natural-selection-denialism wackiness ending up in charter schools; but that’s only applicable if we were judging this as informational, which it clearly isn’t, since this essay delivers no information. It is clearly a work o’ propaganda, & in such circumstance, not mentioning such debilitating problems — as it turns out, education only works well if it’s based on, you know, reality — wherein the writer definitely has no good defenses is the best solution, given the target audience, who are too uneducated to realize these omissions, being poorly-educated Americans & all.
So, o’erall, 1 o’ the better essays. I hope this writer received a good check from whate’er think tank hired him for his efforts.
Tier: C
Next we have the world’s most generic face next to the article, “With a Russian Veto, the U.N. Security Council is Not Fit for Purpose”, an article which demonstrates its writer’s sweet-summer-child ignorance that Russia is the only country on the UN Security Council that has e’er invaded ’nother country. In truth, the UN Security Council has only e’er been a frivolous joke, so whether or not Russia is part o’ it is irrelevant. Somehow I doubt if Russia were to be kicked out it’d magically make Russia’s army slink back to Russia like a shrinking erection; but it will make the delusional adult children that are American “centrists” feel good to know ’nother useless puppet organization is representing their tilted, inconsistent perspective on good & bad.
Grotesque and vile, these were the two words that came to mind when I was watching a recent U.N. Security Council meeting on Ukraine.
In your defense, considering all the terrible things happening in Ukraine right now, I think you can be forgiven for having grotesque & vile words come into your mind. Shit, I have grotesque & vile words come into my mind every time I wake up with a sore throat. I’m just curious to know what these juicy 2 words were — clearly too grotesque & vile to print.
The problem is, even allowing Russia to make such claims on one of the most important global platforms in the world, is an embarrassing complicity in their actions. It gives Russia, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky astutely pointed out to the entire council, the right to vote in favor of killing Ukrainians.
bUt tHaT’s cAnCeLCulTurE
In Ukraine’s defense, a’least they got a vote. Iraq didn’t get shit.
In the council meeting, the American ambassador, supported by the U.K., stated that she would like to see Russia removed from the U.N. Human Rights Council. This has thankfully now happened, but neither country is brave enough to state plainly that Russia should not have a veto, let alone that it should not have a seat at one of the most important decision-making tables in the world.
Halfway thru this riveting article I encountered this video titled, “Everyone Who Believes In God Should Watch This. It Will Blow Your Mind”. Luckily, I don’t believe in God, so I don’t need to watch this video. In fact, showing me Nancy Pelosi’s mummy face just before melting after looking @ the Ark while ol’ turtle man has a laughing seizure ’hind her is the least likely thing in the world to make me believe in God.
Anyway, back to the article:
When Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil,” she was referring to the way in which bureaucrats, who dutifully obey orders, are perpetuating the evil system that they occupy.
That was referring to Germans, not, say, the League of Nations, which are a better comparison. The UN Security Council aren’t perpetuating Russias evils, since they have no input on what Russia does, anyway, whether they let Russia into their li’l clubhouse or put up a “No Russians” sign ( “¿But what ’bout Navalny?” “We said ‘No Russians’” ).
It was almost Kafkaesque —
By allowing Russia to continue being a veto member of the U.N. Security Council, we risk playing into this very system.
If you want to prove you’re not a part o’ your system, you just need to throw Russia on the ground, just like in that Lonely Island song. Problem solved. ¿Why aren’t you paying me ’stead o’ these high-school dropouts? ( Just kidding: there’s no way these interns are being paid jack shit ).
This essay was nothing but a clustering o’ clichés. It didn’t deliver any informational content, nor did it succeed in making me hate Russia mo’. In fact, it made me almost feel a li’l bad ’bout hating the Russian government since it makes me, in some way, similar to this writer, which is a terrible thing to acknowledge.
Paul Grod is president of the Ukrainian World Congress.
I hope that’s just a frivolous organization Ukraine set up to make Paul Grod feel good ’bout himself. If not, then I don’t have high hopes for Ukraine winning their war… Well, ’less the Russian World Congress essay on Newsweek is e’en worse.
Tier: E
Next we have “Why Africa Doesn’t Jump Into the Fray on Ukraine”, wherein we get an answer to the stupidest question in the world. I think “why doesn’t a continent that has nothing to do with Eastern Europe & has had a negative history with Europe” is the last question that was on my mind during this war.
Africans have learned the hard way that, as one of their proverbs puts it, “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” Now that the East and the West are clashing again, many outside the continent fail to understand why Africa—an important part of “the rest” of the world—is reluctant to join the fray.
I somehow think Africans don’t have such low self-respect to describe themselves as mere grass compared to the west & east.
Other than that, tho, he does bring up way mo’ facts & logical arguments than necessary for an admittedly easy, tho absurd, prompt. He e’en has the awareness to realize that Africans are mo’ likely to be skeptical o’ the same US that claimed Iraq had WMDs & France who apparently were still doing some good ol’ fashioned imperialism as late as 2011, which is rare in US media, where everything is from the US or the general west’s narcissistic perspective wherein they imagine themselves to be the center o’ the world, when they’re, in fact, the west, duh.
Tier: A
I’m skipping “Russia-Ukraine War Makes Georgia’s Security Imperative” ’cause it’s the 1 article whose title doesn’t promise stupidity, &, indeed, as expected it’s just a perfectly competent news item. The guy’s face isn’t e’en funny to make fun o’.
Tier: B
Ah, now we’re back to dogshit with “The Great Sovereignty Reclamation Movement”, by a man, who, fittingly, looks like he’s drunk. This article is a jumble o’ incoherent comparisons o’ various elections & historical events, recent & rather distant, as well as to irrelevant issues like trans rights, & “what criteria we should look for in prospective immigrants”, which seems to be based on the delusion that immigrants are hired by countries after an interview process, rather than that they sneak in when their US-backed dictator hasn’t worked as well as the US advertised — truth in advertising, as they say.
But some of our other most politically urgent and galvanizing disputes revolve less around substantive questions, such as the nature of justice, than they do around one of the oldest procedural questions in the history of political science: “Who decides?”
A look around the world at this present juncture suggests an emerging consensus: We the people, through our own internal deliberations and our own political processes, should decide the fate of our own nation-states.
This is such a laughably longwinded way to say what is obvious: that a country’s decisions are made by, well, that country. In fact, that doesn’t answer anything, since that question usually revolves round which people in that country, since it’s taken for granted that the entire country isn’t a borg &, in fact, have differing opinions, &, given different political systems & circumstances, different opinions have different levels o’ power.
Finally, in Israel this week, member of Knesset Idit Silman formally left Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s ragtag governing coalition, which had been comprised of a bare 61-59 parliamentary majority. Silman’s departure means the Knesset is now split evenly 60-60, and the coalition will require at least one vote from the Likud/Benjamin Netanyahu-led opposition to advance any legislation. Bennett’s coalition, which consists of everyone from purported right-wing Zionists (such as Bennett himself) to Muslim Brotherhood-aligned anti-Zionists such as Mansour Abbas, was always extraordinarily fragile. Crucially, due to the coalition’s presence of Abbas’ Ra’am party, the erstwhile national conservative Bennett permitted anti-Zionists to thwart the Israeli national interest on core issues, such as the Iranian nuclear threat and the territorial dispute over Judea and Samaria.
The key lesson from Israel: A proud, self-governing people will only tolerate for so long a parliamentary (or congressional) coalition in which subversive fifth column actors, perhaps in cahoots with external NGOs, wield veto power.
This is a particularly interesting point: a “self-governing people”, which is not what Israel is, since it’s a republic, not a direct democracy, will only tolerate a parliamentary system ( said republic ) so long as it’s not infiltrated by “subversive fifth column actors”. But nowhere in this 1st paragraph is there any evidence o’ anyone in “cahoots with external NGOs”, ’cept that some hold “anti-Zionist” ( read: anti-theocratic ) views. It couldn’t be that Israelis have become better educated & decide they no longer care which made-up god rules o’er them ( it doesn’t matter: Jews & Muslims worship the same made-up god ). Either way, they better start caring ’bout that made-up god, or else I’d hate to see what happens to that mighty fine parliamentary system they have there.
For Americans who seek forward-looking inspiration, the lesson is simple: The nation-state, and the tangible flourishing of the nation-state’s people, must always come first. There is no more important lesson for a decadent, late-stage republic to imbibe.
Fun political language lesson: when someone uses the terms “decadent” & “late-stage” when describing western countries, they’re either Marxists or fascists; if they talk a lot ’bout the importance o’ “nation-states”, then we can narrow it down to fascist.
Trick question: the Supreme Court is an inherently undemocratic institution & thus there is no legitimate nominee, since the whole institution is a tyrannical sham.
But gone are the days of assessing potential justices on the basis of book smarts, pedigree and days spent on the job. The obvious defining factor today is judicial philosophy, which is why Republicans not named Romney, Collins or Murkowski voted not to confirm Jackson.
As it turns out, when you have judges appointed by partisans, those judges will be partisan, too. The only difference is that since they’re appointed ’stead o’ elected, the public will give them less scrutiny; & this & lifetime appointments give Supreme Court justices the ample position to be as corrupt & arbitrary as they wish, which is why Clarence Thomas is able to vote on issues, such as withholding Trump’s documents from the 1/6 panel, despite conflict o’ interests with his wife’s political involvement, since he knows there’s no chance anyone will be able to enforce any laws on him. The fact is that the Supreme Court is effectively ’bove the law.
But, anyway, please continue with your sloppy analysis:
Overwhelming Democratic opposition to Republican nominees is fueled by the same instinct. No one can argue that the three Trump nominees—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett—or the George W. Bush ones—Roberts and Alito—lacked the background to be considered worthy.
This is false, & it’s striking that this writer doesn’t mention Biden being gainst Clarence Thomas’s appointment, which was ( before the aforementioned conflicts o’ interests ) similar to Democrats’ complaints gainst Kavanaugh, but without the qualification concerns. Many, in fact, did dispute Barrett’s qualifications, noting her meager judicial experience.
The writer than spews out reams o’ historical revisionism, wherein he essentially claims that Democrats started it, which is on the same level o’ honesty as saying Democrats supported slavery, as it ignores the fact that Democrats, both conservative & liberal, dominated the legislative branches for most o’ the 20th Century, including during both o’ Bill Clinton’s appointments, in 1993 & 1994. For instance, while he brings up Ted Kennedy’s “incendiary rhetoric” gainst the same Robert Bork ’hind Nixon’s corrupt “Saturday Midnight Massacre” to try covering up the Watergate scandal, he fails to bring up that Republicans attacked Thurgood Marshall as a “judicial activist”, which came long before his examples.
But despite his attempt @ “both-sidesing”, like all fake centrists, this writer reveals their bias @ the end:
But let the difference be understood: while Republicans oppose Democrats’ picks because they waver from the Constitution, Democrats oppose Republicans’ picks because they adhere to it.
Mo’ accurately: the difference is that Republicans oppose Democrats’ picks ’cause their interpretation o’ the Constitution wavers from the fantasy theocratic version that exists in Republicans’ heads ( or perhaps just their propaganda, since considering all the Constitutional violations Republicans have made thruout their tenures, it’s doubtful they truly believe in it @ all ).
Sloppy, lazy logic & a lack o’ references, with many o’ the “facts” brought up mangled or outright wrong. Still, he made an attempt @ a convincing case, & to uneducated readers ( anyone reading Newsweek unironically ), it probably will convince them. Luckily it won’t matter, since nobody votes on senators or representatives based on whether or not they’ll vote gainst opposition Supreme Court candidates, & if they did, they’d base it on getting their favored partisans in the Supreme Court.
Tier: D
Finally we have “Vladimir Putin Must be Tried for War Crimes”, written by a pair that includes a US Lieutenant General, so it’s almost certainly hypocritical, since the US military commits war crimes all the time. But o’erall it’s stupid, since Putin is ne’er going to be tried for war crimes any mo’ than any US president e’er will, so long as Russia still has nukes. Anyone with a shred o’ political savvy knows this. The fact that a US Lieutenant General is this stupid shows how low the US military’s standards are for intelligence.
Clearly, the world will have to go after Vladimir Putin for his war crimes in Ukraine.
They won’t ’cause he has nukes, stupid.
If he isn’t brought to justice, the whole concept of tribunals on behalf of those who have suffered war crimes becomes a farce.
It already is a farce.
And it will confirm the common belief that the world’s most powerful nations can simply have it their way.
Regardless of how long it takes, or how much energy is expended, it is essential that the international community get this one right.
Sure. The international community will just add that to the slush pile & get back to you ne’er ¡real soon!
He violates international laws, and in doing so he defiles the moral foundations of many nations.
That would require nations to have any moral foundations in the 1st place, which is a false postulate, so we don’t need to worry ’bout that problem.
This beat Mr. Apples & Apples as worst article o’ them all. A’least that 1 was funny & was debatably right in how the death penalty could be either-or morally. This article is painfully boring & stupid, specially from a Lieutenant General, who should have a better grasp o’ realpolitik than a 5-year-ol’.
Tier: F
Thankfully, that was the last o’ them. Here’s our complete tier list you can hang on your fridge or wall so when anyone else sees it they can ask, <¿Who the hell are these assholes?>.
( Note: as it turns out, the “apples & apples proves we don’t know anything ’bout death penalty” guy is the same as the Supreme Court revisionism guy, so I represented the latter with his face & the former with a picture o’ 2 apples ).
Yes, I’m not kidding. This is why I’m 100% justified in hating these o’errated faux-liberal papers — they’re all the worst dregs o’ pretend humanity.
They have the fucking gall to masturbate to this war by proclaiming it a “revitalization” to the “liberal international order”, which sounds like something out o’ an alt-right conspiracy theory. ¿Has James O’Keefe donned his magical pimp disguise once ’gain & snuck in to sneak this gem into The Atlantic’s papers?
But I’m less interested in the laughable combination o’ sociopathy & just plain ol’ social incompetence one must have to cheer o’er dead Ukrainians ( & Russians forced into this war to no benefit to them by their dictator ) ’cause their bloody corpses make westerners look good. These people being morally bankrupt & out-o’-touch is ol’ news, & should be no surprise e’en if ’twere, considering how their sheltered, artificial upbringing must’ve completely starved them o’ any capacity for empathy or compassion with the dirty “NPC”s as they call them while they masturbate to Aaron Sorkin pretending he’s John Galt. No, I’m mo’ fascinated by the way this sheltered upbringing has left these people in an alternate dimension where they think the west — & specially liberalism —looks good in this scenario.
¿What is The Atlantic’s idea o’ “liberalism”, anyway? War isn’t what I consider to be a triumph o’ liberalism, that’s mo’ conservativism’s angle; I consider being able to avoid it a triumph for liberalism. As it turns out, the west failed to do so. In fact, the US didn’t e’en try, but intentionally stokes wars whene’er it can ’cause the US isn’t liberal or democratic @ all, but a far-right empire.
Funny story that The Atlantic doesn’t bring up, ’cause it’s a bit o’ a damper on their sexy party going on here: Ukraine used to have nukes. If they still had them, Russia wouldn’t have invaded them, ’cause if they had, Russia, & probably the rest o’ the world, wouldn’t be anymo’. But then the US, Ukraine, & Russia all made a happy agreement to take ’way Ukraine’s nukes, which I’m sure made Christopher Reeves’s Superman happy, but is probably making the thousands o’ Ukrainians now dead much less happy. Part o’ this agreement was “security assurances”, wherein Ukraine could cry to the Security Council if, say, Russia should be “aggressive” toward them, which in my humble opinion invasion sounds a lot like, & then the US & the rest o’ Europe can laugh & tell Ukraine to eat a dick. Many westerners are quick to raise their fists @ Russia for their obvious breach o’ this contract, as if Russia cares ’bout their opinion or this dumb, meaningless memorandum, but say nothing ’bout the US’s own breaching by doing jack shit to provide security assurances to Ukraine after the US encouraged Ukraine to leave themselves vulnerable to invasion. To be fair to Russia ( so we’re good “centrists”, we need to look @ both sides, both the tyrannical invader & the victim, just as we had to look @ “both sides” when discussing the Vietnam War ), the US also gave some vaguely informal promise to Gorbachev to not expand NATO into former Soviet countries, which the US also broke, tho, to be fair, that was voluntary on those former Soviet countries’ parts & maybe the US & Russia shouldn’t be cooking up agreements ’mong themselves revolving round other countries.
¿This is a triumph o’ the “liberal order”? — which, laughably, includes the US, a country that has done several much worse illegal invasions, which any normal person outside the US would call “fascist”, not liberal. Just recently I was exposed to a fascinating experiment on doublethink on my own soil when I saw the US presidentsay “Putin cannot remain in Power” ( but then also said he wasn’t talking ’bout regime change, e’en tho that is exactly what it is, ’cause he, like just ’bout all US politicians, is a drooling senile, who, like many Americans spewing aimless vitriol, would make better use o’ his time going back to playing as Luigi in Mario Kart, which he was much better @ than doing this whole leading a country thing) & witnessed the stampede o’ fake liberals — not self-described conservatives, tho with their nationalistic flag heiling & Russophobia it’s hard for me to distinguish them — cheer him on. Yes, it’s a sentiment I agree with by itself, but from him it’s like praising Stalin for attacking Hitler. Apparently I’m 1 o’ the few Americans with memory longer than a goldfish’s who can remember that this same president voted yes on an illegal invasion that killed hundreds o’ thousands, or it’s just considered rude by a political class, who, just like conservatives, find it unfathomable that one can oppose multiple parties gainst each other ( ’gain, anyone with sanity would’ve had to when Stalin & Hitler were duking it out ), criticizing any mention o’ Biden & the rest o’ the US government’s war crimes as “whataboutism”, which is when someone’s crazy ’nough to believe in consistently-applied principles. As true as it would be that the world would be safer with Putin gone, it’s an unquestionable fact that the world would be much safer if the US government were o’erthrown. This is considered a truism in most o’ the world, specially the “3rd world”; only someone completely brainwashed by American propaganda — which is almost all Americans & mostly just Americans — would deny this. ( Note, tho, that I am most certainly not talking ’bout regime change, but just expressing my moral outrage @ a country that has been mass murdering primary non-white populations for its entire existence & nobody should take it serious, guys, which is why I felt the need to say it, since saying things that apparently have no meaning is the smartest use o’ words ).
& yet how many o’ these chickenhawks masturbating to such violent language when its some filthy foreigner far off would cheer on such a thing on their own soil? Obviously very few, since they don’t cheer it on ’cause they have any semblance o’ morals, — we’ve just established that The Atlantic are all sociopaths who cheer on dead Ukrainians when it makes them look good rather than show sadness like actual human beings would — but ’cause it makes them look good ’mong all the others in the US circlejerk to jerk each other off. That’s all this article is: sad masturbation from a newspaper rightfully losing legitimacy right ’long with the country it stays devoted to, which is also, rightfully, losing legitimacy, not the least ’cause o’ its incompetent handling o’ this whole situation. Yes, you “liberals” are so brave & strong shaking your fist & doing nothing else gainst a dictator who has no power o’er you. You’re totally going to o’erthrow Putin & make Russia a rich ( well, for 1% o’ the population; we must keep 99% o’ its population relatively poor, since doing otherwise would be vile communism — so basically, what Russia is already ) “liberal” “democracy” with your inane articles, just like how I’m totally going to o’erthrow the US government & bring ’bout sexy anarcho-communism with my mean blog posts. I’m sure the families o’ dead Ukrainians will feel good that a’least their sacrifice made some empty “liberal order” that has done nothing for them look good to a bunch of o’erfed morons in the US.
This isn’t e’en getting into how stupid Biden’s statement was, disregarding squishy morality, just in terms o’ realpolitik: Biden accomplished nothing but turning himself into a Russian strawman, as if Putin wrote his speech to make him look bad. Which is why Biden had to sputter out that fine print afterward. He knew he fucked up — just like that time he fell off Choco Mountain & ended up in 8th place.
Maybe you could say it’s Ukraine’s fault for trusting the US, a country notorious for breaking contracts. Maybe they should’ve asked some Native Americans how valuable a pinky promise from the US is. But if so-called liberals like The Atlantic are truly so furious @ what’s happening to Ukraine as they pretend to be, maybe they shouldn’t be praising a “liberal order” that intentionally provoked Russia for decades, & yet, hilariously, left Ukraine in a vulnerable spot. If the US’s goal was to keep Russia from invading Ukraine, the only rational conclusion is that the US are dumbasses. ¡I mean, the west’s hands were tied! Ukraine took too long to join NATO, & by the time they wanted to, they had already lost land to Russia in an invasion, which, for reasons that could only be considered cowardly, precludes countries from joining NATO in their rules. NATO is an organization that exists, ostensibly, to defend people who need it, but refuses to help precisely those who actually need it, ’cause they might actually have to do their job & defend. People like to raise their fists @ Putin for this vile trick — ’gain, ignoring the fact that Putin hates them & doesn’t care ’bout their opinion — but say nothing o’ a stupid or apathetic west that made it so easy for Putin to pull off such a basic trick that several commentators & pundits were talking ’bout long before the result that everyone expected happened.
¡But look @ what a triumph o’ liberalism we have! Ukrainians are dying & their country is being blitzed; Russia’s economy is being strangled by sanctions so hard that they’ll probably ne’er recover; — which means Russia will probably ne’er get e’en western oligarchy’s conception o’ “liberal democracy”, since economic ruin is hardly conductive to healthy governments — Europe’s cut off from Russia’s economy, further dividing Europe; & the US is on the verge o’ a fascist takeo’er heavily influenced by Russian misinformation. That in a year when no one thinks the Democratic Party won’t get demolished in the midterms — which means the legislative branch will probably be filled with people sympathetic to Putin, which I’m sure will work well for that “liberal order” you have— The Atlantic proclaims triumph for “liberalism” is astoundingly delusional.
No, I know exactly what this war will bring; the same thing every war brings: greater authoritarianism from governments all round the world that have a “security” ’scuse for greater restriction o’ liberties & greater poverty for the poorest, while the richest still make lots o’ money selling weapons to a poor Eastern European country they fucked o’er ( like always, whether a triumph for the west or Russia, Eastern Europe gets fucked by both, as they have always gotten thruout history ). But The Atlantic aren’t real liberals, — they have ne’er cared ’bout poor people or the rights o’ anyone but rich white people — so they’re not concerned. Granted, they should be, ’cause if that aforementioned fascist takeo’er does happen in the US, their asses are getting the chopping block just like everyone else, & nobody will say anything, ¿’cause who the fuck cares if someone kills The Atlantic? They’re the fucking Atlantic — they used to pretend Scientology advertisements were news stories ( ¡Ne’er live it down, guys! ).
Bonus Shocking News: Ordinary Americans Are Terrible People, Too
I’ve mostly been focusing on the big boys in government & in the papers, but ’cause I hate myself, I’ve also been looking thru what the average moron thinks on places like r/worldnews & r/politics, & immediately regret it each time when I learn that what they think is a hive mind o’ ignorant racism & myopia. It’s fascinating in a horrifying way & gives a warning to what the future for the US holds: these people ne’er gave 2 shits ’bout Ukraine or probably e’en knew it existed, — they certainly ne’er cared when ’twas invaded back in 2014 & the west did jack shit then, either — but now that whate’er media they’ve been swallowing uncritically have become the 24/7 Ukraine channels & have drilled into them that any minor quibble gainst the US or Biden or Europe is pro-Putin, no matter how much one supports the sanctions or e’en outright military intervention ( which the US & Europe haven’t e’en done — nonetheless we must accept that this incoherence is what is right & put trust in our masters like good servants ).
This is nothing new. I saw the same insanity — in fact, e’en mo’ insanity — after 9/11. It’s a reminder why the US is on the verge o’ fascist takeo’er: the average American people have always been totalitarian-spirited.
& then we have discussion surrounding an article pointing out that Africans have been having deadly wars fore’er & nobody cares ’cause they’re not white like Ukrainians. What I love most ’bout most o’ the comments is how they reveal the bizarrely inhuman way most Americans think. The article is clearly asking for nothing beyond cheap sympathy & maybe @ the most some money, but most o’ the responses are this kind o’ petulant, <Well, ¿what are we s’posed to do ’bout it? ¿Intervene? Then everyone will say we’re dictators. We can’t win no matter what we do. ¡Americans have it so hard! ¡What do these whiny Ethiopians have to complain ’bout when they don’t have to suffer hearing people say mean things ’bout my country while screwing round on the internet all day ’stead o’ actually working?>. It’s not the narcissism & pity party they’re throwing for themselves that’s surprising — that’s just humanity in general; I expect no different from any other rich people. No, it’s the inescapable implication that in their minds news o’ civil wars are only useful insofar as they say who Americans should kill or not kill; the idea o’ telling someone a sad story simply so they can express empathy or give help that doesn’t involve violence is foreign to Americans, who lack any form o’ empathy whatsoe’er, & operate under a caveman mentality that violence is the option to everything. This is why our solution to school shootings is giving mo’ people guns, since the only way to stop kids shooting people is to shoot those kids 1st, & the US would rather spend trillions on military to prevent a 9/11 maybe every century or so, but not e’en a fraction o’ that on health care to prevent the same # o’ deaths every year. Since you can’t shoot cancer ( well, ’less you’re a German donating to Games Done Quick ), heart disease, diabetes, or mental illness ( tho you can shoot mentally ill people or throw them in prison, which is the usual recommended procedure ), Americans aren’t interested in solving these unsexy problems.
& then we have this amazing subthread wherein a racist “racial realist” gives a totally scientific explanation — lacking any form o’ references & contradicting what mainstream historians, who are not racists “racial realists”, but they’re just saying these things as part o’ the conspiracy, so we can ignore what they say & only listen to ideas that correspond to his as authority, which, conveniently, makes it impossible to falsify his arguments — o’ how Africans wouldn’t have had medicine or roads without white people, which can be totally proved by… C’mon, guys. ( Ne’er mind that much o’ this had to be built by Africans & was mainly enjoyed by white people for a few centuries before white people were nice ’nough to let them have some o’ their own handiwork after using it for a few centuries ). These totally not sloppy stereotypes out o’ minstrel are just “serious facts”, & if you guys are so obsessed with this morality thing — which is the core topic here — then maybe you should talk to 1 o’ your silly superstitious priests ( you know, the people s’posedly civilized white people followed while creating all that medicine & all those roads ).
I haven’t been paying much attention to politics for the past… half decade or so. There used to be a joke ’bout comedians intentionally voting for incompetent presidents so they’d have great material, but we have since learned that this is wrong: truly incompetent presidents & the long shadow they cast ’cross politics e’en after their ignoble defeat are themselves jokes, leaving satirists useless. There’s nothing interesting in mocking republicans: they’re self-parodies. Also, I’m getting too ol’ to keep up with whate’er new redundant ingsoc pundits have garbled up without any hope o’ creating any coherent conversation.
Anyway, I have sometimes peeped in for a few seconds just to check to make sure the government hasn’t been o’erthrown while I valiantly fight back with my sword & shield flee to Canada sit round laughing @ how desperate Mario Party fans are for fantasizing o’er DLC GameCube boards for that half-assed remake Nintendo’s regurgitated back onto them like Roger Waters spitting on 1 o’ his unwanted pets. & in this time the “lamestream media”, as all the hip-hopping fly-dog boomers call it, has become, um… weird…
Marx provided a solution. He observed that the working class (the 99%) overwhelmingly outnumbered the rich at the top (the 1%), and thus the working class could transform its massive size into political power by uniting together in a cohesive political movement. Workers of the world, unite!
That is not from some 90s-era website run by a bunch o’ bearded disgruntled commies in their basement but Salon, a major newspaper I’m sure would’ve been stroking themselves o’er the latest milquetoast pontifications o’ Paul Krugman a decade ago.
So you might think I’d be all, “¡Hot shit! ¡I guess you guys are kinda cool all ’long!”. But you clearly don’t know how impossible to please I am. I am, after all, the one who wrote the Nobel-Prize-winning critical review o’ the positive review for Wario Land 3, despite that being my favorite game o’ all time. I don’t know ’bout you young whippersnappers, but I been taught by my school that done taught me good that any dumbass honkey can have the “right” conclusion — a true G has good arguments to back them up.
1st, let’s appreciate this glorious caption with its glorious Photoshop filters:
Poor Hitler looks so camera shy & Kim Jong-Un looks bored out o’ his mind. Hairpiece, who does not belong with these people, not the least ’cause he’s not nearly as crafty as they were, looks like a turtle looking up @ dangling food offscreen.
Anyway, this article is notable in how poorly written it is. Not to be all “both sides, bro”, but it does kind o’ sound like Hairpiece in its simplistic, broad vocabulary & choppy sentences. After the previous snippet ( which was probably the best o’ that article, helped by being able to steal 1 o’ its sentences by a far better writer ), we have this gem:
This is a powerful idea. Extremely powerful. This idea filled the suffering working class with great hope and inspired them to attempt to join together in unity in order to seek greater fairness for workers.
The article starts by talking ’bout how right-wingers are all liars. This is true, but it’s also true that all politicians lie, &, most importantly, many o’ the greatest politicians, like Abraham Lincoln, were some o’ the biggest liars. ¿Remember when Lincoln tricked ’nough moderates into thinking he was a moderate on the issue o’ slavery when he was, in fact, rightfully, completely gainst slavery. The difference is that some rare few manage to, gainst all expectations, lie for the good o’ society ( which is definitely possible ).
In fact, lying is the only way the right wing can win elections. After all, its policies are profoundly unpopular with ordinary people because the right-wing favors the 1% rich over the 99% working and middle classes.
This is true; ¿but how many “left-wing” politicians truly support the majority? ¿Could it also be that none o’ the politicians offered by the US’s “democracy” truly serve the masses, leaving many o’ the masses, specially the lower class, to not bother voting? Also, this is nice o’ this writer to assert that the poor whites who joke-voted for Hairpiece would prefer improving their own station o’er screwing o’er minorities. ¿Could it not be that the US masses are just legitimate terrible people who prefer others’ failure o’er their own success?
By the way, I still haven’t shown you the absolute worst o’ this article’s writing. I’m now ready to unleash it ’pon you:
The lies are not just little lies. They are whoppers. They are the complete opposite of the truth. They are 180 degrees from the truth. They are the polar opposite of the truth, like from the North Pole all the way to the South Pole. Hence the term Big Lie.
This legit reads like Lionel Fanthorpe trying to fill out 1 o’ his 5 daily Badger Books. I think if I were this dumb ’nough to need this many redundant clarifications I’d be legally dead.
Yet, shockingly, many of these egregious lies actually work. They take hold. They create a false impression in the mind of the public.
You know, I’m still not entirely sure what this “lie” thing is. ¿Could you please elaborate a bit mo’?
The writer finally gets round to describing the “big lie”: that Democrats are totalitarian commies & that Karl Marx is the devil & all socialism is satanic. Interestingly, despite the writer’s constant attempts to simplify, I still get confused on whether or not they’re trying to defend socialism, Democrats, or mock the very idea o’ “socialism” ( which they keep putting in quotation marks ) as a real specter @ all. For instance, when they say “Republicans allege that electing Democrats will turn America into a failed socialist state like Venezuela”, the 1 time they don’t put “socialist” in quotation marks, I don’t know if they’re, ironically, accidentally regurgitating the Republicans’ lie that Venezuela is full-on socialist ( it’s mo’ what most would call a mixed economy, with private property & copyright explicitly protected as rights in the Venezuelan Constitution ).
The most problematic part o’ this article is its, um, historical inaccuracies:
Along came the liberal Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, which celebrated liberty of the individual and emancipation from the strictures of monarchy. These new ideas led to the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the American Revolution of 1776, in which the United States declared its independence from the King of England, thereby giving birth to modern liberal democracy. France soon followed with the French Revolution in 1789, overthrowing the French monarchy.
1st, the US was ne’er founded as a democracy ( & it still isn’t 1 ): many o’ the founding fathers, specially the 1s most instrumental in the creation o’ the Constitution, like James Madison & Alexander Hamilton, hated democracy ( literally every use o’ the term in The Federalist Papers is negatively comparing it to a republic, a concept originated by Plato as a distinctly technocratic, hierarchical system in opposition to democracy ) — & it certainly wasn’t a “modern” 1.
Anyway, the real issue is how this article is going to discuss the French Revolution, what with its controversial fall into chaotic mass murder & tyranny…
Unfortunately for the working class, however, even the elimination of monarchies did not improve their plight as they had hoped. From approximately 1850 to 1880, Karl Marx came along and explained the problem. Even though monarchies were receding, a new oppressive force was emerging: capitalism.
Um… I think we might’ve missed some important details regarding the French Revolution. Tho, to be fair, people who emphasize the brutality o’ the Reign o’ Terror noticeably don’t talk as much ’bout things like the violent suppression o’ the Paris Commune o’ 1848, which some historians say had mo’ casualties than the Reign o’ Terror, not to mention worse wars primarily gainst poor people thruout history — too many to count. ¿How many historians or journalists would get ’way with saying “Unfortunately for the US, howe’er, e’en the fall o’ the Taliban did not improve the plight o’ the middle east”? Probably none, since no journalist would allow their writers to write “o’” ’stead o’ “of”. But it is definitely true that while mass murder gainst the rich is a horror that is considered inexcusable in polite media, mass murder gainst the poor is merely an interesting debate to be held by rich people during their surfeit o’ laborless time ( we can call this “Socially-Unnecessary Idle Time”, or SUIT ). So they’re basically a less-bad reverse o’ the whitewashing o’ mass murder vs. poor people customary to the LAME-PEE Media™.
I’m also glad that Karl Marx came round & ’splained a problem that many socialists & nonsocialists who preceded him, like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Utopian Socialists, & e’en Plato had already described years before.
The world was shocked as it watched Marx’s theoretical idea come into actual fruition in the Russian Revolution of 1917 when the working class united in the Bolshevik party led by Vladimir Lenin and overthrew Czar Nicholas II and the Romanov dynasty, ending the Russian Empire and creating the Soviet Union.
I, too, am shocked, but mainly @ the sheer magnitude o’ inaccuracies found in this li’l paragraph. Anyone actually familiar with Marx’s “theoretical idea” — which is that a fully-developed capitalistic society would lead to a “bourgeois revolution”, setting up a parliamentary democracy/republic, which the working class would exploit to gain control o’er the government — would know that the Russian Revolution — wherein an underdeveloped pseudofeudalistic tsardom ’ventually became a totalitarian statist regime ( so it merely became a li’l mo’ developed ) — is hardly “fruition” for the former. & anyone who has e’er read a history book that wasn’t written by Stalin himself would know how obviously wrong the rest o’ this paragraph is. 1st, Lenin had nothing to do with the February Revolution that deposed the Czar — he was still hiding out in Switzerland. In fact, no single party was responsible for that revolution: ’twas a spontaneous uprising.
2nd, apparently the person who wrote this was somehow completely oblivious to the existence o’ the Mensheviks, despite their rivalry being a famous part o’ Russian Revolution history. Either that or they’re ignorant that the Mensheviks were Marxists, too — nor that the founding divergence ’tween them came from the fact that the Mensheviks were less elitist, opposing Lenin’s authoritarian scam that was his small party o’ “professional revolutionaries” ( also known as an “oligarchy” & obviously contrary to any conception o’ democracy ), which was completely contrary to the Marxist idea that socialism would come from the rational self-interest o’ the masses in a democratic system that, by definition, serves the masses’ desires, not from the idealistic ideology o’ a “good” tiny minority totally different from that other tiny minority who were a “bad” tiny minority.
Moreo’er, they were ignorant o’ the existence o’ the Socialist-Revolutionaries ( they certainly couldn’t have missed that they were a socialist party by their name ), who actually won the election after the October Revolution, only for the Bolsheviks to lead a coup gainst them with bullshit claims o’ electoral collusion with the rich elites like US Republicans ( only Lenin, to his credit, was actually competent ’nough to carry it out ). Later, Lenin would have SRs destroyed with show trials gainst 12 prominent SR leaders that ended in their execution, which was heavily criticized by socialists all thruout the west, such as Karl Kautsky:
The Bolsheviki were first to use violence against other Socialists. They dissolved the Constituent Assembly not by way of resistance against any violence on the part of the Socialists-Revolutionists and Mensheviki but because of their realization of their own inability to obtain the support of the majority of the peasants and workers by means of free propaganda. This was the fundamental cause of the Bolshevist coup d’etat against the representatives of the revolutionary workers and peasants. Hence, the abolition of all rights of all other Socialists who refused to submit to the crack of the Bolshevist whip.
This isn’t e’en taking into consideration the many anarchists who, as per their name, had no involvement with “official” politics, but were heavily involved in the Soviets ( labor unions ) that held a lot o’ power in the weird 2-tiered system Russia had ’tween the February & October Revolutions, who were also backstabbed by the man who declared “¡Power to the Soviets!” by taking power ’way from them & keeping it within the government once the Bolsheviks managed to finally get their filthy paws all o’er it. For instance, Kropotkin, a famous anarcho-communist who actually knew the OG Marx ( tho didn’t like him ), who supported the February Revolution, said o’ the October Revolution, “This is the burial of the Russian Revolution”, as well as the following:
They have deluded simple souls. The peace they offer will be paid for with Russia’s heart. The land they have been given will go untilled. This is a country of children – ignorant, impulsive, without discipline. It has become the prey of teachers who could have led it along the slow, safe way. . . . There was hope during the summer. The war is bad – I am the enemy of war – but this surrender is no way to end it. The Constituent Assembly was to have met. It could have built the framework of enduring government.
(I should add that Lenin, after 1 letter too many from Grampa Kropotkin, apparently became enraged & grumbled, “I am sick of this old fogey. He doesn’t understand a thing about politics and intrudes with his advice, most of which is very stupid”).
I broached the subject of the Anarchists in Russia. I showed him a letter I had received from Martens, the Soviet representative in America, shortly before my deportation. Martens asserted that the Anarchists in Russia enjoyed full freedom of speech and Press. Since my arrival I found scores of Anarchists in prison and their Press suppressed. I explained that I could not think of working with the Soviet Government so long as my comrades were in prison for opinion’s sake. I also told him of the resolutions of the Moscow Anarchist Conference. He listened patiently and promised to bring the matter to the attention of his party. “But as to free speech,” he remarked, “that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period. We have the peasantry against us because we can give them nothing in return for their bread. We will have them on our side when we have something to exchange. Then you can have all the free speech you want — but not now.
He goes on to ramble like an ol’ man ’bout how they recently needed to trade salt for the peasants’ wood & how @ 1st they couldn’t find salt, ¡but then they could! What relevance this had to the issue o’ freedom o’ speech, I have no idea, other than that they apparently needed to find mo’ salt before they had time to not spend time locking up pesky anarchists.
Emma Goldman had good reason to emphasize freedom o’ speech: she had been deported from the US for her political views during World War I. Not e’en the typical US-military-industrial-complex-apologetic moderate “liberal” defends the kind o’ flagrant 1st-Amendment violations the US government enacted during this time. But here we have “leftist” Lenin declaring it OK to throw free speech to the wind when inconvenient. I should add that, despite what many who base Marx’s views on this stranger’s actions think, Marx himself was an ardent supporter for freedom o’ speech, & in fact, 1 o’ his most popular tracts during his time was “On Freedom of the Press”.
Emma Goldman continues…
Why did Zorin resort to lies? Surely he must have known that I would not remain in the dark very long. And then, was not Lenin also guilty of the same methods? “Anarchists of ideas [ideyni] are not in our prisons,” he had assured me. Yet at that very moment numerous Anarchists filled the jails of Moscow and Petrograd and of many other cities in Russia. In May, 1920, scores of them had been arrested in Petrograd, among them two girls of seventeen and nineteen years of age. None of the prisoners were charged with counter-revolutionary activities: they were “Anarchists of ideas,” to use Lenin’s expression. Several of them had issued a manifesto for the First of May, calling attention to the appalling conditions in the factories of the Socialist Republic. The two young girls who had circulated a handbill against the “labour book,” which had then just gone into effect, were also arrested.
But, yeah, other than all those li’l squabbles, socialists were all 1 big, happy family.
Anyway, please continue, Salon article:
But Lenin fell ill not much later, became weak and disabled, and died in 1924. Within a few years, Joseph Stalin seized control, consolidated his power, and ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for three decades, until his death in 1953. Stalin is now justly regarded as among the worst dictators of the modern era. Stalin created a deplorable totalitarian state, waged a campaign of murder and imprisonment against millions of political dissidents (as well as imaginary enemies) and repressed human rights, free speech and any version of democracy.
We’re gonna need mo’ paint, Jake, ¡’cause it’s white-washing time! The idea that Stalin came in & turned Lenin’s nice li’l democracy into totalitarianism is a blatant lie: Lenin had already banned all other political parties & had called for the Red Terror, as well as many other onslaughts, such as the mass murder o’ kulaks after a peasant revolt.
It’s ironic that they’re praising Lenin when talking ’bout honesty, since it’s well known the many “Big Lies” Lenin spread, such as the aforementioned lies he gave Emma Goldman or his aforementioned unfulfilled promise to give power to the soviets or spreading the name “Mensheviks” based on their purported “minority” status, when, in fact, on most votes they received the majority & had many mo’ members ( Mensheviks, as stated before, allowed people who were not full-time revolutionaries into their party — i.e. real workers ) — which is precisely why Lenin used nondemocratic means to suppress them.
In Lenin’s defense, the Soviet Union did do some ahead-o’-their-time things under Lenin that distinguished him from Stalin, such as setting up free education, implementing greater tolerance for gay people & greater equality for women, legalizing abortion, granting self-determination for countries like Finland ( tho they violently suppressed the independence movement in Ukraine ), ending involvement in World War I ( not doing so being the 1 major mistake the provisional government made — other than putting any trust in Bolsheviks & giving them weapons & access to military ). & ’course he also smashed that capitalism like a like button, which is always fun, but then replaced it with just a shittier Grand Dad bootleg, which isn’t fun.
I don’t know if any o’ this makes up for the mass murder, rampant violation o’ human rights, & tyrannical rule, e’en with civil war going on. Despite Leninists always calling the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, & anarchists “right-wing”, I see no evidence that they were a threat to the Bolsheviks beyond their opposition to the Bolsheviks’ tyrannical behavior after the Bolsheviks were already doing so, which was before the civil war began. It’s not as if the provisional government they unseated were a major threat — ¡they practically just gave up during the October Revolution! All evidence to me points to Lenin having been an obstacle to democracy & socialism, not a beleaguered leader forced to do ugly things to prevent worse tyranny or disaster. It would be no exaggeration @ all to call him an enemy o’ socialists — he literally spent mo’ time fighting other socialists than monarchists or capitalists.
So what is the assessment here? Was the Soviet Union left-wing? Was Stalin left-wing? Are dictatorships left-wing? Is totalitarianism left-wing?
A bigger question is: ¿who cares? ¿Would this early-20th-century left-wing have any relevance to the average hippie leftist in the US today?
This transformation of the Soviet Union by Stalin from a beneficial left-wing movement into a hideous right-wing dictatorship was masterfully described by George Orwell in his famous novel from 1945, “Animal Farm.” That book, summarized here, tells an allegorical tale about animals on a farm who rise up in revolt, banish the humans from the farm, and seek to govern themselves on the farm under a free and democratic animal society.
The article is entitled ‘Lenin’s Heir’, and it sets out to show that Stalin is the true and legitimate guardian of the Russian Revolution, which he has not in any sense ‘betrayed’ but has merely carried forward on lines that were implicit in it from the start. In itself, this is an easier opinion to swallow than the usual Trotskyist claim that Stalin is a mere crook who has perverted the Revolution to his own ends, and that things would somehow have been different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had remained in power. Actually there is no strong reason for thinking that the main lines of development would have been very different. Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely. Had he lived, it is probable that he would either have been thrown out, like Trotsky, or would have kept himself in power by methods as barbarous, or nearly as barbarous, as those of Stalin.
The Salon article tries to ’splain the mystery ’hind this charade:
Clearly, tyrants should pretend to be someone who can offer what the people desire. Many tyrants falsely proclaim to be Marxists, socialists and left-wingers because the ideas of the left are broadly popular among the oppressed classes in many countries around the world. And for good reason: Left-wing policies would indeed improve the quality of life in most societies.
If we acknowledge that not everyone who calls themselves “left-wing” is honest or good, ¿what people who call themselves “left-wing” can we trust? ¿This Salon writer? ¿Me? Perhaps it’d be mo’ useful to talk less o’ “left-wing” or “right-wing”, which are meaningless when we acknowledge that the words that come out o’ politicians’ mouths are meaningless, but ’stead focus on the composition o’ the government that makes & enforces law — the who, not the what. US leftists elect rich man after rich man into government & are surprise Pikachu face that they serve their fellow rich man — after serving themselves, ’course. If only we could elect a godly perfect human that only thinks o’ everyone else that doesn’t exist. Or if only we didn’t follow a system that actually gave the majority choices that they actually want, rather than a 2-party state.
But implementing a few left-wing policies does not magically convert a right-wing dictatorship into a left-wing democracy. The societies ruled by Castro and Chávez were never left-wing democracies, and cannot truly be considered “socialist.” They were overwhelmingly defined by right-wing attributes, including strongman rule, a one-party monopoly on power, suppression of free speech, false propaganda glorifying the regime, persecution of political dissidents, the restriction or elimination of democracy and so on.
See, I find it funny that this writer goes to such lengths to defend Lenin, but slams on Chàvez, who is generally agreed, e’en by the US, to have been legitimately democratically elected — moreso than US politicians, specially the president we elected @ the time, who didn’t win the popular vote, not to mention all the scuzziness surrounding his victory, such as the Brooks Brothers riot, which succeeded in stopping the vote that may have put Al Gore in the oval office ’stead o’ the man who created decades-long wars & the worst US economic crash since the Great Depression. Maybe this Salon writer should acknowledge that it’s not just Trump — Republicans have always been antidemocracy. It’s not till after Chàvez’s death & Maduro takes o’er that elections get questionable, tho Chàvez did seem to engage in some media intimidation near the end o’ his administration, specially with his shutdown o’ Globovision o’er their support for the attempted 2002 coup & Chàvez certainly said a lot o’ stupid, strongman things. Also, Venezuela has ne’er been a 1-party state, a’least till maybe very recently with the other major party’s boycott o’ the 2020 election. Lenin was certainly worse. In fact, Venezuela broke down the weird power-sharing 2-party state system it had ( basically a reflection o’ the Republican & Democratic Parties in the US ) &, a’least for a while, opened up a plurality o’ parties.
Does anyone really believe that China is a “People’s Republic”?
Considering “republic” is just a vague word that means “people thing” ( making “People’s People Thing” as ridiculously redundant as “The Los Angeles Angels” ) & historically referred to any kind o’ government, not just democratic ones, yes, I do believe China has some sort o’ government.
But Trump intentionally sought the support of blue-collar, working-class voters by promising left-wing policies. He promised a new health care system with universal coverage for everyone at a mere fraction of the cost. He promised he would stop U.S. corporations from shipping jobs overseas, and would bring jobs back to America. He promised he would never cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. He promised to get tough on Big Pharma and cut the high cost of drug prices. He promised a massive investment in America’s infrastructure, like roads and bridges. He promised to tax the rich, including himself, and to provide a massive tax cut for the middle class.
But once Trump was elected, of course, he abandoned all these promises of policies that would benefit the working class, instead implementing right-wing policies that benefited large corporations and the rich at the top, including granting a massive tax cut to himself and the rich, slashing regulations for big business, seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act and seeking to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
But then the article seems to end with a commercial for the Democratic Party, which is not accurate:
The Democratic Party is not authoritarian, and does not seek to create an authoritarian regime such as those in China or Cuba. In truth, the Democratic Party favors robust democracy in direct opposition to authoritarianism.
Perhaps the Democratic Party doesn’t support full on dictatorship, but since it supports the current nondemocratic US electoral system, with its laughable electoral college ( which gave Clinton the majority o’ actual, real, people votes, but, as per the US system as set by the founding fathers, gave the victory to Trump for having the most magical “electoral votes” ), its skewed senate, its unelected judges for life, its legalized bribery in the form o’ lobbying, & its 2-party monopoly, saying it supports a “robust democracy” is a joke, as is the idea that these clowns sitting round in the white house & capital doing nothing while Republicans are standing round putting together their nooses in public sight as “direct opposition to authoritarianism”. That’s a weird way to talk ’bout the Neville Chamberlains o’ the 21st century US.
I thought I’d ’scaped politics till next November, but looking up vital information on Lederhosen Luigi in some new Mario Kart thing I otherwise don’t care ’bout caused me to stumble on this juicy bit o’ conservative news that the liberal lame-pee media won’t tell you:
That is from the Washington Examiner, which sounds like it’s a conservative bootleg o’ the Washington Post — which means we have to do the unfathomable & imagine a newspaper with e’en lower standards than the Bezos in the Trap Post. I can’t wait till they sell themselves to eBay.
As the title hints, this article is nothing mo’ than the writer whining vicariously thru “conservatives” ’cause a newspaper wrote a fluff piece, like they always do for non-fascist presidents, ’bout Biden-His-Time, the most generic o’ Presidents, whose greatest achievement as President, in fact, was playing as best Mario character Luigi in Mario Kart. This is in contrast to all the negative coverage they had gainst TV star who stumbled himself into the presidency thru memes & almost sparked an insurrection &, mo’ importantly, ne’er played as Luigi in Mario Kart, Donald Trump. Conservatives, which, those o’ us with memories stronger than goldfish recall, hated Trump when they expected him to blow their chance to beat Clinton till he managed to stumble into a surprise victory, after which conservatives fell o’er themselves to suddenly start sucking his wrinkled balls, can’t fathom that the reason newspapers have such a stark bias gainst a president who sat by while millions o’ US citizens died o’ a disease whose containment they actively tried to sabotage is ’cause there is an authentic inequality in quality ’tween the 2 — which says something dire ’bout their precious beloved, since Biden isn’t e’en B-tier. Only absolute scrubs play as Biden; you wanna play, you better pick Abraham Lincoln — or Luigi, ’course — in Final Destination with no items, or you better get the fuck outta Super American Bros. Melee. But just like how scrubs who can’t figure out how to wavedash want Melee trophies — wait, no they don’t; only nerds still care ’bout that 20-year-ol’ game — conservatives want their participation trophies simply for having a president, e’en tho they constantly criticize other people for s’posedly wanting participatory trophies.
Fun social experiment: show this Tweet to someone outside o’ the US — maybe someone @ Nintendo o’ Japan — & watch them stare @ you in confusion. You people outside the US don’t realize it, but Mario Kart is sacred to our culture.
What’s funniest is that this article contradicts its own main point when it writes:
Melissa Cooke, Politico’s communications director, told the Washington Examiner that the outlet “is committed to vigorously holding the Biden administration to account — to the same standard that we have covered previous administrations.” She added that since Biden’s inauguration, Politico has reported stories about how Biden’s aim to isolate China on coal could blow back on the U.S. and about how Democrats are preparing for heartburn over Biden’s immigration plan.
Politico is, in fact, so determined to compromise & find some kind o’ fake balance ’tween moderate conservative Democrats & fascist Republicans that they manufactured flaws for Biden, like that some vague immigration plan o’ his will magically cause people heartburn, which doesn’t e’en make any sense. The Washington Examiner could’ve bitched ’bout other newspapers & been accurate if they just stuck with the simpler hypothesis that newspaper articles are written by morons with nothing insightful to say. After all, reading that he played this at Camp David indicates that he was there for something to do with the US involvement in the very controversial conflict ’tween Israel & Palestine. Maybe that would be something to discuss & what Biden-His-Time’s doing there. ¡I’m sure it’s playing “Imagine” for everyone & telling everyone “Give peace a chance, guys” & not giving mo’ money to the Israeli military ( money we definitely don’t have for single-payer health insurance or student debt forgiveness ) so the fun war games will ne’er stop! Perhaps Biden & his daughter should’ve played Call of Duty ’stead, to be mo’ fitting. & perhaps this super-serious newspaper should be deeply embarrassed that wacky blog ’bout Italian Plumber video games, poetry that seems like it’s written by a madman, & such savvy political commentary as jokes ’bout zombie Karl Marx & made-up religions like “Magical Socialism” or “laissez-faire economics” saw fit to discuss such a serious topic mo’ than they did. If conservatives want, they can read actually left-wing newspapers like The Nation, who do criticize Biden for, true to his name, biding his time on Israel policies or watch Noam Chomsky, who has apparently transformed into Gandalf the White in the last few years, @ Democracy Now criticize Biden for his jingo-red-meat policies gainst China & Iran, as well as Palestine. Turns out the solution to the “lamestream liberal media” is to read better newspapers.
But for the Washington Examiner, who sees fit mo’ to whine ’bout the “liberal media” that apparently has no problem with feeding racist wars ’tween 2 theocracies that worship the same imaginary god in the middle east like cockfighters & eats up jingo-red-meat for dinner every night for not criticizing Biden for… for what, they don’t say, since they ne’er bring up a real issue @ all ( I’m sure conservatives are staunchly gainst US involvement in these wars or the trade wars with China or their hypocritical dick-waving in front o’ Iran, considering how much their idol Trump… also did that shit ), that would be pot calling kettle black ( & conservatives are ne’er hypocrites, so that would be an impossibility ). You can’t blame newspapers ’cause they, gainst their will, live in a reality racist ’nough gainst conservatives to make the Democrat president not have nearly as exciting failures as the Republican president. Maybe if you guys elect a president who isn’t a complete fuck-up for once & only funds wars, rather than feed wars & do a lot o’ other terrible things, too, you can get your fluff pieces ’bout your president playing Fortnite @ an Afghan graveyard or some shit nobody cares ’bout ’cause only Boomers read newspapers.
This article doesn’t help Trump’s case, anyway:
The media has also overwhelmingly lauded the Bidens for bringing two dogs into the White House after Trump’s tenure saw no pets.
If conservatives can’t fathom the difference in inner integrity ’tween people who have cuddly pets & those who don’t, then they’re just hopeless nihilists.
While a headline from the Washington Post published on Tuesday reads, “Power Up: Scrunchies and dog walking: the country gets a taste of Jill Biden’s radical normalcy.”
It’s almost as if most o’ the country is revolting gainst the brain dead daytime TV show conservatives have been trying to turn the US into thru their assembly line o’ talking bobbleheads spouting moronic extreme rhetoric in desperation for their 5 minutes o’ attention.
The Washington Examiner then talks ’bout how vague “conservatives” — ¡not them, ’course, ’cause they’re unbiased & objective, unlike these other newspapers! ¡Buy a subscription for only $29.99 a month & get a free mug! — have no real problems unlike the islanders who are ’bout to drown thanks to climate change bolstered by the tax cuts given to coal companies passed by inherently repugnant conservatives & spend their time whining ’bout the media’s bias in favor o’ Biden’s wife, an Ed.D who runs a breath-health-awareness nonprofit gainst Melania Trump, a fashion model who dropped out after 1 year o’ college. It’s almost as if people literate ’nough to write for newspapers prefer educated people who do useful things for the world. This is just like all the times the liberal media showed bias in favor o’ immunologists when discussing COVID o’er what Uncle Roger barks ’bout on his Twitter page. The liberal media should feel ashamed o’ themselves for having such racist “standards”, as they call them.
If Trump was President this tweet would mention thousands dying of COVID as he played and freezing from a huge winter storm with no power. 🤔🧐 https://t.co/0IF210c8SJ
“If this were a shittier president who utterly failed in the time o’ crisis, they would be accurately pointing out their failure ’stead o’ accurately discussing how boring this mo’ boring president is. ¡Damn the liberal media & their belief in individual responsibility! ¡Why can’t they just blame Democrats for bad things Republicans do already!”.
All I can say is that this is a great advertisement for the Washington Examiner. I can’t wait to spend my hard-earned money listening to entitled people whine ’cause mo’ & mo’ people are becoming smart ’nough to not respect them anymo’. This is worth so much mo’ money than the same insipid shit I can get for free on Reddit.
Update:
I happened to stumble ’pon news o’ Biden-His-Time doing something maybe, possibly better than playing as Luigi in Mario Kart:
I oft make blog rounds in search for things to write ‘bout & decided to check on Lord Keynes’s continuing brain rot into what could only be called “reactionary liberalism” — moderate liberal economics matched with backward social politics. I guess this was popular in the 50s, when many European countries had that postwar boom o’ theirs. That Nordic countries are now doing the best while also being the most socially liberal & some o’ the most tolerant o’ foreign cultures breaks this crude “causation = correlation”, but whatever.
But then, that’s easy to keep up without refutation: just declare any refutation, no matter how much evidence is ’hind it, as being “liberal-biased”, or whatever the Realist Left™ equivalent is, based on some sentimental inability to see cold, hard reality. That this is the same thought process that Keynes mocked conservative economists for is rich in irony. I will settle for discovering a new logical fallacy: “Appeal to Bad Consequences”, the opposite o’ “Appeal to Consequences”. This is the idea that we should believe in something that’s ugly ’cause it’s ugly, regardless o’ evidence or reality, ’cause this makes us feel “stronger” & less sentimental. ( That proponents o’ these ideas are ne’er harmed themselves by these “harsh truths”, we need not focus on… )
This is a meaningless “lesson”, since “wealth” is a vague idea. E’en Lord Keynes falls into ol’-fashioned assumptions like all other economic pundits. He defined “wealth” as “the good [sic] and services we consume”. “Consume” itself is vague: it implies that the “good” or “service” ( ¿how do you eat a “service”? ) is destroyed as one uses it. ¿So if I pay to use something that isn’t destroyed, like living on land for a temporary period, is that “wealth”, or something different?
Money cannot be consumed in the way that commodities can.
Actually, money can be used the same way commodities are. There’s nothing stopping some particularly creative fellow from eating money. Most people just don’t ‘cause in most current societies money has greater value in a different use.
A mo’ serious example: commemorative coins are money, but they are simply used as collectible commodities ( which means they could be bad for the economy, since it’s money that’s added to “currency”, but doesn’t actually run in it, which s’posedly creates inflation; but the connection ‘tween adding money to the economy & inflation are much mo’ mixed — ‘specially since some dollars inevitably get destroyed in the violent scramble to grab them all when they’re dropped from Friedman’s helicopter ).
Libertarians are fond [ sic ] accusing Keynesians of saying that “money is wealth” or that “money creation is wealth creation.”
In a society where there exist mo’ than a few people who believe ( or say they believe ) that the Democrats are touching kiddies in their hoo-haws in Chuck-E-Cheese, it’s not that hard to believe that quite a lot o’ people believe things ‘bout other things simply ‘cause they ne’er deign to actually read such works — which means that any correction will also go unread, making it futile.
But I can’t even recall seeing any left heterodox economists who even say this. The maxim that money is not everything – which many people on the Left are fond of saying – is even a subtle admission of the point.
Both Keynesians & neoclassicals do claim that money is value ( or, in connection, that demand is value ), through their hypocritically-named “subjective theory o’ value”, which is just as wrong.
In modern economics, value is normally exchange value, that is, something has an economic value when it is traded or bought as a commodity in a market.
“Economic value” is market demand ‘cause it’s specifically defined that way, making “economic value” tautological & meaningless.
&…
It is the demand for goods caused by the subjective desires of people that is the cause of value, not labour.
If one believes that demand — the willingness to pay money for something — creates value, then the only logical conclusion one can make is that creating mo’ money gives people mo’ money to pay, & therefore mo’ value to create. That’s obviously absurd, just as the idea that people wanting things magically makes it appear is absurd.
Anyone with any sense would realize that if value is subjective, then the means to create value is subjective, & therefore can’t be narrowed down to any 1 grand thing — including money or labor. For instance, price can make something mo’ valuable if I want something expensive to show off how rich I am, or for any other social reason. Similarly, I may value something simply ‘cause I worked hard on it, which means that labor did create that thing’s value, & nobody can tell me that I’m wrong ‘cause they have no objective basis on which to judge my values.
To show you how ridiculous this claim is, remember that Lord’s Keynes’s blog doesn’t sell for any price on any market — it has no demand. Lord Keynes is saying outright that his blog has no value.
Some may protest that economists are only talking ‘bout “commodities” — “economic value”. That is to say that economists, both Keynesian & neoclassical ( & Orthodox Marxist1 & Austrian, actually — which is to say, all economists ), prove the market to be integral to economics ( both good & bad ), by simply refusing to acknowledge economics outside o’ the market — that good ol’ “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” argument ( or as they say it in economic parlance, “We don’t talk ‘bout that thing, e’en though it’s perfectly relevant & we truly ought to, ‘cause it might make us question our assumptions like true scientists” ).
(2) “The Economy is not a Zero Sum Competition”.
Lord Keynes’s critique isn’t bad — & his general conclusion that it’s a mix is just ‘bout right. But his examples are a small speck o’ what could be said in this immensely complex issue. He focuses on small, isolated examples like gambling, & 1 major ( but still not fundamental ) example, finance. I have much mo’ fundamental problems with it.
The most important problem with this idea is that it contradicts subjective value: if value can be anything anyone deems it to be, then basic logic tells us that either there must be cases where certain values conflict with others, creating a zero-sum game, or that we can all get anything we want at the same time, which is obvious fantasy.
This is so hypocritical ‘cause this argument is used to argue gainst certain people’s values. People use this to argue gainst things like economic redistribution; ¿but what if I highly value relative wealth? Then I can either have my value or economists can have theirs — we have a zero-sum game.
‘Gain, economists try to argue that value is only their narrow “economic value”, but it isn’t: value is anything — economic, political, spiritual, aesthetic, personal, emotional, psychological, technological, social… Economics affects all these things, so economists can’t ignore these if they want to talk ‘bout economics in a complete way. If an economy that creates lots o’ “economic value” conflicts with, say, an equal society with high “political value”, then these 2 contradict each other & one must pick 1. For economists to say that they prefer “economic value” simply ‘cause they’re economists is to say that economists are just arbitrary pundits — propagandists. A true scientist isn’t objective within “their particular field”, but o’er everything.
(3) “International Trade is not a Zero Sum Game.
This involves the typical moderate-left critique that Lord Keynes’s readers should already be sick o’ reading a million times. The fundamental idea that he hints at, but doesn’t specifically say, is that neoclassical “efficiency” assumes that efficiency comes from minimizing costs now, disregarding the long-term ( which is ironic, considering their strawman criticism o’ Keynes & his economically-poisonous homosexuality — ne’er live down that classic, Forbes ). This applies in general to any “race to the bottom” situation.
He points out that this idea relies on the assumption that workers can retrain instantly. This is true, but ironically falls into the same problem he criticizes elsewhere: that efficiency must come immediately. It’s perfectly consistent to acknowledge both that workers can’t retrain instantly but that they should for long-term efficiency — e’en when things change rapidly. A perfect example is an industry I’m quite familiar with, web design. That’s an industry wherein workers voluntarily retrain themselves constantly ‘cause they see that in most cases taking the extra time to learn new things is worth lessening e’en mo’ time spent doing the same thing that can be automated from what they learned. Not only that, but retraining can actually in itself be a mo’ rewarding type o’ work, since it adds variety to something that’d otherwise be monotonous — it ironically takes them outside o’ the assembly line that capitalism is notorious for — & ‘cause learning is developing, personal growth.
‘Course, middle-class web developers are quite different from the working class. For 1, web development isn’t a particularly capitalist industry: there is relatively low capital investment ( the education needed is probably a’least 40 times the cost; the rest is just a computer, software, — which you can just download open-source or pirate — & internet ), & thus much mo’ competition. Most web development “businesses” are individuals or groups working for their own salary. Thus, they benefit directly from the efficiency.
The problem with this effect on working class people is the same problem the effect that “efficiency” has on a country in general: there’s no guarantee that all parties will be allowed to share in the efficiency. It’s not that workers shouldn’t retrain to mo’ efficient skills; it’s that in real-world economics, workers aren’t given the option; they’re just laid off & sent into unemployment, where they don’t have the resources to retrain.
In this situation, like many, both neoclassicals & Keynesians are wrong on the solution: the solution is neither to let a tiny few rich people get e’en mo’ money while the majority are made worse off or to stifle development to benefit the majority, but to use government funds to keep poor people healthy & well ( both physically & mentally ) — think a mandatory minimum living salary, or whatever they call it — while offering them tools to retrain them so they can get better jobs.
The failure to understand the efficiency & social benefits o’ this idea come from a common contradictory sentiment: 1. the ( right ) idea that efficiency comes not from working mo’, but from working less — rather that labor creating value, eliminating labor is what creates the most value, & 2. the idea that we should demand people work to make money, else we’ll be inefficient. That workers being unemployed to train off the government dole so that they can do mo’ productive work in the future is mo’ efficient than having them continue to do work they’re not good at doing as others is beyond them, which is strange, since this is how college works for many people.
This particularly annoys me ‘cause these jobs that these modern Luddite Keynesians try to keep are the kind that are least appropriate for humans. The kind o’ jobs that can be automated are the most mind-numbingly dumb & monotonous — hence why mentally inferior machines can do them. While socialists bemoan the inhuman way capitalists turn workers into cogs in a machine, ¡Keynesians panic that humans won’t be able to be cogs anymo’! ( But then, Keynesians have ne’er had much respect for working-class people, so maybe they’re not so interested in treating them like fellow humans as they are protecting the stability o’ their own station ).
This leads to a central conundrum for philosophers to debate: what’s worse, an Austrian dystopia where workers are starved off, or a Keynesian dystopia where workers are trapped in a dour living that makes them wish for death.
His claim that Ricardo’s 3rd point, “it does not matter what you produce (e.g., you could produce pottery), as long as you do it in a way that gives you comparative advantage” is “utter nonsense” is vague. ¿Is he claiming that certain goods are intrinsically better than others? ( i.e. that value is objective ). It’s amazing how much a tricky idea like value being subjective can utterly trip up economists everywhere.
He also seems to assume that manufacturing is where true economic development comes from, which is ( ironicly, considering his repeated criticism ) an outdated Marxist idea. If value is subjective, than “development” is just as much — ‘specially when that “development” comes @ huge environmental costs. Much as efficiency comes from minimizing labor, not making more o’ it, efficiency comes mo’ from creating value from as li’l manufacturing as possible, rather than trying to maximize it. Thus, the obvious reason developed countries, which are still much better off than developing countries, are mo’ & mo’ “service-based” economies.
Despite Lord Keynes’s racist conspiracies, developing countries aren’t outsmarting developed countries; developed countries as wholes are still benefiting mo’ from shifting their dirty industries to poorer countries while keeping most o’ the profits within the developed countries — e’en in the long run. E’en if we acknowledge that only a tiny minority o’ rich westerners benefit from the profits, basic logic would tell you that redistributing this larger chunk o’ wealth to the displaced working class is better than forcing working class people to work crappy jobs for a ( almost certainly smaller ) share o’ a smaller chunk o’ wealth while people in developing countries starve from a lack o’ jobs for themselves.
An e’en better, though unlikely, solution: make laws that force western businesses to pay foreign workers a minimum wage & have western standards o’ safety & worker well being & foreign workers will lose their competitive “advantage” while also allowing foreign workers to make mo’ money & develop their economies mo’ so that they don’t have to rely on western companies for technology just so their people don’t starve — but then, we have to remember that in Lord Keynes’s fever dreams, Chinese workers are living like kings with their wonderful 12-hour sewing jobs without safety regulations while unemployed westerners with better safety nets are the true victims.
Or maybe it’s that protectionists like Lord Keynes don’t care ’bout Chinese people, or the rest o’ the vast majority o’ working class people who aren’t a part o’ the narrow western 17%. Then ’gain, considering LK’s views on women’s rights, that would include half o’ that percentage, & e’en less considering his views on nonwhites — quite a niche populism you have there, LK. It would seem absurd to anyone who wants to defend the lowest classes ( not white, male westerners ) or the mass majority ( also not white, male westerners ), which is what that word “leftism” that LK likes to claim himself to be the only true follower o’ has traditionally meant… ¡till they realize that questioning this makes them on the side o’ the corrupt neoclassical bourgeosie Nazis! ( The most transparent o’ ad-hominem is also serious empirical science that the silly SJW poopy-heads refuse to acknoledge ).
(4) Say’s Law.
His critique here is absurd & hypocritical. He notes that “The Academic Agent” defines Say’s Law differently from Keynes & his worshippers & acknowledges that many economists agree that Say himself didn’t believe in what Keynes claimed was “his” law, but then asserts that Keynes’s definition is the right 1, ‘cause he’s God apparently. He then diverts the subject to Keynes’s critique o’ how Adam Smith & John Stuart Mills interpreted “Say’s Law”, with 1 point also believed by Ricardo. This adds a hitch to Lord Keynes’s critique: this is s’posed to be an o’er-all attack on classical & neoclassical economics, which are s’posedly very similar; but neoclassicals reject “Say’s Law”, since they have incorporated some elements o’ Keynesianism. &, in fact, not e’en all o’ what Keynes called “classical” is included here, ‘cause classical socialists like Proudhon & Marx also didn’t believe in “Say’s Law”.
But he doesn’t go far ‘nough in his critique gainst whatever “The Academic Agent” claims is “Say’s Law”: “(2) supply and demand are not independent of one another, but dependent in the sense that factor payments by producers or income to producers provide the source of demand for other goods.”. He claims that “no serious economist even disputes” this, but only adds that “credit money” adds to demand. Since demand is based on money paid for things, this should be obvious ( it’s supply that it has the risk o’ hurting by creating too much consumption, a problem rare in developed countries, but still real in developing countries, as Venezuela shows ). Not only is this point vague on what counts as a “producer” or what “sense” these are dependent, it’s limited: maybe payment to “producers” can provide demand — if they chose to buy things. Since this is a point Keynes made, it’s odd that the Lord o’ Keynes neglects to mention this.
(5) “Every part of the economy is connected to the whole of economy… .” [ I have no idea why this period & ellipsis are formatted so oddly ]
“Connected” is so vague, it’s meaningless, & this is clearly a “law” that can be “proven” by twisting the word “connected” so that this point is proven by it. I’m not e’en sure what context this is based on — ¿what concrete point is it trying to prove?
Lord Keynes’s rebuke seems ridiculous:
While this is true, this does not vindicate Léon Walras’ Neoclassical economics, which “The Academic Agent” cites as his source for this insight, which has quite specific assertions about capitalist economies.
“Walras may be right ‘bout this thing, but his other irrelevant ideas are wrong”.
I actually looked @ the video, — it’s such strong Dunning-Kruger syndrome that I can’t bear to watch the whole thing — & the video glosses o’er “general equilibrium” & ’stead talks ’bout e’en stupider shit, all in haphazard trawls o’ logic. ¿Why doesn’t LK make fun o’ this other stuff? For instance, he complains ’bout how interest caps s’posedly mostly affects poor people being able to get loans ( no evidence, or e’en Libertarian-style simplistic “logic”, to back that up — like most o’ this video, it’s just a Biblical commandment ), e’en though the 2008 recession showed exactly why blocking poor people from getting loans they can’t pay back may be very much positive. He also parrots Milton Friedman ( who isn’t a classical economist ) saying, “There’s no such thing as free lunch”, which is 1 o’ those sayings that sounds profound, but is vague & almost certainly wrong. Saying that you can’t gain without loss is equivalent to saying that there’s no such thing as profit or growth, which is obviously wrong & contradicts point 2: if every gain comes with an equal cost, then the sum will be 0. Either “The Academic Agent” didn’t proof-read his smug shit or he doesn’t understand basic math. Either way, “The Academic Agent” should stick with foiling terrorist plots by Blofeld in exotic countries & leave economic thought to people who bother to read their own work, much less the work o’ other economists.
[B]oth Austrian and Neoclassical theory ultimately hold that free markets have a tendency towards general equilibrium
He’s mistaken ‘bout Austrian-schoolers — something he should be well aware o’, since he wrote ’bout it before. Many Austrian-schoolers acknowledge that their incoherent conception o’ “free” markets can go into disequilibrium; they simply say that this is just ‘nother example o’ capitalism’s marvelous mysteriousness. The INVISIBLE HAND works in mysterious ways.
No mention, by the way, o’ how inconsistent the concept o’ a “free” market is that we can’t e’en truly define it in a concrete, cohesive way — we just use a jargon word. “Freedom”, ‘course, is a paradoxical concept, since it requires force to keep round, which is why e’en the “freest” countries have police & governments. Economies, too, need governments to run them, or else some other authority just as authoritarian will take its place in the ensuing vacuum.
[M]arket systems are complex human systems subject to degrees of non-calculable probability and future uncertainty
The question no economic school, e’en Post-Keynesians, has the bravery to answer: if economics is so subjective, so non-calculable, & so uncertain, ¿how could anyone devise an objective, certain science that could predict ways to make society better off in the future? This should not lead one to Post-Keynesianism, but an anti-economics — a complete deconstruction o’ the whole branch, just as a “Science o’ Art” has been rendered nonsensical.
(6) “Marginal Utility”.
“The Academic Agent” ends with pointing out the “value” in the sense of desiring or evaluating commodities is subjective. This is true, but does not take you very far.
It takes one quite far if they actually follow it consistently. The problem is that every bozo who squawks ‘bout value being subjective — Marxists included, by the way — then falls onto their own pet preference for the “true” source o’ value & simultaneously proclaims it objective.
He’s right on diminishing returns, though: it mostly applies, but not always, & doesn’t refute government intervention. In fact, applied to money itself ( which is logical — you know the story ‘bout the person so rich they use $ bills as tissue ), it shows that income redistribution literally creates value. This applies intuitively, too: a poor person can have their whole world rocked by gaining just $1000, while someone in the upper 1% whole hardly notice if they gained it or lost it. A minuscule loss paired with a huge gain is the very definition o’ efficiency.
One thing that bugs me ‘bout Post-Keynesians is that they love parroting the same tiny, isolated points in their disparate soup o’ a framework, but don’t go deeper than the floor panels under the carpet. They blow up ‘bout “endogenous money”, prices being based on the cost o’ production rather than supply & demand ( ne’ermind that they already debunk neoclassical supply & demand, making this point redundant ), & all those hokey moral plays by their god Keynes, but ignore the deeper problems with market economics in general that make the foundation ‘pon these questions debatable themselves. Post-Keynesians still treat money in the same superstitious way every other economist does2, as if it follows natural laws & isn’t something humans made up. ( That this invention may be practical is fine to acknowledge — but debating whether a human invention works a certain way as if it had gained sentience & turned gainst its master like AI is ridiculous ).
In short, I’m sick o’ all these conservatives scribbling out how their narrow laws ‘bout how their “capitalism” works when run by robots with no self-awareness; I want to know ‘bout economics its fundamental self.
Addendum
I mostly wrote ’bout this blog article, not the video, ’cause I couldn’t stand the video, but can I reiterate how ignorant the video is ’bout the history o’ economics. I’m not e’en saying what he’s saying is wrong ( it’s definitely made-up assumptions worthy o’ a religious Bible ): he mixes up the history o’ the development o’ economic thought, mixing up neoclassical & classical economics. Ironically, this mixup comes from that devil himself, Keynes, who admits he pulled the definition out o’ his ass. E’en mo’ ironic, the term “classical economist” originates from that e’en mo’ devilish o’ devils, Karl Marx; & his main basis for definition was belief in the so-called labor theory, which this video doesn’t mention @ all.
So LK writes this blog post as if he’s arguing gainst some serious economists, & I finally realize that it’s just some fringe crank on the YooToobs right next to videos o’ 20-year-ols screaming @ their video games who read some fringe crank websites from some think tanks & think they actually know anything ’bout economics.
It also took me this long to realize it’s a fucking listicle video, too. I’ll stick to YouTube Poop next time, LK. Thanks, though.
