Prophet 451
Prophet 451's JournalDo You think Warren will run?
Not asking if she'd win the primary or if she's electable. Just if you think she'll campaign for the nomination.
Will CheneyBush Ever Be Tried For Torture?
Pretty simple question. Do you think any member of DimSon's administration will ever be tried for the torture committed at their orders? I'm not asking whether they should be tried, I think most of us can agree on that, but whether you think they will be.
Why They Get Away With Cutting Welfare
Crossposted and turned into an OP at a poster's suggestion.
The aim of the PtB is to get the populace so desperate that they'll work for pennies, or a meal, or a dosshouse bed for the night. That's why they cut welfare. They dehumanize those who need welfare both because they honestly think everyone incapable of finding a job is a useless eater who should die and so that the genpop will be brainwashed into hating those on welfare. That means less protests when they shrink welfare or abolish it entirely.
Thing is, the Democrats have moved so far to the right and become such wusses, that they keep backing off important shit. Like:
- "the US is the only country in the developed world without some form of universal healthcare. It's an incredible drag on business and taxpayers and we should just pick a random European system and steal it".
- "Government *should* redistribute wealth. That's part of the fucking government's job. To take money from the rich fucks with too much and give it to the poor bastards with none".
- "In the richest country on earth, it is a fucking disgrace that *anyone* goes hungry or doesn't have a roof over their heads".
- "We have given not enough time or power to people who make things and too fucking much to people who just make money".
- "It is the mark of a civilized fucking society to provide for the poor and sick. There is no such thing as a lazy moocher living in luxury on welfare and it's blatant class warfare, with a hint of racism, to say so".
- "Humiliating and demonizing the poor pleb on welfare does not make you tough, it does not make you a hard-choices realist and it shouldn't give you a fucking stiffie. It makes you a sadistic fuck, taking his sociopathy out on people who can't fight back. No-one likes a bully".
- "Being a mean, cruel, ignorant shitkicker is not a prerequisite in a political leader".
- "The Rapture is not a fucking exit strategy".
- "It is not socialism or communism to say these things and the fact that you think it is proves that the liberal media are a complete myth".
Thing is, I actually don't blame Obama. The facts are simple: In order to get elected, you have to have or have access to colossal sums of cash. The campaigning, even for a Senate race, costs more than the GDP of small countries. Bringing in that kind of capital requires either rich backers or rock-star charisma, preferably both, because the USA doesn't have elections anymore, it has auctions. On top of that, getting elected requires serious facetime in media, preferably national media. And the national media are, on teh whole, right-wing because they are fucking corporate. The only candidates the MSM will allow to be taken seriously are those who are either safely corporate Dems (who push disgraceful trade deals or Clinton's obscene gutting of welfare) or to the right of Goebbals.
Obama is exactly what the media love to present to you, centre-right economically, liberal socially with a compelling personal story. He *has* to be that in order to even get in the game. But, because the American electoral system is designed to ensure that only two parties can compete, voting Democrat rather than Crazytown means that the plebs get fucked slightly less. Yeah, the Democrats might fuck you but teh Republicans will torture you, rape you and then slit your throat just to hear you gurgle.
And here's the real bitch: It's not going to change, not for a long time. Let me break this down:
FACT 1: 19% of the plebs think the sun orbits the earth. In other words, a fifth of the electorate are dumb as dirt (and yes, the UK population is just as bad, that's missing the point).
FACT 2: Your media is entirely corporate which means conservative and conservative which means corporate.
FACT 3: Humans are instinctively obedient (Milgram), instinctively conformist (Asche) and will believe fucking *anything* if they hear it enough times (too many researchers to list).
Combine 2 & 3 and much, maybe most, of your population have been brainwashed to believe that a wussy moderate like Obama is the reincarnation of Stalin. Media power is EVERYTHING. The Signal is all around us, everywhere and all-pervasive. It is on your tablets, on your cellphones, on your watches and eyeglasses within the next few years; it is time, it is money, it is the air we breathe and the water we drink. The Signal is fucking GOD. That's how powerful it is. Control the media and you can do ANYTHING and I mean that as an absolute term. Cheney could get pulled over tonight with a dead hooker in his trunk (and, straight-up, no exaggeration in the slightest, I am fucking expecting them to find dead kids in his yard when he dies. No word of a lie) and if it doesn't get airtime, it didn't fucking happen. Conversely, Dennis Kucinich said he saw a UFO. Literally. He said he saw something in the sky that he could not readily identify, that's exactly what he said and the definition of a UFO. Within two hours, the story was that Kucinich believed in little green men.
FACT 4: Conservatives have abused the Congressional rules to give them a minority veto over everything which they will abolish teh very second they're in power and reinstate in a lame duck session when they're going out of power.
FACT 5: Conservatives own the SCOTUS. They have a tame group of five judges who make their opinions purely on political grounds and barely even bother hiding it.
FACT 6: Conservatives have gerrymandered the living shit out of the map to give themselves safe seats, enacted voter "fraud" legislation to prevent likely Democrats from voting (so blatant, I'm amazed they don't just say "you cannot vote if you are a Democrat"
and got everyone using unverifiable voting machines (I worked in IT for ten years, it takes more effort to make teh fucking things unverifiable than it does to make them accountable. I'm not saying they used it to steal an election, I'm saying they could).
Add those three facts together and you get plebs who will either vote for conservatives or their vote will simply not count and The Signal will not tell you about it. And even if it did...
FACT 7: (Look at me, preaching a fucking sermon here) There will be no revolt. The revolution will not be televised because the revolution will not fucking happen. Because The Signal feeds you bullshit. It's lulled you to sleep with American Idol and woken you up to Morning Joe. Bread and circuses, man, bread and circuses. Built the Roman Empire, bread and circuses did. Except system's more efficient now. Can't have the state provide you with bread and circuses, that would be too much like *gasp* socialism. You have to work and buy your own bread and circuses.
FACT 8: Don't think I'm being fucking snobby here. I'm a pleb, just like the rest. I use Facebook. Being disabled and crazy, it's my only window on the outside world. I love wrestling almost as much as I love Father Lucifer and for a good deal longer. I have a Kindle, an Amazon account, I shop at Tesco. I'm as much a puppet of The Signal as anyone else. Only difference is that I can see the strings.
FACT 9: The ultimate aim of the corporate PtB is to have a population so desperate, so *broken*, that they will work for pennies, or a meal, or a dosshouse bed for the night. I'm a Ripperologist (someone who studies the crimes of Jack the Ripper) and being in any way serious about that, you have to know quite a lot about Victorian London. Here is my favorite piece of trivia about Victorian London: The price of sex with a prostitute, 4d, was the exact price of a light meal, a shot of gin or a dosshouse bed for the night. I love that piece of trivia because it shows you, in a very real way, the connection between commerce and your very fucking survival (and also patriarchy, these women were not in a good place but that's a whole 'nother sermon).
That's their endgame, man. To have you so desperate and with so few options that you'll work for pennies, or a meal, or a bed for the night. And if you can't find a job, they'll send you to the workhouse, rent you out as slave labour in exchange for your dole. When you're too old or broken down to work, fuck you, you're out on the street or Soylent Green. If you protest, they'll ignore you and if enough of you protest, they'll send in the police or the army. And if you don't want it, fuck you, there's millions desperate enough to take it. That's what their ultimate aim is, always has been. And the Republicans (and not all but too many Dems) are their political arm just as the SCOTUS is their legal arm. And too many of the plebs have forgotten or never learned, why you need unions. The PtB would bring back slavery but wage slavery is cheaper.
FACT 10: Last one, I promise. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. History, economic history anyway, runs in cycles. Times and technology change but it goes the same way every time. The rich exploit teh rules, gobble up too much cash and crash the system. The plebs protest, demand some protections. Government puts in (water down versions of) those protections. And then all the people who remember the last crash start dying off and the corporate PtB start eroding those protections until eventually, they go too far, they crash the system and the whole cycle starts again. It's what happened with the Dutch tulip mania, it's what caused the fucking American Revolution (the original dispute that triggered the whole thing was because the Crown cut taxes on tea imported by the original megacorporation, the East India Trading Company). It's not a coincidence that the idea that the poor are poor because of their own faults; that being rich is a duty and if you aren't, you didn't try hard enough; that you shouldn't tax the rich because they're "job creators". All of these ideas were incredibly popular in the years leading up to the Crash of '29. And then, just as everyone who remembered that started dying off in droves, along come a bunch of rich fucks and brainwashed plebs who think they don't need no fucking rules and they start eroding the protections. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.
It's not going to change. Not until the end of scarcity (which is possible right fucking *now*), or the end of the class system or patriarchy or The Singularity. It's not going to change. The best you can do, the only thing you can do (save for suggestions that would, rightly, get this post pulled by the mods) is mitigate the damage, ease the pain just a little. That's all that can be done for now.
Here endeth the lesson. Peace with you.
Yes, but take it further
Look at the lifestyles presented as normal on tv. You ever watch Friends? Watching that show, you would think a cook/chef and someone drifting from one dead-end job to the next (Monica & Rachel) could afford a loft apartment in New York. Or a paleontologist (I know some academics, they make crap money) could afford a spacious apartment. Or that an office drone and a jobbing actor could. The lifestyles presented as "average" on tv, in sitcoms and dramas and so on, aren't average. They're upper-middle-class at least. The only time you see poor people and their lifestyles is when they're brought on Jeremy Kyle (think a moralistic, judgmental, constantly shouting Jerry Springer) or something similar to be laughed at.
And yes, being poor and the people who are poor have been demonized. They've been presented as not wanting to work, as being too drunk or drugged to work (people think they're poor because they drink when in reality, they drink because they're poor). They're presented as lazy, irresponsible and sometimes dangerous. People are trained to despise them, to view them as a dangerous and hostile "other". The genpop have been trained to believe that welfare fraud is rampant, that anyone can get a job if they try, that the minimum wage is only paid to teenagers making pocket money and that there is no such thing as a disability that makes you unable to work. The actual facts are that welfare fraud is so rare that it costs more to root out than to ignore it, that there are three unemployed for every job opening, that it is increasingly everyone on the minimum wage (which was intended to be a living wage) and some disabilities make you incapable of work.
I'm British. Here, teh tabloids have been running an outright hate campaign against anyone receiving welfare benefits. Real, Orwell-style "two minutes of hate" stuff. There have been assaults and suicides because of it. I'm disabled, both because I'm physically crippled and because I'm severely mentally ill (MDD, GAD, "visions" and voices). Our system for disability support, ESA, assumes from the outset that your own doctor is a liar. You have to be interviewed by a doctor paid and incentivized to find you fit for work, no matter what your circumstances. The only reason they passed me as unfit for work last time was that my SO and doctor wrote letters saying that my suicide was virtually certain if they didn't. And I know how much the genpop despise me because the tabloids tell them to. There's a very good book called "Chavs" that describes the demonization of the working class here and, although some details are different, I can see it happening in your country as well.
The PtB want you starving and desperate, too broken and too desperate to protest for fair wages or fair treatment. They want you to labour sixteen hours a day for a dosshouse bed for teh night and a meal. And they're just plain brought one party entirely, a fair bit of the other, all the regulatory agencies and a majority of the SCOTUS. And nothing will change for the foreseeable future.
The people have been trained to only kick downward
The aim of the PtB is to get the populace so desperate that they'll work for pennies, or a meal, or a dosshouse bed for the night. That's why they cut welfare. They dehumanize those who need welfare both because they honestly think everyone incapable of finding a job is a useless eater who should die and so that the genpop will be brainwashed into hating those on welfare. That means less protests when they shrink welfare or abolish it entirely.
Thing is, the Democrats have moved so far to the right and become such wusses, that they keep backing off important shit. Like:
- "the US is the only country in the developed world without some form of universal healthcare. It's an incredible drag on business and taxpayers and we should just pick a random European system and steal it".
- "Government *should* redistribute wealth. That's part of the fucking government's job. To take money from the rich fucks with too much and give it to the poor bastards with none".
- "In the richest country on earth, it is a fucking disgrace that *anyone* goes hungry or doesn't have a roof over their heads".
- "We have given not enough time or power to people who make things and too fucking much to people who just make money".
- "It is the mark of a civilized fucking society to provide for the poor and sick. There is no such thing as a lazy moocher living in luxury on welfare and it's blatant class warfare, with a hint of racism, to say so".
- "Humiliating and demonizing the poor pleb on welfare does not make you tough, it does not make you a hard-choices realist and it shouldn't give you a fucking stiffie. It makes you a sadistic fuck, taking his sociopathy out on people who can't fight back. No-one likes a bully".
- "Being a mean, cruel, ignorant shitkicker is not a prerequisite in a political leader".
- "The Rapture is not a fucking exit strategy".
- "It is not socialism or communism to say these things and the fact that you think it is proves that the liberal media are a complete myth".
Thing is, I actually don't blame Obama. The facts are simple: In order to get elected, you have to have or have access to colossal sums of cash. The campaigning, even for a Senate race, costs more than the GDP of small countries. Bringing in that kind of capital requires either rich backers or rock-star charisma, preferably both, because the USA doesn't have elections anymore, it has auctions. On top of that, getting elected requires serious facetime in media, preferably national media. And the national media are, on teh whole, right-wing because they are fucking corporate. The only candidates the MSM will allow to be taken seriously are those who are either safely corporate Dems (who push disgraceful trade deals or Clinton's obscene gutting of welfare) or to the right of Goebbals. Obama is exactly what the media love to present to you, centre-right economically, liberal socially with a compelling personal story. He *has* to be that in order to even get in the game. But, because the American electoral system is designed to ensure that only two parties can compete, voting Democrat rather than Crazytown means that the plebs get fucked slightly less. Yeah, the Democrats might fuck you but teh Republicans will torture you, rape you and then slit your throat just to hear you gurgle.
And here's the real bitch: It's not going to change, not for a long time. Let me break this down:
FACT 1: 19% of the plebs think the sun orbits the earth. In other words, a fifth of the electorate are dumb as dirt (and yes, the UK population is just as bad, that's missing the point).
FACT 2: Your media is entirely corporate which means conservative and conservative which means corporate.
FACT 3: Humans are instinctively obedient (Milgram), instinctively conformist (Asche) and will believe fucking *anything* if they hear it enough times (too many researchers to list).
Combine 2 & 3 and much, maybe most, of your population have been brainwashed to believe that a wussy moderate like Obama is the reincarnation of Stalin. Media power is EVERYTHING. The Signal is all around us, everywhere and all-pervasive. It is on your tablets, on your cellphones, on your watches and eyeglasses within the next few years; it is time, it is money, it is the air we breathe and the water we drink. The Signal is fucking GOD. That's how powerful it is. Control the media and you can do ANYTHING and I mean that as an absolute term. Cheney could get pulled over tonight with a dead hooker in his trunk (and, straight-up, no exaggeration in the slightest, I am fucking expecting them to find dead kids in his yard when he dies. No word of a lie) and if it doesn't get airtime, it didn't fucking happen. Conversely, Dennis Kucinich said he saw a UFO. Literally. He said he saw something in the sky that he could not readily identify, that's exactly what he said and the definition of a UFO. Within two hours, the story was that Kucinich believed in little green men.
FACT 4: Conservatives have abused the Congressional rules to give them a minority veto over everything which they will abolish teh very second they're in power and reinstate in a lame duck session when they're going out of power.
FACT 5: Conservatives own the SCOTUS. They have a tame group of five judges who make their opinions purely on political grounds and barely even bother hiding it.
FACT 6: Conservatives have gerrymandered the living shit out of the map to give themselves safe seats, enacted voter "fraud" legislation to prevent likely Democrats from voting (so blatant, I'm amazed they don't just say "you cannot vote if you are a Democrat" and got everyone using unverifiable voting machines (I worked in IT for ten years, it takes more effort to make teh fucking things unverifiable than it does to make them accountable. I'm not saying they used it to steal an election, I'm saying they could).
Add those three facts together and you get plebs who will either vote for conservatives or their vote will simply not count and The Signal will not tell you about it. And even if it did...
FACT 7: (Look at me, preaching a fucking sermon here) There will be no revolt. The revolution will not be televised because the revolution will not fucking happen. Because The Signal feeds you bullshit. It's lulled you to sleep with American Idol and woken you up to Morning Joe. Bread and circuses, man, bread and circuses. Built the Roman Empire, bread and circuses did. Except system's more efficient now. Can't have the state provide you with bread and circuses, that would be too much like *gasp* socialism. You have to work and buy your own bread and circuses.
FACT 8: Don't think I'm being fucking snobby here. I'm a pleb, just like the rest. I use Facebook. Being disabled and crazy, it's my only window on the outside world. I love wrestling almost as much as I love Father Lucifer and for a good deal longer. I have a Kindle, an Amazon account, I shop at Tesco. I'm as much a puppet of The Signal as anyone else. Only difference is that I can see the strings.
FACT 9: The ultimate aim of the corporate PtB is to have a population so desperate, so *broken*, that they will work for pennies, or a meal, or a dosshouse bed for the night. I'm a Ripperologist (someone who studies the crimes of Jack the Ripper) and being in any way serious about that, you have to know quite a lot about Victorian London. Here is my favorite piece of trivia about Victorian London: The price of sex with a prostitute, 4d, was the exact price of a light meal, a shot of gin or a dosshouse bed for the night. I love that piece of trivia because it shows you, in a very real way, the connection between commerce and your very fucking survival (and also patriarchy, these women were not in a good place but that's a whole 'nother sermon). That's their endgame, man. To have you so desperate and with so few options that you'll work for pennies, or a meal, or a bed for the night. And if you can't find a job, they'll send you to the workhouse, rent you out as slave labour in exchange for your dole. When you're too old or broken down to work, fuck you, you're out on the street or Soylent Green. If you protest, they'll ignore you and if enough of you protest, they'll send in the police or the army. And if you don't want it, fuck you, there's millions desperate enough to take it. That's what their ultimate aim is, always has been. And the Republicans (and not all but too many Dems) are their political arm just as the SCOTUS is their legal arm. And too many of the plebs have forgotten or never learned, why you need unions.
FACT 10: Last one, I promise. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. History, economic history anyway, runs in cycles. Times and technology change but it goes the same way every time. The rich exploit teh rules, gobble up too much cash and crash the system. The plebs protest, demand some protections. Government puts in (water down versions of) those protections. And then all the people who remember the last crash start dying off and the corporate PtB start eroding those protections until eventually, they go too far, they crash the system and the whole cycle starts again. It's what happened with the Dutch tulip mania, it's what caused the fucking American Revolution (the original dispute that triggered the whole thing was because the Crown cut taxes on tea imported by the original megacorporation, the East India Trading Company). It's not a coincidence that the idea that the poor are poor because of their own faults; that being rich is a duty and if you aren't, you didn't try hard enough; that you shouldn't tax the rich because they're "job creators". All of these ideas were incredibly popular in the years leading up to the Crash of '29. And then, just as everyone who remembered that started dying off in droves, along come a bunch of rich fucks and brainwashed plebs who think they don't need no fucking rules and they start eroding the protections. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.
It's not going to change. Not until the end of scarcity (which is possible right fucking *now*), or the end of the class system or patriarchy or The Singularity. It's not going to change. The best you can do, the only thing you can do (save for suggestions that would, rightly, get this post pulled by the mods) is mitigate the damage, ease the pain just a little. That's all that can be done for now.
Here endeth the lesson. Peace with you.
Anyone else noticed a slowdown with DU?
This might be just me but has anyone else noticed a thing where, if you have DU open for a while, the rest of your browser slows to a crawl and doesn't improve until you close & reopen the browser?
I'm using Win7 and Firefox, if it makes a difference.
Is Obama A Liberal?
I'm seeing a lot of complaining about the budget deal right now. So here's a simple question, do you consider Obama a liberal? Feel free to explain your answer (or not) if you like.
Should Factory Farming Be Banned?
Something a little more controversial than my other poll. Should the USA ban factory farming of meat? That is, should the law require that all animals intended for consumption are raised in a cage-free situation?
Also included an option where the suffering of animals is included in teh price of meat. So there's an extra charge on buying caged meat.
What Form Should US Healthcare Take?
Seems I'm posting a poll a day right now. Here are your options:
A) The current ACA plan: Everyone has to carry some form of insurance, subsidies for the poor.
B) Medicare-for-all: Everyone can buy into Medicare.
C) NHS-style single payer: I live under the NHS. It's not bad. Not perfect but not bad. There are short waiting times for some elective surgeries but that's because of not enough surgeons being available. Free at point of delivery, funded by taxes and your only co-pay is a small fee to get your prescription filled (currently about $15; young, old and poor are exempt).
D) Something else.
Should The US Have Mandatory Voting?
So, here's the idea. The turnout for the midterms was shit. The turnout for midterms is always shit. It is a civic good for more people to vote as this (in theory) makes government more representative. Coincidentally, low turnout favors (generally) Republicans and high turnout (generally) favors Democrats. Australia (IIRC) has compulsory voting. If you don't vote, you have to either justify it to a judge or get fined a small amount (like, $20).
So I came up with a few options but all of them require an automatic voter registration. That shouldn't be too hard to do. AFAIK, the US is the only democratic country where you have to actually register to vote. Every other country I know of, you're automatically registered by virtue of being a living citizen. So I'm proposing that, firstly, the US just start automatically registering everyone to vote, the Social Security register has everyone's name and address anyway, it wouldn't be too difficult to register everyone off that. Then, one of these options.
Option A: The US gets compulsory voting. You have to turn up at a polling place, mark or mail in a ballot or you get fined a small amount unless you can justify it to a judge (all proceeds go to funding future elections).
Option B: The US switches to entirely postal voting. In the weeks running up to an election, every eligible citizen gets mailed a polling card. They mark their choice, sign it and mail it back, just like with overseas military votes. Free of postal costs, obviously.
Option C: The US switches to fully online voting. The idea here is that there's a database in every state with everyone's name and SS number. You go to a website, input your SS number. The system checks against the database that you are eligible and haven't already voted. If you clear both of those, you get to pick your choice. Now, the drawback with this one is that, if it's online, it is potentially hackable. However, cyber-security is now at such a level that, given enough funding and expertise, you could make the threat of a hack virtually impossible.
Option D: Things carry on as they are, with barely anyone turning out for midterms.
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