In this dirty old part of the city, where the sun refuse to shine...

[cybermule]

...people tell me there ain't no use in trying.

Now little girl you're so young and pretty
And one thing I know is true
You'll be dead before your time is through.



Oh, so many things have been pissing me off politically recently. You could argue that that is the de facto artefact of having The Bastard Tories (TM) in charge. The thing is, I could actually handle this if there wasn't a sizeable and significant chunk of the population that are seriously challenging my ability to be liberal, tolerant and understanding.

Take this article:

Squatters: Who are they and why do they squat?

The war against homeless people has been pissing me off for a while. Yeah, there are a handful of trendy hipster squatter wannabes out there doing it for the lolz and street cred, I'm sure, but who the fuck actually *wants* to be homeless? I've only dabbled in the unfortunate living in my car for a few days end of the spectrum, and it sucked. I'm pretty sure if you can manage anything else, you don't live on the street. It's dirty, dangerous and cold. I can't prove it, but I would hazard a guess that it takes years off your life expectancy. Again, I'm guessing, but I think you have to have had some pretty unfortunate circumstances to end up like that, or have mental health problems. And these are all the sort of people that I actually personally feel I'd like some of my taxes being spent to protect. I certainly don't give a flying toss if they manage to find themselves some unoccupied roof to huddle under. And I don't buy the line that squatters bring teh property prices down, do damage, sell drugs to 6 year olds, blah blah de fucking blah.

Have you seen what happens to unoccupied buildings? There's one near my allotment that has never seen a dirty dreadlocked hippy in it's life. It's roof has caved in, the windows have crept and warped and cracked, and buddleia sprout from every available nook and cranny.

The thing that pisses me off monumentally in that BBC news article is the paragraph fourth up from the bottom:

"People were paying mortgages and were horrified that people weren't paying their way."

This is the attitude that is increasingly annoying me these days. This kind of mean minded petty shitty little judgementalism get-boot-into-the-people-underneath mentality is getting more and more prevalent in today's pinch-arsed right wing loudmouth little crapocracy.

It makes me sick.

For a long time, I've been maintaining my liberal pincer attack of:

(1) I'm an entrenched introvert, relying entirely on my own moral compass. I should be tolerant to those who are too stupid extroverted to mind their own business.

(2) If you threaten people at their basic level of needs, you can't expect them to be pleasant and functional in areas of higher brain function, such as empathy and tolerance.

But I am not only fucked off to the back teeth with these people pissing all over my ideals, I think it's becoming positively dangerous to be liberal and easy-going and tolerant and let these repressed virtually fascistic little blabbermouths burble on endlessly with their pointless Daily Mail fanned aspirational claptrap.

They talk a pile of crap. They aren't aspirational, climbing higher on the social ladder through dint of their own hard work. They are performing some sort of hideous relativistic upwards mobility by stamping on the fingers of the people hauling themselves along through life and shoving the poor bastards down down so they look better.

In their eyes.

I have a mortgage. I chose to take it on, just like all those other whining bastards who wanted to stamp out their own little 4-bed double garaged bit of middle England. I don't give a rat's arse about the fact that some people out there don't have one. I wouldn't have one if there was decent social housing, and I only stomach mine by (a) having the luck to buy cheap and (b) having the balls to ignore all the people burbling on over their decaf Starbucks caramel saccharine cancer laden puppy killing lattes about how tracker mortgages were teh rock and roll. I just fixed mine for 20 years with the nagging sensation that someone else's hideous loss would inevitably fuel my shiny mortgage gain if I faffed about with stuff. I certainly don't care if someone who doesn't have a mortgage also chooses not to freeze to death by sheltering in an abandoned building somewhere.

FFS people - what are you on? We are on the slippery slope to some sort of hideous New World Order where the non-perfect are exterminated or even eradicated before they get to live, and we are merrily waving our salopettes and bitching about the quality of the canapes and schnapps at the apres-ski.

Worse tham that. We're pouring Jeyes fluid on our rejected canapes so other people can't skip-dive.

hirez and I had some sort of mutual horrified verbal wincing at this in The Other Place. The motivation behind this sort of bitch slapped whinging is assumed to be the fact that dole-scroungers should have the "advantage" of being able to live rent-free is, just, so UNFAIR!!!! *pout-stomp* The sort of emotionally stunted overgrown drivel from a teenager that had some vaguely aspirationally over-priviliged life where mummy told them they were special and beautiful and clever, and then got the big fat slap from reality that they always secretly longed for from their private school's PE teacher. And therefore they're always left with the inability to not equate "advantage" with "lack of disadvantage". It's a simple verbal logic thing that you're not taught at inbred wannabe posh-kid school.

Right now they buy the Mail. In a few years, when they're done with being fucked over by the banks while they anaesthetise themselves by lying back and thinking of their own little slice of England, they'lll have a bit of spare cash left over every month to invest for retirement holidays in Provence and little Julian's McEducation. Then they'll start buying The Times and graduate onto being mindfucked over by Rupert Murdoch while thinking prophylactic thoughts involving the use of thir shiny white collar pound notes and sheafs of pages talking about stocks and shares. And they'll suck their teeth at the "proles" buying News of the World to dull their pain with the harder pain of those worse off.

Or they think they will. This is their bitter, selfish little aspirational dream. In reality, there are two scenarios - firstly, they chew their way up through the social layers like the scum sucking bottom feeders they are until suddenly they find that they're the bottom layer and the Tories aren't so sweet and lovely when they're not manipulating you into squeezing other people's metaphorical guts out. I'm ok with this - I'm in the layer below these arseholes, and I will kick them square in the nutsack before I go down. The other scenario is that the common people get so monumentally pissed off with this that they take up arms and rebel agains the whinging backstabbing aspirationals.

See above re kick, nutsack. These people have actually driven me, the ultimate hippy, into not particularly giving a shit. Either way, they got what they wanted, and they got what they ultimately deserved.

In other news, the liberal lefty literati have now said it's ok to shop at tesco. Hoo-bloody-rah. That means I can boycott Morrisons for supporting ArseFuckTwin #1 of 2, Murdoch and not starve. Remember kids, you saw it here first, in glorious vitriolic technicolour.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I want to club Tony Blair with my dog-eared copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

WTF happened to socialism and the labour party? When did 1997's pissed-up, loved-up hangover wake up and realise that people had voted Tory, not because Cameron had undergone some sort of Road to Portillo conversion, but because what the Labour Party were offering had become worse than the Tories.

How did a decade of Es over the dinner table and Nigella playing Blue Monday on Desert Island Discs turn into the revenge of the small-minded? Who picked a zeitgeist straight out of the Daily Mail?

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they did kind of lose the basic point of socialism. Partly because they were so busy wringing their bleeding hearts over all and sundry that they kind of lost track of boring gritty problems on their doorstep. Guatamalen moonbeam farmers are just *so* more attractive than sink estates in the Rhondda valley. And partly because they just surround themselves by embodiments of their own ideals - their aspirations weren't always founded in the gritty reality of the lowest fifth of the population's lives. Those people got resentful and turned to petty right wing grumbling, the aspirational middle classes got resentful of pretty much everyone else, and.before you knew it, there was a critical mass of Tory.voters.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I can't get behind that LibCon thing. A mob of smug townie sods bagging on The Farmers. Again.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Heh. To be fair, I think they like the idea of having a go at power. Although there has always been an element of over-optimistic "civilising the peasant / brutal rulers" thing to them. Although how they were hoping to do the latter, other than soaking the right wing-ness up in a lake of bland, I don't know.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

.. Apart from that - yes. (Obviously).