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You know what? Several things pissed me off last week, politically, but I let it go. I was a bit tired, then I had a nice weekend with too much wine and awesumz people. You know how it is, you just can't be bothered to rant sometimes. Then first thing on a Monday morning, our esteemed political leader flaps his mouth in the Daily Twatagraph and there you go. Back to being a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.
Bastard.
Here's the article, anyway:
Look out honey cos we're using technology
Oh god. Where do you start on this one? Peurile? Releasing his grip, fnar fnar. How about the lower headline thingy, which probably has a technical term. Common sense. There's a phrase to strike fear into your heart even when it's not being brandished around like a foam banana by a man who looks like a gibbering baboon. Yes, back to the peurile. Seriously, that photo does you no favours, mate, except that it just makes you look stupid as opposed to COMPLETELY FUCKING DERANGED AND EVIL. Oh yeah. Common sense. Everyone thinks they have it, even the people that mimble into the road when there's a crossing 20 yards down. Common sense is about not sticking knitting needles into plug sockets, not about running a bloody country where you may, just possibly, have some lasting and un-fucking-pleasant effect on peoples' lives. It's about applying brain cells to problems with reasonably anticipated solutions, not making policy on complicated and poorly understood systems.
Talking of which, his first priority is clearing up the mess Labour made of our economy. Awesome. Not holding down the poor and sick while his rich mates shaft them then. Glad that's clear.
Now political economical debate is one of those things that definitely shouldn't be argued at polite dinner parties, as everyone has a emotionally held opinion that they try and veil with random politically skewed factoids. And little bits of spit always end up in the hors d'oeuvres at that sort of party. Broken port glasses too, sometimes. But anyway, here's mine. I've not had much time to think about it as I mostly "just didn't care" til recently, but here goes...
Economy? It's fucked. Nobody fucked it up, particularly. It may have lasted longer if there hadn't been such an extreme siphoning off from the upper layers, but it has grown, peaked and started to spiral down. It's a huge lumbering badly understood and uncontrollable macrosystem of a behemoth of a machine, we are trapped inside its stomach, and it is bleeding to death. Everything peaks and declines - civilisation, oil, the price of gin. Possibly.
If you don't think we've peaked, if you're still subscribing to the golden myth of eternal onwards and upwards, that's awesome. Explain to me why, I'll listen politely, then we can go and play with your perpetual motion machine for kix'n'japez.
It's not the end of the world, just the end of civilisation.
Now, I also strongly believe that although we can't stop this inevitable crash and burn into uncivilisation, we can tell ourselves the right stories, build the correct structures, write the hard hitting manifestos, all to make it bearable, not only for ourselves, but also for people at the bottom of the pile. Because although I don't believe in a omniscient and interventionist God, somewhere along the line we will be somehow judged on how we treat the weakest and most disadvantaged and reap the fucking karma. Even if it's just the sink estates arming themselves for bloody and feral revenge. Lawrence Weston vs Westbury is how it's going to go downn when it comes, baby.
We can work on an individual level, training our minds for resilience and husbanding our resources for longevity. And we can take that up to the national level and look after the things and resources that people like fucking Cameron have just missed the point of. Libraries, hospitals, universities, social housing, welfare, schools. My estimated time of next contribution to the tax pool is some time in 2012, but when I worked in a proper job, I didn't actually particularly care where my taxes went. As long as they weren't pissed down the pan in rapidly self-redundantising war technology, for example, I like the idea of them helping other people who need that. I don't care if they were happy on the dole.
In fact, good on them. You know what? If you've worked out how to be happy on whatever it is the dole give you now, you have actually achieved some sort of modest enlightenment and I really do genuinely salute you. Rather than the miserable fuckers who spend all their lives trying to scratch around so that the bastard tories pat them on the head by proxy, and then stamp on the fucking fingers of anyone else who is hauling themselves back up the parapet having the temerity to be happy while they're doing it. That's right, work your arse off for a new carpet and two cars and be as miserable as me, or I will kick you in the kidneys til you bleed. And if I can't do it covertly and metaphorically, I will probably do it in real. As long as it is in an anonymised clinical setting, obviously.
Quote from BBC website: I for one am actually looking forward to having my benefits cut if it means that the "happily" unemployed are made to tighten their belt too
Seriously, I've been around damaged people long enough to chalk that up as vicious inhumanity in one of the worst degrees. It's the sick psychological STD of our times - there is supposed be be eternal progress, and if you mysteriously somehow fail to be ascending, then cause fake upwards mobility by pushing the underlings' heads down under the scum. If they're going down, you must be going up, right? Right? Where have you gone, guys?
I don't really view the reasonably centralised control of our key services as being a bad thing, actually. There, I said it. I've worked in the public sector for years. The sort of people who like common sense view the public sector workers (like they view pretty much everyone else) as being lazy state-sponsored scum. In my experience my colleagues have been kind industrious people doing a good job and building up reams of experience, goodwill and essentially free and open resources. All those crazy things that you just can't put a price on, and are therefore assumed to be completely without value by the scum-sucking common-sensers.
It's common sense to sell the forests, make them pay their way, concrete them over.
It's common sense to introduce a financially driven system of welfare reform
It's common sense to introduce an internal market into the NHS
It's common sense that Mrs Normal's son, who can't get a job in a recession, shouldn't get any dole
It's common sense if that mentally ill person should get no benefits if he doesn't pull his finger out and stop pretending to be ill
It's common sense to put all the poor people out in sink estates - they don't need stuff anyway
It's common sense to keep our jobs and houses for our own kind
...
Where does that start? With common sense. Where does that end? Being a completely fucking evil bastard.
When do people start realising that it's not down to working hard and doing the right thing any more. There but for the grace of god? There but for a random fucking crappy throw of the dice that turns you from winner into the downtrodden. And that will happen to us all in time. We'll all become Mexicans, if we're very lucky. And in my opinion, the best way to survive that is to plough extras into built-in resource resilience and redundancy, like libraries and social housing, that will gently let us down the slippery helter-skelter into the brave new uncivilised future.
So 26th March, I'm going to be there marching for the for my own perceived right to cushion our fall, along with all the other good reasons to be in London. I've talked enough about my own accumulation of credibility, so time to push it out through the comfort zones (crowd fear, much :)) and stick it to the man. It may be completely futile, but if all else fails then I can look *myself* in the eye until the kid is old enough to ask what I did, and then I can look *him* in the eye and at least say I did something, that I tried, that I actually laid just a tiny bit of something out there on the line in the sand.
UKanada, UKanada, I've never been your son. Your concrete expanses lay fallow in the sun.
Your doe eyed policeman demanding more guns.
Bastard.
Here's the article, anyway:
Look out honey cos we're using technology
Oh god. Where do you start on this one? Peurile? Releasing his grip, fnar fnar. How about the lower headline thingy, which probably has a technical term. Common sense. There's a phrase to strike fear into your heart even when it's not being brandished around like a foam banana by a man who looks like a gibbering baboon. Yes, back to the peurile. Seriously, that photo does you no favours, mate, except that it just makes you look stupid as opposed to COMPLETELY FUCKING DERANGED AND EVIL. Oh yeah. Common sense. Everyone thinks they have it, even the people that mimble into the road when there's a crossing 20 yards down. Common sense is about not sticking knitting needles into plug sockets, not about running a bloody country where you may, just possibly, have some lasting and un-fucking-pleasant effect on peoples' lives. It's about applying brain cells to problems with reasonably anticipated solutions, not making policy on complicated and poorly understood systems.
Talking of which, his first priority is clearing up the mess Labour made of our economy. Awesome. Not holding down the poor and sick while his rich mates shaft them then. Glad that's clear.
Now political economical debate is one of those things that definitely shouldn't be argued at polite dinner parties, as everyone has a emotionally held opinion that they try and veil with random politically skewed factoids. And little bits of spit always end up in the hors d'oeuvres at that sort of party. Broken port glasses too, sometimes. But anyway, here's mine. I've not had much time to think about it as I mostly "just didn't care" til recently, but here goes...
Economy? It's fucked. Nobody fucked it up, particularly. It may have lasted longer if there hadn't been such an extreme siphoning off from the upper layers, but it has grown, peaked and started to spiral down. It's a huge lumbering badly understood and uncontrollable macrosystem of a behemoth of a machine, we are trapped inside its stomach, and it is bleeding to death. Everything peaks and declines - civilisation, oil, the price of gin. Possibly.
If you don't think we've peaked, if you're still subscribing to the golden myth of eternal onwards and upwards, that's awesome. Explain to me why, I'll listen politely, then we can go and play with your perpetual motion machine for kix'n'japez.
It's not the end of the world, just the end of civilisation.
Now, I also strongly believe that although we can't stop this inevitable crash and burn into uncivilisation, we can tell ourselves the right stories, build the correct structures, write the hard hitting manifestos, all to make it bearable, not only for ourselves, but also for people at the bottom of the pile. Because although I don't believe in a omniscient and interventionist God, somewhere along the line we will be somehow judged on how we treat the weakest and most disadvantaged and reap the fucking karma. Even if it's just the sink estates arming themselves for bloody and feral revenge. Lawrence Weston vs Westbury is how it's going to go downn when it comes, baby.
We can work on an individual level, training our minds for resilience and husbanding our resources for longevity. And we can take that up to the national level and look after the things and resources that people like fucking Cameron have just missed the point of. Libraries, hospitals, universities, social housing, welfare, schools. My estimated time of next contribution to the tax pool is some time in 2012, but when I worked in a proper job, I didn't actually particularly care where my taxes went. As long as they weren't pissed down the pan in rapidly self-redundantising war technology, for example, I like the idea of them helping other people who need that. I don't care if they were happy on the dole.
In fact, good on them. You know what? If you've worked out how to be happy on whatever it is the dole give you now, you have actually achieved some sort of modest enlightenment and I really do genuinely salute you. Rather than the miserable fuckers who spend all their lives trying to scratch around so that the bastard tories pat them on the head by proxy, and then stamp on the fucking fingers of anyone else who is hauling themselves back up the parapet having the temerity to be happy while they're doing it. That's right, work your arse off for a new carpet and two cars and be as miserable as me, or I will kick you in the kidneys til you bleed. And if I can't do it covertly and metaphorically, I will probably do it in real. As long as it is in an anonymised clinical setting, obviously.
Quote from BBC website: I for one am actually looking forward to having my benefits cut if it means that the "happily" unemployed are made to tighten their belt too
Seriously, I've been around damaged people long enough to chalk that up as vicious inhumanity in one of the worst degrees. It's the sick psychological STD of our times - there is supposed be be eternal progress, and if you mysteriously somehow fail to be ascending, then cause fake upwards mobility by pushing the underlings' heads down under the scum. If they're going down, you must be going up, right? Right? Where have you gone, guys?
I don't really view the reasonably centralised control of our key services as being a bad thing, actually. There, I said it. I've worked in the public sector for years. The sort of people who like common sense view the public sector workers (like they view pretty much everyone else) as being lazy state-sponsored scum. In my experience my colleagues have been kind industrious people doing a good job and building up reams of experience, goodwill and essentially free and open resources. All those crazy things that you just can't put a price on, and are therefore assumed to be completely without value by the scum-sucking common-sensers.
It's common sense to sell the forests, make them pay their way, concrete them over.
It's common sense to introduce a financially driven system of welfare reform
It's common sense to introduce an internal market into the NHS
It's common sense that Mrs Normal's son, who can't get a job in a recession, shouldn't get any dole
It's common sense if that mentally ill person should get no benefits if he doesn't pull his finger out and stop pretending to be ill
It's common sense to put all the poor people out in sink estates - they don't need stuff anyway
It's common sense to keep our jobs and houses for our own kind
...
Where does that start? With common sense. Where does that end? Being a completely fucking evil bastard.
When do people start realising that it's not down to working hard and doing the right thing any more. There but for the grace of god? There but for a random fucking crappy throw of the dice that turns you from winner into the downtrodden. And that will happen to us all in time. We'll all become Mexicans, if we're very lucky. And in my opinion, the best way to survive that is to plough extras into built-in resource resilience and redundancy, like libraries and social housing, that will gently let us down the slippery helter-skelter into the brave new uncivilised future.
So 26th March, I'm going to be there marching for the for my own perceived right to cushion our fall, along with all the other good reasons to be in London. I've talked enough about my own accumulation of credibility, so time to push it out through the comfort zones (crowd fear, much :)) and stick it to the man. It may be completely futile, but if all else fails then I can look *myself* in the eye until the kid is old enough to ask what I did, and then I can look *him* in the eye and at least say I did something, that I tried, that I actually laid just a tiny bit of something out there on the line in the sand.
UKanada, UKanada, I've never been your son. Your concrete expanses lay fallow in the sun.
Your doe eyed policeman demanding more guns.
