Politics 3: Open letter to my friends, the hippies and the fascists

I'm always ending up defending right wing viewpoints to my many socialist friends and acquaintances, not because I enjoy it, but because they often have absurd views. The opposite happens when I'm with my right wing friends and family members. Whereas I'm a socialist black sheep with them, everyone I know from college tends to put me squarely on the privileged rich bastard side. Actually, I believe in neither. The older I get, the less use I have for defining myself or others as left or right wing. Conservative vs. progressive is a workable dichotomy, it's an axis you can stake a place along, for every subject even. But left vs. right? Les extremes se touchent. The amount of times a conversation about politics has lead me to argue against a friend or family member with an absurd point beggars belief.

As a shorthand: You can't fix the economy by privatising everything, or nationalising everything. Freedom of speech applies especially to people you don't agree with, also to people who don't agree with freedom of speech. Immigration only adds more different people to your country, this is a totally neutral process, they should adapt enough to function and eventually (a century or so) will be indistinguishable from other inhabitants, i.e. will probably be anti-immigration themselves. It's not even remotely feasible for everyone to have all their basic needs taken care of, without a dynamic capitalist economy to pay for that, and even then some injustice is inevitable, unless we build an economy not based on money, like on star trek. It's stupid to start wars, but when you have, it's your responsibility to fix the country you invaded. Saving the environment is so difficult, we should make it the driving force behind fixing the economy. Governments should govern, businesses should do business, when they work together just as many good things happen as bad, but they are both entirely ineffective without individuals, who should have as much say in anything they do together as reasonably possible. Most of the people on the planet do not live in the U.S. or Europe, it's completely fair that they should have a bigger say in the stake of the planet then we do. Since the vast majority of the problems we have to tackle in the next hundred years are completely global in nature, it's our responsibility to use the advantage we have to get a result we can all live with.

I guess that makes me a romantic.

The future of fashion is the past.

This is way less ridiculous than you might think. Just look at the guy's outfit at the end and realise that every webmaster you know looks like this, except all the gadgets are smaller. That's how the thirties envisioned the neckbeard they knew was coming, instinctively. Women in shiny, metalic dresses? The same outfit throughout the day? These guys knew exactly what was up. There's way to much pointing out of the obvious failures. We forget that the reason we don't have rocket cars isn't because we don't want them, it's because they're too expensive, ridiculous and unsafe. So many of these things are more cyclical than we'd like to admit. Imagine sitting in the sixties movie version of H.G. Wells' time machine and looking only at beard fashions from circa 1880-2010: Seeing unkempt muttonchops degrade to pencil thin mustaches, to clean shaven, to hippie hair, degrading into sideburns, back to mullets and 'taches, on to gelled tops and goatees, to resurgent neckbeards and permastubble.

Behaving like animals...

It's world week for animals in laboratories this week, but it's been suspiciously quiet. This is usually the week when animal liberation becomes temporarily violent, instead of mostly annoying. There is an obvious fault-line running through animal rights arguments, that the video is pointing out succinctly. The hypocrisy of treating humans as scum to save the chickens or others is completely lost on them. The motivation for saving animals seems to be based in self-loathing and guilt. This is probably why so many movie stars are members of Peta, that seems like a group ripe for all kinds of manipulative arguments.

No man is an Island

UGH. This one is somehow much worse than the first one. The digitally inserted Micheal, the truly terrifying vocodering, the completely nonsensical rap bridge. I hate pretty much everyone in the video. You sort of begin to wonder if these kinds of projects exist to save lives or to further inflate popstar egos. What's really going to happen to all that money? Most likely buy a solid gold plane for the Haitian president, or whichever warlord is in power when the cash gets there. Administrative costs and the salaries of all those highly necessary aid workers will take another big chunk. The rest of the cash? Miscellaneous(theft). If only the American Army wasn't so busy they could restore law and order.

The men who stare at goats

I liked the film, but not as much as the documentary series by Jon Ronson. Mostly because of the oppressive acting. Maybe I shouldn't have watched it after the documentary, now the wacky hijinks of the US military seem a lot less fun and a lot more crazy. The one thing the film doesn't address and the documentary barely touches is the fact that the reason these things work so well in the military context. Any army is prone to these kinds of hysteric flights of fancy, it's in their nature. They spend so much time brainwashing people to become soldiers, what does it matter if you tack on a load of other ideas that don't really make any sense in that context? The unquestioning obedience of orders and other great ideas in service of a single goal make it an easy prey for profoundly stupid ideas. It's remarkably similar to religion that way.