Light Pillar

A little old lady in a woolly sweater shows up to the Trump Taj Mahal with approximately ten million dollars worth of chips. She plays conservatively on the craps table for a bit, but her massive stash attracts interest from the clientele, and The Donald himself descends the elevator and goes to talk to her.
“Well there, little old lady, I like how you have a lot of money! I’m an extremely rich man myself! Did you read my book on how to become extremely rich?”
“No Mr. President, I got it by betting.”
Trump is incredulous. “Folks, this girl cracks me up. You won ten million on craps?”
“No, I bet on people. Tell you what, I’ll make a bet right now. I bet you a hundred grand that in a week’s time your bollocks will be square.”
Trump glows. “I like your style, but more to the point, I cannot resist such a deal!” and he sticks out his hand. She shakes it with a wry look. “You may regret this, Mr. President.” Beaming, Trump ignores her and goes back up the elevator to boast to his son in law about his ability to spot an opportunity, and finish off the rest of his hamburgers.
An appointment is duly made and the next week, the lady and her solicitor ride the golden escalator to the top of Trump Tower. Trump is sitting at his golden desk and turns off the television as his guests are shown into his office.
“Well now, glad to see you again, you spicy minx! I see you’ve brought a witness, and he’s about to learn how I get a hundred thousand dollars richer!”
The lawyer raises an eyebrow as the woman’s frowns. “I don’t believe it,” she says gently.
“You’d better believe it!” blares Trump.
“No, I don’t. You’ll have to show me.”
Trump needs little encouragement. He marches to the other side of his desk, drops his trousers and belches as he bends over. The woman leans back and reaches out her arm, and after a second of rustling she says “Alright, fine. You win.”
“Folks, this is great!” says Trump as he stands back up, but a thumping noise distracts him and he turns to see the lawyer bashing his head against one of the golden pillars in Trump’s office. “Wow,” he says, “What’s with that guy?”
“Oh, I bet him a million dollars that in a week’s time I’d have Donald Trump by the balls.”

I’m a pretty well educated man, I think it’s fair to say; I like logic, and I like language. But the language of logic and reason, invented during the enlightenment to break through the arguments that kings had a divine right to rule as they wished, has now been fully subverted by the new ruling class. It can be used dishonestly while giving an impression that you are the reasonable one, it can be used to insult people while appearing polite, and it can be used to confuse conversations that involve arguments you don’t want to actually engage with. The consequences of this are all around us: it is used to justify wars of aggression designed to enrich our overlords and leave us in pieces on a foreign field, it is used to antagonize people and destroy solidarity, it disempowers people and maintains hierarchies in our society – a perfect reflection of what it was created to fight.
Continue reading “Destroy the computer brain machine”

A significant amount of modern psychology is a ploy to turn your attempts to adapt your human brain to an insane exploitative hellscape society, your inevitable failure and your subsequent misery and dysfunction into a personal problem that you can be judged or punished for by that same society.

If you’re struggling to navigate past a million blaring advertisements and inane pieces of drudgery to find something more important to you than selling your labour to a company owned by a distant cluster of monsters, you’ve got ADHD. If you have a tendency to get overwhelmed by the instability and uncertainty your feel every day at the mercy of gigantic organisations designed and operated by psychopaths, you’ve got anxiety disorder. If your boring work has no point beyond enriching some faceless billionaire a thousand miles away and all that’s left after its burned through your daily energy is despair, you’ve got depression.

With each of these labels comes stigma, and a medical treatment (produced and sold to profit the same corporate overlords, naturally) that may possibly help you ignore your problems in exchange for increasing the risks of impotence, psychotic break or suicide. But the treatment shouldn’t be applied by an insane world to you, a normal person under a horrible amount of stress. It should be applied by you to the world.

Offering support to people taking industrial action (eg scones, good cheer or offers of constructive help) strengthens their fight against a diseased economy. Collaborating with your neighbours to build new organisations that people can rely on if they struggle and fall in our sick society is the first step to treating it. Building these bonds of trust in a diverse community can help undermine the assumptions that prop up white supremacy, a poison injected into us on the scale of populations. It’s not a personal panacea, but it’s a way forward.

It’s helped me.

Half of the families in this country have less than a thousand pounds in savings. A quarter of them have less than £95 in savings. Average personal debt is nearly ten thousand pounds. And the next crash is coming.

During the last recession in 2009, the number of millionaires doubled, but ordinary people got fired from their jobs by the million and the aspiring bourgeoisie were also hit hard, with tens of thousands of small businesses destroyed by predatory banks. But in those times there was still some semblance of a social safety net. Now though?

Real wages in the United Kingdom have fallen almost as fast as they have in fucking Greece, and they had to deal with a financially bankrupt government; ours is merely morally bankrupt. Many of my friends are living horribly precarious lives, bouncing between shitty jobs with no savings whatsoever. Never stop moving, never sleep, drive for uber, cycle for deliveroo, keep thrashing around, make less than the minimum wage and far less than a living wage, barely keep the creditors of your back, grind your soul down into a fucking pencil nub, every waking moment with an entire media and political machine hammering it into you that if you go bankrupt though it’s because you didn’t strive hard enough.

And austerity continues apace – jobseeker’s allowance is pitiful and can be rescinded on a whim, child support is cut to the bone, there’s still – STILL – foodbanks everywhere, and homeless people everywhere. Cuts to local councils mean mass layoffs and rising council tax. Everything is getting more expensive. The NHS is going to start hoovering money out of people’s pockets soon.

Society, in other words, has been almost completely removed. Thatcher’s utopia is here. The idea that we’re part of a cohesive whole that gives something back if you sell your labour to it? That’s gone, it’s all been cut. We’re getting less and less back; instead we’re told over and over that we’re free agents and we get what we deserve. And the next crash is coming.

I don’t know what it’s going to be, or whether it’ll be even something that starts in this country. It could be the housing market here though, or it might be student loans or the bursting of the tech bubble. Or it could be food insecurity, ‘cos that’s right around the corner for us here on this crowded island sitting on a warming planet. Whatever. It’s coming.

There is so little resilience in our personal finances, and there is so little in the way of government programs to protect us from destitution, and our society is so weak that when the next crash happens there is going to be nothing for people to do except start breaking shit.

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The coming crisis is unavoidable. No-one you vote for will be able to prevent the bubble of fake cheap credit that we injected into the veins of the economy after the 2008 recession from bursting. The only consequential course of action for us is to build local institutions, based not on money but on trust and a spirit of communal aid, that can keep people safe and fed after the machinery of state and capital sieze up. In the aftermath, those humble kitchens and shelters will be the building blocks of something new.

They’re getting us ready, you know. This mania about immigrants, the constant pounding drums of war and the glee with which the Tory press respond to the idea of sending gunboats into the Mediterranean to stop people escaping North Africa and coming here? That’s the captains of industry using their influence to prepare us for the future they have made – the cost of their greed is already starting to upend the world’s ecosystem, and the only way they can keep hold of their ill-gotten gains is to start systematically exterminating the people who they have wronged. They want us to watch millions of people die without any inconvenient compassion.

But humankind has the resources and the technology to save everyone! It’s not too late to end the pointless and perverse existence of the billionaires and spend the money they’d hoard and waste on building a new way of living, to repair the planet and create a society of justice where all humans can speak as equals and the person who needs the most help gets the most constructive help.

The repulsive nazi chuds whose resurgent movements are being funded by the same rotten gang of billionaire goblins are proclaiming that if that’s the choice, they’d choose to commit genocide on half the world to validate their fantasies of supremacy and sadism. Make no mistake, the political establishment in this country pursue the same ends even if they don’t announce their motivations as vigorously.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Even now, we can save everyone.