Wage slave, lay down your chains

One of the most important facts about present-day American politics is that poor people have essentially no political “voice” in Washington. They do, however, vote. And they’re also human beings with moral worth and interests who count

Reading this made me realise*, this last century has been in part a story of how the power elites have learned to fission, delude and sucker poor people into voting against their own interests, and in subverting and/or crushing groupings of poor people trying to exert their own political power. This is largely true every in the first world, but is so nakedly and breathtakingly visible in US history as to be a perfect object lesson. The vicious hatred and unbelievably cruel treatment of the union movement in this country, both historically, and still being enforced, is pretty much a perfect example.

If this line of thought is carried much further, I might turn into a 'bomb-throwing radical' hahah. I do wish I'd realised this stuff 40 years ago, or not been so deafened myself as to fail to hear those who were saying it at the time. Plus de souvenirs, plus de regrets.



* or remember!

Hope and pray

Well I can only hope that President Mubarak displays a shred of honesty, and departs, rather than crushing this in the usual tyrannical rivers of blood ... if he can, that is.

One thing that astonished me is that my (few) Egyptian friends, who are all of military occupation or background*, are unanimously of the opinion that his government is now so rotten and dishonest as to need immediate replacement. If army officers of long provenance feel like this, what are the odds of the army NOT enforcing a crackdown, if those orders are passed down? I really hope I don't find out.


*and are all wargamers, unsurprisingly.

Gee, why is it I dont like most recent music?

Alyssa points out:

I think it's fascinating that music has become totally unmoored from skill, or artistic sensibility, it's a part of the celebrity production process. Producers and songwriters and editors and the people who do your hair and help you pick your dress before you hit the red carpet are essentially performing the same function. Releasing a single is the same thing as showing up for an event, or posing in Maxim, or whatever. I don't know if that's because popular music is so simplistic and formulaic that you can engineer anyone into achieving the basics and going through the motions, or because it's much harder to fake acting skill, or because a single is obtainable, it's three minutes. I just think it's fascinating that people are shameless enough not to care if they sound good or not, or to consider faking it an essential part of the process of being a celebrity.

And given that I think most of the music she likes also falls into this description, I daresay she's right. So it's nice to know that being an old cranky geezer gets me to the same place as the young hip culture critic :)

Torture and irredeemable evil

From this long article on solitary imprisonment:

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande#ixzz18IzC8GKT

Also this:

The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago.

It's becoming more and more difficult to avoid seeing US society as predicated on evil - inflicting savage and unpredictable punishments more or less at random, reliant on duplicity and fraud to sustain its businesses, penalising the poor and incapable and inflicting the same conditions on their children where possible, and trying its best to deny the capable avenues to improve their condition: plus showering rewards on the children of the ruling classes in abundance, as if to taunt those denied it.

Time, and past time, to move - but that will take a couple of years I fear. We just have to hold onto our self-respect and wash our hands frequently in the meantime.

Elections.

Feh, talk about overanalysed.

This election cycle is simply down to 2 factors:
(1) The economy sucks, and the party in power gets blamed for this
(2) Only 40% of the eligible voting population came out to vote, so old white voters are massively more significant as a proportion of votes cast.

All the rest is handwaving, special pleading, and irrelevancies.

Lumps

Well it seems to have been medical month (again).

Cat has been to get mammograms and see an oncologist, at the recommendation of her OB-GYN. Mercifully, it seems she just has a benign cyst, and the stabbing pain she is getting in her other breast are customary for the onset of menopause. Did I mention how much it seems to suck just being a woman?

And I've just been to the doctors & gotten a prescription for antibiotics, after getting what seems to be a spider bite on the back of my right hand - it raised a lump about 2 inches square, which failed to go down in a couple of days as I was expecting, hence the doctor. Nasty bugs hereabouts, it seems. The only odd bit really was that neither I nor the doctor could see any puncture wounds, yet it definitely seems to be infectious not inflammatory.

Quote of the week

“objectification” is a funny word invented by feminists because we look so cute when we’re angry