I find myself here having to apologize once more for infrequent updates. You know I love you guys, but everything’s been so busy and crazy and I think I’ve gotten into another of those lulls where I feel like my rage meter has sort of become all overwhelmed and stopped working properly. I still get really fucking angry about a number of things, but before I can think to write about them it just kind of bursts and sputters out and I can’t bring myself to give a shit about them. There are only so many times you can read about, for instance (among many), people for whatever reason earnestly defending insurance companies before your brain just kind of shits itself and says “fuck it, just play some video games or something for a while, I can’t do this right now”.

This has happened before, and passed, and I feel like this time it will as well, but while it persists my updates here are going to be relatively infrequent, and I’m sorry.

In the meantime, I’ve started a new webcomic that captures at least a portion of that anger. It’s incredibly lazy, and is all basically transcripts of conversations I have (mostly — and all to this point, at least — with my friend Tom who you may have seen in Rocket Man) throughout the day that I basically just copy/paste into the database to be spat out as a sort of pseudo-comic. It takes about three minutes of my time outside of the conversation itself, which would be happening anyway.

You can find it by visiting Human Mammal Dot Com or basically clicking on that link right there. There’s so much content that it’s going to be updated daily simply because if I didn’t I’d get this tremendous backlog of material that would necessitate me eventually putting up like eight posts a day or something just to keep up.

I want to keep providing you guys steady content, but it’s hard when I have to sit there and write out some long essay on top of everything else. So while I muscle through this terrible lull amidst my general existential angst and depressive issues, you can check that out. It’s still in beta and I know there are a bunch of bugs, and I’ll be adding more functionality soon, but it’s there and it wants you to look at it so please do.

MORE TO COME!

-The Mgt.

Jabberwock

I’m going to respond to the following comment on the front page, here:

commodorejohn said: Man, Jabberwock, you’re usually pretty good about being fair, but…damn. Is it that hard to acknowledge that at least some of us just don’t want the government running it? That maybe not everybody who’s opposed to your positions is some sort of capitalist-fetish lunatic who would fellate the corporate world if they could? Is it so hard to understand that some of us would just rather keep our options open than trust the federal government to look after our good health the way they look after our privacy and financial solvency? Christ.

Allow me to put this into perspective for you:

TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE in this country — myself included, along with some friends of mine, one of whom needs prescription meds filled on a regular basis — are LIVING WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE. Which means that we are either GOING WITHOUT HEALTHCARE, or we are BEING BANKRUPTED BY and CHARGED OUT THE ASS for NECESSARY MEDICAL EXPENSES.

Think about the private health insurance business model for a moment: The only way they can make any money is to ensure that their customers get as little coverage as possible. It’s not about actually providing anyone health coverage. The ultimate truth of the matter is that the insurance industry has absolutely NOTHING to do with healthcare — it’s just a middle man that exploits the fact that people need medical care throughout their lives in order to continue living.

Now, if our goal is to allow this particular rent-seeking industry to profit at the expense of human lives, then great — we’re doing an awesome job, and our system should be commended for getting a portion of the population to pay substantial amounts of money for a service where the bulk of what’s being paid goes toward ensuring that the customer doesn’t actually get the service they’re paying for through whatever loopholes are intentionally written into the policy. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! *trumpets* *fanfare* *Romanesque chariots being driven through rose-petal parades*

But if our goal is to actually ensure maximal healthcare availability to everyone, regardless of their income or employment status, then we’re total failures.

So we need to examine our priorities: It’s the insurance industry or it’s our health — we can’t have both, because the former ONLY THRIVES WHEN THEY DENY US THE LATTER. Do we provide healthcare, or do we facilitate the exploitation of human lives by the insurance industry? That’s what this is all about.

And then there’s the issue of workers’ rights. Businesses have a sort of bargaining wild card in that they can control whether or not you have health insurance. During any kind of negotiation for better pay (until they recently raised it, the Minimum Wage actually decreased in value, corrected for inflation, since the mid-1900s) or treatment or whatever else, a business can always threaten to take away employees’ health benefits.

Why should your boss have the power to decide whether you live or die? Whether you can get your cancer screening this month? Whether you can afford dialysis? And why should you be forced to stay at a job that’s unfair or unsafe or uncomfortable or that you otherwise hate just because if you leave, you might either a) not get health insurance at your next job, or b) not be able to get coverage after you lose your current plan because of a pre-existing condition?

And yeah, it’s easy to say “well I have insurance so why should I care?” but in this economy, maybe it’s a good idea to remember that no job is permanent.

So yeah, you might have health coverage right now, but that doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed it for the rest of your life. Under a single-payer healthcare system, you WOULD BE, whether you got laid off tomorrow or you were born with cancer or you just found out you have lupus or whatever else. And under our current system, that’s very much not the case. So why perpetuate it? Really, why?

Why pay deductibles? Why get less pay because your employer’s taking a cut out of it to pay for part of your insurance plan? Why pay for a service whose primary business model is to deny you that service?

Why?

So, yes, it really is “so hard to understand”. Especially when what you’re basically doing is condemning me and millions of others to death should we happen to not remain absolutely healthy until we hit our sixties and Medicare kicks in.

I completely respect your right to your opinions. I just don’t want them to kill me and tens of millions of other Americans is all.

Hope your job lasts forever, by the way. Good luck with that one. And if you do happen to get laid off or fired or too sick to work or your employer decides it has to cut back on your coverage or the myriad other things that can (and do, I’m sorry to say) go wrong, I really do hope that you and your then-uninsured family remain perfectly healthy until you can either find another job that offers health insurance or we can actually pass a plan that would guarantee you (and everyone!) healthcare.

Jabberwock

This was originally written in response to a Facebook post made by someone with whom I went to high school:

“God will never tempt you, Satan does. Will you choose to sin when you are tempted? Or will you turn away? God always offers a way out.”

And her subsequent response to my initial reply (which I’ll refrain from posting for the sake of brevity and because the rest of my response renders it redundant):

“I believe that there are demons (Satan) working against believers in Christ everyday. Satan knows when and where we are weak and will take every opportunity to attack. God has set eternity in hearts of man, and I believe that there IS more than this life. Revelations is VERY differnt than that of the rest of the bible..however it does reveal some about what is yet to come. Eternity of punishment=death=sin. Eternity in Heave=life=obediance…..

“Which is Which? Thats a battle believers in Christ struggle with everyday…Is this God speaking to me? or is it my flesh? (Sata) the deeper the relationship with Christ, the clearer it becomes..”

I liked my own argument so much that I wanted to share it with all of you. (Also, she appears to have deleted the entire thread instead of replying. Thanks, Sally. Guess that means I win the argument.)

I’ve modified it slightly for flow/conciseness/etc. Anyway:

The problem lies with authentication: How do you identify the tricks when you see them? If God is giving you some kind of signal, how can you be sure it’s not a forgery? That is, if Satan is truly cunning, it should be possible for him to fake God’s signature sometimes.

Everything gets so oversimplified that God and Satan are reduced from omnipotent or nigh-omnipotent super-beings to these caricatures that can barely pull off cunningness at the level of which humans are capable. It’s all cartoonish and blatant, like the depictions of Satan as a rascally pitchfork-wielding red guy, always causing childish and puerile mischief. But if he’s really such a threat as to necessitate this big, long battle over human souls — something some would argue is one of the most important things we could concern ourselves with — he HAS to be capable of tricking us into doing or believing just about ANYthing.

For instance, maybe Satan wrote the Bible, and every time someone worships the God depicted therein — a God who would commit genocide against humanity when it disgusted him, or who created two people with no sense of right and wrong and expected them to understand the significance of obeying rules and then punished not only them but every one of their descendants forever when they didn’t use the facilities that they didn’t actually even POSSESS until AFTER they’d eaten the apple — every time you align yourself with this petty, irrational, arbitrarily cruel entity, you’re worshiping the REAL Satan — the one who was so devious, so deceitful that he masterfully wove together this elaborate and effective framework of religion and faith, manufacturing and demonizing bogeyman opposition, so that people would eagerly throw themselves with the best of intentions and hopes right into his trap.

And sure, you can say “well I know the difference, I have the clarity that God has given me to recognize the truth”, but that’s exactly my point: How can you be sure? How can you know that that feeling you have, that understanding you feel you possess, is the genuine article and not just a forgery intended to keep you obedient to the REAL Satan?

Maybe the real trick is to get you to think that something is a trick when it’s not. Or that something else isn’t a trick when it is. And whatever clarity you might think you’ve attained is also just deception.

Jabberwock

This discussion came up recently and I wanted to share my thoughts on the issue.

Obviously, a woman should have the right to her own body and the right to choose whether a fertilized embryo or a fetus inside said body is actually carried to term or not or et cetera, regardless of what the father or elected representatives or anti-abortion protest movements would rather she do. It belongs to her, end of story.

This of course means that the father has absolutely no say in the matter. And rightly so, really, since again it IS her body, and the alternatives are either forcing a woman to carry to term a child she doesn’t want or forcefully and nonconsensually removing from her body a blastocyst/embryo/fetus that she does want, both of which are effectively worse than rape.

Anything less than giving a woman complete control over her body effectively removes her choice entirely, since there is no way that any kind of compromise can actually be achieved. And giving men equal say just because “it’s his baby too!” basically reduces everything to primitive property law that treated living things as belongings. We’ve evolved beyond that.

Given the inherent imbalance of the situation — which is (and I feel I need to stress this) as it should be, with the woman in complete control of the offspring until it leaves her body — there are certain factors we need to take into consideration. I’m referring specifically to a father’s parental obligation.

If we don’t allow a father to absolve himself of parental responsibility if his partner wishes to carry to term a child he doesn’t want, we’re forcing an individual who has absolutely no choice in the matter — and again, rightfully so — to be burdened with a (not in any sense trivial, and likely lifelong) responsibility for something that’s entirely another person’s decision. And while this isn’t by any means tantamount to forcing a woman to do something or have something done with her body that she doesn’t want, it’s still wrong. A different, substantially less severe level of wrong, yes, but wrong nonetheless. It’d be like if a person somehow had the legal authority to sign someone else’s name to a mortgage on a house they don’t want to live in.

Of course, in order for this to make sense, there needs to be an established structure with a reasonable window of opportunity for the decision to be made so that guys aren’t just bailing in the delivery room, and beyond that window absolution of responsibility would require the mother’s consent. I also feel that the action should be a matter of public record so that the guy can’t just go around ditching pregnant women without any potential future mates knowing about it. And of course there would need to be limitations on absolution in cases of frequent or repeat or multiple petitions for absolution, and it would be absolutely impossible for absolved fathers to regain parental responsibility/rights without the mother’s consent, etc, etc.

The thing is, if we’re truly working toward genuine sexual equality — which is what I’ve always believed the goal of feminism to be — then women can’t be the only ones with the right to decide whether or not they want or are ready for parental obligation or responsibility when a pregnancy arises.[1] There’s simply no other way of defining “equality” without, well… treating all equally.[2]

Further Thoughts:

I’ve seen arguments to the effect that giving fathers the freedom to absolve themselves of parental responsibility is effectively implicitly pressuring women into having abortions because they won’t be able to afford the baby on their own, and that this is just as bad as removing choice entirely.

But, well, a couple things:

a) If the only reason a woman has decided to carry to term and keep the baby is because she expects that she’ll be able to rely on the father to pick up part of the expense of raising the child, she probably ought to go with the decision she’d have made in the event he unexpectedly died. All this really does is force her to factor into her decision more possible contingencies (which should include things like unemployment, birth defects, death of the baby’s father, abandonment of the baby’s father, her own death, etc.) and change her mind accordingly.

It’s hard to buy “but more women might feel they have to have abortions if they take into account that they might end up having to raise the thing on their own than would if they remained ignorant to the possibility” as a valid point.

b) This argument could just as easily be made to support a law saying that no pregnant woman could ever be fired from a job or evicted from an apartment regardless of circumstance or context, because such a change in her situation could railroad her into getting an abortion, effectively removing her choice.

I’ve also seen arguments to the effect of “shut up until men have uteruses” and “if you’re not having it, you don’t get to decide”, which, well, are little more than just insultingly dismissive. However, I’d like to address a couple ideas, mostly in the forms of some questions I have:

a) If you support this concept, then how do you feel about women who carry to term with the intention of giving the subsequent baby up for adoption? Should they be able to do this? Why? Why do you feel fathers shouldn’t be allowed to do the same?

In a case where the mother carries to term with the intention of keeping it but then changes her mind after she delivers, and the father wants the baby, should the mother be able to absolve herself of parental obligation without the consent of the father? Should she be required to pay child support?

b) (A ridiculous hypothetical:) Let’s say it’s the future, and blastocysts/fetuses can be painlessly teleported from a woman’s body directly into a uterine replicator, which is a device that will bring the fetus to term outside a human body. Let’s say the transfer had to be made within one month of conception, and that a couple that had just accidentally conceived was unsure whether they wanted to actually keep it, and had it transferred into a uterine replicator before the deadline in case they did. Ultimately, the father decided to keep the child, but the mother doesn’t want it.

Should she be able to absolve herself of her parental obligation, or should the father be allowed to force her pay child support even though she wants nothing to do with the child and had absolutely no choice in whether or not it came into existence? Why?

[1] If this whole idea seems icky, by the way, or like it’s just deadbeats wanting to shirk responsibility, remember that there are plenty of guys who actually want to become fathers who still have no say in the matter when their partner chooses to terminate the pregnancy.

[2] And while we can’t actually treat everyone equally with regard to the pregnancy itself (and again, rightly so), we can treat everyone equally with regard to obligation to the pregnancy. That is, if a mother isn’t obliged to keep it (which, again, she shouldn’t be), then a father shouldn’t be obliged to either.

Jabberwock

For some reason, I just threw together a rough page for Some Kind of Advice Column or something. I seriously cannot fathom why I just did this, and can only vaguely remember even putting it together (I think I may have finally gone insane), but go ahead and ask away! I’ll try to help you with your problems! What the fuck?

Jabberwock

So, who here has interesting or entertaining stories about dealing with religious kooks of one variety or another? Did your parents join a cult? Have you gotten into a heated and serious argument with a fundamentalist only to find out to your embarrassment that they were actually schizophrenic? Were you ever forced to go to one of those “Gay Cure” camps? Did your religious friends put a bucket of holy water above the door and keep a priest or pastor handy so that they could baptize you when you walked in? Ever find a Chick Tract rolled up inside a condom? Any Catholics out there ever need the Heimlich because you choked on the communion wafer?

Well, I want to hear about it.

The best, most amusing (and most believable — and trust me, I’ll probably be able to smell bullshit when I read it) stories will be featured as posts (with all due credit, of course, plus a link to your website if you have one or a sketch of your favorite pony or whatever you want to accompany it). And, as with FMyLife and other such sites, don’t be offended if your story doesn’t make the cut.

For right now, e-mail them to me using the “Contact” page over on the left (or if you have an account on the site, log in and submit them as posts) — I’ll try to have some kind of form up by the end of the week.

Tell your friends. Seriously this time. I know some of you actually are, and I really appreciate it, but you other guys… it takes thirty seconds. Only slightly more time than it takes to *cough ahem* click an ad on the side of the page and then close the browser window *choke cough ahem*.

Speaking of telling your friends, only TWO MORE DAYS to the END OF MAY 5TH, the HOG CALL DEADLINE. I’m still 249,879 Twitter followers away from my goal! Let’s get on this shit!

Jabberwock

Via Dyna Moe.

Current Twitter follower count: 109.

COME ON, PEOPLE! SPREAD THE WORD! LET’S GET ME 250,000 FOLLOWERS BY MAY 5!

Jabberwock

If I get over 250,000 Twitter followers by May 5th, I’ll go out and actively try to catch swine flu, documenting my experience along the way. I might even go to Mexico! (The deadline is, after all, Cinco de Mayo.)

Tell your friends to subscribe to Twitter user jdcrowley. Details, logo, and marketing materials to come.

LET’S DO THIS. Only YOU can make this social networking/information distribution experiment work!

Current Twitter follower count: 102

Only 999,898 to go!

4PM Eastern Update: 105 Followers

4:16 Update Lowering the goal to 250,000 after it was pointed out that not even the great and powerful Sockington has 1,000,000 followers.

8:00 Update We have a logo of sorts! See how the body kind of forms an “H” and the head forms a “C”? Hog Call! It looks a lot better larger, but I can’t save it as anything but .png without losing the transparency and I can’t save .png at too great a dimension without it being enormous, file-size-wise. I’ll work on it.

Still only 105 followers — come on, people! Spread the word!

Jabberwock

Question, loyal readers: Should I go out and try to catch swine flu? y/n (Show your work!)

Jabberwock

Until this evening, I’d somehow been completely oblivious to the fact that there’s a transfer between the 7 and the E/V/G/F/etc lines at Roosevelt Avenue. This led me this morning to take the 7 to 23rd and do the annoying above-ground transfer to a Queens-bound E, and then hop onto the R at Roosevelt Avenue. Not only did this add probably ten or fifteen minutes to my total commute, but it also placed me in the presence of a man who was very eager to inform everyone on the train car via loud shouting that Jesus was forgiving enough to fix his life and give him a very nice Honda even though he’d condemned himself to hell by jerking off to the Spice Channel too often.

So that the other passengers on the train wouldn’t have to hear two people ranting, I decided not to argue with him over it, but I really wanted to ask him:

What does God get out of condemning people to hell?

Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot of Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen, mostly for the obvious reason that the movie just came out, but in part because I’ve been experiencing what I think is probably best described as a depersonalization disorder that occasionally leaves me feeling completely indifferent toward all life including my own. Not in a weird, depressing, troubling way or anything, and not all the time, but it’s provided me an interesting perspective on things.

Tonight, though, I realized something: Alan Moore isn’t exactly the best writer in human history by any stretch, yet Doctor Manhattan is a substantially better-written, more believable omnipotent character than the God of nearly all religious texts, especially the most widespread ones.

Christians especially love to dodge the complicated questions like “why are some babies born with no faces?” and “why do children get force-fed drugs and then raped by people they thought loved them?” with their explanation-de-deus-ex-machina “God works in mysterious ways” — we’re not SUPPOSED to know the way God’s mind works because he’s just such a COMPLICATED BEING with such an INCREDIBLE CAPACITY for KNOWING, and it’s IMPOSSIBLE for our LITTLE PEA MINDS to even BEGIN to fathom ONE IOTA of his OMNISCIENCE. Yet throughout the Bible, God is characterized as basically a human with the power to shape the universe — a being with human needs and desires and likes and dislikes. Were God truly omnipotent and omniscient, his mind would likely in no way come close to resembling that of a human.

Sure, some of it can be attributed to the imperfection of human language (as employed in the Bible) as a medium for losslessly conveying information, but it goes well beyond that. All the things God wants are just projections of things humans tend to want — love, respect, adoration, justice, punishment for those who get away with the nasty things they do to others, etc. He’s just a vessel for wish fulfillment. “They never caught the guy who licked my grandmother to death, but it’d sure be great if someone eventually got ‘im!” This is especially evident in the cultural stigmas depicted and the punishments that result. “Thar wussa WHOLE CITY fulla them FILTHY FAGGITS and’n GAWD dropped a buncha METEORS on it!” or “People were mean to each other, so God drown everyone but the nice, respectful folk!”

What would God get out of that? In fact, what would an omnipotent, omniscient being get out of even paying any attention to us at all? Regardless of free will, an all-knowing being wouldn’t likely be surprised by anything. (Well, unless their precognition was affected by tachyons, but presumably God would be immune.) One could argue that God might get a kind of “pleasure” out of it, but this assumes that God would have a need to somehow attain pleasure. Every reason we could possibly come up with for God to do any of the things he’s apparently supposed to do, to feel or need any of the things he’s depicted as feeling or needing, all rely on God basically having a human mind and body. When you look beyond the conditioning of our biology and our parents and our society, nearly everything we attach significance to is in itself meaningless.

With nearly everything we do, we do it because we’re programmed to in one way or another, and it’s ultimately insignificant on a long enough timeline, or compared to the complete scope of all movement in the universe. It’s important from our perspective, but to an outside observer — especially an omnipotent/-scient/-present one who wouldn’t be subject to the same drives and needs and effects of upbringing as we humans — our behaviors wouldn’t have the same importance. Even I can see this, and as much as I sometimes wish otherwise, I’m just a dumb, meaty human with my emotional reactions sometimes temporarily partially factored out of my observations.

Of course, there’s the whole “we were created in God’s image” argument, but even if you were able to ignore basically all of science, and then ignore the fact that humans can be radically different from their opinions to their behaviors to their feelings to their needs, it would only ultimately serve to contradict the argument that God’s mind is beyond ours.

So which is it? Is God’s mind unfathomable, and his actions therefore attributable to his unfathomableness, or is he jealous and needy and loving and desiring of unbalanced revenge for wrongdoers?

Jabberwock

CNN asked viewers, when I was in the airport the other day, how they would solve the Israel/Gaza crisis, with an e-mail address where you could send your response. The anchor said, in a completely unironic tone, “Hey, wouldn’t it be something if one of our viewers out there had the answer?” as though an e-mail response to a cable news network is going to somehow solve thousands of years of conflict in the region.

Wait, has it been thousands of years? I forget, with all this specious “BUT WHAT IF MEXICO WAS LAUNCHING MISSILES AT CALIFORNIA?!?” shittery, as though Israel did absolutely nothing — nothing, and it’s appalling that you would even imply it as a possibility — to warrant any kind of attack. I guess all our politicians and most of our conservatives here in America seem to think that all the conflict in that region began with Hamas launching those missiles.

It’s getting to the point where, as soon as I hear about U.S. politicians supporting something, my immediate response is to oppose it, just because they’re wrong nearly all the fucking time.

It’s weird how it’s gotten to be that any response — of whatever intensity — is always justified, as long as someone did something bad to us. Like that asshole Bloomberg:

Well, let me just phrase it for you something that’ll bring it home. If you’re in your apartment, and some emotionally disturbed person is banging on your door, screaming, ‘I am going to come through this door and kill you,’ do you want us to respond with one police officer, which is proportional, or with all the resources at our command? Just think about it in that context. There is no so such thing as a proportional response to terrorism. This is not something we are playing by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. People’s lives are at risk.

LET’S KILL HUNDREDS OF ARABS BECAUSE DOZENS OF ISRAELIS WERE KILLED! IT’S TOTALLY JUSTIFIED! THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PROPORTIONAL RESPONSE! NUKE THEM FROM ORBIT! IT’S TOTALLY JUSTIFIED!

I’m not saying by any means that Hamas is the best thing since sliced freedom, but everyone’s been treating this as such a one-fucking-sided issue, as though Israel is always already innocent of any wrongdoing in any situation, and that’s just ridiculous and wrong. Wrong. I don’t hate America (or, by extension, usually, for conservatives, Israel), I hate bullshit. This is a major reason the terrorists hate us: Because we unquestioningly support anything Israel does, and we treat any conflict there like it’s entirely one-sided.

[Aside: It's ironic, by the way: Religious fundamentalists tend to be so quick to claim that certain people "hate America", while at the same time talking about (but not actually living by) the idea of "hate the sin, love the sinner". Do they just not understand that you can hate what America does sometimes without hating America itself? Maybe it's because that expression tends to actually mean nothing to them, and they hate gays as much as homosexuality.]

In response to the CNN question, I have an idea for how we could possibly ameliorate the problem: Build a time machine, go back to World War II, and convince the U.S. government to allow Jewish refugees from Europe and the U.S.S.R. to settle here, so that Israel wouldn’t undergo such a massive population boom that effectively turned the Arabs living in the area into a minority underclass of prisoners.

Or, how about this: Everyone can stop giving a shit about this religious feud gone way too long into overtime, stop bombing each other, stop subjugating and oppressing each other, recognize that we’re all human beings, for fuck’s fucking sake already, and deal with all of this like an intelligent civilization.

Jabberwock

…because obviously it’s not overpopulation and the subsequent mass consumption of resources that’s going to endanger humanity, but about ten percent of the population not reproducing, many of them wishing to adopt unwanted children. Yeah. THAT’s the problem.

Somebody get this guy a freakin’ Nobel already!

Jabberwock

If our “mission” was ever to bring freedom and equality to the Middle East, we really should’ve started with Saudi Arabia instead of acting like they were our best pals. That place is arguably the most back-fucking-asswards place in the entire region. Any place that believes that women (in this case specifically, daughters) are effectively property is in dire need of a forceful drag into the twenty-first century, especially when the judges — the people looked upon by the country as bastions of legal wisdom — think that it’s a-okay for a nearly fifty-year-old man to marry an eight-year-old girl in order for her dad to settle some debts.

You can have all the judges and princes and SUVs and palaces that you want, but if you honestly feel this is in any way sensible, your civilization’s barely a step above clubbing things with femurs and fearfully hurling your own shit at thunderclaps. I mean, can you at least put in an effort to catch up with billions of people who don’t, for instance, think women need to be stoned to death for getting raped?

And don’t get me started on the fact that this story is actually not that far a leap from the original, traditional “Institution Of Marriage” that fundamentalists keep yammering on about, where it was more about women being property than anything else. There’s just so much wrong with everything that it nearly makes me physically ill.

I really don’t know how Christians can be swayed and converted by the fear of Hell’s torments when we already live in a world where this kind of shit happens. There’s little that could really be all that more terrifying than the myriad cruel and idiotic behaviors exhibited by the last several thousand years of humanity.

Jabberwock

From what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong because this is from an article I read about three years ago, there are a number of countries (like, if I recall correctly, Australia) in which United States automakers can’t sell many of their vehicles because we fail to meet emissions standards and other environmentally-concerned regulations. Of course, considering the recent focus on churning out an endless parade of SUVs, it’s hard to be surprised that many U.S. autos don’t do so well overseas.

In related news, hey, how’s that banking bailout working out? You know, with all that firm oversight to make sure the money gets spent as intended, and doesn’t allow healthy banks profit from the situation or anything crazy and corporatist like that.

Undoubtedly, we’re going to have to do something to keep the economy from collapsing, and the downfall of the American auto industry could be disastrous if we allow it to continue on to annihilation, especially when we’re already so economically vulnerable. But if we’re going to just hand over a blank check to the auto industry to do with as they please, they’re just going to squeeze out another batch of large, bland, gas-guzzling shitlogs, using the money to keep Business As Usual going long enough to stitch together some golden parachutes in time for all the executives to dramatically dive away from the violent collapse, maybe with some awesome slow-motion shots from multiple angles to really bring in those summer blockbuster crowds. All on Joe the Taxpayer’s dime. (No, no, different Joe — not Joe the Plumber. He doesn’t pay taxes, remember?)

I have my doubts we’ll get our $700 billion back from the banks within my lifetime, mostly because the guidelines that were supposed to make the whole thing rationally play out were either never really laid down or are alarmingly poorly enforced. I’m still of the opinion that we ought to have reclaimed the salaries and bonuses of CEOs of the banks that were the biggest failures from the last year or two in order to offset some of that loan, because if anyone should have to make sacrifices to get things back on track, it should be the people who fucked things up so much in the first place, especially if they were given millions or tens of millions of dollars at the time to not fuck up, but I digress.

What we need to do — especially after blundering it so badly with the banks — is adopt either of these approaches, if we have any intention of succeeding at all and not just giving up and saying “the hell with it” and tossing billions or trillions of dollars all over the place for anyone to do whatever:

A) Partial, temporary nationalization. This way, the taxpayers have effectively bought majority holding in the U.S. auto manufacturers in question, which among other things means keeping executives reined in and ensuring profits will directly pay back the loan. There are other benefits involved, but this is the gist of it.

B) Strict, extremely rigid guidelines, enforced to their fullest extent, that dictate precisely how this money can and cannot be spent, and how automakers must change their business strategies to be more competitive internationally. This means working damn hard to make vehicles that are more eco-friendly than ones available from foreign manufacturers so that they’re even a little bit competitive in places that actually give a fuck about not letting our species get wiped out a hundred years from now because DRILL BABY DRILL LET’S HAVE A FUCKIN’ PETRO-PARTY UP IN THE HIZZLE! COME ON OVER TO THE GAS PUMP GIRLS WE’RE GONNA HAVE US UP A WET T-SHIRT CONTEST! If we’re failing so hard to foreign automakers, perhaps we should be doing as they’re doing instead of charging headlong in basically the opposite direction, rolling out the 2009 Chevy Gigantor and shit. No, I don’t care if it can tow a dump truck full of depleted uranium — nobody fucking needs to do that. Also, slicing down the godlike pay and treatment of CEOs would probably help a bit.

Anyway, you can boo-hoo-blubbery-boo all you like about how privatization is the panacea for all the world’s problems and that anything even resembling socialism or regulation is The Great Satan, but when you consider that these banks and automakers fucked up pretty badly as private businesses and had leadership that could only be described as disgustingly corrupt and executive-pampering as private businesses, it’s hard to chirp the loving praises of how The Market is inherently pure and devoid of corruption and that it’s impossible for mismanagement and corruption to happen anywhere outside of government.

Yeah, some might claim that it was the government’s corporatist involvement in banks that led to that disaster, but a) well, that’s like saying “golly gee shucks, the banks just didn’t know what they were doing, paw!” and completely ignores the fact that lobbyists exist and that a lot of the corruption in government actually comes from private businesses, and b) deregulation would’ve had the very same effect — the only difference is that businesses wouldn’t have to use lobbyists to make sure their interests were secure, they could just do whatever they wanted without having to manipulate government first.

(Oh, and by the way, while I’m on the subject, you guys remember that whole crusade a few years ago to privatize Social Security by dumping it in the Stock Market? Take a quick look at the DJIA and the COMPX and get back to me on how well you think that would have turned out, especially over the last month or two. I only had $3k personally invested and I’m down to probably just over $1k, I can only imagine having my entire retirement savings tied up. I know someone who had $4 million in that they’d invested over the last couple decades, and they’re now down to a little over $1 million. Hard to see how “let’s privatize things even MORE” is really going to fix anything at all, considering, you know, plain, clearly-observable evidence and all.)

In any event, we have to do something to keep the economy from collapsing, so we can’t just ignore the banks and the auto industry, but unless that something involves strict government regulation and oversight or a kind of buy-out by the government resembling *gasp* socialism, then it won’t really help the economy much, we’ll never see our billions of dollars in “loan” money again, and the richest will use the opportunity to yet again get even richer at the expense of the remaining 99% of the country, who are all left to free-fall and crash because we were philosophically opposed to emergency brakes on elevators for some reason.

Jabberwock

In the 1950s and 60s, the top marginal tax rates were in the range of 70-90%. During this time, the average executive salary was roughly 50 times that of the average non-executive employee.

Today, the top marginal tax rates are somewhere in the mid-30% range, and the average executive salary is roughly 450 times as much as the average non-executive employee, with some making thousands of times more per year than the minimum wage.

In other words, the wealthiest in this country are making more than they ever have in the history of America, and being taxed less than they’ve been since the early 1900s. Yet they demand even more and to be taxed even less, whining incessantly about it like a bunch of needy crybabies, and somehow it’s the poor who are being unreasonable for wanting to earn a living wage. Somehow the poor are the problem, even though over that same time span from the 1950s, the minimum wage has actually decreased, from, as I’ve mentioned before, an average of around $6.00 in the 50s and 60s to an average of around $4.50 from 2000-2007 (in 1996 dollars).

Here’s a news flash for all you Libertarians and laissez-faire economists: The wealth has already been redistributed — to the people at the top, more and more every year, via the inherent power imbalance of business over employee. The wealth growth that should have benefited every American has been siphoned off by those with the clout to do so, and just because they had the opportunity and the power to leech wealth out of the system, that doesn’t mean they “earned” it, any more than a mugger “earned” the money he or she stole just because they had the right opportunity and were stronger and had better tools at their disposal than the person they robbed.

Financing social programs through taxes is just a way of attempting to remedy this grievous injustice (though, an imperfect solution; much better would be to tie executive salaries to those of the average employee — say, 70x as much — such that if they themselves want to make more money, they have to give everyone else raises as well), and is no more “theft” than returning a stolen car to its rightful owner. Anything less is simply welfare for those who need it the least, at the expense of those who need it the most.

Jabberwock