Capitalism Rocks

At times I wonder if my lefty ways have been a mistake.
Pretty much everybody says that capitalism is the only
route that is concordant with human nature.  You might
imagine that’s just using an Appeal to Nature, so it’s
lightweight thinking.  But it has a deeper truth.

For how can we motivate anyone to do anything without
obstacles to overcome in the form of poverty, and with-
out the rewards of bourgeois creature comforts?  Life is
less meaningful without real travails, without a metric for
success.  That’s what capitalism gives us, and I’m grateful.

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Capitalism, Heaven, and Hell

It is said without the threat / promise of heaven and hell, humans would have no reason to be moral. Worse people than I have pointed out the flaws in this. Standup comedians, skeptics, and more. One: laws and society enforce moral norms – not religion by itself. Two: if you need divine law to keep you from committing rapes and murders, you should probably seek counseling. Humans care for each other; it’s what social animals do.

It is often said that without capitalism, there would be no motive for labor, for innovation, for anything besides laziness. If you need greed and the suffering of others to motivate your every labor, you should probably seek counseling.

There are a million good motivations to labor that have nothing to do with the carrot of wealth or the stick of poverty. Again, caring for each other. It’s what social animals do, and what we could do a lot more effectively, if our lifeblood wasn’t being congealed into the foundations of castles.

Besides that, leisure. You work to minimize labor, conserve energy and resources so you can enjoy life. Building a house keeps out bears and keeps in heat. Less labor and resources spent building fires every night and guarding against bears. Let the fucking robots take our jobs, we shouldn’t need as many jobs in this world.

And there are plenty of jobs that need doing that are being left undone because they don’t generate gold bricks for the aristocracy. So much human need, infrastructure, education is being left to rot or straight burned to the ground right now in the name of greed.

Kudos for achievement, looking good, pride of accomplishment, basic executive function for self-maintenance. What are your reasons to labor? They don’t have to be dollars and cents or the fear of the economic abyss.

Belief in hell is one of the chief moral failings of the abrahamic religions. Belief in the necessity of poverty is the exact same fucking thing. Fuck capitalism.

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Cat Owner Question

I’ve always had cats, but haven’t always been very observant of how they interact. About ten years ago I noticed a certain annoying behavior for the first time – neck biting. It’s obvious enough it’s some kind of dominance move, but it looks totally rude, and I usually feel compelled to break it up. Stop biting your sister, Hecubus!

But then, it has occurred to me this might be bad. Do they need to reinforce their social status on the regular? Is the dynamic different with more than two cats? What should one do? Any experts out there?

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Exeunt Satans

Motherfucker, I think I ate like a square inch of aluminum with that Chipotle burrito just now. I can’t like, anything maaan.
the "guess I'll die" meme
Apparently I got bone spurs too.  Got one foot in a boot.  My department manager says “You gonna get those things removed?” and I’m like, “Why would I wanna do that?”  If frogs can erupt their bone spurs for intraspecific combat, so can I.

Just… fuck it, man.  Fuck it.

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Feet are Weird

In other news, I am not high. Or maybe the reason I don’t have to smonk big weed is that I think stoner thoughts all the time. So. Feet are weird. I’m doing a 3d art project for someone and when you think about us as the apes we are, our hind paws are extremely weird. What wild-ass ape decided to walk like this, got all her gente on board, and resulted in that wedge-shaped stiffened clumsy nonsense of an extremity?

I normally don’t have a problem with feet – the way they look and whatnot – but I know a lot of people who dislike them. And we all know there are people with an erotic interest in them. Love or hate, they’re charged. What do you think about feet? Whatever you think, you gotta admit. Feet are weird.

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Una Pregunta sobre Chicharrónes

Content Warning: Food, Meat, Diet Talk.

Aviso de tema: la comida, el carne, hablar de dietas.

My Spanish is still egregious, but I have a question about chicharróns. Not the pork rinds you get out of a bag at the grocery store. The kinda crazy carved off hard fried chunk of a pig you get at the carniceria. You know, looks like a foot long two inch thick strip of bacon?

I just had one for the first time today and it was everything I dreamed. It was like a pig fat sandwich where the bread was strips of tasty corkwood. Eldritch culinary ecstasy. Now my question, for those of you whose cultures consume those things: How often are they to be eaten? Is it like a fair food, where you only eat one or two strips a year? Or is it something one might eat once a week? Or every day?

Coming as an outsider / total gringo, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this freaky magic food. Diet culture would have me avoid it altogether, but fuck that shit. I’m curious what the people who invented the recipe have to say.

Mi español todavía es atroz (gracias por duolingo y translate.google), pero tengo una pregunta sobre los chicharrónes. No los chicharrónes de una bolsa en la tienda de comestibles. Un poco loco tallado en un pedazo de cerdo frito en la carnicería. ¿Sabes, parece una tira de tocino de un pie de largo y dos pulgadas de grosor?

Solo tuve uno por primera vez hoy y fue todo lo que soñé. Era como un emparedado de grasa de cerdo donde el pan era tiras de bosque de tapón sabroso. El éxtasis culinario y misterioso. Ahora mi pregunta, para aquellos de ustedes cuyas culturas consumen esas cosas: ¿con qué frecuencia se deben comer? ¿Es como una comida feria, donde solo comes pocos por año? ¿O es algo que comer una vez a la semana? O todos los días?

Viniendo como un extraño / gringo total, no sé lo que se supone que debo hacer con esta extraña comida mágica. La cultura de la dieta me haría evitarla por completo, pero a la mierda. Tengo curiosidad por saber qué dicen la gente que inventaron la receta.

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Worried About My Circuses

Bread and circuses. I can eat – housing costs have been the real enemy of well-being in the USA – so I got bread covered. And circuses are OK, but the economy has hurt my ability to get out to every one of them. I missed Wonder Woman this summer, only got to see Spiderman once, as much as I liked it. But Hollyweird is losing money, and that means it’s about to get crappy.

It’s gonna get crappy because detached billionaire corporate fuckos always take the wrong lesson from travail, change the wrong things. I don’t mind them working smarter with the budget, reducing the level of detail in the spectacle some. I’m betting they could be less shit with how they advertise too. We don’t need saturation advertising to remember to watch something like Guardians 2, come on.

No, they won’t get smarter. They’ll just panic and pander to China harder. Maybe make Chris Pratt a personal slave to Xi Jinping for a week, suck off some party officials, include giant subplots about how the sino-socialist wage slave system makes Stark tech awesome. Nobody committing suicide at the iron man suit factory, pay no mind to the giant nets.

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Why Do Diseases Hurt Us?

It seems like the ideal way to be a parasite is to allow your host animals to proliferate and be well. The healthier the host, the more nourishment they can provide the parasite. So I have a few questions for those in the know:

Why do virii and bacteria harm us, when they’d be better off if we were healthy?

Are there any truly harmless parasites in the average human? The mites in eyelashes seem pretty chill.

As I think of it, some diseases can only spread if the host coughs, sneezes, or vomits, but is that the reason for all of it? A sexually transmitted disease that negatively affects one’s sexiness seems like it should be very unlikely.

To wax Agent Smith-ish for a moment, humans seem to be demolishing the planet on which we depend for life. It’s an instinctive race to grab the most resources that has produced economic and political systems that remove all guilt and forethought, do nothing but grease the slide into hell.

Are parasites doing the same? Does life clamor its way into these overly-successful dead ends every time? Is the cycle of mass extinctions a natural mirror of our boom-bust economics? I don’t know. But I do know this: Nature sucks. Nothing more to add, today.

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The American Bastille

The current system of AmeriKKKan slavery is conducted through the prison industrial complex. That’s a system of Bastilles long overdue for a smashing. This Bastille day, nearly at an end here in the continental USA? Not the moment. But it will come.

Wish I had something more to say on this. I add sentences and subtract them. It’s all just words for their own sake. The point remains simple: Destroy AmeriKKKan prisons. Free the slaves now.

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On Mother’s Day

Today as I was in a drive-through to get breakfast, I saw a crow get its breakfast. Right in front of me, just as I was saying something nice about crows (I’d recently seen one using a proper tool and it warmed my heart), a crow flipped a sub-adult pigeon off the roof and started pecking it to death slow like. Up on the roof, a mother watched its child murdered. Portentous?

The driver of the car was herself a mother, and more upset by the scene than I was. Dismal business, if natural on all accounts.

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