D is for Dangerous

Last weekend I spent a day at PantheaCon.  I couldn't afford to go to the whole thing, with having to work and all, plus I was feeling rather ambivalent about the "community" as present at the con, and running it.

To me it seems that the community has been taken over by the white-light tone police.  These are the people who admonish you if you post angry blogs, or swear, or point out problems, or are actually angry about things like cultural appropriation and fat shaming in paganism.  They "tsk, tsk" at your "outbursts" that they see as "dangerous" to the community.

"How dare you be angry!  No one will listen to angry people! You have to speak reasonably, with 'love' in your heart. Don't endanger the respect people have for us." is the message I hear in the pagan blogosphere.

Fuck. That. Shit.

If that's what I have to do to be considered part of your little white light, goody two-shoes, social norm enforcing, non-threatening community, then you can take your damned community and shove it up your "my shit doesn't stink" ass!

If we can't, or won't, listen when people are upset about stuff, but feel the need to silence them with tone policing to "preserve harmony", "not be dangerous" or some such bullshit, then I feel we have failed as pagans, as servants of the gods, and as people who can and will change the world.  If we value conformity and "niceness" more than we value truth and fairness, then we're no better than a bunch of Baptist hypocrites.

If that is now our community standard, the silencing of the aggrieved and marginalized until they learn to "talk nicely" about their issues, then we are as bad as the quasi-liberals who want peace and order more than they want justice and change.

If being listened to on the web or at a conference requires us to couch everything in terms of what is pleasing to others to hear, we are actually nothing less than unwilling to hear that which might make us uncomfortable.  Then we become just another "three monkeys" community, not magicians willing to examine ourselves and our lives.  That's the real danger, but people won't see that.

Oh, it's "acceptable" to "peacefully protest" environmental causes, as long as we aren't "angry" about it.  It's "acceptable" to protest the treatment of people who are other than us, like "the homeless", as long as we are "the calm voice of reason and peace".  Meanwhile, we ignore the real economic hardships withing the community, although maybe we'll contribute to a nicely worded Kickstarter. 

What a joke.

We have lost our fire in the rush to become "mainstream". We have lost our will to be angry and change things.  We have lost the ability to accept anger as a valid emotion, and allow it to have healthy outlets - and I don't mean silencing it and trying to meditate it away.  We have become a "respectable" minority, always speaking in uplifting, reasonable words, and have lost our fire and heart.

We. Have. Lost. Our. Soul.

I would challenge people in the pagan blogosphere to write one blog post where they were passionately angry about something, where they saw an injustice that was so totally outrageous that they would swear and rage about it.  Gods only know there is plenty in our world to be angry and outraged about.  Find it, and say it.

Tell the tone police to go fuck themselves, and find your voice again.  Save our community from the "calm voice of reason" and forced cheerfulness.  Post a good, solid rant. Be dangerous.

Supply Side Wreckonomics

When the suppliers are the favored party in the economic transaction, even to the point of benefiting from individual taxpayer largess (by not having to pay their fair share of the cost for the infrastructure within which they do business), they end up controlling the economic playing field. When they do, the power in the system flow to the heirarchial heads of those fictitious persons called corporations. Sole proprietorships are unable to compete in such a scenario, because the barriers to entry are actually *raised* by the existing corporations - minimum orders, availability and prohibitive cost of insurance, and other market pressures.

Soon this ends up with a few giant, vertically integrated conglomerates deciding what and how much to produce where, and how much they will sell it for. The fact that these corporations now also decide the prevailing wages for everyone (hint: as low as possible) they will soon produce things that can only be afforded by a few, unless bought on credit from the central company bank. The amount of choice and customization will go down (you can have any color of computer you like, as long as it's white) and this will be touted by the corporate propaganda mills as a fashion statement.

Sounds like communism with a veneer of market doublespeak to me. Manufacturing already takes place in low wage gulags, and if the wages rise it gets moved to somewhere that the wages are lower and the conditions are harsher. Supply side cheerleaders within our government want to do away with the minimum wage and make child labor legal again (to "stop discrimination against the young", but they want to pay them lower "trainee" wages.) Sounds like 1920s sweatshops bullshit to me. The pee party want to bring it all back in the name of libertarianism.

So we are in the middle of stupid tax-cutting on the rich, government job cutting on the middle class, and creating lots and lots more poor with cutting off unemployment benefits, reducing food aid, and cutting medical assistance. The last, I guess, they hope will solve the problem of the poor once and for all - they'll just die and not mess up their spreadsheet world any more.

They want a total buyer's market on labor, a seller's market on goods, and the profits all flowing to the vaunted, elite few who "worked hard for it" - read that as being born rich into the right family with the right schools and the right connections. The "self made man" is a myth

What's worse, is they want all this on the backs of the taxpayers of America - the people who built the schools that trained their idea people, the people who paid for the roads that they haul their supplies and finished goods along, the people who paid for the water system, the power grid, the police, the fire department that keeps their buildings safe, etc. They don't want to pay their share, as stockholders sucking profits out of the system, or as corporations that use the roads, the water, the air, the land, and the educated workforce without paying it forward.

You know what they call such things? Parasites.

I heard Michelle "Batshit" Bachmann bleating the other day about "Job Creators, blah, blah". Problem is, after a decade of tax cuts and more tax cuts, they have only *shed* jobs, not created them. Every time we cut taxes, employment seems to drop more. Jobs creators my ass - they are sending it all into the corporate officers' and major shareholders' pockets. The ratio of CEO to bottom employee pay has gone up, not down. That's what tax cuts give you: greed for MORE.

Tinkle down economics is a failed theory. We have 30 years of proof that human nature is for the rich to always want to be richer, and thus keep more and more of the money, not spend it on creating jobs or making purchases. When they say "A rising tide lifts all boats", you have to realize that you don't make the tide rise by giving the rich guy a bigger boat with more water storage. You have to taken the stored water off of the rich guys barge and put it back in the sea.

So, 'supply side economics' seems like 'centrally planned production', with the suppliers (corporate oligarchs) deciding what to make, where make it, how little to pay the workers, where to sell it, and who to sell it to. The consumers just become a passive proletariat, manipulated by advertising pitches targeted on their income+borrowing ability and psychological weaknesses, kept in hock and enslaved to the corporation by debts that not even death allows him to shed. Should the consumer fall from grace, and lose his job because someone else will do it cheaper, he will still be marketed, but also stigmatized, called "not ambitious enough", "lazy", druggie", "stupid", "too picky" until he takes his life and his children inherit his debts.

These are the glories of "pure" capitalism according to the GOP.

Fuck that shit.