doubleVee - Songs for Birds and Bats

Oh the left kind of people are the right kind of people with the right kind of people jumping through the loopholes... 

EO: merry day after Christmas, Bottle. 

B: merry day after christmas to you too! 

E: you sound suspiciously happy. 

B: that's because you're suspicious. You should be, of course, but not to the point where you lose objectivity and argue for the opposite of what you actually want. What do you want, Skip? 

E: i... uh... ummagumma, i don't know. 

B: great! 

E: it doesn't feel great. It feels terrible. I hate it. 

B: then stop not knowing what you want. Here, i'll give you an example. I'm remembering the future when you give me a Boxing Day present and i'm super happy because it's music and i get to listen to it. It could be great, it could be terrible, but in my experience nothing is as terrible as people say it is or think it will be. I want to move past that, not dwell on it. So, i do what i have to do and then enjoy it. I also want to finish this book, but it's tough because i don't have any control over how the plot unfolds. The Republicans might win and Aidvantage (who ever the hell they are) will jack up my 200k to whatever number suits them. The Democrats might win and stick me with the income tax on 200k which is still some ridiculous 5 digit number that i can't pay. Either way i lose my decade of hard work scrambling back to zero. Biden's administration extending the moratorium on collection and interest is the only possible logical choice given that the House and Senate won't compromise and do both. So yeah, he's doing a great job as far as i'm concerned. 

As for the broader Left/Right thing, it's all still right-wing. All this junk on my facebook feed is total nonsense. Conservatives are trying to conserve who the hell knows what because they don't ever actually tell you what they are trying to conserve. Traditional institutions? Which ones are those? Economic liberty? For whom? Competition? What are we competing for? 

How do you expect to conserve the Leftist ideas this country was founded upon by championing the Rightist ideas that most everyone agrees corrode them into a pile of unusably rusty parts on the courthouse lawn? 

The key to understanding this quite frankly terrible situation is to take a step back and remember that you are not a person. You are a number and a vector. If your number is getting bigger in the positive direction you get a lot of leeway and permissivity. That's it. That's Capitalism. But remember, it's a double sided coin. Why is the death sentence called "capital punishment?" 

That's morose, but we have to understand what we're really talking about. The concept of Capitalism only exists inside an industrialized society in relation to ownership of the means of production, aka the physical factory, equipment, and resources used in the process of the technologically assisted manufacturing of goods for mass consumption and monetary profit for the owner. If the owner hands us as little money as possible, and we hand back as much as they can possibly charge, then we are poor and the owner is doing a bad job of running the economy. 

S: then what is anybody supposed to do? 

B: that's not my job. Do what you do. Remember when i suddenly stopped imagineering you last Summer? Well, it means we switched to a mutually beneficial relationship where i only drag you into my thing when i need your help. Remember when i had to go find Bridbrad 'cause we needed money to keep GREGORY occupied and he ended up being the narrator? Remember when Skip freaked out so i just let him get lost and in the end we both agreed he was happiest just fixing the typos? I keep running full steam into the quitting wall, but i still wake up tomorrow and keep trying. Why? Well, showing the actual struggle of being stuck in the middle is important to me, and i want people to see the actual system exert its annoying brain damage on me. 

What is it that's really happening? What are the rules of the game i have no choice but to play? Here they are: 

1) my next 200,000 is already spoken for. If i win the metaphorical lottery i will pay it all now and be done. If i keep going status quo, that 200k turns into 400k by the end. There's an Auditor who very much wants that 400k to become reality, but there's this amazingly impervious force field that prevents that Auditor from succeeding. Inside that forcefield i have an entertainment budget of $50 per paycheck. I use it to buy records and entertain us all by listening to them and writing about it. But, every paycheck i decide whether or not to do that. Sometimes i don't spend the whole 50, sometimes i use it for something more important, sometimes i offer it up to help pay for things other people want to do. The point here is that either way it puts me farther behind. Helping you hurts me. I have to micromanage my brain and only consume what helps me keep doing it. If i beg for money you all think I'm a greedy little weasel and point out there are people much worse off than i am. If i point out that there are people much worse off than i am then people with more money than me scold me for being a lazy loser trying to destroy their hard earned wealth. That's a lose lose lose situation. 

Normally there are only two loses in that idiom, but i'm a stickler for accuracy. If i give up i lose, if i keep going i lose, and if i lose then everybody loses. These aren't my rules, and this isn't my game. 

Will they come up with a tolerable solution before that first payment is due in June? Will they do yet another 6 month extension? Dunno, i'm not in charge of anything and i'm not the one injecting the profits from cutting corners and filing fraudulent insurance claims into high-risk investments to avoid paying taxes. The government doesn't DO anything, it manages the process of paying for it and tries to make sure we get what we paid for. Individuals hiding behind corporate loopholes are draining the money supply and convincing otherwise good people to cheer them on for doing it. Individuals are terrible at making economic choices for other people and a rich guy is about the worst possible choice. 

Which brings me to the cream cheese shortage. Here's a great copy and pasted synopsis: 

"What caused the cream cheese shortage? 

The shortage started when Schreiber Foods, a major cream cheese producer in Green Bay, Wisconsin, shut down for several days in October after a cyber breach. Other companies stepped up production to fill the void, including Kraft-owned Philadelphia, but it wasn't enough. [6 days ago]." 

Spin that however you want, i guess, the point is that competing corporations under private management aren't capable of meeting total demand in a crisis, and at the same time people care way more about being able to buy cheap industrially homogenized cream cheese than supporting local farmers and creameries or being able to produce their own cream cheese if they love it so much. It's lovely stuff, but it's not exactly the end of the world or the difference between a whole town staving. Tons of people don't eat cream cheese at all, ever. 

I think the underlying issue is that specialization and monopolization of production exacerbates the catastrophes of completely normal everyday "shit happens." It's not like i can call 4 friends and get it loaded on a truck in Wisconsin any faster, now can i? "Cyber Attack Destroys Big Dairy, Tucker Carleson Blames Nose Piercings." I need to go get chicken food because i forgot to last Friday. That's much more important to me. 

What does any of this have to do with early 20th-century Soviet Socialism? As Sandra pointed out, i'm not the one bringing it up, I'm just weighing in on the subject because it's a philosophical topic i happen to know a lot about and i can tell when you're spouting nonsense you yourself don't understand. Misconstruing those arguments is a very lucrative business because most people don't understand the crucial distinction between bureaucracy itself as an exploitative economic class and the more honest but naive (dare i say stupid) anachronistic metaphor of a fast forward button. Insanely wealthy people would rather spend their money endorsing political candidates than paying regular people to do anything, so that must mean they get way more profit that way. 

Now, what is my inflammatory polemic? I argue that if it looks like a fish and smells like a fish then it's a fish but probably well past its best if eaten by date. If you want to walk around spouting vomit inducing levels of propaganda while citing Leftist philosophers in the name of Rightist Capitalism and arguing that the modern working class is being exploited by big corporations who elected a government to  give handouts to the displaced lazy masses, then you look indistinguishable from what you yourself call a Communist. 

Come to think of it, our privatized prison system of forced labor, with a dramatically large population of petty criminals and drug offenders as an economic instrument is pretty darned Communist, not to mention the Japanese internment camps. Is that one of those "traditional institutions" you guys keep mentioning? I can't justify any of that from either direction. Remember, my non-ideological ideology is founded on aphorisms and questions like "if you kill me i'll be dead," and "why do you keep demanding i lie to you?" Of course forced labor is dramatically less productive than free labor. Of course "work or die" is a slogan we instinctively reject. It's the same amount of terrible from either direction. 

And now we're right back to slavery and our own Civil War, with Marx firmly on the abolitionist side of that equation. That hums right along and we finally get to the early 20th century and what an amazing coincidence, Lenin is doing his thing at the same time the Southern Democrats are migrating to the Republican party. Did you know Strom Thurmond was a Democrat until 1964 when Civil Rights became a real political issue and he just couldn't support that so he switched to Republican? 

I know, i know, this is getting to be too much. I'm trying to get there, just a little bit more. 

What is a record label? A record label is a Capitalist. It invests in your already successful musician business (aka loans you money) so that you can make a ridiculously expensive recording that it can sell for its own profit. It owns the process of making and distributing records, divides it up into small tasks that any chump can do if they are a hard worker, and sells it to people who want to listen to it. 

E: hold on, i thought only factory owners were Capitalists. 

B: true, we're well into the two volumes of Kapital assembled after Marx was dead as a doornail. Capitalists are like Jenga, they keep pulling a piece out from the bottom and delicately stacking it on top. 

C: what about record store owners? Are they Capitalists? 

B: glad you asked. No. Those are what we call merchants. See how the component parts separate and become independent parts of the larger corporate structure? 

Pretty soon it gets to the point where people are buying the entire corporate structure, then that gets too big and they sell bits and pieces of that massive investment back to the general public so that everyone owns your work and no one can profit from it. 

S: that's terrible. 

B: yes. Everyone agrees that's terrible, no one can find any proof that Marx is wrong in his description of the illogic of Capitalism. Instead, what they do is intentionally sabotage the process at some point where they get to keep the fairly calculated profit from their initial investment and hand off control to the newly separated subsidiary. Sometimes they fire people, close a small factory, buy another subsidiary to drain their surplus, give it to charity, buy New Zealand citizenship, take a rocket into space, wrap a Lamborghini around a tree, etc., but mostly they just collect their royalties and act important. Why? Because what possible reason do they have to care? 

The answer is that they care very much about their own liberty and autonomy at the expense of everyone else. So, what do i want to do? I want to be real. 

I want to publish stuff, read, listen, make music, have an audience, sell things, fund other peoples' albums, learn new things. I want to have a life, not just serve a mind-numbing function in somebody else's idea of greatness. 

Was there a moral to this story? I doubt it, i'm not known for doing that at all. I am known for just letting my brain wander, so this time i think i delivered the goods. 

So, every thank i can possibly muster to doubleVee for creating Songs for Birds and Bats and autographing my copy "for BOTTLE." I absolutely love it. Apologies for dragging you into this mess of a post-Christmas rantathon ;)