Sounds like a big topic, it’s not really.
For my sins/virtues/one reason or another, I have travelled at lot of the world, and lived in a lot of countries, and they were all quite diverse, so it wasn’t like spending some time in the UK, the US, Oz, where the cultures all had a common root.
I have also seen life from many levels, from literally the millionaire lifestyle to the other extreme, where you went for a month trying to avoid all human contact of any kind and if you eat anything two or three times a week you were doing OK, and what you eat was not a meal, but a bland all one thing to fill your gut, think plain rice or pasta, and, much in between, the insides of various cells etc.
Drugs and alcohol, yes, have played with those extensively for extended periods at ridiculous daily doses too, and they have played with me, friends often make comments about myself and Hunter S Thompson having a lot in common, I doubt that, but I’ve read his shit and can directly relate to a lot of his experiences.
I say all this for one reason and one reason only, you have to know where a guy has been (in life) to know where he is coming from (in attitudes) and thus know what weights to give anything he says.
You know what I am going to say, you know where I come from, you can put these two together and then make further allowances for the differences between thee and me, and come up with the truth as you would have seen it, had you been there.
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The Welfare State.
I’m sat in a prison cell with another guy discussing this, and he tells me social security is not security for the individual, it is security *for* society *from* the individual, it means that the thief has ZERO defence for stealing from you, he has no need to, in order to live.
Somewhere along the line we lost our way on this one, single skank ho mommies make more “take-home” nett than I do before taxes, and not being economically productive, they do nothing for the state, nor do their offspring, parasites one and all… this is not what “social security” was meant to be for.
Abolishing this excess means abolishing all the state employees who have a job doing the paperwork to dole out this excess, and they are the stumbling block, not the skank ho single mommies, they have no political power.
I can say for myself that my life would have taken a different path if the UK in the past 30 years was not such a soft welfare state, I don’t know if it would have been a better or worse path, I do know it would have been different, and remarkably so, not just a little bit.
I know from my own experience that *surviving* in the physical sense takes very little resources, just some food two or three times a week, the problem is to get ahead in society you need an address, and a place to wash and wash your clothes, and a place to store clean clothes and other basic possessions.. I know of several in their fifties single guys whose possessions fit into a couple of plastic trash sacks who live in one room bedsits, it’s enough to stay warm and dry and get the occasional temp or contract job and keep the cycle going.
If you don’t own an electric heater you don’t use much electric, you bundle up to stay warm.
Skank ho single mommy living off the state does not just live a better life economically than me, she does this AS WELL AS having enough surplus to support 2/3/4 kids.
My own “hard times” are a great leveller, it is really, really, really fucking hard for me to get depressed when I can walk out to the kitchen and see 3 x 750g tins of instant coffee, a couple of kilos of proper coffee, brown and white sugar, milk, and electric to do it all with a kettle, filter coffee machine and proper expresso machine, there is food in the freezer, 36 bog rolls and a dozen bars of soap in the bathroom, gas for hot water, gas for heating and cooking, and a warm and dry bed to sleep in.
Not going anywhere near anything else, just those basics, I can take a shit or make a coffee and smile at myself because there were plenty time in my life where either one was impossible… the glass is half full…
The welfare state was never intended to provide a better standard of living (with more job security) than a working stiff (me) could gain by doing a steady 40 hour a week job. The fact that it does (for skank ho mommies and the faux disabled) is not a fault of the welfare state. It is a fault in implementation.
It hasn’t been gamed by the single moms, so much as by the whole new departments that are needed once you start paying single moms to be single moms.
The fix is simple, just one rule, no exceptions, each adult over 18 is entitled to 50 quid a week for housing and 50 quid a week for everything else. Paid weekly, in cash, if you can’t be bothered to go and collect it on the day and time stated, then you don’t get it.
But what about the children, well, if you can’t feed or house them you can, if you choose, give them up to the state, for good. Or they can starve to death, or you can rent them out to paedos, or anything else you like, but you do NOT get rewarded financially for having them, and you do NOT get to blackmail the state with their welfare, you had them, your problem.
The welfare state will still serve its basic function, perfectly, as described to me most excellently by that man in that prison cell.
Nationalised Industries
Yeah, I know all the arguments, but it is the same as the welfare state, if it is kept lean and mean, and no empire building is allowed, nationalised industries can beat everything else into a cocked hat.
Obviously the old soviet system where there were state owned factories making shit like toothbrushes is one very bad extreme, the other very bad extreme is where everything is privatised, but it is illegal to opt out…
Of course we are always, without exception, talking about infrastructure, a national power grid, all working at the same voltages and frequencies, a national rail grid, all running at the same gauge, curve radii and so on, a national road network, with standardised sign-age and which side you drive on, a nationalised water and sewerage system.
Nobody argues that a nationalised weights and measures system is bad, because it isn’t, there are no downsides to it, and again, like the welfare state, it is this extreme that nationalised industries should be aiming for, not the other extreme, which is what the British NHS is today, 1 in 60 of the entire population of men women and children in the country is working for the NHS, the biggest employer on the planet with 1.4 MILLION employees… a minimum of a million of them should be sacked…. people talk about “if kalifornia was a country” well, the NHS is a country, in the economic sense, and a fairly fucking big one, within a country (the UK), and this is NOT what a nationalised industry should ever be.
Oh look, shades of the welfare state, whole departments springing up out of nowhere, to cater to all sorts of people who were NEVER the original intended recipients of the service. Gastric band on the NHS, boob job on the NHS, fertility treatment on the NHS, the list is almost endless.
Education
There is really no point, you are either already expecting the same answers as the above, and you’d be right, or you are not expecting the same answers, in which case you are part of the problem.
In my own lifetime the budgets expended on education and the number of people employed directly or indirectly in education has grown like the fission of bacteria, and yet the mean standards of education delivered to each child have utterly collapsed, and ironically they have collapsed so far that the vast majority of children leaving school today are too dumb to even realise just how fucking exceptionally dumb they are, rural farm hands in the 1800’s able to compose and write stuff (George Loveless) that is beyond even the capabilities of the current pupils teachers, make no impression if the children are never shown what the rural farm hands wrote… and have that “I don’t understand what he is saying” moment, eg you cannot speak English as well as a man born in 1797, who was a ploughman, eg spent all day looking at a horse’s ass, trudging behind it one furrow at a time.
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There is a direct analogy here, if you lack anything except the most basic programming knowledge, not only can you never write a program of any complexity, you can’t understand a program of any complexity either, you just have to take it on faith, or not, that the program is giving accurate and truthful answers.
You might see the difference between GTA-V and this, but you won’t know how or why.
To be sure, these lacks of knowledge don’t matter much when the real person, “AfOR”, plays the virtual character “poop” (cos it’s easy to type) in Skyrim, but what if you ARE “poop” and it IS real life(TM), which is the direct analogy.
You’re fucked, totally and utterly fucked, beyond all possibility of redemption.
Note the similarities between all three things above, all of them, in and of themselves, are laudable things that work well when first implemented or when pared down to the basics, but as soon as we get “fat” and get enough surplus for parasitic empires and ecologies to grow and thrive within these host structures, the whole things starts to go to shit.
The problem is not, never has been, and never will be, these basic things, and you cannot make them evil by giving them a dirty name like socialism, you are missing the fucking point and labelling the wrong thing with the wrong label.
You are looking at someone with the early stages of cancer, screaming CANCER!!!!, and shooting them in the head, you threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
In this, you are doing the bidding of the bathwater, which held a gun to the baby’s head and said you ain’t taking me without killing the fucking baby first asshole.
Because you lack the coding skills to see the differences between BeamNG and Cryengine3, sure, you can see the differences on screen, but you are being asked to select one set of code over another here, and you lack the coding skills, and this tactic works, you do not see that the person or institution presenting you with this choice IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM, so you just call it all socialism or conservatism or liberalism or libertarianism or spaghettimonsterism, and become part of the problem, in gaming terms, you become the NPC, the non player character, you are just there to make the static backgrounds look animated.
And this is BY DESIGN.
George Loveless was born in rural Dorset it 1797, and grew up to stare at a horse’s ass all day ploughing a single furrow, but, he did have a basic education, English and Maths, and he then went out and used that as a foundation to educate himself.
The fucking OBSCENITY that is the western world in 2014 is that the majority of the population have access to the libraries and the internet and the people who do know something, and do sweet fuck all about it.
Yeah, there are guys who because of distance can only connect to me via the internet, so they use me as some sort of learning resource, and I’m not knocking that, but I sit here, qualified time served engineer, lots of world experience, workshop out back with mills lathes welders compressors oscilloscopes bench power supplies IT stuff up the wazzoo and you name it, and a fairly decent education to boot, and you know how many people in real life ask me to teach them how to do X?
None.
None this year, OK, the year is young so far.
None last year.
None the year before.
None the year before that.
None the year before that.
None the year before that.
Now I know none of the guys on the net who use me as a learning resource live close enough to me to do any different, but you live close enough to some fucker, y’all just gotta go out and find them.
And no, they are not going to pay YOU to teach you any shit, or go looking for you, or make any offers to you… we all been bit by that one before.
Or you can sit there and pump iron and play battlefield4 and empty your balls into the odd skank ho and kid yourself you are a survivor, when you’re just one of the “beautiful ones” (search this blog) as discussed previously…. because you aren’t growing and expanding your knowledge and skills.
I’m in my fifties and this time last year I knew dick about Cisco, for example, and compared to the guys who do know Cisco I still know dick, like the coding example given above, however I know enough, I LEARNT enough, to learn a new skill, a new job, a new employer, a new salary.
Got to tell you guys, Debbie Meaden was right on that one, “If I’ve learned anything during my career, it’s that if you sit at home doing nothing, … nothing is exactly what will happen”
The State has abandoned, completely, the idea of teaching anyone anything, you are on your own, literally, as you never have been before.
You, I, We, we are all fucked, totally fucked, and it may be that with dedication and effort and luck, all of them sustained for year after year, you too could be in a place where a man in his fifties works 40 hours a week and his gross pay is less than some skank ho single mommy in her 20’s can get nett.
Would I swap places with the young slut? Would I fuck. Talk about vulnerable and weak and worthless and unable to modify her environment.
The opening scenes of Up In Smoke were as funny as fuck way back when, I was different then, had my whole future in front of me, and the world was different then, “Start with strawberries… you may work your way up to these goddamned bananas….. when boy… when.. are you gonna get your goddamed act together?” I still laugh at it, but it ain’t the same sort of laugh. I’m not laughing at the same things, or in the same way.