#capitalism is the worship of money and theft and murder

[drowningworms]

Salaried is just another word for full time slave. All your time is their time.

Hourly full time is just another word for exclusive part time slave because for 10 hours of your life 5 days a week or whatever you belongs to them.

If you are part time, you are a full time slave with uncertain pay because all your time still belongs to them because they keep jerking you around and they always fuck up your hours.

But they aren't slaves. Nobody owns them. They can go with somewhere else if they must. Nobody is holding a gun to their head.

Well, that is all true. But if chattel slavery is the only thing that counts as slavery to you then you need to open your eyes, man.

Using someone's poverty against them to take shitty pay for shitty working conditions where you do whatever they tell you or lose your kids doctors food and shelter and join the growing masses of unhoused.

Sounds even worse than putting a gun to my head. Have you seen how we treat homeless people? They have to huddle in the corners and alleys and vacant buildings and bridge underpasses breathing the exhaust of our cars on every street and feeling our scorn everywhere.

We won't even let them duck in to shit in any store like you or I can. They have to shit in the street and get filmed for Fox News.

[theabigailthorn]

What I’m Reading, Silvia Federici, “Caliban and the Witch”

<CW for all kinds of horror associated with Witch Hunts> Holy crap this book is excellent. It’s about the Witch Hunts of the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries in Europe and the Americas. Federici’s thesis is that the mass persecution of women as witches was just as foundational to the development of capitalism as colonialism, slavery, and the theft of the common land through enclosure were. I say “mass persecution” without a specific number because we don’t know exactly how many women were tortured, burned, murdered, killed themselves, were cast out and died of preventable poverty... it wasn’t considered important to keep a record, unless it was a record of how much land and money was grabbed as a result. Historians estimate anywhere between 200,000 and six million, and that’s just in Europe. The Witch Hunts in the Americas were just as destructive, if not more so.

What Federici demonstrates is that “the transition from Feudalism to capitalism” is a phrase that makes that period of change seem much smoother and more inevitable than it actually was. In fact it was an extremely bloody time, and all kinds of contemporary resistance to feudalism and nascent capitalism existed. Many of those early rebels were women, or led by women. Once colonialism got into full swing, many women, especially in South America, used magic and traditional religions as the basis for leading colonial rebellions, for example the Taki Onqoy movement in Peru. The resistance to early capitalism seriously threatened to prevent it from ever taking hold. So to break the rebels, the new European elite first had to break the power of women.

As well as mass-murder, the Witch Hunts were accompanied by a massive curtailment of women’s rights, including reproductive rights: contraception, termination of pregnancy, any kind of non-procreative sex (including homosexual sex) was criminalised, as was sex work. The idea that a woman should be passive, remain in the home, and submit to her husband was an invention of this period: women in the Middle Ages had enjoyed more rights and a higher social status than they had in most places by the end of the 17th Century (though they still weren’t equal to men). During this time women were in many places forbidden from being paid wages and from inheriting property or running a business, which previously had been fine. But a family still required more than one income to exist (once the common lands had all been stolen) so women would work in the home making things that the husband would sell, and the money would go to him, keeping women under men’s control. Rather than unite to fight the people exploiting them, the newly minted European proletariat were divided along gender lines and encouraged to fight each other. Throughout all this, the figure of the Witch was used as a stick to cudgel women into the new social order. 

Federici also argues that magical thinking, with its charms, lucky days and unlucky days, rituals, spells, and veneration of nature, had to be eradicated if the new capitalist ideology was to triumph, which regards nature as a collection of exploitable resources and requires regimented, predictable, set times for lots of working. The keepers of magical thinking were often women, and so this period saw the criminalisation and persecution of wise-women, midwives, and female healers, and the violent eradication of generations of knowledge of herbal remedies and folk practices. In the New World charges of devil worship and witchcraft were used to justify the murder and enslavement of entire populations and the theft of the massive amounts of natural resources that built Europe into what it is today.  Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa had no concept of witches as we know them before Europeans arrived: they too were “encouraged” to change their societies in order to oppress women more, and so make them more efficient trade partners and riper for exploitation. Sadly this technique was so successful that it continues in some parts of the world to this day.

Some of the most interesting bits for me were when Federici connected the figure of the Witch back to philosophy being done at the time. Descartes was agnostic on the issue of witches; Hobbes supported the Witch Hunts saying, crucially and tellingly, that even if witches didn’t exist the mass persecution was good for maintaining social order! I assumed that the Witch Hunts stopped because materialism and rationality eventually prevailed and people stopped believing in witches, but in fact this isn’t true - they stopped because they had fulfilled their purpose. Witchcraft was specifically outlawed even if it had no negative consequences - in other words even if your supposed magic failed to have any kind of effect it was still enough to get you killed. From this we can tell that it wasn’t so much a fear of magic that prompted the Hunts as a need by the new European elite to stamp out a whole way of life. Towards the end, members of the higher classes began to be accused of supernatural skullduggery too, and that’s when things started to cool off. It’s also telling that courts and public figures towards the end of the Witch Hunt never denounced it all as a sham and a horrible error - rather the charges of witchcraft were gradually replaced with more specific crimes that the catchall term ‘witchcraft’ had been created to mask, like begging, petty theft, cursing, adultery, fornication, being poor in public, and basically anything that wasn’t shutting up and going to work. The final sentence of the book is a blistering summary: 

“As soon as we strip the persecution of witches from its metaphysical trappings, we recognise in it phenomena that are very close to home.”

This book is amazingly good. Very accessible, thoroughly recommended. It was sent to me by Teri from my Amazon wish list - thank you Teri! You can pick it up here if you’d like to read it.

[timeclonemike]

The Last Machine: The Culture

The setting is summarized HERE.

An overview of the Chimera Plague and its impact is located HERE.

Find a breakdown of the population demographics HERE.

The magic system is briefly explained HERE.

Common technology and industries are explained HERE.

Between the effects of the Chimera Plague, the loss of widespread communication infrastructure, the discovery and spread of magic, and the chaos involved in the formation of each community of survivors, there’s a lot about Lost Eagle Country and the people living in it that really stands out in comparison to The World That Was, when there are records available to compare things to.

Arts and Entertainment: Music plays a considerable role in every community when it comes to creative expression and art, followed by theatrics in the form of plays. Live entertainment is the norm. Most towns have a library of some sort where knowledge is preserved, but actual appreciation for contemporary literature is hard to find outside of Postville. Both Postville and Arcadia have museums dedicated to art and artifacts, but again, these are mostly used to preserve whatever can be saved from The World That Was, rather than providing reflections of modern sensibilities. Creative types are pushing to change this, but it’s too soon to tell if they will succeed.

Crime and Law: It’s impossible to get a bunch of people together in the same place and not end up with fights, arguments, theft and even murder. Different communities tend to form their own taboos, legal restrictions, and punitive measures; for example, the greatest punishment in the Dwarven Freeholds is exile, being completely cut off from all other Dwarves and their support, while for other communities the most serious response to criminal action is death. Out of necessity, these are reserved only for the most heinous of crimes, but again, different communities have different ideas about how heinous a given act is. The legal system has been simplified by all towns and settlements agreeing on a handful of common rights for inhabitants and visitors alike, such as the right to autonomy, right to security, and right of expression, but beyond that things get complicated very fast.

Economics: Lost Eagle Country relies on precious metals to mint their currency; specifically, an aluminum wafer called the Tab. Originally the actual trading post that stood where Postville eventually grew would use the tabs from aluminum beer and soda cans as markers, and would accept payment for debts in the form of various metals, including aluminum. The technology needed to create new aluminum metal from raw ore is incredibly complex and energy intensive, and the metal itself is both lightweight and resistant to corrosion, making it very useful as a medium of exchange in 2125. These coins are minted in the Lost Eagle Mint at Postville, and banks do exist in Postville, Romero, Arcadia and Elsie, but Millstone and the Dwarven Freeholds refuse to establish any sort of bank for ideological reasons.

Education: Every major town has at least one school. Not every town has the same lessons. Dwarven math and science leans towards engineering and geology, while in Millstone the scientific focus is based on biology and the weather. These schools also include information that is out of date or just completely made up, especially regarding the other communities of Lost Eagle Country and the people who live in them. Postville being the accidental melting pot that it is, it’s education is mostly free of such errors. Mostly.

Fashion: The first rule of clothing in Lost Eagle Country is that it lasts as long as possible. Hand in hand with that is that it has to be tough and durable. The second rule of clothing is that more pockets are better. Beyond those two foundations, fashions and styles are actually in a considerable amount of flux in 2125. Short sleeves and high ankle cuffs are currently popular in Arcadia, while long sleeves are the rage in Elsie. High collared vests are popular in Millstone, while Dwarves visiting from the Freeholds have low collars, or none at all. Wearing suspenders in Elsie will get you laughed at, wearing suspenders in Romero will get you whistles, especially if you can pull it off. Decorative buttons are suddenly incredibly popular with the youth, probably because the “useless” ornamentation drives the parents to distraction. It’s an absolute free-for-all, especially in Postville, so much so that no type of clothing or way of wearing it is particularly unusual or worth remarking on.

Government: In theory, Postville is the capital of Lost Eagle Country. It has the highest population, the most flexible industry, and the most money. In practice, Lost Eagle Country is less of a state than an alliance of city-states banding together for mutual advantage. As a result, the elected officials of Postville just make policies for Postville. This has done more to slow down any sort of mobilization of a defending army to fight the Invader than any other factor, as different communities balk at sending their own to die to protect the other communities. There is no “national” ideal or symbol that everyone has agreed to unite behind. For the most part, government itself exists at the town hall level, with city officials elected by some sort of secret ballot (and the occasional scandalous not-so-secret or rigged ballot) and topics tend to be debated loudly and extensively at public meetings.

Healthcare: The largest and most sophisticated hospitals can be found in Postville and Arcadia, where both the population and the technological sophistication are high enough to justify their presence. Clinics and individual doctor’s offices can be found most anywhere else. Treatment varies according to the specific nature of the ailment or injury, but a mixture of technological medicine and healing magic is common. Following an “incident” in 2031, no businesses or organizations comparable to health insurance companies exist in Lost Eagle Country, but there are organizations known as “Health Co-operatives” that ostensibly fill similar roles.

Military: Strictly speaking, Lost Eagle Country does not have a professional military. Which is unfortunate, because they need one to deal with the Invader, and they need it yesterday. Elsie has a lot of airships, ultralights and gliders, and Romero has a number of armed ships, but neither one is exactly a professional air force or navy. However, Postville does happen to be the home of several organizations that could bend their talents in a Martial direction, especially the Wizard’s Cooperative. While they wouldn’t be able to raise a very large standing army, or even a small one very fast, these organizations lend themselves easily to the creation of small units of high power and high mobility. Rather than trying to take and hold territory, these units would apply their particular expertise (magic, chemistry, explosives, hunting, theft, psychological warfare, and so on) to making the Invader’s forces regret their life choices. It remains to be seen if this strategy can be pulled off, and if it will be enough.

Prejudice: In theory, the ability of the Chimera Virus to randomize people’s DNA should have eliminated racism, sexism, and a few more isms, and finishing off the anti-vaccination movement as a grand finale. After all, why would anybody deliberately follow any sort of ideology that gave a certain category of people the short end of the stick, when there was a significant chance of waking up one morning in that category, getting that end of the stick? In practice, the various quarantine procedures reinforced the age old dichotomy of “Us Versus Them” and there’s only so much that mutual economic survival can do against that kind of mentality, especially among the older folks. In Postville, and more generally speaking in Lost Eagle Country as a whole, no single chimeric genotype really has a majority outside of its home town or original quarantine zone; even the population that has the highest percentage is still vastly outnumbered by the other five. Practical necessities of survival being what they are, gender roles are not particularly rigid outside of the Dwarven Freeholds, and even then the Dwarves that don’t live in the Freeholds themselves are more likely to pay lip service to those ideas, if any.

Religion and Faith: Almost no organized religion survived unchanged from The World That Was, and that can be more or less laid entirely at the feet of the discovery of magic in general and Necromancy in particular. Consequently, there are only three major religions with a significant presence in Lost Eagle Country. The first and most common is Ancestor Worship or Ancestor Communion, which relies on Necromancy to communicate with the spirits of departed family members. The second most common form of religion is Sun Worship, as passed down by the words of St. Carlin, Patron of Entertainers. The third most common religion is Reform Judaism; as it turned out, Sheol or She’ol was the closest that any Abrahamic religion got to accurately describing the afterlife. Postville has temples and shrines representing all three religions, as do Arcadia and Romero. It’s worth noting that the Mother Shrine for most organized Sun Worship is found at the summit of Mt. Humble, and not inside the town of Elsie itself.

[burntfingers]

My Talk With God, and How He’s a Space Nazi

I promise, crossed my heart, that this story actually happened. I also need to remind you that I never promised that ANY of this will make sense. I’m gonna have to do this in bullet points.

My second cousin was dating this guy, Brad. At the time I became aware of Brad, it was nearing Christmas time. So I was invited up to Brad’s house to hang out with him and my cousin, who I hadn’t seen in almost 10 years. I went up to Maryland to the house, and right away, I noticed a problem. The house was so damn out of the way that if you wanted its location you had to do geocoordinates. But I arrived safe and sound. My cousin was not coming until the next day, so I got to talk to Brad a bit. Here’s what I found out:

- He was super fucking racist. I gotta get that one out of the way. He legitimately thought that anyone not white (or “Germanic” as he insisted any white person was) was on a lower tier of the evolutionary scale. Lowest on the scale were black people. He refused to refer to other races by anything other than pejorative terms. This pretty much was the foundation of his entire character.

- He thought he was god. Not like, the monotheistic god-with-a-capital-g, but more that he thought he was descended from Odin. (He insisted it was spelled “Oden”) so he of course insisted that his demigod status have him a higher plane of existence than everyone else on earth, and that it allowed him to pass through time warps and allowed him to see Vikings in visions. He also believed that this made him the best guitarist on earth, but that’s another section of the story.

- He was somewhat obsessed with Vikings, in case you didn’t already get that. He paid a lot of money to have runes tattooed into his arms, but they were so poorly done that they looked like they were done with green sharpie. He also worshipped Odin, but did so in a bizarre way. Whereas most people who make burnt offerings (I’ve gotta go off of various books, I don’t know anyone else who does…besides my dad when he grills) will insist on buying a live animal, slaughtering it, and ritually preparing it. Our friend here would just have his mom buy him a butterball turkey, and he’d go out and burn it on an altar. Also he’d talk about how amazing his religion (Asatru) was, due mostly to the fact that, in his understanding, it encouraged wanton destruction of lesser races, subjugation of women, and a lack of personal responsibility. REAL charmer right there. He also would parade about the house in a cheap Viking costume, and whenever he passed a mirror, he’d flip his shoulder-length hair and scowl into it, as if he were trying to intimidate his reflection. He also had his parents buy him a meter-long sword. Yes it was real. Yes it was sharp. And yes, he thought it was the greatest thing ever. He would often tout it as the “Greatest home defense weapon ever,” to which I’d reply “Yes but wouldn’t you have a problem swinging a meter-long blade inside a house?” His response tied into the next point.

- He wanted to start a kingdom…in Maryland. You heard that right. The end goal of this would-be demigod Viking was to buy up a ton of land in Maryland, declare independence from the United States, set up a little nation devoid of racial minorities and/or socialists, and call it “Ascalon.” He wanted to have a castle, tons of statues, and a guard unit called…the High Guard. Creative. Basically he wanted to go to Europe (Never Africa or Asia, for reasons you already know) and adopt up young male orphans, and train them as his brainwashed soldiers. (Literally his plan was to get them, preferably younger than 6, and raise them on a steady diet of Ayn Rand, swordplay, and hate speech) Also he wanted to institute gladiatorial combat as the primary form of capital punishment. What merits capital punishment in the (Allegedly) Libertarian Monarchy of Ascalon? Murder, rape, theft…and Socialism. That’s right, in this “Free society” simply preaching in favor of socialism could land you in the ring across from Robbie the Rapist, and you’ve got to fight to the death. Of course, I was like “Don’t these ‘utopias’ usually get…shot?” but I guess I’m just a cynic. - Now you’re probably imagining this guy as someone who is a.) 14, b.) playing Call of Duty, and c.) Rather scrawny (or fit, if he were really trying to fit into the stereotype of a Viking) Our friend was none of those. He was 20, spent all of his time playing Viking death metal on guitar, and had, by his own admission, never worked out a day in his life. He was 5'7" and 250lbs, and had rarely left his parents’ house, due to a crippling fear of people. He had long, wispy hair, which he fancied made him more Viking-like, and he admitted that he wore the same shorts for weeks at a time, but that was only when he wasn’t trooping around in the dime-store Viking costume.

- He played guitar, and idolized Viking death metal. Now that’s no crime in and of itself, but having your millionaire parents buy you $200,000 in guitars, amps, and cables and only playing one of those guitars IS a crime of some sort. And if it’s not, it should be. This kid’s first guitar was a $2,000 Eric Clapton Stratocaster, and he made his parents go through thousands of dollars until he settled on a guitar he liked. He even had a Gibson Les Paul…signed by Les Paul (Who is dead, btw) which alone is worth a fortune. This feeds into his plan for world domination, trust me.

- So his kingdom? How did he plan on funding that huge land grab? Obviously that was one thing his parents WOULDN’T pay for. So he had a plan that involved taking over the music industry, the video game industry, and eventually, the world. Basically he wanted to start by creating a game that he described as a cross between “Minecraft and Morrowind” that would be infinite and self-aware. All geekiness aside, such a thing is impossible on modern hardware. He wanted to make the game with 5 people, and he said it would make millions of dollars in a few years. Then he’d use that money to build studios in every major city in the Caucasian-dominated world (Sorry, he hated that term, he’d prefer “Germanic”) and make Viking Death Metal the dominant genre of music in the world. This is because he was pissed that “Black people music” had become the dominant style in the world, i.e. hip hop, pop, and dance music.(He SURE didn’t say “black people” but I’m not gonna repeat what he said) That being said, he viewed metal as the whitest genre of music ever to be recorded, completely ignoring the fact that metal came from rock, which came from blues, which came from the soul and gospel music of…you guessed it, black people. So he was screwed either way. But that didn’t stop his racist megalomania one bit, because he planned on using the money garnered from his game and record company to buy up his kingdom in Maryland, and build a castle. And THAT is where he was gonna use his sword for home defense. So finally, we get to my visit with him. I visited and stayed for five days, much like a National Geographic journalist studying a maniacal dictator, and my cousin came. She showed up, smiling, happy to see us both, and with two GIANT boxes of cookies in hand. She was instantly berated by him for letting the cookies go stale. Then they went upstairs, and I didn’t see them for the rest of the day. Apparently that was because he was busy sulking that bread products, when exposed to air, tend to get a bit stale. So then, the next morning, I decided to be a good guest, and offer to help my cousin make breakfast (Brad wouldn’t be down until 12, she said) so we made some devilled eggs. He came down, pulled a face, and I didn’t see him until late that night, considering that he was sulking some more, this time because he didn’t like the smell of eggs. Then he finally came down at 10pm, and got in a fight with his mother, because she caught him mocking his father’s mannerisms. (His father had recently suffered a stroke) The next day, his friend Rich showed up. Rich secretly disliked Brad, and we both knew it. That night however, I decided to sleep in the attic, because there were real beds there. I did so, and regretted it immensely. Brad and my cousin were having VERY loud sex below me, and I spent the rest of the night covering my ears and getting very little sleep.

The next day, I woke up closer to lunch time. My cousin had prepared burgers, freshly ground and grilled, and Brad complained and told her that she sucked at cooking and shouldn’t do it anymore. His mother called him out on it, and he responded that “Encouraging the weak is a socialist value.” and continued to pontificate that it was “Crucial to the survival of our race” (He basically called everything that he liked “Crucial to the survival of our race” Be it a political cause or a videogame) he then continued that he idolized Anders Breivik, the guy who shot up and bombed a youth camp in Norway, because “The people in the camp were socialist Labour party members who were poisoning the youth.”

After I realized that I had had enough of this guy, I decided to pack my bags, and go home. After the visit, I cut off communication with him, and deleted him off Facebook and all other social media. Videos and photos of him still exist, somewhere, trying his best to look tough. So where is he now? After being dumped by my cousin, the last I saw of him was that he was advertising himself as “Lead Philosopher at Ascalon” and posting pictures of the night sky with emo quotes about how nobody loves and/or understands him.

Some god.