Why shoot the rich?
Why do I believe that the poor should rise up in insurrection and murder the rich? Well, it's hard to sum up, but luckily a bank executive did it for me. When told that President Obama intended to cap executive bay to 500K, his reaction was that that "wasn't much money" and it was a disgrace that he should have to consider only being paid it. With no bonus!But wait. This is one of the guys who has fucked up not only his bank, but our economy, on an enormous scale, so badly that his bank, like most others, is technically bust, and now has to go cap in hand to the people who do not even dream of earning 500K, many of whom not earning it in a decade, some only barely clearing it in their lifetime, to ask them to pay not just for the losses he is responsible for, but ultimately the 500K that he thinks is not enough compensation for being useless (or in fact for being too useful but at the wrong thing).
Mes amis, aux armes! We need to cease to believe in philosophies and ideologies that allow these people to believe that they are entitled to being supported by us. We need change. You feel you are wealthy, some of you, and today you are, but your wealth is largely illusory, and even some of us who are doing well enough are a paycheque from the kerb. And we will never sip champagne in our personal helicopter!
Nor should we. Not one of us should while one starves. No one should think 500K is not much money when some do not have so much as 500c. Any world in which this is not true is one that needs revolution; this is self-evidently true, and the only reason you do not share this belief is that you have been indoctrinated, by an education that stifles critical thinking, media that are owned by billionaires and a society that compounds ignorance by worshipping it. We are still enchained! Those chains are not so apparent, and many of us believe we are free because we have enough to eat, but they exist still. Aux armes, citoyens! Who will be free? Who believes it is the right of all?
posted by Dr Zen @ 1:17 pm
7 Comments:
It's all very well calling for a social jihad, but if you could see into the future and realise that you were throwing your support behind someone who would turn out to be another Pol Pot, say; would you still be so keen to take to arms?
Within a few months of the aristos' heads rolling into the baskets, new cadres had sprung up in France, and a new tyrant emerged. Hitler used dissatisfaction to get his way, Stalin purged hundreds of his officers and intellectuals. The list, as they say, is endless.
If you kill the old rich, isn't an open invitation for the appearance of the nouveau-riche?
boots sez:
"If you kill the old rich, isn't an open invitation for the appearance of the nouveau-riche?"
Zen thinks we'll have some glorious communist revolution then everyone will be equally rich. I don't think he considers the possibility that everyone will be equally poor except for the members of the government who will be telling the rest what they will do that is according to their abilities and what they will get because they need it in order to keep working.
Government doesn't change the nature of the individual, it simply requires that he disguise it.
A serf in Voronezh or a member of the soviet ten years later. You choose.
boots sez:
Here's my choice: no
Boots said "Zen thinks we'll have some glorious communist revolution then everyone will be equally rich."
I don't think that was his intended point. Interestingly, not everyone has equal aspirations, and so while a small group of people will do their best to become enormously rich, it does not follow that the remainder of the population will band together to prevent this, or to take away those riches 9which is delegated to the taxation departments of the governments to do, with a singular lack of success :)
The thing I hate the mnost is the idea of levelling everybody out. Kurt Vonnegut wrote an excellent futuristic story once of a world in which those with talents had to wear or use handicaps so that they did not appear to be profiting from them. The name of the story escapes me, but a central character to it was called Billy the Poet. Perhaps someone else can enlighten me further.
boots sez:
"Kurt Vonnegut wrote an excellent futuristic story once of a world in which those with talents had to wear or use handicaps so that they did not appear to be profiting from them."
Oddly enough we seem to live in that very world, but those wearing handicaps are given privileged parking spots to make them forget that below their handicap is a talent.
Obama only suggested capping executive pay because the taxpayers were bailing out the useless fucks.
He's not calling for the end to capitalism, he's calling for an end to irresponsible greed.
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