But the politics weren’t inconvenient enough.
Christopher Chantrill, American Anarchist:
There Has to be a System
So the Republican Party has decided to bring out their chain-store bought Che Guevara/Dead Kennedys shirt and play at being a totally kickass anarchist and bring down the man, man by enacting a government shutdown over a last ditch effort to literally whine an inconvenient law (politically) into no longer being a law. Because, who fucking cares about all the people like counting on shit actually running in this country, which would be everyone when one can air out their Brooks Brothers white polo tees and play at being the rampaging hordes they piss on the other 364 days out of the year.
So of course, given this demonstration of how the Republican Party are at this point, literally a band of terroristic nihilists willing to blow up everything if they don’t get their way, no matter what the pesky people say, it’s only natural that the wingnuts would take this time to show their solidarity and support taking down the system, privileged white douchebag pretending he understands oppression style.
Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):
Cause hey, why not take the one redeeming aspect of anarchism (a recognition of the way hierarchical structures often entrench bigotry and oppression at the expense of those beneath and the way the status quo often only benefits those who have always benefitted) and just rip its spine out Mortal Kombat style so that rich white fuckwads can pretend their real-people-harming temper tantrum is some kind of principled stance against some nebulous “system”.
Some years ago I was discussing conservative health care ideas with a liberal ex-pat Brit. This was when Obamacare was just a gleam in Obama’s eye. Her comeback was that “there has to be a system.”
Yes. There in fact does need to be a system. And in the absence of a system, then systems will coalesce, often in even more abusive ways to marginalized members because they make convenient scapegoats/targets for exploitation. Just look at Somalia. Remove the “system” and it doesn’t free the people, just leaves them at the mercy of smaller more abusive systems of warlords and profiteers who use the lack of protection for their victims to institute a system where the most sociopathic and cruel win. Now, yes, systems like our own in the States or authoritarian systems around the globe reveal you can set up the same thing with rules and laws, but it’s not those rules and laws in and of themselves that are manufacturing the problem.
And with something like health care, there is always going to be a system in place. It may be shitty with you going to the local woman with the biggest herb garden who hasn’t been killed as a witch yet and begging her to treat your syphilis, but it’ll be a system. I know Chris is a robot with no need for organic health care, but us fleshy mortals are not so lucky.
Though I understand exactly why Chris and the other wingnuts only want to focus on how they made Obamacare less perfect, I mean, why it’s not flawless, I mean, why it must suck so bad and it’s a system and blah blah blah. Because it sounds way less noble when they have to mention that they are fighting to the death to keep us shackled to the current system which everybody is already more than aware sucks great big donkey balls.
I mentioned that to Lady Marjorie, who is blasting into orbit right now that her individual health insurance plan has been terminated and replaced with a plan that costs 30 percent more with higher deductibles.
It’s amazing how much they are flogging these scare stories about the scam coverages getting cancelled. Oh noes, you can’t have the health plans where you paid an insurance company money and in exchange they didn’t give you any real health coverage anymore. Oh, what has this world come to?!?
She retorted that most people think that a “big thing” like health care or education just has to be done by the government.
In other words, there has to be a system.
Well, yeah, if you want it to not suck, it can be done by the government. If you want it to completely suck, only provide reasonable service for the richest 1% and cost about a bajillion times more, then sure, open it up to the “alternatives”.
Which yes, is indeed the three-card-monte that the Republicans have been playing all along the boulevards of Fuck the Government, Individual Liberty, and Faux-Anarchism. Pretending that the government exists as an entity unto itself, both unconnected to the people who make it up, have direct power over it, and benefit from it as well as the rest of the fucking world. As if getting rid of government somehow meant that you had a spare health care just chilling in your living room fetching you brewskis.
When you remove the government, there’s a vacuum and where there’s a vacuum, the parasites descend and since they aren’t chartered to put the needs of their beneficiaries first, it ends up bad for all. We see it in America with us paying way more for our internet, electricity, health care, etc… while getting less and less in return (but making a small group of parasites very very wealthy).
Which to be fair to the right-wing ghouls, is in fact their goal as they are directly employed by said parasites to protect the scam, but still.
No there doesn’t.
Aw, you mean we can just Fuck the System and boom, the man will be gone! Whoa! Like pass the hashish bro.
And we know that liberals know this because of their professed love of Darwinian evolution.
… No, I want to see where he goes with this.
Liberals love evolution because it neuters the notion that God organized and created everything everything from scratch, that God created a top-down “system” and said that it was good.
Hierarchy uber alles!
Wow, way to fuck up your first taste of anarchism bro, worshiping the iron bootheel of a hierarchy. There’s a reason the chant goes “No Gods, No Masters!”
On the contrary, evolution by natural selection says that the living organisms that adapt best to their environment get to survive and breed successfully and the others don’t. There’s no system except the DNA and sexual reproduction, and all that is a product of evolution too.
Um, first off, no. Second off, you just noted that it’s a system. Not a terribly kind system to a species entering into an extinction event or to the individuals who end up dying off through a major environmental shift, but a system nonetheless. Which brings up third, yeah, there’s a reason why “social Darwinism”, that brain-dead conservative fart bubble of an “idea” has always been a rancid excuse for greed and lack of empathy rather than an actual “philosophy”.
Letting people die because you don’t understand what “fittest” means in an evolutionary biological capacity (hint: it doesn’t mean the species or individuals that are the “best” succeed) is not how we want to emulate our system, especially if said people we are leaving out in the cold are sentient enough to notice that they are literally being left out to die.
That sort of no-hope, you might as well go down swinging shit is what brings out the real anarchy and revolutions that make rich douchebags living large on the protections of the system break out into a cold sweat.
But health care without a system? That’s Social Darwinism! That means leaving the poor and the helpless to go without! There’s no hope of getting affordable health care without a system, a government system run by large-minded liberals and their expert-led supporters.
This is correct. Without a system to deliver healthcare, then most will go without and die of easily preventable diseases.
Thank you for correctly identifying the problem.
(Watch him deliver absolutely no rebuttal of this in the paragraphs to follow)
So Obama created Obamacare and said that it was good.
And Obama is rival God, aka the Antichrist dog whistle quotient fulfilled. Check.
This would normally be the point to insert stuff about the Smith’s Invisible Hand, Burke’s “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” Spencer’s idea of society as an unconscious organism, Mises on prices, Hayek on bureaucracy, public choice, famines under socialism. Settled science, don’t you know.
MAKING ARGUMENTS IS HARD!
But Daniel Henninger makes the point that facts and theories don’t matter when it comes to political ideas like Obamacare.
An established political idea is like a vampire. Facts, opinions, votes, garlic: Nothing can make it die.
But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.
Uh huh, yup. Totes impossible to end an established political idea, yup. Which is why we are still a royal colony of Britain, segregation and slavery are still the law of the land in the South, women are still legally chattel, it is still legal to beat one’s wives and property (including children) if they prove uppity, and fags and trannies are still imprisoned when they are caught out in their mockeries of all mighty Jesus.
Or maybe it’s fucking hard as shit and leaves it’s share of corpses and battered lives in the road, but people aren’t actually at the mercy of entrenched status quo but can actually resist with a revolution of thought turning to revolution of deeds turning to revolution of ideas to revolution of laws. Which, yeah, would be where I tend to have respect for anarchism, real anarchism, for generally being pretty damn good at the beginning, where all one sees is a fucked up system and people just sort of accepting it because “what are you going to do”, and calling that shit out and taking the first punches to allow others to really start going “oh yeah, that system really is fucked up, ain’t it?”
Good try Danny boy, but I got a better one. It comes from NYT science editor Nicholas Wade in his Faith Instinct, a book all about religion considered as natural selection. He writes:
Gods die when people no longer worship them.
Man, the existence of atheists in HIS PERFECT WORLD is just burning his chaps, ain’t it? Yeah, good luck with that anarchistic movement when you can’t even get through a single fucking post without itching to bust heads with the power of a coercive state.
Since we are full of Darwin today, I think we can include the secular gods in this maxim too. Marxism will die when people stop worshipping Marx.
Should I tell him, or do you want to?
Big government will die when people stop worshipping the system.
All you gotta do is take down the man, man, and then all the shit gets better.
Psst, Chris, there’s a reason no one likes that douchebag. Hint, it’s not because he’s so right and his parents and friends just don’t understand him.
But there is another way that the world changes. It’s when people just give up. Here is the incomparable Willa Cather describing in Death Comes to the Archbishop the Navajos giving up after Kit Carson had invaded their tribal sanctuary, the Canyon de Chelly.
Carson followed them down into the hidden world between those towering walls of red sandstone, destroyed their stores, laid waste to their deep-sheltered corn-fields, cut down the terraced peach orchards to dear to them. When they saw all that was sacred to them laid waste, the Navajos lost heart. They did not surrender, they simply ceased to fight, and were taken.
You can see what is going on right now in the Obamacare wars.
Fuck you.
Some racist ass myth about the Native Americans deserving their subjugation and the repeated lies and broken deals we threw their way because they supposedly “gave up” on themselves does not fucking say anything, much less anything about your sad little self-serving crusade to deny the scary black man any “wins” and prevent Democrats from improving society in ways that could negatively affect the ability of Republicans to reliably steal elections in the future.
Sane people are giving up on your crusade and viewing you as exactly the same sore losers who have spent the last 150 years trying to refight the treasonous war you lost in no uncertain terms, because it’s a pointless fucking fight willing to sacrifice lives for no more noble reason than to aid election prospects for a gang of thieves and sociopaths.
You want to rip off the bandaids, “start” the Obamacare Wars you’ve been losing for the last four years and blame it on the middle class? And then whine when people notice that the quagmire ain’t bringing the boys back home? Well, sorry, Sally, but no.
You decided to ruin everyone’s lives shutting everyone’s lives down because once again you don’t have the self-respect to admit that you’ve lost, again. That’s not nobility, that’s not surrender, that’s acceptance.
What you are doing is the same reality denial shit you’ve been trying to pull ever since the first peasant said “hey, fuck this oppression shit”.
The Democrats are telling us that resistance is futile: it’s the Law, etc.
Yes, the war is over, and your entrenched band of neo-nazis is still pretending the German Panzers are right over the hill to bail your asses out.
Why not just give up, you extremist anarchist Republicans?
A damn good question seeing as how nobody, and I mean nobody asked you to destroy our country to prevent the barest of incremental changes from having the tiniest of impacts.
And the Republican establishment seems to be going along, offering merely mild objections.
Which is why they’ve gone all in on Operation Give the Anarchist a Cigarette.
But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is offering an alternative. That is the strategic meaning of his tactically meaningless non-filibuster. He is saying “Nuts!” He is proposing to lead conservatives and Republicans out of the land of Egypt into the Promised Land. He is saying that we have not yet begun to fight. He is suggesting that with Obamacare the Democrats have gone a bridge too far, and that now is the time to strike back. He is calling on us “boldly [to] outdare / The dangers of the time.”
So… wait, you’re actually admitting that your religious heroes were anarchist rabble-rousers (Jesus was a terrorist)? Huh. Wasn’t expecting that.
For this is our creed, the creed of the People of the Responsible Self. There can be no system for us, for free men and women, because system is domination.
This reminds me of that brand of douchebag faux-anarchists who say that we shouldn’t fight hierarchical oppressions because recognizing hierarchies exist is acknowledging a system of division and “anarchists don’t believe in systems, man” so of course the white rich men who just want to rebel against their parents should lead over the black trans* lesbian with the history of actual political success and scars from the front lines.
We responsible individuals, joined in voluntary cooperation under a limited government, make and unmake such systems as we want and need according to our responsibilities to ourselves and to our families and to society at large.
And do you know what that is called, kiddies?
That’s right.
GOVERNMENT!
You ignorant mark!
And we know that “system” is an illusion, for life on this planet Earth is a ceaseless effort to adapt to its challenges and its changes. There is no fixed and immutable system except in the Hereafter.
You just can’t have heaven on earth.
Hey, remember that joke I posted about giving a man a fish and then giving a man a bible from a couple of posts ago?
Apparently, it wasn’t satire, enough.
Overall, though, fuck the goddamn anarchist for sale shtick. I mean, the one good thing anarchists have going for them is that they are, for the most part, empathetic people who try and stand up for the lowliest, most downtrodden fuckers and take stands against the most seemingly overpowering systems. They are often the front line in moving something from an intractable system to something that bigots find themselves clinging to as it slowly fades away. The beginnings of movements such as disability rights, worker’s rights, women’s rights, queer rights, all began often with anarchists being the only ones willing to speak up.
Remove all that and you just have the fundamental problem with the goals of anarchism. What to do after the revolution. If you shut it all down, what next?
And sadly, we know that answer all too well and we see it again with this form of totalitarianism minority rule trying to pose as anarchism. Shutting down the system because everybody didn’t let you get your way even though you lost in the hopes that enough “little” people will suffer, entrenching old broken hierarchies with underhanded tactics and attempts to spoil anything the minority could win. These are the painful lessons that train the next generation of snarky anarchist bastards who take no shit.
And if the Republicans want to rally to that A flag like it somehow makes them the real true rebels, then fuck them and their brand of “anarchism”.
I’ll be down in the pit rocking out to Laura Jane Grace.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. The revolution was a lie! We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
