Don't yearn to be in the club

Remember high school, how the popular kids always seemed to know how to make themselves enviable? You wanted to be a member of their clique, just because they seemed so awesome? Well, they were not. They were empty shells living off of the life energy that your yearning provided to them. This is the same marketing feat that the US has achieved with its American Dream. It is also an empty promise. Once you are in the dream, you discover that it is a nightmare of stress and toil, the mythical  Good Thing always out of reach. Resist this assault into your soul by greedy vampires. Deprogram yourself from the cult of I Gotta be in the Cult!

Evil Slutopia: Self Esteem Playlist

Evil Slutopia: Self Esteem Playlist: "All of the Self-Esteem Building Campaigns going on right now, inspired us to create a Self-Esteem Playlist. Enjoy and Empower! Wh..."

"Ill equipped to go native"

I just stole this phrase from Twisty's blog. In that post, she is talking about domesticated animals. In this post, I'm talking about myself. Well, less talking, and more, well, freaking out a little. You see, I wanna go walkabout. I want to get rid of my shit, quit the job I've been hating for nigh on ten years, and see if I can de-program my self from the cult of wage slavery. But....am I ill equipped to go native?!

Practical autonomy

This is what lawyer and animal rights proclaimer Steven Wise says is a basic legal parameter for assigning rights to a being. He'd like to assign these rights to chimpanzees and bonobos. I'm all for it. In fact I'm glad that as a human, I'm assigned these rights even before I have proven to possess practical autonomy, because the whole time I've been following the dictates of civilization without questioning them except unconsciously through depression and general malaise, I was not displaying autonomy. Sure, I can recognize myself in a mirror, just like a bonobo can. But still I can't quite recognize my self as a self. I am doing a job I hate and can't see the way out of wage slavery. I have hidden my talents from myself behind a veil of fear. I cower behind debt as an excuse for inaction. I bitterly rail against the clients I serve, never realizing that resentment and recrimination are the recourses of a hobbled soul. Let's hope that genuine self perception leads to liberatory action. Then I will have earned the rights bestowed upon me by virtue of being human.

It's like deja vu all over again!

The persecution of undocumented workers on U.S. soil is akin to the apartheid Pass Laws of Africa. I quote from The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen as he describes two of the Pass Laws created by the installation of apartheid by the De Beers diamond mining corporation: "those prohibiting native movement after 8:00 pm and requiring, under threat of flogging, all native workers to carry signed passes to be shown at any time to anyone who may demand it." The collision of the deregulation of labor with the tightening of immigration laws touted as reforms is not an accident. It is a disloyal labor practice specifically aimed at providing slave labor in a political climate that can only tolerate brands of injustice that are explained to citizens as politically neutral, economically sound, and legally righteous. Both of these practices have one aim: to make labor cheap by controlling the movement of the workers bodies and by creating an artificial way to render these bodies temporarily outside of the law, but yet always accessible to the market flows that demand bioresources as close to unpaid labor as possible. 

If corporations really were humans, they would be tried for domestic abuse

We've got to stop thinking that abusing people for profit is acceptable human behavior, much as it has become economically laudable here in the U.S. We praise companies that bring in lots of profits for their shareholders. We laud as "good competitors" companies that undersell other businesses. We forget that the way these companies are able to reap such profits is by grossly underpaying their employees. When slavery was abolished, we had to find a new way to make people work for much less than they were producing. The newest iteration of this is outsourcing. Outsourcing is tantamount to strike breaking, even in "right to work" states. And yet the newest iteration of outsourcing is "insourcing," (yes, I made it up) which is to say, to lay off full time workers and hire contract labor still in the home country. Or how about importing laboring bodies not possessing all the rights and benefits that a citizen worker would have? No, this is not a rant against undocumented workers. They are simply answering a traditional (artificially created by a refusal to pay a fair wage) market call and also responding to other structural mayhem that was wreaked in their home country by these same slave market forces. This is a rant against current slave market practices and the entities that engage in them.

Free?

How much freedom do you have on a day to day basis? Do you have the freedom of time? Can you decide what time to wake up each morning? What time to eat lunch? What time to switch tasks? Who controls your hours? Do you have freedom of location? Do you decide where you are going to do your work? Did you decide that you wanted to live so far from where you work, and exhaust valuable energy resources? If you believe you are free, ask yourself: free to do what?