It's called the past fucko, learn you it

This may well end up being a bit of a ramble.


Something's been occurring to me lately. It's not good. I was watching the news last night. There was a piece on the rise of the Salafists in Egypt, this was touched on by New Matilda in the piece I linked to in the previous post. They discussed how they would cover the old Egyptian monuments as seeing them is essentially idolatry. For those who don't know, when you believe in an invisible sky pixie, a representation or image of almost anyone or anything else is considered BAD. Who wants to bet they'll cover them? I think they'll destroy them. In any event, write off visiting Egypt for a generation if these vultures take charge.

Like the Egyptian Salafists, hardline Islamists have risen hither and thither, usually riding the backs of revolutionaries like blood-bloated ticks, to inveigle their way into post-revolutionary governments, all for the greater glory of dragging their nation back to a blood-stained stone age.

I think by now, it is almost inevitable that all the major players are gearing up for a war on Iran. Despite the fact this makes no sense diplomatically, strategically or economically, once certain world powers get the War-Erection in their pants, the eventual gushing Wargasm is never far behind. The thing is, the hardline Islamic war-monger image of Iran is pretty much limited to their ruling party and ruling religious elite. Most people in Iran are actually just, you know, people. Still, if the US starts bombing the living shit out of them, you can kiss any internal will to overthrow Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah goodbye. This is why the US and its allies like us, should always try a bit of foreplay first before whipping out their War Erections.

The US is currently in the middle of a culture war. One one side is an incumbent who is trying to walk a fine line between Business as Usual and Not Being A C*nt, and on the other side a motley collection of rapacious pirates, Klansmen and Inquisitors who are just licking their lips and rubbing their trousers in anticipation of destroying all public education and healthcare, removing any and all forms of government regulation and looting every last thing not nailed down to blow on large house and tax-dodging orgies. In this much vaunted war between the democratic west and the islamist east, they are supposed to be the good guys.

Russians have responded to Vladimir Putin's cavalier electoral theft with various calls - revolution, anarchy and even a Bolshevik Revolution to overthrow what they see as a new Czar. All because this thuggish ex-KGB spook wants to keep riding the gravy train of power and wealth.

See, there's this thing called the past. In the past, as a global species we made mistakes, we fucked up at a level considered impossible. After that we sagely sat around and talked about not repeating the mistakes of the past. Which is horseshit. We're repeating the crusades with nuclear weapons. We're repeating the inquisitions of the past by rigging elections and changing legislation. We're repeating acts of piracy and theft with derivatives and too-big-to-fail defaults.

I blame a couple of things. We fucked up economically by allowing derivatives to happen at all. Without getting too technical, derivatives is money that doesn't exist. It's like the implied value of an implied value of a real thing. You can trade them like crazy amassing wealth that is no more real than the currency of an MMORPG. Some say there's something like 3-4 times the wealth of derivatives as actual money in the world. When these financial organisations fail, they destroy society around them. We should have locked up the fucking lot of them a long time ago.

I blame religion. I don't really give a crap if you have a pleasant, quiet belief in a loving deity who keeps out of world affairs and just wants us to be nice to each other. That's really sweet, but that deity of yours is gone, and a bunch of psychotic ignorant monsters have put their deity in its place. Because of religion the US could end up socially and economically cutting its own throat. All these cowboy conservatives share a ruthlessly Kelvinist faith - the Taliban with a crucifix. How long before Russia or Uganda or Nigeria pass those anti-gay laws they want, prompted by religion almost always? When any of those laws get passed, we'll see pogroms almost right away. The Inquisition is alive and well, and it wears the face of the world's biggest religions. All of them. Not one or the other. Christianity isn't the enemy of the Middle East, Islam isn't the enemy of the West. Both are enemies of rationality, compassion and harmony.

I blame the laziness of government, who long ago stopped caring about their citizens, and just started being an automaton to keep business happy. A kind of blank eyed, soulless sexbot, but with tax concessions instead of blowjobs. They stopped guarding against the two previously mentioned evils a long time ago, and let them gain a stranglehold that will be impossible to remove. They could have worked for us, but they gave that up out of laziness and fear.

We've got one chance left really. It's nothing any government can do, it's something we can do. Just don't stand for this shit. Decry it, call it out as horseshit whenever you see it. Don't let arseholes tell you you live in a Christian country, don't let any of these arseholes try to tell you that you, your family or your friends have to suffer for their callowness, delusions or greed. It's their bullshit, make them deal with it.

I don't know about any of you, but I want to live in this world, I want it to be better, I want people to just get the fuck along and stop me wasting my mornings griping about this crap.

The next five years are going to be tumultuous. We are going to live through some strange and fucked up times. Hope to see you on the other side, mi internetados.