Walmart

After a rough few weeks, Joy surprised me with some cash tucked away to get a nice TV for the living room. I went to midway Walmart to get the biggest goddamn TV I could find for the money. (This is a different topic, but yes, from time to time I'll shop at Walmart. Because we're on a budget. And, well, if you think shopping at Target instead of Walmart makes the world a better place, then god bless you I guess.) The dude checking people out at electronics was going between Somali and english having a conversation with three people while helping me with my pretty new 42" sanyo. It was like a dance. The dude was pulling out a sim card and (I think) explaining how calling cards work to a couple women all the while with a company land line tucked under his chin, which would prompt him to announce the occasional "yes" or "yep." Before I could process who was being helped, all the sudden there was a spin to put the phone down with fleeting eye contact towards anyone remotely near him.

 Brilliant form!

An older Hmong woman was trying to buy a laptop. She explained to him, in broken english, that she needed it primarily for email. He didn't bullshit her. He told her the cheapest one will do and pointed her in the right direction.

Apologizing profusely for the two and a half minute wait, he smiled and handed me the receipt.

The Piss Test

I find some perverse solace in knowing someone has to handle my piss, right there in front of me, in order to tell if I've been a good clean boy, or whether I've been dirty and bad.

I hope there's at least a brief moment of " good god, what the fuck am I doing"

(now she's tipping the capped piss container on its side in order to write something I assume is highly technical medical jargon on it.)

Is it warm enough?

Like baby formula, you have to warm up fake piss in the microwave before you can pass it off as your own. (The microwave wattage is important. I don't think altitude matters though.)

I don't even know of any gods who care about piss temperature. 

I know it's not her fault. It's a job.

But holding piss, even if you label it a "specimen," is still a depressing way to sustenance. It's only slightly better than being a bill collector, a stock broker, or the President.

We do share a bond. An unspoken understanding that it's really awkward to be doing this.

(I call it a urinary pact.)

It's superficial, as it should be, but it's also specific enough to be ritualistic. 

Someday, in some grand utopia, it will be more socially unacceptable to be a piss handler than someone compelled, by grave threats, to piss in a plastic cup.

Probable Cause

Interesting how this probable cause works. Easy to find thousands of times across the country every day, particularly if you've the profile that fits, but no where to be found when it counted last night.

Rest in peace Michael Brown, and all the victims of our peculiar institution called a "justice" system. 

Capital is afraid of their own economic system

The response to HRC's recent comments regarding who creates jobs has been interesting.

http://m.wsj.com/articles/BL-WB-50148

In a market economy, consumers create jobs. Business does everything in their power in order to not create jobs (e.g. raise productivity of current workforce), as labor is a major expense, and is only forced to when demand overwhelms capacity. I thought this was market economics 101?

She was posturing, trying to fend off Elizabeth Warren, to be sure, but capital is so afraid of this basic fact (which at least in theory gives the rabble some power) it gets buried in hyperbole. 

Once secret but now available documents show that people like Anne Applebaum are intellectual hacks of the worst kind

It seems the sole purpose of people like Anne Applebaum is to warn educated and engaged liberals (you know, the kind that read "The Atlantic" and 'The New Yorker") about allowing their ideology to stray too far from bourgeois comfort zones. Make your home in identity politics, vague and self-righteous notions of human rights, hell, maybe even support a national health service, but by god make sure you don't start talking about property relations because then before you know it you'll wake up, look in the mirror, and you'll have a big bushy mustache and be starving Ukrainian peasants!

Of course, some new found information (you always find it in the last place you look! Doh!) always will pop up to ensure you that Stalinism was indeed purely ideological and there is, of course, a straight line from Marx's "workers of the world unite" to Stalin's "socialism in one country." No pragmatism there. No, none whatsoever. The Communist International notoriously switching from promotion of world revolution to suppression of it? Yes, well that was well understood to be a purely ideological move, based on Marx's (although probably largely ghostwritten by Engels) polemic "How to Keep Some Guy Who Hasn't Been Born Yet Named Stalin in Total and Complete Power."

You know, in order to understand societies based on classical liberalism, nuance is ok. Yes, our development was based on genocide and slavery, but freedom of speech and Iphones and stuff. Yes, they went from a backwards peasant society to first in space in a couple generations but everything about it was BAD. BAD. BAD. BAD. And that was because of IDEOLOGY. Get it yet? Even with lots of the same people running things the same way in the post-Soviet states, the people are much better off because they lost the ideology.

Thanks Anne, because of you I can't have a decent conversation, with proper historical context, without a liberal (or anarchist for that matter) feeling it necessary to drown the baby in the bathwater violently in front of me. Yes, fuck Stalin, I'm with you, but if you can still pull some feelings of hope out of the glimmer in lady liberty's eyes (I'm with you on that too) let's talk about ideology, history, and politics like well-rounded adults that understand life is full of contradictions. That's why anything about everything is fucking complicated. Reductionist punditry of this sort is taken serious by powerful people, and therefore far more reactionary than what comes from punching bag buffoons like Bill O'Reilly. So let's stop thinking these people are fucking geniuses because they write in the New York Review of Books and can find other countries on a map.