Joe | 22 | Wyoming
Writer, Animator, Musician.
Libertarian Socialist.
Agnostic/Atheist.
Massive Introvert.
Sexually Fluid.

Comedy, music, TV, movies, world news, politics, history, art, cats, foxes, anarchism, feminism, and psychedelics. Fandoms include Orphan Black, Person of Interest, and Breaking Bad

I'm in the process of unlearning all the bullshit this world has tried to teach me, and I think philosophy is annoying.
Background Illustrations provided by: http://edison.rutgers.edu/
15 notes
Posted 20, September, 2012

American imperialism in a nutshell

“Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? That’s a tough one, but I’ll take a shot.

Say I’m working at NSA, and somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself, because I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed.

Now the politicians are saying, “Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area” ‘cause they don’t give a shit - it won’t be their kid over there, getting shot, just like it wasn’t them when their number got called, because they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It’ll be some kid from Southie taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, ‘cause he’ll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They’re taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin play slalom with the icebergs. It ain’t too long ‘til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy’s out of work and he can’t afford to drive, so he’s walking to the fuckin job interviews, which sucks ‘cause the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. Meanwhile he’s starving, ‘cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they’re serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. …Fuck it, while I’m at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.”

- Good Will Hunting

I think the first time I saw this movie is what kicked off my radicalization (and my love for east coast accents).

1 note
Posted 21, August, 2012

A drunken summary of my worldview (paraphrased from text messages I’ve sent in the last hour)

The best thing that can happen is that the system just falls apart and we can start over from scratch. Power is a shitty thing, because only a small amount of people are allowed to have it. When everyone can have power, it’s no longer power - it’s equality.

If the system collapses, we’ll all have to start caring about each other again. Right now, we live in a system in which our social loyalties and responsibilities are outweighed by the convenience of being a selfish dickhead - it’s really easy to be selfish when the unselfish have no other choice but to pay the price. As humans, we had the brains to invent government and currency. I think we have the brains to be able to live without them as well. If the whole global military/corporate/police system went away, we could accomplish so many things as a species. Our own social constructs are slowing down our evolution.

8 notes
Posted 10, August, 2012
Describe your ideal system of government, if anarchy were impossible.
the-chimera-project-deactivated

That is literally the most fascinating question I’ve ever been asked. First off, I would like to thank you for stimulating my mind this morning. lol.

I would be satisfied with a democratic system that is run from the bottom up. I work at a public library, and that’s kind of how it works. It’s an astonishingly efficient system.

The United States are supposed to be a “democratic republic” or “representative democracy,” but it’s neither of those anymore and it’s total bullshit. It’s a corporate police state now; it’s not very far from total fascism, and there’s been an obvious fascist ideology brewing in this country for several decades, with things like the phony Red Scare, the “War On Drugs,” Reagan’s deregulation of corporate banks, the Bush family’s wars driven by the profit motive of the oil companies. On a more abstract platform, there’s also a general disdain towards creativity and intellectualism in this country; it’s not acceptable to be smart or have an efficient mind, unless you’re an imperialist-capitalist fucking swine.

In a truly representative democracy, the government would mathematically/statistically represent the population - if 51% of the population are women, then 51% of congress would be women; if 90% of the people are working class citizens, 90% of congress would represent the working class, etc. Money would be removed from politics, and the defense budget would be dramatically slashed, if not completely done away with.

Essentially it would be a very generous welfare state with a non-interventionist foreign policy and a market based solely on labor/production and not capital gains.

In a perfect world, I’m an anarchist, but in today’s world I’m more of a progressive libertarian or socialist libertarian (libertarian in the formal sense of the word, not the bastardized “libertarianism” we have in America.) I don’t think humanity is ready for global anarchy, because so many humans are evil and have imperialistic motives (“anarcho-capitalists” come to mind there, which is a whole different discussion) but the original roots of pure democracy is one of the few political ideologies that can actually be practiced as it is written on paper in today’s fucked up world. That being said, obviously I’m against the idea of “spreading democracy” as the warmongering neoconservatives in this country like to describe our bullshit foreign policy.