More of A Comfortable Seat At The World's End

Someone linked this on another site, in another life. It's oriented toward the US but since the virus doesn't care about borders and ethnicity (which is all I want to share with it) I figure it would be useful here.

My biggest concern about all this isn't so much catching it, though I certainly hope I don't (other than to get over it - assuming you do). It's the subsequent societal collapse: getting food. Panic buying isn't helping either and my freezer is unfortunately tiny!

When I was a child I remember looking up at the moon from the back garden. I remember it because Jean Michel Jarre's haunting synth bleepiness, Oxygene, was playing. Ever since that tune and the memory have become inextricably intertwined. I thought, then, by this time, the galactic space year of 2020, we'd be there. 2020 was such a distant, almost mystical, number. The future for sure: jetpacks, moon travel, solar power, abundance, hope.

Now look at us. Laid low by our own inability to see past markets and profits. The planet is on fire, the climate is fucked, and the only thing threatening to put it out might wipe out half our families! Politicians are testing positive. You know it's bad when they try to reassure us "I'm feeling fine!". If this was like the disaster movie that would be an inevitable precursor to their death! Jesus, it's come to this: we're living the Andromeda Strain.

Capitalists and capitalism has no answer to this. These problems cannot be traded on stock exchanges. They are only manufactured by them. We've allowed greed to breed reticence that can cost lives. Trump wavers because he wants some chum of his in Big Pharma to make the private healthcare antivirus, so he can profit from investing in it. Nero speculated while Rome burned.

And we're watching all this happen on social media. Like a video game. In fact there is a virus video game. It's called Plague Inc. Your avatar could easily be Trump Strain D, SARS faketanovirus or CoronaTory Wiff Waff 19. Your goal is to cause the world to sneeze itself to death. Big win, ten million points.

Fortunately there are people who care. A little too far from me, but so far the number of known infections is zero (likely above). Check this out, it may help.

Lsatly, since this blog is largely me whining about the DWP, I shall whine about the DWP. We still don't see clear unequivocal guidance. All it takes is the following: "everyone on benefits, over the next X months, gets their benefits paid. You don't need to turn up. You won't be asked to. Look after yourself. Treat yourself to something nice" (that last bit is admittedly optional)."

Why can't they do that? Simple: because capitalism breeds the belief that people be scroungers yo. Even in the midst of a viral outbreak, a pandemic, the worst health crisis for a generation ("a must see movie!"), they cannot let themselves evolve a better, more compassionate - life saving - ideology.

We will see how far this takes us. I suspect, dare I say hope, that, if anything good can ceom from this fundamental, indeed existential, chaos, we might see revolution. People can't take this. Not if these strained ramblings are indicator.

Till next time, sneeze safely and be well.

A Comfortable Seat at the World's End... Part One

To the good people who read this (and you must be good if you're reading this of course :D) - and to the creepy Russian bots that seem to comprise a portion of my analytics - please stay safe.

I've seen my mental health take a drop what with everything in the world. We humans weren't built for this, a pervasive stress. It's not good for the soul. It erodses; wears you down. I catch myself losing patience, getting frustrated, shouting at clouds (not literally but the weather is exasperating). You see yourself in the moment - and even having that awareness is a luxury, some don't - and you start thinking "my god!"

This isn't good. The world is on fire. These weather patterns aren't the norm. It leaves you out of sorts. If winter was properly winter, snow, chilly, cosy (even), I could cope with it. We're programmed for that; to respond to the ebb and flow of time and tide. Things like seasons. But not only are we completely out of balance with that in the modern world, but we've twisted the world itself. Now the seasons are out of sorts. Winter seems to start and end later. This isn't right. A month and a half of storms; freezing gales and thundering icicle rain isn't normal. It's not good for the land, it can't be good for nature. Now to add to that a man made (after a fashion, man's carelessness) has led to an outbreak that's now a pandemic. My first ever! I feel so...blessed?

They say that healthy folk (like me I hope) are no more going to suffer than regular flu and we don't worry about that quite so severely, and for good reason. But 17000 died of seasonal flu last year! I don't want either! But it's there: the fear. You can't avoid it. The media is everywhere now. It's right next to this screen, on another tab, waiting to be unleashed when I next press the button. I hide it like an index. A contents page of man made misery. Our government seems indecisive incompetent or just plain uncaring. Will we all end up sick?

Getting food is my biggest worry. How are the poor to manage? supermarket deliveries are, IME, notoriously unreliable and you have to pay a hefty delivery charge. "Sorry we didn't have any chicken soup, we gave you dogfood instead". What if you live alone? Who will care for you? The epitaph of modern life.

Those are my concerns; strictly born of the modern world. A place I am finding myself increasingly at odds with. I can't handle it. It asks too much of me in ways that bend and break. I am twisted through torsions of complexity that seem to exist for their own sake.

It doesn't have to be this way. We have made it thus. Our very system is being tested. What happens if it fails? When there is no more money to prop it up? In the wake of a pandemic, politicians care more that stock markets fail. Billionaires and millionaires throw their perfumed sanitised hands in the air, from within their privilege bunkers. They are probably gambling and preying on the outcomes of this situation. Delaying the creation of vaccines so that they can get there first. Human life is an investment portfolio, now stained with the sputum of its own sickness.

Turn back spaceman, the earth is not fit for human consumption!

Foodbanks are a sign of Tory Success

This might not be popular. I will endeavour to explain the, slightly clickbaity, title.

You see it's no coincidence that some of the worst people in the country (Jacob Rees Mogg for example) think well of foodbanks. They conform to his neo Victorian ideal that charity should reign o'er all of us, and that taxation is a burden.

Because of course society is full of good people like him who fall over themselves to put their hand in their pocket for those less fortunate than to be born into privilege and wind up running an investment fund.

You could reasonably argue that, if he did care, he would just pay his taxes. That way society can provide services.

Better yet why do we tolerate a society that allows a privileged elite the luxury of being in the position to profit in the first place? Why sustain the system that creates the need for foodbanks at all?

Foodbanks are a Tory success because they prey on the goodwill of decent people. Folks, and fortunately there are stil some out there, don't want to see the less fortunate starve because of a capitalist system that maintains haves vs have nots. A growing cohort that can, all too readily, fall into penury.

Tories champion them as a sign of a caring society. Which they are. But the problem is that it allows them to abrogate their responsibility to that society. As capitalists they support, if not directly, profit from theose people. They just don't care enough to put into place systems to ensure that those same people, when they invariably fall on the hard times capitalism creates, don't starve in the gutter.

With a reserve army of labour those people are then surplus to requirements. Tories don't care. But they do get to champion the 'good works' of those that do, even if those caring come from the same impoverished section of society (which is why the quality of foodbank donations are substandard). Thy do this because it conforms to their sense of social justice. A twisted libertarian outlook that at once congratulates self sufficiency while making it increasing tough for people to be self sufficient - how do you enjoy independence when you are in the gutter?

It's ideological nonsense. Better to have a completely free society where the naturally occurring resources can be harvested and shared directly. Not for profit, but because people need them. They can use them to feed and clothe. They can come together to use them for the social good, to build a better future through research and culture.

I don't need Tory condescension and its warped notion of the social good. I need access to the things that they stole; the land and its resources. Too long have these rapacious elites monopolised them, all for profit. All to sell to each other in an endless game of pass the parcel which makes them increasingly more money until the music stops and the next crash happens.

Get rid of the lot of them. They are the parasites. Not us. We don't need them. That's the irony of their system. If we can feed ourselves and look after each other then they are irrelevant beyond desperately holding onto power. Using their state deputised thugs to beat us to death when we resist.

Finally, and just to clarify, with regard to food quality. I've seen what people donate. It's just rubbish. Blue stripe beans, cornflakes, cheap white bread, even bags of sugar. People deserve quality food. Health shouldn't be a luxury. I'm sure many donate more and most do so with genuine intentions, but this is not good enough.

Another Work Focused Interview

Happy New Year, things will get worse. Hooray!

I hate the way this system leaves you so powerless, but what can be worse is how it makes you feel responsible for things that are unreasonable. Or for situations out of your control.

So i have another Work Focused Interview at the Jobcentre. They want me in next week at a place the uses don't go at a time of their choosing. It's bad enough having to sit through the WCA, but these are just a total waste of time. Not one of them I've ever had has been productive, it's just a jobcentre adviser droning on and propagandising. They have nothing to offer, but you can't tell them that.

What really frustrates me is that, as the scrounging peon, I have no worth in this relationship. I don't get a say in how this is conducted. They book the time, they book the venue. If I'm lucky (and hopefully I will be) I can persuade them to interview me over the phone - which you'd think would be better for them as it saves them refunding travel expenses for instance. I'm willing to compromise, I'de even meet them locally if, for example, interviews were conducted at the local surgery (as an example, that's a whole other can of worms). But I can't make that compromise because of the way the system works and how capitalism defines the relationship between pauper and state. You do what they say or you are a feckless layabout doubtless loafing - because of course if you weren't you'd willingly attend, right?

In short, fuck capitalism fuck the state and fuck the tories.

I really should be posting something more substantial in the wake of this new era of Tory terror we'll be living through, but dealing with the DWP drains my focus.

Mordor, We Vote

I think it's a pretty clever title...for a horrific outcome.

I had tried to anticipate the worst. Hope for the best, gird your loins for the worst. But no mental simulation can substitute for the nightmare of the reality.

It's now bargain basement hard brexit hard right Britain. Whatever greatness we have enjoyed has evaporated in a thatch-haired wiff waff of smoke. We are alone in a cage; gilded no longer it is a rusty prison. Cold and damp under the cosh of a jailer that profits from our internment. Thirty years of my forty six have I lived under these bastards; now in their true form. We see the Tory heart at last. Exposed and evil.

Where did it all go wrong?

The wailing centrists are clamouring for the flayed skin of a fundamentally decent man, ravaged by a highly partisan media. They'll get it too, the only problem is they want it now.

I don't think he was leadership material for the simple reason that he is not built, being a fundamentally decent man, for the type of scrutiny he faced. No charity was afforded and certinly no benefit of the doubt. If he did not perform to their script he was cast down - and cast down he was: architect of antisemitism and master of the gulags.

Yet Labour's policies are popular. They aren't the issue. Certainly the messaging could have been clearer, but that points back to the media as they are the medium controlling the means of transmitting that information. Instead we have a partisan media facilitating a campaign of lies unwilling to scrutinise the Tories.

Brexit is the factor. Labour voters turned away from their own interests because they felt Labour had betrayed their one shot at true democracy. Their voice was being extinguished and so a message had to be sent. "If you won't deliver, then we'll vote for those that will."

The tragedy is that this, too, is a lie. The Tories will not deliver it. A hard brexit is now a certainty, but that will be a slowly unfolding calamity. The 'deal' isn't, it's the beginning. The genesis of a long painful process that the Tories lied about. Trade deals take years, perhaps even decades. We haven't even begun despite thre years of lies and falsehoods perpetrated on a working class that have been divided and let down by the political class (including Labour) - and face being betrayed again as the coming period will truly reveal the Nasty Party in all its dark glory.

This is a terrible result. We have the spectre of serious division in our communities. Racists and bigots have won the vote. In Hastings the newly minted Tory was exposed during a hustings advocating the exploitation of working people with learning disabilities. Disgusting. Another was elected despite also being exposed for his pig ignorance on both payday loans and poverty. Just borrow money from a loan shark! These are those that trade on economic responsibility. This is nothing of the kind; in fact it is the financial crisis in a cold microcosm. Get yourself into crippling debt. Is this deliberate, one wonders? Is this the form Universal Credit will mutate into in the coming period: a serious of loans that the poor canot possibly repay. Charity no more.

Whatever is coming, you can be sure it will be bad. I fear the working class will be turned against each other as they have been for the past decade. Blame foreigners, blame students, blame the old, blame the young, blame the bloke you think is unemployed but owns an xbox probably, the woman with the disability scooter (the lazy cow!). On it goes. That is a symptom of fascism; a manifestation of late stage capitalism. A manipulated working class lacking in vital class consciousness, that we must provide, turning inward. Jingoism 'national pride' in lieu of an understanding of their own exploitation. The tragedy is that in trying to impart that knowledge (and I claim no expertise here) one will be cast down as either a lefty snowflake socialist or an arrogant elitist.

Unfortunately Corbyn seems to have been hit with both by those who have, sadly, smashed themselves in the face of their own class interests with the most expensive hammer they could find (no doubt given at a huge APR by a friendly Tory loan shark).

Good luck Britain!

Your Guide To Voting

Some people believe that voting is a waste of time. Many of those people are anarchists.

I don't think that's true. One doesn't need to support the system or those within it to use it to effect whatever changes can be wrought. My goal is to see class consciousness grow within society because without it meaningful social revolution is impossible. Until that time voting is the only tool we have. This is important for one fundamental reason:

If we don't vote, the Tories remain in power (though of course there are no guarantees and a ton of caveats). It is a shit situation.

Class consciousness cannot rise while people are battered by Universal Credit, disarmed by WCA tests and generally atomised by the cruelty of deliberate and ideologically driven impoverishment. People are too busy trying to put food on their table to worry about structural problems. Who can blame them?

So if Jeremy Corbyn can ameliorate some conditions - why on earth would you not support that when it's plainly in our interest to do so? You don't have to believe he's the second coming, you just have to vote out the Tories. This is also important because it sends a message to society; it puts them, as a ruling class, on notice. They and the values they represent are not welcome.

So why would you not do this?

It makes no sense to me: if you're putting ideology above the working class then your ideology is just a pile of ashes and you're the smartest person in the workhouse.

I agree with the ideology, by the way. They will use our vote for their own ends. They will try and propagandise it. But what is the alternative - simple answer: another term under an increasingly and shockingly hard right Tory party led by the most self entitled and egregiously buffoonish clown I have ever seen. This guy's bullish stupidity makes Theresa Mayhem's standoffishness look like warm embrace from Santa fucking Claus!

That's the alternative. That's what not voting achieves. We are where we are and we cannot move forward with ideology alone. There isn't sufficient revolutionary impetus and, if all that's required (and certainly all that I ask) is that you take five minutes to cast a vote, is that really too much to ask?

Labour has a chequered history for sure. It also currently has some (not all) members in councils engaged in violently damaging policies of social cleansing and gentrification. This is awful. but ask yourself: is that more or less likely to continue under a renewed Tory government? There is a good reason to believe that, under a Corbyn Labour government, the ground for that kind of behaviour will be much less fertile. Again there are no guarantees, we just have to do the best we can.

But to argue that Labour is as bad as the Tories because of things like this, which I hear often, is just facile. Clearly and demonstrably false; simply compares policies. Labour has plenty, many of which are reasonable and tolerable improvements, if not ideal. Conservatives have...? So far nothing - though we know what will happen: welfare entitlement will continue to be strangled, the NHS will be sold to the private insurance market, likely the US (something they have sought to do for decades), and Brexit will impoverish our economy turning us into a one party state and a tax haven benefiting no one in the working class, despite what they have misguidedly chosen to believe (that's a discussion for another day).

This is a period of shit choices, but they are still choices. We can make them, we can use what little power we currently have as part of the struggle to move forward. While these are shit choices to us and far from ideal. However, to the ruling elite, that power is something they would want us not to have and would seek to diminish as much as possible - why else do they want to introduce voter ID?

Look I despise jingoism and the "poppy fascism" brand of vote propaganda. But we don't need to buy into that to use our power against them. That power is precious though, regardless of whether you believe in said propaganda. Use it or lose...everything.

The Bitter Taste of Victory

Warning: this might sound incredibly ungrateful.

Yesterday the brown envelope arrived. It's been three months since my WCA. During that time I have prepared myself, as best I could, for failure. However it appears I have, again, succeeded. At least in respect of the Work Related Activity Group. The upshot of this is that I continue to attend compulsory biannual (at least for now) Work Focused Interviews. In fact my last one was a week or so after the WCA appointment. It was also a complete waste of time for reasons I've mentioned before. These interviews cannot help since they, essentially, are about victim blaming.

By my calculations I anticipate the next will be in January. It could even be next month. Failure to attend will affect a claim so passing the WCA is no guarantee of piece of mind at all. I am still having to watch the pennies in case the DWP pulls the rainy day button. It's insane really, that money has to be saved and not spent accordingly. Putting it back into the economy would be a better situation all round you'd think.

Believe me I could spend it!

It's a bitter victory because for three months I've institutionalised myself to the possibility of failure. Now that hasn't happened I'm still no better off in terms of freedom. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad not to have failed. I consider myself desperately lucky in that respect. But the arrival of success as a reality is a more mundane reality that imagined. I thought about what I might like to do with the money. That I might treat myself, but of course that just brings back the concerns about money, something that's forever been a source of guilt in my life.

I have never been a rich person, though, fortunately again, my circumstances are better than many. I'm lucky that I have a decent enough roof over my head and don't need to use a foodbank. But these are such basic concerns that, in 21st century Britain, surely no one should have to worry about their basic needs being met. Yet we know that isn't the case.

The amount paid on benefits really is such a pittance that you can't make informed choices at all. With enough money I could make significant changes and at least try to move forward. Yet the mindset of our leaders is such that it is best to keep people near poverty. Depressingly they criticise benefits as being a trap without realising the trap comes from the pittance they begrudgingly offer. Something that's merely a political football.

Yes I've succeeded. I'm damned lucky to have done so. But the reality of that success is just the realisation you are not any better off than before. In fact I have no idea when the next WCA call up will be. It 'should' be a year or so. But it could be anytime, though much likely to be later. It took them two years to organise this one and even that wasn't conducted properly (perhaps that was for the best!). Meanwhile I'm forced to attend work focused interviews and be dazzled with the dearth of opportunities that are on offer. Sooner or later my claim will be migrated from ESA to Universal Credit, or so I'm told. Won't that be fun.

What I need this system cannot provide. It is administered by people who see you as weapons in the political war for votes. Not people to invest in.

I hope this doesn't make me sound too ungrateful. I've won a prize. I just don't see how it changes my life. Things should be better than this. No one should have to deal with this rotten system to begin with. It's only a victory because the alternative is so terrible. The prize of not starving for an indeterminate period - until your next assessment. Round and round it goes